Month: November 2023

It looks certain that George Santos will be expelled from Congress. I could argue that this should have happened a while ago, but in truth it’s better to have some due process. I think that’s satisfied, however, now that the House Ethics Committee has issued a scathing report detailing the Long Island congressman’s mind-boggling behavior and criminality. The report itself made no recommendations on expulsion, but the committee chairman, Rep. Michael Guest of Mississippi, has followed up by introducing a resolution that would do just that.

Additionally, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has shown no inclination to save Santos, merely stating that members should “consider the best interests of the institution as this matter is addressed further.” In fairness, Republicans in the New York delegation have been clamoring for expulsion and even tried and failed to expel Santos once. But the overriding concern has been to protect the seat.

Rep. Troy E. Nehls of Texas  was probably the most honest about this, asking Axios “why would we want to expel a guy … [when] we’ve got a three-seat, four-seat majority. What are we doing?”

The Republican majority is going to shrink. The GOP is already down one seat as they await a November 21st special election to replace ex-Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah who quit on September 15. Since the Utah seat is red, that will be remedied before the House returns from Thanksgiving, but losing Santos will leave them shorthanded again, and Santos’s replacement is likely to be a Democrat. Here’s the math:

The GOP has 221 seats and the Democrats have 213. The GOP will briefly go up to 222 when Stewart’s replacement is elected, but fall back to 221 when Santos is expelled. If Santos is replaced by a Democrat, their number will rise to 214. When the House is fully staffed again, it should be a 221-214 split, with 218 votes needed to pass legislation. That reduces Mike Johnson’s margin to three votes, making it even more impossible to do anything without Democratic votes.

I don’t know how quickly Santos’s seat will be filled, but in Stewart’s case the special election was scheduled for a little over two months after he departed. The vote on Santos’s expulsion will take place in early December, most likely, meaning that the special election should be expected around the time the second half of Johnson’s laddered continuing resolution runs out on February 2nd and the government shuts down.

But the Republicans will continue pretending that they can proceed without Democratic votes. Because they can’t stomach reality.

Do me a favor. Read this and tell me if it sounds like what I’ve been saying on this blog and on our pondcast all year long.

[House] Republicans cannot agree on basic policy priorities or even fund the government without a majority of Democratic votes…on Wednesday, conservatives blocked another GOP spending bill, forcing Speaker Mike Johnson to send members home early on a losing note.

Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), who compared Republicans’ infighting to grade school bullying, said Johnson was doing his best with the party’s slim margins, but the party is still a mess.

“It’s the same clown car with a different driver,” Armstrong said. And unless the GOP could figure out a way to regain control of the floor, he warned: “We essentially don’t have the majority.”

My mantra has been that the U.S. House of Representatives has two basic responsibilities, which are to fund the government and pay our bills on time, and that the Republicans cannot do this on their own because they don’t have a functional majority. I predicted even before it started that Kevin McCarthy’s speakership would be short-lived because he’d either be shit-canned by his own caucus for paying our debts in June or shit-canned for funding the government with Democratic votes in September.

I also predicted that Mike Johnson would have the exact same problem. This became evident over the last two weeks. Johnson has not been able to pass appropriations bills. He tried to pass the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development appropriation bill, but pulled it because he didn’t have the votes. He scheduled and then canceled a vote on the Treasury Department, White House, and federal judiciary appropriation. Then, on Wednesday, 19 House Republicans voted against the rule for the Commerce-Justice-Science spending bill.

To be clear, until recently, it was extraordinarily rare for a representative to vote against his or her own party’s rule. That kind of thing could get you kicked off a plum committee or otherwise disciplined. And these are spending bills drawn up by Republicans with no input from Democrats. The spending levels are below what Kevin McCarthy and the Biden administration agreed to during the debt ceiling negotiations, and they have no chance of passing muster with the Democrat-run Senate.

So, Johnson is failing to pass spending bills that aren’t even serious bills. At best, they’d serve as some kind of starting point for negotiations with the Senate, but he’d never be able to get his caucus to pass anything the Senate would agree to as a compromise, so he’s still stuck having to rely on Democratic votes.

