Last Call For It's Not Always The GOP

Not that long-time readers will disagree with me here, but not every single terrible, corrupt politician in America has an (R) besides their name.

 

Former Louisiana Democratic Party leader Karen Carter Peterson, who resigned from the state Senate last year year citing depression and a gambling addiction — and later pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud — was sentenced on Wednesday to 22 months in prison.

Peterson, who served in the Louisiana Legislature for 22 years, admitted in August to taking more than $140,000 in funds from her reelection campaign and from the state Democratic Party. The ex-lawmaker spent a “substantial amount” of that money on casino gambling, according to court documents.

Peterson, who made restitution, was tearful and apologetic in court. “I want to tell everyone who contributed to my campaign and the Democratic Party, I am sorry,” she said to WWL-TV.

In court filings and in Tuesday’s arguments, defense attorneys had argued for probation rather than time in prison. They cited Peterson’s long record of public service, her Christian faith, her first-offender status and a long struggle with gambling addiction that caused what they called “diminished mental capacity.”

She would be unlikely to be able to continue the individual therapy she needs in prison, her attorneys argued.

Prosecutors said prison time was appropriate. “Peterson’s addiction does not excuse her actions,” they said in one court brief.

They added that it was “imperative that the court acknowledge the severity of Peterson’s betrayal of the public trust and exploitation of the awesome power she wielded as a candidate for public office and leader of a major political party to seek personal pecuniary gain.”

The pre-sentence report prepared by probation officers called for a sentence of 41 to 51 months, The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate reported.

 

Here's the thing: Democrats who get caught actually face consequences.  Republicans don't, as evidenced primarily by the number of January 6th insurrectionists, human traffickers, and campaign finance cheats still serving in Congress and in state parties in places like Ohio. 

Let's compare the 22 months Peterson gets to how much former Ohio state GOP Speaker Larry Householder gets for his multi-billion corruption slush fund trial starting this month if he gets convicted at all.

It's not always the GOP, but it's the vast majority.

Fantasma Santos, Con't

The calls for Rep. George Santos (R-Protean Shapeshifter) to resign over his total inability to tell one factual thing about themself are growing louder, and increasingly they're coming from Republicans.

 

Local Republican leaders in New York on Wednesday called for the immediate resignation of their new GOP congressman George Santos, who is facing multiple investigations by prosecutors over his personal and campaign finances and lies about his resume and family heritage.

“His lies were not mere fibs. He disgraced the House of Representatives,” Joseph Cairo Jr., chair of the Nassau County Republican Committee, said at a news conference. “He’s not welcome here at Republican headquarters.”

Santos, swarmed by reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday, flatly rejected the call for him to resign, saying, “I will not.”

Cairo and other Republicans said Santos deceived voters and the Nassau County GOP and they were particularly incensed by his lies about having Jewish ancestry.

Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, another Republican newly elected to represent Long Island, spoke at the news conference via video from Washington and joined Cairo’s call for his colleague’s resignation.

The local party has no mechanism to remove Santos from office. He was sworn in to the U.S. House last week.

The move comes a day after two Democrats from New York asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate Santos. Reps. Ritchie Torres and Dan Goldman, in a letter to the committee, said Santos also failed to file “timely, accurate and complete” financial disclosure reports and the reports he did file are “sparse and perplexing.”

 

Santos of course is refusing to resign, and Kevin McCarthy says "It's up to the voters to decide" which is useless horseshit twaddle even for him. Oh and since the House Ethics Committee has been all but destroyed, there will be no accountability for Santos anytime soon. Even if he's tried and convicted, I suspect he'll remain in the Circus of the Damned as one of the main attractions for years to come.

The Circus Of The Damned, Con't

House Republicans are wasting no time in their legislative and investigatory masturbation as invitations for the circus are being sent.

 

The chairman of the new Republican-led House Oversight Committee has issued a flurry of letters as part of the panel's first formal steps toward a long-promised investigation targeting President Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and social media companies that they allege sought to suppress negative stories about the president's son that they claim could have impacted the 2020 presidential election.

The letters, issued by Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and obtained by ABC News, request testimony from multiple former Twitter executives who were involved in the company's handling of news reporting that surfaced from leaked data obtained from a laptop reportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.

The panel is also requesting financial information from the Department of Treasury regarding Hunter Biden and his associates.

In a letter sent to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Comer requested records related to potential suspicious activity reports, or SARs, on Hunter Biden and other members of the president's family, as well as multiple businesses and business partners. SARs are reports filed by financial institutions to flag questionable banking transactions, but do not amount to allegations of crimes.

In response to the letters, a White House spokesperson told ABC News, "In their first week as a governing majority, House Republicans have not taken any meaningful action to address inflation and lower Americans' costs, yet they're jumping out of the gate with political stunts driven by the most extreme MAGA members of their caucus in an effort to get attention on Fox News."

