Posted: January 27, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, Cats, caturday, just because | Tags: "God's Army", Alabama, Anne Appelbaumn, Border bill, Donald Trump, execution, Greg Abbott, nitrogen gas, Supreme Court, Texas, U.S. House, U.S. Senate, Ukraine aid |
Happy Caturday!!
NOTE: The artwork in today’s post is from the Los Angeles Cat Art Show.
Amanda, by Mark Ryden
Yesterday Dakinikat wrote about Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s refusal to accept the decision of the right wing, corrupt Supreme Court that Federal law supersedes Texas state law; and therefore, Biden can order the removal of Abbott’s lethal razer wire from the Texas border with Mexico.
Unfortunately, other Republican Governors have come forward to back Abbott, and Donald Trump is urging these governors to send National Guard troops to support Abbott’s illegal activities. This is dangerously close to threatening civil war.
Vice News: Trump Calls on ‘All Willing States’ to Send National Guard Soldiers to Texas.
Like pouring water on a grease fire, former President Donald Trump has weighed in on the escalating standoff between the federal government and Texas.
In a multi-part social media post shared Thursday night, Trump called on “all willing states” to deploy their national guard forces to Texas “to prevent the entry of illegals, and to remove them back across the Border.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Tucker Carlson on Friday, that so far, ten governors had sent National Guard or other law enforcement resources to assist on the border, and will be “disappointed” if others do not follow suit.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt told Fox News on Friday that he also “absolutely” plans to send national guard soldiers to Texas. ““We’ve already started putting the numbers together,” said Stitt.
(Less than 24 hours earlier, Stitt joined Newsmax host Carl Higbie for a casual chat about potential “force-on-force conflict” breaking out at the border.)
Stitt is one of 25 red state governors who have released statements expressing support for Abbott, who is continuing to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this week that found that the federal government, not states, have ultimate jurisdiction over border enforcement
The background:
The Court’s 5-4 ruling gave a green light to Border Control to cut down the miles of razor wire that Texas forces had erected without federal permission along the Rio Grande and around Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, which is an epicenter for unauthorized border crossings.
Yawning Toothy Silhouette, by Brandon Boyd
Two weeks ago, the Texas National Guard seized control of Shelby Park, blocking Border Control’s access to the area and effectively preventing them from conducting rescue missions. Rio Grande. Days later, a migrant woman and two children drowned, which the Biden Administration blamed Texas for.
Abbott has doubled down on border enforcement activity since the Supreme Court ruling. He published a strongly-worded letter on Wednesday that accused the Biden Administration of abdicating its constitutional responsibility to protect states from “invasion.” “The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the states,” Abbott asserted.
Abbott cited a dissenting opinion from the 2012 Supreme Court case Arizona v. United States that argued that states have a constitutional authority to protect themselves if the federal government fails to.
Cori Alonso-Yoder, an associate professor from George Washington University Law School’s Fundamentals of Lawyering Program, told VICE News that she believes Abbott’s statement falls “more into the realm of political theater than actual supported legal theory.”
There’s also a bunch of crazy “christians” who say they will march to the border.
Business Insider: A convoy calling themselves ‘God’s army’ plans to head to the Texas border to stop migrants from entering the US.
A convoy of hundreds of people plans to head to the Texas border to stop migrants crossing into the country from Mexico.
The group, called “Take Our Border Back,” is organizing on Telegram and now has more than 1,600 followers.
One of the group’s organizers described them as “God’s army” in a planning call, according to Vice.
“This is a biblical, monumental moment that’s been put together by God,” one organizer said, per Vice.
Another said: “We are besieged on all sides by dark forces of evil.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God. It is time for the remnant to rise,” they said.
Pete Chambers, a lieutenant colonel organizing the group, has claimed he was a Green Beret. He explained the group’s plans while speaking to conspiracist Alex Jones on his Infowars show on Thursday.