That’s what he did with the continuing resolution that passed this week. It was virtually identical to the continuing resolution that McCarthy passed in September that cost him his speakership. It continues to fund the government at levels set when Nancy Pelosi was still Speaker, and it doesn’t have any right-wing amendments attached. The only difference is that it funds part of the government into late January and part of the government into early February–an unnecessary two-step process they’re calling a “laddered CR.”

Johnson gets nothing out of it but some time and, I guess, the ability to avoid a shutdown crisis on the eve of the December holiday season. He won’t get all that much time, however. He just sent the House home early for Thanksgiving because they’re at each other’s throats and not accomplishing anything, and then they’ll have most of December off.

When they come back, he’ll still have the problem that his plan doesn’t work. He can’t even pass unrealistic spending bills. In some cases, he can’t even pass the rule for these bills.

And does this sound familiar?

The conservative tactics could easily backfire, many members point out. Some Republicans predict if they can’t get a bill to the floor on their own, it will lead to GOP centrists leapfrogging their ultra-conservative colleagues and cutting deals with Democrats.

I thought the GOP centrists should have leapfrogged their colleagues and elected a bipartisan Speaker in January, and then again after McCarthy was sacked. But now they’re stuck with Johnson. It’s a bunch of drama, and it could have been avoided. At a certain point, the GOP centrists will go to the Democrats to end or prevent a government shutdown. They will probably have to use a discharge petition to do it. That’s when a majority of the House forces a vote over the objections of the Speaker and the Rules Committee. If that happens, then Johnson will no longer be the leader of the House on the most consequential thing, which is funding the government.

I always said this would happen, one way or that other, unless a bipartisan Speaker was selected. And I also said the Republicans would try everything else before doing the right and necessary thing. See you in late January, when this all comes to its inevitable conclusion.

Howdy everyone. It’s that time of week again. I’m still in a late night talkshow mood, so let’s take A Closer Look, with Seth Meyers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLtvxV5hgN8

Those wacky Republicans: you can’t leave them anywhere unsupervised!

Here’s Stephen Colbert, who’s always a fun person to watch, especially when he’s calling out fascists for what they are:

And as a bonus, here’s his interview with Rachel Maddow:

 

Enjoy! Will see you next week. Cheers!

We’re live with the sixth episode of the Progress Pondcast. I’ve been sick for a month, so it was a lot of effort to put this one together. I hope you give it a listen. Brendan and I discuss new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and his porn habits and struggles to fund the government. We also take a look back at the Blue Wave elections with a focus on Pennsylvania and Virginia. And we have a long deep discussion of the situation in Israel and Gaza. You’ll definitely want to hear that. I think it’s the best thing we’ve done on the Pondcast so far.

 

 

 

It’s not any fun to be a Republican member of Congress these days. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s look at three stories in the news on Tuesday. In the first, Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma apparently had to be restrained by Bernie Sanders of all people from physically attacking a witness during a hearing of the Senate HELP Committee. The witness, a leader of the Teamsters labor union named Sean M. O’Brien, reportedly told Sen. Mullin, “You’re biggest thug here.” Bloomberg reporter Ian Kullgren, who was present for the confrontation, said that Mullin and O’Brien have had a “longstanding beef on Twitter that spilled over into real life.”

Then there’s an incident witnessed by National Public Radio congressional correspondent Claudia Grisales. She was speaking to Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee in the halls of Congress when former Speaker Kevin McCarthy walked by. Suddenly, Burchett lurched forward toward Grisales after apparently taking a McCarthy elbow to the kidney.

Burchett responded jokingly as McCarthy kept walking, “Sorry Kevin didn’t mean to elbow –” then seriously yelled, “why’d you elbow me in the back Kevin?! Hey Kevin, you got any guts!?” That’s when the chase ensued. Burchett took off after McCarthy and his detail. I chased behind with my mic. yelled after catching up to McCarthy, “Hey Kevin, why’d you walk behind me and elbow me in the back?”

KM: “I didn’t elbow you in the back.”

