Bernie Sanders Tried to Block Arms Sales to Israel and Got Almost No Support

Tell me how any of this makes sense.

On Friday, in addition to blowing things up in Syria and threatening Turkey, which we will leave aside for the moment, Israel once again made the rubble bounce in Gaza, killing 17 more people, a day after it killed 100 people, many of them at a school that was being used as a temporary shelter.

From the outside, it would appear to me that Israel has all the munitions it needs to conduct whatever military options it chooses to undertake and that this might be an opportune time for the United States to use any future arms sales as leverage to control its ally so that it’s at least not blowing up schools where kids are sheltering while things are blowing up outside. Nevertheless, when Senator Bernie Sanders tried to block a pending $8 billion arms sale to Israel, he did so practically alone. Only 14 other senators, all Democrats, voted with him. Senator Cory Booker, recently minted hero of the resistance, was not one of them.

Why in God’s name does Israel need $8 billion more worth of weaponry? Why is this country making criticism of an ally in a college newspaper (!) a cause for deportation? Why are demonstrations against one specific foreign-policy issue being used as a club to batter respected universities into line with a president’s lunatic agenda on so many other issues? How does any of this make sense at all? How in the name of God did we get here?

I, too, am more than amused by the fact that the president levied tariffs on uninhabited islands and penguin breeding grounds and even on poor Tuvalu, which is well on its way to being a lagoon in the south Pacific. But then there are places like Lesotho, and things are not as funny as they used to be. Lesotho is a mountainous, landlocked country completely surrounded by South Africa. Some 2.6 million people live there. It has become a manufacturing haven for the garment industry. From The Guardian:

According to the African Growth and Opportunities Act (Agoa) US data portal, Lesotho exported $237m of goods last year to the US and imported $2.8m. Agoa, which has allowed tariff-free access to the US market for thousands of product types since 2000, created a thriving garment industry, accounting for about 20% of GDP. There are about 30,000 garment workers in Lesotho, mostly women, with 12,000 making clothes for US brands including Levi’s, Calvin Klein and Walmart in Chinese- and Taiwanese-owned factories. While most of the jobs pay the monthly minimum wage of $146-$163, they are still highly sought after in the poor, largely informal economy.

On Liberation Day last Wednesday, the president slapped a 50 percent “reciprocal” tariff on Lesotho. It was the highest rate levied against any country.

The tariff rates, which are due to come into force on 9 April, range from 10% to 50% and were calculated with what economists labelled an “idiotic” formula, penalising countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US relative to their imports from the US. Dr Ratjomose Machema, a lecturer in economics at the National University of Lesotho, said: “I don’t understand how this is a reciprocal tariff because we really don’t charge that much in tariffs.”

Economists are not wondering if Lesotho’s economy will survive. They’re wondering if the country will. From NBC News:

Lesotho, which Trump described in March as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” is one of the world’s poorest nations with a gross domestic product of just over $2 billion. It has a large trade surplus with the United States, mostly made up of diamonds and textiles, including Levi’s jeans. Its exports to the United States, which in 2024 totalled $237 million, account for more than 10% of its GDP. Oxford Economics said the textile sector, with some 40,000 workers, was Lesotho’s biggest private employer and accounted for roughly 90% of manufacturing employment and exports. “Then you are having retailers who are selling food. And then you have residential property owners who are renting houses for the workers. So this means if the closure of factories were to happen, the industry is going to die and there will be multiplier effects,” Lesotho Private Sector Foundation CEO Thabo Qhesi said. “So Lesotho will be dead, so to say.”

Happy Liberation Day to all who celebrate.

It is my considered opinion that anyone who describes themselves as an “influencer” as though that were a genuine occupation ought to be signed over to a Middlesex County road crew until they recognize a real job when they see it. At the very least, these nuisances should leave the planet’s reclusive Indigenous tribes the fck alone. From the BBC:

Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, allegedly landed on North Sentinel Island in an apparent attempt to make contact with the isolated Sentinelese tribe, filming his visit and leaving a can of coke and a coconut on the shore. Survival International, a group that advocates for the rights of tribal people, said the alleged act endangered the man’s own life and the lives of the tribe, calling it “deeply disturbing”. The US said it was aware and “monitoring the situation”.

The police chief told AFP: “A review of his GoPro camera footage showed his entry and landing into the restricted North Sentinel Island.” It is illegal for foreigners or Indians to travel within 5km (three miles) of the islands in order to protect the people living there.

According to police, Mr Polyakov has visited the region twice before—including using an inflatable kayak in October last year before he was stopped by hotel staff. On his arrest earlier this week, the man told police he was a “thrill seeker”, Indian media reported.

Somebody should advise the islanders to slap a 25 percent reciprocal tariff on Americans like Vasco da Jackass here.

If you’re making a dive for the wing-nut spotlight, it’s important to keep the bit going even if the rest of the breathing world has come to believe you to be an irredeemable dickhead. Jim Banks is a rookie senator from Indiana. He needs to come out smoking to leap into the higher levels of conservative dickhead-ism. From the Hill:

The viral video showed former HHS employee Mack Schroeder approaching Banks in a Senate office building on Tuesday and asking him about the mass layoffs at HHS. Schroeder, who noted that he personally was among the fired HHS employees, asked the senator how he would ensure residents in his state got the services they needed. “You probably deserved it,” Banks told Schroeder, referring to Schroeder’s termination. When Schroeder asked why, Banks told him, “Because you seem like a clown.”

Cue the next 12 years of fundraising videos and speaking fees. Sign him up for his designated recliner in the Fox News green room.

