Steve Scalise resigned as a candidate for the Speaker. The House Republicans clearly are light years away from choosing a Speaker. Congress is broken. MAGA broke it. This could go on for days.

I’ve read comments in several sources today saying that Bibi Netanyahu will not survive the crisis in Israel, politically. See, for example, Netanyahu Is Losing the War at Home: Incompetence against Hamas and indifference to Israeli suffering has the public boiling over, by Noga Tarnopolsky at New York magazine. At the New Republic, see A Majority of Israelis Think Netanyahu Should Resign by Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling.

See also Fred Kaplan, Trump Somehow Manages to Make the Israel-Hamas Conflict All About Him, at Slate. Trump flaps his lips and shows the world how ignorant he is, but his culties don’t see it because they are just as ignorant as he is.

Let’s have some not-war news. Not that it’s necessarily more cheerful.

House Republicans are going to put Steve Scalise forward as potentially the next Speaker. He beat Gym Jordan in a secret ballot vote, 113 to 99. And he’s going to have to win nearly all of those Jordan votes to get the Speaker’s gavel. It’ll happen when it happens, maybe. Not holding my breath.

Yesterday Aaron Blake wrote about A tantalizing detail in a new Trump legal filing. It appears Jack Smith and crew have a theory about Trump’s motivations for hanging on to classified documents. “The government apparently thinks it knows ‘what Trump intended’ with the documents,” Blake wrote. “And it’s signaling that it plans to prove that intent.”

Of course, we don’t know what Jack Smith knows, yet. I tend to go with the “beautiful mind” theory of Trump document boarding, that he kept his hands on all those secret documents because something about them symbolized the status of POTUS for him, and he couldn’t let them go. An alternate theory is that there is information in them that Trump thinks he might use against his opponents.

George Santos has been hit with new charges.

The 23-count superseding indictment alleges Santos took financial information from his donors and ran their credit cards for more cash during last year’s election cycle. Per the federal prosecutors, Santos “repeatedly, without their authorization” charged the credit cards of his contributors before siphoning the money off to himself, his own campaign, and other election operations. 

Santos was previously indicted in May on fraud and money laundering charges related to his alleged efforts to receive unemployment benefits while he was employed. At the time, prosecutors accused Santos of having “pocketed campaign contributions and used that money to pay down personal debts and buy designer clothing.” There are 10 additional counts in the new superseding indictment, including aggravated identity theft, access device fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy, false statements, and falsifying records. 

Santos denies he is guilty of anything and says he will refuse to take a plea deal. Of course, we don’t know that he’s been offered a plea deal. House Republicans from New York are either about about to introduce a resolution to expel Santos from Congress, or maybe they have done that already.

The rationality-challenged Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced on Monday that he would run for President as an independent. Instantanteously, all the Republicans who had been encouraging him to run changed their minds. The Republican National Committee dismissed Kennedy as “just another radical, far-left Democrat.” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called him “a typical elitist liberal.”

Michael Scherer writes at WaPo,

The attacks came as Democrats remained largely silent on Kennedy’s shift, reflecting a relative optimism among the party’s top strategists that Kennedy poses little threat to Biden as an independent candidate. Kennedy’s polling in the Democratic nomination fight had fallen in recent months, and current national polling shows higher approval ratings for Kennedy among Republican voters than Democratic voters.

In other words, it dawned on them that Kennedy could take more votes from the Republican nominee than from President Biden. Whoops!

What can one say about what’s going on in Gaza but that it’s all just horrific, and there  is little hope of anything but continued horror and death there in the near future.

A U.S. aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, is on its way to Israel with some cruisers and destroyers. This is supposed to be a kind of show of force to Iran to not try anything, plus it can offer surveillance and other support to Israel.

Turkey’s President Erdogan is telling people the carrier will be the base of U.S. attacks on Gaza. I trust this isn’t true, but whatever happens many will believe it. This is not helping.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib for some time has had a Palestinian flag outside her office, and she’s refusing to take it down, and of course Republicans are going nuts over this. It needs to be remembered that “Palestinians” are not “Hamas.” Hamas is a militant group of Palestinians, but not all Palestinians support them. There’s a proposal to not allow any foreign flags in Congress. And let me say further that the mental habit of sorting humanity into “good guys” and “bad guys” is the source of all human atrocity.

