Things aren’t going well for Kevin McCarthy, or the congressional GOP, this week. But I want to draw your attention to west Michigan, where a hard-right takeover of a county commission (Ottawa, in this case) has been going great, if you’re a particular sort of wingnut.
I’ll try to summarize, for you out-of-towners: Ottawa County sits on the Lake Michigan shoreline due west of Grand Rapids, and encompasses several communities within easy commuting distance from G.R., as well as rural areas blending into typical lakefront affluence. It’s a conservative area. That’s just a fact. But as has been happening all over the country, the generally saner conservatives have been falling out with the crazies, and it all reached a crescendo this week.
Last summer, in a story that went national, one of the county’s townships defunded its own library over guess-what. Private donations have kept it open, but it will be officially closing in September 2024. The group that led the defunding, accomplished by defeating a tax millage, got high on its own supply, drunk on its power, and successfully ran candidates to take over the county commission last fall. The new members took their seats and had their first meeting earlier this week, during which they fired the county administrator and killed the office of diversity, equity and inclusion, firing its entire staff. They hired John Gibbs, who lost a congressional race to a moderate Democrat last year, to replace the administrator. They also hired an unqualified “industrial hygienist” to replace the health director, who was also fired. Finally, they changed the county’s motto, from “You belong here” to “Where freedom rings.”
All in one meeting! Whew.
Gibbs is notable for a couple reasons: He defeated the far more honorable and qualified Peter Meijer in the primary, and was one of the GOP candidates whose primary campaign was supported by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in the (correct) view he’d be easier to defeat in November. He’s also a real piece of work; he was a bitter-ender in the Trump administration, working for Ben Carson in the HUD office. An election, denier, of course – in his campaign interviews, he’d say it was a “mathematic impossibility” for Trump to lose Michigan, because he got more votes than in 2016. He was also exposed for his college-conservative lunacy, when he wrote for his own “think tank,” called the Society for the Critique of Feminism, that women’s suffrage was a mistake. LOLOL, just boys being boys!
Anyway, he needed a job, and now I guess he has one.
The health director is a more problematic hire, because it has to be approved in Lansing, and so far, the new guy, “a 39-year-old self-proclaimed industrial hygienist with master’s degrees in health from an online college,” is, um, cut from the same cloth as Gibbs:
In November 2021, during the height of the pandemic, (Nathaniel) Kelly dressed in a parody video as (Gov. Gretchen) Whitmer’s sign language interpreter during a press conference earlier in the pandemic, when she told sports fans stadiums would be shut down. In the video, he could be seen with makeup on, miming gunshots to his head and suggesting those who took vaccine shots could fall ill or die.
There’s video of him presenting at the “America’s Frontline Industrial Hygienists & Multidisciplinary Support Summit,” in which he states that if he were health director of a county, his guidance would be to:
…”send each household a kit with “prophylactic medications and tools,” including “Zinc, vitamin D with K2, vitamin C, ivermectin and NAC.”
“A neti pot with instructions for nasal lavage would also be included,” he claimed.
He also suggested companies upgrade their HVAC systems for better ventilation. The punchline: He works for an HVAC company.
You can’t make this shit up, but here we are. You get a neti pot! And you get a neti pot! Everybody gets a neti pot!
My guess is, Kelly’s ascension will be blocked by saner heads in Lansing, but you never know. Maybe his online alma mater, Columbia Southern University, will go to bat for him.
Ay-yi-yi.
In other crazy-Republican news at this hour, Michelle Goldberg’s column on the speaker deadlock is good, but likely paywalled for non-subscribers. Best part:
McCarthy evidently believed that by courting Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, an avatar of hyper-performative politics, he could co-opt her wing of the party. He was set to offer her valuable committee assignments, and, according to Draper, had even offered to create a new leadership position for her. But her elevation would be valuable to other Trumpists only if there were concrete things they hoped to accomplish together. Putting Greene on the Oversight Committee does nothing to help those who aspire to her notoriety. They don’t want policy; they want airtime.
One of the most amazing aspects of the House Republican crackup has been watching Greene’s angry exasperation as her shot at real power is imperiled by attention-seeking hard-liners. “They’re proving to the country that they’re just destructionists,” she said on Sunday. It was the embodiment of the Twitter meme: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
By bowing first to Trump and then to Greene, all McCarthy has done is show other Republicans how much there is to gain from pushing him around. His downfall isn’t surprising: Almost no one who has sold his or her soul to Trump has come out ahead. (The jury is still out on the Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik.) The reason these deals with the devil always go bad, I suspect, isn’t metaphysical. It’s simply that Trump sycophants are ultimately undermined by their weak and flabby character.
