Megan Twohey has an investigative report into the relationship between Kanye West (who now goes by the name Ye) and shoe maker Adidas. It is astonishing the extent to which the company was willing to overlook Ye’s behavior because he was bringing in money.

For almost 10 years, Adidas looked past West’s misconduct as profits soared. The partnership, which began in 2013, boosted company profits and made West a billionaire. But West subjected employees to antisemitic and other abusive comments. And though their contract for years had a clause allowing Adidas to end the agreement if West’s behavior harmed the company’s reputation, it’s not clear that executives ever considered invoking it before terminating the deal last year.

West showed a troubling fixation on Jews and Hitler. At a 2013 meeting with Adidas designers at the company’s headquarters in Germany, he drew a swastika on one of their sketches. He later told a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a portrait of Hitler every day. And West told Adidas colleagues that he admired Hitler’s command of propaganda.

He brought pornography and crude comments into the workplace. Weeks before the swastika episode, West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment. Last year, he ambushed Adidas executives in Los Angeles with a pornographic film. Staff members also complained to top executives that he had made angry, sexually offensive comments to them.

Big demands and mood swings weighed on the relationship. West, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, at times rejected the assessment and resisted treatment. Tears were common; so was fury. In 2019, he abruptly moved the operation designing his shoes, called Yeezys, to remote Cody, Wyo., and ordered the Adidas team to relocate. In a meeting with company leaders that year to discuss his demands, he hurled shoes around the room.

Adidas adapted to West’s behavior. Managers and top executives started a group text chain, called the “Yzy hotline,” to address matters involving West. The Adidas team working on Yeezys adopted a strategy they likened to firefighting, rotating members on and off the front lines of dealing with the artist.

I am not naive about the extent to which corporate America makes everything subservient to its search for profits but usually they try to avoid those things that might harm the corporate brand and turn off customers. But here it seems like anything Ye said and did, however outrageous, was tolerated and worked around, like the indulgent parents of a a spoiled toddler. Surely they must have known that these things would eventually come to light.

Republicans finally united behind a speaker, a congressman from Louisiana named Mike Johnson. He is an election denier and checks off all the extreme right wing boxes.

There does not seem to be anything substantive that distinguishes him from all the others who tried and failed so I suspect that it was due to sheer exhaustion and embarrassment that any would-be opponents decided to swallow their reservations and vote him in. If his name had come up earlier, he would likely have been rejected.

Let’s see how he manages to run things.

As the GOP members of the House of Representatives continue to flail around trying to find a solution to their problem with electing a speaker, they seem to be trying the same thing of having a candidate forum and selecting a nominee only to have that person withdraw because they cannot get the 217 votes needed on the House floor to win. The difference is that the time taken to find a nominee and having his candidacy collapse is getting shorter and shorter, which is progress of a sort. Late Tuesday night, they voted for Mike Johnson to be their latest nominee. He beat out the Byron Donalds in the final round by 128 to 29 with 49 not voting for either. That means that another five were not even present in the room. They will vote Wednesday morning to see whether he can get the necessary 217 votes or meet the same fate as the previous nominees and have to withdraw. That Johnson got just 129 votes does not augur well for him.

If there is yet another failure, I think they need to try something different and so I am offering a modest proposal. Despite the title of this post suggesting that it is some kind of Swiftian satire, I offer it in all earnestness as a way out of the impasse.
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The GOP circus in the US House of Representatives keeps going on. After multiple votes for the nine candidates who had entered the race, the last person standing was Tom Emmer, the chief whip and the third in the party’s house hierarchy. (I had not realized that Emmer was first elected to congress in 2014, filling the seat vacated by that other noted nutjob Michele Bachmann.) Since the former speaker Kevin McCarthy and the next in line majority leader Steve Scalise were rejected, it was fitting that Emmer would be the next person to be unceremoniously dumped by his colleagues.

And so it appears. Emmer had 26 defections in a vote to see how many would vote for him on the floor of the house, even more that Scalise and Jim Jordan. In fact, 15 of those defectors voted for Jordan. And then serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) launched a major attack on him even though Emmer had tried groveling to SSAT. That pretty much doomed his chances and the latest reports are that Emmer has dropped out.

So now what? Does the GOP go down the list of the eight people who lost to Emmer to see if any of them is willing to be humiliated next? Do they go back to McCarthy, Scalise, and Jordan? Do they look for someone else entirely? How long before the only people left are Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert? The former has been sucking up SSAT in the most disgusting fashion and the latter has shown that she is willing to ‘reach across the aisle’ with at least one Democrat. (Ha!)

All such impasses have to end some time, even if just out of exhaustion or because some catastrophe is imminent. But I just cannot see what form that ending will take with this bunch of rigid extremists with idiosyncratic obsessions that they are unwilling to let go of.

Nine Republican members of the House of Representatives will go before their party colleagues behind closed doors tonight to make their case to be the party’s nominee for speaker. Then they will vote on Tuesday for whom to nominate to be the next sacrificial lamb publicly humiliated when and if they go to the floor of the House for the vote. As far as I know, no decision has been made as to how the selection will be made. Since the McCarthy ouster debacle, there seem to be no rules governing how the party works so we can expect yet another free-for-all.

One option is, after all nine have made their case, to have a preferential ballot where each member ranks their choices one through nine. But this may be too complicated for some of them who are not exactly Einsteins when it comes to reasoning (I am looking at you, Louis Gohmert) and so they could have eight rounds of voting where after each round, the lowest vote-getter is eliminated. Or they could simply take the top vote-getter after the first round as their nominee. These would be a rational ways of going about things so we can be fairly sure that it will not happen and instead there will be chaos. The race has already degenerated into flame wars and obscene tweets.
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