War in Ukraine 25Apr2024

France’s Macron defends Ukraine as being essential to Europe’s security. Russian pundit Solovyev “throws a tantrum” over what Macron has said.

Russia trying to destroy as much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as possible before US aid arrives.

Now Russia’s hitting railways.

Zelenskyy thanks everyone who has helped.

Piece on why Europeans are reluctant to part with Patriot missile systems. These systems take a long time to produce.

The House vote [to resume aid to Ukraine] stops the hemorrhage of US credibility that had thrown US allies into varying degrees of alarm and demoralized Ukrainians…

Is the aid package enough? Ehh, it’s a good start. Can they get another one through? Hard to say. Blogger feels Biden Administration is too “risk averse.”

“What is more, even the fresh infusion of weaponry will not wholly eliminate Russia’s advantage in terms of firepower.“ Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against assaults by air shrank during dithering by the House. It’s hard to make up for that as a great deal of infrastructure has been destroyed.

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, warns that “’the era of peace in Europe is over’ and that Kyiv would inevitably need more help to fight off Russia. … No single package can stop the Russians. What will stop the Russians is a united front of all of Ukraine and all of its partners.”

A Ukrainian veteran now living in Texas, warns that Russian propaganda can turn a country against Ukraine at any time. Ukrainians need to be aware of this. Russians use “disinformation, bribery, and the use of ‘useful idiots.’” Ukraine needs to localize weapons production.

The constant stress of living in wartime conditions.

Long video of a Russian armored assault on Krasnohorivka.

Murders committed by Russian soldiers who return from the war is over 100.

Petroleum tanks holding 200 liters each catch fire in Omsk (roughly 1k miles from Ukraine, just North of Kazakhstan).

https://balloon-juice.com/2024/04/25/war-for-ukraine-day-793-russia-continues-its-bombardment-of-ukraine/

War in Ukraine 18Apr2024

 

Ukrainian anti-aircraft gunner defending against drones.

Russian missile strike on Chernihiv.

It’s great that the Ukraine aid bill is FINALLY going to pass, but instead of simply passing the Senate bill, Speaker Johnson is making a number of very unhelpful changes to it. It’s completely unnecessary to be frugal and to try and save money. That’s the very LEAST of our concerns!

A Ukrainian explains that US aid is a matter of life and death.

CIA Director warns that Ukraine is in a very bad position.

Representative Greene wants the US to withdraw from NATO. Makes a number of other utterly bizarre proposals.

Poland causing trouble again.

Assassination plot foiled.

Czech President urges help for Ukraine.

““The West’s emphasis on escalation management has prolonged the war in Ukraine” permitting Russia to exercise a veto over NATO actions.

The alliance to protect Israel from Iranian air assault did not go unnoticed by Ukrainians. “This pattern of delays and half-measures shows no signs of changing.”

Elon Musk comes in for some deserved scorn. Starlink Is being used by Russians, though not through official, recognized methods.

After Russia launches a big June offensive, they’ll concentrate on the US elections.

Russia ramps up disinformation, falsely claiming Kharkiv faces Russian encirclement, urging residents to flee.

https://balloon-juice.com/2024/04/18/war-for-ukraine-day-786-the-butchers-bill-for-chernihiv/

War in Ukraine 15Apr2024

 

Noticing the different reactions to air assault by Russia and Iran, many Eastern European states are apparently considering getting nuclear weapons.

Actually, splitting the votes on Israel and Ukraine is probably a good idea, but no, I don’t agree with Speaker Johnson that Ukraine should “stand on its own.”

Israel is determined to strike Iran, even though Biden is encouraging them to “take the win.”

Zelenskyy examines the many allies who helped to shoot down the Iranian aerial attack.

LTG Budanov, the Director of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), sat for an interview with ICTV

Heartwarming greeting by Ukrainians to soldiers who received prosthetic legs.

Ukrainian firefighter runs half-Marathon in full fire-fighting gear.

Representative Greene again argues there’s no evidence Russian conquests will continue after Ukraine falls. Erm, remind me, what evidence was there that Ukraine would be invaded to begin with?

VP Harris tells Zelenskyy to stop bombing Russian fuel-making facilities. Blogger calls her idea “strategic malpractice.” Ukrainians are quite rightfully annoyed that they’re getting strategic imitations while NOT getting weaponry!

By the way, cutting off US aid to Ukraine did NOT result in Ukraine surrendering to Russia!

The Czech ammunition initiative has attracted onsiderable international attention. This is a positive thing.

In the village of Robotyne, ALL of the houses were destroyed!

Israel assessing whether to strike back at Iran or not.

https://balloon-juice.com/2024/04/15/war-for-ukraine-day-782-if-the-opposite-of-pro-is-con-then-the-opposite-of-progress-is-a-gop-majority-in-congress/

War in Ukraine 31Mar2024

 

Two-year anniversary of liberation of Bucha. A mass gravesite has been established.

Ukraine hasn’t fully moved to a Western calendar yet, so their Easter is 5 May.

The last piece of the two Donetsk provinces was Avdiivka, which makes that city quite important.

Ukraine’s largest gas storage location is in Stryi, in the Western-most province in Ukraine.

Russia is trying to wear down Ukrainian air defenses, power generation and transmission and their agricultural sector.

France will deliver hundreds of armored personnel carriers.

As the US Ambassador runs to the air raid shelter along with Ukrainians, US effectiveness ebbs. Knowing the Trump may win the 2024 election adds to the gloom. An examination of Trump’s impact on NATO and the defense of Ukraine.

There’s a longer discussion in regard to the fact that Trump is out of office yet is significantly affecting US foreign policy.

...

Grenell has been acting as a kind of shadow secretary of state

.The manner in which Russia has occupied Ukraine means that stopping the war does NOT mean stopping the killing of Ukrainians.

Russians have gained 250 square kilometers since the Republican-led House cut off aid.

