Jon Stewart breaks down the response to Trump’s guilty verdict from Joe Biden and the media, as well as the GOP’s vow for revenge and hypocritical complaint about Democrats pursuing “political prosecutions.” Plus, Jon pleads with the media to act a little more like the court system and examine evidence and reach conclusions, instead of wildly speculating on future realities. #DailyShow#JonStewart#Trump
The good people are fighting back now. DeathSantis and his fundamentalist minority have pushed decent people too far. But look for a response from the right wing shock troops, the Proud Boys, the militias, the other right wing gang thugs. Hugs. Scottie
Several Tampa Bay area cities have raised the LGBTQ Pride flags over city buildings this weekend. But that would have been illegal if a bill that died in this year’s Florida Legislature had instead become law.
On Saturday morning the city of Gulfport in south Pinellas County raised the Pride flag over its public library. It came after a short ceremony of speeches honoring the city’s commitment to equality and before a day-long block party celebration of Pride.
The nearby City of St. Petersburg raised its LGBTQ Pride flag over City Hall on Friday. Meanwhile, the City of Clearwater will host Pride events but will not fly the Pride flag at a city building.
Also raising the Pride flag over their city halls this weekend were Tampa, Wilton Manors, Miami, and Orlando. If you know of any others, let us know in the comments.
The Republican bill to ban Pride flags at government buildings passed earlier this year in the Florida House, but died when the state Senate ran out of time to vote on the issue before the session ended for the year.
Of note, an amendment to the Senate version of the bill would have allowed the Confederate flag, something its sponsor later claimed was as “error.”
— Whitney Fox for Congress (FL-13) (@whitfox) June 2, 2024
The vibrant streets of Gulfport were illuminated in the colors of the rainbow on Saturday as neighbors, business owners and city leaders welcomed people from across Tampa Bay at their fourth annual Gulfport Pride Festival. https://t.co/GkSqEJhIN4
Happy Pride Month, Wilton Manors! No matter how you show up, we'll always celebrate that you've found your home here in the Island City. pic.twitter.com/51NouvUEj8
— WiltonManorsOfficial (@WiltonManorsCty) June 1, 2024
The colors of love and progress are flying high in Orlando as we raise the Progress Pride Flag at Orlando City Hall in celebration of our LGBTQ+ community and their ongoing fight for equality. https://t.co/XJTIK6GB10
Funny how the party that’s always going on about the First Amendment and free speech is always trying to ban speech they don’t like, in this case flying a flag.
This is vivid example of what I said yesterday about opposing a gay tourism boycott of Florida. Aside from the fact that countless of our people make their money that way, the major cities in Florida, most of which are run by Democrats, are overwhelmingly on our side.
AND you (and all of us) can be refused medical care. What if I get food poisoning, have car accident? And gay-bashed. I won’t want someone’s ‘sincere’ religious beliefs to interfere with my ‘sincere’ desire to stay alive and healthy.
I was just in a Tires Plus shop to replace a tire. I had to use the bathroom, so I asked where it was. The guy at the desk pointed to it, and said it was the door to the left. It was marked Ladies!!! The men’s bathroom was out of order, and the guy told me that it was “Uni-sex”!!!
I replied, that I am glad for the Democracy and Equaiity!!!
I was in the Eureka/Arcata/McKinleyvillle area of northern California last weekend and every restaurant bathroom I went into was M/F/Who Cares? As they should be.
I recommend going to the linked article. It has a lot of information on the lawsuit and how petulant the two men are. Here are some quotes. Much more at the Salon link. Hugs. Scottie
Even though the plaintiffs suing for the right to flunk female students for abortion include boilerplate arguments in which they feign concern that abortion is “killing,” the legal filing makes it clear that what really outrages Bonevac and Hatfield is that Title IX prevents them from controlling the private lives of students. Along with their anger about abortion, they grouse about not being allowed to punish students “for being homosexual or transgender.” They also argue they should be able to penalize teaching assistants for “cross-dressing,” by which they appear to mean allowing trans women to wear skirts.
As Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day wrote, the language of the legal complaint is “downright petulant.” The picture painted is of two men obsessed with controlling student lives based on what they’re packing inside their underwear. It should be common sense that college students should be graded on their performance in class, not whether or not their professor resents their sex life or sexual identity. Alas, because the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Texas banned abortion, it’s created a pretext for every busybody who wants to spend less time grading papers and more time working himself into an angry froth over the imagined sexual exploits of his students.