"The President is going to continue focusing on the important issues the American people want their leaders to work together on, and we hope House Republicans will join him," the statement said.

A representative for the Treasury Department declined to comment when contacted by ABC News, and representatives for Hunter Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Beyond their interest in Hunter Biden and his business endeavors, the panel's primary focus is finding out whether his father, President Biden, was more involved in those dealings than previously known.

 

Keep in mind that the goal here is to leak as much of the investigation material involving Hunter Biden as much as possible, and then dare the Justice Department to do something about it. CNN has already shown it will play ball on anything that looks like President Biden is just like Donald Trump as far as corruption goes, so the Circus will have a fertile ground to sow with bullshit.  FOX News is already going along and has for years.

The organ music is starting, and the show is about to begin.

Send in those clowns!

Last Call For The Circus Of The Damned, Con't

Infernal Ringmaster Kevin McCarthy has made a contract from below to keep his current job as House Speaker, but how long that remains the case we don't know, as his GOP clowns voted for a rules package that apparently includes secret provisions that nobody wants revealed.

What we know about the concessions McCarthy made is that they apparently contain some of the more controversial points — especially as compared with the rules package itself, which contained relatively few and passed with little fuss. Among them, as The Washington Post’s Marianna Sotomayor and Leigh Ann Caldwell report:

Those concessions place limits on new spending, including defense spending, which has frustrated some defense hawks. Leadership also agreed to prioritize for a vote an aggressive border security bill that would build a wall along the southern border, according to multiple aides and members of Congress familiar with the agreement who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations. The House would also vote on legislation to establish term limits for members to serve six terms or 12 years, a proposal that would require a constitutional amendment.

The deal also apparently included concessions on committees. But there, too, precisely what form those concessions took isn’t clear.

We know that McCarthy has agreed to things like putting a certain number of hard-right Republicans on the influential Rules Committee, but McCarthy has said he didn’t promise anyone chairmanships. Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), an ally who said he has seen the document, told Axios that it included “no names, just representation.”

At the same time, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) claimed over the weekend that he had secured a slot on the House Republican Steering Committee, which decides committee chairmanships and assignments, in exchange for flipping his speaker vote back to McCarthy:

Fox News: Congressman, what did you get in Florida? What did you get? Everybody got something, right? What did you get?

DONALDS: Oh, well, listen, one of the things that’s going to happen is, it’s been put out I’m actually going to be a part of the Republican Steering Committee as Kevin McCarthy’s designate.

This doesn’t necessarily suggest that Donalds’s name appears on whatever document might exist. But his statement highlights how little we know about the extent or the particulars of the committee promises.

As for why, the obvious answer is that it’s just not terribly helpful to put yourself on the record agreeing to these things. Being forced to agree to such extensive concessions reinforces that McCarthy is a diminished speaker at the mercy of a small number of holdouts. It also would have risked alienating the allies that stood by McCarthy’s side. Sharing specifics would mean McCarthy would have to account for them and his ability to live up to the deal publicly. Some — such as cutting defense spending — open the GOP up to discord and criticism (and those are just the terms for which we know the basic outline).

While that would explain keeping this information from the public, though, it doesn’t explain why even House members appear to be in the dark. Those members have declined to truly press the issue, voting for McCarthy and then the rules package when they could have used both for leverage. McCarthy got what he wanted, ultimately winning both votes without being forced to show the hand that he has left himself with.

 

If Nancy Pelosi had ever done this, it would have been a front-page scandal for years.  McCarthy gets away with it, and the Washington damn Post is asking why he's allowed to do it, rather than, you know, actually finding out what's in the secret rules addendum.

Read the damn assignment.

Mr. Smith Comes For Washington

Special Counsel Jack Smith is getting to work here in the new year with a federal subpoena of Rudy Giuliani over Trump's 2020 Save America PAC slush fund mess.

 

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has subpoenaed Donald Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, asking him to turn over records to a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into the former president’s fundraising following the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the subpoena.

The subpoena, which was sent more than a month ago and has not been previously reported, requests documents from Giuliani about payments he received around the 2020 election, when Giuliani filed numerous lawsuits on Trump’s behalf contesting the election results, the person said.

Prosecutors have also subpoenaed other witnesses who are close to Trump, asking specifically for documents related to disbursements from the Save America PAC, Trump’s primary fundraising operation set up shortly after the 2020 election, according to other sources with insight into the probe.

Taken together, the subpoenas demonstrate prosecutors’ growing interest in following the money after the 2020 election as part of their sweeping criminal probe around Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss of the presidency.

