Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Who ya gonna call?

Last month, as congressional Republicans devolved into endless chaos and the political world finally accepted that Donald Trump would almost certainly be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024, Joe Biden’s campaign decided it would highlight the fact that the president and the Democrats continue to do their jobs professionally and behave like leaders. They called this the “split-screen” strategy, and according to press reports they sent out talking points and daily memos to illustrate the contrast between the steady leadership of the Biden administration and the constant turmoil on the Republican side .

For instance, while the president was addressing the U.N. in September and walking the picket line with striking auto workers, Republicans in the House were squabbling over a defense spending bill they couldn’t pass and preparing to oust their own speaker of the House because a handful of members had a personal grudge against him. Donald Trump was whining about all the legal problems he’s faces and ranting about Republican officials he deems to be disloyal. The contrasts have only gotten starker since then.

But Trump is also deploying his own version of a split-screen strategy, and it’s a lurid fantasy that rivals anything in “Game of Thrones.” His split screen has Joe Biden on one side as a senile incompetent, while all around him crime is rampant, violent immigrant hordes are invading the country, decent Americans are starving and begging in the streets, children are being molested by transgender teachers and the nation’s cities look like something out of “A Clockwork Orange.” On the other side of the screen is the utopia of the Trump years: Everyone was rich, the world was at peace and the whole country was happy and content like pampered children in a fairy tale, all because of their unfairly-defeated Dear Leader.

Whether Trump consciously conceived such a strategy is unclear, but that’s not likely — it’s probably just the natural offshoot of his endless bragging and his relentless insults directed at anyone who opposes him. He believes, not without reason, that if he says this kind of stuff often enough lots of people will believe him, and that he can rely on right-wing media to help him convince half the nation that 2017 to 2020 were the apotheosis of American happiness and achievement and that since then we’ve been plunged into a nightmarish hellscape with no end in sight.

His problem, of course, is that the Biden split-screen is mostly grounded in realities that even the right-wing media can’t fully ignore. At this moment of global crisis, after a catastrophic terrorist attack in Israel with a major war unfolding, the president is behaving like a statesman, conferring with world leaders and giving speeches expressing empathy for the victims. His sincere horror at the Hamas attack was obvious and his administration has supported Israel’s right to defend itself. More recently, the Biden administration has shifted its public rhetoric, with the president and others emphasizing over the past few days that they are trying to calm the situation. Biden appeared on “60 Minutes” on Sunday evening, making clear that he is pushing for a process to protect civilians in Gaza from the consequences of what is likely to be a devastating Israeli invasion:

Scott Pelley: There are about 2 million people in Gaza, as you know, Mr. President, 2 million people trapped. About half of them are children. Are you asking Israel to establish a humanitarian corridor in that area or get humanitarian supplies into it?

Joe Biden: Yes, our team is talking to them about that. And — whether there could be a safe zone. We’re also talking to Egyptians — whether there is an outlet to get these children and women out of that area at this moment. But it’s — it’s hard.

Biden went on to express his support for a Palestinian state — difficult as it is to imagine that prospect at the moment — and warned the Israelis not to reoccupy Gaza. One hopes that pressure, mediation and diplomacy behind the scenes reflects the careful balancing act he’s attempting to achieve in public and that it will help temper Israel’s response, which has already resulted in more deaths than the original Hamas attacks. Just try to imagine Donald Trump in this situation. Or rather, don’t.

Trump can’t really compete from his presidency-in-exile in Palm Beach, but you might have expected him at least to make statements that appeared serious and on point. That’s pretty much the president’s main job, and he’s running to get that job back. Instead, Trump’s first words after the Hamas attack came four days later at a rally for his supporters, where he complained that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had let him down when he was president, called another Israeli official a “jerk,” and made the ludicrous assertion that the attack would never possibly have happened if he were president. Of course he was under no obligation to praise Netanyahu, which nobody in the world is doing at the moment. But his petty and intensely self-centered response struck a sour note, to put it mildly. After hearing criticism from his Republican rivals — a rare event in itself — Trump backtracked slightly, saying that he supports Netanyahu. But the damage was done.

