Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
The NYT author is Cade Metz, who I've never heard of before, but who was getting slammed yesterday on Twitter, along with his newspaper, for an article on Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist by training who blogged at Slate Star Codex (which I only vaguely recall, and that's after myself being immersed in online debates and flame wars for over a decade; so you can see, perhaps, that a lot of NYT's reporting here is "inside baseball," and one of the biggest critiques of Metz is that he gets just about everything wrong at the article, entitled "Silicon Valley’s Safe Space.")
Below is Alexander's own response, at his Substack blog, as well a screenshot with some criticism pulled from Twitter earlier. (I can't seem to cut and paste from Alexander's Substack blog, and maybe that's by design, considering.)
“I want to first thank my team of dedicated lawyers and others for their tireless work upholding justice and defending truth.
“My deepest thanks as well to all of the United States Senators and Members of Congress who stood proudly for the Constitution we all revere and for the sacred legal principles at the heart of our country.
“Our cherished Constitutional Republic was founded on the impartial rule of law, the indispensable safeguard for our liberties, our rights and our freedoms.
“It is a sad commentary on our times that one political party in America is given a free pass to denigrate the rule of law, defame law enforcement, cheer mobs, excuse rioters, and transform justice into a tool of political vengeance, and persecute, blacklist, cancel and suppress all people and viewpoints with whom or which they disagree. I always have, and always will, be a champion for the unwavering rule of law, the heroes of law enforcement, and the right of Americans to peacefully and honorably debate the issues of the day without malice and without hate.
“This has been yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our Country. No president has ever gone through anything like it, and it continues because our opponents cannot forget the almost 75 million people, the highest number ever for a sitting president, who voted for us just a few short months ago.
“I also want to convey my gratitude to the millions of decent, hardworking, law-abiding, God-and-Country loving citizens who have bravely supported these important principles in these very difficult and challenging times.
“Our historic, patriotic and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun. In the months ahead I have much to share with you, and I look forward to continuing our incredible journey together to achieve American greatness for all of our people. There has never been anything like it!
“We have so much work ahead of us, and soon we will emerge with a vision for a bright, radiant, and limitless American future.
“Together there is nothing we cannot accomplish.
“We remain one People, one family, and one glorious nation under God, and it’s our responsibility to preserve this magnificent inheritance for our children and for generations of Americans to come.
“May God bless all of you, and may God forever bless the United States of America.”
I've had CNN on this afternoon, and while it's still early, I can tell you, the folks over there are absolutely crushed that Trump wasn't convicted.
And the seven Republican senators who voted to convict didn't do themselves any favors. G.O.P. Sen. Bill Cassidy has already been censured by the Louisiana Republican Party, so he's lucky he was just reelected to his Senate seat this last November, since he'll at least have six long years for his constituents to "forgive" him for his treason to the Trump cause.
And no doubt some of the others Republicans who voted to convict will sooner or later pay the price for siding with the demonic Democrats in this farce of an impeachment.
WASHINGTON — The Senate acquitted former President Trump on Saturday in his second impeachment trial, even as seven members of his own party delivered a historic rebuke by joining Democrats in voting to convict him of inciting the deadly insurrection last month at the U.S. Capitol.
The 57-43 vote to find Trump guilty fell short of the 67 votes needed for conviction, but it was the most bipartisan such vote in any presidential impeachment trial, exposing the fractures in a Republican Party divided over its future after Trump’s presidency.
The vote was immediately followed by a blistering indictment of Trump on the Senate floor by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who had voted to acquit saying that impeachment of a former president was unconstitutional, but painted Trump as an unhinged menace to democratic institutions.
The Republicans who voted for conviction were Sens. Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania.
Trump is the first American president to be impeached twice, and this trial, which lasted just five days, was the first of a former president. The House impeached him last month on a charge of inciting the insurrection Jan. 6, when a violent mob of his supporters broke into and ransacked the Capitol. The assault left five people dead, including a police officer.
“It is now clear beyond doubt that Trump supported the actions of the mob, and so he must be convicted,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said in his closing arguments. “If that’s not grounds for impeachment — if that’s not a high crime and misdemeanor against the republic of the United States of America — then nothing is. President Trump must be convicted for the safety and security of our democracy and our people.”
“This trial, in the final analysis, is not about Donald Trump,” Raskin continued. “The country and the world know who Donald Trump is. This trial is about who we are.”
In their closing arguments, as they did during the trial, House Democrats played a collection of videos that showed graphic violence from the rioters’ attack, including heretofore confidential security video that revealed how close the mob got to lawmakers and staff. The videos — some filmed just steps from where the trial took place — provided an emotional punch to the case...
You can see how the lame "MSM" news outlets are trying to frame things. The "seven" Republicans who voted to convict are the heroes of the story. The New York Times made it sound like acquittal was the first step toward some kind of ultimate reckoning within the Republican Party. That's of course highly doubtful, since now that Trump's acquitted he can toy with running for reelection in 2024 all he wants, and I doubt the state-level prosecutions around the country (in New York, especially) will have their intended effect of destroying Trump, much less his huge MAGA movement, which is the ultimate bane of deranged leftists everywhere.
It's not that big of a "pushback," but it's something to see, nevertheless.
One really interesting development is the role that Nikole Hannah-Jones played in the despicable firing of veteran Times correspondent Donald McNeil (covered here previously).
I read the whole Slate piece linked by Sibarium, and while I can't verify a word Hannah-Jones says, she still comes out looking like the awful person she is. (She's the Pulitzer-winning "journalist" who hatched the mindbogglingly dumb "1619 Project," and she's bitter she's taken so much heat for it; and I don't believe for a second that she had "no role" in the firing of Donald McNeil; she's as "woke" as "woke can be, and being "woke" means being intolerant as hell, so you probably should just take her words with some heavy salt, that is, if you even want to read the Slate piece).
And here's a second bit of inside information on what's happening at the Old Gray Lady. It turns out that Bret Stephens, who was formerly editor of the Jerusalem Post, before jumping ship from the Wall Street Journal for the Times (for reasons I guess having to do with his own "woke" evolution), wrote a scathing commentary piece that the totalitarian editors of the Times spiked, obviously because Stephens was hitting too close to home.
In fact, someone at the Times leaked the Stephens op-ed to the New York Post, where it was published in full (no doubt to the bitter consternation of Nikole Hannah-Jones and her evil black allies working inside the Times' black radical "lynch gang" now despoiling --- even more than the Times could be already be despoiled --- the newspaper's reputation.
Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention.
It is the difference between murder and manslaughter. It is an aggravating or extenuating factor in judicial settings. It is a cardinal consideration in pardons (or at least it was until Donald Trump got in on the act). It’s an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship and marriage.
A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention. Most of what is cruel, intolerant, stupid and misjudged in life stems from that indifference. Read accounts about life in repressive societies — I’d recommend Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” and Nien Cheng’s “Life and Death in Shanghai” — and what strikes you first is how deeply the regimes care about outward conformity, and how little for personal intention.
