Trump gets to torture Tom Emmer, so that's something.
The disfunction has been a lot of fun, but maybe Emmer is a better choice than anyone else in the Republican caucus. Maybe Rep. Omar should announce her support.
OK, this isn't directly about Trump's legal woes. It'll be interesting to hear what Ellis can testify to.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of assholes. Meanwhile Trump is losing it worse than ever, which would be comical if it weren't so scary. Especially since he seems to finally have a more stable group of brownshirts around him (evil and insane, but also stable and functional by Trumpy standards).
And now Emmer has dropped out of the Speaker race.
3,4 -- Amazingly so. My rep Zinke was saying in public last week that if Jordan couldn't win, Jesus himself couldn't get 217. There's a logical flaw in that.
Of course not, you expect this lot to choose someone with a Hispanic name?
Jesus would certainly win. Say what you will about Republicans, but I bet there are five of them who would support him.
So which will happen first: The next speaker candidate drops out, or the next Trump witness turns?
How long are the GOP "moderates" going to put up with being told they have to vote for the crazies' guy because the crazies refuse to vote for their guy before they just say fuck it and vote "present" on the floor?
Or one of them could decide to be speaker and get elected on Democratic votes for the low price of agreeing to bring up for votes bipartisan bills agreed on with the Senate...
10 "How long" is the filing deadline for their seat. They can never let Jeffries win. What I wonder is how long until they come back around to McCarthy?
I kind of think the political hit for actively working with Democrats to elect a Republican speaker may be bigger than the hit for giving up and letting a Democratic speaker happen. But I don't understand how Republican politics works, so I may be completely wrong.
That's my guess as to how this ends too.
How long will Republican representatives worry about violence against them or their families? Even leaving aside the potential political consequences, you won't find five Republicans willing to enrage the crazies.
Can you imagine the guidance that Trump would give his minions in the wake of such a betrayal?
Emmer and the guy from MI are the only ones who voted to accept 2020 election results. The open rejection of elections seems extremely bad, along with lots of other Trumpist beliefs, but that one maybe won't work in the suburbs?
The lesson of the California budget debacle of the late 2000s is that they will never ever ever do the right thing for good governance no matter the stakes. So that's how I assume things will play out.
Does Trump HAVE a superego? I would have guessed no
19 I think that's basically right, but Israel's need for additional money is going to be something they're not going to feel like they can keep ignoring.
When will Ryan Zinke throw his cowboy hat into the ring? He's a freshman now, but was in the House for a bit before leaving to join the Trump Administration. Trump fired him for being too corrupt, but they've mended fences. He grew up in Montana, but lives in California, so that ought to work for him.
https://www.tiktok.com/@jamellebouie/video/7293640917372652846
I feel like there was a lot of skepticism of the Georgia RICO case among some mainstream legal commentators when the charges came out but certainly seems like the one showing the quickest results.
And Ellis actually pled to a felony. I think that's the first, isn't it?
Further to 23: "the one" of the multiple Trump criminal cases, that is.
23: Fastest in terms of getting various lesser figures to plead, but that's partly because there are so many of them. First one to actually put Trump on trial is likely to be the DC Jan 6th case, I think, because Jack Smith has kept it simple by making him as the only defendant for now and Judge Chutkan is moving things along in a pretty no-nonsense way.
I feel like there was a lot of skepticism of the Georgia RICO case among some mainstream legal commentators when the charges came out but certainly seems like the one showing the quickest results.
Well, Ken White's take was that on one hand, it was somewhat sloppy and possibly overcharging, but on the other hand, Georgia RICO is a very strong law so going as strong as possible usually works for prosecutors out of sheer financial pressure on defendants, even if that doesn't make it the best case intellectually. So that's panning out.
18: The open rejection of elections seems extremely bad,
Weimar Germany has entered the chat.
My rep Zinke was saying in public last week that if Jordan couldn't win, Jesus himself couldn't get 217. There's a logical flaw in that.
Someone should nominate him. Let's see them go on the record voting against Jesus.
Weimar Germany has entered the chat.
Did Weimar Germany actually have a lot of denial of election results? I know there was a lot of political chaos, failure to form majorities etc, but I wasn't aware that there were widespread cases of parties saying "that election was rigged and should be ignored".
30: I can't think of any but more to the point there were plenty of cases of parties saying "we don't need no stinking elections, we've got GUNS" and trying to seize power, starting with the Spartacists and moving on through the Munich Soviet, various border conflicts, the Kapp Putsch, about three different state-level Communist putsches, and the Beerhall Putsch, after which things calmed down a bit.
