“Why is North Korea suddenly testing all these missiles?
Experts are split. One potential reason is that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wants to slowly ratchet up pressure on Biden and get his attention.
“North Korea usually begins its new military threats-cum-psychological warfare cycle through graduated escalation,” Sung-Yoon Lee, an expert on Pyongyang’s politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, told me.”
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“the North Korean leader wants the tests to bother Biden so much that the US engages in some kind of diplomacy with North Korea to stop the launches. Once at the negotiating table, Pyongyang would seek an end to US sanctions on the country before agreeing to dismantle (at least some parts of) its nuclear program, while Washington would push for the opposite — North Korea first verifiably dismantling at least some parts of its nuclear program before the US lifts any sanctions.
That broad standoff has plagued US-North Korean relations for decades, but it’s particularly irksome to Kim right now. The sanctions hurt his country’s economy, which the dictator has promised to improve, and are especially biting during the Covid-19 pandemic. His new round of testing, then, is a message to the White House: End the sanctions, or America’s relations with North Korea are about to get a lot more tense.”
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“The other potential explanation experts gave me for the recent tests has less to do with the US and more to do with simply improving North Korea’s military capabilities.
“These launches are not a cry for attention, nor are they a cry for help with North Korea’s broken economy. Such launches are a sign of North Korea’s clear determination to continue advancing its ballistic-missile programs as part of making good on the ambitious plans for North Korea’s weapons programs,” said Markus Garlauskas, the US national intelligence officer for North Korea from 2014 to 2020.
Getting stronger militarily, after all, was a promise Kim made to top North Korean officials and his people during a January meeting. “If these [launches] go unchecked by the international community, this is likely to lead to launches of bigger and more capable systems, including those capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads,” added Garlauskas, who is now at the Atlantic Council think tank in DC.
Whatever the reason, though, it’s important to note that Kim could have chosen to be even more aggressive than he has been.”
“In 2019, Mitt Romney made history: he became the first Senate Republican to endorse a form of child allowance, where all low- and middle-income parents would get a cash benefit to help raise their kids, regardless of whether or not they’re able to work. At the time, the plan was modest, amounting to only $1,500 a year for kids under 6 and $1,000 for kids 6-17.
But on Thursday, Romney went even further and proposed the Family Security Act, one of the most generous child-benefit packages ever, regardless of political party. The plan completely overhauls the current child tax credit (CTC) and turns it from a once-a-year bonus to massive income support, paid out monthly by the Social Security Administration.”
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“Romney’s plan would replace the CTC, currently worth up to $2,000 per child and restricted to parents with substantial income (it doesn’t fully kick in until you reach an income of over $11,000), with a flat monthly allowance paid out to all parents:
Parents of kids ages 0 to 5 would get $350 per month, or $4,200 a year
Parents of kids ages 6 to 17 would get $250 per month, or $3,000 a year
Parents with multiple kids could get a maximum of $1,250 per month or $15,000 a year; that translates to five kids between the ages of 6 and 17. Very large families would be somewhat penalized, but many families with three or four kids will get the full benefit.”
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“Romney’s proposal would phase out for wealthy parents — the benefits begin phasing out for single filers with $200,000 and joint filers with $400,000 in annual income.”
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“If you’re a liberal reading this and wondering if there’s a catch, there is — but it’s not necessarily a huge one. Romney doesn’t want his plan to add to the deficit, and he wants to simplify the set of child-related benefits the government currently offers. So his plan would pay for the child allowance by eliminating a number of other programs, including some that mostly benefit the poor ”
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“The upside of Romney’s plan being fully paid for, however, is that it would allow Congress to make the measure permanent under budget reconciliation rules, whereas the Biden proposal that relies on deficit funding is a temporary one-year measure.”
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“It’s hard to see Romney’s proposal gaining enough Republican support to get the plan above 60 votes, though I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong on that front. But it could easily, with Romney, Democrats, and maybe a few other choice Republicans on board, make it into a reconciliation package.”
