Author Archives: Hue White

For a feel of the scale of collapse we’re seeing in NFTs (non-fungible tokens, or how you can “own” a digital something that can be easily copied):

Meanwhile, from the same article:

“I think of NFTs as pure froth,” said Peter M. Garber, an economist and author of “Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias.” “It is more of a pump-and-dump, Wolf-of-Wall-Street operation than anything else.”

Garber seems to have a good head on his shoulders, to use an old, old saying.

Ya know, I wonder what Professor Turchin would have to say about this phenomenon, what parallels he’d draw to old Roman Empire corruption and decay.

While musing on yet another snark about Trump’s failure to upend Governor Brian Kemp (R-GA) in the primary, it suddenly occurred to me:

Will Trump endorse Kemp, or would he consider endorsing the Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams?

There’s a mad bit of logic to the latter choice that leads to win-win. If Abrams wins, Trump gets sweet revenge on Kemp after all. And if Abrams loses, Trump can call it the Trump Curse and take credit for Kemp’s victory.

If only in his odd little world.

Out here in the real world, though, that might peel off a large chunk of the MAGA base. Kathy Barnette, defeated candidate for the GOP nomination to the open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, has already suggested that MAGA can live without Trump around.

But it’d sure upset the GOP’s world.

There have been reports of Trump’s rally crowds shrinking, and his influence becoming questionable, at least in some States. But the Tuesday (May 24) primaries in Georgia may have relegated the former President to the dustbin of history, outside of some possible legal entanglements stemming from the January 6th Insurrection – if I’m to believe Erick Erickson, who lives in Georgia and pays attention to local politics:

But here’s why this has a lot to do with Trump and “stop the steal”[.]

Trump went after three Georgia Republicans more aggressively than any other candidates in the nation: Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and Attorney General Chris Carr.

That Brad Raffensperger won without a runoff tells me voters have had enough of Trump’s stolen election grievances. They are ready to move on. They want to look forward, not be pawns to Trump’s ego. Raffensperger’s win is the big indicator this really had more to do with Trump than I was first willing to believe.

Donald Trump literally told Brad Raffensperger that Trump would destroy him and Raffensperger even exceeded fifty percent of the vote in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district. Raffensperger was the scapegoat, the villain, and the responsible party who cost Trump Georgia, according to Trump. And Georgia’s Republican voters just re-nominated him. His race was so close and there was a Democrat cross-over. So Trump could argue Democrats made it happen. But it does not matter. Trump failed to persuade enough Republicans to reject [Raffensperger].

Trump bullied and denounced Attorney General Chris Carr and Carr crushed his Trump-endorsed opponent. Trump and his team convinced a man who had retired from the practice of law to get his license back just to challenge Carr. It did not work out well.

Even John King, the state’s Insurance Commissioner, decisively crushed his opponent, Patrick Witt, whose campaign signs had, in big letters, “Trump Endorsed.”

Erickson doesn’t say it, but possibly the only primary winning, Trump-endorsed candidate was Herschel Walker, the former NFL star. Unlike most, or all, of the rest of the Trump-endorsed, Walker has his own, independent, and substantial reputation, and Georgia is part of the football-loving South. He owes nothing to Trump. But will he appeal to independents, or will his mental illness, his unfamiliarity with public life issues, allegations of domestic abuse, and his documented mendacity when it comes to his business claims obviate the football sentimentality? In this purplish state, the independents hold the balance of power.

Walker’s opponent, Senator and Pastor Warnock (D-GA), certainly has his own reputation. It’ll be an interesting contest.

But back to the point. I agree with Erickson, Trump was rejected by Georgia GOP primary voters yesterday. Some of this is attributable to who Trump endorsed: candidates with dim prospects but a strong and demonstrated allegiance to Trump. But as I noted here, if Trump wants a reputation as the man with the magic touch, it was absolutely necessary to go out and endorse nobodies. That brings the additional advantage, at least for the former President, of making the candidate dependent on Trump and not on their own accomplishments.

