As is sometimes the case in American politics, a bill that many people are likely not paying a great deal of attention to is likely to have enormous impact on the nation’s future.
That $110.5 billion national security supplemental package was designed to provide additional funding for Ukraine in its war to fight off Russia’s invasion; security assistance to Israel, primarily for missile defense systems; humanitarian assistance to citizens in Gaza and the West Bank, Ukraine, and elsewhere; funding to replenish U.S. weapon stockpiles; assistance to regional partners in the Indo-Pacific; investments in efforts to stop illegal fentanyl from coming into the U.S. and to dismantle international drug cartels; and investment in U.S. Customs and Border Protection to enhance border security and speed up migrant processing.
President Joe Biden asked for the supplemental funding in late October. Such a package is broadly popular among lawmakers of both parties who like that Ukraine is holding back Russian expansion that would threaten countries that make up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). If Russia attacks a NATO country, all NATO members, including the U.S., are required to respond.
Since supplying Ukraine with weapons to maintain its fight essentially means sending Ukraine outdated weapons while paying U.S. workers to build new ones, creating jobs largely in Republican-dominated states, and since Ukraine is weakening Russia for about 5% of the U.S. defense budget, it would seem to be a program both parties would want to maintain. Today, even Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “If Ukraine loses, the cost to America will be far greater than the aid we have given Ukraine. The least costly way to move forward is to provide Ukraine with the weapons needed to win and end the war.”
But now that former president Trump has made immigration a leading part of his campaign and a Trump loyalist, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is House speaker, Republican extremists are demanding their own immigration policies be added to the package.
Those demands amount to a so-called poison pill for the measure. The House Republicans' own immigration bill significantly narrows the right to apply for asylum in the U.S.—which is a right recognized in both domestic and international law—and prevents the federal government from permitting blanket asylum in emergency cases, such as for Afghan and Ukrainian refugees. It ends the asylum program that permits people to enter the U.S. with a sponsor, a program that has reduced illegal entry by up to 95%.
It requires the government to build Trump’s wall and allows the seizure of private land to do it.
When the House passed its immigration measure in May 2023, the administration responded that it “strongly supports productive efforts to reform the Nation’s immigration system” but opposed this measure, “which makes elements of our immigration system worse.”
And yet House Republicans are so determined to force the country to accept their extreme anti-immigration policies, they are willing to kill the aid to Ukraine that even their own lawmakers want, leaving that country undersupplied as it goes into the winter.
When he brought the supplemental bill up last week, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) promised the Republicans that he would let them make whatever immigration amendments they wanted to the bill to be voted on, if only they would let the bill get to the floor. But all Senate Republicans refused, essentially threatening to use the filibuster to keep the measure from the floor until it includes the House Republicans' demands.
This unwillingness to fund a crucial partner in its fight against Russia has resurrected concerns that the Trump-supporting MAGA Republicans are working not for the United States but for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who badly needs the U.S. to abandon Ukraine in order to help him win his war.
Media outlets in Moscow reinforced this sense when they celebrated the Senate vote, gloating that Ukraine is now in “agony” and that it was “difficult to imagine a bigger humiliation.” One analyst said: “The downfall of Ukraine means the downfall of Biden! Two birds with one stone!” Another: “Well done, Republicans! They’re standing firm! That’s good for us.”
Today, allies of Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán were in Washington, D.C., where they are participating in an effort to derail further military support for Ukraine (an effort that in itself suggests Putin is concerned about how the war is going). Flora Garamvolgyi and David Smith of The Guardian explained that the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank, which leads Project 2025—the far-right blueprint for a MAGA administration—and which strongly opposes aid to Ukraine, is hosting a two-day event about the war and about “transatlantic culture wars.”
This conference appears explicitly to tie the themes of the far right to an attack on Ukraine aid. Orbán has dismantled democracy in his own country, charging that the equality before the law established in democracies weakens a nation both by allowing immigration and by accepting that women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people should have the same rights as heterosexual white men, principles that he maintains undermine Christianity. In Hungary, Orbán has cracked down on immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and women’s rights while gathering power into his own hands.