The Biden team isn’t spending any time on this particular split-screen contrast. They’ve focused instead on congressional Republicans, whose dysfunctional spectacle gets more and more preposterous every day. While the president carries out his actual duties, speaking with other world leaders and addressing groups like the Human Rights Campaign — as he did this past weekend, delivering a fine speech about empathy, solidarity and tolerance in a time of great upheaval — House Republicans are still unable to perform even the most basic tasks assigned to them as the majority. From what we can gather at the moment, the MAGA candidate for speaker, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, still doesn’t appear to have the votes, and nobody else does either. Nothing can happen in the Congress until they get that done.

For a group that bleats incessantly about the Democrats’ supposed “weakness,” the House Republican majority is offering one of the most pathetic displays of impotence in political history.

So, we have a number of split screens happening. There’s Trump’s Peter Pan fantasy, in which the former president portrays Biden’s America as the poorest, most derelict country in the world and tells his followers to clap their hands and bring back the (completely imaginary) perfect and beautiful years. Then there is the split-screen showing the competent and experienced current president on one side and the absurd circus of the House Republican caucus on the other. Finally, there is the screen that shows Joe Biden acting like a statesman and Donald Trump whining endlessly about how mean everyone is to him. I wish I had confidence that most Americans will be able to tell which of these screens depicts reality and which is total fantasy, but I don’t. It all depends on which screen you like the most.

Salon

She gave birth in a jail shower

Lost amidst the unfolding humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip over the weekend, this popped up in my feed just this morning. It’s the “fetal personhood movement” put into practice. No one “protected” is being protected.

The latest example of outrageous behavior showing that the misnamed “right to life” movement (empowered by its allies in government) is really a hatred of women movement with no regard for actual children or the women who bear them. https://t.co/JQtc91IrO7

— David Cay Johnston (@DavidCayJ) October 15, 2023

Here’s the story from The Guardian:

In March 2021, sheriffs in Etowah county, Alabama, arrested Ashley Caswell on accusations that she’d tested positive for methamphetamine while pregnant and was “endangering” her fetus.

Caswell, who was two months pregnant at the time, became one of a growing number of women imprisoned in the county in the name of protecting their “unborn children”.

But over the next seven months of incarceration for “chemical endangerment” in the Etowah county detention center (ECDC), Caswell was denied regular access to prenatal visits, even as officials were aware her pregnancy was high-risk due to her hypertension and abnormal pap smears, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday against the county and the sheriff’s department. She was also denied her prescribed psychiatric medication and slept on a thin mat on the concrete floor of the detention center for her entire pregnancy.

In October, when her water broke and she pleaded to be taken to a hospital, her lawyer says, officials told her to “sleep it off” and “wait until Monday” to deliver – two days away.

During nearly 12 hours of labor, staff gave her only Tylenol for her pain, the suit says, allegedly telling her to “stop screaming”, to “deal with the pain” and that she was “not in full labor”. Caswell lost amniotic fluid and blood and was alone and standing up in a jail shower when she ultimately delivered her child, according to the complaint and her medical records. She nearly bled to death, her lawyers say.

After she was taken to a hospital, she was diagnosed with placental abruption, a condition in which the placenta separates from the wall of the uterus and the fetus is deprived of oxygen, meaning there was a risk of stillbirth. The baby survived, but Caswell was immediately separated from her newborn.

“Giving birth to my son without any medical help in the jail shower was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. My body was falling apart, and no one would listen to me. No one cared,” Caswell said in a statement. “I thought I’d lose my baby, my life, and never see my other kids again.”

The lawsuit, filed by the non-profit groups Pregnancy Justice and the Southern Poverty Law Center, is the first case to challenge the conditions for jailed pregnant women in Etowah county, which advocates say is ramping up its prosecutions. Data suggests the county is the national leader in arresting women under the guise of protecting their fetuses.

“The sheer level of callousness here and complete disregard for human suffering is part of a broader scheme to criminalize and incarcerate as many pregnant women as possible in a way that is unprecedented across the country,” said Emma Roth, senior staff attorney at Pregnancy Justice.

Alabama targeting women

Jezebel follows up with this:

AL.com reported last year that as many as 12 pregnant or postpartum people suspected of substance use were held in Etowah County Detention Center in August 2022 alone. The conditions some of these women have reported are horrific, and include being forced to sleep on the floor after being jailed for alleged marijuana use, and denied sanitary products for bleeding after being jailed within days of giving birth. One woman was jailed for allegedly using substances while pregnant until a pregnancy test she’d initially been denied showed she wasn’t even pregnant.

