Afghanistan conflict: As Kabul falls,
Biden backlash grows
Posted By: FlyRight, 8/16/2021 9:25:14 AM
The lightning advance of the Taliban in retaking the country has led Afghan Americans, former generals and leading statesmen to blame President Joe Biden for a hasty US withdrawal. But he appears to have the public on his side - for now. Hadia Essazada wept as she recounted the horror the Taliban visited on her household, first beating her father, and then killing her brother. The first time "they were beating my father with an iron rod because they were looking for my elder brother", who had fought to resist their rule in the 1990s, she told BBC Persian. They fled their house in the northern city of Mazar-I-Sharif,
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The lightning advance of the Taliban in retaking the country has led Afghan Americans, former generals and leading statesmen to blame President Joe Biden for a hasty US withdrawal. But he appears to have the public on his side - for now.
Hadia Essazada wept as she recounted the horror the Taliban visited on her household, first beating her father, and then killing her brother.
The first time "they were beating my father with an iron rod because they were looking for my elder brother", who had fought to resist their rule in the 1990s, she told BBC Persian.
They fled their house in the northern city of Mazar-I-Sharif,
Afghanistan Takeover by Taliban Worries
Governments in the Region, Europe
That Chaos Will Spread 18 replies
Governments in the Region, Europe
That Chaos Will Spread 18 replies
The collapse of the Afghan government and takeover of the country by the Taliban is stirring concern in foreign capitals that chaos and instability engulfing the country could spill over to its neighbors and possibly drive a tide of refugees as far as Europe.
There was also an undercurrent of criticism of the U.S. for the speed of its departure after nearly 20 years, colored by Washington’s failure to establish a stable government that could stand without American military support.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on Sunday blamed Democrats – both in the House of Representatives and at the White House – for allowing the eviction moratorium to expire, as millions of American families are at risk of being kicked out of their homes.
"The House and House leadership had the opportunity to vote to extend the moratorium, and there was frankly a handful of conservative Democrats in the House who threatened to get on planes rather than hold this vote," she said on CNN "State of the Union." "We have to really just call a spade a spade.
A widespread internet outage caused several major websites to shut down Thursday afternoon, including Amazon, Delta, Capital One and Costco.
It's still unclear what caused the outage, but Akamai, a content distribution network that helps with the spread of data around the internet, posted online there was an "emerging issue" with their Edge DNS service. A DNS, or domain name service, helps match a website's name to its IP address. If the DNS fails, it becomes impossible to search and connect to a website by name.
By approximately 1:13pm ET, the site read "all systems operational."
The Biden administration's guidance for school reopening promoted a radical activist group’s handbook that advocates for educators to "disrupt Whiteness and other forms of oppression."
The Department of Education linked to the Abolitionist Teaching Network’s "Guide for Racial Justice & Abolitionist Social and Emotional Learning" in its handbook intended to help schools reopen after the COVID-19 pandemic and recommend how they should spend billions of dollars they collectively received through the American Rescue Plan.
White House official and a staff member for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have both tested positive for COVID-19 after attending the same reception last week, officials confirmed to Axios.
Why it matters: While both individuals are vaccinated and mildly symptomatic, they illustrate how Americans inoculated against the coronavirus can still contract and, potentially, unknowingly transmit the virus — even at the highest levels of the nation's government.
Get market news worthy of your time with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free.
"We know that there will be breakthrough cases, but as this instance shows, cases in vaccinated individuals are typically mild," a White House official told Axios.
In 1949, the trailblazing anti-racist musical “South Pacific”––created by composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II––debuted on Broadway to wild critical acclaim, running for over five years in nearly 2,000 performances. A particularly powerful and influential song from the musical, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” carried the message that hatred does not arise spontaneously in the human species, but rather is inculcated––taught, sermonized, infused––by parents, teachers, coaches, political figures or other impassioned haters. Here are the still-relevant lyrics:
Haitian President Jovenel Moise assassinated
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The assassination occurred around 1 a.m. when armed intruders, some of whom allegedly spoke Spanish, shot Moise in the head. Haitian President Jovenel Moise was shot dead by unidentified attackers in his private residence overnight in an "inhuman and barbaric act" and his wife was injured, Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph said on Wednesday.
He said the police and army had the security situation under control but gunshots could be heard throughout the capital after the attack, which occurred amid a rising wave of politically linked violence in the impoverished Caribbean nation.
Six months after resigning as attorney general, William Barr recently re-entered the spotlight, reportedly telling friendly news correspondent Jonathan Karl that allegations of vote fraud during the 2020 election are bull. Now that civilian Bill Barr has jumped back into the political fray, it is time to take unflinching stock of the degraded Department of Justice (DOJ) and how it became even further corrupted during Barr's reign.
The U.S. military has conducted defensive precision airstrikes against three facilities near the Iraq-Syria border region Sunday evening.
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"As demonstrated by this evening's strikes, President Biden has been clear that he will act to protect U.S. personnel. Given the ongoing series of attacks by Iran-backed groups targeting U.S. interests in Iraq, the President directed further military action to disrupt and deter such attacks," Kirby added.
The atmosphere is changing fast for President Biden.
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And the economic picture is mixed, with some weaker-than-expected employment data and new fears about inflation, even as jobs return and businesses reopen.
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Joe Manchin is sparking outright fury from liberals — with some Black Democrats invoking Jim Crow laws and Mitch McConnell as they blast the West Virginian's resistance to a sweeping elections bill. Manchin’s fellow Senate Democrats are being far more conciliatory.
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Despite the Taliban's long history of oppression of women and iron-fisted rule, U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price Monday urged Afghanistan's new leaders to form an inclusive government that had women in it.
