With virus aid in sight, Democrats debate filibuster changes
WASHINGTON >> With President Joe Biden on the verge of his first big legislative victory, a key moderate Democrat said Sunday he’s open to changing Senate rules that could allow for more party-line votes to push through other parts of the White House’s agenda such as voting rights.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin stressed that he wants to keep the procedural hurdle known as the filibuster, saying major legislation should always have significant input from the minority party. But he noted there are other ways to change the rules that now effectively require 60 votes for most legislation. One example: the “talking filibuster,” which requires senators to slow a bill by holding the floor, but then grants an “up or down” simple majority vote if they give up.
“The filibuster should be painful, it really should be painful and we’ve made it more comfortable over the years,” Manchin said. “Maybe it has to be more painful.”
“If you want to make it a little bit more painful, make him stand there and talk,” Manchin added. “I’m willing to look at any way we can, but I’m not willing to take away the involvement of the minority.”
Democrats are beginning to look to their next legislative priorities after an early signature win for Biden on Saturday, with the Senate approving a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan on a party-line 50-49 vote.
Final passage is expected Tuesday in the House if leaders can hold the support of progressives frustrated that the Senate narrowed unemployment benefits and stripped out an
increase to the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Over the weekend, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, representing around 100 House liberals, called the Senate’s weakening of some provisions “bad policy and bad politics.” But Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., also characterized the changes as “relatively minor concessions” and emphasized the bill retained its “core bold, progressive elements.”
Biden says he would sign the measure immediately if the House passed it. The legislation would allow many Americans to receive $1,400 in direct checks from the government this month.
“Lessons learned: If we have unity, we can do big things,” a jubilant Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told The Associated Press in an interview after Saturday’s vote.
Still, the Democrats’ approach required a lastminute call from Biden to Manchin to secure his vote after he raised late resistance to the breadth of unemployment benefits. That immediately raised questions about the path ahead
in a partisan environment where few, if any, Republicans are expected to back planks of the president’s agenda.
Democrats used a fasttrack budget process known as reconciliation to approve Biden’s top priority without Republican support, a strategy that succeeded despite the reservations of some moderates. But work in the coming months on other issues such as voting rights and immigration could prove more difficult.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., pledged that Senate Republicans would block passage of a sweeping House-passed bill on voting rights. The measure, known as HR 1, would restrict partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, strike down hurdles to voting and bring transparency to the campaign finance system. It would serve as a counterweight to voting rights restrictions advancing in Republican-controlled statehouses across the country in the wake of Donald Trump’s repeated false claims about a “stolen” election.
“Not one Republican is going to vote for HR 1 because it’s a federal takeover of elections, it sets up a system where there is no real voter security or verification,” Graham said. “It is a liberal wish list in terms of how you vote.”
The Senate is divided 5050, but Democrats control the chamber because Vice President Kamala Harris can cast the tie-breaking vote. With 60 votes effectively needed on most legislation, Democrats must win the support of at least some Republicans to pass Biden’s agenda.
When asked about the voting rights bill, Manchin on Sunday left the door open to supporting some kind of a workaround to allow for passage based on a simple majority, suggesting he could support “reconciliation” if he was satisfied that Republicans had the ability to provide input. But it was unclear how that would work as voting rights are not budget-related and would not qualify for the reconciliation process.
“I’m not going to go there until my Republican friends have the ability to have their say also,” Manchin said.
On Sunday, the anti-filibuster advocacy group “Fix
Our Senate” praised Manchin’s comments as a viable way to get past “pure partisan obstruction” in the Senate.
“Sen. Manchin just saw Senate Republicans unanimously oppose a wildly popular and desperatelyneeded COVID relief bill that only passed because it couldn’t be filibustered, so it’s encouraging to hear him express openness to reforms to ensure that voting rights and other critical bills can’t be blocked by a purely obstructionist minority,” the group said in a statement.
Manchin spoke on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “Fox News Sunday,” CNN’s “State of the Union” and ABC’s “This Week,” and Graham appeared on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
The two top Democrats in New York’s legislature withdrew their support for Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Sunday amid mounting allegations of sexual harassment and undercounting COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.
Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins became the first senior Democrat in the state to say the three-term governor should resign. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie stopped short of demanding that Cuomo quit, but said in a statement that “it is time for the Governor to seriously consider whether he can effectively meet the needs of the people of New York.”
