“He does have a sense of humor.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The top headline today from Public Notice sums it up nicely. “Crime is down. But Trump’s authoritarian power grabs are escalating. Random street crimes are being used as pretexts for repression.” Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden is one big tacky cement patio bedecked with tacky patio furniture and yellow umbrellas that look like a field of dildos. The Oval Office is bedecked with gold spray-painted Baroque Cherubs and has the feel of a tacky brothel mimicking Versailles. These changes are about as necessary as tariffs. The worst of it will be a ballroom with the same tacky aesthetic. Meanwhile, the Big Budget-Busting bill will leave people starving, ill, and homeless. I smile at a young black man with a loaded shopping cart, as he heads down Burgundy Street this morning to the various homeless encampments at the abandoned Navy Base bordering the canal and the Mississippi. Once again, VooDoo Economics takes its toll. Then, there are the tariffs and the dearth of tourists this season.
Justin Glawe writes the story behind the headline.
The White House has seized on two unrelated incidents of street crime as a pretext for a federal government power grab at a time when violent crime has, in fact, dropped across the country.
The attempted carjacking of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine in Washington DC and a street brawl in Cincinnati are the latest cause célebrè on the American right, which has long supported Donald Trump’s plans for military and law enforcement crackdowns in largely Democratic cities. Both incidents are being used as anecdotal evidence of out-of-control crime across the country — a narrative that is necessary for Trump and Republicans to maintain their grip of fear on their MAGA base.
And it’s worked: a Gallup poll in October found that 64 percent of Americans believed crime had gone up in 2024, but new data from the FBI shows that is not the case. In fact, 2024 saw the lowest levels of violent crime since 1969, with violent crime down 4.5 percent across the country, including a 14.9 percent drop in murders.
The events being seized upon by the White House and Republicans as evidence of surging crime have little to do with one another save for the fact that the victims are white. In the case of the brawl in Cincinnati, those “victims” may not be entirely innocent: two white men faced off against a largely Black crowd on July 26, with one of the men spewing a racial slur. The other white man involved may have been a willing combatant in the melee, slapping a Black man in the face and squaring off to fight, as seen in videos circulating online. (Police have disputed that the slap was the impetus of the brawl.)
While the exact cause of the brawl isn’t entirely clear, videos of the incident have gone viral, framed by right-wing media as a “Black mob” beating innocent whites. On her show last Thursday night, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked a victim in the attack whether it was “racially motivated in any direction.” Neither Ingraham or the guest noted the use of the racial slur.
Vice President JD Vance and other prominent Republicans have politicized the incident, using it as an opportunity to call for everything from replacing judges to increasing funding for police.
At the same time, Trump, Elon Musk, and others have used the alleged carjacking of Coristine as justification for a federal takeover of Washington DC. Last week, Trump threatened to “FEDERALIZE” Washington, sharing a photo of a bloodied Coristine on Truth Social. Later, Trump reiterated the threat and called for juveniles to be charged as adults. He’s holding a news conference this morning to announce some sort of takeover of DC amid reports that hundreds of National Guard troops will be deployed to the city this week.
“Somebody from DOGE was very badly hurt last night. A young man who was beat up by a bunch of thugs in DC,” Trump said last Tuesday. “And either they’re gonna straighten their act out in terms of government and in terms of protection or we’re gonna have to federalize.”
This morning’s Washington Post describes Trump’s response thusly. “Trump orders federal moves on D.C. crime, takes over D.C. police. The president is planning to flex his law enforcement power over Washington, declaring that he would clear the city of homeless people and crack down on crime.” Am I the only one who sees the pandering to power in this headline?” This hardly compares to the violence, destruction, and crimes that happened on January 6.
President Donald Trump announced Monday that he was placing the D.C. police under direct federal control and will deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington to fight crime, an extraordinary flex of federal power that stripped city leadership of its ability to make law enforcement decisions andcould expose residents of the nation’s capital to unpredictable encounters with a domestically deployed military force.
The decision totake over the Metropolitan Police Department anddeploy 800 National Guard troops comes as the president has been slamming America’s cities as places where crime is out of control, despite two years of declines that have brought homicide levels in many major cities to their lowest levels in decades.
The administration has already mobilized FBI agents in recent days in overnight shifts to help local law enforcement prevent carjackings and violent crime, officials said. Because the District of Columbia is not a state, the federal government has unusually sweeping powers to intervene over the objections of its residents and leaders, giving the president an opportunity to use it as a laboratory for a militarized approach to urban crime-fighting.
Trump portrayed a sweeping vision of law enforcement on the streets of Washington, declaring that federal agents, D.C. police and the National Guard would use physical force to intimidate
“They fight back until you knock the hell out of them, because it’s the only language they understand,” Trump told reporters at a White House news conference. “It’s a disgusting thing.”
“It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness, and we’re getting rid of the slums, too,” Trump added. “I know it’s not politically correct.https://www.facebook.com/ You’ll say, ‘Oh, so terrible.’ No, we’re getting rid of the slums where they live.”
Trump has portrayed crime in the nation’s capital as spiraling upward. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has noted repeatedly that violent crime has declined for the past two years after a sharp post-pandemic spike in 2023.
All this is happening while the majority of Americans are like me. How the hell am I going to buy groceries this week? This headline is from Forbes Magazine. “Almost 90% of Americans Are Worried About The Cost Of Groceries. The story is written by Mary Whitfill Roeloffs.
Almost 90% of American adults say they’re stressed about the cost of groceries, a new poll out Monday shows, as the price of food rises and items like poultry, ground beef and eggs see the biggest cost jumps.
Key Facts
More than half of Americans (53%) see grocery prices as a major source of stress and another 33% see it as a minor source of stress, according to a new poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
More people were concerned about grocery prices than any other financial concern brought up in the poll, but more than half of respondents also said they were at least somewhat stressed about their salaries, the cost of housing, the amount of money they have saved, their credit card debt and the cost of health care.
The Consumer Price Index shows the price of food has risen 3% in the last 12 months—groceries have risen 2.4% while dining out is 3.8% costlier than it was 12 months ago.
From June 2024 to June 2025, groceries got more expensive in every category tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: meats, poultry, fish and eggs rose in price by 5.6% (egg prices alone rose 27.3%); nonalcoholic beverages are 4.4% more expensive; fruits and vegetables rose in price by 0.7%; and both cereals and bakery products and the index for dairy products rose 0.9%.
At 3%, the cost of food is rising faster than the overall inflation rate as measured by the Consumer Price Index, at 2.7%.
After groceries, the price of housing had the highest number of people reporting it as a major stressor in Monday’s poll (47%), followed by the amount of money saved (43%), salary (43%) and the cost of health care (42%).
81 cents. That’s how much the price of chicken breast increased, per pound, from July 2024 to July 2025, according to NBC News, making it the largest price hike among the six staple items tracked by the outlet. The cost of ground beef increased 67 cents per pound, while eggs grew 64 cents more expensive per dozen.
Are we great again yet?
With American Foreign Policy out to lunch, Bibi Netanyahu has expanded his genocidal and authoritarian attack on Gaza. This is the latest step taken by the accused War Criminal. This is from The Guardian. “Anas al-Sharif, prominent Al Jazeera correspondent, among five journalists killed in Israeli airstrike on Gaza. Israel admits deliberate attack on the journalist, known for frontline coverage, in a strike on a tent outside al-Shifa hospital.” How are we falling back into 20th-century fascism when so many of us have been thoroughly educated on both World Wars?
A prominent Al Jazeera journalist who had previously been threatened by Israel has been killed along with four colleagues in an Israeli airstrike.
Anas al-Sharif, who was one of Al Jazeera’s most recognisable faces in Gaza, was killed while inside a tent for journalists outside al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on Sunday night. His funeral was held on Monday morning.
