News Worth Knowing (which you may have mssed) #4

“News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed)” is one of the regular features of our weekly 1-hour lunchtime vigil downtown. This one involves me taking about 5-7 minutes reporting on a few things which are outside the main headlines but which I think are still worth some attention. I’ve taken to posting those things here for whatever additional attention they get. So here is edition #4, a bit longer than usual but still, I hope, worth the read. Comments are always welcome.

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Being arch about “The Arch”

I got a notice about the National Park Service taking public comments on the DC “Arch” desired by The Orange Overlord. So I thought I’d get in on the fun and submit a comment. This was it:

I write in opposition to the proposed “Triumphal Arch at Memorial Circle.”

Contrary to the description, this proposed arch celebrates not our founding principles but rather a parody of them. It is “monumental” for the sake of being monumental, its size substituting grandeur for grace, expansiveness for elegance.

It is, to put it simply, big just for the sake of being big, not for any artistic or even memorializing purpose; it’s an expression not of national pride but of national pridefulness.

Which is why it seems oddly appropriate that the proposal is “drawing on the historic Roman precedent of erecting freestanding arches,” that is, reaching back to a time of emperors and empires, of “bread and circuses” and gladiatorial contests to find inspiration for architecture as well as for fights on the White House lawn.

It is particularly improper for this latest outgrowth of Donald Trump’s desperate desire to be remembered as someone of oversized importance to be intended as an entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, where if it has any effect at all it will be to disrupt and distract from the solemn air, the contemplative atmosphere, of the site.

If it is to be built anywhere, let it span some side avenue somewhere, where it can, in time, come to be seen like the monuments and arches peppering London, as a pretty but ultimately quaint and otherwise unimportant reminder of times when some leader’s sense of self-importance outran their self-awareness.

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This is a feel-good one

Todd Blanch (not a typo; the thought of him makes me go pale) said in April that the Epstein files “should not be a part of anything going forward.” In other words, “Get over it.”

Well, one of Jeffy’s estates was a place called Zorro Ranch in New Mexico - and the people of New Mexico are apparently not willing to get over it.

A small bipartisan commission headed by state Rep. Andrea Romero is going after not just abusers but those who enabled them.

The commission, which has a $2 million budget, has now issued 14 subpoenas to targets ranging from Epstein’s estate through local law enforcement and state officials, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase, up to the FBI and the DOI (Department of Injustice).

Meanwhile, state authorities have reopened a criminal investigation that was closed in 2019 at the request of the DOI and searched the ranch in March.

No big media splash, no self-promoting puffery, just a state commission doing the work the minions of TOO were too corrupted, cowardly, or contemptuous of others’ pain to undertake.

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Taking action

The 2027 National Defense Authorization Act - NDAA - is coming to the Senate floor.

One provision, section 224, would set about “synchronizing cooperative efforts” in military research and integration between the US and Israel, essentially aiming to intertwine the two militaries, which would decrease any leverage the US has over Israel (not that we’re using what we have) while increasing leverage Israel has over the US by making the US at least partly reliant on Israeli military technology.

There will be moves to strip section 224 - which may have been renumbered as section 219 in later versions - from the bill.

I’m confident that in my home state of New Jersey we can count on Senator Kim and probably Senator Booker to support those moves. (”Probably” because Booker’s refusal to oppose arms to Israel, acceptance of AIPAC money, and persistent referral to the slaughter and devastation of Gaza in the passive voice as if it is a natural disaster with no human agent - that is, the IDF - involved give me reason to doubt.)

However, they made need some pushing to commit to - in the event those moves fail - opposing the NDAA in full - which, in fact, they should anyway.

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Home Sweet Homeless

In the first weeks of The Orange Overlord take two, on February 7, 2025, HUD Sec Scott Turner said the agency would stop enforcing the 2016 Equal Access Rule, which requires services funded by HUD to have equal access to programs for individuals based on their gender identity.

Now he’s announced a proposed formal federal rule change, formalizing and institutionalizing the anti-trans bigotry they’ve been practicing so far.

The rule would apply to all HUD programs and would allow providers of services, including housing and shelters, to demand “assurances or evidence” to confirm the stated sex of the person matched their birth certificate with no regard to their gender.

Public comments can be submitted through June 29 at:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/28/2026-08244/equal-access-to-housing-in-hud-programs-revisions

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And there is always more to do

TOO and the noxious goo of acolytes, toadies, and grifters that make up his maleficent maladministration have decided to go all in on their hatred of trans people.

They have proposed a new federal rule regarding the distribution of all discretionary federal funds and grants across all agencies - “discretionary” meaning anything not set by law.

Centrally, it requires that before a grant recipient can get any money they have to go through a “pre-issuance review” done by a political appointee who is explicitly instructed to look for any sign of a “denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans” or support for “the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic,” with “sex” and gender being declared as identical - which they decidedly are not.

Note well: They are not examining the grant in question, they are examining the entire organization requesting it.

So any institution that acknowledges in any way, even indirectly, that transgender people, or nonbinary people, or gender-diverse people exist - maybe it has a DEI policy, maybe healthcare coverage includes gender care, maybe it allows trans restroom access or sports participation, anything at all - could be deemed to “deny the sex binary” and so denied funding.

Hell, it’s easy to imagine a university looking for a grant for a new gymnasium being rejected on the grounds of promoting “gender ideology” because its medical school has a class on human sexuality that includes a section on gender being on a spectrum - because remember, it’s the whole organization, not the grant request, that’s on trial.

What they’re proposing, in short, is that federal funding be available only to those people and institutions who are prepared to actively behave as if trans folks literally do not exist. Don’t mention them, even by suggestion, even indirectly, even from areas unrelated to the funding. Erase them entirely from archives, historical records, even, it would appear, from casual language or offhand reference - or risk losing all federal funding.

Oh, and be sure to act fact, because the same proposal includes means to cancel any existing grants.

This is more than draconian, more than diabolical. It is outright evil.

Comments can be submitted through July 13 at

https://www.regulations.gov/document/OMB-2026-0034-0001

and be assured I’ll bug you about this every week until then.

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A revealing footnote to that

During a press event at the Oval Office on Thursday, in the middle of a long, rambling response to a question about the voter-suppression SAVE Act, TOO went off about “mutilization of your children for transgender purposes” (No, you’re not wrong; there is no such word as “mutilization.”) and that there are six states where “they take your child from you do what they want to do,” which is “transgender mutilization.”

The next question was not a follow-up, nothing about “which six states.” Rather, it was another reporter asking about US intelligence staffing.

And so the normalization of this man’s descent into paranoid delusion continues apace while another lie about trans folks goes unchallenged.

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The White House lawn isn’t the only place where there are fights

Finally some encouraging news, as the courts show there’s still fight in the legal system, especially at the district court level.

Last July, ICE instituted an unprecedented policy of mandatory detention without bond of anyone they said was undocumented. Formerly, that had only been applied to those caught crossing the border; now it was to be applied to everyone, no matter where in the US they were found or how long they have lived here.

