Israel’s Attacks on Lebanon Aren’t an Opportunity for Anything But More Bloodshed

t’s galling to hear policymakers in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere suggest that the devastating blows Israel has dealt to Hezbollah and Lebanon have created “an opportunity to put Lebanon on a better path.”

First and foremost, it’s horribly insensitive. There are, to date, thousands dead, major sections of Beirut destroyed, and one-quarter of Lebanon’s people internally displaced without adequate shelter, food, and services. And the toll continues to mount. To suggest that good can from this enormous human tragedy is disgraceful. Such a view not only dishonors the victims, but also is akin to putting “ashes in the mouths” of those who’ve lost loved ones and are in mourning.

This mindset is also dangerously naive as it ignores the lessons of history. Recall how, in the face of similar nightmares in 1982 or 2006, we were told that they would also be opportunities. Each involved Israel’s overwhelming use of force. In each instance, Israel said that its “enemies would be vanquished ushering in a new day.” In the end, each only resulted in a more unsettled situation with a more virulent foe rising from the ashes left behind. This was because at the root of each of these conflicts were real grievances born of injustice, that gave rise to movements of resistance. Instead of addressing and resolving these grievances, Israel, with the full-throated support of the U.S., saw force as the only acceptable solution. What they said, in effect, is, “Once we punish them and pound them into submission, all will be well.” This approach hasn’t worked before, and it won’t work now.

Instead of naive fantasies about opportunities, the only logical step forward is to end this conflict now.

At the heart of these deep grievances is the historical injustice done to the Palestinian people. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton described it eloquently when he told an assembled group of Palestinian leaders that he knew their history of having been “dismembered, dispossessed, and dispersed among the nations.” And for the Lebanese, who have embraced Hezbollah, the grievances include both their abiding fury over Israel’s more than two-decade-long hostile occupation of the south of Lebanon that resulted in the displacement of tens of thousands of Lebanese, and the historical inequities experienced by the Shia community as a result of the country’s sectarian system of governance.

None of this is to say that the Palestinian militia groups or the Shia’s Hezbollah movement haven’t made grave errors as they’ve acted to address the grievances of their constituencies. What it does say is that this effort to violently eliminate these groups is shortsighted, at best, and is no solution, as it does not address the source of the grievances that make them appealing in the first place. This is a recipe for disaster. And finally, to ignore the responsibility that Israel bears for its actions that have created much of the pain at the heart of the problem and then refusing to press them to change direction only ensures that the grievances will metastasize into more virulent forms.

This is where we are today. In an effort to totally eliminate resistance to their occupation and annexation of Palestine, Israel is committing genocide in Gaza coupled with a reign of violent terror across the West Bank. Meanwhile with Hezbollah launching missiles into Israel to back the survival of its “resistance ally” in Palestine, Israel has now turned its attention to methodically eliminating the leadership and cadre of Hezbollah.

In both Lebanon and Gaza, Israel has pursued this effort at “total victory” without regard for civilian casualties or damage to the broader society and its infrastructure. Seeing Iran as the main backer of both Hezbollah and Hamas, Israel has gone a step further by attacking Iranian sites and assassinating Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran itself—bringing the Middle East to the brink of a devastating regional war.

While the U.S. worries aloud about the dangers of expanding this war, it has done nothing to restrain Israel’s behavior. We’ve established red lines that Israel continues to cross; expressed concern with civilian casualties which Israel ignores; and repeatedly put forward cease-fire proposals which Israel rejects. All the while we are flooding Israel with sophisticated deadly weaponry and unlimited diplomatic support. The result is Israeli impunity, more Arab casualties and greater suffering, and a Middle East ever further from addressing the problems at the root of the conflict. When the fighting ends, if anything, the grievances will be even greater.

If history is prologue, in the coming years we’ll most likely see: the emergence of a Hamas 2.0; a reconstituted movement of Lebanese with an ax to grind with both Israel and those whom they feel betrayed them; a bottomless well of anger and bitterness directed at both Israel and the U.S.; and a region more unstable that it has been.

That said, there is no opportunity in this tragedy. In fact, there’s only one thing about which we can be certain. And that is that Israel’s war in Lebanon and Gaza will not end well.

Instead of naive fantasies about opportunities, the only logical step forward is to end this conflict now. For that to happen, the U.S., as we say, “needs to put on its big boy pants,” tell Israel to “stop,” and back this up by suspending arms shipments. At that point, we will need to address the human cost and work to alleviate some of the suffering. Then, and only then, can we begin to assess the steps that must be taken to deal with the grievances at the root of this tragedy. That’s not an opportunity. It’s a responsibility.