Seven people in total were killed in the attack, including al-Sharif, Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa, according to the Qatar-based broadcaster.
The Israel Defense Force admitted the strike, claiming the reporter had “served as the head of a terrorist cell in the Hamas terrorist organisation and was responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF forces”.
It claimed it had intelligence and documents found in Gaza as proof but rights advocates said he had been targeted for his frontline reporting on the Gaza war and that Israel’s claim lacked evidence.
Calling al-Sharif “one of Gaza’s bravest journalists,” Al Jazeera said the attack was “a desperate attempt to silence voices in anticipation of the occupation of Gaza.”
Last month Israeli IDF spokesperson Avichai Adraee shared a video of al-Sharif on X and accused him of being a member of Hamas’ military wing. At the time the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Irene Khan, called it “an unsubstantiated claim” and a “blatant assault on journalists”.
What passes for US foreign policy is the usual lovefest between Putin and Yam Tits. This is from The Bulwark. This story is reported by Cathy Young. “Alaska Summit: Trump and Putin Planning to Carve Up Ukraine. It’s hard to see anything good coming from the meeting of the president and his hero.”
REMEMBER WHEN, A FEW WEEKS BACK, commentators suddenly started talking about Donald Trump’s “pivot” or “dramatic shift” on Ukraine and Russia? The promises of aid to the one and scary sanctions against the other? Trump’s tough talk about the “bullshit thrown at us” by Vladimir Putin and the “nice phone calls” followed by bombings of Ukrainian cities? The fifty-day deadline to make peace or else, which then abruptly became a ten- to twelve-day deadline that expired over the last few days?
Well, guess what. The pivot seems to have fully unpivoted. We’re back to more diplomacy for dummies by Trump’s real estate pal and golf buddy Steve Witkoff, who went on another trip to Moscow and had—as Trump announced with a straight face on Truth Social—a “highly productive meeting” with Putin. So productive, in fact, that it took a while to figure out exactly what sort of deal Putin offered Witkoff, since Witkoff initially reported a garbled—and more attractive—version of the offer. (Witkoff did get to consume a monster-sized cheburek meat pie which greatly excited the Russian media, so it wasn’t a total loss. Oh, and he brought back an Order of Lenin that Putin gave him for a CIA deputy director whose son was killed in the Donbas last year fighting for the Russians. Is Putin trolling Trump at this point?)
And now, Trump and Putin are set to have a summit in Alaska (of all places!) this coming Friday. Trump’s initial proposal for a three-way summit with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has quietly fallen by the wayside; Vice President JD Vance has told Fox News that “we’re trying to figure out, frankly, scheduling and things like that” for the three to meet. So Zelensky may yet get invited to Alaska, but it’s not clear if he will ever be in the same room with Putin. At least for now, it looks like the summit will be a blatant violation of a principle repeatedly proclaimed by Western leaders, from Joe Biden to former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg: “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” Or, in as Russian-Ukrainian political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov, currently a scholar at University College London, put it in an interview: “Two mob bosses decided to sit down and have a chat about the capitulation of Ukraine.”
Of course, we don’t know at this point what the final version of the proposed settlement will look like. Trump has talked about “some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.” Presumably, this means that Ukraine will be expected to cede territory that Russia wants but hasn’t managed to seize in exchange for other Ukrainian territory illegally occupied by Russia. But even that, it turns out, is unlikely to happen: Russia is demanding unilateral land concessions in exchange for a peace agreement or a temporary truce. Zelensky has already rejected such concessions, as he has consistently done since the invasion.
But whatever the outcome of the summit, its mere fact already hands Putin a huge win—unless, of course, Trump should decide that after Zelensky’s disgraceful Oval Office humiliation in February, it’s Putin’s turn for an internationally televised verbal beatdown. (Right. And then he’ll give Ukraine a shipment of alien superweapons from a super-secret vault in Area 51.)
I really don’t know what to make of this headline. Maybe this is how Trump plans to pay for his extensive wrecking of the White House. “U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China. In a highly unusual arrangement with President Trump, the companies are expected to kick 15 percent of what they make in China to the U.S. government.” And of course, this cost gets passed forward from the businesses to the consumers. This is reported by the New York Times.
Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are expected to pay the United States 15 percent of the money they take in from selling artificial intelligence chips to China, as part of a highly unusual financial agreement with the Trump administration.
The deal, which was described by three people familiar with the agreement who spoke anonymously because they didn’t have permission to discuss it publicly, comes a month after Nvidia received permission to sell a version of its artificial intelligence chips to China.
While the Trump administration publicly said a month ago that it was giving the green light to Nvidia to sell an A.I. chip called H20 to China, it did not actually issue the licenses making those sales possible.
On Wednesday, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, met with President Trump at the White House and agreed to give the federal government its 15 percent cut, essentially making the federal government a partner in Nvidia’s business in China, said the people familiar with the deal. The Commerce Department began granting licenses for A.I. chip sales two days later, these people said.
Though Mr. Huang has led negotiations with the White House, Nvidia isn’t the only company that sells A.I. chips to China. AMD has an A.I. chip called the MI308 and in April the Trump administration also banned sales of it to the Chinese.
There are few precedents for the Commerce Department agreeing to grant licenses for exports in exchange for a share of revenue. But the unorthodox payments are consistent with Mr. Trump’s increasingly interventionist role in international business deals involving American companies. In June, the administration approved investment by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, in U.S. Steel in a deal that included a so-called golden share in the company, a rarely used practice where the government takes a stake in a business.
The administration is also using tariffs as a stick to bring manufacturing to the United States. Last week, Mr. Trump said that tech companies would have to pay a 100 percent tariff on semiconductors made abroad, unless they invested in the United States.
The deal agreed to last week could funnel more than $2 billion to the U.S. government. Nvidia was expected to sell more than $15 billion worth of its H20 chip to China through the end of the year, and AMD was expected to sell $800 million, according to Bernstein Research.
The Commerce Department, White House and AMD didn’t provide comment on Sunday.
Ken Brown, a spokesman for Nvidia, said that the company follows the U.S. government’s rules for sales abroad. “While we haven’t shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide,” he said.
Okay, so tell me the one about “free markets” again. I’ll end with this opinion piece in the Guardianby Steven Greenhouse. “Trump is losing his foolish trade war. This will cost ordinary Americans greatly. Trump’s trade war has pushed up inflation, slashed US job gains, slowed economic growth and caused the manufacturing sector to sputter.” I started my study of economics back on the cusp of the Carter/Reagan years. I absolutely thought we’d learned the lessons of what not to do by that time. It’s amazing that the “Voodoo Economics” of that period and the resulting stagflation is back here in the future. It’s being replayed by the same, but much older group of idiots.
The ever-bombastic Donald Trump has boasted repeatedly of his trade victories, while White House news releases trumpet his “historic trade wins”. The Wall Street Journal echoed Trump’s triumphalism with a headline saying, “Trump is Winning His Trade War”, and last week the New York Times used the exact same words in a headline. That must have been music to the president’s ears.
Forgive me for being a spoilsport, but I don’t see where the victory is or how Trump is winning. I keep reading how Trump’s trade war and tariff machinations have pushed up inflation, slashed US job gains, slowed economic growth and caused the manufacturing sector to sputter.
The rate of job growth plunged by over 70% in the three months after Trump unveiled his 2 April “liberation day” tariffs that filled corporate executives with uncertainty and dread. Trump is palpably impatient for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, but the higher prices resulting from his tariffs are likely to delay the rate cuts he desperately wants. So can someone please tell me where is the victory here?
