The shutdown is nearly over

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess the Democrats were waiting for last Tuesday’s election. They thought the shutdown would help them win – especially in Virginia, home of the federal worker, and that they could successfully blame it on the GOP. Now they can end it. The vote was for cloture, which means the shutdown will almost certainly be ended by a simple majority, and fairly soon.

All those predicting that the Republicans would cave were wrong; at least so far. It was eight Democrats who “caved,” none of them up for re-election in the 2026 midterms. So now it goes to the House, where I predict it will pass (hopefully), with a few more Democrats from purple districts “caving”:

… [M]ost Senate Democrats [had] refused for weeks to reopen the government unless a deal included the extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are set to end Dec. 31. The compromise includes a commitment for a Senate vote on the subsidies in the second week of December, but the concession doesn’t guarantee an extension.

John Hinderaker thinks it was the problems with air travel that caused the Democrats to give in:

Based on the speeches by Chuck Schumer (bordering on the insane) and John Thune, it sounds like what tipped the balance was disruption to air travel. Important Democrats are not on food stamps, but they fly. A lot. So when a shutdown of air travel threatened, pressure on Democratic senators became irresistible. That is my reading of the situation, anyway.

I have zero inside info on this, but I don’t think that’s correct – although I do think the air travel shutdowns made the “cave” even more likely. As I wrote above, I think it was always the Democrats’ plan to give in after the elections. I think the whole thing was pre-orchestrated, and the eight senators who “gave in” did so with the blessing of Schumer. If the Democrats had wanted to continue with the shutdown, they could have tried to continue to spin out propaganda that the big bad Republicans were the ones holding out, which never made sense but with the MSM’s help they were successful in convincing at least the Democrats I know that this was the case.

Several New Englanders were among the “cavers”, including the two bland senators from New Hampshire who like to pose as moderates but rarely are if it would mean actually defying the Party:

A critical group of at least eight Senate Democratic centrists has reached a deal with Senate GOP leaders and the White House to reopen the government in exchange for a future vote on extending enhanced Affordable Care subsidies, according to two people familiar with the discussions — even as the rest of their party has openly pilloried the deal.
***
At least eight Senate Democrats have agreed to vote for the deal, which was brokered Sunday night between three former governors — Sens. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Angus King of Maine and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire — along with Senate Majority Leader John Thune and the White House.

One of those Democrats is Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who represents thousands of federal workers in the state and who said he supports the GOP’s promise for a future vote on the subsidies.

The more radical Democrat politicians seem outraged, and the Bluesky contingent likewise. Many of the former may be angry only because the GOP didn’t make more concessions; most of the latter probably thought the Democrats could and should hold out forever, or until the revolution.

Only the lonely

The New Neo Posted on by

The guy who made this video, Chris, has a channel in which he goes around spotting people who look interesting to him, and he talks to them and offers to take their photos. Here’s one:

And now for some music on the theme:

The Bee Gees wrote so many songs about loneliness that it’s hard to pick just one. But here’s my choice from their early years:

And I’ll close with this:

James Watson of double helix fame dies at 97

The New Neo Posted on by

I must admit that my first reaction on reading the news of the death of one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, James Watson, was to think in wonder: he was still alive? It was so very long ago that I first heard of him, and back then I was a child and he was quite the celebrity and brash young man. I later read his book The Double Helix when it came out in 1968, and the impression its somewhat gossipy pages gave was of a brilliant young man in a great hurry, who considered the pursuit of scientific discovery a competitive race. The book certainly wasn’t your typical dry work of science, and it ruffled a lot of feathers, including that of his older partner in the discovery, Francis Crick:

Crick himself immediately understood the significance of his and Watson’s discovery. As Watson recalled, after their conceptual breakthrough on February 28, 1953, Crick declared to the assembled lunch patrons at The Eagle that they had “found the secret of life.” Crick himself had no memory of such an announcement, but did recall telling his wife that evening “that we seemed to have made a big discovery.” He revealed that “years later she told me that she hadn’t believed a word of it.” As he recounted her words, “You were always coming home and saying things like that, so naturally I thought nothing of it.”

… Crick was incensed at Watson’s depiction of their collaboration in The Double Helix (1968), castigating the book as a betrayal of their friendship, an intrusion into his privacy, and a distortion of his motives. He waged an unsuccessful campaign to prevent its publication. He eventually became reconciled to Watson’s bestseller, concluding that if it presented an unfavorable portrait of a scientist, it was of Watson, not of himself.

