The Daily Parker

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has lost his seventh bid for Speaker—nope, eighth—while Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has amassed more cumulative votes for the office than anyone except Sam Rayburn. Things in the House have become surreal, even without a bad lip reading for levity. As Tom Nichols puts it,

What all of these GOP members do seem to have in common is a shared belief that they should be in Congress in order to make other people miserable. Usually, those “other people” are Democrats and various people on the generic right-wing enemies list, but lately, the targets include the few remaining Republicans who think their job in Washington is to legislate and pass bills and other boring twaddle that has nothing to do with keeping the hometown folks in a lather, getting on television, and getting reelected.

And yet, the XPOTUS remains absent from the proceedings, with both sides of the Republican Party basically ignoring him. His "wishes, feelings, threats, anger and really anything else about him are just completely absent from this entire drama. In a way that is the biggest story here."

Meanwhile, back in the real world:

• NPR explains how the 1923 Speaker election went.
• James Fallows dissects the "prose poetry" of Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy's New Years Eve address.
• Timothy Noah examines the evidence and concludes that the January 6th insurrection was the XPOTUS's "most successful business venture in 40 years."
• An Illinois judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Illinois Automobile Dealers Cartel Association against electric car manufacturer Rivian, clearing the way for direct-to-consumer car sales in the state.

Finally, the most recent defense authorization bill the outgoing Congress passed last week included a provision promoting Ulysses S Grant to General of the Armies. Only George Washington and John J Pershing have held that rank (O-11).

Six times in the last two days, the House has tried to elect a Speaker. In each attempt, no fewer than 19 right-wing crazies refused to vote for Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), meaning that Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has gotten a plurality of the vote every time. Naturally, they'll try again in a few hours. Naturally, they'll fail again soon after.

Make no mistake: the right-wing crazies have no problem with the richest country in the history of the world operating without a functioning legislature.

In a completely unrelated story, researchers discovered an ant colony trapped in an abandoned Soviet nuclear bunker in Poland that has no queen and no hope of escape:

The wood-ant ‘colony’ described here – although superficially looking like a functioning colony with workers teeming on the surface of the mound – is rather an example of survival of a large amount of workers trapped within a hostile environment in total darkness, with constantly low temperatures and no ample supply of food. The continued survival of the ‘colony’ through the years is dependent on new workers falling in through the ventilation pipe. The supplement of workers more than compensates for the mortality rate of workers such that through the years the bunker workforce has grown to the level of big, mature natural colonies.

Sounds so familiar, and yet...

The House will probably elect a Speaker before the end of March, so we probably won't set any records for majority-party dickery before the Congress even starts. (We might for what the 118th Congress does, though.) But with three ballots down and the guy who thought he'd get the job unable to get the last 19 votes he needs, it might take a few days.

Meanwhile:

• How does the House elect its Speaker, anyway?
• Whoever the Republicans elect, they have already made clear their intentions for the 118th to become the "most chaotic, do-nothingest Congress in modern history."
• Developers have proposed $1.2 billion in commercial-to-residential conversion projects in downtown Chicago to create 1,000 new residential units on LaSalle Street by 2028. (I worked in one of those buildings in 2015 and 2016.)
• Strong Towns correspondent Tiffany Owens compares how Santa Fe and Albuquerque, N.M., handled opposite ends of a regional passenger railway.
• NPR has some predictions about life in 2023 made back in 1923.

Finally, a ground crew worker at Montgomery Airport in Alabama fell into a running jet engine on Saturday; the NTSB is investigating. Yecch.

The Republicans in the House of Representatives made an own-goal just now as they failed to elect a House Speaker on the first ballot for the first time in over a century:

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California lost his first vote for speaker on Tuesday and was in a pitched battle for the top job in the House, amid a rebellion among hard-right lawmakers that left the post up for grabs and prompted a historic struggle on the floor at the dawn of the new Republican majority.

The Republican mutiny, waged by ultra conservative lawmakers who for weeks have held fast to their vow to oppose Mr. McCarthy, dealt a serious blow to the G.O.P. leader and laid bare deep divisions that threaten to make the party’s majority ungovernable. But it did not end the California Republican’s bid for speaker, which he has vowed to continue, forcing multiple votes if necessary until he wins the top post.

