McCarthy is in for a tough time if he becomes Speaker

The Republicans finally received a majority in the House of Representatives, getting 218 seats to the 211 for the Democrats in the 435 member body, with six races still to be called. In the outgoing body, they had 213 seats. Republican minority leader McCarthy had predicted that his party could pick up at least 60 seats but they fell far short.

So what can we expect for the next two years now that Republicans control the House? We can for sure expect a lot of symbolic actions and grandstanding. Less certain is what legislation they will actually get through. Anything that Democrats do not like could be blocked in the Senate where the Democrats have retained control and even vetoed by the president if necessary.

The first question is who Congress will elect as Speaker. This is an important position since “The Speaker is simultaneously the House’s presiding officer, party leader, and the institution’s administrative head, among other duties.” They are the person controlling the agenda that decides what legislation is brought to the House floor for debate and voting. So come January 3rd when the new Congress takes office, any Democratic agenda items are pretty much dead, which means that they have about three weeks to do whatever they think they must do.
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The verdict is in: Trump’s big announcement was boring

The general consensus about Trump’s speech announcing that he is running again was that it was long and boring. It did not help that he had telegraphed what he was going to say a long time ago. It also did not help that much of it was mostly a rehash of the speech he has been giving at rallies. The difference was that he was very low energy. This may have been deliberate in that he was trying to appear ‘presidential’ and reading from a teleprompter, which is not something that he does well. Or it may be because the audience was not the raucous crowds at his rallies that he seems to relish speaking to.

Even Fox News cut away from the speech and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post had at the bottom of its front page the single line “Florida man makes announcement”. That must sting.

In contrast, the late night talk shows reviewing the speech were pretty funny.

Here is Jimmy Kimmel.

Here is Seth Meyers.

Someone should tell Jeff Bezos that charity begins at home

The founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos has said that he plans to give the majority of his wealth of $124 billion to charity, telling CNN “that he will devote the bulk of his wealth to fighting climate change and supporting people who can unify humanity in the face of deep social and political divisions.” He did not say when and how much and to whom he will give money away, so frankly I am going to wait and see if he actually follows through.

But here’s an idea. Why doesn’t he start by paying his workers decent wages and benefits and provide them with decent working conditions so that they are not forced to urinate in bottles because of the pace of work?

Amazon has apologised to a US politician for falsely denying that drivers are, at times, forced to urinate in plastic bottles.

Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Wisconsin, referenced Amazon making “workers urinate in water bottles” in a tweet.

The official Amazon Twitter account then replied: “If that were true, nobody would work for us.”

The company has now apologised after evidence emerged of drivers having to urinate in bottles.
…

Mr Pocan rejected the apology on Saturday, tweeting: “Sigh. This is not about me, this is about your workers – who you don’t treat with enough respect or dignity. Start by acknowledging the inadequate working conditions you’ve created for ALL your workers, then fix that for everyone and finally, let them unionise without interference.”

Also, why not pay his house staff a decent wage and give them decent conditions so that they are not forced to sue him?
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Trump and election deniers were the big losers

To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy for 2024 in a rambling hour-long speech that the media cut away from because it was largely a warmed over version of what he says at rallies, except that it seemed even more incoherent. Even Fox News cut away, showing just how much his star has faded and Rupert Murdoch has reportedly told him that Fox News will not support his candidacy. That will not deter his MAGA cultists who will be delirious with joy at their Dear Leader riding to their rescue.

Trump is clearly announcing his run from a position of weakness because he had undoubtedly expected that he would be riding a wave of election successes by his acolytes in the various races. But they lost all over the place. Now his announcement is seen as a desperate attempt to stem the calls for him to stay out of the race and to stymie those who might think of challenging him. The Republican establishment is recoiling from the thought of him dragging them down again. With a normal person, pressure might work to get a failing candidate to withdraw and one can expect all manner of maneuvering behind the scenes to try and keep him out so that someone else can be the party nominee. But that may not work because Tump is not a normal person. He is a delusional narcissistic pathological liar who sees anyone who is not totally supportive of him as an enemy and he will lash out at them. Republicans have created a monster and it is now turning on them.
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The Twitter albatross around Elon Musk’s neck

Elon Musk is by no means stupid. No one who creates his own company and in the process becomes one of the world’s richest people can do so without having considerable acumen in some areas of life. But such people can be, and often are, jerks and narcissists who get carried away by their success in one area to think that they somehow have a general ability to succeed at whatever they do that they can apply anywhere. That is what seems to have happened with Musk. Musk was a highly successful user of the Twitter platform, having close to 100 million followers, and was able to use it to sway financial markets and bring attention to himself. This must have made it seem that he could easily run it even better and draw even more attention to himself and was why he rashly made an offer to pay $44 billion for it, a figure that analysts said was way too high. After he realized that, he tried to back out of the deal but was sued and had to go through with it. After being forced to buy Twitter, Musk said in a tweet that he did so not “to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love”. And there was much laughter in the land.
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Funny comic strip

As we await the results of today’s election, here is one of the strips from Get Fuzzy, a daily comic strip by Darby Conley that has three main characters who live together in an apartment: a human Rob, a dog Satchel, and a cat Bucky. Rob is a nerdy single guy with apparently no social life who spends his spare time playing video games and is a fan of rugby. Satchel is naive, gullible, lovable but dim, while Bucky is devious, ignorant but thinks of himself as very smart, and is constantly scheming to find ways to make money and also torment Satchel.

I read the strip daily and decided to share this one to introduce it to people who might not have known about it. Sadly, Conley stopped producing new daily strips in 2013 and Sunday ones in 2019 but reruns appear every day and they have mostly a timeless quality and whatever current events that are alluded to that have become dated can be easily understood.

(Get Fuzzy)

I clearly pay too much attention to the crazies

Last Tuesday turned out to be the best mid-term elections for the party in power in 20 years, thwarting the so-called Red Wave. Republicans, Trumpists, and election deniers had been salivating over the prospect of getting massive wins in the Senate and House of Representatives and state offices and that simply did not happen.

Some of those down ballot races for state offices were very important. Take Nevada. Democrat Cisco Aguilar, who had never run for elected office before, defeated Trump-endorsed election denier Republican Jim Marchant for the position of secretary of state. This is important because the secretary of state oversees state elections and Marchant was the founder of an organization called America First Secretary of State Coalition that consists of seven election deniers running for similar positions in other states that sought to restrict access to the ballot as part of their effort to make sure that Republicans win.

Aguilar, an attorney and first-time candidate, cast himself as a bulwark against Marchant, who had intimated that he would try to make it easier for Trump to win his state in a comeback run for president.

“When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re going to fix the whole country and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024,” Marchant said at a Trump-hosted rally in Nevada in early October.

“The secretary of state’s job is to protect democracy by keeping our elections fair and transparent,” Aguilar said in his most-played general election TV ad.

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