Watson was a man of his times, too, as this article describes, making statements that were later criticized as racist and sexist. There was also the controversy about whether he and his colleague Crick gave enough credit to the work of Rosalind Franklin on which they built their theory. Long ago I read quite a bit about that, too, and I think this quote from the article is a pretty fair description:

The breakthrough did not come until 1953, when Watson visited Wilkins at King’s College in London, and Wilkins showed him a new x-ray crystallography image of DNA. The image was made by PhD student Raymond Gosling, who was working for Rosalind Franklin, a gifted chemist and crystallographer who also worked at the college. Watson was dazzled.

“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” Watson wrote in his 1968 book, The Double Helix. “The pattern was unbelievably simpler than those obtained previously. Moreover, the black cross of reflections which dominated the picture could only arise from a helical structure.”

Critics have argued that Watson, Crick and Wilkins effectively stole Franklin’s work, especially since they later also came into possession of some of the data she had derived by analyzing the image. They did not — but nor did they cover themselves in glory.

Gosling, who had been working for Franklin when he created the picture, was now working for Wilkins, who thus had legitimate access to his work. What’s more, Franklin’s data was not confidential, but rather was readily available and had been passed to Watson and Crick by other researchers who knew that they were exploring the structure of DNA. Informal protocol did call for Watson, Crick and Wilkins to tell Franklin that they were working with her material and to seek her approval, which they did not do; that was a breach of professional courtesy, however, not scientific ethics. Most important, Franklin’s data was raw; it required far more work and far more independent analysis before it could reveal the double helix. Watson, Crick and Wilkins did that work — and they did it well.

Unfortunately, Franklin died of cancer before the others won the 1962 Nobel prize for their 1953 discovery, and at the time of the award she was therefore ineligible to share it. Also, the personal portrait Watson painted of her in his book was unflattering, and people who knew her said it was deeply untrue.

Watson and Crick (I think of them together always, because that’s the way I first learned about them) made a discovery with extremely far-reaching consequences. Later research based on their work told us so much about the human genome, as well as that of other living things, and the knowledge has been used not only in medicine but in forensics, in anthropology, in botany, in evolution, in paleontology, in genealogy, and in history. And I’ve probably left a few things out.

RIP.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) A jury decided that throwing a sandwich at a public official doesn’t put him “in fear of bodily harm”:

The jury deliberated for several hours over Wednesday and this afternoon before finding Dunn, a former Justice Department paralegal, not guilty of misdemeanor assault on a federal law enforcement [ICE] officer. The verdict is another high-profile embarrassment for federal prosecutors in the District of Columbia, who have repeatedly failed to win convictions or even indictments against residents accused of obstructing or assaulting federal officers deployed as part of the Trump administration’s occupation of D.C. …

In a statement to Reason, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said, “As always, we accept a jury’s verdict; that is the system within which we function. However, law enforcement should never be subjected to assault, no matter how ‘minor’. Even children know when they are angry, they are not allowed to throw objects at one another.”

True. The principle is that initially the person on the receiving end has no idea what the object is, and it could be dangerous. There also is no question in my mind that had the political party of the sandwich-hurler been the GOP, and the officer a member of the Capitol Police, the defendant would have been convicted. Here the charge was misdemeanor assault, and I think it’s clear that’s exactly what this was.

(2) SCOTUS rules on SNAP payments and issues a stay on a lower court’s order to fully fund SNAP despite Congress’s inaction:

The U.S. Supreme Court has issued an administrative stay on Friday night, in response to the Trump administration’s emergency appeal on the SNAP funding case. …

“The core power of Congress is that of the purse, while the Executive is tasked with allocating limited resources across competing priorities,” the brief reads. “But here, the court below took the current shutdown as effective license to declare a federal bankruptcy and appoint itself the trustee, charged with picking winners and losers among those seeking some part of the limited pool of remaining federal funds.”

(3) CNN pundits pretend the GOP is making stuff up about Mamdani:

(4) The shutdown is resulting in flight cancellations. I have little doubt that regular Democrat voters will blame Republicans, although it’s the Democrats holding out.

(5) Here’s an article claiming links between the current strain of paleoconservative thought represented by Tucker Carlson, and the Ron Paul libertarians of the past.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Greetings from Idaho! I’m bored to tears at work so I decided to browse your website on my iphone during lunch break.

Who knew a spambot could get bored, much less to tears.

Then again, if you really think about the life of a bot, it must be very tedious – traveling the web, dropping the same message over and over and over, never or almost never getting a response. It’s the least I can do to spotlight one every now and then on this blog.

Is the shutdown coming to an end?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d heard for a while that the Democrats were planning to keep the shutdown going till Tuesday’s election, because they thought it would help them, and then after that some sort of compromise would be reached since the shutdown had served its purpose.

