Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Re: tsarstepan (Post 7312383)

45 was gonna pardon them all, i heard...

A Few Observations on Israel’s Spiraling Crisis
By Josh Marshall
March 27, 2023 12:19 p.m.

In general, the Israeli protests against the so-called judicial reform package have garnered much less news attention in the U.S. than one might have expected. But these are much more than mass protests of the sort that occur with some regularity across the democratic world. It’s not too much to say that the scale and scope of these protests are without any clear precedent in Israel’s 75-year history. They have gone on for roughly two and half months, and they have continued to gather momentum, expand in scope and grow in intensity. They have increasingly cut into the central institution of Israeli society, the IDF. They have united much of the country’s financial sector in arguing that the reforms threaten the future of the Israeli economy. And today they have spurred a general strike which has brought much of the country to a standstill.

There are so many different dimensions of this story that each time I consider writing about it my effort spirals into something far too unwieldy. So I thought I’d just write out a series of observations.

One: Many Americans continue to view Israeli politics as operating along axes defined by the occupation of the West Bank and the long-moribund “peace process.” That is such a central fact of Israeli life that it’s certainly a latent or implicit factor in almost every political question. But in any direct sense, it’s hard to overstate how little any of that has to do with the current conflict. The “peace process” hasn’t figured, in any real sense, into any of the repeated elections of the last three years, or really for any in the last decade or more. Nothing about the current crisis has anything with any of that in any direct sense.

Two: Fundamentally this conflict is about a basic political division in Israeli society and Israeli politics’ long drift to the right. But in the short- to medium-term time horizon, Israeli society hasn’t moved as far or as quickly to the right as Israeli politics has. And the key factor there is the way in which Benjamin Netanyahu has manipulated the country’s factional politics first to remain in power and then to remain in power and out of prison. To a great degree you now have a governing coalition dominated by far-right nationalists because this is the only coalition that could bring Netanyahu back to power.

Political power in Israel rests on national elections in which parliamentary seats are apportioned on the basis of each party’s percentage of the vote. As many as a dozen parties realistically compete for seats, with each needing to get at least 3.25% of the vote to get any seats at all. That electoral threshold, combined with the fluid emergence and demise of parties, creates immense uncertainty in how overall voting percentages will translate into potential coalition seats. Even in an election in which the nationalist right camp and the center-left camp get roughly the same number of votes, the precise mix of different parties and the mix of ideologies and ethnicities which make them up can spell the difference between a narrow majority and a loss of power.

One reason for Benjamin Netanyahu’s long dominance of Israel politics has been his ability to shape the mix of parties running on the right or even shepherd into existence new parties to maximize his chances of building a majority. On paper, Netanyahu is the leader of the largest right-wing party, Likud, and thus the most logical prime minister in a rightist coalition. But really he’s the head of the right-wing bloc and he’s shaped that bloc to keep himself in power.

Sadly, for those of us who wish Israel’s politics were different, Israel could have had a center-right government without any problem over the last few years. The issue is Netanyahu and the increasing maximalism of the far-right parties. A good bit of the opposition is now center-right. But it’s Netanyahu himself who has incubated and cultivated that right-wing maximalism to keep himself in power.

Three: The morning started with widespread reports that after yesterday’s protests, Netanyahu would announce a pause to the judicial reform package. But that announcement hasn’t come. It’s universally agreed that if he gave up on the central elements of the package his government would collapse more or less immediately. As I write, he finally seems to have gotten sign-off from the most extreme elements of his government for the pause. But this is just a pause. And the strategy behind it is self-evidence. Slow down, make a show of negotiation and hope that the public protest movement will lose steam and focus. Then come back in a few weeks and pass it.

That’s a pretty good strategy — or perhaps better to say, it’s the only viable one Netanyahu has available. The problem is that this has been going on since mid-January and the protests and backlash have only escalated. It’s really, really hard to keep people in the streets for weeks on end. And everyone gets that this is merely a tactical pause. So it’s really not clear this will change anything. As I said, everything here is totally unprecedented. It’s very hard to imagine Netanyahu will relent and drive himself from office or that the extremists he’s made common cause with will give up what they want here. But it’s also hard to imagine that this protest movement, which has already cut into the central institutions of the state, will just get distracted and fade away.

