Strong earthquake in Burma causes many deaths and much destruction
An 8.2 earthquake in Burma is estimated to have caused thousands of deaths, although the figures are unknown as yet. But it sounds very very bad:
An air traffic control tower collapsed at Naypyidaw International Airport, killing all staff who were on duty, Burmese media said. …
Mandalay’s Ava Bridge collapsed into the Irrawaddy River after the quake, and buildings and temples lie in ruins.
Many homes have collapsed, and even some buildings in Thailand have been destroyed.
RIP.
Blaming Bibi: documentary about the family of a hostage
The harrowing plight of the remaining hostages, and their loved ones and friends, should not be forgotten. Their are still about 59 and perhaps half of them are still alive.
And so I read this piece with interest. It describes a documentary that focuses on one such family, with relatives both in Israel and in the US.
The hostage families are not a unitary group, and even within this family there apparently are considerable political differences of opinion. And I consider that the families of hostages have undergone such stress, turmoil, fear, and sorrow that they are almost beyond criticism for anything they might do or say. However, quite a few of them are on the Israeli left and have long hated Netanyahu, and it should come as no surprise that they consider him blameworthy.
But two things in the article surprised me enough that I’m going to discuss them. First, a little background:
The film, which won the best documentary feature award at the Berlinale film festival, shows the first months after teacher Liat Beinin Atzili and her husband, artist and mechanic Aviv Atzili, were taken hostage in the attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz, part of the wider Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas assault on southern Israel in which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.
Much of the film focuses on Beinin Atzili’s older parents, American-born couple Yehuda and Chaya Beinin, who have lived in Israel since the early 1970s. They worked with the couple’s siblings and three children to get their daughter and son-in-law released.
As it turned out, Liat was released in that first wave, but Aviv had been murdered on October 7 and Hamas still holds his body.
Liat’s father Yehuda had this puzzling thing to say about the family’s initial attitude:
“We thought another couple of weeks and this would all be over,” said Beinin. “Nobody thought we’d be in this for the long haul.”
Why would anyone think that? I understand that it might have been wishful thinking, but it makes zero sense to me based on history. Beinin must be aware that the negotiations for a single hostage, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, took five years to accomplish. Also, 1027 prisoners were exchanged for that one man, 280 of them lifers.
So how could anyone think this would “be over” in a couple of weeks, and why would that person not realize this would not just be a prisoners-for-hostages deal but would have to involve a war to destroy Hamas?
Yehuda Beinin is described in the article as a “peacenik” and “committed liberal who has long been opposed to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.” So obviously he is going to see Netanyahu as the problem; perhaps that allows him to have a fantasy that this matter could have been resolved quickly and easily without Bibi. In fact, that leads to the second puzzling statement of Beinin’s:
It’s clear to Beinin that if Israel wants the remaining 59 hostages released, then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has to go,” he said. “The hostage families found themselves in a very difficult situation. There won’t be any resolution if he’s still prime minister.”
Well, I suppose he would be correct if Netanyahu was replaced by a leftist government willing to give Hamas everything it wants, keep Hamas in power, end all military operations and control of Gaza, and throw in a Palestinian state as well. But short of that, I can’t imagine what sort of magical thinking is required to think someone else would do better than Netanyahu – whose government, after all, made the deal that returned Liat Beinin Atzili to her family.
More:
And as [Yehuda] Beinin pointed out, both in the film and in interviews, he sometimes angers people, including his own grandchildren, when he brings in politics, and has tried to rein himself in.
So the family members are not united with him politically. And yet they have managed to work together. In addition, neither Liat nor Aviv’s relatives seem to want compromises in order to bring Aviv’s body home:
“Liat has said she doesn’t want a single hair on any Israeli soldier’s head harmed to bring Aviv home,” said Beinin. “And Aviv’s brother says if it will take twenty years to bring his body home, then it will take 20 years.”
I would be interested in seeing this movie if and when it becomes readily available.
Stefanik’s UN nomination withdrawn
This seems wise to me:
President Donald Trump on Thursday withdrew his nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Trump cited the razor-thin majority that Republicans hold in the House of Representatives for his decision to pull Stefanik’s name from consideration by the Senate for the U.N. post.
The vote of Stefanik, a New York Republican, has repeatedly been crucial in helping the GOP caucus pass key legislation since the beginning of Trump’s term in January.