Yep, exactly.
OK, then, happy Thursday/Friday to all you celebrate. See you next week.
alex said on January 5, 2023 at 11:31 am
Goodbye West Dutchistan. Hello New Trumpistan.
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Jeff Borden said on January 5, 2023 at 12:19 pm
While tRump surfed these waves to the presidency, he didn’t create the tsunami that caused it.
When St. Ronald of Reagan gave his inaugural speech in 1980, he baldly called out the government as the reason for all our woes. (If you want to experience cognitive dissonance, watching the JFK inaugural speech in 1960 followed by St. Ronald’s and marvel at the different views.) Thus, the Republicans became an “anti-government” party with all it entails. Recall this is the president who eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, took the regulatory constraints away from everything from oil companies to media firms, who created the myths if the “welfare queen in a Cadillac” and the “young buck buying steaks and lobsters” with his food stamps. Yeah, Reagan himself was an amiable dolt, but he started the whole thing. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Alex Jones, et.al. wouldn’t exist if this fucker hadn’t gutted regulations.
Then along came the morally compromised, overstuffed popinjay Newt Gingrich, who used his newfound House majority to demonize Democrats and progressives. They weren’t simply wrong, said Newt, but they were “sick.” They were diseased. They weren’t worth negotiating with. Remember when Gingrich shut down the government in a fit of pique because Bill Clinton seated him at the rear of Air Force One and forced him to use the rear entrance?
The Freedumb Caucus, the election deniers, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters are the natural descendants of all that has come before. They remain a distinct minority –thank dog– but there are enough of them to bring this nation down. Watch and see. They’re not going to do shit about the debt ceiling or funding the government because they aren’t there to legislate. The want to set the world on fire just to watch it burn.
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Mark P said on January 5, 2023 at 12:25 pm
I love to hate on Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I’m never sure exactly how to hate on her. Is she evil, or just stupid? My personal favorite is stupid, and Hanlon’s Razor argues for that. But her current behavior seems to indicate she has some powers of calculation. Maybe we should use Hanlon’s Mirror Razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice. I think I’m going to settle on Mark’s Law of Inclusion: she’s crazy stupid evil.
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David C said on January 5, 2023 at 12:29 pm
Ottawa County is the Indiana of Michigan. They’re both stingy in ways that are downright dangerous. My biggest problem I had with both is due ice storms. My last job in Michigan was in Ottawa County. We had an ice storm followed by a freeze below the temperature where salt will work. There was a period before the deep freeze where the ice was slushy. Allegan and Kent, the two adjacent counties got the plows out and cleared the roads. That was on a Sunday so either because Jesus or because they were too cheap to pay overtime they did nothing and the streets were an icy rutty mess for a week. Indiana did the the same thing. We were headed home and had an ice storm, Michigan and Illinois had the trucks out and salted I-94. Not the cheap skates in Indiana. It took us two and a half hours to drive through.
Oh and Jamestown Township, the ones closing the library, they’re the Indiana of Ottawa County. The worst of the worst.
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Jason T. said on January 5, 2023 at 12:37 pm
Changing the county’s motto from “Where you belong” is a good start, but in my opinion, they should have gone all of the way and changed the motto to “Trespassers will be shot.”
These dumb-dumbs are never satisfied until they’ve chased out any new investment, eliminated any inward migration, and waved goodbye to all of their younger citizens.
Then they sit around and try to figure out why their counties are so old, poor and stagnant, and conclude “it’s probably because we need to cut taxes more.”
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Sherri said on January 5, 2023 at 1:07 pm
And they also wonder why half their kids leave and never come back, and the other half are on drugs.
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Julie Robinson said on January 5, 2023 at 2:59 pm
Oof. These people.
Despite significant concessions McCarthy couldn’t seal the deal on the seventh vote.
And I’m still testing Covid positive 10 days later. I’ve been isolating and no one else in the family has gotten it, thank God.
In happier news, Mom just bought a mobility scooter and is flying high. She saw them at Disney and decided to get one of her one. Apparently Medicare will often pay for them but she didn’t want the hassle. It’s small and breaks down into five pieces so it fits easily in the back of our CRV. Freedom!