As a result, thousands of immigrants filed suit to be released based on improper detention, that ICE was misapplying the law - which it was - and the vast majority of them won.

That is, until February 6, when the extreme right-wing 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed that overwhelming rejection of ICE’s new policy and upheld the mandatory detention scheme.

So what happened? Judges in the 5th Circuit switched from addressing claims of not following the law to addressing claims of a denial of due process, and continued setting people free.

According to data gathered by Politico, since the February ruling, District judges in the circuit have ordered bond hearings or release of detainees more than 1,200 times on due process grounds - that’s nearly 60% of all immigration detention rulings on all bases in the 5th Circuit since Feb. 6.

What’s more, overall, across all circuit courts and again according to Politico, since the new policy went into effect last July, there have been rulings in at least 15,100 immigration cases - and the Whitest House has lost at least 13,300 of them, a loss rate of 88%.

Finally, while the 8th Circuit agreed with the 5th, the circuit courts of the 2nd, 4th, and 6th Circuits have all reached the opposite conclusion, which means it will at some point be at SCOTUS. Which is potentially bad news but you have to wonder if there’s a point where when decisions of the district courts are so overwhelmingly on one side and are supported by a majority of the circuit courts that have ruled on the matter that even this court not dismiss them.

Keep hope alive. And keep on keepin’ on.

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You have the best week you possibly can and we’ll see you then.

Remember, comments and reactions are always welcome.

 

So I said... #16 for March 31 to April 7

 So another variegated conglomeration of perspectives and postulates from your couthy sesquipedalian. At or least I think it is.

As always, I’ve included context where I thought it would help understanding the comment itself along with links to the original if you’d like to check it out. With that, here we go.

2026-03-31
[Most comments in WaPo on SCOTUS oral arguments re Trump’s birthright citizenship order supported the 14th Amendment being read literally. Supporting Trump, someone wrote dismissively “Please tell me which Supreme Court case ruled where the plaintiff’s parents were in the US illegally. This reminds me of being told the 14th amendment case about getting Trump off ballot was a slam dunk, only to lose 9-0.”]

I expect this will not satisfy you but US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) involved a child who was born to parents who were subjects of the Emperor of China and so had neither US citizenship nor allegiance but yes, were here legally. But his parents had no diplomatic exception (they were “not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China”), so he was “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US - interpreted to mean “required to obey US law.” So yes, the Court did rule on that very point. Thus, the Court ruled, Wong Kim Ark was a citizen by birth.

Bluntly, it’s hard to imagine a space in there where the argument “Yeah, but they were documented so that doesn’t count” would fit unless you were to argue that being undocumented means you’re not required to obey the law, an argument I doubt would find much support.

Oh, as for those “legal scholars,” a phrase I strongly suspect was used sarcastically, you should have asked me. I predicted it would fail, albeit on a different basis.(1)
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[Wong Kim Ark was actually a test case. In 1884, a person named Look Tin Eli had sued the government in the US Circuit Court for the Central District of California over his citizenship. He won, as the court affirmed that a native-born person is a US citizen regardless of race or ancestry. Some supporters were disappointed that the US declined to appeal because they wanted to get the matter before SCOTUS and the case of Wong Kim Ark provided the opportunity. The Look Tin Eli case was cited by SCOTUS in its favorable opinion.]

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2026-04-01
There should be a requirement that any client considering conversion “therapy” should be given accurate information on all risks involved, including psychological harm and increased risk of suicide, and the success rate. Then they can make an informed decision and bluntly I wonder how many would continue in that event.

==

2026-04-01
[A woman in Kansas named Samantha Boucher noted Trans Day of Visibility by openly defying the state’s new bathroom ban.]

Bravo to her.

I wonder if [Gov. Kris] Koback would try to dodge the whole thing by saying he doesn’t want to bring attention to a “stunt” so will do nothing because she didn’t really “use” the restroom, just went in and right out.

I doubt he’s that clever, but these kinds of laws are often passed with the idea that trans folks will simply disappear from the restrooms and there will be no consequences that might get attention or even some sympathy among the public.

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2026-04-03
[Referring to a list of suggested responses to being challenged for using the “wrong” restroom.]

I’ve re-written this three or four times because I keep thinking it could by misunderstood. This is my last shot at this.

I doubt the situation described will arise for me (I’m cis and in a safe state) since the freakage level over transmen in restrooms seems quite muted (which I say supports my contention that a lot of this is old-fashioned, albeit an extreme form of, sexism) but if it ever did I would be the bystander.

I think in that case my first instinct would be to blurt out “Why?” and if anything about being trans figured in a response, follow with “Prove it.” That is, “put up or shut up,” intending to shield the target from the harassment. (It occurs to me now that a better response would be “And?”)

But my favorite among the proposed bystander responses is #3 - actually, forget the first part as unnecessary; just use the second.

[The whole #3 was ”Who polices other people’s restroom use? You’re being really weird right now.”]

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2026-04-03
[The Ohio House passed a bill to outlaw drag shows. Someone argued that some provisions could make it illegal for transgender folks to appear in public.]

The bill is indeed bad and hopefully will be killed or at least significantly modified, but I have to say I think your description in some ways goes too far.

Specifically, the section on “adult cabaret performance” (lines 153-173 of the bill, found at https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_136/legislation/hb249/02_PH/pdf/) repeatedly uses the terms “performance,” performers,” and “entertainers.” Applying that to “a transgender individual simply walking down the street wearing makeup” stretches the wording (the “legislative intent”) far past the breaking point.

But! That “cisgender woman playing a guitar in a park” wearing “too masculine” clothing? Oh, yeah. Just call her a performer and bang, covered by the law. Um, except wait - the section also says the performance must be “harmful to juveniles or obscene,” so just playing a guitar in a park isn’t enough, regardless of the clothing. (Yes, I looked up the definitions of “harmful to juveniles” and “obscene.” They’re all about “prurient interest” and “arousing lust.” https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2907.01)

I wholeheartedly embrace your (implied but accurate) argument that actually defining what constitutes “masculine” and “feminine” expression is a fool’s errand and I also agree that any attempt to do so, even by implication, is a threat to trans rights.

But here I’d focus on the obvious intention to ban drag shows by regarding them as de facto sexual and thus obscene. One thing I think the attempt shows is how difficult (if it’s even possible, which I very much doubt) to do that without trampling on basic rights and opening the door to “guilt by personal opinion of a cop.” Such bills can and should be rejected outright.

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2026-04-03
Ben Meiselas reports that in a talk at George Washington University, Karoline Leavitt told the audience that her advice is to always be the most well-read person in the room - then said Trump always is.

I used to call her Levity because no one should take her seriously but this goes beyond that. She is either a pathological liar or in some other way deeply mentally disturbed.

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2026-04-03
[The Georgia legislature ended its session with all of the nearly 15 anti-trans bills having failed.]

This is excellent news and everyone involved in this achievement should savor the moment and accept congratulations.

In passing, this raises something I’ve wondered about. This isn’t the first time a state legislature has come to the end of a session with a whole bunch of anti-trans laws dying without action.

