By David Morgan, Moira Warburton and Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican Kevin McCarthy was elected speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives early on Saturday, after making extensive concessions to a group of right-wing hardliners that raised questions about the party’s ability to govern.

The 57-year-old Californian suffered one final humiliation when Representative Matt Gaetz withheld his vote on the 14th ballot as midnight approached, prompting a scuffle in which fellow Republican Mike Rogers had to be physically pulled away.

McCarthy‘s victory in the 15th ballot brought an end to the deepest congressional dysfunction in over 160 years. But it sharply illustrated the difficulties that he will face in leading a narrow and deeply polarized majority.

He won at last on a margin of 216-212. He was able to be elected with the votes of fewer than half the House members only because six in his own party withheld their votes – not backing McCarthy as leader, but also not voting for another contender.

As he took the gavel for the first time, McCarthy represented the end of President Joe Biden’s Democrats’ hold on both chambers of Congress.

“Our system is built on checks and balances. It’s time for us to be a check and provide some balance to the president’s policies,” McCarthy said in his inaugural speech, which laid out a wide range of priorities from cutting spending to immigration, to fighting culture war battles.

McCarthy secured the gavel only after agreeing to a demand by hardliners that any lawmaker be able call for his removal at any time. That will sharply cut the power he will hold when trying to pass legislation on critical issues including funding the government, addressing the nation’s looming debt ceiling and other crises that may arise.

Republicans’ weaker-than-expected performance in November’s midterm elections left them with a narrow 222-212 majority, which has given outsized power to the right-wing hardliners who have opposed McCarthy‘s leadership.

Those concessions, including sharp spending cuts and other curbs on McCarthy‘s leadership, could point to further turbulence in the months ahead, especially when Congress will need to sign off on a further increase of the United States’ $31.4 trillion borrowing authority.

Over the past decade, Republicans have repeatedly shut down much of the government and pushed the world’s largest borrower to the brink of default in efforts to extract steep spending cuts, usually without success.

Several of the hardliners have questioned McCarthy‘s willingness to engage in such brinksmanship when negotiating with President Joe Biden, whose Democrats control the Senate. They have raged in the past when Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell agreed to compromise deals.

The hardliners, also including Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry and Chip Roy of Texas, said concessions they extracted from McCarthy will make it easier to pursue such tactics this year – or force another vote on McCarthy‘s leadership if he does not live up to their expectations.

“You have changes in how we’re going to spend and allocate money that are going to be historic,” said Representative Scott Perry, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.

“We don’t want clean debt ceilings to just go through and just keep paying the bill without some counteracting effort to control spending when the Democrats control the White House and control the Senate.”

One of those Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, warned that the concessions McCarthy made to win the job may come back to haunt him.

“Kevin McCarthy‘s concessions to the extremists in his party make it far more likely that the MAGA Republican controlled House will cause a government shutdown or a default with devastating consequences to our country,” Schumer said in a statement.

In a sharp contrast to this week’s battles among House Republicans, Biden and McConnell appeared together in Kentucky on Wednesday to highlight investments in infrastructure.

McCarthy‘s belated victory came the day after the two-year anniversary of a Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when a violent mob stormed Congress in an attempt to overturn then-President Donald Trump’s election loss.

This week’s 14 failed votes marked the highest number of ballots for the speakership since 1859, in the turbulent years before the Civil war.

McCarthy‘s last bid for speaker, in 2015, crumbled in the face of right-wing opposition. The two previous Republican speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, left the job after conflict with right-wing colleagues.

McCarthy now holds the authority to block Biden’s legislative agenda, force votes for Republican priorities on the economy, energy and immigration and move forward with investigations of Biden, his administration and his family.

CONCESSIONS

But McCarthy has agreed to concessions that mean he will hold considerably less power than his predecessor, Democrat Nancy Pelosi. That will make it hard for him to agree to deals with Democrats in a divided Washington.

Allowing a single member to call for a vote to remove the speaker will give hardliners extraordinary leverage.

The agreement would cap spending for the next fiscal year at last year’s levels – amounting to a significant cut when inflation and population growth are taken into account.

That could meet resistance from more centrist Republicans or those who have pushed for greater military funding, particularly as the United States is spending money to help Ukraine fend off a Russian assault.

