Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Shaping the battlefield is a phrase used by analysts of Putin’s War, describing the attempt to reshape a battle field into a more favorable configuration by each side. It’s very common and, in politics, it happens a lot, from what I see, especially for statewide contests.

The Republicans are now signaling their recognition that there’s an existential threat in ranked-choice-voting, as Alaska Public Media is reporting:

Alaska Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom has certified an application for a petition that, if successful, would get rid of the state’s ranked choice voting system and non-partisan primary.

Sponsor Art Mathias wants to go back to the traditional election, where a candidate from each officially recognized party has a spot on the general election ballot in each race.

Which is much easier for extremists. The ideological gap, if you will, between an extremist and a moderate example of their Party may be far larger than that between the moderate and the moderate of a different Party, and, if this is made apparent during the campaign, why, the extremist may not get the votes they’d otherwise receive in a non-ranked choice voting system.

Mathias reason for discarding a system made for moderates?

He said the new system forced candidates to hold their tongues, to avoid rankling the supporters of their opponents.

Sounds like unrepentant whining to me.

Look, shaping the battlefield, or changing the rules in less romantic parlance, is a perfectly valid maneuver, providing the changes don’t unfairly advantage one side or the other. That, in itself, can sometimes be a nasty little question, but I’ll not go into it here.

The real question here is not whether Mathias is just a whiner, or recognizes that he’s an extremist and is trying to cover it up. The question is whether Alaskans liked the experience of having available an option to select a moderate in the two 2022 state-wide races (in which Senator Murkowski (R) and Mary Peltola (D) won re-election and election, respectively), and took it.

I would say the same question applies to the left wing of the Democrats, but in Alaska the Republicans dominate, so it may not matter much.

And this may be one of the most important political maneuvers for the next five years, if it spreads out of Alaska. Win or lose, this is an excellent path for reclaiming seats from extremists.

Too bad this was the best headgear. I’d have preferred the title Evil Under Hats. Or maybe Evil Under Hairpieces.

Evil Under the Sun (1982) is a lightweight rendition of Agatha Christie’s Poirot stumbling into a murder, this time on a French vacation beachfront. Make no mistake, there are twists and gambits, passions and hatreds, but somehow it never comes to life. A is dead, B through F have reasons, even good reasons, to kill A, but in the end the bad guys would get away, if they just hadn’t made that one tiny error.

Meh.

Perhaps the problem is the scenery dominates the movie, fabulous cliffs and blue seas and men and ladies in scant, for the time, swimming clothing. But it all feels so bourgeois, as if it’s happening again and again on all the beaches local to this one, to the self-centered by the self-centered. Bourgeois? Yes, bourgeois, crimes of the bourgeois against the bourgeois.

It may be murder, but in some essential sense it feels like a peculiarly bourgeois crime, committed by newcomers to the class of bourgeois against its royalty, a ridiculous statement on its face, and, yet, a truth that renders the drama painfully socially provincial: no one really cares, but, perhaps, Poirot and his neurotic physique.

Perhaps the lack of Poirot-foil is brought to a sharp point in this drama, as Captain Hastings, the naive and jealous sidekick of Christie’s invention, is not yet present. In other of the Belgian’s dramas he’s the anchorline for Poirot, who is the racing yacht, holding the quicksilver detective in close contact with the working men and women who have suffered at the hands of some criminals’ mischief; or, sometimes, the reverse, as the lower-class criminal buffets the hapless heiress, relieving her of her ill-earned millions and even her life, much to her grief.

But in Evil Under The Sun, it’s not so much the criminals, but the entire social system under indictment, an indictment equal parts criminal and petty and boring. They all dance, but it’s all uncertain mincing and tights exhibiting dismaying seams.

Et ainsi ça se passe.

Found on AL-Monitor’s Why Tunisian InstaDeep’s $682m exit may not mark Maghreb’s turning point:

Yassir Ismail Idrissi, former Careem entrepreneur and co-founder of the Egyptian food supply startup Nomu, believes that this exit will not lead external investors to pump money into the region, “not because they don’t want to, but the hassle of dealing with the region’s grunting policies is not worth it.”

Grunting? I understand that exit means the enterprise has been sold, but grunting?

