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You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / Open Thread (and President Biden’s Remarks on the Attacks In Israel)

Reader Interactions

93Comments

  2. 2.

    WaterGirl

    @JPL: Boebert is suggesting that it’s our fault for bringing home the person who had been in captivity in Iran.  The Rs are such incredibly ugly people with black hearts, and they have no business being part of the government they want to destroy.

  4. 4.

    WaterGirl

    @JPL:  Good rebuttal from Tommy Vietor:

  6. 6.

    WaterGirl

    In other news, whatever Twitter did to make it so twitter wouldn’t work on my mac in Safari – for several days – has been un-borked.

  7. 7.

    Chief Oshkosh

    JD Vance appears to be the northern version of Ted Cruz. And Republican voters just eat up their shit.

  8. 8.

    Alison Rose

    @WaterGirl: See, I wouldn’t be good at that because my response would just be “why are you so fucking dumb and why do you want innocent people to be slaughtered” which probably wouldn’t have gotten us anywhere.

  9. 9.

    Elizabelle

    Adam’s post about Hamas – Israel will not load on my iPhone, or my MacBook Air. I have tried several times, over several hours. It constantly crashes.

    And since I can never get past that post, no earlier posts.  FYI.

  10. 10.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JPL:

    Oh, yes. It’s coming from On High:

    Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

    These Hamas attacks are a disgrace and Israel has every right to defend itself with overwhelming force. Sadly, American taxpayer dollars helped fund these attacks, which many reports are saying came from the Biden Administration. We brought so much peace to the Middle East through the Abraham Accords, only to see Biden whittle it away at a far more rapid pace than anyone thought possible. Here we go again.

  12. 12.

    Geminid

    @WaterGirl: And in still other news, so much has happened recently that Senator Menendez’s resignation is no longer the pressing issue it was 13 days ago. It still matters of course, but I think this is a matter of when and not if.

    And fire alarm? What fire alarm?

  13. 13.

    Baud

    @WaterGirl:

    Using facts and logic, he calmly gets this trump supporter to reverse direction on Ukraine support.

     
    He’ll never make it on the Internet.

  14. 14.

    trollhattan

    @SiubhanDuinne: ​
    Fuck me. It’s just missing “My GOOD FRIEND BIBI” to be das Uber Trump.

    Bibi, BTW is being Peak Bibi because threatening is what he does best.

    In his statement, the Israeli PM says what has happened today has never been seen in Israel, and Israel will take “mighty vengeance for this black day”

    More now from Netanyahu.
    The Israeli PM says Israel will “reach every place Hamas is hiding” and he tells “Gaza’s people to leave those places now”, according to Reuters.
    He says Hamas is responsible for the wellbeing of captives.
    “Israel will settle the score with anyone who harms them,” he adds.

  17. 17.

    Geminid

    @SiubhanDuinne: Trump likes to claim credit for normalization of relations between Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco with Israel. This process had been in the works for years, though.

    I thought Trump’s influence was a negative one: these nations realized that for the first time since WWII, the US could not be relied upon and they had better make arrangements among themselves.

  18. 18.

    JPL

    @Chief Oshkosh:  Yup and I hope someone investigates who he uses for maintenance and yard work.  Hate to find out not all of their workers are documented.  Money is fungible and all that.

    just sayin

  20. 20.

    Ksmiami

    As someone of Jewish decent, Israel’s refusal to be fair minded with the Palestinians was never going to result in anything good. I feel terrible for the innocent civilians but until and unless Netanyahuism is defeated, escalation and reprisals will rule the day.

  21. 21.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @trollhattan: ​If this were 1939, the PAB would be talking about his good friend Adolf putting those Untermenschen Poles in their place.

  22. 22.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    Oklahoma beating Texas in Dallas was not on my bingo card😲

  24. 24.

    E.

    @Elizabelle: Same here, on my iPad. Once the front page reaches a certain number of tweets, everything comes to a halt until the next post is up and I can open it alone.

  26. 26.

    sab

    @Chief Oshkosh: I live in Ohio and I love Ohio, and every time JD Vance (newly returned from San Francisco where he was a venture capitalist) opens his mouth as our Senator I want to crawl under a rock.

  27. 27.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Under Secretary Brian Nelson @UnderSecTFI 3h

    All of the money held in restricted accounts in Doha as part of the arrangement to secure the release of 5 Americans in September remains in Doha. Not a penny has been spent.