Russia “suspects” Ukrainian head of security service played a role in Crocus City massacre and demands Ukraine turn him over. Ukraine refuses.

https://balloon-juice.com/2024/03/31/war-for-ukraine-day-767-russia-bombarded-ukraine-again-overnight/

Some budget-cutting recommendations

Senator Scott is trying to show that he and his party are not the only ones proposing dramatic changes to Social Security and Medicare. Someone discovered a clip of the current president Joe Biden arguing for serious changes to Social Security. Bit of a problem with using the clip as any sort of evidence is that people, even politicians, can change their minds. If the GOP could show that Biden continued to call for changes to Social Security, then yes, it would be appropriate to call him a hypocrite.

Representative Gaetz demonstrates in his zeal to cut spending that he hates democracy and opposes Western values.

At least Representative Greene has been spending a bit of her time actually looking through the budget so as to make specific proposals. Her budget proposals are based on going line by line through the budget and finding specific items to cut. This, in my own humble opinion, is the only way to approach this job!

Her first recommended cut is to not find a way to build better latrines. This strikes me as the proposal that only a comfortable, middle class woman who has never been outside the US, or at least has never been outside an area that’s been built to be a tourist destination. In the Navy, I’ve been to some non-tourist-type places and believe me, better latrines are a worthwhile project.

Study the emissions of wood heaters? Seems doubtful, but I’d need to see more detail before I could agree or disagree.

“Taxpayers should never be paying unelected bureaucrats to undermine our democracy.” Yeah, okay, but the budget is there as a result of legislators voting on specific projects. Bureaucrats don’t just arbitrarily come up with projects by themselves.

“Global Disinformation Index.” Is there the slightest doubt that the US and the world are awash in disinformation? There may be questions about this project and there may be a need for more oversight and close-up management, but it’s hardly controversial that something needs to be done about rampant disinformation.

Priority: “stopping ALL evil and cruel animal cruelty experiments that are funded by taxpayer dollars.” Yeah, I’ll go with that. Again, I would take a close and careful look at the projects to make sure that that’s what’s happening. The only way “gain-of-function” studies would be dangerous would be if they were carried out under non-scientifically-approved circumstances. That appears to have been the case in Wuhan, China, as the scientists there were apparently rushing through projects without taking the time or spending the money to make sure everything was being done safely.

“We must stop funding war in Ukraine and push for peace!“ Erm, Ukraine is a liberal democracy, Russia is an oppressive, authoritarian, centralized state. Is Greene suggesting that the US doesn’t have a vested interest in supporting democracies when they’re under attack? Is there any reasonable probability that either side is ready to open up peace negotiations? Ukraine wants to regain all of the territory that was lost since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Russia wants to rebuild the old Soviet Union, when Ukraine was a Soviet Socialist Republic under the direct control of Moscow.

“We are on the verge of defaulting our country’s debts…” Only and strictly because Republicans insist on playing dangerous games with the debt ceiling! Not because of anything that unavoidable!

Foreign aid has been an easy target since forever. The great majority of it comes immediately and directly back to the US in terms of purchases of arms, food and other types of national assistance. There may indeed be something that can be cut safely without damaging foreign relations, but I’d take a close, careful and detailed look before cutting anything.

“The past 2 yrs Democrats spent more money in history…” Yes, they did, because there was a need for it! Because Republicans have been holding back needed spending since 2011, when the GOP took control of the House and in subsequent years, when they kept control of at least one of the three branches (House, Senate or Presidency). When Democrats finally took control of all three branches, there was a big backlog of spending that needed to be done. Also, Covid required lots of spending.

“It’s easy to cut spending because for decades our government budgets have been the absurdly stuffed with stupid spending.” Ronald Reagan could make a case fo this back in 1981 because Democrats had indeed gotten fat and lazy and had permitted unnecessary spending to occur, but the days of finding “low-hanging fruit,” spending project that can be easily cut, are long gone. Greene made a good attempt, but she has failed to prove otherwise.

Latest on Palestinians

 Generally, we've heard about military-grade attacks on the Palestinian civilians of Gaza (Gaza has been run by Hamas since 2005) as various cutely-named “Operations.” Operation "Summer Rains" in 2006, Operation "Autumn Clouds" that same year, Operation "Hot Winter" in 2008, etc. But the conflict in May 2021 has never received a name. The
difference was that Israel didn’t expect Gaza to decide to join the conflicts going on around Jerusalem.

Sheikh Jarrah had six Palestinian families living in it. According to an Israeli law that we have seen many variations on over the decades since 1948, those families had to pay rent or otherwise acknowledge that Jewish Israelis were entitled to live there owing to the neighborhood having been previously occupied by Jewish families. This would be a
reasonably fair rule, but it's an entirely one-sided rule. Palestinians can't make any similar claims. The Palestinians of Sheikh Jarrah refused to make even symbolic concessions. despite the Israeli Supreme Court ruling against them.

In a struggle that was going on at the same time and very close by, Israel was also trying to prevent Palestinians from 1948-occupied areas of Israel to attend a ceremony in the old city of Jerusalem at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Hamas of Gaza decided to ally themselves with the residents of Sheikh Jarrah by demanding Israel withdraw from there and from the Temple Mount complex. They launched a barrage of rockets after Israel refused to budge. The one-sided battle (May 10 to 17) resulted in enormous damage to Gaza. Hamas launched 4,360 rockets towards Israel. As the rockets were small and unaimed, 12 Israeli civilians, including two children died.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provide direct relief and works programs for Palestinian refugees, discovered after Israeli bombs hit one of its schools, that Hamas had dug a tunnel underneath the school. The tunnel did not begin or end on the school grounds, but apparently just traveled underneath it. The tunnel was unknown to
civilians, meaning it was dug for military purposes. 

The war cost Gaza over 260 people, including 66 children and 41 women, and exacerbated previous traumas in particular among children. The World Bank estimated that up to US$380 million in physical damage and US$190 million in economic losses were caused.Recovery needs have been estimated up to US$485 million during the first 24 months. They also estimated that Gaza's GDP would contract by 0.3% in 2021 compared to an estimated 2.5% annual growth before the conflict.

