“I Said to Bibi, 'Don’t Make the Same Mistake That We Made in America'”
May 9: Biden’s bombshell … Foxconn revisited … Federal stimulus unstimulating … Barron enters the fray …
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“Hamas ❤️ Biden,” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir Tweeted after Pres. Joe Biden paused shipments of bombs until Israel either drops its intention to invade the Gazan city of Rafah or comes up with an acceptable plan to do so while still protecting civilians.
“If they go into Rafah, I'm not supplying the weapons,” Biden said last night. “I’ve made it clear to Bibi [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] and the war cabinet: They’re not going to get our support if they go [into] these population centers.”
That will mean no more bombs for fighter jets or artillery shells. In other words, the weaponry one uses to kill people somewhere else. Weapons for defending Israel, as with its Iron Dome system for intercepting incoming rockets, would not be halted, Biden said.
Where it gets tricky is…who decides what’s a full-blown ground invasion? The Israeli Defense Forces have already gone into Rafah, taking control of the border crossing and forcing people out of some areas. Biden says the (new) red line is population centers. That, too, is a definition that’s shifted given that the population of Rafah is now one million people more than it used to be, thanks to the influx of refugees fleeing everywhere else that got full-blown ground-invaded.
Biden also made an admission that tippy-toed right up to the border of war-crimes confession. He was asked about the 500- and 2,000-pound U.S.-made bombs that Israel has been using. Specifically, about whether those U.S. bombs have killed Palestinian civilians, which they’re legally not supposed to do.
"Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs,” Biden said.
Biden also said that the horrors and scope of the Oct. 7 attack have been forgotten. And suggested the fact that it was so bad — the worst, bloodiest attack on Jews since the Holocaust — was precisely what made it so important to respond wisely. Unlike America’s post-9/11 freakout. “I said to Bibi, don’t make the same mistake that we made in America.”
And, Biden said, he’s heard the message of college protesters outraged at the civilian death toll, about 35,000, and U.S. complicity in it. (In other words, it worked. The way not disrupting order would not have worked.)
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in a rare joint letter to Biden condemned the arms holdup and demanded that the U.S. resume helping Israel make the same mistake that we made in America.
In it, they questioned Biden’s commitment that America’s support for Israel’s security is “ironclad.” Like literally everyone else, they chose not to question whether killing tens of thousands of civilians might be bad for Israel’s security.
To wit, a Likud member of the Knesset yesterday said if the U.S. stops supplying precision weapons, “I’ll use my imprecise missiles and I’ll just collapse ten buildings.” The Intercept’s Ryan Grim says the State Department called the remark “deplorable.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), meanwhile, praised the suspended bomb shipments as a “first step.” He said, “We can no longer be complicit in Netanyahu’s horrific war against the Palestinian people.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pointed out that it’s hard not to kill civilians when you drop a 2,000 bomb. On anything. Instead, Austin said, the U.S. would like to see Israel use more precise weaponry.
Public Citizen Senior Counsel Aaron Regunberg wrote after Biden’s remarks, “This is what we’ve been asking for! And he’s going to be massively attacked for it.”
He added, “All of us who’ve been arguing that his bad stance was bad politics should be doing what we can now to demonstrate that these good moves are good politics.”
Biden Touts New Investment That Will Get Credited to Trump at Site of Failed Trump Investment That Will Get Blamed on Biden
Pres. Joe Biden yesterday went to the site of a massive, humiliating, embarrassing failure of D4FRFP1 Donald Trump, to mock that failure and make sure everyone saw Biden’s victory now happening on the same spot.
While Trump’s repeated “Infrastructure Weeks” became a running joke, Biden has not only succeeded at unleashing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of new infrastructure and manufacturing and other construction, he’s also achieved the previously scientifically impossible feat of making all those new structures invisible to the naked eye of registered voters.
Biden was speaking in Wisconsin yesterday, at the site of the $10 billion factory that Trump got the Taiwan company Foxconn to build there, which is also invisible due to never existing.
The project did manage to waste hundreds of millions of dollars and destroy 100 homes that were in the way of the thing that never came, but not generate the promised 13,000 jobs. (About 1,000 jobs ended up coming there.)
Instead, the site will now be home to a $3.3 billion Microsoft data center set to be built by 2,300 union construction workers and create permanent 2,000 jobs. (And, since it’s gonna be A.I., destroy untold numbers of jobs, obvi.) The scale of the new, real project, however, is much smaller than the fictional project Trump successfully built in people’s minds.