The full Senate for nearly two months had held off on voting on her ambassadorship nomination, after it was recommended by the Foreign Relations Committee, because of concerns that her departure from the House would threaten Trump’s legi
The post of ambassador to the UN is, I’m afraid, a rather meaningless job. Yes, it’s nice to have someone good in the position, but the task is to basically take orders from the White House and give ringing speeches at an institution that is hopelessly wrong-headed. Trump doesn’t need to threaten his own House majority in order to choose someone who can do that.
I was curious how the article would deal with the way in which NY Democrats have been handling the special election to replace Stefanik. Here’s the answer:
If Stefanik left the House, her seat would be filled by a special election in New York.
That leaves out the real reason why Trump removed her nomination:
“We still haven’t seen the final proposal from the Democrats in Albany, but there’s no doubt that Tammany Hall corruption is alive and well in the state capital,” Republican New York Assemblyman Matt Slater, who represents the state’s 94th district in areas of Putnam and Westchester counties, told Fox News Digital in an exclusive Zoom interview on Sunday morning.
“It is just blatantly corrupt for the New York State Democrats to keep changing the rules of engagement simply out of self-interest. Meanwhile, New Yorkers are struggling in so many different ways. U-Haul just gave us our worst migration rating ever because there’s so many New Yorkers who are fleeing this state. So they can get things done, but they only do it when it benefits them,” Slater continued.
Slater, who serves as the ranking Republican on the state’s Election Law Committee, was reacting to state Democrats working to introduce legislation that could keep Stefanik’s House seat vacant until June, when the state holds its scheduled primary elections.
And that’s not all. The Republicans of NY are doing a little dance, as well. Here’s the situation:
However, there is turmoil within New York Republicans because supposedly one Republican candidate, state Sen. Dan Stec, threatened to run as a third-party candidate if he did not win the Republican primary.
The state’s Conservative Party favored Stec despite him not supporting Trump and taking sides with the state’s Democrats.
What’s up with that? My guess – and it’s only a guess – is that, as in many deep blue states, the GOP in NY isn’t used to fighting to win. Many of them are in it for other reasons.
But there is a larger issue involving special elections and the GOP. I’ve noticed in the past it seems to be that, in special elections, the left mobilizes much better than the right. Turnout is ordinarily quite low in special elections and therefore it’s possible for a very motivated minority to win, and the left is certainly very motivated.
So, for example, we have this in Florida:
Voters in Florida’s 6th Congressional District, a Republican stronghold on Florida’s northeast coast, will head to the polls on Tuesday to elect a successor for the seat vacated by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. In November, Waltz won reelection by a whopping 33-point margin and President Donald Trump won the district by 30 points.
Although Republican candidate Randy Fine is expected to eke out a win over his Democratic opponent Josh Weil, a new St. Pete Polls (for Florida Politics) survey shows Fine ahead by just 4 points, which falls within the poll’s margin of error.
Is it a skewed poll meant to put fear into the GOP? I have no idea, but the article mentions that another poll shows Republican Fine 13 points in the lead. However:
The general consensus is that Fine has run a lackluster campaign. For starters, he has been outraised by a staggering 10-to-1 margin.
That is common. The left has some very deep pockets and is not reluctant to dig into them when it matters. There is no question that they would early love to flip the House, and special elections are a tool for doing that.
It seemed short-sighted of Trump to nominate people from the House, with such a narrow majority and the threat of special elections to choose a successor. No district is “safe” under present-day conditions.
Open thread 3/28/2025
Biden and the press: now it can be told
I think we already pretty much knew this, actually, merely by observing. But now it’s being admitted to:
Former President Joe Biden’s White House staff made “really unethical” demands of the press as part of a campaign to “bully” journalists into portraying the aging commander in chief in a good light, a former staffer revealed Tuesday.
“They did bully a lot of journalists, and I think they would tell you that now. They wouldn’t have told you at the time,” Michael LaRosa, who served as former first lady Jill Biden’s press secretary, told “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur.
The former president’s communications team, led by Anita Dunn, was “very hostile and very suspicious” of journalists and treated their jobs as if they were operating “out of a bunker,” LaRosa said. …
There was this thing in Biden world about quote approval, everything had to be on quote approval,” LaRosa said, explaining that the practice involved “one person” on Biden’s team deciding “what the reporter can use, what quotes they can use” after an interview with the president. …
“I mean you saw them get caught trying to script questions to radio reporters that summer, summer of 2024. It was very reminiscent to me of being on the campaign in 2020, where these young press staffers in these states like New Hampshire, or Iowa, or Nevada, they were sort of like dog trained to make the questions conditional for interviews,” he said.