Four high-rise building in Gaza City were also destroyed. Israel warned inhabitants just before the strikes, so they had the chance to escape. Allegedly, the buildings were being used for military purposes, but there were several news agencies housed in one of them. One would think that reporters would have kept an eye out for people whose very presence
would be a danger to them. A quick search showed no updates, no Israeli defense of the attacks, meaning no one has provided evidence that any of the buildings contained any legitimate military targets.

A term that has been used for the political post-war time has been “habbet Ayyar” (May outburst). Palestinians inside Israel and Israel-occupied territory since 1948, with residents closing roads, throwing Molotov cocktails and putting up Palestinian flags in place of Israeli
ones. On May 12, Israel declared a state of emergency in Lydd for the first time since 1966 and imposed a curfew on the city as the war on Gaza began to unfold. Over 2,000 Palestinians had been arrested from then until early June. Palestinians were led by regular people within their own communities.

A very serious result of the May conflict was that Congress wanted to send Israel $1 billion for the Iron Dome missile defense system that defends against Palestinian short-range rockets. For the first time ever, members of Congress refused to vote for a shipment of military goods to Israel The vote was very small, but was an ominous first. Currently, the
appropriation isn’t passed yet, Senator Bernie Sanders Is insisting that the Iron Dome appropriation be coupled with humanitarian aid for Palestinians. 

Senator Robert Menendez, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, usually a strong supporter of Israel, says he’s “troubled” by reports of “innocent civilians” suffering at the hands of Israeli forces this past May. He assured Israel that he still supports them, but his statement is unusual and worth noting.

Turning to the question of Israel’s laws that permit Israel to seize properties that used to
belong to Jewish people, but do not permit Palestinians to seize properties that used to belong to Palestinians, we need to ask: “Is it antisemitic to protest such laws?” By protesting such an imbalanced judicial system, are we being insensitive to the Israeli need to survive as a Jewish state that’s surrounded by Arab states?

The NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) B'Tselem says Israel is practicing Apartheid. Human Rights Watch agrees. Both the Jewish Israeli population and the Palestinians who live within the boundaries of both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories number 6.8 million each. If we insist that Israel must give equal right to Palestinians, then
isn’t that asking that Israel no longer be a Jewish state? Would such a demand be antisemitic as we’d be asking Israelis to give up something very precious to them or would it simply be asking for justice? After all, living under Apartheid is something no people would voluntarily do.

The Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman recently noted that progressives hardly ever mention Hamas. She identifies Hamas as a “terrorist” group and had some harsh words for them.

My own view on that is that I don’t think Israel draws any real distinction between Hamas, which runs Gaza, and Fatah, the Palestinian group that runs the West Bank. Both are under tight blockade by Israel, nothing and no one gets in or out without going through an Israeli
military checkpoint. Israel feels no obligation to let anything in that they have not approved. One could make the argument that since we’d like to see Palestinians have more unrestricted commerce with the outside world, that we’d “really” like to see the destruction of Israel and thereby, maybe we’re really just antisemitic. 

Our idea is that we need to draw a distinction between wanting to annihilate the Jewish race, y’know “Drive them into the sea” (that is, being antisemitic) and between being critical of the policies of the state of Israel, that is, criticizing Israel as though it were a regular country.

What’s the status on Critical Race Theory?

 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has a surefire method of detecting when Critical Race Theory (CRT) is being taught. She identifies a course given by the National Children's Museum as containing the 1619 Project, a set of essays that described the contributions to American history made by slaves and by the institution of slavery. So the definition of CRT is pretty elastic, the meaning is broad and vague.

Further definitions are given by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, with them identifying “the civil rights movement, the KKK, the Versailles Treaty, Nazis, NATO/the Cold War, 20th century Africa & Asia…“ as all indicating a suspect agenda. In other words, CRT is what separates a school course on American history from a children’s bed-time story.

A Republican Congressman decides he’s

...against a bill to remove Confederate statues from the Capitol because it's "animated by the Critical Race Theory concepts of structural racism, microaggressions, and a United States based solely on white supremacy."

This is apropos of:

Today, the House voted in favor of removing all treasonous confederate statues from our US Capitol. 120 GQP Republicans voted against removing them, thus cementing once again that they are indeed the party of white supremacy terrorism.

Occam’s Razor

 

The idea of Occam’s Razor is to examine a theory. If the theory is relatively simple and straightforward, it’s more likely to be correct than if it’s really complicated. This was a piece in my local paper, today’s Philadelphia Inquirer (The Inquirer doesn’t like posting the author’s pieces because it attracts too many partisan commenters, so I have to use the AEI site to get an online version of the editorial). The editorialist comes up with what I feel is an overly complex theory.

He feels that President Biden wore a mask to his address to the Joint Session of Congress on the 28^th of last month. Biden also instructed the people at the address to socially distance from each other. But, the editorialist says, everyone there was vaccinated! It must be some sort of conspiracy to create an atmosphere of crisis!

Hmm. Or, perhaps, it could be that the COVID-19 crisis isn’t quite over yet. As we see in these two charts at the top, we’re doing well, but we’re not doing that well! It really isn’t time to break out the champagne just yet. In which case, Biden may be modeling the sort of behavior he’d like to see the rest of us adopt so that we can get out of the crisis faster!

The second theory presented is that Biden wants to spend a humongous amount of money and thereby needs to create a sense of crisis in order to justify that.

Hmm. Or, perhaps Democrats have wanted to spend a lot of money on infrastructure and other items for a long time and Republicans have been standing in the way. Check out how many filibusters they’ve deployed against the legislation that Democrats would like to pass. Filibuster motions filed per two-year periods remained in first the single, then the double digits until the 2007-2008 session. It’s been at least 100 per session since then. Maybe there’s a big backlog of legislation that Democrats would like to pass!

I tend to favor the second, simpler theory in both cases!

President’s response to 2nd impeachment

 

President Trump probably didn’t write out this whole document. My guess is that he ranted and snarled into some sort of recording device, probably banging the table every now and then to really make a point, and then some minions typed it all up and made sure everything was spell-checked and arranged into some coherent order.