In the U.S. the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and its allies—including former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson and Arizona representative Paul Gosar—openly admire Orbán’s Hungary as a model for the U.S. Indeed, some of the anti-LGBTQ+ laws Florida governor Ron DeSantis has pushed through the Florida legislature appear to have been patterned directly on Hungarian laws.
Orbán—a close ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who embraces the same “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” Orbán does—is currently working to stop the European Union from funding Ukraine. Now Orbán’s allies are openly urging their right-wing counterparts in the U.S. to join him in backing Putin. A diplomatic source close to the Hungarian embassy told Garamvolgyi and Smith: “Orbán is confident that the Ukraine aid will not pass in Congress. That is why he is trying to block assistance from the EU as well.”
Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul today noted that even the delay in funding has hurt the U.S. “Delaying a vote on aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan will do great damage to America's reputation as a reliable global leader in a very dangerous world. Delay is a gift to Putin, Xi, and the mullahs in Iran,” he wrote. “The stakes are very high.”
Republican determination to push their own immigration plan seems in part to be an attempt to come up with an issue to compete with abortion as the central concern of the 2024 election. As soon as he took office, Biden asked for funding to increase border security and process asylum seekers, and he has repeatedly said he wants to modernize the immigration system. To pass the national security supplemental appropriation, he has emphasized that he is willing to compromise on immigration, but the Republicans are insisting instead on a policy that echoes Trump’s extreme policies.
Immigration, on which Orbán rose to power, has the potential to outweigh abortion, which is hurting Republicans quite badly.
We’ll see. The story out of Texas, where 31-year-old Kate Cox has been unable to get an abortion despite the fact that the fetus she is carrying has a fatal condition and the pregnancy is endangering her health and her ability to carry another child in the future, illuminates just how dangerous the Republicans’ abortion bans are. Under Texas’s abortion ban, doctors would not perform an abortion, so Cox went to a state court for permission to obtain one.
The state court ruled in Cox’s favor, but Texas attorney general Ken Paxton immediately threatened any doctor who performed the abortion, and appealed to the Texas Supreme Court to block the lower court’s order, saying that allowing Cox to obtain an abortion would irreparably harm the people of Texas. All nine of the justices on the state supreme court are Republicans.
Late Friday night the Texas Supreme Court blocked the lower court’s order, pending review, and today, Cox’s lawyers said she had left the state to obtain urgently needed health care. This evening the Texas Supreme Court ruled against Cox, saying she was not entitled to a medical exception from the state’s abortion ban.
The image of a woman forced by the state to carry a fetus with a fatal condition at the risk of her own health and future fertility until finally she has to flee her state for medical care is one that will not be erased easily.
Meanwhile, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has disappeared. His lawyer says he was told Navalny was “no longer listed” in the files of the prison where he was being held, and Navalny’s associates have not been able to contact him for six days.
Injured Palestinians face potentially fatal delays in treatment, say aid agencies
Fears raised as WHO says ambulance staff detained at gunpoint, stripped and beaten by Israeli troops
Palestinians who have been injured during the war in Gaza are facing potentially fatal delays both in getting treatment within the coastal strip as well as in being evacuated abroad, caused by Israeli bureaucracy and military checkpoints, the UN and aid organisations say.
The delays come amid a claim by the World Health Organization (WHO) that Palestinian ambulance staff involved in a recent high-risk evacuation were detained at gunpoint, stripped and beaten by Israeli soldiers.
With estimates that 50,000 Palestinians have suffered injuries in the two months of Israeli military operations launched after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, an Israeli NGO – Physicians for Human Rights Israel – said on Tuesday that only 400 Palestinians had been evacuated abroad, despite a number of countries being willing to receive the wounded.
