Happy Caturday!!
I’m really late getting started today, so I’m just going to get right to today’s news. Things are getting out of hand in the the Middle East, and Republicans in the House are determined to make the worse. They are also working hard to shut down the government unless they get all the goodies they are demanding. Johnson did manage to get a continuing resolution passed, but he depended on Democratic votes. Meanwhile the Republicans are holding back funding for Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
This is from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American: January 18, 2024.
This afternoon, Congress passed a new continuing resolution necessary to fund the government past the upcoming deadlines in the previous continuing resolution. Those deadlines were tomorrow (January 19) and February 2. The deadlines in the new measure are March 1 and March 8. This is the third continuing resolution passed in four months as extremist Republicans have refused to fund the government unless they get a wish list of concessions to their ideology.
Today’s vote was no exception. Eighteen Republican senators voted against the measure, while five Republicans did not vote (at least one, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, is ill). All the Democrats voted in favor. The final tally was 77 to 18, with five not voting.
In the House the vote was 314 to 108, with 11 not voting. Republicans were evenly split between supporting government funding and voting against it, threatening to shut down the government. They split 107 to 106. All but two Democrats voted in favor of government funding. (In the past, Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and MIke Quigley of Illinois have voted no on a continuing resolution to fund the government in protest that the measure did not include funding for Ukraine.)
This means that, like his predecessor Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to turn to Democrats to keep the government operating. The chair of the extremist House Freedom Caucus, Bob Good (R-VA), told reporters that before the House vote, Freedom Caucus members had tried to get Johnson to add to the measure the terms of their extremist border security bill. Such an addition would have tanked the bill, forcing a government shutdown, and Johnson refused.
Republican extremists in Congress are also doing the bidding of former president Donald Trump, blocking further aid to Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russian aggression and standing in the way of a bipartisan immigration reform measure. Aid to Ukraine is widely popular both among the American people and among lawmakers. Immigration reform, which Republicans have demanded but are now opposing, would take away one of Trump’s only talking points before the 2024 election.
Richardson discusses a column in yesterday’s Washington Post about what happens when a country backslides on democracy: Poland is a test case for reviving a corrupted democracy, by Lee Hochstader. This could apply to Ukraine and potentially to the U.S.
Read more at the WaPo. This is the danger we face if we let Trump gain power again.
This is funny. From The Kiyv Independent: Zelensky invites Trump to Ukraine.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has extended an invitation to Donald Trump to visit Kyiv, with a specific condition attached.
Speaking with U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 News, Zelensky said that Trump would be warmly received in the capital under one stipulation: the former U.S. president must demonstrate his ability to bring an end to the war with Russia within 24 hours, as he once promised.
Trump has repeatedly said that the war would not have happened if he was still in power in Washington, and that he would bring it to an immediate end if voted back in because he has what he described as “a good relationship” with both Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Beyond that, former U.S. president has provided no details of what his peace deal would involve.
Zelensky, who has previously extended the invitation without receiving a response, emphasized that if Trump indeed has a “formula” for resolving the war, he is eager to learn the specifics.
“So, I invite President Trump. If he can come here, I will need 24 minutes — yes, 24 minutes. Not more. Yes. Not more — 24 minutes to explain [to] President Trump that he can’t manage this war. He can’t bring peace because of Putin.”Zelensky said on air: “He is very welcome to come here, but I think he can not end the war in 24 hours, without giving our land to Putin.”
On the Israel situation, from The Washington Post: Growing number of Senate Democrats question Biden’s Israel strategy.
Five Senate Democrats on Friday signed onto a measure that would condition aid to Israel on its compliance with international law, bringing the total number of co-sponsors to 18. And a prominent Democrat, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, is rounding up support for his amendment to stop President Biden from circumventing Congress when he orders weapons transfers to Israel, a maneuver the president has pursued twice in recent months.
Kobayashi Kiyochika, Cat and Lantern
Earlier this week, 11 senators voted for a bill by Sen. Bernie Sanders aimed at forcing the Biden administration to examine potential human rights abuses by Israel.
