Wednesday Open Thread

20 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread”

1. The new (hopefully temporary) Speaker’s first act is to kick Nancy Pelosi out of her office while she’s attending Diane Feinstein’s funeral. And they thought McCarthy was bad‽ 

    

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2. It's Systemic, not Personal. David Kurtz at TPM.

   Between the comedic value, the schadenfreude, the story-telling appeal, and voyeuristic frisson, there’s a lot to love about the downfall of Kevin McCarthy. He deserved everything he got. The House GOP is a colossal mess. If you like spectacles that reinforce your priors and expose the foibles of the incompetent and cruel, this is a glorious time.

   “At the start, his speakership was effectively an optical illusion,” John Harris writes. “At the end, it was an exercise in self-abasement.” Indeed.

   But this is not really about Kevin McCarthy. He’s a stand-in. Before him were the chronically debased Paul Ryan and John Boehner. The House GOP has been on this merry-go-round for more than a decade.

   McCarthy’s downfall is another symptom of the same underlying pathologies: a cultish GOP in thrall to a would-be autocrat, anti-majoritarian structural impediments, a surge in right-wing extremism, white resentments and grievances channeled into a burn-it-all-down fever.

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3. Best comment so far:

   "Turning the base up too high blows out your speaker."

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   1. Bwaa-haa-haa!

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   2. That's a great quote! Kurtz lays it out very well.

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4. Two points of interest —

     * Despite the departure of former Speaker McCarthy, the RULE that allows any single member of Congress to make a privileged motion to vacate the Speaker's chair and the subsequent timetable for a vote remains.  If I'm reading the rules correctly, it would apply to the designated Speaker Pro Tempore, the position Rep. McHenry has now.  Don't know what would cause a Representative to do that, as it would mean further trampling through the already broken eggshells of House precedent.

     * Current count:  221 Republicans, 212 Democrats, and 2 vacancies (to be filled by Nov 7 and Nov 21 special elections).  Because of the vacancies, a Speaker will need 217 votes. One potential hurdle: "Absent unanimous consent or specific House approval, a designated Speaker pro tempore may not:

   Administer the oath of office to a Member-elect…."

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5. and on a lighter note, you may be interested in the prescient treatment of McCarthy last January by Randy Rainbow, in his video on Speaker of the House.

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6. Turning Twitter into a Fascist Machine. EmptyWheel.

   Is there a difference between Fascism, Kleptocracy and Libertarianism?

   Since the spring (when I first started writing this post), I’ve been trying to express what I think Elon Musk intended to do with his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, to turn it into a Machine for Fascism.

   Ben Collins wrote a piece — which he has been working on even longer than I have on this post — that led me to return to it.

   Collins returns to some texts sent to Elmo in April 2022, just before he bought Twitter, which referenced an unsigned post published at Revolver News laying out a plan for Twitter…

   The text messages described a series of actions Musk should take after he gained full control of the social media platform: “Step 1: Blame the platform for its users; Step 2: Coordinated pressure campaign; Step 3: Exodus of the Bluechecks; Step 4: Deplatforming.”

   The messages from the unknown sender were revealed in a court filing last year as evidence in a lawsuit Twitter brought against Musk after he tried to back out of buying it. 

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   1. I just finished reading this article. It's very informative. The problem isn't 

      2016: PROFESSIONALIZING TROLLING

      One thing that got me thinking about Elmo’s goals for Twitter came from reading the chatlogs from several Twitter listservs that far right trolls used to coordinate during the 2016 election, introduced as exhibits in Douglass Mackey’s trial for attempting to convince Hillary voters to text their votes rather than casting them at polling places.

      The trolls believed, in real time, that their efforts were historic.

      On the day Trump sealed his primary win in 2016, for example, Daily Stormer webmaster Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer boasted on a Fed Free Hate Chat that, “it’s fucking astonishing how much reach our little group here has between us, and it’ll solidify and grow after the general.” “This is where it all started,” Douglass Mackey replied, according to exhibits introduced at his trial. “We did it.”

      And see the Table from the Stanford Election Integrity Project…

      The table, which appears in a Stanford University’s Election Integrity Project report on the election, does not reflect use of disinformation (as the far right complains when they see it). Rather, it measures efficacy. Of a set of false narratives — some good faith mistakes, some intentional propaganda — that circulated on Twitter in advance of the election, this table shows who disseminated the false narratives that achieved the most reach. The false narratives disseminated most broadly were disseminated by Donald Trump, his two adult sons, Tom Fitton, Jack Posobiec, Gateway Pundit, Charlie Kirk, and Catturd. The least recognized name on this list, Mike Roman, was among the 19 people indicted by Fani Willis for efforts to steal the election in Georgia. Trump’s Acting Director of National Intelligence, Ric Grenell, even got into the game (which is unsurprising, given that before he was made Ambassador to Germany, he was mostly just a far right troll).

      This is a measure of how central social media was to Trump’s efforts to discredit, both before and after the election, the well-run election that he lost.

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   2. Sinister reading.

      The lesson of the 2020 election for trolls is that inadequate efforts to moderate disinformation during the election — including the Hunter Biden “laptop” operation — prevented Trump from pulling off a repeat of 2016. The lesson of January 6, for far right trolls, is that unfettered exploitation of social media might allow them to pull off a violent coup.