First they came for the Blacks, and I did not speak out—because I was not Black.

Then they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out—because I was not an immigrant.

Then they came for the women….

Good luck with that

U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya tried back in August to stop Little Donny in his highchair from throwing his spoon. With little success.

This morning, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan will have a go at stopping the … ahem … former president of the United States from “attacking potential witnesses, prosecutors and court officials involved in his federal case over election fraud” (Politico):

If Chutkan agrees that Trump’s penchant for public invective should be restrained, it will be his first brush with court-ordered consequences in a criminal case — consequences that, at least in theory, could be backed by the threat of jail time.

And a gag order would immediately raise two questions that could define his bid to retake the White House: Is Trump capable of abiding by a court-ordered restriction on his speech? And what is Chutkan prepared to do if he isn’t?

Restraint is not exactly Donald Trump’s middle name, accustomed as he is his whole life to having sycophants trailing him with their lips firmly affixed to his backside. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson graphically described [52:22] Trump’s alleged response to being told by his Secret Service detail that they would not drive him to the Capitol after his Jan. 6 Ellipse rally. Chutkan will have to be at least as forceful if she expects compliance with any gag order.

If Trump were to violate a potential gag order, enforcement would fall to Chutkan, who has a range of options ranging from gentle warnings to pretrial incarceration. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which she orders the former president jailed before trial — though his rhetoric may test that premise. Still, short of detention, Chutkan could impose other restrictions, such as limits on his use of social media or access to the internet. Any consequence she were to impose on Trump would become instant grist for Trump’s attacks on the court and the justice system, a dynamic Chutkan is plainly aware of.

The former president is already subject to a narrow gag order in another case: the New York civil fraud trial of Trump and his business empire, which Trump attended earlier this month. During the proceedings, Trump posted a social media attack on Justice Arthur Engoron’s top clerk, including a picture of her and a link to her Instagram account. When Engoron learned of the post, he quickly ordered Trump to refrain from publicly commenting on his aides and staff.

But Engoron’s admonishments have barely slowed Trump’s efforts to publicly brand officers of the courts handling his multiple cases as “Trump haters” and “racist.” On some level, the indicted former president knows the weakness of his legal position in the concurrent criminal cases against him. His strategy now is not just to pound the table but to throw it over like lunch against the wall [58:59]. Trump’s attorneys argue that his being a presidential candidate, a gag order amounts to a freedom of speech violation.

But prosecutors replied with renewed urgency after Trump mounted a series of late-September attacks on Milley and former Vice President Mike Pence, saying he shouldn’t be able to use his political candidacy as a cover for harassing witnesses.

Milley told the House Jan. 6 select committee that he encountered Trump repeatedly during the final frenetic weeks of his administration, saying Trump privately acknowledged he had lost the election despite his public claims to the contrary. Pence became the object of Trump’s last-ditch bid to remain in power on Jan. 6, 2021, and the target of Trump’s fury when he refused to acquiesce.

“[N]o other criminal defendant would be permitted to issue public statements insinuating that a known witness in his case should be executed,” Smith’s team argued. “This defendant should not be, either.”

It may not be Chutkan’s job to defend the courts from charges that that U.S. justice is a hopelessly two-tiered system that treats the poor and non-whites dramatically more harshly than the well-heeled and prominent. But that is the hand she’s been dealt in overseeing the Trump case. The seemingly endless amount of slack Trump has already employed to trash both the courts and potential witnesses against him is visible to the world. Chutkan’s actions (or inaction) will either confirm or further undermine public trust in the institution to which she’s devoted her life, a system already visibly tattered by ethical lapses on the U.S. Supreme Court.

But see Trump’s antics in their broader context. See how his antidemocratic behaviors have undermined faith in democracy not just in public elections but within his own party. Trump is one face of a global authoritarian faction, albeit a minority movement, bent on getting its way or else. Adherents treat popular democracy and the rule of law as optional. Useful when the will of the people leans their way; disposable when it doesn’t. How U.S. justice handles Trump will either slow or accelerate the backsliding.

The only thing American about them beside their boasting is their birth certificates.

It’s the electoral college, stupid

This piece by an expert on the electoral college made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The US political system is just nuts enough right now for this to happen:

Most of the concern over the independent presidential campaigns of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and the No Labels party has focused on the risk that they could draw votes away from President Biden and throw the 2024 election to Donald Trump. That’s understandable, given what happened in 2000 and 2016.

