Vivek Ramaswamy creates a new facet of the model minority myth

As an immigrant from South Asia I am of course familiar with the model minority myth that surrounds that community, that we are high achievers in many areas (other than sports), from mathematics to science to business to spelling. But Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has created a new frontier, that we can also be world-class assholes.

Desi Lydic of The Daily Show has a nice compilation showing how Ramaswamy tries to be everything to everyone, to ingratiate himself with diverse groups of people while at the same time having a repellent personality.

I do not normally use words like ‘asshole’ but frankly, I could not find a better descriptor for him. The word ‘jerk’ simply does not do justice to how disgustingly smug, arrogant, and annoying he is. My ire may be also greater because he and I share the same ethnicity of being Tamils, although he is from India and I from Sri Lanka. I would hate for people to think that he and I are alike in other ways too, which is what ethnic stereotyping tends to do.

Susanna Gibson speaks out

Just before the elections in November, I posted about Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner running for a seat in the Virginia House of Representatives. She and her husband had in the past live-streamed sex acts. It was all perfectly legal but some Republican operative had obtained the video and shopped it around to media outlets and the Washington Post had published it. Then flyers with that information were mailed out by the Republican party to voters in that district. To their credit, most of the Democratic party rallied around her but in the end she lost a close race 17,878 to 16,912, a margin of just 966 or 2.8%. The fact that it was so close means that she might well have won otherwise.

Gibson has given an interview about the whole affair and about what people need to realize about the whole online experience.

I think a big underlying factor that really needs to be addressed, and our society needs to start being educated on, is there is this devaluation and misunderstanding of consent, especially when we’re talking about digital privacy. Content that is initially made in a consensual context, which is then distributed in a non-consensual context digitally, is a crime. Just because someone consented to share something in one particular context doesn’t mean that it is or should be fair game for the whole world to see.

Choosing to share content, online or in whatever medium, with select people with the understanding that it will disappear and can only be seen by those present at the time — when we’re talking live streaming, webcamming and Skype — that is a far cry from consenting for that content to be recorded and then broadly disseminated. And there is case law precedent confirming this.

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The nightmare for Kate Cox continues

The Texas supreme court has put on hold the restraining order that a lower court judge had imposed that would have allowed Kate Cox to get an abortion, stating that her condition met the requirements for an exception to the state’s almost total ban on the procedure. The Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, a Republican anti-abortion zealot, had appealed to the supreme court for such a move. Even before the supreme. court stepped in, Paxton went even further and said that he would prosecute any doctor and hospital that allowed the procedure even if the courts rule it to be permissible. So much for the party that says that it is the upholder of law and order.
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The latest bonkers Republican debate

The debate on Wednesday debate involving the four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination other than serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), saw most of them trying hard to claim the title of the main challenger to SSAT. This article summarized the main points.

The explosive fourth Republican presidential debate Wednesday night made plain why former President Donald Trump has so far skipped the 2024 primary debate circuit.

The four contenders onstage — former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — spent most of the two-hour debate hammering each other, overshadowing efforts to focus attention on the frontrunner in the race.

With the smallest debate field so far and with Iowa’s caucuses less than six weeks away, the candidates were better able to showcase their policy beliefs and explore major differences, but they followed the pattern of previous debates with a series of memorable personal shots.

Ramaswamy referred to Haley as “lipstick on a Dick Cheney.” Christie mocked Ramaswamy’s “smartass mouth.” DeSantis said Haley “caves every time the left comes after her.”

An AP article noted this interesting point: “By the end, moderators asked candidates which previous president inspired them. No one named Trump.” SSAT will not be pleased,

Will Saletan describes himself as a political moderate who now does not have a home because the Republican party is bonkers. He summarizes some of the evidence for this that he heard during the debate.

I’M A MODERATE. In 2018, I voted for Larry Hogan, Maryland’s Republican governor. Four years later, when Republicans nominated an election denier to replace him, I voted for the Democratic nominee, Wes Moore. Give me a sensible conservative party, and I’ll consider it. But that’s not what I’m seeing in Congress or in this year’s Republican presidential debates.
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THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S INSANITY leaves a big hole in this country. When progressives jerk their knees on one issue or another—deriding religious parents, overdoing COVID restrictions, calling every border-control policy racist—I’d like to hear alternative ideas from a sane conservative party. Instead, what we have is an extremist, authoritarian party in which—as Kelly essentially acknowledged—the one presidential candidate who tells the truth and adheres to principle has no chance of being nominated.

