Absolute lunatic Jim Jordan is running for Speaker of the House

Welcome to the show. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg will be joining me today for the interview segment. His mere presence, a major win in the battle of ideas for independent progressive media. More on that later. Let's talk about the race for speaker of the House. Speaker of the House, a role recently vacated after eight Republicans joined Democrats to remove Kevin McCarthy from that role. We suspected that there would be no shortage of lunatics, extremists and radicals running for that seat. And indeed, that is the case. Jim Jordan, first and foremost, joining the race for a U.S. House speaker. Jim Jordan is an absolutely terrible person, an unflinching defender of the worst political instincts of Trump and MAGA, a brown noser in the extreme, and also allegedly a guy who turned a blind eye to sexual misconduct. Remember that when it comes to Jim Jordan, there is the belief that when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University, this was in the late 80s and early 90s. He was involved in this situation where the now deceased team doctor for the wrestling team, Dr. Richard Strauss, was believed based on a report to have sexually abused nearly 200 different male students. And the report that was issued at the time concluded that numerous university personnel were aware of the complaints and concerns against Strauss, but did nothing, took no action, didn't tell anybody. And many of the wrestlers said Jim Jordan was one of those people. Jim Jordan had to have known about the abuse. It was pervasive. There were endless conversations about it. It was not happening in secret. It was in the locker room and elsewhere. Jordan has denied knowing anything about it, an extraordinarily difficult claim to believe. So that's one guy, Jim Jordan, that guy who is running for speaker of the House, also running for speaker of the House is Steve Scalise. Steve Scalise is a marginally less extreme Republican than Jordan. And I say that even with some trepidation. So Steve Scalise has also announced that he is running. And there's actually a good page. You can find a Wikipedia page called October 2023 Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Election. And it outlines not only what happened with the removal of Kevin McCarthy, but it also explains that there is on the Democratic side, the presumptive nominee, Hakeem Jeffries, a prior guest on this show and all around good guy and someone that Democrats have rallied around, you know, without being in the majority, it's certainly very unlikely that Hakeem Jeffries will become speaker, although strange things have happened in politics. We will see over on the Republican side. The declared candidates are, as I mentioned, Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise and Kevin Hearn, who's the chair of the Republican Study Committee. There is a whole long list of potential candidates and then a list of people who have declined. Notable declinations are Ken Buck, Matt Gates. McCarthy himself has said he's not going to run. And Elise Stefanik in the background of all of this is this question mark around. Are they serious when they talk about the failed former President Donald Trump as a potential speaker of the House, a temporary speaker of the House? I'm not going to play all the clips for you again, but yesterday we had Sean Hannity, the well-known Fox News propagandist, saying sources are telling me that some Republicans want Trump. We had other Republicans, Greg Stubbe, and I don't even remember who else, Marjorie Trader Greene and others saying Prump. Prump is the guy that we want. It doesn't seem to me as though they're actually serious about it. But interestingly, this is super interesting. Republicans actually passed a rule which bans Trump from being speaker of the House. And I want to talk about that next. Perfectly.