So do some of these people sometimes introduce such legislation without really caring if it passes or not, they just want to be able to use “I introduced” or “I supported” such-and-such on the campaign trail, avoiding both the possibility of being “out anti-transed” by some opponent and the stronger pushback from the other side that could arise if it actually passed?

Just speculating; as a practical matter, I doubt it makes any difference.

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2026-04-04
[Referring to forgiving MAGAs: “My gut instinct is to NEVER forgive them for their cruelty and greed.”]

I’ll just offer a variation on what I said about this very topic several days ago on a different site.

I’m what used to be called a fallen-away Catholic. In fact, I fell so far I fell away from theism altogether. But I can remember from my Catechism what’s required for forgiveness in Confession: contrition and penance - genuine regret and a sacrifice to make up for what you did.

The penance was pretty invariably symbolic, saying some prayers and the like, but still was a necessary part of the process of forgiveness.

The same should apply here. You want me to “welcome you into our tent?” First, give me good cause to believe you sincerely regret what you’ve done. (I think of the woman in that viral clip who said she voted for the Orange Overlord three times, punctuated with “That’s on me. Obviously, I’m an idiot.”)

Second, tell me what you’ll now do to make up for - more importantly, to undo - the harm you’ve helped to cause. Note that “I’ll never vote for another Republican” is not good enough. It is not penance and will not serve the purpose any more than a convicted robber saying “I’ll never steal anything else” does not excuse them from consequences. Tell me what positive action you will take (or have taken).

Then we can talk about forgiveness.

==

2026-04-04
So Gregg Phillips, associate administrator for FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, has doubled down on his claim of having been repeatedly teleported and connected it to his religious beliefs, claiming that the Bible refers to being “translated” or “transported” - that is, he got to a Waffle House through divine intervention.

“Here’s the real question,” he said. “What’s harder to believe? That God could move in a moment during a spiritual battle, or Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is coming again?”

In other words, which is harder to believe: 1+1=5 or 2+2=pi?

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2026-04-04
[Various extremist Xians want women to be unable to vote.]

Whenever I read about this sort of bigoted insanity presuming a Biblical basis for their anti-democratic, anti-freedom, male-supremacist crackpot notions, I recall seeing (as part of my job at the time) a marriage manual from either the late 16th or early 17th century advising that, as near as I can quote from memory, a man who marries a woman from who he can’t get advice has a fool for a wife - and she has a fool for a husband.

==

2026-04-05
[In a comment, a parent told how their trans daughter, despite having adopted a new name at school, had declined using it at home until some time later.]

I can understand how that would hurt. But I suspect there was a reason: The whole purpose of the sort of social transitioning she did at school could have well been for her a matter of, if you will, trying it on, seeing if it fits, if it feels right, “is this me.” You said it yourself: She “tried” new pronouns and a new name.

Doing it with you, OTOH, isn’t a trial or a test, it’s a conclusion. A decision. She just needed more time to make it.

So when she did come out to you, she was saying “This is who I am. I’ve decided.” By giving her that time, you did the right thing.

==

2026-04-05
My response to “Yeah, well, all lives matter!” was to say “Yes, all lives matter. And if we actually acted like all lives matter, it wouldn’t be necessary to say ‘Black lives matter.’”

[I also used to say that in saying or thinking the phrase, the stress should be on the last word, not the first.]

==

2026-04-05
[“Some Democrats soften or side step trans rights. It doesn’t read as strategic. It reads as hesitation in the face of coordinated attacks.”]

“It doesn’t read as strategic. It reads as hesitation.”

More accurately, it reads as fear. The same old fear that has plagued the Democratic party for decades, the fear that the reactionaries might say something nasty about you in a campaign, so better to downplay the issue, even better to avoid mentioning it at all and be forever prepared to yield ground if it comes up. Consider it a political version of “duck and cover.”

Transgender rights are not the only example. There have been many over the years. The issue here, narrowly defined, is not trans rights but institutional cowardice, the kind of stark political cowardice that has had a major role in getting us into our current mess.

I know I have several times on this platform recalled seeing a survey from all the way back in the Gingrich era finding that people didn’t dislike Democrats for what they stood for but because they didn’t seem to stand for anything.

Well, that remains true today, as the intensity of Democrats’ active opposition to The Orange Overlord (TOO) is pretty much in inverse ratio to his favorability rating and the safer it looks politically on a given issue the more willing they are to go after him.

(I still cringe when I recall Hakeem Jeffries, around the time of the OBBB - the Obnoxious Barbarous Bigoted Bill - actually saying something to the effect that the Dems were waiting for TOO’s favorability rating to drop below 40% - in other words, when it was safe enough - promising that then, they’d really go after him. You can decide for yourself how well they followed through on that.)

I’ve said this before, perhaps even here, but I think it bears repeating. It’s not necessary for Dems to make trans rights the or even a centerpiece of their campaign, particularly as it ranks low on lists of people’s concerns and even Republicans in some polls say their party spends too much time on the issue.

What is necessary is to say clearly that you support trans rights and when challenged don’t evade and don’t back down.

And don’t settle for defense. Instead say something like “Of course I support trans rights because they are human rights. Trans folks have every bit as much right to grow and flourish, to go through their lives smoothly, without discrimination, and to be treated with respect and fairness the same as anyone else does. The really important question is why the other side is so damned focused on people’s genitalia instead of on” whatever issue or issues seem appropriate at the moment.

I’ve gone on long enough. Probably too long. So I’ll stop.

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2026-04-06
The Pentagon has failed its department-wide financial audit eight years in a row.

Admittedly, US military operations are very complex, so clean audits are a challenge.

But if any “woke” program had a record anything like that, Faux News would be melting TV screens with the heat of its rage.

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2026-04-06
I was watching the live NASA coverage of the Artemis mission. As the crew went to the Moon’s dark side (losing contact for 40 minutes) one of them just had to invoke Jesus to say “love your neighbor,” punctuated by ground control echoing the statement and adding “How great Thou art.”

:sigh:

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2026-04-07
[Erin Reed demolished a study claiming to prove GAC actually harms the mental health of trans youth.]

Okay, I gotta be honest. I got as far as the percentages (the 9.8% before vs. 60.7% after) and a vibrantly bright red flag started flying.

Phrased rather more coherently than my initial response, it was “Wait - they’re comparing the mental health of folks who got and didn’t get GAC based on psychiatric visits after an initial one? But if someone was at that initial visit to obtain GAC, getting additional counseling would be a pretty normal part of the process of transitioning. Of course they’d have more visits than the general population!”

And that was before learning that they might have years of visits before they could even start actual medical transitioning (i.e. GAHT) - not to mention the history of the study author.

And this tripe got published? Just wow.

==

2026-04-07
[A commenter responded to Megan Rapinoe saying “They lost the battle on gay marriage” with “If they don’t lose hard enough over transgender issues, they will level their political guns to reverse that loss.”]

“they will next level all their political guns to reverse that loss”

They already are. The “LGB without the T” folks who think they’re safe are fools.
-
2026-04-07
[They are. I do think that attacking us is distracting some of the SoCons efforts from that though...]