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ROGirl said on January 5, 2023 at 3:19 pm
Eighth fail. They’re fucking nihilists.
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Suzanne said on January 5, 2023 at 3:43 pm
I am still not convinced all this House crap isn’t theater to keep the news off the fact that metal detectors have been removed and idiots like Boebert will happily walk into the House packing heat. What could happen then? Carnage? I wouldn’t rule it out. They want to destroy the government and tried 2 years ago. They have not backed down from calls for violence.
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FDChief said on January 5, 2023 at 4:06 pm
Margie Greene is “shrewd”, which is the one-dimensional variant of intelligent that applies that intelligence only to their own benefit, and usually only to the short-term benefit.
The thing about her I DON’T really understand is whether she truly believes her QANut nonsense or whether it’s part of her kayfabe. If the former, then I have to downgrade her for actual smarts. The latter is part and parcel with “shrewd”.
Boebert? Now SHE really is a whackjob.
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Sherri said on January 5, 2023 at 4:32 pm
I’ve stopped caring if they really believe it or if it’s all an act. It just doesn’t matter. Besides, the texts to Mark Meadows that were uncovered in the Jan 6 investigation reveal that yes, many of them really do believe.
They’re all whackjobs. That’s all that’s left. When people like Kevin McCarthy are being referred to as “moderates”, the word has lost all meaning.
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FDChief said on January 5, 2023 at 4:46 pm
My interest in the minds of the traitors is purely academic; crazy or stupid is a difference without a distinction. A vicious animal that’s rabid versus one that’s just vicious? Meh; you shoot them both and autopsy later.
Unfortunately it’s going to be impossible to take that sort of pragmatic solution to the problem these people represent. They want to cancel-culture the 20th Century, everything from meat inspection to vaccination, civil rights to unionization…but getting the press and the bulk of the public to see that?
Good luck..
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Sherri said on January 5, 2023 at 4:56 pm
Would monkeys flinging poo have been able to elect a leader by now? I suspect so.
The Republican majority: not as effective as monkeys flinging poo.
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Sherri said on January 5, 2023 at 5:03 pm
After the November election when the Republicans won the narrower than expected majority, a friend of mine speculated that the result meant they’d have to be more reasonable. I said the opposite, that they’d be controlled by the most extreme members, because they couldn’t do anything without them.
I hate being right.
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Sherri said on January 5, 2023 at 5:08 pm
I also point out that AOC and company could have done this. They didn’t, because they actually care about getting shit done.
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Mark P said on January 5, 2023 at 5:33 pm
I heard an interview with a newly-elected Republican moron from NY, who was confident that they would eventually elect McCarthy so they can get on with their agenda. I kept hoping the reporter would ask what their agenda was, but no. The Repubmoron mentioned a few items, which I will expand: first and foremost, obstruct Biden; then help speed up global warming; cut taxes for the wealthy; cut programs that help the non-wealthy; increase air, water, and ground pollution; aid and abet the Russians; perform border security theater, investigate Hunter Biden; and possibly try to impeach Biden. And you think I’m exaggerating, don’t you?
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Scout said on January 5, 2023 at 6:20 pm
After trumpeting their “plans” for America – debt ceiling fights, ending SS and Medicare, ending aid for Ukraine, no Ethics committee, revenge hearings, etc, they want the Dems to cross over and help them get started on this excremental agenda? Yeah, no. At this point we’re safer with this limbo situation.
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alex said on January 5, 2023 at 6:36 pm
I’m intrigued by the idea of a not so nutso Republican like Fred Upton getting bipartisan support and forming a “coalition government” that’s actually interested in governing. That’ll put those MAGA mofos back on the margins where they belong. Maybe after McCarthy loses Round 12 or 15 people will start to entertain the idea.
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Deborah said on January 5, 2023 at 7:46 pm
I’m worried that this chaos is exactly what the Republicans want. They want the public to lose faith in government as a bunch of slimeballs out for themselves. Yes it’s the right wing extremists that are the slimeballs only out for themselves but the average Joe doesn’t understand that and only sees chaos that they then ascribe to both sides. The extremists know their base and how to exploit them. That’s the only explanation I can come up with about why they keep holding votes that don’t change?????
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Mark P said on January 5, 2023 at 8:59 pm
The moron I heard interviewed today said McCarthy will eventually be elected. I also saw another moron on tv tell a reporter he can stop asking how he’ll vote because he will never vote for McCarthy. That’s what happens when a party goes so far off the rails that it’s impossible to get back on the rails.
