Israel takes another step down the road to becoming an official rogue state: Israeli officials seized broadcasting equipment belonging to the Associated Press on Tuesday, arguing it was used to illegally provide a live feed to Al Jazeera, whose Jerusalem bureau was shuttered by officials earlier this month following the passage of a new foreign broadcast law. Press advocates have warned that the law creates a dangerous precedent for censoring independent news outlets in the region amid the ongoing war with Hamas. Israeli lawmakers passed the measure last month, empowering Israel’s communications minister to take action against any foreign media network that it says poses a national security risk.
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Anyone who is “looking at that” is someone who is contemplating taking away the right to contraception. For years people like me have been raising the alarm about birth control. All you have to do is read what the anti-abortion extremists have been saying. They will take it step by step (they say that too) and now that they got Roe v. Wade overturned they know that it works. They will not stop. Abortion and phony sexual morality are among the most important organizing principles of the right. Trump being their exalted leader, an adjudicated rapist and admitted sexual assaulter, five children with three different women, shows (just as it does with the plethora of other cult leaders, religious and otherwise) that patriarchy is the real basis of it. I suspect that Trump is going to come up with a “solution” on birth control that will look very much like his answer to the abortion problem. He will endorse “states’ rights” and say that’s what everyone has always wanted and he will deliver it.
The Horror This excellent piece by Radly Balko at his newsletter on Trump’s fascist immigration is sobering. Like him, I don’t think people are taking this seriously enough. It’s a nightmare in the making and a percolating international crisis when most of the rest of the world rises up in horror at the most powerful nation on earth enacting a massive policy of ethnic cleansing. Some excerpts: Trump has made 15 million deportations a central part of his 2024 campaign. And he’s stepped up the dehumanizing of immigrants he’ll need to get a significant portion of the country on board. Even if Trump gets distracted, it’s likely he’ll put Stephen Miller in charge of the plan. Miller is the only non-relative senior staffer who served the entirety of the first Trump term. And Miller won’t be distracted. Ridding the country of non-white immigrants has been a core part of his identity for his entire life. Miller himself has long made clear that the distinction that matters most to him is not between “legal” and “illegal,” but between white and non-white immigrants.
And one was even scanned for Trump’s PAC for some reason Axios: Former President Trump’s attorneys found classified documents in his bedroom four months after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, per court documents unsealed Tuesday. The revelation comes as part of a newly unsealed opinion that U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell cited last year when she found that prosecutors brought forward sufficient evidence to show Trump mishandled classified documents. The former president’s classified documents trial in Florida was indefinitely postponed earlier this month, with the judge citing the number of outstanding pre-trial motions. An empty folder and “another mostly empty folder marked `Classified Evening Summary'” were found when Trump lawyers searched his properties following the FBI’s August 2022 raid on the former president’s Florida home.
Oh never mind I shouldn’t be shocked by this but I am: Republican officials have completely lost any sense of decency. So much so that even Fox News MAGA adherents like Bartiromo are pushing back. By the way, Murphy is a surgeon. Honestly, this sort of thing greatly worries me. MAGA seems to infect a lot of doctors and it makes me think it’s probably wise to determine whether yours has Fox News Brain Rot before you go under the knife.
Really? When the greatest crisis of his presidency hit — a global pandemic the likes of which hadn’t been seen in one hundred years — he failed miserably. How anyone can think this man should be back in the White House is mind boggling and once he is dispatched next November, this nation is going to have to undergo some very serious soul searching to figure out what has happened to it and what to do about it.
Protecting the in-group from you, the out-group Jonathan Last on Friday made sure readers saw clearly that for Republicans “law and order” has a very, very narrow meaning. Last was commenting on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s pardon of Daniel Perry, convicted and sentenced to 25 years for the vigilante murder of Garrett Foster during a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. Last recounts the details that put Perry, a racist murderer, behind bars, but the key detail is Abbott’s pardon: There is no legal or moral justification for pardoning Perry. His trial was fair. The jury acted reasonably. The laws he broke were well-defined and serious. He is not a good guy who had one bad moment. There is no indication that he has repented and become a different man than the one who fantasized about murder and then carried it out. The only reason to pardon Perry is political. Pardoning Perry creates political gain for Gov. Abbott because his constituents like Perry. And these voters like Perry precisely because of who he murdered.
Trump had a little meltdown last night. ‘My Speech in Dallas this weekend at the NRA’s ‘Endorsement of President Donald J. Trump,’ was attended by a Record Crowd of very enthusiastic Patriots,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Biden Campaign, however, put out a Fake Story that I ‘froze’ for 30 seconds, going into the ‘Musical Interlude’ section, when in actuality, the 30 to 60 second period of silence is standard in every one of my Speeches where we use the Music,” he went on, “Check out any of my Speeches!” “The reason they came up with this Disinformation is that Biden freezes all the time, can’t put two sentences together, and can rarely find his way off the stage without help,” he claimed. “Donald Trump doesn’t freeze! It is a MADE UP Biden Campaign story, put out in a dying Newspaper that I never heard of, and every Reporter knows it, including the large group that was there….” he added. Here’s the thing. Nobody’s ever mentioned that his speeches always contain a weird 30 second pause right in the middle when the music comes on.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and other MAGA leaders are demanding that Mike Johnson defind Jack Smith’s office. That’s ridiculous, of course but it’s good for fundraising, I guess. But Trump and his henchmen do have big plans for the DOJ and the FBI if they win in November: Trump, who has been indicted on dozens of criminal charges by the Justice Department, has vowed on the campaign trail to overhaul the agency if he wins the presidential election on Nov. 5 and pledged to use it to pursue his own opponents, including Democratic President Joe Biden. The plan is essentially twofold, according to the nine people interviewed by Reuters, some of whom requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. First: flood the Justice Department with stalwart conservatives unlikely to say “no” to controversial orders from the White House.
Also sprach Tom Cotton International alliances are sometimes untidy affairs. Some are built on ideological or cultural common ground. Others on trade or security interests. Or a mix. We Americans like to think of ourselves as the good guys allied with other good guys, but that’s a flattering oversimplification. Our WWII alliance with the Soviet Union under Stalin’s murderous regime was one of strategic necessity that lasted long enough to defeat Nazi Germany, and no longer. When the Saudis murdered and dismembered dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Americans expressed appropriate outrage for an appropriate interval and then went about our business. Because the Saudis are good for U.S. business. Now Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists and its toll on civilians in Gaza is straining U.S. relations with its longtime ally. It’s about to get more strained. This is breaking news (New York Times): The International Criminal Court prosecutor, Karim Khan, said Monday that he had requested arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity in relation to the Oct.