Genocide. Pure and simple fucking genocide.
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To be clear, the reason the US insisted on this is because this is what international law requires. Withholding aid is a form of collective punishment. It violates Article 33 of the Geneva Convention. It is literally a war crime.
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And goodness knows, the US has never committed any of those itself.
/s
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Oh obviously we have, and probably continue to. I just want to make sure everyone understands this isn’t just about what the Biden administration wants. Israel would be violating a number of treaties it has signed onto if it did not comply with this.
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But really, Israel too violates rules and laws left and right all the time, then tarts up those crimes with euphemisms like “occupation” and “settlements.” It’s been holding an entire population in what amounts to an open air prison. And the US has barely murmured a complaint about it all, let alone pumped the brakes even a bit on its shoveling of money at Israel for another euphemism, “self-defense.”
For the US to suddenly appeal to its leaders on the basis of treaties and laws and such at this point is pretty rich, no?
Edit: I guess what I mean is that I can’t believe that a sudden concern with the rule of law is driving the actions of either country’s leaders.
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It is, but I’d rather they draw a line somewhere than to just allow Israel to continue to commit war crimes without any pushback.
ETA: What I’m really saying is that I will accept the hypocrisy for now if it saves lives.
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Given the public rhetoric, what this tells me is the private meetings the US has had with the Israeli government are much harsher. That’s the only way this aid was allowed to get through.
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Wow, that took quite a while and is surprisingly cheap.
Journalists need to learn, and fast, that bothesidism, false equivalence and false balance can be countered, and that fact checking divisions need to be used live or near live in interviews and reporting segments.
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October 22, 2023 (Sunday)
A moment of calm before we pick up the news again in the morning.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
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October 23, 2023 (Monday)
The word of the day is “conversations.”
The White House and the Commerce Department announced the designation of 31 communities across 32 states and Puerto Rico in the first phase of the Regional Innovation and Technology Hub Program (Tech Hubs Program). The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law in August 2022, authorized the creation of these hubs, where private industry, state and local governments, colleges and universities, labor unions, Tribal communities, and nonprofit organizations work together to innovate, create jobs, and protect our supply chains.
The administration explained that because economic growth and opportunity has been “clustered in a few cities on the coasts,” the tech hubs selected were spread across the country. Nearly three quarters of them are in small cities or rural areas, and more than three quarters of them directly support historically underserved communities. The government will invest $500 million of public money in these hubs to attract private investment, hoping to create high-paying jobs and support innovation across the country.
The hubs focus on autonomous systems for manufacturing and transportation, drugs and medical devices, healthcare, clean energy, semiconductors, and so on. They “will boost U.S. manufacturing, create more good-paying jobs and bolster U.S. global competitiveness,” said Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves.
The administration is trying to sell the idea of investing in America rather than turning the economy over to the operation of markets. The latter has been the nation’s focus since 1981, but that ideology has not nurtured the economy so much as concentrated wealth among a few individuals. The White House has called instead for government investment in new industries, and it noted today that such investment has prompted record private investments in clean power and job growth in clean energy.
Private companies have announced investments of about $133 billion in clean energy production, which has in turn helped to spur the strong job growth and robust economic growth. Employers have added about 260,000 jobs a month this year, on average.
Today the ongoing United Auto Workers strike spread to a key Stellantis plant, where 6,800 workers walked off their jobs making Ram pickup trucks, Stellantis’s top-selling vehicle in the U.S. The strike will cost the company an estimated $110 million a week. There are now more than 40,000 UAW workers on strike. Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis have offered what union leader Shawn Fain says are record contracts but still not in line with the company’s record profits.
The UAW has reached a tentative deal with General Dynamics, covering about 1,100 workers who make military vehicles at defense contracting facilities. Union members still have to approve the agreement.
Conversations continue in foreign affairs as well.
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the 1983 bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 U.S. military personnel in the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. Minutes after the first bombing on that day, a second suicide bomber killed 58 French paratroopers. Six Lebanese civilians also died. Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken recalled that tragedy and blamed it on Hezbollah militants, a charge Hezbollah denies.