Trump further proclaims that his tariffs are wondrous because, he says, they will generate trillions of dollars in revenue for the US Treasury. But those revenues will come out of the hides of tens of millions of American consumers who will pay Trump’s taxes on imports. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the price increases caused by Trump’s tariffs will cost the typical US household $2,400 in 2025. As a result of the tariffs, the budget lab says, apparel prices will soar 37% and shoe prices 39%. What Trump boasts as a win is a loss for millions of typical Americans.
Some economists are warning that Trump’s tariffs will bring back stagflation, a dangerous combination of rising prices and slowing growth last seen in the 1970s. Pointing to signs of stagflation, BMO Economics wrote: “Economic activity and job growth are sputtering under the weight of higher tariffs, increasing inflation and rising economic policy and trade uncertainty.” Doesn’t look as if Trump’s trade war is winning there.
Trump recently said on CNBC’s Squawk Box that “people love the tariffs”, but evidently the people he’s talking about aren’t the American people. A recent Fox News poll of registered voters found that Americans overwhelming disapprove of Trump’s tariff policies by 62% to 36%. Ben May, a forecaster at Oxford Economics, said his tariffs will hurt US families because “they are obviously raising prices … and squeezing household incomes”.
Many days it seems that Trump tries to dominate the news cycle with some tariff announcement or other: 50% on Brazil, double India’s tariffs to 50%, impose a 100% tariff on semiconductors. (Even some Maga folks probably think he uses tariff announcements to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.) This week the White House dismayed the world by announcing that Trump would impose tariffs, ranging from 15% to 50%, on 90 countries effective Thursday. As a result of Trump’s tariff craze, the average effective tariff rate on imports into the US will be 18%, up from 2.3% last year – the highest level since the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 worsened the Great Depression.
Yes, it’s Make the Great Depression Great Again time!
I need a few stories with a cute baby hippopotamus and a few other cuddly creatures. It’s really hard to face this news daily. I do not understand how this lived experience isn’t hitting more people in the head. Well, the billionaires are getting a tax cut in perpetuity.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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I’m getting really sick of the constant TV coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas. Yes, it’s an important story, and needs to be covered. But do we really need to see and hear about it 24-7, while the cable networks ignore just about everything else? Dakinikat remarked to me a few days ago that it seems our generation have seen wars play out on TV now for most of our lives, beginning with Vietnam. She’s right. It’s so sad and depressing.
And . . . It appears that the explosion at the hospital in Gaza was caused by a failed Hamas rocket, not a bomb from an Israeli airplane. Meanwhile, the fatally flawed U.S. media reported it as an attack by Israel on civilians. Meanwhile the media blamed it on Israel without waiting for any evidence. I’m sick and tired of the DC media too.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday expressed agreement with Israel in denying that the Israeli military was responsible for a catastrophic explosion at a hospital in Gaza that left hundreds dead.
On Tuesday night Hamas—which rules Gaza—blamed an Israeli airstrike for the disaster at the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital, which Gaza health officials said killed 500 people. On Wednesday morning, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) published evidence that it claimed showed that a failed rocket launch from inside the enclave was to blame, with Biden saying U.S. intelligence led him to believe Israel was not at fault.
“Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,” Biden said, speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden later said he’d drawn his conclusion based on “the data I was shown by my Defense Department.”
“Like the entire world, I was outraged and saddened by the enormous loss of life yesterday in the hospital in Gaza,” Biden said in a second speech Wednesday, reiterating that the blast “appears the result of an errant rocket fired by a terrorist group in Gaza.” [….]
IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari claimed in a statement early Wednesday that Islamic Jihad, the second-biggest militant group in Gaza, “was responsible” for the hospital explosion. He said that at 6:59 p.m. local time on Tuesday, Islamic Jihad launched a barrage of 10 rockets from a cemetery. Reports of an explosion at the hospital also emerged at the same time, Hagari added.
Vietnam reporting on TV
“According to our intelligence, Hamas checked the reports, understood it was an Islamic Jihad rocket that had misfired—and decided to launch a global media campaign to hide what really happened,” Hagari said. “They went as far as inflating the number of casualties.”
The statement from Hagari did not clarify what the IDF believed the true number of casualties of the hospital explosion to be. He did, however, say aerial footage showed there was “no direct hit of the hospital itself,” with a parking lot outside the facility being “the only location damaged.” Hagari said if the blast had been caused “by an aerial munition,” it would have caused craters and structural damage to buildings—neither of which had been detected.
This story is behind a paywall, so I’m going to give you a bit more:
Hagari went on to criticize media outlets that “immediately reported the unverified claims by Hamas.” “It is impossible to know what happened as quickly as Hamas claimed they knew,” he added. “That should have been an initial warning sign for many.”
He also explained that the IDF confirmed that “there was no IDF fire—by land, sea or air—that hit the hospital.” At the same time, Hagari said, Israeli radar tracked rockets launched from inside Gaza at the time of the explosion. “The trajectory analysis from the barrage of rockets confirms that the rockets were fired in close proximity to the hospital.”
Hagari said “two independent videos” also showed the failure of the rocket launch and its trajectory toward the ground as it fell in the hospital compound. The IDF also released a recording of a conversation “between terrorists talking about the rocket misfiring.”
American officials say they have multiple strands of intelligence — including infrared satellite data — indicating that the deadly blast at a Gaza hospital on Tuesday was caused by Palestinian fighters.
The intelligence includes satellite and other infrared data showing a launch of a rocket or missile from Palestinian fighter positions within Gaza. American intelligence agencies have also analyzed open-source video of the launch showing that it did not come from the direction of Israeli military positions, the officials said. Israeli officials have also provided the United States with intercepts of Hamas officials saying the strike came from forces aligned with Palestinian militant groups.
“While we continue to collect information, our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open-source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.
Other U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive information, cautioned that the analysis was preliminary and that they were continuing to collect and analyze evidence. Multiple officials said the evidence gathered so far refutes claims that Israeli forces were responsible for the blast and was strong enough for President Biden to make comments supporting Israel’s account of events….
A senior Defense Department official said based on the launch data collected by infrared sensors that the United States is “fairly confident” the launch did not come from Israeli forces.
Israel said Wednesday that it will allow Egypt to deliver limited quantities of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, the first crack in a 10-day siege on the territory. Palestinians reeled from a massive blast at a Gaza City hospital that killed hundreds the day before and grew increasingly desperate as food and water supplies ran out.
Israeli-Hamas conflict reported in 2021.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the decision was approved after a request from visiting U.S. President Joe Biden. It said Israel “will not thwart” deliveries of food, water or medicine, as long as they are limited to civilians in the south of the Gaza Strip and don’t go to Hamas militants. The statement made no mention of badly needed fuel.
It was not clear when the aid would start flowing. At Rafah crossing, Gaza’s only connection to Egypt, truckloads of aid have been waiting for days to enter. But the facility has only a limited capacity, and Egypt says it has been damaged by Israeli airstrikes.
Israel’s announcement came as rage over Tuesday night’s blast at al-Ahli Hospital spread across the Middle East, and just as Biden began his visit to Israel in hopes of preventing a wider conflict in the region. The war started when Hamas militants rampaged across communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Back in Washington, the Republicans are supposedly trying to elect a Speaker of the House, but I have to ask, are they really trying to choose a gang leader?
Jim Jordan’s allies attempted to badger House Republicans into making him speaker. Those tactics backfired on Tuesday, and could soon doom his speakership push outright.
The Ohio Republican’s most vocal GOP defectors during Tuesday’s failed speaker vote said they were pressured to back Jordan by party bosses back home and national conservatives with big megaphones. Most of those skeptics viewed it as a coordinated push with a threatening theme: Vote for Jordan — or else.