    These restricted funds cannot go to Iran — it can only be used for future humanitarian-related purposes. Any suggestion to the contrary is false and misleading

    Brian E. Nelson, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at Treasury Dept

  29. 29.

    Ivan X

    @Elizabelle: I think it’s because Adam forgot to put in a “jump,” in which the bulk of the post, which contains many embedded tweets, is hidden until revealed.

    @Adam Silverman or @Watergirl, can we get a jump added to Adam’s post?

  31. 31.

    RevRick

    As Josh Marshall at TPM pointed out, Netanyahu has really screwed the pooch on this one. It’s on his watch. His catering to rightwing fanatic settlers who wanted to make in-your-face displays in the West Bank led him to withdraw military forces from around Gaza so they could protect those pugnacious settlers. Hamas saw an opportunity to inflict pain and couldn’t resist. They claimed it was about the Temple Mount mosque, but that was clearly an afterthought.

  32. 32.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    The context in which today’s events are taking place is important to acknowledge; that context being the end of our recent decades of “Pax Americana”.

    From Noahpinion:

    Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of “American exceptionalism”, to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “world police”, and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better.

  33. 33.

    Princess

     

    @RevRick:  Yes, and as I said at the end of the last thread, I saw an Israeli friend complaining about that move in forces BEFORE the attack today. Israelis are well aware of this. We’ll see if it matters.

  34. 34.

    Geminid

    @RevRick: Yes, Hamas clearly has been planning this operation for a while. And with Itamar Ben-Gvir as the Israeli Minister in charge of police, Hamas could count on provocations upon which to launch it.

    In his youth, Ben-Gvir was a follower of the racist Meir Kahane. He was so radical as a teenager that the Israeli Defense Forces would not draft him into the Army, and that is highly unusual.

  37. 37.

    Baud

    @p.a.:

    I get the impression Isreal is already polarized.  So it may not work like it worked for Bush. I don’t think that tactic would work here today.

  38. 38.

    wjca

    @JPL: I hate Oklahoma and may they be buried in dust.

    Sometimes, you have to go with the lesser evil. Which, in this case, had to be Oklahoma.

  40. 40.

    wjca

    @Villago Delenda Est: What?  Pathetic sack of shit Vance might be lying or misleading?  /faints

    Sometimes it may just be that the pervasive and massive ignorance of his supporters has rubbed off.  That is, he simply has no clue about the subject that he’s talking about.  We see a lot of that on the right these days.

  41. 41.

    Geminid

    @p.a.: Generally speaking, Israeli voters are keenly aware of security matters. The 80%* of them who are Jewish tend to be “hawks” on Palestinian issues, but they value competence highly.

    * This is a guesstimate; the Jewish component of Israel’s population is closer to 75%, but Israeli Arabs have a lower participation rate. Some will have nothing to do with a Zionist state, and others are cynical and apathetic about politics. In the past, Arab parties have put 15 or more members into the 120-member Knesset, but right now there are 11 (I think). There would have been a couple more, but Balad split from an Arab Joint List and fell short of the 3.25% threshold and elected no MKs.

    Balad got 2.86%, while liberal Meretz got 3.15% and was also blanked. This turned what would have a 60-60 Knesset into a 64-56 majority for Netanyahu’s Likud and his 3 coalition partners.

  42. 42.

    eversor

    @wjca:

    JD Vance very publically converted to Catholocism and became all TradCath.  It was after that he started spouting the full on crazy, flying out to Hungary, and siding with Putin.  I doubt it’s an act at this point.

  44. 44.

    WaterGirl

    @Elizabelle: He’s got that post so loaded up that the front page barely loads on my laptop.

    But here if you can copy this link and go directly to it through your browser then you can get to the earlier posts – using the flyouts.  Just make sure you click the correct fly-out so you go to the earlier posts not to Adam’s.

    Link

  45. 45.

    RevRick

    @Princess: For the time being, a national defense coalition has formed. But when the dust settles, Bibi will be the focus of intense questioning about how he could leave Southern Israel defenseless while offering protection to yahoos in the settler movement.

  46. 46.

    RevRick

    @p.a.: Bibi will have a hard time pulling that one off. He’s got a lot of’splaining to do, leaving the South defenseless in order to protect settler shenanigans.

  47. 47.

