I was … impressed? … by the number of titles that included the word “pucking”. Apparently subtlety is not a hallmark of that genre.
2 Likes
I haven’t even read one and I’m already pucking tired of that genre.
4 Likes
Unfortunately, no. There are hours of interviews of Lewis about his book that aren’t worth anyone’s time to listen to where he defends FTX’s business model, calls his book “a letter to the jury”, etc. This interview is a brief sample of Lewis’s bullshit. There’s a 60 Minutes interview that’s even worse, but basically, this guy is in the tank for SBF, and it’s just disgusting and sad.
5 Likes
Ugh. It sounds like Lewis got too close to SBF and fell for the con. Disappointing.
7 Likes
October 15, 2023 (Sunday)
“We came here with four key objectives,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in Egypt: “to make clear that the United States stands with Israel; to prevent the conflict from spreading to other places; to work on securing the release of hostages, including American citizens; and to address the humanitarian crisis that exists in Gaza.”
Blinken has been traveling country to country in the Middle East since shortly after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas fighters, who crossed into Israel and killed at least 1,300 people, of whom more than 1,000 were civilians, 30 were Americans, 12 were Thais, and 2 were French nationals. They also took 126 hostages, including not only Israelis, apparently, but also 8 Germans, 5 U.S. nationals, and 2 Mexican nationals.
Retaliatory strikes by Israeli forces on Gaza since then have killed at least 2,670 people and displaced almost a million. Israel has stopped food, water, fuel, and electricity from getting to Gaza and has told the more than a million residents in northern Gaza to move south to clear the way for a military incursion. Israeli energy minister Israel Katz said the siege would continue until Hamas frees the hostages. About 500 U.S. citizens are in Gaza.
The Biden administration has been pushing diplomacy to stop the crisis from spreading. On October 11, Blinken traveled to Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and then to Jordan, where he met with the head of the Palestinian Authority that exercises limited government in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas.
Then he went on to Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Virtually everywhere, he said, he found “a shared view that we have to do everything possible to make sure this doesn’t spread to other places; a shared view to safeguard innocent lives; a shared view to get assistance to Palestinians in Gaza who need it, and we’re working very much on that.”
Blinken emphasized that the U.S. will stand with Israel “today, tomorrow, and every day…in word and also in deed.” He noted that the U.S. has moved a second carrier strike group (CSG) to the Eastern Mediterranean. A CSG is a powerful, flexible group of about 7,500 sailors and Marines on a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, a replenishment ship (which carries oil and supplies), a cruiser, destroyers, and a submarine, as well as various aircraft.
The U.S. maintains 11 CSGs. Two of them are now in the Eastern Mediterranean not as provocation, Blinken said, but “as a deterrent. It’s meant to make clear that no one should do anything that could add fuel to the fire in any other place.” Sending two CSGs to the region is a strong statement, almost certainly designed to address threats by Iran that it will “respond” if Israel proceeds with a ground invasion of Gaza.
Iran backs Hamas—although there is not yet evidence that Iranian officials directly helped plan the October 7 attack—and also backs Hezbollah, the militant group that controls southern Lebanon. Today, clashes broke out on the border between Israel and Lebanon as Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel and Israeli forces fired artillery back.
Israel has “the right—indeed it has the obligation—to defend itself against these attacks from Hamas, and to try to do what it can to make sure that this never happens again,” Blinken said. But, he added, “[i]t needs to do it in a way that affirms the shared values that we have for human life and human dignity, taking every possible precaution to avoid harming civilians.”
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres implored Hamas to release the hostages immediately and Israel to grant “rapid and unimpeded access…for humanitarian supplies and workers for the sake of the civilians in Gaza,” which “is running out of water, electricity and other essential supplies.” These two issues must not become bargaining chips, he said. “[W]e are on the verge of the abyss in the Middle East.” Opening a gate between Gaza and Egypt would allow supplies to be brought in and would help to move refugees south, away from the northern areas Israel is expected to attack.
Relief for Gaza’s people has been bottled up on the Egyptian side of the border as Israeli officials refuse to guarantee their forces will not bomb relief trucks out of concern they are carrying weapons. The U.S. has put strong pressure on Israel to reopen the water supply to Gaza, especially in the southern region since the influx of refugees was already stressing supplies, and today Israel did so, but observers say that without electricity and fuel, the pumping stations and the plants that take salt out of the water don’t work.
The U.S. is also clearly working to get the U.S. hostages released, but officials will not talk about the details of that operation.
Today President Biden appointed Ambassador David Satterfield as the U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues, charging him with bringing “urgently needed humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, in coordination with the U.N., Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and other regional stakeholders.”
