Is the House Speaker impasse coming to an end?

The New Neo Posted on by

I certainly hope so. The end might just be that the rebels have extracted enough concessions – some of them improvements on business-as-usual – and McCarthy gets elected. The latter is something that’s okay with me although not ideal because, as I’ve said before, no one emerged who was both better and willing to take the job.

The story as it now stands is that McCarthy got 214 votes on the most recent ballot, which was the 13th taken so far. Here’s a statement from one of the former holdouts:

What is this “framework” to which he refers? I don’t know, but the responses I see on Twitter are uniformly angry at him. For example: “Wow! Y’all caved quickly! This sucks!”. And at Instapundit it’s much the same thing in the comments there; for example, “Flipping the bird at their constituents in the process” and this:

That Republicans are even considering McCarthy for speaker in the first place is proof positive that Uni-party is in control and nothing will change. He might as well be a Democrat. He will let the J6ers rot in jail. There will be some showy investigations, and then sternly worded letters, and then… nothing.

I actually agree with that commenter that McCarthy and the other Republicans should have made much more of an issue of the J6 defendants and their treatment and differential prosecution. But then I can almost guarantee they would have been criticized by the left and moderates as “election deniers,” but more importantly by the right as being only about blah-blah-blahing and not doing anything. But without the power to control the DOJ, what could they actually do in terms of freeing these people? As for “showy investigations,” I’ll take it. The reality is that the GOP only controls the House by a hair, and controls neither the Senate nor the presidency.

The “framework” might involve this sort of thing:

Kim Strassel’s [WSJ] column is behind the paywall; I can read it. Her point it that these dissidents have forced McCarthy to agree to returning the House to most of the pre-Pelosi rules and procedures. Implemented, these will make the House once again a body which considers bills one by one, with discussion in committee and with amendments permitted on the floor. In fact, it would be a legislative body and not merely a rubber stamp for whatever monstrous bill the Speaker concocts and forces through. Strassel says the dissidents should just take the win.

But the House holdouts have drawn a line in the sand, and once someone like Perry crosses it, that person is considered to have betrayed the cause. So I think the net result of the whole thing is more cynicism and anger, not less.

Even better news on Hamlin, and some personal reflections

The New Neo Posted on by

Here you go:

One of Damar Hamlin’s first thoughts after he woke up in the intensive care unit at University of Cincinnati Medical Center on Wednesday night was to ask, in writing, who won Monday’s Bills-Bengals game during which he was injured.

Hamlin was able to wake up, follow commands, and even communicate in writing, as he remains in critical condition with a breathing tube after going into cardiac arrest during the game.

“Yes, you won,” UC doctors told Hamlin. “You won the game of life.”

Hamlin’s first comments were to a nurse at his bedside, while his parents, other friends and family members, members of the Bills organization have remained by his side since he was transported to the medical facility.

This matches the protocol I discussed in my two previous posts on Hamlin. First the induced coma and breathing tube, then the tests of reflexes, then the simple commands (like “squeeze my finger” or “wiggle your toes”), then the withdrawal of the coma-inducing drugs for longer periods. Then comes writing, and from my experience of watching someone undergo this process I’d say that if Hamlin is writing coherently at this point it’s very early and a great sign. Then finally the drugs and breathing tube are withdrawn.

The reflex testing isn’t just to see if the normal neurological responses are intact, but also to see if they are bilateral. The following of the simple verbal commands tests hearing and the ability to understand language, as well as movement and coordination. The person I observed who underwent the experience did some of those simple-sounding things on day three, and the doctors and nurses were extraordinarily elated. I was a bit puzzled at the time – why are they so very happy that he has reflexes, or can squeeze their finger? After all, that’s hardly full functioning and there’s such a long long way to go. But they explained to me that such early responses indicate that a full recovery might be in the works, and that’s not very common. So I decided to follow their lead and be optimistic, and that optimism ended up being fully justified.