Word is that that may be happening. I don’t get the sense that the GOP is “caving,” although I’m sure some will disagree. I think there are concessions and both sides want to move on. The dispute wasn’t over much in the first place:

Senate Majority Leader John Thune told fellow Republicans in a private lunch that he plans to hold a vote Friday that could pave the way to end the government shutdown, according to two people in the room who were granted anonymity to describe his comments.

The plan, the people said, is to bring up the House-passed continuing resolution that Democrats have repeatedly rejected and then seek to amend it with a new expiration date very likely in January as well as a negotiated package of three full-year spending bills.

While Thune believed the plan would win the support of enough Democrats to advance, Democratic senators emerged from their own private lunch determined to seek out a better deal, and they are expected to block the House CR again absent additional progress in negotiations, according to two other people granted anonymity to describe the deliberations.

In any case, Senate GOP leaders are preparing to keep lawmakers in Washington to try and force a resolution to the record-breaking shutdown. Asked if the chamber will be in through the weekend, Majority Whip John Barrasso said “yes.”

Your guess is as good as mine. Hey, maybe even better.

NOTE: More verbiage here, but not much more news.

Pelosi announces she won’t be running for re-election

The New Neo Posted on by

A long overdue retirement is coming up.

However, apparently California State Senator Scott Weiner is attempting to replace her. He’s one of the worst of the leftist politicians around and has done plenty of harm on the state level; you can read about it here. I’ve been following his career for a while, including reading a recent NY Times Magazine article described here:

The New York Times Magazine’s recent exposé, “Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street?” offers a harrowing glimpse into a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in plain sight on the streets of Los Angeles. Reporter Emily Baumgaertner Nunn paints a vivid picture: Girls as young as eleven pace at 68th and Figueroa alongside “preteens hobbling in stilettos and G-strings.” LAPD officer Elizabeth Armendariz watches nearby, overwhelmed and under-resourced. Despite authorization for six investigators, Armendariz is the sole member of the 77th Street Division vice unit department. She is helpless to rescue the dozens of barely adolescent girls trapped in a nightmare of exploitation.

The Times deserves credit for shining a light on this crisis, and for pointing out how California laws like SB 357 have handicapped police efforts to rescue minors and transformed Figueroa Street into what one police chief called an “open sex market, 24 hours a day, 365 days out of the year.” Yet the reporter failed to mention SB 357’s author, Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who is now running to replace Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, nor the man who signed the law, Governor Gavin Newsom, who is now officially eyeing the presidency. Why?

The question is rhetorical. They are being protected because they are leftist Democrats.

The law in question was framed this way when it was passed:

Yet SB 357 represents the bitter fruit of a worldview that prioritizes abstract notions of “decriminalization” and “anti-profiling” over the concrete reality of children being bought and sold on our streets. The bill’s supporters cloaked their arguments in the language of compassion and criminal justice reform, claiming the loitering law disproportionately targeted marginalized black and brown women. What they failed to acknowledge (or deliberately ignored) is that the most marginalized among us are the children trapped in trafficking.

The bill’s opponents predicted the trafficked children would suffer, and that’s what has happened.

But that bill is hardly Weiner’s only destructive legislative effort related to sexual issues:

In 2017, Wiener … co-authored Senate Bill 239, which lowered the penalty of exposing someone to HIV without their knowledge and consent from a felony to a misdemeanor. Wiener said that the laws had unfairly singled out HIV-positive people. The bill passed and was signed by Governor Jerry Brown on October 6, 2017. …

Wiener authored Senate Bill 219 in 2017, which strengthened protections against “discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or HIV status” for LGBT seniors living in long-term care facilities. The bill was opposed by groups who argued that the bill criminalized bathroom gender designations and would force care providers to address those under their care with gender-appropriate language. Wiener called these arguments “transphobic” and “absurd”.[72] The naming provision of the law was overturned on July 16, 2021, after the Third District Court of Appeals ruled that the law violated employees’ free speech rights. …

In 2019 and 2020, Wiener attempted to pass Senate Bill 201, a bill that would have restricted physicians’ and parents’ ability to decide to perform reconstructive genital surgery on intersex infants, and would instead require the impacted child be old enough to decide to undergo surgery. The bill was opposed by the California Medical Association and other medical groups who said they would not be able to apply medical expertise, which would threaten patient safety. The bill died in committee. Wiener re-introduced the bill a second time in January 2021, this time as Senate Bill 225.

Wiener introduced Senate Bill 145 on January 18, 2019. The bill proposed to remove the requirement to place someone convicted of non-forcible oral or anal sex with a minor over the age of 14 (provided the convicted is less than 10 years older) on the sex offender registry, instead leaving this to the judge’s discretion, as was the case for vaginal sex. He argued that existing law was discriminatory towards LGBT couples where the partners were just above and below the age of legal consent. Wiener received online harassment and death threats from those who claimed the bill protected pedophiles. The bill was signed into law by Gavin Newsom in September 2020.