Even though Bonevac and Hatfield work in Austin, Texas, they filed their lawsuit 486 miles away in Amarillo, Texas. The reason for this is not mysterious: Donald Trump-appointed judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. The right-wing judge has a long and frankly unhinged history of screeching at top volume about the evils of “sexual revolutionaries.” (Yes, that does sound like a compliment, but he doesn’t mean it as such.) It takes very little to draw Kacsmaryk’s sexualized condemnation. Premarital sex, for instance, makes one a “sexual revolutionary.” Using contraception within marriage also makes one an irredeemable pervert. In his legal writings, Kacsmaryk is very clear that sex is only for procreation within marriage, and anything outside of that should draw legal sanction. He has not weighed in on whether there should be restrictions on what sexual positions are legally permissible within the procreation-only marital sex, but give him time.
“Pregnancy is not a disease, and elective abortions are not ‘health care,’” University of Texas at Austin professor Daniel Bonevac sneers in a federal court filing with professor John Hatfield. Instead, Bonevac writes, because pregnancy is the result of “voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse,” students should not be allowed time off to get abortions.
If the students disobey and miss class for abortion care, the filing continues, the professors should be allowed to flunk students.
Even though Bonevac and Hatfield work in Austin, Texas, they filed their lawsuit 486 miles away in Amarillo, Texas. The reason for this is not mysterious: Donald Trump-appointed judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. The right-wing judge has a long and frankly unhinged history of screeching at top volume about the evils of “sexual revolutionaries.”
Bonevac [screenshot above] can be seen in the October 2016 video below expressing his devotion to Trump.
Judge Kacsmaryk, a former lawyer for an anti-LGBTQ hate group, was exposed last year for failing to disclose millions in stock holdings.
Kacsmaryk was previously exposed for failing to disclose virulently anti-LGBTQ interviews and acting to hide his authorship of an anti-abortion article ahead of his Senate confirmation hearing.
More recently, he upheld a ban on drag shows at a Texas university. Kacsmaryk’s ruling to ban abortion pills is pending before the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on the issue in March.
Two male Texas professors are suing to flunk students who get abortions.
Their reason? The students had "consensual sexual intercourse."
Remember folks, if you find out during a wanted, planned pregnancy that the fetus is dead and CHOOSE to terminate, that’s an “elective abortion.” These people are as ignorant as they are cruel.
Whenever marriage equality comes up, they all scream about how gay marriage means the end of the human race bc children. So now they want to make it impossible to get an abortion, which means more people will be using contraception. Then they want to eliminate contraception to increase births, many of which will be unwanted. But that’s the best I can figure their plan is.
I want to thank Ali for the link to this story. I will try to post the comment she left pointing me to it. I do not mind a link here or there in the comments if it leads me to new good article on issues. Ali has offered me many links in the comments and all of them so far have been worth reading, and yes many I end up posting like this one. Thank you Ali. Hugs Scottie Below is Ali’s comment.
All is well. So many things tend to work out for the very best.
Here’s a new link. I’ve been reading Oliver Willis for years, and I really like his work. You’ve probably seen his work around. I now subscribe (for free) to his work on Substack, and here is the one he posted today. Bonus on each post is a photo of his doggy Kal-El, who looks like our Chrissy back when she was that age (she crossed the bridge in 2020 at age 21.) Anyway, back to the link: https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/how-boring-lgbtq-people-made-america . Enjoy when you get to it!
When I was a kid and well up until into my teens in the 1990s, the right wing in America sold us a dystopian vision of what would occur if gay and lesbian people were granted equal rights, most notably, the right to marry.
According to conservative pundits and politicians, if we allowed same-sex marriage to occur, every street in America would immediately, overnight, turn into the most extreme version of a San Francisco leather parade. Innocent families would be forced, Clockwork Orange style, to watch as bulging crotches were shoved into their faces, sparkling zippers twirling before them, women dressed in men’s clothes, men wearing dresses, the kinkiest sexual acts occurring in public at the drop of a hat.
On Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, equal marriage rights would surely end up in people marrying ducks, cows, goats, etc. Certainly.
But in the decades since then, after figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both now thankfully six feet under) blamed LGBTQ people for events like 9/11, none of that happened. For sure, there are sometimes leather parades, but they’re mostly happening in the same places where there have always been leather parades and nobody there is bothered by them.
Instead, after the epochal event of same sex marriage becoming legal, nothing happened. Nothing at all. No forced Pride parades breaking out in rural Alabama. No kids in Montana getting instructed on the fine art of same-sex kissing. No families in Orange County, California, compelled to learn the words to “YMCA” in gender reeducation camps. Nothing at all.
