#Senate intelligence committee

[davidaugust]

[auroraluciferi]

4/19/2023 Senate hearing on UFO’s and UAP’s

This is the second congressional hearing in 50 years on this subject that follows testimony from intelligence and military officials in May of 2022, the transcript of which can be found here

[cherryblossomshadow]

#IM STILL MAD ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR #I WILL BE MAD FOREVER ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR #god knows what you kids are being taught in what remains of our schools #but it was an atrocity #start to finish (tags courtesy of @roach-works)

Nothing. I was in 4th grade when obama got elected, and our “current events” textbook hadn’t been updated to include information past the turn of the millennium. we talked a bit about Arab Springs, but literally everything I learned about the Bush Administration I learned from tumblr. and I went to a californian school system that talked about colonization and slavery and why they were bad (comment courtesy of @magic-gps)

.

He was Secretary of Defense for President George HW Bush, which also included what later became the Department of Homeland Defense. Gulf War I was a taste, just enough to get their beaks wet. (comment courtesy of @montereyjackrubytuesdayweld)

.

Hey, don't sleep on the time he shot a guy In. The. Face. And the guy had a press conference to apologise to Dick The-Guy-Who-Shot-Him-In-The-Face Cheney I mean it doesn't compare to all the torture and war crimes and gestures at mountain of stone but let us not forget that the guy was evil and scary enough that a dude got shot in the face, had a heart attack because of a pellet too close to his heart, and 6 days later felt compelled to PUBLICLY apologise to the man behind the trigger for causing HIM discomfort by getting shot by him. (comment courtesy of @arwynnywra)

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Yes, Trump is too much even for Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney was a refined kind of evil, that shoot you in the face and make you apologize for it kind of evil…not this crass gold toilet moronic hate-savant evil. (comment courtesy of @shantismurf)

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Not to excuse Cheney or anything, but my take on him is that his evilness and cruelty has always tried to have a point or purpose. Usually imperialist or profit or other perceived benefit, but there was a point, and a chain of logic that you could comprehend. The cruelty and lack of ethics wasn't the sole purpose, but a byproduct. Even Gitmo had the excuse of "wanting intelligence".

So I think it's probably more accurate to say that Trump is too stupid of a politician for Cheney to work with, because Trump's actions often don't have a point beyond cruelty for its own sake. Not profit for the oil companies, not reconstruction money diverted into private accounts, not imperialist control of foreign regions for American nationalist interests...

Indeed, the majority of his actions that do make sense only make sense in the viewpoint of "Putin is Trump's idol and puppetmaster", and to a man like Cheney, who views the USA as the sole rightful superpower in the world, there is no greater evil than selling out the US to Putin.

But yeah, it certainly says a lot that a man who viewed "enhanced interrogation techniques" as acceptable, even desirable, has looked at Trump and gone, "You are too evil for me to work with." (comment courtesy of @the-library-alcove)

Quotes:

When a small terrorist cell headed by a saudi arabian royal based out of afghanistan smashed two planes into new york, we somehow ended up invading Iraq for uhhhhhhh *checks notes* an entire generation.

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8 trillion dollars of american taxpayer money … was paid to dick and his pals to slaughter a generation of middle easterners whose only crime was being born in the gap between valuable resources and evil men.

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it's probably more accurate to say that Trump is too stupid of a politician for Cheney to work with

I can't get over the fact that Dick fucking Cheney said, basically, that Trump is too evil of a dude for him to get behind.

That's like... fuck, idk... that's like Dick Cheney saying a politician is too fucking evil for him to work with. The dude who famously shot a dude in the face and the dude apologized to him. That fucking guy.

[xtruss]

More Than 10 Years Later, The Senate Torture Report Is Still Secret

I Filed A Lawsuit To Obtain The 6,700-Page Report with “Excruciating Detail” About The CIA’s Abuses.

