Friday Refreshments & Crudites
On Mitt Romney via Vanity Fair:
“One of the biggest revelations to me in my conversations with Romney was just how important the threat of political violence was to the psychology of elected Republicans today,” said Coppins, who recalled Romney telling him “story after story about Republican members of Congress, Republican senators, who at various points wanted to vote for impeachment—vote to convict Trump or vote to impeach Trump—and decided not to, not because they thought he was innocent, but because they were afraid for their family’s safety. They were afraid of what Trump supporters might do to them or to their families.” That “raises a really uncomfortable question,” Coppins said, which is “how long can the American project last if elected officials from one of the major parties are making their political decisions based on fear of physical violence from their constituents?”
Coppins said Romney has been grappling with what complicity he, and others in the party, have with Trump’s political rise. “He was looking back at the moments in his pursuit of the presidency that he sort of flirted with the more extreme elements of his party,” Coppins said. “I think he realizes now that the mistake he made, and the mistake that a lot of the Republican establishment made, was thinking that they could basically harness the energy of the far right without succumbing to it.”
Fear does not induce good decision-making. And political cowardice should be called that. Much of the mainstream media is shirking its responsibility to tell it like it is.
The age difference isn’t enough to really be a ‘son’ but it raises questions. Based on their ages when they made him a part of their family, Mike Johnson was 25 and Michael, who he called ‘son’, was 14.
As his 2019 mention of Michael to his Congressional colleagues does not indicate he’s hiding Michael. But if he’s close enough to be called ‘son’ by Mike, why doesn’t he appear in any official pictures of Johnson the candidate or Johnson the officeholder?
It is just odd.
That’s more than a 32% increase in one year. It’s more than 1 in 8 US residents.
More than 44.2 million Americans lived in households that struggled with hunger in 2022, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report released Wednesday — an increase of 10.3 million over the previous year.
The article also points out that childhood poverty more than doubled from 2021 to 2022. And a chief driver of this was an end to the child tax credit expansion provided during the worst years of the pandemic.
Food banks are stretched to near capacity already. And if the GOP House doesn’t pass the budget legislation in 3 weeks, mothers and children using the WIC program will be in worse poverty.
Twitter’s worth declines as it becomes a vehicle of disinformation and war propaganda. Via Joseph Menn at Washington Post:
A social media account recommended by Elon Musk for its coverage of the Israeli war with Hamas with a long history of antisemitic posts is connected to a southwest London teenager, according to research and a text exchange with the account.
The @WarMonitors account on X, formerly Twitter, is one of two that drew hundreds of thousands of new followers the weekend that the Palestinian group rampaged into Israel after Musk recommended them.
The second account Musk recommended in the now-deleted post, @sentdefender, has been identified by a research company as belonging to a member of the U.S. military from Georgia who has amplified Russian propaganda. As previously reported, both have spread false information, including reporting a nonexistent explosion near the White House that sent stock prices down.
Both accounts were among seven cited a week ago by researchers at the University of Washington as the “new elites” of influence on X, with more than 1.6 billion combined views in the first three days of the war.
Elon Musk often makes recommendations on the fly without doing due diligence research. Some people ‘rely on their gut instincts’ but Musk’s instincts have a long history of being really poor choices.
In this case, he’s amplified Russian propaganda and the ‘war expertise’ of a foreign 18 year old who’s been paid more than $16,000 as a Twitter ‘content creator’ before Musk’s mention.
Here’s more from that 18 year old:
War Monitors has repeatedly referred to Israeli forces, civilian leaders and activists as Nazis, and he responded to someone else on X in June with the riposte “mind your own business, jew.”
He told The Post: “the things i said were taken out of context, they weren’t right to say, but they made sense in context.”
Excerpts via different articles from Washington Post today:
1. Doctors Without Borders, the medical humanitarian organization, called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, citing a “medical emergency that is worsening everyday.”
2. Three Jewish members of Congress — Reps. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), and Susan Wild (D-Pa.) — released a joint statement Thursday adding their voices to calls for a “temporary cessation of hostilities in Gaza” to allow for the safe passage of civilians and for humanitarian aid to enter the Strip.
3. U.S. House representatives from New York, Daniel S. Goldman (D) and Jerrold Nadler (D), released a joint statement echoing calls to implement humanitarian pauses in fighting in Gaza to facilitate aid deliveries. Goldman and Nadler are Jewish and have described themselves as supporters of a two-state solution, which envisions two states — one Israeli and the other Palestinian — alongside each other.
4. Countries throughout the world are calling for measures to address water, fuel, electricity and medical shortages in the Gaza Strip, but what those measures look like in practice varies.
The U.S. drafted a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses in the Israel-Gaza war. Russia drafted a different U.N. Security Council resolution that called for a cease-fire in addition to humanitarian pauses.
The words can seem similar, but they are distinct.
5. At least 57 members of staff with the U.N.’s Palestinian relief agency in the Gaza Strip have been killed since the war began, including 15 in one day, the agency’s chief said.
In a news conference Friday, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini also defended his agency from accusations that aid was being diverted to militant group Hamas.
6. Ten experts including a war surgery team and a weapons contamination specialist entered Gaza on Friday, along with six trucks carrying urgent medical aid, the International Committee of the Red Cross said — the first time in this war its medical workers have entered the besieged Palestinian territory.
TEN? To serve more than 2 million people? It’s well overdue. The Palestinian people under siege need a cessation. Period. And any reasons given not to provide that aid are only weak excuses now. Too much human suffering has occurred to many people who had no part in the horrid attack on Israel by HAMAS.
I’m pretty certain Dean Phillips’ real goal is to gain name recognition for a 2028 campaign. As well, he could serve as an alternate substitute (to Kamala Harris) in 2024 should Biden suffer serious illness.
Recommended Reading
In 2016, Senate Republicans blocked Obama’s nominee - a moderate - from the Supreme Court for 11 months, hoping a Republican would take over and nominate a conservative. They said they’d do the same if the party situation was reversed.
They lied.
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died of pancreatic cancer on September 18, 2020, her dying request was for her replacement to be made by the next president. Instead, Mitch McConnell rushed through Trump’s nominee in record time, 38 days.
And because of the expensive gifts scandals SCOTUS judges Thomas and Alito have been through in the past year, we’ve become very aware of Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow and other extremely wealthy people who’ve been stacking the SCOTUS and other federal courts for years. With very conservative judges. Utilizing a rather dubious definition of ‘federalism’ that was designed to shield the effort from claims that it was a political takeover by conservative Republicans.
What was their real aim? Clearly, one was overturning Roe v. Wade. It appears it might also be an attempt to marginalize and possibly criminalize gay people. But beyond the efforts to provoke greater divisions in the citizenry, it’s critical to rely on the old adage of ‘follow the money’ to determine what’s really going on.
Eliminating environmental regulations, labor protections and measures to slow climate change are clearly next on the conservative agenda of our country’s richest people. Along with weakening many other powers of the federal government.
Because state’s rights has always worked so well for the very richest in our country at the cost of many lives in more than 90% of the population.
So it’s essential to see what Charles Koch and others are up to now.
It’s not very nice.
And, of course, they might even want to loosen restrictions on the ownership of guns. Because our dead family members are replaceable.