Jimmy Kimmel lets fly at Dennis Hastert

Former speaker of the House of Representatives Dennis Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison for bank fraud in that he violated banking laws in order to provide hush money to buy the silence of students he had sexually molested when he was a high school wrestling coach. At his sentencing, he admitted to having molested students and the judge called him a ‘serial child molester’ but the statute of limitations had expired on those charges.
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The strange case of Dennis Hastert

I am in Washington, DC for a conference and so read the hard-copy version of the local paper the Washington Post. One thing about reading the hard copy is that one tends to go through the entire paper rather than zeroing in on the main topics you are interested in when you read it online. The big story today was the indictment of the former speaker of the House of Representatives Dennis Hastert, who retired from Congress in 2007 and (surprise!) became a high-paid lobbyist.
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Deja vu all over again?

In a move that did not get too much attention in the news, 13 Republicans members of the hard right caucus voted with 203 Democrats to defeat by 216-203 an effort to ‘pass the rule’ for three Republican bills to be brought to the floor, thus stymying their speaker Mike Johnson. Without the rule being passed, Johnson will need a ⅔ majority. (In a post back in November, I explained what this procedural stuff is all about.)

Why did they do this? Apparently they are unhappy with the deal that Johnson made with the White House and the Democratic leadership over the spending bills for the budget, because it did not contain all the measures they sought. I can understand the frustration of the hard right caucus. As Kevin Drum writes, the framework of the deal that Johnson agreed to is pretty much the same that former speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to with the White House eight months ago.
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McCarthy loyalist Republicans lash out

After the drama over Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker, the House has adjourned and will meet next Tuesday where the Republicans will meet for a candidate forum and begin voting for the next speaker on Wednesday. This Republican debacle is going to have ripple effects for some time. As is often the case after a humiliating experience like this, the people who come out of it looking bad try to pin the blame on others for their own mistakes and faults. In this case, the reason for the chaos is that the Republican party has ceased to be a party in the traditional sense but is now dominated by angry, unprincipled, attention-craving egomaniacs who have sworn their allegiance to an increasingly deranged cult leader.

For example, we have McCarthy blaming Democrats and former speaker Nancy Pelosi for his downfall, saying that they should have supported him “for institutional reasons”.

McCarthy blamed Democrats for his ouster as speaker — arguing that they should have supported his remaining in the top role for institutional reasons.

McCarthy said he had a discussion with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in the days he was trying to wrangle enough votes to get elected speaker. McCarthy claimed that Pelosi promised to support him if he faced a challenge.

McCarthy then argued that by joining Gaetz and other Republicans, Democrats picked politics over the institution.

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More politicians should behave like this

A member of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, who happens to be a Sikh who wears the traditional turban, was singled out for extra scrutiny by US officials at the Detroit airport as he was returning to Canada after an official visit to the US.

Officials from the Trump administration issued an apology after a security agent at a Detroit airport repeatedly demanded that a Canadian cabinet minister remove his turban, the minister has revealed.

Navdeep Bains, the country’s minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, described the incident in an interview with the French-language paper La Presse on Thursday.

Bains was returning to Toronto after meetings with Michigan state leaders in April 2017 and had already passed through regular security checks, but because he was wearing a turban, a security agent told him that he would have to undergo additional checks, according to La Presse.

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Technology guerilla warfare

One of the interesting things about technology is the way that it creates a kind of arms race between those who quickly adopt new technologies and those who feel that it impinges on their own freedom and want to thwart them. We know, for example, that the radar guns used by traffic police have spawned detectors that can tell drivers who like to speed when such devices are in use, leading to more sophisticated devices being developed for police, and so on. In this case, the radar detectors were being used by people who were trying to break the law for their own benefit and increasing the risk to other users of the road.
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