Israel’s assault on Gaza has entered the there’s-no-excuse-for-this stage. One indication of how bad it is: Desperate Gazans broke into UN aid centers and looted their already insufficient food supplies. Calls for a cease-fire continue to come from everywhere but the Biden administration.
And it’s not just in Gaza. As Lucian Truscott IV notes, armed conflicts are ongoing in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen and Myanmar, and Niger recently underwent a coup. Americans, on the other hand, shoot each other without an open civil war.
The best backgrounder on Christofascist creep Mike Johnson comes from the Rude Pundit, who traces the new Speaker’s culture-war moralizing back to its roots 20 years ago, when he led a campaign to keep a Louisiana parish dry.
Looming behind all this world unrest is the existential threat we mostly ignore. Dr. James Hansen, the climate scientist who first sounded the klaxon about global warming, warns that the climate is heating faster than we thought. Which reminds me, we have a hard freeze forecast for Tuesday night into Wednesday, so bring those tender plants inside.
Also in climate news, research has found that warming waters are behind the collapse of the snow crab population in the Gulf of Alaska, where officials have canceled a second consecutive snow crab harvest.
Digby’s column on Republican denialism about their cult leader’s attempted coup contained this interesting tidbit about GOP enthusiasm, or lack thereof:
In 2016, 57% of Republicans and independents who lean Republican said they followed the news all or most of the time. In the 2022 survey, 37% said the same, a decrease of 20 points. By comparison, the share saying this among Democrats and Democratic leaners dropped by only 7 points, from 49% to 42%.
Another sign of waning Republican enthusiasm: Trump rallies are fewer and further between, and people are getting bored with his rants and leaving early.
A second auto company appears ready to settle with the UAW. There’s so much going on in the world nobody has had time to explain why this is bad news for Biden.
The floor’s yours.