All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

I don't see how other countries make any kind of deal with the US, even if the Democrats win in 2020. Doesn't matter if it's Biden, Sanders, or Warren.

Trump has sunk our reputation among our allies and enemies that will take ages to recover, if it ever does.

Well everything Obama did was dismantled by Trump, so nobody has any reason to think commitments will be honored 4-8 years anyways

[Mister Mets]

It's not a question of partisan advantage. There are plenty of well-intentioned potential voters who don't get off work until right before the polls close and they're exhausted. So while yes, technically they're not kept from voting by their job, they are at a disadvantage when compared to, say, salaried workers with more flexible schedules. It's not a level playing field.

But it usually won't make a difference if it's only in the general election. If you're voting in Harlem or rural Wyoming the competitive election for any position that people are voting for is likely the primary.

[AnakinFlair]

Well everything Obama did was dismantled by Trump, so nobody has any reason to think commitments will be honored 4-8 years anyways

I feel that most of what Obama did he was forced to do by Executive Orders, which are easily overturned by the next President. Then again, Donnie Demented doesn't seem to care much about actual laws either, so I do see your point.

[Tendrin]

Anyone surprised that the Republican is arguing against making it easier for people to vote?

[David Walton]

But it usually won't make a difference if it's only in the general election. If you're voting in Harlem or rural Wyoming the competitive election is likely the primary.

The question wasn't whether Harlem or rural Wyoming should make election day a national holiday.

Also, it's impossible to say what impact unburdening countless potential voters will have because it hasn't been done yet.

And democratic governments don't get to decide where voting rights are and aren't applicable based on perceived outcomes.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Anyone surprised that the Republican is arguing against making it easier for people to vote?

Not particularly. Standard operating procedure.

[Tami]

Iranian Missile System Shot Down Ukraine Flight, Probably by Mistake, Sources Say

The incident was first reported by Iranian semi-official media outlets, which cited the country's Red Crescent Society as assessing that the initial cause appeared to be mechanical failure. The Ukrainian embassy in Tehran shared this view in a statement, but later retracted it, with Kyiv warning against any preliminary assessments.

Images began to circulate Wednesday of what appeared to be fragments of a Tor M-1 missile said to have been found in a suburb southwest of Tehran. On Thursday, Ukraine Security Council Secretary Oleksiy Danylov said Thursday in a statement that contact with a Tor M-1 system was among the potential causes for the plane's destruction that his country was looking into.

Other potential scenarios involved a collision with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or another flying object, technical malfunction and a terrorist attack.

[AnakinFlair]

Iranian Missile System Shot Down Ukraine Flight, Probably by Mistake, Sources Say

This wouldn't surprise me. Honestly, I'm shocked that Iran didn't ground all air traffic- especially commercial- while they were launching missiles. You would think that would be SOP.

[Jim Kelly]

Iranian Missile System Shot Down Ukraine Flight, Probably by Mistake, Sources Say

Of the 176 souls lost, 63 were Canadian and a total of 138 had Canada as their ultimate destination. Canada cut off diplomatic relations with Iran some years ago and there are no direct flights between Iran and Canada, so passengers had to book a flight through Ukraine to return to Canada. 30 were from Edmonton, mostly from my alma mater at the University of Alberta.

If the fog of war resulted in these deaths, you can't really claim that no innocents have been lost in this current dust-up between the USA and Iran. Collateral damage.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

To say the least that article certainly casts Mayor Pete in a less than flattering light.

Pete is one of the worst people running for the nomination.

[Tami]

Of the 176 souls lost, 63 were Canadian and a total of 138 had Canada as their ultimate destination. Canada cut off diplomatic relations with Iran some years ago and there are no direct flights between Iran and Canada, so passengers had to book a flight through Ukraine to return to Canada. 30 were from Edmonton, mostly from my alma mater at the University of Alberta.

If the fog of war resulted in these deaths, you can't really claim that no innocents have been lost in this current dust-up between the USA and Iran. Collateral damage.

@cbsnews
: US officials are confident Ukrainian Flt 752 was shot down by Iran. US intelligence picked up signals of the radar being turned on & satellite detected infrared blips of 2 missile launches, probably SA-15s, followed shortly by another infrared blip of an explosion.

Twitter Link

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Sunrise Movement Endorses Bernie Sanders For President

Senator Bernie Sanders has a $US16 ($23) trillion climate plan. And now he has an army of young climate activists ready to support his Democratic presidential candidacy and ensure he brings that plan to the White House.

At the conclusion of a six-week process, the Sunrise Movement’s members voted to endorse Sanders for president. The group said in their announcement they’ll be shifting resources in the field to stump for his bid for the presidency in early primary states and getting volunteers supporting his campaign.

Sunrise Movement burst on the national scene in the wake of the 2018 midterms by staging sit-ins on Capitol Hill demanding the newly minted Democratic House work on a Green New Deal. Protestors were joined by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the group subsequently went on to establish itself as a major player in climate politics. The Sanders endorsement follows a host of Congressional primary endorsements last month and shows Sunrise has aims to reshape national politics around the climate crisis.

The six-week deliberative process, which concluded in the endorsement of Sanders, including a vote by rank-and-file members on whether to endorse a candidate at all. Eighty-five per cent of the 3,349 members who voted wanted to endorse a candidate, and three quarters picked Sanders as their choice. Senator Elizabeth Warren—who released her full Green New Deal plan last month after a slew of other climate plans—came in second with 17.4 per cent of the vote. “No preference” came in a distant third with 1.85 per cent of the vote.

Sunrise praised both Warren and Sanders in their announcement and noted that their political principles call for “No permanent friends, no permanent enemies.” And they thanked Warren for her work on climate and organising her climate plan around the Green New Deal, but in the end, the people have voted.