Ryan Cooper of MSNBC is another advocate of the platinum coin solution to the threatened Federal debt default. If you’ve not been paying attention, this hypothesized imminent catastrophe is the fact that the amount of money that can be borrowed by the Federal Government is limited by law, and when we run into that limit then the government cannot borrow more to, say, pay subcontractors, employees, and any other liability. House Republicans have so far refused to up the limit, demanding Democrats cut spending on a collection of institutions, such as Medicare, and thus letting the Republicans bypass the primary, preferred, and only legitimate way to change those programs: legislation. What they’re trying to do is extortion, as many have pointed out.

Incidentally, the House Republicans, or at least the House’s Freedom Caucus, think they should be able to pick and choose who gets paid in the meantime, but the President, the Senate Democrats, and quite possibly the Senate Republicans have all slapped the House GOP’s hand.

Cooper’s advocacy is for an outré counter-strategy called the platinum coin solution:

All this is why the famous platinum coin is Biden’s most legally defensible option, despite how silly it sounds. A 1997 law clearly grants the treasury secretary the ability to mint platinum coins of any denomination, in part with the intended purpose of making profit for the government through seignorage [WOTD here – haw]. If Congress says that the president must spend, cannot borrow, but can mint, then the way is clear for a legal stickler. Mint a trillion or two in platinum coins, deposit them at the Federal Reserve, and hey, presto, problem solved. Economically, it would be virtually identical to borrowing the money, and presumably at some point the ceiling could be raised and the coin spending replaced with normal debt.

More on the platinum coin solution is here.

Now, I’m no expert on this sort of thing. Arguably, no one qualifies as such when it comes to a financial strategy that has never been promulgated before. It’s worth noting that Treasury Secretary and former Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen disagrees with Cooper, as he notes:

Yet administration lawyers apparently disagree. Yellen has further said the coin is a “gimmick” that “compromises the independence of the Fed, conflating monetary and fiscal policy.” This is a weak argument in context — it’s hard to see why a gimmick that allegedly erodes the (highly overrated) independence of the Fed would be worse than financial Armageddon.

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), current leader of the GOP in the Senate.

In the end, though, I have to wonder if Cooper is trying to analyze the wrong problem.

Anyone who has been paying attention to President Biden knows the President’s strongest domestic concern is not a debt default, but, much to the consternation of the GOP, the House GOP itself. Biden regards their behavior as poisonous to the United States. He’s said this a number of times.

So how does one defang the serpent?

Not by negotiating with the extremists. It grants them legitimacy and a reputation for being effective. They are wild-eyed extremists, and letting them acquire a reputation for being part of the mainstream would simply encourage them to repeat this illicit maneuver.

So, instead, they are being isolated. They are told to follow the rules, they are virtually being told to grow up. For many, including myself, Biden is running the risk that the House GOP won’t abandon the extremists, and we’ll go into default, world-wide financial meltdown, blah blah blah. But Biden and his advisors may calculate that such a disaster is better than letting the inmates run the show – and then can be used to end the careers of the troublemakers. They may view this as a win-win situation – and it’s a position not without legitimacy.

In the end, I think the point here is to blunt the extremists’ influence, and to imperil their careers. Solve the default problem? Sure, that, too.

It’s just what you think: the Plantae version of Senator McConnell, See above for the human version.

But, really, it may be to chase the nut-cases out of the government. This may be part of the McConnell Reform Effort.

What!! you say?

Senator McConnell (R-KY), much as it pains me to say it, may represent the sanest segment of the current Republican Party. He’s certainly no fan of such lunatics as former President Trump, or Senators Scott (FL), Johnson (WI), or the Freedom Caucus. I, personally, think he’s displayed exceptionally poor judgment over the years, resulting in an arrogant, overweening super-majority on SCOTUS that is bringing public opprobrium on the institution, and an inability to write serious legislation when he’s in charge of the Senate. But, compared to the other inmates, he may be the most sane, and he seems to be competing with the far more extreme members of the GOP for access to the controls of the party.

And so I call it the McConnell Reform Effort.

And sigh.

Just give her a pipe and she’ll fit right in.

