Yesterday, the House of Representatives succeeded in their second attempt at impeaching homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas after they botched the first attempt last week. This time, they passed it by the narrowest of margins if 214-213. Two Republicans and two Democrats did not vote, for reasons that I have not been able to learn. Three Republicans voted with the Democrats. The impeachment effort is expected to meet a swift death in the Senate.

Republicans wanted to have this vote yesterday because the special election to fill the seat formerly held by the disgraced and expelled congressperson George Santos was also held yesterday and they feared that it would be won by a Democrat and thus their attempt would fail again if they voted after he was sworn in. Their fears were justified because Tom Suozzi won easily over his Republican rival Mazi Pilip by a margin of 54-46%, in a race that was expected to be much closer. So now the House is split 219-213 in favor of Republicans with three seats vacant, allowing them to have at most two defections if they want to pass anything.
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There are two things about the upcoming US presidential election that are not really worth agonizing over. One is that that Joe Biden and serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) will be the nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties, unless something major happens. The second is that both are old. We just have to live with that reality.

There is far too much focus on Biden’s age and not nearly enough on SSAT’s age, even though the latter seems much more cognitively impaired. In one post, Kevin Drum lists some of the wrong and crazy things SSAT has said recently that indicate that he is losing it.

1. Pointed at Matt Gaetz and repeatedly called him Rick Gates.
2. Confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi.
3. Claimed that Obama was still president.
4. Said that Russia should feel free to attack NATO if they “don’t pay.”
5. Posted an endless stream of unhinged rants on Truth Social.
6. Snidely asked why Nikki Haley’s husband is never around (he’s stationed overseas).
7. Explicitly told Republicans to kill an immigration bill so things would stay chaotic during his presidential campaign.
8. Confused E. Jean Carroll with Marla Maples, his ex-wife.
9. Asserted that the United States is “an institute in a powerful death penalty,” whatever that means.
10. Said that Viktor Orbán is the head of Turkey (he’s the prime minister of Hungary).
11. Claimed that Jeb Bush started the Iraq war.
12. Said that Nancy Pelosi started the January 6 insurrection.
13. Insisted that he never endorsed James Lankford (he did).

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The wild conspiracy theory swirling around the internet about how the Pentagon and the NFL had colluded in order to fix the Super Bowl so that Kansas City would win and that after the game Taylor Swift would celebrate with Travis Kelce and they would announce their engagement and she would endorse Joe Biden, was only partly borne out in that KC did win. But as a very dominant team, that outcome was hardly a stretch to predict. None of the other things happened, One must wait to see how the theory now gets modified, as all conspiracy theories do when contradicted by facts. The most likely modification is that ‘they’ are waiting for an even more opportune moment to make the announcement. Why Swift, one of the most successful musical artists ever, would feel the need to follow the dictates of the NFL-Pentagon complex is never explained. Unless, unless, ‘they’ have got some ugly secret about her and are blackmailing her. Yes, that must be it.
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Nikki Haley, like Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, and most of the other people who started out vying for the Republican presidential nomination, seemed to have decided early on in their campaigns that they needed to avoid attacking serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and alienating his MAGA cult followers as much as possible and so refrained from mentioning him except in the mildest and vaguest terms. Many observers wrote about the incompetence of SSAT’s challengers and the fact that although they raised quite a bit of money, they did not spend it on attacking SSAT.

This strategy of not going after the front-runner never made much sense if they wanted to win the nomination and so it was assumed that they were merely auditioning for the vice-presidential slot. And that seemed a valid theory as they dropped out and embraced SSAT. But their strategy of treating SSAT with kid gloves in order to ingratiate themselves with him did not make much sense either since SSAT hates anyone who does not completely kowtow to him and so he began attacking them, especially DeSantis and Haley, since they were the ones who had the best shot by the time the caucuses and primaries actually had their contests. As this dawned on the two of them, they started going after SSAT, mildly at first but more pointedly later.
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There is no other word to describe what is happening in Gaza other than to call it the willful murder of innocent people by a rampaging Israeli army that is using indiscriminate force as never-ending revenge for the attacks on October 7. Almost 30,000 Gazans have now died. The sheer scale of the killings of ordinary people is evidence that these actions are deliberate policy of the Israeli government, not those of a few rogue soldiers. This extremely sad story about one family captures the sheer horror of what is happening.

A six-year-old girl who went missing in Gaza City last month has been found dead, along with several of her relatives and two paramedics who tried to save her.

Hind Rajab was fleeing the city with her aunt, uncle and three cousins when the car they were travelling in appears to have come face to face with Israeli tanks, and come under fire.

Audio recordings of calls between Hind and emergency call operators suggest that the six-year-old was the only one left alive in the car, hiding from Israeli forces among the bodies of her relatives.

Her pleas for someone to rescue her ended when the phone line was cut amid the sound of more gunfire.

Paramedics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) managed on Saturday to reach the area, which had previously been closed off as an active combat zone.

They found the black Kia car Hind had been travelling in – its windscreen and dashboard smashed to pieces, bullet holes scattered across the side.

One paramedic told journalists that Hind was among the six bodies found inside the car, all of which showed signs of gunfire and shelling.

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In US politics, money plays a huge role because of the length of the campaigns and the high cost of TV ads. It is only a minor exaggeration to say that a better predictor than opinion polls of who is going to win a race is to look at which side raised more money. This is why media organizations eagerly report the fund-raising totals that are regularly released, though the relaxing of campaign financing rules means that nowadays a lot of that money can be kept hidden. As a result, the correlation between fund-raising and electoral success was perhaps more true before the narrow 5-4 US Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case in 2010 that prohibited “the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations”. That decision opened the floodgates for much more so-called ‘dark money’ than before, so that now even minor candidates in lower tier races can raise huge sums.

One result is that some candidates and parties running campaigns have chosen to live the high life on campaign cash, using it to fund private jet travel, limousines, resorts, and any other aspect of a fancy lifestyle that they thought they could pass off as a campaign expense. For example, this report describes what the Republican National Committee has been spending money on.
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The US House of Representatives is structured so as to give the speaker, who is selected by the majority party, almost total control over what legislation comes to the floor for a vote. This means that you are almost guaranteed that when the speaker put a bill before the house, it is because they are confident that they have the votes to pass it. When Nancy Pelosi was the speaker, she was an accurate vote counter and never lost a vote.

But yesterday, the GOP lost a vote. This was not over a trivial issue but a vote to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. A major goal of the GOP is to impeach someone, anyone, as revenge for the two impeachments of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) but their efforts to do so against Joe Biden are floundering because they cannot find any grounds for dong so. They decided on Mayorkas because he deals with border security and accusing him of failing to protect the country advances that agenda too. Not everyone in the GOP was happy with the idea of frivolously using the impeachment process this way and three of the GOP members said that they planned to vote vote against the measure but the speaker went ahead with the planned vote anyway.
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