Israel blockade of Gaza challenged

Joe Biden has long been one of the staunchest supporters of Israel and has even called himself a Zionist. He has been a steadfast supporter of that country’s governments, refusing to condemn them even when they did the most appalling things. So it was no surprise when he rushed to Israel following the October 7th attacks by Hamas and embraced prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, although Netanyahu had shown his disdain for Barack Obama when he was president and Biden was vice-president and Netanyahu even accepted an invitation to speak to Congress, bypassing the Obama White House. Netanyahu’s preference for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and Republicans is not hard to discern.

Biden’s seeming unqualified support for Israel has angered many progressives in the US and infuriated many Arab Americans who see him as condoning the ongoing slaughter of Gazans by the Israeli military machine. The US has been increasingly isolated on the world stage as leaders of many countries and the United Nations have condemned the Israeli policy of essentially starving the entire population of Gaza, numbering about two million people, by refusing to allow in relief trucks to bring in adequate amounts of food, water, energy, and medical supplies. Israel controls ground access to the Gaza strip and has long imposed a blockade to prevent access even by sea. The situation is so bad that the few relief trucks that Israel allows in have been besieged by starving people and Israeli troops have opened fire on them, reportedly killing over a hundred.
[Read more…]

Jon Stewart on who the ‘real’ Americans are

He discusses something that has also long irritated me, and that is the claims by GOP politicians that ‘real’ Americans are those that live in the middle parts of the country in rural areas, as if the vast majority who live in cities and the coastal areas count for less.

This is part of a more general pattern. GOP politicians seem to think it is perfectly acceptable to sneer at big cities and the diverse array of people who live in them as somehow being less worthy, while reacting with outrage if any Democratic politician even slightly disparages rural white America.

The GOP gets crazier and crazier

In an earlier post, I wrote about how the GOP is on a slippery slope when it comes to some issues, where in pandering to their base by accepting certain premises like that life begins at conception, they found themselves quickly dragged to the logical end point that embryos produced in the IVF process are children and thus cannot be destroyed. Now they fond themselves struggling to extricate themselves from the mess they put themselves into without disavowing the ‘life begins at conception’ premise because doing so would infuriate their base.

But that is not the only slippery slope that the GOP find itself on. It is as if the floodgates of oil have opened on the slopes and there is no way to halt the descent.
[Read more…]

Katie Britt gets brutally roasted on SNL

Katie Britt has now essentially confirmed that the story that she told in her response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address was misleading in all the key details, as was exposed by journalist Jonathan Katz, though in typical MAGA fashion, still claims that it is ‘true’ in some unspecified sense.

Actor Scarlett Johansson did a brutally funny takedown of Britt on Saturday Night Live, capturing all her manic, hyper-dramatized mood swings.

SOTU GOP responder accused of lying

Alabama senator Katie Britt, who delivered the widely panned response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, has been accused by a journalist of flat-out lying about a harrowing story she told about a woman recounting to her how she had been raped multiple times by multiple men when she was twelve years old. Britt implied that it was caused by Biden’s border policies.

But journalist Jonathan Katz says that she is lying, that the woman said that it happened to her in Mexico between 2004 and 2008.
[Read more…]

The GOP ties itself up in knots over Alabama IVF ruling

After the Alabama supreme court ruled that embryos are children and deserve all the protections that children are entitled to, IVF clinics in the state began to stop providing IVF services because of fears that if any embryo were to be destroyed (which is done routinely with embryos that are no longer needed), they could be culpable.

The ruling has caused an uproar because IVF treatments have broad support. So the state legislature rushed to pass a law to protect IVF doctors and parents from any legal repercussions. But apparently the law is pretty tortured in its reasoning.

The enacted legislation doesn’t define or clarify whether under state law frozen embryos created via IVF have the same rights as children. Rather, the narrowly tailored bill is designed to protect doctors, clinics and other health care personnel who provide IVF treatment and services by offering such workers civil and criminal “immunity.”

The new law will “provide civil and criminal immunity for death or damage to an embryo to any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization.”

It says that “no action, suit, or criminal prosecution for the damage to or death of an embryo shall be brought or maintained against any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization.”

