U.S. Politics January 2023: Kevin McCarthy's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Life

i keep thinking Gettr is some sort of hookup app

gettr done

xpost also, by the time the staffer felt bad, they'd probably already been contagious for days. so the likelihood that following the alleged protocol would have stopped transmission is iffy. esp w/ non-masking Porter.

Nassau County (NY) GOP just called for Santos to resign. I don't think they care about the ethics/lies, I just assume they smell smoke on this guy and don't want to be near him when he explodes.

it was kind of sad to watch him grow and gain confidence during his first days at school, during the speaker votes. at first he sat in the back row by himself. by the end he was sitting with boebert, gaetz, and greene and it was clear that he was being embraced by the troll army

The Nassau County Republican Committee has exactly no power over a sitting member of congress, though.

And because the House GOP needs every vote it can get, it has no incentive to remove Santos.

How did he get the money to run? He won't say, and no one else knows. It's not necessarily illegal to suddenly have money, unless someone can (a) figure out where it came from and (b) demonstrate to someone with actual enforcement powers that it was illegally obtained. A general atmosphere of privacy protections makes this difficult unless a literal or figurative smoking gun is found.

So my prediction is that he serves out his two stupid years doing precisely nothing of use, and retires into obscurity. Perhaps he can go into landscaping.

Should he resign, a special election would happen, yes?

...which would presumably be won by a Democrat. Hence the entire GOP machinery will work to prevent that happening. There is no incentive for Santos to resign, nor is there an incentive for House leadership to force him to. Indeed, quite the contrary - the incentives all run the other direction.

Remember these are the people who gave you "I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles, I want control of the Senate!"

Ronny Jackson is fundraising off this pic.twitter.com/sBetEvJLbG

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 11, 2023

it's a miracle we found out about lead when we did sheesh

"the fatcats in washington are trying to take OUR LEAD"

There it is.

Alabama’s attorney general has said women who use pills to induce abortion could be prosecuted, citing a law first passed to protect children from meth lab fumes. His warning comes after the federal government’s recent move to ease access to medication abortion from retail pharmacies.

While Alabama has a near-total abortion ban that took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, that legislation targets abortion providers and exempts the people receiving abortions from liability. However, Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office said women could still face consequences under the state’s “chemical endangerment of a child” statute.

“The Human Life Protection Act targets abortion providers, exempting women ‘upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted to be performed’ from liability under the law,” Marshall said in an emailed statement Wednesday. “It does not provide an across-the-board exemption from all criminal laws, including the chemical-endangerment law — which the Alabama Supreme Court has affirmed and reaffirmed protects unborn children.”

xp You'll pry my asbestos out of my cold, dead hands*

FREEDOM!

* = Literally

...which would presumably be won by a Democrat.

everyone keeps saying that. they have to run someone with a pulse, though.

robert zimmerman, the guy who got his ass kicked by santos in the election (embarrassing), must have been a supremely horrible candidate. i just learned that it was the first time that two openly LGBTQ candidates opposed each other in an election. zimmerman seemed to be an empty DNC suit kind of candidate. even when the race was very close, the RNC took a look at zimmerman and decided they could safely spend elsewhere and still win the district:

Late in the campaign, both parties realized the elections on Long Island would be close and could decide control of the House. A Democratic political action committee spent $3 million in the 3rd District race to support Zimmerman. On the Republican side, the Congressional Leadership Fund spent nothing, while at the same time committing $1.5 million to the neighboring 2nd and 4th district races, also ultimately won by Republican candidates.[40]

It takes about three times as much energy to produce and deliver electricity to an electric range as a gas range. There's data on this *everywhere*. The major thing would be forcing people to buy induction-based ranges, which legitimately utilize less energy than gas ranges. Otherwise the whole thing just seems like...yes, government overreach.

(I prefer electric for baking, but gas is FAR superior for stovetop cooking, it's not even a question afaic)

I love our induction stove. It is very efficient--water boils in a couple of minutes.

it's less about energy usage and more about indoor air pollution, right?

I love gas cooking, but apparently the amount of particulate air pollution it puts into your home is horrifying.

xp oops

yes this is about emissions from the range. also this is about not allowing gas in new construction going forward, not taking it away from anywhere it currently is (I have a gas range that we just bought a year ago, in Berkeley, which outlawed gas some time ago).

I love our gas range but I also recognize the indoor air pollution issues. Whenever we move from this house, I doubt we'd take the gas stove with us.

Anything to feed the perpetual outrage machine.