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Bernie Sanders is America's best hope for a sane foreign policy

In the American foreign policy discussion, socialists are often presented as gormless naifs — people whose utopian projects might sound good in theory, but who can't be trusted to exercise real power in a dangerous world. Only hard-nosed liberals or conservatives can make the tough decisions required to protect American interests.

Yet it is beyond question that, for at least the last 20 years now, American foreign policy has indeed been in the grips of starry-eyed utopian cranks — the imperialist variety, whose violent madcap schemes have unleashed hell across the globe, for no purpose or benefit to anyone but a narrow elite. Most recently, the supposedly anti-war President Trump has assassinated Iran's most important military leader under the delusional belief that it will somehow reduce instability and violence in the region.

Meanwhile, the 2020 presidential candidate with the most serious, realistic foreign policy agenda is the self-identified socialist, Bernie Sanders. Sanders promises the most stubborn confrontation with this lunatic militarism on offer, and the best possibility that America might become a responsible member of the international community.

Let's briefly review American foreign policy since the turn of the millennium. After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush launched an invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda. This quickly became a quagmire of an occupation, with clueless U.S. forces halfheartedly trying to stand up a democracy in the graveyard of empires.

Then, as had been the plan all along, Bush launched a wholly illegal war of aggression against Iraq, justified by faked-up intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and heavy implications that Saddam Hussein had been behind 9/11. Neither was true, and while Hussein was defeated easily, another quagmire quickly developed — drastically worsened by the bungling idiots Bush put in charge of things, who dismissed the entire Iraqi army and forced destructive right-wing economic policy on the fledgling Iraqi state.

Meanwhile, occupation forces committed scores of atrocities in both countries — some the typical concomitants of war, some simply gratuitous crimes, as in the torture dungeon at Abu Ghraib and the Nisour Square massacre. Bush himself and all his top advisers set up a program of systematic illegal torture which produced no good intelligence and made it impossible to prosecute some of the perpetrators of 9/11.

Across the world, the U.S. was revealed as a shrieking, blood-drenched hypocrite — a nation that loudly proclaimed itself to be a paragon of freedom and democracy while contemptuously ignoring international law and committing horrifying war crimes by the score.

The decisive factor in Barack Obama's victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary was the fact that he had opposed the Iraq invasion while she had voted for it. But once in power, Obama appointed Clinton as secretary of state and largely embraced Bush's imperialist foreign policy. He slowly drew down forces in Iraq, but drastically escalated the war in Afghanistan, which accomplished nothing except more chaos and death. As the Afghanistan Papers recently published by the Washington Post reveal, Obama administration military commanders and officials lied constantly about the total lack of progress on any of the occupation's goals.

Obama also sharply escalated the use of drone attacks, killing thousands of people in several countries — including several U.S. citizens, one of them a 16-year-old boy. He largely backed the Saudi war in Yemen, which quickly turned into a humanitarian catastrophe. And while Obama banned torture by executive order, he refused to prosecute any of the perpetrators (as required by treaty) and quietly backed the CIA in its effort to suppress the Senate report on its torture program — which included illegal spying on Senate staffers.

The post-9/11 wars have already cost roughly $6.4 trillion (in current and future costs). Now President Trump has escalated U.S. troop deployments across the world, and further scaled up the use of drone attacks — culminating with the assassination of Iranian general Qassam Soleimani in Baghdad last week, raising the prospect of an all-out war with Iran.

Bernie Sanders has stood against the worst of all this. He opposed the Iraq invasion because of probable U.S. casualties, the terrible precedent it would set, the heavy cost, and possible blowback. He voted against Michael Mukasey to become attorney general in 2007 because he refused to say whether waterboarding was torture and refused to recognize any limits on the president's wartime authority. He opposed Obama's surge in Afghanistan. And he has loudly condemned practically every action of President Trump of any kind.

Now, foreign policy was clearly not Sanders' main concern during most of his time in Congress, and he has not been as strong a critic of imperialism as some people. He did, like everyone in Congress except Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), vote for the Afghanistan invasion. In 2011, he was mealy-mouthed on the assassination of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki.

But since foreign policy was identified as a weakness in his 2016 campaign, he has scaled up his policy work and staffing there, especially by hiring Matt Duss, a noted anti-war scholar. Sanders has bolstered his anti-war thinking and messaging, including both extensive speeches and contemptuous attacks on well-connected imperialists like Henry Kissinger. Sanders now says his Afghanistan vote was a mistake and favors a careful withdrawal of troops there.

In the 2020 campaign, Sanders has leaned into the anti-war message, distinguishing himself as the boldest critic of imperial overreach in the Democratic field. As Ryan Brooks writes at Buzzfeed News, Sanders was alone among the Democratic frontrunners in not implicitly justifying the assassination of Soleimani in his initial response. Even Elizabeth Warren couldn't manage this, though she did come out with a better response after her first one drew criticism from the left. (Joe Biden didn't even explain why the Obama administration didn't kill Soleimani, while Mike Bloomberg supported it outright.)

[Mister Mets]

Gold star families? You mean the same gold star families that Trump regularly insults if they dare to disagree with him?

Yeah, but Collins is talking about Christian gold star families.

[Gray Lensman]

The question wasn't whether Harlem or rural Wyoming should make election day a national holiday.

Also, it's impossible to say what impact unburdening countless potential voters will have because it hasn't been done yet.

And democratic governments don't get to decide where voting rights are and aren't applicable based on perceived outcomes.

I think a superior version would be to make election day a two day event over a weekend, with legislation that prevents anyone at a job with more than a certain number of employees from being on the schedule for more than one of them.

[Gray Lensman]

Yeah, but Collins is talking about Christian gold star families.

Of all the ways in which you could have worded your response, you managed to pick the worst one.