I hope everyone is having a great day so far!
Actions speak louder than words
Joe Biden calls for ‘immediate ceasefire’ in Gaza and says Israel must protect civilians to keep US support
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/04/israel-us-gaza-joe-biden-benjamin-netanyahu-phone-call
U.S. approved more bombs to Israel on day of World Central Kitchen strikes
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/04/world-central-kitchen-us-weapons-israel/
Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll wriggle out of this one too
Trump suffers setbacks in efforts to shut down two of the criminal cases against him
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/04/politics/trump-classified-documents-georgia-election-interference/index.html
Stonks!
Dow futures are little changed after index notches worst day in more than a year, jobs report looms: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/04/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
Sprots!
Chiefs’ Rashee Rice was driving Lamborghini in Dallas crash – attorney
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/apr/04/rashee-rice-driving-lamborghini-dallas-chain
Insert turtle content or funny Tweet here!
This elephant is more graceful than I am.
Oh, that’s me getting in and out of bed after a bottle of wine….
Turtle content unlocked. Not everything in Georgia sucks.
Georgia group and others release 34 rehabilitated sea turtles into ocean after reptiles regained their health
Yeah but they are a bunch of ungrateful bastards!
“Turtles: Cats of the Sea”!
This is bullshit. As someone who has worked for and currently has relatives working for senior living homes, I can categorically state that these places make INSANE amounts of sheer profit.
Assisted living managers say an algorithm prevented hiring enough staff
That Algorithm is called Greed 1.0.
Joe will never cut off the flow of money and weapons to Israel. He will get crucified in the media if he does so–especially in an election year–and he knows it. What’s more, Netanyahu knows it, too. So, Joe will make concerned faces and issue strongly worded statements, but ultimately he will do nothing.
I obviously think Biden should cut off aid and munitions today.
But I think it’s way more of a no-win scenario for him than people give it credit for. I know this because after he pulled out of Afghanistan — a not entirely dissimilar scenario — the press killed him, his popularity has never since recovered, and the people who wanted it to end gave him 0.0% credit for it. And the very same thing would happen again, except this time, Mango Unchained would very happily double the flow of bombs come Jan. 21, 2025 and then we have basically an even worse scenario.
Except that *Biden* wasn’t the one who “pulled out of Afghanistan”
His administration had to stick with the Doha agreement that Trump made to withdraw troops. Biden’s administration ABSOLUTELY did things wrong, as they pulled out–and the idea that things wouldn’t go TERRIBLY once the Taliban took over was naive a.f.!!!
But he was also bound to an agreement that Trumpty-Dumpty had made, to hamstring the US, because Trump is an idiot;
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/u-s-review-of-chaotic-afghanistan-withdrawal-blames-trump
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/30/us-generals-say-afghanistan-collapse-rooted-in-trump-taliban-deal
Here’s the thing: There was never going to be a good end to Afghanistan because there’s never been a good end in that country a) for the country itself and b) for any imperial invader. And to your point, it’s fine to blame Trump (he always deserves it) but the media would have worshipped at Biden’s feet if he was like “Sorry, jack, this is a bad deal, we have to stay another 5 years and spend another trillion dollars” even though nothing would have changed in the interim. The Taliban never went away — and if the mission was to get rid of it, that would have required a Pakistan invasion which is a much bigger, bloodier mess.
More could have been done; I’m not saying it was a perfect withdrawal by any means. But that became the entire focus instead of people saying hey he closed the book on the nation’s longest war, an unpopular one to boot, which should have been over a decade or more earlier. There was never going to be a fairy-tale ending because it was a mess from Day One, and as always, the idea that the military is a “nation building” force has never been true and remains untrue now.
Although I agree with you 100% on the fact that if Biden *were* to do the right thing with regard to Isreal and the war crimes they’re committing in Palestine, he’d be absolutely vilified for it.