The arm-twisting campaign, which in many cases included veiled threats of primary challenges, was meant to help rally support behind Jordan’s candidacy. Instead, it has put the Judiciary chair’s bid on life support and threatened to plunge House Republicans deeper into turmoil with no clear way out.
“Jim’s been nice, one-on-one, but his broader team has been playing hardball,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told POLITICO about Jordan’s network of supporters, adding that he’s been getting calls from party chairs back in Nebraska. He added that his wife even received multiple anonymous emails and texts saying: “your husband better support Jim Jordan.”
He’s not the only one who faced significant pressure. Other Republicans, too, told POLITICO they have received a barrage of calls from local conservative leaders. They blame the onslaught on his backers even though, by all accounts, he isn’t directly involved. Even some of Jordan’s supporters acknowledge that the aggressive moves have set him back ahead of a potential second speaker ballot….
Acknowledging that his speaker bid is in limbo, Jordan punted his plan to hold a second vote on Tuesday after Republicans privately warned he was at risk of seeing his opponents’ numbers grow. Instead, he is expected to huddle with allies and make calls in an attempt to get his bid back on track before a second vote as soon as Wednesday.
“We’re going to keep working, and we’re going to get the votes,” Jordan said on Tuesday night, saying that Republicans were having “great conversations.”
Rep. Don Bacon speaks about the January 6 Capitol attack.
The wife of Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) reportedly received anonymous text messages and emails warning her husband to back Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) House speakership campaign ahead of Tuesday’s vote….
Bacon — who was one of 20 Republicans who voted against Jordan for speaker — also told the news outlet that his wife had received “multiple anonymous emails and texts” pressuring him to vote for Jordan.
Politico reporter Olivia Beavers shared several screenshots of the text messages sent to Bacon’s wife from anonymous senders who refused to identify themselves.
“Why is your husband causing chaos by not supporting Jim Jordan? I thought he was a team player,” read one text, to which Bacon’s wife responded, “Who is this???”
The anonymous sender then warned, “Your husband will not hold any political office ever again. What a disappoint [sic] and failure he is.
A former Ohio State University wrestler who accused Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, of ignoring sexual abuse at the college criticized Jordan for “turn[ing] his back” on members of the team while a coach.
Former Ohio State wrestler Will Knight said he disagreed with Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who called the Ohio Republican a “fighter” in a speech Tuesday.
“People always call Jim Jordan a fighter, and I always wonder who he’s fighting for, because he had a real opportunity to fight for us,” Knight said in an interview with CNN. “All he’s done is turn his back on us.”
Hundreds of former athletes and students are suing Ohio State University in a case that alleges the university failed to protect them from a sexual predator who served as the assistant coach on their team during the 1980s and 90s. Jordan was an assistant wrestling coach on the team at the time and has denied knowing what was going on.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) tried to make the case for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) as House speaker on Tuesday, but her comments caused some members of Congress to audibly gasp.
While nominating Jordan for the job, Stefanik claimed that he “is the voice of the American people who have felt voiceless for far too long. Whether as judiciary chair, conservative leader, or representative for his constituents in West Central Ohio, whether on the wrestling mat or in the committee room, Jim Jordan is strategic, scrappy, tough and principled.”
Jim Jordan with a photo insert of him as a College wrestler.
The “wrestling mat” comment may not have left the impression Stefanik intended.
When Jordan was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University between 1986 and 1994, he reportedly ignored molestation allegations against the team’s doctor, Richard Strauss.
Although Jordan has denied that he knew anything about the allegations, Mike DiSabato, a former wrestler and friend of Jordan’s, said in 2018 that the lawmaker “is absolutely lying if he says he doesn’t know what was going on.”
“He doesn’t deserve to be House speaker,” Yetts said. “He still has to answer for what happened to us.”
A 2019 report from the university found that Strauss, who died in 2005, committed nearly 1,500 sexual assaults on student-patients while he worked there.
A couple more stories on the House Speaker search:
Jordan’s missed-it-by-that-much candidacy for the third most powerful position in America is a sobering reminder that however principled some in the GOP might be, far-right extremists are firmly in control of the party — even if they can’t quite elect a Speaker of the House.
Jordan can thank Republicans representing districts Joe Biden won in 2020 for most of his vote-counting woes. Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, a vocal Jordan critic, represents an area Biden won by 6 points. New York Reps. Mike Lawler and Anthony D’Esposito won areas Biden carried by 20 and 12 points, respectively. Their refusal to support Jordan amounted to an admission that Jordan’s brand of conspiracy-driven politics is poisonous to swing district voters.
In a statement on just how divided the House Republicans truly are, Jordan lost more than twice as many Republicans in his bid for Speaker (20) as Rep. Kevin McCarthy lost in the vote that ultimately ousted him (8). Jordan’s vote breakdown reveals a House Republican Caucus more divided than it was during McCarthy’s fractious 15-round elect-a-thon. GOP leaders hoped two weeks away from office would help mend the party’s festering wounds. Instead, things have only gotten worse.
On Monday, Jordan irritated some of his Freedom Caucus colleagues by assuring skeptical Republicans that he would allow votes on additional Ukrainian military aid. That’s the same Ukrainian spending that Jordan’s Freedom Caucus colleagues cited as a reason for giving McCarthy the boot. As Jordan discovered on Tuesday, the strict fundamentalism of the MAGA movement is totally incompatible with the compromises required in governing.
Signs of the party’s continued fracture were everywhere ahead of Jordan’s ill-fated vote. Earlier on Tuesday, Colorado Rep. Ken Buck had sought assurances from Jordan that the 2020 election was, in fact, legitimate. Judging by Jordan’s stony silence when asked by reporters about his bogus claims of 2020 election fraud, there is still at least one concession Jordan isn’t willing to make in his quest for power. Jordan’s intractability likely cost him as many votes as his abhorrent political views.
But after the House holds another vote on Jordan’s speakership Wednesday morning, Republicans aren’t expected to be any closer to ending their nightmare either. [NOTE: That didn’t happen.]
In fact, they may be further away.
While Jordan was able to flip at least one member who voted against him by Tuesday evening, rumors were flying around the Capitol that more Republicans planned to vote against Jordan on the next ballot—a potential death knell for Jordan’s candidacy and a signal that the archconservative Ohio Republican should perhaps step aside for someone else.
Publicly, however, Jordan—the chief architect of the modern day House GOP’s legislative hardball tactics—showed no signs of bowing out. Instead, he wanted to continue applying pressure on his detractors, with the help of his allies in right-wing media, and even to blame current House GOP leaders for not getting him the votes.
One rift that was already emerging Tuesday involved Jordan and his initial rival for the speakership: Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA).
Last week, Jordan narrowly lost to Scalise in a private vote for the party’s speakership nomination. Afterward, Jordan allegedly told Scalise he would back him as the conference’s pick for one ballot—with the expectation that Scalise would drop out and endorse Jordan if he didn’t get the speakership on the first vote.
And that didn’t happen either.
Scalise chose not to even go to the floor, after it was clear he couldn’t get the near-unanimous GOP support it would take to win.
After winning the nomination himself, Jordan faced the same problem. But he decided to move to a floor vote anyway, hoping that the prospect of putting his colleagues on the record publicly—under the scrutiny of a fired-up conservative base—would deliver him a victory.
The strategy didn’t work.
But instead of stepping aside, Jordan is moving ahead with another vote, and sources indicated to The Daily Beast that Jordan is blaming everyone but himself for his lackluster showing on Tuesday.
“Attacking members and laying the blame anywhere but your own feet when you’re 20 votes down shows you don’t know the first thing about bridging divides,” a senior GOP aide told The Daily Beast. “This is 2013 Jim Jordan all over again and it shows he’s not mature enough to lead the conference.”
Read more at the link.
So those are the top two news events going on today. What other stories have you been following?