A pro-Palestinian rally in New York on Sunday apparently went over the line into anti-semitism, and now the Democratic Socialists of America — which promoted the rally but did not organize it — is taking heat for it. This has always been my beef with big lefty protests; there are always a few who do something stupid and outrageous that get all the attention.

In other news: If you need a break from news about war, you may enjoy reading After years of exaggerating his business assets, Trump confronts them in court. No paywall.

Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal reported that the Hamas attacks were coordinated with and authorized by Iran in a series of meetings in Beirut. Josh Marshall points out that this information appears to have come entirely from Hamas. And I can’t tell that any other news outlet has independently verified it. That doesn’t mean Iran wasn’t involved, but as Josh Marshall says, everybody should be very cautious about this. Rash decisions based on faulty information easily could turn the situation into something more widespread.

In her newsletter, Joy Vance says it’s a bleeping shame Twitter is so bleeped up.

In the past, in a crisis of this magnitude, we were able to get at least some real time reporting on social media and on Twitter specifically. It was easy to search for reporting from a wide variety of news organizations all in one place. With some discernment, and the use of blue checks with trusted experts weighing in, it was possible to get a sense of what was accurate and what was disinformation. But of course, that functionality is a casualty of Elon Musk’s X/Twitter.

No one who is serious would pretend that Twitter or any other social media platform was ever perfect, but that’s not the point. In the past, we could use the platform to obtain reliable news, often from firsthand reporting. That happened, for instance, at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when reporting was murky. But now Twitter is awash in a sea of misinformation and hate. And we see, in its absence, how important having an international public square is in a moment like this.

Speaking of Twitter … er, X … Reuters reported recently that the social media company not only is worth a ton less money than Elon Musk paid for it, at this point it probably is worth less than the debt held by banks on it. Its value is underwater. You’ll remember that Musk paid $44 billion for the company, and he got $13 billion of that from banks. Meanwhile advertisers have fled the network like rats off a sinking ship.

Put it all together, and X isn’t just worth less than Musk paid for it, but likely less than its debt. Assume that the company’s revenue last year was $4.7 billion, based on results before it was taken private. If advertising has dropped by half, then this year’s sales should be a bit over $2.5 billion. Put that on the same enterprise-value-to-sales multiple as Snap, which is down to a mere 3 times, and X is worth around $8 billion.

He’s still able to make the interest payments on the $13 billion, but this can’t go on indefinitely, I don’t think.

Meanwhile — as the U.S. shifts military assets — mostly ships, I think — closer to the Middle East, Sen. Tommy Tuberville continues to keep the U.S. military hamstrung for stupid reasons. A retired U.S. Navy Commander posted on the sinking hulk of X that there is no chief of naval operations at the moment because of Tuberville.

Well, try to enjoy Indigenous Peoples Day, anyway.

Update: I see the Biden White House is being slammed from the Right for holding a scheduled barbeque for White House staff while Israel is at war. Of course, the White House has continued to hold all sorts of gala functions since Ukraine has been under attack, and the Right didn’t mind about that. There have been, in fact, a number of wars and insurgencies and other armed conflicts going on around the globe for some time, and sometimes Americans are killed in those conflicts. And the Right doesn’t blink an eye.

The attack by Hamas against Israel appears to have caught both Israel and the United States by surprise.  At The Atlantic, Gal Beckerman reports that just a week ago, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was touting increasing stability in the Middle East. “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” he said.

In the coming days, Sullivan’s Pollyannaish view will undoubtedly be subjected to great scrutiny. Hamas, and its Iranian and Hezbollah allies, has not made a secret of its ultimate aims. Beyond wishful thinking, the cause of the hopefulness articulated by Sullivan might be this: the developing deal to establish formal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia—a developing deal that is most likely developing no more.

