Wed: The Fun in Georgia is Just Starting

The Hamas Attack Is Horrible?  Will the Israeli Response Be Horrible, Too?

Gaza's only power station has run out of fuel, after Israel announced it was cutting off energy supplies as well as food and water.  It means Gazans will be relying on generators for electricity - if they have fuel to power them

The Gaza Strip’s biggest hospital, Al-Shifa, only has enough fuel to keep power on for three days, said Matthias Kannes, a Gaza-based official for Doctors Without Borders. The group said the two hospitals it runs in Gaza were running out of surgical equipment, antibiotics, fuel and other supplies. “We consumed three weeks worth of emergency stock in three days,” Kannes said.

So far, Israel has unleashed an increasingly destructive bombardment in Gaza that has flattened entire city blocks and left unknown numbers of bodies beneath mounds of debris. Militants in Gaza continued to fire rockets at Israel on Wednesday, including a heavy barrage at the southern town of Ashkelon.

Some 250,000 people have fled their homes in Gaza — more than a tenth of the population — most crowding into U.N. schools. Others crowded into a shrinking number of safe neighborhoods in the strip of land only 40 kilometers (25 miles) long, wedged among Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea.

Since Reporters Are Not Allowed Into Gaza, We Are Seeing A Lot of Coverage of Horrors in Israel, but No Coverage of the Suffering in Gaza.

If You Want to Review the History

What was the Balfour Declaration?

More than 100 years ago, on November 2, 1917, Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote a letter addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of the British Jewish community.

The letter was short – just 67 words – but its contents had a seismic effect on Palestine that is still felt to this day.

It committed the British government to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to facilitating “the achievement of this object”. The letter is known as the Balfour Declaration.

In essence, a European power promised the Zionist movement a country where Palestinian Arab natives made up more than 90 percent of the population.

A British Mandate was created in 1923 and lasted until 1948. During that period, the British facilitated mass Jewish immigration – many of the new residents were fleeing Nazism in Europe – and they also faced protests and strikes. Palestinians were alarmed by their country’s changing demographics and British confiscation of their lands to be handed over to Jewish settlers.

What’s the Israel-Palestine conflict about? A simple guide

It Is a Welcome Action.  How Long Until SCOTUS Kills This?

The Biden administration is proposing a new rule to prohibit companies across the private sector from hiding fees from consumers, the president's most sweeping action yet on so-called "junk fees."

The Federal Trade Commission's rule would require all industries under its jurisdiction to show the full price up front to consumers, including for concert and sports tickets, hotel rooms, and apartment and car rentals. Violators would be subject to financial penalties and be required to compensate customers.

"Our proposed rule to ban junk fees would not just return money to people's pockets but also restore a degree of justice to American families and restore fairness in our markets," said Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

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The move comes as President Joe Biden, who will unveil the rule in remarks Wednesday, has made tackling junk fees a top priority to help consumers. Americans collectively pay "tens of billions of dollars" in junk fees each year, according to the FTC. Khan likened the fees to "an invisible tax that quietly inflates prices across the economy."

After All, the Founding Fathers Didn't Want Businessmen to Be Honest

Where There's a Wall, There's a Way (In).

In the wake of a shooting that left five people injured during homecoming festivities, Morgan State University leaders announced Tuesday they plan to build a wall around most of the northeast Baltimore campus and station security personnel at entrances and exits.

The wall would extend existing barriers by about 8,000 feet (2,400 meters) to encircle 90% of campus and effectively “eliminate unfettered access,” university President David Wilson said during a campus town hall.

“We’re doing this, let me be clear, not to keep out our neighbors and our community writ large; we are doing it to keep out the bad actors,” Wilson told an auditorium filled with students, faculty and staff of the historically Black university.

After the shooting the night of Oct. 3 following a coronation ceremony for this year’s Mister and Miss Morgan State, university leaders canceled classes and homecoming activities for the remainder of the week. They’re now grappling with how to keep students safe as gun violence becomes an ever-growing threat in American schools.

During Tuesday’s town hall, Wilson and others faced a litany of questions from students and staff demanding to know what more could have been done to prevent the shooting. Students were walking from an auditorium to the campus student center, where a coronation ball was scheduled to start, when the gunfire erupted.

The campus was placed on lockdown and students were told to shelter in place because police initially thought there was an active shooter threat. No arrests have been made, but Baltimore police have released surveillance images of persons of interest and asked the public for help identifying them. Police said they believe the violence stemmed from a dispute and involved two shooters.

They said the five victims, including four Morgan State students, likely were not intended targets. All the victims were released from local hospitals last week.

I Don't Think Mace Aced High-School English

Rep. Nancy Mace has always courted media attention. But now she’s taking it to the next level, seeking to remake herself fully in the mold of Reps. Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. In fact, on Tuesday evening she pulled a stunt that made those three look almost subtle.

Mace had been one of the eight Republican votes to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House, a prominent role she clearly relished. McCarthy’s ouster necessitated a candidate forum as Republicans try to decide on his replacement. Mace wasn’t going to be overshadowed by some piddling little candidate forum: She showed up in a top with a giant red “A” on it.

“I’m wearing the scarlet letter after the week that I just had last week, being a woman up here and being demonized for my vote and for my voice,” Mace said, giddy self-regard coming off of her in waves.

“I’m here to let the rest of the world know, the country know, I’m on the side of the people, I’m not on the side of the establishment, and I’m going to do the right thing every single time no matter the consequences, ‘cause I don’t answer to anybody in D.C., I don't answer to anyone in Washington, I only answer to the people.”

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet “A” for “adultery.” In Mace’s case, of course, the “A” is for “attention.” You have to suspect that over the weekend she rewatched the Emma Stone movie "Easy A"—and missed the point of that as thoroughly as she did of “The Scarlet Letter.”

Sympathy for Israel: Yes. However,

It’s Dangerous for the U.S. to Give Israel a Blank Check to Assault Gaza

There’s no military solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. If there were, the attacks of this past weekend would not have happened.

In the wake of atrocities, it is hard to be rational. But the failure of rationality in precisely moments like these that begets future atrocities. It does not help the Israeli people, nor does it advance U.S. interests to “show solidarity” by supporting, defending, or even simply tolerating the bad acts or instincts of the most incompetent, corrupt, and vile government in Israel’s history. Such a position dishonors the victims of Hamas and the rest of the people of Israel if it compounds the crimes with more crimes that make more senseless bloodshed more likely. It is not “loyal” to increase the likelihood of more, not fewer, October 7ths.