“That’s what Green Berets do. Unconventional warfare is our bread and butter. Now we’re doing domestic internal defense,” Chambers said.
More at the Insider link.
The Senate is now working on a new border bill, and President Biden has endorsed it. It’s not yet clear what House Republicans will do, but Speaker Johnson has said the bill is dead on arrival.
Politico: Biden says he’ll shut down the border if deal gives him authority.
President Joe Biden on Friday urged Congress to pass a bipartisan bill to address the immigration crisis at the nation’s southern border, saying he would shut down the border the day the bill became law.
Katsunori Miyagi, Gravity Cat
“What’s been negotiated would — if passed into law — be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country,” Biden said in a statement. “It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”
Biden’s Friday evening statement resembles a ramping up in rhetoric for the administration, placing the president philosophically in the camp arguing that the border may hit a point where closure is needed. The White House’s decision to have Biden weigh in also speaks to the delicate nature of the dealmaking, and the urgency facing his administration to take action on the border — particularly during an election year, when Republicans have used the issue to rally their base.
The president is also daring Republicans to reject the deal as it faces a make-or-break moment amid GOP fissures.
It comes after a hectic week on the Hill, as Senate negotiators try to salvage monthslong talks to reach a border deal and unlock aid for Ukraine. The White House has continued to engage in talks and has publicly signaled optimism that a deal can be struck, even as some House Republicans say any bill is dead on arrival in the lower chamber. Donald Trump has also tried to scuttle the talks, adding another layer to complicated negotiations.
On the developing deal:
The contours of the deal are still subject to negotiation. But the negotiators have long discussed setting triggers for daily border crossings after which the Biden administration could shut down the border between ports of entry. Under the current proposal, asylum seekers would still be authorized to present claims at authorized ports of entry, although they would face a much higher standard for being granted the opportunity to apply for asylum.
Republicans who support a deal say the authority would both force Biden’s hand and strengthen that of his potential successor.
“This is an opportunity to put laws on the books that someone who is genuinely interested in securing the border will be able to use,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said as the Senate adjourned Thursday. “President Donald J. Trump in 2017 asked for laws like this. We’re going to deliver it and if he becomes president, he’ll be glad that we did.”
The terms of the deal under discussion, which is largely agreed to but not yet final, would also give DHS expulsion authority if border encounters hit an average of 4,000-a-day over the course of a week, a metric that includes asylum appointments. That authority would become mandatory if daily crossings average more than 5,000 people for a week or crest over 8,500 a day, according to two people briefed on the emerging agreement and who were granted anonymity to discuss the details.
Read more at Politico.
Manu Raju at CNN: Biden endorses emerging deal to give US new power to clamp down on border crossings.
Senate negotiators have agreed to empower the US to significantly restrict illegal migrant crossings at the southern border, according to sources familiar with the matter, a move aimed at ending the migrant surge that has overrun federal authorities over the past several months.
President Joe Biden has vowed to use the authority offered by the deal, embracing measures that are far more draconian than he’s previously considered in an area many voters perceive him as weaker than former President Donald Trump.
Kitty Bread Time, by Travis Lampe
The Senate deal, which is expected to be unveiled as soon as next week, would also speed up the asylum process to consider cases within six months – compared with the current system, under which it could take up to 10 years for asylum seekers.
The details provide a new window into high-profile negotiations that have been going on for months – as Senate leaders hold out hope they can attach the deal to aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan as domestic and international crises loom. The plan would also put pressure on Republicans to decide whether to greenlight these new authorities or reject the plan as Trump has urged the GOP to defeat anything short of what he calls a “perfect” bill.
Under the soon-to-be-released package, the Department of Homeland Security would be granted new emergency authority to shut down the border if daily average migrant encounters reach 4,000 over a one-week span. If migrant crossings increase above 5,000 on average per day on a given week, DHS would be required to close the border to migrants crossing illegally not entering at ports of entry. Certain migrants would be allowed to stay if they prove to be fleeing torture or persecution in their countries.
