At the Wall Street Journal, "Procedures are set for new Congress, clearing way for GOP to pursue legislation."
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
Prince Harry's Bridge-Burner of a Memoir Signals a Bigger Royal Rift
This is something.
At the New York Times, "The self-exiled royal has given the world a warts-and-all look at his family — with an emphasis on the warts":
LONDON — King Charles III has long pushed the idea of slimming down the British royal family. If his younger son’s unsparing new book is any indication, he has achieved his goal, though not in the way he intended. The publication of Prince Harry’s memoir on Tuesday — with its scorched-earth details about his rupture with his family — seems likely to dash any near-term prospects that Harry will return to the fold by reconciling with his father; with Camilla, the queen consort; or with his older brother, Prince William. The book, titled “Spare,” paints a portrait of a hopelessly divided House of Windsor. Far from the smooth-running operation known as The Firm, it comes across as a collection of warring fiefs, where family members jockey for advantage with a complicit tabloid press, trying to buff their images by dishing dirt on one another. With Harry and his wife, Meghan, estranged and living in Southern California; the king’s disgraced younger brother, Andrew, in internal exile following his settlement of a sexual assault lawsuit; and the death of Queen Elizabeth II last September, the family’s senior ranks have dwindled to a handful of figures. Even those who remain are caught in a poisonous public-relations contest that pits family members against one another, according to Harry. He writes that an aide to his father and stepmother planted negative stories in the London newspapers about William and his wife, Catherine — a practice that he said also tormented him and Meghan and contributed to their decision to leave. “I was displeased about being used this way, and livid about it being done to Meg,” Harry said in the book, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “But I had to admit it was happening much more often lately to Willy. And he was justifiably incandescent about it.” Buckingham Palace has stuck to its policy of not commenting on the book or on the cavalcade of television interviews Harry has done to promote it. But as the disclosures reach a clattering peak this week, royal experts predicted Charles and William would have to reach some kind of accommodation with Harry, if only to prevent the rift from overshadowing the king’s coronation in May. The Harry-and-Meghan drama, several royal experts said, has become the gravest crisis confronting the monarchy since the fraught aftermath of the death of Harry’s mother, Diana, the Princess of Wales, in a car crash in the late summer of 1997, when the queen came under rare criticism for not showing enough sympathy. “The key thing that rescued them every time in the past was that the queen was above reproach,” said Peter Hunt, a former royal correspondent for the BBC. “But we now have a king who is himself a divisive figure.” The palace has signaled that Harry and Meghan might be invited to the coronation, suggesting that Charles still hopes to play a healing role. But in an interview Sunday with an ITV correspondent, Tom Bradby, Harry was noncommittal about attending. “There’s a lot that can happen between now and then,” he said. So much has already happened that it is hard to imagine Harry in dress uniform, marching to Westminster Abbey with his father and brother. “This seems unsustainable,” said Ed Owens, a historian who has written about the relations between the monarchy and news media. “It suggests an institutional failure, and a complete contradiction to how historians think of The Firm as always working together. They’re just as often at odds with each other.” Mr. Owens said William, one of the most popular royals, had been particularly damaged by the book. Harry, the “spare” to William’s heir, portrays his elder brother as ill-tempered, entitled and prone to violence, knocking Harry to the floor in one altercation and grabbing his shirt in another. “They’ve got to get a grip on how they deal with Harry,” Mr. Owens said. The latest drip of disclosures began last week with teasers for a promotional TV interview Harry did with ITV and another with the CBS program “60 Minutes.” It accelerated after the book, published by Penguin Random House, leaked out nearly a week before its publication date, first in The Guardian and later in other papers after it was mistakenly put on sale in Spain. The Times obtained its copy in London. For days, nuggets from the book have been splashed across front pages. “Outrageous boast,” The Daily Mirror said Saturday of Harry’s claim that he had killed 25 Taliban fighters as a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. “Wills lunge at me after Philip’s funeral,” The Sun said on Sunday, referring to Harry’s account of a tense meeting with his brother after they buried Prince Philip, their grandfather, in 2021. On Monday, after the TV interviews, the tabloids played up the claim that Harry had walked back one of the most explosive accusations made by him and Meghan in their interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021: that a member of the royal family had spoken in racist terms about their unborn child. The episode is not mentioned in “Spare,” which is curious since Harry skips little else, from his recreational drug use to how he lost his virginity in a field behind a pub. Speaking to Mr. Bradby, Harry did not retract the couple’s claim that a family member had speculated anxiously about the skin color of the child. But he said it was an example of “unconscious bias” rather than racism. Questions of racism reverberated for weeks after Ms. Winfrey’s interview, forcing William to deny that the royal family was racist. They resurfaced again recently when a former lady-in-waiting to the queen, Susan Hussey, was stripped of her duties and forced to apologize after subjecting a Black British guest at Buckingham Palace to insistent questioning about where her family came from. For a few royal watchers, Harry’s decision not to reprise those accusations left the door open for some sort of peacemaking...