A diplomat since 1980, Satterfield has worked in countries all over the region for both Republican and Democratic administrations. He has served as the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, U.S. deputy chief of mission in Iraq, assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, and director general of the body overseeing peace between Israel and Egypt.
“There are two very different visions for the future and what the Middle East can and should be,” Blinken said today. The U.S. stands behind a vision “that has countries in the region normalizing their relations, integrating, working together in common purpose, and upholding and bringing forth the rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people.”
The other vision is the one Hamas embraces: “a vision of death, of destruction, of nihilism, of terrorism. That’s a vision that does nothing to advance aspirations for Palestinians, that does nothing to help create better futures for people in the region, and does everything to bring total darkness to everyone that it’s able to affect.”
The visions are clear, Blinken said. He said he had no doubt that the overwhelming majority of people in the region would choose the first if given the chance. So it is the responsibility of “all of us who believe in that first path…to make it real, to bring it to light, to make it a clear, affirmative choice. And that’s what we’re determined to do…. If we do that, everyone in this region will be in a much better place and so will the rest of the world.”
And yet that vision must be reinforced at home. The murder of a six-year-old child and the attempted murder of the child’s mother yesterday in Illinois by their 71-year-old landlord prompted the president to warn against Islamophobia. The family was Palestinian and had immigrated to the U.S. “seeking what we all seek—a refuge to live, learn, and pray in peace,” Biden said. The child was born in the U.S.
“This horrific act of hate has no place in America, and stands against our fundamental values: freedom from fear for how we pray, what we believe, and who we are,” Biden said.
“We join everyone here at the White House in sending our condolences and prayers to the family, including for the mother’s recovery, and to the broader Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim American communities.”
5 Likes
What Hamas did is unforgivable, but it does not justify war crimes, and Israel is committing war crimes.
9 Likes
Yes.
If I remember right, HCR is a “presidential historian,” so she’s focused on presidential actions. Reporting in such clarifying detail on Tromp’s larcenous lunacy made her famous. She has seen Tromp (rightly, I think) as a threat to US democracy, and Biden as a savior of it (hmmm…).
I wondered a year or two ago how objective she could remain after being invited to the White House to personally interview Biden. I do think she sometimes comes close to writing these daily “letters” as a form of mere presidential stenography (if not quite hagiography).
6 Likes
The “yet” in that sentence is doing a fair amount of work.
5 Likes
I didn’t even mean that as a criticism of her, really. The sentiment that Israel’s response is justified is common and widespread. And I even understand it. The Holocaust casts a shadow over all of this. I just want more people to start realizing that what we all learned in Kindergarten is still true. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
6 Likes
Yeah she definitely has a bias. It doesn’t bother me typically because I share some of that bias in that I favor a democratic president… but it is still an obvious bias.
It becomes crystal clear on issues of war and foreign policy.
As horrible as I think the rising fascists in the US are and as completely overwhelming and impossible as the Palestinian/Israeli wars are for me to comprehend really, the fact is that I do not know that this administration or any US administration has really done any actual good for the world through their involvement. I suppose I’m willing to imagine it could be possible, but not much more than that. So far the results have been horrific. And I think her bias does prevent her from admitting it fully.
7 Likes
Agreed. When HCR extends her reporting beyond US borders, she doesn’t do so within a framework that acknowledges that the US is an extractive, de facto empire. Nor that its government and military primarily function (seems to me) as guardians of US-based corporate interests.
10 Likes
I think this is also a statement to Israel that ties into the statements like these
At least some of that support is meant to pressure Israel. To let them know their actions are being watched in an attempt to prevent Israel from committing war crimes.
Not sure if it is going to work. Cutting off the water and electricity is going to hurt civilians. Not Hamas. Hamas would have been prepared for that
5 Likes
Maybe.
UNRWA, the UN organization that treats Palestinian refugees and their descendants, says Hamas authorities in Gaza have apparently stolen fuel and medical supplies meant for refugees from its premises in Gaza City.
The agency says on X that the people claiming they were from the Hamas-run health ministry loaded the supplies on trucks
Evil bastards.
eta:
UNRWA has deleted the Tweet accusing Hamas of stealing supplies. UNRWA has not made a statement on why they deleted it.
5 Likes
I’ve often imagined the wizards’ staffs as hockey sticks, so this checks out. 
2 Likes
October 16, 2023 (Monday)
This morning, the Justice Department announced that the United States has reached a settlement with the plaintiffs in the case of Ms. L. v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a class action lawsuit filed in 2018 over the Trump administration’s policy of separating parents and children at the southwest border to deter migrants. That policy, implemented in 2017 and 2018, resulted in more than 5,500 children being separated from their parents.