Moderate Republican Brian Fitzpatrick said he was not worried that the House would effectively be run by hardliners.

“It’s aspirational,” he told reporters. “We still have our voting cards.”

(Reporting by David Morgan, Moira Warburton and Andy Sullivan; Additional reporting by Gram Slattery, Jason Lange and Makini Brice, writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Scott Malone, Cynthia Osterman and William Mallard)

The post ‘It’s How You Finish’: McCarthy Outlasts Opposition, Elected Speaker of the House appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

After dragging it out all week in humiliating fashion, House Republicans finally voted Kevin McCarthy into the Speaker position late on Friday night. We’re already seeing doomsday narratives about how this means House Republicans will shut down the government forever and cut Social Security and Medicare. It’s important to understand that most of this won’t really happen.

First, you have to keep in mind why this past week happened. Members of the House lunatic caucus dragged out the Speaker vote because they were fundraising off it the entire time. They know that these kinds of anti-government antics are popular with their far right base, and so they milked this for every dollar it was worth. When they finally relented on Friday night and allowed McCarthy to become Speaker, it wasn’t because anything had really changed ideologically. It was because the lunatic caucus concluded that they’d milked this stunt dry, and now they’re ready to move on to the next stunt.

The thing about this week-long Speaker stunt is that it didn’t actually harm the United States government in any major way. That’s because it didn’t have to. These things are about symbolism, noise, fluff. Just as the lunatic caucus couldn’t have just magically gone on forever with no Speaker, it can’t just magically shut down the government forever either.

House Republicans in moderate districts aren’t going to let their own reelection prospects be damaged by some long term government shutdown. They might sit back and let the lunatic caucus take things to the brink, or even shut things down for a bit, but they’re not going to let a shutdown go on forever – which means the Democrats won’t have to cave on Republican demands to cut Social Security and Medicare.

The problem is this. The lunatic caucus knows that just by threatening to shut down the government forever and cut Medicare and Social Security, it can get the media and pundit class to hype it as if it were a real thing that might actually happen. The media can’t pass up the opportunity to chase ratings with this kind of doom casting, and too many audience members think they’re only being “vigilant” if they sit there and panic over every scary thing the media says.

This all adds up to a vicious cycle where the lunatic caucus manages to fundraise off these empty threats just by getting the media to treat them as if they’re real. It gets worse when so many of the activists on our side think they’re helping by frantically yelling “oh no we’re all doomed!” Now people on all sides are hyping the same exact false narrative about House Republicans having a some magic wand.

This harms things in two ways. First, it creates the notion on our side that House Republicans are going to get their way no matter what, which tells activists on our side that there’s no reason to bother fighting back. Second, when all the focus is on these imaginary doomsday things that House Republicans are supposedly going to do, far too little focus is on the more subtle corrupt things that House Republicans are actually doing. In other words, panicked doomsday hysteria makes us less vigilant, not more vigilant.

In reality, there are two narratives we should be pushing right now. The first is that House Republicans are inept idiots who can’t even tie their shoelaces. The second is that House Republicans are evil for even threatening to do all these evil things that they can’t actually do. These two narratives make for effective messaging. It’s how you take the legs out from these House Republicans while they’re trying to carry out their agendas, and it’s how you convince voters in the middle to hand the House back to the Democrats in 2024 or any special elections that come before that.

Not coincidentally, these smart narratives are precisely what House Democrats have been pushing all week. The Democrats are in fact very good at messaging. It’s time more of us started listening to them, amplifying them, and learning from them. Anything else, and you’re just playing into the hands of House Republicans, who want you out there talking about how they supposedly have infinite powers to do any evil they want.

The post Even with Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, House Republicans aren’t going to be able to do most of what they’re threatening to do appeared first on Palmer Report.

You become a prime target for advertisers the moment you get a positive pregnancy test

“Cocaine is God’s way of saying that you’re making too much money,” Robin Williams once joked. God also might have a few choice words to say about a new $3,300 self-driving stroller unveiled at the CES tech show in Las Vegas. The Ella smart stroller uses artificial intelligence to navigate and is filled with bells and whistles like a white noise machine and an automatic parking brake. It’s the Tesla of strollers, basically.

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Jonathan Weiss/Shutterstock

• A Southwest passenger spent $600 and 4 days trying to get home after the airline’s holiday meltdown.
• Olivia Laskowski couldn’t get another Southwest flight for more than two weeks, per New York Times.
• Instead, she decided to buy a JetBlue flight to get back to New York with her cat.