But there is another reason to fear these candidacies, and it’s right there in the Constitution: a contingent election decided by the House of Representatives, arguably the worst part of the Electoral College system.

Ask people who don’t like the Electoral College — that’s roughly two-thirds of Americans — and they will point to its occasional habit of awarding the presidency to the candidate who comes in second in the popular vote. This fundamental violation of majority rule has happened five times — in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016. It nearly happened in 2020 and threatens to do so again in 2024.

Don’t get me wrong: The wrong-winner scenario is unequivocally bad. Mr. Trump once called it “a disaster for a democracy,” before it delivered him to the White House. Yet it is not the most democratically offensive feature of the Electoral College. Few Americans are aware that under the Constitution, a candidate could lose the popular vote and the Electoral College and still become president. In fact, it’s already happened.

How? By taking the election completely away from the people and giving it to the House of Representatives. This may sound far-fetched, but it is alarmingly plausible at a moment when the major-party candidates are relatively unpopular. No Labels (which is also the No Candidate party at the moment) seems to think that a contingent election is an entirely viable path to the White House — which is true, since it is virtually impossible to imagine any third-party candidate winning the old-fashioned way. But the group seems willfully oblivious to the chaos and destabilization that contingent elections provoked in the past and undoubtedly would again, especially in such a tense and polarized political climate. It is, as the best-selling author James Michener put it in a 1969 book on the topic, “a time bomb lodged near the heart of the nation.”

The bomb goes off if an independent candidate like Mr. Kennedy manages to pick up a few electoral votes and prevents either of the two main candidates from winning an outright majority of electors (at least 270 out of 538). In that case, the American people no longer have a say in the biggest election in the land. Instead, under the 12th Amendment, the top three electoral vote getters advance to a second round, in which the House of Representatives “shall choose immediately, by ballot, the president. But” — and rarely in the history of democracy has a “but” been asked to do so much — “in choosing the president, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote.”

Those votes in the past were decided by what a majority of a state’s delegation wanted, although the House can set different rules if it chooses. If the delegation is evenly divided, the state gets no vote. The point is, it doesn’t matter which party has more members in the House as a whole; all that matters is the happenstance of which party controls more state delegations. And right now Republicans control 26 state delegations and Democrats 22.

One vote per state, with the presidency in the balance. Stop for a moment and consider the absurdity of this. North Dakota, whose single representative in Congress represents about 779,000 people, would have as much say in choosing the nation’s leader as California’s 52 House members, who together represent almost 40 million people. The two Dakotas combined (fewer than 1.7 million people, about the population of Phoenix) would wield twice as much power as Texas, with 30 million people. This is about as far from the principle of majority rule as you can get.

The irony is that many founders expected this to be the standard way America would choose its presidents. As the plan took shape during the constitutional convention in 1787, Virginia’s George Mason predicted that the House would end up deciding 19 out of 20 elections. This wasn’t a bug in the system but a natural consequence of the lack of knowledge held by 18th-century Americans of politicians outside their home state. As a result, the thinking went, votes would be spread among a wide range of candidates, leaving most with some electors but none with a majority.

This sounded reasonable at the time, but as soon as it happened, in the wild tie election of 1800, it nearly collapsed the young nation, and the founders quickly realized what a bad idea it was. Congress rapidly passed the 12th Amendment to avoid a repeat. Thomas Jefferson, who prevailed that year, later wrote to a friend that the House-election provision was “the most dangerous blot in our Constitution, and one which some unlucky chance will some day hit.” He was proved right in 1824, when a four-way race for the White House prevented any of the candidates from winning an outright majority. Andrew Jackson led in electoral votes and popular votes, but the House picked the second-highest vote getter, John Quincy Adams. Jackson’s supporters were furious. They called it a corrupt bargain, and for good reason: Henry Clay, the speaker of the House and one of the other candidates in the race, hated Jackson and strong-armed lawmakers to vote for Adams, who later chose Clay for secretary of state.

The House has not decided a presidential election in the 200 years since, although it came close in 1968, during a tumultuous three-way race among Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, the former Alabama governor who ran on the ultraright American Independent Party ticket. Nixon won but not before Wallace, an archsegregationist, captured 46 electoral votes in five Southern states.