Additionally the WHO has blamed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for lengthy delays at checkpoints in allowing wounded people to pass. It cited the case of a patient who died in an emergency convoy en route to a Gaza City hospital, during repeated and lengthy Israeli checks in which a health worker was detained and beaten.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the WHO, said at the weekend that the UN health agency and its partners had managed to deliver essential trauma and surgical supplies to the Al-Ahli hospital and to transfer 19 critical patients.
On Tuesday, he provided further details about the high-risk mission, saying on X that the WHO was “deeply concerned about prolonged checks and detention of health workers that put lives of already fragile patients at risk”.
“Due to the hold-up, one patient died en route, given the grave nature of their wounds and the delay in accessing treatment,” he said.
A statement further described the incidents.
“On the way north, the UN convoy was inspected at the Wadi Gaza checkpoint, and ambulance crew members had to leave the vehicles for identification. Two Palestinian Red Crescent [PRCS] staff were detained for over an hour, further delaying the mission.
“WHO staff saw one of them being made to kneel at gunpoint and then taken out of sight, where he was reportedly harassed, beaten, stripped and searched.
“As the mission entered Gaza City, the aid truck carrying the medical supplies and one of the ambulances were hit by bullets.
“On the way back towards southern Gaza, with the patients from Al-Ahli hospital onboard, the convoy was again stopped at the Wadi Gaza checkpoint, where PRCS staff and most of the patients had to leave the ambulances for security checks.
“Critical patients remaining in the ambulances were searched by armed soldiers.
“One of the same two PRCS staff temporarily detained earlier on the way in was taken for interrogation a second time. The mission made numerous attempts to coordinate his release, but eventually – after more than two and a half hours – had to make the difficult decision to leave the highly dangerous area and proceed, for the safety and wellbeing of the patients and humanitarian workers.”
With only 11 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals even partially operating, and shortages of crucial medicines including antibiotics to treat post-operative infections, the coastal strip’s collapsing healthcare system has been struggling to deal with the sheer numbers of wounded.
Gaza’s health ministry has accused Israel of dragging its feet over approval for emergency health evacuations out of Gaza through the Rafah border crossing.
Under a byzantine system of approval for emergency medical evacuation, a list prepared by the health ministry must first be sent to the Egyptian authorities, who then pass the list to the International Committee to the Red Cross, who then forward it to Israel for security screening. Once Israel approves the names, the list is sent back to Gaza via the same route.
“Even before 7 October and start of war, the [southern] Rafah border crossing was not fully controlled by the Palestinians,” said Aseel Aburass, of the NGO Physicians for Human Rights Israel, which has written to the IDF and Israeli attorney general about the situation.
“Any person who wants to pass the border needs Israeli permission and there is a complex mechanism for approval which means it can take one to three days for people who need evacuating in hours.
“Until yesterday 430 people have been evacuated out of the 49,600 people who have been injured despite the fact a number of countries including Egypt Qatar and Turkey have said they would take injured Palestinians.”
We are no strangers to human suffering — to conflict, to natural disasters, to some of the world’s largest and gravest catastrophes. We were there when fighting erupted in Khartoum, Sudan. As bombs rained down on Ukraine. When earthquakes leveled southern Turkey and northern Syria. As the Horn of Africa faced its worst drought in years. The list goes on.
But as the leaders of some of the world’s largest global humanitarian organizations, we have seen nothing like the siege of Gaza. In the more than two months since the horrifying attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 people and resulted in some 240 abductions, about 18,000 Gazans — including more than 7,500 children — have been killed, according to the Gazan health ministry. More children have been reported killed in this conflict than in all major global conflicts combined last year.
The atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 were unconscionable and depraved, and the taking and holding of hostages is abhorrent. The calls for their release are urgent and justified. But the right to self-defense does not and cannot require unleashing this humanitarian nightmare on millions of civilians. It is not a path to accountability, healing or peace. In no other war we can think of in this century have civilians been so trapped, without any avenue or option to escape to save themselves and their children.