“As we reflect on this day, and in light of the ongoing challenges in Lebanon and the region, we remain committed to building a brighter future for Lebanon, the Lebanese people, and the broader Middle East,” Blinken said.
Attacks from Hezbollah on Israel and Israeli retaliation have been increasing since the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut has told American citizens who want to leave that they should go now. The Biden administration has warned Israel not to launch a preemptive strike against Hezbollah as the tensions on the border rise. The U.S. is also sending more air defense systems to the Middle East and is moving the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group to the Middle East to discourage attacks.
President Biden, Secretary Blinken and their teams have been talking constantly with those involved in the Middle East and elsewhere, trying to build coalitions to stave off an expansion of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, backed by Iran.
On Sunday, after Biden spoke with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Pope Francis, Biden spoke with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom. The latter group issued a joint statement reiterating their support for Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism and also called for all parties to keep within the bounds of international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians.
Today, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan submitted to the Turkish parliament a bill approving Sweden’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a step he has been delaying to pressure Sweden into clamping down on members of the Kurdistan Workers Party in Sweden, a party that aims to create an autonomous Kurdish region that would include parts of Turkey.
While taking pains to emphasize that it is not making decisions for Israel, the U.S. has been stressing to Israeli leaders its discomfort with what seems to be a lack of a plan for a careful ground invasion of Gaza or for what would come after the ground operation. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller today declined to detail private conversations but offered: “[I]n all of our conversations we continue to talk to them about the importance of having meaningful goals, meaningful objectives, and a plan to achieve those objectives.”
Miller used the word “conversation” twenty times in his press conference.
Tomorrow, Secretary Blinken will travel to New York City for a United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East. He will also meet with his counterparts and with officials of the United Nations.
As Israeli airstrikes pound Gaza and Hamas rockets fire back, relief trucks continue to trickle across the Egyptian border into Gaza. Fourteen crossed on Sunday; another small group today. Fuel, which is necessary to take the salt out of water as well as for medical care and transportation, is still embargoed out of Israeli concerns Hamas will take it for military purposes. Also today, Hamas released two more hostages, elderly Israeli women this time, for a total of four so far.
Conversations of a different sort are going on among the Republican members of the House of Representatives, but they are unwilling to talk to their Democratic colleagues, who have repeatedly offered to work with those Republicans who reject MAGA extremism.
Republicans remain unable to agree on a candidate for speaker. So far, they have shut down the House for three weeks, eating up 20 of the 45 days the continuing resolution bought for them to come up with measures to fund the government.
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I’m all for investing in historically disadvantaged areas, but if that investment focuses on autonomous systems, how is that going to create jobs?
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I think I might be overly optimistic about this, but I hope autonomous tech will eliminate drudge jobs while opening up better-paying, less body-destroying jobs. That only works, of course, if the benefits are seen by all, not just the Bezos and Musks of the world. I am a huge Star Trek fan and seeing that world come to pass (without the world wars and massive loss of life from the canon history) would be wonderful.
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
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Well so far it’s just eliminating the drudge jobs. We’re not providing the kinds of training and education needed for factory workers and other physical laborers to be able to do “better-paying, less body-destroying jobs.” And some people aren’t going to be able to do those jobs, no matter how much training and education we provide. And even with jobs like coding and programming, the less skilled end of those jobs are starting to get automated. I just think we need to do more planning and not just automate everything just because we can. Right now, we’re just eliminating jobs without finding other jobs for the people who were doing those jobs. UBI would help, but most people want to do something. Maybe they could go into the arts, but (a) we’re eliminating arts education in school and (b) we’re allowing AI to run rampant in creating art. Even here on BoingBoing sometimes. Maybe it’s just me, but the Midjourney art on some posts kinda pisses me off. Ok, I’m rambling now and getting off topic. Sorry. But I think about this issue a lot, and I don’t think we’ve thought through the full ramifications of automation yet.