Burchett: “You got no guts, you did so, …the reporter said it right there, what kind of chicken move is that…” Burchett con’t: “You got no guts, you did so, …the reporter said it right there, what kind of chicken move is that? You’re pathetic man, you are so pathetic.”

Burchett starts to walk away from McCarthy, tells me, “What a jerk,” and then yells back, “You need security Kevin!”

Burchett tells me that’s the first point of “communication” with McCarthy since Burchett voted for McCarthy’s ouster as speaker last month: “That’s just it” for communication since ouster vote, “He’s just a jerk. He’s just a childish little…”

Burchett adds, “did you just see that?” he asks in disbelief. I’m stunned, too. Says he won’t follow up with McCarthy on what happened, “he’s on a downhill spiral… he just, that was pretty gutless of him. I’m disappointed in his, in him.”

Burchett reiterates he hasn’t talked to McCarthy since he voted against him. “No, no that was it. That’s it. He’s got $17 million to work against me. And he’s just a — he should have kept his word. I think that just showed what he’s about and it’s unfortunate.”

That’s pretty stunning, I think. But here’s something I’ve never seen before. The Texas Tribune reports that Rep. Pat Fallon from the Ft. Worth area is retiring from the U.S. House of Representatives to run for his old seat in the Texas Senate. He was quoted as saying that his previous time in the state Senate was “the best two years I ever spent” in politics.

Needless to say, this is the exact opposite of how things normally work, which is that you first get elected to your state legislature and then get promoted to Congress. I’m sure there must be, in the long history of our country, some other example of the reverse happening, but it’s unprecedented as far as I know.

It’s just a joyless thing to be a Republican officeholder right now, at least in Washington DC. Can’t say I’m unhappy about it either.

 

 

It’s November 11, 2023, and the Times of Israel acknowledges that a lot of Gazans have died in the month since the October 7 terrorist attacks.  Citing the “Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza,” and rightly arguing that the numbers cannot be confirmed and doubtlessly include Hamas fighters and victims of misfired Hamas rockets, they put the number of dead north of 11,000. That’s not the full report from the ministry, however. There are also allegedly 26,000 who have been injured and more than 3,000 that are missing. That adds up to 40,000.

That is carnage.

But I think the full picture only begins to come into view when you consider the recently issued report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). It estimates, based on aerial surveillance, that 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units have been damaged or destroyed. The CIA estimates that Gaza began 2023 with a population of 2,098,389, so we can calculate that nearly a million people have had their homes damaged or destroyed in the last five weeks. As of November 5, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) estimated that 70 percent of Gazans had been displaced from their homes.

Now, on Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron went on the BBC and argued that there is “no justification” for Israel’s bombing of “these babies, these ladies, these old people” in Gaza and that there must be a cease fire. “There is no reason for that and no legitimacy. So we do urge Israel to stop.”

In response, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that “Israel is doing everything to refrain from harming civilians.”

I don’t care where you come down on Israel, Gaza and Hamas, it’s very clear that Netanyahu is lying. Maybe you think he’s justified in lying. But you can’t destroy 45 percent of the housing units of a population of 2 million people in a mere five weeks and argue that you are refraining from harming civilians. That’s preposterous.

Now, Netanyahu argues that Hamas is to blame for all this death and damage, and I agree to the extent that they instigated this fight and they are prolonging it by refusing to release the over 200 hostages they’re keeping in holes in the ground. I don’t dispute that Hamas is hiding in bunkers and tunnels under schools, hospitals, mosques and residential buildings. When it comes to assigning blame, Hamas deserves the lion’s share of it.

Having said that, however, it’s very clear to me that Israel is following a very deliberate policy of absolutely wrecking Gaza. For proof of this, I cite Netanyahu himself, who said on October 7 that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) would turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers ‘into rubble.” On October 10, Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, the Israeli Army’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, stated  “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

Also on October 10, Maj. Gen. Giora Eland, who is admittedly retired, wrote that “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in. Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal.” He later wrote that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

Writing in the Washington Post, Ishaan Tharoor proposes that Israel is following something called the “Dahiya Doctrine.”