Hell, look at what’s happening to liberal D’s who’ve been speaking up, about the atrocities being committed by the Israeli Government, against the Palestinian people;
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/05/1242536070/democrats-israel-palestine-primaries
Meanwhile, you have Chicken-Hawk rightwing/fascist *asshats* inside the Israeli Government like Ben Gvir & Smotrich, who *literally* want the elimination of the Palestinian people, from Palestinian lands, and who WILL work at cross-purposes to *EVERY* humanitarian intervention–because they don’t see the Palestinian People as human;
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66614459
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/27/who-is-israels-far-right-pro-settler-security-minister-ben-gvir
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/8/29/23850757/israel-ben-gvir-palestine-comments-freedom-movement-controversy
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ben-gvir-calls-to-bar-palestinian-authority-residents-from-temple-mount-on-ramadan/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/27/itamar-ben-gvir-israels-minister-of-chaos
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-slams-irresponsible-calls-by-smotrich-and-ben-gvir-for-emigration-of-gazans/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-pressured-on-hostage-deal-as-ben-gvir-smotrich-lash-out-at-us/
https://jstribune.com/svetlova-ben-gvir-and-smotrich/
Itamar Ben Gvir–and I’m pretty sure Smotrich, too, has absolutely *NO PROBLEM* doing to the Palestinian People, the SAME ATROCITIES which were perpetrated against the Jewish People, during The Holocaust.
It is *IMPOSSIBLE* to *NOT see the parallels right now*, between what was done to the Jewish People in the 1940’s in the Warsaw Ghettos, in the way the Palestinians have been Ghettoized, and are slowly being bombed and starved to death.
*THIS is what our Grandparents MEANT when they said, “You HAVE to be On Guard–you CAN’T EVER let THIS happen again!”
And ironically, it’s a bunch of hard-line Jewish dudes, who never HAD to serve their country, and who are–to use an American term, a bunch of fucking Chicken Hawks with *absolutely NO skin in the game*, who *never* served their country, who are–just like so many in the US Congress who voted to send troops to Iraq–sending *OTHER PEOPLE’S KIDS* off to war.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israeli-court-halts-subsidies-ultra-orthodox-dont-serve-army-rcna145572
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/26/plan-end-ultra-orthodox-students-military-exemption-row-israel
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-asks-israeli-court-defer-deadline-conscription-controversy-2024-03-28/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ag-says-army-must-start-process-to-draft-haredim-warns-against-trying-to-bypass-court/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ministers-approve-major-budget-cut-to-pave-way-for-forming-ben-gvirs-national-guard/
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-736359
https://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-communal-world-baffled-after-ben-gvir-targets-mainstream-us-aid-group-jdc/
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-736124
https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/israeli-minister-orders-police-to-cut-ties-with-wexner-foundation/
Ben Gvir and his wife Ayala are *incredibly* reminiscent of the Magats like MTG and Bobo;
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-722377
This solves everything!
https://apnews.com/article/israel-world-central-kitchen-gaza-aid-workers-69b6176362dafc8e4e2754b2342faa1d
Genocide is obviously infinitely worse than basically anything else, but Israel has openly been an apartheid state for years with the tacit approval of the Western world, and it’s particularly grim viewed through the lens of Jewish history (though as always, Israel doesn’t equal Judaism and vice versa.)
But yeah, Bibi and his party are the same brutal assholes as the right in our country, stoking fear so they can plow Palestinians under. They’re only more open about it now but things have been trending this way for a long time with very little said about it from any of their allies.
Precisely
Seems a classic damned if you do….
Problem is, this isn’t theory, lives are being brutally taken as I type. Unfortunately, if he was to end aid to Israel, the GOP could very well use it to get combaround elected and then what?
Fuuuuuuck…..
We’re going to have to rely on other countries to have a spine and hopefully inflict enough economic damage that even our weapons and money can’t make up for it.
Sadly, I think there are plenty of other countries that would be happy to fill in as the money connection if we were to step back. I have no doubt Russia would love to fund an irritant to their oil competitors of OPEC, and I imagine China wouldn’t hesitate to do the same.
The scam third party No Labels has given up and announced they couldn’t recruit a candidate.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/04/politics/no-labels-president-unity-ticket/index.html
They raised tens of millions of dollars, overwhelmingly from rich donors, and did nothing. They got huge amounts of idiotic PR treating them as a viable “centrist” organization, but eventually became so dysfunctional behind the scenes and so obviously a pro-Trump organization that nobody wanted to be associated with them.