A Southwest passenger and her cat were stranded for four days over the holidays following Southwest’s meltdown, a report says.

The New York Times reported that Olivia Laskowski was due to fly from Nashville to New York on December 27 when she received a text message from Southwest the night before saying her flight was canceled.

Laskowski, who was travelling with her pet Siamese cat Pretzel, found that the earliest she could book a new flight with the airline was January 11. She was forced instead to spend $478 to fly with JetBlue, which included a $125 charge for Pretzel.

The JetBlue flight got her back to Brooklyn on December 30, per The Times – four days later than planned.

Laskowski was one of the passengers who received 25,000 frequent flyer points, valued at more than $300, the newspaper reported. She was also told she would get a refund, but was unsure about further compensation from the airline.

“Sometimes you get extra expenses in life and you just kind of brush them off and they are what they are,” Laskowski told The Times. 

“But it’s the type of money that I’d really like to get back because as a young person that lives in probably the most expensive city in the country, $600 does make a big difference to me.”

Southwest expects to take a hit of about $825 million in lost revenue, passenger reimbursements, and other costs from the chaos.

Southwest didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.

Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images; Dr. Matt Davey; Rey Mourot

• Photos show colorful algae blooms are turning glaciers pink, purple, and green across the planet.
• Aristotle first wrote about “blood snow.” The glacier algae is probably a vestige of the Ice Age.
• But scientists think the algae blooms are growing and speeding up glacier melt as the planet warms.

You might think of glaciers as vast fields of white snow. But some of them are changing colors.Pink snow at the Presena glacier, near Pellizzano in the Italian Alps.

Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images

In Greenland, glaciers are turning a deep purple-grey — almost black.A drone image shows researchers trekking to a vast bloom of purple algae staining the Greenland ice sheet black.

Courtesy of Laura Halbach

In Antarctica, they’re peppered with green snow.Scientist Andrew Gray surveys blooms of green snow in Antarctica.

Dr. Matt Davey

And in the Alps, they’re blushing pink.A man walks on pink snow at the Presena glacier near Pellizzano, Italy.

Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images

In all these places, and more, the culprit is microscopic algae.Purple algae from Greenland, imaged through a microscope.

Courtesy of Katie Sipes

Colorful blooms of snow and ice algae have been documented on glaciers in nearly every continent.A strip of “blood snow” filled with red algae cuts across a dark bloom of purple algae in Greenland.

Dr. Pamela E. Rossel/GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam

The first written record of a glacier algae bloom comes from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. He wrote about seeing pink snow on Mount Olympus.Illustration of a sculptural bust of Greek philosopher & teacher Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)

Stock Montage/Getty Images

Today, people call that “blood snow” or “watermelon snow.”

Eric Maréchal/AlpAlga

Researcher Eric Maréchal suspects snow and ice algae are on every glacier on Earth — vestige of a time when ice covered the planet, 20,000 years ago.Eric Maréchal shows a sample of microalgae near the Galibier peak, in the French Alps, on June 18, 2021.

Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images

Maréchal studies the red algae that makes blood snow. He leads a research group called AlpAlga.The algae that makes “blood snow,” under a microscope.

Eric Maréchal/AlpAlga

He’s one of many scientists who think the algae blooms are getting bigger and more common — both an indicator and a driver of glaciers’ catastrophic disappearance.A researcher takes a sample of Sanguina nivaloides algae at the Brevent in Chamonix, France, June 14, 2022.

Denis Balibouse/Reuters

That’s because microalgae thrive in warmth and moisture.

Eric Maréchal/AlpAlga

“The moment you have melting, the algae just are happy,” Liane G. Benning, who studies purple ice algae in Greenland, told Insider.Liane G. Benning examines an ice core in Greenland.

Courtesy of Katie Sipes

“They just need a little bit of water,” she added. “And they have a party. They go and bloom.”A helicopter flies above a purple algae bloom darkening the ice sheet in Greenland.

Dr. Pamela E. Rossel/GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam

While the algae are partying, they’re slowly killing their hosts. Instead of the blinding white that reflects sunlight away from a glacier, algae blooms create vast patches of pink, red, purple, or green.A close-up of wet ice full of algae. This image is about 20 centimeters wide.