Oh, and they actually, really, truly do want to burn it all down, no hyperbole involved at all. Nihilist is accurate, even if they don’t know what the word means.
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Peter said on January 5, 2023 at 10:01 pm
While I am enjoying the Dysfunctional Family Circus show going on at the House of Representatives, it’s a shame that Jeffries couldn’t make a deal with Kevin.
You want the job? We’ll vote for you if:
– raise the debt ceiling right now and get it off the table.
– none of those 20 yahoos gets any meaningful committee assignment – they can all get the DC admin committee or the one that looks after the mint.
But Kevin would be too scared to do it – it would make those nuts look like martyrs to the cause…
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Sherri said on January 5, 2023 at 10:05 pm
If McCarthy cuts a deal with the Dems to become Speaker, he’s a Dead Man Walking. He’ll be primaried, and will lose. And that probably won’t be as bad as the death threats he gets.
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Jeff Borden said on January 5, 2023 at 10:23 pm
There are gonna be some very compelling political commercials–for Dems– coming from this tragicomedy the loonies are producing.
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Connie said on January 6, 2023 at 6:47 am
I grew up in Ottawa County, the dutchiest part of it. Note I no longer live there.
Julie, my husband’s 105 year old aunt died and her daughter gave me her mobility scooter. So far it has been to an art fair at the local high school.
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FDChief said on January 6, 2023 at 8:47 am
These loons and people like them are going to either rule or ruin. They have no interest in anything – town, county, city, state, nation – that does not bend the knee to their demands that we praise their “agenda” of God, guns, money, and penile whiteness and therefore will try to destroy any of those places which refuse.
Period.
You would think since the majority of people (in a supposed republic) are not those things – beginning with “no penis” and moving on from there – that agenda would be confined to a tiny fringe of loony sidewalk shouters.
And yet…here we are.
Back in the Iraqi clusterfuck a bunch of us lefty military types used to hang out at a website called Intel Dump.
We had an acronym for what the “best case” outcome we saw for Dick n’ Dubya’s Excellent Middle Eastern Adventure that I dare say is perfectly applicable to our current political situation
WASF
“We are sooooooooo fucked”.
I smell the same dumpster fire smoke from here…
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basset said on January 6, 2023 at 10:54 am
Guess I don’t understand the process well enough, but… why does McCarthy get eleven shots at this? And at what point will it stop?
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Deborah said on January 6, 2023 at 11:20 am
Basset, you and me both. What is the point of constantly having votes when nothing changes each time the vote is tallied? Do they call for votes whenever someone is nominated? But they keep nominating the same people, so I don’t get it? Are the voters not divulging who they will vote for ahead of time? Are they making promises that they’ll vote for McCarthy and then when the vote is called they don’t vote for McCarthy? If that’s what they’re doing is it just to embarrass McCarthy? My husband keeps telling me they have no strategy or plan, but I keep trying to discern one.
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Julie Robinson said on January 6, 2023 at 12:10 pm
We’re ungovernble, apparently. Britain is the same, and so many other countries around the world. So let’s haul out the dictators! JK
I watched All the Way, about LBJ pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and tried to ponder what’s different today. Many say it’s partly because legislators don’t socialize with each other anymore since they’re going home every weekend to r̶a̶i̶s̶e̶ i̶n̶s̶a̶n̶e̶ a̶m̶o̶u̶n̶t̶s̶ o̶f̶ r̶e̶e̶l̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ m̶o̶n̶e̶y serve their constituents.
Connie, that’s exactly the kind of thing Mom wants to do. She doesn’t have stamina but alsodoesn’t want to ask anyone to push her around in a wheelchair. Quilt shows, botannical gardens, Disney, even just tooling around the neighborhood will be more open to her.
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Sherri said on January 6, 2023 at 12:24 pm
My guess is that McCarthy doesn’t think he can get the votes of the hardliners, but as this drags on into the weekend, other Congress members will want to leave to go home for the weekend. If enough other members aren’t around for the vote, then maybe he can win a majority of those left even without the hardliners. That counts on Dems not showing up on the weekend.
And of course, he’d be Speaker without enough support to outlast a head of lettuce. But he’d finally have achieved his lifelong dream.
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FDChief said on January 6, 2023 at 12:55 pm
Julie: what’s changed is Civil Rights.