In 2018 a judge ordered the families reunited, but it turned out the Trump administration had not kept records of the family members. As soon as he took office, President Joe Biden appointed a task force to accomplish the reunifications, but 85 children are still separated from their families. The task force also found that 290 of the children removed from their parents were U.S. citizens.
The lawsuit charged that the policy broke a number of U.S. laws—seeking asylum is legal, and taking children away from their parents without cause is not—and the settlement seeks both to heal the victims of the policy and to make sure it never happens again. The affected families will have a different process for applying for asylum than other migrants and will have access to benefits such as work authorization, possible housing assistance, immigration lawyers, and mental health care to address the trauma of the separations, and the government will agree not to turn back to such a policy in the future.
“The separation of families at our southern border was a betrayal of our nation’s values,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. “By providing services to these families and implementing policies to prevent future separations, today’s agreement addresses the impacts of those separations and helps ensure that nothing like this happens again.”
The judge will need to approve the settlement.
MAGA Republicans seem unconcerned with what the law says. Indeed, they have been working hard to discredit the law in order to protect former president Trump, attacking the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After Trump has publicly attacked prosecutors and witnesses in the case over his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Judge Tanya Chutkan today prohibited him from such attacks on the court’s staff, witnesses, testimony, and prosecutors.
Last week, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) called for shutting down the government in November unless Democrats agree to cutting all spending for processing or releasing into the country any new migrants. He says the demand is “non-negotiable.” But U.S. and international law require the U.S. to process asylum requests, even if a migrant arrives in between legal points of entry.
Former senior Department of Homeland Security lawyer Tom Jawetz told Greg Sargent of the Washington Post that Jordan’s plan “would be both illegal and a practical impossibility.” Administration officials “are legally obligated to process people for asylum on request,” he said. “It’s not a choice.”
But therein lies the heart of today’s Republican Party: its extremist leaders no longer believe that rules apply to them. Jordan, a staunch ally of Trump, was key to the former president’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election. He is now gathering votes for a bid to become the speaker of the House of Representatives after the MAGA extremists threw former House speaker Kevin McCarthy out.
In 2017, former Republican House speaker John Boehner told journalist Tim Alberta: “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate…. A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.” In 2021, he clarified: “I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart—never building anything, never putting anything together.”
After a secret ballot showed that 55 of his colleagues would not support him in a floor vote, Jordan has insisted on a public vote, putting his colleagues under pressure to support him and thus to support Trump. They are caving, one at a time.
But Representative Don Bacon (R-NE) called out the MAGA group that revolted repeatedly against the Republican conference and now is demanding Republican unity for the unpopular Jordan, forcing the party to fully embrace Trump. “I can’t abide by the fact a small group violated the rules to get what they wanted [and] now I’m supposed to play by the rules,” Bacon said. “I think we’ve got to have consequences, and you’ve got to stand up for this. That’s what Americans do.”
We used to be able to assume that Americans did, in fact, play by the rules, accepting the principle of the rule of law. That principle is now openly challenged here in the U.S.
That principle is also at stake around the world. In a piece in The Atlantic on October 9, foreign policy journalist Anne Applebaum noted the fragility of the rules-based international order, a system of norms and values established after World War II in an attempt to create a system for resolving international disputes, preventing territorial wars, and ending no-holds-barred slaughter.
A series of agreements, including the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war established those rules, and while they have often been flouted, they offered grounds for challenging those nations and military personnel who broke them.
Applebaum pointed out that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians “are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all.” They feel justified in ignoring the rules-based international order and sowing terror and chaos among civilians.
Their “goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online.” Applebaum suggests “we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone.”
Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have made no secret of their determination to strengthen the rules-based international order, and tonight the White House announced that Biden will travel on Wednesday to the Middle East, where he will visit Israel before traveling to Jordan, where he will meet with the country’s leader King Abdullah II, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.
We might miss the idea of the rule of law here at home if we continue to empower MAGA Republicans. Voters in Poland missed it, and yesterday 73% of them turned out to oust from power the nationalist-conservative party that, Anne Applebaum notes in a different Atlantic article, “turned state television into a propaganda tube, used state companies to fund its political campaigns,… politicized state administration[,]… altered electoral laws and even leaked top-secret military documents, manipulating their contents for electoral gain.”
Opponents of the ruling party, which took power in 2015, came together in a coalition that rejected angry nationalism in favor of civic patriotism, met in demonstrations around the country, featured women prominently in their campaigns, promised to end Poland’s strong abortion restrictions, and offered closer cooperation with Europe.