A great deal of it re-litigates his first impeachment. Lots of details I take issue with, but this is an especially interesting one.

Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made available) that the paragraph in question was perfect.

Actually, it wasn’t a transcript that was made available. It was an informal summary. The documents that described the call to Ukraine President Zelensky were not made public. They were instead placed on a super-duper top secret server.

White House lawyers allegedly buried records of the call in a highly classified “super secret” server reserved for information regarding covert operations and other sensitive intelligence actions.

To my knowledge, the documents that were stored there have never been made public. The information that was released on the “perfect” call was 1. not released until after people were tipped off on the call by the whistleblower and 2. the summary was quite enough to caused shock and outrage across the country. I mean, why would someone who made a “perfect” call not wish to share all of the details with the world?

This is a big problem with the whole assertion that the President was innocent. The document asserts that Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t find any evidence, that the whole case against Trump was a matter of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Actually, Mueller found a great deal of Obstruction of Justice. Trump was very energetically hiding whatever he could. Again, not the action one would expect from an innocent man.

More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.

Nothing prevented the Trump Administration from publishing information on their own that would have exonerated them. When the Republican-led Senate refused to allow much in the way of testimony, the Trump Administration could have used a wide variety of forums in which they could have presented their case. It’s hardly the fault of the Democratic Party that Trump refused to do so.

A few claims by the off-going, one-term President:

7 million new jobs; the lowest-ever unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans

Yes, Barack Obama left the economy in good shape at the beginning of 2017.

more than 170 new federal judges and two Supreme Court Justices

Actually, it was three Justices, but this record has far more to do with the energetic Republican Senate. The President was pretty much just a bystander in that process.

the elimination of the individual mandate

Theoretically, this was supposed to cause the collapse of the ACA/Obamacare. The ACA has survived quite nicely, thank you very much.

the first decline in prescription drug prices in half a century

Which had to do with the ACA. Actions taken by the Trump Administration had nothing to do with that decline.

criminal justice reform

This had far more to do with the House and Senate than it did with the President. There’s little indication that he did much more than to sign the final document.

a defeated ISIS caliphate

This happened because the military insisted that the President needed to simply maintain the Obama policy and ISIS would be defeated. Trump did not change the policy and ISIS was eventually defeated.

the replacement of the disastrous NAFTA trade deal with the wonderful USMCA (Mexico and Canada)

Trump made a few minor changes to NAFTA and then proclaimed that the “all-new” policy was a success.

withdrawal from the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal

An extremely stupid and unproductive policy that has not produced any positive results. By increasing trade with China, Iran has made up quite a bit of their economic losses.

cancellation of the unfair and costly Paris Climate Accord

Again, an extremely stupid and short-sighted policy that has exacerbated climate change.

recognition of Israel’s capital, opening the American Embassy in Jerusalem

A stupid and short-sighted policy that has infuriated Palestinians and has put peace with them further out of reach.

a colossal reduction in illegal border crossings, the ending of Catch-and-Release, and the building of the Southern Border Wall

What most people will remember about the reduction of immigrants coming to the US from Mexico, Central and South America will be “kids in cages” and the degradation of international laws on asylum. No one will remember any positive impacts. They’ll just remember the horrible cruelty.

Is it true that “[The Democratic Party] simply cannot compete with our record” or is it that the Trump Administration built a very modest and forgettable record that will quickly be overtaken by the incoming Biden Administration?

Side note: The First Lady Melania Trump wrote a piece that had an extremely odd list in it:

Paragraph four: “Most recently, my heart goes out to: Air Force Veteran, Ashli Babbit, Benjamin Philips, Kevin Greeson, Rosanne Boyland, and Capitol Police Officers, Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood. I pray for their families comfort and strength during this difficult time.” Note that the woman who was shot by police as she was part of a violent group attempting to enter a secured area comes first on this list. Interesting choice there.

The Capitol Police Officers are listed last. This can’t be attributed to her lack of proficiency in English. Raises a question as to who Melania thought were the heroes in the violent invasion and occupation of the Capitol.

What happened?

 

In January 2017, the Republican Party had all three branches in their hands, the House, the Senate and the Presidency. Now, in January 2021, all three are now in the hands of the Democrats. Why? What happened?

One of the issues that propelled Barack Obama into office in 2008 and that people showed a great deal of concern about, was health care. About 15% of Americans couldn’t get health care insurance because of “preexisting conditions.” Ever since at least the Truman Administration, capitalist health care insurance couldn’t deal with clients who were sure to cost the insurance companies more money in payments than they’d get from the client in premiums.

Obama stopped trying to square the circle and just made the ACA/Obamacare a public system where insurance companies would still make a profit, but not as much as they would have preferred to make. How did the Republican Party handle this during the time when the had the “Trifecta?” According to the Senate Minority Leader in 2017:

Only 20% of Americans support Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act without offering a replacement. The majority of Americans want to see the law implemented as is or improved.

After seven years to come up with a replacement for the ACA, the GOP came up with a plan that was worse than nothing.

"I do not support the new plan," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told reporters. "A better approach would be...to begin hearings focused on the problems in the ACA, and let’s try to get bipartisan support to fix those egregious flaws."

Not sure the flaws in the ACA were “egregious,” but Collins clearly advocated for a more sensible approach than to repeal the ACA and to install a pre-ACA type of health care system.

In October of 2020, President Trump tried to put out an executive order that would replace the ACA. Essentially, he listed a lot of fine, wonderful, desirable goals without saying how those goals would be reached.

So that whole issue was a complete bust for the GOP.

How did the party do on the immigration issue?

The Trump administration was more hostile to immigration and immigrants than any administration in decades, making it harder for people to visit, live or work in the United States and seeking to reduce the number illegally entering the country.

…

People were denied the opportunity to apply for asylum and returned to dangerous conditions at home. Children were traumatized by being separated from their families. Trump’s signature border wall went up in environmentally sensitive areas.

Trump’s policy was marked by great cruelty. The Trump Administration tightened up asylum requirements.

