It appears that not a single female candidate has thrown her hat in the ring. Interesting!
So yesterday, while doing the dishes, I had the thought that since the Republicans would never consider ranked-choice, voting, maybe they could get to a similar spot by kind of doing that serially. 9 Speaker-hopefuls enter, 8 leave. Them 8 Speaker-hopefuls are on the ballot, 7 leave. And so on, until they get to one. I thought that was a pretty good idea.
But now I see that that’s what the Rs have planned for today, so I suddenly find myself in the position of wondering what I missed – if that’s what the Rs are doing, it must be a terrible idea!
What am I missing?
Of course, I never made the assumption that in the end 217 Rs would vote for the last man standing. And it seems like the Rs are making that assumption, which is surely a mistake. But hey, maybe they’ll surprise me.
Open thread.
lowtechcyclist
Whatever the House Rethugs do, it’ll probably be more stupid than we expect. And we expect them to do seriously stupid shit.
Percysowner
Elon Musk Says He’ll Give Wikipedia $1 Billion if They Change Their Name to D*ckipedia because, of course, he did. He also says they have to keep the name for a year. So no changing the name then changing it back.
WaterGirl
@Percysowner: The man is a maroon. Seems like he is trying to drag a perfectly fine organization down in the mud with him.
MattF
From Ursula Vernon’s (aka T. Kingfisher’s) Hugo Award acceptance speech:
I nominate ‘There’s always a light at the end of the frog’.
bbleh
… I suddenly find myself in the position of wondering what I missed …
Probably the precise process whereby candidates are excluded. You see, rather than some wimpy “tallying” of “votes,” following which the bottom-ranked candidate is excluded, they instead are staging a fight to the death, wherein each candidate may attack and kill any other candidate, or any combination of candidates may attack and kill one candidate, or a candidate successfully incites the mob to attack and kill another candidate. Then, presuming they can restrain themselves from tearing into his flesh and devouring it raw, the excluded candidate is carried out, and the next round begins.
OzarkHillbilly
@bbleh: Sounds good to me. Is it gonna be on TV?
sab
@MattF: Yes, please make that a thing.
Betty Cracker
@MattF: What a hilarious and inspiring speech — thank you for sharing it!
WaterGirl
@MattF: I don’t know… this is strong competition!
Falling Diphthong
Ranked choice voting is good if you would prefer long-shot candidate A, be okay with B or C, and you absolutely do not want D anywhere near this role. If the options are nothing but Ds, it makes sense to just not vote
You’ve got a small minority saying “You can have Jim Jordan OR Matt Gaetz OR Paul Gosar” and they have managed to repel anyone from climbing in for “You can have any of these three random pretty normal Republicans.”
WaterGirl
@Falling Diphthong: If they are all Ds, then they may have to go to bbleh’s method!
Frankensteinbeck
@Falling Diphthong:
And indeed, Republicans will never vote for a D, even though he has more votes behind him than any of their candidates.
cain
@WaterGirl: He’s in the game of misinformation clearly – so of course stuff like wikipedia is wrong.
I don’t know what prompted him to go after wikipedia. That seems strange. I wonder who set him off?
randy khan
@bbleh:
Leaving aside that I would never, ever, suggest such a thing, even though the very idea of some members of the House in that kind of fight makes me giggle, the most obvious merit of that idea is that killing off 8 members of the House Republican caucus means that their majority would drop down to 1 slim vote. In fact, if that were the way they were going, I would encourage a few more Republicans to, uh, join the fray.
WaterGirl
What is so amazing is that in that entire group of 221, there is not one adult in the room. Even if you expand from the House and include other key Republicans in power, there is not one person they will listen to.
And that’s because a group of them want to burn down the House. And because there are not 5 Republican statesmen who will stick their necks out in order to preserve democracy and the rule of law at the risk of their position. They would rather stay in the burning building, as it burns down, than stopping the fire.
And there aren’t 10 Rs who would even be willing to miss the fucking vote in order to preserve the rule of law and preserve democracy.
I really think that as soon as things start to fall apart, 7 of them should vote present in the next formal speaker vote. Then on the next vote, there should be 8 voting present. Then 9 let.