Courtesy of Rey Mourot

Studies in the Himalayas, Greenland, Alaska, and across the Arctic have found that these colorful blooms cause glaciers to absorb more sunlight, leading to new ice melt.Annotated image of snow fading into darkened ice in Greenland.

Insider/Laura Halbach

This could have dire consequences. Glacier melt is raising sea levels, driving extreme weather, and diminishing water supplies worldwide.Rising sea levels destroy homes built on the shoreline, forcing villagers to relocate, in El Bosque, Mexico, November 7, 2022.

Gustavo Graf/Reuters

But the idea that the blooms are getting bigger is still a hypothesis, since there’s no thorough record of glacier algae before human-caused climate change.A DeepPurple research camp in Greenland, surrounded by an algae bloom, as seen from a drone.

Courtesy of Rey Mourot

Benning’s research group, Deep Purple, is trying to fill this gap.Deep Purple researchers store samples in Greenland.

Courtesy of Laura Halbach and Alex Anesio

They’re looking back in time by drilling into the ice, where they hope to find clues about the history of algae on the Greenland ice sheet.

Liane G Benning

Researchers like Andrew Gray are also using satellite imagery and drones to measure today’s algae blooms.Satellite imagery shows green blooms of algae lining the coast of Robert Island in Antarctica.

Landsat/Copernicus/Maxar Technologies/Google Maps

“We still don’t know much about the fundamental ecology of snow algae,” Gray, who studies green snow algae in Antarctica, told Insider in an email.Multi-colored snow algae on Anchorage Island in Antarctica.

Dr. Matt Davey

He’s trying to solve some key mysteries about the algae: “where they are, why they are where they are, and how they’re likely to respond to warming.”Researcher Matt Davey samples snow algae at Lagoon Island, Antarctica.

Sarah Vincent

For Maréchal, warming is actually making it harder to study the algae.Sunset over the Mediterranean, as seen from Mount Olympus.

Eric Maréchal/AlpAlga

In May, his team hiked to the glaciers to take samples of snow while it was still white. They needed a baseline to compare against later in the summer, once the red algae started blooming.Maréchal’s colleagues, Stephane Ravanel and Lucie Liger, take samples of red snow algae on Mount Olympus.

Eric Maréchal/AlpAlga

But when they reached their sampling site on Mont Brevent, expecting blankets of pure white snow, they found it was already pink with algae.Eric Maréchal searches for Sanguina nivaloides algae at the Brevent in Chamonix, France.

Denis Balibouse/Reuters

When they returned a week later, all they found was bare earth. The snow had already melted away.A research site atop Mont Brévent, usually covered in seasonal snow through early July, lost most of its snowpack in May.

Eric Maréchal/AlpAlga

One Italian ski resort covered a glacier with reflective white material to counteract the snow’s color change and slow its melt. But that’s not an option in most places.Huge geotextile sheets on the Presena glacier near Pellizzano in Trentino, northern Italy, in order to delay snow melting on skiing slopes.

Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images

“What can we do about these pesky algae? Everybody asks that question,” Benning said. “We should bloody stop changing the climate.”A coal-fired electricity plant in Juliette, Georgia.

Chris Aluka Berry/Reuters

The scientists don’t think their algae research will solve the problem. But it can help inform better models of future glacier melt. For now, modeling doesn’t account for algae.

Courtesy of Laura Halbach and Alex Anesio

“My perception of life in Antarctica really changed when I started thinking of the snow and ice as a kind of soil, supporting all sorts of bacteria, fungi, virus, cyanobacteria, algae (of course), all the way to invertebrate life,” Gray said.Red snow algae under an electron microscope.

Liane G Benning/German Research Centre for Geosciences/GFZ Potsdam

“Most people when they go on a glacier and they look at that, they think it’s just dirt,” Benning said.Researchers stand in a vast patch of glacier darkened by purple algae in Greenland.

Courtesy of Laura Halbach and Alex Anesio

Generally, studying microalgae in the snow and ice can help researchers understand Earth’s glaciers and the hidden worlds inside them, before they disappear.An AlpAlga researcher digs beneath a pink algae bloom.

Eric Maréchal/AlpAlga

But like dirt, the ice has a life of its own. And it may be changing with the climate, just like life everywhere else.

