BernieMadoff

ETHICS COMMITTEE AT ENRON
NJ

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

DoorDash has ripped off more than 260,000 NYC delivery workers. We’re making them pay $131.5 million — the largest worker settlement in City history.

This is New York, where hard work pays and greed will cost you.

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.

How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.

Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.

An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians.

For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings.

By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do.

So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951.

How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it.

At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform.

It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.

[Harrison Berger @BergerPosts]

Aaron Rodgers: “This is a Pro-Israel First administration. And when you dig into it, that’s the uniparty”

[Former Fetterman Staffers @FettermanStaff]

Hello, Twitter.

We’re a group of former campaign & Senate staffers for John Fetterman who are disgusted with what he's become.

If you were troubled by yesterday's Wall Street Journal story... trust us, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

It's even worse than you thought.

[Rory Johnston @Rory_Johnston]

Isn't serious until Pakistan gets involved.

[Acyn @Acyn]

El-Sayed: Well, I’ll tell you this. Every time J.D. Vance opens his mouth, the first two things I can think are, man, that guy is boring. And second, Peter Thiel had to spend a ton of money to get that man elected, barely in the state of Ohio. 

But the confusing thing about it is that he thinks that there are some people who are more American than others because they can point to their Papaw who was here earlier. And my question to him is simply, why is it then, how do you look your parents-in-law in the eye and say that somehow they’re less American than you are? Because that’s what he’s implying there.

But bigger picture, this is about trying to change the channel. They’re trying to dissuade us from actually paying attention to the issues that we see laid bare when we talk about our kitchen table budget every single month.

My name and my background aren’t raising your gas prices. That’s what the Trump administration is doing. My name and my background aren’t picking trade wars to increase your costs. That’s what the Trump administration is doing. My name and my background aren’t the reason you can’t see a doctor. That’s because of the Medicaid cuts and the ACA cuts that are about to come down the pike next year because of what the Trump administration is doing.

So if you don’t want to talk about what you’re doing, that’s fine, but I encourage you to leave my name and my background out of it. This is an America that’s big enough for all of us, even if J.D. Vance doesn’t agree, except for the fact that he actually understands and benefits from the nature of immigration and the fact that we are a bigger country because we are inclusive of people who don’t have Papaws who were here 50 years ago.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

🤦‍♂️The FBI gave her the bomb and the gun and the funds to spend at Home Depot. The government literally encouraged and enabled this terrorist plot in order to foil it. One day they’ll have to admit this how the J5/J6 pipe bomb happened as well. H/T @KyleSeraphin

[Dr. Abdul El-Sayed @AbdulElSayed]

Mike Dodgers.

[Dr. Abdul El-Sayed @AbdulElSayed]

Does it ever feel like you're in a cage being watched?

Well, you are. By Flock cameras, thanks to Mike Rogers.

[679 Enthusiast @marionumber4]

. @laurenboebert ’s son is a pedophile

[Mark Ruffalo @MarkRuffalo]

It’s going to a be a long election season for Mike “roger that” Rogers. Abdul is undeniable.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Sky News: “[Trump] says you’re full of shit”

Abdul El-Sayed: “At least I don’t let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office”

[Asad🗽🍎 @AsadFromNYC]

We should just run handsome brown leftist Muslim men who are earnest (but also somewhat cringey) in races all over the country. I think it’s the only way.

[𝐌𝐚𝐥𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐦 @Malcolm_Pal9]

Does Israel have a right to exist?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: "Nobody ever asks whether Palestine has a right to exist. Israel exists. A better question is: Does Israel have a right to our tax dollars?"

[James Li @5149jamesli]

Make this go viral.

[Commie Trucker @commie_trucker]

I think it’s important to remember that the world’s wealthiest man sued Minnesota to be allowed to make fake child porn.

[Harry Sisson @harryjsisson]

His lawsuit to stop WHAT???

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Hunter Biden: “As it relates to Donald Trump, fuck him. Fuck his son. Fuck his daughter. I mean it, all of them, the whole family down to the grandchildren. I hope for the rest of time their names will live ignominy. They have done the most awful things to my family and to me”

[Shagisabadword @shagisabadword]

thanks babe for the new format option to let people know that Israel is committing genocide on Palestinians

[SNEAKO @sneako]

Come and get me