A Passover Report from the Middle East: Bombs Away!

 

By Hebraic Affairs Editor A. Cahan with Military Editor Douglass MacArthur

With the economy and democracy itself in the United States on the verge of collapse, it’s sometimes hard to keep up with what’s going on in the rest of the world.

It’s not good.

The world has apparently forgotten that since the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023 which killed 1,139 Israelis, most civilians, and took another 250 hostage, Israel and Hamas have been embroiled in a war in Gaza that has so far killed over 50,000 Gazans, again mostly civilian, and left over 2,000,000 people homeless, traumatized, and starving.

While most living hostages have been released in exchange for the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, at least 24 Israelis are thought to be still living in increasingly dire captivity. Just like the remaining civilian population of Gaza.

Gaza 2025: it's no worse than...

After the wholly-intentional collapse of the interim cease fire, Israeli forces have returned to Gaza, unleashing fresh waves of death and destruction. To give you a taste of the enormity of the violence, here’s one day’s summary of events from The Guardian:

• At least 29 Palestinians, including children, were killed on Wednesday from an Israeli strike in the Shujaiya area of Gaza City, local health authorities said. Medics said dozens of others were injured in the attack that hit a multi-floor residential building in the eastern suburb of Gaza City. They said many were still believed to be missing and trapped under the ruins of the building. The strike damaged several other houses nearby....
• The Israeli military said in a statement it struck a senior Hamas militant responsible for planning and executing attacks from Shujaiya in northern Gaza, whom it did not identify. ....The Gaza health ministry said on Wednesday that at least 1,482 Palestinians have been killed since Israel resumed intense strikes on the Gaza Strip on 18 March, taking the overall death toll since the start of the war to 50,846....
• United Nations (UN) secretary general António Guterres said on Tuesday that Gaza had become “a killing field” because Israel has continued to block aid, an accusation an Israeli official quickly denied, saying there was “no shortage” of aid. “More than an entire month has passed without a drop of aid into Gaza. No food. No fuel. No medicine. ...,” Guterres said in remarks to journalists. Six weeks since Israel completely cut off all supplies to the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, food stockpiled during a ceasefire at the start of the year has all but run out. “All basic supplies are running out,” said Juliette Touma from ....Unrwa. She said: “Every day without these basic supplies, Gaza inches closer towards very, very deep hunger.” ...
• The mother of an Israeli soldier held hostage in Gaza told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that she fears that Israel’s renewed bombardment of the territory puts his life at even greater risk. “Our children are in danger,” Herut Nimrodi told AFP during an interview. Her son, Tamir, who turned 20 in captivity, is one of 24 hostages believed to be alive, though no proof of life has been sent since his abduction. . . .

And if there’s one certainty in the Middle East, tomorrow will be worse.

Without justifying or excusing the horrific October 7 attack (unlike some of our former friends), we focus today on the continuing carnage and destruction being carried out by Israel Defense Forces at the direction of President for Life Bibi “Melech” Netanyahu and with the connivance of US President Pol Potbelly, whose sadistic love of pain and torment is too well known to require extensive recapitulation. Just ask E. Jean Carroll.

As the Guardian summary notes, Israel has been blocking all humanitarian aid, including stuff like food, from entering Gaza for over a month to put pressure on Hamas. Israel claims that this is no biggie because Gaza has plenty of food and Hamas is stealing it anyway.

The aid organizations on the ground report hunger and scarcity. And if Hamas is stealing the food, then blocking aid won’t put pressure on them, will it? It will just increase suffering and starvation.

If the starvation and bombing weren’t bad and illegal enough, Israel is continuing to order hundreds of thousands of Gazans to leave what's left of their homes again and again supposedly to help them hunt down Hamas, an activity they have not succeeded at over the past 18 months.

The Israelis claim that Hamas embeds itself with the civilian population, which to the Israeli apparently justifies any level of violence in Gaza no matter how many civilians die. How it justifies attacking marked ambulances with lights flashing is another question that has given even Israel pause.

The endless assault on civilians has many Israelis, including veterans of its air force, wondering if the purpose of these attacks is actually to destroy Hamas, a legitimate military target, or something else:

And the hostages themselves:

The go-back-to-Gaza gibe demonstrates that the hostage-based justification for endless war is but a pretext.  Many fear that Israel’s real goal is to force the civilian population of Gaza to leave, although they have no place to go. This goal is shared by the corrupt demented Russian-owned stooge currently serving as President of the United States:

Mr. Netanyahu and his government say they are serious about [Trump’s] idea but emphasize that they are speaking about facilitating the “voluntary” migration of Palestinians, in an apparent attempt to avoid any suggestion of ethnic cleansing. Critics say that it would hardly be voluntary if Gazans left, regardless, given that so many of their homes have been smashed to rubble.

Those critics, always carping about something.

While Israelis robustly debate the value of continued civilian carnage in Gaza, American Jews are supposed to fall into line and parrot only extremist Likud talking points.

The chief rabbi of the large mainstream Conservative synagogue in St. Louis, B’nai Amoona, has said “there do not appear to be any ‘innocent civilians’ in Gaza.”

There also does not appear to be any connection between this monstrous rationalization for indifference to civilian death and suffering and Jewish values. That didn't seem to bother his devout halachic congregants much:

But the incident also reveals the extent to which remarks like Abraham’s have become accepted in the range of Jewish discourse. B’nai Amoona’s president backed the rabbi publicly and in a message to congregants, and while Abraham took down the post at the president’s behest, he did not disavow its contents in subsequent statements to the congregation and to the Forward. 

A slightly more sophisticated apologia for depraved indifference to the lives of Gazans civilians comes from those of the Jewish persuasion arguing that what Israel is doing is no worse than what we did to Germany in World War II:when our bombs (and British ones) killed and injured plenty of German civilians.  A column by the reliably-loathsome Bretbug in The New York Times last year argued that we should not worry about the death toll of Gaza civilians because, as with the bombings of World War II, the underlying conflict was “existential.”

...the bombing of Dresden!  So that's OK then!

That's not how the international law of war works.  But without even comparing and contrasting the bombing campaigns of the U.S. and Britain in World War II and that of Israel in Gaza today, we have to raise one simple question:  What the f*** difference does it make?

We can debate similarities and differences between historical events.  We can even point out that after V-E Day America reconstituted Germany as an independent state, without any American settlers stealing German land.  We can also point out that no one has ever asserted that Roosevelt prolonged World War II to remain in power and avoid punishment for his many crimes.  And as others have said, if the best defense of Israel's campaign in Gaza is that it is no worse than Dresden, that's not too terrific.

But it is no answer to Israel's callous indifference to civilian life as evidenced by its endless and brutal war on Gaza that maybe it resembles the Punic War.  Israel's brutal, if not sadistic, conduct has to be judged on the basis of our current understanding of law and morality, including the postwar Geneva Conventions on the rights of noncombatants.

The reality is that Israel's indifference, and that of American Jewish leaders, to the suffering of Gaza's civilians is both immoral and contrary to Jewish law and values, according to the liberal Zionist group J Street:

We strongly oppose the decision by Prime Minister Netanyahu to reignite this horrific war. This decision flies in the face of pleas from freed Israeli hostages, families of those still held in Gaza and top Israeli security experts. It will put every remaining hostage’s life at risk while thrusting families in Gaza back into the crossfire of a brutal war which has killed far too many.

Endless war and an endless siege will not be effective in freeing the hostages or making Israel safer. Every day, renewed fighting puts more lives in danger, empowers extremists and isolates Israel further from global support – including among Jews worldwide. 

But you don't have to take it from a liberal Jewish lobbying group. There's higher authority, as some of you may have heard last night at Seder:

Our rabbis taught: When the Egyptian armies were drowning in the sea, the Heavenly Hosts broke out in songs of jubilation.  God silenced them and said, “My creatures are perishing and you sing praises?”....Our rabbis taught: God is urgent about justice, for upon justice the world depends....

CCAR Passover Haggadah at 48-49 (quoting Talmud).

And those Egyptians were armed combatants, not mothers and babies crushed under hundreds of tons of rubble. 

The resumed brutal war in Gaza is existential all right: it is a war over the existence of Judaism as a moral force in the world.

The battle is not going well.

A self-destructive war started for no good reason? Who could have seen that coming?

By Finance Editor Samuel Insull with Meta-content Generator A.J. Liebling

By now, we are all aware that the actions of one corrupt depraved demented Russian-owned stooge have destroyed the global economy, sent the United States spiraling downwards into the first period of stagflation since the oil shocks of the 1970’s, and wiped out trillions of dollars of shareholder value.

Gripped by a strange vindictive lust to tank an economy that was on January 20, 2025 the envy of the world, the Tangerine-Faced Fascist decided to impose ridiculously random punitive tariffs on the entire civilized world, and even some places where civilization hasn’t reached, like the Heard Islands, which are inhabited only by penguins who apparently are living huge from ripping off US workers, and catching fish in the chilly waters of the sub-Antarctic ocean.

The penguin enemies will not replace us

It’s hard to find anyone who supports this insane self-immolation other than the usual gang of Republican grifters, plug-uglies and otherwise unemployable shills, hacks and weirdos.

And even supposedly stalwart Republicans are having trouble swallowing the s*** smorgasbord. The insanely reactionary, pro-greed anti-worker Wall Street Journal Editorial Page on Wednesday issued a scathing critique of President Donald Trump’s so-called Liberation Day announcement vowing sweeping new tariffs on countries worldwide:

In a sharply worded editorial headlined “Trump’s New Protectionist Age,” the newspaper’s conservative board warned of multiple ways the tariffs could backfire on Trump that the president “isn’t advertising.”

The board pointed to a range of possible repercussions, including potential retaliation from foreign governments, higher prices for American consumers, economic pain for U.S. exporters, and “the end of U.S. economic leadership.”

The Petersen Institute, founded by reactionary plutocrat Pete Petersen to advocate fearlessly for tax cuts for the rich and starvation for the poor said: 

The always wrong and always screaming stock tout and former Crimson Editor Jim Cramer ‘77 admitted for once he was played for a schmuck:

Source: CNN Business

If you feel like a sucker Jim, imagine how all those people who ever took you seriously feel? All 28 of them.

The Atlantic, run by well known chat room participant Jeffrey Goldberg, has editorialized against tariffs, noting:

Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.”

Former Republican White House functionary David Frum slammed the tariffs (in Goldberg's esteemed pubulication) and invited his fellow Canadians to take up smuggling.

And our Wonderful Republican Ally Billy Kristol said:

Source: The Bulwark

We'll get back to destruction in the name of liberation shortly.

It turns out that the basis for these inflationary and job-killing tariffs was even stupider than the most severe critic could have imagined. The tariff rates were calculated by an AI bot that divided the US trade deficit with say the Falkland Islands by the total exports to the US from that territory. This of course principally disadvantaged poor countries who export to the US but are too poor to buy our iPhones and remakes of “Snow White,” like Madagascar. That’s not a rip-off; that’s global inequality on parade.

Let Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on global trade, explain it:

So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess.

The stupidity is one point but the real point is the fecklessness.  The Tangerine-Faced Grifter and his spineless Republican toadies don't care how tariffs are calculated.  They only care about flaunting the power to impose them and their corrupt desire to trade exemptions for personal gain. 

But perhaps the most absurd complaints are from those who claim they never saw this coming:

following Trump's unveiling of what some said were larger-than-anticipated tariffs - and in the midst of the market selloff that followed - many of the same individuals said their main takeaway was a sense of heightened risk and plenty of unanswered questions.

"This is bigger than I expected; bigger than anyone really expected," said Mark Spindel, chief investment officer of Potomac River Capital. "And the market is reacting accordingly." 

These Masters of the Universe sure surprise easily.

Some have pointed out correctly that the Tangerine-Faced Destroyer had repeatedly promised tariffs during the campaign, so his decision to do what he promised should hardly have come as a surprise.

But there's another reason not to be gobsmacked by Republican efforts to blow up the world for vanity and sadism gratification.

We'd remind you that the previously Republican President, an alcohol-demented ne'er-do-well and nepo baby named George W. Bush did the same thing just over twenty years ago.

Idiot Republican going to war for no reason?
Who saw that coming?

Without any credible justification and accompanied by lies and smears of anyone who dared question his idiotic decision, he took his country into a pointless and bloody war of choice against  a country that posed no threat to the United States.  Unlike the Heard Islands, it was full of people, 400,000 of whom subsequently died to appease the vanity of George Bush and his band of bros. 

Like the Tariff War of 2025, the Iraq War alienated our allies, emboldened our enemies, cost our country over $2 trillion and accomplished nothing.  And that's even before getting to the torture and war crimes which the Bush Administration claimed it had the authority to impose under its theory of an all-powerful Executive.

Sound familiar?

Funny how those inveighing against the insanity and futility of the Tariff War supported the equally stupid and futile misadventure in Iraq. 

Frum, Goldberg, Kristol: all Iraq warmongers.

Now they are supposedly our friends, having failed to reckon with or apologize for their previous embrace of imperial Republican sanity (Frum being an exception).

We're beginning to wonder if the Republican playbook – heavy on grandiose and violent conceptions of an all-powerful Executive unchained by petty things like law and morality – hasn't changed much since the invasion of Cambodia (R. Nixon, 1970).

In fact, both the Iraq and Tariff Wars suggest that the long-standing Republican conception of tyrannical unchecked Executive power is fatally flawed.   

Which is why the only ones surprised were the Republican flacks and plutocrats who bought into it until it bit them in the face.

What's the Matter With Boys Today?

 

By Eric Stratton, M.D., Spy Man Correspondent

Below our office today a line of dorks waits for hours in the cold March wind for a store to open. A few are women, but about 80% appear to be men. What are they doing on the mean streets on a weekday morning?

They’re not working. They’re not in class. They’re not studying. They’re not performing acts of tikkun olam.

They are waiting for the release of a new deck of Pokemon cards.

This got us to thinking about all the noise we hear about the plight of young men.

What’s wrong with men? Pretty much everything, apparently. A recent television series about a 13-year-old boy who stabs a young woman has led the worriers at the Guardian to bemoan the misogyny and cruelty of boys:

Dr Stephanie Wescott, like Schulz, has been researching misogyny in schools for some time. ... With the advent of [the television series] Adolescence, she says, “I feel now the conversation has caught up to the scope of the problem. I feel we do need to be a little bit alarmist here, because what is happening is alarming.”

Research released by Wescott last year, based on qualitative interviews with 30 female teachers, found that sexism – long identified in research on schools – endures still, “resurrected in part by the ubiquity and influence of one specific misogynist ‘manfluencer’, Andrew Tate”. An anonymous online survey of more than 130 South Australian teachers conducted by Schulz last year found teachers identifying a “heightened use of misogynistic language and behaviours by male students, some as young as five”.

As any teenager might say: “Ew. Gross.”

The same article notes that disgusting misogyny among boys is nothing new:

Prof Michael Salter...says, it is not young men, it’s older men. “The idea that young men today are more misogynistic than they were 20 or 30 years ago, I don’t see any evidence for this.” Salter recalls his own primary and high school years, where sexual harassment was rife and normalised. The average age of sexual harassment of girls is prepubescent, he says, and “that’s been the case for decades”.

Now every man was once a teenage boy and if they are being honest they will admit that saying and thinking revolting things about their female contemporaries is not new.

So what is new, other than the unfortunate fact that boys today can immortalize their awful views on social media?

This is the specimen Donald Trump rescued from justice

One answer lies in the quote itself. The ubiquity of hateful anti-woman creeps like Andrew Tate may lead boys to think that such vile conduct is what society expects from young men.

For those of you living in innocence, Andrew Tate is an avatar of sexual violence against women. As Moira Donegan explains:

There are so many allegations of sexual abuse and violence by the misogynist mega-influencer Andrew Tate that it can be difficult to keep track of them all. ...[In 2016, ] Tate was kicked off [a reality] show after producers became aware that he was under police investigation for sexual assault and rape following a 2015 arrest. (Tate denies wrongdoing.)

But after being kicked off of TV, Tate had another career to fall back on: that of a pimp. For some years, Tate has been running an online business in which he collects the earnings of women who perform webcam pornography. ...he has amassed a staggering number of followers – almost 11 million on Elon Musk’s X alone – including a large and growing proportion of young boys.

Who would have anything to do with a specimen like this? Hint: he is a tangerine-faced Russian-owned sex offender and traitor:

Andrew Tate is now a free man. The rightwing anti-woman influencer landed in Florida last week after being held detained for over two years in Romania on rape, sex trafficking and money laundering charges. The Romanian courts abruptly reversed their previous refusal to allow Tate to leave the country after several high-level Trump administration officials took an interest in his case – including Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr, who called Tate’s arrest in Romania “absolute insanity”. The Romanian foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, was reportedly approached by a Trump envoy about Tate’s case at a security conference in Munich in February; Tate arrived in the US within weeks. When asked if Trump had played a role in Tate and his brother’s release, the Tates’ lawyer Joseph McBride said: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.”

So if the question is where young men got the idea that scum like Tate are admirable and indeed role models, the answer seems tolerably clear: they got it from the President of the United States and his flacks and shills.

Indeed, when a 13-year-old boy sees a man who has admitted to sexual abuse, who has been found guilty in court of committing sexual assault, who has been accused by 25 women of sexual abuse or harassment, and who boasts of palling around with a trafficker of underage girls, and that man is elected President in spite of this appalling record, why shouldn’t that boy think that treating women with cruelty and contempt is now the American norm? And when a majority of white women vote for a sexual predator, what conclusion does a young man draw about whether such views are acceptable and normal?

I mean what young man isn't influenced by inept Trump mouthpiece Alina Habba:

Of course, the usual gang of Republican hacks and shills can’t admit that they and their fellow Republicans are to blame for the wretched behavior of young men. They blame, wait for it,... Both Sides.  

For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male misconduct, the refusal to engage with men’s feelings has now become almost a point of principle. For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized. The two are not morally equivalent, but to boys, the impact can often feel similar. In many cases, the same people who are urging boys and men to become more emotionally expressive are also taking a moral stand against hearing how they actually feel. For many boys, it can seem as though their emotions get dismissed by both sides. This political isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-politicized reclusion. 

You'll be shocked to learn that this horses*** appeared in the Opinion section of The New York Times.

Here on Planet Earth, have you ever heard of a progressive refusing to engage with men's feelings or telling them not to express their concerns?  Well, maybe if their concerns involve the desirability of raping and pimping out women.  But if their concerns involve a lack of good-paying jobs and health care, we'd submit that progressives have been responding for decades to such concerns.

(By the way, it is a standard trope of right wing disingenuousness to pass off entirely justified shock and outrage at expressions of bigotry and misogyny, however crude, as intolerance of conservative “ideas.”)

We're progressive.  And we're going to respond honestly to the concerns of sad young men living in their mom's basements playing video games and whining about how they can't find a date.

Here's our response.

• Get out of your mom's basement.
• Go to school, whether college or vocational school.
• Get a real job.
• Stop listening to ass**** telling you that the party of plutocracy and racism has your best interests at heart.
• Try not to whack off more than four times a day.
• If you're having trouble meeting women, volunteer at an animal shelter.  

We are reliably informed that there are very many women out there who may be interested in young men who work or study, are able to carry on a conversation without references to the pride of Newton South, Joe Rogan, and exhibit some morsel of kindness and caring for others, including cats and dogs. 

Will it work?

Hell, nothing is sure in this vale of tears. But it sure beats waiting for three hours in the freezing cold outside a GameStop for a deck of Pokemon cards.

Dems in Dis - array? -grace? -function? You make the call!

By Washington Correspondent Nellie Bly with Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling 

It's been a reliable media standby for over half a century.  Sometimes it was true:

 

but most times it wasn't:

Which is it this time?  We'll go with Too Soon To Tell.

For those of you just awakening from your coma, we'll remind you that American Government is being actively subverted and destroyed by the regime of a bent corrupt Russian-owned bigoted demented sex criminal.

You would have thought that in response to this outrage, Democrats would quickly and uniformly coalesce around adamant and total opposition.

And if you put a honeybee on that at +140, you lost!

Very many Democrats have responded to this crisis of democracy as if they had been pithed:

 Source: NBC News

Sure, as the panzers sweep across the Meuse and toward the channel, why not call for unity with the Wehrmacht?  It worked out great for the French.

How did that bipartisanship work out for “Hot Mess” Klobuchar?

Judging by what happened one hour after that beautiful bipartisan moment, we'd say not great.

The struggle between the collaborators and the resisters came to a head last week, when Democrats failed to block a bent Republican resolution to fund the government, with added sprinkles of racism (not letting DC spend its own money) and subversion (letting Apartheid Leon move appropriated dollars around according to his whim and ketamine dosage).

The resisters have demanded the head of Pops Schumer, who orchestrated the armistice by leading enough Senate Democrats to join Republicans in letting the funding bill proceed to a vote.  

Schumer and his apologists attempted to paint the craven surrender as protecting Democrats from being blamed for a government shutdown.  In fact the Fifth Column Democrats had orchestrated those bad options by not uniting around a demand for a clean resolution that didn't screw DC and didn't give Apartheid Leon a roving commission to blow up any government he chose while the demented nominal President busied himself signing orders he didn't read or understand, like Gov. Lepetomaine.

Imagine if Democrats had posed the choice in that manner, which would have placed the blame for any shutdown on Republican whackjobs and Trump taint polishers.  Schumer admitted to being terrified that the Tangerine-Faced Traitor might be content to keep the government closed for many months, even if that meant letting Social Security recipients starve to death.

We doubt it.

We'll submit that the debate over whether it's time for Pops Schumer to join the condo board at Glades of Del Boca Vista West II isn't the right one to have.

The right debate is how to oppose the continuing Republican assault on democratic government and the rule of law.

Let's start with a general principle articulated by our old buddy Lord Randolph Spencer Churchill (Winston's dad): “The duty of an opposition is to oppose.” 

It worked out pretty well for Winston.  Maybe the Democrats should try it.

We submit that it's more important to decide on resolute opposition than to fight about who will do the opposing.  The time wasted on trying to crowbar Pops Schumer out of his position could be better spent on crafting and delivering a unified opposition message.

The Vichy Democrats usually interpose two objections to the strategy of opposition.  Neither persuades.

They argue that public opinion is with the Tangerine-Faced Traitor as evidenced by his 1.5% electoral plurality and various polls purporting to show that majorities of voters approve of some of his evil plans.

California Gov. and former Kimberly Gilfoyle spouse Gavin Newsom has argued that Democrats should bow to public opinion trending against allowing trans kids to play sports, a problem that has thus far had no effect on 99.9% of athletic teams and gotten almost no traction with the cis athletes who are the supposed victims.

Of course this policy just represents licensed cruelty against almost all trans kids, like Rebekah here who wants to play field hockey with her friends without submitting to genital inspection:

You can meet her here.

Besides the transparent gratuitous cruelty, Newsom's pandering to supposed public opinion constitutes a path to failure.  Given the choice between the party that offers unlimited happy hour doubles of transphobia and the one that serves up diluted transphobic spritzers, who are bigots going to choose?  And what will happen to the Democrats who think that tormenting teenage trans girls is horrible? Will they say, “The hell with it; I'll be happy to abandon my principles because someone who used to bang Kimberly Gilfoyle tells me to?”  We doubt it.  

We think they'll be alienated and susceptible to the song of third party sirens.  And we know what happens to those who chase after that song. 

But there's a deeper error here.  Public opinion is not an immovable mountain. It can be molded and changed by what we do and say.  Just ask Ukrainian Prime Minister Zelenskyy.  He used to be popular among Republicans.  Then his favorability dropped 42 points. Gee, what happened?

Chasing public opinion without trying to influence it is the political equivalent of what in football used to be called the prevent offense.  It can't ever work.

A second equally specious argument against total opposition to the Republican attack on America is that Democrats must “pick and choose” battles.

Why?  That advice works when you want to coexist in some sort of harmony, like marriage or work or raising children.  Who give a f*** about harmony with Republicans?

Dems, listen to Churchill!  This one.

Republicans sure didn't follow that policy in opposing every single thing the last three Democratic Presidents did.  They didn't feel they had to compromise or work with Democrats on any issue.  They simply screamed about every Democratic initiative, from universal health care to fostering equal opportunity to preserving the Earth to blocking Democrats from filling judicial vacancies.  Why didn't they have to pick and choose? 

The argument against picking battles is more than tit for tat.  For example, the battle-choosers start by throwing the most vulnerable overboard, like Rebekah, in favor of various unnamed economic issues, which usually turn out to be the pet causes of Vichy Democrats (balanced budget, anyone?).  That's both wrong and counterproductive.

Second, it muddies the waters.  If the public is told by Democrats that lots of stuff the Republicans want to do isn't so bad, who can complain if they believe it?

Why don't Democrats as part of a campaign of total opposition tie every single thing the Republicans want to foist on us to a few simple principles:

1.  Allowing a ketamine-demented plutocrat to rampage through the Government proves you can't trust Republicans to govern or to protect your interests.

 2.  Republicans are too cowardly to oppose their demented criminal President and protect our Constitution.

3. As for immigration and minority rights, we don't need lectures on violent criminals from the felon who pardoned 1,500 violent insurrectionists or lectures on protecting girls from the threat of  trans field hockey players from the guy who was found to have raped a woman and boasted about spying on undressed underaged girls in their beauty-contest dressing room.

4.  Republicans are destroying jobs and economic growth by imposing tariffs, killing jobs, and borrowing $4 trillion to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

5.  Republicans are subverting US national security with insanity like threatening our allies and sucking up to Vladimir Putin.

That's five points.  Even Pops Schumer can hold on to five talking points.

Is this hard?

Will it work?  Why not give it a try?  At worst, Democrats will shore up their progressive base and get them excited about the midterms.

It might even move public opinion in favor of Democrats.

It's worked before:

The state of mind of Democrats after the 2004 election was not good. The party remained divided between those who had supported and opposed Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Beyond that, Democrats were on the defensive after 9/11, fearful of perceptions they were weak on terrorism specifically and national security generally. ...

As we now know, the sense of Republican strength and Democratic weakness that was so pervasive on Election Night 2004 was ephemeral. Within months, Bush gave Democrats a unifying issue with his clumsy, immediately unsuccessful efforts to “reform” Social Security. His Iraq war became an increasingly unpopular quagmire. His administration’s feckless handling of the Katrina catastrophe on the Gulf Coast became a symbol of an administration that seemed inept and heartless both at home and abroad. 

This isn't hard, Democrats.  And as bad as things were under Bush Minimus, they are a hundred times worse now.  

That ought to scare Democrats into array.

Across 116th St.: Why is Chancellor Kent weeping?

By Legal Editor Saori Shiroseki with Alison Porchnik on Morningside Heights

Allow us to wallow in some nostalgia for the good old days at Columbia. We remember one winter’s day at the Law School when our beloved Civil Procedure professor, keen to impress upon us the majesty of both Columbia and the Law, asked our class: “Who knows what it says on Kent Hall?”

To which one of our bright young classmates responded instantly: “Kent Hall.”

When the hilarity died down, our professor said that the answer, while technically correct, was not the one he wanted. (That happens a lot with law professors.)

What he was looking for was the inscription over one of the doorways of the former home of the Columbia Law School: "IVS EST ARS BONI ET AEQUI."

That’s Latin for "Law is the art of the good and the just."

How are goodness and justice doing these days at Columbia?

The short answer is: “Not so good.” The long answer is worse.

On the night of March 8, 2025, a Columbia graduate student living with his eight-month-pregnant wife was rousted in the lobby of his Columbia-owned apartment building (not a public space) by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. government agency charged with apprehending immigrants living in the United States.

Does he look happy to you?

This student, one Mohammed Khalil, was told that his student visa was being cancelled (by whom?) and that he was being arrested, not on any criminal charge, but for civil detention in anticipation of his deportation from the United States.

When Mr. Khalil pointed out to the armed body-snatchers that he was not in fact living in Morningside Heights pursuant to a revocable student visa, but because he was a Lawful Permanent Resident of the United States (based unremarkably on his marriage to a US citizen), they were momentarily confused but then received their marching orders (which they followed):

Attorney Greer advised Agent Hernandez that Mr. Khalil is a lawful permanent resident and has the right to due process. Agent Hernandez responded that the Department of State had revoked Mr. Khalil’s green card, too, and that he would be brought in front of an immigration judge. ...Mr. Khalil’s wife presented the DHS agents with documents confirming Mr. Khalil’s status as a lawful permanent resident, handing them to an agent who was speaking on the phone. The agent looked confused when he saw the documents and said, “He has a green card” to the individual with whom he was on the phone. Mr. Khalil’s wife heard the agent repeat that they were being ordered to bring Mr. Khalil in anyway.

The law on LPR status is clear: there is no such thing as “cancelling” a green card on the whim of ICE. Permanent residents can’t be deported until they have had a chance to contest whatever charges are brought in an Immigration Court. There are specific grounds to revoke LPR or “green card” status, all related to serious misconduct such as committing various crimes or engaging in terrorist activity.

As you might imagine, there are Columbia Law Professors expert in this area, including Professor Eliora Mukerjee:

Revoking a green card is quite rare, said Elora Mukherjee, the director of the immigrants’ rights clinic at Columbia Law School, and in a vast majority of cases where it does happen, the holder has been accused and convicted of criminal offenses, she said.

If the government was to revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card “in retaliation for his public speech, that is prohibited by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Ms. Mukherjee said,...

That seems clear enough to even the dimmest legal intelligence. We only wish our professors had been equally clear about the severability of contracts for the sales of goods under the UCC. [No one cares about your time at law school - Ed.]

After Mr. Khalil was shanghaied to an ICE lockup in the wilds of Louisiana, he was eventually presented with something called a Notice to Appear, which is the document that initiates removal proceedings. If as and when an Immigration Judge finds by clear and convincing evidence that a non-citizen is removable (and all appeals have been exhausted), their green card is indeed cancelled, which is a condign punishment for say robbing the Danville stage or committing other serious crimes of the sort that the January 6 terrorists received pardons for. The NTA was issued early on March 9, which means it could not have provided a lawful basis for the civil arrest on March 8:

Paragraph 3 is curious, because it states alternative bases for lawful admission to the United States, neither of which without more supports removal.  The body-snatchers were unable to confirm when Khalil entered the US, so they simply admitted he did so legally.  Then they had to admit he remained here legally too as an LPR.

The money paragraph is number 4, which invokes an obscure provision of a McCarthy-era immigration bill intended to boot those regarded as Communists and other baddies out of the country.   

On what basis did Li'l Marco conclude that Khalil's continued presence on Morningside Heights have a serious adverse effect on U.S. foreign policy?  None has been provided, and of course ICE will argue (in Immigration Court and otherwise) that his decision is unreviewable.

Sadly for the body-snatchers, that interpretation of the statute is fatally undercut by the word “reasonable,” which necessarily means that unreasonable conclusions do not support removal.  When the immigration laws wish to vest unreviewable discretion in some government official, they say so. 

Reminder: empowering Fascist vigilantes is not good for the Jews

Whether the Republican bent Supreme Court will interpret this statute correctly is of course open to question because the six Republican Justices have shown a repeated inability to act as judges rather than unelected Republican politicians.

With so much catastrophe to deal with around the world (most caused by his boss), how did Li'l Marco even learn of Khalil's existence, much less his damage to U.S. foreign policy, whatever that is these days?  (Khalil never spoke out against annexing Canada or Greenland, just to take two principal tenets of current foreign policy.)

It turns out that Khalil was targeted by certain self-appointed guardians of Jewish members of the Columbia community who were supposedly victims of anti-Semitism because they were forced to look at pro-Gaza demonstrations on or near the Columbia campus:

A far-right group that claimed credit for the arrest of a Palestinian activist and permanent US resident who the Trump administration is seeking to deport claims it has submitted “thousands of names” for similar treatment.

Betar US is one of a number of rightwing, pro-Israel groups that are supporting the administration’s efforts to deport international students involved in university pro-Palestinian protests, an effort that escalated this week with the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, an activist who recently completed his graduate studies at Columbia University.

This week, Donald Trump said Khalil’s arrest was just “the first of many to come”. Betar US quickly claimed credit on social media for providing Khalil’s name to the government.

Betar, which has been labelled an extremist group by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish advocacy group, said on Monday that it had “been working on deportations and will continue to do so”, and warned that the effort would extend beyond immigrants. [What the f*** does that mean? – Ed.]

The group claims to have “documentation, including tapes, social media and more” to support their actions. It claims to be sharing names with several high-ranking officials, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller; and the attorney general, Pam Bondi, among others. 

....[Betar leg-breaker Ross] Glick described Khalil as an “operative”. When asked who he was an operative for, he responded: “Well, that has to be determined.”

We're sure Ross will let us (and Li'l Marco) know when he finds out.  So now we are outsourcing US immigration law to Jewish extremist vigilantes who want to suppress all pro-Palestinian speech.

Now it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a Jew heard an anti-Semitic remark, which is hate speech. If uttered by someone who is a member of the Columbia community, hate speech subjects the hater to university discipline.

It’s also not beyond the realm of possibility that one or more Jews, especially those who support the Likudnik project of annexing Gaza and the West Bank and cleansing them of their indigenous Palestinian population, either honestly or otherwise are affronted by the views of those who do not share their belief in conquest and ethnic cleansing. Such speech is not in fact anti-Semitism or hate speech, despite the best efforts of right-wing Jews (like the Betarniks) to stigmatize all opposition to the current Israeli Government and its violent policies as anti-Semitism.

If the Federal Government under the reign of the Tangerine-Faced Fascist or Columbia University seeks to punish any and all speech that a Likudnik doesn’t want to hear (and apparently it does), that position is antithetical to and indeed subversive of the First Amendment and the supposed academic freedom fundamental to the functioning of any institution of higher learning.

It’s not good and it’s not just.

And that’s why even though his hall still stands, Chancellor Kent is weeping.

Broken News: Those pretentious out-of-touch Republican elites!

Editors’ Note: We still remember all the galaxy brains who told us that Kamala Harris lost to a demented corrupt Russian-owned rapist because pretentious Democratic elites were out of touch with the hopes, dreams, and fears of average Americans. Apparently, those hacks don’t remember telling us this because now the likes of Norma Desmond (Kevin Dowd’s sister to you) and St. David Brooks are grinding out new columns in which they reveal that President Tiny Toadstool is, wait for it, bad.

That got us to thinking what it would look like if the current chaos and the Tangerine-Faced Fascist’s plunge in popularity was subjected to the same brilliant all-purpose punditry. It might read something like this:

By Spy Columnist Tess Harding

It should come as no surprise that President Trump’s popularity rating, like a Tesla, has plunged into a pond and sunk, trapping everyone inside.

Pretentious Republican elites at play

The post-Inaugural assault on American government and the world order that has kept the peace and defended democracy for 80 years represents the most recent effort of pretentious Republican elites to impose their unpopular vision of America on average Americans, who wisely aren’t buying it.

Trump has surrounded himself, and in many cases, turned over the reins of the Presidency, to some of the richest and most out-of-touch plutocrats the world has ever known.

We’d submit that $400 billion of untaxed wealth qualifies its owner as elite by any measure. Elon Musk’s drug-fueled assault on large swaths of American government in defiance of volumes of Congressionally-passed legislation has proven to be massively unpopular, except among his fellow reactionary alien elitists like David Sacks and creepy Peter Thiel.

Did you ever hear an average American clamor for the destruction of veterans’ health care and other services? How about sabotaging the National Weather Service and the FAA’s critical air traffic control services? Or consumer protection?

While dismantling the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau remains popular among a narrow slice of reactionary plutocrats, including its acting general counsel Mark Paoletta, who has enjoyed sipping tea on Hitler’s china with fellow elitists like Harlan Crown and Clarence “Have a Coke and a Pube” Thomas, most average Americans, up to their double chins in usurious credit card debt, would like to know that someone is out there protecting them from giant banks and rapacious credit card companies.

The assault of these out-of touch elites has now reached the ramparts of the three bulwarks of well-being for average Americans: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  Elitist Leon and his gang of incel douchebags have already ordered the closure of 47 Social Security offices, with senior officials warning that sabotaging the Social Security system will lead to its imminent collapse.  Is this what average Americans are hoping for, or is it something imposed on them by billionaire Ayn Rand fanboys and Wall Street finaglers looking to privatize the system for their own gain?

Some out-of-touch Republican elitists are even threatening to cut Medicare and Medicaid, which provides vital health care benefits to a fifth of all Americans (that's about 70 million people who would rather not sicken and die).  Leading the charge:  Rick “I'll Take the Fifth” Scott, who made billions by, wait for it, scamming Medicare, and used his ill-gotten gains to buy himself a Senate seat in Florida.  These elitists don't recognize that in deep red states, Medicaid covers much higher percentages of the population: West Virginia, 28%; Louisiana, 32%; and Arkansas, 28%.

These elite plans are shall we say not very popular with average hard-working diner-dining Americans:

 Source: KFF

These pretentious Republican elites, including Harvard man Brainworm Bobby Kennedy, Jr., wealthy scion of American political royalty, are also working to undermine medical science and the health of the average non-crazy Americans, who would prefer not to die from preventable infectious disease.  The doctors who actually know some medicine and treat patients are alarmed:

Source: NBC News

And the elitist assault on science and medical research threatens research on treatments for cancer and other potentially life-saving breakthroughs:

The proposed cuts to NIH research funding—which specifically target expenses known as "indirect costs"—directly and immediately put critical and ongoing research across the country in jeopardy, JHU President Ron Daniels and Hopkins Medicine CEO Theodore L. DeWeese wrote in a message to the Hopkins community on Monday night.

DHS Secretary Brainworm Bobby's power breakfast

To illustrate this point, Daniels and DeWeese noted that among other ongoing research, NIH funding currently supports approximately 600 ongoing clinical trials at Johns Hopkins, including trials in cancer, pediatrics and children's health, heart and vascular studies, and the aging brain, among many others....

"The NIH funding cut endangers these trials and many more like them into the future," they wrote. "And these trial participants are our patients. The care, treatments, and medical breakthroughs provided to them and their families are not 'overhead'—they offer meaningful hope and scientific expertise, often when it's needed most. They are the lifeblood of the advanced care that draws patients from across the country and around the world to Johns Hopkins. Many of them come to us with life threatening conditions or diseases that have failed to respond to treatment elsewhere. They come to us because of our commitment to connecting our research with the very best clinical care.

Even on supposedly popular issues, like starting a growth-killing trade war, have you found anyone who wants to pay $10,000 more for a pickup truck, or another $1,000 on food?  We haven't found too many average Joes happy about the carnage in their 401(k)s. Billionaires like Bessent can spin nonsense about tariffs and inflation but when prices go up due to import taxes, prices go up. That is inflation, at least in every Ohio diner we’ve ever visited.  And every Ec. 10 section we attended. 

By the way, tariffs not only increase inflation, they crush economic growth by reducing consumption.  Someone tell Ezra Klein who the anti-growth party really is.

And the same out-of-touch Republican elites that are burning down American government at home are also imposing their bizarre views on U.S. foreign policy, contrary to the judgment of average Americans.

Those elites in their Palm Beach mansions are trying to foment simultaneous wars of aggression against Panama, Mexico, Canada, and Greenland.  They'd fight the battles themselves but their bone spurs require daily rounds of golf.  

Republican elites party at Mar-a-Lago as Ukraine bleeds

Finally, these arrogant nattering nabobs of cowardly Communist containment are hell-bent on handing Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin a series of glittering prizes that he never thought were possible when he first installed video-recording equipment in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton and sent up three hookers from Omsk bearing buckets of fried chicken.

These pretentious elites and their wholly-owned Republican politicians intend to force Ukraine to surrender to Russia by cutting their supplies of U.S. weapons (thereby sacrificing the well paid U.S. jobs involved in their manufacture).  Not content with their contemptible sell out of Ukraine and its toll of innocent Ukrainians, they have also decide to blow up NATO, which has kept peace and fostered prosperity and democracy in Europe.  

The result is either a fatal weakening of our most vital alliances, leading to further wars of conquest as Putin seeks by force of arms to recreate the old Soviet Union by running over nations who won their independence three decades earlier.  Or Europe could surprise these know-it-all Republican elites and form an independent effective defensive alliance (including Canada and possibly key East Asian allies) that would reduce the United States to lonely isolation, its military squandered in short-arm inspections of brave troops and impaling helpless refugees along the Rio Grande.

All of these elite objectives are massively unpopular with average three-egg-and-bacon-slam eating Americans.  But those insufferable Republican elites are too busy flying Supreme Court Justices around on their private jets and draining billions out of the U.S. Treasury for their exploding rockets to notice.  

It really makes you long for the days when the worst things that our elites did was let 16-year-old trans girls play field hockey.

You are cordially invited to your lynching, Mayor Wu

 

By Spy City Hall Bureau Chief Jimmy Burke with Immigration Correspondent Emma Goldman

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, juggling a full time job, a new baby, and a re-election campaign, is now forced to put aside all three because the Republican stooges in Congress have issued an invitation she can’t refuse: to attend her own lynching in Washington DC on Wednesday, March 5.

The supposed point of the invitation is to hear from her on how the Boston Police handles undocumented immigrants as part of its crime-fighting strategy. And if you believe that, you’ll believe that the Republican regime in Washington is a legitimate competent government.

The invitation, backed by the threat of a subpoena, was issued by Republican plug-ugly and bully James Comer, who spent the last two years investigating the “Biden crime family” and coming up with bupkis. He and his fellow screaming bigots are eager to yell at the Mayor about Boston’s reputation as a crime-ravaged “sanctuary city” in front of television cameras.

The term “sanctuary city” has no particular meaning, although it is generally thought to encompass jurisdictions in which the police are instructed to fight crime and leave civil immigration enforcement, like civil tax enforcement, or civil labor-law enforcement, or civilian environmental-protection enforcement, or any other f***in’ kind of civil enforcement of federal law to the responsible federal agency.

