The challenges ahead (Biden's America)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Biden had previously said that if the investigation confirmed that Cuomo had engaged in inappropriate conduct he should resign, so this statement is consistent with that.

I think Cuomo will resign once it becomes apparent that if he doesn't he will be impeached.

ETA: Pelosi also called for Cuomo to resign, which she had previously not done.

And 55 of the 63 State Senators (who would be the jury of an impeachment trial, along with the seven judges for the New York State Court of Appeals, the state's highest court) have called for him to resign. That is of course well in excess of the 2/3 necessary for conviction (even if none of the seven judges jointed them).

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The Albany County District Attorney's office issued a statement which says they are requesting that the New York Attorney General's office provide them with the investigative materials underlying today's report about Governor Cuomo. The Albany Co. D.A. also referred to an "ongoing criminal investigation."

The missing piece with regard to criminal charges was a victim willing to press chargers.

No longer.

Cuomo staffer files criminal complaint against governor with Albany sheriff's office

[N.E. Brigand]

The new IPCC report, per this summary, says that the "last decade was hotter than any period in 125,000 years. CO2 levels are higher than any time in 2 million years. Methane and nitrous oxide are higher than any time in 800,000 years. And almost all of it is because of human activities, largely from burning fossil fuels."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Andrew Cuomo will (and should) be resigning at some point in the not too distant future. And yes, I understand that it is likely that a different standard will be applied to him as Democrat than to Trump or some other Republicans. Nonetheless, he will (and should) be resigning at some point in the not too distant future.

And he has.

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/ ... bdd7b2f415

Good riddance.

[RoseMorninStar]

The morality/law & order/patriotic (etc..) dissonance between one party who claims to have all of those virtues but does not live them and the other who, in some ways at least, demands/upholds those principles is really jarring at times.

[N.E. Brigand]

Andrew Cuomo will (and should) be resigning at some point in the not too distant future. And yes, I understand that it is likely that a different standard will be applied to him as Democrat than to Trump or some other Republicans. Nonetheless, he will (and should) be resigning at some point in the not too distant future.

And he has.

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/ ... bdd7b2f415

Good riddance.

By resigning, Cuomo avoids impeachment and removal, which apparently would or could have had the effect of barring him from holding office in New York in the future. In other words, he may be hoping for voters to change their minds with time. Of course, there are still criminal investigations underway.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile, the Senate passed the 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure plan, with 19 Republicans joining all the Democrats in voting for it, despite vociferous opposition by former president Trump. However, the fate of the bill is still uncertain, as House Democrats (who are on August recess) have indicated that they will not take up the bill unless and until the Senate also passes the massive 3.5 trillion companion bill that they are seeking to pass through budget reconciliation with no GOP support. Senator Sinema has already declared that she won't vote for that bill (and I suspect that Manchin is right there with her, though I don't recall him taking a specific position on it), so unless there can be compromise reached that would satisfy both her (and potentially Manchin) on the one side, and progressive Democrats in the House (as well as Bernie Sanders, the driving force behind the bill in the Senate as both the leading progressive in the Senate and the Chairman of the Budget Committee) it is possible, even likely, that neither bill will pass. Because of course nothing is better than something.

(Actually, I do think that something will get passed eventually, probably, maybe, possibly.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Meanwhile, the Senate passed the 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure plan, with 19 Republicans joining all the Democrats in voting for it, despite vociferous opposition by former president Trump. However, the fate of the bill is still uncertain, as House Democrats (who are on August recess) have indicated that they will not take up the bill unless and until the Senate also passes the massive 3.5 trillion companion bill that they are seeking to pass through budget reconciliation with no GOP support. Senator Sinema has already declared that she won't vote for that bill (and I suspect that Manchin is right there with her, though I don't recall him taking a specific position on it), so unless there can be compromise reached that would satisfy both her (and potentially Manchin) on the one side, and progressive Democrats in the House (as well as Bernie Sanders, the driving force behind the bill in the Senate as both the leading progressive in the Senate and the Chairman of the Budget Committee) it is possible, even likely, that neither bill will pass. Because of course nothing is better than something.

(Actually, I do think that something will get passed eventually, probably, maybe, possibly.)

It's just astonishing to me that the Trump administration, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, never made a serious attempt to pass an infrastructure bill. Probably at least as many Democrats would have voted for that as Republicans voted for this bill.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Right? Particularly as many times as Trump talked about it. The only two possibilities, in my mind, is that 1) Trump didn't really want to pass an infrastructure bill; and/or 2) Trump and his team were too incompetent to do so (though they did pass a massive tax cut bill).

Of course it remains to be seen whether Biden can successfully get an infrastructure bill passed.

[River]

My impression is that Congress found Trump's White House to be an unreliable negotiating partner and that's why President Art the Deal never closed anything on infrastructure. Or healthcare. Or a middle-class taxcut. Or anything else he promised within the next couple weeks at any given moment between Inauguration Day 2017 and Inauguration Day 2021. Even in those first couple years of his term, Trump was at least partially hamstrung by his own pathologies.

[RoseMorninStar]

I choose Door #2. And then some.

[N.E. Brigand]

And apple pie.