The regulation raises additional obstacles to passing a preliminary screening at the border, eliminates multiple long-established grounds for granting asylum, and allows immigration judges to deny people their day in court by rejecting applications without a hearing. The regulation denies protection to nearly all who pass through more than one country on their way to the U.S.

The former First Lady, Michelle Obama, slammed the Trump Administration for, among other things, an awful immigration policy.

She said the last four years had been difficult to explain to America's children.

"They see our leaders labelling fellow citizens enemies of the state, while emboldening torch-bearing white supremacists.

"They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages, and pepper spray and rubber bullets are used on peaceful protests for a photo op."

Again, the last administration took on a policy that had escaped solution for a while, but its solutions were catastrophically worse than had they done nothing.

That last reference was to an event that will forever color views of the Trump Administration. Peaceful protesters were occupying Lafayette Square, right in front of the White House.

Last summer, peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters were met with rubber bullets and tear gas outside the White House to clear the way for President Donald Trump’s photo-op with military leaders and a Bible at a nearby church.

Basically, the President treated American protesters as though they were foreign enemies. Instead of simply sending a few people out to the square to clear the way and rope off a path to the St. John’s Episcopal Church, the President and his people strolled through after tear gas and massed police had violently cleared the way. It didn’t help that this occurred only a week after the brutal murder of George Floyd by four policemen in Minnesota.

Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died May 25 after an encounter with Minneapolis Police in which former officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nearly eight minutes as Floyd pleaded for air. Floyd's final moments were captured on video, and his death led to rioting and fires in the city as well as widespread protests against police brutality and racism.

What the church photo op showed was that the President wasn’t particularly concerned about Floyd or even the general issue of police brutality, one way or the other.

A big example of tone-deafness on Trump’s part was the awarding of a Medal of Freedom to the radio talker Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh is popular with right-wingers. With the general public? Ehh, not so much. Obama’s awards were to people like Bill and Melinda Gates and the comedian Ellen DeGeneres. Obama’s choices were perhaps not to everyone’s liking, but they weren’t as in-your-face partisan as Trump’s choices were.

So, I agree that I’ve highlighted some of the very worst policies of the Trump Administration, with the Republican House and Senate often just playing a supporting role, but I don’t think there’s much mystery as to why Democrats have successfully taken over three branches of our government.

The House under Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed a total of nearly 400 bills by November 2019 that were then largely ignored by the Senate and the President, meaning that there was a demand for legislation that the other two branches simply weren’t addressing.

Response to "10 Best of Trump"

 This was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer today, though the Inky like to not post Thiessen's work online as that would open it up to too much blowback, so it's online here. Here are my responses: 

10. Yes, Trump inherited a good economy.

9. Yes, Trump improved on his own performance from 2016. But the younger George Bush did better with non-white voters than Trump did.

8. Yep, he joined the anti-choicers in person. Other Republican presidents kept their distance. This is really cool if you're an anti-choicer. 

7. True, the "Blue Wave" focused on Trump and didn't do any damage to down-ballot races.

6. "He shut down travel from China" - Contrary to the off-going President's telling, this was completely non-controversial at the time and remains so today. 

"held Beijing responsible for the pandemic" & "Trump correctly blamed the Chinese regime for unleashing the virus" - It may be satisfying to some to blame China for the coronavirus. China is indeed responsible for hiding and evading some responsibility for a natural disaster that started within their borders, but evidence is that the coronavirus spread across the world well before China was even aware of it.  

"and cracked down on China’s intellectual property theft." Again, this is a completely non-controversial policy objective. 

5. "[Trump] took out Iran’s terrorist Quds force leader Qasem Soleimani." This was an extremely stupid move that resulted in completely unnecessary hostilities. There was no evidence that Soleimani was up to anything in particular and his aerial assassination gave Iran a martyr that gives them a legitimate reason to attack American interests. Was deterrence "restored"? Hardly. The US flew B-52s above the Persian Gulf within the past week precisely because they feared that Iran would try to avenge Soleimani's death.

4. "He put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court." Which is cool if you're a right-winger. That also meant Republicans made complete hash of their justifications for not seating Merrick Garland four years earlier. We can't blame Trump for that, that was the doing of Republican senators.

3. "[Trump] transformed the Middle East with the Abraham Accords." These accords did nothing significant to affect relations between Israel and Arab countries. These were arms-selling accords with countries that wee not hostile to Israel in the first place. As the columnist suggests, the Palestinians were simply ignored.

2. Yes, the CARES Act was passed on Trump's watch. As with the getting of a new Supreme Court Justice seated, the off-going President was pretty much just a bystander to the CARES Act. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had vastly more to do with that than he did. 

1. "[Trump] launched Operation Warp Speed." True. The operation gave laboratory groups money to pursue a vaccine, which they did. But when it came to the operation actually doing something on its own, y'know, to do more than just hand out money to other organizations, when OWS was called upon to get vaccines into the arms of Americans, it proved to be like every other Trump activity, a pathetic and dismal failure. Among other things, no one in OWS remembered to account for the Anti-Vaxxer Movement. There is no national public relations strategy to counter the Anti-Vaxxers.

To impeach or not

I read this piece

Yes, Trump Is Guilty, But Impeachment Is A Mistake

and scribbled out a few thoughts on it in response. 

1. This will probably achieve nothing.
Agree in that the Senate will probably follow the lead of the 1868 and 1998 impeachments. House will convict, but the 2019 Senate will most likely not remove the President from office.

2. We’re in the middle of an election campaign.
No, we're still over a year out from the 2020 Election Day. Speaker Pelosi is determined to get this done by Thanksgiving.

3. This is not what the country wants to talk about.
As Speaker Pelosi has put it, the President has forced her hand. The law-breaking here is just too severe to do anything less than impeach.

4. Democrats are playing Trump’s game.
No, the White House is in a state of frantic hysteria. This happened because the President has gotten away with so much for so long that he thought himself to be invincible. The word here is "hubris."

Nope. Full speed ahead.