“Over the past three decades, 30 states — red and blue alike — have passed laws requiring electric utilities to use more clean energy. Since 2015, 10 states have adopted 100 percent clean electricity standards, requiring the transition to fully 100 percent carbon-free power. And six more have committed to that goal. State laws are popping up so fast, it’s hard to keep track. Across the country, 170 cities have policies to get to 100 percent clean. As a result, more than one in three Americans already live in a place that’s committed to reaching 100 percent clean power.
We know this approach is technologically possible. Wind, solar, batteries, transmission lines, and other technologies can replace dirty fossil fuels. Google, one of the largest electricity consumers in the country, is aiming for 100 percent clean power, real-time at all its facilities by 2030.
With all this state and local leadership, it’s not surprising that this approach is popular with the public. In independent polls from both Data for Progress and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, run over the past few months, more than two-thirds of voters support the federal government moving the country to 100 percent clean power by 2035.
And once we implement this policy nationally, it should stay popular because clean energy saves customers money.”
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“Many utilities continue to operate old, uneconomic coal plants. In just three years, these plants cost customers an additional $3.5 billion to keep open — and that’s before we add in all the extra hospital bills for folks breathing in their pollution day after day. Or the cost of destabilizing our climate. Replacing these dirty plants with clean power is not only good for our health; it’s also good for our wallets.”
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“In our research for our report, we spent months talking with congressional offices, parliamentary experts, think tanks, climate advocates, and others, and have concluded that it is possible to pass a CES through the budget reconciliation process. In our report, we identify several ways a CES can fit with the Byrd Rule.”
“Ocasio-Cortez’s alleged “extremism” is her advocacy of a democratic socialist politics common among peer democracies; her signature policy proposal is a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent. Greene is a conspiracy theorist who has called for executing Barack Obama, claimed the Parkland school shooting was staged, and suggested a space laser controlled by wealthy Jews caused the 2018 California wildfires.
One advocates for left-wing policy ideas in good faith; the other spreads absurd, offensive, and even dangerous lies.
The most interesting part about the AOC-MTG comparisons aren’t the similarities between the two but rather the differences. That this is how “extreme” is defined with regard to each congressional delegation reveals that while one party has moved somewhat to the left in recent years, the other has flown completely off the deep end, breaking American politics in the process.
It also shows how poorly equipped some members of the media are to convey this essential fact.”
“The Biden administration is struggling to accommodate an increasing number of unaccompanied children arriving on the border. About 70 percent of them are teenagers, but hundreds are under the age of 12.
As of March 24, more than 5,100 such children, a record number, were in US Customs and Border Protection custody, staying in unsuitable, jail-like facilities, often for longer than the 72-hour legal limit.
Another 11,900 children were in custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. Those children are staying either in permanent shelters — state-licensed facilities that are better equipped to administer care but have had to slash capacity amid the pandemic — or in temporary influx facilities that have comparatively little oversight. So far, the Biden administration has opened or is in the processing of opening six of these temporary facilities in Texas and California and is trying to expand space in others.”
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“The increase in arrivals among unaccompanied children is happening even though, for the most part, the border remains closed. Last March, at the outset of the pandemic, Trump invoked Title 42, a section of the Public Health Safety Act that allows the US government to temporarily block noncitizens from entering the US “when doing so is required in the interest of public health.” Since then, more than 514,000 migrants have been expelled, including more than 13,000 children.
Biden has chosen to keep the policy in place. He has carved out some exceptions: In addition to unaccompanied children, the administration has started processing 28,000 people who were sent back to Mexico to await their immigration court hearings in the US under a Trump-era program known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or the “Remain in Mexico” program.
The administration has also been admitting many families to the US because a change in Mexican law has limited the country’s capacity to detain those with young children. A CBP official told reporters on Friday that agents are encountering about 2,300 parents and children daily and 1,900 are being allowed to stay in the US.”
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“They are primarily coming from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which for years have been suffering from gang-related violence, government corruption, frequent extortion, and some of the highest rates of poverty and violent crime in the world.
The pandemic-related economic downturn and a pair of hurricanes late last year that devastated Honduras and Guatemala in particular have only exacerbated those more longstanding problems. Many people are hoping to apply for asylum or other humanitarian protections, and the US is obligated by federal law and international human rights agreements to give them that chance.