The so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” took shape in the wake of the bruising 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dahiya refers to the southern Beirut suburbs where Hezbollah maintained its strongholds and which were pummeled by Israeli jets after hostilities began when Hezbollah fighters abducted two Israeli soldiers…

…The doctrine that emerged out of the conflict was most famously articulated by IDF commander Gadi Eisenkot. “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction.

The philosophy behind this strategy was articulated in a paper former Israeli colonel Gabriel Siboni wrote for Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.

…the necessary response to militant provocations from Lebanon, Syria or Gaza were “disproportionate” strikes that aim only secondarily to hit the enemy’s capacity to launch rockets or other attacks. Rather, the goal should be to inflict lasting damage, no matter the civilian consequences, as a future deterrent.

“With an outbreak of hostilities, the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses,” he wrote. “Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.”

When you consider these ideas, it makes more sense that almost half the housing in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed since October 7. It’s well beyond the point of a “long and expensive reconstruction process” already. It’s approaching the point where Gaza is “a place where no human being can exist.”

It’s not just the housing and destruction of infrastructure. There’s no water. There’s no food. There’s no electricity. And, increasingly, there are no medical facilities or supplies. All of this makes living impossible.

Now, Hamas brought this upon the Palestinian people, and they continue to hold hostages which provides Israel with justification for fighting into the heart of Gaza City. If they cared about their people, they would do something to stop it.

But the bigger problem is that they shattered Israel’s sense of security. The Israelis thought they could live next to Gaza and manage the security risk. They no longer believe this. That’s why calls for a cease fire are unrealistic. Israel isn’t going to stop while their people are still held underground and while Hamas is still launching rockets at them. Israel isn’t going to be satisfied until there are no more rockets and there is no imminent threat of cross-border raids.

How can the international community accelerate the process by which that security is reached? To begin with, by getting the hostages released. But then something else needs to be created. It has to police Gaza. It has to reconstruct Gaza. It has to lead to a political autonomy for Palestinians.

If can’t be Fatah or the Palestinian Authority. It has to be an international force.

As for America, figuring this out is urgent, because we can’t be a party to what Israel is doing. It’s immoral and bad for our national security, and it’s ultimately bad for Israel, too. Above all, Netanyahu needs to go. His policies brought this ruin on both Israel and Palestine, and he cannot be a partner or a leader for peace.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Jerome, Arizona scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now started the street and further refined the buildings.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

I’m not gonna lie. I’m afraid of bears. I don’t think I ever recovered from learning that a grizzly bear had killed a camper in his tent in Yellowstone Park on the same night that I was camping there with my brother in 1982. I revisited Yellowstone a few years ago, armed with bear spray, and I had a wonderful time. But I was still pretty anxious when hiking in remote areas. We did come across a carcass a mountain lion had munched, so maybe I was worried about encountering the wrong predator.

Where I live in Pennsylvania, we do have black bears, but I’ve never seen one and they don’t worry me as much. In any case, I will admit I’d be concerned if the federal government announced that they were introducing grizzly bears on nearby federal land. And that’s what the Biden administration has done with respect to Washington state’s North Cascades.

The North Cascades ecosystem — a largely undeveloped 6.1 million acres that holds wild animals, rainforests, glaciers and meadows — was home to grizzly bears for centuries until hunters decimated them in the 19th and 20th centuries, when thousands of hides were shipped from area trading posts.
By the time grizzly bears were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975, few remained in the North Cascades, Servheen said. The last one was spotted in 1996.

The plan is to introduce up to seven grizzlies a year until there are twenty-five. They expect it will take 60-100 years for this population to grow to two hundred. Currently, the plan is receiving public comment, and there’s some vociferous opposition, as detailed in a panicked coverage from Fox News.

“Nobody needs grizzlies, nobody needs wolves,” another resident added during the event last week. “And the thing we need even less than that is the Department of Fish and Wildlife. These guys know nothing about fish, they don’t care about wildlife. All they want to do is ruin the most important people, which is farmers and ranchers who grow our food. There’s no reason for these people, there’s no reason for grizzly bears.”

“If any grizzly bear comes around my place, I’m shooting it,” he said.

Native Americans have a different view.