Four: The latest escalation started when Defense Minister Yoav Gallant publicly called for a freeze on the legislation. Netanyahu promptly fired him. This triggered a fairly organic new wave of mass protests. Back in, 2010 Gallant was slated to be made the head of the Israeli army (the IDF). On paper, that’s equivalent to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the U.S., but the job has an incomparably more central role in Israeli society. His appointment ended up being scuttled over two separate sets of allegations against him. For present purposes, those controversies aren’t really relevant. What is relevant is that he was among the most senior and revered generals in the IDF.

In the last couple weeks there have been increasing murmurs of dissent from within Netanyahu’s Likud party over the reform package. The gist of these misgivings haven’t necessarily been the package itself but the perception that whatever its merits it threatened to undermine the integrity of the state and the IDF. Gallant has repeatedly warned that the crisis is threatening the readiness of the IDF and thus Israel’s security. Because of his military background and role as defense minister he’s basically seen as speaking for the country’s security establishment, warning about the danger of what’s happening. The situation is so volatile in Israel that I am not in a position to say just why his firing spurred quite such an explosive backlash. But I think a key reason has to be that this was seen as the country’s defense establishment saying this has to stop and Netanyahu saying he didn’t care but would do whatever it takes to remain in power and do whatever is necessary to satisfy the extremists keeping him in power.

The key point is that Gallant is a retired general and very much a man of the Israeli right, though not the far right. There’s really no right/left in this in any conventional sense.

Five: Initial reports suggest that Netanyahu was able to get the support for a pause from Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir by agreeing to create a new national police force directly under his control. Ben-Gvir represents the most extreme party in the governing coalition and he has constantly chafed at the refusal of the actual national police to treat the protestors as something like state enemies rather than in the vast majority of cases peaceful protestors. If this comes to fruition it’s a very ominous development. In a way it recapitulates a central element of the whole drama: whether central societal institutions which have a loyalty to the state over the government of the moment will be put under the direct and unmediated control of that government.

a gallon of ivermectin.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may not have announced his intent to run for president, but he’s already got some thoughts about what he’d do in the White House. Among them is a plan to decimate the civil service. And it may look familiar.

In the closing days of the Trump administration, a plan to gut the federal bureaucracy in a hypothetical second term took form, with the comic-book sinister name of Schedule F. (You probably don’t remember this, and that’s fine — a lot was happening, and this is one of those important things that was neatly disguised as a very boring thing.) But in October 2020, just two weeks before Election Day, the President signed an executive order that would allow large swaths of the civil service to be designated as at-will employees, exempt from protections that have for decades insulated those workers from the whims of each presidential administration and from political pressure.

And even though Trump lost the election, TPM revealed that, by December, the political appointees in the lame-duck administration were hard at work populating an Excel spreadsheet with the names of workers who would be given Schedule F status. The number of employees who would qualify could have reached into the hundreds of thousands, experts told us — but it never got that far. The initiative seemed to sputter out — perhaps everyone who still cared was too preoccupied with the election-theft effort — and Trump left office with Schedule F largely unimplemented. Biden unwound Trump’s executive order almost immediately.

But it didn’t end there. Trump kept talking about it, promising at a 2021 rally to “pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fire-able by the president of the United States. The Deep State must and will be brought to heel.” And the effort to identify the should-be-fired employees continued to move forward as well. Jonathan Swan, then of Axios and now of the New York Times, reported last year that many familiar Trump administration names are busy drafting up a shadow government of replacement right-wing policy minds for the day when Schedule F is finally implemented. From his report:

Quote:

No operation of this scale is possible without the machinery to implement it. To that end, Trump has blessed a string of conservative organizations linked to advisers he currently trusts and calls on. Most of these conservative groups host senior figures from the Trump administration on their payroll, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The names are a mix of familiar and new. They include Jeffrey Clark, the controversial lawyer Trump had wanted to install as attorney general in the end days of his presidency. Clark, who advocated a plan to contest the 2020 election results, is now in the crosshairs of the Jan. 6 committee and the FBI. Clark is working at the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the group founded by Russ Vought, the former head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.