    WaterGirl

    @Ivan X:

    @Elizabelle: I think it’s because Adam forgot to put in a “jump,” in which the bulk of the post, which contains many embedded tweets, is hidden until revealed.

    That’s a good thought.  Except that even if you use the MORE command to hide part of the text below the fold, WordPress loads the entire page anyway.

    I know this because I tested it a year or two ago – it was right after that that we set the 10 tweet limit in the post itself.

  48. 48.

    RevRick

    In order to stay in power, Bibi made a nasty bargain with the hard right, giving free rein to their shenanigans. Will this be his downfall?

  53. 53.

    Ivan X

    @WaterGirl: Ah. But does that still help on iPhones, because the page loads, but doesn’t have to be rendered until the MORE is tapped? If it didn’t still help, I’d think every Ukraine post would break every iPhone, as well as certain Anne Laurie superposts.

  54. 54.

    Elizabelle

    @Ivan X:  Thank you.  Doing  better, but crashed again on the iPhone.  Just too much to load.  Going out for a little while, but I’ll try again with the laptop later this evening.

  58. 58.

    Dan B

    @WaterGirl: I had a housemate from Gaza years ago.  I bet he has family there.  Their life was awful but this augers worse.  I feel sick to my stomach.

  61. 61.

    JaySinWA

    @JaySinWA: I just fired up my test Iphone, and in safari the home page loaded and seemed to be working slowly. Then after a while the “A problem repeatedly occurred on ‘https://balloon-juice.com”‘

    So maybe not fixed

    Reloaded from ‘Webpage crashed” message. So far it is okay.

  63. 63.

    Another Scott

    @JaySinWA: @Elizabelle:

    My J has an iPhone 13.  She was having trouble with Safari on it one day and asked me to look at it.  (I have an Android phone (Galaxy S20+).)  I was poking around and noticed that Safari seems to default to caching every web page it visits.  There were something like 1200 web pages in the cache!!11  Once I deleted all that cruft, it worked fine again.

    As Jay indicates, maybe looking at your cache on the phone is worth a shot.

    (Sorry if this is noise.)

    Good luck!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  67. 67.

    JaySinWA

    @WaterGirl: Yes I saw the comment at 47.

    The refresh on my Iphone seems to be working after the crash. I hadn’t visited the site on Safari before, so the first crash was without any cached data and after Adam added the jump.

  69. 69.

    wjca

    @WaterGirl: If Palestinians were treated like human beings, who mattered, this would not be happening.

    You mean like, giving votes to everyone who lives in territory effectively annexed to Israel?  Yeah, but that way lies a state which is arguably, no longer “Jewish.”  Which would, I believe, have been fine with the original Zionists.

    But now, there are the ultra-Orthodox.  Who have an incedibly sweet deal where they have a lot of influence in the government (even when they don’t have a Bibi totally beholden to them).  While getting a pass on serving in the military or otherwise doing anything to support the country.

  70. 70.

    Geminid

    @sab: Netanyahu is a rightwinger for sure, but his “Religious Zionism” coaltion partners are far more radical than Netanyahu’s Likud party.

  71. 71.

    SuzieC

    If any of you read Simon Rosenberg he had an interesting take, though terrifying.  His essential point is that this invasion has Putin’s fingerprints all over it and is part of the Putin/MAGA plan to destabilize the world.  I tried to copy/paste but no dice.

  72. 72.

    WaterGirl

    @wjca: I think Israel lost its way a long time ago, and have betrayed most of what they stood for.  Very sad.

    edit: Maybe Israel was the OG for “I’ve got mine, fuck you”.

  74. 74.

    HinTN

    @JaySinWA:

    My Android seemed to handle the post okay too.

    As did mine. Adam’s post was highly pessimistic about Bibi suffering too much from blowback. He’s usually right but I hope he’s wrong on this.

  75. 75.

    JaySinWA

    @WaterGirl: I think it may change the contours of the problem. And I think cache plays a role as well.

    I am loading the post itself now and it is updating very slowly. So even if the page was cached from the front page, some of the rendering is still happening after the page is viewed

    ETA the page finally finished painting and the page did not crash

    ETA2 returning to the front page after going to the post caused the web page crash again. Of course Adam has a new war post up so the page has changed again.

  81. 81.

    HinTN

    @WaterGirl: A phrase of music that got transmogrified and repurposed. I recognized neither.