Now imagine that in 2024, a No Labels candidate or even Mr. Kennedy or Mr. West is able to peel off a few electors in, say, Maine or Alaska, states that pride themselves on their independent streaks. (Maine awards its electors by congressional district, making it even easier to pick one off.) It’s not a simple task, given the varied and sometimes strict ballot-access rules in many states. Many fans of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. West may never get a chance to vote for them. Still, No Labels has managed to secure a spot on the ballot in 11 states, including key battlegrounds like Arizona and North Carolina.

Bottom line: It’s easy to assemble an electoral map in which no candidate reaches 270 electoral votes, sending the election to the House. That vote would not take place until early January 2025, after the newly elected Congress is seated, but even if Democrats regain a numerical majority in the House, Republicans are likely to hold and possibly expand their advantage in state delegations. In other words, assuming Mr. Trump is still a free man, he could be picked by the House to be the 47th president, even if Mr. Biden wins millions more popular votes and the most electoral votes.

It is reckless fantasy for a group like No Labels to inject more choices into a system that is not designed to handle them. That may sound like democracy in theory, but in practice it produces the opposite: a greater chance of a candidate winning with the support of only a minority. That’s all the more likely when the two major parties are as closely divided as they are today.

This isn’t an argument against more political parties. To the contrary, multiparty democracies can give voters a wider and healthier range of choices, better reflecting the diversity of the electorate.

A huge, diverse country like the United States should welcome reforms like a proportional election system — and, while we’re on the subject, the elimination of the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote. Until then, the quixotic campaigns by today’s professed independents aren’t just futile; they’re dangerous.

I was at a meeting some years back with some political heavy hitters and they asked me what electoral process I would change if I could and I said the electoral college. They practically laughed me out of the room. “What a waste of time,” they said.

That was after the 2000 election but they apparently thought it was a fluke. It’s not a fluke. It’s an anachronistic mistake. And even until recently our leaders couldn’t see that.

They have no mechanism for fixing it as long as MAGA reigns

Even if they finally manage to pick a speaker, they will find it impossible to govern. The inmates are running the asylum. Matt Ford at TNR:

For three years in the thirteenth century, there was no pope. The cardinals who gathered in the small Italian town of Viterbo after Clement IV’s death in 1268 could not agree on a successor. A group of French cardinals hoped to elect one of their own to lead the church, while the others feared France’s influence in the Italian peninsula. A deadlock ensued, until the people of Viterbo locked the cardinals into a church, cut their rations, and removed its roof.

Maybe someone should do that to the House of Representatives. The lower house of Congress is no closer to electing a new speaker since a renegade GOP faction ousted Kevin McCarthy earlier this month. If anything, it’s strayed even further away from that goal. Earlier this week, the House Republican caucus internally elected Majority Leader Steve Scalise as the party’s nominee for speaker. Then, unsurprisingly, everything fell apart.

“There are still some people that have their own agendas, and I was very clear: We have to have everybody put their agendas on the side and focus on what this country needs,” Scalise said on Thursday, while announcing his withdrawal from the speakership race. “This country is counting on us to come back together. This House of Representatives needs a speaker, and we need to open up the House again. But clearly, not everybody is there, and there [are] still schisms that have to get resolved.”

His withdrawal was sudden but hardly surprising. The math behind the House leadership race is simple and unyielding. There are 435 seats in the House, meaning any speaker-elect would need 218 votes for a majority. House Republicans only have 221 members in the chamber. Any three House Republicans, in other words, could effectively deny Scalise—or anyone else—the speakership. House Democrats, following the historical practice, would vote for their own leader, Hakeem Jeffries, in speakership races.

Scalise, the most obvious successor to McCarthy, received just 113 votes within the House GOP caucus. Ninety-nine of his colleagues instead voted for Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, a hyperpartisan member (even by today’s standards) of the far-right House Freedom Caucus. To say that Jordan would be a disastrous speaker is an understatement. He has shown no interest in actual governance throughout his 16-year tenure in Congress. His great passion in life appears to be yelling at people in House committee meetings.

A narrow majority isn’t a problem in and of itself. After all, House Democrats have held the chamber with razor-thin margins in recent years and avoided anything close to the leadership crisis facing House Republicans. The House GOP’s problem goes much deeper: a critical mass of their members expect the speaker to refuse to compromise on anything with the Democratic Party—a position that might work well on the campaign trail but is unfeasible in day-to-day governance.

