Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The putative GOP nominee shows his priorities

Trump: They want to keep me here instead of campaigning in Iowa… They want me to be here

*3 minutes later*

Reporter: Will you be back tomorrow?

Trump: Probably not. We’re having a very big professional golf tournament at Doral, so probably not pic.twitter.com/l8TUIbASUv

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) October 18, 2023

And he doesn’t have to be at the trial ever. He just wants the attention he gets at the Courthouse. It’s his current version of chopper talk.

Act like a bunch of clowns

The Republican circus is not playing well in those swing districts. How could it? These people are a joke:

In California’s 45th Congressional District, along Western Avenue in Buena Park, a giant billboard is set to display a photograph of Representative Michelle Steel next to former President Donald J. Trump and Representative Jim Jordan, the Republican hard-liner from Ohio she voted for twice this week for speaker.

“Rep. Steel Supports Extremism,” the billboard reads. “Stop the extremism.”

The advertising campaign, paid for by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, is part of a broad effort by Democrats to target Republicans like Ms. Steel, who represent congressional districts that President Biden won in 2020. A dozen of those vulnerable G.O.P. lawmakers have stood on the House floor this week and cast their votes to put Mr. Jordan second in line to the presidency.

Another group, the Congressional Integrity Project, began a digital ad campaign this week in those same districts, focusing on Mr. Jordan and his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.

“Every House Republican who votes for Jim Jordan to be speaker of the House should be held accountable for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his role in the Jan. 6 fake electors plot, and his continued attacks on our democracy,” said Kyle Herrig, the executive director of the advocacy organization.

Republican groups are pushing back on a narrative of extremism and dysfunction. The American Action Network is running an ad campaign lauding 16 Republicans in Biden districts who voted to prevent a government shutdown last month.

But the latest round of House Republican infighting has badly damaged the G.O.P. brand. It has left the party leaderless and one chamber of Congress paralyzed for more than two weeks. The chaos is raising the chances that Democrats could win back the majority next year, and it has given them ample ammunition for their campaign narrative, which casts Republicans as right-wing extremists who are unfit to govern.

“It hurts the country; it hurts the Congress; it’s hurting our party,” said Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of 18 Republicans who represent districts won by Mr. Biden in 2020. “It’s putting us in a bad hole for next November.”

He said his hard-right colleagues who moved to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this month and touched off the intractable scramble to replace him “want to be in the minority. I think they would prefer that. So they can just vote no and just yell and scream all the time.”

Mr. Bacon opposed Mr. Jordan’s candidacy, but he and other mainstream G.O.P. lawmakers worry that, no matter who is ultimately elected speaker, the Ohio Republican’s nomination has only boosted Democrats’ efforts to tie them to the most hard-right members of their party, placing their seats at risk in 2024.

“Jim Jordan is the poster boy for MAGA extremism,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, said on Tuesday night.

In a speech on the House floor in which he nominated Mr. Jeffries for speaker, Representative Pete Aguilar of California, the No. 3 House Democrat, laid out a case against Mr. Jordan that could have doubled as a template for a campaign attack ad against any Republican who supported him.

“A vote today to make the architect of a nationwide abortion ban, a vocal election denier and an insurrection inciter to the speaker of this House would be a terrible message to the country and our allies,” Mr. Aguilar said.

The candidacy of Mr. Jordan, the combative co-founder of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus and a key player in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, has left many House Republicans in a no-win position.

If Mr. Jordan were to prevail — a prospect that appeared less likely on Wednesday after he lost a second ballot — his ascension would confirm concerns among a large swath of voters. Many believe that the G.O.P. is an extreme party that is badly out of step with most of the country, and that the House Republican conference is essentially composed of Mr. Trump’s loyal foot soldiers. And if the hard-right lawmaker continues to fail in his bid, it only hardens the view of Republicans as completely incapable of governing.

For mainstream Republicans representing politically competitive districts, the damage may already be done regardless of the outcome of the vote, or how many rounds it takes.

“It’s hard to present yourself as a figure of bipartisan compromise and moderation when you vote for someone who resolutely stands against any bipartisan compromise and is the furthest thing from a moderate a voter can imagine,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.