— Shawn Musgrave | June 27 2024

The Control Tower is seen through the razor wire inside the Camp VI Detention Facility in Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, in 2019. AP

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence submitted its 6,700-page “torture report” about the CIA to the White House in April 2014. More than 10 years later, the full report remains secret after a federal appellate court dismissed a lawsuit I filed in the hopes of forcing its release.

The document “includes comprehensive and excruciating detail” about the CIA’s “program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques,” the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chaired the Senate intelligence committee at the time, wrote in a 2014 summary.

For years, there have been calls to release the full report, including from human rights watchdogs, one of its authors, and even Feinstein and some high-ranking Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee.

“The full report details how the CIA lied to the public, the Congress, the president, and to itself about the information produced by the torture program,” said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has fought to obtain CIA records. “We need to know our real history so we don’t repeat its crimes.”

So far, efforts to obtain the torture report using the federal Freedom of Information Act have been unsuccessful. In late 2016, despite the CIA director’s objections, former President Barack Obama placed a copy in his presidential papers. But that copy is not subject to FOIA until 2029 — 12 years after Obama left office.

The CIA and a handful of federal agencies also have copies of the torture report, although the Trump administration returned several of these to the Senate intelligence committee vaults in 2017.

The Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations all fought strenuously against FOIA requests for these agencies’ copies. In 2017, the Supreme Court declined to consider a challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union. A law professor’s attempt to obtain the report under FOIA is currently pending before the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, following oral argument last fall.

In 2021, my lawyer, Kel McClanahan of National Security Counselors, tried a different tack. We sued the Senate intelligence committee itself and its current chair, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., for a copy of the full torture report.

FOIA explicitly does not apply to Congress. Instead, McClanahan argued that the public is entitled to the committee’s copy of the torture report under the common law right of access, a doctrine that is well developed when it comes to court records but less so regarding the records of Congress.

“It is high time that this critical piece of American history is made public,” McClanahan said.

The district court rejected this argument in 2022, ruling that it had no jurisdiction to order the committee to disclose the report because of the U.S. Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which protects members of Congress from being sued for legislative activities. Last week, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling.

“In sum, we conclude that the report is a legislative document, and that the Speech or Debate Clause therefore protects it from compelled disclosure,” wrote Judge Cornelia Pillard for the unanimous panel.

If courts continue declining to wade into the matter, Congress could also take steps to make the torture report available before 2029. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who still sits on the intelligence committee, has previously called for it to be declassified.

“I’m not holding my breath,” Blanton said.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found. Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence. The test involved testing generative AI models before selecting one to ingest five submissions from a parliamentary inquiry into audit and consultancy firms. The most promising model, Meta’s open source model Llama2-70B, was prompted to summarise the submissions with a focus on ASIC mentions, recommendations, references to more regulation, and to include the page references and context. Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts. Then, a group of reviewers blindly assessed the summaries produced by both humans and AI for coherency, length, ASIC references, regulation references and for identifying recommendations. They were unaware that this exercise involved AI at all. These reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.  Human summaries ran up the score by significantly outperforming on identifying references to ASIC documents in the long document, a type of task that the report notes is a “notoriously hard task” for this type of AI. But humans still beat the technology across the board. Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information. Three of the five reviewers said they guessed that they were reviewing AI content. The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicated the message better and more concisely. 

3 September 2024

[truth4ourfreedom]

THINGS NOT IN THE NEWS ANYMORE. VERSION 6.0

Things not in the news anymore….

(Version 6)