Massive Sinkhole Opens Up in Chatsworth as Heavy Rains Pound the Southland (VIDEO)
The Los Angeles Times has continuing rain and flood reporting here, "Southern California faces another day of punishing rains: ‘We are definitely not out of the woods yet’."
And at CBS News 2 Los Angeles:
Representative Katie Porter Announces U.S. Senate Bid (VIDEO)
She's nasty. I never paid her that much attention, even though she's my congresswoman. But recent news stories have highlighted how disagreeable she really is, and that's putting it nicely.
In late December, Reason had this: "California Congresswoman Katie Porter Blamed, Punished a Staffer For Allegedly Giving Her COVID-19."
And at Fox News: "Rep. Katie Porter used racist language, ‘ridiculed people for reporting sexual harassment,' ex-staffer claims: California Democrat accused of running toxic office."
She's vile, and now she's going to inflict her reprehensible personality on the entire state.At the Los Angeles Times, "Rep. Katie Porter announces bid for Feinstein’s Senate seat."
You can see just how nasty she is at the video:
Monday, January 9, 2023
'Life-Threatening' Flooding Feared in Northern California as Storms Cause Rivers to Swell (VIDEO)
At the Los Angeles Times, "A string of atmospheric rivers that has left more than 400,000 without power in California will be followed by two major episodes of heavy rain and mountain snow in the next several days, forecasters say."
And watch, at KCRA News 10 Sacramento, "Some Wilton residents choose not to evacuate ahead of strong storm," and "Here's a look at rainfall totals from Sunday night to Monday morning, levels at Arcade Creek."
Brazil Detains Hundreds More People, Ousts Capital's Governor After Attacks (VIDEO)
At the Wall Street Journal, "President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s newly elected government says supporters of former leader Jair Bolsonaro tried to overthrow it."
Also, at the BBC, "Brazilian forces regain control after Congress stormed," and Memeorandum.
And Sky News, here:
Cold War II
From Michael Lind, at the Tablet, "The U.S. is losing its economic advantage in a new era of global conflict."
Sunday, January 8, 2023
Friday, January 6, 2023
Thursday, January 5, 2023
Horny Goat Weed Extra Strength -- Boost Desire, Performance, Stamina, Energy, Non-GMO Formula, 120 Capsules
Good stuff for the new year.
Tuesday, January 3, 2023
Ken Block, Rally Car Racer and Hoonigan Founder, Killed Snowboarding in Utah (VIDEO)
At Yahoo, "Rally star Ken Block dies in snowmobile accident," and at the U.S. Sun, "RACER TRAGEDY Ken Block dead at 55 – Top Gear star and rally driver legend’s cause of death revealed after horror accident."
Block's video of him flying and sliding through San Francisco in a 650-horsepower Ford Fiesta has been viewed at least 110 million times.
Monday, January 2, 2023
Pittsburgh Steelers Running Back Najee Harris Rips Microphone Out of Sideline Reporter Melissa Stark's Hands (VIDEO)
Heh.
Brazen.
The mofo is brazen.
At Total Pro Sports, "Steelers’ RB Najee Harris Snatches Microphone From Melissa Stark Following Win vs. Ravens on SNF (VIDEO)."
At 2:40 minutes below:
'Covidiots Sheeple'
This dude, at Liberals Leaving, has the rap down!