True enough. But the reactionaries have already legitimized the notion “transgender = drag queen = sex” and it’s not that far a reach to reprising “disgusting” descriptions of “disgusting” gay/lesbian sex of the sort I remember from not that many decades ago.

The LGB/noT crowd should remember that Martin Niemöller’s poem is not just about Germany.

THAT’S IT! SEE YA IN A WEEK OR SO!

---

 

1 The 14th Amendment, Section 3, says that anyone who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the US is ineligible for public office. The argument was that Trump was thus disqualified and Colorado tried to remove him from the ballot. The Court ruled that it was up to Congress, not the states, to make the decision about ballot eligibility. I had predicted they would rule that for Constitutional purposes he couldn’t be held to have “engaged in insurrection” absent a conviction on a relevant charge.

031 The Erickson Report for February 4 to 17, Page Three: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [Outrages]

031 The Erickson Report for February 4 to 17, Page Three: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [Outrages]

Now we turn to the Outrages, and this time we have just one. It's the Blahden administration.

Okay, it's more focused than that. A number of domestic moves have been encouraging, some even better than I expected. But on foreign and military policy, it's a disaster and an Outrage. Let me go through a few things in no particular order to illustrate.

For one thing, the Space Force, Tweetie-pie's vanity project, apparently is going to continue. Once established, it quickly developed institutional momentum, now preaching the Fear Merchants' classic line about "emerging threats," just now in space, and it seems he is of no mind to challenge that.

For another, take military spending in general. Despite the fact that during Tweetie-pie's regime, such spending rose 19%, Blahden is expected to resist calls from progressives to cut that budget in order to finance human needs, expected especially because even during the campaign, he said if elected he didn't foresee any significant reductions.

On Afghanistan, there are already indications that Blahden will keep US troops there past a May withdrawal deadline laid out in a deal with the Taliban. It appears the intention is to keep 2000-2500 troops there for "counterinsurgency" - apparently permanently, giving an interesting twist to the notion of "ending our forever wars."

Another forever war he is likely to continue is the drone wars. He's spoken very little on the topic, but as vice-president he advocated for what he called “counterterrorism plus,” in Afghanistan, a combination of special forces and aggressive drone bombing.

Now, I'm sure there are those who will praise his plans for Israel and the Palestinians, but they look good only by comparison to the horrendous Tweetie-pie years.

What he proposes is a return to the mushy, all-talk-no-action "support" for a two-state solution, a policy pursued by multiple previous administrations across parties, one marked primarily by tut-tutting and tsk-tsking about Israel's oppression of the Palestinians - including turning Gaza into what has been accurately described as the world's largest outdoor prison, building settlements, illegally seizing Palestinian land, and demolishing Palestinian homes - while at the same time providing Israel with billions in military support and deliberately refusing to use any of the leverage this gives the US to push for a political settlement.

One more case to mention is Venezuela, where the Blahden administration will continue to recognize Juan Guaido as president, part of a campaign to force out president Nicolas Maduro, a campaign marked by crushing economic sanctions that have cost the Venezuelan economy an estimated $194 billion, reduced import earnings by 99%, and killed tens of thousands from lack of medical supplies and medicines. And for those who would parrot the official line that the sanctions are because of Maduro's disputed 2018 re-election, I'd note that the first round of economic sanctions came in August 2017, nearly a year before that election took place.

There is a lot more to this; I had originally intended to do a whole segment about Venezuela but the time to explain it properly just kept expanding and expanding to more than I could properly present. But know this: There is a great deal to doubt and question about Nicolas Maduro but ultimately this is not and never was about him. The US has been trying to undermine or overthrow the government of Venezuela since 1998, when the people there committed the unforgivable sin of electing the socialist Hugo Chavez. Nicolas Maduro is not the cause, he is the current excuse.

Because ultimately, this is not about democracy or free elections. It is about dominance and the bipartisan foreign policy consensus which Joe Blahden embraces. Which is an Outrage.

031 The Erickson Report for February 4 to 17

031 The Erickson Report for February 4 to 17

Good News
private prisons
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/26/politics/executive-orders-equity-joe-biden/index.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-to-limit-private-prisons-military-equipment-police_n_601017aec5b634dc37385e66
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the ERA
https://www.aol.com/news/2021-could-women-full-constitutional-104500716.html
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LGBTQ+ rights
https://www.aol.com/news/alabamas-trans-id-law-requiring-093251908.html
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Georgia COVID protocols
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/georgia-republicans/

Clowns
SCOTUS
https://www.aol.com/news/supreme-court-ends-trump-emoluments-145628882-151217164.html
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/25/politics/emoluments-supreme-court-donald-trump-case/index.html
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-emoluments-cases-why-the-supreme-court-didnt-want-to-hear-them/ar-BB1d5mzk
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Leon Cooperman
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/01/29/cry-me-river-sanders-hits-back-billionaire-investor-whines-about-potential-tax-hikes
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/hedge-fund-billionaires/
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Jaime Allard
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/nazi/
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Terry Jones
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/01/19/a-north-dakota-gop-lawmaker-filed-an-absolutely-insane-anti-lgbtq-bill/

Outrage
Biden foreign/military policy
https://www.aol.com/news/biden-seen-likely-keep-space-052951856-144408237.html
https://news.yahoo.com/biden-struggle-cut-defense-spending-210710322.html
https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/09/11/biden-not-planning-defense-cuts-but-they-may-come-anyway/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-admin-us-troops-afghanistan-amid-escalating-violence/story?id=75547504
https://theintercept.com/2020/11/22/biden-drones-endless-wars/
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/1/28/biden-to-israel-palestine-the-show-must-go-on
https://news.yahoo.com/biden-administration-lays-policies-israel-181759037.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-state-venezuela-idUSKBN29O2PE
https://www.codepink.org/pbsvenezuela

Rules for Rightwingers
personal observations over time

The Erickson Report. Page 5: Looking to 2020

The Erickson Report. Page 5: Looking to 2020

Janus

Now with Janus’s other face we take a look forward to 2020 and there are some issues that we here believe should be in the forefront for progressives:

- Climate change, obviously.

- Issues of racism and other forms of bigotry should always be within our awareness and we here would include immigration under that heading since so much of the attacks on the undocumented are driven by such racism.

- There's also economic inequality - economic injustice more aptly - which also has ties to racism and sexism but goes beyond them to include all of the 90% and even the 99%.

- And there's gender inequality as the gains for LGBTQ folks are under sustained attack.

That's obviously not a complete list, but there are four more we specifically want to mention precisely because we think they are not getting the attention they should.

First there is our war spending, our military spending, which has become so bloated that the yearly increase in the DOD budget since Obama's last one is more than enough to pay for the free public college for everyone that we keep getting told we "can't afford."

And there are the on-going wars themselves, which occasionally percolate out of the back pages only to fade back into the mist as soon as some shiny penny is waved around rather than being a source of sustained outrage.

Then there is privacy rights, both regarding government databases like the no-fly list and the corporations transforming our personal lives into their profit.