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As a former WVian, I can certainly agree. The issue I saw there was the rejection of the training for green jobs for displaced miners, not so much by the miners, but by the politicians. Automation in the mines became an issue way back in the (?) 70’s-80’s when long-wall miners became commonplace. Put a ton of miners out of work, resulted in huge increase in profits for the mine owners and the first push to offer retraining to the displaced miners. This process has continued since, with the blame for the displaced miners placed on Dems for environmental regs and “War on Coal” bullshit. As this is a useful issue for the Republicans who own the state, arguably is the issue that flipped the state to deep, deep red from reliably blue. They do not want the retraining, as they would lose their best issue and these programs are painted as “liberal socialism” which means if they work, and they do, they miners may realize they have been gamed. It does not change my hope, though. I hope to see the mine bosses, along with the rest of the neofascists, run over and left in the dustbin of history. Won’t happen this week, but there is a lot of future out there.
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I couldn’t agree more.
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October 24, 2023 (Tuesday)
Another of Trump’s lawyers has pleaded guilty to charges as part of a cooperation agreement with the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney’s office. This morning, Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting false statements and writings as part of the plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. She is the fourth of the 19 people charged in the Georgia racketeering case to plead guilty.
In late September, bail bondsman Scott Hall, who helped to breach voting equipment and data in Coffee County, Georgia, pleaded guilty; lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty last week.
Ellis opposed Trump’s 2016 nomination but supported him after his election in frequent television appearances as a “constitutional law attorney” although she had not worked on election law. After Trump saw her on the Fox News Channel, Ellis became a “senior legal advisor” to Trump’s reelection campaign.
After he lost, she was a very visible television spokesperson for the Big Lie that the election was stolen. On November 19, 2020, she joined Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee to insist that Democrats had rigged the voting in majority-Black cities and that communist forces in Venezuela had tampered with U.S. voting machines. She also peppered her social media feed with MAGA statements, mixing it up with anti-Trump figures, making her a more public figure than the other lawyers.
Nonetheless, Trump declined to cover her legal fees after her indictment as a co-defendant in the Georgia racketeering case, possibly because she had supported Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid. While Ellis said she had stopped supporting the former president because of his “narcissistic” tendencies, she continued to echo Trump’s rhetoric. In September she raised more than $216,000 for her legal defense fund from crowdfunding, claiming she was fighting “a weaponized government and the criminalization of the practice of law.”
Today, in a court of law rather than in front of the television cameras, she sounded quite different.
“As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously, and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings,” a tearful Ellis told the court. “I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information.” (Ellis worked closely with older Trump lawyer Giuliani; she will be 39 on November 1.)
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” Ellis said in court. “I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse. For those failures of mine, your honor, I have taken responsibility already before the Colorado bar, who censured me, and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize to the people of Georgia.”
Ellis’s plea agreement spelled out the statements she made that were lies. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, this means the court has identified the specific lies that made up the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and that Ellis will testify that they are lies. Those claims include the lie that there were 96,000 fraudulent mail-in ballots, that 2,506 felons voted illegally, that 66,248 underage people illegally registered to vote, that 2,423 unregistered people voted, that more than 10,000 dead people voted, that Fulton County election workers counted ballots with no oversight.
In the civil case in New York in which Trump, his older sons, two employees, and the Trump Organization are on trial for fraud, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen testified today that he and the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, would reverse engineer Trump’s financial statements to meet whatever number Trump wanted.
His testimony suggested that the alleged massive fortune on which Trump based his identity, as well as his presidential bid, was an illusion.
In a series of motions filed overnight, Trump’s defense team appears to be throwing anything it can at the wall to challenge the election conspiracy case in Washington, D.C.
But as Trump’s legal peril escalates, Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to reject any House speaker who does not embrace Trump. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) today said, “We need a speaker of the House that reflects the values and the views of Republican voters across the country, and they support President Trump and they support his agenda.” Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX) suggested nominating Trump himself for the job.
