Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Elaine Chao

Elaine Chao was the secretary of transportation during almost the entirety of the Trump administration, only resigning after the events of January 6th 2021, just two weeks before its end. She held the position of labor secretary during the administration of George W. Bush. She is married to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. She is also the child of Chinese immigrants and came to the US as a child. Her family also founded a massive shipping company. This latter feature opened her up to charges of using her official government position to benefit the family shipping business but this kind of influence-peddling is now routine. The idea that one should go to great lengths to prevent even the appearance of any impropriety is now seen as some kind of quaint old-world fantasy.
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What the Speaker holdouts achieved

In order to get the votes to become Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy had to agree to a lot of the demands made by the most extreme members of the so-called Freedom Caucus.

Some of those concern committee assignments. Legislation must pass through the various and committees and subcommittees before they reach the floor for a vote. Draft legislation (the initial versions of which are often prepared behind closed doors with the help of lobbyists who tilt them to favor their bosses) are supposed to get hearings in these subcommittees with public input. Members of Congress desire seats on those committees that are of prime concern to wealthy constituents because then those constituents’ lobbyists will pour money into their campaigns in order to get their vote. Since these committees are much sought after, many of those seats are assigned by seniority, meaning that the longer one has been in Congress, the better your chances of being placed on the desired committees or, even better, chairing them. But some of the Freedom Caucus members have demanded seats ahead of senior members and you can be sure that McCarthy is going to face some anger if he shoves aside senior members to appease the extremists.
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Here we go again with the debt ceiling dance

Once again, we are being told that there is a danger that the US may default if Congress does not raise the limit on the debt ceiling that allows the Treasury to borrow money to meet its obligations. The debt ceiling was formally reached last week but the Treasury is shifting money around in order to cover the shortfall. That room for financial maneuverings runs out around June.

The country has been through this before, usually when a Democrat is president and the House or the Senate is controlled by Republicans who like to use this issue to create difficulties for the president. When Trump was president, the ceiling was raised with little fuss. Of course, Trump is now urging his followers to use the debt ceiling as hostage.

On Monday, Trump, whose influence over the party was shaken somewhat by poor midterm election results for his endorsed candidates but who remains the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination for president, called on House Republicans to leverage power “by simply playing tough in the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations”.

Posting on the social media network he set up, Truth Social, Trump pressed all wings of the Republican party, including those rebels who initially voted against McCarthy, to join the negotiations: “It will be a beautiful and joyous thing for the people of our country to watch.”

The debt ceiling issue is one that seems made to be exploited by grandstanding politicians. To understand it, one must realize that what is called the ‘power of the purse’ is given to the House of Representatives. What that means is that all spending bills must originate in the House. It then goes to the Senate that can make changes which then have to be reconciled with the House and the reconciled bill is then sent to the president for their signature.
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Are we living in an Age of Unreason?

I have been thinking about how future historians will characterize the period through which we are living and the label ‘The Age of Unreason’ popped into my mind as a suitable one (at least for the US). The reason is that I marvel at the kinds of things that people currently believe and are doing that seem so detached from reality and untethered to reason. Here is a short list of things that immediately came to mind and I am sure that there are others.

Anti-vax: Vaccines are some of the greatest inventions in medicine, saving countless lives all over the world. The rapid development of the vaccines for covid-19 was a stupendous achievement. And yet, we have people refusing to take it because they think that Covid-19 was an intentionally planned outbreak and part of some plot and are willing to trust completely untested and sometimes dangerous alternatives. Some of these people are even giving up on Trump because he does not buy in to all their claims.
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Ted Baxter is the archetype for TV personalities who pretend to be journalists

Many of the people whom one sees on cable TV ‘news’ shows are not really journalists but people selected for their looks and attitudes. Some old timers may remember the Mary Tyler Moore TV comedy series in which she plays an assistant producer on a local TV new station. Much of the humor in that show comes from their TV news anchor Ted Baxter (played by Ted Knight) who was pompous and ignorant but had the look and the voice of a TV anchor, at least by the standards of that time when they were pretty much all middle-aged white men.

Chris Kaltenbach writes that in the film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell models his character on Baxter.

Burgundy’s is a character profile that fans of television’s “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” know well. For seven seasons, pompous blowhard Ted Baxter anchored the news on Minneapolis’ WJM-TV, mangling the English language, acting as his own biggest fan, placing more importance on the color of his blazer than on his understanding of the news. He was an insufferable buffoon who rarely did anything right, who believed the world existed for him and him alone.