Presumably the plea deals are so sweet ($5k fine and a written apology, coughing to a charge that won't affect your law licence) because they're going for, you know....Trump? Otherwise it looks a bit easy going.
32: and, crucially, an agreement to testify against other defendants.
after which things calmed down a bit
This made me boggle a bit but I suppose it's true, on a short timescale... strange to imagine some relieved German sitting back in 1929 and saying to himself "well, that was just one bloody thing after another, thank god it's all calmed down now".
The last coup attempt is November 1923, which is also the peak of the inflation. By 1925 Germany had got a new currency, joined the League of Nations, negotiated the French army out of the Ruhr, made some progress on the reparations issue, and managed to sell Wall Street on German investments as the new hotness. It's absolutely canonical to split Weimar into a phase of crisis 1919-1923, a phase of stabilisation 1924-1929, and then a further crisis 1929-1933 as the Depression completely wrecks everything.
Yes exactly! My point is that from our perspective it's easy to overlook that brief period, and so saying "everything calmed down in Germany after 1923" sounds really weird because we're so focussed on the awfulness of 1929-49.
It seems like this sort of thing should violate Powell's plea deal.
Also, I liked this paragraph:
"Go see this movie!! It is so important and terrifying because it is true," Powell wrote, tagging right-wing media figures including catturd2, Dan Bongino, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
27: The Georgia RICO law is being used (and it doesn't seem like a stretch given how the law is written!) to, among other things, target the people who were running the bail fund for the Cop City protestors.
The sweet plea deals set up a bit of a buyer's market, right? The deals can only get worse from here. Who wants to be the last sucker holding the bag for the megalomaniacal ringleader?
If that wasn't a rhetorical question.
It is a tricky one. More complicated than the Prisoner's Dilemma.
If you stick with Trump *and* he wins, that's the best outcome for you because you maintain your status and get a pardon. But if you stick with him and he loses, you're going away. If you betray him now that's better than betraying him later because you'll get a better deal, but only if Trump then loses. If he wins he'll come after you.
I bet someone smart has written about the order in which these deals are taking place. It's not just the defendants who are making calculations about pleas.
That's why I asked for a thread. Because I'm not reading random stuff until I find something clear. I was hoping someone knew a brief, accurate piece.
Sometimes I just marvel at how goddamn wild 2024 is going to be.
That's my guess as to how this ends too.
My guess is that the so-called "moderates" cave based solely on what has always happened before.
44: 2020 would have been, but the pandemic counterintuitively kept a lid on things.
41: You have to factor in the cost of your defense as well, which won't be refunded if you get a pardon. I guess some of these people turned down Trump PAC lawyers.
45: Unimaginable somebody could hate Hakeem Jeffries more than they hate Matt Gaetz. But that's pretty much the story of the Trump era in a nutshell.
46: You are high on your own supply if you don't consider 2020 to have been a wild year.
He might be high on someone else's supply if they left it unattended.
We may look back on 2020 as being tame.
It's irresponsible to speculate whose supply apostropher is high on.
Haven't listened yet, but the Georgia pleas are a topic on this week's episode of Ken White's podcast, and he's a good source on criminal trial strategy in general.
End of the day they get their denier. (Almost certainly appears to be the case--I think no defectors yet.)
"The GOP is a failed state. Donald Trump is its warlord." --Blind pig Will Saletan finding an acorn 8 years ago. (via Josh Marshall)
In a happy way. How do they end happily?
All successful states are alike. Each failed state has failed in its own way.
47.1: good point. If you stick with Trump you can con people into paying your legal costs.
We have an actual Speaker. Mike "Johnson".
I'm not sure how "actual" this "Mike Johnson" character is. Sounds pretty made up. But he does seem to be the Speaker.
So far he sounds like a significant step down from both the bow tie guy and McCarthy.
I'm disappointed. Call me crazy, but it was taking so long, I was starting to think Jeffries had a chance. He's already set records for the most votes.
I would say they're not sending their best, but I suspect they actually are.
65: The way McCarthy's term ended tends to obscure what an evil fuck he has always been. It's not clear to me that Johnson is worse.
Shirtsleeves was OK with threats against legislators who voted against him, while forced-birth guy hasn't done that.
Yeah, it seems like the sweet spot here is "far right lunatic but not also interpersonally a huge asshole." Which seems about right for the modern GOP.
It's especially noteworthy how long it took them to find someone like that.