Them! (1954) is a highly competent story-telling effort grafted onto a nuclear horror meme. It all starts with the discovery of a little girl wandering the New Mexican desert by the police. Traced to a nearby vacation trailer owned by an FBI agent, the location of her family remains a mystery, as the trailer has been wrecked.

Sending the kid to a hospital via ambulance, the cops find a local store similarly vandalized, and the proprietor dead. One of the cops heads for the station, leaving the other to face the New Mexican night and its shadows.

It doesn’t go well.

Soon, a father & daughter team of entomologists from the Federal Government show up in response for calls for assistance. With their help, the local New Mexicans finally find a huge mound, and in it is … well … monsters.

Nuclear monsters.

They’re eradicated, but where there’s one mutation, there can be more, and a nationwide search yields another infestation under Los Angeles, missing children, and the ongoing challenge of bad special effects.

But that last is the worst of the movie, and badly done monsters is something of a tradition in the industry of the time. The rest of Them! is absolutely nothing to sneeze at: tight, logical, and plausible plot, a minimum of gender discrimination, and excellent acting and sets. It was really a pleasure to watch.

If you like monster movies from the era prior to the advent of computer graphics, Them!, despite its fairly odd title – yes, I know the little girl uses it – is one of the best of that category.

Not all physicists are tongue-tied.

I'm thrilled to be joined on the Science Committee by my Republican colleague Dr. George Santos, winner of not only the Nobel Prize, but also the Fields Medal – the top prize in Mathematics – for his groundbreaking work with imaginary numbers. https://t.co/RJQ7eP8n8x

— Congressman Bill Foster (@RepBillFoster) January 20, 2023

Rep Foster (D-IL) forgets to mention that MIT Professor Santos’ work in black holes is a wonderful metaphor for what the good Professor is doing to the Republican Party – sucking them down a black hole of dishonor.

Image source: ScienceBlogs

In a moment, you’ll be asked to judge the Executioner’s technique. Please use the criteria of efficiency, cost, and – no, D’Artagnan, that’s not a kaiju. Shame on you for distracting us while trying to save the malcontent!

The Four Musketeers (1974) is the simple and straightforward continuation of the first of the series of Aramis, Portos, Athos, and D’Artagnan of Gascony. Suspicion of Milady’s origins has D’Artagnan in her bed, where he discovers she was indeed condemned, and is also Athos’ ex-wife. With the endangered Constance, who has insulted Milady, safely tucked away in a convent, the Musketeers engage in various adventures.

Meanwhile, the ladies are either helpless, or having to sacrifice their virtue to avoid having to, ah, sacrifice their lives to the marital gods. Freedom is, for the most fortunate women, dearly bought; the less fortunate simply don’t have any.

But then, the men are subject to the whims of the King, of God the Cardinal, and, lurking in the background, incurable illnesses and a medical profession incompetent in much of its efforts. The parallels are unemphasized, but present. My Arts Editor, unfamiliar with the story, fully expected one of the good guys to find a miraculous way to survive imminent death, so when that death did prove implacable, it’s yet another reminder that, for all the life and vivacity of the story and, especially, Athos’ particularly energetic style of fighting, the dice of the Gods play’s heavily with the lives of everyone in this story.

But it remains fun, and is a worthy successor to The Three Musketeers (1973).

When it comes to the cryptocurrency situation, it’ll be interesting to see in five years how the following report is viewed – an announcement introducing the Great Turnaround, or the introduction of the Clown Show of the Last Act:

In an attempt to eradicate trade transactions in fiat currencies, Russia is working with several countries to launch a stablecoin backed by the global monetary asset, gold, but this move could reportedly pave the way for the establishment of a new global economic order.

Nikhil Kamath, the co-founder of the Indian financial services company Zerodha, sounded the alarm about this undertaking led by Russia and Iran and noted that if this trend picks up, then it could establish a new global economic order.

Zerodha is the largest, most popular and technologically advanced stock broker in India that works on a low-margin, high-volume model that allows the company to charge a very minimal amount per transaction due to its generally high trading volume.

“Iran and Russia to issue a new stablecoin backed by Gold. Damn, if this picks up could be day 1, event 1 of establishing a new economic order everywhere. No idea why it’s getting no oxygen from the global press,” Kamath said in a tweet Monday. [International Business Times]

Because, well, this is Russia and Iran using Western technologies, if only inspired. Because the two countries together don’t have the international prestige and wherewithal to swing this project.

