Sun: His Followers Are So Dumb, They Even Get His Name Wrong

NIMBY - Help the Homeless, But Not in My Neighborhood

Generally, Americans support tackling housing insecurity, with 71 percent saying that it should be at least an important priority for Congress to pass legislation growing the housing supply and improving housing affordability. But research also suggests that while Americans want more kinds of infrastructure to reduce homelessness, far fewer want those resources close to where they themselves live.

Earlier this year, YouGov surveyed Americans about building almost 40 kinds of developments, ranging from country clubs to waste management facilities. Regarding social infrastructure, 85 percent of Americans supported building homeless shelters somewhere in the United States. However, when they were asked about building shelters in their own local area, support was over 20 percentage points lower. Support for low-income housing followed a similar pattern, with broad approval for building it someplace in the country (82 percent) but much less for building it locally (65 percent).

This discrepancy isn’t necessarily new or surprising, however. More recently, we’ve seen it play out in American cities throughout the pandemic. For example, in New York City’s Upper West Side, the city temporarily housed homeless people in unoccupied hotel rooms. But after local homeowners and renters protested, the city relocated many of the people to other neighborhoods.

Screw Referrals!  I Want to See a Perp Walk.

The House January 6 select committee plans to use its final meeting on Monday to refer Donald Trump, among others, to the justice department for conduct connected to the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

As it prepares to release its voluminous investigative report, the panel is expected to use its meeting, announced for 1pm, to take several conclusive steps. These include outlining an executive summary of its findings and legislative recommendations, voting to formally adopt the report, and then voting to issue criminal and civil referrals.

The committee was scheduled to meet over the weekend to finalize the referrals, which, in the case of Trump, center on obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the United States, among other potential charges, the Guardian first reported. The referrals for Trump mark a remarkable moment for the precedent-shattering investigation, which has looked into the former president’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat at any cost, culminating in the Capitol attack last year.

Answer:  He's in Jeopardy.  Question:  Who Is Kevin McCarthy?

In his quest to rise to House speaker, Kevin McCarthy is charging straight into history — potentially becoming the first nominee in 100 years unable to win the job on a first-round floor vote.

The increasingly real prospect of a messy fight over the speaker’s gavel on Day One of the new Congress on Jan. 3 is worrying House Republicans, who are bracing for the spectacle. They have been meeting endlessly in private at the Capitol trying to resolve the standoff.

Taking hold of a perilously slim 222-seat Republican majority in the 435-member House and facing a handful of defectors, McCarthy is working furiously to reach the 218-vote threshold typically needed to become speaker.

“The fear is, that if we stumble out of the gate,” said Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., a McCarthy ally, then the voters who sent the Republicans to Washington “will revolt over that and they will feel let down.”

Not since the disputed election of 1923 has a candidate for House speaker faced the public scrutiny of convening a new session of Congress only to have it descend into political chaos, with one vote after another, until a new speaker is chosen. At that time, it eventually took a grueling nine ballots to secure the gavel.

McCarthy, a Republican from Bakersfield, California, who was first elected in 2006 and who remains allied with Donald Trump, has signaled he is willing to go as long as it takes in a floor vote to secure the speaker’s job he has wanted for years. The former president has endorsed McCarthy, and is said to be making calls on McCarthy’s behalf. McCarthy has given no indication he would step aside, as he did in 2015 when it was clear he did not have the support.

But McCarthy also is acknowledging the holdouts won’t budge. “It’s all in jeopardy,” McCarthy said Friday in an interview with conservative Hugh Hewitt.

‘Crypto winter’ has come. And it’s looking more like an ice age.

A year ago, the crypto world was booming, with prices for bitcoin and ethereum at all-time highs, celebrities stumbling over each other to promote expensive digital art, and logos from blockchain companies gracing sports stadiums and Super Bowl ads.

That era is over.

In the last year, cryptocurrency prices have fallen by more than half, trading volume has cratered, and several high-profile companies have collapsed in liquidity crises. The arrest last week in the Bahamas of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of what until very recently was one of the biggest and best-respected cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, has only deepened the sense that the crypto bubble has definitively popped, taking with it billions of dollars of investments made by regular people, pension funds, venture capitalists and traditional companies.

Governments that had long demurred on regulation are suddenly pressing for more oversight, while federal regulators and law enforcement have rolled out multiple civil and criminal investigations.

The crypto industry is calling this moment its “crypto winter.” They say it’s cyclical, much like a bear market for Wall Street — something that has happened before and will eventually blow over.

But experts say the ferocity and scale of this downturn could end up leading to more of an ice age.

“Where we are is at a deeply existential point for the industry,” said Yesha Yadav, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who closely follows cryptocurrency regulation.

A major determining factor: “How deep is the rot?”

The spectacular rise and fall of the cryptocurrency markets has rocked its world of investors and boosters, who just a year ago were riding at the top of the market. Finance experts have compared the collapse to other major busted bubbles in the past — from the dot-com crash two decades ago, to a run on Florida property a century ago.