A clear-eyed look at the situation in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank

The death toll continues to rise in Gaza with the latest estimates at over 11,000, including over 4,000 children. And given Israel’s relentless bombing and the almost complete cutting off of water, food, medicine, and fuel to the Palestinian populatioon, those numbers are undoubtedly going to rise, with many people dying excruciatingly of hunger and thirst.

Adam Conover has a podcast series called Factually! where he tries to clarify important issues by inviting knowledgeable guests and having a thoughtful discussion with them. He is a good interviewer who does not try to make himself the center of attention but instead asks probing questions and allows the guest to speak uninterrupted. This is quite rare with TV interviewers. Some of you may recall Conover used to have a series Adam Ruins Everything where each episode humorously debunked popular myths. The new series is more serious in tone, though he does interject some levity when appropriate.

In a recent episode recorded on October 26, 2023, he interviewed Nathan Thrall about the situation in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank and I found it to be one of the best discussions about this very complex situation. Thrall is an American journalist and former director of the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group who lives in Jerusalem with his family and has worked with many groups in the region.

It was a sober and enlightening discussion. The interview is about an hour long but well worth listening to. Although I follow events in that region fairly closely, I learned many new things from Thrall about the nature of the situation of the Palestinians and the Israeli occupation and the history of the conflict.

Big wins for unions are wins for many others as well

The last few months have been good for trade unions in the US, long seen as being on the decline. We had strikes by the United Auto Workers,Writers Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild, all gain big wins, albeit after hard fought struggles.

United Auto Workers (UAW) strikes yielded pay raises and abolition of tiered wages that gave lower pay to newer hires. Tens of thousands of nurses, ER technicians, and pharmacists recently concluded their strike against Kaiser Permanente by winning 21 percent raises over the next four years. The prolonged Hollywood writers strike ended with studios granting almost three times their original pay offer.
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UPS workers recently averted a strike by ratifying a five-year contract that their union hailed as “the most lucrative agreement the Teamsters have ever negotiated at UPS.” The topper: public approval of unions is at a six-decade high.

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The need for immigrants

The GOP has taken a very anti-immigrant stance. According to what they say they want, the borders should be shut to any newcomers. But as can be seen from this graph that shows how the US population would change under various assumptions about the level of immigration, that would not be a good thing.

Immigration is essential to the long-term health of the country, because otherwise people 65 years or older will outnumber children under 18 by 2029, putting stress on medical care and other services.

What the xenophobes are likely most scared about is the growth of the Hispanic population, expected by 2060 to make up 26.9% of the country (currently it is 19.1%) while the non-Hispanic white population, currently making up around 58.9%, will begin to decline in 2045 and may drop to 44.9% by 2060.

One suspects that if the influx of immigrants were from (say) Scandinavian countries, they would be welcomed.

And here we go with the shutdown threats, again

We are now just one week from the deadline for yet another government shutdown on November 17 with no deal in sight, even though the last deal was meant to provide 45 days to arrive at one. Much of that time was spent selecting the new speaker and since then members of the GOP in the House of Representatives have been busy passing important bills such as reducing the salary of secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg to $1 a year because they don’t like some of the things he has done. Of course, that bill is going nowhere in the senate.

To get an idea of how dysfunctional things are, let us look at how the whole budget process should play out, something that is called ‘regular order’. It starts with the president submitting on the first Monday in February a budget for the fiscal year starting October 1. Note that 70% of the government’s expenditures, such as social security, is mandatory and outside the budget process so that only 30% of all government spending is covered by the budget. But those areas are crucial to many aspects of people’s lives.
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Is this any way to run a family business?

Family businesses tend to keep tight control of the enterprise and have members of the family occupy key positions and make all the major decisions.

But not the Trump family business. If you take the testimony of the patriarch, his two sons, and daughter at the fraud trial in New York City at face value, it seemed like none of them knew what was actually going on even though they occupied key positions. They claimed ignorance of major decisions, or said “I don’t recall” to key events, implying that all they did was sign documents that underlings put before them without really knowing what was in them, let alone doing the minimum due diligence to make sure that what they were attesting to was correct. Legal experts explain the “I don’t recall” strategy.

This is of course their strategy, to imply that they could not have committed fraud if they did not have the intent to commit fraud, and that they were misled by others. It is similar to the defense strategy that Sam Bankman-Fried put forward in the FTX cryptocurrency fraud trial and which the jury overwhelmingly rejected.

The defense will begin putting forward its case today. Let’s see how far they are going with that strategy. This case is not before a jury but a judge who had already ruled against the company, that they had falsified the valuations of its various components. How long the defense lasts will depend on the number of witnesses they put on the stand. Given their strategy of delaying things as much as possible, expect to see them ask to put forward many witnesses, however little they may actually contribute to the facts of the case.

Elections results were even better than I thought

While the top line election results on Tuesday were good for Democrats, the picture looks even better when you look further down at other races.

Right wing bigots have targeted school boards in their push to narrow down what is taught and the books that are read. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin pushed the so-called ‘parental rights’ issue to win his election to the governorship in 2022. He and other Republicans thought that they had found the magic formula for winning elections and sought to use that same message to win control of both house of legislature and school boards. Youngkin was also being promoted to be the party savior by the anti-Trump establishment as Ron DeSantis’s campaign seemed to be flaming out. But both houses gained Democratic majorities and he lost even school board races, tarnishing his credentials considerably.

Loudoun county, Virginia, attracted national headlines in 2021, when parents outraged over the alleged instruction of critical race theory and policies regarding transgender students shouted down officials at school board meetings.