“And I said to them, ‘Please never ask the journalist for the questions ahead of time. You can always ask about the topics, but do not ask them for the questions for Dr. Biden,’” LaRosa explained, claiming that he refused to take part in the practice when handling press for the former first lady.
Oh, how ethical of him! Jill didn’t need the help; Joe did. His was a Potemkin presidency, and the press was fully complicit.
And then there’s that name: Anita Dunn. She goes way back. I first mentioned her in 2009 when she worked for Obama and was blasting Fox as biased and holding up CNN as objective (unfortunately the video there no longer works).
Trump signs EO to promote US election security
Nice try, although I doubt that this EO of Trump’s will hold up. The president does not have the authority to set nationwide voting rules for federal elections.
However, as you can see, the EO is cleverly drafted and in this particular form I suppose it might have a chance of court approval:
The order strengthens election integrity through a variety of mechanisms, including having the Election Assistance Commission require documentary, government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship on its voter registration forms, the administration said in a fact-sheet.
In order for states to receive federal funds for elections, they will be required to comply with “integrity measures set forth by Federal law, including the requirement that states use the national mail voter registration form that will now require proof of citizenship,” the document said.
“The Order improves the integrity of elections by directing the updating of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0 and security standards for voting equipment and prioritizing federal grant funds accordingly,” the administration said. “This includes requiring a voter-verifiable paper ballot record and not using ballots in which the counted vote is contained within a barcode or QR code.” …
“All agencies must report on compliance with undoing Biden Executive Order 14019, which turned Federal agencies into Democratic voter turnout centers,” the document said.
The trick is that it doesn’t force states to do anything, but federal money is conditioned on compliance.
One of the things that is increasingly clear is that, by taking fairly commonsense approaches to a number of things, Trump pushes the left into taking more and more unpopular stances. Democrats for voting insecurity. Democrats for illegal violent gangs. Democrats for government fraud and waste.
ADDENDUM: And right on schedule, Governor Pritzker of Illinois claims that this will disenfranchise “millions.’
This woman is the president and CEO of NPR
Mind-boggling.
An absolute clinic from @realBrandonGill here. pic.twitter.com/tEA0CAwhT0
— Luke Thompson (@ltthompso) March 26, 2025
When Twitter first came out, it struck me that a lot of people were revealing themselves through it. Did they think their tweets would not be noticed, or were ephemeral? Did a certain group contagion and abandon take hold? Did they think they were among friends?
Did they think at all?
And of course the notion of objectivity of coverage in the face of such a degree of partisanship is absurd.
Open thread 3/27/2025
And what of those Palestinian “protests”?
I’ve heard many people wonder why there have been so few Palestinian protests against Hamas. My response has been that there’s only a small percentage of Palestinians who aren’t onboard with Hamas and the war, and the consequences of protests would be dire. Gaza isn’t exactly a bastion of free speech.
But now we have this:
CAIRO — Thousands of Palestinians marched between the wreckage of a heavily destroyed town in northern Gaza on Wednesday in the second day of antiwar protests, with many chanting against Hamas in a rare display of public anger against the militant group.
The protests, which centered mainly on Gaza’s north, appeared to be aimed generally against the war, with protesters calling for an end to 17 months of deadly fighting with Israel that has made life in Gaza insufferable.
But the public calls against Hamas, which has long repressed dissent and still rules the territory months into the war with Israel, were rare.
In the town of Beit Lahiya, where a similar protest took place Tuesday, about 3,000 people demonstrated, with many chanting, “The people want the fall of Hamas.” In the hard-hit Shijaiyah neighborhood of Gaza City, dozens of men chanted “Out, out out! Hamas get out!”
“Our children have been killed. Our houses have been destroyed,” said Abed Radwan, who said he joined the protest in Beit Lahiya “against the war, against Hamas, and the [Palestinian political] factions, against Israel and against the world’s silence.” …
The militant group has violently cracked down on previous protests. This time no outright intervention was apparent, perhaps because Hamas is keeping a lower profile since Israel resumed war against it. …
Later, they said they regretted participating because of Israeli media coverage, which emphasized the opposition to Hamas.