They are run by the married couple Mark Penn and Nancy Jacobson. In the 1990s, Penn was an ally of Dick Morris and also Bill Clinton’s pollster, and pushed for complicated, ineffective and diluted policies and divisive attacks on the party’s progressive wing.
Hillary Clinton made the fatal mistake of choosing him to lead her 2008 campaign against Obama, and after 2016 Penn became an open backer of Trump.
And yet somehow to this day No Labels has maintained the “centrist” label. CNN disclosed how even last month the group was pushing its backers to lie about Biden:
The off the record backroom powerpoint with talking points backed with shady polling is a classic example of how DC political consultants operate. It’s exactly how they pitch people like David Brooks, and if you ever wonder why so many print and TV pundits sound the same, it’s because they only talk to the same five people.
Penn is currently busy generating polls designed to game aggregates like 538. He’s gotten so blatant that some of his clones are finally being dropped. But he’s still raising tons of money from oligarchs and corporations who buy into his fake centrist messaging. He’s not done yet.
Well, former Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Cigna/Aetna), co-founder of No Labels, is done, so 2024 hasn’t been entirely awful.
I was surprised he was only 82. I thought he was about 82 when Al Gore chose him to be his VP pick.
I love that.
The stories about infighting there have been crazy.
In the political PR world, they’re a classic Pitch ‘n Ditch operation. Penn uses his connections to make a pitch to the press and funders and shows up with a ton of pithy, plausible sounding research that makes him sound reasonable.
Money gets handed over, stories are written, and only later does reality take over and it turns out he’s completely full of it. But by then he’s long sunce moved on.
What makes him so potent though is he knows that the world of wannabe intellectuals is driven by myths. Evidence is just something that gets cherry picked to back up the myths, and if you dump enough factoids they don’t understand on them, they’ll think you’re onto something profound.
Oh my drive to work, I passed a pile of green bell peppers on the shoulder of the fast lane.
I have questions.
Every once in while we get a news item about a steer or pig which has escaped from a truck bringing it to its doom. Maybe these made a break for it.
Run free my lil friends!
The opossums and raccoons will get them tonight.
NYC just had an earthquake! Very mild, or maybe the epicenter was very far away, or both, but I did get a little rock-and-rolling here in my secret undisclosed lair.
More information than you’ll ever need.
Earthquake! We felt it good here in Morrisville PA.
I was wondering if you were quaking in NYC!
Mrs. Butcher felt it but I’m underground so, perversely, didn’t. I checked and it’s a 4.8 in NJ.
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=21.9838,-125.24414&extent=51.78144,-64.73145
Did you feel it? I’ve actually experienced quite a few, two severe ones in Southern California and then that one years ago centered in VA that closed down the Washington Monument for years. We felt it up here. And now this. It’s kind of shocking that we should feel anything, because we’re sitting on Manhattan schist, but I know nothing about seismology.
I was driving when it happened and did not feel it, but other people in my neck of the woods did. They really travel!
Could these assholes be the next to go down?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-reps-andy-biggs-paul-gosar-subpoenaed-in-arizona-fake-electors-probe
Speaking of rattling…
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/03/rfk-jr-democrats-third-party-00150497
and why this is a good thing…
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/rfk-jr-steve-tracy-slepcevic-fundraisers-trump-qanon-january-6-extermists/
No Labels is No More.
Good riddance, No Labels. No one will miss you
Due to Snowmageddon I don’t have a DUAN lined up. Someone is welcome to fill in if they’d like.
I got you!
Anyone need an elephant?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-68715164
Figures. I just bought a fucking elephant and now the price is going to drop.
The March jobs report was as good as it gets — here’s why
NYT: Biden campaign will flounder because everyone has jobs and no one has time to vote.
The problem is nobody believes or cares about those numbers because “it feels like a bad economy”. Whatever that means. The biggest obstacle for Biden will be gas is going to be around $6 right before the election…
https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-saudi-and-putin-scheme-for-screwing-1e4
Yeah, somebody needs to put that column in front of Biden.