-Maui wildfires. -East Palestine, Ohio -Joe Biden classified documents as a Senator. -Fauci working with China to create a bioweapon. -Pete Buttigieg’s best friend in prison for child porn. -Cocaine in the White House. (TWICE NOW) -The BLM and Antifa riots during 2020 causing BILLIONS of dollars of damage. -The data collected from the Chinese spy balloons. -Ukraine intelligence documents released that showed they were suffering massive losses and the American taxpayer was being lied to. -Nancy Pelosi’s “documentary” film crew on J6. -Veterans being kicked out of shelters to make room for illegals. -Pizzagate “debunker” jailed for possession of child pornography. -Gay porn film in Senate hearing room. -Veterans Affairs prioritizing healthcare of illegals over Veterans. -THE SOUTHERN BORDER CRISIS. -Afghanistan drawdown and 13 service members killed in an attack on Kabul International Airport, that they hid the severity of it. -Obama droning an American citizen in the Middle East. -George Bush’s false WMDs. -3 service members killed in Jordan. -Hunter Biden making over $1M for “paintings”. -J6 political prisoners that are still in jail. -85,000 missing children at the southern border. -Epstein’s clients. -Obama coordinating with John Brennan and 4 other countries (5 eyes) to spy on the 2016 Trump campaign. -Mail-in ballots were the cause of the stolen 2020 election. -Jeffrey Epstein mentioning that Bill Clinton liked his girls “really young”. -The (NOW TWO) airline whistleblowers that mysteriously died. -Benghazi (I won’t mention anything more about this because I care about my life.) -Nancy Pelosi’s daughter stating that January 6th wasn’t an insurrection. -The January 6th committee destroying encrypted evidence before the GOP took over the House. -Nancy Pelosi admitting that J6 was “her responsibility”. -House Speaker Mike Johnson claiming there wouldn’t be foreign aid without border security in the bill, which was a lie. -The recent riots from illegal criminal aliens at the southern border and the border in general. -Hunter Biden not complying with a Congressional subpoena and deemed untouchable. Democrat privilege. -Vaccine side effects. -“Lab leak” out of China -The Secret Service having to basically guide Joe Biden everywhere he goes. -Who leaked (Sotomayor) the SCOTUS Alito decision. -Federal instigators inside the Capitol including pipe bomb evidence against them. -Obama’s chef “passing away”. -HRC’s chef “passing away”. -The Sheriff that happened to be in Las Vegas (during the mass shooting) AND the wildfires in Hawaii. -P Diddy sex-trafficking allegations. Where’s Diddy? -Gonzalo Lira (an American journalist) that was killed in Ukraine -Congress approving warrantless spying violating American’s 4th amendment rights while they are exempt. -Americans that were left in foreign countries (Haiti, Palestine, Afghanistan). -The billions of dollars of weaponry left in Afghanistan and the Taliban receiving $40M a week in “humanitarian assistance”. -Biolabs found in California. -Joe Biden’s impeachment. -The scum in the UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES waving the Ukrainian flag. -The over 300k ballot images that could not be found in Fulton County, Georgia; the same county Donald Trump on trial for “election interference”. -Democrats defunding the police causing massive rises in crime. -Kamala Harris’s record as DA in California. -The Transifesto from the school shooting. -Many U.S. Representatives and Congress receiving FTX funds. -They’re already working hard to bury Donald Trump’s àssassination attempt but we won’t let them bury that story. July 13th is never going away.

The distractions are out of control.

Share to show that legacy media is dead and that WE are the media now.

Please like,share and reblog to keep people aware!

[macybay947]

not that i expected anything different, but the senate intelligence committee's report on torture is truly horrific

[reality-detective]

Things that are not in the news anymore… 👇

-Maui wildfires.

-East Palestine, Ohio

-Joe Biden classified documents as a Senator.

-Fauci working with China to create a bioweapon.

-Pete Buttigieg’s best friend in prison for child porn.

-Cocaine in the White House. (TWICE NOW)

-The BLM and Antifa riots during 2020 causing BILLIONS of dollars of damage. And yes I brought this up on Juneteenth.

-The data collected from the Chinese spy balloons.

-Ukraine intelligence documents released that showed they were suffering massive losses and the American taxpayer was being lied to.

-Nancy Pelosi’s “documentary” film crew on J6.

-Veterans being kicked out of shelters to make room for illegals.

-Pizzagate “debunker” jailed for possession of child pornography.

-Gay porn film in Senate hearing room.

-Veterans Affairs prioritizing healthcare of illegals over Veterans.