Let’s see if that focuses the mind of some Republicans. If 9 doesn’t do it, then make it 10 and let Jeffries win as speaker of the house. All the Ds and some small number of Rs could then remove the stupid rule that any one person can blow up the entire house.
cain
@Falling Diphthong: and if they are rigid that means that no matter what the candidates are – you aren’t going to satisfy the ideologues. The folks want chaos. Their voters want chaos. They’ve finally reached the end game.
Ken
I doubt anyone in the Republican caucus is planning to re-enact And Then There Were None, but I am sure that Matthew Gaetz should avoid taking a train trip with twelve of his colleagues.
randy khan
Since the not-so-insane group grew a spine for the Jordan vote, there is a serious possibility that there will be two blocs that are essentially going to stand firm on getting what they want and that want opposing things. If that really is the case, it kind of doesn’t matter who wins the beauty context, because they won’t be able to elect a Speaker. One of those groups – and maybe both! – has to give in to get to 217.
Just Some Fuckhead
There was already a woman speaker before and you saw how well that worked out for Republicans.
Ohio Mom
Waiting at CVS for my Covid shot. My favorite pharmacist is not here and the regular tech is in a foul mood. Oh well, my immune system will be boosted even if I’m sneered at.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Someone pointed out the next pressure point is the expiration of the CR in November. Until then I think we can expect a continuation of the current circus.
Scout211
USA Today / Suffolk University Poll published yesterday:
So shouldn’t we all be thankful to the crazy caucus now that they’ve brought the country together? 😉
Betty Cracker
Since the Repub Party is now 100% a trolling operation, I think it’s possible they’ll elect Rep. Byron Donalds of SW Florida as Speaker. He’s a Trumpy wingnut with no relevant experience for the actual job, but he would be the first black Speaker of the House instead of Jeffries, which Repubs might view as an attractive trolling opportunity.
sdhays
@Frankensteinbeck: Honestly, I’m beginning to rank a coalition with the Democrats as a higher likelihood than Republicans picking someone they can agree upon because the people who dumped McQarthy simply aren’t reasonable and enough of their colleagues are sick of them. I don’t think a compromise candidate exists until the extremities of the lunatic fringe accept that they can’t dictate what they want to the entire caucus, and those people are more about grandstanding than anything else, so there’s no real incentive for them to accept anything.
Except for maybe that dipshit who claimed that McQarthy insulted his religion and that’s why he had to go. Assuming he’s not lying (ha!), anyone should be able to tell him religion is the bestest and he’ll sit down and vote with the rest of his caucus. Right? Right?
Eunicecycle
@cain: from what I’ve seen of it, Musk is probably angry about some entry in Wikipedia, so he’s big mad that they fundraise; that they raise way more money than they need, according to the guy who thinks he could run Twitter (X I know!) with 20% of the employees it used to have.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@randy khan: @bbleh:
Good Lord, people, you’re doing this all wrong. Our posts are all supposed to say that a fight to the death which results in the untimely end of at least 4 GOP congresscritters, would be an exercise in anti-woke toxic masculinity that no Democrat would ever approve of. Plus, it would be scary and intimidate us, while secretly arousing young Democratic interns. That’s why we are all 100% against it, especially Hillary Clinton and Obama.
sdhays
@Scout211: Well, there have been even greater levels of agreement on various gun control proposals, yet somehow they rarely get enacted.
The reason for that tends to be the same people.
jonas
@Percysowner: If they change it to “D!ckipedia” does that mean all the articles have to be about Musk somehow?
Also, doesn’t he need that $1 billion to make the interest payment on his massive boondoggle purchase of Twitter?
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: Donalds, Hern and Palmer are the only three who haven’t taken a “bad” vote.
If by “bad” you mean that they didn’t vote for anything like the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act or vote to raise the debt ceiling.
WaterGirl
@sdhays: In the end, I think it’s most likely that Rs end up going back to McCarthy, with most of the 8 going with “my bad” for causing all of this in the first place.
KWDragon
@Percysowner: Imagine my shock to see that wasn’t an Onion story. I hate this timeline.
sdhays
@jonas: No one should take Musk’s offers seriously until the slap fest with Mark Zuckerberg happens.
jonas
@Ohio Mom: CVS, working hard to follow RiteAid right into the bankruptcy shitter, seems to be operating on the premises these days that you can run an entire store and pharmacy with one or two harried, overworked employees per shift.
SFAW
@Percysowner:
More projection: Melon Husk is one of the bigger dicks around, and I ain’t talking about his “manly manliness.”