CNN’s Jake Tapper has had enough. “I’m covering life and death issues, serious tragedies, serious momentous occurrences here in Israel and of course in Gaza,” he said today. But, he said, “We have to interrupt this for one moment to cover the complete and utter clown car that is the House Republicans’ Speaker’s race.”
House Republicans today selected Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN) as their choice for the post, only to have him drop out of the race after Trump, apparently angry that Emmer had dodged a question about whether he supported Trump’s nomination for president, turned on him.
Trump went on social media to call Emmer, whose work in Congress has earned him a 79% lifetime approval rating from the right-wing Heritage Action for America, a “Globalist RINO,” meaning “Republican In Name Only.” Trump warned that Emmer “never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement, or the breadth and scope of MAGA…. I believe he has now learned his lesson, because he is saying that he is Pro-Trump all the way, but who can ever be sure? Has he only changed because that’s what it takes to win?”
Trump ally Ohio Representative Jim Jordan’s failure to win the speakership even after threatening his colleagues showed that Trump cannot put his chosen candidate into the chair, but Emmer’s failure to win the speakership suggests Trump’s opposition can keep a candidate out of it.
Just hours after Emmer dropped out, the House Republican conference threw up a fourth candidate for speaker: Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson is a self-described Christian and staunch Trump ally. He defended the former president during both of his impeachment trials and fought for Texas v. Pennsylvania, the key lawsuit contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election (the Supreme Court decided that Texas did not have standing to sue). He voted against certifying the 2020 election results.
Johnson won the conference’s nomination with 128 votes to 29 votes for Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, who only entered Congress in 2021. In an interesting sign that Republicans might be reconsidering their rejection of former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) three weeks ago, 43 Republicans voted for him even though he was not standing for the position. Johnson told reporters he expects a floor vote at noon tomorrow.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has offered a bipartisan deal in which Democrats would help Republicans elect a speaker. In exchange for their help, Democrats have said they want a candidate who is not an election denier and who agrees to hold up-or-down votes for bills that have broad support across the parties. Such a deal would mean some security for future elections. It would also mean that a measure funding Ukraine, which is popular across Congress but which the extremists oppose, would get a hearing.
So would funding the government.
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“I am but a wee lass of 39, and cannot be held responsible for my girlish whims! Twas these older men who mislead me!”
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It really disgusts me when people bring up their Christianity when they want people to feel sorry for them or to excuse bad behavior. That has to be a sin right, something about the Lord’s name in vain?
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This. I’ve analyzed this topic for a former employer. Automation does not decrease payroll; it actually increases it slightly. The benefit is higher output and better consistency. The shift in employment is away from repetitive physical labor towards skilled technicians and engineers for line setup, quality analysis, and troubleshooting. So fewer, but higher-paying, jobs.
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October 25, 2023 (Wednesday)
Today, the United States House of Representatives elected a new speaker to replace former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who was ousted by Republican extremists. The new speaker, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, had an advantage over rivals because he has been a backbencher in the House fewer than eight years, too invisible to have made many enemies. He is the least-experienced speaker in more than a century.
Senate Republicans openly admitted they didn’t know who he was. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) added: “Apparently experience isn’t necessary for the speaker job…. We’re down to folks who haven’t had leadership or chairmanship roles, which means their administration of the House will be a new experience for them.”
The Republican conference decided to back Johnson after extremists scuttled their first choice after McCarthy, Louisiana representative Steve Scalise, and after a block of Republicans refused to back Trump loyalist Jim Jordan of Ohio. After Jordan, Minnesota representative Tom Emmer got the nod from the conference…until former president Trump expressed his disapproval.
Democrats repeatedly offered to work with Republicans to elect a speaker who accepted the results of the 2020 presidential election and who agreed to bring to the floor for an up-or-down vote legislation that was widely popular in both parties. The Republicans rejected those offers.
Instead, they have elected a pro-Trump extremist as speaker.