Moreover, if crossings exceed 8,500 in a single day, DHS would be required to close the border to migrants illegally crossing the border. Under the proposal, any migrant who tries to cross the border twice while it is closed would be banned from entering the US for one year.
The goal of the trio of negotiators – GOP Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, Independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut – is to prevent surges that overwhelm federal authorities. The Biden administration and Senate leaders have been heavily involved in the talks, and more details of the deal are expected to be released in the coming days.
Meanwhile, it appears Congress is continuing to block aid to Ukraine.
Pablo Manriquez at The New Republic: Senate Republicans Are on a Major Ukraine Collision Course.
In the Senate battle over Ukraine funding, one surprising issue has emerged that has led to a fascinating intra-Republican dispute—and one of the most aggressively anti-Ukraine Republicans is very vocally leading the “anti” side.
The issue is whether the United States and other Western countries should pay to prop up Ukraine’s entire economy, and specifically its social safety net and old-age pensions, or just replenish its critically diminished supply of munitions in its war with Russia. On December 11, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy traveled to Washington to make his case to Congress for $61 billion in emergency assistance the White House has requested for Ukraine.
Paul Koudounaris, Warhol Cat
“If there’s anyone inspired by unresolved issues on Capitol Hill, it’s just [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and his sick clique,” Zelenskiy said, only to fly home empty-handed because many MAGA Republicans in both chambers of Congress have soured on America’s Ukrainian ally—a position in lockstep with Donald Trump’s longtime geopolitical bromance with Russia’s leader-oligarch, Vladimir Putin.
Walking point in that platoon is Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, once an anti-Trump moderate who was reincarnated on the 2022 campaign trail as an ultra-MAGA scourge of liberals and university professors and elite educational institutions (he has a law degree from Yale). “Even if you support funding for Ukraine for some national defense purpose, which obviously I do not, I think it suggests that they’re effectively becoming a welfare client if we’re funding their pensioners,” said Vance, who is considered a possible vice presidential pick for Trump.
In December, Ukraine’s minister for social policy, Oksana Zholnovych, said that 500,000 civil servants, 1.4 million teachers, and 10 million pensioners could experience payment delays if foreign humanitarian assistance is not approved soon.
Vance and other MAGA senators have since gone out of their way to throw cold water on Biden’s funding package for Ukraine, which has been tied down in the Senate with unrelated immigration policy concessions Senate leaders in both parties have demanded to push a deal through.
Read the rest at TNR.
Anne Appelbaum at The Atlantic: Is Congress Really Going to Abandon Ukraine Now?
As I write this I am in Warsaw, 170 miles from Poland’s border with Ukraine. The front line, where Ukrainians are right now fighting and dying, is another 450 miles beyond that. Not so far, in other words. A long day’s drive. I am well within range of Russian missiles, the kind that have hit Kyiv, Odesa, and Lviv so many times over the past two years.
Tens of millions of other people—Poles, Germans, Romanians, Finns, Estonians, Swedes, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Czechs, Latvians, Norwegians—are also in range of Russian conventional missiles, whether launched from Belarus, Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine, or Russia itself. Anyone in Europe could also be hit by Russian nuclear weapons, of course, as Russian television propagandists so frequently like to remind us. Dmitri Medvedev, a former Russian president, in recent months has threatened Poland with the loss of its statehood, threatened Sweden and Finland with nuclear and hypersonic missiles, and said the Baltic states belong to Russia anyway.
Most of the time, the possibility of Russian aggression doesn’t affect anybody or change anything. No one talks about it. Life goes on as normal. In Finland and Romania, preparations for presidential elections are under way. In Germany, farmers are on strike. Lithuania is holding an international light festival.