Third is the rest of the freaking world, which we almost as much as Americans as a whole blithely and arrogantly ignore.

And fourth and perhaps most important, voting rights must absolutely be right up at the top of any list of our concerns for the coming year.

That, I'm sure you'll notice, is a relatively broad spectrum of concerns. And that very fact bring up something I talked about in August but I want to end up for this time by going over again.

The thing is, I see around me today multiple campaigns for change but I don't see a Movement, I don't see any evidence that the people involved in these various efforts conceive of themselves as part of a bigger whole.

Do those who identify with #MeToo feel a kinship with Black Lives Matter or the discussions over reparations? Do those who focus on global warming see themselves as part of the same cultural or political whole as the fight to raise the minimum wage or protect voting rights? I don't think they do, to the loss of each and every one of them.

When I talked about this is August, I had been struck by something that had happened recently: Bernie Sanders gave a speech which covered a number of topics. Afterwards, there was a commentator who slammed the speech and Sanders because he didn't mention race or gender until 23 minutes in and yes, she said she clocked it. Actually, she was wrong; he first mentioned the topic less than five minutes in, but that's not really the point. Be clear here: She didn't attack him for what he said about race and gender, which apparently was to her at the very least unobjectionable, she was attacking him because he didn't say it early enough in the speech; he didn't give her focus privilege of place.

Bluntly, in the dreaded '60s the response to that criticism would have been along the lines of "What the hell difference does that make? This was a speech, not a Top 10 list ranked according to importance." When the order in which topics are addressed in a speech becomes a basis for criticism, when people are actually clocking how long it takes their issue to come up, we do not have a Movement, we have a collection of atomized, isolated efforts incapable of drawing strength from each other.

Worse, it seems to me that there has developed a basic divide between two fundamental types of activism, which I call "inside" and "outside."

"Inside" activism focuses on political campaigns, elections, and lobbying to the exclusion of other means. "Outside" means favoring street action, pickets, rallies, mass demonstrations and marches, civil disobedience, and the like.

"Inside" activism in the long run will fail you because change doesn't start from inside, it starts from outside. As Margaret Mead is supposed to have said, "never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has."

But "outside" also usually comes up short because our demands and proposals will remain unfulfilled demands and proposals unless there are those working the inside route in order to be there to act on them.

These sides of activism, inside and outside, should be mutually reinforcing, should be, if I can use a cliche, two sides of the same coin, but now it seems like they are different worlds with each observing the other warily from a distance. And every bit of lobbying and campaigning, every rally-driven demand, is weaker for it.

Yes, there have been victories, have been successes, and don't think for even an instant that I am denigrating the efforts of oh so many people or any of what has been achieved. But I can't help but be distressed by how many of those efforts have been aimed at preventing losses of what has been gained in years past by movements of years past rather than on going further, gaining more. We need to do better. We can do better.

I will leave you with this: I am hardly the first to raise the idea of the lack of an over-arching message among progressives, which simply means that others have noted the same atomized nature of our efforts that I am critiquing here, except that I see it as a lack of a feeling of connection, a lack of a feeling that despite our particular focuses, we are family, we are of the same tribe, even if the connection lies more in convictions than any outward sign.

So for your consideration I offer my over-arching message for progressives: Justice, compassion, and community. That’s what we - all of us - are about, that is what we - all of us - believe in. Every political action you take or for that matter anyone takes, whether inside or outside, is a reflection of one or more of those principles. Realize how as you are in one particular effort, you are a single strand, one of multiple strands that very much need to be woven together to make a capital M movement far stronger than the sum of its parts.

One more very important piece of advice: Do not repeat the mistakes of the past. I'm sure you won't repeat my generation's mistakes of overconfidence, but don't repeat the mistakes of other generations. Don't slice away your friends and supporters in a foolish attempt to avoid criticism or look "more mainstream" - or, for that matter, more progressive or radical. It will not help you; it never has and it never will, it merely narrows the field of fire for the forces of reaction. And don't divide yourselves into sectarian camps where people are dissed and dismissed for not using quite the preferred language or for having a different focus from you. That way lies madness and the death of dreams.

38.3 - Question: why has the left dropped military spending as an issue?

Question: why has the left dropped military spending as an issue?

I have a question.

In the midst of all the talk about Tweetie-pie's proposed tax gift to the rich and the hack-and-slash treatment proposed for Medicare, Medicaid, and much more, another part of budget considerations has been met with a massive yawn.

On November 8, House and Senate negotiators agreed on the Fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), setting authorized levels of spending for the War Department. The figure? $700 billion.

That stunning figure includes $634 billion for core Pentagon operations and $66 billion for our various wars.

That is not just an increase over last year, it is an increase over what Tweetie-pie asked for: It's $31 billion more for Pentagon operations and $1 billion more for the wars.

It is a total increase over last year of $81 billion, more than 13% - an increase so large that had the DOD budget simply stayed the same level as FY 2017, not cut, just stayed the same, the US could have paid this year's tuition for every public college student in the country and still have $11 billion left over for board and books and so much for "free college is unaffordable."

Instead, we're supposed to waste it on crap like the F-35 strike fighter, the most expensive weapons system in history, with more than $100 billion invested over 25 years and it is still, according to recently-retired Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, at least two years and $1 billion from being combat ready.

We're supposed to spend it on more bombers, more submarines, more destroyers, more aircraft carriers.

And we are supposed to pay for war and more wars and wars you haven't heard of and wars that are secret.

The New York Times reports that the United States has been at war continuously since 9/11 and now has nearly a quarter-million active-duty and reserve troops in at least 172 countries and territories. American forces are actively engaged not only in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen but also in Niger, Somalia, Jordan, Thailand, and elsewhere. In fact some 38,000 troops are on assignment in places the DOD lists as "unknown" doing who knows what.

So here's the question: Where the flaming hell is the left?

Why the silence? Why the acquiescence? The NDAA passed the House by 344-81 and the Senate by 89-9.

Looking for, proposing, ways to cut war spending used to be a rallying cry of the left. Money for life, not death! we said. Fund human needs! we said. What the hell happened?

Is it truly that just because it's not Americans doing a lot of the dying that we just don't care? Is that what we are saying? Or are we embracing the militarized paranoia of "the terrorists are coming! the terrorists are everywhere?" Is that what we are saying?

Well, I'll tell you what I say and I'll do it by paraphrasing something I wrote about 25 years ago:

Killing is what too much of our federal budget is about. I’m not going to get into the argument about what portion of federal spending goes to the military, not only because of disagreements over exactly what should and shouldn’t be considered “military spending,” but also because, frankly, I just don’t care.

Forget the number-crunching, forget the arguments about discretionary versus non-discretionary spending, about ratios and operating budgets and “trends,” forget the blather and the bother. The issue is not the percentage of federal spending going to the military, the issue is military spending. And the military budget has been and continues to be too big.

As long as we can afford to build rail guns but not railroads, the military budget is too big.

As long as we can afford humvees but not health care, the military budget is too big.

As long as we can afford military housing but not public housing, the military budget is too big.