The term “crime-ravaged” does have a particular meaning. In the case of Boston, it means that

“We saved you a tree, I mean a seat, lady!”

Boston is on track to end 2024 with the fewest number of homicides in nearly seven decades, mirroring a national trend of decreased violent crime and bolstering its status as one of the safest large cities in the United States.... “In the entire time that I’ve been a police officer, going back since when I came on, the city has never been safer, period, when it comes to crime, particularly violent crime,” Police Commissioner Michael Cox said at a news conference. There were 24 homicides in Boston through Dec. 22, according to Boston Police data — a 33 percent decline from 2023 and the fewest in 67 years. Boston is an outlier among similarly sized US cities: In 2023, there were 150 homicides in Louisville, Ky.; 132 murders in Las Vegas; 73 homicides in Portland, Ore.; 85 in Denver; and 38 in El Paso, Texas.

So whatever Mayor Wu is doing about crime, it seems to be working admirably. By the way, with a murder rate six times that of Boston, Las Vegas could really use the exciting new residency of FBI Supremo Kash Patel.

That’s the reality. In the paranoid fantasy world of white bigots who have found employment with the Tangerine-Faced Fascist, Boston is a hellscape of violent crime, caused by the Boston Police’s failure to round up undocumented immigrants and turn them over to the federal body snatchers:

On Wednesday, Republican members of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released what was effectively an ominous teaser trailer for the March 5 hearing, in which lawmakers claim Wu, along with the mayors of Chicago, Denver, and New York City, will be “held publicly accountable” for their cities' policies. The video served as a preview for the grilling Wu and the other three mayors are expected to endure by conservative lawmakers, who will likely argue the cities are less safe because of their laws that ban local police from complying with requests from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to detain people based solely on their immigration status.

Yeah, no.

A few reality checks are in order:

First, what the Republican immigrant-persecutors are bitching about is something not actually under the control of the Mayor. The Boston Police cannot just lock up immigrants because the federal body-snatchers want them to. Amazingly, in a free society the authority of the police is bounded by law. In the Commonwealth, the law is that:

Why don't Republicans like Mayor Wu?
(Photo: Wu Campaign)

...as defined in a 2017 decision by the Supreme Judicial Court, which held that “Massachusetts provides no authority for Massachusetts court officers to arrest and hold an individual solely on the basis of a federal civil immigration detainer.” The practical impact of that SJC decision is that Massachusetts law enforcement can’t hold people just because ICE asks them to. (The reference to “court officers” has been interpreted to mean all law enforcement agencies.) If there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, and a warrant is issued, Boston Police partner with state and federal law enforcement agencies — including ICE. But if there’s no criminal warrant, an individual cannot be kept in BPD custody.

You could look it up.

So in fact Mayor Wu can’t instruct the police to hold suspected undocumented immigrants in the absence of a reason based in state criminal law. You’d have to be an idiot to claim otherwise. That doesn’t stop loud useless white men, though:

[Wu]r drew Homan’s fire after she said...that local authorities will not assist federal mass deportation efforts,... “Either she helps us, or she gets the hell out of the way, because we’re going to do it,” Homan shot back Monday in an interview on the conservative news outlet Newsmax. “She’s not very smart, I’ll give her that,” Homan said of the Harvard College and Harvard Law School graduate.

Hey f***nuts, this is Boston and the Globe isn’t going to let you get away with attacking the brainpower of someone with two Harvard degrees. (That doesn’t mean she’s right; it just means attacking her as dumb says more about the speaker than the Mayor).

Never mind the law. The decision to instruct the Boston Police not to interrogate people about their immigration status is rooted in, wait for it, public safety:

Under Boston’s existing laws, Wu has said, law enforcement will not be required or expected to participate in mass deportations of residents who have not been involved in “serious criminal activity.” Advocates for such policies argue they are important tools for community safety: if undocumented immigrants fear deportation every time they interact with local authorities, they may be less likely to report crimes, supporters say.

Ya think? If the undocumented believe that the Boston Police will turn them over to ICE, that essentially puts them outside the law. If a victim of crime thinks they’ll be detained based on their immigration status, how can they be expected to report crimes like domestic violence? And how can they be expected to otherwise assist the police in any other criminal matter? 

So Mayor Wu is doing nothing more than following Massachusetts law, as she is required to do. 

Why then is she going to be strung up by Republican white men next week in Washington?

Three terrible reasons.

1.  The Republican white supremacist and woman-hating base enjoys nothing more than the spectacle of beating up on a woman of color.  That she is much much smarter than they are is only a bonus.

2.  Spineless Republican weirdos and toadies like to perform their sadism and cruelty to amuse and delight their cruel and sadistic overlord, King Tiny Toadstool.   

3.  Cheap loudmouths like the Tangerine-Faced Fascist and his knee-breakers like Tom Homan have been running their mouths about how they are going to scoop up millions of undocumented immigrants and bulldoze them into the sea, like a reboot of Soylent Green.

To the body snatchers, it's kryptonite

But so far the numbers demonstrate that they have conspicuously failed to achieve their evil goal.  They lack enough jackboots and whips to get the job done.  Even worse, many immigrants are now aware of their legal rights, including the right to tell ICE body-snatcher to sod off in the absence of a civil warrant (which they also know does not permit the goons to break down your door).

The body-snatchers need an excuse to explain away their lack of success.  The easiest excuse is that they're being frustrated by the likes of Michelle Wu, even though she (a) a girl, (b) not white, and (c) according to Homan, not very smart.

If your mighty deportation machine can be stopped by a little dumb girl who doesn't look like a 'Bama sorority rush captain, maybe you're not as big and strong as you claim to be.

But by tormenting her before a national audience, you can pretend to be big and powerful and strong and white.

Comer and his Republican lynch mob are simply following in the footsteps of their Fascist ego ideal, Mussolini. Old Benito, until he was strung up in a Milan gas station, always strutted around as if he were actually big and strong.  Until he was confronted by people who weren't impressed and weren't going to be bullied.

Like Mayor Wu.