Hamas attacks Israel with kit rockets and AK47's... US sends aircraft carrier in support.

[StringJunky]

5 minutes ago, geordief said:

This Smotrich guy?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/12/31/israeli-minister-reiterates-calls-for-palestinians-to-leave-gaza

Not the Defence Minister-the Finance Minister and excluded from the War Cabinet  from my cursory knowledge.

Oops. You are right. Corrected.

[TheVat]

David Ignatius looks at a possible three party solution to the Gaza war that the Biden administration is working on.  Here's a gift link, courtesy of my subscription.

https://wapo.st/4bzxyyb

Pull-quote:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken plans to travel to the Middle East soon. He’ll probably stop first in Saudi Arabia, where he hopes for a renewed pledge from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to normalize relations with Israel if — and only if — Israel ends the Gaza conflict and commits to the eventual creation of a Palestinian state that includes Gaza and the West Bank.

Blinken is then likely to travel to Israel, where he’ll meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader, mired in war, deeply wants a breakthrough peace deal with MBS, as the Saudi leader is known. But at the same time, Netanyahu and his hard-line coalition refuse the Saudis’ conditions of a quick end to the fighting in Gaza and a path to Palestinian state.

Here’s President Biden’s game: He wants to make Netanyahu an offer his coalition can’t accept politically — but that the prime minister, whose legacy as a historic Israeli leader has been shattered, personally might not be able to resist. If Netanyahu embraces the Saudi proposal, his coalition will fracture, and he’ll need to find new partners. If he refuses, his government might be toppled by rivals who embrace the U.S. formula for ending the war.

 

[Sensei]

The bill should deal with one issue at a time. Trying to cram several things into one bill is an impure and increasingly common political practice..

[TheVat]

10 minutes ago, Sensei said:

The bill should deal with one issue at a time. Trying to cram several things into one bill is an impure and increasingly common political practice..

It's a practice which has been common for at least a century.  Riders, logrolling, omnibus bills....been around for a long time.  Sometimes called horsetrading here in the USA.  Some legislative measures would never make it without being added in as riders.  The Hyde Amendment was a rider.  Congress has been trying to legally insure Net neutrality by adding it as a rider on other bills.  It can't pass by itself.  

[Sensei]

44 minutes ago, TheVat said:

It's a practice which has been common for at least a century.  Riders, logrolling, omnibus bills....been around for a long time.  Sometimes called horsetrading here in the USA.  Some legislative measures would never make it without being added in as riders.  The Hyde Amendment was a rider.  Congress has been trying to legally insure Net neutrality by adding it as a rider on other bills.  It can't pass by itself.  

I condemn this practice. Which is quite obvious from my post.

E.g.:

Content of the statute: "let's give every U.S. citizen $10,000 and expel illegal immigrants." Which US citizen would not sign (vote for etc.) such a statute?

How about "let's give every U.S. citizen $10,000 and call Donald an enemy of the state".... (I'll feel like I'm back to the Roman Empire of two thousand years ago, but with new toys like computers, etc.).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_state

 

1 hour ago, Sensei said:

Trying to cram several things into one bill is an impure and increasingly common political practice..

I will correct this to make it clearer: "Trying to cram several unconnected things into one bill is an impure and increasingly common political practice.."

Edited February 9 by Sensei

[iNow]

2 hours ago, Sensei said:

Trying to cram several unconnected things into one bill is an impure and increasingly common political practice.."

It’s a way to camouflage unpopular parts of legislation with their base. In a big bill there are (as you already know) many different items. Some are popular. Some are unpopular. When politicians go home to speak with constituents, they can claim they really hated PartA but decided the benefit of PartB was worth it. It provides them with some cover among a group of voters who are rabid and ready to attack / vote for someone else at any moment. 

[MonDie]

It's been a few months since I read this thread, but I had an interesting epiphany. I think the most offensive and off-putting features of this Israeli assault echoes some of the problems with our current system of government in the US, which are the problems of un-accountability.

The disgust is not at Netanyahu's choice to strike back at Hamas, but the overkill of the response.  Moreover, the issue is not that the US is aligned with Israeli, but that there seems to be no conditions upon which the alliance is predicated.  In our own democratic process, we are constantly trained by the media to view politics through a two-party lens, but the fundamental problem with the current situation is a lack of accountability, a problem which this two-party lens offers no solutions for.  Approaching accountability as a politically partisan problem assumes that conflicts of interest stem from party allegiances and not from the perpetrator's personal interests or his personal relationships to whomever are the direct beneficiaries of his corruption.

The current system of deregulation championed by the likes of Ronald Reagan, Billl Clinton, and Newt Gingrich (and Jimmy Carter too if he hadn't been outflanked) is not a system of unilateral, top-down accountability, but a system of diffuse, decentralized conflicts of interest.  It was championed by the same greedy people who bend the rules with the cost-benefit analysis of what if I get caught.  Moreover, the conflicts of interest it has unleashed are not solvable thought a party-based system of accountability.  Nonetheless, our minds always go back to the "tactical framing" encouraged by media.  "But the Republicans are even more ultra-wealthy and corrupted than the Democrats," they moan.  Moreover, when Netanyahu's IDF bombs another hospital or schoolbus, they just cry Hamas.

Part of the reason Hamas gets so much flak is because their actions are shrouded in the moral ambiguity of being the underdog, because Israel has the upperhand.  You can't blame the Israelis for wanting to have the upperhand.  We are inherently self-interested (egoistic), which means we want to do what we want and not what somebody else wants, and self-centered (egocentric), which means we think our perspective and ourselves are right and that contrary perspectives and people are therefore wrong.  Moreover, Israel inherently wants to have the upperhand.  Why wouldn't they?  And that is why we've chased the Gazans into the corner where they're currently trapped.  However, the overkill of the response from Netanyahu's IDF is not just a predictable response to the trials of conflict, it is an underhanded way of dealing with the situation.  When it's in secret, it's called cheating.  Out in the open, it is called political violence.  Netanyahu rose to power with the help of political violence, and he uses Hamas's violent tactics to justify violence against non-violent Palestinians.  He can operate in this way because he has dismantled the mechanisms of accountability from within and his US alliance has no clear conditions he's violating.  Netanyahu was on trial for corruption prior to the October seventh attacks. Moreover, the US is also guilty of war crimes,  so that probably wouldn't be a condition upon which the Israel alliance rests.

The solution to these problems doesn't come from switching to the other side, it comes from holding people accountable.  If I knew what the words "Apartheid," "Colonialism" or "Genocide" meant, then I could explain whhat they mean in this context.  For now,  all I see is brutality caused by brutal tactics from amoral people who've calculated that they likely won't be held accountable.  Biden is looking to alleviate the burden of Netanyahu's assault on Gaza, but the hope for accountability, accountability for anyone other than Hamas, was killed when Netanyahu dismantled the courts.  Make no mistake though, Netanyahu is just another agent of unaccountable corruption looking to implement more deregulation, to personally benefit from it, and especially to dismantle anything that would hold him accountable.  He was on trial for corruption, until he intervened.

[StringJunky]

The animosity towards UK/US administrations will only increase. The first thing we Brits need to do is to get rid of Sunak and Co. I voted for him, to my shame.

This conflict is edifying in seeing countries and their leaders personal positions blooming like Rotten Corpse flowers. They bloom about every 7-9 years. Is that a bit harsh?

[LaurieAG]

18 hours ago, StringJunky said:

The animosity towards UK/US administrations will only increase. The first thing we Brits need to do is to get rid of Sunak and Co. I voted for him, to my shame.

It wouldn't matter. https://elbitsystems.com/global-partnerships/