It looks like déjà vu all over again

The GOP circus in the US House of Representatives keeps going on. After multiple votes for the nine candidates who had entered the race, the last person standing was Tom Emmer, the chief whip and the third in the party’s house hierarchy. (I had not realized that Emmer was first elected to congress in 2014, filling the seat vacated by that other noted nutjob Michele Bachmann.) Since the former speaker Kevin McCarthy and the next in line majority leader Steve Scalise were rejected, it was fitting that Emmer would be the next person to be unceremoniously dumped by his colleagues.

And so it appears. Emmer had 26 defections in a vote to see how many would vote for him on the floor of the house, even more that Scalise and Jim Jordan. In fact, 15 of those defectors voted for Jordan. And then serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) launched a major attack on him even though Emmer had tried groveling to SSAT. That pretty much doomed his chances and the latest reports are that Emmer has dropped out.

So now what? Does the GOP go down the list of the eight people who lost to Emmer to see if any of them is willing to be humiliated next? Do they go back to McCarthy, Scalise, and Jordan? Do they look for someone else entirely? How long before the only people left are Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert? The former has been sucking up SSAT in the most disgusting fashion and the latter has shown that she is willing to ‘reach across the aisle’ with at least one Democrat. (Ha!)

All such impasses have to end some time, even if just out of exhaustion or because some catastrophe is imminent. But I just cannot see what form that ending will take with this bunch of rigid extremists with idiosyncratic obsessions that they are unwilling to let go of.

Ellis becomes the fourth to take a plea deal in Georgia

Jenna Ellis, who toured the country with Rudy Giuliani to testify before bodies with false claims about how the 2020 election was stolen from serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), has become the fourth of the 19 people charged with conspiracy to overturn the Georgia results to take a plea deal, with terms similar to the other three.

Jenna Ellis, the lawyer for Donald Trump who was also facing criminal charges for attempted election subversion, is taking a plea deal, pleading guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.

In Fulton county on Tuesday, Ellis became the fourth of 19 defendants to plead guilty as part of the wide-ranging racketeering charges into Trump and allies in the 2020 election in Georgia. Last week, both Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty before their trials were to start. Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman, has also pleaded guilty.
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The Republican beauty contest

Nine Republican members of the House of Representatives will go before their party colleagues behind closed doors tonight to make their case to be the party’s nominee for speaker. Then they will vote on Tuesday for whom to nominate to be the next sacrificial lamb publicly humiliated when and if they go to the floor of the House for the vote. As far as I know, no decision has been made as to how the selection will be made. Since the McCarthy ouster debacle, there seem to be no rules governing how the party works so we can expect yet another free-for-all.

One option is, after all nine have made their case, to have a preferential ballot where each member ranks their choices one through nine. But this may be too complicated for some of them who are not exactly Einsteins when it comes to reasoning (I am looking at you, Louis Gohmert) and so they could have eight rounds of voting where after each round, the lowest vote-getter is eliminated. Or they could simply take the top vote-getter after the first round as their nominee. These would be a rational ways of going about things so we can be fairly sure that it will not happen and instead there will be chaos. The race has already degenerated into flame wars and obscene tweets.
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Is Trump showing signs of dementia?

Kevin Drum argues that serial sex offender Donald Trump (SSAT) is showing signs of steady decline in cognitive ability and gives a list of recent statements that SSAT has made in support of that claim.

September 16: Says you need ID to buy a loaf of bread. (No you don’t.)

September 18: Claims that under Biden, we would be in World War II. (World War II already happened.)

September 18: Says he beat Obama in 2016. (He beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.)

September 26: Tells a rally audience that Jeb Bush invaded Iraq. (George W. Bush led us into Iraq.)

October 8: Says Hannibal Lecter was a great actor. (Lecter was a fictional character played by the great actor Anthony Hopkins.)

October 13: Thinks Obama is currently president. (Joe Biden is the current president.)

October 14: Says Republicans “eat their young” when they attack him. (The teleprompter probably said “eat their own.”)

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Rugby World Cup final set

It will be played this coming Saturday in France between New Zealand and South Africa. The former beat Argentina quite easily in the first semi-final game but in the second England almost pulled off an upset over the highly favored South African team. In a forwards-dominated game played in rain with a slippery ball, there was a lot of kicking back and forth and England led throughout until almost the very end. With the score 15-6 in England’s favor, South Africa scored a goal ten minutes before the end to make it 15-13 and then made a difficult penalty conversion to edge England out 16-15.

You can see the highlights.

These two finalist have dominated the rugby World Cup, each of them winning three of the nine played to date, and winning all four of the most recent. I think it is good for the game when more teams win the big tournaments so while no one will think either of them unworthy of the title, it is kind of disappointing to me at least that other teams did not make the final.

One of the things that made me prefer rugby to American football is that there were so few stoppages of play. But I had not watched top-level rugby for decades before this tournament and noticed that stoppages had become much more frequent, slowing down the action. I can understand when players are injured and need tending but there seemed to be a large number of stoppages for drinks. There were also a large number of breaks for substitutions of players.

Another thing that I liked about rugby was that once the game started, it was the players who made all the tactical decisions on the field, not the coaches. But it appears that the ‘drinks breaks’ are used by coaches to send instructions to the players through the drinks carriers. In fact the referee at one point seemed to be admonishing the two teams to stop having so many drinks breaks, probably suspecting that they were being misused by the coaches.

The GOP fed the beast. Now the beast is turning on them

I have been posting a lot about the utterly chaotic search for a new speaker for the House of Representatives. This is not because that news story is so important that nothing else matters. Although the lack of a speaker and the resulting paralysis in government may well lead to a government shutdown on November 17, there are other important things going on in the world as well.