I suspect that the threats had a mixed effect: materially damaged Jordan's chances (which weren't great to begin with it seems) while making moderates more eager to get the whole thing done with. I never thought they'd defect*, but I think the threats reduced whatever the chances were.
*actually voting Jeffries was 0%, but there was some tiny % of a deal where Dems + R "moderates"** voted for an R speaker with conditions. I think Freedom Caucus recalcitrance could eventually have led there, just because, at some point, you think "OK, if you assholes won't even vote for assholes, what are we doing here?"
**arguably 2 groups that fit that description, neither of which is moderate on any meaningful policy axis: Rs in heavy Biden districts, whose careers are almost certainly over next January (but who could at least try to thread the needle), and non-deniers who aren't complete weasels. The latter seems to have proven a null set, surprising nobody.
Anyway, Johnson has repulsive politics and should be relatively easy to run against, but he's not obviously personally repulsive (the way that Jordan & Gaetz are), so I wonder how he'll end up appearing in the media. Obviously he'll be graded on a steep curve, as Rs nearly always are, but as a complete non-entity, there's really no telling. Is he a gaffe machine? Is he capable of making reasonable Republican sounds in front of cameras? Will he be in any way competent at his actual new job? Hell, are we about to be deluged with videos of him saying the worst things very loudly? There was certainly no time to vet him, and I doubt he's faced any well-financed opposition in his district.
There goes additional funding for Ukraine among other things
Johnson is probably going to be a low-key horror. Stuff like 74.
Kashana Cauley on Bluesky: I guess they were waiting for an election denialist who looks like he uses the right fork at the dinner where he celebrates taking your birth control
.
BTW, I have Bluesky invite codes, contact me at the linked email
I have a question. Does the rule that it only takes one person to move to vacate the chair still hold? Or did that expire when McCarthy did?
That rule remains in effect. But it will only come into play if Johnson does something decent, so I imagine he's safe.
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this practice of "Fujifying" has even extended to the United States, where Japanese Americans living in Washington State renamed the perfectly shaped stratovolcano Mount Rainier, borrowing its Indian name of Tacoma and calling it "Tacoma-Fuji."|>
It was always going to be someone awful. The question is going to be whether he can get his caucus to do some things they don't want to do -- like pass another CR -- and I suppose that the answer is no.
79: Pre-1980 St. Helens looked a lot more like Fuji. Rainier isn't as tidy.
Harry Truman turned down a proposal to nuke Mt Fuji. Mt St Helens then nuked Harry Truman.
86: Wrong geology here. Closest thing would be spatter cones but they're not very big. The shield volcanoes they sit on are big but not conical.
I'm struggling to imagine a dumber headline than this one from the NYT: "Is the Republican Speakership Cursed? Johnson Is About to Find Out."
The whole article is pretty dumb.
91: You promised us dumb, and you delivered!
92: I had somehow not heard of that.
This would be the Pacific Northwest Fuji you want. (Also, the view of Fuji itself from the Shinkansen was one of my Japan highlights: it looks so huge and ominous, and the industrial landscape in the foreground is anything but classical. Chills for sure.)
Is the Speakership cursed, or is leading a party composed entirely of malevolent, nihilistic assholes impossible? Opinions differ.
So... the NYT's implicit audience is rich people, 50+ or so, in NYC and other urban centers? Has that been consistent for its whole existence?
タラナキ富士 seems the most obvious, what with that Tom Cruise movie.
96 I've never understood why anyone has ever thought this isn't so. OK, right wing yahoos go around talking like it's some kind of communist party organ, but it's never been that. Or the mouthpiece of the Left, or whatever.
This is always the iconic Rainier view for me:
https://images.app.goo.gl/cNprXnJopEvKiYsX7
An old friend stopped by in the midst of a road trip last weekend. As she was going there, I asked if she remembered when The Resistance was led by (a) the twitter account for Badlands National Park and (b) Teen Vogue.
Despite its staff's long experience with Trump, and the huge influx of new subscribers hoping to be informed of Trump's various outrages, the NYT determined that the most important thing to do with all that money was hire conservative columnists, to join their access political team, and lecture their readers on why they're wrong about everything.
I think the target age for the NYT might include rich people younger than 50+, like individuals and couples looking to buy expensive property, luxury goods, or high-end vacation packages, and some of the style/real estate stories* seem to bear this out.
*NB: I haven't read the NYT regularly for about a decade, but that was my impression when I did. Stories like how tough the housing market is (for people looking to buy in Manhattan).
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NMM to Bull from "Night Court."
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I stand toweringly and baldly over everyone in commemoration.