-THE SOUTHERN BORDER CRISIS.

-Afghanistan drawdown and 13 service members killed in an attack on Kabul International Airport, that they hid the severity of it.

-Obama droning an American citizen in the Middle East.

-George Bush’s false WMDs.

-3 service members killed in Jordan.

-Hunter Biden making over $1M for “paintings”.

-J6 political prisoners that are still in jail.

-85,000 missing children at the southern border.

-Epstein’s clients.

-Obama coordinating with John Brennan and 4 other countries (5 eyes) to spy on the 2016 Trump campaign.

-Mail-in ballots were the cause of the stolen 2020 election.

-Jeffrey Epstein mentioning that Bill Clinton liked his girls “really young”.

-The (NOW TWO) airline whistleblowers that mysteriously died.

-Benghazi (I won’t mention anything more about this because I care about my life.)

-Nancy Pelosi’s daughter stating that January 6th wasn’t an insurrection.

-The January 6th committee destroying encrypted evidence before the GOP took over the House.

-Nancy Pelosi admitting that J6 was “her responsibility”.

-House Speaker Mike Johnson claiming there wouldn’t be foreign aid without border security in the bill, which was a lie.

-The recent riots from illegal criminal aliens at the southern border and the border in general.

-Hunter Biden not complying with a Congressional subpoena and deemed untouchable. Democrat privilege.

-Vaccine side effects.

-“Lab leak” out of China.

-The Secret Service having to basically guide Joe Biden everywhere he goes.

-Who leaked (Sotomayor) the SCOTUS Alito decision.

-Federal instigators inside the Capitol including pipe bomb evidence against them.

-Obama’s chef “passing away”.

-HRC’s chef “passing away”.

-The Sheriff that happened to be in Las Vegas (during the mass shooting) AND the wildfires in Hawaii.

-P Diddy sex-trafficking allegations. Where’s Diddy?

-Gonzalo Lira (an American journalist) that was killed in Ukraine

-Congress approving warrantless spying violating American’s 4th amendment rights while they are exempt.

-Americans that were left in foreign countries (Haiti, Palestine, Afghanistan).

-The billions of dollars of weaponry left in Afghanistan and the Taliban receiving $40M a week in “humanitarian assistance”.

-Biolabs found in California.

-Joe Biden’s impeachment.

-The scum in the UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES waving the Ukrainian flag.

-The over 300k ballot images that could not be found in Fulton County, Georgia; the same county Donald Trump on trial for “election interference”.

-Democrats defunding the police causing massive rises in crime.

-Kamala Harris’s record as DA in California.

-The Transifesto from the school shooting.

-Many U.S. Representatives and Congress receiving FTX funds.

-They’re already working hard to bury Donald Trump’s àssassination attempt but we won’t let them bury that story. July 13th is never going away.

The distractions are out of control.

Share to show that legacy media is dead and that WE are the media now. 🤔

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jay Kuo at Think Big Picture:

For years, critics of Vladimir Putin have been warning that the Russians have taken over parts of the Republican Party. They raised the alarm as Republicans defended the Russian leader, parroted clear Kremlin talking points, and became mules for disinformation campaigns. In recent weeks, that criticism has shifted to include not just Republicans who have left the party, including former representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, but current GOP members. Recently, two powerful Republican chairs of the House Intelligence Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee warned openly about how Russian propaganda has seeped into their party and even made its way into speeches on the House floor. Other members are now even openly questioning whether some of their fellow officials have been compromised and are being extorted. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) suggested in a recent interview that the Russian spies may possess compromising tapes of some of his colleagues. It’s unclear where he’s getting his information or how accurate it is.