But it carries the risk of exposing the endorser as a charlatan, an electoral fraud, if those candidates fail.

So what happens next? Trump’s influence varies across American geography, so in some areas he’ll retain influence, but in others it’s going to wane. He’s been revealed as just another idiot with a big mouth. The Georgia GOP appears to be moving on, at least in part, and by that I mean that some of those who supported Perdue and other failed Trump endorsees may decide to take their toys and go home.

That is, not vote in the general election.

Will it be enough to affect some races? The state-wide races, yes. Incumbent governor Kemp is at a slightly increased risk of losing. Walker, already facing an incumbent Senator while carrying many burdens which, in a rational society, would invalidate his candidacy, has an increased risk – although his pre-existing reputation shields him, to some extent, from sore loser syndrome. District races, on the other hand, will depend on the district.

Similarly to the sore-loser voters, GOP candidates who pledged eternal devotion to Trump and Trumpism will also scream. After all, they’ve had their shot at, and in some cases their taste of, power, and they will bitterly resent that foreclosure, that invalidation that their notions of how their little bit of America should be run. To be returned to the bar stool after that little taste will be cruel, indeed.

But Trump-appointed judges and SCOTUS Justices will hang around, looking worse and worse as Trump’s incompetence and any crimes committed become more and more salient. But don’t look for any resignations, excepting those judges caught committing a crime themselves. I suspect we’ll see Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett blushing from time to time, should liberals choose to demonstrate when they are in public.

The Southern Baptist Convention logo. Soon to be retired?

And Trump? Another step closer to the dustbin. Add in his connections to the recently morally devastated Southern Baptist Convention, a cornerstone of his base, and two of the legs on his three-legged stool may be missing screws. Look for hot air from him and his coterie and devotees, but this may mark the beginning of the end for Trump.

Will he be smart enough to leave the United States? At one time, I thought the answer was yes, but with his long-time ally, or perhaps master, President Putin both ill and in danger of losing Putin’s War, he may have nowhere to go.

Which I don’t think is present any longer:

“Gucci, Gucci, Goo I said!”

Kung Fu Yoga (2017) is a fairly dull Jackie Chan epic / Indiana Jones riff. Chan plays China’s greatest, but very humble, archaeologist Jack. He and his retinue of young & agile students – I think they’re students – are recruited by Indian professor Ashmita to buy and evaluate a huge emerald. It’s stolen by Ashmita’s rival, evil and arrogant Randall, who might be a prince of India or something, and claims ownership of the emerald. There’s also the theft of a diamond from a trove, yada yada yada. I lost track.

Eventually, and there’s a lot of eventually here, fair warning, we find Chan recreating the third Indiana Jones movie’s scene of the invisible bridge. I think. At its end is a golden gazebo full of treasure – and after some acrobatic fighting, villagers abruptly appear, everyone, even evil Randall, says namaste, and they break into a Bollywood-style musical number. And that’s it.

Yeah. No kidding. I’m not making that up. It’s too insipid, really.

And the rest was sort of dull. Yes, lots of kung fu, escapes from tight situations, and I think my credulity was all stretched out of shape at the end. Don’t get me wrong, technically it’s well done, and the escape from the hyenas was fun.

OK, I hooted really loudly at the lion scene. I think I scared my Arts Editor, even. The lion might be worth the price of admission. If the price is fairly low.

But I won’t remember this ripoff of Jones for much longer, though.

Voyager 1, our first interstellar probe, is not only out beyond the heliosphere, but its warranty period as well, which is a compliment to the designers and builders of the probe. But now it’s having problems:

NASA has reported that while the venerable Voyager 1 probe appears to be functional, there does appear to be something up with some of its instruments. According to its recent press release, readouts from the Attitude Articulation and Control System (AACS) seem invalid.

For an as yet unknown reason, data received from the system doesn’t seem to match up with what’s actually happening onboard.

