Bye, bye, Kevin

The ex-speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy has said that he will leave Congress at the end of this year. That will result in two vacancies, since George Santos was unceremoniously kicked out last week and leaves the body split 220-213 in favor of the GOP. The current speaker can now afford to have only three defections om any bill he brings to the floor. (Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that the GOP now has a majority of only one, showing that she has not yet grasped this thing called arithmetic.)

After his ouster, he had said that he would not leave and that indeed he would run for re-election in 2024. But now McCarthy has released a statement saying that although he was leaving Congress he will not stop fighting for the country. I translate that to mean that he will quickly seek to make a ton of money as a lobbyist.

I was planning to write something about how awful McCarthy was but I see that Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said it much better:

“In his short time as speaker, Kevin McCarthy managed to plunge the People’s House into chaos in the name of serving one person and one person alone: Donald Trump. At every turn, Kevin sought to give his puppet master a lifeline, even after the horrific events of January 6, and spent his embarrassing speakership bending the knee to the most extreme factions of the MAGA base.



This anticlimactic end to Kevin’s political career is in line with the rest of his time on Capitol Hill – plagued by cowardice, incompetence, and fecklessness. Our country will be better off without Kevin in office, but his failed tenure in the House should serve as a stark warning to the country about the future of the GOP – no matter how much he kowtowed to the extreme right, no matter how much he kissed the ring, none of it was MAGA enough for the de facto leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump.”

Yep, that’s about right.

McCarthy was apparently furious with serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) for not calling off his attack dog Matt Gaetz when the latter was working to oust him, after all the groveling he had done to gain SSAT’s favor. But even after being ousted, he never said anything publicly, maybe hoping for some kind of rehabilitation. These guys never seem to learn that a sense gratitude is not part of SSAT’s qualities. He wants unquestioned loyalty and obedience and gives nothing in return. If you want something from him, you have to get it in writing and notarized before you give him anything.

Tommy Tuberville caves on abortion issue

The arcane rules that the US senate has set for itself gives enormous powers to even a single senator to gum up the works. Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville used this power to hold up the promotions and transfers of 451 military personnel for nine months. The reason? He was unhappy that the military would pay for the abortions of personnel who were forced to travel to another state to have them because the state they were in banned them. This policy is not specific to abortions but is part of the military’s general health care policy that covers any treatment that requires such travel. He was demanding that the abortion requirement be removed beforehe would release the holds.

This hold caused a lot of problems for the officers involve since it complicated the planning of them and their families since where they would live was in limbo. It even irritated Tuberville’s Republican colleagues but they were unwilling to do anything drastic to overcome his hold.

Then today, Tuberville suddenly announced that he was lifting the hold on all but the promotions of 12 four-star officers.

Tommy Tuberville is dropping most of his months-long holds on military officer nominations in the Senate, backing down from his vow to block them until the Pentagon changes an internal abortion policy.

The Alabama Republican plans to continue his holds on four-star nominees, he told reporters, but will release the rest effective immediately. That means the Senate can move to confirm most of them as soon as Tuesday evening, and possibly all of them before the new year.
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Schumer told reporters the Senate will move “as soon as possible” to confirm the outstanding nominees, which are typically approved via unanimous consent. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said that “should be today.”

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) told POLITICO he expects Democrats will discuss voting on the other four-star officers this month. The Senate only has one more full week of session and confirming those officers one at a time would take several days. Reed suggested individual roll-call votes on the four-star nominees could happen “if necessary.”

Another example that what Republicans do best is create obstacles over their pet obsessions.

That was quick: Film about Santos already in the works

To no one’s surprise, there is going to be a made-for-TV film about serial fabulist and no ex-congressperson George Santos. In Santos’s case, the film will be based on a book on his life that was released last week.

A book about the improbable rise and rapid fall of former congressman George Santos has been optioned by HBO Films, it was reported Saturday, and will be produced under the guidance of Frank Rich, a former New York Times columnist known for executive production credits on Emmy awards-winning Succession and Veep.

HBO reportedly optioned the rights to Mark Chiusano’s The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, published last week.
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“He is someone who is clearly very ambitious and wants to live a kind of wealthy life, a life of fame and notoriety, and he is trying to attain essentially a version of the American dream, which so many people have sought over the years,” Chiusano said.
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According to Deadline, the adaptation of The Fabulist will be written by Mike Makowsky, who wrote the screenplay of HBO’s crime drama Bad Education, and will tell the “Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on truth and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American Dream”.

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Trump faces even more lawsuits

Following the riot on January 6th 2021, a Democratic congressperson and two Capitol police officers brought lawsuits against serial sex offender Donald Trump (SSAT), accusing him of inciting the mob with his speech that day to the crowd.

The lawsuits seek civil damages for harms they say they endured when rioters descended on the Capitol as Congress met to certify Biden’s election victory, smashing windows, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police officers and sending lawmakers running into hiding. One of the lawsuits, filed by Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, alleges that Trump directly incited the violence at the Capitol “and then watched approvingly as the building was overrun.”

Two other lawsuits were also filed, one by other House Democrats and another by officers James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby, who were both injured in the riot. Blassingame said Friday that he “couldn’t be more committed to pursuing accountability” in the case.