The matters that require some amount of compromise include raising the debt ceiling, an unconstitutional measure that only functions as a gun pointed to the left temple of the American economy, or passing a continuing resolution to keep the government funded and open, which McCarthy did last month. Eight rogue House GOP members used that moment to topple him, and it’s unlikely that anyone who can replace him—if anyone even can—would survive something similar.

“The French have a word for it: ‘clusterfuck,’” Representative Mike Lawler quipped to reporters after a closed-door meeting among House Republicans on Friday morning. Representative Mike Collins posted a meme on Friday that shows two screenshots from a comedy sketch by Eric André. It shows André’s character, labeled “House Republicans,” shooting Hannibal Buress, who is labeled “Republican controlled House,” and then turning to face the camera. “Why is Jeffries the speaker?” André asks.

In theory, House Democrats could throw their weight behind one of the GOP nominees to elect them speaker. But at the moment, they have no political interest in helping Republicans solve their own internal leadership battles. I previously wrote that Democratic lawmakers should make their demands clear for any hypothetical coalition-style government, starting with abolishing the debt ceiling and restoring Covid-era expansion of the child tax credit. If the leadership vacuum goes on long enough, they just might convince a handful of swing-district House Republicans to back them.

House Republicans haven’t made things any easier on themselves by setting one another up to fail. Jordan, who denies that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, applied that thinking to his own defeat in the speakership race. According to Politico, after Scalise won the caucus vote on Wednesday, he spoke privately with Jordan about the path forward. “You get one ballot,” Jordan reportedly told him. “And when you go down, you will nominate me.” After Scalise noted he had won under the caucus’s rules, Jordan allegedly replied, “America wants me,” and left the room.

To say that America “wants” a Jim Jordan speakership is dubious at best. Americans barely wanted a House Republican majority in the first place. The GOP gained only nine seats in the 2022 midterms and eked out a narrow five-seat majority in the chamber. This was a poor showing by historical standards: The party out of the White House typically gains far more seats in a president’s first midterms, with Barack Obama and Donald Trump seeing the House lost to wave elections in 2010 and 2018, respectively. Had it not been for Republican gerrymandering in key states, Democrats might have even retained the House.

Jordan’s road to the speakership also apparently won’t be uncontested. Georgia Representative Austin Scott, a GOP backbencher and McCarthy ally, announced shortly before Friday’s next caucus vote that he would challenge Jordan for the post. “I have filed to be Speaker of the House,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday. “We are in Washington to legislate, and I want to lead a House that functions in the best interest of the American people.”

Scott, for his part, is far from a high-profile member of the GOP caucus. He holds no leadership positions or committee chairmanships. But he may nonetheless serve as a potent rallying point for disaffected House Republicans who aren’t willing to throw their weight behind Jordan. Axios reported on Friday that Jordan is struggling to gather support from members who supported McCarthy and Scalise, in no small part because of Jordan’s perceived backstab of Scalise after the latter won the previous vote.

When House Republicans gathered on Friday afternoon to vote again, the results were similar. One hundred twenty-four members voted for Jordan for the speakership nominee. Eighty-one of them voted for Scott. While Jordan may be tempted to cast this as consolidating support, it reads like the opposite to an outsider. That Scott, a virtual unknown before the weekend, could get the backing of more than one-third of the caucus for the speakership is a testament to how divided the House GOP remains.

It’s an open question whether Republicans can overcome this and do anything of substance before the next House election, where they face the unenviable task of trying to persuade voters that they deserve another shot. If this country had a more parliamentary system, a snap election would have already been called, and the House GOP may well have lost it. For now, the leadership feud continues until the American people say otherwise—whether by voting for new lawmakers next November or by locking the current ones in and taking the roof off of the building.

They have organized themselves entirely around the idea opf “owning” the other other side. Naturally it’s now extended to owning themselves. They have no other way of looking at the world anymore.

At this point I have no earthly idea what’s going to happen. It seems to me that it’s entirely possible that Kevin McCarthy will end up speaker again. Hell, it wouldn’t surprise me if Newt Gingrich ended up speaker again.

Sounds pretty good to me.

but….