I’ve been thinking about these questions in an unexpected connection. Late last week, Donald G. McNeil Jr., a veteran science reporter for The Times, abruptly departed from his job following the revelation that he had uttered a racial slur while on a New York Times trip to Peru for high school students. In the course of a dinner discussion, he was asked by a student whether a 12-year-old should have been suspended by her school for making a video in which she had used a racial slur.
In a written apology to staff, McNeil explained what happened next: “To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.”
In an initial note to staff, editor-in-chief Dean Baquet noted that, after conducting an investigation, he was satisfied that McNeil had not used the slur maliciously and that it was not a firing offense. In response, more than 150 Times staffers signed a protest letter. A few days later, Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn reached a different decision.
“We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” they wrote on Friday afternoon. They added to this unambiguous judgment that the paper would “work with urgency to create clearer guidelines and enforcement about conduct in the workplace, including red-line issues on racist language.”
This is not a column about the particulars of McNeil’s case. Nor is it an argument that the racial slur in question doesn’t have a uniquely ugly history and an extraordinary capacity to wound.
This is an argument about three words: “Regardless of intent.” Should intent be the only thing that counts in judgment? Obviously not. Can people do painful, harmful, stupid or objectionable things regardless of intent? Obviously.
Do any of us want to live in a world, or work in a field, where intent is categorically ruled out as a mitigating factor? I hope not.
That ought to go in journalism as much as, if not more than, in any other profession. What is it that journalists do, except try to perceive intent, examine motive, furnish context, explore nuance, explain varying shades of meaning, forgive fallibility, make allowances for irony and humor, slow the rush to judgment (and therefore outrage), and preserve vital intellectual distinctions?
Journalism as a humanistic enterprise — as opposed to hack work or propaganda — does these things in order to teach both its practitioners and consumers to be thoughtful. There is an elementary difference between citing a word for the purpose of knowledge and understanding and using the same word for the purpose of insult and harm. Lose this distinction, and you also lose the ability to understand the things you are supposed to be educated to oppose.
No wonder The Times has never previously been shy about citing racial slurs in order to explain a point. Here is a famous quote by the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater that has appeared at least seven times in The Times, most recently in 2019, precisely because it powerfully illuminates the mindset of a crucial political player.
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights’ and all that stuff.”
Is this now supposed to be a scandal? Would the ugliness of Atwater’s meaning have been equally clearer by writing “n—, n—, n—”? A journalism that turns words into totems — and totems into fears — is an impediment to clear thinking and proper understanding.
So too is a journalism that attempts to proscribe entire fields of expression. “Racist language” is not just about a single infamous word. It’s a broad, changing, contestable category. There are many people — I include myself among them — who think that hardcore anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. That’s also official policy at the State Department and the British Labour Party. If anti-Semitism is a form of racism, and racist language is intolerable at The Times, might we someday forbid not only advocacy of anti-Zionist ideas, but even refuse to allow them to be discussed?
The idea is absurd. But that’s the terrain we now risk entering.
We are living in a period of competing moral certitudes, of people who are awfully sure they’re right and fully prepared to be awful about it. Hence the culture of cancellations, firings, public humiliations and increasingly unforgiving judgments. The role of good journalism should be to lead us out of this dark defile. Last week, we went deeper into it.
Well, if poorer minority communities are less likely to open schools for in-person instruction, who's fault is that? Certainly not the kids'.
I don't think California's as bad as Chicago, Illinois, but our state could certainly be doing a better job, and the blame can certainly be placed right at Governor Newsom's feet, who's likely to be facing recall, if those signature petitions, now circulating statewide, gain enough valid signatures.
South Whittier schools Supt. Gary Gonzales works seven days a week to move his elementary schools closer to reopening. But the barriers are significant: He’s looking for ways to get vaccines to teachers, negotiating with the union and closely monitoring coronavirus case numbers that show that the virus is still ravaging his community, even as case numbers fall countywide.
Gonzales knows his district’s students, almost all of whom are Latinos from low-income families, are struggling under remote learning. And he knows his community is hurting — the pandemic has claimed 118 lives in tiny South Whittier. A date for bringing students back to the classroom is unclear.
“It’s all kind of wait and see,” he said.
Thirty miles away, Supt. Wendy Sinnette of the La Cañada Unified School District, which has among the lowest coronavirus rates in the county and few students from low-income families, has been focused on reopening as many classrooms as possible since November, when students in transitional kindergarten through second grade returned to campus. Third-graders will be welcomed back on Tuesday.
Sinnette spends her days ensuring desks are socially distanced, teachers have KN-95 masks and acrylic plastic dividers are installed.
“When I go on campus and see the in-person instruction that’s happening, it really makes you understand why you’re doing all of this,” she said. “Kids need the structure, to be in school.”
A Times survey of more than 20 school districts throughout Los Angeles County in the past two weeks has found that districts in wealthier, whiter communities such as La Cañada are more likely to be moving full steam ahead to reopen elementary schools and have plans in place to welcome students back as soon as permitted — within as little as two weeks if coronavirus infection rates continue to decline.
They were among the first to bring back their youngest students under waivers and guidelines allowing in-person instruction for high-needs students. These districts are building on that momentum to quickly expand their reopening.
Districts serving less affluent Latino and Black communities — some of the hardest hit by the pandemic — are further behind. Their leaders spoke of the suffering and fears of their families in the darkest months of the pandemic. School officials, measuring the hardships within their communities, largely did not use waivers to bring back young students.
Their teachers and staff, too, harbor ongoing worries about the trajectory of the virus in the neighborhoods they serve. Although they want to bring students back to school, many said their reopening date was uncertain...
I'm not a huge fan of Glenn Greenwald's, particularly in light of his shady operations in years past.
I'll swear though, he's probably the most prescient thinker who gets significant media coverage, if only on Tucker Carlson's show. Whatever the case, he's worth a listen.
Democrats are out for the blood of Trump's 74 million supporters, who Democrats are libeling as "right-wing domestic terrorists." And those MAGA folks aren't stupid, despite what the idiot leftists in Congress think. The Biden regime is not getting off to a good start, and the 2022 midterms will be here before they know it, and poof!, bye bye Democrat majority in both chambers. Then who's going to be labeled "domestic terrorists"? The Republicans, as sad a lot as they are, certainly know how to play tit-for-tat.
So buckle your seat belts as our partisan divisions get worse over these next few years, and China Joe's pledges for "national unity" go up in smoke like a BLM Molotov cocktail.
As a candidate, President Biden promised to make tackling domestic violent extremism—a long-simmering issue in the U.S.—a priority.
The threat has taken on fresh urgency after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which involved several far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
The matter is fraught: Addressing terrorism involving U.S. citizens is complicated by constitutional, political and cultural concerns, homeland-security officials and other experts say.
One long-debated issue is whether the U.S. needs a generic federal domestic terrorism offense with which to charge violent extremists. Mr. Biden’s campaign website said he would make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism “that respects free speech and civil liberties,” though it is unclear if that would entail creating a broad statute. The Biden administration has yet to make any recommendations and is considering civil-rights concerns, a senior administration official said earlier in February.