As long as we can find money for mass murder but not mass transit, the military budget is too big.

As long as we can pay to make our bombs smart but not our children, the military budget is too big.

As long as military aid is given higher priority than development aid and world hegemony matters more than world hunger, the military budget is too big.

In short, as long as it’s easier to approve money for matters of death than for matters of life, the military budget is just too damned big.

But that’s still the political reality, no matter the current numbers: For domestic programs or non-military foreign aid, spending has to be justified - but for military programs, not spending has to be justified. The bias remains in favor of the Pentagon, the burden of proof remains on its opponents.

That bias, to be blunt, is the mark of militarism. And as long as that remains true, the military budget Is. Too. Big.

And I am ashamed of how the left seems to have forgotten that.

What's Left #38

What's Left
for the week of November 10 - 16, 2017

This week:

Hero Award: Brennon Jones and Sean Johnson
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/6/1713224/-Barber-who-has-been-giving-free-haircuts-to-homeless-is-gifted-barbershop-by-stranger
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/11/01/stranger-gifts-barbershop-to-man-behind-haircuts-for-homeless.html

Clown Award: unnamed man who went to a Halloween party dressed as a suicide bomber
https://splinternews.com/louisiana-supreme-court-rules-that-a-man-who-asked-for-1820085946
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/11/02/the-suspect-told-police-give-me-a-lawyer-dog-the-court-says-he-wasnt-asking-for-a-lawyer/
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/357985-roy-moore-impeach-judge-blocking-transgender-military-ban
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/the-lawlessness-of-roy-moore/541467/
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/malaysia-arrests-man-who-dressed-as-suicide-bomber-for-halloween-9384492

Question: why has the left dropped military spending as an issue?
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/house-senate-negotiators-land-on-700-billion-deal-for-pentagon/
http://fair.org/home/outlets-that-scolded-sanders-over-deficits-uniformly-silent-on-700b-pentagon-handout/
http://www.pogoarchives.org/straus/dm/defense_monitor_jan_may_2017.pdf
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1190216/dod-releases-fiscal-year-2018-budget-proposal/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/opinion/americas-forever-wars.html

We Are Not Alone: Malaysia, Vietnam, India
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/malaysia-to-roll-out-more-than-us-1b-worth-of-flood-mitigation-9378508
http://www.todayonline.com/world/asia/7-killed-10000-evacuated-penang-and-kedah-floods-worsen
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/malaysia-to-roll-out-more-than-us-1b-worth-of-flood-mitigation-9378508
https://www.nst.com.my/news/nation/2017/11/299593/penang-floods-meteorological-dept-explains-what-triggered-heavy-rainfall
http://news.iafrica.com/worldnews/1056471.html
http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/world/2017/11/07/death-toll-from-vietnam-typhoon-rises-to-69/
http://www.sfgate.com/world/article/Blanketed-in-toxic-haze-New-Delhi-has-become-12338697.php
http://abcnews.go.com/International/severe-air-pollution-declared-public-health-emergency-delhi/story?id=50987745

Outrage of the Week: sexism, the cause of sexual harassment and assault
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/10/22/women-of-the-senate-share-their-metoo-stories-of-harassment/23251721/
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/one-common-denominator-all-sexual-harassers-seem-share
https://hbr.org/2017/10/a-study-used-sensors-to-show-that-men-and-women-are-treated-differently-at-work
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/03/gender-pay-gap-facts/
https://womenintheworkplace.com/

RIP: "Fats" Domino
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fats-domino-rock-pioneer-behind-143021193.html
https://www.aol.com/article/entertainment/2017/10/25/legendary-new-orleans-musician-fats-domino-dead-at-89/23255560/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6JZW7zMDfY

22.7 - Outrage of the Week: militarism as national policy

Outrage of the Week: militarism as national policy

One area which I have felt for a few years that the Congressional Progressive Caucus has downplayed in its budget is war spen - excuse me, military spen - excuse me, "defense" spending. They used to be clearer and harder on the need not just to contain expansion of our various wars but to turn them back and indeed to slash the size of the military budget, which takes up half of all discretionary spending in the federal budget.

The proposed military budget - not, I note just the Department of Defense budget, but the entire military budget, including the parts stashed in the Departments of State and Energy - the proposed military budget for Fiscal 2018 is $824.1 billion, including $76 billion for our various wars.

I said about a month ago that what we are seeing with TheRump's administration, more than with previous ones, is a free hand being given to the military; what we are seeing is, I said, "militarism unleashed as national policy." I declared it the Outrage of the Week.

The weeks since have given me no reason to change that judgement and so it is again the Outrage of the Week.

We have deepening involvement in fighting in Syria, with maybe 1000 more ground troops to help with the fight to take ISIS's self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa, along with a new agreement to provide arms to the Kurdish forces taking the lead in the fighting.

Note well: The idea of arming the Kurds was something the outgoing Obama administration wanted the incoming TheRump administration team to sign off on. Reports are that Michael Flynn, TheRump's former national security adviser, rejected the idea and some say it's because Turkey is opposed to arming the Kurds and Flynn is a registered foreign agent for Turkey. But whether or not that is true, the point here is that arming the Kurds is not a TheRump policy, it's a Pentagon policy.

And then there is the fact that

President Trump's most senior military and foreign policy advisers have proposed a major shift in strategy in Afghanistan that would put the United States back on a war footing with the Taliban.

It would add 3000 troops to the 8400 already there, authorize the Pentagon, not the White House, to set troop levels in Afghanistan, and give the military far broader authority to use airstrikes at times and on targets of it's choosing.

In other words, it is again, as it is in Syria, as it is in drone strikes, as it is in North Korea, as it is in Iraq, it is let the military, whether it's the Pentagon, the CIA, or whoever, it is let the military do what it wants.

I say it again: It is militarism unleashed as national policy.

It's time the progressive left stopped ignoring military spending, stopping ignoring weapons spending, stopped ignoring the constant background drumbeat of death. Because that drumbeat and even more ignoring it is an outrage.

199.5 - Outrage of the Week: media blackout on CPC budget plan

Outrage of the Week: media blackout on CPC budget plan

Now for our other regular feature, the Outrage of the Week.

On March 25, the US House held a series of votes on various budget plans under an unusual arrangement where the budget that got the most votes would be the "official" house version.

At the end of the day, surprise, surprise, the official GOP plan got the most votes.

I want to mention one of losers. Specifically, the Peoples Budget, prepared by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This is the 5th year the CPC has done its own budget proposal, with this year's being called A Raise for America.

It's important for you to realize something right at the top: This is a real budget, which has been subjected to independent analysis. It is not just a summary of principles or a bunch of bullet points or a list of headings or a concoction of fudged numbers with what Paul Krugman accurately called trillion doll asterisks.
http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/the-peoples-budget-a-raise-for-america/
This budget proposes a multi-trillion dollar public investment in areas such as the desperate need for infrastructure repair and improvement, upgrading our energy systems, and addressing climate change, the sorts of investment that not only create millions of new jobs but improve the quality of life for the nation as a whole.

