Another thriller in rugby World Cup

Today (Sunday) saw two interesting quarter-final games. In the first England beat Fiji 30-24. It was a close game and Fiji had its chances but England were more disciplined while Fiji gave away away penalties at crucial moments and failed to convert two penalty goal attempts.

The other match between France and South Africa was a real thriller with South Africa edging out a 29-28 victory. France led 28-22 towards the end but South Africa took the lead with a goal and then their dogged defense held off a furious French attempt to get back the lead. This was another match that was worthy of a final.

One feels sorry for France. They have never won the World Cup since its inception, reaching the finals in 1987, 1999, and 2011 only to lose each time. This time they had a really good chance, especially since the tournament was being played in their home country.

The semi-final games will be Argentina v. New Zealand on Friday and South Africa v. England on Saturday. New Zealand and South Africa are favored to win. Each nation was won three times before, sharing equal honors in the last four World Cups.

Bias in coin tosses

When we have to randomly but fairly choose between two outcomes, we instinctively reach for the coin toss. It is because it is an article of faith that the two outcomes of heads and tails are equally likely. But the two sides of the coin are not identical, and hence that slight difference may make a difference in outcome probabilities. In fact, there are four possible forms of bias that may exist. It is possible that either heads or tails may come out on top slightly more frequently or that there is a same-side bias (i.e., the side that is on top when flipped is more likely to be on top when it falls) or an opposite side bias.
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Thriller in rugby world Cup

The quarter-final game between top-ranked Ireland and #4 New Zealand was an excellent game, closely fought and displaying a high standard of play by both teams. New Zealand won 28-24, defending a ferocious Ireland attack in the last five minutes. It was a game worthy of a final but due to the unfortunate seeding, these two teams met far too early in the tournament.

In the other semi-final game, Argentina beat Wales 29-17. Argentina had a good second half. Argentina has benefited from this draw that placed them in the weakest pool D where England was the only top eight team in it. Wales (#7) also had an easy path to the quarter-finals, having just Fiji (#8) and Australia (#9) as their most serious contenders. Argentina now meet New Zealand in the semi-finals, which is going to be very tough for them, and one does not expect a close game.

The other two quarter-finals on Sunday involve France (#3) v. South Africa (#3) and England (#6) v. Fiji (#8). The first match is another pairing of teams that should not meet this early. The winners of these two games will play each other in the semi-finals and that too may not be a close game.

Don’t Republicans know how negotiations work?

After majority leader Steve Scalise withdrew from the race of House speaker late Thursday evening following his failure to get enough support from his party members to ensure that he would get the necessary majority on the House floor, it seemed like Jim Jordan, the person whom he had defeated just a little earlier, had a clear shot at getting the nomination and the required House vote.

The rules require a speaker to get a majority of people present in the chamber and voting, which means that anyone who is present but just votes ‘present’ does not count towards any of the totals. That opens up various mathematical possibilities. One is that if the party persuades enough extremists to vote ‘present’ to enable a Republican to get 213 votes (out of their 221), that will be just enough to defeat the 212 Democratic votes that will go to their leader Hakeem Jeffries. In January, McCarthy became speaker on the 15th ballot, after six Republican holdouts finally agreed to vote ‘present’, leaving him needing just 216 to win which he was finally able to get.

But on Friday, things went awry again. Just minutes before the vote behind closed doors, Austin Scott, a congressperson from Georgia threw his hat into the ring and while Jordan got 124 votes, Scott got a surprising 81, even though he is hardly a household name. Then they took a second vote on the crucial question of whether the members would vote for Jordan on the floor of the House and he got only 155 votes in favor, with 55 against. This 155 is less than the 188 that McCarthy got in his first round of voting in January, which means that Jordan has to work even harder to get people to switch their minds.
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Explanation for the puzzling World Cup rugby draw

The 2023 World Cup rugby tournament has entered the quarter-final knock out stage and one thing that had puzzled me all along was the draw that placed the 20 teams that started out into four groups (called ‘pools’), in which the five teams in each pool that would play every other team, with the top two going to the quarter-final stage. You would expect that the teams would be seeded so that the top eight teams would be split equally among the four groups in such a way that, in the absence of upsets, the top four would meet in the semi-finals and the top two would meet in the finals.