From Claire Berlinski:
I now know that a great number of my fellow Americans are bonkers. Not even passingly acquainted with the Reality Principle.Stark staring nuts. Off their trollies.
— Claire Berlinski. (@ClaireBerlinski) January 2, 2023
I spent the better part of my life having no idea this was so.
It's weird to know better, now.
Big Banks Predict Recession, Fed Pivot in 2023
Hmm.
Let's see if these predictions hit gold.
At the Wall Street Journal, "More than two-thirds of economists at 23 major financial institutions expect the U.S. to have a downturn this year."
Sunday, January 1, 2023
How the 2022 Midterms Rewrote American Politics
At Vanity Fair, "Honey, We Dumped the Playbook: 10 Ways the Midterms Rewrote American Politics in 2022":
The counterintuitive takeaways from November’s Big Blue Surprise election. One of the few absolute constants of American politics is that every election cycle brings its own surprises. Which, like good drama, makes elections interesting and entertaining—and, often, real nail-biters. Inevitably, no matter how much analysis or how many polls are conducted, the results prove the experts wrong. In fact, arguably—despite advances in knowledge, data, and technology—we’ve been getting it more wrong than ever before. How does that happen? Well, this election was a good example of how we become seduced by convenient narratives. One of the obvious tools we use is history. We look back at the accumulated experience of past elections to project what might happen in the future. But this can be extremely misleading and misguided. Because it leads to the kind of thinking I hear all the time from political insiders: “X won’t happen because X has never happened before.” Then you have a Black man elected president. And a real estate huckster from New York City. And a peanut farmer from Georgia. And an actor from California. All things never thought possible. Until they happened. So, the only real rule here is: Things aren’t possible in politics—until they are. Let’s look back at the Big Blue Surprise of November 2022. In this election, by using history as a guide, a red wave was predicted. In only two midterms since 1934 has the president’s party not lost seats in the House, and one of those was simply due to a post–9/11 blush of support for the incumbent. Also, over the last decade, Republicans had won most redistricting fights and were therefore expected to pick up seats simply as a result of more GOP-favorable electoral maps. On top of that, the Republicans seemed on the offensive on three key issues that were plaguing the Democrats: the troubled state of the economy, crime, and immigration. Reporters are often criticized for reporting and writing analysis and predictions from their offices in places like Washington, DC, and never getting their boots on the ground around the country. But, wait a moment. I can testify to how misleading this sort of anecdotal canvassing can be. For the work I do for the weekly political series The Circus, on Showtime, I spent most of the fall traveling all over America, going to coffee shops, truck stops, bus tours, house parties, and small-town rallies. In fact, since 2016, I have adopted a sort of “momentum test” based on what I see on the ground in the last two weeks leading up to an election. My fieldwork out on the hustings six years ago, for example, told me something tangible during that Hillary Clinton–Donald Trump face-off. Yes, I certainly believed, along with 99% of the rest of the country, that Clinton was likely to win. But about seven days before voters went to the polls, I made the assertion on Megyn Kelly’s show, on Fox News, that a person out in the heartland—in the political thick of things during the last week of a campaign—usually gets a sense which direction the momentum is headed. And I said that Trump seemed to have some winds at his back. This past November, as well, those winds were all blowing in a seemingly discernable direction. Our team from The Circus put on a full-scale blitz and went to 17 states in the final few days of the campaign. And if you judged what the outcome might be—simply by the size and enthusiasm of crowds—you’d likely have guessed: red wave. New Hampshire was a good example. Democratic senator Maggie Hassan had seemed in solid shape until the final weeks when polls showed the race tightening. I went to an event at her campaign headquarters, which by any objective standards was modest. A small group of supporters appeared earnest, committed, and dutiful, but hardly excited. On the other hand, Hassan’s MAGA-leaning, Trump-endorsed opponent, retired Army general Don Bolduc, held one of his many town hall meetings and he drew an SRO crowd of supporters who were enthusiastic, committed, and energized. Hassan won comfortably by 10 points. So who are you gonna trust? The partisans and hucksters or your own lyin’ eyes? With this in mind, let’s go down the list of some surprises and counterintuitive lessons we learned in these topsy-turvy, down-is-up midterms...
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