I read a Fox News article

Disgraced former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich looks back at the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 and remarks on the differences between then and now.

Some observations about that:

1. Both the President and Congress were highly productive in 1998. This is true. According to the Clerk of the House, there were 547 roll call votes in 1998, but there were 701 roll call votes in 2019. So yes, the Congress of 1998 was busy, but the Congress of 2019 was busier.

2. Many Democrats voted to impeach Clinton. Again, this is true. The Republican Party is much more cohesive and united today then Democrats  were back then. As a blogger has pointed out though, the case that Republicans have made that the President is innocent of the charges against him is awfully threadbare. "And at that point, the president and his party said the impeachment process was unfair because … well, just because."

3.

Now, we are watching the culmination of Pelosi’s two-and-a-half-year impeachment effort – in which the Democrats failed to find anything close to a crime.

Couple of quibbles: Pelosi herself has not been conducting all of the various investigations of the President and Congress did find specific statutes that he violated. There's a reason the Constitution includes the vague term "high Crimes and Misdemeanors." But certainly the President has been investigated for pretty much his entire term.  Gee, I wonder why that is:

Democrats have also charged Trump with obstruction of Congress based on his stonewalling of the House’s impeachment inquiry. The White House has refused to provide documents to congressional investigators and has instructed top advisers and government officials to defy subpoenas and refuse to testify.

It's not like people have examined the evidence and have decided that the President is innocent, it's that We The People have been spending this whole time trying to uncover the evidence.

More presidential overreach - Puerto Rico

Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on why the Trump Administration felt free to refuse to spend money that Congress had appropriated for the purpose of arming Ukraine: 

“We do that all the time with foreign policy,” Mulvaney said, adding “Get over it. There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.”

Well, now it seems that there's yet another Congressional priority that the Trump Administration just doesn't feel like spending money on, Puerto Rico's hurricane damage. Ben Carson, the Secretary for HUD, is the one who's doing the actual withholding of money. His reason is allegedly that Puerto Rico is incapable of managing that money without turning it to corrupt purposes. The people from HUD made it clear to Congress that they had no statutory authority to withhold funds. They just arbitrarily and unilaterally decided to do that.

The blogger cites the case of the $31k dining room table that Secretary Carson wanted for his office and asks, quite reasonably I think, what on earth makes Carson qualified to supervise any other office to spend money in a responsible manner? Why does any Cabinet Secretary need a dining room set to begin with? If he or she wants to entertain lobbyists, citizens, friends or relatives, they have restaurants in the area they can do that at. In 2018, Carson had around $180 million in personal assets. He's perfectly capable of buying his own dining room set and moving it into his office at HUD if he likes. If not, for eating in the office, the regular government supply office can supply perfectly adequate tables.

Again, the Trump Administration is playing fast and loose with the spending of money. If the president can spend or not spend money however he pleases, the separation of powers, the ability of Congress to control spending, becomes meaningless.

BTW, my favorite example of Carson and how he administers HUD is still the "Oreo" incident. He confused the term REO (Real Estate Owned) with the cookie. What the hell is wrong with someone who had been in office for over two years and still didn't know basic terms?!?!?!

Two claims from the President

President:

“The Democrats have gone crazy… they have to be careful because when the shoe’s on the other foot and someday hopefully in the very long distant future, you’ll have a Democrat [sic] president, you’ll have a Republican House and they’ll do the same thing because somebody picked an orange out of the refrigerator and you don’t like it.”

So, the Democrats should be aware that something like Bill Clinton's 1998 impeachment could happen. The Republican Party could undertake a completely partisan impeachment for trivial reasons. Hmm. Okay. Got it.

Why the President doesn't want any of his people testifying at the impeachment hearings:

“I would like them to testify but these are very unfair hearings,” the president insisted. “For the hearings, we don’t get a lawyer, we don’t get any witnesses. We want [Joe] Biden, we want the son, Hunter. Where’s Hunter? We want the son. We want Schiff. We want to interview these people.”

So he'd prefer a lot of distractions as opposed to serious witnesses who would shed light on his actions. Why is this? Unfortunately, starting with President Nixon, but really accelerating with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the Republican Party has become hyper-partisan. We saw this extreme partisanship during the presidency of Barack Obama, with the Senate Minority, then Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, sacrificing national well-being, goals and priorities for purely partisan gains.
The Republican Party under McConnell never showed why the ACA/Obamacre was a bad thing or how it could be improved upon, it just dug in its heels and opposed it, period! During the President's impeachment hearings, we have not seen any members of the President's party crossing the aisle to condemn Trump's actions, even though Democrats have made a very clear case that the crimes he has been charged with are very real, have been amply proven and are very deeply serious.

Are federally-funded pregnancy health centers the answer?

Of course, it's entirely possible for anti-choicers to construct centers that provide medical services for women. Obviously, if Planned Parenthood was serving a wealthy population with cash to spare, Planned Parenthood might never have come into being. Any pregnancy health centers needs to be funded either by voluntary contributions with no expectation of financial returns or they'd need government funding.  But with a little over a million abortions in 2011, is it at all likely that voluntary contributions will be forthcoming on the necessary scale? A major point that anti-choicers made was that they don't need to as there are  federal community health centers.

But Abby Johnson, a Catholic and former Planned Parenthood facility director, told the Register that the nation’s approximately 10,000 federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) could absorb clients from any Planned Parenthood closures. However, she said these health centers are “not the whole package” women need, because they have material, physical and emotional needs that only pro-life medical centers can provide comprehensively. 

Also,

House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan succinctly and calmly laid out the case for redirecting taxpayer dollars from abortion goliath Planned Parenthood to federal community health centers at a CNN townhall Thursday night.  

So hey, not a problem, right? Instead of having women depending on that icky Planned Parenthood for needed pregnancy-related medical health services, just refer them to the federal community health centers. Simple, right? Well, those same centers, while serving around 27 million people at 10,000 centers, are under serious financial pressure and are having to impose hiring freezes and a little over half of them may have to lay off staff.