Democrats have been circulating data from YouGov Blue, a research division for progressive and Democratic clients, that found that 63 percent of respondents in a recent poll said that moderate Republicans should work with Democrats to form a bipartisan governing coalition. Only 37 percent of respondents said those moderate Republicans should only work with other Republicans to elect a new speaker.

Christina Bohannan, a Democrat challenging Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks in a competitive Iowa district, said her opponent’s vote for Mr. Jordan on Tuesday “shows her true values and how contrary they are to Iowa values.”

She said that more than 60 percent of Iowans reject Mr. Jordan’s position in support of a nationwide abortion ban, and noted that he has never voted for a farm bill, one of the most critical issues for the state.

“This is a real slap in the face to Iowa women for Miller-Meeks to support him,” Ms. Bohannan said. “I can’t imagine a clearer example of how Representative Miller-Meeks is selling out Iowans to the extreme members of her party rather than take a more bipartisan position.”

Ms. Miller-Meeks on Wednesday switched her vote, backing off her support for Mr. Jordan and voting for Representative Kay Granger of Texas, instead. But the damage had already been done.

Some Republicans were admitting as much on Tuesday.

“There’s no way we win the majority if the message we send to the American people is we believe in the election was stolen, and we believe that Jan. 6 was a tour of the Capitol,” Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, said on CNN. Mr. Buck was one of 22 Republicans who refused to vote for Mr. Jordan on Wednesday. He has said he is opposed in part because Mr. Jordan has been unwilling to say that Mr. Biden won the 2020 election.

Representative Jen Kiggans, who represents a Virginia district won by Mr. Biden, also was outspoken about her opposition to Mr. Jordan.

“Mr. Jordan’s government funding plan has the potential to further cut the defense budget, which is already inadequate,” she said in a video posted on social media. She also voiced concerns about his vote last month against keeping the government open.

The Republicans are brushing this off saying that nobody will remember any of this next November. I’m pretty sure the Democrats are going to make sure they do.

BTW: Here are the 12 Republicans who voted for Jim Jordan twice.

• Rep. David Valadao: CA-22 had a Biden margin of 12.9 percentage points.
• Rep. Mike Garcia: CA-27 had a Biden margin of 12.4 points.
• Rep. John Duarte: CA-13 had a Biden margin of 10.9 points.
• Rep. George Santos: NY-03 had a Biden margin of 8.2 points.
• Rep. Brandon Williams: NY-22 had a Biden margin of 7.5 points.
• Rep. Michelle Steele: CA-45 had a Biden margin of 6.2 points.
• Rep. Mark Molinaro: NY-19 had a Biden margin of 4.6 points.
• Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick: PA-01 had a Biden margin of 4.6 points.
• Rep. Tom Kean: NJ-07 had a Biden margin of 3.9 points.
• Rep. Young Kim: CA-40 had a Biden margin of 1.9 points.
• Rep. David Schweikert: AZ-01 had a Biden margin of 1.5 points.
• Rep. Juan Ciscomani: AZ-06 had a Biden margin of 0.1 points.

Josh Marshall on the Gaza Hospital blast. Like him, I have zero expertise on these issues so I have to try to find credible sources to inform me. I have been seeing the same thing:

I have no ability to evaluate grainy videos or make sense of what different blast patterns look like. But I’ve spent several years developing lists of open source intelligence and forensics analysts who are consistently credible. You’ve seen some of this in the various Twitter lists I sometimes post here. Credible doesn’t mean always right, of course. By credible in this case I mean analysts who are highly knowledgeable in one relevant domain, use an empirical framework for analyzing videos, open source data, etc., and have a proven track record of the appropriate level of caution and skepticism in drawing conclusions. Many of these people come out of the Bellingcat world, others got started (at least publicly) analyzing the Syrian and Ukraine conflicts. It’s actually remarkable what people not drawing on any state or property “intelligence” can demonstrate with overlapping provenance-proven video evidence, geolocation, satellite photography, open source weapons information, tracking data and more.

I watched this group very closely overnight (even at the expense of not getting much sleep) as more videos and data emerged about the hospital blast in Gaza and from what I can tell none of these people think the evidence points to an Israeli bomb as the source of the blast.