What was supposed to be a day of jubilation for Republicans instead devolved into a chaotic display of disunity within the party as it embarks on its first week in power in the House. And it all but guaranteed that even if Mr. McCarthy eked out a victory — an outcome that appeared remote, given the stalemate at hand — he would be a diminished speaker beholden to an empowered right flank.

With Democrats holding together behind their leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York won more votes than Mr. McCarthy did for speaker — 212 to 203 — a symbolic victory since Mr. Jeffries did not have the support to claim the top job, but an embarrassing metric for the California Republican who has been campaigning for the post for years.

Because the whole House votes for Speaker, the winner needs a majority of all representatives to win. With 435 seats, that means 218. So the Democrats' 212 occupied seats will not win unless 4 Republicans actually cross the aisle, which none of them will do.

And until the House has a Speaker, the House can't conduct any business. Which, as far as extremist Republicans care, works just fine.

Still, the Democratic candidate for House Speaker winning the plurality on the first ballot has to sting. It's a pity the right-wing arsonists in the GOP have no shame.

With tomorrow night having the earliest sunset of the year, it got dark at 4:20 pm—two hours ago. One loses time, you see. Especially with a demo tomorrow. So I'll just read these while devops pipelines run:

• Reversing their First Amendment argument from only 18 months ago, the Chicago Tribune editorial board finally agrees with most Chicagoans that the big sign facing down Wabash Street from the tower named after the XPOTUS has to go.
• After reporting on elections for 22 years, Josh Marshall finally realizes that watching election returns on TV harms one's health.
• Megan Stack takes a sympathetic view of Reality Winner, who leaked information about Russian interference in the 2016 election (and the XPOTUS's cover-up) and spent years in jail because of it.
• Tom Nichols laments that, loss or not, Herschel Walker represents the future of Republican candidates. David Von Drehle just calls Walker "a tragic figure."
• James Fallows breaks down what looks to me like journalistic malfeasance from Pro Publica.
• Twelve years ago, Salon ran a series of shorts on "how America will collapse (by 2025)" that don't seem far-fetched in 2022.
• One of Illinois' oldest movie theaters, the Pickwick in Park Ridge, will close at the end of January.
• In his third excerpt from his update to 2010's Walkable City, Jeff Speck points to the data showing that rideshare companies won't save your city.

Finally, John Seabrook takes a few pages to explain how to become a TikTok star. Hint: do it before you turn 22.

Clearly, I have to get my priorities in order. I've spent the afternoon in the zone with my real job, so I have neglected to real all of this:

• Lawyers who don't subscribe to the radical right-wing theory of constitutional originalism shouldn't argue it to the Supreme Court.
• If Republican US Senate candidate Herschel Walker really got into law school, I'll eat my own JD diploma.
• British architecture protects against cold, damp weather, but not the heat that global warming will bring to the island.
• I have no problem with Sam Bankman-Fried continuing to run his mouth (and his Twitter feed) because I like it when the Justice Department has an easy case.
• In the US, we need to bring back mixed-use developments.

Finally, because only one guy writes about half of the songs on top-40 radio, modulations have all but disappeared from popular songs.

It's 14°C right now, going down to -3°C tonight. Then it's back up to 8°C on Friday. Because why wouldn't the beginning of winter feel like April?

While you ponder that, read this:

• Tom Nichols warns that the authoritarian right may have lost the plot recently, but not for long.
• Patty Davis thinks that ignoring the XPOTUS will make him go away. That's cute.
• The Republicans have asked loser Blake Masters to explain why they lost.
• United Airlines and American Airlines have moved away from small regional jets to 737s and A320s, freeing up landing slots at O'Hare.
• Want to help the environment? Wash your clothes in cold water, and only when they're dirty.
• Jill Lepore wants me to read Mick Herron's spy novels. Good thing he was already on my list.
• A French historian worked with a cryptography team to crack the diplomatic code Charles V used in the 16th century.

Finally, Whisky Advocate has a good explainer taking the water of life from barrels in Scotland to the glass in your American kitchen.