Planned Parenthood depends on Medicaid reimbursements, but they're not the government and therefore aren't quite as vulnerable to political pressure as the federally-funded health centers are. So no, the anti-choice movement really doesn't have an adequate answer to the pregnancy-related health care services that Planned Parenthood provides.

Democrats vs Republicans, any real difference?

Okay, so I was challenged to come up with a list of differences between the two major parties so as to prove they’re not just one party with two names. Here’s the opposing list of where there’s not much difference between the parties:

War

Brutal sanctions preceded the Iraq War, but Democrats left the actual military invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan up to Bush. Yes, Obama reinforced the Iraq War and then carried out the Bush plan to pull out by the end of 2011. In contrast to Republican charges that came out after Daesh (ISIS) appeared, the Obama Administration tried very hard to remain in Iraq longer, but neither the Iraqi nor the American public wanted any such thing to take place. 

the Democrats' support for NAFTA, TPP
Formally and officially, Hillary Clinton opposes TPP, but a major criticism of NAFTA was that labor and environmental groups were heard from as an after-thought. If Clinton had truly learned from NAFTA criticism, those groups would have been in on the ground floor for TPP.
 
bank deregulation

True, but Dodd-Frank has had a modest effect on restraining “too big to fail” financial institutions. Not a major effect and not right away, but “what is clear is that Dodd-Frank sent notice to banks and other financial institutions that they couldn’t continue with as little scrutiny and oversight as they had in the past.”

welfare "reform"

Yes, a very bad move on Bill Clinton’s part.

social security "reform"

Bill Clinton was planning on major “reform” but thanks to Monica Lewinsky, he wasn’t able to. The Simpson-Bowles “Cat Food Commission” certainly tried to “reform” SS, but Rep. Paul Ryan thought it wasn’t destructive enough and Rep. Jan Schakowsky thought it went too far, so there was no consensus report, just the recommendations of Simpson and Bowles to gut SS. So not really sure what’s meant by that.

NSA spying

Yep, definitely a bipartisan thing.

corporate welfare for the insurance industry - aka Obamacare (originally a right wing thinktank policy first implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney)
Actually, many people have interpreted that as a clever move by Obama. By going as far to the right as was possible and still having a workable system, that left the Republicans with nothing to recommend in its place. The new Governor of Kentucky ran on dismantling the ACA/Obamacare, but found that he had no way to do so without throwing 300,000 citizens off of their health plans and thereby directly causing 300,000 people to become loyal, committed Democrats, so he backed off on that.
Also, the Democrats did have a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, but they had to keep right-wingers like Senator Joe Lieberman and others aboard, so the set-up had to be kept modest. We can’t blame the right-wing Democrats entirely. there’s evidence Obama wanted to blame Lieberman for his dropping the public option and that Lieberman agreed to be the scapegoat, but that Obama was really the one that wanted to drop it. 

bailing out the banks in 2009 but not Main Street

Yeah, Obama wasn’t in office yet, but he signed off on that.

refusal to fight for serious campaign finance reform
Another bipartisan thing.

refusal to tax the rich
Obama raised taxes on the wealthy a bit, but yeah, we could return to the Kennedy-era 70% rate without damaging the economy at all.
 
or cut the military budget
I’m personally disappointed Star Wars/SDI/Missile Defense is still being researched. Complete boondoggle. The A-10 “Warthog” attack plane simply doesn’t need replacing. Nor does the B-52, for that matter. Both planes are extremely well-designed for their function. The F-35 is another complete boondoggle that’s good for putting money into defense contractor pockets  and not much else. From 2011 to 2014, that is, from the pull-out from Iraq to the appearance of Daesh, US military spending went down a few hundred billion (it went back up again), but yes, way too much being spent.
 
refusal to prosecute makers of illegal wars and torture
Again, yup. Obama made a deliberate decision not to prosecute.

So what can we list as being real differences between the two parties?

Legislation. Enacted laws went from 460 during the last term under G.W. Bush, to 385 under a period of Democratic control of both the House and Senate, but also when Republicans got more and more filibuster-happy. Was at 284 and 296, then crashed to 165 (so far as of June 2016) when the GOP took over the Senate. Speaker Paul Ryan, formerly the Republican Budget Director, can’t seem to pass a Budget Resolution that’s, by the way, required by law. There’s no filibuster in the House and Republicans have a solid majority, so Democrats get zero blame for that. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell regards a Trade Promotion Authority bill (One of those bipartisan things listed above) and a bill concerning the Obama Administration deal with Iran as his two biggest accomplishments of the current Senate. Not really sure what the latter bill did as it would have canceled the deal with enough votes, but they didn’t get those votes and it’s not at all clear that the critics of the deal got anything else out of the bill. 

Republicans just don’t seem to like passing legislation as much as Democrats do.

Zika. After sitting around for two months and essentially twiddling their thumbs, the House finally decided to take money out of the response to Ebola and put it into Zika. Problem is, the fight against Ebola isn’t over. Neither Congress nor the Senate has voted on a bill that gives the Administration the full amount it’s requesting. And Congress left town in late May without doing anything to fix the problem. “Dozens of Democrats staged a media event on the steps of Capitol to decry the Republicans who control the House and Senate for leaving for the week-long break with what Democrats argued was so much unfinished business.”  How serious is Zika? Very!

Republicans just don’t seem to like fixing problems.

Abortion. One of the effects of Zika is that it affects babies in the womb, causing them to be born with microcephaly. That is, their brain is much smaller than normal because it hasn’t developed properly. One would think that, being allegedly very, very deeply concerned about babies in the womb, that anti-choicers would be all over this issue. They aren’t. Problem is, Zika and the called-for response contradicts the anti-choicer crusade against Planned Parenthood that was kicked off by a series of highly edited, misleading videotapes released by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). Studying fetal tissue could help combat the effects of Zika, but the issue of women who have abortions and then donating fetal tissue is what’s at the heart of the CMP videos. A fourth federal committee was established (a dozen states had already investigated Planned Parenthood and exonerated them in every case) to further investigate Planned Parenthood to “find the truth.” As of June 2016, the committee has turned up zip. 