Why? Because the vast majority of LGBTQ people are just as boring as straight people. They have jobs, go to school and work, take care of their kids, have marital bliss and squabbles and all the rest of it. They aren’t activists militantly marching in the streets for issues or disco, but simply want to make it through another day in peace. Boring as hell, like all of us are.
And this is a triumph. Because for all of American history, the people in power – almost always wealthy, straight, white, men – have attained power and retained power by demonizing everyone else who doesn’t look like them. Black men were after their daughters, Muslim people are terrorists, women are emotional hysterics, and on and on and on. These people profit off of the dehumanization of others and by working overtime to scare people about the horror that could happen if we treated everybody with equality and respect.
Yet every time that the country gets over itself and fulfills the words of the Founders in ways that they could not comprehend in their limited view of the world and who truly deserved “liberty,” we collectively discover that the nightmare was always total nonsense.
This is a lesson to keep in mind as we watch in horror as the right whips up fears about immigrants, transgender people, and refugees from the Middle East in our current electoral cycle. Integrating LGBTQ families into the mainstream of American life made the country stronger, not weaker. Our collective understanding increased, the rich tapestry that is the United States benefitted from increased diversity. The only ones who lost out were close-minded bigots who can’t accept that the world doesn’t look like the deranged fantasies in their brains (and never existed in reality).
Boring is good. We’re all boring. Reject the lurid fantasy world of the haters and instead embrace the mundane reality of a diverse world. And throw a leather parade, if you feel like it. This is America, where you’re free to do so if you like.
If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!
Gov. Ron DeSantis speaking at an elementary school in Florida, where teachers’ salaries are now the lowest in the nation.
Six states have now passed universal school choice programs, but Florida has been singularly effective at accomplishing what Republicans have had near the top of their agenda for decades: destroying public education.
As The Hill reports, public schools in Florida are shutting down in multiple districts due to a rapid loss of students. Meanwhile, private school enrollment is up by more than 50,000 students, and charter schools have picked up 68,000. Homeschooling has increased by 58.6%, which would likely be even higher if parents weren’t competing for a limited number of available homeschool vouchers. Despite those vouchers expanding by 40,000 a year, they still can’t keep up with demand.
No other state has seen anything even close to this vast shift away from public education.
So why are Florida Republicans so successful in reducing public school enrollment? Because they did their homework. They spent decades draining public school funding, making them poorly staffed, poorly run, and an overall miserable place to get an education. Then they created a voucher system that offers parents unmatched goodies for joining in the enterprise of keeping children ignorant while making right-wing “education” providers rich.
The reason that Republicans want to destroy public education has never been much of a mystery. As Barbara Miner at Rethinking Schools puts it:
Education is a multibillion-dollar market, and the private sector is eager to get its hands on those dollars.
Conservatives are devoted to the free market and believe that private is inherently superior to public.
Shrinking public education furthers the Republican Party goal of drastically reducing the public sector.
Privatization undermines teacher unions, a key base of support for the Democratic Party.
Privatization rhetoric can be used to woo African American and Latino voters to the Republican Party.
Few states have matched Florida when it comes to undermining public schools to make the alternatives look better.
In 2007, Florida’s investment in public education was about average. The state had one of the worst high school graduation rates in the nation and poor student performance in science, but those numbers were improving. But they didn’t keep improving.
The state did institute a funding program that rewards businesses with tax breaks for educational investments—so long as those investments go tovoucher programs. As a result, the program simultaneously feeds private schools by directly putting money in their pockets and starves public schools through loss of tax funding.
The combination of low teacher pay, poor student investment, harsh state oversight, and a restrictive curriculum that cripples students’ ability to learn has all but destroyed Florida’s public schools. It’s not hard to understand why parents and students would want something better. They deserve something better.
This is exactly how Florida created unprecedented demand for alternatives.
As a bonus for parents who choose to homeschool their children, the state is willing to coverDisney passes and giant televisions. No questions asked. So it’s absolutely no surprise that Florida’s available homeschool vouchers were all snatched up for this school year and areexpected to double next year.
But Florida isn’t the only state that has caught onto the make-it-terrible-and-they-will-leave system of driving kids to private schools. Tennessee now comes in just ahead of Florida on spending per student, and ranks No. 44 on teacher pay. Tennessee’s Republican legislature is considering the unprecedented step of turning down federal funding for education in hope of evading federal requirements on education. Not even Florida went that far.
