March 13, 2024 - Let's SPLIT UP to Find Ukraine Aid!

Mar 13, 2024

Let’s SPLIT UP to Find Ukraine Aid!

Ukraine is running out of bullets. And blowy-uppy things. And would like more airplanes, please, to fire bullets and drop blowy-uppy things.

And the world’s elites are demanding that Congress do something about this because it’s not like the world’s elites could buy this weaponry and still have enough change left over to bring home a doggy-bag for Taiwan.

While most members of Congress support arming Ukraine, D4FRFP1 Donald Trump is still sulking that Ukraine wouldn’t arm him with lies to fight off his own invader, an elderly Delaware native named Joe Biden. So, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) won’t allow a vote on arming Ukraine.

Which means the only way to force a vote is through what’s called a discharge petition, in which a majority clears the way for a vote even over leadership opposition.

And so yesterday, to find that missing money for Ukraine, members of Congress yesterday decided to split up…with two discharge petitions going live. One, solely Democratic, is going down the fast track — simply putting forward language that already passed the Senate to fund Ukraine weapons, Israel weapons, here a weapon, there a weapon.

The other group is bipartisan — which might explain why it’s only got 12 people on board. This effort is going down a long, twisty path that veers past the old, 1980s-decor abandoned properties that Old Man Trump is about to have to sell off. This path involves tons of shit on the Mexican border, which Trump opposes because it might help Old Joe. Are you still following along with me here?!?

The team detouring to the border before going down this long, dark, bipartisan corridor lined with spooky “empty” suits of armor and shit is led by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA). (Fun fact, Fitzpatrick is co-chair of the House Ukraine Caucus and was a key player in helping boost anti-LGBTQ+ politicians in Ukraine whose work would’ve made membership in the European Union much thornier. HMMM!!!)

Democrats argue that Fitzpatrick’s way will take too long, because it also has to get past the ~~haunted graveyard~~ Senate.

Of course, everyone knows what happens in a scary story when you split up. You die.

Even eerier, the impasse could lead to a scenario in which an entire nation falls because the U.S. did not get more involved militarily, a classic flip on the more recent model of screwing shit up by getting involved.

Plus, the same Republicans who are fine attacking Gaza or even Russian President Vladimir Putin are balking at going face to face with Johnson, because they’re terrified by his creepy smile.

Turns out, though, Johnson wasn’t the real phantom at all. It was just the creepy old real-estate developer all along, masquerading as a patriot. And he just might get away with it, too.

Congress to Issue First Declaration of War in Decades (Against TikTok)

The House today is expected to pass a bill that gives TikTok a stark choice: Become less Chinese or get banned in the U.S. It’s been a long time since Congress actually authorized a war or targeted Chinese stuff and people as directly as it’s doing now, but here we are.

The bill has caused some confusion because before House Republicans vote, party procedure dictates that first they have to figure out how D4FRFP Donald Trump wants them to vote.

And Trump now says he kinda likes TikTok because it counters Facebook’s strength. “I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people,” Trump said, coming soclose to getting it about corporate America writ large.

The intel community, meanwhile, warned yesterday that it “cannot rule out” the possibility that Beijing will try to use its stake in TikTok to influence U.S. elections, which are only supposed to be influenced by oligarchs who live here (when their accountants say it benefits them).

The annual global threat assessment claimed that “TikTok accounts run by a [Chinese] propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022.”

And TikTok recently sent messages to users who live in House districts key to today’s vote, telling them to warn their representatives to lay off TikTok. The company says it’s not owned or controlled by China and that the decision to turn TikTok users into an army of volunteer lobbyists came from company leaders based right here in the USA. Plausible!

Dems Start Talking Tough on Israel

Senate Democrats are now talking about cutting off the flow of weapons if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes ahead with his vow to invade the border town of Rafah.

Taking those weapons off the table is now, uh, on the table, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said yesterday.

This comes after Pres. Joe Biden and Netanyahu traded rhetorical artillery fire over the weekend. Biden said Israel invading Rafah — where everyone who fled previously invaded places was told to flee — would be a “red line.” Netanyahu responded like a Twitter troll on Sunday, saying his “red line” is another Oct. 7 attack, because he’s determined to let that happen only that one time that he already did.