As the potential for corruption and grifting using cryptocurrencies comes into focus, why would anyone paying attention to international events even consider playing in this sandbox?

So this is just a weird little clown show, in my view.

FAFO:

A reader writes concerning the fencing in Musketeers:

Good take Hue. Thanks for sharing that.

Whats your opinion on the physicality of the sword play vs. the Errol Flynn/Stewart Granger/Zorro films? I would think it was a realistic portrayal.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any Errol Flynn movies since I began fencing. Zorro with Banderas was quite athletic and, if not entirely realistic, a great deal of fun; I do recall seeing an installment with, I believe, Basil Rathbone as the bad guy, so it was probably the 1940 THE MARK OF ZORRO, and while not nearly as athletic as Banderas, I seem to remember thinking it was really good stage fencing.

When it comes to Granger I’ve only seen SCARAMOUCHE, and, yeah, while the movements are a little exaggerated, it does look something like what fencers do.

Syncope:

Syncope (SINK-a-pee) is another word for fainting or passing out. Someone is considered to have syncope if they become unconscious and go limp, then soon recover. For most people, syncope occurs once in a great while, if ever, and is not a sign of serious illness. However in others, syncope can be the first and only warning sign prior to an episode of sudden cardiac death. Syncope can also lead to serious injury. Talk to your physician if syncope happens more often. [Johns Hopkins Medicine]

Noted in “For decades, she endured brief blackouts. Then a scary one hit her.”, Sandra G. Boodman, WaPo:

“Is she about to chuck a pie at us?” thought Constance. “Ah, she’s such a vindictive woman!”

The Three Musketeers (1973) is the Michael York & a cloud of stars version of the old and venerable tale. This is the most comedic version of the old tale that I’ve seen, ranging from broad farce to subtle presentation of an English Duke completing an assignation with a French Queen in a laundry in the basement of the French palace, and includes such touches as capturing the offhand mutterings of characters, the disposal of slops and worse out the building windows onto passing traffic, that might be suppressed in a more dignified retelling of the story.

In terms of the story, there’s little enough out of the ordinary: D’Artagnan is dispatched to Paris by his sword-master and former Musketeer father to seek fame, fortune, fighting, and women. He encounters Rochefort and is insulted by Rochefort’s disdain for D’Artagnan’s Gascony homeland; later, as he attempts to arrange a duel with Rochefort, he inadvertently schedules duels with the eponymous trio of musketeers. Interrupted by the Palace guard for brawling, they and D’Artagnan pummel the guard and befriend D’Artagnan. From Constance to the Queen’s assignation with the Duke, and her gift of a rememberance to the Duke, and then Cardinal Richelieu’s devious request for a masked ball at which the rememberance should be displayed, it’s all here, executed with flair, dash, and the occasional bit of clumsiness. As a fencer, I appreciate the clumsiness, it enhances my self-esteem.

This is what I grew up on, and its carefree approach to heroism is a lesson in itself.

Still, it shows its age a little bit. Constance is distressingly helpless, and the disparate lives of the various classes can be appalling for those audience members not conscious of the utility of fidelity to social realities in period storytelling. And if you need your heroes to be ridiculously buff and testosterone-ridden, go elsewhere for your entertainment. Michael York, playing the lead, might be described as ripped, but he’s built like a collection of toothpicks, and he’s not the only such actor.

It’s too light-hearted and, to be frank, shallow to recommend, but if you haven’t seen it, if you like sword-play and quick wit and plain silliness, and have a couple of hours to while away, this might be a candidate for your time.

From CNN/Business:

First, it was disposable cameras. Then it was low-rise jeans. Now, Gen-Z’s latest “vintage” obsession is the flip phone – that mid-1990s era phone that has suddenly become oh so popular with millennials. …

Actress Dove Cameron, who rose to fame on the Disney Channel’s “Liv and Maddie” show, said in a November interview that she had switched to a flip phone. Spending too much time on her phone and looking at social media “is really bad for me,” she said.

Eschew timesucks, folks. Give yourselves time to think.