This piece of kit is vital for monitoring and controlling the 45-year-old probe’s orientation, and it is also vital for keeping Voyager 1’s high-gain antenna pointed precisely at Earth. This enables it to send data home, so is very important to keep working properly.

“All signs suggest the AACS is still working, but the telemetry data it’s returning is invalid. For instance, the data may appear to be randomly generated, or does not reflect any possible state the AACS could be in,” explains NASA. [Interesting Engineering]

A technical problem? A phenomenon interfering with the spacecraft? I wait with great anticipation.

Stephen Colbert has a hack at NFTs (non-fungible tokens) last night:

I liked Emo Emu.

On a more serious note, back in January Jason Bailey mentioned NFTs a few times:

The NFT explosion this year has created an arms race toward increasingly loud and fast-moving digital imagery jockeying for attention (and sales). Against this backdrop, Iskra Velitchkova’s work stands out in contrast to all the noise for how quiet, subtle, and meditative it is. [Artnome]

And

By mid-2021, despite my best efforts, I found it almost impossible to ignore the avalanche of cutesy PFP (personal profile pic) NFT projects featuring cartoon apes, cats, penguins, etc. Around that same time, generative art also captured the public’s eye, but sadly, it, too, quickly devolved, turning into a flood of hastily constructed, hard-edged geometric abstractions produced to meet the new market demand.

Never had I been surrounded by so much imagery that left me feeling so flat. I found myself craving the grotesque. I wanted to be shaken, made to feel uncomfortable, made to feel… anything, really. It was about this time that I discovered the work of Ilya Shkipin. His work makes me feel like I blacked out in a cheap motel room and woke up to find Polaroids under a dirty ashtray documenting the bad life decisions from the night before. Yet it also has its own deep sense of beauty.

Neither of which I quote to define NFTs, or more properly the art promoted under the NFT label. Remember Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.

But my Arts Editor continues to snort at the very mention of NFTs.

Kleptoparasitism:

Kleptoparasitism means parasitism by theft. What is parasitism? Parasitism is when an organism benefits at another organism expense. Kleptoparasitism is used in different ways e.g. bullying other organisms to give up their food they just caught, and steal collected or stored food. This way of obtaining food normally saves the kleptoparasite hunting time and also gives them the chance of food they might not be able to catch themselves. A negative part with using this as a feeding technique is the risk of injuries. Bullying someone to give up their food put you in the direction of their claws, beaks or teeth. [Ocean Adventures]

I’m not sure I would have used the word ‘use’, above. Kleptoparasitism is a behavior, not a tool, although sometimes distinguishing between the two is problematic.

Noted in “Jackals seen stealing kills from lynx as they expand range in Europe,” Josua Rapp Learn, NewScientist (14 May 2022, paywall):

According to new research, [golden] jackals have been seen scavenging carcasses of deer killed by lynx in southern Slovenia. While the evidence is limited at this point, it shows the first recorded incidents of kleptoparasitism — the act of stealing food — against lynx in Europe by jackals.

And a quick nod of provisional nominative determinism to Mr. Learn. Thank you.

Kicking off a new feature centered around the late Senator Goldwater’s (R-AZ) concerns about extremist clerics taking over the Republican Party.

The first entry is Republican candidate for the Michigan Senate Jacky Eubanks:

“We have to decide if we want to be the ‘party of me’ or the ‘party of us.’ And that’s what a lot of these primaries are going to decide.” – former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) in WaPo.

The former, a ‘party of me,’ is what we see every time a losing candidate starts singing the “they cheated” song – in a primary!

Long-time readers will recall that I’ve chewed on Aussie Prime Minister Scott Morrison (Liberal Party) for his general reliance on God over science and his admiration for former President Trump.

Well, now it’s former Prime Minister Morrison.

In this parliamentary democracy, the Liberal Party lost enough seats to the Labor Party and a host of independents that Morrison is out as PM, and those independents are the story of the election:

Morrison not only lost seats to Labor but also lost a swath of seats to a group of female independents who adopted the color teal — a blend of Liberal blue (to signal they were economically conservative) and green (to signal they were progressives on climate change and the status of women.) The “teal independents” won seats in wealthy parts of Sydney and Melbourne that had long voted Liberal — including that of Morrison’s deputy, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. [WaPo]

2021 Australian fires. Source: YCNews.

That independents concerned about climate change won in the heart of Liberal-land, the wealthy parts of Sydney and Melbourne, signals that the threat of climate change to human civilization is beginning to penetrate all the level of Australian society.

And while the obvious question is How far is the United States’ Republican elites behind the Australians?, a more interesting question is whether or not the United States, out of frustration at the elites of both parties, forms one or more new parties that return to an embrace of science and rationality while discarding rigid, even alien, ideologies and theologies.

It’s a tall mountain to climb, but I’m beginning to wonder, given the problems the Democrats keep inflicting on themselves in the face of wonderful political opportunity, if we may see that hypothetical party transition to reality. The Republican problems are increasingly becoming self-evident, especially if you, like I am, are in the process of political analysis of the Senate races this year. Refugees from both parties could join this third party, and it could become a mover and shaker.

If it’s in sync with American independents.

Ready to take on Ebirah, eh?

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)? What can it be? Why don’t we get to see Ebirah in the deep, but only at the surface? Does it keep a messy domicile? Are there human bones – shish kebabbed, to judge from Ebirah’s habits on the surface – scattered about?

And who are these classic Japanese villains running around on the island? They’ve kidnapped an indigenous tribe from another island, or at least some of them, and conveyed them to their island to make … Ebirah-repellent?

Maybe go to a different island, instead, and live in peace there? Or does Ebirah have a grudge against the bad guys?

And then there’s this pack of rescuers – not of the tribe, mind you, but from modern-day Japan, looking for the brother of one of them. Another is a lock breaker and the original thief of the boat, from whom the others thieved the boat. Our morals need a boost.

And then there’s guest star Godzilla, clomping his/her/its way through the landscape, aping for the camera, as it were. OK, it was supposed to be King Kong, but Godzilla had to step in at the last moment while King Kong attended to his mistress. Or financial matters. The record’s a bit cloudy on the matter.

And, just for fun, there’s yet another guest star. Ebirah’s outnumbered, but, see, it has this big ol’ claw. Yeah, the shish-kebab claw.

It’s all a mess, but it moves right along and almost makes a sort of sense. In a way, it’s another anti-nuclear story, but so subtle that it may not affect today’s audience, at this far remove from –

Oh, wait. Ukraine. Maybe it is relevant.

So it’s a bit of fun, a good pace on it, and a kaboom at the end is threatened. Maybe we care. Maybe we don’t. But, in today’s weather here in Minnesota, the thought of residing on a warm, South Pacific island is quite alluring.

Go for the island and the views!

And can you imagine the Disney ride? Wheeeeeeeeeee– gulp

Aphantasia:

As many as 3.9 per cent of people have aphantasia, the inability to picture images in one’s head. But formally diagnosing the condition is difficult. A simple physiological test involving a webcam could one day offer a solution. [“Simple webcam test could show whether you lack a mind’s eye,” Jason Arunn Murugesu, NewScientist (14 May 2022, paywall)]

In the GOP primary contest for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania, contested by Mehmet Oz (aka Dr. Oz of television fame), David McCormick, a businessman who is another Trumpian devotee, and Kathy Barnette, who claims to be a Trumpian while discarding the actual former President, the first two candidates are locked in quite a battle at the ballot box, while Barnette did not do as well as expected. In fact, the contest remains undecided.

And Trump is trying to game the system:

Ex-President Donald Trump is injecting his democracy-damaging fraud claims into a new election cycle, urging his friend Mehmet Oz to simply declare he won a too-close-to-call race for the Republican Senate nomination in Pennsylvania — a key state in Trump’s desperate bid to steal the 2020 election.