It’s a hard thing to go through, to watch a previously seemingly healthy person – in my case an older person but in the case of Hamlin a young person with great promise and his whole adult life ahead of him – be unresponsive and hooked up to machines, with a very iffy future. The joy of seeing these sorts of basic responses by the person, and of hearing from the staff how meaningful these movements are, cannot be overemphasized. It isn’t really coming back from the dead, but it’s just about as close as it gets.

More Twitter files

The New Neo Posted on by

Discussion and links here. An excerpt:

Ironically, the documents tweeted by Taibbi also indicated that the increasingly cozy relationship between agencies in the federal government and Twitter made some on the Twitter side uncomfortable in part because they were starting to be flooded by requests from multiple departments and were having problems keeping up with it all…

Not surprisingly, Twitter was also receiving requests from powerful figures in Congress to ban the accounts of their critics. Then-Intel Committee Chair Adam Schiff’s office requested writer Paul Sperry’s account be banned ostensibly on “QAnon conspiracy” grounds. In reality – and as the NY Post also observed, Schiff likely targeted him primarily because Sperry’s reporting at RealClearInvestigations shined an unflattering spotlight on Schiff’s “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella…

The extent of the connections between government – particularly Democrats – and Twitter was extraordinary.

Let’s have a little House Speaker Gedankenexperiment

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m no Einstein.

(I thought I’d get that out of the way first.)

However, I’ve always liked that word: Gedankenexperiment, otherwise known as “thought experiment.” I’ve got one for you about the current brouhaha over electing a Speaker in the House.

Imagine that the majority of GOP members of the House were staunch conservatives who agree with you, and they’ve nominated a person for Speaker who is a candidate you think would be good for the job. And yet, because the GOP margin over the Democrats is very small, only a few of those GOP House members can defect from the majority or this person you like cannot win the Speakership.

In fact, no one can win the Speakership without almost all the GOP votes. So, near-unity on a Speaker candidate isn’t just desirable for some abstract reason, it’s necessary for a very practical reason.

But there’s a very small number – it might be 5 or it might be as many as 20, but it’s small compared to the total of 222 – of GOP members of the House are holding out. They are all RINOs, and they want their guy (or one of several guys). Their guys have very little support and can’t win either; in one or two cases their guys have said they don’t even want the job and wouldn’t take it. But those 5-to-20 RINO supporters hold out, ballot after ballot after ballot. You’re not sure what their endgame is, but there’s a way – highly unlikely, but theoretically possible – for them to vote “present” and facilitate the election of the leftist Democrat around whom the Democrats are solidly (with no defections whatsoever) behind.

There is some indication that the 5-to-20 RINOs holding out are jockeying for more power for themselves in committees. You hear a lot of rumors, but you don’t know what’s really going on behind the scenes. Meanwhile, the business of the House is stalled. That includes things you want to have happen – such as the cutting of funds to the IRS, or the investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden, or any number of other things on the agenda:

“If we had elected Kevin McCarthy speaker we would have already voted to defund the 87,000 new IRS agents, new border security measures, and a select committee on China,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R., Fla.) told the Free Beacon. “We would also be sending notices to the Biden administration that we’re coming for answers on the FBI, Department of Justice, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and conflicts of interest surrounding the Biden family.”

Without a House speaker, the legislative body grinds to a halt. No members can be sworn in, introduce legislation, or issue subpoenas. For all intents and purposes, the United States currently doesn’t have a House of Representatives. But the failure to find a House speaker carries political consequences as well. The longer the fight drags on, the longer Biden, who is expected to run for reelection in 2024, goes without virtually any real oversight in the form of hearings and subpoenas.

So, how would you feel about all of that?

Commenter “Gregory Harper” writes:

What I don’t understand is why people like Dan Crenshaw also seem so desperate to have McCarthy elected. So desperate that he calls fellow Republicans “terrorists”. Surely there are alternatives to McCarthy. If McCarthy really cares about the party and the country, he should step aside.