In 2021, Wiener authored SB 107, a “trans refuge bill” to protect transgender children seeking gender affirming care in California and their families from civil and criminal punishment under other states’ laws. The law would restrict the enforcement of out-of-state laws and policies that penalize gender affirming care in subpoenas and arrest warrants, and in parental custody cases. SB 107 became law in 2022.

So, he could be the representative to replace Pelosi. In that part of the world, winning the Democratic primary is ordinarily the key to winning the seat.

Then again, maybe Pelosi will keep it in the family – there’s speculation that her daughter might run, although her daughter hasn’t declared her intent.

Kevin Roberts: I’m just a script-reader, so don’t blame me

The New Neo Posted on by

How did Kevin Roberts get to be the head of the Heritage Foundation in the first place? Is it an example of the Peter Principle?

He now seems to be saying some version of gee, don’t blame me for my boneheaded comments; I didn’t do my own research, I didn’t compose them, and I was just told by an aide to read them.

You think I’m exaggerating what he said? You be the judge [emphasis mine]:

“I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full Stop,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told the staff of the conservative think tank on Wednesday …

Roberts said he was willing to resign but felt a “moral obligation” to repair the situation and had told the organization’s board of directors: “I made the mess, let me clean it up.” …

While Roberts stated unequivocally in his original video that the Heritage Foundation would never cancel “our friends,” he said Wednesday he should have made clear there was a “limiting principle.”

“You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone … while also being clear you’re not endorsing everything they’ve said, you’re not endorsing softball interviews, you’re not endorsing putting people on shows, and I should’ve made that clear.”

One limiting principle would be to research the issue before issuing statements on behalf of the organization. Admitting that he still “didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy,” Roberts explained that he simply trusted his now-former chief of staff to do his thinking for him. “This is an explanation, not an excuse,” Roberts told Heritage staff:

Roberts said his former chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, who has since resigned, wrote the script for the video and deceived him into believing colleagues had approved the message. “Our former chief of staff had the pen,” he said. “When the script was presented to me … I understood from our former colleague that it was approved, it was signed off on by the handful of colleagues who are part of that. Still my fault, I should have had the wisdom to say, ‘Time out, let’s double check this.’”

The other day, after watching Roberts being interviewed by Dana Loesch, I wrote this:

I watched the Loesch interview with Roberts last night. I found him extremely unimpressive; she was quite good. He kept going on and on with his strawman about not “canceling” Fuentes or Carlson. Meanwhile, he ignored the fact that the real objection was that Carlson gave Fuentes only a little pushback and the interview mainly functioned to legitimize the vile Fuentes rather than challenge him. …

In the interview with Loesch I got the distinct impression that Roberts had not watched the Carlson interview before he gave that pro-Carlson statement. He looked utterly stunned when Loesch mentioned what Carlson had said about detesting Christian Zionists more than he detests anyone on earth.

And now I’m convinced that not only had Roberts not watched Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, but he probably hasn’t watched any of Carlson’s “the Jews are purposely killing Christians!” interviews, or his “Hitler was an okay guy and Churchill was the villain” interview, or paid much attention to anything his good buddy Carlson has been doing for the last couple of years.

What does Roberts pay attention to?

Kansas checks its voter registrations, and finds something curious

The New Neo Posted on by

The mayor of a small town is not a citizen:

The mayor of a small south-central Kansas town has been charged with committing fraud by voting in elections since 2022 even though he is not a United States citizen, the state’s attorney general and secretary of state said Wednesday.

Attorney General Kris Kobach said Joe Ceballos, who garnered nearly 83% of the vote Tuesday for a second term as Coldwater mayor, was charged with three counts of voting without being qualified and three counts of election perjury. Both are felony offenses. …

During a news conference in Topeka, Kobach and Secretary of State Scott Schwab said the state is actively pursuing cases like this by using the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, which can be queried by states to determine a voter’s U.S. citizenship status.

According to The Center Square, 26 states are using the database to verify voter registration information. Schwab confirmed Kansas has begun using the SAVE database to check voter registrations, but also said the case against Ceballos was not compiled using the database. …

Kobach said he expects there will be hundreds of people on the voter rolls who are not legally eligible to vote. Although that may be a small number compared to the 2 million registered to vote in Kansas, it matters, he said.

Indeed it does. And I assume that Kansas has a lot of company in this and is hardly the worst offender. It’s taken an awfully long time to do effective checking, even in a red state like Kansas.