    David McCallum had an album out around the time he wad playing Illya Nutcrackin (inside joke). Apparently the phrase was from that album.

    edit to correct spelling

  85. 85.

    Geminid

    @wjca: Ultra-Orthodox, or “Haredi” Israelis made an unusually strong showing in the last election. Some more secular Israelis lacked motivation because it was the 5th election in four years. But the two Haredi parties had been out of the Bennet-Lapid government and feared for their priviledges.

    The Haredi were especially incensed when the Finance Minister raised taxes on disposable plates and dinnerware. Avigdor Lieberman, the Minister, is not an environmentalist but rather a former Russian bar bouncer known to have grudge against the Haredi. Their religious leaders make things tough on immigrants from the former Soviet Union because many cannot satisfactorily prove they are Jews.

    Lieberman knew the Haredi like disposable dinnerware because of their large families and he decided to thumb them in the eye with higher taxes. They took their revenge at the polls.

  86. 86.

    Geminid

    @Eolirin: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was another setback. He left Likud and formed a new party, Kadima, because Likud was adamantly opposed to a two-state solution and Sharon knew that had to be happen. Sharon had the reputation of a super-hawk, and he might have been able to pull it off but he had a massive stroke ~2003 and never recovered.

  89. 89.

    SuzieC

    @WaterGirl: I don’t follow him on Twitter.  I read his substack blog.  But yes, that’s part of his point.  The R talking points, spread by Trump and Vance, are that this is all Joe Biden’s fault because we gave Iran its money back and therefore our tax money purchased Hammas’ weapons.  Obscene, but what else is new.

  90. 90.

    wjca

    @SuzieC: The R talking points, spread by Trump and Vance, are that this is all Joe Biden’s fault because we gave Iran its money back and therefore our tax money purchased Hammas’ weapons.

    So, then Hammas has a time machine (for money anyway) which allows them to purchase weapons with money which they will only (maybe) get at some indeterminate point in the future?   Seems like they ought to be able to leverage such a machine to better effect….

  91. 91.

    Matt McIrvin

    @RevRick: This is like 9/11, right? If American experience is any guide, this is the kind of failure you get massively rewarded for. Bush was at something like 90% approval a few days after failing to stop 9/11. If he’d stopped it he’d have been far worse off.

  92. 92.

    MisterDancer

    @HinTN: @WaterGirl: (sigh) Let me give some context, because I DO RECOGNIZE IT.

    It’s a really well known sample in hip hop. Snoop Dog using it in one of this biggest hits made it take off, and it’s be revisited over and again in the decades since.

    Had no idea it was from David McCallum!

  93. 93.

    Geminid

    @Matt McIrvin: Your looking at this like an American. This is far worse than 9/11 was for us, and it will go on for days and quite possibly weeks. From former Knesset member Einat Wilf:

        Objectively, this is the single darkest day in the history of the State of Israel.

    And it’s not over yet.

    @EinatWilf

    Israel has had hundreds of people killed in a population less than one thirtieth of ours. That death toll will certainly increase.

    And Wilf had this to say about her government:

        At least President Biden is speaking to the people of Israel (unlike our MIA government).

    ****

    Other nations can afford to occasional have weak and ineffective leaders. Israel cannot.

    Ms. Wilf is more tuned into politics than the average Israeli. She went to work for Mossad upon graduating from college and served on Prime Minister Rabin’s team that negotiated the Oslo Accords. But Israelis in general are much more aware of national security issues than we are, because they have to be. I would bet that a broad majority of Israelis will hold Netanyahu personally responsible for this disaster.

    And it is a disaster.This is not like the 1973 October War. Israel cannot defeat Hamas in Gaza like they did the Egyptian and Syrian Armies back then. This will be a salvage operation like what Bush’s stupid Iraq war turned into.

    And as Wilf pointed out in other posts, Netanyahu now wants opposition leaders Gantz and Lapid to join a unity government, in coalition with a bunch of draft dodgers! Because that is basically what his ultra-Orthodox and National Religious partners are.

    When this war is over, Netanyahu might be able to hang on to his 64-56 Knesset majority, although I doubt that very much. But regardless, his good will and prestige will be less than zero. Netanyahu will always be remembered for the shocking defeat he allowed on his watch, and not for whatever bitter “victory” he can salvage from this debacle.

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