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“My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. In the picture I am painting — which I shall call Guernica — I am expressing my horror of the military caste which is now plundering Spain into an ocean of misery and death.” — Pablo Picasso
Good Afternoon!!
I’m experiencing some kind of paralysis today, so I don’t know what this post is going to consist of. I’m just going to take it moment to moment. First thing this morning, I read List of X’s long comment on Dakinikat’s Friday reads. I hope everyone will go read it. I think that could lead to our having a serious, productive discussion on Israel/Palestine. For now, I’m just going to put up the latest stories I can find on the conflict.
A day after they were to begin a cease-fire, Israel and Hamas are still firing at one another, in a conflict that has killed at least 1,650 Gazans, 63 Israeli soldiers and 3 Israeli civilians, according to tallies from the respective sides.
Those numbers surpass the estimated fatalities from the last major Gaza conflict, which raged for around three weeks from 2008-2009.
Hamas, which has been condemned for breaking a temporary peace and capturing an Israeli soldier, said Saturday that it has lost contact with the group that conducted the ambush that killed two soldiers and resulted in Lt. Hadar Goldin’s capture.
The military wing of Hamas released a statement today, NPR’s Emily Harris reports, in which it said that after an Israeli bombardment, “the Hamas fighters are believed to be dead and if there was a soldier with them, he probably is too.”
At the link, read a brief synopsis of events in the conflict as of this morning. Other headlines:
Israel’s security cabinet decided after a five-hour meeting Friday night that Israel will no longer seek a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip via negotiations with Hamas, senior Israeli officials said. Therefore, Israel does not intend to send a delegation to the Cairo truce talks as previously agreed in the course of the last cease-fire, before it was violated by Hamas.
The senior officials said that ministers were unanimous in the cabinet meeting in their position that there is no point in pursuing cease-fire negotiations after Hamas violated the previous one by capturing an IDF soldier on Friday. According to the officials, the ministers also agreed that the captured soldier will not change Israel’s overall strategy. In other words, the IDF will continue its operations to destroy the tunnels and the ground operation will not be significantly expanded at this stage.
The cabinet also decided that instead of efforts to reach a cease-fire through negotiations, Israel will focus on restoring Israel’s deterrence against Hamas. The senior officials said that in light of the failed cease-fire efforts, Israel will consider ending the operation and unilaterally leaving Gaza, relying on deterrence.
“We think there is still enough international legitimacy for an operation in Gaza,” said a senior Israeli official. “In the coming days the destruction of the tunnels will be complete, and then a decision will be made as to how to continue from there.” The official added that “if we feel that deterrence has been restored, we will leave the [Gaza] Strip on the basis of the ‘quiet for quiet’ principle. If we feel deterrence has not yet been achieved, we will continue the operation inside the Gaza Strip or exit and continue with the aerial bombardment.”
For the war-weary group of international journalists struggling to find their sea legs, the patrol offered a rare insight into Israel’s navy, which over the past four weeks has acted as a strategic support to Israel’s ongoing military operation against Hamas in Gaza and served as a deterrent against militants attempting to infiltrate Israel via the sea.
“We were not surprised by Hamas’s attempt to infiltrate into Israel from the sea. They have used many different measures to attack us,” said Cmdr. Z, one of the Keshet’s two commanders who spoke on the condition of anonymity in accord with standard Israeli military protocol.
GAZA CITY, GAZA AND KFAR AZA, ISRAEL — In the battered Gazaneighborhood of Shejaiya, Ataf Ettish surveys what was once her home. An Israeli bomb ripped off the outside of the three-story building, exposing the blue and pink inner walls of her daughter’s bedroom.
The building next door is gone, replaced by a crater, the 80-year-old owner buried beneath the rubble. Ms. Ettish now lives in a United Nations shelter, sharing a single toilet with 1,000 people.
“This is not a war – this is destruction of humanity,” she says. “I’ve lived through two previous wars here, but this is the worst.”
In the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Aza, just across the border but a world away, Mark Joffe agrees it’s getting worse.
“Each time it happens … the rockets are bigger, the threats are bigger,” says Mr. Joffe, who says residents fear Hamas will infiltrate the border community (“Aza” is the Hebrew word for “Gaza”). “If we’d done the right thing five to six years ago, it would have been a lot less costly.”
Now many Israelis’ belief that an extended, harsh crackdown on Hamas will bring lasting peace is being put to the test. On Friday, a conflict that has cost 1,600 Palestinian lives and seen a quarter of Gaza’s population displaced from their homes looked set to enter a dangerous new phase after an apparent Hamas capture of an Israeli soldier.
Read the rest at the link.
Would this work?
As if.
U.S. News
Back in Washington DC, another intractable conflict continues in Congress between crazy ultra-right-wing Republicans and semi-sane right wing Republicans. Here are the latest stories about that.
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives voted on Friday to crack down on Central American migrants, including unaccompanied children, who are flooding to the U.S. border with Mexico, as lawmakers passed a $694 million border security bill.
The 223-189 vote came one day after conservative Republicans balked at an earlier version of the measure, exposing a deep rift between Tea Party activists and more mainstream Republicans.
In passing the retooled bill, the Republican-led House ignored a veto threat from the White House. But with the Senate already on a five-week summer recess, this measure will advance no further at least until September.
Isn’t that just ducky? And this will lead to suffering for real people, not that most people in DC really give a sh*t.
House Democrats complained that the legislation would too speedily return children to dangerous conditions in their home countries. President Barack Obama called the Republican bill “extreme” and “unworkable.”
Later on Friday, the House also passed a separate bill reversing Obama’s 2012 policy suspending deportations of some undocumented residents who were brought to the United States as children years ago by their parents.
The measure also would bar Obama from expanding this policy, possibly to parents of children who already qualify.
The tougher language in the twin bills would make it easier to deport migrant children and add money to deploy National Guard troops at the border with Mexico.
“There are numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action,” the leadership quartet proclaimed, “to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries.” ….
Just the day before, House Republicans had voted to sue Obama for using his executive authority. They called him lawless, a usurper, a monarch, a tyrant — all for postponing deadlines in the implementation of Obamacare. Now they were begging him to take executive action to compensate for their own inability to act — even though, in this case, accelerating the deportation of thousands of unaccompanied children coming from Central America would likely require Obama to ignore a 2008 law.
This was not a momentary lapse but a wholesale upending of reason.
In an unusual breach of decorum, even for the divided Congress, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi chased Rep. Tom Marino across the House floor, taking offense at comments by the Pennsylvania Republican during debate on the border funding bill Friday night.
“We don’t have law and order,” Marino began as he wrapped up his comments on the border supplemental. “My colleagues on the other side don’t want to do anything about it.”
“You know something that I find quite interesting about the other side? Under the leadership of the former Speaker [Pelosi], and under the leadership of their former leader [Rep. Steny Hoyer], when in 2009 and 2010, they had the House, the Senate and the White House, and they knew this problem existed,” he continued. “They didn’t have the strength to go after it back then. But now are trying to make a political issue out of it now.”
Off-mic, Pelosi then approached Marino, crossing the aisle in view of cameras, and apparently challenged Marino’s assertion that Democrats did not do anything about the issue when they had majority control.
“Yes it is true,” Marino replied directly to Pelosi, who was House speaker in those years. “I did the research on it. You might want to try it. You might want to try it, Madam Leader. Do the research on it. Do the research. I did it. That’s one thing that you don’t do.”
John Parkinson of ABC apparently had no issues with what Marino said, just shock that Pelosi responded.
After Marino concluded his remarks and as many Republicans applauded their colleague, Pelosi crossed the chamber again in view of cameras, enraged, pointing and sticking her finger at Marino.
