So Kevin McCarthy has been ousted from his position as Speaker of the House. Meanwhile, Trump, on trial for massive fraud, has been hit with a gag order because he won’t stop running his mouth. Discuss, if you are so moved.
Oh, and on an unrelated note, I’m now a WRITING COACH! Get in touch with me if you’re facing writer’s block or any other writing malady. I can help get you unstuck!
There’s a tradition here that, although people obviously do want to be speaker of the house of commons, they have to pretend that they don’t want the job.
So newly appointed speakers get dragged to the speaker’s chair.
ETA: One advantage of being speaker is that the other parties don’t put up candidates to contest your seat in elections.
It’s morbidly entertaining watching the GQP stumble from one crisis to the next.
@Alan: So Kev has taken the opposite path. I picture Capybarrister narrowing his eyes* at all these shenanigans.
Colbert had an extra-long monologue last night just to give a precis of all the goings-on of the last 5 months.
*which his people are good at
Not only have the wheels come off the GOP truck, but the steering column’s broken and the dashboard radio’s stuck on AM.
In the alternate universe where Billy Joel is only just getting around to considering creating “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, he’s giving up on that idea because it would have to be longer than a feature film just to cover the last five years.
A more feasible song to update/timewarp/whatever would be the one being blasted out by a passenger on a bus whom Spock neck-pinches in the one with the whales. There’s a lot of “I hate you, screw you!” in that, which certainly seems apropos for the Trump era, along with this: “The only choice we’re given is how many megatons!” Just change the implication from “megatons of TNT” to “megatons of CO2” and it works.
(In situ, it was eerily prophetic, given that it was the 1980s and in the original ST:TOS timeline, pre-meddling by the Borg and others, World War III was only about a decade away, and Nuremberg Trials II, and Khan’s exile into space on the Botany Bay, not much longer. The Borg, the Temporal Cold War, Braxton and Starling and Chronowerkz Industries, and assorted others appear to have altered that. So far as it can be pieced together now, the bad times start with Trump, continue until refugee camps and the housing crisis converge to produce the Bell Riots next year, and keep escalating; as Pike states in a SNW episode, “they called it Civil War II, then the Eugenics Wars, and then just World War III”. (SNW is cool. SNW actually showed footage from the J6 coup attempt in that sequence, early in a montage that culminated in war footage and mushroom clouds. SNW also went on to adapt Omelas shortly afterward, in a different episode.) A Picard episode reminded of the Bell Riots sanctuary districts being a thing by 2024 and then hinted strongly that Khan would rise to power not long after. First Contact puts the war going nuclear sometime between 2030 and 2060, with Cochrane’s aptly-named Phoenix rising from the ashes of that conflict. And, presumably, Khan’s exile taking place shortly thereafter, now that the needed technology existed to effectuate this. Strangely, there’s no mention of catastrophic eco-collapse or climate change in either timeline, and First Contact‘s Montana has rather a warmer climate than I’d expect it to have in the middle of a nuclear winter.)
The 20? (I haven’t kept exact track) members of the “Freedom Caucus” (more like anarchy caucus) haven’t exactly been genius planners. High risk tactics, with no clear follow-up and no guarantee that any payoffs would be what they expect. First we disrupt government… and then, step two! …and then no more Democrats. That doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous, just that they’re a different kind of dangerous than they intend to be.
It’s been floated by people smarter than them that they might try to prevent a new speaker from being elected, in order to force a shutdown in late November when the current deal expires. It’s not entirely clear if that would work, and it runs a risk of Hakeem Jeffries being elected speaker if it fails. That risk was already on the table the moment they ousted McCarthy, but in this case, some of the other Republicans might be tempted to cross over if that’s the only way to avoid the shutdown, since it didn’t exactly go well in the short run the last 4 times they did it.
There’s been talk of expelling Matt Gaetz, who was the primary instigator of everything recently (the attempted shutdown, the Biden impeachment hearing, McCarthy’s ouster), but it’s not clear whether that can be done before the new Speaker is elected. There’s a Speaker Pro Tempore, Patrick McHenry, but it’s apparently uncertain whether that falls within the more limited powers and duties he has compared to an elected Speaker.
Heads up for people in the US: today (Wednesday, 10/4/2023), at some point between 2:20 and 2:50 PM, the Emergency Alert System will be issuing a nationwide test of all radios, TVs, and phones.
First, be forewarned; you needn’t freak out when the alarm tone goes off. Second, if for whatever reason you need to maintain a secret phone, turn it off—not silent, off—during that period (and turn it back on only when you can be assured of privacy; the alarm will have been delayed.)
(Third: despite what certain parties have been putting about, the signal is not the cue for a mass zombie outbreak. Stop that.)
Beau of the Fifth Column on YouTube points out that the Fascist Caucus voted with the Dems to punish McCarthy for voting with the Dems.
He also points out that although an extreme the speaker will allow then to get extreme legislation passed in the house, it still has to go through the Senate before it becomes law, and the Senate is under democratic control. In other words they won’t get the legislation they say they want.
So I think that’s not what they’re after. I think they want to appeal to ignorant, unreasoning voters and perhaps fundraise or get some career progression that way.
I felt rather zombie-esque before my phone made an annoying beep. It’s been that kind of week.
