The real cost of imperial hubris is always borne by the victims

Now that the Taliban has swept back into power in Afghanistan with great rapidity, recriminations are pouring in with all the principal actors trying to avoid blame for the speed by shifting it to others. This is the normal aftermath of any debacle and the pattern is predictable. One target has been the intelligence services, blaming them for not knowing the strength of the Taliban. But the intelligences services like the CIA are experts at deflecting blame and they have produced background sources saying that they correctly predicted the rapid Taliban takeover but that the administration ignored their reports.
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SNAP benefits to increase permanently

In a welcome move, the Biden administration has permanently increased the amount of support families get under SNAP. SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, that we used to call ‘food stamps’, and is meant to provide needy families with assistance to buy food.

The Biden administration has revised the nutrition standards of the food stamp program and prompted the largest permanent increase to benefits in the program’s history, a move that will give poor people more power to fill their grocery carts but add billions of dollars to the cost of a program that feeds one in eight Americans.

Under rules to be announced on Monday and put in place in October, average benefits will rise more than 25 percent from prepandemic levels. All 42 million people in the program will receive additional aid. The move does not require congressional approval, and unlike the large pandemic-era expansions, which are starting to expire, the changes are intended to last.

For at least a decade, critics of the benefits have said they were too low to provide an adequate diet. More than three-quarters of households exhaust their benefits in the first half of the monthly cycle, and researchers have linked subsequent food shortages to problems as diverse as increased hospital admissions, more school suspensions and lower SAT scores.

Under the new rules, average monthly benefits, $121 per person before the pandemic, will rise by $36. Although the increase may seem modest to middle-class families, proponents say it will reduce hunger, improve nutrition and lead to better health.

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Lindsey Graham has always been a weasel

Color me unsurprised. Lindsey Graham had apparently called Joe Biden after his election victory to privately tell him that his attacks on Biden’s son Hunter during the campaign was the minimum that he had to do to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces. This is being treated as news.

The South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham called Joe Biden after his victory over Donald Trump to tell the president he only joined attacks on his son, Hunter Biden, as a “bare minimum” to satisfy Trump supporters.

The detail was included in a lengthy profile of Graham and his Washington manoeuvres published by the New York Times. It said the call, intended to “revive a friendship damaged by [Graham’s] call for a special prosecutor to investigate the overseas business dealings” of Hunter Biden, was “short, and not especially sweet”.
…

In February the first lady told CNN: “I don’t know what happened to Lindsey. We used to be great friends. I mean, we traveled together with the [Senate] foreign relations committee, we had dinner, you know … And now he’s changed.”

The Times said Graham made his call to Biden in November, even while he actively supported Trump’s attempts to overturn his defeat, himself ending up under investigation for a call to an election official in Georgia.

Citing two anonymous sources close to the president, the Times said that shortly after the call, Biden said: “Lindsey’s been a personal disappointment, because I was a personal friend of his.

Why are people in politics and the media always acting surprised when Graham shows himself to be an unprincipled, self-promoting, duplicitous, back-stabbing, hack? He has not ‘changed’. There is a long trail of evidence that he has been this way all along, changing his views according to the prevailing winds and showing no hesitation on turning on is friends for political gain. When people like Jill Biden say that he has ‘changed’, surely they must realize that his character has not changed, what happened is that he felt that being friends with the Bidens was no longer to his advantage, and so he merely once again changed his alliances to advance his own interests?

Could the massive tragedy of Afghanistan have been averted?

So yet another effort by a foreign power to determine the future of Afghanistan has come to an ignominious end. (See here for a timeline of the US war in that country.) While the speed with which the Taliban finally entered Kabul and took control of the country may have come as a surprise, the end result is surely not. I am struggling (and failing) to think of any time in the post-colonial era where a foreign power invaded a country, overthrew the government, installed a new one more to its liking, and then left, leaving behind a stable society. There are going to be many heated arguments trying to identify who ‘lost’ Afghanistan and pin the blame on them but the reality is that it was always never winnable in the first place. Pouring weapons and soldiers and money into the country just provided an illusion of control.
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When bonkers beliefs lead to murders

The internet is awash with examples of people in the US who believe in the craziest things. Even without seeking them out, my casual websurfing throws up so many that I have become somewhat numb to the examples that I find that demonstrate deep stupidity. But once in a while, I come across things that really boggle the mind, the more so when the perfectly normal way that people start out talking give you no warning that they are about to say things that are completely bonkers.