She then followed Marino up a Republican aisle, gesturing and arguing with him. Lawmakers on the GOP side gathered in dismay as one spoke out to tell the chair that the House was not in order, in an effort to halt the bickering.
H/T to Fannie for this video:
What sane person could blame her? But sanity is at a premium in U.S. politics and journalism today.
Other News Stories of Possible Interest
No one else her probably cares except Pat, but the last-place Red Sox completely blew up the team and then they beat the Yankees last night.
I continue to investigate news stories where a large group of people seem to sit in denial. You might even say they wallow in denial. There are never stories with one side. There are never truths that should be accepted with out proof and facts. Nothing good ever comes from denying the complexities of life. Here are a few stories that offer up complexities. I hope you enjoy reading them, although I have to admit that the details aren’t always pretty.
The first story I want to offer is about Greece and the collapse of its government, its economy, and the ongoing collapse of its culture. Is Greece a nation for sale? Is it a nation whose people are being sold out and have been sold out? How can democracy exist when your entire country is up for sale to the highest bidder?
The savage methods of alleged “economic efficiency” and privatization increase neither efficiency nor competition, but do lead to price increases for consumers, higher costs for government, corruption, embezzlement and the destruction of democracy.
When the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came to Greece’s rescue in May 2010 with a 110 billion euro bailout loan in order to avoid the default of a eurozone member state (a second bailout loan worth 130 billion euros was activated in March 2012), the intentions of the rescue plan were multifold. First, the EU-IMF duo (with the IMF in the role of junior partner) wanted to protect the interests of the foreign banks and the financial institutions that had loaned Greece billions of euros. Greece’s gross foreign debt amounted to over 410 billion euros by the end of 2009, so a default would have led to substantial losses for foreign banks and bondholders, but also to the collapse of the Greek banking system itself as the European Central Bank (ECB) would be obliged in such an event to refuse to fund Greek banks.
Second, by bailing out Greece, the EU wanted to avoid the risk of negative contagion effects spreading across the euro area. A Greek default would have led to a financial meltdown across the euro area and perhaps to the end of the euro altogether.
Third, with Germany as Europe’s hegemonic power, there was a clear intention to punish Greece for its allegedly “profligate” ways (although it was large inflows of capital from the core countries that financed consumption and rising government spending), and by extension, send out a message to the other “peripheral” nations of the eurozone of the fate awaiting them if they did not put their fiscal house in order.
Fourth, the EU wanted to take the opportunity presented by the debt crisis to turn Greece into a “guinea pig” for the policy prescriptions of a neoliberal Europe. Berlin and Brussels had long ago embraced the main pillars of the Washington Consensus – fiscal austerity, privatization, deregulation and destatization – and the debt crisis offered a golden opportunity to cut down the Greek public sector to the bare bones and radicalize the domestic labor market with policies that slash wages and benefits and enhance flexibilization and insecurity.
Everyone has known for some time that the Southern United States is primarily a drag on the rest of the country. Its states cannot function without massive infusions of federal dollars. Its institutions remain broken. Its governments are corrupt. What does it mean to the country that the South behaves like a third world set of nations where any one can dump pollutants, destroy worker’s rights, deny women and the poor basic health care, and pay wages that don’t cover any kind of normal expenses? What’s worse is that poor white Southerners just seem to vote like they love taking it up the ass. Why are we letting an entire region drag the country to ruin?
On this point Thompson is unrelenting. “We can no longer afford to wait on the South to get its racial shit together,” he writes. “It’s time to move on, let southerners sort out their own mess free from the harassment of northern moralizers.” This is pretty much what William Faulkner wrote in more eloquent terms some 60 years ago. And, as we approach the 150th anniversary of the battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Thompson finds plenty of Southerners who think, as one of them tells him, “We’re on the verge of a civil war.” Thompson asks, “Between North and South?” The answer: “Between conservative and liberal.”
It’s attitudes like this that keep white Southerners from understanding that year after year, decade after decade, they support policies that don’t help them. “Rank-and-file southern voters—who have lower average incomes than other Americans—resoundingly defeated Barack Obama in 2008; the eventual president carried just 10, 11, and 14 percent of the white vote in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana respectively,” Thompson writes. “An influential percentage of poor, uneducated, underserved, insurance-less white southerners continue to cast votes for candidates whose agendas clearly conflict with their own self interest.” What Thompson doesn’t do—what I’ve never seen anyone do—is offer a valid explanation for why white Southerners ally themselves with the party that treats them contemptuously.
Whites in the South overwhelmingly support right-to-work laws, which Thompson defines, correctly, as “the Orwellian euphemism for ‘the right for companies to disregard the welfare of their workers.’ ” According to a 2009 survey by Grand Valley State University, annual salaries for autoworkers in Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina averaged about $55,400, while their counterparts in Michigan averaged $74,500. Thompson notes that Southern blue-collar workers also have “inferior health and pension plans, less job security, higher risk of being fired for trivial reasons, and diminished safety precautions. … ”
Not only are Southern workers hurt by their anti-union attitudes, the whole nation suffers. “Southern economic success,” writes Thompson, “comes at the expenseof the rest of the country.” By luring foreign manufacturers to Southern states with promises of cheap labor, “The South is bad for the American economy in the same way that China and Mexico are bad for the American economy. By keeping corporate taxes low, public schools underfunded, and workers’ rights to organize negligible, it’s southern politicians who make it so. … [The South] is an in-house parasite that bleeds the country far more than it contributes to its collective health.”
That leads to what is for me the single most baffling 21st century paradox about the South. The region, home to nine of the nation’s 10 poorest states, is rabidly against government spending, yet all of its states get far more in government subsidies than they give back in taxes, as pointed out by Sara Robinson in a 2012 piece for AlterNet, “Blue States Are the Providers, Red States Are the Parasites.”
The subject of Palestine and Israel frequently leads to passionate, intractable arguments. At another blog, we eventually decided to leave the topic in the “Do Not Discuss” box for the sake of peace and quiet.
I still cannot believe that some folks find disliking Israeli neocon policy to be the same as being anti-semitic, but there it is and seems to be.
I do not support Hamas or consider it blameless. Indeed, the horrific things going on in Iraq due to Sunni Muslim fundamentalism should be damned. But, so should Israel’s continued oppression of Palestinian people.
I’m no longer staying quiet and avoiding arguments. I cannot stay quiet while completely innocent people die, when they live under apartheid and intolerable situations, and when I hear completely unsubstantiated talking points from Israel’s propaganda ministry held up as truths.
The first completely unsubstantiated talking point just got a vote in the US House of Representatives. I’ve read every independent NGO that I can find. There appears to be no truth to rumor that Hamas uses citizens as human shields. There is some proof that the IDF actually uses children in that capacity. I stand appalled. I will call out the mass slaughter of indigenous people and innocents no matter what their religion or what their nationality. This is ethnic cleansing with a sophisticated Luntz-style propaganda show. I’ve linked to a well sourced article on Five Israeli Talking points that no independent source can verify and if looked into are completely false.
Hamas hides its weapons in homes, mosques and schools and uses human shields.
This is arguably one of Israel’s most insidious claims, because it blames Palestinians for their own death and deprives them of even their victimhood. Israel made the same argument in its war against Lebanon in 2006 and in its war against Palestinians in 2008. Notwithstanding its military cartoon sketches, Israel has yet to prove that Hamas has used civilian infrastructure to store military weapons. The two cases where Hamas indeed stored weapons in UNRWA schools, the schools were empty. UNRWA discovered the rockets and publicly condemned the violation of its sanctity.
International human rights organizations that have investigated these claims have determined that they are not true. It attributed the high death toll in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks. Human Rights Watch notes:
The evidence Human Rights Watch uncovered in its on-the-ground investigations refutes [Israel’s] argument…we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages.
