Today I learned:

The universe is expanding, but I can't find a parking space.

Well, a group of parking spaces is traditionally classified as a lot of parking spaces.

Today, I learned that all one digit numbers qualify as palindromic numbers. I had presumed that there was a multiple digit requirement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palindromic_number

Yesterday, I learned that the US House needs a Speaker to get things done.

I did not learn that a few or even single representatives can block a lot of legislative work from happening, this already was a established fact.

How would any deliberative body function without a Chair to administratively facilitate parliamentary procedure? I presume that the Bundestag and European Parliament face similar constraints.

The more interesting aspect is how Pramila Jayapal and the Progressive Caucus within the Democratic Caucus so consistently got rolled last Congress when they supposedly had 95 members out of a Congressional Majority of 220. A Republican faction of 20 members have already exercised power more effectively during the first week of this Congress. Given that my Representative is the Deputy Chair of the Progressive Caucus, I find their ineptitude genuinely noteworthy. They were practically a majority of the majority caucus last session and surrendered on seemingly every issue.

I presume that state political news trickles into Germany less efficiently. A moderate Democrat in the Pennsylvania state legislature resigned from the Democratic Caucus to stand as an independent and subsequently got elected Speaker of the Pennsylvania State House a few days ago. In Texas, a few years ago, a group of dissident Republicans revolted after losing the Republican Caucus leadership vote and cut a deal with the minority Democratic Caucus to seize the gavel entirely for themselves with Democratic votes. They were able to maintain procedural control across multiple sessions I believe.

Oh the part about representatives was meant more broadly as in that’s how parliaments work in general.

The pretty happened in New York State under Cuomo too. For many years the Republicans controlled the Senate even though Democrats held a large majority.

The CPC, sadly, is larger than it looks. A good number are also New Democrats. But yeah, they should be able to wield more power than they do!

Gopher, the so-called "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party were not inept. They didn't have the votes in the Senate to do what they wanted. So they faced reality and accepted the best compromise they were going to get with Sense. Machin and Sinema.

The 20 Republicans holding things up in the House can hold out for much longer, well past the point of reasonableness and sanity, because they don't care about getting anything done, they don't care about the House as an institution, they don't care about their colleagues. Their only "agenda" is to get on TV, go viral on social media, rile up their far-right-wing supporters, and collect more campaign contributions. Is that really what you would have wanted the Progressive Caucus to do in the last Congress? If they had, the Democrats never would have passed the Inflation Reduction Act, or the bipartisan (and admittedly, somewhat watered-down) voter protection legislation, or anything else. The Democrats and Pres. Biden managed to pass a lot of legislation last Congress precisely because all sides were willing to compromise instead of throwing bombs at each other.

The Progressive Caucus repeatedly threatened to do things and repeatedly said that they would do things only to cave when relatively small amounts of pressure were applied to them. If you have 100 votes in a narrowly divided House and you cannot get everything you want, then you are not very good at politics.

Ultimately, Biden passed legislation because he was willing to systematically break his pledges and promises, not because there was some spirit of compromise. Machin turned out to be both oddly gullible and susceptible to outside pressure. Were I in McCarthy's position, I would promise every concession to the dissenters which I could not deliver until becoming Speaker, and then I would purge them ruthlessly as Sam Rayburn and LBJ did with the Shivercrats in the 1950s.

"Cactus Jack" Garner had a one vote majority in the House with a minority in the Senate, and he ended up building a generational majority and becoming Vice President.

You should be careful what you let these people convince you of. If you believe that they are willing to blow things up, then you have surrendered enormous power to them. How will you respond to an increase of the Debt Ceiling that is linked to a restricting of certain tax credits so as to exclude corporations and upper income households? "How can we in good conscience take on yet more debt while handing out tax breaks to the wealthy?" There would go the entire Inflation Reduction Act and everything that the Democrats passed last session. If you have not noticed, "tax expenditures" are now roughly equal to the entire Defense Budget.

The Progressive Caucus got everything they wanted through the House. In 2021 the House passed "Build Back Better," the Democratic left"s wish-list legislation. Manchin -- a red state Democrat backed by big oil -- wouldn't vote for it and it died in the Senate. I don't think he was bluffing. (Frankly, I don't think it was just Manchin. He took the political bullet, but I expect a lot of Democratic Senators were opposed to BBB behind the scenes.)

I agree with your last point. We can expect some ugly Debt Ceiling fights the next 2 years.

The Progressive Caucus stated explicitly that they would not vote to pass the Senate's infrastructure bill until after the Senate voted on BBB. They folded as soon as pressure was applied to them.

Can you demonstrate that Manchin has been "backed by big oil"? His being backed by "little natural gas" would make a fair bit of sense in terms of constituent service, but can you offer FEC filings to provide some intellectual seriousness to your point? When I do a quick search, Manchin's big dollar donations seem to come disproportionately from Massachusetts and Colorado with Alabama being represented presumably via his personal connections to Nick Saban. ACTBLUE can muddy the waters a little bit.

I could be wrong about "big oil" vs. "little natural gas," I have not done a research project on this, I'm only remembering things I read at the time in mainstream media. (I don't know what ACTBLUE is.) You can take issue with these details, the fact remains, BBB would have been disastrous for the oil & gas industry. This I am sure about. I read large portions of the bill. It was designed specifically to penalize oil & gas and Manchin made it clear he wasn't going to vote for it. What should the Progressive Caucus have done?

A quick google search turns up numerous seemingly credible news reports of Manchin's ties to the oil & gas industry (and coal).

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/08/joe-manchin-cuts-climate-deal-with-democrats-but-remains-backed-by-family-orbit-of-oil-and-gas/

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/climate/manchin-coal-climate-conflicts.html

https://www.eenews.net/articles/manchin-has-raked-in-400k-in-fossil-fuel-donations/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/joe-manchins-deep-corporate-ties

ACTBLUE is an online system that aggregates the online functionality for collecting donations to Democratic candidates. It has been around for about 20 years. In the Federal Election Commission database of all political contributions made to federal campaign vehicles (individual candidates and committees), ACTBLUE can end up appearing on both sides going through donor and recipient lists.

Looks like this is all stories told by the professional storytellers. Manchin seems to be collecting more campaign money in Tuscaloosa, Alabama via college football than he does in Houston, Texas via oil industry types. Given social connections to West Virginia football, I am kind of surprised to not see Tilman Fertitta (owner of the Houston Rockets and supposedly Mark Kelly's best friend) high on Manchin's donor list. I guess the Rice brothers' dad lives in Boston, so perhaps he is doing yeoman's work bundling for Manchin in Massachusetts, but I do not see big donations flowing in from Pittsburgh where EQT actually is. My guess is that Ken Griffin, Peter Singer and Ken Langone are funneling more money to Manchin than Exxon employees are.

A West Virginia Senator should represent the interests of the coal industry (and its employees).

Look up the Inch Pipelines and the eventual birth of Texas Eastern; it is an interesting story. Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia conspired to block the construction of natural gas pipelines into the Northeast for decades to maintain the urban markets for "coal gas" which was processed from coal within cities to be piped into homes. This is, for example, how Faraday isolated benzene as it condensed on municipal gas mains in London (frightening!), which does not happen with natural gas today. But the cities on the Acela Corridor did not gain access to natural gas until several years after the war, when the broader US started converting over from coal gas to natural gas in the 1920s. Natural gas had significantly higher energy density than coal gas and was quite a bit cheaper. This is almost certainly why natural gas pipelines are now federally regulated in the US while oil pipelines are still state regulated.

For a more modern version of this dynamic, scratch the surface on any lobby or activist group promoting wind energy, and you will find natural gas money. The entire subsidy framework in the US was designed by lawyers at Enron back in the 1990s. In Europe, Russian fingerprints are everywhere. The same is generally true for anti-nuclear activism. One of my favorites is the fact that Harold Hamm (America's richest oil man) was the main bankroller of activists blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline.

If you want to get into three dimensional chess (or tin foil hat) stuff, the main financial backers of the California Proposition 47 that made petty crime virtually un-prosecutable, thus turning the public spaces in LA and San Francisco into ungovernable, open air drug markets and homeless encampments was largely funded by John Arnold (a Houston natural gas billionaire) and the Schusterman Family (Tulsa oil billionaires with huge real estate interests in Texas).

"The Progressive Caucus stated explicitly that they would not vote to pass the Senate's infrastructure bill until after the Senate voted on BBB. They folded as soon as pressure was applied to them."

You don't think that it would have been a far greater disaster to get nothing passed at all? The Democrats would have been creamed in the midterms. Remember that the Progressive Caucus has literally just 1% of the votes in the Senate. In any case, if you have the press release where the CPC made that explicit statement, I'd be curious to read it.

Regarding your last post, that is a hell of a lot of claims without a single citation . . .

Politics:

Democratic Senators being forced to vote on BBB would not have been a disaster for the Progressive Caucus. Losing seats in a midterm election as the party holding the White House is what one should proceed expecting.

But then I think that Jeremy Corbin should have embraced Brexit without accepting any responsibility for implementation and used the issue to deselect and purge as much of the Blairite wing of the British Labour Party as he could have in the name of "Democracy" using Bennite language. Forcing the establishmentarian leadership caste of the Labour Party into the Liberal Democratic Party, where they belong ideologically, would have allowed the emergence of a more coherent political party that would have still dominated in a world of coalition politics on the Left. A more Blairite LDP could have consolidated the Remain voters in the urban professional class seats to better compete against the Tories while a Corbinite Labour Party would not have lost the Red Wall seats. The Harriet Harmans of the world should not be gifted working class safe Labour seats (that they have no interest in effectively representing) by professional class liberals through control of a central party apparatus. This was the essence of Tony Benn's program in the early 1980s under which Corbin came into the Labour Party. I can't imagine that anyone has ever raised a voice to express sorrow at the absence of Shirley Williams. (All of this is tactical politics as opposed to any endorsement of ideology.)

Sources:

The FEC's publicly available online database is not specific enough for you?