Save America was part of broader fundraising efforts by Trump and the Republican Party that raised more than $250 million after the election. Since then, the political action committee has compensated several lawyers who now represent Trump and his allies in January 6-related investigations.

The subpoenas to other witnesses in addition to Giuliani were sent in late December, according to the other sources.

The information the prosecutors seek is still being collected, the sources said. With Giuliani, the investigators have prioritized getting financial information from him, one person said.

The inquiry to Giuliani came from David Rody, a former top prosecutor in New York who specializes in gang and conspiracy cases and is assisting Smith with examining a broader criminal conspiracy after the election, according to some of the sources.

 

Rudy escaped prosecution on his earlier Ukraine lobbying legal problems, but he's now facing a host of new potential charges. We'll see how far these get.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Ten Years Later

One of the biggest advocates for gun safety legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook has been Shannon Watts, who founded the advocacy group Moms Demand ten years ago. But facing two years, minimum, of a hostile Supreme Court and a House GOP who will never pass anything to stop kids from being butchered by guns, Watts is hanging up her spurs, and I don't blame her one bit.

 

Shannon Watts, one of the country’s most influential gun-safety activists, says she will retire later this year from Moms Demand Action, the grass-roots advocacy group she began in her kitchen a decade ago and grew into a political juggernaut.

“I have asked myself, honestly, every year since I started this organization: Is it time for me to step back and let other people step forward?” Watts, 52, said in an exclusive interview with The Washington Post to announce her decision. “And I think this is the right time.”

The 2012 massacre of 20 first-graders and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut inspired Watts, then a stay-at-home mom, to act. When she searched online for a gun-safety group to join and found that all of them were led by men, she decided to start her own. From her home in Indiana, Watts recruited like-minded women through a Facebook group.

Now, in much of the country, Moms Demand’s influence has eclipsed that of its longtime adversary, the National Rifle Association. Under Watts’s leadership, the organization has established chapters in all 50 states and enlisted tens of thousands of volunteers — almost always dressed in branded red shirts — to organize rallies, campaign for “gun sense” candidates and pack meeting rooms where firearms laws are being debated.

Watts’s success stems from an uncommon blend of qualities and experience that made her ideally suited for the job’s challenges. Her previous work as a communications executive gave her a deep understanding of how to attract media attention and market ideas. She turned a severe case of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder into what she called a “superpower” that allowed her to hyperfocus for many hours straight, a skill she’s harnessed hundreds of times to live-tweet details and context after shootings.

Watts, who says she has never taken a salary from Moms Demand, also possesses a fortitude that has sustained her despite years of death threats from gun-rights extremists, inaction by federal lawmakers and near-constant immersion in one of America’s darkest crises.

Although she denies opposing the Second Amendment, gun-rights groups have long portrayed her as an enemy of the Constitution who wants legal weapons confiscated. In its many denunciations, the NRA has called her a “#2A-hating lobbyist,” accused her of promoting “nearly every gun control measure” and described her Twitter feed as a “fevered anti-gun stream-of-consciousness.”

Through it all, Watts has maintained a sense of optimism — as well as a biting wit she often deploys against her many conservative critics (Watts’s “location,” according to her Twitter profile: “NRA’s head, rent free”).

“This woman has nerves of steel,” said Katie Couric, among the first journalists to introduce Watts to a national audience. “I just admire her on so many levels for her organizational acumen, for her fearlessness in the face of just horrible harassment, and for her determination to stop at nothing.”

Watts says she won’t stop after resigning either, and though some around her have suggested she run for public office, the mother of five has yet to decide what will come next.

She started the organization assuming she would run it for only a few months, but in the spring of 2013, the U.S. Senate rejected President Barack Obama’s effort to overhaul the nation’s gun laws. Watts was in the Capitol, watching from the gallery, when one of those bills failed to pass by six votes.

Among the senators to reject the legislation was Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat from North Dakota, who told reporters that calls to her office the day before the vote were “at least 7 to 1 against that bill.”

Watts never forgot that comment. Nine years later, when the chance for reform finally returned to Capitol Hill this summer after another deadly school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex., she helped organize a massive lobbying effort that directed more than a million calls and messages to the Senate.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed Congress with relative ease, despite NRA opposition. The bill didn’t include many of the sweeping changes activists had long fought for, but it represented the first significant gun legislation to become federal law in three decades.

 

A victory in the BSCA, but the war has effectively been lost. We live in Gunmerica now, where firearms outnumber people by tens of millions. There's no reason to believe any further legislation will pass, or even be considered Constitutional, in the years ahead.

 

Like I said, I see why Watts is retiring.  Maybe she can make a difference in Congress.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The special grand jury investigating Donald Trump's 2020 election interference in Georgia has finished its work and is suggesting that its report be made public, as Fulton County DA Fani Willis weighs her options going forward with possible indictments.