After weeks of unquestioning support, the Senate is emerging as a center of resistance to Biden’s unwavering embrace of Israel — at least in modest ways — as even centrist Democrats are signaling their discomfort with the president’s “bear hug” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A number of prominent Democrats have proposed or backed measures that aim to hold Israel accountable or to shift American strategy, even if they are unlikely to garner enough support to pass.
The growing willingness of establishment Democrats to criticize or push back on Israel — a move that would have come with serious political ramifications just a few months ago — signals a shift in the politics of the party since the war in Gaza began more than 100 days ago. Senators from swing states, including Georgia, Wisconsin and Minnesota, have signed on to some of these measures as polls show a notable drop in support for Biden among young, Muslim and Arab American voters over his handling of the issue.
While few senators are voicing full-throated criticism of Biden’s Israel policy, the new, more skeptical tone reflects an increasing unease as the civilian toll in Gaza rises and Israel repeatedly flouts U.S. requests to modify its military onslaught.
“Every week the Netanyahu coalition promises the Biden administration that we will see meaningful changes, and every week it never materializes,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who, along with Kaine, organized the effort to impose conditions in exchange for aid. Van Hollen noted that some members of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition are even “bragging” about ignoring American requests.
Read more at the WaPo.
Iran’s involvement in the conflicts is getting scary. From Reuters: Iranian and Hezbollah commanders help direct Houthi attacks in Yemen.
Commanders from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Lebanon’s Hezbollah group are on the ground in Yemen helping to direct and oversee Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, four regional and two Iranian sources told Reuters.
Iran – which has armed, trained and funded the Houthis – stepped up its weapons supplies to the militia in the wake of the war in Gaza, which erupted after Iranian-backed militants Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, the four regional sources said.
Tehran has provided advanced drones, anti-ship cruise missiles, precision-strike ballistic missiles and medium-range missiles to the Houthis, who started targeting commercial vessels in November in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, the sources said.
IRGC commanders and advisers are also providing know-how, data and intelligence support to determine which of the dozens of vessels travelling through the Red Sea each day are destined for Israel and constitute Houthi targets, all the sources said.
Washington said last month that Iran was deeply involved in planning operations against shipping in the Red Sea and that its intelligence was critical to enable the Houthis to target ships.
The Guardian: Iran accuses Israel of killing Revolutionary Guards spy chief in Damascus.
A suspected Israeli strike killed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ espionage chief for Syria and three other guard members on Saturday, Iran has said, in an attack that destroyed much of a multistorey residential building in Damascus.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said six people were killed in the Israeli strike on the upmarket Mazzeh neighbourhood in the Syrian capital.
Four Cats Sleeping, by Inagaki Tomoo
In recent weeks, Israel has been accused of intensifying strikes on senior Iranian and allied figures in Syria and Lebanon, raising fears the war in Gaza could expand into a regional conflict.
“The Revolutionary Guards’ Syria [intelligence] chief, his deputy and two other guard members were martyred in the attack on Syria by Israel,” Iran’s Mehr news agency said.
In a statement, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) confirmed it had lost four of its members and blamed Israel.
When asked about the strike, the Israeli army said: “We do not comment on reports from the foreign media.”
Tensions between Iran and Israel have risen to a new high after the bloody surprise attack launched by Hamas into Israel on 7 October.
Trump has been directing racist attacks against Niki Haley, now that the Republican primary campaign has moved to New Hampshire.
The Washington Post: Trump lobs racially charged attacks against Haley ahead of N.H. primary. [For the WaPo headline writer: the attacks are racist, not “racially charged.”
Former president Donald Trump is lobbing racially charged attacks at Republican rival Nikki Haley, a daughter of Indian immigrants who served as his U.N. ambassador, days before a hotly contested New Hampshire primary that could determine the trajectory of the party’s nominating contest.