Johnson was instrumental in Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Routinely in touch with Trump, he rallied his colleagues to object to counting the electoral votes from states that Democratic candidate Joe Biden won. As Trump’s legal challenges to the results failed, Johnson pushed a Texas lawsuit against the four states that had given Biden the win, calling for the invalidation of millions of his fellow Americans’ ballots, and echoed lies about Venezuelan interference with ballots.
Johnson has also embraced the far right’s culture wars. He is a self-described evangelical Christian who is staunchly anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-union, and anti-immigration. He has close ties to the Israeli right wing, and he opposes further aid to Ukraine, saying such money would be better spent at home, but he has also called for extensive cuts to domestic spending programs.
When a reporter asked Johnson about his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the colleagues surrounding him booed and told the reporter to “shut up.” On the floor of the House, every single Republican voted for Johnson.
And so, the House Republicans have caved to the MAGA extremists. Representative Pete Aguilar (D-CA) said that for the Republicans, the search for a speaker hadn’t been about looking for someone interested in “growing the middle class, helping our communities, keeping the cost of healthcare lower, and making life for everyday Americans better.” Instead, Aguilar said, “this has been about one thing…who can appease Donald Trump. House Republicans have put their names behind someone who has been called the most important architect of the [2020] electoral college objections.” A Republican yelled back: “Damn right!”
The Republicans appear to be planning to go before the voters in 2024 with a presidential candidate who is deeply enmeshed in trials over allegedly criminal behavior, whose hastily appointed Supreme Court justices overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, and who tried to steal the 2020 election. Alongside him, they have now elevated a fervently anti-abortion House speaker who backed the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Voters resoundingly rejected both of those positions in 2022.
In contrast to his Republican colleagues, in his welcome to the new speaker, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) outlined his caucus’s efforts to work with Republicans in a bipartisan way, noting that it was the Democrats who provided the votes to raise the debt ceiling, to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government and thus avoid a shutdown, and to secure disaster assistance for Americans suffering from extreme weather events.
Going forward, he said, House Democrats will “continue to push back against extremism in this chamber and throughout the country. House Democrats will continue to protect Social Security, protect Medicare, protect Medicaid, protect our children, protect our climate, protect low-income families, protect working families, protect the middle class, protect organized labor, protect the LGBTQ community, protect our veterans, protect older Americans, protect the Affordable Care Act, protect the right to vote, protect the peaceful transfer of power, protect our democracy, and protect a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive health care decision.”
But Jeffries’s soft speech covered a steely message. He observed that “Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election,” adding that “[h]e’s doing a great job under difficult circumstances, and no amount of election denialism will ever change that reality.”
Jeffries pointed out that great presidents of both parties have urged House members to “put aside partisan politics for the good of the American people,” and he noted that Americans are “understandably alarmed at the turbulence of the moment, at the chaos, the dysfunction, and the extremism that has been unleashed in this chamber, from the very beginning of this Congress.” But in what amounted to a warning to the newly empowered extremists, he continued: “But this, too, shall pass. Our country has often confronted adversity, and the good news is we always find a way to make it to the other side.”
“We faced adversity in the 1860s, in the middle of the Civil War, when the country was literally tearing itself apart. We faced adversity in October of 1929 when the stock market collapsed, plunging us into a Great Depression. We faced adversity in December of 1941, when a foreign power unexpectedly struck, plunging us into a world war with the evil empire of Nazi Germany.
“We faced adversity in the Deep South in the 1950s and 60s, when the country was struggling to reconcile the inherent contradictions between Jim Crow segregation and the glorious promises of the Constitution. We faced adversity on September 11th, 2001, when the Towers and the Pentagon were unexpectedly struck, killing thousands of lives in an instant.”
And then, by placing House Republicans in this list, Jeffries tied them to the wrong side of history. “We faced adversity right here in the House of Representatives when on January 6, 2021, a violent mob of insurrectionists incited by some in this chamber overran the House floor as part of an effort to halt the peaceful transfer of power,” he said.
And, he concluded, “[e]very time we faced adversity, the good news here in America is that we always overcome….”
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