And then there’s this: According to a report by Politico, a number of European politicians were recently paid by Moscow to interfere in the upcoming EU elections by Russians pretending to be a “media” outlet called “Voice of Europe.” The Kremlin-backed operation used money to influence officials to take pro-Russian stances. Authorities have conducted some money seizures and launched an investigation into which members of the European Parliament may have accepted cash bribes. This in turn raises an important question for our own politics: Are the Russians doing the same with U.S. politicians, directly or indirectly? This piece walks through the three types of compromise—disinformation, extortion, and bribery—to give a sense of what we know and what we don’t really know, and, importantly, where we should be on our guard. As this summary will show, from the 2016 election till now, there’s enough Russian smoke now to assume there is a fire, one that compromises not only the integrity of our own system of elections, but the safety and security of the free world. Duped.

Over the past year, we have witnessed two distinct kinds of Russian propaganda in action. Both use our own elected officials and intelligence processes to amplify and even weaponize disinformation. The first kind originates online through Russian-backed internet channels. Information operatives begin spreading false rumors, for example about Ukraine, that then get repeated within right-wing silos before reaching willing purveyors of it within the halls of Congress. A chief culprit in Congress is Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Among the Russian-originated false narratives she has uplifted is the patently false claim that Ukraine is waging a war against Christianity while Russia is protecting it. On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Greene even claimed, without evidence, that Ukraine is “executing priests.”

Where would Greene have gotten this wild, concocted notion? We don’t have to look far. Russian talking points have included this gaslighting narrative for some time. The twist, of course, is that, according to the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, it is the Russian army that has been torturing and executing priests and other religious figures, including 30 Ukrainian clergy killed and 26 held captive by Russian forces. The Russians have also targeted Baptists, whom they see as U.S. propagandists, according to an in-depth Time magazine piece on the violence and death directed toward evangelicals. The Congressional propaganda mouthpieces for Russia aren’t limited to the U.S. House. Over in the Senate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance was also recently accused of spreading Kremlin-backed disinformation about Ukraine, this time over spurious allegations that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy siphoned U.S. aid to purchase himself two luxury yachts.

[...]

The accusation that Russians are presently extorting and blackmailing U.S. politicians into supporting Russia’s agenda has some broad appeal. It would help explain some mysteries, including why people like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) suddenly is no longer as supportive of Ukraine as before and constantly kisses the ring of Donald Trump these days—after presciently saying in 2016 that the GOP would destroy itself if it nominated him. 

The problem has been that these accusations aren’t supported by much evidence. That means that political extortion by the Russians is either not a very prevalent practice, or it’s so effective that no one dares expose it. Either way, we’re left without much to go on. The Russian word kompromat came into common parlance around the time that Buzzfeed published a salacious story about another intelligence report back in early 2017. In that instance, the author, a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, was concerned Russia had compromising data on the soon-to-be president, Donald Trump.

That report never wound up being substantiated, and its sources and funding came into question as well. But intelligence agencies are in general agreement that obtaining kompromat is standard practice by Russia, and someone like Trump could have been an easy mark considering the company that he kept (e.g. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell) and the projects he was involved with (e.g. the Miss Universe contest). Lately, the notion of kompromat emerged once again, this time not from Democratic-paid outfits but from within the GOP itself. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) is one of the more “colorful” characters within the GOP, primarily known lately for being one of the eight members who voted to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and even for getting into public jostling and shouting matches with McCarthy.

The Republican Party (or at least its pro-MAGA faction) is compromised by Russian kompromat.

[boymeetswerewolf]

Sterek Week '23 // Day 3, Worlds Collide / @sterekweek-2023

Rebel vs Empire / Star Wars AU Stiles Stilinski, a former Republic officer turned rebel, is secretly acting as a double agent for the Empire after the Imperial Security Bureau took his father hostage and forced him to turn on his rebel cell. His ISB handler is an agent who has close connections to Derek Hale, an Imperial senator who sits on the Intelligence Oversight Committee. Derek, who has become disillusioned with the Empire and is doing all he can to protect his planet from being crushed under the authoritarian heel of Imperial oppression, intercepts Stiles' message from his handler first, then decides what to send to the ISB that is the least damaging and won't blow either of their covers. In turn, he uses his position as a senator to feed bits of classified Imperial information via the handler to Stiles who passes it on to his rebel cell. When the ISB handler mysteriously disappears and the pair arrange to meet for the first time, things begin spiralling out of control very quickly. Their twisted symbiotic relationship is a dangerous dance during a time when Emperor Palpatine's hands are closing tighter and tighter around the throats of those who remain loyal to the idea of the old Republic. Gradually, as their worlds begin to collide, Stiles and Derek start to recognise that there's no one else left for them to trust but each other.