Alexandra Petri’s latest:

 The word “But” has been stunned to find itself appearing in an increasing number of sentences that begin “The killing of children is never acceptable … ”

After finding itself in yet another Instagram comment, preceded by the phrases “I am devastated to read about the loss of life” and “I deplore the killing of civilians, especially children,” the word “But” described itself as “horrified” to be included. Although it did not specify what sentiment came after it — possibilities included the phrases “should have had different parents,” and a reference to making omelets and breaking eggs — “But” took to social media to beseech other posters to avoid making this mistake.

The coordinating conjunction begged that those phrases be added to the list of sentences in which it would notappear under any circumstances, a list that already includes: “You never have to compliment Stalin for any reason”; “I don’t want to suggest that slavery wasn’t an unmitigated evil”; and “Genocide is always bad.” The words “Nevertheless,” “Still” and “However” jointly concurred in “But’s”statement, though “Nevertheless” looked visibly tired and strained.

“‘I am against the killing of children, regardless of who their parents are or where they live,’ is a set of words that never should be accompanied by any of us,” their statement read. “If you notice that you are putting us in, please, we beg you, reconsider.”

“But” also asked to be left out of sentences that start with “Of course, I condemn the deaths of innocent civilians,” and, especially, “I object to war crimes.”

“‘I believe in the inherent dignity of human life’ is a sentence that is getting along just fine without me,” “But” observed, a sentiment with which “Nevertheless” said it concurred “a thousand times.”

In a separate statement, the noun “Collateral Damage” and the adjective “Inevitable” asked to stop being forced to appear together.

“But” concluded its statement by saying it would return to anxiously watching someone compose a post that began “There is no excuse for antisemitism” and praying not to be called into service.

She’s absolutely right …. but …

No really, some things are just unequivocal. Baby killings are bad, no if, ands or buts.

It had so much promise …

We thought that social media was going to be a great boon to civilization, opening up communication across the planet for the benefit of humans everywhere. Instead it’a become a dystopian nightmare. Look what’s happening in Israel and Gaza:

A WhatsApp voice memo purporting to have insider information ricocheted across hundreds of group chats in Israel early on Monday. The Israeli army was planning for another “battle like we’ve never experienced before,” the anonymous woman said in Hebrew, warning that people should prepare to lose access to food, water and internet service for a week.

Across the country, Israelis raced to the banks and to the grocery stores, anticipating another attack. But the message, the army clarified hours later on X, turned out to be a falsehood.

One week into the war between Israel and Gaza, social media is inducing a fog of war surpassing previous clashes in the region — one that’s shaping how panicked citizens and a global public view the conflict.

Social media has long played a critical role in battles in the area. During the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, posts of carnage in Gaza rallied the public to the Palestinian cause. Researchers say increased internet access and the spread of smartphones enabled a watershed moment, revealing how tech platforms could show the horror and human toll of such events.

But now, a volatile, months-long fight over Israel’s democratic future has primed conspiracies and false information to spread within its borders. Tech platforms, diminished from waves of layoffs, have receded from policing falsehoods, disinformation and hate speech online. Electricity outages and strikes on telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza threaten Palestinians’ connectivity, according to human rights organizations.

While social media has been a critical tool for disseminating wartime information in recent days, a barrage of images, memes and testimonials is making it difficult to assess what is real. Activists in the region warn that viral horror stories that turn out not to be true may lead people to further distrust authority figures — and could spark hate, violence and retaliation against innocent people.

“I’m terrified,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst at Al Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank and regional policy manager for the nonprofit digital human rights group Access Now. “There’s a lot of information being shared that is not verified, a lot of calls to violence and dehumanization. And all this is fanning the flames for further massacres [of Palestinians].”

Foreign disinformation — a key element ofRussia’s global strategy — has been a major feature of the protracted war in Ukraine.

But in the current Middle East war, researchers have so far found only minimal evidence of disinformation originating abroad, said John Hultquist, chief analyst with the Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant.

Instead, much misinformation about the war is directed inward.

Posts, videos and memes falsely claim that the attack stemmed from collusion between Hamas and Israel. In the 24 hours after the Hamas attack, the hashtag “TraitorsFromWithin” became the top trend on X, formerly Twitter, in Hebrew. Some threads posited that Palestinian citizen of Israel workers were stationed at the border fence, while others claimed the attack was orchestrated to push a peace deal with Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Months of protests over the country’s future, deep domestic polarization and broad distrust of authorities have caused these theories to spread, said Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog organization dedicated to fighting disinformation and hate speech online.