What is the argument for a domestic terrorism law?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation can robustly monitor international terrorists with the goal of disrupting plots before they occur. But there are legal constraints on what the bureau can do at home.
Its ability to open an investigation solely based on hateful speech or affiliation with known domestic extremists is severely curtailed by the First Amendment and other constitutional provisions, which protect Americans’ rights to speak, organize in groups and even stockpile firearms. The law-enforcement response to domestic terrorism has been largely reactive—investigating and helping prosecute attacks after they occur.
“Domestic terrorism within law enforcement has historically not been given the importance” of its foreign counterpart, said Tom O’Connor, a former FBI special agent who worked on domestic terrorism cases for 23 years.
By law, U.S. officials have limited ability to monitor communications between people on American soil who may be intent on violence, lacking the sweeping surveillance powers against U.S. citizens that they can use overseas.
The U.S. also has no federal terrorism laws “that apply to the most common method of committing a terrorist attack—a mass shooting—where there is no tie to a foreign terrorist organization,” Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor, has said.
In recent years, most ideologically motivated killings in the U.S. have been tied to far-right extremists such as white supremacists, according to researchers, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
Some federal prosecutors, FBI officials and experts tracking American extremism have called for a new law for years, particularly after a string of deadly attacks committed by white supremacists. For example, the man responsible for killing 11 people in 2018’s Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh was hit with 44 charges, including federal hate crimes, but faced no terrorism offenses.
“Enacting a federal crime of domestic terrorism would place it on the same moral plane as international terrorism,” Ms. McCord and Jason Blazakis, a professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies, argued in a 2019 article in Lawfare.
Mr. Blazakis said in a Feb. 11 interview that a statute could result in additional jail time for violent offenders, though such a law would require government oversight to ensure that U.S. authorities don’t infringe on civil rights.
The FBI Agents Association has said it supports creating a law...
I was 9-years-old when the Sylmar earthquake woke up Southern California Feb. 9, 1971 --- and I still remember it clearly. Even in Orange County it caused structural damage. Our house in the City of Orange had some cracks in the walls afterwards. And on that same day, my fourth grade class had a field trip planned to Los Angeles (I think to the tar pits, but I can't remember.) All the kids lining up before classes at 8:00am were chattering on about how their families also felt it. And while there've been stronger earthquakes in California since then (Lomo Prieta in 1989 and the Northridge quake in 1994), apparently it's the Sylmar quake that still resonates the strongest in the geological scientific community.
Also interesting, at the L.A. Times piece below, is that apparently back in the 1970s, the state actually had some good and farsighted leadership who passed legislation that did some good things to protect the state's residents from future temblors. (Must've not been so many Dems in Sacramento back then, for one thing.)
How close Los Angeles came to what would have been — many times over— the deadliest disaster in U.S. history remains a matter of historical conjecture.
When the Sylmar earthquake rumbled through Los Angeles 50 years ago, on Feb. 9, 1971, the top of the earthen Lower Van Norman Dam melted into the reservoir. No one knows exactly what kept the dam near Granada Hills from collapsing. Was it the number of feet of earthen wall that remained? Was it the duration of the quake, since a few more seconds might have shaken loose the rest of the dam face, unleashing a torrent on tens of thousands of homes below?
That the dam survived has rendered those questions a subject for scientific inquiry rather than the annals of catastrophe.
But what might have been remains part of the mystique that sustains the Sylmar earthquake — formally, the San Fernando earthquake — as the keystone in the long arc of seismic knowledge and the practice of earthquake safety. The quake might not have been the Big One, but it still managed to wake California up to a danger that was largely unrecognized. The modern era of earthquake awareness and preparedness is deeply rooted in Sylmar.
Before then, earthquakes were either removed in time — 1906 in San Francisco, 1933 in Long Beach — or physically distant —1964 in Anchorage.
The 6.6 magnitude earthquake that struck the northeast San Fernando Valley seconds after 6 a.m. not only woke up the city but fixated the nation’s budding seismic community as none had before.
“Los Angeles was the city of the future,” said geophysicist Susan Hough of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earthquake Sciences Center. “You had the space-age LAX. You have this modern glistening city and all of a sudden hospitals are being knocked down. It really got people’s attention in many ways.”
The indelible images of Sylmar were the hospitals.
At the Veterans Administration Hospital in Sylmar, two buildings dating to the 1920s collapsed and several others were severely damaged, causing 49 of the 64 deaths attributed to the disaster.
Less costly in lives, yet more startling to engineers and scientists, was the partial collapse of the 4-month-old Olive View Medical Center. Elevator towers tumbled, and the second floor of the 50-bed psychiatric unit collapsed onto the first. Three died there.
No less shocking was the collapse of the soaring, nearly completed overpass from the new Antelope Valley Freeway (Highway 14) to the Golden State Freeway (Interstate 5) in Newhall Pass and portions of the Foothill Freeway (I-210) interchange, where two men in a pickup were killed.
“There were some structures that people thought were safe that turned out not to be,” Hough said.
The hospital buildings and the freeways, all made of concrete, proved unable to roll with the earthquake’s punches.
“We as an engineering community learned from that, that just having strength was not enough,” said Jonathan Stewart, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA. “You had to have ductility” — the ability to stretch. “The [building] code would essentially produce nonductile concrete buildings.”
Another revelation was the damage to single-family homes, at the time thought to be resilient enough to ride out moderate quakes. They proved helpless when the fault rupture reached the surface, a phenomenon that had not previously occurred in an urban earthquake.
“It would go through people’s lawns, it would go through homes,” said Tim Dawson, engineering geologist with the California Geological Survey. “It would torque the buildings. That was the recognition of that earthquake, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t be building on top of faults that can rupture the surface.’”
For the seismic community, the near debacle of the Lower Van Norman Dam, causing no loss of life but forcing the evacuation of 80,000 people, was the most frightening lesson.
“This was a big one because people started to realize you could have killed 100,000 people if that dam had cut loose,” said acting state geologist Steve Bohlen.
Luck may have played a part. The water level had been lowered 10 feet in 1967 after an evaluation had raised doubt about its stability.
“It was very close,” Bohlen said. “Had the shaking gone on for maybe another five seconds or 10, it could have been horrific. It galvanized both the state and the federal government.”
Still more at that top link, including photos and video.
Practically every "executive order" the new president has signed is designed to destroy some group that voted for Trump in November. Jobs? Schmobs? The Democrats don't give a crap about creating jobs. They care about the hardline leftist agenda being pushed out by the weak and feeble new president's freakin' job-destroy anti-capitalist handlers.
The NBA's a black league and besides the NFL loser Colin Kaepernick, the NBA's been the biggest bastion of BLM-style cheerleading. And the MSM? You think this might have been news before the season's 13th game? Nah. MSM types hate the patriotic anthem just as much as Antifa and Black Lives Matter terrorists.
Naturally, this Sky News video (from Australia!) was the only one that came up on a YouTube search, probably not because YouTube's censoring any outlets --- there just are no American outlets that are interested in reporting the story. For shame.