In fact, Trump was so successful at building fictional buildings, that new polling shows voters are split on which president has done more to create new infrastructure, be it Biden’s kind of tangible, three-dimensional structures that achieve physical existence in this universe’s space-time continuum, or Trump’s kind.
In fact, Democrats are the only group in which a clear majority, 74%, credit Biden with doing more to promote infrastructure improvements and jobs. Seventy percent of Republicans say Trump did, despite him not.
And Independent voters credit Trump more than Biden by a margin of 34% to 32%. Registered voters overall are similarly split, with 40% giving Biden more credit, and 37% giving Trump more credit.
Politico paints a similarly grim picture for Biden of its polling on several related subjects, including voter awareness of landmark legislation signed by Biden, and whether those laws are having any impact on voters’ lives.
“Majorities of poll respondents said they haven’t seen, read or heard anything or much about three of Biden’s four major spending laws,” Politico doomcasts. But I think Politico may have this wrong. Here’s their polling on those big funding laws:
But here’s the thing: People generally don’t know jack diddly about jack bupkis. What law in U.S. history did most people know much about?
In fact, we can come up with very different framing, Lakoff-style, if we crunch these numbers just a bit differently (nom nom nom). Brace yourselves, intrepid Newsfuckers, we’re gonna have to math the shit out of this…
Okay, so if we’ve done our plusiplication right, a whopping two-thirds of registered voters have heard at least something about the American Rescue Plan. Seventy percent have heard at least something about the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. A clear majority have heard at least something about the CHIPS and Science Act. And a whopping 76% have heard of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Houston, we’ve identified four subjects about which a majority of Americans know at least a thing!
These strike me as workable numbers. And while Politico poops on the low number of people who think Biden’s sending spree is helping them, well, it mostly isn’t. Yet.
And Biden has abjectly failed to get his message through to the media outlets otherwise occupied with reporting that he can’t get his message through.
But awareness of — and appreciation for — all of this shit will grow as George Soros marshals his liberal media to ramp up coverage as we approach the conventions. Most voters barely even start paying attention until summer’s over.
Of course, it would help if more of this spending were putting shovels in dirt by now. Which, um…
Massive Federal Spending Massively Unspent
A new analysis of government spending for pandemic relief and infrastructure shows that, out of $1.6 trillion approved, checks have only been cut for $125 billion.
A lot of the delay in getting new construction projects is simply that it takes time for funding to get where it’s headed and for building and rehab projects to get approved.
The massive (by which I mean insufficient) spending by Pres. Joe Biden was intended to parallel President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and signal a rejection of President Ronald Reagan’s approach.
Instead of relying on Reagan’s trickle-down economics to enrich working Americans, Biden has pumped $1.6 trillion of taxpayer funds into infrastructure and climate spending. According to Politico’s analysis, more than a third of that is in the forms of tax cuts, which will make it cheaper for companies to invest in manufacturing, which will ultimately create new jobs, so that the tax breaks will, er, trickle down to workers.
(On the other hand, the global oligarchy has a well-established pattern when it comes to tax cuts. They invest it in automation, offshoring, outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions. All of which destroy jobs.)
Of course, if voters don’t see the economic benefits of all this, and D4FRFP Donald Trump wins, he’ll have yet another presidential term in which he’ll be able to take credit for massive infrastructure improvements and manufacturing investment. Only this time, they’ll be real.
(This assumes, of course, that Trump doesn’t cut off the remaining funding entirely, and/or award all the remaining contracts to Trump Bridge-Making and Stuff-Building LLC.)
Campaign Watch
BARRON Okay, according to Chelsea Clinton’s rules, which I can’t be bothered to look up, Barron Trump is fair game for political criticism as of…now. It’s not that he’s 18 years old. It’s that last night, he became a political figure.
Politico reports that Barron Trump has been selected as one of the Florida Republican Party’s at-large delegates to the Republican National Convention. Other delegates elected in this entirely democratic and not-at-all nepotistic system include Eric Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Tiffany Boulos (née Trump) and her husband Michael Boulos. There’s no known estimate for how many delegates are Trump’s unacknowledged offspring.
TCB
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Go get ‘em, kids…!
D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.
I would upgrade to paid if it cost less.
How about $50 per year?
Anyone agree with me?
I just wrote a comment & apparently lost it when I went back to the story to check my spelling of Lakoff. Also, Jon doesn't write his name anywhere and I don't want to misspell Larsen. Call me Old & Fucked Up.