Yes, Trump and the GOP Have a Plan to Steal This Election If Defeated

Sometimes I hate being right.

Donald Trump is campaigning in Blue states right now, including California, Colorado, and New York. It has pundits scratching their heads: is it just all about his ego? Is he crazy? Or crazy like a fox?

I’d argue the latter: that this is part of a strategy to legally seize the White House after he’s lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, much like Republican Rutherford B. Hayes did in the election of 1876.

Eight months before the 2020 election, I wrote a largely-ridiculed article for Alternet.org predicting that Trump would lose the election but would then use multiple phony slates of swing-state electors to try to get the Electoral College count thrown to the House of Representatives where, under the 12th Amendment, the Republican majority would crown him president.

I noted that I’d first heard of the plan that month from a Republican insider I knew from my days living and doing my radio/TV program from Washington, DC.

And, as we all now know, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.

Fortunately, Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi stopped Trump and his merry band of corrupt lawyers and lawmakers (including Mike Johnson, who led the effort in the House) from executing the plan, but not before five civilians and three police officers lay dead because Trump incited a violent attack on the Capitol in his final, desperate attempt to pull it off.

Now we know, I believe, why Donald Trump thinks it’s so important to call out the military around election day this year. He expects millions of Americans to be in the streets because his plan is for the House, Republicans in the states, and the Supreme Court to hand him the presidency regardless of the election’s outcome.

Last Friday, my SiriusXM colleague Michelangelo Signorile mentioned to me (on his program) that a prominent rightwing hate radio host had claimed Trump is campaigning in Blue states right now so he can help out down-ballot House members in those states. According to that host, it’s all about holding the House so when the time comes for the election to be certified Republicans will be able to deny that still-necessary certification and vote Trump in themselves.

Which is giving me a terrible sense of déjà vu. At the risk of again playing the reluctant role of Cassandra, here are some examples of how Trump and the GOP could try to steal the White House this winter, regardless of how the vote turns out. And how Republicans are today telegraphing this very outcome.

Article II (the Executive Branch), Section I, Clause 2 of the Constitution (and the 12th Amendment, which revises it) gives solely to the legislatures of the states the power to control the electors who will decide the presidential election.

It does not say — and there is no federal law that says — that the people of the states shall vote for their choice of president and then that vote shall be reflected in the states’ electoral votes. It’s entirely up to each state’s legislature (without any input from the governor).

“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…” is how it appears in Article II of the Constitution.

As Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote in the 2000 Bush v Gore decision when the US Supreme Court overturned the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a recount that would have given the election to Al Gore:

“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States… [T]he state legislature’s power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary; it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself, which indeed was the manner used by state legislatures in several States for many years after the framing of our Constitution.”

Every state’s legislature generally directs all their electors to vote for the candidate who won the majority in the state (Maine and Nebraska are the exception, allowing for split decisions), a system we call “winner takes all,” but, as Rehnquist noted, a state’s legislature (its combined house or assembly and senate) can, by simple majority vote, direct its electors to vote for any candidate they want, even over the objection of their governor.

In the 2000 election, for example, when the Florida Supreme Court ordered a complete recount of the vote for president in that state, Jeb Bush and his Republicans knew that a full, statewide recount would give Al Gore the presidency. (It would have discovered the additional 45,599 votes for Al Gore that Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris arbitrarily and illegally chose not to count, as The New York Times noted a year later.)

In other words, had the U.S. Supreme Court not intervened to stop the Florida recount, the Republicans in the Florida legislature were fully prepared to hand the entire Florida electoral college vote — and, thus, the White House — to George W. Bush, even if a recount showed that Al Gore actually won the state. It was, after all, their constitutional right, as Rehnquist later noted in Bush v Gore.

As David Barstow and Somini Sengupta wrote for the New York Times on November 28, 2000, just before the Supreme Court intervened:

“The president of Florida’s Senate said today that Gov. Jeb Bush had indicated his willingness to sign special legislation intended to award Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes to his brother Gov. George W. Bush of Texas even as the election results were being contested.”

“But,” some say, “Kamala Harris is the Vice President, so she won’t refuse to accept the Electoral College votes like Trump wanted Pence to do!”

That’s true, but irrelevant.

While the updated Electoral Count Act explicitly redefines the Vice President’s role as purely ceremonial, it does not — and could not without a constitutional amendment —alter the power of individual Republican-controlled swing states to send Trump electors (claiming that the Harris-winning results in their states are the result of voter fraud) to DC.

Regardless of how transparently dishonest such an effort would be, its primary result would be to throw to the Supreme Court the decision over which electors to count.