They’re not all saying it’s open and shut. In fact, I’m not sure any of them are saying that. That’s a very high standard. But every one that I follow is saying the weight of evidence points to some version of a failed rocket launch from within Gaza. And they’re saying that with varying degrees of certainty.

Significantly, several different kinds of evidence appear to point to this same conclusion — nighttime video of the explosion, audio analysis of the sounds immediately prior to the blast, day after photographs of the impact site and blast zone, et al. Israel has published what it says is audio of Hamas operatives discussing the blast and ascribing it to the failed Islamic Jihad rocket launch. I don’t disbelieve that audio because it fits with the other evidence. But I place it in a separate category because a lot of people are going to be inherently skeptical of any evidence coming from one of the interested parties. All the evidence discussed above is from photographs and videos from international news organizations. Indeed, the key blast video, I believe, comes from a Hamas-run TV station.

I’m not looking at whatever comes over the transom and generated by whatever algorithm. I’m only looking at sources and experts who I had experience with prior to the conflict.

One interesting example of this analysis is tied to the photo at the top of this post. I’ll just speak generally since I’m no expert. I’m just summarizing. (Here is some more detail in a larger thread. Here’s video from Tass of the hospital the morning after.) But if you look, there’s a small crater at the center of this parking lot. The cars right next to it are totally demolished. But cars just no more than twenty or thirty feet away have no more than blown out windows and some are almost totally unscathed. To a trained eye that suggests a relatively small blast.

With daybreak there are growing questions about whether the blast was of the magnitude reported last night and whether the alleged number of fatalities can be accurate. Unlike the ‘who did this’ question, this analysis seems less clear to me. If I’m understanding the discussion it seems like the actual blast as opposed to the subsequent fire was fairly small and much of the blasted building is actually intact. But I’d recommend looking at the discussion yourself and drawing your own conclusions.

One red flag last night is that there were almost instant, very large and very round fatality numbers. The two I saw circulating in global media, based on the accounts from the Gazan (Hamas) health ministry, was either 200-300 or 500 dead. It’s almost impossible to actually count numbers of dead and wounded that quickly. So at best those were estimates in a highly chaotic situation. But while most global media showed some caution about who was responsible, these death counts were reported more or less as fact. It’s possible they’ll prove to be accurate. But there’s significant skepticism about whether what’s visible in daylight squares with those immediate claims. I don’t know what numbers of fatalities are credible, just that credible analysts are skeptical of those original estimates.

In case it isn’t clear. This isn’t a booyah! conclusion. This doesn’t change the fact that an estimated three thousand people have died in Gaza during this war. But as best as I can tell this is what people who have a proven track record of credibility in those earlier conflicts (as opposed to people popping up in algorithms) are saying as of this morning.

If you’re interested in reading some of this stuff yourself a lot of it comes from my list of military analysts tracking the Ukraine War. There’s also my list of reporters tracking events in Israel. There’s also this list of open source intelligence analysts which I look at, but I am not the curator of. That list is a bit more raw however. So I’d be more cautious with it.

Generally, if you dip into this stuff, don’t take any one analysis as the one that settles it. Look at the weight of an opinion, whether it seems to point clearly in one direction or another. Also, run towards expressions of caution and away from expressions of certainty.

I don’t know when, or if, this will ever be settled. I do know that it seem illogical that Israel or Islamic Jihad would have purposefully targeted that hospital. It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen but that seems the least likely. So, if it was a accident, it was a horrific aaccident regardless of which side did it, and it’s one that we can easily anticipate with all those rockets flying all over the place. War is an abomination. This is what happens. It’s all a terrible nightmare.

He made their political motives clear

Trump’s lawyer Kenneth Chesebro wrote some things down that he probably shouldn’t written:

On Dec. 24, 2020, Kenneth Chesebro and other lawyers fighting to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s election defeat were debating whether to file litigation contesting Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in Wisconsin, a key swing state.

Mr. Chesebro argued there was little doubt that the litigation would fail in court — he put the odds of winning at “1 percent” — as Mr. Trump continued to push his baseless claims of widespread fraud, according to emails reviewed by The New York Times.