What did you just say about the outrage machine?! SAY IT TO MY FACE

remember Trump's riffing on low-flow shower heads? this is the same thing

Ten-flush toilets

Energy efficient light bulbs

I am not wishing pollution on anyone, especially children, but cooking on an electric range is awful.

eh fuck, many xposts

It takes about three times as much energy to produce and deliver electricity to an electric range as a gas range. There's data on this *everywhere*.

i really, really don't want to get into this shit, but it's more complicated than that with stovetops and ovens. yes, you can google it and you will find data everywhere saying that gas ranges are 3 times as efficient as electric. but that's referring only to the source energy, which is only one part of the equation (and also depends on your utility's fuel mix). with oven ranges, you also have to consider the cooking efficiency - how efficiently the heat is transferred from the source to what is being cooked. electric ranges are far more efficient in this regard. there is also a difference when considering stovetop cooking vs inside the oven. in both cases, the cooking efficiency is better with electric. and both options are less efficient than induction.

a big factor is also what kind of source fuels your electric utility uses. that's a big reason why a blanket statement that gas is 3x more efficient than electric is misleading. it depends on where you live, and it also depends on how frequently you use the stove.

when you're using the oven, the most important energy decision you can make, by far, is what you're cooking on it - meat or veggies.

i'm not even going to get into the methane and NOx leakage and asthma stuff.

so, i'm just trying to point out that there are actually a lot of tradeoffs and that it's not simple at all. i guess it is simple, if you can afford to get an induction stove.

https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/efficient-cooking
https://grist.org/buildings/your-gas-stove-is-warming-the-climate-even-when-its-turned-off/
https://www.vox.com/2022/1/27/22902490/gas-stoves-methane-climate-pollution-health-off

a big factor is also what kind of source fuels your electric utility uses. that's a big reason why a blanket statement that gas is 3x more efficient than electric is misleading. it depends on where you live, and it also depends on how frequently you use the stove.

yeah I thought this was the idea behind phasing these out. theoretically you could switch an electric grid to renewable energy sources (everything is electric where I live because of heavy investment in hydro power), but you can't use anything other than gas for gas

also I've used both, and the idea that electric ranges are somehow *vastly* inferior to gas is silly—have the people saying this never used a newer one? not the old coil ones (those really are shit), the flat ones that are also easier to clean than gas ranges. granted, they're slower to heat things, but you can adjust I promise

I finally got an electic kettle, racked with guilt for using natural gas to boil water

I got my mom an induction cooktop, awkward for anything where you have to shake a pan or pick it up to flip but she got used to it pretty quick. Aside from speed, not wasting any heat is pretty nice in the summer.

Whenever we move from this house, I doubt we'd take the gas stove with us.

who takes the stove with them when they sell a house anyway?

the people who sold me my house

Republicans know their most natural constituency is old people who hate change.

a new challenger has entered the arena

Rep. Barbara Lee has told her fellow lawmakers she’s running for Senate in California, according to two sources familiar with the situation.

She informed her colleagues in a closed-door Congressional Black Caucus meeting on Wednesday.

Asked later Wednesday about her plans, Lee said in a brief interview she’d officially announce “when it’s appropriate.”

as opposed to the leak

would suck to lose my representative but would be happy to see her in the senate.

That Ted Cruz hard seltzer-throwing incident just took an even more embarrassing turn

https://www.queerty.com/ted-cruz-hard-seltzer-throwing-incident-just-took-even-embarrassing-turn-20230110

Omg this is George Santos’s résumé. Insanity. Just pure lies and not even believable ones. pic.twitter.com/gffXl9twW9

— Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) January 11, 2023

KM, i frankly don’t give a fuck— cooking on an electric stove sucks ass, as a majority of cooks will tell you, and all of those articles are part of a continuous effort to shift the blame of industrial pollution and climate change onto normal people who don’t and can’t actually have much effect on these things.

Electric range is good if you are in a dorm freshman year and need a hotplate. After that, fuck no.

"if you have to cook on electric, you might as well go out to eat" - quote from a bougie kitchen magazine 20 years ago, still true

and yes, hard agree that personal choices are not the problem here, at all, ever

Electric is fine, you just can't crank it to high and expect to cut heat immediately so you have to plan ahead (except for induction, where you can control heat much finer than gas).

I've never lived anywhere with a useful vent-a-hood so high heat cooking is pretty much irrelevant anyway. When I had a gas stove I bought a plug-in induction burner that I used 99% of the time anyway.

Well, this thread took a turn.

I have an electric range. I live in an building about 45 years old.

As for indoor air pollution, I can understand concerns about it for some individuals and families, but frankly I just think that the pervasive desire to get rid of every harmful thing in our environments has led to anxiety, fear, and a culture of paranoia. For most people, a gas stove isn’t going to kill them. Shit, these boomers keep staying alive and they grew up in a world where everyone smoked indoors, constantly!

I’ve got a very “cold dead hands” attitude towards gas stoves myself

i have a gas stove and it’s good but gas ovens are terrible ime. they only have a bottom element ime wtf (to get heat from above you have to use “the broiler” drawer?!)

but like, i would be fine with switching to an electric stove. i’ve cooked on them before. like…. whatever. and if you’re really concerned with getting your pan immediately hot (do you work in a restaurant?) get a carbon steel pan or gtfo, that heavy tefal aluminum with a dementia-tastic coating takes twice as long to heat up

these boomers keep staying alive

To swerve again:

interesting and scary article about Montana, seems like a blueprint that is happening in a lot of places. This shouldn’t be paywalled, gift article so to speak:

”If you want to live here, be a Christian “

Quite possibly the cigarette smoking indoors led them to vote for Reagan, Bush, Trump, etc.