In fact, only Israeli soldiers have systematically used Palestinians as human shields. Since Israel’s incursion into the West Bank in 2002, it has used Palestinians as human shields by tying young Palestinians onto the hoods of their cars or forcing them to go into a home where a potential militant may be hiding.
Even assuming that Israel’s claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties that “would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” A belligerent force must verify whether civilian or civilian infrastructure qualifies as a military objective. In the case of doubt, “whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.”
I did want to put up a link to an interview with Rabbi Henry Seignman at Democracy Now! The Rabbi was an executive director–for some time–of the American Jewish Congress and is considered the foremost authority on Jewish people in America. Please watch it. The number of American Jewish Rabbis and intellectuals coming out against Israel’s policies and attacks on the occupied territories is amazing. As the children of holocaust victims and survivors, they recognize the “slaughter of innocents”. There are two interviews that you may watch or read.
HENRYSIEGMAN: Yes, it’s disastrous. It’s disastrous, both in political terms, which is to say the situation cannot conceivably, certainly in the short run, lead to any positive results, to an improvement in the lives of either Israelis or Palestinians, and of course it’s disastrous in humanitarian terms, the kind of slaughter that’s taking place there. When one thinks that this is what is necessary for Israel to survive, that the Zionist dream is based on the slaughter of—repeated slaughter of innocents on a scale that we’re watching these days on television, that is really a profound, profound crisis—and should be a profound crisis—in the thinking of all of us who were committed to the establishment of the state and to its success. It leads one virtually to a whole rethinking of this historical phenomenon.
Seeing Israel as engaging in senseless bloodletting might seem an even more reasonable conclusion in light of the massacre of sixty-three people in Shujaiya after “the extensive use of artillery fire on dozens of populated areas across the Gaza Strip” that left bodies “scattered on streets,” or the bombing of United Nations shelters for those fleeing the violence. That conclusion is also tempting based on reports out of Khuza’a, a hamlet in the hinterlands of the Strip that was the scene of another Israeli massacre.
But describing such violence as aimless misses the underlying logic of Israel’s conduct throughout Operation Protective Edge and, indeed, for much of its history.
As Darryl Li points out, “Since 2005, Israel has developed an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, experiment in colonial management in the Gaza Strip,” seeking to “isolate Palestinians there from the outside world, render them utterly dependent on external benevolence,” and at the same time “absolve Israel of responsibility toward them.”
This strategy, Li goes on to argue, is one way that Israel is working to maintain a Jewish majority in the territories it controls so that it can continue to deny equal rights for the rest of the population.
The suppression of Palestinian resistance is crucial to the success of the Israeli experiment. But there is a corollary, which is a cyclical interaction between Israeli colonialism and US militarism. As Bashir Abu-Manneh explains, there is a relationship between American imperialism and Zionist policies. American policymakers believe that an alliance with Israel helps the US control the Middle East. So the United States enables Israeli colonialism and occupation, which in turn creates contexts for further US interventions in the region that can be used to try to deepen American hegemony.
I would like to see a peaceful two- (very secular) state solution; but as I’ve said before, I don’t think Bibi wants that at all.
“Do you believe that the five male justices truly understood the ramifications of their decision?” Couric asked Ginsburg of the 5-4 Hobby Lobby ruling, which cleared the way for employers to deny insurance coverage of contraceptives to female workers on religious grounds.
“I would have to say no,” the 81-year-old justice replied. Asked if the five justices revealed a “blind spot” in their decision, Ginsburg said yes.
The feisty leader of the court’s minority liberal bloc compared the decision of her five male peers to an old Supreme Court ruling that found discriminating against pregnant women was legal.
“But justices continue to think and can change,” she added, hopefully. “They have wives. They have daughters. By the way, I think daughters can change the perception of their fathers.
“I am ever hopeful that if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow,” she said.
David Wasserman reported yesterday that he recently sat down with state Rep. Lenar Whitney, a Republican congressional candidate in Louisiana’s 6th congressional district, though their interview didn’t go well.
As a House analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, I’ve personally interviewed over 300 congressional candidates over the course of seven years, both to get to know them and evaluate their chances of winning. I’ve been impressed by just as many Republicans as Democrats, and underwhelmed by equal numbers, too. Most are accustomed to tough questions.
But never have I met any candidate quite as frightening or fact-averse as Louisiana state Rep. Lenar Whitney, 55, who visited my office last Wednesday.
Whitney, who reportedly likes the “Palin of the South” nickname, “froze” when asked to substantiate her claims that climate change is the “greatest deception in the history of mankind.”
And then Wasserman asked about President Obama’s birthplace.
…I asked whether she believed Obama was born in the United States. When she replied that it was a matter of some controversy, her two campaign consultants quickly whisked her out of the room, accusing me of conducting a “Palin-style interview.”
It was the first time in hundreds of Cook Political Report meetings that a candidate has fled the room.
A tip for candidates everywhere: if you literally run away from questions, you’re doing it wrong.
Whitney, a graduate of Nicholls State University who is running for Louisiana’s open 6th District, owned a dance studio in Houma, La., for 34 years and also worked in sales for small telecommunications and oilfield equipment companies. She clearly relishes poking Democrats in the eye, cites Minnesota’s Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) as a political role model, and takes kindly to the nickname “Palin of the South.”
Whitney has only raised $123,000 to date (fourth in the GOP field), but she has sought to boost her profile and appeal to conservative donors with a slickly made YouTube video entitled “GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX” (84,000 views so far). In the video, Whitney gleefully and confidently asserts that the theory of global warming is the “greatest deception in the history of mankind” and that “any 10-year-old” can disprove it with a simple household thermometer.
Whitney’s brand of rhetoric obviously resonates with some very conservative Louisiana voters who view President Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency as big-city elitists directly attacking the state’s energy industry and their own way of life. And she would hardly be the first “climate denier” elected to Congress. But it’s not unreasonable to expect candidates to explain how they arrived at their positions, and when I pressed Whitney repeatedly for the source of her claim that the earth is getting colder, she froze and was unable to cite a single scientist, journal or news source to back up her beliefs.
We’ve definitely entered a zone where people are just saying things they believe are true simply because they want them to be true or–ala Luntz–they’ve heard it from some one who keeps repeating lies over and over again. Hey, it ain’t there if they don’t want to see it, right?
I’m on break today. Enjoy yourselves. Whats on your reading and blogging list today?
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We’re going to have to see what I come up with today because I openly admit to being extremely tired. We’ve had all this rain recently and it’s dark and gloomy all the time. Yesterday, it was so hard and heavy that the French Quarter flooded. So, here are a few things to consider before I head back to bed for awhile.
The Boston Globefeatures an articlearguingthat Southern Blacks and Hispanics will eventually trump angry, resentful, and backward white Republican voters in the South. If only. The analysis is by Bob Moser. The demographics have to be playing into white backlash which make the South the epicenter of voter suppression laws but it’s also a place where voter turnout is highly irregular.
The question is whether Democrats in these states are better served by following the region’s five-decade-long drift toward the GOP — or by betting that the climate is finally changing in their favor.
It’s a sign of things to come in states like North Carolina, where large influxes of Latino immigrants and “relocated Yankees,” both black and white, are tilting the demographic balance toward the Democrats and inspiring a new progressive movement. But despite Obama’s own surprising Southern breakthroughs — after Al Gore and John Kerry lost the entire region, he won three large Southern states in 2008 and two in 2012, falling just short in North Carolina — the region’s blue future is still a long-term proposition. Candidates like Hagan are stuck between the past, when Southern Democrats’ recipe for victory involved courting white moderates and conservatives, and a future in which they’ll be able to successfully campaign as full-throated, national-style Democrats. To win, Hagan and her compatriots must simultaneously woo independent-minded whites while persuading massive numbers of young voters and nonwhites, who lean left on both economic and social issues, to join them.