Meanwhile, Trump is demonstrating his cognitive decline in his campaign speeches. Yesterday, he confused Nicki Haley with Nancy Pelosi–claiming Haley was responsible for Congressional security on January 6, 2021.
Donald Trump on Friday was skewered online for apparently confusing Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, resulting in the ex-president blaming the former for the events of Jan. 6.
Leisure Day by Togyu Okumura
Trump was delivering remarks in Concord, New Hampshire, on Friday, when he said that Haley was “offered 10,000 people” on Jan. 6, and implied that she was involved in the deleting of video evidence. These are common allegations that the former president has previously lobbed at Pelosi and the Jan. 6 subcommittee.
The video quickly went viral, causing people to make fun of Trump and even suggest he has mental health concerns.
“Do we need to do the dementia test again?” asked national security attorney Bradley P. Moss. MSNBC personality Mehdi Hasan had a similar take, asking, “Does he need to take the ‘person woman man camera TV’ test again?”
Hasan had been responding to a Biden-Harris HQ post in which the campaign says a “deeply confused Trump confuses Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley multiple times.”
Trump has also begun bragging again about how he “aced” a cognitive test as president. Actually the test he took is designed to detect dementia and has nothing to do with IQ or intelligence generally.
The Washington Post: A ‘whale’ of a tale: Trump continues to distort cognitive test he took.
Donald Trump this week bragged about purportedly acing a widely used cognitive test that was administered to him when he was president, suggesting that the test included identifying drawings of three animals.
CBS News: Deposition video shows Trump claiming he prevented “nuclear holocaust” as president.
Combative, angry and prone to grandiose claims — newly unveiled footage of an April 2023 deposition gives a glimpse into how former President Donald Trump behaves when testifying under oath.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Looking Tiresome
The video, released to CBS News on Friday in response to a freedom of information request, shows Trump claiming to have averted a “nuclear holocaust” and “saving millions of lives” as president. A transcript of the deposition was previously made public as an exhibit in Trump’s New York civil fraud case.
Trump testified at trial on Nov. 6, and his testimony that day often mirrored the April deposition.
During the trial, Trump said he was too “busy in the White House” to worry about his businesses. “My threshold was China, Russia and keeping our country safe,” he said.
It echoed a response he gave in his April 2023 testimony in a small conference room with New York Attorney General Letitia James. He went further that day, explaining just what he believes he kept Americans safe from:
“I was very busy. I considered this the most important job in the world, saving millions of lives. I think you would’ve had nuclear holocaust if I didn’t deal with North Korea. I think you would’ve had a nuclear war if I weren’t elected. And I think you might have a nuclear war now, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said.
Read more from the deposition at the link.
One more on Trump’s issues from Raw Story:
Appearing on MSNBC on Saturday morning, conservative attorney George Conway was asked how the jury in the E.Jean Carroll defamation trial is likely viewing Donald Trump in the flesh as opposed to just seeing clips of him on TV.
Getting right into it with the hosts of MSNBC’s “The Weekend,’ Conway explained, “When you see little clips of him, you kind of think you know, it’s reality TV. He’s silly, he’s harmless, it’s just nonsense and he just does his thing, he does his schtick. But when you see him up close and in person you start to realize there’s something seriously wrong with him.”
“And that’s what happens with his own people,” he continued before recalling, “Remember how his chief of staff, General Kelly, brought in a book, like the psychiatrists had written about Donald Trump, saying he was completely out of his mind, and he [Kelly] is like, ‘This is the key. We could figure this out!'”
“People learn, there is something seriously wrong with this guy, and I think what this jury is going to learn, which is like you are in this solemn proceeding you are taking this seriously, and jurors generally don’t look at scams and people behaving badly in the courtroom, and here, they have this psychopath sitting right there,” he elaborated. “It’s got to be off-putting and scary, and just appalling to them, because they were actually seeing him in the flesh, this real person, not this caricature on TV, this self-caricature on TV. They’re seeing the face, the face literally, of evil right there.”
Yes, the face of evil is accurate–I agree.
What do you think about all this? What other stories are you interested in?