On The Daily Show, this week’s guest host Charlamagne Tha God highlighted some of the points raised, focussing on the most bonkers of the four, Vivek Ramaswamy, who endorsed a whole list of wacky conspiracy theories.

Will every abortion in Texas have to be approved by a court?

The sweeping restrictions on abortion that some states have imposed in the wake of the US Supreme Court invalidating Roe v. Wade means that some women have to go to court in order to get an abortion that should have been non-controversial. A judge in Texas yesterday issued a temporary restraining order against the state, thus permitting Kate Cox to get an abortion even though she was 20 weeks pregnant and thus exceeded the six-week limit in that state. Her baby had been diagnosed with trisomy 18, a condition under which it is not expected to live more than a few days outside the womb.

Kate Cox, who is 20 weeks pregnant, filed a lawsuit this week asking the court to temporarily block the state’s abortion ban, because she has been unable to get the procedure due to concerns of violating the law. Cox’s baby was diagnosed with trisomy 18 and is not expected to live more than a few days outside the womb, according to the suit.
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Cox has been to three different emergency rooms in the last month due to severe cramping and unidentifiable fluid leaks, according to her lawsuit. Cox has had two prior cesarean surgeries – C-sections – and, the suit said, “continuing the pregnancy puts her at high risk for severe complications threatening her life and future fertility, including uterine rupture and hysterectomy.”

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Another delusional person seeks Santos’s seat

Now that George Santos has been kicked out of Congress, there is a scramble to fill his seat in the special election scheduled on February 13, 2024. Under the rules for special elections, there will not be a primary and each party can pick their nominee. The GOP is reviewing 15 candidates and one candidate, Philip Grillo, seems to be the perfect successor to Santos. Who is Grillo? I’m glad you asked.

Philip Grillo, a candidate in the special election for Santos’s vacant Long Island seat, was convicted this week of charges relating to the January 6 attack, when he entered and exited the building multiple times, at least once through a broken window.

At one point during the protest Grillo, 49, was interviewed on camera about why he was there.

“I’m here to stop the steal,” he said, according to the justice department. “It’s our fucking House!”

He then made his way further into the Capitol. He also recorded videos of himself in the Capitol. “We fucking did it, you understand? We stormed the Capitol,” Grillo said in one. “We shut it down! We did it! We shut the mother..!”

On his third entrance to the building, the justice department said, he could be seen in multiple instances pushing up against police officers and, in another recording, from his cell phone, smoking marijuana inside the building and high-fiving other rioters.

Recently, during his trial, he testified that he had “no idea” Congress convened inside the Capitol.
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At trial, his attorney’s argued that their client had “was acting under actual or believed public authority at the time of the alleged offenses” and said “he was and believed he was authorized to engage in the conduct set forth in the indictment”.

So basically Grillo is both highly ignorant and highly delusional. Given that these are the qualities that the GOP’s leader serial sex offender Donald Trump (SSAT) also embodies, what is there for the GOP not to like about him? Grillo should be a shoo-in for the nomination.

The real problems that Tuberville’s hold highlighted

I posted on Tuesday about how Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville finally caved and released the holds on all but 11 of the hundreds of military promotions that he had held up for over nine months, disrupting the lives of the people and the functioning of the units in which they serve. He did this because he objected to the military reimbursing members of the military for medical treatment that required them to go to another state. He was not objecting to all treatments, just for those getting abortions.
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Bye, bye, Kevin

The ex-speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy has said that he will leave Congress at the end of this year. That will result in two vacancies, since George Santos was unceremoniously kicked out last week and leaves the body split 220-213 in favor of the GOP. The current speaker can now afford to have only three defections om any bill he brings to the floor. (Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that the GOP now has a majority of only one, showing that she has not yet grasped this thing called arithmetic.)

After his ouster, he had said that he would not leave and that indeed he would run for re-election in 2024. But now McCarthy has released a statement saying that although he was leaving Congress he will not stop fighting for the country. I translate that to mean that he will quickly seek to make a ton of money as a lobbyist.

I was planning to write something about how awful McCarthy was but I see that Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said it much better:

“In his short time as speaker, Kevin McCarthy managed to plunge the People’s House into chaos in the name of serving one person and one person alone: Donald Trump. At every turn, Kevin sought to give his puppet master a lifeline, even after the horrific events of January 6, and spent his embarrassing speakership bending the knee to the most extreme factions of the MAGA base.