If you contemplate the hypothetical I’ve offered in this post, maybe it’s easier to understand why someone like Crenshaw calls them “terrorists.” Maybe it’s also easier if we take a look at what Crenshaw actually said instead of the soundbite:

Look, [the holdouts] came into this without a plan. And look, if you want to and here’s. Here’s what I’ll tell them. What I’ve been telling them. If you wanted to have someone else as speaker, you know, you knew this moment was coming. Is like, you know, an election is coming. And when you know an election is coming, you start running. You start building support. You go out and you fundraise. If there’s somebody else wanted to run, if they want to run a different candidate, well, they could have been competing with Kevin McCarthy this whole time. But they didn’t. They had no plan. They have some list of demands that mostly have been met. The speech Scott Perry just gave about what needs to change and etc., etc., those have been met as have largely been agreed to in the rules package. So we don’t know what the hell he’s talking about at this point. They settled on Jim Jordan for a while. He’s obviously very well-respected conservative leader, but then they did some, but now they’re settling on a freshman named Byron Donalds. I, I don’t know where that came from. They’re they’re making the argument that it’s about identity politics and that we should have a black speaker, that that’s actually where they’re going with this. No one knows what the heck is going on or what their end game is. They basically closed all the doors and pulled, depends on the grenades and are staring at each other like, what the hell do we do? Everyone is trying to work with them in good faith to give them an off ramp, because this is this is a terrible situation for them personally. They are responsible for holding up a GOP agenda. They could be responsible for Democrats pulling some really clever deals, maybe forcing a plurality vote, maybe potentially getting a rules package the Democrats want. I don’t know. I mean, the possibilities we could talk for hours about them, but they’re dangerous for Republicans. The best solution here is go with the guy that already won 85% of our internal vote. He won the primary with 85%. And so the obvious thing to do after that is to vote for him in the general election, which is what we’re doing now. We’ve asked these different members repeatedly what they want and they can’t tell us they give us these policies to give us. It’s like they’re talking on the campaign trail. They say the place doesn’t work. Washington is broken. Enough is enough. We don’t trust the system. We don’t trust it. You follow the rules and we’re like, What? What does that mean? Give me something specific. And they won’t…

Lauren Boebert…gets up and she basically tells Donald Trump to f off [after his support of McCarthy for Speaker]. That’s what she just did. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I just I just couldn’t believe it. So I don’t know what path they’re going down. I think, again, they’ve pulled the pins on the grenades and they locked themselves inside of a room and they were trying to give them off ramps and they weren’t articulate what those off ramps are. I mean, it’s genuinely frightening…

[If Steve Scalise is nominated] we all know [this dynamic] wouldn’t change, which is why we can’t give in. And so those of us who are standing against this, we’re standing for principle. They are standing for notoriety. They’re standing for that extra news that because nobody ever cares about them and they’re frustrated by that, and they want that extra news that we know that we can’t give in to this because then they will always run the conference and they’ll just get another scalp and another scalp, whether it’s whether it’s Boehner or Paul Ryan or them McCarthy. Scalise would just be next and we all know it. We just can’t allow that to happen. That’s why those of us are saying like, look, you pushed us into this corner. So now we’re now we’re saying we won’t vote for anyone but McCarthy. That’s why we’re saying it, because we cannot let the terrorists win. That’s basically what’s happening. And I do have to go.

You don’t have to agree with him to understand exactly what he’s saying and why he’s saying it. And he didn’t call the holdouts “terrorists” – he used an analogy that involves the inadvisability of giving in to the pressure of terrorists, a small group who want to throw their weight around and use threats of violence to do it. He sees the holdouts as basically destructive rather than constructive, as well as publicity seekers.

To me it makes some sense, mainly because of what he explains in the first paragraph I excerpted from his interview: they have no candidate of their own. They need a viable alternative or they leave themselves very open to charges such as Crenshaw’s.

NOTE: I realize that a lot of people detest McCarthy because he didn’t advance the right’s agenda when he could have done so, and therefore they don’t trust him at all (I’m hardly keen on him myself). Their argument is that he won’t do what he’s promised to do, such as investigating Biden or dealing with the IRS or any of it. He’s pledged to do it, the House members seem determined to do it, and someone like Crenshaw and lots of other House members like Jordan and Scalise (who voted for him for Speaker) seem to trust him to do it. Why not trust them? – because until a viable alternative shows itself, this current escapade seems merely a case of obstructionism.

