ICC warrants

Daniel Rubenstein comments on the ICC warrants

International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu

[...] In a statement on Thursday, the Netherlands-based court said it found “reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu bears criminal responsibility for war crimes including “starvation as a method of warfare” and “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” ....

The court on Thursday also issued a warrant for Hamas official Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, also known as Mohammed Deif, who Israel says was one of the masterminds of the October 7 attack. Israel said it killed him in an airstrike in July but Hamas hasn’t confirmed his death ...

This seems to be a result of hatred of Israel. I don't see how else anyone could think Israel is trying to starve all the Palestinians to death ... Israel has been continuously sending in food to Gaza, and though people keep saying famine is "imminent", there still is no actual famine.

If Israel wanted to commit genocide of the Palestinians, they could easily have accimplished that without instead fighting an urban door-to-door battle against the terrorists of Hamas, which has cost Israel almost 1000 of their soldiers' lives.

BTW, nice touch to also release warrants for three of the Hamas leaders who actually started the was ... so convenient that they're all dead. Why didn't the ICC go after the living Hamas leaders who have scuttled off to Turkey from Qatar like roaches whose rock has been overturned?

There's nothing they won't do

Lawrence O'Donnell, who used to work as an aide to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and was staff director for the Senate Finance Committee, describes what was going on in the House Ethics Committee as they decided not to give their research on Matt Gaetz to the Senate.

Lawrence believes that if the truth about Gaetz's behavior came out, his nomination would be rejected by the Republican Senate. He has more faith in them than I do. I believe they will accept Gaetz as Attorney General, and will do so no matter what he has done.

Why wouldn't they? They have already embraced a convicted rapist* and crook** as their lord and master. There is nothing they won't do now.

* Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll

** Trump is found guilty on 34 felony counts. Read the counts here

In the yard

My sister and I were out in the side yard, cleaning out the rain gutters on the garage before the bomb cyclone/atmospheric river strike us here in California ...

From here you can look out at the back yard and see the pop tent under which I keep the backyard cats' food and a couple of chairs for them. Also you can see some of the gray cat condos my nice neighbor made for the cats, to keep them warm and dry in the winter ...

Do something

In the news, a UN resolution for ceasefire on the war, and aid trucks are looted by Gazan civilian gangs, and Netanyahu offers $5 million and safe passage out of Gaza to anyone returning a hostage

I don't think the UN ceasefire resolution will do anything. UNRWA refuses to admit Gazans themselves are keeping aid relief from getting to Gazans, and meanwhile, the US, unlike Netanyahu, seems to have no real plan to get the hostages back, some of whom are Americans.

Biden should throw caution to the wind, as he is now doing with Ukraine, before it is too late. Offer money like Netanyahu. Lean on Turkey, where the families of Hamas leaders, and now the leaders themselves, are holed up. Send in a military team. Do something.

Team rapist

As more information comes out about the sexual crimes of two of Trump's picks for his administration, he stands by them. Of course he does - he's a serial sexual abuser himself.

How do people justify knowingly voting for a rapisr? Money? Hatred of the other side? Sex crimes aren't really crimes?

The Pope and genocide

So now the Pope thinks Israel is committing genocide. Does he actially know what "genocide" means? A crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part - UN document

The US has determined (Biden: What's happening in Gaza is not genocide ... US says Israel hasn't breached its law against blocking aid in Gaza) that genocide is not what Israel is doing, and anyone with a brain would know this, as Israel is actually acting to save lives in Gaza by sending in aid, relocating civilians to safe zones, and even helping children be vaccinated against polio ... all during a war, one in which 101 hostages, some of whom are Americans, are still being held.

But what's happening in Israel now? Daniel Rubenstein speaks about UNRWA, the war in the north of Gaza, and Iran.

Harris asks for more

Harris raised more than $1 billion in her loss to Trump—and is still asking donors for more money

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party’s prodigious fundraising operation raised more than $1 billion in her loss to Donald Trump, but the vice president is still pushing donors for more money after the election.

Democrats are sending persistent appeals to Harris supporters without expressly asking them to cover any potential debts, enticing would-be donors instead with other matters: the Republican president-elect’s picks for his upcoming administration and a handful of pending congressional contests where ballots are still being tallied ...