Multiple Court observers have noted how light the Court’s docket is this fall because, they speculate, Roberts is fully expecting to play a role in the election similar to what five Republicans on the Court did in 2000 when they stopped the Florida recount, handing the White House to George W. Bush.

The Court could then declare the election flawed because of the alleged voter fraud — Republicans across the country, as well as Trump and Vance, are already preparing the ground for this claim — and, citing the 12th Amendment, throw it to the House of Representatives.

Under that scenario, each state’s House delegation has one single vote for president (the Senate is not involved under the 12th Amendment) and right now there are 26 states controlled by Republicans: the 26-24 vote would put Trump and Vance in the White House for the next four years.

That strategy would require one or more individual states to either refuse to certify their vote, delay certifying their vote, or submit multiple slates of electors.

And we’re already hearing from both local elections officials and state legislators’ rumblings that this is exactly what they intend to do.

Another option to produce the same result would be for a majority vote in the House to refuse to certify a Harris win.

Which brings us back to Trump campaigning in Blue states. As Ed Kilgore wrote for The New Yorker:

“As it happens, there are ten highly competitive House races in California and New York, and a Trump appearance nearby could goose GOP turnout and promote party-organizing efforts in ways that could make a difference in those contests.”

This brings us back to the scenario Michelangelo shared with me. The new, 2025-2026 House is sworn in on January 3rd, whereas the presidential vote is certified on January 6th.

If Democrats win the House in November and are sworn in on January 3rd, it’s unlikely that Speaker Hakeem Jeffries would go along with Trump’s scheme on January 6th, and Republicans wouldn’t have the necessary majority in any case.

But if Republicans can hold the House, there’s a good chance that Speaker Mike Johnson would happily hold the vote to declare Harris’ win as “fraudulent.” After all, he’s the guy who corralled fully 147 votes against certifying the 2020 election in the House; his being the ringleader of that effort is the main reason he’s the speaker right now.

There are multiple razor-tight House races in California, Colorado, and New York. Trump and his co-conspirators may well believe that his holding rallies in those states represents the best bet for helping Republicans win those races, thus insuring Johnson is in charge of the House so they can refuse certification and throw the case to themselves via the Supreme Court.

Seizing control of the Senate would be the icing on the cake for this scheme, as it’s also sworn in on January 3rd and also votes to certify the Electoral College vote, but a deadlock is only necessary in one of the two legislative bodies, and if the 12th Amendment is invoked by six Republicans on the Supreme Court because of that deadlock only the House votes for president.

Keep in mind, JD Vance is still refusing to say that Trump lost the 2020 election, most recently stonewalling the question five times in a podcast interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times last week. Donald Trump is also still asserting that he won, and is already signaling that he intends to declare victory in November regardless of the “official” outcome.

And, unlike in 2020, there are no longer Mitt Romneys, Adam Kinzingers, or Liz Cheneys in Congress who could gum up the works. The GOP is today unified in its assertion that voter fraud handed Joe Biden the 2020 presidency: this is the perfect setup for the scenarios I’m describing, and Republicans know it. They created it, in fact.

The most likely scenario, though, would involve local election officials gumming up the works by slow-walking counts, challenging counts, or outright refusing to certify counts at the state level long enough that several individual state votes can’t be certified by January 6th, very much like in the election of 1876.

That would provide an easy excuse for the six Republicans on the Supreme Court to intervene, invoke the 12th Amendment, and throwing the election to the House, guaranteeing Trump’s victory.

As Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti recently wrote for The New York Times:

“The Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system. Their wide-ranging and methodical effort is laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump. …
“Even if the cases fail, Mr. Trump’s allies are building excuses to dispute the results, while trying to empower thousands of local election officials to disrupt the process. Already, election board members in several states have moved to block certification of primary election tallies, including in a major swing county in Nevada last week.”

The updated Electoral Count Act sets a hard date of December 11th for states to certify the vote, but doesn’t detail any consequences or outcomes if states fail to meet that date. Thus, in the case of conflict, confusion, or multiple lawsuits the case would, again, end up before the six Republicans who control the Supreme Court.

As the Times’ Rutenberg and Corasaniti note:

“For his part, Mr. Whatley, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, was noncommittal when reporters recently asked him if his party would seek to block certification in any states this fall.
“‘We’re not going to cross any of those bridges right now,’ he said.”

Gee, ya think? They couldn’t be telegraphing their plans any more clearly if they were skywriting them.

I wrapped up my March 2020 article predicting the GOP’s upcoming fake elector strategy by imploring Democrats and the media to ring the alarm before they tried to pull it off:

“Get it into the media and repeat it over and over again: The GOP plans to claim Democratic voter fraud in this election to steal the election for themselves, and they’re already getting people primed for it!”