The Georgia special grand jury investigating whether former President Donald Trump and his allies unlawfully sought to interfere in the state's 2020 U.S. presidential election results has issued its final report, a court filing showed on Monday, but it remained unclear whether criminal charges will follow.

In an order, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney dissolved the grand jury now that its work is complete and set a Jan. 24 hearing to determine whether the report will be made public. The jurors recommended that their findings be released, McBurney said in the order.

The special grand jury, which was convened at the request of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, had subpoena power but not the ability to issue indictments. Willis will ultimately decide whether to bring charges against Trump or anyone else, though the jury's report could include recommendations.

Willis, a Democrat, opened a criminal investigation soon after a January 2021 phone call in which Trump, a Republican, urged top election officials to "find" enough votes to overturn Democrat Joe Biden's statewide victory.

The grand jury heard testimony from numerous state officials including Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, as well as key Trump advisers such as U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham and attorney Rudy Giuliani, many of whom unsuccessfully attempted to quash their subpoenas.

Prosecutors have told Giuliani he is a target and could face criminal charges, as well as Trump allies who backed a scheme to appoint alternate electors in a bid to deliver Georgia's electoral votes to Trump, rather than Biden, in the Electoral College process that determines the outcome of presidential elections.

 

So, the questions are if the report will ever see the light of day, and if DA Willis will press charges. Doing so immediately would make her a target, both in the political sense as GOP Gov.  Brian Kemp and the GOP-dominated state legislature will almost certainly try to attempt to remove Willis from office if she does charge Trump and/or his inner circle, and in the dangerously literal sense of the very real possibility of violence by Trump faithful, up to and including Atlanta PD, Fulton County Sheriff's office, or the Georgia State Police.

We'll know soon, possibly by the end of the month.

The Circus of the Damned, Con't

One of the biggest concessions that House Republicans ripped out of Kevin McCarthy is Jim Jordan's "special" committee to "investigate" ongoing Justice Department investigations into Trump and his inner circle, something the GOP hopes will lead to leaks and sabotage of any federal case against Trump and a pretense for impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland.

 

House Republicans are gearing up to investigate the Department of Justice and the FBI, including their “ongoing criminal investigations,” setting up a showdown with the Biden administration and law enforcement agencies over their criminal probes, particularly those into former President Donald Trump.

The new House GOP majority has proposed that a new select subcommittee be formed – a result of one of the key concessions House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made to his opposition to secure the gavel.

In addition to having the power to investigate all ongoing criminal probes of the executive branch, the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government would also “be authorized to receive information available to the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,” giving it access to the most highly classified information in Congress, according to the proposal.

An earlier draft of the select subcommittee proposal gave it less power and was much narrower in scope: It would have only been able to focus on the FBI, DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security, and made no mention of getting access to ongoing criminal investigations.

Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, an early holdout against McCarthy who became a key negotiator for the hard-liners, said on Fox News that changes made to the select subcommittee proposal, particularly seeking a budget as big as the January 6 select committee, was key to getting those initially opposed to McCarthy on board.

“So we got more resources, more specificity, more power to go after this recalcitrant Biden administration,” Roy said Friday. “That’s really important.”

The select subcommittee would be under the jurisdiction of the House Judiciary Committee, which is partly why Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the committee’s incoming chairman, was crucial to the negotiations last week that led to the proposal. As Judiciary chair, Jordan would oversee the subpoenas of the select panel. By contrast, the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol made subpoena decisions unilaterally. Jordan has foreshadowed that he will make investigating assertions that the FBI and DOJ have been politicized a key focus of the House Judiciary Committee as chairman.

“We’re going to get into what’s going on at the FBI,” Jordan said Sunday on Fox.

If the proposal passes, McCarthy would be able to select 13 lawmakers to serve on the subcommittee, five of whom would be chosen in consultation with House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. McCarthy would also pick the subcommittee chair. This was similar to the setup of the January 6 select committee, for which then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave then-Minority Leader McCarthy five spots to fill. But when Pelosi rejected two of McCarthy’s picks, the California Republican pulled all his members from serving on the panel.

 

So yes, this is going to be the Evil Mirror Universe version of the January 6th Committee, complete with farcical accusations and damaging leaks in an effort to capsize investigations into Trump and his flunkies.

 

I'm not sure if Democrats participating in this bad faith effort will help or hurt them. I see the need to at least try to mitigate the stupidity, but they'll just be used as political props for the next two years.