JD Sword and Jeff Dellinger noted in passing on The Morning Heresy:

Posters for artist Demi Lovato’s new album, Holy Fvck, have been banned by Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for being “likely to cause serious offense to Christians.” According to CNN, the ASA received “complaints from four members of the public.” You know, out of the nearly 67 million people in Britain.

Surely there’s a religion out there that takes holy offense at any form of censorship?

The biggest natural pair of eyes in movies. No, I don’t know about the cap. Yes, that’s milk.

Carry On Cleo (1964) is the story of the Roman Empire at the time of Julius Caesar, his assault on Britain and Egypt, his relationship with Ptolemy, Marc Antony, and all the test, the Vestal Virgins, the slaves, and all the rest.

Told with bawdiness, puns, and no consideration for what’s possible and what’s not, Carry On Cleo is part of a 30-odd long series of movies covering various topics with a tongue in the cheek and a wink. Nothing is sacred nor profound, and the rest is, well, silly.

As we watched the pretty English lasses endure the leers of English cum Roman men, however, my Arts Editor said, “I should hate this, but it actually isn’t making my teeth itch.” Is there any better praise?

Sonification:

Sonification is the use of non-speech audio to convey information or perceptualize data. Auditory perception has advantages in temporal, spatial, amplitude, and frequency resolution that open possibilities as an alternative or complement to visualization techniques.

For example, the rate of clicking of a Geiger counter conveys the level of radiation in the immediate vicinity of the device. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “How sounds from space are revealing otherwise hidden cosmic phenomena,” Ajay Peter Manuel, NewScientist (28 December 2022, paywall):

It wasn’t until the 1960s that astronomers began listening to their data on purpose. And it was Donald Gurnett at the University of Iowa who pioneered the technique. When data came back from the Voyager 1 mission as it flew past Io, a moon of Jupiter, in 1979, Gurnett listened to the signals and identified low-frequency radio waves. In the 1980s, Gurnett and his colleagues used sonification to identify problems affecting the Voyager 2 mission as it traversed the rings of Saturn. When they converted signals from the craft’s radio and plasma wave science instrument into an audio representation, they heard sounds that they described as “resembling a hailstorm”. This led to the discovery that electromagnetically charged micrometeoroids the size of grains of dust were bombarding the probe.

Ears as highly sensitive sensory analyzers. BONUS: An example from the article, sourced on YouTube:

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare thinks not, but cannot guarantee it:

This fact pattern, in which the president’s counsels on their own initiative identify and arrange for the return of classified material, is not obviously consistent with criminal misuse of that classified material—much less by the president himself. So depending on what investigators find, there may be scant evidence that a crime took place at all.

Right now, all we really know is that a relatively small amount of classified material from the Obama era has been found where it wasn’t supposed to be on three occasions and in three locations associated with the period between Biden’s vice presidency and his presidency.

It has to be investigated, to be sure. This kind of mishandling of classified material always triggers a referral to the Justice Department. And it has to be investigated by a special counsel. The regulations are pretty clear about that. But that does not mean it is likely to blossom as a criminal case. Indeed, it’s a most unpromising criminal case.

An unfortunate coincidence, perhaps. I’ve even speculated that the docs were planted, although how that could be accomplished escapes me.

So I’ll be watching and waiting, while ignoring propaganda from both sides.

Leadership is easy when the stream of events contains nothing of an adverse nature. It’s only when hard decisions come tumbling down the river, and the river gets out of its banks and threatens to wash away all held dear, does good leadership really come to the fore.

I’d say the town is washing away as GOP leadership – a word to be put in quotes by those of us with a quaint disposition – has failed to look beyond its nose when it comes to new Rep George Santos (R-NY):

McCarthy told reporters on Thursday that Santos has “a long way to go to earn trust” and that concerns could be investigated by the House Ethics Committee, but emphasized that Santos is a part of the House GOP conference.

“The voters of his district have elected him. He is seated. He is part of the Republican conference,” he said at a news conference on Capitol Hill.

The controversy surrounding Santos is presenting an early test of McCarthy’s leadership as speaker and has created a major issue for the new GOP majority.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, echoed McCarthy, saying, “Obviously, you know, we’re finding out more, but we also recognize that he was elected by his constituents.”