Van Hollen said the threat to hold up new arms sales is a way of giving Biden’s red line teeth, which is not how I wanted that metaphor to come out. “[I]f the president’s gonna say something’s a red line, it’s essential the president have an accountability structure,” Van Hollen said.

ALSO, ISRAEL HAS FAILED That annual threat assessment we got on Monday had another tidbit in it that didn’t get a lot of attention. It said Israel will still have to deal with Hamas “for years to come.” Meaning: This whole demolish-Gaza plan of Netanyahu’s didn’t accomplish the goal that he said made the death toll worth it. Hey, the important thing is he tried.

THE CONDESCENDED-TO ARE WINNING “First they laugh at you…” etc. Our Revolution was crowing last night about the Washington State presidential primary, where Uncommitted — the proxy vote for supporting a Gaza cease-fire — was nearing in on 50,000 votes. “The national total is 425k and growing,” Our Revolution wrote.

This is after weeks and weeks of everyone (myself included) mostly or entirely ignoring these efforts, the protests, the disruptions, etc. But it’s working.

The aircraft carrier of U.S. foreign policy is tacking left (cue our nautical Newsfuckers: “It’s tacking to port,” followed by “And aircraft carriers don’t tack! Jesus!”)

Point being: there are folks out there who’ve done little but try to fuck shit up to make clear that some of us were not okay with America abetting what Israel is doing. Each time they did it they were met with condescension, dismissal, ridicule, or worse. Well, it took time, but it worked. That’s how it works.

Could Dems Win the House…in the SPRING?
(Alt. headline: The Buck Stops Now!)

Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) is officially done with this shit. Not as of November or January, but as of next week. As he said yesterday:

“I am not going to lie on behalf of my presidential candidate, on behalf of my party. And I'm very sad that others in my party have taken the position that as long as we get the White House, it doesn't really matter what we say.”

What blows me away every time is, if you see your candidate and party doing that, isn’t the ultimate patriotic response to stay in the fray and fight it? Use the platform to oppose it?

But no, Buck had to bothsides it, because Americans, according to Buck, according to Axios, "are upset about [Donald] Trump as a candidate and [Joe] Biden as a candidate."

Which is weird because later last night, both of the people Americans are upset about clinched their nominations as their party’s presidential candidate.

With Buck’s departure, Daily Kos’s excellent election analysis crunches the (shrinking) GOP numbers for us, and finds that Republican control of the House is about to get a lot tenuouser. And as the American Enterprise Institute’s Norman Ornstein points out, the GOP could now be just barely at unvaccinated-arms-length away from COVID absences handing Democrats a majority. So, Ornstein warns, Democrats should have a break-glass-in-emergency legislative arsenal ready to go to sweep away a ton of annual/recurring ticking time bombs like the debt ceiling, the child tax credit, and other stuff that’s a bit over my head and/or too deep for me to fully appreciate.

To his credit, Buck has spoken out (ish) against GOP impeachment efforts against Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Not to his credit, he’s leaving instead of sticking around to continue making that argument.

Which is weird because Buck is an insider of The Family, which assures us that prayer is politically uniting, and now Buck’s chamber is run by a full-throated prayer of prayers, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). It’s almost as if prayer is not a magical force that can bring about unity…even in the half of the House that loves prayer. To wit…

BIG BUCK FLASHBACK As I reported back in 2022, Buck was part of an ongoing effort by insiders at The Family to bring about political (religious) change in Guatemala.

One of The Family’s leading insiders, former Gov. David Beasley (R-SC), spoke about creating prayer groups from different factions in Guatemala, because “God created it such a way that when you break bread, have fellowship, pray together…you can’t hate that other person but so long.”

Not long after, Buck went down to Guatemala to meet with the president and leaders of the Family’s spinoff group there and discuss “how to change a Nation through principles and values,” as Buck wrote in his trip disclosure form. Well, Guatemala changed, all right.

Within just a couple years, the evangelical regime was running its own prosecutors out of the country along with a UN anti-corruption task force that had been widely popular and praised for making things better there…until The Family’s insiders helped kill it through principles and values.

It’s almost as if Beasley and Buck are wrong about what makes democracies thrive?!? And here’s Buck now, with the House controlled by his kind of Christian, his party controlled by the choice of evangelicals…and he can’t take it anymore. What hath God wrought? Seriously, what hath He?