 

We'll see what Hakeem Jeffries decides to do.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

In a Friday Night News Dump™ crapped out late last week while the world was watching our dysfunctional House GOP Circus of the Damned and laughing at Kevin McCarthy openly for his stupidity, Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his own coming Pyrrhic humiliation at the hands of Disney and invited everyone to pull up a seat for the show.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will seek to bring Disney's special governing district under direct state control in a bid to end the entertainment giant's multi-decade arrangement with the Sunshine State.

DeSantis is expected to appoint a new board to control Reedy Creek, the self-governing area that is currently de facto run by The Walt Disney Company, and allows it to maintain its own infrastructure and public services. Created in 1967, the district also allows Disney to raise taxes and issue bonds to finance the expenses required to run services for Walt Disney World resort.

“The corporate kingdom has come to an end," said DeSantis's communications director, Taryn Fenske, in a statement. "Under the proposed legislation, Disney will no longer control its own government, will live under the same laws as everyone else, will be responsible for their outstanding debts, and will pay their fair share of taxes."

Fenske added that a state-controlled board would also ensure that neighboring Orange County cannot use Reedy Creek-related issues "as a pretext to raise taxes on Orange County residents.”

Fox News first reported the Friday development, citing sources in DeSantis' office. In a document posted to the website of Osceola County, which also borders Orange County and Reedy Creek, notice was given that the proposed legislation would leave no current aspect of Reedy Creek untouched.

Florida legislators already voted in a special session last year to dissolve all special districts like Reedy Creek in Florida by June 2023. It was not immediately clear how that earlier vote would impact the new proposal.

 

DeSantis is clearly betting that he has better lawyers than Disney, and there's tens of billions of dollars at stake here. He's expecting Disney to surrender and for his army of trolls to attack the company until they do. Maybe there's a deal in the works, but I'm betting this fight is going to last years and cost both sides buckets of cash...which is what DeSantis wants anyway.

 

This is going to be nasty, especially if you live in central Florida, because it's going to be the people of the Orlando area who are going to definitely suffer the most when DeSantis wrecks the economy there for good.

Last Call For The Darkest History, Rhyming

Looks like Brazil is getting its own version of January 6th today on the 8th.

Thousands of radical backers of Brazil’s far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro breached and vandalized the presidential office building, congress and the Supreme Court on Sunday, and sought to enter other halls of power, in scenes that hauntingly evoked the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former president Donald Trump.

The attack came a week after the inauguration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated Bolsonaro in a runoff election in October.

Images on Globo TV showed protesters roaming the halls and standing near smashed glass cases in the Planalto Palace, the office of the president. Thousands of others wearing the national soccer shirt — now a symbol of the far right — and waving the Brazilian flag milled about the massive square outside in a part of the Brasilia capital that is similar to Washington’s National Mall.

“This absurd attempt to impose the will by force will not prevail,” Lula’s justice minister Flavio Dino tweeted shortly after the invasion began around 2:30 p.m. local time. “The Government of the Federal District claims that there will be reinforcements. And the forces at our disposal are at work. I’m at the headquarters of the Ministry of Justice.”

The incident captured the uncanny parallels between Bolsonaro and his political lodestar, Trump, and came after months in which pundits have feared a Jan. 6 style copycat action here.

In a manner similar to Trump, Bolsonaro has fueled discontent among his base since his loss to the newly-inaugurated leftist, stepping down while refusing to officially concede.

Thousands of Bolsonaristas have camped out at military headquarters across Latin America’s largest country, demanding military intervention to reinstate Bolsonaro, who last week flew to Florida instead of attending a ceremony in the capital of Brasilia where outgoing presidents traditionally hand over the sash of power.

Military police officers attempted to stop the demonstrators with tear gas and other weapons but appeared far outnumbered. The group is inside the Palácio do Planalto, the official building where the president works.

The Congress and Supreme Court are both in recess, so lawmakers and judges are not there.

Lula was not in Brasília today, as he was in a São Paulo countryside. He had planned to return to Brasília by the end of afternoon.

 

The good news is that President Lula de Silva, Brazil's Congress, and Brazil's Supreme Court are not in the capital of Brasilia today. That's also the bad news. Bolsonaro has fled to Orlando to avoid prosecution and needs to be kindly returned. Meanwhile, Lula has called in the national army to deal with the protesters.

We'll see where this goes, but this is a scary moment for South America's largest democracy...and it echoes too closely our own failures in dealing with our own "Bolsonaristas" like, you know, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, who have been trying to foment this kind of terrorism in Brazil for months now, and it looks like they have succeeded.

The Circus Of The Damned, Con't

After an astonishing display of abject failure that took fifteen votes and the shedding of all power, dignity, and self-respect to win, the question isn't "Will Kevin McCarthy still be Speaker of the House in January 2025?" but "How soon will McCarthy be ousted?"

 

As far as we know, the “motion to vacate” has never successfully ousted a speaker, even though it’s been in existence for 200 years.

