Pro-Palestinian Demonstration
10 Dec 2023
Marching in Harrisburg, PA. Very large and enthusiastic crowd!
Israel is flooding
the tunnels that are being used by Hamas to hold
hostages, fighters and munitions.
Citing
unnamed U.S. officials, the Wall Street Journal reported that
Israel had recently begun pumping seawater into Hamas' vast labyrinth
of tunnels underneath Gaza, in a process that would likely take weeks.
The Times of Israel says:
Environmental experts have warned that
the move could have long-lasting effects on the groundwater in the
Strip.
Assembly with symbolic wrapped bodies.
Biden very
explicitly tells Israel that how they're treating Gaza is costing
them from a public relations standpoint. Biden has been a very loyal
and steadfast friend to Israel, which hopefully gives him enough
credibility for Israel's Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, to listen to
him.
Apparently the
plan, developed between Americans and Israelis is:
The plan seems to be for the Israelis
to shift over the next couple weeks from the massive aerial bombardment
of the last two months, which has resulted in so much civilian loss of
life. That will be followed and replaced by more targeted, low
intensity commando raids focused on killing or capturing Hamas
militants and destroying the Hamas tunnel network.
Possible
health effects of Israel's military operation on residents of Gaza:
A lack of food, clean water and shelter
have worn down hundreds of thousands of traumatised people and, with a
health system on its knees, it's inevitable epidemics will rip through
the enclave, 10 doctors and aid workers told Reuters.
Back in June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.
Conservatives
cheered and Donald Trump was quick to take credit. He
said that he “was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of
everyone.” One of the "concessions" that conservatives
gave to opponents was that if "a doctor determines that the patient
is experiencing 'a life-threatening physical condition'" then and only then, could she seek
reproductive care and terminate the pregnancy. Even if Kate Cox was
certain to suffer (she's had to go to the emergency room three times in
the past month due to complications with her pregnancy), she couldn't
legally seek an abortion until she was at death's door. So what does
the "Life and Health" exception actually mean in practice? Ehh, not
much.
Of course, this
puts the two Texas Senators,
John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, into a
no-win situation. They can't admit that they aren't doing their jobs as
Kate Cox's representatives. They're allowing her to suffer through a
very bad situation over a change to the law that they stronggly
supported. They can't take the position that this is a good thing
because that would make them look cruel and heartless. But if they were
to sympathize with her, they wold make the Texas Attorney General Ken
Paxton and the Texas Supreme Court look cruel and heartless. So they've
adopted the strategy of simply being silent on the issue.
Heh! Senator Cruz really, really
doesn't
want to discuss the case!
Other Republican candidates didn't
like the question much, either.
Almost none of the candidates who
commented on the matter this week were willing to outright say they
disagreed with Texas’ decision to deny Kate Cox an abortion, but they
also weren’t jumping to defend the Republican politicians in the state.
Looking down towards speakers.
The Federal Budget is made up of 12
seperate bills. The Senate is largely agreed on what should and
shouldn't be covered, so their work on all 12 bills is pretty much
done. The House has a number of people with strong ideological
convictions that the Federal Government just
spends too much.
Ukraine aid has
been successfully added to the
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but it won't be until some
time in January that the House will actually get it into an actual
spending bill. But the House goes
off into holiday recess because, hey, priorities!
A massive military aid package for
Israel and Ukraine remains stalled in Congress, where Republicans are
pushing for major changes to border policy.
And why, you ask, is the House, along with Republicans in the Senate,
trying to make "major changes to border policy" when they're also
initiating an evidence-free impeachment of President Biden, oh, and
Speaker Johnson wants to adopt a "laddered continued resolution,"
differenet deadlines for differenet agencies? Hey, priorities!
Chants, music and speeches.
Why is border policy so hard to reconcile? There are sharp
partisan divisions. Ds and Rs see the issue from differenet
perspectives. As
a result
House Republicans earlier this year
passed a bill known as H.R. 2 that included much stricter asylum and
border provisions, including the reinstatement of migrant family
detention and the so-called "Remain in Mexico" policy. It also included
drastic limits on the humanitarian parole authority, which the Biden
administration has used to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees
and migrants from Afghanistan, certain Latin American countries, Haiti
and Ukraine.
Personally, I think it was wildly unrealistic to think that Republicans
could simply force Democrats to accept whosesale a bill that was passed
with only Republican voes. Making policy
through blackmail has never been consistent with American democracy.
Speakers were under tent roof.
The war in Israel has escalated because the Saudi Arabian-Yemeni
Houthis problem was never resolved. That war began in 2014. The
conflict between the countries has been relatively quiet lately.
Iran has tried to supply the Houthis, but with a Saudi-US blockade in
between Iran and Yemen, the war has been largely stalemated. The war
has constituted a major economic and humanitarian crisis since 2015.
So now
the
Houthi of Yemen have closed
off
the Red Sea to Israeli and America shipping. Major
shipping lines are avoiding the Red Sea. How much shipping is
effected? “Some 10 percent of world trade goes through the Suez
Canal on 17,000 ships a year.”
Also:
“There have been Shiite militia attacks on US personnel in Syria
and Iraq, with more threatened.”
The binder was last seen by Cassidy Hutchinson, the fomer aide to the
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. She saw Meadows with the
binder on the last day durin which Trump left the White House and Biden took
over. The
binder was 10 inches thick. That's thousands of pages of evidence
that
Trump acted as a friend of, if not an agent of, Moscow.
The Russia materials included highly
classified raw intelligence gathered by the U.S. and NATO allies,
fueling fears that the methods used to collect the information could be
compromised, the source added.
Senator Lindset Graham tries
strenuosly to downplay and to throw cold water on the fact that
Donald Trump's rhetoric sounds an awful lot like the language that der
Fuhrer used in the 1930s and 40s to describe the Jewish people. Meet
the Press host Kristen Welker
tried really hard to get Graham to comment, but Graham kept insisting
that Trump's language wasn't important. Trump
said:
"They're poisoning the blood of our
country," Trump told a rally in the city of Durham attended by several
thousand supporters, adding that immigrants were coming to the U.S.
from Asia and Africa in addition to South America. "All over the world
they are pouring into our country."
At the Governor's Mansion.
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