But the “relevant analysis,” Mr. Chesebro argued, “is political.”

The emails have new significance because Mr. Chesebro is scheduled to be one of the first two of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants to go on trial this month on charges brought by the district attorney’s office in Fulton County, Ga. The indictment accused Mr. Chesebro of conspiring to create slates of so-called fake electors pledged to Mr. Trump in several states that Mr. Biden had won.

Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers have argued that his work was shielded by the First Amendment and that he “acted within his capacity as a lawyer.” They have called for his case to be dismissed, saying he was merely “researching and finding precedents in order to form a legal opinion, which was then supplied to his client, the Trump campaign.”

Scott R. Grubman, a lawyer for Mr. Chesebro, said lawyers often argue for positions that are not widely held. “For example, any lawyer who has ever filed a pleading challenging existing Supreme Court precedent falls within this category,” he said. “Maybe a long shot, but far from criminal. In fact, it’s how the law changes over time.”

Mr. Trump has also signaled that one of his possible defenses is that he was simply acting on the advice of his lawyers.

But Mr. Chesebro’s emails could undercut any effort to show that the lawyers were focused solely on legal strategies. Rather than considering just the law and the facts of the case, Mr. Chesebro made clear he was considering politics and was well aware of how the Trump campaign’s legal filings could be used as ammunition for Republicans’ efforts to overturn the results when Congress met to certify the Electoral College outcome on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Just getting this on file means that on Jan. 6, the court will either have ruled on the merits or, vastly more likely, will have appeared to dodge again,” Mr. Chesebro wrote in the email chain. He added that a lack of action by the Supreme Court would feed “the impression that the courts lacked the courage to fairly and timely consider these complaints, and justifying a political argument on Jan. 6 that none of the electoral votes from the states with regard to which the judicial process has failed should be counted.”

Of the chances of success, Mr. Chesebro estimated the “odds the court would grant effective relief before Jan. 6, I’d say only 1 percent.” But he wrote the filing has “possible political value.”

Mr. Chesebro wrote that it was “hard to have enormous optimism about what will happen on Jan. 6, but a lot can happen in the 13 days left until then, and I think having as many states under review both judicially and in state legislatures as possible is ideal.”

He said the legal filings could produce a “political payoff” to bolster the argument that “there should at least be extended debate in Congress about election irregularities in each state.” He added that “the public should come away from this believing that the election in Wisconsin was likely rigged, and stolen by Biden and Harris, who were not legitimately elected.”

Responding to the email chain was John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who has also been charged in the Georgia election case. Mr. Eastman said he believed the legal arguments were “rock solid” but the odds of success were “not based on the legal merits, but an assessment of the justices’ spines. And I understand that there is a heated fight underway.”

This is the real smoking gun, to me:

Mr. Chesebro responded: “I particularly agree that getting this on file gives more ammo to the justices fighting for the court to intervene. I think the odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”

The promise that January 6th “will be wild” was seen as a way to intimidate the US Supreme Court. Wow. And we still have to wonder where Eastman was getting his “inside information” on the Court. He was good friends with the Thomases …

I’m sure Jack Smith has all these emails as well as the Fulton County DA. Whether they can tie Trump into it is unknown but remember, Trump sent the “will be wild” email right after that raucous meeting at the White House featuring the Overstock.com guy.

Joe Biden went to Israel today and spoke from experience

Joe Biden urged Israel not to repeat “mistakes” the US made after 9/11 as he made a statement during his visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, 18 October, following Hamas’ attack earlier this month.

The US president told people not to be “consumed” by rage as he compared the attacks to the events of September 11 in the US.

“After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes,” he added.

Mr Biden’s statement came as he announced a new $100m aid package to Gaza after a hospital explosion that is feared to have killed hundreds of people on Tuesday.

I suspect the right wingers will have a fit about this because American presidents are never allowed to admit to mistakes. On the other hand, they must be confused because Trump is hostile to Netanyahu and they’ve recently been programmed to be against war in the Middle East (what they now call “forever wars” no matter what the circumstances.) So, we’ll see.

