UPDATE: Adam Frisch, Democratic challenger to Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) has conceded the race for Colorado’s 3^rd House District seat, The Hill reports late Friday, even though the margin was small enough to trigger an automatic recount.

“The likelihood of the recount changing more than a handful of votes is very small,” Frisch said in his concession.

The GOP now has 219 House seats to the Democratic Party’s 212, with four races remaining to be determined.

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After the GOP clinched the House after incumbent Rep. Mike Garcia of California was declared the winner earlier this week, five seats remain up for grabs. As of Friday morning the Republican count was still at 218 and Democrats have 212 seats, according to The Guardian. 

One race that appears to be headed to an automatically triggered recount is for Colorado’s 3^rd District. With 95% of ballots counted, incumbent MAGA firebrand Lauren Boebert was leading Democratic challenger Adam Frisch by 551 votes, or 50.08% to 49.92%, according to The New York Times. 

Scroll -- Read pundit Ken Zino’s left-column commentary, “Alas, Midterm Mania Continues,” below.

Comment – Add your opinion to the Comment box by clicking on the headline above, or the headline in the right column if that’s how you lean, or email editors@thehustings.news.

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Rep. James Comer (R-KY), incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), incoming chair of the Oversight Committee announced Thursday their first order of business will be investigation of the Biden family, the New York Post reports. 

“Our investigation is about Joe Biden,” Comer said. “Was Joe Biden directly involved with Hunter Biden’s business deals and is he compromised? That’s our investigation.”

Meanwhile: Senate Republicans are not so unified, where “tensions” between Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Donald J. Trump’s closest ally, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham are “boiling over,” according to The Hill. Graham is reported to have “sharply criticized” McConnell’s leadership in a private meeting, and voted to replace McConnell as leader of the GOP in the Senate with Florida’s Rick Scott.

Scroll – Read Pundit-at-Large Stephen Macaulay’s commentary, “Trump in Context” below.

Comment – Add your opinion to the Comment box by clicking on the headline above, or the headline in the left column if that’s how you lean, or email editors@thehustings.news.

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We want to hear from you on Donald J. Trump’s announcement he will run again in 2024 and his likely coming clash with presumed primary race opponent Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) likely ascendance to House Speaker, and the escalation of Russia’s war against Ukraine, after Ukraine reclaimed the city of Kherson late last week. It will be interesting to see whether the MAGA-leading side of the GOP tries to make a point of resisting signing a “blank check” for military and economic aid to Ukraine.

Become a citizen pundit: If you lean conservative, please use the Comment box in the right column. If you lean liberal, the Comment box in this column works best. Or email us at editors@thehustings.news and list your political leanings in the subject line.

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By Stephen Macaulay

“As President Trump looks to the future, he will continue to champion his America First Agenda that won overwhelmingly at the ballot box.” — Taylor Budowich, Trump spokesman

Back in the late ‘60s to early ‘80s there was a literary school known as “Deconstructionism.” Although it was essentially limited to academia, and even there somewhat limited (the strongest proponents in the U.S. were labeled “the Yale School”), it became highly controversial. One of its tenets (a word its own practitioners would dispute) was that for a given text there is no indisputable meaning.

That meant that there was something of a potentially rampant relativism. This gravely upset many people who believe there are fixed rules, such as religious leaders who adhere to lists of right and wrong. If there is no fixed meaning, then those lists could be turned on their heads, inside out and otherwise made indefinite.

As Aristotle had it, A is A, a specific identity, not A is B, C, D, E, F, G. . . .

But the Deconstructionists would quibble in such a way that it would be incomprehensible to most people exactly what it is they were saying — or were trying to say, and if they were trying to say it, whether it meant what they, or the listener, thought it did.

So we had the midterm elections. Across the country candidates were elected who make the Deconstructionists look like pikers. Not as many as had been expected. But more than enough. One would think that in the 21^st century there would be people of a certain level of intellect and probity who would run for office. 

Most people have what can be considered a shared vision or overall acceptance of reality.

Generally, if someone makes something up and there is no commonly accepted evidence that the thing exists, then that person is thought to be mistaken, perhaps inadvertently. And so it is explained to that person that talking trees don’t ride unicorns, or whatever it is they claim.

If the person, after patient explanation, continues to believe that talking trees ride unicorns, then that person isn’t considered particularly perceptive or reliable. To put it nicely.

But now there is a whole cadre of people, about to make up the House’s new majority, who will be taking on jobs in Washington that believe — or seem to believe — things that would otherwise be considered to be folly were these delusions not so pernicious.

It is one thing for academicians who are in schools of literature and art to go headlong into a rabbit hole. Arguably, there needs to be some of that outré thinking in places like that. However, if you are on a plane or you are the patient on an operating table, you’d want the pilot and the surgeon to have a grounded sense of reality.

Nowadays it seems as though seriousness doesn’t matter, with that term having a most basic meaning of having ideas that are predicated on reality as most of us know it.

What’s more, knowing things (real things, that is) and having plans for dealing with them (there was a lot of noise about inflation overall and the price of gas — will impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden for some yet-to-be-defined high crime or misdemeanor address those issues?), the basic competencies that we expect from a car mechanic (“You have a flat tire. I’ll change the oil”) are now irrelevant in wide swaths of the country.

Jacques Derrida, largely considered to be the father of Deconstruction, wrote:

“Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring.”

In the context that has been created by the 2022 midterms, in the context that another run for president by a man who has shown himself to have no truck with truth, “there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring.”

Or to quote Donald Trump, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Who knew he was a Deconstructionist?

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news