Yes, and it's not just big donors she's hitting up. I am gerring multiple emails from Harris everyday asking for more money. Here's one from this morning ...

Seems just cheesy somehow.

The working class

An article in The New Republic ...

Harris Lost the Very Voters She Needed the Most

We live in a working-class country. More people graduate college than ever before, but, among Americans aged 25 and over, the great majority (62 percent) still do not. These non–college graduates define, to demographers, America’s working class. The exit polls are still a little rough around the edges—they’ll need further weighting when the popular vote is fully tallied—but in Tuesday’s election, most voters (57 percent) were working class. Only 44 percent of them voted for Kamala Harris, against 54 percent who voted for Donald Trump ...

I have to stop here and point out something. Not everyone who graduates from college is guaranteed an escape from the "working class". I and my sister and my mother can't be the only people who went to college ... all earning masters degrees ... and ended up working at mundane "working class" jobs that didn't pay well. Alternatively, there are also people who became economic sucesses and never graduated from college.

But anyway, why didn't the Harris campaign try to appeal to the working class? She supported unions, but people in the big unions actually make a lot of money. Remember the almost strike by the Dockworkers union? The people in that union were making six figures already.

When you think of the working vlass, think instead of people making the federal minimum wage = $7.25 an hour. That's about $15,000 a year, and is also the amount I receive from Social Security.

Why didn't the Harris campaign or my party care about us? Because they didn't think it would benefit them. They don't think we vote. Well, we do, and since Trump did try to appeal to we lower forms of life, a lot of us (but not me) voted for him.

The picks

Still mulling over Trump's picks for his administration.

I'm not sure Matt Gaetz is a serious pick ... this may be Trump throwing a bone to the Republicans in the senate, giving them one nominee he'll allow them to veto, so they will let the others pass.

Others like RFK Jr. If he does become the head of HHS, people will die, predominantly children. But hey, he's a Kennedy, and that American royalty thing dazzles our proto-dictator from Queens.

And then there's Pete Hegseth for the Defense dept. He's what you'd call an open book ... The tattooed Secretary of Defense: Here is all of Pete Hegseth’s ink, and what it means. A defender of war criminals, a Christian nationalist who thinks women shouldn't be in combat positions in the military (and he has in common with Trump and Gaetz sexual misconduct allegations).

There are other horrible Trump picks, of course, but I don't have all day.

What I think this is all about are two things ... Trump showing the world that he has neutered the beta males of the Republican congress ... and ... Trump giving the finger to the Democrats and the whole of the American people, those who voted against him and also those who were stupid and selfish enought to vote for him.

Rotting in the sun

The Times of Israel's daily news briefing discusses the humanitarian aid problem in Gaza, as well as discussing what a Trump presidency will mean for the war.

About the humanitarian aid, there's been a lot in the news about the US trying to get Israel to let more into Gaza. What hasn't been addressed by the press is the fact that some aid trucks that have gone into Gaza ... currently at least 900 trucks ... are just sitting on the other side of the crossing points, with no UN or other agency picking them up and distributing them.

Why are they not being picked up and distributed? First of all, it is a war zone, which makes ditribution difficult. But another problem is that not only Hamas, but civilian gangs, steal the aid to sell on the black market. The press seems to ignore this aspect.

Surreal

UPDATE: Matt Gaetz? Sex-trafficking Matt Gaetz? Apparently the sole qualification for being in Trump's administration is being an enthusiastic suck-up.



I guess this is better than a riot? I would expect nothing less from Biden - I think he always tries to do the right thing.

About Trump's possible picks so far for his administration ... Maybe Marco Rubio is not too bad. Kristi Noem, the climate-denying dog-murdering gun-nut, seems a horrible choice. Kash Patel - ongoing nightmare.

Amsterdam again

From an opinion piece in The New York Times today by Brett Stephens ...

A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’

If any doubts remained about the motives of the Amsterdam thugs who last week terrorized and assaulted Israeli soccer fans in droves, an investigation in The Wall Street Journal should settle the questions.

It wasn’t merely a reaction to provocative behavior by some of those fans. It wasn’t just overflowing anger over the war in Gaza. It was something altogether darker ....