[Read more…]

Biden’s SOTU speech and Republican response

President Joe Biden gave his annual State of the Union address to the joint houses of congress yesterday. I did not watch it but the reviews suggest that he gave a good speech, with the main criticism being his use of the loaded word ‘illegals’ to describe undocumented immigrants.

Biden apparently gave a feisty speech touting his successes and attacking Republican policies and his ‘predecessor’ (as he referred to him without mentioning him by name) on a whole range of issues.

The scrappy tone from Biden was a sharp break from his often humdrum daily appearances and was intended to banish doubts about whether the 81-year-old president, the country’s oldest ever, is still up to the job.

For 68 minutes in the House chamber, Biden goaded Republicans over their policies on immigration, taxes and more, invited call-and-response banter with fellow Democrats and seemed to relish the fight.

[Read more…]

Trump has more legal setbacks – one in a UK court

[UPDATE: SSAT has posted a $91.6 million bond in the E. Jean Carroll case.

Federal Insurance Co. is a division of the large insurer Chubb. It was not immediately clear what property or other investments Trump pledged as collateral in order to get the bond.

The bond is dated Tuesday and signed by Trump and a representative of the insurance company. That means it was available several days before Kaplan declined Trump’s request to postpone the deadline.]

Late last evening, judge Lewis Kaplan denied the appeal by s serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to either delay the payment of the bond in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case or to reduce the amount.

Kaplan made the verdict official on 8 February and gave Trump 30 days to post a bond or come up with cash during his appeal, which is expected to challenge the jury’s finding of liability and the amount of damages.

Trump had sought to delay enforcement of the verdict until the judge ruled on his motions to throw it out, which he filed on Tuesday.

But the judge said Trump should not have waited 25 days after the verdict before seeking a delay.
He also said Trump failed to show how he might suffer “irreparable injury” if required to post a bond.
[Read more…]

The GOP is on a very slippery slope

The GOP is discovering that there is a real danger in pandering to the extreme right wing religious faction within their party because those people are insatiable in seeking to carry out their fanatical beliefs to their logical conclusions. The strategy works as long as their followers do not take things too far.

Take the case of abortion. For many on the right, the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision, that said that women had a right to terminate their pregnancies before a certain period, became a rallying cry and when the US Supreme Court did just that, they were ecstatic. But among those calling for the overthrow were those who believed that life begins at conception and that anything that prevents a fertilized egg from further growth is tantamount to murder. These people were energized and proceeded to pass state laws that prevented abortion under any circumstances, even in the case of danger to the life and health of the mother and even if the fetus had such problems that it did not have a viable chance of survival, or would suffer from all manner of serious abnormalities.

But while these people are a significant force in the GOP , they are minority nationwide. There is a whole spectrum of people on this issue. It was always the case that there was a majority of people who felt that abortion should be allowed under certain circumstances, although they were not unanimous on where the line should be drawn. But it is clear that that line is not that far from what Roe drew. But rather than negotiating about the line, the extremists took their position that life begins at conception to its logical conclusion and demanded the outright. banning of abortion This has caused a serious backlash as popular movements to restore abortion rights kept winning referenda quite easily even in so-called red states, and anti-choice extremist candidates fared poorly at the polls.
[Read more…]

Clock ticking on payment of Trump’s fines

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), after a string of legal setbacks in court, has had several legal decisions go his way recently. One is that the US Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal that as president, he had total immunity, and scheduled oral arguments for April 22. The opinion is likely to only come down at the end of the court’s term in June which means that SSAT gets the delay that he has sought. It is clear that SSAT’s strategy is to delay everything as much as possible until after the election, hoping that he wins which would allow him to order his attorney general to shut down all the federal investigations. The US supreme court also overturned the decision by the Colorado supreme court to disqualify him from the state ballot because he violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment (known as the Insurrection Clause) when he instigated the riot on January 6th, 2021.

But the civil cases that he has already lost must be giving him headaches because he has to cough up real money to appeal those. He is required to put up about 110% of the fines into an escrow account before his appeals can proceed.
[Read more…]