It’s an awkward proposition, to be sure. But the Democratic contenders have appeared hell-bent on making it look downright impossible.
In a poll by Landmark Communications released Sunday, Democrat Michelle Nunn has a commanding lead against both of her potential challengers in Georgia’s US Senate race. Against Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) Nunn is up by eight points, 49% to 41%. The poll also shows her with a nice lead against businessman David Perdue as Nunn leads him 48% to 42%. Perdue and Kingston are heading into a GOP primary runoff this coming Tuesday. The survey shows Kingston with a sizable lead as he is ahead by seven points, 48% to 41%.
While Nunn holds leads against both men, the thought is that she’d prefer to face Kingston in the general election. Atlanta-based political analyst Bill Crane had the following to say after this poll was released.
“I think Michelle Nunn would prefer to run against Jack Kingston. Twenty-two year incumbent, PAC money, special interest, her preferred race is the race that I think she’s going to get.”
Nunn taking the Georgia Senate seat would put a huge crimp in the plans of Republicans who feel they can take over the US Senate this November. Currently, the GOP needs to net six seats in the midterm to become the majority party in the Upper Chamber. Losing a Senate seat in a deep-red state that was previously held by a Republican will almost certainly prevent Republicans from taking over the Senate. While it is nearly a given that Democrats will lose seats this November, it is looking more and more promising that they will be able to retain control of the Senate.
There’s all kinds of things happening that have caused me to pull the blankets over my head. The horrors in the Gaza strip, the ongoing downed Malaysian jet catastrophe, and the week long visit of the Army of God to our city. They’re all over our women’s health clinics and they are creepy as creepy gets. Russia’s hand prints are all over the downed commercial airliner. Militants weirdly suggested that the people on the plane were all dead before the plane took off. WTF kind of craziness is this?
In a briefing at the Pentagon on Friday, Rear Admiral John Kirby told reporters that it “strains credulity” to think pro-Russian separatists believed to have shot down MH17 didn’t have at least some help from Moscow. Kirby said the Buk is a “sophisticated piece of technology” that would likely require technical assistance from Russia.
Inside a Buk. As you can see, it’s not as easy as just pushing one big red button.
Indeed, Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove said in June the U.S. military’s intelligence was that rebels were being trained in tanks and anti-aircraft capability across the border, before heading back into eastern Ukraine to put it into practice.
According to IHS Jane’s Defense, a resource for intelligence and defense analysis, operating a Buk requires a trained crew. While the government of Ukraine also has Buk missile systems, Jane’s notes that the Ukrainian military has none of the systems in the region near the MH17 crash, as they were overtaken by pro-Russian separatists.
“The system is not a simple system to use. You need at least four to six months of training and ongoing training to operate it,” Ronald Bishop, a former U.S. Air Force missile expert, told Australia’s Warwick Daily News. “To fire this system you need to have highly-specialized military training.”
Investigators are still far from an official judgment of what brought down a Malaysia Airlines flight in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew onboard. But the global court of public opinion, the verdict appears to be rendered.
Vladimir Putin is guilty.
The Russian President could once claim a semblance of a role as a global statesmen. But with the downing of a commercial airliner by what U.S. and Ukrainian officials suggest were pro-Moscow rebels using a missile supplied by Russia, Putin was facing a very personal barrage of worldwide condemnation that threatened to result in further sanctions on Russia if it did not rapidly change course in Ukraine.
Australia raised the prospect of banning Putin from a G-20 meeting of the world’s most powerful nations in November if he did not exert more pressure on the rebels who left corpses strewn on the ground for days,contaminated the crash site, and hampered an international investigation. Britain, meanwhile, openly accused the Russian leader of sponsoring “terrorism.” U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry, appearing on multiple political talk shows Sunday, called this a “moment of truth” for Russia.
Particularly in Europe – a continent long leery of going too far to pressure Moscow over its support of separatists in Ukraine – initial shock was quickly gathering into outrage and action.
On Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron held a joint phone call on Russia. A Downing Street spokesman said the three leaders agreed that the European Union “must reconsider its approach to Russia and that foreign ministers should be ready to impose further sanctions on Russia when they meet on Tuesday.”
In an unusual moment during “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace presented Secretary of State John Kerry with video recorded before he came on air.
Wallace introduced the segment as being in reference to civilians killed in fighting in the Gaza Strip. “While you were on camera and while on microphone,” Wallace said, “you spoke to one of your top aides between the interviews about the situation in Israel.” He then played what the network had recorded. In the clip, Kerry is holding a cellphone conversation with someone. The person on the other end of the call isn’t identified, and the audio from the other participant is staticky.
Kerry’s comments are clear. “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,” he says, then repeats it. “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation.” It’s an apparent reference to Israel’s insistence that its incursion into the region would be limited. “It’s escalating significantly,” the person on the phone replies, and Kerry then says: “We’ve got to get over there. I think we ought to go tonight.” He then calls it “crazy” to be “sitting around.”
“When you said it’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,” Wallace asked, are you “upset that the Israelis are going too far?”
“It’s very difficult in these situations,” Kerry said, repeating that the United States supports Israel’s right to defend itself. He then explained his comments by saying, “I reacted, obviously, in a way that anybody does in respect to young children and civilians.”
A week of planned anti-abortion protests in the New Orleans area began Saturday morning (July 19) with about 55 people affiliated with Operation Save America gathered at the Causeway Medical Clinic in Metairie.
Shortly after, 40 picketed a private home in Carrollton, some holding posters with graphic images of aborted fetuses. Organizer Rusty Thomas of Waco, Texas, said activists are still arriving and other demonstrations are planned for coming days.
The organization said it was encouraged by anew Louisiana law that opponents say will likely shut down three of the five clinics in the state that perform abortions. The law, which supporters say is aimed at improving patient safety, goes into effect Sept. 1.
Richard Fegan of Mandeville, outside the Metairie location, said, “We’re trying to shut the place down because God gives life and God takes life … this place is trying to be God.”
Planned Parenthood said the protests are sparked by the organization’s upcoming new facility on South Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans. No one was gathered at the construction site Saturday morning.
“Planned Parenthood’s focus is the health and safety of women, men and families in Louisiana,” said Melissa Flournoy, state director of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, in a statement. “These extremist organizations are trying to stop a new health center from serving this community, but in the end they’re only helping us build more support.”
It’s just hard to know what to do with people that just want to inflict their view of the world on the rest of us. What is with all this craziness? It’s like we’ve not gotten much farther than when we crawled out of the caves. At least back then, we could only do limited damage.
Anyway, naptime is calling my name folks! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
This morning’s 
Are we great again yet?
What passes for US foreign policy is the usual lovefest between Putin and Yam Tits.
I really don’t know what to make of this headline. Maybe this is how Trump plans to pay for his extensive wrecking of the White House. “U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China. In a highly unusual arrangement with President Trump, the companies are expected to kick 15 percent of what they make in China to the U.S. government.” And of course, this cost gets passed forward from the businesses to the consumers. 
Okay, so tell me the one about “free markets” again. I’ll end with this opinion piece in the
I’m getting really sick of the constant TV coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas. Yes, it’s an important story, and needs to be covered. But do we really need to see and hear about it 24-7, while the cable networks ignore just about everything else? Dakinikat remarked to me a few days ago that it seems our generation have seen wars play out on TV now for most of our lives, beginning with Vietnam. She’s right. It’s so sad and depressing.
Jordan can thank Republicans representing districts Joe Biden won in 2020 for most of his vote-counting woes. Nebraska Rep. 
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