The mid-20th Century US politics was a really weird time. The two parties were very diverse; you had New Deal Dems tied to racist Dixiecrats (which is why the New Deal had to exclude nonwhites…) and Taft/Bircher Republicans tied to the Eisenhower/Rockefeller wing. So both parties had a hard right wing and a “leftier” wing that made cutting deals more possible.
(And keep in mind that the R’s were destroyed by the Depression! The US was a functionally one-party state from about 1932 to well into the Forties…)
But Civil Rights changed all that.
The Dixiecrats fled to the GOP. The Eisenhower wing became “RINOs” and were hounded out. The rise of people like Limbaugh and Hannity and Gingrich meant that it was impossible to make deals. Democrats were commies! Traitors! Groomers!
So here we are.
The thing I see as insoluble is who talks these QANuts down off the ledge? Anyone sane is automatically a RINO. Hell, McCarthy is a bog-standard wingnut, but he’s not crazy enough for the Freedumb lunatics.
WASF.
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Peter said on January 6, 2023 at 1:32 pm
Julie, when I think about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I think back to senators like Everett McKinley Dirksen, who said that he “is a firm and unyielding believer in conservative principles, the first being that I’m always willing to compromise.”
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Sherri said on January 6, 2023 at 3:21 pm
What we’re determining is whether it’s possible to have a pluralistic multi-racial democracy or not. We’ve really only been trying, in fits and starts, since the Civil Rights Act, and there is a significant fraction of the country that doesn’t want it. They want a country where white Christian men are on top, period, and will do whatever it takes to keep things that way. They don’t think of themselves as racist or misogynist, they think of themselves as the real Americans, because, after all, that’s the way America worked for almost 200 years.
And yes, it’s not just here; everywhere is struggling with the question of pluralistic multiracial democracy.
Here, add a few decades of regarding government as something to be destroyed and people who disagree with you as enemies who must be defeated, not compromised with, and you get today’s Republican Party. I suppose eventually they will pick a speaker, so they can get on with the business of holding hearings about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
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basset said on January 6, 2023 at 3:58 pm
Well put, Sherri. Too bad it’s so true.
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FDChief said on January 6, 2023 at 4:25 pm
And the thing about that, Sherri, that drives me nuts is the vast majority of sources of Americans’ information refuse to be honest about the difference.
To be a diverse open society simply means that you can be a racist/sexist/homophobic scumbag so long as you keep it to yourself. You wanna be a jerk in private? Go nuts!
But to be a racist/sexist/homophobic society means you HAVE to keep your boot on the neck of all “those people”.
So the “polarization” isn’t symmetrical. “Cancel culture” means a dirty look or a dropped subscription. “Don’t say gay” means firings, intimidation, beatings, even murder.
But you’d never guess that from how it shows up on channel six or the news and advertiser…
These fash will continue to prosper so long as the bulk of the public isn’t informed of what they are and is resolved to fight them without mercy…
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Julie Robinson said on January 6, 2023 at 6:08 pm
Our daughter’s little church is sponsoring a play this weekend written from the perspective of a queer woman. She had been very involved and faithful as a teen, and when she offered herself as a leader she was told it wasn’t allowed because she was a sinner. She’s young, still in college, but the play was performed at the Fringe Festival in 2019. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s any community reaction.
I so wish I could go, but those positive tests are keeping me at home. I heard anecdotally today that the newest strain reads positive long after you’re healed. A woman we know was still pinging the tests after a month and wasn’t allowed at work. She ended up going through a doctor and getting a note.
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Sherri said on January 7, 2023 at 12:45 am
Well, McCarthy finally gets the speakership he’s so long coveted, and the rest of us get to pray that the GOP doesn’t default on US debt and provoke an financial crisis worse than 2008.
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alex said on January 7, 2023 at 9:33 am
And Matt Gaetz alone (or any disgruntled House member) can call for a vote to remove the Speaker anytime they please under the compromises that were proffered by McCarthy, so I expect we’ll see a lot of this sort of jousting in addition to all of the Republicans’ other antics. Good times.
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Deborah said on January 7, 2023 at 10:52 am
What I read Julie, is that you can test positive for Covid for 30 days or more, but that You’re not considered contagious 5-10 days after your first positive test. I can’t remember where I read this, I think it was the CDC website. I read it towards the end of my first bout with Covid when I still tested positive after 9 days, that was back in mid-May, so I may be miss-remembering it. I’m too lazy to look it up right now.
