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A Well-Informed Citizenry

Republicans increasingly are going to pretend they love abortion and reporters are going to pretend to believe them. 

This is called journalism.

Now They Do!

 You weren't supposed to tell!

Joke, but there is a issue at the smaller scale.  I was talking to someone from Mallorca, and he was explaining how, not all that long ago, the island had plenty of special "hidden" places (picturesque coves, etc.) that mostly "only" locals knew about, or could find.  Sure maybe a few were in Lonely Planet, or whatever, but now every tourist can google "best hidden beaches in Mallorca" on their phone, have 20 pop up, and hit google maps for directions.  

Rules

"Funny" how it was the thing they emphasized, seeming to truly believe it set them apart from their predecessors (including Obummer), but then the opportunity to facilitate the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians came along and they couldn't resist!

If the United States was frustrated by that negative reaction, imagine the reaction, post-Gaza, that awaits Washington the next time it seeks global support for the target of an adversary. The dead-on-arrival passage of resolution 2728 may very well be remembered as an inflection point in the decline of the rules-based international order — which is to say the world that the U.S. seeks to build and maintain.

Rising powers will be happy to cite U.S. precedent as they assert their own exceptions to international law. For as Gaza shows in a horrific manner, a world with exceptions to international law is one in which the least powerful suffer the most.

Lunch

Shop while you eat! (Ad, I get a commission).

Prematurely Anti-Ethnic Cleansing

Now that elite opinion has coalesced around the idea that Israel has (caveat caveat caveat caveat) gone a bit too far, I really would like someone to explain what changed between January (let alone October) and April?

I'm just a simple city blogger and my opinion was clear from the beginning: whatever the conflict, de-escalation is alway the right guiding principle, and the assertion of  "no red lines," combined with everybody with a microphone screaming at and trying to ruin the careers of people who thought otherwise, was not good! 

There was a weird regularly repeated notion after 9/11, that somehow the event of that day gave us "the right" to respond by killing a bunch of people, as if satiating the desire for wanton revenge killing was some sort of dispensation you could be granted.

You get to kill a lot of people, as a treat.

To be fair to Israel, their strategic goals are probably much more clear than ours after 9/11, though "clear" does not mean good!

Lock'em Up

Somebody, at least.

NEW YORK -- Former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg was sentenced Wednesday to five months in jail for committing perjury and immediately handcuffed and taken into custody.

What A Shame

Ah, well, nevertheless..

Two right-wing political operatives who used a robocall campaign to try to discourage Black New Yorkers from voting in the 2020 election will pay up to $1.25 million for their actions, the New York State attorney general’s office announced on Tuesday.

...

The office said the calls came from a “sham” organization called Project 1599, which was created by the operatives, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman.

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The Great Noticing

Sounds bad.

On March 8, after an internal investigation, the IDF released a timeline suggesting that the aid convoy began to cross into northern Gaza accompanied by its tanks at 4:29 a.m. A minute later, at 4:30 a.m., the IDF said its troops fired “warning shots” toward the east to disperse crowds before firing at “suspects” who they claimed posed a threat. At 4:45 a.m., the military said it fired more warning shots.

But CNN’s analysis of dozens of videos from the night and testimonies from eyewitnesses’ casts doubt on Israel’s version of events. The evidence, reviewed by forensic and ballistic experts, indicated that automatic gunfire began before the IDF said the convoy had started crossing through the checkpoint and that shots were fired within close range of crowds that had gathered for food.

Burn

Klion:

Along with Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken, the key figures on Biden’s foreign-policy team include Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and, of course, Biden himself. Of these, Sullivan features most prominently in Ward’s book—both the first chapter and the epilogue are structured around him, and we learn more about his personal background than anyone else’s. One gets the sense that Sullivan and Ward spoke often and that Ward identifies with him. Though the main role of any national security adviser is to advise the president, each individual to hold the job brings their own unique approach, and Sullivan’s particular talent seems to be as a crafter of narratives designed to appeal to journalists.

...

Sullivan comes across in the book as bright, competent, and well-intentioned, even if his thinking remains far more conventional than he wants it to seem. But good intentions will get you only so far when your job is to steer an imperial superpower through the multiple crises that it spent years getting itself into. Ward likewise does a capable job of recounting how Sullivan and the Biden team have tried to navigate those crises, but The Internationalists would be more compelling if it looked deeper into the underlying contradictions that make US foreign policy so crisis-prone in the first place. One has to squint pretty hard to see what most of these overseas entanglements have to do with the well-being of the American middle class, however one defines it, and one has to squint even harder to see how any of them might be considered wins.

$TSLAQ

We do love to make fun of Elon, but the market cap of Tesla is $550 billion, ten times the market cap of General Motors. There isn't anything to justify it. Even if you believe in "robotaxis," there's no reason to believe Tesla has figured out what Waymo has not, that Tesla could have even a temporary advantage on such a product.

And yet it persists.

Sounds Bad

Maybe somebody should do something.

Another month, another global heat record that has left climate scientists scratching their heads and hoping this is an El Niño-related hangover rather than a symptom of worse-than-expected planetary health.

Global surface temperatures in March were 0.1C higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68C higher than the pre-industrial average, according to data released on Tuesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Sure Why Not

Now that's hilarious.

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron flew to Florida to meet Donald Trump, as the UK tries to get Trump's allies in the House of Representatives to support further military aid for Ukraine https://t.co/7WUny8l7Mb

— Bloomberg (@business) April 9, 2024

I suspect Dave is not the man with the skills to successfully coax brainwormed malignant narcissist in-hock-to-Russia Trump, but I suppose that fancy accent can be powerful!

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