That brings us up to February 2023, when Ron DeSantis appeared on pundit Mark Levin’s Fox News show, where the two had fun ranting about the government bureaucrats behind pandemic public health measures.

“But it’s hard to remove them with the civil service rules and the union rules and all the rest,” Levin griped.

“Well, there was a proposal that I think a lot of us wanted to see under the prior administration to do a Schedule F,” DeSantis offered. “So anyone who has any policy role is classified as a Schedule F, and they can be removed by the president. The left would litigate that, but I honestly think we would win on that in the Supreme Court.”

(The publication GovExec wrote about that exchange early in March, though I only came across it today through a Substack post by journalist Thor Benson.)

In this case, it’s not that surprising to hear DeSantis toss off a compliment for a policy implemented by the “prior administration,” whose president he may soon run against. Though gutting the supposed “Deep State” is a distinctly Trumpian objective, shrinking the federal government appeals to moneyed, conservative donors of all types, from libertarians like the Kochs to weirdo reactionary tech monarchists who get excited about the Curtis Yarvin/Mencious Moldbug idea to “Retire All Government Employees,” cheekily referred to as “RAGE.” Voters and non-rich party activists, presumably, think it’s fine too: The topic has become a major theme at right-wing gatherings and on Fox News — though not always under the sleep-inducing moniker of Schedule F.

The point here isn’t that there are no differences between DeSantis and Trump. The point is that there is a muscular conservative apparatus that has been hard at work since Trump bailed out of the White House on Jan. 20, 2021 — what the boss Josh Marshall has called “the conservative Deep State.” It’s making lists and spreadsheets and policy proposals, it’s learning from the mistakes of the Trump years, and it sees its opportunity with a 6–3 Supreme Court to reshape American government. It’ll be ready when it next has a chance to act, whether through Trump, DeSantis, or some other person we haven’t yet identified.

Quote:

............. that many familiar Trump administration names are busy drafting up a shadow government of replacement right-wing policy minds for the day when Schedule F is finally implemented. From his report:

Quote:

.............It’ll be ready when it next has a chance to act, whether through Trump, DeSantis, or some other person we haven’t yet identified.

TPM

This is scary! The dems can win the next election; but, fascism can still be possible unless the repubs change their tune.

Seven people died today in a school shooting in Nashville. Three of them were nine-year-olds. Three were staffers. One was the shooter. In the aftermath of the shooting, President Joe Biden once again urged Congress to pass a ban on assault weapons, to which today’s Republican lawmakers will never agree because gun ownership has become a key element of social identity for their supporters, who resent the idea that the legal system could regulate their ownership of firearms.

In the wake of the shooting, Representative Andrew Ogles (R-TN), who represents Nashville thanks to redistricting by the Republican legislature that cut up a Democratic district, said he was “utterly heartbroken” by the shooting and offered “thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost.”

In 2021, Ogles, his wife, and two of his three children held guns as they posed for a Christmas card with a caption that read: “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference—they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.”



Meanwhile, protests continue in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to hamstring his country’s Supreme Court and put the legislature in charge of judicial review has sparked fierce opposition.

Netanyahu regained power last November while he was facing criminal charges of fraud, breach of trust, and bribery. His far-right coalition put together a government and elevated two critics of the Israeli judiciary, who promptly put forward a plan of “legal reforms.”

According to Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany in Lawfare, supporters of those changes claim that unelected judges who are part of a “liberal deep state” have too much power, often using it to pursue criminal proceedings against senior politicians, prohibit Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank, or to refuse religious exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students.

On January 4, 2023, Netanyahu’s minister of justice Yariv Levin proposed an overhaul of the judicial system that would put Netanyahu’s slim majority—just 64 seats in the 120-member Knesset—in complete control of the country’s laws, enabling the far-right majority to avoid any checks on its power (as well as enabling Netanyahu to evade the criminal trials he faces).