That may change this year.

In December, we reported that even McCarthy’s allies privately agreed that his time as speaker would be limited. Since then, he’s effectively ensured that will be the case by restoring the motion to vacate, enabling a single unhappy member to trigger a vote to oust him. McCarthy can only lose four votes; conservatives can show him the door any time they want.

We saw this week how difficult it was for McCarthy to muster enough votes to get the gavel — and that was after years of trying to win over his detractors. Now, he’ll have to do the even more difficult job of governing: passing spending bills, dealing with the debt ceiling — and yes, unfortunately for him, negotiating with Democrats, which will jeopardize his standing on the right.

How long will he last? Rep. DAVE JOYCE cracked a funny line with elements of truth in it during a 2 a.m. CNN interview just after McCarthy won the gavel. Asked how long it would take for conservatives to use the “motion to vacate,” the Ohio Republican replied: “Tomorrow?”

We think McCarthy will probably have a few months. But the fiscal deadlines looming this year — spending bills and a debt ceiling increase, with shutdowns and even a national default possible — mean that his hourglass is already starting to run out of time.

This morning, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” conservativeRep. CHIP ROY (R-Texas) was asked whether he’d trigger the motion to vacate if Republicans go for a clean debt ceiling increase. “I’m not going to play the what-if games on how we’re going to use the tools of the House to make sure that we enforce the terms of the agreement,” Roy said. “But we will use the tools of the House to enforce the terms of the agreement.” 

 

In other words, the moment  McCarthy fails to deliver on one of a thousands promises that he cannot deliver on, he's done.

 

And I think that moment is going to come sooner rather than later, as soon as the January 6th terrorists in the House GOP caucus decide they want to collapse the country's economy in an effort to try to collapse the federal government.

 

Buckle up.

Sunday Long Read: The Streets Of L.A.

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from the award-winning team at California non-profit news outlet Capital & Main, where Ethan Ward gives us the hard truth of trying to find a place to live in Los Angeles even when you make $24 an hour and would have a fairly decent life anywhere else.

 

Beneath a glaring porch light over her grandmother’s driveway, Sarah Fay is on her smartphone, searching once again for a place to sleep for the night.

As is often the case when she needs a place and has not already burned through the last of her monthly income, the 28-year-old scrolls through Priceline.com in search of a bed and four walls.

Sarah could lie down on a makeshift bed surrounded by storage boxes and bowls to feed two dogs in her grandmother’s uninsulated two-car garage — and sometimes she does. But that means lying feet away from her 64-year-old mother Karon Fay, who has been sleeping there for more than a dozen years. Sarah’s grandmother says that her granddaughter has always been welcome to stay in the cluttered garage, but the situation is more complicated. Sarah’s cigarette-smoking mom, who wrestles with breathing problems — as her oxygen mask makes clear — already lives in there. Karon also tries to manage her diagnosed bipolar disorder, but that doesn’t always go so well, her daughter suggests.

Sarah has tried for the past four years to find an apartment — her last steady residence was her college dormitory. When Sarah needs to get away from her mother and the rest of her life on the periphery of her grandmother’s one-story ranch home in Culver City, California, she splurges on a motel. When she doesn’t have the money, she gets more resourceful. She will sleep in her 2018 black Ford SUV, which she is still paying off. When it is not too cold, she pitches a green pop-up tent on the beach in Playa Del Rey. But most nights, Sarah closes her eyes in the garage next to her mother — and hopes for the best.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development defines “homeless” through four categories. Sarah does not fit the most dire category of “Literally Homeless,” which is generally those who live in public places or shelters. She likely could fall into the next tier, “Imminent Risk of Homelessness,” typically someone who will “imminently lose their primary nighttime residence” and lacks the resources to get permanent housing. At minimum, she is “housing insecure,” a description for people, experts say, who double or triple up in overcrowded apartments or who move frequently. The term also applies to people without a lease or a contract that grants them legal rights to live somewhere and have no space of their own. Their desperate state may be dressed up as couch surfing, or the sort of measures that Sarah takes, but it is a form of homelessness nonetheless.

Sarah does not use that term to describe her circumstances. She says, “I would say I’m housing insecure.”

When many people refer to “the homeless,” they may be talking about people settling in tents, underpasses or cars, but such people are a fraction of the many like Sarah without a stable place to live.

In Los Angeles County alone, nearly 70,000 people experience homelessness on any given night, according to the 2022 point-in-time count. By contrast, a September 2021 report from the Mayor’s Office of City Homelessness Initiatives estimated that there are hundreds of thousands of people like Sarah wrestling with housing insecurity in the city. (Nationally, there are well over half a million unhoused people, and millions more who are at risk of joining them.)

