“Immigrants seeking to come to the U.S. to live and work are absolutely not terrorists conducting a paramilitary operation. Mexico and the U.S. are not Israel and Palestine. And, as Saturday’s attack makes obviously clear, even the most extreme measures designed to “shut down” a border can be defeated.
Conflating these issues only serves to make the debate over U.S. immigration policy more toxic and stupid than it already is.
Unfortunately, DeSantis is not the only one doing this. Former President Donald Trump, never one to care much about accurately describing the status of U.S. immigration policy, claimed in a TruthSocial post on Monday that “the same people that raided Israel are pouring into our once beautiful USA, through our TOTALLY OPEN SOUTHERN BORDER, at Record Numbers.”
Meanwhile, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley—who has at times seemed like the metaphorical adult in the room during this GOP presidential primary contest—made a similar claim during an appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday. “We have to remember that what happened to Israel could happen here in America,” Haley said. “We have an open border. People are coming through; they’re not being vetted.””
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“There are not many borders in the world more heavily militarized than the one between Israel and the Gaza Strip. It should stand in stark contrast to how these Republican politicians are describing America’s southern border.
In fact, the Gaza border wall went far beyond anything that would be feasible or affordable for the U.S./Mexico border. As Amir Tibon, a journalist who survived Saturday’s attack in Israel, described to The Atlantic on Monday, the structure included an “underground wall” meant to prevent Hamas from digging tunnels.
And guess what? The wall didn’t work.”
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“Thankfully, the U.S. has not been in a decades-long, slow-simmering conflict with our neighbor to the south—though some Republicans now seem eager to start one. There is no terrorist organization in Mexico motivated by centuries-old religious and cultural hatred that refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the American state or the rights of the people who live in it.
Most importantly, there is little evidence that any terrorists seeking to harm Americans are passing through the southern border.”
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“the best way to focus on whatever actual threats might exist would be to allow more immigrants into the country legally—leaving only those who cannot clear background checks to be sneaking over the fence illegally. That’s the opposite of shutting down the border.”
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“If a politician can’t tell the difference between migrants coming to the U.S. for jobs and terrorists hell-bent on murder and mayhem, they shouldn’t be trusted with making federal policy in either arena.”
“The restrictions have mostly been about security concerns in North Sinai where the Egyptian authorities have long been involved in a deadly conflict with jihadists linked to Al Qaeda.
But Egypt’s current reluctance to open the crossing without clear conditions and guarantees may be more about trying to avoid a mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza.
The UN’s humanitarian chief, Martin Griffiths, says the Egyptian authorities fear a great influx of Gazans – for whom they would then be responsible, for an indefinite period.
In addition, Egypt does not want to play any role in what could amount to a permanent resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza.”
“Biden’s administration sold off more than 40 percent of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last year to help limit rising fuel prices after Russia invaded Ukraine, leaving the stockpile at its lowest levels since the early 1980s. That’s fueling Republican accusations that Biden has left the U.S. vulnerable to a disruption of global oil supplies — at a time when Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel are stoking fears of a wider regional war disrupting fuel shipments from the Middle East.”
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the reserve still holds 351 million barrels — equivalent to nearly 56 days of total U.S. oil imports last year — though well below the peak of 727 million barrels it held during the Obama administration. That’s on top of 424 million barrels that private companies were storing in the U.S. as of early October.
The administration has defended its handling of the reserve, saying it still holds ample crude to protect the nation’s strategic needs and offer a cushion against price shocks. “I am not worried about the reserve levels at all,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told a House committee in September, adding: “It is the largest strategic reserve in the world.”
And the U.S. is no longer the energy beggar it was in 1973, when the Yom Kippur War prompted an Arab oil embargo against the United States that sent prices spiraling and left Americans waiting in hours-long lines at gas pumps. Back then, U.S. oil production was dropping while its thirst for the fuel was rising — prompting Congress to pass a law in 1975 to create the reserve.”
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” the United States is the world’s biggest oil producer, which exports more crude and petroleum products than it imports. Its output is at record highs and is climbing, even as demand has flattened.
Over the years, some conservatives have even called for abolishing the reserve, complaining — as the Heritage Foundation did eight years ago — that “Presidents have used the SPR as a political tool.”
Still, the reserves’ diminished volumes limit Biden’s options to respond to a future shock to the oil markets, including those that could result from a widening of the war in the Middle East.”
“Before the declaration of Israel as a state in May 1948, the apron of land surrounding Gaza contained dozens of Palestinian Arab towns and villages, the largest of which was al-Majdal—what is now the entirely Jewish city of Ashkelon.
