We barely had time to catch our breath from the wild spectacle of the Republicans finally electing a speaker when their next spectacle started with a bang. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen abruptly announced that the U.S. will hit the so-called debt ceiling on Jan 19, putting the issue immediately on the front burner. The government can move money around to keep paying its bills until some time next summer, but this is already shaping up to be an exhausting, months-long battle royale. It’s probably a good thing that they’re getting an early start since the MAGA House majority seems to need some serious remedial instruction on how the world works. That’s not to say that debt-ceiling standoffs are some core tactic of the MAGA movement. In fact, Republicans raised the debt ceiling three times during the Trump administration with no fuss at all. They never felt it necessary to try to persuade Trump to cut spending, and the Freedom Caucus didn’t utter a peep as he massively increased the deficit. These hostage situations are reserved for times when the GOP holds the House and a Democrat is in the White House. Shocking, I know.
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On social media, anyway Feel the magic: Mounting a comeback for the White House, Donald Trump is looking to regain control over his powerful social media accounts. With access to his Twitter account back, Trump’s campaign is formally petitioning Facebook’s parent company to unblock his account there after it was locked in response to the U.S. Capitol riot two years ago. […] “Trump is probably coming back to Twitter. It’s just a question of how and when,” said a Republican who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with Trump about returning to the platform. “He’s been talking about it for weeks, but Trump speaks for Trump, so it’s anyone’s guess what he’ll do or say or when.” Another Trump confidant who also didn’t want to be identified speaking about conversations with him said that Trump has sought input for weeks about hopping back on Twitter and that his campaign advisers have also workshopped ideas for his first tweet. I’ll never get over the fact that they actually “workshop” tweets.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump predictably does the best analysis of this “both sides” excuses for the “classified documents” story: Look, when there’s no need for your rhetoric not to be lazy, you land on lazy rhetoric. If you can carry the day — at least with those who you’re most worried about convincing — with little effort or logical consistency, why bother putting in the effort or assembling that consistency? If your target audience hasn’t even heard the nuances that undercut your point, why bother rebutting those nuances? So it is that we enter our second (third? Who can keep track) week of apologists for former president Donald Trump seeking to equate his effort to retain documents sought by the government with a clutch of documents with classification markings found at President Biden’s home and an office he used.
His allies don’t understand anything You all remember anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, don’t you? The guy who said they wanted to made government so small you can drown it in the bathtub? He hasn’t had much to say the last half decade but suddenly his issue is front and center. Unfortunately, today’s Republicans don’t understand what they’re supposed to be doing because they are very deluded and very stupid. And he’s upset: As part of his deal to become House speaker, Kevin McCarthy reportedly promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax. The assurance got relatively little attention at the time, drowned out by the many other concessions McCarthy made to win his gavel. But with Democrats already attacking the proposal, some conservatives see it as a political headache in the making. “This is a political gift to Biden and the Democrats,” Grover Norquist, the dean of D.C. anti-tax activists, said in an interview.
Note that he says he was loyal to America, not to Trump. Trump is no doubt sharpening the shiv as we speak. This was interesting considering the bromance between Trump and Kim: Former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo wrote in his new memoir that his secret meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un in 2018 began with a “joke about assassination.” “This small, sweating, evil man tried to break the ice with all the charm you would expect from a mass murderer. ‘Mr. Director,’ he opened, ‘I didn’t think you’d show up. I know you’ve been trying to kill me,’” Pompeo’s memoir, which Fox News obtained a copy of, reads. “My team and I had prepared for this moment, but ‘a joke about assassination’ was not on the list of ‘things he may say when he greets you.’ But I was, after all, director of the CIA, so maybe his bon mot made sense,” he added. Pompeo’s memoir, “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” is set to be released on Jan.
As usual, 26 January has been marked by protests, denunciations of those protests, and further iterations. Even apart from the fact that it marks an invasion, the foundation of a colony that later became one of Australia’s states isn’t much of a basis for a national day. A logical choice would be the day our […]
I’m developing a set of Mastermind lectures on economics, and the marketing has included video “shorts” from my interview with Lex Fridman. This one, on why socialist economies didn’t innovate as fast as capitalist ones drew a lot of ire on Twitter. The text of that short is: Innovations: Socialist versus Capitalism [Under capitalism] You … Continue reading "Why did socialism fail at product innovation and economic growth?"
And he is the rest of us Donald J. Trump is a catalyst not a cause. Trumpism and its nihilistic “Deep State” wreckers have deeper roots than the shallow, game-show grifter whose name attached to our grievance-fueled anti-democracy movement. There is more than polarization afoot, argues Brian Klaas, writing from Britain. Unlike the U.S., few in England buy into conspiracy theories. Here, polarization “plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral.” The paranoid style was with us since before Richard J. Hofstadter’s 1964 essay. Jared Yates Sexton argues that conspiratorial thinking found fertile ground in the New World and was present at the nation’s founding. Klaas compares the belief gap (The Atlantic): According to YouGov polling, a third of Americans believe that a small group of people secretly runs the world, while just 18 percent believe the same in the United Kingdom. Similarly, 9 percent of Americans think COVID-19 is a fake disease. In Britain, that figure is just 3 percent.
Why does the conservative American Dream look like Mogadishu? Jeff Sharlet is documenting the attrocities. I’ll repeat: Why does the conservative American Dream look like Mogadishu? And like Syria:
Some supposed “moderates” are nervous It won’t make a difference: Senior House Republicans are moving swiftly to build a case against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as they strongly weigh launching rare impeachment proceedings against a Cabinet secretary, a plan that could generate sharp backlash from GOP moderates. Key committee chairmen are already preparing to hold hearings on the problems at the southern border, which Republicans say could serve as a prelude to an impeachment inquiry against Mayorkas. Three House committees – Oversight, Homeland Security and Judiciary – will soon hold hearings about the influx of migrants and security concerns at the border. The House Judiciary Committee, which would have jurisdiction over an impeachment resolution, is prepared to move ahead with formal proceedings if there appears to be a consensus within the GOP conference, according to a GOP source directly familiar with the matter. The first impeachment resolution introduced by House Republicans already has picked up support, including from a member of the GOP leadership team.