How kind of him to give democrats such a great campaign Ad https://t.co/1Iw0pBIdHE

— Olivia Julianna 🗳 (@0liviajulianna) October 18, 2023

And they see it as a selling point.

Tom Cole, by the way, is frequently mentioned as a possible speaker candidate.

Jim Jordan is the heir to the Gingrich Revolution.

Another day, another clusterf***k in the US House of Representatives. After days of behind the scenes haggling (and reports of strong-arming) Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said he was ready to call for a vote to make him the new Speaker of the House. The word on Tuesday morning was that they believed they had commitments for the necessary votes and the worst case scenario would be defections in the single digits, which were being rationalized as protest votes that would fall away on a second ballot. As it turned out Jordan lost 20 votes and after originally calling for another vote in the afternoon they postponed until Wednesday morning.

By the time you read this that vote might have taken place already or perhaps Jordan has seen the writing on the wall and dropped out. The rumors are that serious discussions of making the “acting” Speaker Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina a temporary Speaker with full powers to get the House through the appropriations process although nobody seems to know exactly how that would work. Some congressmen are even calling for Kevin McCarthy to be reinstated, which would be the perfect coda to this absurd brouhaha.

One of the main objections to Jim Jordan is that he’s too ideologically extreme and will hurt the Republicans’ chances of maintaining the majority in 2024. There are 18 House members who were elected in those districts that Biden won and it’s assumed they will be in danger if a full-blown MAGA wingnut becomes Speaker of the House. Some of those members voted for Jordan on Tuesday so they aren’t convinced but the Democrats are making it clear that they see this as an opportunity. Jim Jordan’s record is as far right as it gets and he’s joined at the hip with Donald Trump who is as toxic as ever in those districts.

But the idea that Jordan would be a departure from all the alleged statesmen who previously served as Republican Speakers and that the maelstrom that’s engulfed this congress since they took over is competely unprecedented isn’t true. In fact, Jordan and the rest of the House GOP rebels are following in a recent tradition.

Back in the 1980s the Reagan Revolution brought into the Republican House caucus a group of backbench bomb throwers led by an obscure Georgia congressman named Newt Gingrich. He was very adept at getting attention from the nascent right wing media represented in those early days by talk radio. He first came to national notice when he maneuvered to oust the then Speaker of the House over an ethics complaint. He said at the time, “I’ll just keep pounding and pounding on his ethics. There comes a point where it comes together and the media takes off on it, or it dies. What I really want is to get some people with subpoenas poking around.” (That Gingrich himself had a very similar ethics problem made it a “chef’s kiss” of a political gambit and secured his place in the GOP as a bold, risk taker. )The Speaker in that case was a Democrat and was hastily replaced by another Democrat but that was the play that started it all and led us to where we are today.

Gingrich started his climb into the leadership right away and by 1994 he was not only the undisputed leader of the House Republicans, he was the undisputed leader of the Republican party. When he led them to their massive win in that midterm election, there was talk in the political media that he was going to be a co-President with Bill Clinton and might have to run against him in 1996 for the good of the country.

He and his accomplices reveled in the tales of small state corruption and lurid sexual misdeeds of Arkansas’ gothic political culture and launched the practice of non-stop tabloid House investigations that continues to this day. Their smashmouth rhetoric, the crude character assasination was not unprecedented in American politics but the modern conservative movement under Newt Gingrich took it mainstream.

But the old “live by the sword, die by the sword” trope came back to bite him in 1997 when an insurgent group of 20 or so Representatives from the Gingrich class of 94 felt that he had betrayed their principles and they recruited the Speaker’s top lieutenants to go to him with an ultimatum that he was to step down or they would remove him by parliamentary maneuver. Unfortunately for them, the top lieutenants were a bunch of Keystone Kops and began fighting among themselves only to have the plot leaked to the press before any action could be taken. Gingrich survived but it was clear he was hanging on by a thread.

When his predictions of a massive gain in the 98 midterms turned to dust, he knew he no longer had the support of the caucus and he resigned. At the time half the men in Washington were being exposed as philanderers, and Gingrich was among them, as was the man who maneuvered behind the scenes to edge out his more likely successor, Bob Livingston of Louisiana. They finally settled on a little known member of the leadership Illinois Congressman Dennis Hastert who went on to become the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House. It was only later that it was discovered that he had been paying off a former student to keep quiet about his molestation of boys when he was a wrestling coach, which landed him 15 months in jail.