It reduces income inequality by raising taxes on the rich and closing corporate loopholes while cutting taxes on low- and middle-income folks. It improves the lives of the poor with expanded social supports. It invests in education and provides debt-free college. It improves on Obamacare by creating a public option (if you can remember what that is). It invests in renewable energy technologies.

And it does all this and much more while reducing the annual deficit not only by raising taxes on the rich and corporations but by cutting military spending and ending pointless war spending and pointless wars.

And in fact, many of its proposals are popular with the public. For a few examples, 80% of Americans support raising the minimum wage, which this budget does. Two-thirds think the rich pay too little in taxes, 70% oppose the cuts to Food Stamps, and large majorities favor paid leave, equal pay, and affordable child care, all of which this budget supports, and say the government has a responsibility to ensure employers treat employees fairly by enforcing such policies.

As the budget describes itself,

A fair wage is more than the size of a paycheck. It’s having enough hours, paid overtime, sick and parental leave, and affordable health and childcare. It’s being able to afford a good education for your kids and never living in fear that your job will be sent overseas. It’s knowing you can make ends meet at the end of the month. The People’s Budget helps achieve that.

And does it in a way that is fiscally sound with a budget that stands up to analysis.

So of course it only got 96 votes in the House.

But that's not the real outrage here.

The outrage is that until this moment, most of you had never heard of that budget. Most of you, unless you haunt lefty news sites or are a real political wonk who reads Politico.com or TheHill.com, you have never heard of this budget. The budget most in line with what Americans want, the one that does the most for the many instead of the few at the top, the one that does the most to advance economic and social justice, and the one that showed you can do all that while being more fiscally responsible than either of the major parties' alternatives, was subjected to an all but total media blackout.

I searched on Yahoo! News for major media coverage of this budget. I got nothing. I searched on Google News, got nothing. A search at the New York Times site produced zero hits. A search at the Washington Post site got exactly one hit.

I have said it many, many times before: We are by our national mainstream media uninformed, misinformed, and malinformed. And no matter how many times I say it, it is still an outrage.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/house-gop-budget-resolution-2016-116382.html
http://cpcbudget.org/#peoples-budget
http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/uploads/FINAL%20FY16%20Peoples%20Budget.pdf
http://www.epi.org/pay-agenda/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/opinion/paul-krugman-trillion-dollar-fraudsters.html
http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/the-peoples-budget-a-raise-for-america/
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/03/24/congressional-progressives-economy-serve-americans-way-around/
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/236957-house-rejects-democratic-budget-alternatives

195.5 - The 47 Senators who signed the letter to Iran are tying to provoke a war

The 47 Senators who signed the letter to Iran are tying to provoke a war

Okay, I have to address The Letter. You know the one I mean, the one signed by 47 wackos in the Senate and directed to "the leaders" of Iran. Not anyone in particular, no names were included, just "the leaders."

Positively dripping with condescension, it opens with "you may not fully understand our constitutional system" and proceeds through several paragraphs that boil down to "there is no point in your reaching an agreement with the US and other nations on nuclear issues" with the clearly implied tagline "so why bother?"

A Farsi version sent to Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif “in case you need a translation.” Just how deep is the wackos' grasp of the facts of the situation can be seen in the fact that Zarif moved to the US at age 17, has a Masters degree from San Francisco State University, and has a second Masters and a PhD from the University of Denver.

It's also safe to say that the Iranian leadership has a pretty good grasp of the US system, since Iran's current presidential cabinet has more members with doctorates from US universities than Obama's does.

Javad Zarif

Which is probably why Zarif felt no need to spare the sarcasm in his reply, in which he pointedly noted that, contrary to the wackos' letter, were a future president simply to ignore an international agreement reached at the executive level, even if it's not a treaty, it would be a violation of international law. Besides, he went on, the wackos' own argument would in fact render the great many of what the letter called  "mere executive agreements" into which the US has entered as meaningless and brand the US as untrustworthy.

But here's the point: None of that matters. None of it. The people responsible for this letter, the people who signed this letter, the people who say they support this letter even if they didn't sign it, they don't care. They don't care that they got the facts about executive agreements wrong. They don't care that they even got the Constitutional details of treaties wrong. They don't care because this has nothing to do with any of that.

Tom Cotton

The purpose of the letter is to discourage the Iranian government from agreeing to a deal, or, alternately, to push the White House into giving Congress the power to veto any deal - both of which would have the same result: destroying any hope of an agreement.

The people who signed this letter do not want an agreement. They want negotiations to fail. They want diplomacy to fail. They want this to fall apart. These people want a war. The closer it comes to where there may actually be a deal, the more rabid they become, the more obvious their desire, their intent, becomes, the more transparent their bloodlust becomes

You think that's overstating it? In January, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who organized the letter, told a conference hosted by the right-wing group Heritage Action for America that the whole purpose of Congressional action was to make negotiations fail. That the collapse of negotiations, quoting him,

isn't an unintended consequence of congressional action. It is very much an intended consequence. A feature, not a bug.

He compared the international negotiations with Iran to the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s (Godwin's law strikes again) and said the goal should be "regime change" in Iran - because, after all, that worked out so well in Iraq.

I mean, they're not even pretending any more. They will not be satisfied until the blood flows freely in the Middle East. Their bloodlust is palpable and I have to say that I think that at least for some of them it's because they think such a war will bring on the apocalypse and thus the second coming of Jesus, that they really do think these are the End Times. (And, of course, that they are among the saved.)

Even if I'm wrong about that, maybe I am, hopefully I am, it doesn't change anything about the rest. The people who signed this letter are bloodthirsty warmongers who will not be happy until the piles of burnt bodies and shredded limbs are too high to see over and the wails of the wounded drown out the drones. They are despicable.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/03/09/gop-senators-warning-over-us-iran-nuclear-negotiations/21151149/
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/03/10/Iran-Pushes-Back-Against-Senate-GOP-Letter
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/09/senate-iran-deal_n_6832706.html
http://crooksandliars.com/2015/03/backstabbing-republicans-publish-open
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/09/tom-cotton-iran_n_6831328.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_time

192.10 - Obama's AUMF for ISIS is about endless war

Obama's AUMF for ISIS is about endless war

Back on November 5, PHC* said he would ask Congress for new war power authorities to fight the Islamic State,.

Now, more than three months later and six months since he began the bombing campaign, a campaign that has so far cost more than $1 billion, involved more than 1,700 airstrikes, and seen roughly 3,000 US troops sent to Iraq, he has finally put forth his proposal, even as he continues to insist that he don't need no stinking new authorization because he's the commander in chief, dammit, and besides, the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (or AUMF), a reaction to 9/11, gives him all the authority he needs. What he will do is grandly allow the Congress to agree to what he has been and is doing.

His proposed new AUMF, first, is retroactive: It applies from the start of the bombing campaign last August. The proposal would limit military action against ISIS to three years (absent a renewal of authority) and would repeal the 2002 AUMF that was the basis for the Iraq War.

However, it would not repeal the 2001 AUMF, the one he has been relying on all along, which means whether or not Congress passes this thing, nothing will change. It is utterly meaningless crap.