Open thread 1/5/23

The New Neo Posted on by

Only a few of these qualify as among the hardest. But everything in ballet is hard to do well. I post this video because it has some nifty excerpts. I especially like the double cabrioles, which are truly hard:

A note on Damar Hamlin

The New Neo Posted on by

The news is promising:

Jordon Rooney, the Bills safety’s marketing representative and friend, told ESPN’s Coley Harvey Wednesday morning that doctors saw encouraging signs overnight in Hamlin’s condition after he went into cardiac arrest Monday night during a game against the Bengals.

“Per Jordon and Damar’s family, doctors overnight got promising readings that they had been hoping to see by this morning. Jordon couldn’t go into specifics, but progress appears to be made,” Harvey wrote on Twitter, adding that Hamlin remains sedated and in critical condition in the ICU at University of Cincinnati Medical Center.

I believe that indicates the situation is as I wrote yesterday. I’ll add that I based what I wrote partly on knowledge I gained by observing the protocol when a loved one had a cardiac arrest and was hospitalized afterwards. This is from yesterday’s post on the matter:

To get back to Hamlin – he is now reported to be sedated and in critical condition. That almost certainly means he is being purposely kept in a coma, cooled, and has been placed on a breathing tube. That is pretty much standard procedure after a cardiac arrest of any real duration. What they will probably do in the next few days is periodically withdraw the coma-inducing drugs for a short while at a time in order to test his reflexes and then later to see whether he can follow simple commands such as to squeeze a person’s finger. Those tests are to evaluate whether he is retaining function and what his long-term prognosis might be. Then if all goes well, they take him out of the coma and off the breathing tube on a certain schedule as he heals. He could make a full recovery, although he certainly might not, and anything in between, depending on how oxygen-deprived he was for how long. Prayers go out for a full recovery.

So my guess is that the “promising readings” involve things like reflexes and responses to simple commands like “squeeze my finger” and “wiggle your left toe.” I used to think that they did brain EEGs right away, but (at least back when I was the hospital observer) I learned they don’t usually do that till three days of non-responsiveness have passed. Luckily, Hamlin already is responding so a scan of that sort may not be necessary.

They also have probably done all sorts of tests on his heart already. Nothing was said about that, but my guess (and it’s just a guess at this point, and probably a hope as well) is that it’s basically healthy and that the cardiac arrest was just a freak one-time thing for him, perhaps from the chest blow but perhaps not. I hope the family will decide to release more complete medical information on that.

The conflict in the House continues

The New Neo Posted on by

I hope it isn’t a case of he that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind – the “he” there being the right, and the house being the GOP in the House.

Then again, the next line is and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart, so that’s more hopeful.

At any rate, the fighting continues for Speaker of the House of Representatives. To clarify my own position, I don’t care if it’s McCarthy or someone else and I’d actually prefer someone else. I just don’t want the whole thing to end up benefiting the left, and it also would be nice to have a “someone else” on the right who can be elected to the job and perform it well in the ideological, organizational, and the fundraising sense (the latter also being quite important, as this comment by “eworth” explains; I recommend reading it). It’s all very well and good to think of Person A or Person B or C or D whom you’d prefer. But does that person have the necessary qualifications, including having enough support to win?

I believe that McCarthy has the support of some of the more conservative members of the house (such as Jordan) because they don’t see a better alternative. Meanwhile, the voting continues. I make no predictions except I doubt this will be resolved today; we may be in for the long haul.

Hamlin’s collapse and sudden death or cardiac arrest in young athletes

The New Neo Posted on by

It was a terrible moment watched by millions: Buffalo Bills’ player Damar Hamlin collapsed after making a hit. He was in cardiac arrest but immediate medical attention caused his heartbeat to resume, and he is now in critical condition and intensive care.