House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican who endorsed Santos in his race, would not call on the embattled freshman to resign on Thursday.

“It will play itself out,” she told CNN. “He’s a duly elected member of Congress. There have been members of Congress on the Democrat side who have faced investigations before.” [CNN/Politics]

Trying to focus on the facts about Rep Santos results in this.

These excuses are quite rank, easily disassembled by anyone willing to take a moment and think about them. This is not leadership. Leadership would recognize that Santos, a very bad apple whose depths may not yet be plumbed, should be expelled, and acted quickly to stanch the bleeding.

What are the consequences of ignoring the problem? McCarthy’s told every corrupt-politico wannabe that he’ll tolerate their presence in the House of Representatives’ GOP caucus. He’s told every voter who’ll pay attention that the GOP is loaded with scalawags and grasping power mongers, who are unworthy of any elective office.

He’s told his caucus that his leadership skills are non-existent.

And the caucus may be listening. At least eight GOP Reps (here and here) have expressed their dismay that Santos is in the House, and under the colors of the Republican Party. Most or all of them want him gone.

McCarthy & his leadership group are off to a very poor start. McCarthy was stripped and manhandled by the far-right extremists, and then here on his very first challenge, he’s refused to take decisive action.

That action would have been to move to expel Santos from the House. Yes, Santos managed to get himself elected by a GOP that failed to do its gatekeeper job, but McCarthy’s message would be We forthrightly cleaned up our mistake, and voters would have appreciated that.

Instead, he’ll be a festering, maggoty wound on the side of the Republican elephant, and when the special election does come around, chances are that the Democrats will easily take the seat. Indeed, this could be a problem for all swing-district Republicans, and those expressing disapproval may be trying to immunize their re-election efforts.

But McCarthy’s off to such a rocky start that I foresee withdrawing my labeling of Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) as the worst Speaker in the modern era, and moving that label to McCarthy.

Long-time readers may recall the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Succinctly, those States subscribing to the Compact dedicate their Electoral College votes to the Presidential Candidate who garners the most votes, nation-wide, each Presidential election cycle. This would prevent the perceived injustice of a victory in the popular vote obviated by a loss in the Electoral College, as happened to candidates Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. Paul Hogarth on Daily Kos has an update:

We are already 72% [of the winning 270 electoral votes] of the way there—with 15 states and the District of Columbia having passed a law joining the Compact, which totals 195 electoral votes. And in Colorado, after the governor and state legislature joined the Compact in 2019, it even survived a referendum challenge at the ballot box.

Getting from 195 to 270 electoral votes will not be easy, as we already got the “low-hanging fruit” of large blue states like California, New York, and Illinois. But the Compact has already picked up battleground states like Colorado and New Mexico, and in recent years, the Compact came very close to passing in Nevada (where it passed both houses of the legislature), Maine, and Virginia.

After the 2022 midterms, Democrats have a trifecta in Minnesota and Michigan—so in 2023, these two states will be top priorities for the Compact. We also now have a Democratic majority in the Pennsylvania state House, and are likely just one more election cycle away from picking up the legislature in Arizona.

It’s interesting that he thinks the Arizona legislature will fall to the Democrats in 2024.

This was written during the 15 elections for Speaker of the House, and then I forgot to publish it. Oversights happen.

Jennifer Rubin of WaPo thinks the House GOP is nuts, and not because of the ongoing fiasco of the electing anyone to the Speaker’s chair:

The OCE [Office of Congressional Ethics], which Democrats created in 2008, was designed as an independent office with the power to investigate ethics violations among House members. (The OCE, however, can only conduct preliminary investigations and make recommendations, leaving it to the House Ethics Committee to decide whether to investigate further and enact punishment.)

Ever since the office’s conception, Republicans seeking to avoid independent scrutiny have attempted to dismantle it. So it should come as no surprise that while they cannot agree on a speaker, Republicans have apparently agreed to introduce rules changes that would hamper the OCE’s ability to do its job, including imposing term limits on its board and severely restricting its ability to hire new staff.

Yeah, that’d be the corpse of the GOP there.

When someone is a third-rater, and finds themselves in a prestigious and powerful position such as being a member of the US House of Representatives, the first thing to do is put in place safeguards against detection.