Most of our organizations have been operating in Gaza for decades. But we can do nothing remotely adequate to address the level of suffering there without an immediate and complete cease-fire and an end to the siege. The aerial bombardments have rendered our jobs impossible. The withholding of water, fuel, food and other basic goods has created an enormous scale of need that aid alone cannot offset.
Global leaders — and especially the United States government — must understand that we cannot save lives under these conditions. A significant change in approach from the U.S. government is needed today to pull Gaza back from this abyss.
For a start, the Biden administration must stop its diplomatic interference at the United Nations, blocking calls for a cease-fire.
Since the pause in fighting ended, we are again witnessing an exceptionally high level of bombardment, and at increasing ferocity. The few areas left in Gaza that are untouched by bombardment are shrinking by the hour, forcing more and more civilians to seek safety that does not exist. Over 80 percent of 2.3 million Gazans are now displaced. The newest Israeli offensive is now forcing them to cluster on a tiny sliver of land.
The bombardment is not the only thing brutally cutting lives short. The siege of — and blockades surrounding — Gaza have led to a critical food scarcity, cutoffs of medical supplies and electricity, and a lack of clean water. There is barely any medical care to be found in the enclave and few medications. Surgeons are working by the light of their mobile phones, without anesthetics. They are using dishcloths as bandages. The risk of waves of waterborne and infectious disease will only grow in the increasingly overcrowded living conditions of the displaced.
One of our colleagues in Gaza recently described their struggle to feed an orphaned infant who had been rescued from the rubble of an airstrike. The baby had not eaten for days after her mother’s death. Colleagues could only scrounge up powdered milk — not formula, not breast milk, and not a nutritionally suitable infant food — to help stave off her starvation.
Before the war, hundreds of truckloads of aid were needed each day to support Gazans’ daily existence. Only a trickle of that required aid has made it into Gaza in the two months since the war began. But even if more were allowed in, our work in Gaza is dependent on ensuring our teams can move safely to set up warehouses, shelters, health clinics, schools, and water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure.
Today our staff members are not safe. They tell us they’re making the daily choice of staying with their families in one place so that they can die together or go out to seek water and food.
Among leaders in Washington, there is constant talk about preparing for the “day after.” But if this relentless bombardment and siege continue, there will be no “day after” for Gaza. It will be too late. Hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance today.
So far, American diplomacy in this war has not delivered on the goals President Biden has conveyed: protection of innocent civilians, adherence to humanitarian law, more aid delivery. To stop Gaza’s apocalyptic free fall, the Biden administration must take tangible measures, as it does in other conflicts, to up the ante with all parties to the conflict and bordering countries.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken once said of the war in Ukraine that the targeting of heat, water and electricity was a “brutalization of Ukraine’s people” and “barbaric.” The Biden administration should acknowledge that the same holds true in Gaza. While it has announced measures to deter violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, Mr. Blinken and his colleagues should apply similar pressure to stop violence against civilians in Gaza, too.
The harrowing events unfolding before us are shaping a global narrative that, if unchanged, will reveal a legacy of indifference in the face of unspeakable suffering, bias in the application of the laws of conflict and impunity for actors that violate international humanitarian law.
The U.S. government must act now — and fight for humanity.
Last night, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to decide Trump’s claim that he is immune from any and all criminal prosecution for anything he did while in office. That claim is central to Trump’s defense; he has requested the charges against him be dismissed because of that immunity.
When Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case in which Trump is charged with trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, dismissed this claim, Trump’s lawyers appealed and asked for the case to be frozen while the appeal worked its way up through the courts. By going straight to the Supreme Court, Smith appears to be trying to stop Trump from delaying the trial until after the 2024 election.
The Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether it will hear the case. So far, Justice Clarence Thomas refuses to recuse himself, even though his wife Ginni was deeply involved in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. His refusal suggests that the Supreme Court’s new ethics rules are as toothless as their opponents charged.
In another filing last night, Smith revealed that the government expects to introduce the testimony of three experts who will speak to the use of cell phones by Trump and one other person after the 2020 election, including on January 6, a revelation that Los Angeles Times legal analyst Harry Litman suggested must “have the Trump camp totally freaked out.”