I didn't watch a single minute of yesterday's "snap impeachment" insanity. I do know that CNN made a big day of it, as I just checked the channel guide on my Samsung TV, which showed CNN scheduling hours-long segments blocked out for the "presidential impeachment." It's all such bull.
But I don't begrudge Rep. Jamie Raskin, who just the week before the Capitol riot lost his 25-year-old son, Tommy, who succumbed to depression and took his own life. And apparently, Rep. Raskin previously taught constitutional law before becoming a Member of Congress. And the verdict is in that his opening statement was a barn-burner.
All that aside, like I said, this whole impeachment thing, the second time Trump has been impeached by hate-addled Democrats who've spent four years fomenting and CONDONING the very kind of "incitement" the former president is now being charged with, is a sham; and American's aren't all that enthusiastic about it, according to Gallup, where the poll shows the Trump overall job approval record isn't that bad, with respondents saying "the country made progress in two important areas over the four years he served as president. More also see progress than regression in another five areas."
And you gotta remember, Gallup and every other polling organization underrepresents conservatives and Republicans in their polling, so the public's view on his performance is probably even better than what's reported. But it is what it is. Democrats in the press and polling world can never do wrong, while conservatives are always the "bad ones," clinging to their "guns and religion," or whatever.
Well, I meant to blog this story a couple of weeks ago, but no matter, because it just keeps getting worse.
Check out this interview with Gabriela López, of the San Francisco Board of Education, who's been in charge of the board's decision-making for the local school name changes (the "cancelling) at schools named after President Lincoln and Senator Feinstein, among others. *SMH.*
The MLK hospital in Los Angeles was featured in an astonishing set of articles at the Los Angeles Times way back in 2004. I've never forgotten these stories. In fact, one thing I've never forgotten is that I hoped to God I never ended up getting treated there.
I know this might sound "racist," but MLK-LA at the time was an "all-black"-run health care facility. I don't know, but are black medical professionals less proficient than health professionals of other races or ethnicities? Of course, asking these kind of questions is verboten in the current climate, but I'm just a lowly blogger, so who cares?
In any case, I'm coming back to MLK-LA in light of the New York Times' report out yesterday, "Dying of Covid in a ‘Separate and Unequal’ L.A. Hospital." (And especially notice how it's the status of "separate and unequal" that's apparently the main explanation for why so many people die there. I don't know, maybe it's not just those "systemic" factors that have left the hospital in the lower tier of hospitals in Los Angeles? Just spit-balling, but it's always worth using your critical thinking skills when addressing such topics.)
Inside an overwhelmed facility in the worst-hit part of California, where the patriarchs of two immigrant families were taken when they fell sick.
LOS ANGELES — Over the New Year’s holiday, the grown children of two immigrant families called 911 to report that their fathers were having difficulty breathing. The men, born in Mexico and living three miles from each other in the United States, both had diabetes and high blood pressure. They both worked low-wage, essential jobs — one a minibus driver, the other a cook. And they both hadn’t realized how sick they were.
Three weeks later, the men — Emilio Virgen, 63, and Gabriel Flores, 50 — both died from Covid-19. Their stories were hauntingly familiar at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, by size the hardest-hit hospital in the hardest-hit county in the state now leading the nation in cases and on the brink of surpassing New York with the highest death toll. In the intensive care unit on Jan. 21, Mr. Virgen became No. 207 on the hospital’s list of Covid-19 fatalities; Mr. Flores, just down the hall, became No. 208.
The New York Times spent more than a week inside the hospital, during a period when nearly a quarter of all Covid inpatients there were dying, despite advances in knowledge of the disease. It was an outcome that approached that of some New York hospitals last spring, when the city was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. That rise coincided with a surge of cases in Southern California, a doubling of the mortality rate in Los Angeles hospitals over all and the spread of a new local strain that may be more transmissible than the more prevalent one.
Eight out of ten of those who died at M.L.K. hospital were Hispanic, a group with the highest Covid-19 death rates in Los Angeles County, followed by Black residents. County data also showed that the most impoverished Los Angeles residents, many of them around the hospital in South Los Angeles, are dying of the disease at four times the rate of the wealthiest.
Michelle Goldson, an I.C.U. nurse who cared for both Mr. Virgen and Mr. Flores, said many patients had a “distrust of the health care system, distrust of doctors” and came in only when desperately ill. Severe cases, she said, weren’t limited to older people. “Everybody’s dying here,” she said. As she headed home one recent evening, she waved at a 27-year-old patient who was sitting up eating dinner. When she returned the next morning, he was dead. “What kind of virus is this?” she asked.
Right now, it is one that is merciless in dense, low-income neighborhoods like those where Mr. Virgen and Mr. Flores lived. Relatives similarly described them as hardworking and upbeat, determined to provide for their families. Mr. Virgen raised four children who all went to college, and stubbornly nurtured scrawny mango and lemon trees. Mr. Flores was proud that his oldest son, a Dreamer who had been slipped into the country as a toddler, had graduated from the Los Angeles police academy.
For M.L.K.’s chief executive, Dr. Elaine Batchlor, the inequities in disease and death from Covid reflect those long present in the community. Patients come from what she termed a “medical desert,” with chronic shortages of primary care doctors and other health services.
In the best of times, her small institution cannot match what many other hospitals offer, from caring for preemies to major heart attack victims. Now, amid the pandemic, the hospital can’t test experimental therapies, can’t draw on a large pool of specialized staff in a surge and can’t offer last-chance care on an external lung machine.
During the peak, M.L.K. treated more Covid patients than some Los Angeles hospitals three to four times its size. While Dr. Batchlor emphasizes that her institution has learned to be nimble, she also says it has been overwhelmed. She has pleaded with the governor for help, tried to shame other institutions into accepting transfers of patients and spoken out about the failings of American health care.
“We’ve created a separate and unequal hospital system and a separate and unequal funding system for low-income communities,” she said in an interview. “And now with Covid, we’re seeing the disproportionate impact.”
Whatever the cause of all this medical heartbreak, it's definitely hitting hardest those "marginalized" communities leftists are always blathering about.
In any case, kudos for her for scoring an opinion piece at NYT, as that leftist craphole is no doubt right up her ideological alley. That said, she did once say that she "sometimes pays attention to [Robert Stacy McCain] because he's so radical."
If I had to guess who inspired Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, to kick himself upstairs and appoint Andy Jassy, a deputy, as his successor as chief executive, I might wager that at least part of the blame can be laid on Lucy McBath, the freshman Georgia congresswoman, and her understated grilling of one of the world’s richest men at a July hearing held by the House antitrust subcommittee.
At the hearing, widely regarded as a watershed moment for America’s tech giants, most of the subcommittee members — and all the Democrats — had coalesced around a consensus: The business models of the four biggest tech companies depend on cementing and exploiting their statuses as gatekeepers to the internet, and scheming to bring down anyone who threatens their power to exact ever higher tolls on every minute we spend on the internet.
Only Mr. Bezos, however, had explicitly set out to become a ubiquitous “middleman” of all internet commerce. So most of the lawmakers pushed him to admit that he had systematically bought rivals and lost money selling goods and services below cost solely to destroy the competition, in violation of numerous federal laws that had long gone unenforced — or, as the antitrust scholar Lina Khan has put it, “charted the company’s growth by first drawing a map of antitrust laws, and then devising routes to smoothly bypass them.”