My fascination with this story is because I do not think that I have ever witnessed such a spectacular act of self-immolation by a major political party. Let us be perfectly clear. This is a completely self-inflicted party death. It was not caused by any external factors or forces. It was not caused by being routed at the polls. It was not caused by people rioting in the streets against it. What happened is as if some members of the party secretly decided to destroy the party from within and set the wheels in motion. I am not saying that that is what happened. But if it had, this is what it might have looked like.

I have to admit that I am feeling considerable schadenfreude at this implosion. The GOP has become a vehicle for hate and demonization of anyone who does not support serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and all his lies and attacks on people. It has been waging war on marginalized groups and opposing anything that might seek to redress the legitimate grievances of anyone who does not belong to the ruling class. It has welcomed to its bosom white, right wing, xenophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, racists. Seeing it turn on itself provides a satisfying feeling akin to what one experiences in films where the bad guys, after riding high for a while, get their just deserts at the end. But that enjoyment is tinged with concern that it also shows that the state of democracy in the US is not healthy.
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Jokes that depend on iconic film scenes

(Mother Goose and Grimm)

To get the joke, you need to be familiar with the famous scene from the film TheTreasure of the Sierra Madre starring Humphrey Bogart.

To the groans of my family and friends, I never hesitate to use the line “We don’t need no steenkin’ badges” whenever the word ‘badges’ comes up in any conversation. Alas, many people have never seen the film and hence I usually just get baffled looks, similar to the reaction I get to the ‘I am Spartacus’ line.

With my immediate family, I have used the badges gag so often that even though they haven’t seen the film, they recognize the allusion. I particularly enjoy using it when the word ‘badgers’ comes up, because the pun and the absurdity of the reference is what makes it funny, to me at least.

I have the sense of humor of a six-year old.

Things fall apart: The GOP cannot hold

In what has to be a real slap in his face, on Friday afternoon, in a closed door meeting, the Republican members of the House of Representatives in a secret ballot voted by a margin of 122 to 86 for Jim Jordan to withdraw from the contest for speaker. This followed the third open vote on the house floor where Jordan once again failed to get the votes to be elected speaker. He had been hoping to go for a fourth ballot and had called for this secret ballot to show the strength of his support, but the number of negative votes being five times the number in the open vote ones conveyed the clear message that he should just go away. He finally announced that he was giving up his attempt and would ‘go back to work’, which in his case does not involve any real work but simply grandstanding about MAGA obsessions.

So what does the party do? They go home for the weekend again. They will come back for a candidate forum on Monday and maybe hold a closed door vote on Tuesday to see if anyone can win a majority. All nominations will have to be in by noon on Sunday.

This episode illustrates how without proper procedure and protocols and structure, an organization can fall apart quickly. Normally, organizations have some sort of hierarchy to allow for smooth transitions. In the case of the Republicans, the leader is the speaker which used to be Kevin McCarthy. If the speaker resigns, dies, or is otherwise unable to continue (such as in this unprecedented case of being ousted), the majority leader (Steve Scalise) would step up to the position and the third person who is the majority whip (Tom Emmer) would usually become majority leader.
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Jordan goes down for the third time

The House of Representatives convened this morning because Jim Jordan wanted yet another vote on him becoming speaker. The result was even worse, with 25 Republicans defecting, even more than the 22 on the second vote and 20 on the first. Jordan is clearly someone who cannot read the room and does not know how to count votes. It took Kevin McCarthy 15 votes to become speaker but at least his vote totals were inching up. This is a farce.

Yesterday, after the second defeat, Jordan announced that he was suspending his candidacy and supporting a move to give the interim speaker limited extra powers for about three months. So why did he suddenly decide to suspend his suspension and try for a third vote so soon?

Jordan’s strategy seemed to be that, if he cannot get the votes now, to prevent someone else from deciding to try their luck and maybe succeeding where he had failed. Hence the proposal for a limited extension. That way, he could freeze the field and give him a lot of time to wear down his opponents. Unfortunately for him, that proposal was was shot down almost immediately by his party. So he had no alternative but to try for another vote or have someone else take center stage.

The guy is flailing. If he had a shred of self-respect, he would realize that people just don’t like him. But like all MAGA cultists, they never give up trying to gain power by whatever means necessary.

The siege of Gaza

Gaza has frequently been referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison, housing about two million inmates. If anyone thought that this was just hyperbolic language, the events of the past week would have put paid to that since Israel was able to instantaneously cut off all food, water, and electricity to everyone living there. That kind of action can only be done with the kind of control that prison authorities have.

The attack by Hamas that killed large numbers of ordinary Israeli people and took many as hostages was a horrendous act that has deservedly been widely condemned. But those of us who are familiar with the history of the region knew that Israel routinely enacts collective punishments and would react to this with disproportionate force, just as it has done in the past. But to cut off the basic elements of existence to two million people, essentially causing an entire population to die slow and painful deaths of thirst and starvation, is an unconscionable act that violates not just the laws of war but the norms of basic human decency.

Immediately after the Hamas attack, several Israeli government spokespersons repeatedly referred to this as their equivalent of the 9/11 attacks and one knew that they were deliberately laying the foundation for rallying American public opinion to their side in anticipation of their carrying out an extreme response, because the 9/11 attacks were used by the US to justify massive attacks that resulted in the deaths of huge numbers of people in many countries, far out of proportion to what the US suffered, using the language of revenge as an excuse. It was clear that Israel was going to use the same rationale for a similar over-reaction. But I did not expect them to seek such an extensive and cruel form of retribution as cutting off food and water to two million people.

As usual, the US political establishment has come down firmly on the side of Israel, using the familiar trope of ‘Israel has every right to defend itself’ , though they never say that ‘Palestinians have every right to defend themselves’ whenever they are under attack.