The cliffhanger contest between Oz and David McCormick, another claimant to Trump’s legacy, is the marquee race from Tuesday’s round of primaries — and carries calamitous echoes of 2020 election controversy and ill omens for 2024. [CNN/Politics]

Oz has not, to my knowledge, taken that advice, but a number of pundits are outraged. What struck me, however, is how this is really an attempt to take part of our electoral system away from the folks who are tasked with, and measured by, their partisan-less vote counting, and move that part of our system into, at best, a partisan operation, and, at worse, into the camp of a party involved in the contest.

Trump attempts to camouflage this by claiming the process is already rigged, as we all know. Here’s Trump on this race:

He’s at it again. pic.twitter.com/F7AGlfjAbC

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) May 19, 2022

The usual sloppy thinking. France is a magnitude smaller than the US in terms of voting population. Less obvious is the spirit of volunteering in the two countries, which would certainly affect the number of volunteers available; interference and security concerns; monitoring concerns; requirements for overseas voting by military personnel and how they handle it.

And here Trump wants to discard the votes of Republicans that don’t meet his criteria, i.e., didn’t vote for Oz.

In the end, he wants his people to count the votes, to move vote counting under his control. Sorry, dude, it just doesn’t work that way.

And that’s the most important part of this race.

Colorado gubernatorial candidate Greg Lopez is in search of a way to help Republicans win in this heavily Democratic state, and it involves getting rid of the one-person one-vote paradigm and replacing it with an electoral college approach of peculiar character. He’s got it all worked out:

Lopez said his electoral college plan would weight counties’ votes based on their voter turnout percentage to encourage turnout.

“I’ve already got the plan in place,” Lopez said. “The most that any county can get is 11 electoral college votes. The least that a county can get is three.” [9News]

Onwards to the exceptionally dubious summation by Lopez:

“It’s not about one-person, one-vote,” Lopez said at the May 15 campaign stop. “It’s about true representation.”

It conveniently ignores differences in population, doesn’t it? If you’re in a ten person county, your vote will weigh far more than if you’re in a one hundred person county.

Then there’s that pesky winner-take-all stipulation implied in the proposal. A candidate wins an important county by a single vote and they get all the electoral votes. This is representation how?

It’s not, is it? Just a poorly thought out scheme to grab power.

9News, of course, analyzed how such a system would have changed the last election, for what it’s worth:

9NEWS analyzed how Lopez’s proposal could have impacted the results of the 2018 gubernatorial race. In lieu of details on the plan from the Lopez campaign, 9NEWS sorted the 2018 county turnout percentages in the gubernatorial race and sorted then into as equally-sized tiers as possible, assigning 11 electoral votes to the highest turnout tier and three electoral votes to the lowest turnout tier.

Under Lopez’s plan, that governor’s race would have been a runaway win for Republicans, who lost the actual race by double-digits when each vote was weighted equally.

Democrat Jared Polis defeated Republican Walker Stapleton by more than 10 percentage points. Lopez’s electoral college plan would have swung that race for Republicans by nearly 30 percentage points, resulting in the equivalent of an 18 percentage point victory for Stapleton over Polis.

And this dude is the best that Colorado Republicans can manage for the governor’s seat? They’re just crumbling into dust, it seems.

From before the hailstorm, some creeping phlox.

And more irises.

And these dudes, trying to be charming. One of them was lobotomized by the hail, later.

We’ve been seeing numerous Republicans exit the party as it skids to the right, but now, apparently, the fractures may be on the right.

Although I’m also inclined to read this as the whimpering of an immature and power hungry twerp:

“I am on a mission now to expose those who say and promise one thing yet legislate and work towards another, self-profiteering, globalist goal,” [Rep Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), defeated recently in a primary] wrote. “The time for genteel politics as usual has come to an end. It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command. We have an enemy to defeat, but we will never be able to defeat them until we defeat the cowardly and weak members of our own party. Their days are numbered. We are coming.” [Maddowblog – I’m not going to link to the unreadable original Instagram post.]