@Snowberry. Anarchists and into anarchy they are not. The Freedom Caucus could probably have a hard time spelling anarchism, let alone understand it, and if they did it is antithetical to everything they believe in.
@Thomas James: I purposefully didn’t claim that they were capital-A Anarchists in the political sense (not that they would understand what that even means), I meant that they attempt to foment anarchy in the general, common-use sense. To copy-paste dictionary.com: “1. a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority or other controlling systems.”
Though that’s just their first-step means, not their ends. They want a one-party nation like China, except also a Christian Theocracy. They don’t appear to have a plan or a clue how about how to reach their ends after that point beyond “someone will seize power after we’ve torn down the system and we’re confident that they’ll be on our side”.
Now the Heritage Foundation does have a late-stage plan (Project 2025), but it rather relies on “Step 1: A miracle occurs”. Said miracle requires the existing system to be mostly intact, which doesn’t mesh well with the Freedom Caucus’s “tear it all down” antics.
I turned on Do Not Disturb so as not to get bleeped at. Which also let me avoid a spam call. The text came through fine. No sign of zombies here, and the cat’s never had much braiiiinss.
Well, this happened:
https://www.salon.com/2023/10/03/john-kelly-slammed-for-revealing-horrifying-statements-three-years-too-late/
His salary stopped depending on his not understanding it, of course.
Meanwhile all of my comments on the Brand thread seem to have been ignored …
Dear God, TV really does seem to be a dying medium. I just checked tonight’s primetime listings and it’s all game shows with a movie or two sprinkled in. Not one drama, save for a single lonely Law and Order rerun tucked away in one corner.
On a Thursday night primetime well into October.
Did the radio star finally get some long-awaited revenge?
@Snowberry. They definitely want to tear everything down and replace it with a theocratic totalitarian regime. But they have no clue how to do part two.
For no reason beyond my compulsion to share, here’s a specimen of the literal garbage Kids Today™ are playing:
http://www.tiktok.com/@bosohurricane/video/7278960670715022600
The RooshVForum is finally closing too.
Paging Vicky P
Every Texan I know (admittedly a relatively small sample size) is reacting to this like they’ve just invented free rocket packs. Er, please could I invite you to explain?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8BdSxqWsAANIdr?format=jpg&name=large
@Alan: I am neither Vicky P nor Texan, but Blue Bell ice cream is the national brand of Texas and an object of worship. It is pretty good.
@Alan Robertshaw; @GSS ex-noob:
Blue Bell ice cream has also become available, and developed a fan following, in parts of Florida; my late mother was quite fond of the stuff, although not to the point of buying tie-in merchandise.
@Alan
GSS and Full Metal Ox have covered the basics – Blue Bell is an iconic Texas brand. It was a HUGE scandal back in 2015 when the company was discovered to be committing some food safety violations. Y’see, it’s not just good ice cream. It’s a company that has successfully branded itself as smalltown goodness. The milk for the ice cream famously comes from “happy cows,” to quote the advertising campaign. Brenham, Texas, where the happy cows live, is a rather lovely small town – Mr. Parasol and I have been there a few times, and while Blue Bell is definitely the main industry, Brenham itself manages to come off as a simple lil’ Texas town in the countryside.
The ice cream tubs have a pretty simple yet striking design, making them easy to spot in the freezer section of your local grocery. To touch on yet another advertising campaign, Blue Bell ice cream is so popular in Texas, it’s a wonder there’s any available for export – “We eat all we can and sell the rest.”
National brand? Has Texas seceded and resurrected the Republic of Texas again, without my being notified?
And … if a MAGA state has seceded, does that mean the boogaloo is imminent?
@Victorious Parasol; @GSS ex-noob; @Alan Robertshaw:
Comfort food has a way of becoming a regional rallying point, doesn’t it! The Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based fried chicken franchise Raising Cane’s has a similar Fandom with a capital F, as I learned in 2017 when a branch opened in my previous neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio.
You’d think Taylor Swift and Beyoncé were holding a joint concert: the drive-through lines not only straightaway became cram-packed, but looped around into a surrounding holding pattern that made crossing the shopping center parking lot on foot an exercise in “Frogger: the Live-Action Roleplay”—and slammed surrounding traffic to a crawl for a radius of at least half a mile during mealtime hours. This state of affairs continued for a couple months.
@Full Metal Ox
Oh, totally. Texas has a lot of regional pride to begin with – we have chili and BBQ, after all! Plus Blue Bell is probably the state champion of ice cream, but in some parts of Texas, you want to go to Amy’s Ice Cream. That stuff is AMAZING.
I was talking with Mr. Parasol about the Blue Bell scandal this morning and we were trying to figure out how to explain it to people outside of Texas. The best analogy we could come up with was that it felt like learning your dear sweet grandma had been spitting in her homemade soup before serving it to you.
Ah thank you all!
We have a similar thing here with Yorkshire Tea.
A few years back a mate went to India to get in touch with her roots. She kept us up to date with her travails on Facebook; including her constant complaints that ‘you can’t get a decent cup of tea.’ In India.
But she was missing Yorkshire Tea; even though we all pointed out it’s not actually grown here.
ETA: I’ve had Cornish tea; which is actually grown here. It’s alright; although I don’t think Ceylon will be worrying too much.