Banks, in a video posted to the social platform X on Wednesday, further dug his heels in, refusing to “back down” from his position. “The Democrats and the left-wing media have lost their minds because I told a left-wing activist in the halls of the Senate office buildings yesterday what I really thought: A clown is a clown, who’s chasing senators through the halls with a cellphone, complaining about losing a left-wing woke job in the federal government that should have never been a job to begin with,” Banks said in the video Wednesday. “I won’t back down. I won’t apologize for it,” he continued. “I support President Trump and the DOGE effort 100 percent to cut wasteful spending and woke jobs out of the federal government, and we’re just getting started.”

Banks might be interested to know that hundreds of people demonstrated against the HHS Medicaid cuts in Indianapolis this week, and also against the state’s jumping on the cut-and-slash bandwagon. Or that, between the Republican administration in Washington and the one in Indianapolis—and right-wing, well, clownishness—Indiana public health is a mess. The state university, to name only one source, is less than impressed. From The Indianapolis Recorder:

Simultaneously, Gov. Mike Braun has introduced measures aimed at making health care more affordable. However, these measures include significant cuts to public health funding and reductions in Medicaid access for low-income residents. Critics argue that these cuts contradict promises to improve health care accessibility and transparency, potentially undermining efforts to enhance health care access for Hoosiers.

These funding reductions come at a time when Indiana is already grappling with declining vaccination rates. Between 2019 and 2023, the state’s average immunization rate for children fell from 72% to 56.4%, according to the Indiana Department of Health. This decline raises concerns about the potential resurgence of preventable diseases. The loss of federal funding could exacerbate these challenges by limiting resources available for vaccination outreach and education programs. Public health experts emphasize the importance of rebuilding trust in immunizations and ensuring that vaccines remain accessible to all Hoosiers.

There are clowns back home, Senator, putting all their neighbors at risk. You know them. You campaigned for them in the House and when you ran for Senate. Go talk to them. Clown.

Okay, it’s time for us to hang up the halo we put on Mike Pence for doing his job on January 6, 2021. He’s still the half-bright theocrat who thought he was salvaging his dying career by signing on with El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. And certainly there’s no reason for him to win the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award in 2025 for something he did five years ago. Surely there have been Profiles in Courage since then. Hell, between Cory Booker and Judge James Boasberg, there have been two worthy Profiles in Courage just in the past month. Do better, Kennedys. You have enough problems with the brand already.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “Ain’t It Crazy” (Lightnin’ Hopkins): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1938, is Secretary of State—not “Foreign Secretary,” ya ig’nant Brits—Cordell Hull celebrating a new trade deal between the United States and the UK and Canada. I don’t know if “all Americans” were happy about it, but Hull seems to be having the time of his life. (By the way, Cordell Hull has a place on my list of Great Names of American White People. Other entrants include Elihu Root and Thurlow Weed.) History is so cool.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From MSN:

The discovery was made at a vacant lot in the Lincolnville neighborhood of St. Augustine, close to downtown. The team with the City of St. Augustine Archaeology Program discovered what they believe is archaeological evidence of a small British fort, known as a redoubt. ... According to maps and historic documents, there were seven of these British redoubts in St. Augustine when Florida was a British colony in the 1700s.

Archaeologist Katherine Sims said there’s evidence the redoubt was built in 1781. She even pointed to it on two different historical maps. “However, in every map, it’s in a slightly different place and they’re all different shapes,” Sims noted. “Which has contributed to why it’s been so hard to find them archaeologically.” So what happened to that redoubt? It was only built two years before the British pulled out of St. Augustine and Florida became a colony of Spain again. White said there’s no real documentation that the Spanish even used the British redoubts in the western part of St. Augustine.

Personally, I believe the Brits disappeared because of a lethal sunburn outbreak at the end of the 18th century.

Hey, BBC, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Huge meat-eating dinosaurs and their plant-eating prey shared the same watering holes on Skye 167 million years ago, say scientists. University of Edinburgh researchers examined dozens of dinosaur footprints at Prince Charles’s Point on the island’s Trotternish Peninsula. The dinosaurs included carnivorous megalosaurs—ancestors of Tyrannosaurus rex—and long necked herbivores that were up to three times bigger in size than an elephant. The scientists analysed the footprints to understand how the animals had moved, and suggested the different dinosaurs had “milled around” shallow freshwater lagoons.

To explain this phenomenon, we contacted noted naturalist and African explorer, Captain Geoffrey Spaulding:

The principal animals inhabiting the African jungle are moose, elks and Knights of Pythias. Of course, you all know what a moose is. That’s big game. The first day, I shot two bucks. That was the biggest game we had. As I say, you all know what a moose is? A moose runs around on the floor, and eats cheese, and is chased by the cats. The elks, on the other hand live up in the hills, and in the spring they come down for their annual convention. It is very interesting to watch them come to the water hole. And you should see them run when they find it is only a water hole. What they’re looking for is an al-co-hole (or elk-a-hole). One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know. Then we tried to remove the tusks. The tusks. That’s not so easy to say, tusks. You try that some time. ... As I say, we tried to remove the tusks, but they were embedded in so firmly that we couldn’t budge them. Of course, in Alabama, the Tusk-a-loosa.

So it was back in the day, too, when they lived then to make us happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday, for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for everyone touched by the earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand, and by the tornadoes throughout the Southeast, and for everyone touched by floods in Kentucky and in West Virginia, and by the crash in Washington, and by the measles outbreak in the Southwest, and in the wildfire zone around Dallas, and in the fire zones in Los Angeles, and for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, and all the people in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun. And the people in drought-stricken north Alabama. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And all the folks we regularly cited here in the year gone by, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.