Fortunately for Tennessee children, the legislature broke into factions and failed to pass Gov. Bill Lee’s voucher plan this year. But it will surely try again next year.
And Tennessee can always look to Florida as its model.
Rule by gang thugs violence and threats. Make everyone feel unsafe to even question the right or the cult Dear Leader. These people are a small number of our public, but they are vocal, and they are willing to use violence, hurt others, break the laws to get their way. They are the brownshirts of 1930s Germany, and the Proud Boys admit they are trump’s army. The rest of us must not let this be the new normal. They are teenage bullies just like their boss. This is terrorism. Hugs. Scottie
The addresses and phone numbers of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s family members were posted to a doxing website after presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in connection with a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election.
Phone numbers and addresses for Cohen’s wife and children were posted early Monday morning on a site that has been used to target other figures involved in Trump’s various legal issues, according to the group Advance Democracy, a non-profit research group.
Trump supporters attempted to dox jurors last week. During the trial, the mother of a former police officer who was nearly killed on Jan. 6, 2021, by rioters who believed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election was swatted after her son called Trump “an authoritarian” with “a violence fetish.”
NEW: The addresses and phone numbers of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's family members were posted to a doxing website after presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies… https://t.co/oAWjeAqSjU
There is no republican party anymore. It is gone and needs to be placed in the history books of the past. It is the cult of tRump party, or tRump party for short. Or maybe Cult party. But the tRump party is out to destroy anyone or anything that doesn’t clearly glorify and help the dear leader of the cult who is tRump. Republicans have told the family members with trans kids they don’t believe the laws they are voting for … but if they don’t they will be primaried and lose their seat, so lose the easy money. The former republicans are all fearful of the new party, the cult of tRump. The choose the easy money of being in office rather than their dignity or honor or even doing the correct thing for the country and the people. Hugs. Scottie
Lara Trump, the Republican National Committee co-chair and daughter-in-law of former President Donald Trump, dodged answering whether the RNC will support Maryland Republican Larry Hogan’s run for Senate after Hogan called for Americans to respect the verdict.
“I don’t support what he just said there. I think it’s ridiculous,” Lara Trump said when asked by CNN’s Kasie Hunt if the RNC will support Hogan on “State of the Union” Sunday morning.
“I think anybody who’s not speaking up in the face of really something that should never again have seen the light of day, a trial that would never have been brought against any other person aside from Donald Trump, doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone,” Lara Trump added.
Read the full article. Maryland’s Senate seat could turn out to be the deciding factor in whether Democrats maintain control of the chamber.
Regardless of the result, I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process. At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders—regardless of party—must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship. We must reaffirm what has made this nation…
— Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) May 30, 2024
Kasie: Does the RNC support Hogan for Senate?
Lara Trump: I don't support what he just said there. He doesn't deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point. And quite frankly, anybody in America pic.twitter.com/npj9qRuokM
.@GovChrisSununu hits "bad statement" by RNC co-chair Lara Trump on former Gov. Larry Hogan: "We want him to win the Senate race… he was a great governor of Maryland, and I have no doubt he's going to be a great senator of Maryland." pic.twitter.com/j5xp6LLnIC
Larry Hogan tried to paint himself as a moderate Republican and found out it doesn't work when the majority of the Republican party is composed of Trump acolytes who don't respect the Rule of Law and want to install Trump as a dictator. #mdsenpic.twitter.com/sNlShDeJx3
Finally and about time reporters are starting to push back against tRump and his sycophants lies. Maybe Fox losing a almost a billion dollars for endorsing lies might have wakened them up. Stephanopoulos was angry the guy kept saying it even after he corrected him several times. Hugs. Scottie
Trump lawyer Will Scharf: “This case in New York? It was called the zombie case. It sat and sat and sat. It could have been brought at any point after 2020. And then suddenly, when President Trump announced his campaign for president, it was dusted off, rushed in front of a grand jury and then rushed into court.
“You want to talk about the politicization of the legal system? I mean, this is exhibit A. I vehemently disagree that the district attorney in New York was not politically motivated here. And I vehemently disagree that President Biden and his political allies aren’t up to their necks in this prosecution.”
ABC host George Stephanopoulos: “There’s no evidence of that! Sir, I’m not gonna let you continue to say that! There’s just zero evidence of that! This has nothing to do with President Biden.”
RELATED: Scharf is running for Missouri attorney general and a couple of weeks ago Jimmy Kimmel had a field day with Scharf’s very creepy smile, calling him “the first human attorney to be generated by AI.” The clip below is cued up.