When Hastert left he was succeeded by Ohio Rep. John Boehner, one of the original Gingrich coup plotters. As we all know, Boehner was eventually forced out by Tea Party back benchers, Jim Jordan among them. His successor Paul Ryan found himself being jeered at townhalls and rallies and left after two years to be followed by Kevin McCarthy who was just ousted in a parliamentary maneuver much like the one with which the Keystone Kop coup plotters were supposed to threaten Gingrich in 1997.

Jim Jordan is certainly an extremist whose legislative record is non-existent and whose entire career in congress has been devoted to nothing but culture war issues, Fox News hits, insurrection and character assasination. But he’s not unique. (He even has a wrestling coach molestation scandal in his background.) In fact, he is the natural heir to the Gingrich revolution. And there are plenty more just like him.

Salon

Update:

Jordan lost his second vote by more than the first one. Back to the drawing board.

And a way out of cynicism

Polling has been bad for years. Traditional models seem to be failing. Too many focus on horse-race politics. But why?

Dan Pfeiffer this morning:

Despite historically high turnout in the last several elections, people are disconnected from politics, angry at politicians, and distrustful that the political process can make an iota of difference in their lives. To be fair, Americans have always had some cynicism about politics and a distrust of government dating back to dumping tea in the Boston Harbor. But the levels of discontent are unprecedented and happening across the political spectrum.

Pfeiffer is commenting on a Pew survey that came out in September. Is it any good? Who knows? But its findings may be instructive for Democrats in 2024, Pfeiffer believes:

• Can Democrats run on saving democracy when people are so down on our political system? The common explanation for our surprising success in 2022 is that Democrats upended expectations by centering the election on the threat Republicans posed to democracy. I think the story is more complicated, but Democrats are planning to make saving democracy a central part of the 2024 campaign. I am not arguing that this is the wrong decision. Democracy is at stake. Still, we must factor the distrust and disillusionment into our messaging — otherwise, we will become the defenders of a broken, corrupt political system.
• How do we talk about Democratic accomplishments? The primary theory for President Biden’s high levels of disapproval on economic issues is that voters are largely unaware of his major accomplishments. And therefore, educating them about those accomplishments is a strategic priority. How we talk about those accomplishments must start from a place that acknowledges the high level of distrust in the federal government. Some of Biden’s biggest accomplishments have yet to go into effect. This distrust creates a hurdle for convincing people that these policies will really deliver for them.
• What’s the best message against Trump? Given the close election, it’s fair to say that the Democrats’ anti-Trump message was not as effective as we thought it would be in 2020. In a moment when the public is livid at politicians, we have to be careful not to inadvertently help Trump with a message that makes him seem even more like an anti-politician.

That last bit is good advice. Trump’s brand is rule-breaking. Even if his instincts are criminal.

But Joe Biden has instincts too. Not for what Americans tell pollsters they believe about this country, but for what they want to believe about it. He may not deliver his message as skillfully as Michael Douglas in Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin’s The American President (1995), or as endearingly as Kevin Kline in Ivan Reitman’s Dave (1993), or bring people to tears the way Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) does singing “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca (1942), but Biden’s throwback, almost corny optimisim about the country he’s spent his life serving feels authentic. When he says he’s not kidding, he’s not kidding.

Americans love a redemption story. They’ll soon be watching Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Miracle on 34th Street (1946) and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (in all its incarnations) for they’ve lost count of how many times. Even at our most cynical, we want to believe things will work out, and that people can change for the better.

Democrats running on redeeming democracy will feel more authentic if Biden is their messenger, and if their message is more aspirational than confrontational, although they need both. Under Trump, under McCarthy, under Jordan, all MAGA Republicans offer America is more fear, decay and hate, chaos and carnage. Republicans cannot lead, do not lead. Look how far Obama got with Hope. Underneath the cynicism, Americans still want to believe. In spite of all he’s suffered, so does Joe.