Which makes it even more remarkable how strenuously some people initially tried to obscure the nature of the Amsterdam pogrom. The media are rarely shy about calling out certain kinds of hate crimes as racist. Yet for days the word “antisemitic” was either put inside quotation marks or attributed to Dutch officials when talking about the violence. The identity of the attackers has been treated as a mystery, or a secret, beyond delicate references to people with “a migration background,” in the words of Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof ...

Bernie on why we lost

Bernie was on Meet the Press today and he really told it like it is for many of the "lower class". I share his opinion that this is how the Democratic party failed to win the election ...

The political autopsy

- my grandpa

After a terrible defeat, political parties often have an "autopsy" to figure out what went wrong ...

More Democrats fear the party’s image isn’t just damaged – it’s broken

Some Democrats are saying the party went to far to the middle or right, with trying to win over disaffected Republicans. Some say Harris didn't try to appeal to working class and lower class voters. Etc, etc, etc.

When I think of what the Democratic party should be, I think of how it was when my grandfather was a Democrat, and what it was like when I was a kid.

Back then, the Republican party was the party of educated wealthy conservatives, business interests, with a touch of nutball (John Birch Society).

But the Democrats were for the working class, unions, the poor, women, racial minorities (civil rights) and religious minorities (Jews, Catholics). It was what they called the New Deal Coalition, and they tried to help people after the Great Depression with programs like the New Deal ...

The New Deal was a series of domestic programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938, with the aim of addressing the Great Depression, which began in 1929. Roosevelt introduced the phrase upon accepting the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, and won the election in a landslide over Herbert Hoover, whose administration was viewed by many as doing too little to help those affected. Roosevelt believed that the depression was caused by inherent market instability, and that massive government intervention was necessary to rationalize and stabilize the economy.

The Democratic party of today has changed a lot. Now we are (also) the ones affiliated with the rich, with Ivy League universities. I assume (hope) Democrats are still trying to help the poor, the elderly, the homeless, but they act as if they are ashamed of doing so, and politicians like Harris leave those groups completely out of their speeches and promises - they don't believe those people vote, and they don't want to estrange the "working middle class".

And the Democratic party has adopted stances that seem extreme to me ... why must every person who wants to liive in America be able to? We have more than 600,000 homeless people here living in terrible conditions who never get a word from Democrats (except Bernie) ... shouldn't we be helping them first?

And why does being a Democrat now mean we would rather side with Middle Eastern terrorists than with Israel?

Oh well, I'm sure there's a lot I don't understand about all this, and of course times have changed. But I just remember that I used to be proud to be a Democrat like my grnadfather. I don't feel that way anymore.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is in the news. I've actually been to Amsterdam but it was long ago, on my family's one trip to Europe in 1976. What I recall ... the houseboats, the Heineken museum, and especially the Rijksmuseum ...

- The Night Watch by Rembrandt van Rijn

But I digress.

People in the press have been noting the history of Amsterdam's mistreatment of Jewish people before and during WWII (Kristallnacht, Anne Frank), and connecting that to this recent attack.

But the attack after the game does not seem to have been by right-wing Dutch people (neo-nazis). The attacks were carried out by pro-Palestinian Middle Eastern immigrants living in Amsterdam. I guess it's not politic to mention that, but it is relevant.

Women and the election

Yes, a rapist is soon to be our president, voted in by a majority of men.

I feel like all that women have been trying to do sicne the dawn of time is to just be seen and treated as people in the same way men are. And we've never gotten there. Maybe we never will.

And men don't have to do all the work of keeping us down. Many women project themselves as meat puppets in order to get ahead in this world ... think of Kim Kardashian, wealthy and famous, whose main "achievement" in life is that she has an unusually huge butt.

I despair.

Trump and Israel

The Times of Israel's editor, David Horovitz, talks about Trump winning the election.

What do the Israelis think of Trump winning? They are mostly happy. Why? When he was president before, he did a lot of stuff they liked, including moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, being ok with the settlements, and doing the Abraham Accords.

There is a reason, though, why almost 80% of Jewish Americans voted for Kamala Harris - they live here and they know the damage Trump has and will cause to the US.

I hope more Israelis realize that Trump doesn't actually care about Israel, that he has helped them in order to help himself, and that he could turn on them in a minute if it made his own outcomes better.

