The Ukraine Bill, the Michigan Primaries, the Local School Mergers, And Other Semi-Recent News
Plus, Irish Heritage Month and My Honors History Thesis
It has been 9 days since I wrote my last post, but these 9 days have seemed like an eternity. So much has happened this week. So let’s dive in:
2024’s term of the year: greedflation.
Rest in power, Alexei Navalny.
Our failure to get funding for Ukraine’s war against imperialist Russia is a pox on the Republican House. My brother (not me; I mainly did some touch-ups) wrote an article suggesting that Biden call a special session of Congress to force the do-nothings to actually do something. Yet, if all else fails, Ukraine may want to imitate the tactics the North Vietnamese once used against us during the Nixon era. Use pretend negotiations to delay, delay, delay. Start out by giving Putin the hope of getting a sweetheart deal, and then pull out suddenly (and unexpectedly) when the time is right.
It would also give President Biden the opportunity to press on the American public the urgency of getting Ukraine funding through now.
On Face the Nation, I heard that one Arab-American reportedly said he would rather vote for Mickey Mouse right now than vote for President Biden again. Although Biden did end up breaking 80% in Michigan, I did want to once again point my fellow progressives back to an article I wrote earlier in the year. Remember, folks: it can get much worse in Israel and Palestine. And a Trump presidency practically guarantees that it will. Do not give Netanyahu his day of triumph. Please.
That said, President Biden should really consider doubling down on the Biden Doctrine’s original plan for irreversible steps (or as close to irreversible as humanly possible) towards the recognition of West Bank Palestine. We should not repeat the mistakes of Oslo, and allow the Netanyahus of the present and future to derail negotiations towards Palestinian self-determination and truly lasting Israeli security.
We are, frankly, running out of time. Netanyahu’s radical right-wing government is expanding settlements at a record pace, including in once-dismantled settlement areas like Homesh. Eventually, the Israeli settler population will overwhelm the West Bank—and possibly become the majority there. If that happens, say goodbye to your two-state solution. The conflicts such a situation could create in the West Bank might make 1990s Rwanda “look like a children’s birthday party” (to borrow the words of Thomas Friedman). Like I said, even if you ignore the implications Biden’s Palestine policy could have in the upcoming election, the stakes could not be any higher.
In more postive news, President Biden may have found the best possible way of addressing “the age question.” He and his campaign should make these talking points a mainstay on the campaign trail. I would rather have an old Biden over Trump’s old ideas any day.
Trump’s most recent address on the border. Ah, where do I begin? “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime,” but apparently they are not bringing languages. At least if you believe MAGA’s “stable genius.” Welp, time to burn our Spanish to English dictionaries, I guess. And time to throw away Don Quixote while we are at it.
In local news, Providence public schools sometimes seem to merge faster and with less public accountability than large multinational corporations do. More on this story soon, pending news on State Representative David Morales’s recent proposals for greater accountability and pending news on the May 2024 local bond referendum.
Finally, this day is the first day of Irish Heritage Month. In a funny little coincidence, I just completed my first draft of the honors history thesis on the Ireland and the American Revolution. It comes out to about 58 pages, and a little less than 70 if you include citations. All that is to say, to my Irish-American subscribers, happy Irish Heritage Month!