Once detection is mitigated, then taking corrupt advantage of your position can begin.

We saw this with former President Trump as he fired or otherwise muzzled a number of inspectors throughout the Executive Branch; it’s no surprise that the House, temporary home to a number of highly questionable, if deeply self-righteous, individuals with allegiances to Trump and his corrupt methods, will be seeing similar actions taking place.

After all, this is the end-phase of the GOP. Already in the process of ripping itself apart, opportunists are rampant in the Party machinery. I expect we’ll be witness to quite a lot of corruption in the next two years. Unless the corruption actually takes the GOP out of power, which, given the small GOP advantage in the chamber, could certainly happen.

The FTX debacle is apparently scrambling some brains:

Collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX says it has recovered more than $5 billion worth of cash and crypto assets it may be able to sell to help repay customers and investors, an attorney for the company told a Delaware bankruptcy court on Wednesday.

Company advisers have identified a significant amount of crypto that it will be more difficult to sell without depressing the market price of those digital tokens, FTX attorney Andrew Dietderich said. The company is also trying to sell off other “nonstrategic investments” made by FTX that have a book value of $4.6 billion, he said. [WaPo]

I do hope the judge rules the “crypto assets” are worthless. That’s how I’d view it.

Now-Rep George Santos (R-NY), of ethical scandals fame, is refusing to fold under the pressure:

“He deceived voters,” Cairo said. “His lies were not mere fibs. He disgraced the House of Representatives … He’s not welcome here at Republican headquarters.”

Moments after the news broke, Santos, who was in Washington at the time, refused to resign.

“I will not,” he told reporters on Capitol Hill when asked if he will step down. He refused to answer additional questions as he went into an elevator.

The top Republicans in the House – Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Majority Whip Tom Emmer – did not answer questions from CNN about Santos and the Nassau County GOP’s calls for his resignation.

A source close to House GOP leadership said the calls from the county GOP will not have any bearing on their decision regarding Santos’s political future. [CNN/Politics]

Santos will be a continual embarrassment for the House GOP, but they do not dare expel him. Why?

Because it’d be an acknowledgment that there are, indeed, ethical lines in the sand.

And the Democrats would then know where to push any subsequent GOP scandals – right over that line.

Representative George Devolder-Santos, NY-CD3, currently

That’s why I quoted the House GOP leadership source, because I think it indicates they’ll be sticking their poo-covered fingers in their ears. After all, their current advantage in the House is only ten, when they had forecast something in the fifties a few months before the election. If Santos resigns, the advantage is nine – and if the Democrats win the special election, it’s down to eight. This effectively means the number of votes they can lose to out of sorts extremists actively working against them goes from 4 to 3, assuming all Democrats are present and voting en bloc.

But the more moderate Republicans are those that are thinking more than a week ahead, and they have already begun to press Santos to resign. While McCarthy would not agree, that’s the best result the GOP can hope for, as it doesn’t result in a goal for which Democrats can try to push the next Republican ethics scandal, but kicks out someone who puts out a vibe best described as pathetic and power-hungry. Pathetic Republicans will not attract enough votes to retain control of the House in 2024, and they’re already in trouble after the collapse of the GOP leadership during the Speaker elections.

But does Santos realize how pathetic he’ll look if credible evidence of campaign finance laws infringement emerges, if his misrepresentations concerning schooling, personal finances, religious position, and who knows what else continues to dominate headlines? In politics, winning elections is not the end-all, be-all. Truth be told, it’s barely the first step. Bungling the second step is a fool’s move.

Posit:

to suggest something as a basic fact or principle from which a further idea is formed or developed: … [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “The T. rex may have been a lot smarter than you thought,” Dino Grandoni, WaPo:

[Johns Hopkins University evolutionary biologist] Balanoff said she would like to see future research with updated fossil measurements. She also called the notion of the T. rex forming cultures a “really fascinating idea” but added, “I don’t know that we’re quite there yet in being able to make this prediction.”

“That being said, I welcome the positing of big ideas to drive science forward,” Balanoff said.

One of our gutters is leaking, so we’re catching the water in a bucket. Here’s a little bit of what we found when we dumped it.