But Netanyahu did not campaign on remaking the judiciary; it is the far-right members of his coalition who have made it their signature issue. Protests against the measures began almost immediately as alarmed Israelis realized the move would destroy their democracy.

The protests continued until this Saturday, when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant warned that the massive backlash against the judicial overhaul, including more and more military members who are boycotting their training missions, threatened the nation’s military readiness. He called for a halt to the attempt to force through the changes. Two members of the coalition backed Gallant and one appeared to be wavering, thus threatening Netanyahu’s majority. The next day, Netanyahu fired Gallant.

The firing sparked massive demonstrations and widespread strikes. At first, the far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition refused to stop their plans to overhaul the judiciary and called for their supporters to turn out to oppose the protesters, but Netanyahu apparently cut a deal with them. He has announced that the judicial reforms will be postponed while the two sides look for a compromise, and that he has agreed to the formation of a civil “national guard” the right will control. While Bethan McKernan of The Guardian called this move an empty gesture, Zach Beauchamp of Vox noted that the new paramilitary unit will be under the control of the extremist minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who in 2008 was convicted of supporting a terrorist organization and who used to keep a photograph of a mass murderer in his living room.

Still, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, the halt is “pretty transparently a stalling tactic,” launched in the hope that the protests will die down and the package can go forward later, although, as Marshall points out, polls show that the so-called reforms are very unpopular.

The crisis in Israel threatens the country’s relationship with the United States. During the Trump administration, Netanyahu cozied up to Trump and his Republican allies, and Israel’s continued rightward shift has alarmed foreign observers. In early March, Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the state to “erase” a Palestinian town, and he has called himself a “proud homophobe” and a “fascist.” In Israel, Netanyahu’s son tweeted that the U.S. State Department is behind the protests, hoping to overthrow Netanyahu, a sentiment to which Netanyahu himself has nodded.

When Smotrich visited Washington, D.C., earlier this month, White House officials declined to meet with him, and more than ninety Democratic lawmakers wrote to Biden asking him to use “all diplomatic tools available to prevent Israel’s current government from further damaging the nation’s democratic institutions and undermining the potential for two states for two peoples.” According to Josh Lederman of NBC News, more than 300 rabbis last year said that members of Netanyahu’s coalition were not welcome to speak at their synagogues.

The threats to the Israeli judiciary threaten the nation’s economy, as billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed out in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month. “Companies and investors place enormous value on strong and independent judicial systems because courts help protect them — not only against crime and corruption but also government overreach. Just as important, they protect what their employees value most: individual rights and freedoms,” he wrote.

In case anyone missed the obvious comparison between what is happening in Israel and what might transpire in the U.S., Bloomberg continued: “In the United States, our founding fathers’ insistence on checks and balances to control the tyrannical tendencies of majorities was part of their genius. Our Constitution is not perfect—no law is—but its many checks and balances have been essential to protecting and advancing fundamental rights and maintaining national stability. It was only through those safeguards that the United States has managed to withstand extreme shocks to our democracy in recent years—including a disgraceful attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power—without a catastrophic fracturing.”

Our Constitution is not perfect—no law is—but its many checks and balances have been essential to protecting and advancing fundamental rights and maintaining national stability. It was only through those safeguards that the United States has managed to withstand extreme shocks to our democracy in recent years—including a disgraceful attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power—without a catastrophic fracturing.”

Biden ally to take on school culture wars as White House weighs broader response

WASHINGTON — A top White House ally plans to paint Republicans’ focus on issues around race, gender and sexual identity as part of a GOP strategy to undermine public education as White House officials debate how forcefully to engage in the so-called culture wars dominating the right.

In remarks prepared for the National Press Club on Tuesday, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is expected to say state and local laws that ban certain types of books or restrict what can be taught in the classroom are “fueling hostility and fear” and aren’t serving students, parents or teachers, according to an advance copy of her speech provided to NBC News.

“What started as fights over pandemic-era safety measures has morphed into fear mongering — false claims that elementary and secondary schools are teaching critical race theory; disgusting, unfounded claims that teachers are grooming and indoctrinating students; and pronouncements that public schools push a 'woke' agenda,” Weingarten will say. “This is an organized and dangerous effort to undermine public schools.”

