Raptorpat

Temperatures are supposed to upswing out of freezing, like 38 today and 50 tomorrow, just enough to get the remaining ice off my driveway. Then we get another storm over the weekend.

One (hopefully) last bump in the 2022 election narrative. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/nyregion/george-santos-ny-republicans.html George Santos (R), elected to an open swing seat on Long Island, is apparently just a massive fraud and none of his biography checks out. Neither the DCCC nor the local or national media picked up on this until now, despite this being the second time the guy's run for this seat. The million dollar question though is what will happen? Will he be forced out? He is a pro-McCarthy vote and McCarthy doesn't have enough votes for speaker yet, so my guess is McCarthy will protect Santos to guarantee his vote.

this is what you get for kissing toilets

lol I missed this follow-up

lol Twitter Support deleted the policy change tweet because it blew up so hard

Don't they get fired every episode?

LOLOLOLOLOL

The mastodon social account was also banned, and apparently direct links to it are also banned.

On ASMB, your ability to delete a post was tethered to whether it was anchored by a direct reply, but the IPB software doesn't categorize posts that way. Because the software doesn't distinguish that, or between posts and threads generally, if an OP deleted their OP it would delete the entire thread. So it's turned off by default for everyone. Some (likely older) non-volunteer custom ranks have the ability to hide their posts, but that's best explained as a horribly tedious cleanup/conforming job that's as far down the list as possible.

stranger coincidences have happened Is Scott Kelly from Neurosis also an astronaut? And does he have an identical twin brother who is an astronaut too who is also a US Senator from Arizona?

Yeah, I've read that basically she checked off every box for Putin to illustrate the "excesses" of what he claims is the West's decline, so prosecuting her in particular sent the most potent message. I'ma try to find where I read that but it's probably been a month, because you literally just paraphrased it.

oh man this visualization is trippy

Nah it's pure electoral gamesmanship. No one's cutting her a check and saying "you must do this thing." I've seen a lot of commentary from people who knew her in AZ pre-Senate and they consistently said she was always personal ambition over everything else. She cozied up to pharma and whomever supports her quest to protect the status quo because she thought she needed to carve an ultra-moderate path to be successful and after two years of digging through bedrock in the wrong direction for nothing, she's calculating that her most realistic path to personal success is to just dam the river.

Also I bumped the Sinema talk to the 2024 thread because it's her election year and I'm tentatively pegging this as a purely electoral play. She's made no indication that she's leaving the conference as there's no benefit to immediately burning all those bridges, so her independent enrollment is more akin to Angus King or Bernie Sanders. (Though I expect her to be highly transactional if she is in a position to leverage her seat for partisan control, or maybe just seek to join the GOP conference if it wins a majority without her.)

This is 100% the answer. Her OG strategy was that she needed to be a John McCain maverick to win in a red state but Mark Kelly just proved that's not true, so now her backup strategy to remain in office is to outright hold the party hostage.

what a beauty

belated hoggle birthday

Kamala can now leave the Senate chamber and see sky again, but the Dems now have to worry about the Tester/Brown/Manchin trio of races in 2024 without even getting into the actual swing state races. There's a realistic possibility of the Democrats holding the White House, flipping the House, but losing the Senate. But any discussion on that is better fit for the 2024 thread.

Does anyone know whether the gov preserved the right to argue against standing? I don't actually know where that all ended up, but that's where they should focus to preempt an argument on the merits.