Rebuilding democracy will be neither fast nor easy, Applebaum notes, but “Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable.”
12 Likes
October 17, 2023 (Tuesday)
This morning, the Ukrainian military launched a surprise attack on two Russian airfields in occupied Ukraine, using a longer-range missile system secretly supplied in the last few weeks by the United States. The Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, has a range of about 100 miles, or 161 kilometers. It enabled the Ukrainians to damage runways and destroy nine Russian helicopters. The missiles also killed a number of Russian soldiers. One of the conditions of Ukraine’s acquisition of these weapons was that they would only be used within Ukraine against the occupiers, not in Russia itself.
The thirty-one M1 Abrams main battle tanks the U.S. had promised Ukraine have all arrived, the U.S. confirmed today. All the Ukrainian military personnel who trained to use those tanks in Germany have also returned.
A recent Russian offensive has been largely unsuccessful, while the Ukrainian goal of dividing the Russian invaders in two (much as the U.S. did to the Confederacy) has been partially achieved but troops have not punched through. At the same time, strategic Ukrainian attacks have pushed Russia’s Black Sea fleet out of its main base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, and the Institute for the Study of War assesses that the attacks on the airfields will force Russia to pull its aircraft back and either to disperse its ammunition depots or to fortify them.
Meanwhile, the struggle in the House of Representatives today looked like a preview of the 2024 election.
Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), a staunch supporter of former president Trump and a key figure in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, is pushing hard for election as speaker, emphasizing how imperative it is for the House Republicans to enable the House to get back to business. As Karoun Demirjian outlined in the New York Times, Jordan and his allies have deployed a pressure campaign against those Republicans opposed to him, as she puts it, “working to unleash the rage of the party’s base voters against any lawmaker standing in his way.”
This is the same tactic that the extremists have used for decades to move the Republican Party to the right. But there is a different dynamic at play in this speakership crisis. Jordan and his allies created the crisis in the first place by supporting Trump’s demands to shut down the government, tossing out former speaker Kevin McCarthy because he would not agree to shut down the government, and refusing to abide by the vote of the Republican conference to accept the choice of the majority: first McCarthy and then Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA).
There is another way in which this moment is different. Jordan is a flamethrower who was one of the original organizers of the right-wing Freedom Caucus. Republicans saw McCarthy, who was an excellent fundraiser, as a pro-business Republican who worked with the far right, but Jordan is the real deal: a far-right extremist. Republican donors have already suggested they are not enthusiastic about working with him to fund Republican candidates.
The third way this moment is different is that putting Jordan in the speaker’s chair makes him, along with Trump, the face of the Republican Party going into the 2024 election. Representative Pete Aguilar (D-CA) previewed the many downsides of Jordan as speaker when he nominated Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for the speaker’s chair. Aguilar blamed extremism and partisanship for the unprecedented chaos of the House and urged the Republicans to embrace bipartisanship to do the work the American people had sent them to Washington, D.C., to conduct.
Aguilar noted that Jordan was “the architect of a nationwide abortion ban, a vocal election denier, and an insurrection inciter.” He has “spent his entire career trying to hold our country back, putting our national security in danger, attempting government shutdown after government shutdown, wasting taxpayer dollars on baseless investigations with dead ends, authoring the very bill that would ban abortion nationwide without exceptions, and inciting violence on this chamber. Even leaders of his own party have called him ‘a legislative terrorist.’”
Aguilar pointed out Jordan’s opposition to disaster relief, veterans’ relief, support for Ukraine, and military aid to our allies, including Israel, and added: “This body is debating elevating a speaker nominee who has not passed a single bill in 16 years. These are not the actions of someone interested in governing or bettering the lives of everyday Americans.” Jordan as speaker would mean the Republican Party would “continue taking marching orders from a twice-impeached former president with more than 90 pending felony charges.”
Even without mentioning Jordan’s involvement with the cover-up of a sexual assault scandal at Ohio State, Aguilar put Republicans on notice that placing Jordan at the head of the party would have brutal consequences in Democratic campaign ads.
When House members voted for speaker, the Democrats were unified behind Jeffries, who won all 212 of their votes. Jordan won only 200 of the 217 votes necessary to become speaker, with 20 Republicans voting for someone else. His allies initially said they would call a second vote tonight but changed their minds, apparently realizing that another loss would weaken his candidacy significantly. They say they will hold another vote tomorrow.