“The image in most people’s minds when it comes to homelessness in California is the chronic person living in a tent on a sidewalk,” explains Ned Resnikoff, policy director for California YIMBY and the author of a new report on ending homelessness. “That’s a significant and growing portion of the homeless population in California, but when you’re talking about the typical experience, it is usually not chronic, but the more intermittent form, like one housing situation to another.

That’s crucial to keep in mind for Mayor Karen Bass, who pledged to “drastically reduce homelessness” and “end street encampments” in Los Angeles. On her very first day in office in mid-December, the mayor declared a state of emergency to respond to the housing crisis. The City Council approved it the following day.

To really put a dent in visible homelessness, Bass will need to galvanize a wide array of resources to produce structures to house people on the streets. She will also need to stabilize the situation for people who sometimes still have a private place to sleep.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority calculated in 2020 that a network of supports were helping an average of 207 people out of homelessness each day in the city, but that the overall situation was worsening with 227 new people losing their housing.

The housing crisis in Los Angeles is based on some fairly simple principles. There is far more demand for affordable housing than there is supply, so prices have soared in recent years, and few renters’ incomes have come close to keeping up. The result, according to a February 2022 report, is that renters in Los Angeles County are the second most “cost-burdened” in the nation, and rents grew about 20% in a year.

A recent analysis by the personal finance site SmartAsset shows that three in every 10 renters in Los Angeles pay more than half of their income for housing. Sarah, who works full time, would have to become one of them to afford a simple market-rate studio apartment.

Personal finance experts generally consider people who spend more than 30% of their income on housing to be prone to accumulate debt. People who spend more than half of their income on rent tend to be extremely vulnerable to a single bad event — the loss of a job, a breakup, car trouble, a broken arm or falling out with a housemate — that can force them out of where they live. In extreme cases, they can slide straight onto the streets.

But many more end up trapped, like Sarah, in an in-between world, relying when they can on loved ones who have their own problems.

 

A new class of the demimonde, the "intermittently housed". America is in trouble, folks. It has been for most of my life, Something's got to change very soon or it's going to shatter.

Last Call For Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is sending out a message that higher education will no longer continue in the state, as he is currently engineering a complete takeover of New College of Florida to serve as a loud warning as to what's coming to a state college campus near you.

Gov. Ron DeSantis began the process Friday of transforming Sarasota's New College of Florida into a more conservative institution, appointing six new board members, including conservative activist Christopher Rufo, a dean at conservative Hillsdale College and a senior fellow at The Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank.

"It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida's classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south," Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz said in a statement.

The shakeup of the 13-member board is certain to create major tensions at New College, an institution that started as a progressive private school before becoming the state's liberal arts honors college. The small school's student body and faculty have a reputation for leaning left politically.

Turning New College into a Florida version of Hillsdale would amount to flipping it upside down, a wholesale reinvention akin to a hostile takeover, and one that many current students and faculty are likely to resist.

DeSantis aides blasted the school Friday and said an overhaul is needed.

"Unfortunately, like so many colleges and universities in America, this institution has been completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning," said DeSantis Communications Director Taryn Fenske.

Rufo is known for his activism on transgender and racial issues, making him a leader in the new wave of conservative culture wars. He joined DeSantis when the governor signed HB 1557, the Parental Rights in Education Act, which is derided by critics as the "Don't Say Gay" bill.

Rufo said in a series of Twitter posts Friday that public universities have "been corrupted by woke nihilism" and he is "ready to transform higher education from within." He said he plans to recruit new faculty to New College to "create an institution where academics can thrive, without self-censorship."

“My ambition is to help the new board majority transform New College into a classical liberal arts institution. We are recapturing higher education.” Rufo said.

Rufo recently applauded DeSantis on Twitter for requesting information on diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory at all Florida colleges and universities.

"Gov. DeSantis is going to lay siege to university 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' programs," Rufo wrote.

Among Rufo's goals for New College that he laid out in a tweet: Restructuring the administration, developing "a new core curriculum," eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion policies and restructuring academic departments.

 

Now, DeSantis isn't about to mess with a big name football school, at least not yet. But a small liberal arts honors college like New College is the perfect target to turn into Liberty University lite. The Supreme Court will make it much easier late this year when they eliminate diversity from public and private colleges and universities, and DeSantis will use New College as his testing grounds for destroying public universities nationwide should he be elected in 2024 or 2028.

 

This is all part of the plan.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Police and FBI in New Mexico are trying to determine if a series of shootings at offices and homes of five New Mexico Democrats over the last month are related. Nobody has been injured so far, but officials are worried that may not remain the case.

Federal and local authorities in New Mexico are investigating whether several shootings since early December at the offices or homes of five elected Democratic leaders were connected and possibly politically motivated, officials said.