And knowing Husk, the purported $1B would probably be in stock.
ETA: And I see jonas beat me to the punch. Oh well.
kalakal
@bbleh: Which would have the added bonus of reducing the GOP majority in the house
SFAW
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
I like the way you view things, and would consider subscribing to your newsletter.
Betty Cracker
@WaterGirl: Donalds’ wife is a board member for Moms for Liberty and was appointed by DeSantis to some state education position, can’t remember which, before Rep. Donalds snubbed DeSantis by endorsing Trump.
If I recall correctly, Ms. Donalds was neck-deep in the rightwing charter school grift movement well before DeSantis arrived on the scene, which probably means she has ties to the Jeb Bush edu-grift players as well as the DeSantis edu-grift network. Those folks usually have very deep pockets
ETA: I bring Ms. Donalds’ activities up because it could be a factor in the furious behind-the-scenes lobbying that is happening right now.
SFAW
@jonas:
I work for a small local pharmacy. A significant part of our clientele is there because they appreciate the compassionate/caring, personal service our pharmacists and staff give them.
I believe there is also a not-insignificant number of customers who come to us because they hate CVS.
Redshift
In case anyone was getting their hopes up that a non-insurrectionist would win this round of the clown car caucus vote, Greg Sargent (WaPo) reports that all but two voted against certifying the election, and the remaining two (among others) signed on to the farcical Texas lawsuit to refuse to accept swing state results. I guess the winner could be someone who didn’t actively participate in the insurrection (unlike Jordan), but that’s a pretty low bar for democracy.
sdhays
@WaterGirl: That would be the smart thing, but I don’t believe there are 4 of them serious enough to do that.
The really smart thing would have been to just accept Scalise right away, crow about taking Qevin’s scalp, and move on. Gaetz said Scalise would have been acceptable back in January.
But they got greedy, thinking they could install Gymmy the Jordan. And now they’re fucked because everyone hates each other, trust is destroyed, and the country has a front seat to their dysfunction.
Geminid
@sdhays: Gun safety legislstion is still being enacted in some states. Virginia’s General Assembly passed 6 gun safety measures* in 2020 that are still on the books. I believe Colorado and Washington have passed gun safety measures since, and there may have been others.
*Virginia Republicans tried to repeal their state’s new gun safety laws in the last General Assembly, but were stopped by Senator Lucas’s “Brick Wall.” I think Democrats are making this an issue in the Fall elections, although they are pounding the issue of abortion rights much harder.
SiubhanDuinne
@MattF:
What a great story! Thanks.
sdhays
@Geminid: I meant nationally. But even in Virginia, those really popular gun safety measures wouldn’t have happened if Democrats hadn’t controlled the governorship and both houses of the legislature. Even though large bipartisan/non-partisan majorities supported them.
That was my point. Large bipartisan majorities in the electorate often don’t translate into bipartisan action unless one side has the power to force the issue.
Another Scott
@OzarkHillbilly: C-Span says the next House session is Tuesday at 11 AM EDT.
Cheers,
Scott.
mdblanche
It could just be that the “x men enter, x-1 men leave” approach is particularly well suited to the Republican caucus.
Another Scott
+1. It’s accurate, and funny.
Cheers,
Scott.
catclub
@bbleh: after about 9 candidates have been killed the GOP will no longer have a majority in the House.
mrmoshpotato
I don’t know, but let’s blame the Democrats for the media’s sake.
brantl
@cain: Probably the Elon Musk article on Wikipedia?
PaulWartenberg
There will not be a Republican Speaker because there are enough Tea Party / Freedom Caucus bomb-throwers who know this chaos is shutting down Congress and getting them what they want anyway.
Nothing’s going to change unless 5-8 “main street” Republicans realize this shit isn’t worth it, and flip to Dem.
PaulWartenberg
@Percysowner: If Musk has $1 billion to throw around like that, he ought to be spending that $1 billion on fixing the damage HE inflicted on Twitter, hiring back more people to make those fixes, and then spend another $1 billion towards the rest of us as a goddamned apology for wasting our time.
smith
I’m sure it’s been said before, but the current impasse in Congress is the natural endpoint to the GQP’s philosophy of “Me First” and “My Way Or The Highway.” I don’t expect any of them have an epiphany about the need to act collegially when collective action is required , but I hope this leaves them with the kind of scars this philosophy has inflicted on the nation.
catclub
OT: Reuters correspondent cannot tell the difference between income and assets:
So that is a 2% tax on ASSETS that they think is the same as a 2% tax on net income. grrr
Or do they think those billionaires had $13TRILLION of income in one year????
sdhays
@PaulWartenberg: If Musk has $1 billion to throw around, he should light it on fire so he has $1 billion less to throw around.