I'm just finishing up a very large push to our dev/test environment, with 38 commits (including 2 commits fixing unrelated bugs) going back to last Tuesday. I do not like large pushes like this, because they tend to be exciting. So, to mitigate that, I'm running all 546 unit tests locally before the CI service does the same. This happens when you change the basic architecture of an entire feature set. (And I just marked 6 tests with "Ignore: broken by story X, to be rewritten in story Y." Not the best solution but story Y won't work if I don't push this code up.)

So while I'm waiting for all these unit tests to run, I've queued all this up:

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced today that she will step down from her party leadership role when the 118th Congress meets on January 3rd.
• This came on the heels of a loser Florida retiree trying to get his old job back. Tina Nguyen looks at who might challenge the loser retiree for the same job. One thing I know: this won't end well for the Republican Party.
• Maybe that's why 12 Republicans in the US Senate crossed party lines to vote on moving the Same-Sex Marriage bill forward?
• Aaron Gordon investigates why American transit projects cost so much more than any other country's (hint: they have stronger anti-corruption laws).
• And yet, Washington got a Metro line to Dulles after waiting only 60 years, just slightly longer than we in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood have waited for the inbound Metra platform to open.
• Speaking of corruption, Kelsey Piper got a phone call from Sam Bankman-Fried, the guy who made a couple billion in crypto go *poof* last week, so he could clear the air. On the record. With pending litigation. (Seriously, who's his dealer?)
• For no reason anyone can determine, certainly not the recent dismissal of half its workforce including the only engineers who know where the bolts go, Twitter has experienced some intermittent problems with its multifactor authentication setup. Even better, "a researcher contacted Information Security Media Group on condition of anonymity to reveal that texting 'STOP' to the Twitter verification service results in the service turning off SMS two-factor authentication." Oh my!
• Speaking of that dying company, Elon Musk has done his utmost to hasten the exodus of engineering talent by giving everyone until (checks watch) two hours from now to choose a lifetime of misery or a three-month severance. Because we software engineers do our best work for narcissists with whips. (There simply isn't enough popcorn in San Francisco for this shit show.)
• Sadly, Republican speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson has died at 58. I didn't agree with him much, but he remained one of the sane ones till the end.

Finally, one of Chicago's last vinyl record stores, Dave's in Lincoln Park, will close at the end of this month. The building's owner wants to tear it down, no doubt to build more condos, so Dave has decided to "go out in a blaze of glory."

All right...all my tests passed locally. Here we go...

I mean, why? Just why?

• The XPOTUS, as predicted, announced his run for the 2024 election, despite looking like a total loser in the 2022 election. But narcissists gonna narcise.
• The Illinois Worker Rights Amendment passed, and will now become part of the state constitution. I think this will have a bunch of unintended consequences not beneficial to workers, so I voted against it. We're stuck with it now.
• Boomer Kathleen Parker spends her column today tut-tutting Boomers for not understanding Millennial jobs, picking "influencer" as just one example. I'm an X-er who completely understands "influencer" (i.e., children monetizing their own narcissism) and "change manager" (i.e., operations flunky) just fine, and suggests that the problem lies not with the Boomer parents but with the Boomer executives. (Longer post, maybe?)
• Pushwoosh, a Russian software company that writes spyware has pretended to be an American company, for reasons left as an exercise to the reader. About 8,000 apps use their stuff. As Bruce Schneier has said, supply-chain security is "an insurmountably hard problem."
• Bloomberg laments that "the wrong Americans are buying electric cars."
• Julia Ioffe cautions that Ukraine's re-taking of Kherson could lead to dangerous overreach as the war goes on—and a difficult diplomatic situation for the US.

Finally, the Missouri Department of Transportation proudly announced the 50th anniversary of their engineers killing downtown Kansas City, and the Internet let them have it.

The Democratic Party got another governor yesterday when Katie Hobbs beat election-denier and former news anchor Kari Lake 51%-49%.

Someday this won't make any sense at all, but this was the perfect meme for Hobbs' win:

Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Lake also had a delicious spat on Twitter. Cheney's response gets a chef's kiss from The Daily Parker.

I recognize that links to Twitter will just be lint by this time next year, but for now, enjoy.