When, on Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to divide Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state, this whole area—including Gaza, its surrounding areas, and parts of the Negev Desert—was designated to be included within the Arab state. But the U.N. failed to provide money, troops, or administrators to implement its decision. Abandoning Palestine to chaos, the British, who had ruled the territory for more than 20 years, pulled their forces out of city after city, region after region. As they did so, Jews and Arabs plunged into an atrocity-filled civil war over which areas would fall under Jewish or Arab rule.
The result of this civil war, of battles between Israel and the expeditionary forces of Arab states that invaded Palestine in May 1948, and of increasingly systematic Israeli campaigns to expel Arab civilians from territories that were to have been the Arab state, was the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians; 200,000 of them found shelter in a narrow wedge of coastal Palestine occupied by Egyptian troops—what became known as the Gaza Strip. Israel’s refusal to allow those who fled or were expelled to return to their homes, and its subsequent destruction of their villages, towns, and neighborhoods, turned these displaced persons into refugees.”
“Inflation has fallen from the shocking highs that were reached last year, but the Federal Reserve’s efforts have not successfully returned the beast to its cage.
If rising prices are to be fully tamed, it increasingly looks like Congress will have to get the deficit under control first.
Prices are up 3.7 percent over the past year, according to new inflation data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday morning. But so-called “core inflation,” which filters out the more volatile categories like food and fuel prices, rang in at 4.1 percent in the newest report. Some smaller categories have seen considerably faster price hikes over the past 12 months—shelter prices, which include rents and hotel costs, are up 7.2 percent.
In an attempt to control inflation, the Federal Reserve had raised interest rates at 11 consecutive meetings starting in March of last year. Since July, the central bank has left interest rates unchanged—the Fed’s current base rate is 5.5 percent, up from 3.25 percent a year ago. Higher interest rates seem to have brought inflation down, but prices are still rising nearly twice as fast as the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent annually.
It’s possible that we’ve reached the limit of what the Federal Reserve can accomplish in terms of taming inflation through monetary policy. The federal government’s $33 trillion national debt and rising budget deficits are creating inflationary pressure in ways that remain underappreciated.
The big problem is that, while higher interest rates are helping curb inflation, they are worsening the federal government’s deficit. Writing at CNBC, Kelly Evans gets at the heart of this conundrum: “If we don’t quickly close the gap between spending and revenues, the debt load will keep growing, and interest costs will keep on rising, and the deficit will thus stay elevated, which grows the debt load even more.””
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“Changes to monetary policy have brought inflation down from last year’s near-record highs, but the monetary theory upon which that policy is built assumes that fiscal policy will finish the job by reducing deficits. Congress, so far, doesn’t seem interested in cooperating—so expect prices to keep rising at an annoyingly fast rate.”
“One of the militants interviewed in the videos said that Hamas leaders promised him a cash bounty for every hostage he brought back to Gaza. “Whoever kidnaps a hostage and brings them to Gaza gets a stipend … an apartment and $10,000,” said the man, who added that Hamas promised to pay him in U.S. currency.”
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“Toward the end of the compilation the men are asked if killing women and children is allowed in Islam. They all answered no. The interrogators also asked if their actions were akin to those of the Islamic State terrorist group. All of the men answered yes.
Douglas said the video was also meant to send a message to Hamas members in Gaza. “They’re doing this to put it on video. I think the whole ISIS and Hamas, equating those two organizations, is a good takeaway for Israel,” Douglas said, adding that other Hamas members are likely included in the target audience.”
“Johnson is a movement conservative close to the Christian right. He’s also a stalwart Trump ally who actively worked to help the former president try to overturn Joe Biden’s victories in key 2020 swing states — making Trump, who helped torch the chances of Johnson’s leading rival Tom Emmer on Tuesday, another winner.”
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“After Johnson won the GOP conference’s speaker nomination Tuesday night, one reporter asked him about having led Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election results. The assembled GOP leadership team booed, with one member yelling “shut up!” Johnson demurred: “Next question.”
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“January 2025 could be different. The House that meets to certify the presidential election results that month will be newly elected, but Johnson could well still be speaker. If so — and if there’s a similar dispute where Trump is denying a Biden victory — it’s far from clear what Johnson will do.
Generally, from November 2020 through January 2021, the Republican Party behaved terribly irresponsibly, but just enough Republicans in positions of power did the right thing — certifying the results at some political cost. Since then, critics of Trump’s attempt to seize power have largely been purged from the party, and election denial has been increasingly normalized. For instance, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), an idiosyncratic conservative, said he initially wouldn’t support a speaker candidate who denied the election results — but he backed Johnson anyway.
Would a GOP-controlled House certify a Democratic victory in the 2024 presidential election? With Johnson in charge, that may have grown less likely — and that has ominous implications for the state of American democracy.”