Tonight, hundreds of people were killed in an explosion at a packed hospital in Gaza City. Palestinian authorities blamed an Israeli airstrike for the explosion; hours later, Israel Defense Forces said the explosion was a misfired missile launched as part of a “barrage of rockets” by the Islamic Jihad militant group. Neither version of events has been confirmed.
Governments around the region have blamed Israel and sometimes the U.S. for the catastrophic loss of life, and protests have broken out in Lebanon, Iran, and Turkey as President Joe Biden travels to the region personally to demonstrate U.S. support for Israel, pressure Israel to permit humanitarian aid into Gaza, learn any new information about the hostages, and to try to keep the conflict from widening and escalating.
Biden will meet in Tel Aviv, Israel, with Israeli leaders, first responders, and families of hostages, but the second leg of his trip—to Jordan, for a meeting with King Abdullah II, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—was canceled as Abbas rushed home. National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told reporters Biden would speak with Abbas and Sisi on the trip back to the U.S.
10 Likes
October 18, 2023 (Wednesday)
President Joe Biden spoke today in Tel Aviv, Israel, reiterating support for the Israelis but also hammering on the need to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Biden called the actions of Hamas “pure unadulterated evil” and noted that such brutality “would have cut deep anywhere in the world, but it cuts deeper here in Israel.” “The attack,” he said, “has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by…millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people.” In the past, he said, the world watched and did nothing, but “[w]e will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
Biden promised the U.S. is working to recover the hostages, and he empathized with those who had lost loved ones. He promised that Israel would always be a safe home for the Jewish people. He promised military aid and once again warned “any state or any other hostile actor thinking about attacking Israel…. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.”
But in a statement that spoke to the Arab world, Biden also warned Israel not to give into the “primal feeling” of “[s]hock, pain,… an all-consuming rage.” “I caution this,” he said: “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
Biden also appeared to speak to the administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he spoke about what it means to be a war leader. “[I]t requires being deliberate,” he said. “It requires asking very hard questions. It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve those objectives.”
“The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.”
Biden reiterated that Hamas uses families in Gaza as human shields, putting command centers, weapons, and communications tunnels in residential areas. “The Palestinian people are suffering greatly as well,” Biden said. And then he took on the issue of yesterday’s explosion at the hospital in Gaza, expressing outrage and sadness.
And then he clarified what had happened in that explosion: “Based on the information we’ve seen to date, it appears the result of an errant rocket fired by a terrorist group in Gaza.” This statement reflects the assessment of the U.S. Defense Department and was echoed today by the Senate Intelligence Committee, with a Democratic majority, and the House Intelligence Committee, with a Republican majority.
“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,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said today.
Biden went on to explain that the United States stands unequivocally for the protection of civilian life during conflict—a key tenet of the laws of war—and said “I grieve—I truly grieve for the families who were killed or wounded by this tragedy.”
“The people of Gaza need food, water, medicine, shelter,” Biden said, adding that he had asked the Israeli cabinet to agree to the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. He said that Israel has agreed, based on the promise that the aid would go to civilians. Should Hamas divert or steal that aid, he said, access will stop and Hamas “will have demonstrated once again that they have no concern for the welfare of the Palestinian people.” Biden said the U.S. is working closely with Egypt and the United Nations to get trucks moving across the border as quickly as possible. It is also demanding that the International Red Cross be able to visit Hamas’s hostages.
Biden also announced that the U.S. will dedicate $100 million in new funding for humanitarian assistance in Gaza and the West Bank to help the more than 1 million displaced Palestinians.
Biden urged Israelis to remember that their state is a democracy. It must live not by the rules of terrorists, but by the rule of law. “What sets us apart from the terrorists is we believe in the fundamental dignity of every human life—Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Jew, Muslim, Christian—everyone,” he said. “You can’t give up what makes you who you are. If you give that up, then the terrorists win. And we can never let them win.”
“Nations of conscience like the United States and Israel are not measured solely by the example of their power,” he said. “We’re measured by the power of our example. That’s why, as hard as it is, we must keep pursuing peace. We must keep pursuing a path so that Israel and the Palestinian people can both live safely, in security, in dignity, and in peace.” “For me, that means a two-state solution,” he said. He also reiterated that Israel must be better integrated with its neighbors.
“May God protect all those who work for peace,” Biden concluded. “God save those who are still in harm’s way.”
The speech was one of Biden’s best, drawing on personal experience, religion, history, politics, and the present. But it was not just rhetoric. Biden’s personal arrival in an area at war—his second as president—and his adamant support for Israel were a key demonstration that the U.S. does not want this war to expand, either by the introduction of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia or by Israeli overreaction in the Palestinian territories.