Before the hearing, Ms. McBath had shown little interest in waging class war on billionaire elites. A flight attendant who entered politics after the murder of her teenage son in a crime enabled by Florida’s infamous Stand Your Ground law, she had endorsed Mike Bloomberg in the Democratic presidential primary race. But interviews she and her staff had conducted with small business owners who sold their goods on Amazon’s platform had clearly left her in no mood to suffer fools.
During her questioning, Ms. McBath played an audio recording from a woman later described in a congressional report as a successful textbook seller who said Amazon had cut off her account 10 months earlier. “This business feeds a total of 14 people, which includes three children and one 90-year-old granny,” she said in the recording.
The report said the bookseller’s listings had been kicked off the platform with no explanation. Like virtually all successful Amazon sellers, she purchased fulfillment and storage services from the company because the algorithms would bury her listings if she fulfilled orders herself. But Amazon returned only a small portion of her inventory, continuing instead to charge her for storing it in its warehouses...
Rep. McBath is a radical Democrat who can go get screwed, for all I care.
But it is what it is, and Moe's seemingly gotten more radical since I interacted with on Twitter a decade ago.
Besides, Amazon's never treated this blog badly, so I'm not going to gripe about a company that not only sends me money once a month, but one that also provides all kind of services that have improved my consumer life (like my own book-buying habit).
So whatever. Bezos will still be pulling the strings at Amazon no matter who he names as the new "C.E.O."
I usually just mute the commercials during the game, but my wife was watching too, and she mainly likes the commercials and the halftime show, heh.
And I did see some folks on Twitter draggin' on Springsteen as a mediocre musician and uber-leftist clod. Be that as it may, I liked the ad, because, first, I drive a Dodge Challenger and my wife's previous vehicle was a Jeep Liberty SUV; and second, I like the message: It goes without saying that Americans need to focus more on the "middle" of the country, and I guess the ad's trying to convey that we need to seek the "middle" as Americans, and pull away from the freak fringes (on both sides, frankly) that are easily pulling the rest of the country to the brink of ruin.
In any case, you may like this or may not, as is your prerogative. I post you decide lol.
That's the headline for the L.A. Times' Super Bowl coverage this morning. You may not like Tom Brady, and I'm not a particularly big fan, as I think the Patriots under Belichick and Brady were ruthless at winning, and weren't, by any means, beneath cheating to do it.
But Brady broke all previous boundaries (again, really) at Raymond James Stadium last night, with a socially distanced crowd of just 25,000, with 7,500 of those seats reserved (and deserved) for Covid pandemic "front-line workers."
Tom Brady screamed to the sky. He barked into facemasks. He pounded his palms.
Then, when his magnificent moment was clinched midway through the third quarter, he ran off the field with the loudest gesture of all, the silent waving of a single finger that stood for a legacy.
Of seven Super Bowl wins, this was his most enduring.
Of Super Bowl wins spanning three different decades, this was his most eternal.
For the GOAT, this was the greatest.
To Tom Brady, I ultimately bow.
In Tom Brady, I finally believe.
I picked against him, and I’ve never looked more foolish. The majority of bettors picked against his team, and they’ve never appeared more broke.
It wasn’t supposed to happen, it couldn’t happen, it shouldn’t happen, but on a historic night at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium on Sunday, Tom Brady even outdid Tom Brady.
The greatest quarterback ever became the greatest football player ever, and arguably the greatest American team sports athlete ever, as he led his Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a stunning 31-9 rout of the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV...
The "black sins" here are those of "Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC)" staffers at the Old Gray Lady, who are cancelling anyone, no matter how good or how esteemed in their past work, like Donald McNeil, who as noted, seems like an arrogant bastard, but I read his reporting myself, and dang, he's good.
But he's out now. A victim of the cancerous cancel culture that is destroying American institutions up and down the line, from corporate America, to newsrooms, and especially the public schools.
On what Black History Month and the racial reckoning mean at the New York Times …
Over the past week, the Times’ crossword puzzles have included many clues having to do with black culture and issues, and in fact have been by black constructors. A fine gesture for Black History Month.
But then the other night we learned that longtime reporter Donald McNeil, who has done groundbreaking work on the pandemic, has been fired, at 67. His sin was that on an NYT-sponsored educational trip with teenagers, he used the N-word in referring to it (as opposed to actually using the word).
Inevitably, in response to outcry over how needlessly punitive this is, his inquisitors and defenders will note that he is documented to have said some other things that suggest that he is not completely on board with what a certain educated orthodoxy considers the proper positions on race, and that he was reputed to have treated some staffers in a discriminatory way. However, if the complaints were only these, it is reasonable to suppose that he would still have his job. It was the N-word thing that pushed things over the edge, and is the focus of the letter signed by 150 staffers demanding, in effect, his head on a pole.
That is, for people like this, the N-word has gone from being a slur to having, in its mere shape and sound, a totemic taboo status directly akin to how Harry Potter characters process the name Voldemort and theatre people maintain a pox on saying “Macbeth” inside a theatre. The letter roasts McNeil for “us[ing] language that is offensive and unacceptable,” implying a string of language, a whole point or series thereof, something like a stream, a stretch – “language.” But no: they are referring to his referring to a single word.
The kinds of people who got McNeil fired think of this new obsessive policing of the N-word as a kind of strength. Their idea is “We are offended by this word, we demand that you don’t use it, and if you do use it, we are going to make sure you lose your job.” But the analogy is off here. This would be strength if the issue were the vote, or employment. Here, people are demanding the right to exhibit performative delicacy, and being abetted in it by non-black fellow travellers.
One way we know that this pox on even uttering the N-word to refer to it is that it was not the common consensus quite recently...
On Monday, Iran tested a new rocket. The Zuljanah rocket is a 25-meter (82-foot) three-stage rocket with a solid fuel engine for its first two stages and a liquid fuel rocket for its third stage. It can carry a 225 kg (496-pound) payload.
The Zuljanah’s thrust is 75 kilotons, which is far more than required to launch satellite into orbit. The large thrust makes the Zuljanah more comparable to an intercontinental ballistic missile than a space launch vehicle. The US’s LGM-30G Minuteman-III land-based ICBM for instance, has 90 kiloton thrust. The Zuljanah can rise to a height of 500 kilometers for low-earth orbit or, if launched as a missile, its range is 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) – far enough to reach Britain from Iran.
Israeli missile experts estimate that Iran has paid $250 million to develop the Zuljanah project. Monday’s rocket launch itself likely cost tens of millions of dollars.
Iran is in deep economic distress today. Between the COVID-19 global recession, Iran’s endemic corruption and mismanagement and US economic sanctions, 35% of Iranians live in abject poverty today. Iran’s rial has lost 80% of its value over the past four years. Official data place the unemployment rate at 25% but the number is thought to be much higher. Inflation last year stood at 44% overall. Food prices have risen 59%.