On Saturday, two more women who worked for Cuomo publicly accused him of inappropriate behavior, on the heels of other allegations in recent weeks.
“Every day there is another account that is drawing away from the business of government,” StewartCousins said in a statement. “New York is still in the midst of this pandemic and is still facing the societal, health and economic impacts of it. We need to govern without daily distraction. For the good of the state Governor Cuomo must resign.”
Her public push for his resignation came shortly after a Sunday press conference where Cuomo said it would be “anti-democratic” for him to step down.
“There is no way I resign,” Cuomo told reporters.
“They don’t override the people’s will, they don’t get to override elections,” he said. “I was elected by the people of New York state. I wasn’t elected by politicians.”
In a brief phone conversation Sunday prior to the press conference, Cuomo told Stewart-Cousins he wouldn’t quit and they would have to impeach him if they wanted him out of office, according to a person who was briefed by someone on the call. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the call was intended to be private.
Cuomo said the next six months will determine how successfully New York emerges from the coronavirus pandemic. “I’m not going to be distracted because there is too much to do for the people,” he said, noting that the state must
pass a budget within three weeks and administer 15 million more COVID-19 vaccines.
Support for Cuomo has eroded with surprising speed as he’s faced twin scandals, one over his treatment of women in the workplace, and a second over his administration’s months-long refusal to release complete statistics on COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.
Some lawmakers have been infuriated by revelations that Cuomo’s administration delayed releasing some data about deaths of nursing home patients in hospitals, at least partly because of concerns it could be used against them by
President Donald Trump’s administration.
Several women have publicly told of feeling sexually harassed, or at least made to feel demeaned and uncomfortable. The state’s attorney general is investigating. Cuomo has urged people to wait for that investigation to conclude before they judge him.
Others who have called for Cuomo’s resignation include U.S. Rep. Kathleen Rice, a Long Island Democrat.
Former adviser Lindsey Boylan, 36, said Cuomo made inappropriate comments on her appearance, joked about playing strip poker and once kissed her on the lips at the end of
a meeting. Former aide, 25-year-old Charlotte Bennett, said Cuomo asked if she ever had sex with older men and made other comments she interpreted as gauging her interest in an affair.
Another former aide, Ana Liss, told The Wall Street Journal in a story published Saturday that when she worked as a policy aide to the governor between 2013 and 2015, Cuomo called her “sweetheart,” kissed her hand and asked personal questions including whether she had a boyfriend.
Asked about Liss’ story at his news conference Sunday, Cuomo said such talk was “my way of doing friendly banter.”
Echoing comments he made in a news conference last week, Cuomo acknowledged he’d made jokes and asked personal questions in an attempt to be collegial and frequently greeted people with hugs and kisses.
“I never meant to make anyone feel any uncomfortable,” he said. Cuomo has denied touching anyone inappropriately.
While Cuomo has been apologetic in recent days over his behavior, at least tacitly acknowledging that some of the things women have said are true, he’s also singled out a few accusations as flatly false.
On Sunday he disputed a story told by about him by Karen Hinton, a former press aide to Cuomo when he served as the federal housing secretary under President Bill Clinton.
In a story published Saturday in The Washington Post, Hinton detailed an uncomfortable hotel room interaction she had with Cuomo when the two met in California years ago as they were trying to patch things up after an estrangement.
Hinton said that as she got up to leave, Cuomo gave her a hug that was “very long, too long, too tight, too intimate.”
She described the encounter not as sexual harassment but as a “power play” for “manipulation and control.” She was no longer an aide to Cuomo at the time.
Asked Sunday about Hinton’s account Cuomo said it was “not true” and noted that the two had been longtime political adversaries.
AP reporter Michael Balsamo contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.
The United States and South Korea have reached agreement in principle on a new arrangement for sharing the cost of the American troop presence, which is intended as a bulwark against the threat of North Korean aggression, both countries announced.
The State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs said Sunday the deal includes a “negotiated increase” in Seoul’s share of the cost, but it provided no details. The Bureau wrote on Twitter that the agreement, if finalized, would reaffirm the U.S.-South Korean treaty alliance as “the linchpin of peace, security and prosperity for Northeast Asia.”
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry on Monday issued a similar statement, saying the two countries are seeking to tentatively sign the deal. It said the agreement came after three days of face-to-face talks in Washington.
