unfortunately this is our circus and our monkeys

Well, that particular clown show is finally over with Republicans acting like they achieved a great victory after four days of hurling insults and cursing at each other and nearly came to blows at the end with one republican restraining another who was lunging at Gaetz. McCarthy finally prevailed after 15 votes and only because he convinced enough republicans to vote present lowering the bar to a number he could attain and now has the title Speaker of the House. He has the title, empty though it is, but not the power which he traded away to the 20 far right insurrectionists (of which he is one himself, make no mistake) for puppet strings. If he fails to dance to their tune, all it takes is for one representative to call for his ouster, another of his concessions.

Fifteen votes to finally elect a Speaker and not even a full majority of 218, he won with 216 votes, and he's up there claiming that 'the people' have spoken and Republicans have a mandate to force their unpopular policies on America. McCarthy only beat Jeffries by four votes, their majority comes with only 10 representatives. I could be wrong but I don't think that slim of a majority constitutes a 'mandate'.

Apparently now that we have a functioning House, sort of, if you can call the GOP functioning, one of the first things they will do is vote to undo the new funding for the IRS which is woefully understaffed right now. If you have ever tried to speak with an IRS agent on the phone or meet with one in person you know how impossible that is and how badly the funding and new agents are needed. A phone call gets you put on hold for hours and then finally dropped, a visit to an office is worse.

We fell behind on our taxes a decade or so ago and it took a long time to get it straightened out. To meet with an agent, Marc would have to get to the office as close to opening time as possible and sign in; agents called you on a first come first serve basis and there was no guarantee you would get in that day just because you showed up. I forget how many days it took. Fortunately we were self employed and he could take those days off without penalty.

The good thing is that the Senate won't go along with it and neither will Biden, which will be the end result of whatever legislation they manage to pass in the House. Unfortunately, there's no way to stop them from their bogus and retaliatory investigations which will turn up nothing and will be another clown show so the next two years will be full of faux outrages, baseless accusations, and zero proof. Probably the only real power they have besides obstruction is their stated refusal to raise the debt ceiling when it comes around again thereby causing the government to fall into default, which will impact not only the US but world economies as well, unless they get heavy reductions in spending and the reductions they want are Social Security and Medicare. This will be a game of chicken since Biden has said he will not cut SS or Medicare.

If they want to cut spending how about stop subsidizing the oil industry or any subsidized industry making record profits. We could stop bailing out companies failing through their own malpractice like the billions we gave SW Airlines who used over $5B of the money to buy back their stock and give their CEO a big raise or stop increasing the defense budget. Seriously, we spend more on the military than the 10 next highest military budgets combined. In 2021 our defense budget accounted for 39% of the world's military spending and Biden increased the budget for 2023.

Well, I didn't mean to engage in another political essay when I started writing but here it is anyway.

No additional old post today. I think maybe I'll just do it once a week since it takes a lot of time to select one and you'll probably quickly tire of a second post every time.