Looking up the history of the Inch Pipelines, their construction and their eventual sale to a consortium that became Texas Eastern seems fairly well sourced to me. Many books exist documenting J. R. Parten and the Inch Pipelines' construction, and most of them presumably cover the post-war aftermath. There is at least one decent corporate histories of Texas Eastern. I also believe that I remember the process being covered in a corporate history of Dillon, Read & Company. The politics of natural gas is also amply covered in any decent book on LBJ's career both in terms of Leland Olds and Eisenhower's vetoing of the Natural Gas Act of I think 1956. There is a biography of John Connally called The Lone Star that provides a decent telling of the 1956 Act. Connally and Wright Patman's brother were the principal lobbyists involved. Connally ran for Governor of Texas as Kennedy's Secretary of the Navy, and before that he had replaced Robert Anderson (another Secretary of the Treasury) as the personal political fixer for a Texas oil man named Sid Richardson.

Enron's role in designing the wind generation tax credit framework is fairly well known. The Sweetwater wind farm outside of Lubbock was designed and built by Enron and is the model for the last few generations of large scale onshore wind farms in the US.
GE's wind energy unit was purchased from Enron during the bankruptcy. I admit that I am extrapolating to presume that GE (the largest beneficiary of building new natural gas generation capacity on the capital expense side) would actively support expanding wind capacity as a trojan horse to promote the building of natural gas generation capacity.

One would seem to me quite daft to believe that Vladimir Putin was indifferent as to the shaping of German energy policy both in terms of nuclear and wind generation. Adding wind generation has always and everywhere resulted in significant increases in consumption of natural gas. Both coal and nuclear generation capacity has to be decommissioned once sufficient wind capacity is added to a grid due to the laws of physics and realities of engineering.

Harold Hamm's funding of activists working to obstruct Keystone is well documented in numerous places. I believe that Gregory Zuckerman's book The Frackers does so.

Contributions supporting Proposition 47 are again a matter of public record. The link to John Arnold is very easy to establish. The Shusterman connection may be a bit trickier as I believe that it was done mainly through a daughter, who happens to run their large commercial real estate portfolio in Texas, and may not actually bear the Shusterman name due to marriage. I honestly do not know.

not coming from the US - from my understanding looking at individual donations cannot tell the full picture, since Super PACs can be funded by anyone and support anyone without much oversight?

As in could support for Mr. Manchin and other go through such channels without being as obvious as the public direct contributions?

PACs have to report their donors as well, and I have included the Super PAC associated with Manchin. The FEC provides functionality to do so relatively easily. Donors to general Democratic Super PACs would not be expected to uniquely influence Manchin as opposed to influencing Chuck Schumer.

I would still contend that ACTBLUE would be the bigger issue in obstructing my first cut simple analysis.

The root research question as a matter of social science would seem to me to be whether or not Manchin received a noticeably high percentage of contributions from employees of Exxon, Chevron, Conoco or the American employees of BP, Shell and Total. That is how I would define "Big Oil". All of these organizations have large concentrations of employees in Houston, Texas. I skimmed through the FEC database looking for donations from Texas. Again, the large dollar donations to Manchin's most recent campaign and his associated Super PAC seem to me to come disproportionately from Massachusetts and Colorado, both states that I associate with a particular kind of affluent leftwing donor as far as the Democratic Party goes (Aspen and Martha's Vineyard types). But this is my projecting a commonality. I would draw different conclusions if a politician were receiving lot of large donations from Colorado and Texas. But these could obviously be two completely different groups of people giving money to a particular candidate for entirely distinct reasons. There is then also a cluster of large donations from Alabama, and I did check those a bit closer to see that they seemed to all be from Tuscaloosa and thus be presumably traceable back to Nick Saban, the football coach at the University of Alabama, whom I believe was Manchin's neighbor growing up. American football coaches at the college level are active fundraisers as part of their job when they run the big programs. Bryant-Denny Stadium expansions do not build themselves.

The CEO of Nintendo's US subsidiary is named Doug Bowser. (The "Bowser" name only exists in English language products)

I always wanted Nintendo to release an adults only patch so when playing Mario Cart, and Mario knocks someone off the course he says "Fuck you!" in his usual voice.

Youtube comment: "Australians are well-balanced people. They have a chip on each shoulder."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esBLinbJydI

@Amby....is there anything one should know about English versus American expletives in Australia? Additionally, does an Englishman say "Fuck you!" in that situation or "Bugger!"

@Gopher. Australians love the word "c*nt".

@Lord Saviour....Whereas Brits love the word "tw@t"?

It depends on what Brit to be honest. It varies a lot depending on where you are.

@everyone....where are you from and what would the driver say?

Amby: "I always wanted Nintendo to release an adults only patch so when playing Mario Cart, and Mario knocks someone off the course he says "Fuck you!" in his usual voice."

"Bugger" is more something person flying off the track would say, not the one who caused it.

"Cunt!" works for both parties, though

@Amby....Your Australian-ness and basic cultural authenticity is being called into questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dqsyXPkG3I

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Wn48geCJ8&pp=ygUSTWFyaW8gY2FydCBjYXJ0b29u