DL Open Thread: Thursday, December 26, 2024
Let’s get this out of the way first: Wednesday NFL football is bad NFL football. At least Beyonce was there to save halftime.
Israel: Fuck The Civilians. And you believed them when they said that they weren’t targeting civilians:
At exactly 1 p.m. on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s military leadership issued an order that unleashed one of the most intense bombing campaigns in contemporary warfare.
Effective immediately, the order granted mid-ranking Israeli officers the authority to strike thousands of militants and military sites that had never been a priority in previous wars in Gaza. Officers could now pursue not only the senior Hamas commanders, arms depots and rocket launchers that were the focus of earlier campaigns, but also the lowest-ranking fighters.
In each strike, the order said, officers had the authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians.
The order, which has not previously been reported, had no precedent in Israeli military history. Mid-ranking officers had never been given so much leeway to attack so many targets, many of which had lower military significance, at such a high potential civilian cost.
It meant, for example, that the military could target rank-and-file militants as they were at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors, instead of only when they were alone outside.
Were it up to AIPAC, that strategy would have been employed on college campuses. Wonder if Ol’ Feckless Joe knew. Or cared.
Rethugs Tee Up New January 6–On Themselves?:
Lingering ill will among House Republicans after another messy spending fight could complicate Speaker Mike Johnson’s bid to retain the House gavel — and potentially the Jan. 6 formalizing of Donald Trump’s election victory.
As president of the Senate, Vice President Kamala Harris would be the presiding officer during a joint session of Congress that day to complete the American presidential election process. It is a constitutional duty that essentially requires her to oversee the certification of her 2024 rival’s decisive victory.
To get to a swift and professional counting session, the House on Jan. 3 — or perhaps in the following two days — would need to elect a speaker, who would then administer the oath of office to the newly elected and reelected members.
If a protracted speaker fight lasts beyond 1 p.m. on Jan. 6, congressional scholars agree there are procedural options that could help ensure the counting and certifying of Electoral College votes that day. But that could prove difficult following yet another span of GOP infighting over government funding and the debt ceiling that saw Speaker Mike Johnson battling rebellious conservatives.
Monster Of 2024: Joe Biden. Discuss:
By staying long past his expiration date, Biden did more than ease Trump’s path to victory; he was the apotheosis of an entire gerontocracy that brought us to this point. (He came back to win the nomination in 2020 only after the party closed ranks to stop the even-older Bernie Sanders.) As Semafor‘s Dave Weigel recently observed, you could tell the recent history of the party through the people who didn’t quit when they should have. Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death threatened to blow up the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, after she declined to retire when Democrats could still replace her, likely cemented several decades of right-wing dominance on the Supreme Court.
When it took the form of a halting gait or an on-camera freeze-up, that weakness could be as humanizing as it was politically damaging. There has always been an emotional heaviness about the man. When that weight took the form of foreign policy, it produced a historic moral abdication. Biden’s legacy will be more than a year of virtually unchecked Israeli carnage as the so-called “rules-based international order” he championed dissolved into nothing. There was seemingly no line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not cross. Not the clear “red line” on Rafah. Not Netanyahu’s invocation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a defense of his flattening of Gaza. Not thousands of dead kids. Not a clearly stated desire to bulldoze the United States government’s official preference for a two-state solution. Not the attacks on journalists and aid workers or even the death of American citizens. Biden seemed like the only person in the whole situation who didn’t realize that Netanyahu, a right-winger from Philadelphia, was just dog-walking him to get to a president he likes better.
WEHT A.I. DuPont High School? The school that one of the senators I worked for once described as ‘Delaware’s only private public school’. Or was it ‘only public private school’? You get the drift, though.
A.I. du Pont has been characterized as one of the most popular high schools in the Wilmington area in the past. Today, the school has less than 600 students enrolled. Some believe the school’s history should serve as an opportunity to reflect on what enabled that decline.
Turning Seaford Into–An Oasis?:
For more than 80 years, Seaford’s riverfront stood as a testament to the power of industry.
The town near Delaware’s southwest corner was once home to an oil-fired power plant and DuPont’s Nylon Plant, which helped to shape the city’s economy and environment.
The power plant, decommissioned in 2015, once fueled Seaford’s growth but left behind a legacy of contamination. Meanwhile, the DuPont Nylon Plant, established in 1939, catapulted the city onto the global stage as “The Nylon Capital of the World.” Yet, its success came with environmental costs, including pollutants that tarnished the air and groundwater. Together, these industrial titans left an indelible mark — a mix of prosperity and challenge — on a city now determined to reimagine itself.
The initiative, led by the state’s Dept. of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s Brownfields Program, signals the city’s determination to turn its industrial legacy into an environmental and economic success story.
“The focus of brownfield redevelopment is to take formerly contaminated sites, restore them to environmental health, and put them back into productive use – ideally to revitalize an area that’s been held back because a brownfield thwarted progress and prosperity,” said DNREC Secretary Shawn Garvin. “This investment in Seaford is a perfect example of these efforts. We are pleased to have been able to help partner the state with the city of Seaford and work toward the goal of seeing Seaford become a thriving city once again.”
Don’t know if $3 mill will do all that. Perhaps they could transfer some funds from the Underwater City At Ft. DuPont…
What do you want to talk about?
I know this idea is laughable in Delaware, but why doesn’t DuPont pay to clean up the mess DuPont made? DuPont is still a huge, multinational corporation, it has money.
Wasn’t the whole purpose of spinning off Chemours to divest itself of obligations to clean up the mess it left behind?
Or claw back the cleanup money from the investors who got fat off the profits of pollution. In Delaware this would not look too different from a robust upper-bracket tax increase.
The power plant was owned by the city of Seaford so they would be responsible for that clean up. Dupont sold the nylon plant to Koch brothers. Koch may have some liability as well. I would like to think that DNREC should have records as to who contaminated the site. Although Dupont was the main one responsible for the Nylon plant contamination since they were there for so long when regulatory oversite was limited.
“Monster Of 2024: Joe Biden. Discuss”
Thanks for the invitation to discuss – I will.
If Biden had not run in 2020, we’d be 4 years into Project 2025 by now and , if there was enough democracy remaining, in 2024 we would have been able to choose between a younger MAGA and a younger Democrat. Who the hell knows how that would have turned out.
I think Biden will be Carterized by the media, so low-information voters will forever word-associate Biden with inflation as if he had somehow caused it. And Biden’s inflation will be remembered as much higher than it actually was.
Biden’s legacy will not be tarnished at all by a fringe minority of anti-Israel polemicists.