When viewed in the context of Iran’s impoverishment, the government’s investment in a thinly disguised ICBM program is all the more revealing. With 35% of the population living in utter destitution and food prices rising steeply, the regime has chosen ICBMs over feeding its people.
Most of the media coverage of the Zuljanah launch failed to register the significance of the project both for what it says about Iran’s capabilities and what it says about the regime’s intentions. Instead, the coverage focused on the timing of the test. The Iranians conducted the test as they flamboyantly breach the limitations on their nuclear activities which they accepted when they agreed to the 2015 nuclear deal.
The Iranians are now enriching uranium to 20% purity – well beyond the 3.67% permitted under the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, (JCPOA). They are using prohibited advanced centrifuges for enrichment in cascades at their Natanz nuclear installation. They are beginning uranium cascades with sixth generation centrifuges at their underground Fordo nuclear reactor in total defiance of the JCPOA. They are stockpiling uranium yellowcake far beyond the quantities permitted in the deal. They are producing uranium metal in breach of the deal. And they are test firing rockets that can easily be converted to nuclear capable ICBMs.
Reportage of Iran’s aggressive nuclear has presented it in the context of the new Biden administration in Washington. It is argued that Iran is taking these aggressive steps to pressure the Biden administration to keep its word to return the US to the JCPOA and abrogate economic sanctions on Iran. In 2018, then-President Donald Trump renounced the JCPOA and re-imposed the economic sanctions that were abrogated in 2015 with the deal’s implementation. Iran’s idea is that out of fear of its rapid nuclear strides, the Biden team will move urgently to appease Iran.
Notably, the Zuljanah test exposed the strategic insanity at the heart of deal, which was conceived, advanced and concluded by then-President Barack Obama and his senior advisors.
The main strategic assumption that guided Obama and his advisors was that Iran was a status quo, responsible power and should be viewed as part of the solution – or “the solution” — rather than the problem in the Middle East. Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism, its proxy wars and its nuclear program were unfortunate consequences of a regional power balance that put too much power in the hands of US allies – first and foremost Israel and Saudi Arabia – and too little power in Iran’s hands. To stabilize the Middle East, Obama argued, Iran needed to be empowered and US allies needed to be weakened. As then-Vice President Joe Biden put it in 2013, “Our biggest problem was our allies.”
A new balance of power, Obama argued would respect Iran’s “equities” in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. As for the nuclear program, which was illegal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran signed, it was totally understandable. Given that Pakistan, India and allegedly Israel have nuclear arsenals, Obama’s advisors said, Iran’s desire for one was reasonable.
With this outlook informing its negotiators, the JCPOA’s legitimization of Iran’s nuclear program makes sense. The purpose of the deal wasn’t to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. It was to “balance” Israel by delegitimizing any Israeli action to block Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
While Israel and America’s other allies would be massively harmed by this new balance of power, Obama and his European partners assessed that they would be more secure. They were convinced that once secure in its position as a regional hegemon, Iran would leave them alone.
The deal reflected this view. A non-binding clause in the JCPOA calls for Iran to limit the range of its ballistic missiles to 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) – taking the US and most of Europe out of range.
Many commentators view the Biden administration nothing more than Obama’s third term. And from the perspective of its Iran policies, this is certainly the case. President Joe Biden’s Iran policy was conceived and is being implemented by the same people who negotiated the JCPOA under Obama...
She nails it, as usual (and there's more at the link).
One of the things you learn, if you spend as many years in the news business as I have, is that the news is not random. That is to say, the question of what stories will appear on the front page of the New York Times is not merely matter of what happened the day before, because all kinds of things happen every day, and there is only so much space on the front page of a paper. Actual choices have to be made, by human beings called “editors,” to determine what’s front-page news, what gets stuck back on Page A14, and what never gets reported at all.
The process of deciding what is “news” is not random, as I say, even though some events are of such unquestioned importance that they must be at the top of the front page. If you picked up any American newspaper on Sept. 12, 2001, this was rather obvious, but such historic events are rare, and on most days the question of what goes on A1 leaves a fair amount of leeway to the editors to make their own choices. There may be one or two stories of such unquestioned importance that they must be on the front page, but when it comes to the rest — Story 3, Story 4, Story 5, etc. — the editor’s have more room to exercise discretion.
Trust me, there is often a lot internal disagreement over such things. When I was at The Washington Times, some reporters would get very angry if a story they had pitched for A1 didn’t make the cut. It was generally the policy that A1 would have at least one Metro story, and on most days also there would be something from Sports or Features on the front page, so that out of a total of seven or eight front-page stories, the National desk would only get five or six. Well, if Bill Gertz had a story about the Chinese military that he felt deserved to be on A1, he’d get rather peeved — and understandably so — if his story was bumped back to Page A3 so that we could have, say, a feature about Georgetown University basketball on the front page. It happens.
Human beings make decisions about what counts as front-page news, and there is a certain amount of selectivity involved. You know who figured this out? Matt Drudge. The story is that when he was working as the overnight clerk at a 7-Eleven in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., he would read all the newspapers to pass the time in the wee hours when there were no customers. Reading the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Times, the New York Post, USA Today, etc., back-to-back every day for weeks on end, Drudge began to notice the different choices reflected in the content of the papers. From that insight sprang his subsequent approach to aggregating news at the Drudge Report (which, alas, he seems to have turned over to a gang of liberal dimwits in the past couple of years). Thanks to the Internet, all of us now have more access to different sources than was possible for most people back when Drudge was reading all those newspapers at 7-Eleven, so there is more widespread understanding of how media bias operates.
“Why is this story national news?”
That’s the question you have to ask, whenever a crime story makes it to CNN or to the network evening news broadcasts. Because America is a very large country, with more than 325 million people, the vast majority of crime in the United States is strictly “local news.” There were more than 16,000 murders in America in 2019, which works out to about 45 murder per day. How many of those murders even get mentioned on CNN? Not many. So when something like the Trayvon Martin shooting or the death of George Floyd becomes national news — hourly updates 24/7 on CNN — this means that a decision was made by someone. These stories didn’t just coincidentally become national news. On the day that George Floyd died, about 40 other Americans were shot to death, but none of those other deaths were deemed newsworthy by CNN...
Actually, it's both Donald McNeil and Andy Mills (a podcaster of whom I've never heard).
But McNeil was a superstar at the newspaper. Back in spring/summer 2020, my wife and I saw him appear on CNN a number of times. He's an arrogant bastard, but he did seem to know what he was talking about. But he made an extremely detrimental faux pas while leading a field trip of young people to Peru in 2019. As Andrew Sullivan noted on Twitter last night, regarding McNeil's resignation, "This reads like a confession procured by the Khmer Rouge. It’s both ridiculous and terrifying."
As I always tell my (extremely "woke") 25-year-old son, be careful of cancel culture, and avoid partaking in it, because it always come back to you, with not-so-excellent consequences. Or another way of putting it, "the revolution eats its own."
Two journalists responsible for some of The New York Times’s most high-profile work of the last three years have left the paper after their past behavior was criticized inside and outside the organization.