Inflation slowed again in November, dropping to 0.1% as gasoline prices fell, so that the annual inflation over the past year has dropped to 3.1%.
Fallout continues from the Texas Supreme Court’s decision that a woman carrying a fetus with a fatal condition cannot abort that fetus even though it threatens her own health and future fertility. President Joe Biden promised today to continue to fight to protect access to reproductive health care, saying: “No woman should be forced to go to court or flee her home state just to receive the health care she needs. But that is exactly what happened in Texas thanks to Republican elected officials, and it is simply outrageous. This should never happen in America, period.”
But for all the importance of these major stories, the outstanding story of the day is that the Republican Party appears to have decided to undermine financial support for Ukraine’s war against Russia’s invasion.
This is simply an astonishing decision. Majorities in both the House and the Senate want to pass supplemental aid to Ukraine, which both protects North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries and provides jobs in the United States, but an extremist minority in Congress is stopping passage of a measure that would provide more weapons to Ukraine.
There is no doubt previous funding has been effective. A newly declassified intelligence memo shows that Russia had an army of 360,000 before the war and that thanks to the Ukraine resistance it has lost 315,000 troops—87% of its army—forcing it to squeeze more recruits out of its civilian population. It has also lost 2,200 out of 3,500 tanks, forcing it to turn to Soviet-era equipment.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who was in Washington, D.C., today to try to convince Republicans to pass such a measure, noted that Ukraine has regained half the land Russia seized in the February 2022 invasion, forced Russian warships out of Ukrainian territorial waters, and opened export corridors to get Ukrainian grain to countries that desperately need it. At the same time, he said, Ukraine’s economy is growing at a 5% rate, suggesting it will be less dependent on foreign aid going forward.
In The Atlantic, David Frum, who has criticized Democrats on immigration policy, pointed out that Biden and the Democrats have made a real effort to negotiate with extremist Republicans but the Republicans are simply refusing to engage. Frum concluded that Republicans do not want to make a deal. Either they want to perform a ritual in which Republicans demand and Democrats comply, or they want to keep the border as a campaign issue, or they actually oppose aid to Ukraine. And yet, Frum reiterates, majorities in both the House and the Senate want the supplemental aid package to pass.
Republicans appear to want to keep the issue of immigration front and center in 2024, hoping that people will focus on it rather than on abortion, especially in states like Texas.
Poland’s newly elected prime minister Donald Tusk today vowed that he would “loudly and decisively demand the full mobilization of the free world, the Western world, to help Ukraine in this war,” but Russia expert Fiona Hill told Politico’s Maura Reynolds that U.S. funding will be key to determining whether Ukraine wins back control of its territory. That decision, she says, is really about our own future.
Permitting Putin to win in Ukraine, she says, would create a world in which the standing of the U.S. in the world would be diminished, Iran and North Korea would be strengthened, China would dominate the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East would be more unstable, and nuclear weapons would proliferate.
“Ukraine has become a battlefield now for America and America’s own future—whether we see it or not—for our own defensive posture and preparedness, for our reputation and our leadership,” Hill told Reynolds. “For Putin, Ukraine is a proxy war against the United States, to remove the United States from the world stage.”
“The problem is that many members of Congress don’t want to see President Biden win on any front,” Hill said. “People are incapable now of separating off ‘giving Biden a win’ from actually allowing Ukraine to win. They are thinking less about U.S. national security, European security, international security and foreign policy, and much more about how they can humiliate Biden. In that regard,” she said, “whether they like it or not, members of Congress are doing exactly the same thing as Vladimir Putin. They hate that. They want to refute that. But Vladimir Putin wants Biden to lose, and they want Biden to be seen to lose as well.”
Today, Biden noted that Russian media outlets have been cheering on the Republicans. "If you're being celebrated by Russian propagandists, it might be time to rethink what you're doing,” he said. “History will judge harshly those who turned their back on freedom's cause."