One viral TikTok video featured a woman who identified herself as a former soldier on the Gaza Strip. She claimed that the border was so tightly controlled that even “a cockroach” would have been detected in advance — a description many commenters took to mean that Israel would have had to have aided Hamas in penetrating it.

Supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have taken to calling critics of his far-right government traitors in recent months, said Schatz. Now the narrative is bleeding into the current conflict.

“People don’t want to believe that their leader has failed them,” he said. “So it must have been an inside job.”

Hamas and its supporters have taken advantage of Israel’s disunity: On Monday a pro-Hamas account called Gaza Now shared an image suggesting that former left-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was fleeing the country. The image was undated and showed him in the baggage claim at an airport. The Gaza Now account had picked it up from a Jewish Israeli influencer who supports the far-right government of Netanyahu, and had shared the content to criticize Israel’s left. The influencer ultimately issued an apology on X.

Two years ago, when a war broke out between Israel and Hamas, locals used their cellphones to broadcast a play-by-play of the demonstrations and subsequent bombardment to the world.

But the stakes are far higher in today’s conflict, said Fatafta. While the 2021 conflict resulted in 250 deaths in Gaza and 13 in Israel, at least 1,300 people in Israel and more than 1,799 people in Gaza have been killed in the current war.

And unlike in 2021, Palestinians in Gaza are already losing access to the internet, she said, compromising their ability to tell their story to the world.

“People don’t have enough electricity to charge up their devices,” she said. “There are people who can’t send SMS messages, some telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged … It’s becoming an information blackout.”

Hamas’ swift and violent attack is more difficult to parse than the events in 2021. “No one knows what really happened on the border,” Schatz said. “It was too big, too fast and too brutal.”

This void is being filled by misinformation that appeals to people’s rage — which researchers warn could lead to more antisemitic attacks or violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel — and to justify a more brutal retaliation in Gaza.

Another WhatsApp voice memo featured the voice of a man claiming to be a soldier with intelligence that the country’s Arab citizens — roughly 20 percent of Israel’s population — were planning a coordinated attack. The audio message, which was played for The Washington Post, said Palestinian citizens were going to show up invehicles with Israeli plates and “start shooting people.”

We should have seen this coming. And I’m sure some people did. But it’s making everything worse.

Even here in the safety of the US, social media is a sewer owned by feckless billionaires who are helping to brainwash millions of people. This is the last thing we need right now.

In a deranged rant, Trump says Barr, Romney and Paul Ryan are conspiring with big donors and two GOP candidates running against him. He says they are disloyal losers with no talent and they “eat their young” by opposing him. He says “Republican Nation” must not listen to them. pic.twitter.com/zuDzMAbtDg

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 14, 2023

He always says that he feels like he’s 35…

To the rude, inappropriate and manipulative

Kat Abughazaleh of Media Matters is sick of being asked.

Stop asking every Palestinian if they support Hamas: pic.twitter.com/3oFalcc1as

— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) October 14, 2023

One of the most outrageous features of the public response to any mass terror attack is the assumption that everyone from the ethnic group of the terrorists is expected to publicly and immediately condemn the villains or be condemned themselves as a terrorist sympathizer. (Unless the perpetrator is a white American, naturally.) The premise behind the demand is assignation of mass guilt by association.

Plus, the demand itself is annoyingly manipulative, and not just limited to (in this case) Palestinians. It kind of works like, “If you are outraged by this act of terror, if you are horrified and sickened, we, your neighbors (and political adversaries), demand you shout your outrage from the rooftops. We demand you feel the way we feel and express your feelings about the attack the way we do, now, performatively, publicly and loudly. That is, unless you want to draw suspicion and condemnation yourself.”

Sincere question for the hive mind: Can anyone point me to statements or interviews from Republicans that struck this same balance? https://t.co/mZhV0oq7qf

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) October 15, 2023

Despite the wailing mothers seen on TV, not all people express their feelings the same way. Not all people experience grief the same way, nor express them as openly and immediately. It is rudely and inappropriately manipulative to insist you either join us in our performance of outrage or you are with the terrorists. But some people are just that rude, inappropriate and manipulative. They’re too busy trying to score points to care.

I’ve not met Abughazaleh and have no other connection to Palestinians except for my humanity, but I too respond poorly to being manipulated.

omg pete davidson just made me cry https://t.co/j8wgInkNoc

— Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) October 15, 2023