Price cited a United Nations declaration calling for "an immediate cessation of all hostilities and the establishment, through inclusive negotiations, of a new government that is united, inclusive and representative – including with the full, equal and meaningful participation of women."
Former Vice President Mike Pence is ramping up his donor outreach as he weighs a 2024 White House bid.
Pence held a donor retreat late last week benefiting his newly formed nonprofit group, Advancing American Freedom. The event, held in wealthy Jackson Hole, Wyo., is the first such gathering the former vice president has hosted since leaving the White House in January.
John R. Bolton says the calamitous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will go down in history as “the Trump-Biden policy.” Mr. Bolton, who served as former President Trump’s national security adviser, said in a Daily Telegraph op-ed that Mr. Biden’s approach to withdrawing troops from Afghanistan was “virtually indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s.” The former adviser, though, said Mr. Biden’s insistence that Mr. Trump left him with only two bad options—“follow Trump’s blueprint or else considerably increase US combat forces in Afghanistan”—is a “strawman argument” and “palpably false.” Mr. Bolton, who has been an outspoken Trump critic since he was pushed out of the White House
President Joe Biden delivered a speech of quiet fury at the White House on Monday, defending his decision to bring home U.S. troops before blaming Afghan leaders for their failure to prevent the country collapsing. 'I stand squarely behind my decision,' Biden said. 'After 20 years I've learned the hard way. That there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.' It was the first time the president had spoken publicly about the unfolding crisis in six days. He was forced to return from Camp David amid hostile headlines about his absence from Washington while Americans were being rescued from Kabul airport.
Actor and activist George Takei on Sunday said that the “willfully unvaccinated” who refuse to be inoculated against coronavirus should be last in line for priority care. “The willfully unvaccinated who wind up in hospitals from Covid should not receive priority medical care over other very sick or injured people who are as much in urgent need of medical care,” the actor known as Lieutenant Sulu for his years on “Star Trek” said on Twitter. He followed that with, “Anti-vaxxers think they are owning us liberals by refusing to get vaccinated. But as the kids say, this is an epic self-own.”
Chief White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the vaccine-hesitant should “put aside” their concerns about personal liberty and recognize the “common enemy” is the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fauci said, “What’s coming next is that we are going to have to continue to get people vaccinated so that right now, even in states in which you have a good relative proportion of people vaccinated, you have to get the overwhelming proportion of people vaccinated. But you also have to do mitigation. And that gets to the controversial issue of mask-wearing and the mandating of things mandating of vaccines,
President Joe Biden will remain hidden at his presidential retreat at Camp David through Monday, according to the White House, as the Taliban swiftly seized control of Afghanistan.
The president’s daily guidance for Monday indicated Biden would remain at Camp David for at least one more day, with no public events scheduled.
But a senior administration official indicated to reporters Sunday evening that Biden might address the country “in the next few days,” according to reports.
It remains unclear whether Biden will speak from Camp David or return to the White House to deliver his speech, the reports noted. He was previously scheduled to remain at Camp David until Wednesday.
Joe Biden and his media acolytes call him Mr. Empathy and Mr. Compassion. His Afghanistan speech yesterday told a different story, and should end that phony spin forever.
My takeaway was how cold, and hard, and compassionless Biden was as he sought to extricate himself from the catastrophe of his own making. He blamed everyone but himself for his failure, particularly the Afghan army. He smarmily assured terrified Afghanis left behind he'd now speak out for their human rights instead of actually protect them. He effectively told U.S. servicemembers their service was for nothing. It was appalling.
The embarrassment that is Joe Biden
38 replies
Although the White House had intended to keep Biden under wraps for as long as possible, the demand that he say something – anything – about the unfolding debacle in Afghanistan forced him to leave Camp David for a 20-minute statement, after which he refused to take any questions. The important part of what he said boils down to one sentence: We had to leave and everything that went wrong was Trump’s or the Afghans' fault. Biden is a craven coward, a feckless fool, a dismal dummy, and a man who will soon have more blood on his hands than a thousand Lady Macbeths.
Thousands of people were seen running for planes in countless videos posted to social media at the airport in Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan, as the Taliban takes control of the country.Some of the videos were posted late on Sunday night and during the early morning hours on Monday local Afghanistan time.“Witnesses at the civilian domestic terminal said they had heard occasional gunshots and said thousands of people had crammed into the terminal and filled the parking lots, desperately seeking flights out,” The New York Times reported. “Late Sunday, the State and Defense Departments issued a statement saying the U.S. was working to secure control of the airport
The incoming. It’s coming fast and furious for (at) Joe Biden.So much so that as I begin this article, the suddenly embattled president is about the speak to the nation, having cut short his Camp David “vacation” solely because his administration is at least “smart” enough to finally recognize they better do their damnedest to attempt to stop the bleeding — ASAP.They — he — will not succeed. It’s not just conservatives who continue to skewer the ever-loving crap out of the hapless Biden for his disastrous decision to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan — not because he withdrew them, but because of how he did it.
Obama’s Former Ambassador to Afghanistan:
I Question Biden’s ‘Ability
to Lead Our Nation’ 36 replies
I Question Biden’s ‘Ability
to Lead Our Nation’ 36 replies
The fall of Afghanistan has shocked Obama’s former ambassador to such a degree that he is now questioning President Joe Biden’s ability to lead the nation.
Speaking with The Spokesman-Review, Ryan Crocker, who served as Obama’s ambassador from 2011 to 2012, lamented that the Biden administration failed to see the Taliban’s swift takeover when preparing for the withdrawal from Afghanistan.“I think the direction was predictable; the trajectory was not,” he said. “What President Biden has done is to embrace the Afghan policy of President Trump, and this is the outcome.”Just a little over a month ago, Joe Biden rejected assertions that U.S. withdrawal would lead to