He won’t be fixed until he’s impoverished (or imprisoned or…) and can’t do anything anymore.
mdblanche
@catclub: Oh well.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: Sad that I have to ask – is that scurrying to support him, or scurrying to tank him as a possible speaker?
mrmoshpotato
@sdhays:
Agreed.
WaterGirl
@Redshift: I have this set to go up in a post later because I don’t want to step on Anne Laurie’s post that’s going up soon.
But here’s an awesome chart: (click the chart to see a bigger, more readable version)
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: Yeah, I don’t think that’s the content that Ozark was looking to see on TV. :-)
Geminid
@sdhays: Yeah, I think Democrats in blue and purple states will have to enact gun safety laws without Republican help. One good development though is that gun safety reform is favored more by voters now, especially in the suburban areas that are now election battlegrounds.
Virginia Democrats understand this now. Democrats here used to be afraid of the gun safety issue, but they made it an effective one in 2017 and 2019.
JPL
@Betty Cracker: Someone is busy releasing lots of negative info on him including distributing marijuana as a kid. We already know he doesn’t disavow white supremacists or child abusers, but that’s a prerequisite at this point.
catclub
@catclub: Actually, I think a tax that was max of:
X% of net income or Y% of assets
could be a good idea.
A lot of rich boomers like me might hate it. It would be a tax on THEIR savings.
RSA
They’ve already given up any hope of dignity (which they lacked in the first place).
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4266969-anti-mccarthy-eight-accept-punishment-holdouts-vote-jordan/
Ken
@Percysowner: One thing to remember is that Musk would be an absolutely terrible poker player, because he has a “tell”. When he’s got a bad hand — say, Tesla stock is going down because the company had to make huge price cuts to get anyone to buy the cars — he does some jackass “look at me!” stunt to try to distract attention.
Uncle Cosmo
@jonas:
It’s the dollar-&-a-quarter store model of retail. Which only works because most of their crap is so horrifically marked up over what it costs them that they can ride out the endemic shoplifting, and they can throw all cash receipts into safes that can’t be opened except by the heavily-armed armored-car collector so the occasional theft costs them little (and if they lose an employee or two to gunfire, them’s the breaks).
I used to deal with a CVS second-nearest to my home** and went in last December to collect an Rx that had gone back to the shelves*** but then been reinstated by the home office. The pharmacist’s assistant failed to reinstate it, blew up at me, and when I tried to explain told me to SHUT UP. The store manager heard the whole brouhaha & promised to drive it himself to my home (he didn’t).
When I returned a couple of days later for the Rx the pharmacist himself told me, We don’t deal with you anymore. You aren’t welcome here.
So I switched to mail delivery for my drugs – and sonofagun, last Labor Day I got an e-mail from CVS to say that specific store was being closed in a couple of weeks. I hope both of those “employees” were laid off and had trouble finding new jobs – you do not EVER treat a customer (and especially not one who’d been with them for years) like that.
** The closest had no parking lot, only metered street parking patrolled by an army of ticket-writers. Even pharmacy employees just ducking in to pick up a transferred prescription told me they’d come out to find tickets on their cars.
*** I was sick & couldn’t collect it in time.
schrodingers_cat
OT: I am having fun with fountain pen inks.
Besides the regular blue and black, I am experimenting with red, green, hot pink and purple.
mrmoshpotato
@schrodingers_cat: Someone makes hot pink fountain pen ink?
Dammit words. Stop rhyming.
schrodingers_cat
@mrmoshpotato: Hot pink, orange, turquoise you name it.
glc
@Eunicecycle: You got it. They give a history of Tesla which makes it clear that Musk was not one of the founders.
The Thin Black Duke
Hannah Arendt said, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
It’s the Fox News business model as created by Rupert Murdoch, and as a fellow parasitic oligarch, it’s a tool to be replicated by Elon Musk.
“Truth” is a pliable commodity to be weaponized for Musk’s benefit, which is why he’ll probably try to buy Wikipedia next.