Weingarten will lay out steps that would address issues like mental health, school safety and learning loss from the coronavirus pandemic but also call for others to more forcefully push back against culture wars.

Legislation passed or pending in states across the country is designed to “create a climate of fear and intimidation” to allow conservative activists to advance an agenda that includes shifting funds for education away from public schools, Weingarten will say.

“Our public schools shouldn’t be pawns for politicians’ ambitions, or defunded and destroyed by ideologues,” she will say.

A senior White House official who spoke with Weingarten said her remarks focus primarily on education policy.

So far, the Biden administration has launched something of a scattershot response to the GOP’s culture war campaign, largely calling out specific bills as they move forward or addressing them in passing at events with relevant communities.

At a Black History Month reception in late February, for instance, both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris indirectly criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for rejecting a proposed Advanced Placement course about Black history for high school students.

“Black history is American history,” Harris said. “And let us all be clear: We will not, as a nation, build a better future for America by trying to erase America’s past.”

Biden said at the event: “History matters. And Black history matters. I can’t just choose to learn what we want to know. We learn what we should know. We have to learn everything: the good, the bad, the truth and who we are as a nation. That’s what great nations do.”

The administration also hit back at DeSantis with an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Times this month by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, who argued that classroom discussions about America are hampered “when politicians try to hijack them to promote their own partisan agendas.”

“Ironically, some of the very politicians who claim to promote freedom are banning books and censoring what students can learn,” Cardona wrote. “Parents don’t want politicians dictating what their children can learn, think and believe. That’s not how public education is supposed to work in a free country.”

A White House official pointed to the op-ed as an example of how the White House plans to engage on the issue — however intermittently — until Biden fully leans into the debate.

At some point, Biden will weigh in more fully, but as of now the White House sees it as a 2024 conversation and doesn’t believe he should be focused on it, the official said. “We don’t think this is the time,” the official said.

Biden’s wading into the debate could be seen as his going toe to toe with DeSantis, and the White House’s goal is for the president to appear above that. The official also said polling doesn’t suggest it is an issue Biden should give much attention, given it shows Americans’ top concerns are inflation, health care and their personal economic circumstances.

“I’m not naive and underestimate the potential of wedge issues in certain races. But the average voter is just so much more wary of bulls--- issues,” a Biden adviser said.

Biden last year twice explicitly referred to “culture wars,” once as he honored the Council of Chief State School Officers’ national and state teachers of the year and again in his prime-time address from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where he said the nation shouldn’t focus on “divisive culture wars” or “the politics of grievance, but on a future we can build together.”

Officials say to expect Biden for now to continue to focus on topics like manufacturing and supply chains. On Tuesday, he is launching an administration-wide “Investing in America” tour at a stop in North Carolina.

This is scary! The dems can win the next election; but, fascism can still be possible unless the repubs change their tune.

My 6-year-old boy died in January. We lost him after a household accident, one likely brought on by a rare cerebral-swelling condition. Paramedics got his heart beating, but it was too late to save his brain. I could hold his hand, look at the small birthmark on it, comb his hair, and call out for him, but if he could hear me or feel me, he gave no sign. He had been a child in perpetual motion, but now we couldn’t get him to wiggle a finger.

My grief is profound, ragged, desperate. I cannot imagine how anything could feel worse.

But vaccine opponents on the internet, who somehow assumed that a COVID shot was responsible for my son's death, thought my family’s pain was funny. “Lol. Yay for the jab. Right? Right?” wrote one person on Twitter. “Your decision to vaccinate your son resulted in his death,” wrote another. “This is all on YOU.” “Murder in the first.”

(...more...)

Eric Kleefeld (becoming a parody of myself)
@EricKleefeld
23h
Bill Bennett goes on a tear about supposed mass cultural subversion, including this bit of paranoia: “When the Islamists, the radical Islamists seek to take over a country, what do they do? They have lots of children, and try to take over the educational institutions.”