The Biden administration and Netanyahu have been deeply invested in such an agreement, and the desire for it might have created a blindness among Israelis and Americans alike about what was happening just over the border in Gaza. “We wanted to try and pretend that this conflict was isolated and contained and didn’t need our attention,” Yaakov Katz, the former editor in chief of  The Jerusalem Post, told me today hours after the invasion.

The only predictable thing about this is that Republicans blame Joe Biden for the attack.

Note that there seems to be a lot of assuming that Iran is behind the attack, but that’s not something we actually know at this time. So let’s not assume.

Josh Marshall:

One big mystery about today’s events in Israel, which I alluded to in the previous post, is how exactly Israel was caught quite this unprepared. An attack of this scale required very large numbers of people to be read into the preparations if not the operational planning for the attack. Israel has long had a dense network of informants and collaborators in the territories. That’s layered over with signals intelligence and various forms of surveillance. And yet Israel appears to have been caught totally unawares and unprepared. It’s not just that they didn’t know something like this was happened today. They don’t seem to have known that an operation of this scale and audacity was even being considered.

That’s an intelligence fairly that’s hard to overstate.

Why Hamas did this also requires some explanation. A friend rightly described this as an organization-scale suicide operation. For the why you have the unsettled business of 1948 and 1967. You have the fact that Mahmoud Abbas won’t live forever. You have Israel’s looming normalization with the Gulf Arab states. Particularly the last factor provides a decent explanation of the ‘why now?’ Indeed, I’m seeing a lot of foreign policy and security analysts confidently declaring that Hamas planned this attack with Iran to break the momentum for normalization with the Gulf states.

But then Josh goes on to remind us that we don’t know if Iran was in on this or not.

The Washington Post is reporting that this shouldn’t have been such a surprise.

Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and carried out Saturday’s attacks, said the operation was in response to the blockade, as well as recent Israeli military raids in the West Bank and violence at al-Aqsa Mosque, a disputed religious site in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount.

“Enough is enough,” the leader of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif, said in a recorded message Saturday, the Associated Press reported. “Today the people are regaining their revolution.”

As of Sept. 19, before Saturday’s outbreak of violence, 227 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli troops or settlers this year, according to U.N. figures, with most of those deaths — 189 — occurring in the West Bank. At least 29 Israelis, mostly in the West Bank, were also killed this year as of the end of August, according to the same U.N. database.

I don’t pay enough attention to the Middle East to know how this might impact Netanyahu politically.

I need certain people to not misbehave so fast. It’s hard to keep up. And I’ve managed to catch the mother of all head colds and just want to watch old movies and blow my nose a lot. I’ll make a point of writing something tomorrow.

Some House Republicans appear to be making a semi-serious effort to make Trump the next Speaker. This is mostly about burnishing MAGA bona fides, I’m sure. Observers point out that (a) between Trump’s many trials and his campaign, he’d never have time for the job, which he wouldn’t know how to do anyway; and (b) there’s a GOP conference rule that says any leadership member indicted for a felony that carries a sentence of at least two years “shall step aside.” And nobody knows if Trump would accept the position, anyway. If he did, though, President Biden and Vice President Harris would need double security. The Speaker is next in line, you know.

Plus there is always the possibility that if a Trump speakership came up to a vote, Trump would lose. There must be a few Republicans in swing seats whose re-election chances require not being tied to Trump.

The eight Republicans who voted with the Democrats to oust McCarthy are pretty much all hard-right wackadoos from safe districts, I understand.

I have learned that everybody hates Matt Gaetz. There are headlines declaring such. And yesterday so many Republicans were fed up with Gaetz and his grandstanding they wouldn’t let him use the microphones on the Republican side of the room. Newt Gingrich, of all people, is calling for Gaetz to be expelled. Gingrich is from a time when the power of movement conservatism came from all Republicans dutifully marching in lockstep reciting the party’s approved talking points. Those days are mostly gone, although not quite gone enough for my taste.