While this could end in blood for certain Republican Party members that have displeased Cawthorn, I hope not. Cawthorn needs to go find an obscure job and just drop out – it’s clear that he’s not suited to politics or high responsibility.

Reading this:

The Oklahoma Legislature passed a bill Thursday that would ban nearly all abortions, the latest and most severe in a string of anti-abortion measures approved in the state in recent months.

Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, is expected to sign the measure, HB 4327, which would prohibit abortions after “fertilization” with few exceptions, making it the most restrictive such law in the country. It passed the Republican-controlled House by a vote of 73-16. [NBC News]

It’s hard for me to avoid the impression that the Oklahoma legislature is trying to engage in one-upmanship. In other words, rather than incentivizing wisdom in governance, someone has said The winner will be the one who can be most extreme in casting out abortion!

Which seems despicable to me.

Extremism has been incentivized by the Republicans for half a century and more, and that’s what we’re getting: cartoon characters in State and Federal legislatures.

Or just file this under Toxic Team Politics, yeah?

Public Opinion Strategies‘ Glen Bolger, a top Republican pollster, on former President Trump’s strategy when it comes to endorsements:

“I don’t know whether he is letting emotion rule his decision making or if he is getting bad advice,” explained Glen Bolger. “But it seems like he is picking candidates who are pretty weak, and that’s not a place — when you’re trying to be kingpin — where you want to be.” [Raw Story]

But, for the audience Trump seeks to please, numbers are not of primary importance; they want good stories. I say that as, to borrow a phrase from my sister, a story junkie myself.

If Trump can endorse a nobody and elevate that nobody to electoral victory, he gains not only the undying gratitude^[1] of the recipient, now riding on high, but he adds to his personal story of the Midas touch. The iconic example is Ron DeSantis, then an obscure backbench member of Congress, who entered the race for Florida governor and is widely credited with winning it by attracting Trump’s endorsement through artful and plentiful appearances on Fox News.

If Trump were better at it, his prestige would be higher. But he’s not all that good at it. In some cases, he’s stepped on the one step too far for the GOP base, domestic & sexual transgressions. See Charles Herbster (R-NE), for instance, beaten in the Nebraska primary for governor despite Trump’s endorsement amidst allegations of Herbster sexually harassing various women, or, worse yet, Sean Parnell (R-PA), endorsed for the Pennsylvania Senate race and forced to withdraw over domestic incident accusations, even though heartily denied.

Other failures are less obvious: Incumbent Senator Luther Strange in Alabama springs right to mind. I do not recall any particular transgressions, but Trump-endorsed Strange lost to Judge Roy Moore, who was then beaten by Democrat Doug Jones in the special election.

But the point is that Trump is trying to build a brand. He doesn’t do it very well, witness his poor picks, and other picks just go awry. He’s not the kingpin that Bolger believes he aspires to be. But I think Bolger has the story wrong.

As it were.

¹ Not really. See, again, Governor DeSantis, now a man making the noises of a 2024 rival of Trump’s.

Thinking back to when I read Reason Magazine, they never pointed out that government regulation, effectively implemented, can stop crap like this:

As downpours intensified on 23 April on the outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia, toxic foam from an adjacent river started engulfing the Los Puentes neighbourhood.

Fluffy white froth emerged from the water and was whisked up by the wind until it reached a height of 5 metres and blanketed cars and roads, says restaurant manager María Morales. Eventually, it crept through the windows of her kitchen, forcing her to close the business.

Though the scenes may resemble a harmless giant bubble bath, the residents know better.

“If it were normal foam, the kids would love it,” says Maria Chacue, who has had a hard time stopping her 22-month-old son from playing in the toxic chemicals, which include compounds from soaps and detergents. “But it’s not normal. It’s so polluted.”

Environmental officials blame the heavy rains driven by the La Niña weather phenomenon, which have flooded much of Colombia in recent weeks. As the Bojacá and Subachoque rivers converge in the lower river basin near Los Puentes at high speeds and volumes, they churn up the underlying contaminants. [“Toxic foam from polluted rivers causes health problems in Colombia,” Luke Taylor, NewScientist (14 May 2022, paywall)]

The Cuyahoga River fire, aka, if inaccurately, the Lake Erie Fire.
Image: Cleveland State University Library via WYSO.