Courtesy of Laura Halbach and Alex Anesio

Corona Beer on Instagram

• Supply chain costs have driven up beer prices.
• Brewers are waiting to see when consumers get fed up, as beer tends to be “recession-resistant.”
• The maker of Corona says customers have started to buy less beer where prices are highest.

It takes a lot to waive beer drinkers off the bottle. And for that reason, beer sales are a solid indicator of the state of the economy when inflation is in play. 

“We are very fortunate in the alcohol beverage business that we tend to be recession-resistant,” said William Newlands, CEO of Constellation Brands, which owns Corona and Modelo along with major wine and spirits brands, on a Thursday earnings call.

Newlands and his peers from other companies have been warning investors that the current environment, in which supply chain costs have caused mass inflation, would test consumers’ desire for beer.

The average price of beer in the US increased nearly 8% from November 2021 to November 2022, according to Moody’s. All indications say it’s still going up, though there’s a lag in nationwide data. 

“It’s obviously too soon to be able to give complete reassurance that the price increase has landed well and not changed consumers’ behavior because we’re still learning, and we’ll see what unfolds over the next few months,” Molson Coors CEO Gavin Hattersley said at a Morgan Stanley investor conference in early December. Molson Coors upped prices 5% in the spring and another 5% in the fall, company executives said.

Other players in the beer supply chain, including the stores that sell Modelo and Corona, up their own prices to varying degrees on top of the wholesale price, Newlands explained Thursday. So Constellations’ view of sales across the country shows how much consumers are willing to pay. The CEO said that in some places, especially California, prices have gone as far as consumers will tolerate. 

“Many businesses, including ours, took additional pricing over what we had planned. And that caused an overall softness in the market,” Newlands said. “It wasn’t limited to us.” 

Some supply chain costs are coming down as imports and overall freight demand cool, but those will take time to hit the balance sheet, and then perhaps eventually the shelf. Sales of Constellation beer brands were up 8% in the most recent quarter, but the company’s stock still fell on Thursday since high costs are continuing to strain profits. 

The CEO said the company will need to be more cautious about raising prices further since consumers are starting to balk. 

Economists say that inflation will persist through the whole of 2023, but a downtick in demand for goods, which then sends a signal to companies to cool it with price hikes, is a new and necessary phase on the way out of the current cycle.

Avery Hartmans/Insider

• Peloton will pay a $19 million penalty to settle charges by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
• The CPSC said Peloton failed to immediately report injuries and stop distributing treadmills.
• Peloton received 150 incident reports, including the death of a child trapped under a treadmill.

Peloton has agreed to pay a $19 million penalty for failing to immediately notify the Consumer Product Safety Commission after its treadmills were linked to dozens of injuries.

The company received more than 150 reports of incidents from users of its treadmills, including 13 injuries such as broken bones, cuts, and burns as well as the death of a child, the CPSC said.

The reports, received in late 2018 and 2019, described incidents where people, pets, and objects were pulled under or trapped under the treadmill.

It has agreed to pay a $19 million penalty to settle charges by the CPSC for failing to report faults with the devices and continuing to distribute them after a recall.

The CPSC announced Thursday that the gym equipment provider “knowingly failed” to immediately report a fault with its Tread+ treadmill, which it said could cause a risk of serious injury to its users.

It also said Peloton violated the Consumer Product Safety Act by distributing 38 recalled treadmills after the product was jointly recalled by the CPSC and the company in May 2021.

Peloton has to file annual reports on its compliance and internal controls for five years as part of the settlement agreement, which was provisionally accepted by the CPSC.

Alexander Hoehn-Saric, its chairman, said in a statement: “It was not until after receiving notice that a six-year-old child had died after being entrapped under the rear of the treadmill that Peloton reported these incidents to the CPSC.”

He added: “When a company continues to sell dangerous products that they know can cause serious injury or death, it must be held accountable.”

The CPSC issued an “urgent warning” in April 2021 telling consumers to stop using the treadmill. 

Then-CEO John Foley said that Peloton “made a mistake” with its first response to the CPSC’s request, CNN reported. “We should’ve engage more productively with them from the outset. For that I apologize.”

Peloton said last July it would stop making its own exercise equipment and outsourced manufacturing to Taiwan months after it abandoned plans to build a $400 million factory in Ohio.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.