Josh Marshall writes that Republicans in Congress are livid with Democrats for ousting McCarthy. So sure McCarthy went back on his word who knows how many times, allowed a bogus impeachment inquiry to go forward against President Biden, and lied in a Face the Nation interview that it was Democrats who were trying to shut down the government. The Dems shoulda helped out and voted to keep McCarthy so Republicans wouldn’t look bad, or something. Right. “McCarthy sought Democratic votes to save him from his own refractory members, and in return he offered nothing. Not even politeness,” David Frum writes at The Atlantic. Frum continued,

The only way to produce a stable majority in the House is for the next Republican leader to reach a working agreement with the Democrats to bypass the nihilists in the GOP caucus. But that agreement will have to be unspoken and even denied—because making agreements that show any respect for the other side will be seen by Republican partisans as betrayal. The price of GOP leadership is delivering delusions and fantasies: the delusion and fantasy that Trump won in 2020, the delusion and fantasy that the Republicans did not lose in 2022.

The bottom line is that neither party has a working majority. The Republicans could have such a majority with effective leadership and responsible members. Ain’t gonna happen.

Republicans are so angry about McCarthy that the little neofascist pissant acting as temp speaker, Patrick McHenry, ordered Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi to give up her current hideaway office by today. Even though she’s been in San Francisco attending Dianne Feinstein’s funeral and didn’t have anything to do with yesterday’s vote.

Whoever they end up with won’t be an improvement, of course. Right now I understand the most serious contenders are Gym Jordan and Steve Scalise. Barf.

The best analysis I’ve seen about yesterday’s fiasco is by David Kurtz at TPM. Recommended.

In other news: I doubt you will be surprised to learn that Trump is fundraising off his gag order.

It appears Kevin McCarthy’s speakership is about to go to speakership heaven. But we’ll see.

Okay, they’re starting the vote … and he’s out!

Judge Arthur Engoron, who is in charge of Trump’s real estate fraud trial in New York, has issue a gag order for Trump! Finally!

In a Truth Social post that went up while Trump was sitting in the courtroom Tuesday, Trump targeted Engoron’s principal law clerk — who was sitting just a few feet away — calling her “Schumer’s girlfriend,” that reposted a picture of her alongside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a fellow New York Democrat.

It is unclear what connection, if any, Schumer has with the clerk. Schumer’s office has not responded to a request for comment from The Hill.

Trump’s campaign on Tuesday also sent out an email shortly after the Truth Social post while the court was on a lunch break that lambasted the judge himself. …

… Judge Arthur Engoron issued the gag order barring Trump and any party in the case from posting or speaking publicly about members of his staff after Trump released personally-identifying information about his principal clerk on Truth Social while the hearing was underway.

The trial judge, without naming Trump, addressed the court on the matter, saying “one of the defendants” posted a “disparaging, untrue and personally-identifying post” about his staff, and though the judge ordered it deleted, it had been emailed out to “millions of other recipients.”

“Personal attacks on members of my court staff are not appropriate and I will not tolerate it under any circumstance,” Engoron said.

He added that he warned counsel off the record about the former president’s comments yesterday, but the warning went unheeded.

See also Judge Shuts Down Trump’s Claim That He Reversed Himself on Statute of Limitations. Apparently Trump misunderstood something that happened yesterday and left the courtroom thinking that the judge had agreed most of the case against him was past the statute of limitations. This morning he learned otherwise. I bet he’s in a bigger snit now than he was yesterday. Heh.

And I think Engoron would be a great name for a super villain. Just sayin’.

In the J6 federal trial, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan shut down some crap coming from Trump’s lawyers.

A D.C. federal judge called out the latest bid at endless delay from attorneys for Donald Trump.

Trump’s lawyers had argued that deadlines in his D.C. election reversal case should be delayed because of issues relating to classified material.

It was an obviously bogus excuse to further push the proceedings down the calendar from the start, but federal prosecutors with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office made it clearer in a Monday filing. Trump attorney John Lauro hadn’t even submitted his paperwork for a security clearance yet, they said, while another, Todd Blanche, had done so more than one month ago. Attorneys in cases involving classified material need a provisional security clearance to review records.

So, Tuesday morning, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan essentially called the lawyers’ bluff: She ordered Trump attorneys to “initiate and complete all security clearance tasks” by Oct. 10. And she wants proof of compliance by Oct. 11. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Oct. 16.