The majority of unaccompanied children arriving on the border also have family in the US, so they’re aiming to reunite with their relatives.”
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“Single adults still account for the vast majority of people who are arriving (about 71 percent), but the number of unaccompanied children arriving on the border is unprecedented. There are more than 17,000 currently in government custody and an average of 466 arriving daily as of March 24. By comparison, CBP apprehended 11,475 unaccompanied children in May 2019, the last time that migration levels spiked.”
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“Though Biden administration officials have warned that the US could encounter more migrants on the southern border than they have in 20 years, experts have cautioned against calling the current flow of migrants a “surge” for several reasons.
Migration levels tend to fluctuate based on the season. The number of migrants arriving on the border has historically increased in the warmer months between about February and June when the journey is less treacherous than it would be in the hot summer sun.
What we’re observing on the border is in part a “predictable seasonal shift,” as Tom K. Wong, an associate professor at the University of California San Diego, and his co-authors write in the Washington Post.
“When the numbers drop again in June and July, policymakers may be tempted to claim that their deterrence policies succeeded. But that will just be the usual seasonal drop,” they write.
There was also an almost 50 percent drop in migration at the border following the implementation of the pandemic-era border restrictions last March, rather than a typical seasonal increase. It’s likely that those restrictions “delayed prospective migrants rather than deterred them — and they’re arriving now,” they add.”
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“There’s also reason to believe the number of migrants encountered by Border Patrol overall is inflated. Title 42 created perverse incentives for single adults to attempt to cross the border multiple times. Before the pandemic, they might have been dissuaded from trying again for fear of facing criminal prosecution for illegal entry and disqualifying themselves from legal migration pathways, such as asylum. But under the pandemic-era process, they are merely fingerprinted, processed, and dropped off in Mexico without consequence.”
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“On top of the factors pushing people out of their home countries, four years of Trump’s policies have created pent-up demand. Migrants correctly perceive that Biden is seeking to take a more humane approach than his predecessor and see an opportunity to seek refuge in the US where they did not before.”
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“Smugglers have sought to capitalize on that desperation by spreading misinformation about the Biden administration’s plans to process asylum seekers.”
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“Title 42 has also created an incentive for families to choose to separate. Parents have sent their children to the border alone, knowing that they would be accepted by US authorities, while they await a chance to cross either in Mexico or their home countries. That has been the case since last fall, when a court forced the Trump administration to begin accepting unaccompanied children.”
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“Republicans have been eager to call this a “Biden border crisis.” Migration levels were already rising in the months before he took office, but because Trump was expelling nearly all migrants arriving on the border, they were largely invisible”
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“Trump’s policies, which promised to deter migrants from attempting to cross the southern border, were ultimately unsuccessful, instead creating pent-up demand that is only beginning to become evident now. And the Trump administration did nothing to improve conditions in the Northern Triangle that were driving people to flee, even revoking some $4 billion in aid.”
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“Republicans have criticized Biden for not being strong enough in telling migrants they’re not welcome. But his administration has been clear that the border is “not open” and that they should not come in an “irregular fashion.” As political pressure has ramped up, he has been even more strict, telling migrants in a recent interview with ABC “don’t come,” “don’t leave your town or city or community,” and that they would soon be able to “apply for asylum in place.”
The White House has been amplifying that messaging with more than 17,000 radio ads in Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras since January 21, playing in Spanish, Portuguese, and six Indigenous languages and reaching an estimated 15 million people. There have also been ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter”
“The researchers found that shifting to clean energy is feasible and easily pays for itself by eliminating the immediate and long-term harms from burning fossil fuels.
But they also placed a great deal of emphasis on making sure the costs and benefits of the shift to clean energy are spread equitably. This is essential, they conclude, to getting buy-in from a wide coalition for the major changes needed to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, there could be strong resistance that would undermine progress.
The fear of consequences of the shift to clean energy has thwarted many proposals to address climate change over the years. For example, the cap and trade legislation that passed the House in 2009 and died in the Senate the next year was framed by opponents as a tax that would hamper the economy.”
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“A clean energy transition is not simply a matter of replacing coal power plants with solar and wind energy. It is also about making sure that the communities that depend the most on fossil fuel industries are compensated for losses to their economies and that those who have suffered in the shadows of smokestacks have an opportunity to seize the light.”