George Stephanopoulos pushes back on Trump lawyer Will Scharf after Scharf alleges some form of collusion between Bragg and Biden: "There's no evidence of that. Sir, I'm not gonna let you continue to say that. There's just zero evidence. The DA in Manhattan is elected." pic.twitter.com/q1F8Bclf8r
Why don’t they want to talk about the fact that Bill Barr made Cy Vance, through the U.S. Attorney in Southern District of NY, to squash this case, meaning it had to wait for a new, Biden-appointed attorney general to reignite it? And why aren’t people bringing this up every single time???
Why even have these trumpanzies on? They just repeat all the bullshit that their master has said at every presser. And Missouri is getting more and more fascist with brainwashed idiots like this guy.
One of the things that’s so ridiculous about blaming Biden is this: Why the DA? Why didn’t Biden just command the DOJ to prosecute Trump for this?
Why have the DA prosecute a lowest-level-felony false-business-record case, when DOJ could have prosecuted Trump for the same coordinated-expenditure federal election crime Michael Cohen went to jail for? Or the plain-as-day tax crime of issuing a phony Form 1099 to Cohen disguising reimbursement as ordinary compensation?
Again the credit for the link goes to Ten Bears, link below. This is important because the right still wants to claim that Hamas is the hold up to peace. But the fact is this plan in almost the very same respects was offered by Egypt and Hamas accepted it while Israel again refused it. Every attempt that has been offered to stop the slaughter and bring the hostages home has been blocked by Israel and Bibi specifically. Does anyone remember when the Biden administration claimed the last few days that Israel accepted the proposal … that was pressure on Israel because Bibi was already saying no not without with major changes, while Hamas said OK. It was also gaslighting by still making Hamas the bad guy in all this. Hugs. Scottie
“It’s a question of which is to be master, that’s all.”
Saturday, June 1, 2024
What’s Going On. II
From the Livre d’Or des Voyages of Louis Mainard, 1890, via picryl.com.
Déjà vu all over again? Biden (the day after the guilty verdict for convicted felon Donald Trump, some people think that’s relevant) announces proposals for a ceasefire in Gaza, to be carried out in three phases: six weeks during which all Israeli forces withdraw from the Strip, hostages in Gaza (especially women and elderly, and remains of the dead) will be exchanged for detainees in Israeli prisons, Gazan civilians will return home, supplied with temporary shelters, and delivery of food, water, medicine, and fuel will get back to full strength, and the parties will work out the details of a probably lengthier second phase; a second phase in which the exchange of hostages and prisoners will be completed and the parties will negotiate a final, permanent ceasefire; and a third, which is supposed to last forever, when Gaza is rebuilt and the last remains are transmitted.
Isn’t this approximately where we arrived three weeks ago, when Haaretz reported that Hamas had accepted a deal proposed by Egypt with a very similar shape, and Israel appeared to have turned it down?
Not exactly. The big difference, to my mind, which isn’t getting a lot of press attention, is that this one is billed as an Israeli proposal—Biden is very insistent on that:
Now, after intensive diplomacy carried out by my team and my many conversations with leaders of Israel, Qatar, and Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, Israel has now offered — Israel has offered a comprehensive new proposal.
Although, as he acknowledges, there are ministers in the Israeli cabinet who are determined that Israel should reoccupy Gaza
I know there are those in Israel who will not agree with this plan and will call for the war to continue indefinitely. Some — some are even in the government coalition. And they’ve made it clear: They want to occupy Gaza, they want to keep fighting for years, and the hostages are not a priority to them.
and national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi told reporters just two days ago that the war would continue for another seven months—and a couple of hours after Biden’s statement the Israeli prime minister’s office seemed to be categorically rejecting the offer:
Israel released a vague statement following Biden’s address, saying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized a proposal to maintain its goal of returning hostages as soon as possible, but insisted that “the war will not end until all of [the Israeli government’s] goals are achieved, including the return of all our abductees and the elimination of Hamas’ military and governmental capabilities.”
Wait what? Israel refuses to sign on to its own ceasefire plan? What’s up with that?
It’s possible, of course, that Biden was just lying about it, but what would be the value of that? What would it get him, or us, or anybody?