PETTY HILARITY Quick sidebar on Republican fractiousness. House Republicans are holding a retreat today and tomorrow. Except most of them are running from the retreat, CNN schadenfreuports.

Fewer than half of the House GOP caucus is planning to attend, for the following reasons, listed here in order of increasing hilarity, all of which are literally cited in CNN’s piece:

Busy campaigning.
Busy campaigning to get more power in order to do less.
Busy campaigning for candidates opposing their Republican colleagues.
Running their farm.
Keynote speaker Larry Kudlow of Fox “Business” dropped out.
Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick stepped in.
Appearing on Bill Maher Friday.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) chose to hold the retreat in “family-friendly” West Virginia rather than crimes-and-misdemeanors-friendly Florida, where then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) liked to party.
They don’t want to spend time with each other.

Some more reasons for skipping the retreat, courtesy of Semafor:

ACC Men’s Basketball Tournament is in DC.
So are fundraisers.
“This isn’t real Congress.”
Cleaning boat.

Hur Was It For You?

So yesterday I suggested that Democrats would be dumb to attack former special counsel Bob Hur’s focus on Pres. Joe Biden’s memory and mental state during the House hearing yesterday. In my defense, I still think Democrats might have fared better focusing on Hur’s assessment that D4FRFP Donald Trump’s indictment for his mishandling of documents was fitting because Trump’s behavior was criminal where Biden’s was not.

But either way, my take was dramatically, hilariously wrong.

In my defense, didn’t know Hur had screwed up so badly in his report on the testimony he himself took from Biden. And I didn’t know Congress would have a copy of that testimony transcript.

In Hur’s report, he claimed that Biden couldn’t remember when his son Beau died. Judge for yourself, Newsfucker! Here’s the actual transcript:

Quel scandale, non?

Sadly, both sides — and the media — have consumed considerable news-cycle bandwidth with this stupid bullshit. Hur screwed up. Biden gets to notch another feather in his thinking/remembering cap. We can move on to more substantive issues now, oui? Like this…

Iran Not Awful About One Specific Thing

If you missed yesterday’s TFN — first of all, see me after class — I flagged that the U.S. intelligence community’s annual global threat assessment pegged the “far-right and ultraorthodox” Israeli ruling coalition’s hardline policies on Gaza as reducing the the viability of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Well, there was something else I want to flag from the threat assessment, which also seems to have gotten very little attention despite it being multiple Politico-units more important than Hur vs. Biden. Namely, that Iran didn’t know about the Oct. 7 Hamas attack:

Seems important given how easily all that early saber-rattling could have gone awry.

TCB

SEO CLICKBAIT KEYWORDS OF THE DAY Hur. Biden. Beau. “Oh, God. May 30th.”

NEW NEWSFUCKERS Here’s to the new Newsfuckers who are subscribing at 5:26 in the morning, eastern time. Game recognizes game, mad bastard!

BRACE FOR IMPACT I won’t be doing BREAKING NEWS ALERTS for your newsfucking pleasure again until March 22.

I had a vacation scheduled and planned before I got laid off in January, and we’re going ahead with it. But also, I think it’s important for news people to take time away from the news. Not just for the mental clarity — honestly, if it’s too much for you, you’re probably too normal to be in news (OTOH that leaves news in the hands of psychopaths, which…bad). I also think it’s important sometimes to be one of those people who doesn’t follow the news. What am brain like without constant minutiae that won’t matter in a day about people who won’t matter in a year?

That said, I hear from so many people, terrifyingly, that TFN helps them get through the day/world/life. Hence, I have guilt about leaving. Hence, I wrote stuff ahead of time to keep the lifeline going until I get back. Even knowing that the less-newsy content will damage my open rate! The SACRIFICES I make for you people!

I’m gonna try to stay off social media, so please forgive me if I don’t respond right away on n Twitter or Facebook or Bluesky or Mastodon. But I will when I get back!

And, yes, I won’t be able to stop working on this big (I think?) story I’m working on. So if you want to support my original reporting, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

I’ll see you March 22, and I expect you’ll have accomplished lots of Newsfucking in the interim! Go get ‘em, kids…!

D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.