My husband is flying back to Chicago today so he can meet with his Dr there about his headaches. He still has them but they have gotten less painful. He will come back to NM but we’re not sure exactly when, it depends on when tests can be scheduled etc. It means I’ll be driving down to Albuquerque to drop him off at the airport, but it’s a sunny warmish day, no snow to worry about, so it should be fine.
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Julie Robinson said on January 7, 2023 at 12:21 pm
The goofy thing about the testing is that last time I never once tested positive although there wasn’t any doubt I had Covid as all my symptoms were the same as the rest of the family. Fortunately no one else has gotten sick this time so I’ll give it a few more days before I test again. I’m not up to much anyway; certainly not to going out.
Last night I got sucked into the Speaker drama and it was really something else. Incredibly there were still a few families there together, one Rep brought her dog, Matt Gaetz came *this* close to being physically assaulted (not that he doesn’t deserve it). Among the Democrats, 100% unity, and over there was Katie Porter reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k. They shouted over each other while voting to adjourn, necessitating a formal vote which the R’s were clearly losing.
And then, the R’s started filling out vote change slips and voted not to adjourn. Enough members had received enough concessions for McCarthy to win.
Holding it all together were two women; House Clerk Cheryl Johnson and Reading Clerk Susan Cole who performed magnificently despite having, apparently, only a chewed down golf pencil with which to work. At one point she looked at all 1.5 inches, walked over to set it down, then realized she didn’t have anything else to use. Eventually someone gave her a regular length writing implement.
The entire thing was surreal, and of course it’s only beginning. This House will do nothing but fight. Has the lettuce cam begun for McCarthy?
Right before this I had been watching a show on HBO called Years and Years, about the devolution of life in England in the not too distant future. Chaos and violence and right-wing politicians are in charge, making it a cautionary tale for us. As if anyone is paying attention.
I didn’t know anything about it except that Emma Thompson was in it. If you have HBO please watch, but don’t tell me more since I’m only two episodes in.
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FDChief said on January 7, 2023 at 3:28 pm
Once the angry teenager caucus gets the committees and the Horse Paste Commission they want they won’t need McCarthy. He’ll either hang about uselessly or someone will challenge him. It won’t matter.
The real problem will be the idiotic “debt ceiling”. We’ll see if the citizens of this nation will sit on their hands as these schmucks either get the Back to 1888 they want or break the economy and risk the Second Great Depression.
I’m not optimistic either way.
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Mark P said on January 7, 2023 at 8:47 pm
If the US defaults, the US will have to pay significantly higher interest rates to borrow, and despite what the moron party thinks, the government can’t run without borrowing, any more than a school board can build a multi-million dollar school building without borrowing, or most families can buy a house without a mortgage. And all of those things will also cost us more, maybe even a lot more. It’s also likely that the rest of the world will dump dollars. We may all need wheelbarrows to withdraw grocery money. It will be a catastrophe that none of us will live long enough to see a recovery from, assuming there is a recovery. But the US will never regain its former position in the world economy.
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FDChief said on January 7, 2023 at 8:49 pm
And the Cheney piece at Politico flushes the teenage girl out of the woodpile; the “select subcommittee” at Judiciary? The “Church Committee” about “weaponizing” the DoJ that Gaetz and Gym Jordan screwed out of McCarthy in return for the gavel?
It’s specifically authorized to look at ongoing criminal investigations…such as the criminal conspiracy to overthrow the constitutional transfer of power committed by…Gaetz, Jordan, Boebert, and the other J6 traitors.
Hmmm…
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brian stouder said on January 8, 2023 at 5:09 pm
An interesting, informed (and comfortably informal!) political discussion….I genuinely love this website! (and always have) Some number of years ago, I was a Republican conservative Reagan guy; loved Jack Kemp, read William F Buckley and Pat Buchanan (et al), plus National Review and a couple shelves of Conservative Book Club books……and even back then, there was a publication – from Michigan, if I recall correctly – that seemed to go too far for me…. forget what the heck it was called – but in any case, by the time Obama came onto the scene I was more of a Democrat than I’d ever been a Republican. Maybe this is the way things always are – which is to say, fluid. Not to get ahead of the game – and I have no objection to President Biden continuing on – but if he retires next year I will LEAP at the chance to vote for the first woman to ascend to the presidency ( let alone the first woman who isn’t white!)
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