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Santos soap opera comes to an end – maybe

The House of Representatives voted today to expel George Santos from the body by a vote of 311-114, well above the 290 votes needed, making him only the sixth person to be so treated. It did not help his case that two of the people he is alleged to have ripped off in his fraudulent credit card scheme were a fellow Republican congressperson and his mother. That is not how you win friends and influence people.

10 members either voted present or did not vote. 112 out of 222 Republicans and 2 out of 213 Democrats voted not to expel him. All four members of the Republican leadership team also voted not to expel him. After the vote, he refused to answer any questions and left in the style to which he has become accustomed, in a Jaguar SUV. There will now be a special election within 90 days to fill his seat.

Yesterday at a news conference Santos had leveled all manner of accusations against his fellow members and promised a scorched-Earth response if he were expelled. But that did not seem to sway enough of his colleagues to support him. He also said that he planned to continue in politics. It may have been bluster on his part, like so many of his other claims, or he may be saving it all for a tell-all book or a made-for-TV film. You can be certain that he will seek to monetize his 15 minutes of fame to help pay for his legal expenses to avoid prison time for all the frauds that he has been accused of committing.

Kissinger gets the send-off he deserves

Once again, we need a comedy show (The Daily Show‘s Michelle Wolf, Ronny Chieng, and Michael Kosta) to give us the unvarnished truth about this monster who just died, and other US war criminals.

The late Anthony Bourdain, the much traveled chef, also had the right take on Kissinger way back in 2001.

Henry Kissinger finally dies

The war criminal and terrible person has died at the age of 100. In general, I do not feel glad at the death of anyone but I will make an exception in this case. When I heard the news this morning, my reaction was “Finally!”.

Kissinger had a great deal of influence on policies that caused immense harm and suffering to millions of people all around the world. His winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, for arriving at a deal that began the process of the US disengaging from the fighting in Vietnam, was an utter disgrace since his policies had created much of the carnage in the country in the first place. He was part of repeated American interference in Latin America, especially Chile, where he supported the coup that overthrew the democratically elected president Salvador Allende and put in power the murderous General Pinochet. People are less aware of his role in enabling Indonesian leader General Suharto unleash a bloody massacre in East Timor. and he suffered absolutely no consequences for any of these because he did it to advance American interests.
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Jonathan Pie on David Cameron’s return to the British government

I had missed this earlier clip from Pie about the British prime minister’s surprise move to bring the former prime minster back into the cabinet as foreign secretary. But better late than never.

Cameron came from a highly privileged background and was a member of the infamous and highly exclusive Bullingdon Club at Oxford University, “known for its wealthy members, grand banquets, and bad behaviour, including vandalism of restaurants and students’ rooms.” Boris Johnson was also a member, as are other members of the British political establishment.

There are rumors that initiates had to go through a pretty disgusting ritual to be allowed in, that was cruel to pigs. While that may or may not be true, what is known is also pretty disgusting, that members of the club would trash restaurants where they ate and then threw money at the wait staff to cover the costs. They also reportedly burned £50 bank notes in front of homeless people.

You would already have to be an awful human being to even want to be a member of such a club.

The sports stadium grift

In the US, wealthy owners of professional sports teams have long practiced the art of extortion on the local citizens of the cities where they play. They demand that taxpayers pay for, or at least partly subsidize, brand new fancy stadiums that give them more revenue and threaten to move the team to another city if their demands are not met. They play on the fact that elected city officials fear facing the wrath of enraged fans if the city loses its team, and thus often are willing to agree to the terms. On the flip side, the cities seeking to attract a team are also willing to make deals that are generous to the owners. These deals rarely benefit the local population, who would have benefited more if the money had been spent on other things.
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How dangerous are deepfakes?

We have got used to the existence of ‘deepfakes’, computer generated images and videos that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This has caused some serious concerns about the possibility of deepfakes becoming a powerful tool for disinformation and mischief, especially in the political arena, since it is possible to have people seem to say and do things that are damaging to themselves with the viewer being none the wiser that they have been conned.

But how dangerous is this?

In the November 20, 2023 issue ofThe New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr reviews some recent books that look at the dangers posed by deepfakes and concludes that the fears may be overblown, and that even when deepfakes are explicitly political, most of it is used for parody and otherwise humorous purposes, and not meant to convince us that we are watching the real thing,

Fakery in the visual realm goes back to the earliest days of photography, where a lot of editing was done in darkroooms to get the effect sought.

In “Faking It” (2012), Mia Fineman, a photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explains that early cameras had a hard time capturing landscapes—either the sky was washed out or the ground was hard to see. To compensate, photographers added clouds by hand, or they combined the sky from one negative with the land from another (which might be of a different location).
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From our vantage point, such manipulation seems audacious. Mathew Brady, the renowned Civil War photographer, inserted an extra officer into a portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman and his generals. Two haunting Civil War photos of men killed in action were, in fact, the same soldier—the photographer, Alexander Gardner, had lugged the decomposing corpse from one spot to another. Such expedients do not appear to have burdened many consciences. In 1904, the critic Sadakichi Hartmann noted that nearly every professional photographer employed the “trickeries of elimination, generalization, accentuation, or augmentation.” It wasn’t until the twentieth century that what Hartmann called “straight photography” became an ideal to strive for.

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