JoanofArgh
JoanofArgh's JournalBreaking: France recalls its ambassador to the U.S. in protest of Biden's submarine deal with Aus.
France announced on Friday that it is immediately recalling its ambassador to the United States, Philippe Étienne, in protest of President Biden’s announcement of an agreement to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia without consulting French officials.
In a statement, the French foreign minister said the decision was made by French President Emmanuel Macron.
“At the request of the President of the Republic, I have decided to immediately recall our two ambassadors to the United States and Australia to Paris for consultations,” Jean-Yves Le Drian, the foreign minister said. “This exceptional decision is justified by the exceptional gravity of the announcements made on 15 September by Australia and the United States.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/us/politics/france-ambassador-recall-us-australia.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20210917&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=cta®i_id=72416910&segment_id=69255&user_id=20a86bb77f8705e060212c90659bdb01
The story around SC lawyer Murdaugh is getting crazier and crazier
Alex Murdaugh, the prominent South Carolina lawyer whose wife and son were shot and killed in June, asked a former client to kill him this month so his other son could collect a $10 million insurance payment but survived being shot in the head, the police said on Tuesday night.
The former client, Curtis Edward Smith, 61, of Walterboro, S.C., was arrested and charged with assisted suicide, aggravated assault and battery, and insurance fraud in connection with the shooting on Sept. 4, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division said.
The state police agency said that Mr. Murdaugh, 53, had admitted to the scheme on Monday and that Mr. Smith had admitted to being at the scene and getting rid of the gun. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyer did not respond to inquiries about the arrest, and it was not clear if Mr. Smith, who was booked in the Colleton County jail, had a lawyer.
The shooting of Mr. Murdaugh came nearly three months after he returned to his family’s large, rural property in Islandton, S.C., and discovered that his wife, Maggie, and son Paul, a 22-year-old college student, had been shot to death. At the time of his death, Paul Murdaugh was facing charges that he had drunkenly crashed a boat in 2019, killing Mallory Beach, a passenger, and wounding others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/us/alex-murdaugh-shooting-arrest.html
I won't be surprised to find out that Murdaugh hired somebody to kill his wife and son.
Boris Johnson is using Biden's campaign slogan,lol
https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1438099412446765063?s=20Cabinet reshuffle is now official. No10 source: “The PM will today conduct a reshuffle to put in place a strong and united team to Build Back Better from the pandemic… The PM will be appointing ministers this afternoon with a focus on uniting and levelling up the whole country”
New Quinnipiac poll. Biden's approval rating is at 42%
Americans' views have dimmed on the way President Joe Biden is handling his job as president, with 42 percent approving and 50 percent disapproving, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University national poll of adults released today. This is the first time Biden's job approval has dropped into negative territory since taking office. In early August, 46 percent of Americans approved and 43 percent disapproved of the way Biden was handling his job.
In today's poll, Democrats approve 88 - 7 percent, while Republicans disapprove 91 - 7 percent and independents disapprove 52 - 34 percent.
Biden's numbers on his handling of the response to the coronavirus are mixed, with 48 percent approving and 49 percent disapproving. This compares to August, when he received a 53 - 40 percent approval rating on his handling of the coronavirus.
Americans give him a negative score on his handling of foreign policy, 34 - 59 percent. In August, 42 percent approved and 44 percent disapproved of his handling of foreign policy. They also give Biden a negative score on his handling of his job as Commander in Chief of the U.S. military, with 40 percent approving and 55 percent disapproving.
On his handling of the economy, Biden receives a negative 42 - 52 percent rating. In August, it was a slightly negative 43 - 48 percent rating.
On his handling of climate change, Americans are divided, as 42 percent approve and 45 percent disapprove. This compares to a positive 48 - 35 percent approval rating in August.
More than half of Americans, 54 - 41 percent, say they approve of President Biden's decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Nearly 7 in 10 Americans, 69 - 24 percent, say it was the right thing to do to end the war in Afghanistan.
However, Americans give Biden a negative 31 - 65 percent score for the way he handled withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
More than 6 in 10 Americans, 62 - 28 percent, say they think American troops will have to return to Afghanistan to fight terrorism. Republicans say 83 - 10 percent and independents say 65 - 25 percent that they think American troops will have to return to Afghanistan to fight terrorism, while Democrats say 52 - 38 percent they think American troops will not have to return to Afghanistan to fight terrorism.
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3819
When all you see on TV are pundits with links to the defense industry screaming about the pull out , this isn't surprising. Even MSNBC has had these people on. And then there's Andrea Mitchell.
From former OSHA Deputy Asst Secretary : USPS is not exempt
https://twitter.com/jbarab/status/1436105973291225089?s=20Jordan Barab (You're on mute!)
@jbarab
OSHA Deputy Asst Secretary 2009-2017. Former Congressional, AFSCME and Chemical Safety Board staff.
USPS is not exempt. USPS workers are considered to be private sector employees for legal purposes. This means they will be covered under the #OSHA vaccine/testing mandate, rather than the federal employee mandate.
Andrew Yang to launch a third party
Former presidential and New York mayoral candidate Andrew Yang is set to launch a third party next month, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Yang is expected to start the party in conjunction with the Oct. 5 release of his new book, "Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy. It’s not clear what the name of Yang’s third party will be or how he plans to deploy it in 2022 or 2024. Yang and his team did not respond to requests for comment.