[todaysdocument]

Letter from Senator Edwin Johnson to Secretary of State Dean Acheson Urging the United States’ Recognition of the People's Republic of China

Record Group 59: General Records of the Department of StateSeries: Central Decimal FilesFile Unit: 893.01/10-249 to 11-649 [1/3]

United States Senate

Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce

October 26, 1949

Hon. Dean Acheson

Secretary of State

Washington, D. C.

My dear Secretary Acheson:

I have watched with great interest the developments in China and the sincere efforts of our State Department to react in an intelligent, realistic and constructive manner to that dynamic situation.

I have sincerely believed that the former policy of military and other support for the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai Shek has been in error since available evidence has demonstrated the completely corrupt and irresponsible character of that government.

It seems to me we must recognize that after centuries of cruel military and tyrannical oppression, the mass of Chinese people have lost hope and are now turning to a government which paints pretty pictures and might possibly give them needed social and economic change and the peace they want so badly.

It is reported to me that our missionaries whose experience in China is many generations old are unanimously of the opinion that the new government in China should be promptly recognized. It is their experience that this government might possibly cooperate in a forthright manner and might possibly create conditions which will mean progress in their work.

I am informed by various shipping lines, cotton exporters, and other American businessmen who have transacted business in China for 40 years that the new government is eager to conduct normal trade with American businessmen. More than this, these businessmen are fearful that a continued policy of non-recognition may lose to us the Chinese market for many years. Since the British Government and British businessmen plan to make this market the exclusive province of British shipping, it seems desirable that our State Department should promptly take those steps which would protect the interests of American business in China. [complete transcript at link]

[morganbritton132]

The CIA babysitter post is perfection and I am absolutely tickled at the idea of Senator Erica getting to sit on the Intelligence Committee. Her just staring down the director of the CIA like “you know what I know you wanna try again?” while somewhere in the distance Steve whoops like it’s an NBA championship game.

Also most classified items come under review to be declassified after 25 years with some exceptions so you know Murray is out there meddling. I just love it.

I am dying at the image of Steve watching an Intelligence Committee hearing on C-SPAN just because Erica is a part of it. Like, this guy does not follow politics. Most of the news he gets is second-hand from Robin and Nancy. He didn’t even start voting until 2008.

He has no idea what the hell this hearing is even about or what side he should be on. Honestly, he finds the ways that politicians talk without saying anything confusing and boring, but he’s watching to support his girl.

Eddie is chattering away to his livestream audience on his way upstairs to see if Steve is ready to leave for their lunch date. He pauses at the top of the stairs when he hears loud clapping coming from the living room and an enthusiastic, “That’s what I’m talking about!”

He fully expects to see some kind of sports game on the tv when he walks into the room, not…a democratic representative from New York.

And Steve is hyped.

He is sitting on the edge of the coffee table, as close to the tv as he comfortably can be and his knee is bouncing up and down like it does when he’s excited. And Eddie is…confused? He’s baffled? Wondering what the hell happened to his husband.

“…Stevie?” Eddie asks and gets promptly shushed. Steve doesn’t even look over at him, just waves his hand in Eddie’s direction. “Babe, are you suddenly interested in…energy security?”

“What?” Steve asks, giving him a confused look before returning back to the screen. “Oh, shhh. This is the best part.”

“There’s a best part of a government hearing?”

“Shhh, look,” Steve says, smiling when the camera cuts away from the director of the department of energy over to Indiana Senator, Erica Sinclair. “Look at how professional she looks! And she’s like. She’s doing amazing.”

“What’s her stance?”