Meanwhile, of course, international pressure on Israel continues to mount, after the move by Ireland, Spain, and Norway to recognize the existence of a Palestinian state before it really exists. Last week, the International Court of Justice, engaged in the investigation of South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide, ruled that Israel must
Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
(Israel has a quibble over the comma after “Governorate”, claiming it means it doesn’t have to halt anything, since it denies that it is doing anything that could have such an effect, which is patently absurd, since its blockage of aid could clearly starve everybody to death, among other things. The comma is simply an error; if you were to take it seriously, you would have to interpret it as changing the restrictive relative clause “which may inflict…” into a non-restrictive relative applying to the main clause with the verb “halt”, which would imply that halting the offensive could destroy the civilians, which makes even less sense).
Two days later came the massacre at the Tel al-Sultan refugee camp in western Rafah, a supposed safe zone to which IDF had instructed people to move, where bombs apparently ignited a fire in which 45 or 50 human beings burned to death in their tents in a strike aimed at two Hamas militants who may or may not have been there. Less than two days after that, an attack on another tent city in the area killed at least 21 more.
In Washington, the congressional leaders have finally agreed, after weeks of wrangling, to invite Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress, though they’re not saying when, and it’s become clear why it was taking so long, according to The Hill; it was Schumer:
The invitation left Washington after weeks of delay from Schumer who, during a high-profile floor speech in March, declared Netanyahu had “lost his way” and called for new elections in Israel, drawing the ire of the longtime Israeli leader, Republicans and some Democrats.
Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in U.S. history, and his office on a number of occasions said the Senate leader was supportive of having Netanyahu address Congress, despite his sharp criticism of the Israeli leader, but the New York Democrat did not sign the letter until recently.
I’m really glad to have it clarified that Schumer hasn’t dropped his opposition to Netanyahu as PM (he says the invitation isn’t to be interpreted as extended to Netanyahu as a person at all, but as a representative of the Israeli state)
In Israel, IDF has been at diametric odds with the prime minister since mid-May over his obstinate refusal to offer any plans for what happens after the war, led by defense minister Yoav Gallant, who has demanded that Gaza should be administered by Palestinians, in opposition to Netanyahu’s religious nationalist partners, who want to reoccupy the Strip with Jewish settlers, and Netanyahu fears (no doubt with reason) that if he crosses the partners they will leave the government, collapsing it and leaving Netanyahu without a job and forced to face his corruption trial.
That lends an extreme significance to something that came up this morning from Yair Lapid, who implores Netanyahu to accept the plan Biden announced yesterday, with what sounds like an offer of his own—that his party will allow Netanyahu to stay in office (for now) if the religious nationalists decide to topple the government, if and only if he sign on to the new ceasefire proposal:
“The Israeli government cannot ignore President Biden’s significant speech. There is a deal on the table and it needs to be done,” Yair Lapid wrote in a post on X.
“I remind Netanyahu that he has a safety net from us for the hostage deal if Ben-Gvir and Smotrich leave the government.”
Netanyahu’s response so far has been negative, but that could change. The hostage families, of course, have endorsed the new idea.
In the most recent weeks I’ve frequently been tempted to give up on the theory of Biden as peacemaker, as he seems just not to respond to how horrible this war is, but I generally come back to realizing how impossible it would be for him to do the work by himself—how much help the process requires from a host of international and domestic actors, from the worst (Saudi Arabia) to the most annoyingly virtuous (South Africa). It occurs to me that Biden could be telling the truth about this new ceasefire approach—that it really is an Israeli proposal, with buy-in from all the Israelis the US needs to be talking to, in the military and intelligence, in the political opposition in all its prickly oppositionality, in the broad public, just not exactly Netanyahu himself (who isn’t Israel, as Schumer helpfully reminds us, just a hated PM), or not yet. But don’t rule it out.
May 30, 2024 – A day that will go down in infamy. For the first time in the history of the USA, an ex-president was convicted of a crime – 34 felonies to be exact. Another first is that he is the only felon to ever be a presumptive nominee for a major party. Parody of Heartbreak Hotel. Lyrics by David Cohen – Performance and video by Don Caron. Executive Producers Don Caron and Jerry Pender
Gov. Ron DeSantis speaking at an elementary school in Florida, where teachers’ salaries are now the lowest in the nation.
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Scottie's Playtime 
All is well. So many things tend to work out for the very best.
Here’s a new link. I’ve been reading Oliver Willis for years, and I really like his work. You’ve probably seen his work around. I now subscribe (for free) to his work on Substack, and here is the one he posted today. Bonus on each post is a photo of his doggy Kal-El, who looks like our Chrissy back when she was that age (she crossed the bridge in 2020 at age 21.) Anyway, back to the link: https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/how-boring-lgbtq-people-made-america . Enjoy when you get to it!