It also put Netanyahu on notice that the U.S. is watching his actions. As David Rothkopf discussed today in The Daily Beast, Netanyahu allied himself with former president Trump and has appeared to consider his U.S. relationships with right-wing figures more important than his relationship with Biden. Now, with his own government on shaky ground as Israelis blame him for failing to protect them, Netanyahu jumped at the chance to be seen with Biden, whose response to the explosion and his steady handling of the ongoing crisis has made him enormously popular.
On Air Force One on the way home, Biden told reporters that his quest to get humanitarian aid had succeeded. Egypt has agreed to send up to 20 trucks of aid to Gaza, seemingly testing whether the aid will get through and if it will disappear into the hands of Hamas. If Hamas “doesn’t let it get through or just confiscates it, then it’s going to end,” Biden said. He continued: “[T]he bottom line is that [Egyptian president Abdel Fattah] El-Sisi deserves some real credit because he was very accommodating and, quite frankly, as everyone I’ve spoken to thus far since this trip began.”
Biden said that Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues David Satterfield was already in Cairo to coordinate the aid.
When reporters asked if Biden was disappointed that his trip to Jordan was canceled, the president said no and laughed. “Disappointed? Look, I came to get something done. I got it done…. Not many people thought we could get this done, and not many people want to be associated with failure…. [H]ad we gone and this failed, then, you know, the United States failed, Biden’s presidency fails, et cetera, which would be a legitimate criticism…. I thought it was worth taking the chance to get it done.”
Biden’s steady hand, experience, and courage stood in contrast today to the House Republicans in the ongoing fight to elect a speaker. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a far-right extremist and key Trump ally, lost more votes in the second round of voting than in the first, in part because he and his allies infuriated colleagues by threatening people. After saying yesterday that it was imperative to finish the balloting and get on to the people’s business, today he announced he would not retire from his crusade but would keep trying to get the votes he needs as the crisis stretches into a third week.
The House will vote again tomorrow, but Republicans predict Jordan’s support will fall even further. Some Republicans are exploring the possibility of sidestepping the question of electing a speaker by expanding the powers of acting speaker Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC).
On Thursday night, President Biden will address the nation from the Oval Office.
9 Likes
October 19, 2023 (Thursday)
This book tour has finally caught up with me and I’ve hit the wall. Simply must get a decent night’s sleep, so will leave it here and pick it up tomorrow. Lots of pieces moving on lots of chess boards, but I think—hope!— they can all wait a day.
Buddy’s got more time to play with his camera since I’m away, and he’s doing it to some purpose.
[Photo by Buddy Poland]
7 Likes
October 20, 2023 (Friday)
Last night, President Joe Biden spoke to the nation from the Oval Office to shore up U.S. support for Ukraine and Israel. “[H]istory has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction. They keep going, and the cost and the threats to America and to the world keep rising,” he said.
“[I]f we walk away and let Putin erase Ukraine’s independence, would-be aggressors around the world would be emboldened to try the same,” he said. “The risk of conflict and chaos could spread in other parts of the world—in the Indo-Pacific… [and] especially in the Middle East.”
Biden noted that Russian president Vladimir Putin has suggested he might like to take part of Poland, while one of his top advisors has called three other NATO allies, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Russia’s “Baltic provinces.” Russian aggression there would draw the U.S. into war.
Iran is supporting Russia in Ukraine, he noted, and “it’s supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups” in the Middle East.
“The United States and our partners across the region are working to build a better future for the Middle East, one where the Middle East is more stable, better connected to its neighbors, and—through innovative projects like the India–Middle East–Europe rail corridor that I announced this year at the summit of the world’s biggest economies—more predictable markets, more employment, less rage, less grievances, less war when connected. It…would benefit the people of the Middle East, and it would benefit us.”
Biden explained that he was sending to Congress “an urgent budget request to fund America’s national security needs, to support our critical partners, including Israel and Ukraine. It’s a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations, help us keep American troops out of harm’s way, help us build a world that is safer, more peaceful, and more prosperous for our children and grandchildren,” he said.
That money, he said, would harden the Iron Dome that protects Israel’s skies after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas that took more than 1,300 lives. But he also said that the U.S. “remains committed to the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and to self-determination. The actions of Hamas terrorists don’t take that right away”
He explained that he had discussed with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “the critical need for Israel to operate by the laws of war. That means protecting civilians in combat as best as they can. The people of Gaza urgently need food, water, and medicine.” Biden secured an agreement for such relief when he visited Israel on Wednesday, but so far the route from Egypt has not opened, at least in part because Israel and Egypt can’t agree on a way to inspect the trucks to make sure they are not carrying weapons.