It’s worth repeating today.

Pass it along.

It’s Not Enough to Blame ‘Climate Change’ for Disasters Like Helene and Milton

For years, linking climate change to the growing destructive power of hurricanes was off limits for mainstream media. Now the connection is undeniable. Massive in size, rapidly intensifying, loaded with unprecedented rainfall, and firing off fatal tornadoes, the link between a warmer world and monster hurricanes like Helene and Milton is impossible to ignore—though too much coverage still does.

But even when news stories tell us that “climate change” is causing these rapidly intensifying storms, they are only telling us half the story. Climate change is not just the fuel for these disasters, it is also the result of the decades of lies from big oil and gas companies that created the climate emergency and are still fueling it today.

Scientists from ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel majors told executives decades ago that unabated use of their products could cause “catastrophic” climate disasters. Instead of sounding the alarm, the oil and gas industry launched the most consequential campaign of lies in human history, on a scale far worse and more damaging than anything before. They funded junk science, polluted our politics, and ran massive advertising campaigns all with the goal of stopping any action that could threaten their bottom line. Our climate crisis is the result of that deception, as are the super-charged hurricanes, deadly heatwaves, and mega wildfires that we now face because Big Oil stole decades from humanity that we can never get back.

The problem with only blaming “climate change” for killer weather events is that it leaves out how exactly we got into this mess—and who is responsible.

If we talk only about “climate change” during these disasters, we forgo a critical teaching moment when millions are open to learning about an issue that typically commands almost no attention at all. As painful as they are, the moments when deadly storms have our attention are precisely the times we need to talk about the elephant in the room: the fossil fuel industry. The longer we avoid the issue, the more violent these storms will become, because the industry has not stopped lying and is doubling down on the products fueling the crisis. Now that climate change is everywhere, fossil fuel companies don’t so much deny the problem as they promote “solutions” they know are bogus, like “natural gas,” which is roughly as bad for the climate as coal, or carbon capture, which is laughable as a solution in the timeframe and scale that is needed, not to mention that to date it has been used primarily to extract even more oil.

The problem with only blaming “climate change” for killer weather events is that it leaves out how exactly we got into this mess—and who is responsible. Climate change doesn’t have lobbyists, doesn’t have executives making decisions, cannot be investigated, and cannot be held accountable in the courts. As long as climate change is seen as the cause of all extreme weather destruction, the oil industry can continue pretending to be part of the solution.

It was the oil and gas industry, not climate change, that created widespread climate denial and turned climate action into a partisan political issue. It was the oil and gas industry, not climate change, that successfully blocked ratification of the Kyoto Treaty in 1998, killed Waxman-Markey in 2009, and watered down the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, ensuring the law would not place limits on climate pollution or in any way slow the expansion of the U.S. oil and gas industry.

This focus on a causal agent that can never be held accountable spawns a spectrum of negative consequences. It shields the true cause, the lying oil and gas majors, from any form of accountability. Instead of the oil and gas majors being forced to pay their fair share for disaster recovery, we hear calls for more FEMA funding, which is merely taxpayers footing the bill. And instead of reckoning with the fact that some of those who died would very likely still be alive were these storms not radically amplified by fossil fuel emissions made possible by companies who have lied about just about every aspect of their role in causing the problem, we act as if there can be no accountability for these deaths.

The question is not, “Did climate change make these two hurricanes more destructive?” We already know that along with climate change comes more powerful and deadly storms. The question is, who and what caused climate change? The answer to that question is right before us.

Meme Rehashes Old, False Claim That J6 Committee Destroyed Evidence

The House committee that investigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, issued a more than 800-page report presenting and analyzing the evidence about what happened that day. It also released videos, transcribed interviews, depositions and other documents. But some high-profile conservatives are now making the false claim that the committee destroyed "all the evidence."

The post Meme Rehashes Old, False Claim That J6 Committee Destroyed Evidence appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Misinformation Floods Hurricane Season

The 2024 hurricane season has brought with it a deluge of conspiracy theories and false or misleading claims about storms that have devastated some parts of the country and killed hundreds of people.

The post Misinformation Floods Hurricane Season appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Trump’s False Claims of ‘No Help’ or Helicopters Sent for Helene Victims

In his continued attack on the federal response to Hurricane Helene, former President Donald Trump falsely said that no helicopters and no help were sent to the affected areas for days, blaming Vice President Kamala Harris. There's plenty of evidence that helicopters have been used and that federal, state and local disaster recovery teams have responded to help victims of the storm.

The post Trump’s False Claims of ‘No Help’ or Helicopters Sent for Helene Victims appeared first on FactCheck.org.

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