Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 31. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 4:55 PM for 9h 37m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1879, the Battle of Isandlwana during the Anglo-Zulu War results in a British defeat. This same day and the next, the Battle of Rorke’s Drift just some 15 km (9.3 mi) away from Isandlwana, results in a British victory.
Thomas Edsall writes, of Congressional extremists in the GOP caucus, ‘You Don’t Negotiate With These Kinds of People’:
Over the past eight years, the Republican Party has been transformed from a generally staid institution representing the allure of low taxes, conservative social cultural policies and laissez-faire capitalism into a party of blatant chaos and disruption.
The shift has been evident in many ways — at the presidential level, as the party nominated Donald Trump not once but twice and has been offered the chance to do so a third time; in Trump’s — and Trump’s allies’ — attempt to overturn the 2020 election results; in his spearheading of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol; and most recently in the brutal series of votes from Jan. 3 to Jan. 7 in the House of Representatives, where 20 hard-right members held Kevin McCarthy hostage until he cried uncle and was finally elected speaker.
What drives the members of the Freedom Caucus, who have wielded the threat of dysfunction to gain a level of control within the House far in excess of their numbers? How has this group moved from the margins to the center of power in less than a decade?
Since its founding in 2015, this cadre has acquired a well-earned reputation for using high-risk tactics to bring down two House speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. During the five-day struggle over McCarthy’s potential speakership, similar pressure tactics wrested crucial agenda-setting authority from the Republican leadership in the House.
“You don’t negotiate with these kinds of people,” Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, declared as the saga unfolded. “These are legislative terrorists.”
There lies problem for nation, state, and city: inability to see the difference between listening and acceeding. No one should say — least of all this libertarian blogger — that others should not speak. And yet, and yet… any prudent person should know — among them this libertarian blogger —that to hear is not to agree, to listen is not to assent.
A political affliction in nation, state, and city: listening leads to intimidation, and intimidation leads to appeasement. A prepared man or woman should know how to hold a defensive position.
Divers capture rare footage of live giant squid: