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"Normal person: It’s bad to murder children

Crazy person: Aha I see you hate the Jewish faith"

-- Caitlin Johnstone

News and Opinion

Idiot Republicans Are Saying Genocide Joe Has ‘Abandoned Israel’

Dopey Republican pundits and politicians have begun claiming that Joe Biden has “abandoned Israel” and has fallen under the control of Hamas, because this is a presidential election year and everything needs to be ten times dumber than usual.

Donald Trump said on the campaign trail on Wednesday that “Any Jewish person that votes for a Democrat or votes for Biden should have their head examined,” saying of Biden, “He totally abandoned Israel.”

Trump’s comments were made in response to Biden saying that Israel should declare a ceasefire of six to eight weeks, seemingly suggesting that Israel should do so without conditioning the ceasefire on the release of Israeli hostages. This hopeful statement was swiftly dispelled by Biden himself, however, with the president reiterating the same keep-killing-children-until-Hamas-gives-us-everything-we-want position that this administration has stood by for six months. Apparently Biden’s dementia-addled brain is just struggling to keep its story straight.

Meanwhile Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro has been pushing the narrative that Biden has “saved” Hamas by capitulating to demands from the left on Gaza, going so far as to declare that “Hamas is now in control of the Biden administration.”

We've reached the moment you've all been waiting for: "Joe Biden is Hamas" pic.twitter.com/mWmh6PJbTF

— Read Let This Radicalize You (@JoshuaPHilll) April 9, 2024

To be clear, this is all foam-brained nonsense. Biden has spent six months pouring weapons of mass murder into Israel without any conditions whatsoever, and his administration has been justifying and spinning and making excuses for all of Israel’s heinous actions in Gaza this entire time. No US president in history has done more to directly serve the murderousness of the Israeli war machine than Joe Biden.

Right to this very day the president is declaring “ironclad” support for Israel as fears mount that Iran may retaliate for the Israeli strike on its consulate building in Syria which killed multiple Iranian military officers, despite the fact that Iran has made it clear to the White House that if the US comes to Israel’s defense it will make the US a target as well. Biden is so fanatically pro-Israel that we could be near the precipice of the worst-case nightmare scenario of all possible middle eastern conflicts because of his unwavering support for the genocidal apartheid state.

In reality, the only reason Republicans have begun trying to frame Biden as anti-Israel is because only through fiction and fantasy can America’s two mainstream parties pretend there are any significant differences between them. They’re both insanely supportive of Israel and its crimes. They both support war, militarism, imperialism, capitalism and oligarchy. The only areas in which there’s any meaningful disagreement between them are the issues that don’t inconvenience the powerful in any way like whether or not you’re allowed to have an abortion or whether it’s good or bad to be mean to trans people — and even those issues are only used to keep everyone’s interest and attention locked into mainstream politics and diverted from revolutionary sentiment.

So they make up these moronic fictional battlegrounds to fight on, because that’s the only way they can actually have anything to fight about. Joe Biden is a Hamas agent. Donald Trump is a Kremlin agent. Joe Biden is controlled by “the CCP”. Donald Trump is going to be another Hitler instead of another shitty Republican. The Democrats want to steal your guns and make your son wear a dress. The Republicans want to dismantle NATO and let Vladimir Putin take over the world.

Absolutely none of this is real, but if Republicans and Democrats were forced to campaign against each other solely on issues in which they truly disagreed, they’d have very little to talk about, and it would give the whole two-party scam away. Before you know it you’d have them arguing about things like whether it would be best to ramp up nuclear aggressions with China first or prioritize taking out Russia, and people would start to notice that neither of these parties have the interests of normal human beings at heart.

So they keep up their kayfabe combat schtick, and sell it as hard as they can to make sure as many Americans as possible are clapping along to the pretend drama of the two-handed puppet show.

Can’t wait til this election is over and done with so we can go back to the normal levels of stupid.

Phil Giraldi: Israel’s Dangerous Game

Aid ‘still not reaching Gaza’, as top US official warns famine has started

A promised surge in aid into Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu promised Joe Biden a week ago has so far failed to materialise, aid workers say, as the US aid chief confirmed that famine is beginning to take hold in parts of the besieged coastal strip. The increase in the number of truck crossing into Gaza claimed by Israel conflicts with UN records and already appears to be faltering. ...

One of Netanyahu’s pledges to Biden, to open the Ashdod port north of Gaza as a portal to sea-borne humanitarian aid, has led to no apparent action, according to the Israel N12 channel. N12 reported that none of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (Cogat) nor the Ashdod Port authorities have so far received instructions about opening the facility to shipments bound for Gaza.

Israeli officials had been promising their US counterparts for weeks that a crossing point would be opened into northern Gaza where the starvation is the most severe. It would either be at Erez, which was the main border point before the current war, or at a new site, they informed Washington. No decision was made, however, until Wednesday, six days after the Biden-Netanyahu call, when the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said construction had begun on a new crossing. It is not clear how long that construction work will take.

Two other steps Israel was supposed to take to increase the flow of assistance are also under way, with no target completion date. One is a coordination centre where aid agency officials and Israeli operational commanders are supposed to sit together to make sure that aid missions are not bombed like the World Central Kitchen (WCK) convoy on 1 April, when seven of its aid workers were killed. The other is a new security screening centre where trucks of humanitarian assistance heading for northern Gaza can be inspected by Israeli monitors before crossing over.

Aid officials say the amount of food getting into the coastal strip is far short of what is needed to fend off an impending famine, particularly in the north. On Wednesday, Samantha Power, the head of the US humanitarian and development agency, USAID, became the first American official to confirm publicly that famine had already got a grip in at least some parts of Gaza. Power told a congressional committee that her officials had analysed an assessment by food insecurity experts in mid-March that a famine could set in between later the same month and mid-May, and had found that judgment to be “credible”.

“So famine is already occurring there?” Democratic congressman, Joaquin Castro, asked her. “That is – yes,” she replied.

Circle the wagons, Biden apologists...

Tim Kaine: Biden knows Netanyahu ‘played’ him in early months of Gaza war

Senator Tim Kaine, a former vice-presidential nominee and leading foreign policy voice in the Democratic party, has said Joe Biden now understands that Benjamin Netanyahu “played” him during the early months of the war in Gaza but “that ain’t going to happen any more”.

In an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, Kaine accused the prime minister of making Israel “dramatically less safe” and hurting its longstanding relationship with the US, and said the US president had come to realise the limits of his influence. ...

Biden embraced Netanyahu early in the conflict but had little to show for it as Israel continued to rain bombs on Gaza, causing mass displacement, threats of famine and disease and, last week, the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. Protesters have condemned Biden for miscalculating the extent of his sway over Netanyahu.

Kaine reflected: “I do believe he felt like that relationship and the true compassion that he had for Israel over his career would lead him to be listened to by the Israeli leadership. I think he is enormously frustrated that he’s been trying to give advice, not like a foe would give it – ‘I think this is better for you if you listen to me. I’m not just saying this is better for me; I’m saying this will be better for you.’”

Israeli Scholar Neve Gordon on Israeli Mass Surveillance in Gaza & Use of AI to Kill Palestinians

Hamas says it does not have 40 hostages who fit criteria for deal with Israel

The Palestinian militant group Hamas has indicated it does not have 40 captives who are still alive who meet the “humanitarian” criteria for a proposed hostages-for-prisoners ceasefire agreement with Israel. A senior Israeli official confirmed claims made at the weekend by Hamas during talks in Cairo that it does not have 40 hostages in Gaza who meet the exchange criteria.

Ceasefire talks have focused on a US-backed proposal of a phased exchange of hostages and prisoners. In the first instance women, children, and elderly or sick people – including five female Israeli soldiers – would be exchanged for an estimated 900 Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel, alongside a six-week ceasefire in Gaza.

Hamas appears reluctant to make up the numbers for an exchange with surviving male hostages. Reliable information about how many hostages remain alive, who is holding them and where has been hard to come by.

The CIA director, William Burns, has presented a new proposal to try to bridge the gaps between the two sides. The US is pressuring Israel to agree to release 900 Palestinian prisoners in the first phase of a three-stage deal as well as allowing the return of Palestinians to northern Gaza.

The talks, which resumed on Sunday, have brought no signs of a breakthrough on a plan presented by US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators, which Hamas said it was studying.

US seeking to deter Iran from strike on Israel, officials say

The US is seeking to deter Iran from carrying out a retaliatory strike against Israel with concerted declarations of commitment to Israeli security, while at the same time trying to prevent the outbreak of a major regional war, officials in Washington have said.

US officials still believe that a direct Iranian missile or drone strike is possible within the next few days, in retaliation for the Israeli bombing of an Iranian consular building in Damascus on 1 April, which killed a top Islamic Revolutionary Guards general and six other Guard officers.

Israel would rely heavily on US-supplied weaponry in any response to an Iranian strike, a point that Benjamin Netanyahu made implicitly on Thursday, by standing in front of American-made F-15 fighters at the Tel Nof airbase in southern Israel to tell reporters: “Whoever harms us, we will harm them.” ...

The US hopes that strong messages of solidarity and support for Israel from Joe Biden and the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, could still deter Tehran from seeking to hit a target in Israel. A strike would mark a dangerously significant escalation in a long-simmering war, fought until now by proxy, or by strikes in third countries, such as Lebanon and Syria.

Blinken spoke by phone to Chinese, Turkish, Saudi and European counterparts “to make clear that escalation is not in anyone’s interest and that countries should urge Iran not to escalate,” state department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Thursday.

US Tax Day Campaign Urges Congress to Stop Arming Israel's Genocide in Gaza

With the April 15 U.S. federal income tax filing deadline just around the corner, the American Friends Service Committee on Thursday announced a Tax Day campaign to demand members of Congress stop funding Israel's genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza.

AFSC—a Quaker group that has been active in Gaza since the Nakba, or Israeli ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine in 1948—said it seeks to highlight how U.S. taxpayer dollars "are misused to fund war and militarism instead of life-sustaining programs."

This year, the group's focus is on U.S. military aid to Israel amid the ongoing Gaza genocide, in which at least 109,500 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces, often using weapons supplied by Washington—including 2,000-pound bombs that can level entire city blocks. The majority of Palestinians killed during the war have been women and children, including more than 13,000 minors.

According to AFSC:

Over the last six months, tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been killed using weapons provided by the United States. Humanitarian aid workers delivering vital assistance continue to be attacked and killed at unprecedented rates. The blockade and killing of humanitarian aid workers are causing widespread famine and starvation in Gaza.

"This scale of devastation is only possible because of financial, political, and military support from the United States," Jennifer Bing, who heads the AFSC's Palestine Activism Program, said in a statement. "We need our members of Congress to listen to their constituents and their conscience and say no to any additional military funding for Israel and yes to a cease-fire and humanitarian access."

AFSC general secretary Joyce Ajlouny said: "The U.S. government is deeply complicit in the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children and families. Our tax dollars are buying the bombs dropping on their loved ones and the tanks that are destroying their cities."

"As a Quaker and a Palestinian I know that this violence will never bring peace," Ajlouny added. "We need an immediate cease-fire, an end to military funding from the U.S., and a political process that will end the apartheid system and bring true peace and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians."

The U.S., which already gave Israel around $4 billion in annual military aid before the October 7 attacks, has approved more than 100 arms shipments to the key Middle Eastern ally over the past six months. President Joe Biden—who since October 7 has repeatedly circumvented Congress in order to expedite weapons transfers to Israel—is seeking an additional $14.3 billion in armed assistance to the country.

This, despite multiple domestic laws and the Biden administration's own rules barring arms transfers to countries that violate human rights.

Israel imports nearly 70% of its arms from the United States. Common Dreams reported earlier this month that the Biden administration is pushing Congress to approve the sale of $18 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets to Israel.

Kharkov blackout. Russian military stretching the front lines

West’s refusal to condemn Kiev looks like encouragement for attacks on ZNPP — diplomat

West’s refusal to condemn the Kiev government for its shelling attacks on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) looks like an indirect encouragement to continue these attacks, Russian Permanent Representative to the International Organizations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov said.

The main problem, of course, is with Western countries. Whatever the Ukrainians do, they are never, under any circumstances, ready to say anything negative about the Ukrainian side. And this looks like indirect encouragement of attacks on Zaporozhskaya NPP, which I also stated during my speech at the meeting," he told reporters after an extraordinary meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors.

"Time will tell how effective today's meeting was. I still hope that there will be no new attacks. They weren't there yesterday, they weren't there today. I would like to hope that this is also a result of the fact that we convened this event," the Russian diplomat continued. ... In recent days, the Ukrainian military has been attacking the ZNPP almost daily with the help of drones.

Russia Destroys One of Ukraine’s Largest Power Plants

Russia launched massive missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure on Thursday morning and destroyed one of Ukraine’s largest power plants in the Kyiv region.

The Russian Defense Ministry said the bombardment was in response to Ukrainian attacks on oil refineries and other energy infrastructure inside Russian territory. Ukraine has been stepping up attacks inside Russia as it has become clear there’s no hope for victory on the battlefield, and Ukrainian lines are at risk of collapsing.

Confession of Polish mercenary Mihail Lipski, who fought against the Russians in Ukraine for two years

About Americans.
These are not guys you can go to full scale war with. You can go on a "safari" with them to Afghanistan or Iraq. You have everything, but your…

— -- GEROMAN -- time will tell - -- (@GeromanAT) April 11, 2024

"Council of War": Walden Bello on Biden's Trilateral Summit with Philippines, Japan to Contain China

Dementia Joe is a big fan of iron cladding, he likes it so much he gives it out like party favors.

Biden pledges to defend Philippines from any attack in South China Sea

Joe Biden has pledged to defend the Philippines from any attack in the South China Sea, as he hosted the first joint summit with Manila and Tokyo amid growing tensions with Beijing.

“The United States’ defence commitments to Japan and to the Philippines are ironclad,” the US president said on Thursday as he met the Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos and Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida.

The summit at the White House comes after repeated confrontations between Chinese and Philippine vessels in the disputed waterway that have raised fears of a wider conflict.

“Any attack on Philippine aircraft, vessels or armed forces in the South China Sea would invoke our mutual defense treaty,” said Biden. The US president made a similar commitment when he hosted the Philippine president at the White House last year.

Mexico calls on UN to expel Ecuador over embassy raid as tensions soar

Mexico is demanding that the United Nations expel Ecuador from the world body as part of a complaint to the top UN court over a police raid last week on the Mexican embassy in Quito.

Tensions between Mexico and Ecuador have soared since late last week when Ecuadorian authorities forced their way into the diplomatic mission to arrest Ecuador’s former vice-president Jorge Glas who had been holed up there seeking asylum in Mexico.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said his country had filed a complaint at the international court of justice in the Netherlands asking the UN to expel Ecuador.

“The court, in accordance with the United Nations charter, should approve the expulsion, and there should be no veto” from the UN security council, López Obrador said.

López Obrador also said Mexico was demanding a public apology from Ecuador for last week’s raid, reparation of damages and a promise not to do it again. The Ecuadorian foreign minister, Gabriela Sommerfeld, said her country would defend its actions and said an apology “is not something that is under discussion at this moment”.

The long Calvary of Julian Assange may be coming to an end

World’s coal power capacity rises despite climate warnings

The world’s coal power capacity grew for the first time since 2019 last year, despite warnings that coal plants need to close at a rate of at least 6% each year to avoid a climate emergency.

A report by Global Energy Monitor found that coal power capacity grew by 2% last year, driven by an increase in new coal plants across China and a slowdown of plant closures in Europe and the US.

About 69.5 gigawatts (GW) of coal plant capacity came online last year, of which two-thirds were built in China, according to the report. There were also plants built in Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Korea, Greece and Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, a slowdown in coal plant shutdowns in the US and Europe led to more than 21GW retiring last year. This resulted in a net annual increase of almost 48.5GW for the year, the highest since 2016.

The authors of the report said coal plants needed to shut at a faster pace, and that China needed to adopt stricter controls on its expansion of capacity.

Water pours out of Utah dam as residents prepare for evacuation

Workers hurriedly tried to shore up a rural Utah dam after a 60ft (18-meter) crack sent water pouring into a creek and endangering the 1,800 residents of a downstream town.

State and local leaders don’t think the Panguitch Lake dam is in imminent danger of breaking open but have told residents to be prepared to evacuate if conditions worsen. Emergency management officials passed out a list of evacuation procedures to worried residents at a Wednesday evening town meeting meant to mitigate panic.

“I can’t say that the emergency situation is entirely averted, but I’m very, very encouraged by the progress we’ve made today,” Everett Taylor, an assistant state engineer for dam safety with the Utah division of water rights, told residents of the southern Utah town.

Lowering the reservoir to below the affected area will take several days, he said. About 2ft (61cm) of water remained above the crack as of Wednesday evening, and workers had covered nearly 45ft of the crack with boulders.

An ice sheet on the reservoir had pushed up against the dam, causing the top to crack and tilt downstream, with water gushing through the opening, Taylor explained. His staff was able to relieve some of the pressure against the dam by making large cuts across the ice sheet. The ice has now pulled away, and the top of the dam has tilted back, he said.

EPA has limited six ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water – but there are 15,000

Strong new limits for some PFAS compounds in drinking water set by the US Environmental Protection Agency this week are being celebrated for how far they go in reducing exposures to the dangerous chemicals.

But public health advocates say the rules merely represent a first step that is limited in its impact on the broader PFAS crisis because they do not directly prevent more pollution or force the chemical industry to pay for cleanup.

The rules also address only six compounds, although about 15,000 PFAS exist, and the vast majority remain unregulated or unstudied. Meanwhile, drinking water represents only about 20% of human exposure, the EPA estimates, and diet is probably a larger problem.

The PFAS crisis is so vast and complex that the only way to address it is to regulate the chemicals as a class and strongly limit their use, public health advocates say.

“The EPA is not going to succeed this way – they have to define PFAS broadly and ban all non-essential uses. Otherwise, we’re not getting out of the contamination crisis,” said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official now with the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer).

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

How Britain Would Be Obliged to Free Assange, While Biden ‘Considers’ Ending the Case

As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

Israeli Suffering Is Not Comparable To Palestinian Suffering

US Commander Arrives in Israel To Discuss Potential Iranian Attack

The Cynical Reason Biden Let the UN Pass a Gaza Cease-Fire Resolution

Gantz Says Middle School-Aged Israeli Children Will One Day Fight in Gaza

Here's How Much You Gave Last Year to The Pentagon (Hint: It Was a Lot)

Russia Delivers Major Blow to Ukraine by Destroying Kiev’s Biggest Power Plant

Ukraine - To Hurt Russia Means Pain For Ukraine

How To Know When The US Deficit Is Actually A Problem

75% of Great Barrier Reef Suffers Coral Bleaching

Banquet room with preserved frescoes unearthed among Pompeii ruins

"A Stalemate and Attritional Grind": Journalist Luke Mogelson on 2 Years of Russia's War in Ukraine

Catherine Herridge BLASTS CBS News In Congressional Testimony, Gov't SEIZED Source Docs

“Mainstream Media Is Just A Mouthpiece For The Democratic Party!” – Matt Taibbi

A Little Night Music

Marcia Ball - I'm Coming Down With The Blues

Marcia Ball - Louella

Marcia Ball - Find Another Fool

Marcia Ball & Paul Thorn - That's Alright Mama

Marcia Ball - Mobile

Marcia Ball - Give it up

Marcia Ball - Tattooed Lady and the Alligator Man

Sonny Landreth and Marcia Ball - Walking Blues

Marcia Ball - Hot Tamale Baby

Marcia Ball - Louisiana 1927

Marcia Ball - Peace Love and BBQ