“A new poll conducted January 29 to February 1 by Vox and Data for Progress (DFP) found that a majority of 1,124 likely voters and an overwhelming proportion of Democrats “strongly” or “somewhat” supported offering a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants broadly (69 percent and 86 percent, respectively). That support jumps to 72 percent of likely voters and 87 percent of Democrats if you ask them specifically about “DREAMers” who were brought to the US as children. Those findings are consistent with other recent surveys on legalization, including one conducted by Pew in June 2020.
As part of his proposal for comprehensive immigration reform, President Joe Biden has called for creating an eight-year earned path to citizenship for immigrants who were present in the US on or before January 1, 2021, and can pass a background check and pay taxes.
However, it is unlikely to survive in its current form given that it would have to attract 10 Republican votes to proceed in the Senate — where some members have already decried it as “mass amnesty” and criticized its lack of border security provisions — unless Democrats can eliminate the filibuster. While Republicans’ declarations don’t generally reflect American attitudes about legalizing undocumented immigrants, polling has shown that the public does favor certain measures to increase border security, including upping the number of border agents.
Piecemeal legislation to legalize at least some groups of undocumented immigrants might have a better chance at passing.”
“While presidential contests have been consistently competitive since 1988, it’s true that not every race has sat on a knife-edge. For instance, there wasn’t much doubt that Bill Clinton was going to win reelection in 1996, and he won by 8.5 points, the largest margin of victory in the nine elections from 1988 to 2020. But before you doubt that a 10-point margin is a helpful barometer of competitiveness, consider that from 1904 to 1984, 12 elections were settled by double-digit margins compared to just nine by single-digit ones. By comparison, not a single election from 1876 to 1900 or from 1988 to 2020 was a blowout.
It’s no coincidence that the late 19th century is the most comparable period to the present. Few people in the 1880s could mistake a Democrat for a Republican because the parties differed sharply in their views — something that is also true today. Case in point: the last time the average Democrat and Republican in Congress were this far apart ideologically was between the 1870s and early 1900s, according to Voteview, which measures the relative liberalism or conservatism of senators and representatives based on their voting records.”
“Although the U.S. continues to struggle with COVID-19, it has apparently beaten the flu into submission. Since the end of September, the combined total of positive flu cases identified by both public health and clinical labs is fewer than 1,500. There are high schools with more people in them. The phenomenon is not only in the United States — worldwide, rates of influenza are nearly off-the-charts low. When you line multiple years up on the same graph, it can even look like there are no cases of flu this year. That’s how out of step we are with the norm.”
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“This massive shift, experts told me, is likely tied to the precautions we’ve taken to avoid catching COVID-19: mask-wearing, social distancing, obsessive cleaning of surfaces (which doesn’t do much to prevent COVID-19 but probably is preventing flu) and even keeping kids out of the classroom. “The major vector for influenza is children,” said David Topham, co-director of the New York Influenza Center of Excellence in Rochester. If they don’t get to breathe on each other like normal, they also can’t transmit as much flu. And that trick still works, even if flu isn’t the reason we’re keeping them distanced.
Influenza hasn’t been our target with all these interventions, but we’ve certainly given it a good pummelling. And that’s because flu just isn’t as transmissible as COVID-19.”
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“Our strategies are working on COVID-19, as well. Just not as dramatically, because it was more likely to spread to more people to begin with.”
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“Significantly reduced international travel has probably played a role in that, Brammer said. Usually, our flu season follows that of the Southern Hemisphere. But if there wasn’t much of one there, and there wasn’t much travel to transport the virus — the flu has no way to travel.”
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“scientists don’t know for certain what’s happening because the trouble with a really, really minuscule flu season is that it doesn’t leave you enough cases to make solid statistical inferences. We don’t know, for example, much about what happens when you get both the flu and COVID-19, because there haven’t been enough cases of it to do good research. We don’t really know how this bottleneck is affecting which strains of flu are circulating for the same reason. We don’t even know, for certain, that it is the masks and distancing that are squashing the flu because there are so few flu cases left to look at.”