As soon as I heard the news, I thought it was either a case of spontaneous cardiac arrest or a phenomenon known as commotio cordis, which I recalled from previous tragic incidents involving young athletes. This is what I wrote last night after hearing he’d been struck in the chest during the play that had just ended:

I was thinking the player might have been felled by some form of commotio cordis. I first heard of the phenomenon when this death occurred.

Hamlin is considerably bigger than the usual victim, but it is still possible that this is what happened.

Even if it’s not commotio cordis, the sudden cardiac arrest of healthy young athletes is not as unusual event as one might think or hope. I wrote this last night, as well:

…[Sudden cardiac arrest] happens to a certain percentage of professional athletes with some regularity. Go to the link. Read it. See the list towards the bottom under “notable cases.” And those are just cases of fairly well-known athletes who died. There are many many cases of people who are not professional athletes, or who had some sort of incident but didn’t die.

Note the dates.

There has been no recent uptick, by the way. But people are paying more attention, that’s all.

Here’s a statistic from the article: “a population as large as the United States will experience the sudden cardiac death of a competitive athlete at the average rate of one every three days, often with significant local media coverage heightening public attention.” The footnote for that quote is from an article written in 2012. Long before COVID or COVID vaccines.

It is a tragic phenomenon and unfortunately it’s not as uncommon as we would like.

In that comment I was addressing the idea that this had something to do with a COVID shot or with COVID. The ascribing of every bad event to something connected with the vaccine in particular is something I’ve noticed and noticed and noticed. The great majority of those doing so either do not understand statistics, misuse them, don’t care about them and only look at anecdotal evidence, or state that they distrust all statistics issued by official sources and consider them lies. That latter bit allows them to say or believe anything they wish, of course.

Believe me, I understand distrust of the CDC and the government. They’ve earned our distrust, to a large extent. But that doesn’t mean that the people who promote alternate theories and who post lies or errors about what’s going on are to be believed either. I have spent an enormous number of hours on this blog countering what they write, but mostly in the comments section here and so it’s difficult for me to locate much of it and to amalgamate it into one big post or several. It’s a time-consuming job, and I’m weary of it at this point. But I’ll just reiterate that everything of the sort that I’ve read is highly flawed.

As I said, though, I understand the distrust. However, the emotions of rage and frustration shouldn’t cloud our judgment. The whole thing is compounded by the fact that research involving human subjects, and the statistics involved, are not easy to understand and most people don’t understand them. I have an advantage at that because I’ve taken a statistics course at the graduate level, but that doesn’t mean I know everything either. But it means I have a relatively sophisticated understanding of the principles involved and can critique both the original research and the critiques of that research with some degree of understanding.

I don’t have an agenda except trying to get to the truth as best I can, using the tools and knowledge I have. Defending the government is not my goal, but debunking the government is not my goal either.

Most of the US and the Western world is vaccinated. I don’t know the exact total, but it’s vast. In that vast number of people, bad things will happen to some. Actually, eventually, bad things will happen to all. Only statistics can tell us what difference the vaccine makes, but to properly evaluate those statistics a vast number of things must be taken into consideration, among them the ages and relative pre-vaccine debility of the vaccine recipients, and the usual pre-vaccine incidence of those same events in a matched population.

I’ll add a recommendation to look at this article, this one, and also this.

That last link involves some research done in Minnesota in an attempt to figure out the cause of the excess deaths there. Here are some quotes:

COVID-19 comprised 9.9% of deaths [in Minnesota] in 2020. Other categories of causes of death with significant increases in 2020 compared to 2018–2019 included assault by firearms (RR 1.68, 95% CI 1.34–2.11), accidental poisonings (RR 1.49, 95% CI 1.37–1.61), malnutrition (RR 1.48, 95% CI 1.17–1.87), alcoholic liver disease (RR, 95% CI 1.14–1.40), and cirrhosis and other chronic liver diseases (RR 1.28, 95% CI 1.09–1.50). Mortality rates due to COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 causes were higher among racial and ethnic minority groups, older adults, and non-rural residents…