What's more, the "restrictions" it would place on his lovely little war have more loopholes than a fancy lace doily. For one, it supposedly limits the use of US ground troops to things like rescue operations or intelligence sharing - and even leaving aside just how broadly the term "rescue operations" can be and has been defined, what it actually says is that they can't be used for "enduring offensive ground combat operations," a description vague enough that even party loyalist Dick Durbin was moved to ask, in just these words, "What does it mean?"

And there is no geographical limit on the campaign; it says rather that military force can be used against ISIS "or associated persons or forces," which are defined as "individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside" ISIS as well as "any closely-related successor entity." Considering that, as happened with al-Qaeda, previously-unrelated groups are taking up the name "ISIS" or some form of it, this could easily be used to justify military attacks on sites not just in Iraq and Syria but in, as of now, Libya, where one group has taken up the name, and we can assume other places in the future.

This is not a prescription for limited war or even targeted war, but for endless war on shifting targets across the globe. In other words, it's exactly the same crap as we have seen for over 13 years now.

Adam Schiff in the Asylum and Ben Cardin and Chris Murphy in the Senate have introduced bills to terminate the 2001 AUMF, which I suppose is good except that they would terminate it in three years, the same time frame as Obama's proposed new AUMF, so I'm really not sure what is the point of not terminating it immediately. It still means, one way or another, giving Obama what the wants while being able to claim to be exercising some sort of oversight - which I suppose is, when all is said and done, the whole purpose of this entire vapid exercise.

When he was running for president in 2008, a major part of O's foreign policy allure was his promise to move the country away from launching open-ended, ill-defined wars with few restrictions and no end game. Like on so many other things, it's turned out that well, he talked real purty but it didn't mean a freaking thing.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

Sources cited in links:
http://www.defenseone.com/politics/2014/11/obama-ask-congress-new-war-powers-fight-isis/98270/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/28/adam-schiff-aumf-isis_n_6559066.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/11/obama-isis-war-authorization_n_6662930.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/11/obama-aumf-congress-isis_n_6660208.html
http://whatalovelywar.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/13/2001-war-authorization_n_6682398.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/13/obama-aumf-endless-war_n_6680210.html

168.6 - Factoid of the Week: F-35 fighter

Factoid of the Week: F-35 fighter

Okay, this is something that may or may not become a regular feature. Pretty soon I may have so many regular features I won't have time for anything else. But here it is: It's the Factoid of the Week.

The subject is the program to create a fleet of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets, which is 7 years behind schedule and a couple of weeks ago was grounded just before two air shows that were supposed to be the jet's coming out party.

Here's the factoid: The entire cost of the program over the projected life of the jets is now $400 billion. That amount could have provided a $600,000 home to each and every one of the estimated 600,000 homeless people in the US.

Or, if you prefer another way to look at it, a single year's cost of the program, about $49 billion, could have covered the entire yearly cost of the National School Lunch Program, which feeds roughly 31 million students every year, eliminate the cuts made in the Food Stamp program, pay our share of UN's 16 peacekeeping missions around the world, and pay the entire amount sought by the UN Office of Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs to address humanitarian crises around the world, including the millions of refugees and internally displaced people in war zones - and we'd still have a few billion left over for dessert.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/11/military-jet-spending_n_5575045.html?cps=gravity
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/budget-appropriations/211520-f-35s-air-show-debut-in-jeopardy
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-16/us-approve-limited-flights-for-f-35-joint-strike-fighter/5599896
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/07/09/3458101/f35-boondoggle-fail/
http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/operations/current.shtml

Left Side of the Aisle #168

This week:

Good News: Chicago moves on minimum wage
http://www.wbez.org/mayor-emanuel-backs-chicago-minimum-wage-hike-13-110462

Good News: same-sex marriage advances in CO, OK, and FL
http://www.advocate.com/politics/marriage-equality/2014/07/09/colo-marriage-ban-ruled-unconstitutional
http://www.advocate.com/politics/marriage-equality/2014/07/10/breaking-denver-now-issuing-same-sex-marriage-licenses
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/tenth-circuit-declares-oklahomas-gay-marriage-ban-unconstitutional
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/07/17/4240865/keys-judge-gay-couples-can-marry.html
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2014-07-15/news/os-gay-marriage-florida-roundup-20140715_1_florida-family-policy-council-gay-marriage-3-judges
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/court-rules-gay-marriage-oklahoma-case-24618411

Hero Award: Salem, MA, Mayor Kimberly Driscoll
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/07/09/salem-kills-contract-with-gordon-college-over-school-stance-against-antigay-regulations/0hqb8efQqei1IO4gvCTz4I/story.html?p1=Must_Reads_hp

Unintentional Humor: NSA concerned about privacy
http://izquotes.com/quote/14039
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/07/14/nsa-releasing-edward-snowden-emails-would-violate-his-privacy
http://thedesk.matthewkeys.net/2014/07/nsa-says-snowden-emails-exempt-from-public-disclosure/

RIP: Johnny Winter, James Garner
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/johnny-winter-dead-70-blues-guitarist-struck-chord-rock-fans-article-1.1870928
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/legal-and-management/6164928/johnny-winter-blues-torchbearer-an-appreciation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Garner
http://www.people.com/article/james-garner-best-roles

Factoid of the Week: F-35 fighter
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/11/military-jet-spending_n_5575045.html?cps=gravity
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/budget-appropriations/211520-f-35s-air-show-debut-in-jeopardy
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-16/us-approve-limited-flights-for-f-35-joint-strike-fighter/5599896
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/07/09/3458101/f35-boondoggle-fail/
http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/operations/current.shtml

Outrage of the Week: Suit against discrimination fails even though Court admits there was discrimination
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/justices-reject-iowa-class-action-bias-case/2014/07/18/1bcf0cf4-0e84-11e4-b0dd-edc009ac1f9d_story.html

Middle East and Gaza: Israel does not want peace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Too_Much_with_Us
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/test-393840245
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/07/22/Deadly-clashes-between-Libyan-army-and-Islamists-strike-Benghazi-.html
http://www.npr.org/2014/07/22/333892178/violence-flares-in-libya-leaving-main-airport-in-ruins
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/18/some-of-israel-s-top-defenders-say-it-s-time-to-end-u-s-aid.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/21/rula-jebreal-msnbc-palestinians-airtime_n_5606673.html
http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/23/world/meast/human-shields-mideast-controversy/
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/middle-east-unrest/netanyahu-says-hamas-wants-pile-bodies-sympathy-n161236
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-22/israel-declares-soldier-hamas-says-holds-in-gaza-missing.html
http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/boston-population/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/07/21/333537714/in-crowded-gaza-civilians-have-few-places-to-flee
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/07/14/did_netanyahu_just_say_what_he_really_thinks_about_a_two_state_solution.html
http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-finally-speaks-his-mind/

Clown Award: House GOPpers on Washington, DC laws
http://www.aol.com/article/2014/07/16/house-gop-to-dc-guns-ok-pot-dangerous/20932428/