Republican Glenn Youngkin made the issue a central focus of his gubernatorial campaign in the months after, accusing Democrats of politicizing education to the detriment of students’ learning and blaming them for pandemic-related school closures. And he had hoped it would continue to work in Tuesday’s general election.

“No more are we going to make parents stand outside of the room,” Youngkin told a crowd in Leesburg, part of Loudon county, on Monday. “We are going to put them at the head of the table in charge of our children’s lives.”

But that message failed on Tuesday, as Democratic-endorsed candidates won a majority on the Loudoun county school board.

The elections, in which every school board seat was up for grabs on Tuesday, had been framed as a test of the resiliency of parents’ rights as a campaign issue. Republicans had hoped to replicate Youngkin’s success in Loudoun county, which serves more than 80,000 students in a wealthy area located about an hour outside Washington. Instead, Loudoun county voters delivered a six-seat majority for Democratic-backed candidates on the nine-seat school board.
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As Democrats took a victory lap on Tuesday, some of them pointed to the results in Loudoun county as evidence that Youngkin’s message of parents’ rights no longer resonates with Virginia voters.

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Good election night for Democrats

In Ohio, the amendment to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution passed easily by a margin of 57%-43%. This adds to the number of states including red ones like Kansas and Kentucky that, in the wake of the US Supreme court to overturn Roe v. Wade, passed state constitution amendments to restore the right to abortion.You may recall that the Republican legislature in Ohio, seeing the writing on the wall, tried to thwart this by suddenly putting a ballot issue in August, when hardly anyone votes, that would have raised the threshold for passing constitutional amendments to 60%. But vigorous campaigning by abortion rights advocates defeated that measure, enabling the right to abortion to pass yesterday. Recreational use of marijuana also passed by 57%-43%.
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Why do they take the abuse?

In yet another new book about serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), we read about how he lets loose with lengthy abusive attacks on those around him whom he feels have let him down.

The extent of Donald Trump’s frustrations over the timing of his multiple scheduled court appearances in the thick of the 2024 presidential race, as well as the disdain with which he treats his own lawyers, is laid bare in a new book by Jonathan Karl.

The Washington correspondent for ABC News reveals Trump’s furious reaction when told by a Manhattan judge earlier this year that his criminal trial in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case would start on 25 March 2024. That places it right in the middle of the Republican primaries, and just 20 days before the all-important Super Tuesday in which 15 states decide their preferred candidate.

Karl relates in his new book, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party, how the former president responded angrily as he heard the date virtually as he sat in his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.

He turned to one of his key lawyers, Todd Blanche, and yelled: “That’s in the middle of the primaries! If I lose the presidency, you are going to be the reason!”

Trump’s tantrum lasted almost half an hour, Karl reports, based on an anonymous source present in the room. When the court hearing was over, and the cameras were turned off, the former president launched what Karl describes as “a withering attack on perhaps the most highly regarded lawyer on Trump’s troubled legal team”.

“You little fucker!” Trump shouted in Blanche’s face. “You are going to cost me the presidency!” He went on to rant against other lawyers in his team, saying: “They want me to be indicted!”

I can understand low-level employees having little choice but to take the abuse. But powerful lawyers like Blanche are wealthy and don’t really need SSAT’s business. They could presumably tell him to go to hell and walk off.

But they don’t and seemingly sit there and take it meekly. Why?

Serious injuries in rugby

I have been railing about the serious dangers to participants in American football, especially with the rise in evidence of CTE, the long-term brain injury that results from repeated collisions that can cause concussions. It is thought that the repeated accumulation of concussions, even small ones during practices, is what leads to later serious cognitive decline in players. I feel the evidence is already compelling enough that I no longer watch games and also think that schools and colleges should no longer offer this as a sports option to their students. It is an activity that should be left for adults to choose to participate in, though they should be made aware of the risks.

Americans tend to view rugby as pretty much the same as American football, except without the protective helmets and body padding and hence think that it must be much more dangerous. I used to tell them that it was not so, that there were differences that made rugby safer. One is that there is evidence that the protective gear actually gives players a false sense of safety and encourages them to do dangerous things that they would not do without it. Another is that in rugby, it is only the player who has the ball that can be tackled, thus any given player faces far fewer collisions per game. A third is that any collision that results in contact with a player’s head results in an immediate yellow card that requires the offender to be off the field for ten minutes, to sit in a chair that is quaintly called a ‘sin bin’. If, during that time, an off-field review shows no mitigating factors, it is upgraded to a red card and the player cannot return to the game.
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Republicans cannot handle the truth

There was something called the Florida Freedom Summit held over the weekend. I had not heard of this group before but have learned that any outfit which has the words ‘freedom’, ‘family’, or ‘liberty’ in its name can usually be predicted to be made up of extreme right wing nut jobs and this one seems to fit the bill. Two candidates for the Republican nomination who have staked out positions critical of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) spoke at the meeting and they got very hostile receptions when they criticized the Dear Leader SSAT.

To his credit, the combative Chris Christie did not flinch but engaged with the people jeering him.

Christie fed off the animated crowd, fueling more boos as he challenged audience members’ reactions to his remarks.

“The problem is, you want to shout down any voice that says anything different than what you want to hear. You can continue to do it, and believe me — believe me, it doesn’t bother me one bit,” Christie said before pivoting to Israel.
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With each disruption, the New Jersey Republican fired back until he left the stage at the conclusion of his remarks.

“You can yell and boo about it as much as you like, but it doesn’t change the truth. And the truth is coming. The truth is coming, and all of you need to understand: America needs better than what we’ve had. And it never makes America a better place, whether it’s on a college campus in an Ivy League or whether it’s in an auditorium in Orlando, for us to be booing and shouting down opinions we don’t agree with,” Christie said.

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