Deaths due to assault by firearms were increased in individuals 15–34 and 45–64?years of age, with the greatest increase among those 45–64?years (RR 2.30, 95% CI 1.23–4.32) and women (RR 2.28, 95% CI 1.24–4.22) (Supplemental Table 2). There were also significant increases in deaths due to assault by firearms among Black Minnesotans (RR 1.82, 95% CI 1.35–2.45), non-rural residents (RR 1.73, 95% CI 1.35–2.20), and men (RR 1.60, 95% CI 1.25–2.04). When firearms-related deaths were stratified by sex (Supplemental Table 3), we found that the majority of these deaths were among men, though women saw a larger increase in firearms-related mortality in 2020 relative to 2018–2019.

Deaths due to accidental poisoning/overdose increased 49% in 2020 relative to 2018–19 (RR 1.49, 95% CI 1.37–1.61). Although the category includes all types of poisonings, nearly all accidental poisonings included one or more drug (98.4% across the 3 years). The proportion of accidental poisoning deaths that included one or more opioids increased from 55.6% in 2018–2019 to 63.3% in 2020 (RR 1.69, 95% CI 1.52–1.88). Accidental poisoning deaths increased substantially in nearly all demographic groups (Supplemental Table 4). The greatest increases occurred among racial and ethnic minority populations…

Deaths due to malnutrition were increased among residents aged 85?years and older (RR 1.76, 95% CI 1.27–2.45), women (RR 1.64, 95% CI 1.23–2.19), White individuals (RR 1.44, 95% CI 1.13–1.83) and rural residents (RR 2.50, 95% CI 1.55–4.04) (Supplemental Table 6). Their rates of death in 2020 were 60.4, 2.95, 2.6, and 3.1 per 100,000, respectively…

We did not find statistically significant increases in deaths due to other causes, including those hypothesized to be affected by pandemic-related changes in daily life and access to health care including cancer, cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, dementia, kidney disease, motor vehicle collisions, and suicide.

As you can see, it’s a complex process, but all-cause deaths can involve a great many causes having nothing to do with COVID or COVID vaccines.

To get back to Hamlin – he is now reported to be sedated and in critical condition. That almost certainly means he is being purposely kept in a coma, cooled, and has been placed on a breathing tube. That is pretty much standard procedure after a cardiac arrest of any real duration. What they will probably do in the next few days is periodically withdraw the coma-inducing drugs for a short while at a time in order to test his reflexes and then later to see whether he can follow simple commands such as to squeeze a person’s finger. Those tests are to evaluate whether he is retaining function and what his long-term prognosis might be. Then if all goes well, they take him out of the coma and off the breathing tube on a certain schedule as he heals. He could make a full recovery, although he certainly might not, and anything in between, depending on how oxygen-deprived he was for how long. Prayers go out for a full recovery.

GOP discord in the House

The New Neo Posted on by

The GOP margin is tiny, and a small portion of the conservative wing in the House sees its chance to wring more concessions from would-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy. At least, I hope that’s what’s going on, because no realistic alternative for speaker has emerged.

At any rate, as expected, McCarthy failed to win the speakership on the first ballot. This cannot fail to warm the cockles of the Democrats’ hearts. Furthermore:

A group of five conservatives led by Biggs and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) have publicly stated that they will not support McCarthy under any circumstances and have called on him to stand down to make room for a more viable candidate.

Unless they come up with a truly viable candidate, I hope this is just pressure being applied to McCarthy. Here’s an article listing their supposed demands. And it contains this:

Now, there’s a fab idea – you think the current speaker candidate is unsufficiently conservative, so you decide to help put an extreme leftist in there instead – along the way, negating the votes of all the people who cast ballots for a Republican majority. I can only hope that’s either an inaccurate report or an idle threat they won’t carry through, because otherwise it’s one of the stupidest and most self-destructive things I’ve heard in a long time, and that’s saying something.

If there had been the expected red wave, I assume that McCarthy would be sailing it to victory at this point. But that’s not what happened, so here we are.