“I don’t know, energy department bad?” Steve shrugs like it’s not important. “She called the director guy out on inadequate internal controls, said it hasn’t gotten any better since the ‘80s. She didn’t say it but she was definitely talking about Hawkins Lab and the ‘chemical leak’ in ‘83 and like, that guy knew it too.”

Steve turned back to the tv, “How cool is that?”

Eddie pauses, takes in everything Steve just said and then ends his live-stream abruptly, “Baby…was that not a real chemical leak?”

[contemplatingoutlander]

The House GOP is a circus. The chaos has one source.

Republicans spent two years sabotaging the U.S. House. Another two years would be ruinous.

Dana Milbank does a masterful job of describing just how dysfunctional the House GOP members have been in the past two years.

This is a gift🎁link for the entire article. Below are some highlights:

The Lord works in mysterious ways. Six weeks after his improbable rise from obscurity to speaker of the House in late 2023, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson decided to break bread with a group of Christian nationalists. [...] “I’ll tell you a secret, since media is not here,” Johnson teased the group, unaware that his hosts were streaming video of the event. Johnson informed his audience that God “had been speaking to me” about becoming speaker, communicating “very specifically,” in fact, waking him at night and giving him “plans and procedures.” [...] Today, Johnson’s run looks anything but heaven-sent. In the first 18 months of this Congress, only 70 laws were enacted. Calculations by political scientist Tobin Grant, who tracks congressional output over time, put this Congress on course to be the do-nothingest since 1859-1861 — when the Union was dissolving. But Johnson’s House isn’t merely unproductive; it is positively lunatic. Republicans have filled their committee hearings and their bills with white nationalist attacks on racial diversity and immigrants, attempts to ban abortion and to expand access to the sort of guns used in mass shootings, incessant harassment of LGBTQ Americans, and even routine potshots at the U.S. military. They insulted each other’s private parts, accused each other of sexual and financial crimes, and scuffled with each other in the Capitol basement. They screamed “Bullshit!” at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address. They stood up for the Confederacy and used their official powers to spread conspiracy theories about the “Deep State.” Some even lent credence to the idea that there has been a century-old Deep State coverup of space aliens, with possible involvement by Mussolini and the Vatican.

The above article was adapted from Dana Milbank's (2024) book: Fools on the HILL: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House.

[See more below the cut.]

And this is on top of the well-known pratfalls: The 15-ballot marathon to elect a speaker, the 22-day shutdown of the House to find another speaker, the routine threats of government shutdowns and a near-default on the federal debt that hurt the nation’s credit rating. They devoted 18 months to a failed attempt to impeach Biden, which produced nothing but Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly displaying posters of Hunter Biden engaging in sex acts. One “whistleblower” defected to Russia, another worked with Russian intelligence and is under indictment for fabricating his claims, and still another is on the lam, evading charges of being a Chinese agent. As soon as Biden withdrew his candidacy, they promptly forgot their probe of Biden’s “corruption” and rushed to launch a new series of investigations into Kamala Harris (over her record on border security) and Tim Walz (over his military service and “cozy relationship” with China). After a number of failed attempts, they did impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (the first such action against a Cabinet officer since 1876) without identifying any high crimes or misdemeanors he had committed; the Senate dismissed the articles without a trial. House Republicans created a “weaponization committee” under the excitable Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), but it was panned even by right-wing commentators when it produced little more than a list of conspiracy theories from the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. They lapsed repeatedly into fits of censure resolutions, contempt citations and other pointless acts of vengeance. In all of its history, the House had voted to censure one of its own members only seven times; in the two weeks after Johnson became speaker, members of the House tried to censure each other eight times. [...] In lieu of consequential legislating, they passed bills such as the Refrigerator Freedom Act, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act. On the House floor, the Republican majority suffered one failure after another, even on routine procedural votes. Seven times (and counting), House Republicans voted down their own leaders’ routine attempts to begin floor debates — something that hadn’t happened once in the previous 20 years.