The U.S. keeps about 28,000 troops in South Korea to help deter potential aggression from North Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War. But how much South Korea should pay for the American military presence was a thorny issue in bilateral relations under the Trump administration, which often asked its Asian ally to drastically increase its share.
In 2019, the allies struck a deal that required South Korea to pay about $924 million (1.04 trillion won) for the U.S. troops presence, an increase from $830 million in the previous
year. But negotiations for a new cost-sharing plan broke down over a U.S. demand that Seoul pay five times what it previously had paid.
The State Department said in a statement that the increase in the South’s share of the cost was “meaningful” but was not more specific.
The Wall Street Journal, which was first to report
the agreement, said it would last through 2025.
In its statement, the State Department said: “America’s alliances are a tremendous source of our strength. This development reflects the BidenHarris administration’s commitment to reinvigorating and modernizing our democratic alliances around the word to advance our shared security
and prosperity.”
Many conservatives in South Korea worried that then-President Donald Trump might use failed cost-sharing negotiations as an excuse to withdraw some U.S. troops in South Korea as a bargaining chip in now-stalled nuclear talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The U.S. and South Korea had also halted or cancelled some of their military exercises in recent years to support the nuclear diplomacy, which eventually fell apart due to disputes over U.S.-led sanctions on North Korea.
On Monday, the South Korea and U.S militaries kicked off annual military drills that would last for nine days. South Korea’s military said the drills are command post exercises and computerized simulation and don’t involve field training. It said the allies reviewed factors like the status of COVID-19 and diplomatic efforts to resume the nuclear talks with North Korea when it decided to hold the drills.
The prospect for a new cost-sharing plan has been heightened as the Biden administration has been seeking to bolster its alliance with South Korean and other countries.
South Korea began paying for the U.S. military deployment in the early 1990s, after rebuilding its economy from the devastation of the Korean War. The big U.S. military presence in South Korea is a symbol of the countries’ alliance but also a source of long-running antiAmerican sentiments.
Associated Press writer Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report.
Republican state lawmakers are pushing for social media giants to face costly lawsuits for policing content on their websites, taking aim at a federal law that prevents internet companies from being sued for removing posts.
GOP politicians in roughly two dozen states have introduced bills that would allow for civil lawsuits against platforms for what they call the “censorship” of posts. Many protest the deletion of political and religious statements, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Democrats, who also have called for greater scrutiny of big tech, are sponsoring the same measures in at least two states.
The federal liability shield has long been a target of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans, whose complaints about Silicon Valley stifling conservative viewpoints were amplified when the companies cracked down on misleading posts about the 2020 election.
Twitter and Facebook, which are often criticized for opaque policing policies, took the additional step of silencing Trump on their platforms after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Twitter has banned him, while a semi-independent panel is reviewing Facebook’s indefinite suspension of his account and considering whether to reinstate access.
Experts argue the legislative proposals are doomed to fail while the federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is in place. They said state lawmakers are wading into unconstitutional territory by trying to interfere with the editorial policies of private companies.
Len Niehoff, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, described the idea as a “constitutional non-starter.”
“If an online platform wants to have a policy that it will delete certain kinds of tweets, delete certain kinds of users, forbid certain kinds of content, that is in the exercise of their right as a information distributer,” he said. “And the idea that you would create a cause of action that would allow people to sue when that happens is deeply problematic under the First Amendment.”
The bills vary slightly but many allow for civil lawsuits if a social media user is censored over posts having to do with politics or religion, with some proposals allowing for damages of $75,000 for each blocked post. They would apply to companies with millions of users and carve out exemptions for posts that call for violence, entice criminal acts or other similar conduct.
The sponsor of Oklahoma’s version, Republican state Sen. Rob Standridge, said social media posts are being unjustly censored and that people should have a way to challenge the platforms’ actions given their powerful place in American discourse. His bill passed committee in late February on a 5-3 vote, with Democrats opposed.
“This just gives citizens recourse,” he said, adding that the companies “can’t abuse that immunity” given
to them through federal law.
Part of a broad, 1996 federal law on telecoms, Section 230 generally exempts internet companies from being sued over what users post on their sites. The statute, which was meant to promote growth of the internet, exempts websites from being sued for removing content deemed to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable” as long as the companies are acting in “good faith.”
