Freaks and Geeks
Freaks and Geeks
The House Space Laser Caucus explodes.
Good Things Happen: This grand bargain might work and Mike Johnson might turn out to be willing to torch his career in order to do the right thing. Who knew?
Joe Perticone was in the House today when everything blew up:
[W]e may be on the verge of seeing a clever maneuver to circumvent the members who have been holding the chamber hostage.
Since Johnson laid his cards on the table on Monday, the individual bill texts have been released. The toplines are as follows:
Ukraine: $60.84 billion
Israel: $26.38 billion
Indo-Pacific: $8.12 billion
Johnson created a plan that insulates him from potential scheming and alterations by the Senate, while structuring a package that essentially includes what has already passed the upper chamber. This helps ensure the bipartisan support he needs. At the same time, Johnson has made himself the primary target of the Freedom Caucus by requiring Democrats to come to his aid on the Rules Committee. After the committee vote, Johnson won’t be done relying on Democrats: He’ll need their votes to pass the rule to bring the bills to the House floor, and maybe again to fend off an attempt by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her allies to oust him.
Johnson’s gambit depends on his getting support from Democrats on the Rules Committee. But here’s the thing: That just doesn’t happen. Like, ever. The Twitter account Ringwiss, operated by a congressional procedure whiz (who as it turns out, is actually a 20-year-old college student in England), notes that “It would appear that never in recorded history have minority members of the Rules Committee voted in favour of reporting a rule to make up for majority votes against it.”
Read the whole thing. Thomas Massie, Lauren Boebert, MTG, and Matt Gaetz are all losing their minds. (Though honestly, how can you tell?) But maybe this works?
But it only works if:
(a) Johnson doesn’t lose his nerve.
(b) Democrats continue to be governing partners who prefer policy success to owning the MAGAs.
(c) The rest of the Republican caucus doesn’t implode.
Also: No one know what Trump will do. Will he try to whip votes? Will he turn on Johnson?
A lot is going to happen in the next 96 hours.
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It’s Joe
Joe and Sonny sat down to do a quick video on the House floor insanity. Get your popcorn.
The Newsletters:
Kristol & Egger: The Ukraine deal is win-win-win.
The Logic of Immigration Anxiety
Chris Murphy and Ian Marcus Corbin:
Last summer, we took a trip to Boone, North Carolina, located in one of the state’s most overwhelmingly Republican congressional districts. Average household income in Boone ($28,200) is far below the state and national levels, and more than 55 percent of the population lives in poverty. We wanted to hear from people about how the economic policies of the last few decades and the opioid epidemic had affected their lives and their community, and what they were doing about it.
We heard the same point over and over: People here feel abandoned. Locals told us how good, dignified jobs had left the region, gone in search of cheaper forms of labor, and how pharmaceutical companies had added to the suffering by aggressively plowing addictive, life-wrecking opioids into the region. Many people we spoke with had been directly affected by these problems, and everyone knew of someone who had been affected. Meanwhile, important community institutions, like hospitals and mom-and-pop stores, have withered. Local business owners told us they feel constantly in danger of being squashed by monopolistic corporate behemoths. And ever present in the background was the sense that the government had failed to prevent any of it.
We asked for specifics: Whom exactly did they feel abandoned by? Why? The answer we heard is that people feel abandoned by society as a whole.
This answer may seem frustratingly vague—but in fact it is incredibly instructive about the spiritual and economic realities of American life, including the reasons why so many Americans are susceptible to the siren song of immigrant scapegoating and us-vs.-them tribalism.
🚨OVERTIME🚨
I don’t know much about sociopathy, but holy crap, this profile of podcast guru Andrew Huberman rings so many bells.
Huberman’s specialty lies in a narrow field: visual-system wiring. How comfortable one feels with the science propagated on Huberman Lab depends entirely on how much leeway one is willing to give a man who expounds for multiple hours a week on subjects well outside his area of expertise. His detractors note that Huberman extrapolates wildly from limited animal studies, posits certainty where there is ambiguity, and stumbles when he veers too far from his narrow realm of study, but even they will tend to admit that the podcast is an expansive, free (or, as he puts it, “zero-cost”) compendium of human knowledge. There are quack guests, but these are greatly outnumbered by profound, complex, patient, and often moving descriptions of biological process.
That’s alarm bell #1. In general, someone who features both quacks and legitimate experts isn’t playing down the middle. That’s not how trusted systems work.
Think of it this way: If I told you that Candy Bar X was mostly made of high-grade chocolates, but that every tenth bar contained dogshit, would you say, “Oh, Candy Bar X is 90 percent good!”
Because I would not. I would say: Do not trust a company that puts dogshit into 10 percent of its products. That company’s judgment cannot be trusted.
Then there’s the podcast grift:
On every episode of his “zero-cost” podcast, Huberman gives a lengthy endorsement of a powder formerly known as Athletic Greens and now as AG1. It is one thing to hear Athletic Greens promoted by Joe Rogan; it is perhaps another to hear someone who sells himself as a Stanford University scientist just back from the lab proclaim that this $79-a-month powder “covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.” In an industry not noted for its integrity, AG1 is, according to writer and professional debunker Derek Beres, “one of the most egregious players in the space.”
Then there’s the woman stuff. Throughout the story you hear from a series of women who were all in relationships with Huberman at roughly the same time and none of whom knew about the existence of the others. There is a version of this sort of behavior that plays as semi-charming bedroom farce: Alex Keaton with two-dates to the prom.
Huberman is on a different planet from that level. He is a 48-year-old man deceiving multiple women while hawking supplements on a podcast and doting on his dog.
Oh yes, he’s dog person.
He was devoted to his bullmastiff, Costello, whom he worried over constantly: Was Costello comfortable? Sleeping properly? Andrew liked to dote on the dog, she says, and he liked to be doted on by Sarah. . . .
“I don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive friend just because of my personal observations and disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’” . . .
He was busy all the time: with his book, and eventually the podcast; his dog; responsibilities at Stanford.
I try not to judge people for their lifestyle choices but cards on the table: I judge single, childless, middle-aged men who are emotionally needy about their pet dogs. Red flag.
Read the whole thing. It’s like a mini-DSM for a certain type of sociopath.