But the book’s publisher, Crown, did give some clues about the type of platform Yang may pursue. It writes that the book is an indictment of America’s “era of institutional failure” and will introduce “us to the various ‘priests of the decline’ of America, including politicians whose incentives have become divorced from the people they supposedly serve.”
The book is blurbed by businessperson Mark Cuban (“a vitally important book”) and The New York Times’ Kara Swisher (“Can there be another political party in the U.S.?...In Forward, Yang does not just give us a laundry list of intractable problems, but shows how we can find solutions if we think in new ways and summon the courage to do so.”).
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/09/andrew-yang-third-party-511033
In our system, all he's doing with a 3rd party is giving Republicans a better chance to gain office.
Meet Matt Castelli, A Dem who' s running against Elise Stefanik
https://twitter.com/castellimatt/status/1435577855577034759?s=21As a CIA and White House counterterrorism official, I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
@EliseStefanik took that same oath. But she violated it on Jan. 6th.
Now I'm running for Congress to defeat her and uphold mine.
New Hampshire Democrat wins GOP-held state House seat
A former town councilor in Bedford narrowly won a seat in the New Hampshire state House on Tuesday, the first Democrat to win a previously Republican-held legislative district in any state since President Biden took office.
Election results showed Catherine Rombeau (D) narrowly edged out former state Rep. Linda Rea Camarota (R) in the race to replace the late state Rep. David Danielson (R), who died in May. Rombeau won election by just a 37-vote margin, out of about 4,600 votes cast.
Rombeau will be one of six legislators representing her Hillsborough County district, only two of whom are Democrats.
Now-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) easily carried the district in his 2012 presidential contest, by a wide 23-point margin. Former President Trump beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the Bedford-area seat by 7 points in the 2016 presidential election, but Biden won the seat in 2016 by just over 3 percentage points.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/571225-new-hampshire-democrat-wins-gop-held-state-house-seat
7.0 earthquake about 7 miles outside Acapulco tonight
A powerful earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 has struck Acapulco in southern Mexico, seismologists and residents say. Details are still limited but shaking was felt as far away as Mexico City.
The earthquake, which struck at 8:47 p.m. local time on Tuesday, was centered just north of Acapulco, a city and major seaport on Mexico’s Pacific coast. The area is about 240 kilometers (150 miles) south of Mexico City.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) put the earthquake’s preliminary magnitude at 7.0, down from an earlier estimate of 7.4. It struck about 12 kilometers below the surface, making it a very shallow earthquake.
Details about damage or casualties were not immediately available, but shaking was felt as far away as Mexico City, where power outages and gas leaks were reported.
https://bnonews.com/index.php/2021/09/powerful-earthquake-hits-southern-mexico/
How the Navy failed to stop a murderous special operations leader. (Eddie Gallagher)
In recent years we’ve had a raft load of fanboy books by and about Navy SEALs and other special operators at war. But in Alpha, David Philipps, a reporter for The New York Times, has produced a serious study of a SEAL unit in crisis as it fought ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, in 2017. By Philipps’s credible account, the unit’s leader, Eddie Gallagher, was a one-man wrecking crew for ethical behavior. He murdered a teenage captive by plunging a knife into the helpless prisoner’s neck. He entertained himself by repeatedly firing his sniper rifle at people who clearly were civilians, such as old men, schoolgirls, and people doing their laundry in the Tigris River. He frequently disobeyed orders from his superiors and hid information about his unit’s whereabouts on the battlefield. He had a drug abuse problem.
Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs by David Philipps Crown, 480 pp.
The story gets worse. Gallagher’s immediate superior, a Navy SEAL lieutenant, was intimidated by him and went along with his misdeeds. The chain of command above that officer was aware of Gallagher’s behavior but did nothing to constrain him. Indeed, when the commander of SEAL Team 7, Robert Breisch, was told of possible war crimes violations by members of Gallagher’s team, instead of pursuing their allegations, as was his clear and legally required duty, he told them to report the violations themselves. But Gallagher’s immediate subordinate worried that if he vocally asked for an inquiry into the murder of the prisoner, Gallagher would find a way to kill him—which would be easy enough in a combat zone.
But Philipps’s book isn’t just about Gallagher. It’s about a system that enables evil because it doesn’t want to look bad. After the Mosul deployment, Gallagher was assigned to teach special operations urban warfare in the United States, and the compliant lieutenant was promoted to teach the art of command in such fights. Despite his justified fears of death, Gallagher’s concerned deputy went on to report the murder three times—only to have the Navy fail to act on each occasion. The institutional Navy’s response was to figure out a way to handle the situation quietly. When that failed and Gallagher’s story became major news, the Navy was still unable to discipline him, and the SEAL was embraced by high-level political figures, including then President Donald Trump.
In the spring of 2018, several members of Gallagher’s platoon lost patience with their leader’s misdeeds and essentially demanded an investigation. Gallagher responded by seeking to intimidate witnesses. Among other things, he gave the names of his accusers to an old SEAL buddy, who responded in a text message, “some day we will just kill them.” This book brims with such striking quotations, mainly because Philipps was able to read a trove of some 6,000 texts written by Gallagher and 2,300 others sent by members of his platoon.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/september-october-2021/seal-of-disapproval/
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