In two memos on Friday afternoon, Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, and Joe Kahn, the managing editor, informed the staff of the departures of Donald G. McNeil Jr., a science correspondent who reported on the coronavirus pandemic, and Andy Mills, an audio journalist who helped create “The Daily” and was a producer and co-host of “Caliphate,” a 2018 podcast that was found to have serious flaws after an internal investigation.
Mr. McNeil, a veteran of The Times who has reported from 60 countries, was an expert guide on a Times-sponsored student trip to Peru in 2019. At least six students or their parents complained about comments he had made, The Daily Beast reported last week. The Times confirmed he used a “racist slur” on the trip.
In their memo, Mr. Baquet and Mr. Kahn wrote that Mr. McNeil “has done much good reporting over four decades” but added “that this is the right next step.”
The statement was a turnabout from last week, when Mr. Baquet sent a note to the staff defending his decision to give Mr. McNeil “another chance.”
“I authorized an investigation and concluded his remarks were offensive and that he showed extremely poor judgment,” Mr. Baquet wrote, “but that it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious.”
Days after that note, a group of Times staff members sent a letter to the publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, that was critical of the paper’s stance on Mr. McNeil. “Despite The Times’s seeming commitment to diversity and inclusion,” said the letter, which was viewed by a Times reporter, “we have given a prominent platform — a critical beat covering a pandemic disproportionately affecting people of color — to someone who chose to use language that is offensive and unacceptable by any newsroom’s standards.”
Mr. Sulzberger, Mr. Baquet and Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, replied to the group in a letter on Wednesday, saying: “We welcome this input. We appreciate the spirit in which it was offered and we largely agree with the message.”
In a statement to Times staff on Friday, Mr. McNeil wrote that he had used the slur in a discussion with a student about the suspension of a classmate who had used the term...
Well, this is the administration that claims to want to "use diplomacy" and "rebuild" alliances in order to "restore America's standing in the world."
Well, what's to restore?
The Trump administration had, no doubt, perhaps its greatest successes in foreign policy. At the video below, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gives a somber, reasoned defense of his leadership, at both the CIA and the State Department, while serving on President Trump's foreign policy team. Pompeo notes that no American diplomats or CIA operatives were killed or bombed under his watch. He also defended the Trump administration's record at maintaining and building alliances, particularly in the Middle East, where the U.S. entered into historic agreements that have literally shifted the balance of power away from enemies such as Iran, in favor of our longtime friends and allies, especially Israel.
Under the Trump administration, high-value and dangerous enemies intent to take out American troops and other U.S. government officials (and regular American citizens) were liquidated with very carefully-targeted actions that left minimal collateral damage (for example the pinpoint drone strike against Iran's Qassim Suleimani, the Commander of Iranian Forces, who had in the past been the Iran's leading strategist on Iran's attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and elsewhere, and U.S. intelligence reports indicated that more attacks were in the works under Suleimani's leadership). To say, as Joe Biden does a the video linked above, that "America's back" is bluster and hubris from the new Democrat administration filled with idiotic war-hawks.
Now while I'm no isolationist, at all, I prefer to fight back when America is threatened and attacked, and screw lame "diplomacy" when U.S. vital interests are at stake. But restraining U.S. power, especially when the use of credible threats remain always in the background, is preferable to the all-out bluster approach under the new administration's foreign policy team. I mean, Pompeo notes that no new wars were hatched under President Trump, that troop withdrawals were taking place, and that in fact, it was the previous Democrat administration of Barack Obama who "lost Crimea" to Russian aggression in that southern zone of Ukrainian sovereignty, and it was the Obama administration that stood aside as Russia's "Little Green Men" launched a clandestine incursion into Ukrainian territory proper, to destabilize the legitimate government there in Kiev.
So now we're going to KEEP troops in Afghanistan. We've been there for almost 20 years, and saying this as a big supporter of our goals in Afghanistan from the start, enough is enough. If the Taliban don't want peace, and they don't appear to be heading in that direction, abandon those losers, work with real hard diplomacy, and wield the stick of our military forces to send the big message to those backtracking on previous agreements with the U.S. government under the Trump administration that they will bear heavy costs. Maybe a few well-placed Predators drones targeting the renascent al-Qaeda ready to come out from the hillsides and safe-zones in the mountainous regions in Pakistan, will get the message that the U.S. means business, and that's without any boots on the ground.
Everybody with a cool and calm demeanor, and personal self-honestly knows this. It's the new "globalists" in this new Biden administration who will misread the tea leaves and end up botching the current peace, and Biden himself will go down as a freakin' authoritarian and warmongering nincompoop.
WASHINGTON — President Biden is under pressure to delay the withdrawal of the remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a decision that has forced a vexing early debate within his national security team about whether ending America’s longest war will plunge the violence-plagued country deeper into chaos.
It’s a decision that Biden inherited from former President Trump, who negotiated a withdrawal timetable with the Taliban but left the final and most difficult step of actually ending the war to his successor.
Though Biden has long favored shrinking the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, current and former national security officials warn the president that even after nearly two decades in Afghanistan, the departure of U.S. forces there could lead to a resurgence of Al Qaeda, the militant group behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Biden’s national security team is looking for ways to pressure the Taliban to reduce attacks, break with Al Qaeda and return to peace talks before the final 2,500 troops are scheduled to depart in four months, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.
But senior military and intelligence officials are skeptical about prospects for an Afghanistan peace deal, contending that Taliban militants have shown little willingness to reduce violence or enter into a power-sharing agreement with the Afghan government, the officials said.
“We believe that a U.S. withdrawal will provide the terrorists an opportunity to reconstitute, and that reconstitution will take place within about 18 to 36 months,” said retired Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump. Dunford offered that assessment Wednesday, during the unveiling of a congressionally mandated study on policy options in Afghanistan.
But Biden faces at least as powerful political pressure not to put off withdrawal indefinitely — from liberals in his party as well as many other Americans who favor bringing troops home — even with the risk that terrorist groups will grow stronger.
“This is unacceptable,” tweeted Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) after hearing the study group recommendation to delay withdrawal. “Those who had any part in getting us into this 20 year war should not be opining about keeping us mired in it.”
At the height of the war a decade ago, U.S. forces numbered more than 100,000. By Trump’s last year in office, however, that figure had dropped from 14,000 to only 2,500 — the lowest number since the invasion in 2001.
At the same time, Taliban attacks on Afghan government troops have surged, along with assassinations of government officials and activists. Peace talks between the government and the Taliban that began last fall have stalled, and many Afghans have grown fearful that a U.S. withdrawal will cause the fighting to worsen.
If the U.S. pulls out on schedule, but without progress on a peace settlement, the Taliban is likely to step up its attacks on Afghan troops and suicide bombings in urban areas, officials say.
But an order by Biden to halt the withdrawal is likely to reignite the U.S. shooting war with the Taliban, extending American involvement in the two-decade-old conflict.
Another option is for Biden to announce a delay in the U.S. withdrawal, in hopes of convincing Taliban officials that their only option is to negotiate with the Afghan government.