[N.E. Brigand]

The withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan is going about as badly as many predicted. I don't think it would have gone any better ten years ago or ten years in the future. And it's probably worth emphasizing that the withdrawal is part of an agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban that dates to February 2020. In fact, the Trump administration had announced that the withdrawal would be complete by May 1, 2021, but the Biden administration extended that until August 31.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Talk about a lose/lose situation. Staying would have been bad. Leaving has certainly been bad.

[N.E. Brigand]

In February, Fox News host Laura Ingraham called Joe Biden the "war president" and added, "I think we all know we're staying in Afghanistan another four years." She didn't mean that as praise! And in April, former president Donald Trump praised Joe Biden for announcing the withdrawal of U.S. troops but said the U.S. "should get out earlier" than Biden wanted.

In 2019, the Washington Post published a story about secret Pentagon papers that assessed the security situation in Afghanistan: "None expressed confidnece that that the Afghan army and police could ever defeat the Taliban on their own."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics ... pic-chain1

Ever.

But I do appreciate this reminder that the war seems to have been a complete success for defense contractors.

[N.E. Brigand]

Andrew Cuomo will (and should) be resigning at some point in the not too distant future. And yes, I understand that it is likely that a different standard will be applied to him as Democrat than to Trump or some other Republicans. Nonetheless, he will (and should) be resigning at some point in the not too distant future.

And he has.

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/ ... bdd7b2f415

Good riddance.

Someone said the other day that once Cuomo no longer has the power to punish his enemies, a lot of stories about him are going to come out. Well, he's still in office for another ten days, but the New York Times today reports that in 2018, Cuomo told a labor union leader that he didn't want the New York state senate to be led by Democrats (i.e., his own party), at least until a budget was passed, because the senate's Democratic leader, Andrew Stewart-Cousins, who is Black, would "give free breakfast to all Black people."

[N.E. Brigand]

In February, Fox News host Laura Ingraham called Joe Biden the "war president" and added, "I think we all know we're staying in Afghanistan another four years." She didn't mean that as praise! And in April, former president Donald Trump praised Joe Biden for announcing the withdrawal of U.S. troops but said the U.S. "should get out earlier" than Biden wanted.

In 2019, the Washington Post published a story about secret Pentagon papers that assessed the security situation in Afghanistan: "None expressed confidnece that that the Afghan army and police could ever defeat the Taliban on their own."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics ... pic-chain1

Ever.

But I do appreciate this reminder that the war seems to have been a complete success for defense contractors.

The Military Times reprts that more than 70% of U.S. veterans support a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's president has left the country as the Taliban enters Kabul.

I read that one reason that Afghani soldiers have been surrending so quickly to the Taliban is that the Afghanistan government hasn't paid them in months.

Also among the Taliban's forces are some of the 5,000 prisoners that the Afghani government released last year, after being pressured to do so by the Trump administration.
- - - - - - - - - -

Two more points:

(1) As President Biden's statement yesterday reminded us: in 2019, President Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David for negotiations. This fell apart when news of the plans leaked, but the talks were scheduled to take place on the anniversary of 9/11.

(2) I have prevoiusly noted that President Trump's plan was for U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan by May 1, and he complained about President Biden postponing the departure until August. But I had forgotten that Trump originally intended for U.S. troops to be out by January 15, i.e., seven months ago:

The one-page memo was delivered by courier to [Acting Defense Secretary] Christopher Miller's office two days later, on the afternoon of Nov. 11. The order arrived seemingly out of nowhere, and its instructions, signed by Trump, were stunning: All U.S. military forces were to be withdrawn from Somalia by Dec. 31, 2020. All U.S. forces were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan by Jan. 15, 2021.

And when Secretary Miller contacted the White House about the memo, it turned out that a lot of people who normally would have been involved in drafting suchan order or at least briefed on it, including the National Security Adviser and the White House Counsel, had been unaware of its existence.

[River]

We should have left as soon as we decided to not do an equivalent of a Marshall Plan. That was when we lost Afghanistan.

[N.E. Brigand]

Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban leader who is apparently going to be Afghanistan's new president, was captured in Pakistan in 2010.

In 2018, the U.S. government pressured Pakistan to release him (which they did) in order to move the U.S.-Taliban peace talks along.

- - - - - - - - - -
In 1975, following the fall of Saigon, a poll asked Americans which of the five presidents who led the U.S. during the Vietnam war should get the most blame. The responses were:
34% -- Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69)
29% -- Richard Nixon (1969-74)
20% -- John F. Kennedy (1961-63)
16% -- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61)
2% -- Gerald Ford (1974-77)

- - - - - - - - - -
My take on Afghanistan is that the U.S. never decided what the goal was. Lots of people point to how the U.S. still has troops in Japan, South Korea, and Germany many decades after armed conflict ended there. If the U.S. really wanted Afghanistan to transform into something like those nations, then we should have increased our troop presence at least tenfold and should have pumped vast amounts of money into Afghanistan's economy. And in another 50 years or so, that *might* have worked.

Anything less than that was doomed to fail, and thus Donald Trump and Joe Biden were right to pull out. The Biden administration probably could have done a better job of it, but I don't know that for sure.

Edit: Cross-posted with River, who made the same point.

[Túrin Turambar]

Rebuilding worked in West Germany and Japan because they had a central government enjoying high levels of public support (particularly in Japan), a centralised nation-state, and a past history of functioning central government with some democratic institutions. Afghanistan had none. In the absence of those things, I don't know if spending any amount of money in Afghanistan would have led to a different result to the one we're seeing now.