No one was injured in the shootings in Albuquerque involving three residences, a workplace and a campaign office associated with a pair of county commissioners, two state senators and New Mexico’s newly elected attorney general. Three of the shootings took place in December and two this month, the latest of which was on Thursday, the authorities said.

The Albuquerque police chief, Harold Medina, said at a news conference on Thursday that there could be a pattern to the shootings, possibly tied to political affiliation.

“On the surface, that is one of the things that, as a law enforcement agency, we are looking at and is a concern to us,” Chief Medina said.

He said the authorities were still processing evidence and had no one in custody. The department did not announce the shootings earlier, he said, because it was not clear in December whether there might be a pattern.

Mayor Tim Keller of Albuquerque said the authorities were concerned that the shootings might have been targeted and were “possibly politically motivated.”

“This is a high priority for us,” Mr. Keller said at the news conference.

The F.B.I. in Albuquerque is assisting with the investigation, an agency official said at the news conference. The state police were also involved, officials said.

The Albuquerque Police Department provided a timeline of the shootings on Thursday. It said the police had been called that morning to the law office where State Senator Moe Maestas works after gunshots were heard in the area. Three shots were fired at 11:41 a.m., but there was no damage to the building, the police said.

On Tuesday, at least eight shots were fired at the home of State Senator Linda Lopez, the police said.

On Dec. 11, the department said, “more than a dozen gunshot impacts” were found at the house of Debbie O’Malley, a Bernalillo County commissioner who left office at the end of the month because she was limited to two terms.

On Dec. 4, eight rounds were fired at the home of Adriann Barboa, also a Bernalillo County commissioner, the police said.

The police said in a statement late Thursday that they were also examining whether shots that were fired in December at the former campaign office of Raul Torrez, who had just been elected New Mexico’s attorney general, were part of the pattern.

Mr. Torrez moved out of the office after the November election. On the morning of Dec. 10, the Police Department’s ShotSpotter gunshot detection system identified several gunshots in the area of the building that the authorities now think “may be tied to the string of shootings involving elected officials,” the police statement said.

“These shootings are serious crimes, regardless of whether anyone was injured,” Mr. Keller, the mayor, said on Twitter on Thursday, referring to the Albuquerque investigation.

While the authorities have not definitively tied the gunfire to politics or ideology, the investigation reflects national concern over threats and intimidation against lawmakers, public officials and, in some cases, their family members.

 

At some point, bullets are going to start hitting people, and even if nobody is physically hurt, everyone will be looking over their shoulder. That's how domestic terrorism works, folks.

This is a terrorist attack, as sure as the sun on New Mexico's flag rises.

It Only Took Fifteen Times

Kevin McCarthy was elected Speaker f the House on the fifteenth ballot, late after midnight last night, and has surrendered so much of his power that he may not survive the month in the office.

 

The vote capped a historically dysfunctional week in which members — who were not even allowed to be sworn in before choosing a speaker — sat through vote after vote with the world watching. McCarthy was the first party leader in a century whose race even went past the first ballot.

He'd fumbled a previous bid for speaker in 2015 before it came to a vote and some of his initial backers openly questioned whether it was possible for him to succeed this week given the strength of his opposition.

But McCarthy’s victory also came at a steep price: In exchange for the rebels’ support, he agreed to various concessions (the details of which are still not fully known) that would give conservatives more power to set the agenda, block legislation they dislike, and quickly call a vote to remove McCarthy if he pushes back.

With at least four members still in the “Never Kevin” camp, and the possibility of the majority shrinking through resignations or acts of God, he'll remain a vote or two away from the brink at all times.

He will have to manage expectations and deliver results in high-stakes battles over issues like spending, reauthorizing the farm bill, and, most especially, raising the debt ceiling. One wrong move could lead to a shutdown, financial crisis, or his ouster as speaker, none of which are mutually exclusive.

But for now, the Congress can adopt rules, set up committees, hold hearings, and begin to at least outwardly resemble a normal functioning institution. That's a victory no one should take for granted anymore.

 

The good news is that McCarthy's position is so precarious that it's bound to fail. The bad news is once the Freedom Caucus nutjobs get everything they want from McCarthy as far as committees and assignments go, he's 100% disposable. 

But the real damage will be the rules he's agreed to in the House: No bill can increase spending over five or ten year timeframes, the House Ethics committee has to have a public complaint period, the return of the Holman Rule, which would allow specific punitive government salary cuts or entire program eliminations, and will almost certainly allow the House to default on the national debt, crashing the economy.

And yes, the big one is the Coronavirus Pandemic subcommittee, which is going to be months of stupid people having hearings from "medical professionals" about horse dewormer.

Get ready. These idiots broke the House, and they're going to break the country.