“It’s going to be a tough call,” said a senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions who agreed to discuss deliberations under the condition of anonymity. “If we stay after the deadline, the Taliban is likely to take that as a sign that we are not leaving and start attacking us.”
The Afghanistan Study Group, a congressionally mandated panel of former military officers, diplomats and lawmakers charged with recommending a future path, called Wednesday for the Biden administration to extend the May withdrawal deadline “in order to give the peace process sufficient time to produce an acceptable result.”
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, is conducting an administration review of the withdrawal agreement signed by the Trump administration and the Taliban last February and is expected to recommend options to Biden within weeks, officials said.
Biden has kept Zalmay Khalilzad, the Trump official who negotiated the deal and has led efforts to push the peace talks along, in his post, a possible sign that Biden hopes to salvage at least some of the Trump exit strategy.
The Trump-Taliban agreement set the May deadline for U.S. forces to leave, along with more than 10,000 Pentagon contractors who play an important role in assisting Afghan troops fighting the Taliban. In return for a hard deadline on withdrawal, the Taliban agreed to halt attacks on U.S. troops, a commitment it has honored.
But Biden administration officials say the Taliban has not complied with other parts of the deal, including a commitment to seek a cease-fire and to prevent Afghan territory it controls from being used by Al Qaeda members. Taliban officials have accused the U.S. of violating the deal in carrying out airstrikes to help Afghan troops — a charge the U.S. denies.
One likely outcome of Sullivan’s review is a renewed U.S. push for a cease-fire, or at least a temporary reduction in violence, between the Taliban and the Afghan government. That would keep alive the prospect that U.S. troops could leave on schedule or close to it, several U.S. officials said.
The Biden administration “is committed to a political settlement in Afghanistan, one that includes the Afghan government,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told reporters Tuesday. He added that any decision to reduce U.S. troops below 2,500 would be “conditions-based,” a Pentagon term meaning not tied to a fixed timetable.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III sounded out the views of Marine Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the top commander in the Middle East, in a telephone call Monday, according to a Defense official.
McKenzie and Army Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, oversaw the steep drawdown of U.S. forces last year, but are said by associates to have deep reservations about a full withdrawal.
There are also about 8,000 troops from other countries under NATO command in Afghanistan, who would also depart if the U.S. left.
During the presidential campaign, Biden promised to “bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan” and to “focus our mission on Al Qaeda” and Islamic State, extremist groups with small but entrenched followings in Afghanistan.
He has long argued that if Al Qaeda ever reemerges in Afghanistan — where it mounted devastating terrorist attacks against the United States 20 years ago — the militants could be dealt with by small special operations teams and with airstrikes, instead of large numbers of ground troops...
I mean, Gayle King, who's surprising fair usually, considering she's a gushy progressive most of the time, doesn't press "Sandy" Cortez about her outright falsities about her "harrowing" experience during the so-called "right-wing domestic terrorist siege" of the Capitol. Everybody know she was safe and secure in her office, and wasn't about to be "murdered" by Ted Cruz, or anyone else.
She's just a perpetual victim, and it's frankly sad and unbecoming for such an otherwise hip and talented woman. But that's the Dem playbook, and she's the Pied Piper of leftist-Dem "bawling" victimization scams.
“I cannot remember the last time I did not worry, I did not spend my day worrying about so much stuff. Every day is something different. I just want to wake up and go through my day and not worry, and not wonder, and not know what the future holds. Because this right here sucks. And I’m sick of it. I’m so sick of this.”“There is just so much talking. Talking all the time. All day long. Words. Words. Words. So much talking. I just, I need no more talking. No more words. I need no more. No more. So much talking. I just need silence. Please. Silence.”“I love my kids. I love my family. But we are together all of the time. Like, I never appreciated teachers and school as much as I did now. I don’t want to be my child’s teacher. I am not doing good with this. But, all things considered, things are cool. Somebody else rear my children, please. I miss going out. I miss being drunk. I miss dancing.”
I was watching this segment on Tucker tonight. William Jacobson started out pretty much as an everyday blogger about 10 years ago, and he's turned his blog into an entire project to literally hit-back at the radical left, across the entire country, in this case, with initiatives and programs that are available to all. He's a real mensch, heh.
My appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight about our new database and interactive map of Critical Race Training in Higher Education, criticalrace.org: "we’re trying to empower parents and students."
I've already said my piece about the disgusting CNN hack Jack Tapper, seen at the video below. Boy, has he really O.D.'d on the Kool-Aid, man.
But here's WSJ's write up on Representative Greene, who unlike Liz Cheney (as noted) is actually a movement conservative, despite her loony-bin statements and tweets (those mostly being "weaponized" by hate-mongering leftist-Dems at almost all the network and cable news shows). I'm not defending her whatever "Q-Anon" affiliations, or what not, not at all. My point, and any reasonable person's as well, is that if she's to be punished by the "uniparty" leadership in Congress, it's not going to end up well, especially for Republicans currently throwing her under the bus.
WASHINGTON—Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she regretted past social-media comments embracing conspiracy theories, hours ahead of an expected vote by the House to sanction the freshman Georgia Republican by stripping her committee assignments.
In a speech on the House floor Thursday, Mrs. Greene said she regretted posts she made about QAnon, the far-right-wing, loosely organized network and community of believers who embrace a range of unsubstantiated beliefs. Mrs. Greene said she realized in 2018 that she was receiving misinformation and stopped believing it.
“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true and I would ask questions about them and talk about them and that is absolutely what I regret,” she said Thursday, wearing a “Free Speech” mask. “If it weren’t for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today and you couldn’t point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong, because I’ve lived a very good life that I’m proud of.”
Democrats criticized Mrs. Greene’s speech, saying her remarks fell short of an apology. “It was unpersuasive,” said Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D., N.C.). “It is so easy to say ‘I am sorry.’ Those are three important words in our culture.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) opted Wednesday not to remove Mrs. Greene from her committees over her incendiary past comments, but urged her to publicly denounce them. Democrats said they would hold a vote to kick her off unless Republicans acted first.
The resolution, which Democrats can pass with a simple majority, would push Mrs. Greene out of her spots on the budget and education committees. But Republicans warned that Democrats would be setting a dangerous precedent by unilaterally ousting lawmakers from the other party off committees, and that such a move would open the door for Republicans to retaliate, should they retake the House majority next year.
“I remain profoundly concerned about House Republican leadership’s acceptance of extreme conspiracy theorists,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) told reporters Thursday. She said she wasn’t concerned about the possibility of GOP retribution. “If any of our members threaten the safety of other members, we’ll be the first ones to take them off of committee,” she said.
Stripping committee assignments is seen as a severe punishment by taking away a lawmaker’s ability to shape and influence legislation. Former GOP Iowa Rep. Steve King was stripped of his assignments by fellow Republicans in 2019 after questioning what was wrong with white supremacy. He lost his primary in 2020.
A loyalist to former President Donald Trump, Mrs. Greene emerged as the most contentious new House Republican before arriving in Washington. While running for the GOP nomination last year, her online activity began to draw attention, including posts tying her to QAnon and other conspiracy theories, as well as comments vilifying Muslims and other groups...
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