Congress is set to leave for the holiday break on Thursday, returning in the second week of January. Biden urged Congress “to pass the supplemental funding for Ukraine before they break for the holiday recess—before they give Putin the greatest Christmas gift they could possibly give him.”
Never trust the pols before the conventions. Never.
bobsal u1553115 wrote:
Never trust the pols before the conventions. Never.
Can you address why it is that only one kind of poll is getting wide media attention- the ones that show Biden lacking?
Can you address why it is that only one kind of poll is getting wide media attention- the ones that show Biden lacking?
WASHINGTON, Aug 3 (Reuters) - About half of Republicans would not vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted of a felony, a sign of the severe risks his legal problems pose for his 2024 U.S. presidential bid, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Thursday.
...these polls could be used to suppress the vote.
I think they could be written to bring about a specific result.
• Biden (49%) and Trump (48%) are closely matched among registered voters nationally in a head-to-head presidential contest. Independents break for Trump. 50% support Trump compared with 45% for Biden.
• Biden’s job approval rating among Americans is 40%, little changed from 42% last month. In contrast, 53% of Americans disapprove of Biden’s job performance. 42% of Americans strongly disapprove of how Biden is doing his job compared with 23% who strongly approve.
• Biden’s favorability rating among Americans is upside down, 40% favorable to 53% unfavorable. In October, 43% of residents nationally had a favorable impression of Biden while 51% had an unfavorable one. By nearly two-to-one, Americans are more likely to perceive Biden very unfavorably (39%) than very favorably (20%).
• 49% of Americans, including 24% of Democrats, favor the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into President Biden. 48%, including one in five Republicans, disapprove of the investigation. In October, 52% of Americans disapproved of the probe, and 47% supported it.
• Like Biden, Trump’s favorability rating is upside down. 38% perceive Trump favorably while 56% have an unfavorable view of him. This score is identical to what Trump received in October. Americans are also more likely to view Trump very unfavorably (45%) than very favorably (24%).
Frank, I truly believe that these polls could be used to suppress the vote. I think they could be written to bring about a specific result.
At worse these polls are dark. At best they are bait for circulation for advertiser bucks.
We have a complex objective here: We have to turn out the vote while acting like we're trying to catch up. We cannot allow Joe to go down or not have a working Congress.
Our nation is depressed, sick of the lies and failed policies of our self appointed Progressive elites...
Meanwhile our self appointed, authoritarian "progressive" elites are busy redesigning our washing machines...
Compared to the G7 countries, an informal group of industrialized democracies, the US has the highest gross domestic product growth over the last three years while also seeing inflation come down faster than most of those other wealthy countries. bi
Very little appears to have changed here over the past year. Hard for me to understand why people stick with the same worn out opinions, in the face of the growing mountain of contrary evidence.
Political polls all have sampling errors, and some appear to be timed to get a preferred result. That said the steady decline 'ole Joe Biden has seen appears now to have some real meaning and significance .. notwithstanding all the "policy successes" his slavish followers claim - in hilarious contradiction with all the actual results that have followed, for our economy, national security and standing in the world. Our nation is depressed, sick of the lies and failed policies of our self appointed Progressive elites and the hapless, superannuated, but corrupt lap dog who does their bidding in the White House. A major shift in public concerns and preferences appears to be on the horizon. My similar expectations approaching the mid-term elections were not realized, but I believe that now the bastards have now removed all public doubt.
Meanwhile our self appointed, authoritarian "progressive" elites are busy redesigning our washing machines, ventilation systems and food preferences - this after the wonderful job they did on our "all electric transportation system", powered by "clean, efficient and low cost" wind turbines and solar panels. It was an unrealizable fantasy based on amateurish engineering and enforced in rapidly failing policies. The public is at last coming to see these fantasies for what they are .... merely tools for power seeking pipsqueaks in search of control over the rest of us. They will, of course, never admit that, but the reckoning is clearly on the horizon.