But when you looked at the pools, you see that pool A had France (#2) and New Zealand (#4), while pool B had Ireland (#1), South Africa (#3), and Scotland (#5), pool C had Wales (#6) and Fiji (#8) along with Australia (#9), while pool D had just England (#6). (These rankings were those just before the current tournament started and may have changed as a result of the matches already played.) As a result, Scotland did not qualify for the last eight, even though they are ranked #5, because their pool B also had the two of the top three teams of Ireland and South Africa. Even though England is ranked lower than Scotland at #6, they easily made it to the quarter-finals. Their toughest opponent is when they meet Fiji in the quarter-finals and the first time they have to play any team that is higher ranked than them, assuming they get by Fiji, is in the semi-finals.
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Steve, we hardly knew ye

It appears that winning the majority of votes for speaker within the Republican conference by a margin of 113-99 and then being endorsed by his rival Jim Jordan was not enough for Steve Scalise to get 217 votes (from the total of 221 Republicans) to enable him to become speaker. There were enough hard ‘no’s to force him to withdraw his name from further consideration. The House adjourned last evening and it is not clear when it will meet again to try and get this essential piece of business done.

Here are some of the people who are opposed to Scalise.


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The Republican speaker fiasco continues

Yesterday the Republican members of the House of Representatives (there are 221 in all) met behind closed doors to hear from the two candidates Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan who put their names forward to replace Kevin McCarthy as speaker. In order to prevent a repeat of the public humiliation that took place in January when McCarthy had to make all manner of deals to win over votes and even then it took 15 rounds of voting, this time the party decided that they would vote behind closed doors until one candidate got at least 217 votes, the minimum necessary to get a majority in the 433-member house (two seats are vacant due to resignations).

Scalise and Jordan are supporters of all the extreme Republican positions. Both are Trump loyalists who refuse to concede that he lost the election and have refused to condemn the actions of the January 6th rioters. Scalise has even given a speech to a white nationalist neo-Nazi group and reportedly once referred to himself as “David Duke without the baggage”. In a normal party, such things would hurt a politician but in today’s Republican party it is likely seen as a plus. Meanwhile Jordan has been dogged by allegations that when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University, he turned a blind eye to rampant sexual abuse of about 300 wrestlers by the team doctor, claiming that he did not know what was going on.
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George Santos gets even more indictments

The Republican serial liar and fabulist congressperson has been hit with even more indictments that greatly expands the range of his alleged crimes to a total of 23. It seems like there was no crime too petty for him if the proceeds could be siphoned to his own bank accounts. His former campaign treasurer Nancy Marks has already pleaded guilty to fraud and is willing to testify agains Santos, which cannot be good news for him.
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McCarthy as speaker again?

Incredibly, there are reports that Kevin McCarthy may be interested in becoming speaker again. While he has not explicitly said so, some of his supporters are planning to nominate him at the closed door party meetings and he has not asked them to refrain.

A bloc of Kevin McCarthy’s most vocal GOP supporters, many of them centrists, are vowing to nominate the former speaker to return to the job and support him for as long as they can.

Three House Republicans involved in the effort to return the gavel to McCarthy — which is flaring up just a week after his historic ejection — say they expect dozens of colleagues to initially vote for the Californian during this week’s internal conference debate over speaker candidates.

Their plans depend on whether McCarthy is nominated, as expected, and may prevent either of the declared candidates to replace him — Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio — from garnering a majority on the first ballot.

After POLITICO’s initial report published, McCarthy publicly asked supporters not to nominate him. Several GOP members involved in the effort, however, have said they received no direction to stand down.

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How do you fix a broken political party?

There is widespread acceptance outside the MAGA cult that the Republican party has ceased to be a political party in any accepted sense. Even within the MAGA movement, there are those who have contempt for the Republican party, seeing it as part of the establishment that is not fully accepting of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT). The rot did not begin with SSAT’s takeover of the party, though. The rot started earlier, and John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin has his running mate in 2008, and the way she was embraced by so many, was the first serious sign that it had ceased to be a serious party. But the surest indication that a political party has gone seriously off the rails is when a demagogue with no serious policy agenda but instead spouts a series of grievances is seen as a savior and becomes its unquestioned leader, leaving it as just a hollow shell. The brutal ouster on Kevin McCarthy as speaker, someone who tried to have it both ways as a establishment figure as well as a MAGA cult member, was seen as the stripping away of final veneer of any political credibility.

Politico had an interesting roundup of opinions from academics and journalists about how it went so horribly wrong for the Republican party and what needs to be done to make it into a party again. I picked out just a few of the many contributions and the gist of the things they said.
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