Ethan Bronner and Henry Meyer of Bloomberg reported yesterday that President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have pressured Israel more deeply than any recent administration, demanding they adjust their planned ground assault on Gaza to minimize civilian casualties and think about what happens when the assault is over. U.S. officials are worried that Israel’s response to the October 7 attack could prompt Hezbollah to join the war, scuttling the administration’s attempt to stabilize the region and drawing the U.S. further into the conflict.
But Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners who have backed further settlements in the West Bank are eager to exact revenge on the Palestinians there, killing at least seven in the last week. U.S. officials told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times that “the representatives of those settlers in the cabinet are withholding tax money owed the Palestinian Authority [that exercises authority over the West Bank], making it harder for it to keep the West Bank as under control as it has been since the start of the Hamas war.” Netanyahu, who has been charged with corruption and fraud, needs those partners in order to remain prime minister and thus stay out of jail.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is worsening as Israel has launched extensive airstrikes, killing what U.N. observers estimate to be more than 2,800 Palestinians, including several relatives of former representative Justin Amash (Libertarian-Michigan) who had been sheltering in a church. It has also driven about a million people of the 2.3 million in Gaza from their homes. Hospitals are closed, and food and water are scarce.
Foreign policy journalist Laura Rozen of Diplomatic gave Biden credit for his attempt to calm the region, support Israel, and protect Palestinian civilians but was, she said, “very worried” that the conflict would drag out and “inflame & destabilize [the] region & spark blowback & it will be very very ugly.” The U.S. had not been able to get “a single truck of aid into Gaza, much less set up a quasi-safe zone…five days after it thought it had a deal to do so.” It is not helping that X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, is amplifying disinformation about the crisis.
The U.S. and governments in Europe have pressured Israel not to go into Gaza while diplomats in Qatar try to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas. Today, Hamas released two dual U.S. citizens who had been held hostage in Gaza.
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) took a different tack, noting that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (believed to be the group responsible for the hospital explosion in Gaza) received more than $130 million in cryptocurrency in the past two years, and researchers believe this is just a fraction of the total. Cryptocurrency funds crime and terror, they wrote: more than $20 billion in illicit transactions last year “that we know of.”
Those exchanges are currently unregulated, and Warren and Marshall have introduced the bipartisan Digital Asset Anti–Money Laundering Act to bring digital assets under the same rules that regulate traditional payment systems.
Today the administration asked Congress for a little over $105 billion in funding for national security. The package would devote $61.4 billion to support Ukraine (some of it to replenish U.S. stockpiles after sending weapons to Ukraine); $14.3 billion to Israel for air and missile defense systems; $9.15 billion for humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Gaza, and other places; $7.4 billion for initiatives in the Indo-Pacific; and $14 billion for more agents at the southwestern border, new machines to detect fentanyl, and more courts to process asylum cases.
But Congress is currently unable to act. Seventeen days after the extremists in the House Republican conference ousted then-speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the Republican civil war continues to paralyze the House. After key Trump ally Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) lost a second round of balloting on Wednesday, his allies apparently spent Thursday threatening the colleagues who didn’t vote for him.
Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) explained: “So far I’ve had four death threats. I’ve been evicted from my office in Colorado…because the landlord is mad with my voting record on the Speaker issue. And everybody in the conference is getting this…. Family members have been approached and threatened, all kinds of things are going on….”
The threats simply hardened Jordan’s opposition. He lost a third ballot today, with 25 Republicans voting against him, and in a secret ballot the Republicans took privately over whether to keep him as their nominee for speaker, only 86 voted for Jordan, with 112 against. The House recessed for the weekend, despite the mounting crises that need to be addressed.
Having a key lieutenant in the House speaker’s chair, where he could, among other things, smear Biden by pushing to impeach him in the months before the election, would have been a huge boost for Trump. That Republicans refused to get behind Jordan even when he forced them into a public vote and then threatened them, much as Trump threatened them to line up behind him in the past, suggests they are starting to fear Trump less than they have for years.
Three plea deals in the past two days have intensified Trump’s legal troubles. Two of his own lawyers, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, have pleaded guilty to some of the charges brought by Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis in the racketeering case against Trump and 17 others.
Yesterday, Powell pleaded guilty to trying to tamper with voting machines. In exchange for a lenient sentence, she will have to testify against others. As she was the person Trump considered tapping as a special counsel to investigate alleged voter fraud, she was at a key meeting with Trump allies Rudy Giuliani, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and former Overstock chief executive officer Patrick Byrne.