The Washington Post and New York Times are both running articles about the shocking decline in life expectancy in the U.S., which is not happening in other prosperous countries. Just here.  These are all without a paywall:

Washington Post, An Epidemic of Chronic Illness Is Killing Us Too Soon

Washington Post, How Red-State Politics Are Shaving Years Off American Lives

New York Times, Without a College Degree, Life in America Is Staggeringly Shorter

This was Trump’s face while sitting in the New York courtroom today.

Clearly, he’s about to explode. I so wish someone would have snuck up behind him and popped a balloon. And then during a break Trump found some television cameras and declared that Judge Engoron should be disbarred. “This is a judge that should be out of office,” he said. “This is a judge that some people say could be charged criminally for what he’s doing.” Yeah, insulting the judge always helps you at trial.

I take it from this CNBC news story that Trump’s lawyers will say the banks who loaned the money made a profit, so there was no fraud. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve been visiting my family in Brooklyn all weekend and got behind. So Congress managed to put off the shutdown until November. Matt “Son of Chucky” Gaetz immediately began a coup against Kevin McCarthy. But today Josh Marshall wrote,

There are already almost certainly fanciful threats circulating in right-wing media that Republicans will try to expel Gaetz from Congress if the long-simmering ethics investigation into his druggie, teen-dating past finds evidence of wrongdoing. This report started at Fox and got picked up in the New York Post, Daily Mail, et. al. More significant, very few of the hardliners Gaetz will need are coming to his banner. As far as I can tell only Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona has suggested he might be on board.

Don’t hold your breath thinking that Republicans are going to expel Matt Gaetz. That’s BS fed to pliant press. But the attack articles in the right-wing press confirms what is true, which is that a lot of Republicans are seriously pissed at Gaetz for his central role in their latest highwire debacle.

Lots of people have lots of advice about what House Democrats ought to do if McCarthy’s speakership comes up for another vote. I am not one of those people. But if you have any good ideas, trot ’em out.

Margorie Taylor Greene is bragging that she, personally, took Ukraine funding out of the CR.

70% of our budget is passed in our appropriations bills, and we had a BIG win in our defense bill last week.

I was able to get all of the aid to Ukraine taken out so that we can focus on OUR military, our borders, and put America First.

A majority of the majority voted AGAINST… pic.twitter.com/N4GQcDU9Wa

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene?? (@RepMTG) October 2, 2023

Max Boot at WaPo is beside himself and calling for a Ukraine funding bill be brought to the House floor immediately.  I have no idea what the chances are that will happen.

Gavin Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler, president of EMILY’S List, to fill Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat for the remainder of the term. Butler is known as being a powerhouse fundraiser who also has long-standing ties to organized labor.

Senator Feinstein’s death leaves an open seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. And it’s possible Senate Republicans will block anyone from filling that seat, this Politico article says. Although they may not. The Dems need 60 votes to confirm her replacement, it says. If the seat is left open it’s going to be really hard to get judges confirmed.

See also Kate Riga at TPM about who might be appointed to fill Feinstein’s seat.

Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark described the first House impeachment inquiry hearing: “The charitable view is that the first hearing was a dumpster fire inside a clown car wrapped in a fiasco.”  There are many reports that Republicans are furious with James Comer for his obvious incompetence. Instead of presenting evidence that might tie President Biden to some criminal activity, the first hearing apparently was about establishing a rationale for an impeachment inquiry. The results were, apparently, inconclusive. The witnesses all suspected Joe Biden could maybe be connected to something nefarious through his wayward son, Hunter, but they couldn’t say for certain what that might be and had no actual evidence of anything. Perhaps the committee should have worked out their rationale before holding public hearings.

Meanwhile, the Democrats on the Committee were on a roll. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D-TX).

Amen.

Update: From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, First Trump co-defendant pleads guilty in Fulton election case.

Bail bondsman Scott Hall on Friday became the first defendant in the Fulton County election interference case to take a plea agreement with prosecutors.
During an impromptu hearing before Fulton Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, Hall pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties.

Read more about Scott Hall here.