Take this woman who rose to speak at a school board meeting in Kansas where they were debating whether to require students to wear masks.

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Masks are coming back

I just returned from a trip to the supermarket and noticed that pretty much everyone, except for four people of whom three were young, is wearing masks again. While I always wore masks there and at any indoor venue where I was not sure that everyone was vaccinated, I had noticed last month that mask usage had dropped considerably. I wondered whether people would be more resistant to the advice to mask up again and was glad to see that, at least in this area, people seem to have adopted them again. The county has as yet not mandated that everyone mask up indoors, though with the rising number of infected people due to the Delta variant, I expect to see such a mandate soon.
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Weaponizing language

What do the terms ‘politically correct’, ‘cancel culture’, ‘woke’, ‘death panels’ and ‘death tax’ have in common?

They are all terms that have neutral or positive meanings that right wingers have turned into terms of abuse.

‘Politically correct’ has a long history, originating as a sarcastic reference to orthodox opinions in intra-left debates that then morphed into meaning the avoidance of using terms that were offensive, mostly to marginalized groups. It meant being sensitive to others in our use of language. Weirdly, the right wingers have used it to defend the right of those who want to say offensive things, arguing that they are the victims of ‘political correctness’. When someone begins by saying, “I know that this is not politically correct but …”, you can be sure that they are going to say something that will make you cringe if not angry.
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Barack Obama was a mediocre president and is now a terrible ex-president

Despite some vague gestures towards progressivism early on in his life, Barack Obama clearly saw that being a Wall Street-loving neoliberal while spouting lofty rhetoric was his ticket to bigger things. After largely squandering away his chance while president to strive for major accomplishments, since leaving office, he has been indulging in extremely ostentatious self-glorification, as Liza Featherstone writes.

He’s distinguished himself as an enemy of labor and friend of racist cops. NBA players began to go on strike last August after Jacob Blake, a black man, was shot by police seven times in front of his kids, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Amid a national uprising over the shooting and many other acts of racist police brutality, Obama called LeBron James and players’ union leader Chris Paul and urged them to get back on the court and finish the playoffs, which they did.
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How Trump blew it on infrastructure

After much back and forth, the US Senate has finally passed an infrastructure bill. The bill has a total cost of one trillion dollars and was arrived at after weeks of haggling in which Republicans fought to reduce it from the more ambitious plan that Joe Biden and progressive Democrats had initially wanted. In the end 19 Republicans voted for it, joining all 50 Democrats, and Biden hailed the compromise as a sign that the much sought-after unicorn of bipartisanship was not dead.
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Why the Sackler deal is so bad

The legal cases brought by so many state attorneys general and individuals against the odious Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma was responsible for so many opioid deaths, is going before a bankruptcy judge this week who will decide on a plea deal brought by some state attorneys general.

John Oliver gives a masterful expose of why the deal that has been proposed is such a bad one but will likely get approved. Basically the deal is such that the Sacklers, while pretending to pay billions, will actually get off very lightly by having their considerable personal assets mostly protected and will also be given sweeping blanket immunity from the lawsuits of those who did not agree to be part of this deal and even future lawsuits. They will not even have to plead guilty to any personal wrongdoing in the case, blaming it all on the company even though they were very hands-on in driving the practices that led to massive rates of addiction.

The bankruptcy judge hearing the case has a history of being sympathetic to these kinds of deals which is why the Sacklers shopped around so that they could appear before him in the small town of White Plains, NY. This case shows how the rich can manipulate the legal system to their benefit.

I hope that this show helps to create a big enough uproar that he has second thoughts about letting them get off so easy.