Powell’s unexpected jump to the prosecution side—she was lying about the election just this week—put pressure on others, and today Chesebro also flipped. He was allegedly the one who designed the false electors scheme, although he has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to file false documents. In exchange for a lenient sentence, he has to turn over any evidence he has and testify truthfully against others in the case, including Trump.
In Michigan, a Republican man charged with participating in the false-elector plot also entered into a cooperation agreement yesterday, meaning he will talk to investigators and, if necessary, testify.
Finally, today, Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the fraud case against Trump and the Trump Organization, fined Trump $5,000 for violating the gag order he had imposed on October 3. Trump told Engoron that day he had taken down a social media post disparaging one of Engoron’s law clerks, but it remained up on his campaign website.
Engoron warned Trump that “future violations, whether intentional or unintentional, will subject the violator to far more severe sanctions, which may include, but are not limited to, steeper financial penalties, holding Donald Trump in contempt of court, and possibly imprisoning him pursuant to New York Judiciary Law.”
8 Likes
October 21, 2023 (Saturday)
Today, a convoy of 20 trucks crossed into Gaza from Egypt to bring food, water, and hospital equipment. Secretary of State Antony Blinken thanked “our partners in Egypt and Israel, and the United Nations, for facilitating the safe passage of these shipments through the Rafah border crossing” after “days of exhaustive U.S. diplomatic engagement in the region and an understanding President Biden reached with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi during his recent historic visit to Israel.” Since then, Special Envoy David Satterfield has worked to get the aid flowing.
Israel had vowed not to allow any aid to Gaza until Hamas released the 210 hostages it is holding, but Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant explained that officials had to back down: “The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”
The convoy is a test to see if Hamas will permit the aid to get to civilians. Blinken warned that if it interferes, “it will hinder the international community from being able to provide this aid. Civilian lives must be protected, and assistance must urgently reach those in need. We will continue to work closely with partners in the region to stress the importance of adhering to the law of war, supporting those who are trying to get to safety or provide assistance, and facilitating access to food, water, medical care, and shelter for citizens wherever they are located in Gaza.”
While more than 200 trucks are waiting at the border and Egypt says the crossing is now open permanently, the next convoy is not expected to cross the border until Monday, even as conditions in Gaza worsen.
The U.S. is continuing to work to get U.S. citizens and their families out of Gaza through Egypt.
Also today, Egypt held a hastily convened peace summit with leaders from Arab countries, Europe, Africa, and North America to figure out how to stop the violence in Gaza. While the parties were unable to agree on a statement, there was a broad consensus that Israel must abide by the laws of war, which prohibit making war on civilians. (Israel claims it honors this prohibition as it tries to eliminate Hamas and its infrastructure, and also to recover the hostages Hamas is holding. Hostage-taking is also prohibited by the rules of war.)
Neither Israel nor Hamas was at the meeting. The head of the Palestinian Authority (which has partial control of the West Bank), Mahmoud Abbas, spoke for the Palestinians. He decried what he called war crimes as Israeli airstrikes kill civilians, and called for a two-state solution to the crisis, although a recent Gallup poll suggests a strong majority of Palestinians do not support that effort.
Abbas’s call harks back to the longstanding plan for two independent states that Hamas rejects and that the 2020 Abraham Accords negotiated by the Trump administration undermined by normalizing relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain without providing for a Palestinian state. Since then, Israel has accelerated the settlement of Israelis on Palestinian lands in the West Bank.
The call to resurrect a two-state solution was echoed by Egypt’s president Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who do not want Palestinians displaced by Israel to destabilize their countries. Chinese leader Xi Jinping backed that idea on Thursday in his first statement on the crisis, and in his own speech on Thursday, Biden also said, “We cannot give up on a two-state solution.”
Meanwhile, Israel has increased its warnings to those in the north of Gaza of an approaching ground invasion, in which those who do not evacuate risk being “identified as a partner in a terrorist organization.”
As this conflict plays out, observers have already identified widespread disinformation about it on social media. “X,” formerly known as Twitter, is one of the worst actors.
In the U.S., such disinformation pits Americans against each other, and today the U.S. sent a cable to more than 100 countries warning that U.S. intelligence officials assess that Russia is using such methods to affect the elections around the world. A senior State Department official told reporters that Russia was so successful in amplifying disinformation about the 2020 U.S. election and the COVID-19 pandemic that the Kremlin decided to up its game.
With that in mind, I’m going to ask you to keep comments on this post civil. Going forward, we’re going to assume that the abusive stuff that is being written on every post about this crisis is by foreign trollies trying to stir up trouble, and ban them.
8 Likes