Tribes and conservation groups say that bears belong on the land. Grizzly bears would be moved from well-populated areas, such as the Yellowstone region, to the North Cascades each summer until the population became big enough to sustain itself…

…Scott Schuyler, a policy representative for the Upper Skagit tribe, said he would support making the bears an experimental population “if it ultimately achieves the end” goal of reintroducing grizzlies. “We’re hopeful that things will proceed,” he said.

“We feel this inherent hereditary need to protect the creatures in the environment and speak for them, and in particular the ones that have been lost,” Schuyler said. He noted that his people once coexisted with grizzlies and, like the bears, were threatened with removal by settlers. “The grizzly bear’s survival is, in a sense, the survival of our culture, our history.”

Greetings! I hope you all have been enjoying the week. This time around, I thought I go with something a bit more serious. Seth Meyers recently had Rachel Maddow on, in part to promote her new book, Prequel, but also just to speak about a number of topics of concern right now. She always makes an interesting guest on any talk show, and she does well here.

Of course, this being a late night talk show, expect moments of humor, along with an intelligent conversation.

Cheers!

Rachel Cohen of Vox has an excellent article on how abortion politics played out in Tuesday’s elections, which saw the Democrats exceed expectations nationally, almost across the board. It’s important to understand that the Republicans came into this election well aware that their position on reproductive rights was hurting them. They tried out new messaging (and policy) on limiting access to abortion in the hope that they could neutralize the issue. It clearly didn’t work.

The most important test case was in Virginia where the GOP hoped they had a Goldilocks solution.

[Gov. Glenn] Youngkin and anti-abortion groups bet that if they could win in Virginia by running emphatically on a 15-week abortion ban, something they cast as a “reasonable” and “consensus” position, then they could prove to Republicans nationwide that abortion need not be a political loser for their party. (The ban, which they called a “limit,” also would have exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.) They also hoped that staking out this position would allow them to more easily change the subject to topics they had advantages on, like crime and the economy.

The Democrats ran hard against this proposal and not only kept their narrow Senate majority but won control of the House of Delegates.

The Republicans lost the abortion argument explicitly in Ohio where voters enacted reproductive freedom into the state Constitution. But they took it on the chin in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, too.

In the Keystone State, Democrat Daniel McCaffery defeated Republican Carolyn Carluccio for a seat on the Supreme Court.

McCaffery’s win is the latest in a string of victories for Democrats running on an abortion rights platform following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and ending national abortion rights protections. His campaign was supported by state and national reproductive rights groups that spent millions on advertising and grassroots efforts in the highly competitive swing state.

In the Garden State, the Democrats overcame the scandal surrounding senior U.S. Senator Bob Menendez and actually picked up legislative seats.

Republicans — benefiting from the unpopularity of President Joe Biden, the collapse of two major offshore wind projects and backlash to LGBTQ-friendly policies in public schools — had been hopeful at winning a majority in the state Senate or the Assembly for the first time in more than 20 years…

…Democrats also took on the culture wars by targeting Republicans on abortion rights — an issue that has galvanized the Democratic base since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe last year…

…Facing political headwinds and what appeared to be a motivated Republican base, New Jersey Democrats not only managed to hold onto their state legislative majorities Tuesday night but expand them.

And in Kentucky, incumbent Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear defied conventional wisdom and ran aggressively on abortion rights. He was easily reelected even as Republicans swept all the lower offices. But, as the New York Times notes, those down ballot Democrats “did not run on abortion.”

Another Democrat who didn’t run on reproductive rights is Brandon Presley who was seeking to oust Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves from office.

Mississippi’s governor’s race was the exception to this off-year election’s rule on abortion: The incumbent governor, Mr. Reeves, and his Democratic challenger, Mr. Presley, ran as staunch opponents of abortion rights. And in that race, the Democrat lost.

You might think is was a foregone conclusion that a Democrat would lose in Mississippi, but the race was closely watched for a reason. The simple fact is that Presley did not meet expectations, and it’s possible he could have won if he’d taken Beshear’s approach to the abortion question. But GOP women who might have defected had no one supporting their bodily autonomy.