Of course, the United States has seen such abuse, although with different manifestations. In 1969, the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire; the link on the right has a story on the resulting Clean Water Act.

But the point is, if you consider yourself to be anti-regulation, that picture on the right is what you’re enabling.

The latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll is out and contains what some might think is preliminary evidence of my contention that the Democrats will find strength in the supposedly imminent ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade:

Democrats also got a boost on which party Americans want to control Congress. By a 47%-to-42% margin, this survey showed voters would cast their ballot in favor of a Democrat in their local congressional district if the election were held today.

For Democrats, that is a net increase on the so-called congressional ballot test of 8 points from last month’s survey, when 47% said they would vote for a Republican, as compared to 44% who said they would vote for a Democrat. Those numbers were within the margin of error, but it was the first time in eight years that Republicans had done that well on the question in the Marist poll.

The question is whether this spike for Democrats lasts. [Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll] sees reason to believe it might.

Yes, will the spike not be a spike? In a poll with a margin of ± 3.9% for adults and 4.1% for registered voters, there’s lots of room to bounce around, so I’d like to see several polls in a row before I might believe that there’s some proof that the upturning of Roe has electoral legs.

Keep in mind that this has the most visibility in Presidential and Senate races; the House, which is vulnerable to gerrymandering, will only reflect such legs if independents in the few swing districts go out and vote.

Keep an eye on the polling.

On a slightly lighter note concerning cryptocurrencies comes this news from the recent primary in Oregon:

Speaking of the Democratic establishment getting one wrong: Biden aside, the party more broadly didn’t fight too hard for [Rep. Kurt Schrader of Oregon]. But a PAC affiliated with House Democratic leaders did spend $1 million on a candidate in the neighboring 6th District, Carrick Flynn. Flynn is trailing state Rep. Andrea Salinas, 38 percent to 19 percent.

That investment in an apparently losing candidate, though, pales to Flynn’s biggest benefactor: cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. His Protect Our Future PAC spent more than $11 million on Flynn — a stunning sum for one out of 435 House seats — and it appears to have failed badly. [WaPo]

… when you realize it’s HAILING.

These were all unfortunately taken through window screens.

And here’s a couple of our neighbor.

In what seems to be a desperate bid for attention, Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) is gaining a second Earl Landgrebe nomination on basically the same subject as the first one – expungements:

FIRST ON FOX: House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik and more than two dozen of her colleagues are supporting a resolution to “expunge” former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment – as pro-Trump Republicans push to rally voters ahead of the midterms.

Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., is leading the resolution, which would apply to Trump’s 2021 impeachment in the wake of the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters. It’s similar to a previous resolution Mullin introduced on Trump’s first impeachment, which concerned him allegedly withholding military aid from Ukraine in exchange for political favors.

The Daily Beast first reported on the existence of the more recent resolution. But the support for it by Stefanik and other Republicans, including House GOP Conference Vice Chair Mike Johnson, R-La., was not revealed until Wednesday. And although it will not pass the Democrat-controlled House, it underscores Republicans’ continued support for Trump nearly 16 months after he left office. [Fox News]

The prior nomination was for Rep Mullin’s sordid attempt to expunge the record of Trump’s first impeachment.

And is this an example of his continued support for Trump? Steve Benen remarks:

… Mullin — who also happens to be a U.S. Senate candidate in Oklahoma — …

There’s one real clue: a kid desperate for the attention of Daddy. And who else is in the race to replace the retired Senator Inhofe (R-OK)? Why, former Trump EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt (R-OK), he who was chased from government with so many scandals nipping at his heels that I lost count! An embarrassment to the nation and to Trump, and at least the latter didn’t acknowledge it.

So Mullin’s feeling worried, eh? Let’s all scream for Daddy now!