Another Scott
I don’t think it will be Qevin again. GQP politicians cannot ever admit they were wrong. It’s a higher commandment than never voting with Democrats.
So, I think it will be someone “new”. And someone in the GQP House conference right now. They’ll look even more like complete failures if they cannot pick someone in their caucus.
Who? Dunno.
If it goes on long enough, they’ll probably pick a woman because we all know that women are brought in when things are desperate and when the PTB want to be able to look back and say “things were going Ok until that woman wrecked everything…”
Lisa McClain from Michigan is the Secretary of the conference, has been in office about 10 months, and seems to be in the middle of them on the ideology scale (and of course is an election denier and a culture-warrior). Maybe they’ll pick her??
:-/
Grr…,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@lowtechcyclist: That ought to be A Rule, like Occam’s Razor or something like that.
Paul in KY
@Betty Cracker: They do like to do that kind of stuff, so I think it’s a distinct possibility. The only thing holding it back (IMO) would be him being that close to Presidency and the rest of em not wanting the blackilty black housedude being that close.
Paul in KY
@jonas: If it was a legit $1,000,000,000.00, I would say do it. I’ll still call it ‘Wikipedia’ for the 1 year. Plus they would have redirects if you wish not to type that.
Paul in KY
@catclub: Shhhhhh!!! Don’t tell them that!
evodevo
@cain:
Simple..he went after Twitter, which was functioning as a world-wide site for reasonably accurate info about current events, and has wrecked it in less than a year. So now he’s going after another widely used fact-based site to wreck it. It’s Steve Bannon only with billions at his disposal…
Soprano2
@Uncle Cosmo: Man that’s sad and crazy. The main pharmacist at the CVS my husband uses is super friendly – he remembers my husband and calls him by his first name. I heard him tell someone else that the prescription he was picking up for his wife was different than the ones she had before, that it was twice as strong, and that if he wasn’t sure that was right he should call the doctor before he gave it to his wife.
Bill Arnold
@Eunicecycle:
The tweet thread suggests that he was upset about poop and cow emoj’s on his wikipedia entry. I didn’t spot them, or in a sampling of the history. But somebody did add this, which remained briefly then got deleted:
Elon Musk has questioned the funding of the Wikimedia Foundation through user donations, in a series of tweets in 22 October 2023, saying he “will give them a billion dollars” if Wikipedia is renamed to “Dickipedia”.[343]
RaflW
@WaterGirl: Anything that has community ownership is a threat to the richest jackass on earth. These people want to concentrate and own everything.
I’m leaning towards tumbrils at this point.
Anonymous At Work
I must have missed it but [tell me if I did]:
Ranked Choice voting is 1 round of voting, with a longer ballot to eliminate candidates by a rote and automatic process until 1 wins by majority (in theory) or everyone loses. I’ve seen intractable ties with multi-way selections, though.
Republicans are proposing 8 rounds voting which, after each round, the lowest vote-getter is eliminated, until 2 remain and the winner of that 8th round is by simple majority.
WaterGirl
@Anonymous At Work: I wasn’t trying to say that what they are doing IS ranked choice voting, but it is a clumsy, manual way of eliminating candidates that no one wants.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: This way they have a chance to make deals as various candidates are eliminated.
That’s what happened when 5th Virginia CD Republicans had to select a candidate on short notice in 2020. Denver Riggleman won on the last ballot after promised the guy who had just been dropped that he would join the Freedom Caucus. So Riggleman leapfrogged the leader on the last ballot. That created hard feelings among her proponents., and they got their revenge in 2022 when Bob Good knocked Riggleman out in a caucus/convention process.*
In 2021, Virginia Republicans used ranked choice voting to select Youngkin. 33,000 thousand qualifying “Delegates” cast ballots in 27 locations, which were then were transported to Richmond to be counted the next day. Republicans called this a “Disassembled Convention.” It was a one-off, conditioned by pandemic rules.
* Riggleman was one of three Republicans that year who failed to win renomination. One was some guy in Florida, and the other was the incumbent Lauren Boebert beat in Colorado, Scott Tipton.
Ealbert
CVS is not going to go under. They own/are owned by Aetna as well as the WellCare prescription plan. If you have ether of these, you have to use CVS
Anonymous At Work
@WaterGirl: Ah, yes, well, the dumbest people in the room *are* using the dumbest method to conduct a multi-candidate election where “NOTA” might win the majority.