No, Kevin, Republicans did this

Please append this to Digby’s Tuesday post, The Most Fatuous Spin In World History.

Former speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) spun like a top yesterday after Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) lost his first vote for Speaker of the House by 20 Republican votes one week after Republicans gave McCarthy the boot and stopped the House cold amidst an international crisis.

McCarthy: “Every single Democrat voted to stop one branch of government. They created this mess with eight Republicans. Every single Democrat did this.”

McCarthy was referring to the vote last week that ousted him as speaker.

Um, Short Attention Span Theater, Kevin.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) reminds Republicans that the reason they, McCarthy, Jordan, and the country are in this mess (and why McCarthy is out of a job) dates from a January vote by Republicans only (here). McCarthy himself set the stage for his ouster by caving to his MAGA lunatics’ demand for a rule change that would allow only one member of Congress to bring a “motion to vacate” and force a vote on removing the speaker.

One did. Matt Gaetz did. And here we are.

.@AOC on the GOP blaming Democrats for their own dysfunction: “Democrats tried to save Republicans from themselves. There was this entire rule that allowed for one member of the House to kick out the Speaker… Every single Democrat voted against this rule… They didn’t listen.” pic.twitter.com/fOSSqUeAVA

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) October 17, 2023

They think it’s perfectly normal

This is the way wingnuts used to sound back in the dark ages when I was growing up. I guess it’s what they mean by “making American great again.”

In August, reporter Yanqi Xu heard her name called from a stage in Philadelphia for a national award recognizing Our Dirty Water, her series examining Nebraska’s high nitrate levels and their potential connection to childhood cancer.

Weeks later, she published a piece looking at the environmental impact of Pillen Family Farms,  Gov. Jim Pillen’s company. She found that 16 Pillen hog farms have recorded nitrate levels higher than 50 parts per million – five times higher than is considered safe to drink. One farm recorded a reading of 445 parts per million. 

Yanqi combed through hundreds of government records to find that a dozen Pillen operations violated state regulations. Employees at one farm constructed a PVC pipe to drain pig waste into a freshwater channel.

Four days after we published that story, Governor Jim Pillen called into KFAB radio from a trade mission in Japan. He touted Nebraska’s historical support for immigrants, saying “We are the most welcoming state in the country.”

Then the governor was asked to comment on Yanqi’s work.

“Number one, I didn’t read it. And I won’t,” Pillen said. “Number two, all you got to do is look at the author. The author is from communist China. What more do you need to know?”

Clearly, he is a no-nothing bigot. Here’s the rest of the story from her newspaper’s editor:

Yanqi Xu (pronounced “Yen-chee Shu”) did grow up in China, in Guangzhou. She left for Beijing, where she studied English and international journalism. 

She then left everything she had ever known. She moved to the United States. She wanted to pursue American-style journalism. 

She earned her masters degree at my alma mater, the University of Missouri-Columbia. She got a crash course in the power of government transparency while working at the National Freedom of Information Coalition. She anchored for a radio station. She began using data to find and tell revelatory stories at the National Institute for Computer Assisted-Reporting and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. She eventually joined North Carolina Policy Watch, that state’s chapter of States Newsroom, which also launched Nebraska Examiner.

Then she joined us at Flatwater Free Press almost exactly two years ago now, and wasted no time becoming a key reporter – for us, and for Nebraska. 

Her work speaks for itself. 

Yanqi sniffed out the larger story behind a recall effort in Alvo. She examined overtime in the prison system to discover employees doubling their salary by working 100-hour weeks. She analyzed the attendance records of the Nebraska Board of Parole, finding that the full board showed up together to hearings 37 percent of the time. (They started showing up for hearings far more in the year after her story ran.) 

She has done all of this while pursuing a second master’s degree, this time in analytics. And she is far more than even the impressive sum of her stories.

Yanqi loves live music. She hated the Nebraska wind when she moved here, though she said this week that she’s growing used to it. She works late. She didn’t get to see her parents back in China for three years during COVID-19, until she could finally visit last December.

She’s whip smart. She’s pit bull stubborn. She’s a courageous reporter, a remarkable reporter.  

She’s remarkable, period. 

She is the American dream. And this governor is a piece of shit.