The moment the Ukrainians start to lose, all of that will change. For the past few months, Western observers have been tossing around the word stalemate, as if the Russian invasion of Ukraine had settled into some kind of dull, permanent stasis. In fact, the battlefield is dynamic. The front line is constantly changing, and the changes, both material and psychological, are starting to favor Russia. The Ukrainians are just as brave as they were a year ago and just as innovative. Their drones recently hit a Russian gas depot near St. Petersburg, hundreds of miles from Ukraine, among other targets. With no navy of their own, they have pushed much of the Russian Black Sea fleet away from their shores. But on the ground, in the southern and eastern parts of their country, they are rationing ammunition. They’ve never had sufficient missiles and bullets, and now they are at risk of not having enough to keep fighting at all.
Marc Dennis, Night Out
Were their front line to fall back dramatically, the horrific violence alone would trigger a shock wave through the rest of Europe. Russian occupation of more territory would continue to mean what it has meant for the past two years: torture chambers, random arrests, and thousands of kidnapped children. But an even deeper, broader shock wave would be triggered by the growing realization that the United States is not just an unreliable ally, but an unserious ally. A silly ally. Unlike the European Union, which collectively spends more money on Ukraine than Americans do but can’t yet produce as many weapons, the U.S. still has ammunition and weapons to send. Now Washington is on the verge of refusing to do so, but not because the White House has had a change of heart.
The looming end of American aid to Ukraine is not a policy decision. For two years, the Biden administration successfully led an international coalition to provide not soldiers but rather military aid to Ukraine. Officials convened regular meetings, consulted with allies, pulled in military support from around the world. Majorities in the U.S. continue to support Ukraine. Majorities in both houses of Congress do too. The Senate is said to have its legislation almost ready to go. But now, for reasons that outsiders find impossible to understand, a minority of Republican members of Congress, in a fit of political pique, are preparing to cut it all off. They might succeed.
Read the rest at The Atlantic. If you can’t get past the paywall, Applebaum has posted a gift article on Twitter.
On Thursday night, Alabama executed Kenneth Eugene Smith using nitrogen gas, a method never before used, but approved by the right wing Supreme Court. It did not go well, but Alabama will pretend that it did.
One more story before I call it a day.
Yahoo News: Alabama AG calls first nitrogen gas execution ‘textbook,’ but witnesses say inmate thrashed in final moments.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall on Friday vowed to continue using nitrogen gas in executions and offered to assist other states interested in the novel method, while fending off concerns that an inmate executed the night before did not become unconscious as quickly as expected and thrashed on the gurney, according to witnesses.
“What occurred last night was textbook,” Marshall told reporters after the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith on Thursday evening by nitrogen hypoxia, in which he was forced to breathe only nitrogen through a mask and was denied oxygen.
The execution, the first in the U.S. using nitrogen gas, lasted roughly 30 minutes from the time it started to Smith’s time of death. Marshall said Friday that nitrogen hypoxia “is no longer an untested method — it is a proven one.”
But the physical reaction of Smith, who was 58 and on death row for over three decades for a 1988 murder-for-hire slaying, was already being highly scrutinized after a 2022 attempt to execute him by lethal injection failed when prison staff could not locate a suitable vein.
Media witnesses to Thursday’s execution said Smith was conscious for several minutes into the execution and then appeared to shake and writhe on the gurney for two minutes. They said that was followed by several minutes of deep breaths until his breathing slowed and it was no longer perceptible….
…one media witness said it appeared to take longer than the state had suggested for Smith to become unconscious and die.
“It’s interesting to see the attorney general say that everything went consistent with plans that they laid out,” Lee Hedgepeth, an Alabama reporter, said on MSNBC.
“We saw him begin violently shaking, thrashing against the straps that held him down,” Hedgepeth said of Smith. “This was the fifth execution that I’ve witnessed in Alabama, and I’ve never seen such a violent execution or a violent reaction to the means of execution.”
He added that Smith had dry-heaved into the mask.
There’s more at the link.
That’s all I have for you today–not a lot of good news, I’m afraid. What stories are you following?
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