      That’s the critical background leading up to Elmo’s purchase of Twitter.

      The first thing Elmo did after purchasing Twitter was to let the far right back on.

      More recently, he has started paying them money that ads don’t cover to subsidize their propaganda.

      The second thing he did, with the Twitter Files, was to sow false claims about the effect and value of the moderation put into place in the wake of 2016 — an effort Republicans in Congress subsequently joined. The third thing Elmo did was to ratchet up the cost for the API, thereby making visibility into how Twitter works asymmetric, available to rich corporations and (reportedly) his Saudi investors, but newly unavailable to academic researchers working transparently. He has also reversed throttling for state-owned media, resulting in an immediate increase in propaganda.

      For months, Elmo, his favored trolls, and Republicans in Congress have demonized the work of NGOs that make the exploitation of Twitter by the far right visible. More recently, Elmo has started suing them, raising the cost of tracking fascism on Twitter yet more.

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7. " Denver sees third wave of immigrants, officials blame Texas busing program"  –  Colorado Politics

   Denver proclaimed itself a "sanctuary city", so what's the problem here? Officials should be praising the Texas busing program. Fact is the number of illegals being bused here are a small fraction of what Texas and the other border states have been dealing with for years now.

   Democrat NYC Mayor Adams says the city is being "destroyed" by the influx of illegal immigrants.

   Democrat NY Governor Hochul has issued a plea to close the border.

   The hypocrisy defies description.

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   1. More people in Colorado will help the economy, but will drive up housing costs, not to mention the driving costs.

      Maybe we should make all those California and Texas refugees go back where they came from!

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8. It’s all about the Kale – US Life Expectancy Decline.  Dylan Matthews at Vox.com

   But the relevant divide does not seem to be between people who earned a bachelor’s degree — who remain a minority among American adults — and people who didn’t. Other research suggests that the problem is concentrated in specific areas of the US, and between the very least-educated Americans (particularly high school dropouts) and the rest of the country, rather than between college grads and non-grads.

   Moreover, the cause of the divergence between high school dropouts and the rest of the country does not seem to be caused by “deaths of despair.” There is no doubt that the opioid epidemic in particular has wrought spectacular damage in the US. But some researchers are finding that stagnating progress against cardiovascular disease is an even bigger contributor to US life expectancy stalling out, and to mortality divides between the most- and least-educated Americans.

   That implies we might want to think more specifically about heart disease, and about the American underclass, and less about the bachelor’s/non-bachelor’s divide that Case and Deaton highlight. That might enable us to produce a more useful policy agenda for tackling the problem.

   It’s actually more subtle than you think. The category “College Grads” has changed of the past couple of decades,

   So a group of people moving from not finishing college to finishing it should have the effect of making both college grads and non-grads, as groups, less healthy. The non-grads are losing their healthiest compatriots, and the grads are adding a somewhat less healthy group to their mix.

   This means we cannot look at graphs showing a widening mortality gap between college grads and non-grads and conclude, “Something is really going wrong with less-educated Americans.” That may be true, but it may just be a statistical artifact. As Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby noted in her comments on the latest Case-Deaton paper, it’s “entirely plausible that selection accounts for most or even all of the widening mortality gap.”

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   1. We’re about to renew a Farm Bill that will subsidize High Fructose Corn Syrup and deliver boatloads of processed goodies to food deserts for the Poors.  The math isn’t that hard. God forbid we’d make nutritious food affordable to the least amongst us. We know the long-term costs of obesity.

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      1. You optimist … your idea that the Farm Bill will be renewed presupposes a working Congress.

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         1. I should have been more clear!  It’s “up” for renewal but likely to be punted into next year now. 

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9. Looking forward to all the hot takes in the coming months about how Democrats really should've taken one for the team and voted to keep McCarthy  as Speaker to reduce Republican extremist chaos. /sarcasm

   I bet before the end of the year right-wing media will be convinced it was President Biden's fault somehow.

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   1. It was George Soros… You're not keeping up.

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10. Partisan Turnout helped Republicans gain seats in 2022. Pew Research

    There is no persuasion (Party switching). The only two facts you need to know Turnout and Partisanship:

    67% of Biden 2020 voters turned out in 2022
    71% of Trump 2020 voters turned out.

    … 

    93% of Biden Voters voted for the same Party in 2022
    97% of Trump Voters stayed with the Republicans.

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    1. US House vote was extraordinarily close.  The New Republic article said

       An analysis by Jacob Rubashkin in early December for the political tip sheet Inside Elections found that just 6,670 votes spread over five House districts would have kept the Democrats in the majority. (Final counts have changed that number to 6,675). For math mavens, that works out to be 0.006 percent of the more than 107 million votes cast in House races. According to Rubashkin’s tally, 22,378 of these votes in the right places would have prevented the Republicans from picking up a single seat in the House. So we are not talking about a normal election—this was the Democrats losing on a wild pitch in the tenth inning of the seventh game of the World Series.

       And turnout is regularly higher for the administration's opposition.   "The last five presidents have been elected with party control of the House and Senate, and four of them lost that control in the following midterm." The exception was Bush43 in 2002 — and I doubt anyone considers that a "normal" election cycle.

        

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