Conducting ideological crusades appears to take priority over solving real-world problems.

Holding up nominations. The Supreme Court nominee blockade, the blocking of any person nominated by the current president to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia is utterly and absolutely unprecedented in American history. Just as an example of the grossly excessive blocking of legitimate nominations, Senator “Tehran” Tom Cotton put a block on “Obama's ambassadorial nominations in order to pressure him to do something about the leaks coming out of the Secret Service. Eventually, that issue was resolved, and Cotton lifted all of the holds except [Cassandra] Butts'. When she met with him to ask why the hold remained on her nomination, Cotton told her "that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama’s — the two first encountered each other on a line for financial-aid forms at Harvard Law School, where they were classmates — and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president."

Shorter Senator Cotton: “I’m holding up a legitimate appointee because, fuck you, that’s why!”

Priorities.  Senate Majority Leader McConnell was asked about Donald Trump’s racist attack on a judge and responded “I think the Party of Lincoln wants to win the White House.” In other words, yeah, yeah, attacking a judge strictly for his ethnicity is, y’know, maybe not so great, but hey, winning is all that matters!

Winning is more important than maintaining basic decency.


No, I’m sorry, the two parties are not as different as I’d like them to be, but they are indeed different. It does make a difference whether you vote or whether you blow off the voting booth. It does make a difference whether you vote for the Democrats or for a third party.

How's the political opposition doing these days?

What John Kasich reveals here is where his head is at. He's asked about voting rights, a subject one would think would call forth an American, inclusive response that everyone could get behind. Instead, he shows us, just as Senate Majority Leader McConnelll did a few weeks back*, that he's thinking entirely in narrow, partisan terms. He wants less voting because if there was more voting, those extra votes might go to Democrats.

*Asked about the Senate perhaps becoming, y'know, er, productive, the Majority Leader responded thusly:

As proof of the Republican Congress’ “incredible” productivity, McConnell quickly pointed to the Keystone XL pipeline, which was vetoed by President Obama. The Senate Majority Leader immediately added, “We put the repeal of Obamacare on his desk. We put defund Planned Parenthood on his desk*.” Neither became law.

In other words, McConnell was asked about how inclusive and bipartisan his Senate was being and he responded by talking about efforts that were designed to stick it to the President and the Democrats and to raise the middle finger of Senate Republicans to them. Is there any hope for the two sides to get along and for both of them to focus upon the needs of the American people? Sure, but not with the current mind-set that prevails on that side of the aisle these days.

So how's the other Republican-run branch of the US Government, the House of Representatves, doing? Yeesh!

"I think I do it better," the House speaker told CNN during an interview this week, adding that his leadership style is different than his predecessor, whose resignation last year shocked Washington. "Not to knock John [Boehner], but I spend more time with all of our members on a continual basis."

[...]

Republicans say the speaker’s agenda project — the product of several task forces and dozens of meetings among rank-and-file House members — will provide specifics, and perhaps even draft legislation, on key issues of importance to conservatives, including health care, taxes and national security.

Ri-i-i-ight! Well, Ryan sure makes it sound as though the House were a beehive of activity with people accomplishing great things left and right. How does the reality look? Well, there's the rather important fact that Ryan couldn't make the mandated budget deadline of April 15^th. Ryan should have produced a detailed budget document by that date and that document is nowhere in sight because of deep disagreements between those who wish to carry out the agreement that Boehner arranged before he left the Speaker's office and those who wish to make even deeper spending cuts than anybody outside the Freedom Caucus has signed onto.

Boehner managed to make the budget deadline every year he wa Speaker and remembe, Ryan used to be the Chairman of the House Budget Committee. So much for all that “I spend more time with all of our members” guff. What good does it do to spend more time with members if you can't get your most basic, fundamental job done? As the saying goes: “You had one job...”

As for getting out a health care alternatve to Obamacare, “Why, that’s something the Republicans have been working on so long that … exactly no one is still waiting for them to provide a solution.”

But hey, we can still provide imaginary solutions to problems that we've already made rat progress on! Ryan tells us: “College and heath care keep getting more expensive. ISIS continues to spread.” As far as I know, college costs continue to rise, but the cost of health care? Politifact points out that “On average, premiums have risen by about 5.8 percent a year since Obama took office, compared to 13.2 percent in the nine years before Obama.” So actually, there has been a substantial slowdown in the rise of health care costs. How are we doing on Daesh (ISIS)? Daesh is not doing as well as they'd have everyone believe.

Even in Syria and Iraq, Daesh holds territory only because the states have collapsed. I remember people would do this with al-Qaeda, saying it had branches in 64 countries. But for the most part it was 4 guys in each of those countries. This kind of octopus imagery is taken advantage of by Daesh to make itself seem important, but we shouldn’t fall for it.

No, Daesh does not have an air force or a navy and just about every target that is identified as important to Daesh gets bombed (In January, the US located ther Treasury building and bombed it, leaving their soldiers in a tough spot for a while), so it's not the succesor to Nazi Germany and will never have the capacity to become a world power.

So, not surprisinly, Speaker Ryan, who used to be regarded as a golden boy wonk who could do no wrong, is taking some really serious hits to his image. 

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Other items: Back in the old days, people could rely on the magazine Foreign Affairs because it was rigorously fact-checked. Unfortinatey, that's not the case anymore. Their latest piece on global warming is complete mess. To survive past the year 2100, we don't need to come up with awesome new inventions, we need to deploy what we have. We need to be constructing windmills and installing solar panels as quickly as possible. Of course we should work on both developing new technology and on improving what we already have, but we're not doomed because we don't have new tools and inventions. We just need to get cracking and to speed up deploying the stuff that we already know works.

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Yeah, 120,000 voters were improperly purged from the voting rolls for the primary on April 17^th, but did the pro-Hillary people cheat in Brooklyn? That's not at all clear and it's really not clear that Bernie would have won without the voter purge. Bernie suporters would be well-advised not to throw around wild accusations.