Fans of the show loved him. Critics loved him. His peers loved him, awarding actor Ted Knight a pair of Emmys for his portrayal. Who knew that Knight and the show’s writers were creating an archetype that would still be going strong three decades later?
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[Show co-creator Allan] Burns, who would go on to win a pair of writing Emmys for the show, says he and Brooks patterned Baxter after a pair of news anchors popular in Los Angeles at the time the show debuted in 1970.

“[Moore’s] aunt was the assistant to the president of the local CBS affiliate here in L.A., and so Jim and I spent a lot of time hanging around that newsroom just to try and get the flavor of it,” he says. “There was an anchorman there, Jerry Dunphy — Jerry was one of those stentorian, firm-jawed, gray-haired guys who looked right on camera, but who was not a newsman, like so many of the anchors are not. They’re really newsreaders more than anything else.

Baxter would constantly mangle the script written for him to read, to the chagrin of the writers. In this clip, Baxter reads the script oblivious that the visuals accompanying it are wrong.

Heather Hendershot makes the case that the fictional Baxter, for all his faults, is better than the current crop of media news pundits.

The skills of a cult leader

When we think of cult leaders, we tend to think of those with large followings. But that same kind of phenomenon can occur with smaller numbers, even within households, because the kinds of skills used by a cult leader to control others can be seen in abusive relationships where the abused person seems unable to escape from the clutches of the abusers, even though on the surface they seem to have the ability to walk away. The abuser seems to know exactly what buttons to push with each captive, which combination of threats and affection work to keep them from leaving.

I was struck by the case of Larry Ray who has just been sentenced to 60 years in prison for trafficking. It starts with his daughter Talia asking her seven dorm roommates at Sarah Lawrence College if her father, who had just been released from prison, could stay in their dorm for a short while and they agreed.
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The Santos lies keep coming

According to Politico:

Embattled Rep. George Santos has claimed that reports and videos documenting him performing in drag are both “outrageous” and “categorically false.”

But nearly a dozen years ago, Santos himself appears to have confirmed that he participated in drag shows while he was a teenager living in Brazil.

A Wikipedia page accessed by POLITICO shows a user named Anthony Devolder — a Santos alias — writing that he “startted [sp] his ‘stage’ life at age 17 as an gay night club [sp] DRAG QUEEN and with that won sevral [sp] GAY ‘BEAUTY PAGENTS [sp].’”

That he may have once been a drag queen is not nor should be an issue. However, I will be skeptical that he actually won beauty pageants until he provides proof, because he seems to have a penchant for exaggerating his accomplishments, such as claiming that he was a volleyball star at Baruch College when they won a championship, when he did not even attend that institution. He seems to be incapable of making up simple lies, he seems compelled to adorn them with further grandiosities.
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Public libraries survive despite threats

I love libraries. They are truly egalitarian spaces that are open to everyone and enables anyone free access to information, be it in the form of books, newspapers, magazines, or the internet. I have never met a librarian who did not seem genuinely pleased to be asked to help me find out something or seek out a resource. They are welcoming spaces. The Peterborough Town Library in New Hampshire, established in 1833, is reported to be the first documented free, public library in the world, though claims of being the ‘first’ for anything are always ripe for challenge.

One thing to note is that the modern library is far more than a repository for books. It also provides classes, workshops, internet access, resume and tax help, and serves as a meeting space for community events, as community gathering places, and so forth
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Harvard reverses rejection of Israel critic

Kenneth Roth, the outgoing heard of Human Rights Watch, was offered a fellowship by Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy school of government but that offer was vetoed by the school’s dean Doug Elmendorf for what became clear was uneasiness with Roth’s role in HRW’s criticisms of Israel’s human rights record, which included a scathing report that accused Israel of practicing a form of apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories. It joined an Amnesty International report that described Israel’s policies in those same terms. That apartheid description has become widely accepted but is opposed by the Israel lobby in the US.
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Media obsession with the British monarchy

I suspect many readers of this blog are as wearied as I am from being bombarded with news headlines about the the Windsor family’s internal fights. It seems like it never ends.

This 11-year-old clip from the Australian sketch comedy team The Chasers pokes well-deserved ridicule at the media’s obsession with the most trivial details about that annoying family. And that was long before the current media binge about whatever the hell is the latest topic in this long-running soap opera.