The news that's fit to print

All the News That's Fit to Print

The press is reporting that the IDF is ordering evacuations from northern Gaza and that civilians will not be allowed to move back to their homes afterward ... The Guardian: Palestinians will not be allowed to return to homes in northern Gaza, says IDF ... CBS: Israel expands offensive in northern Gaza with new ground operation, says civilians won't be allowed back

But that's not true.

The truth is ...

UK’s Guardian appears to muff general’s quote on return of north Gaza civilians

Contrary to a Wednesday report in The Guardian, the commander of the IDF’s 162nd Division did not say that Palestinian civilians will be prevented from returning to their homes in the northern Gaza Strip and that no humanitarian aid will be delivered there.

The British newspaper appears to have mistakenly taken a somewhat inaccurate paraphrase of comments by division commander Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen from a report in Israel’s Kan public broadcaster, presenting it as a direct quote from the general ...

I offer this as an example of the predjudice against Israel which seems to inform most of the European and American press. They have a belief about Israel and the war, and appear more open to stories that will support that opinion. That isn't "news". The press is supposed to be impartial.

Time to save the country

Rachel Maddow points out that those of us who didn't get the election result we had hoped for now have a lot to do.

We could spend time trying to figure out why we failed ... what was wrong with our party, our candidate. I do have my opinion ... that the party has ignored the underclass, the disabled, the elderly, the homeless. All the campaign events with the rich and the famous bothered me.

But maybe we should also figure out how we can try to protect what we fear a Trump presidency will damage or destroy. I myself worry about the environment and the animals most. Trump will roll back every environmental protection he can, and I recall him promising to open the national park system to hunting, mining, and drilling. Maybe it's time for me to join The Suerra Club or The Human Society.

As Rachel says, it's time to save the country.

Trump wins

I'm stunned. I knew it was possible but somehow still didn't believe it would happen.

Goodbye vaccines, goodbye environment, goodbye Ukraine.

Who to blame? People the Democratic party has depended on for decades ... racial minorities and young people.

Trump eroded Democrats’ traditional advantage among key groups

Trump picked up a small but significant share of younger voters, Black voters and Hispanic voters, many of whom were feeling down about the economy. Majorities of younger Black voters and Latino voters said the economy is not working well.

Yes, the economy. As I mentioned in many past blog posts, the Harris campaign seemed to only care about the middle and upper classes but seemed to ignore those who actually most needed help. Did they just not know we existed or is it that they didn't care?

The sad thing is, Trump will not help the poor and he has no idea how to fix the economy. The stupid selfish people have voted for a terrible candidate in order to get more for themselves. They will be disappointed, and the rest of us will have to suffer along with them.

Election eve

Worth watching for the end, in which Seth catalogues all the awful things Trump has done since he became president in2016. People really need to remember this stuff.

Trump in Michigan

- Dearborn, Michigan

Trump courts divided Arab-American voters in must-win Michigan

One might wonder why Trump would bother courting Arab American voters, he being the originator of the Muslim ban and constantly voicing his support of Israel.

But we know that Trump doesn't have any true religious convictions and has been on Israel's side in order to get conservative Christian approval. And we know that he has often been on the side of anti-Semitites, from Kanye West to the marchers at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. And we know that he is an opportunist, who is buddies with wealthy Arab leaders like MBS who can enrich him. And we know that the father of his son-in-law, a Lebanese American businessman, has been helping Trump with voters in Michigan ...

Trump’s In-Law Is Trying to Exploit Democrats’ Weakness With Arab American Voters

[...] Since early this year, a pair of unofficial Trump emissaries — Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman and an in-law of Mr. Trump, and Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and acting intelligence chief — have been crisscrossing Michigan, trying to repackage and sell Mr. Trump to skeptical Arab American and Muslim voters there ...

As weird as it may sound, I thiink that Trump and the Republican party is actually a better fit with many Arab American voters ... the shared emphasis on a social and religious conservatism that restricts women's rights and condemns gay people is just one example of why.

Nooooo

Just watching the news, where Trump is in Michigan meeting with Arab Americans. And who is by his side? RFK Jr., crazy as a bedbug and the soon to be head of everything health and science in the government, if Trump wins. God help us all.