So, what I take from it is that (a) it’s a very small group (b) they’re angry that they’ve had negative consequences from the war they started and probably supported (c) they want a breather from war, but their sentiments regarding Israel and its right to exist have not changed (d) they blame everybody; and (e) Hamas is choosing to take it easy on them, perhaps because it serves their “suffering Palestinians” narrative.
This may be the truth [my emphasis]:
A 19-year-old Palestinian, who also spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said he planned to join demonstrations on Wednesday. His mother has cancer and his 10-year-old brother is hospitalized with cerebral palsy, and he said the family has been displaced multiple times since their home was destroyed.
“People are angry at the whole world,” including the United States, Israel and Hamas, he said. “We want Hamas to resolve this situation, return the hostages and end this whole thing.”
But truth is an elusive commodity in the Palestinian world. The whole thing may be some form of taqiyyah – that is, strategic deception. Hard to say. Actually, impossible to say. But I would guess there is a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the length of the war and its cost to the common Gazan. Having a temporary ceasefire gave them bit of respite, and then a resumption of the war must have seemed especially unwelcome. They believe that if the hostages were given up, the war would end. But I’m not so sure at this point; Israel cannot allow the situation to continue and leave Hamas or any similar group with similar goals in charge.
Signalgate
I know I’m supposed to care deeply about Jeffrey Goldberg’s entrée into the administration’s Signal discussion of an attack in Yemen. And I probably should be writing more about it. But it’s just not of any real interest to me; it palls in significance to almost everything else going on in the US and the world, and was at worst an error that will hopefully never occur again and has not had any serious repercussions in terms of national security.
The most interesting thing about it is the question of whether it was a setup, but even that simply doesn’t interest me.
Sorry.
However, here are two links for you to peruse: this as well as this.
The fearful are leaving Trumpland
This article caught my eye. It describes what you might call the Rosie O’Donnell phenomenon of people leaving the country because of their hatred of Trump and fear of what he has in store for them. Ordinarily the latter bears zero relation to reality. But that seems to be the echo chamber in which they live, and they’re willing to act on it.
For example, the article describes the motives of a gay couple moving to Ireland [emphasis mine]:
“This is not just four years of a president that we don’t happen to like,” Hennigan said. “This is a different regime, and it’s time to leave. For years, I saw progress with race equality, women’s equality, and gay equality. Now, I think maybe we’ve already lived through the pinnacle of equality, at least in this country.”
Atlas, a retired school teacher, and Hennigan, a travel adviser who can work remotely, are concerned about their rights as a gay married couple. Despite recently completing a 20-month renovation of their Boston home, they have decided to uproot.
I can’t even figure out what rhetoric of Trump they might be relying on to think that those rights would be threatened by Trump during his term. He did nothing about it during his first term, either. And a policy of blocking medical transition for youths actually supports gay people, because a great number of de-transitioners finally settle into accepting that they are gay rather than trans.
But logic has little to nothing to do with fear of Trump.
“Some of these people are mixed-race couples or same-sex couples that perceive a threat to their future in the US,” [an immigration law attorney] said.
In Ireland, by the way, gay marriage is indeed legal, but there are about half the number of such marriages per capita compared to in the US. Support for gay marriage is very high in Ireland, although the churches in Ireland oppose it.
However, the idea of Ireland as some sort of benign country is laughable to me, although my priorities are apparently quite different from those of the recent Irish arrivals from the US. I can’t imagine that they care one whit that Ireland has the distinction of being the most anti-Israel country in Western Europe, and that’s saying a lot. As Ireland’s few Jews consider fleeing, the Rosie O’Donnells and the Hennigans enter:
Ireland has been among the most outspoken critics of Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas militants that sparked the war in Gaza.
Polls since the start of the war have shown overwhelming pro-Palestinian sympathy in Ireland.
A survey in June by the news site The Journal found that 76 percent of Irish people believed the EU should impose economic trade sanctions on Israel over the conflict.
Protesters at rallies in Dublin told AFP they feel empathy with Palestinians due to Ireland’s centuries-long history resisting British rule.
The ignorance is almost overwhelming.
Ireland is also not without its share of violence, anti-immigrant (mostly anti-Moslem, not anti-affluent Bostonian) demonstrations, and populist sentiment. It would be ironic if these people moved to Ireland only to have Trumpism follow them there. But I doubt it, because populism isn’t especially strong in Ireland and leftism is.