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Three Things: GOP House Caucus in Chaos

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I admit I debated using a header photo from the archives taken on a circus fairway. Accurate depiction, yes?

And yet when I ran across this photo of a LEGO dump I chose it instead, in part because of the chaos, in part because of the minifig bodies strewn throughout — and in part because of the leopard lying in wait in pile.

Any time now someone in the GOP caucus will complain about the mess they’re making and how it makes the GOP look bad.

Insert Adrian Bott’s now-classic “I never thought leopards would eat MY face” meme.

~ 3 ~

I wish I’d noted the exact time I took this screenshot in Google News; I think it was about 4:00 p.m. ET:

Here’s another screenshot taken at 6:45 p.m.:

What a bunch of clowns. Especially this guy:

At 4:53 p.m., Sahil Kapur summarized the situation on the dead bird app by the numbers:

They threw McCarthy overboard when he had 210 votes in the House majority to be speaker. Then they picked Scalise, who had 113 votes. He withdrew. Now they nominate Jordan, with 124 votes. (The magic number to win is 217.)

Nancy Mace (SC-01) objected to Steve Scalise (LA-01) because of his David Duke remarks; apparently in the GOP it’s okay if you’re a closeted racist, just don’t admit it out loud.

Nobody knew who six-term representative Austin Scott (GA-08) was.

Quite literally, CNN published an article with this headline,
Who is Austin Scott, the Georgia Republican who lost the GOP speakership nomination?

Everybody knows who Jim Can’t Dress Himself Jordan (OH-04) is but too few want to vote for him or he’d have been a cinch in the first round. It’s doubtful he’d swear to the criteria which was put to Scalise: publicly acknowledge the outcome of the 2020 election which Biden won/Trump lost.

And of course there’s the inconvenient obstruction Jordan as House Speaker would pose, as Liz Cheney posted on the dead bird app at 11:55 a.m. today:

Jim Jordan was involved in Trump’s conspiracy to steal the election and seize power; he urged that Pence refuse to count lawful electoral votes. If Rs nominate Jordan to be Speaker, they will be abandoning the Constitution. They’ll lose the House majority and they’ll deserve to.
Twitter

This isn’t governance but a goat rope.

~ 2 ~

The Democratic House caucus Democrats back House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY-08).

That’s it, that’s Thing 2.

Democrats NOT in disarray.

~ 1 ~

Passed on October 1, a continuing resolution extending the last federal budget runs through and expires on November 17 — just shy of five weeks from today.

The nonpartisan, non-profit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget published a table document outlining the budget items which will expire without a new budget and in some cases, budget items which have already expired in spite of the continuing resolution.

Childcare aid and nutrition programs for children may be part of the expired line items.

The longer the GOP dicks around with picking a speaker, the less time they will have to negotiate a new budget.

The media should be hammering on this point but nope. The threat of hungry children and families struggling to work and ensure their children have care just aren’t clickbait.

~ 0 ~

Stay behind the barrels, keep your hands inside the compartment. This is an open thread.

Science in the ‘National Interest’: What About Everything Else? [UPDATE]

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FieldsOfScience_ImageEditor-FlickrThe Republican-led House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (TX-21), wants the National Science Foundation’s grants to be evaluated based on the “national interest.”

Bring it, boneheads. By all means let’s try that standard against EVERYTHING on which we spend federal money.

How many television and radio stations, licensing publicly-owned airwaves, are granted licenses under which they are supposed to serve the “public interest, convenience, or necessity”? Because apart from emergency broadcast signal testing, most of them don’t actually do that any longer, suggesting we really need to re-evaluate broadcasters’ licenses. Let’s put the FCC’s licensing under the microscope. If broadcasters aren’t truly serving “national interest” in the manner parallel to a House Science Committee discussion draft — proposed criteria being “economic competitiveness, health and welfare, scientific literacy, partnerships between academia and industry, promotion of scientific progress and national defence” — the least they could do is pay us adequately for a license to abuse our publicly-owned assets as well as our sensibilities. There’s probably something in the defunct Fairness Doctrine about broadcasting and the nation’s interests…unless, of course, “public” does not mean “nation.” Perhaps Rep. Smith believes “national interest” = “business interest,” which opens up a massive can of definition worms.

How about banks and insurance companies? How many of them were in one way or another not merely affected by the financial meltdown of 2008, but direct contributors to the cataclysm because their standards of operation were shoddy — specifically, with regard to subprime mortgages. Why not put their regulation under the same lens: are these financial institutions serving the “nation’s interest”? The financial industry’s business practices and the regulatory framework existing in early 2008 certainly didn’t defend this nation’s economic competitiveness, damaging the ability to obtain credit as liquidity was threatened. Jeepers, wasn’t that the intent of defunct Glass-Steagall Act after the Great Depression, to assure that commercial and investment banking acted in a secure manner consistent with the nation’s interests?

We could go on and on across the breadth of departments and regulatory bodies which either issue funds or licenses, putting them all to the same test. Do they serve the “national interest”?

The problem here isn’t that the NSF in particular isn’t validating grants as to whether they serve the “national interest.” The NSF already uses criteria to evaluate proposal submissions for their alignment with the nation’s aims. Read more →