The list of Republicans questioning House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) decision to keep his caucus out of town and the House out of session is growing.
The thing that I find most striking about that part is where the “angsty” GOPniks are coming from. These aren’t squishy marginal reps from Biden districts, oh no.
Dan Crenshaw is from TX-2, with a Cook PVI (per Wikipedia) of R+12, and voted 61% for the felon in the 2024 election.
It might be easy to dismiss one or two noisy ambitious ones, like MTG. But this is starting to look like a rather suspicious number of outliers (pronounced “trend”) to me.
Health insurance rate notices are about to go out. SNAP benefits are being cut. Air traffic controllers feel a bad case of the “Uber flu” coming on.
We had our investment advisor remove $$ from funds with large holdings in AI a company ple months ago. We may have missed the ups since then but we won’t miss the crash in two months.
I used to be some kind of financial journalist, for what that’s worth, and before that worked for a brokerage firm. The two adages I remember from those days were “Oinkers never win” and “No tree grows straight to the sky.” Also, Nathan Rothschild is supposed to have said that he made his fortune by selling too soon.
The speaker is between a rock and a hard place. He serves at the whim of the Republican caucus. He has sworn undying loyalty to Trump. If he brings the house into session he knows the Epstein case will get much, much worse. He has almost walked himself into keeping the house on vacation until November 2026. He won’t last much longer.
It is a shame to see the incompetence of the US trade delegation trying to work things out with China. The top agenda items are a) car production chains, b) rare earth metals and c) soy beans. Only b) has much to do with the technology frontier or transition costs, and really doesn’t acknowledge that the GOP earlier was all for outsourcing rare earth metal production to China. The US closed the world’s premier rare earth mine, the Mountain Pass mine in California, in 2002, during the second year of GW Bush’s first term.
China is the global manufacturing center. It needs lots of energy to do that manufacturing. Up until a decade ago, there was little discussion about decarbonization, but today it is big deal. Europe, for example, already generates 3/4s of its electricity from renewable or nuclear. China, as well as India and Indonesia, the other massive coal-burners in Asia, are now at peak coal and entering a declining phase, so the focus is on technological advancement and reducing transition costs. Indeed, China may be able to drastically reduce its carbon footprint at relatively low cost, but it will probably have to look to Europe rather than the US for guidance. The Chinese are a bit perplexed by the US anti-science tantrums as the technology frontier is still where the money is. For example, even with an infinite supply of AI agents and assistants, you still need to understand basic principles. Currently, over half of US adults read below a sixth-grade level, meaning they have difficulty with complex reading tasks and instructions. If Trump could come up with low transition cost proposals, I think he’d have Xi’s ear. Otherwise, it’s all just noise a global resource fight. (I posted on TPM about the need to get Mountain Pass back up to full production in 2018, so it is kind of pathetic to see this “negotiation” even happening. Look, boss, I would have come to work and would have done a great job, but we had eight cases of beer in the garage with no way to refrigerate them all. I always meant to get around to it someday. I’m also working on the best healthcare plan you could ever imagine, by the way.)
It’s hard to see how it won’t (the AI bubble), it’s just the timing that’s hard to predict. The two main factors are 1) it looks to be impossible for companies like OpenAI to monetize the product enough to cover the insane investment amounts, and 2) so much of the investment is going into AI data centers, which don’t follow any traditional models for depreciation and upkeep. Both of those thing interact with each other.
Unlike building a new electric power plant, or even a traditional data center like Amazon’s AWS, new and faster GPU cards for AI development are developed every year. That means the GPUs in the data centers have to be replaced with better ones, on a continual basis. It’s insanely expensive to do that, and how does the “product” bring in enough income to pay for it? It might be an actual business model for something like military AI where the government is funding it. But as a consumer-facing business it’s crazy. It isn’t sustainable, but the reality hasn’t hit just yet.
The Dems ought to be pointing out that the “Big Horrible Trump Bill” and the current stopgap up for vote would actually cut those SNAP benefits. All Republican bills, with no Democratic input. So Republicans are once again lying about being the Defenders of SNAP and WIC against the Evil Democrat Party.
Trump? Come up with any kind of technical plan? To deal with that imaginary “global warming” conspiracy theory?? And it’s less a resource fight than a dick measuring contest and publicity stunt. Remember, this is Donald “King” Trump we’re talking about, not some kind of legitimate “presidential” person.
Though how one would go about replacing the Speaker when the House is not in session is a really interesting question.
I mean, you’d think there would have to be a way, right? What if a Speaker were to shuffle off this mortal coil during an adjournment? I suppose that in a normal world, they’d already have a scheduled time to reconvene, and the first order of business when they get back would be to elect a new one.
But this, with the Speaker arbitrarily and indefinitely extending a recess that was called for pure partisan gamesmanship … I’m no expert in parliamentary procedure, not by a long shot, but November 2026 – or indeed noon on January 3 of next year – doesn’t seem impossible any more.
South Korea simply gave up on trying to explain real-world issues. They gave him a gold crown and some ketchup. I expect Xi to be a bit less accommodating tomorrow.