This anticlimactic end to Kevin’s political career is in line with the rest of his time on Capitol Hill – plagued by cowardice, incompetence, and fecklessness. Our country will be better off without Kevin in office, but his failed tenure in the House should serve as a stark warning to the country about the future of the GOP – no matter how much he kowtowed to the extreme right, no matter how much he kissed the ring, none of it was MAGA enough for the de facto leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump.”

Yep, that’s about right.

McCarthy was apparently furious with serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) for not calling off his attack dog Matt Gaetz when the latter was working to oust him, after all the groveling he had done to gain SSAT’s favor. But even after being ousted, he never said anything publicly, maybe hoping for some kind of rehabilitation. These guys never seem to learn that a sense gratitude is not part of SSAT’s qualities. He wants unquestioned loyalty and obedience and gives nothing in return. If you want something from him, you have to get it in writing and notarized before you give him anything.

Inventing philosophers and their works

[I posted this yesterday and then soon after seem to have inadvertently overwritten it with the Tuberville post, so I am reposting it. Apologies to ahcuah who commented on this post before it got over-ridden and thus his comment became irrelevant to the Tuberville post. Also apologies to Steve who responded to ahcuah’s comment and that also became irrelevant through no fault of his own.]

I was intrigued by this article by Jonathan Egid titled Forging philosophy about questions that have been raised as to whether a 17th century Ethiopian philosopher who was credited with writing an influential work really existed or whether he and his work were invented in the 19th century by an Italian monk.

The Ḥatäta [Zera Yacob], or ‘enquiry’ (the root of which, ሐ-ተ-ተ, in the ancient Ethiopian language of Geʽez literally means ‘to investigate, examine, search’ ) is an unusual work of philosophy for a number of reasons. It is not only a philosophical treatise but also an autobiography, a religious meditation and a witness of the religious wars that plagued Ethiopia in the early 17th century; it presents a theodicy and cosmological argument apparently independent of other traditions of Christian thought; it employs a subtle philosophical vocabulary that is virtually without precursors. Finally, and most perplexingly, the progenitor of these ideas, the Zera Yacob who is the subject of the autobiography and gives his name to the title, may never have existed.

Why might we think this? The text is composed in the voice of one Zera Yacob, a man born to poor parents in ‘the lands of the priests of Aksum’ in northern Ethiopia around the turn of the 17th century.
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The troubled afterlife of the text begins when the work is ‘discovered’ in 1852 by a lonely Capuchin monk named Giusto da Urbino in the highlands of Ethiopia. Before this date, there is no mention of the text in the historical record. The work was sent off to da Urbino’s patron back in Paris, the Irish-Basque explorer, linguist and astronomer Antoine d’Abbadie, and placed in the Ethiopian collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Over the next couple of decades, scholars flocked to consult this fascinating, seemingly unprecedented text. The Ḥatäta was edited and translated into Russian and Latin, and began to gain a wider readership among European intellectuals.

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Tommy Tuberville caves on abortion issue

The arcane rules that the US senate has set for itself gives enormous powers to even a single senator to gum up the works. Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville used this power to hold up the promotions and transfers of 451 military personnel for nine months. The reason? He was unhappy that the military would pay for the abortions of personnel who were forced to travel to another state to have them because the state they were in banned them. This policy is not specific to abortions but is part of the military’s general health care policy that covers any treatment that requires such travel. He was demanding that the abortion requirement be removed beforehe would release the holds.

This hold caused a lot of problems for the officers involve since it complicated the planning of them and their families since where they would live was in limbo. It even irritated Tuberville’s Republican colleagues but they were unwilling to do anything drastic to overcome his hold.

Then today, Tuberville suddenly announced that he was lifting the hold on all but the promotions of 12 four-star officers.

Tommy Tuberville is dropping most of his months-long holds on military officer nominations in the Senate, backing down from his vow to block them until the Pentagon changes an internal abortion policy.

The Alabama Republican plans to continue his holds on four-star nominees, he told reporters, but will release the rest effective immediately. That means the Senate can move to confirm most of them as soon as Tuesday evening, and possibly all of them before the new year.
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Schumer told reporters the Senate will move “as soon as possible” to confirm the outstanding nominees, which are typically approved via unanimous consent. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said that “should be today.”

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) told POLITICO he expects Democrats will discuss voting on the other four-star officers this month. The Senate only has one more full week of session and confirming those officers one at a time would take several days. Reed suggested individual roll-call votes on the four-star nominees could happen “if necessary.”

Another example that what Republicans do best is create obstacles over their pet obsessions.