As the power of social media has grown, so has the prospect of government regulation. Several congressional hearings have been held on content moderation, sometimes with Silicon Valley CEOs called to testify. Republicans, and some Democrats, have argued that the companies should lose their liability shield or that Section
230 should be updated to make the companies meet certain criteria before receiving the legal protection.
Twitter and Facebook also have been hounded over what critics have described as sluggish, after-the-fact account suspensions or post takedowns, with liberals complaining they have given too much latitude to conservatives and hate groups.
Trump railed against Section 230 throughout his term in office, well before Twitter and Facebook blocked his access to their platforms after the assault on the Capitol. Last May, he signed a largely symbolic executive order that directed the executive branch to ask independent rule-making agencies whether new regulations could be placed on the companies.
“All of these tech monopolies are going to abuse their
power and interfere in our elections, and it has to be stopped,” he told supporters at the Capitol hours before the riot.
Antigone Davis, global head of safety for Facebook, said these kinds of proposals would make it harder for the site to remove posts involving hate speech, sexualized photos of minors and other harmful content.
“We will continue advocating for updated rules for the internet, including reforms to federal law that protect free expression while allowing platforms like ours to remove content that threatens the safety and security of people across the United States,” she said.
In a statement, Twitter said: “We enforce the Twitter rules judiciously and impartially for everyone on our service — regardless of ideology or political affiliation — and our policies help us to protect the diversity and health of the public conversation.”
Researchers have not found widespread evidence that social media companies are biased against conservative news, posts or materials.
In a February report, New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights called the accusations political disinformation spread by Republicans. The report recommended that social media sites give clear reasoning when they take action against material on their platforms.
“Greater transparency — such as that which Twitter and Facebook offered when they took action against President Trump in January — would help to defuse claims of political bias, while clarifying the boundaries of acceptable user conduct,” the report read.
While the federal law is in place, the state proposals mostly amount to political posturing, said Darrell West, vice president of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a public policy group.
“This is red meat for the base. It’s a way to show conservatives they don’t like being pushed around,” he said. “They’ve seen Trump get kicked off Facebook and Twitter, and so this is a way to tell Republican voters this is unfair and Republicans are fighting for them.”
Izaguirre reported from Lindenhurst, New York
Associated Press coverage of voting rights receives support in part from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
You hear it said all the time. “Mind your own damn business.” It could be the American people’s unwritten motto. Liberals and conservatives alike say it, though often in different contexts.
It has long been a prevailing American sentiment, a direct offshoot of Jefferson’s assertion that the Creator bestowed on the folks “certain inalienable rights” that the authorities are obliged to respect.
In his famous farewell address, George Washington warned the country to avoid getting mixed up in entangling alliances. He was merely saying, in effect, “Hey, let’s mind our own damn business, okay?”
From the very first, Americans have been distrustful of authority, dating back to their experiences with a bossy British Crown. They adopted the mindyour-own-business sentiment as a way of saying to government, “Back off, buster.”
But today minding your own business is sternly regarded by our hallway-monitor elite as uninformed, unsophisticated “isolationism” and, worse yet, as as subversive yahoo-ery poised to spread the virus of fascism.
If you’re wondering what business America has to be mucking around in, say, Djibouti, you’re immediately under suspicion of being one of those America Firsters, ready to trade in your MAGA hat for a black or brown shirt.
Our recent history of futile or disastrous endeavors in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria oddly have only excited the interventionist cravings of our State Department, Pentagon and intelligence community busybodies.
America prevailed in the long Cold War more through restraint, patience and cautious diplomatic engagement — the pattern set by the old general, President Eisenhower — than by meddlesome bluster, the policy preferred by Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and now, evidently, by bombs-away Biden. He unilaterally re-entangled America in Syria by ordering an air attack on an obscure Kataeb Hezbollah waystation in the remote region of Boukami and Qaim, asserting vital U.S. national interests to be hanging in the balance.
Biden’s tough-guy pose is, of course, not all that surprising. In the past, he was an enthusiastic supporter of interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he voiced no objections when Obama — the unhailed “Drone President” for whom he played the vice-presidential backup role — began obliterating suspects and bystanders in Waziristan and other distant environs via Predator-delivered Hellfire missiles.
Reports published by the Council on Foreign Relations and Bureau of Investigative Journalism reckon that the escalating drone spree during the Obama/Biden era unleashed a record 500-plus Predator/Hellfire attacks resulting in more than 3,700 deaths including 300-plus collateral bystanders. (Snopes.com, which revels in debunking overinflated claims, preferably conservative ones, scrutinized these reports and labelled them as “true.”)
A major source of Trump’s woes with the Washington Insiders’ Club was the simpleminded man’s insufficient appreciation of the supposed subtle doctrinal verities of interventionist meddling.
The buffoonish Trump took to wondering out loud — flouting the Insider Club’s sacred etiquette protocols — “Just what the hell are we hoping to accomplish in Afghanistan, anyway? And just how many more decades and dollars and how much more blood is it going to take?” (The count is now up to $2 trillion and 2,400 American lives.)
To nitpick big government’s objective there, and elsewhere, is to fall afoul of ethereal foreign-policy dogma. It is to put yourself in the dangerous spot those old Christian heresies like Monophysitism and Nestorianism did when they persisted in raising bothersome questions about the Trinity.
Interventionist meddling favored by big government and big business today enjoys near complete freedom from democratic interference, in contrast to the days of the military draft.
Today, interventionism’s military volunteers, with stumps where there were once arms and legs, return from distant places all but unnoticed. It’s no longer the conscripted but volunteer military coming back in body bags or as amputees. So Americans are much less inclined to demand of the government, “Hey, what the hell’s the story here?”
With volunteers doing all the sacrificing, it’s far easier today to ignore the real price of these distant, open-ended fools errands with no exit strategies. We are reminded of the cost only during breaks in Fox programming when veterans groups beg for donations to build homes to accommodate handicapped returnees — accommodations the government itself seems disinclined to provide.
Despite America’s cities, small, medium and large, being in a state of advanced decrepitude, America First sentiments are scorned as the resurgence of the Nazi Bund. Rather than fret about the Newarks, Trentons and Camdens dotting the U.S. landscape, the government lavishes its dollars (and/ or munitions) on Baghdad, Kabul and Sana’a. Such obligations, we’re lectured, come with the responsibility of being the Global Leader, even as the government and its big business partners suck up to the Chinese politburo apparatchiks.
Further facilitating our busybody interventions are our drone and manned-bomber technologies. These enable us to rain down destruction on distant targets while putting a safe margin between us and the carnage. If there’s civilian collateral damage, well, who’s to know the gory details, such matters being classified under threat of draconian prosecution?
Government has always been tempted to keep the disgruntled citizenry distracted by interposing the menace of hobgoblins. Not necessarily imaginary ones, mind you — maybe real enough hobgoblins, but ones whose menace is hard to quantify and therefore easy to exaggerate.
Our chief hobgoblin was, for a while, Islamists of the al Qaeda or ISIS variety. Then this foreign hobgoblin was traded in for a domestic one — Donald Trump! Trump’s fabricated and fictionalized “collusion” with Vladimir Putin was a two-fer. It put Trump on the defensive and reinstated Russia to the top foreign hobgoblin spot it had commanded back in the heydays days of the Cold War.
By nearly every logical measurement, autocrat Xi Jinping and his circle of Chicom enforcers and business oligarchs would seem to be our main hobgoblin of concern. But alas too many in the American financial plutocracy have lucrative arrangements with Xi’s tyranny, an amalgamation of Maoist hooey and corporatist hustle, synthesizing the very worst of communism and capitalism.
Additionally, there’s the unseemly fact that certain wellconnected Americans have hit money gushers dealing with the Chinese — for example, ahem, those two white-privileged Yalies, John Kerry’s stepson and Joe Biden’s son.
All of which leaves Russia — down-at-the-heel, frayed-cuffs, has-been Russia — stuck with the role of being our chief hobgoblin. China is off the list. We depend on cheap-labor (or slave labor) China with its industrial coal clouds of global-warming emissions to keep us clothed and shod and supplied with bandages, penicillin and such other products as are needed to fill the shelves of the big box stores.
We also count on China to buy our surplus soy beans and corn and — not least — to be a paying customer for our hightech services, services that fatten Nasdaq bottom lines even as they are adapted to instruments
of surveillance and repression by Xi and his gang. The unpleasant truth is that in capitalist countries such as ours Big Money pays handsomely to look the other way.
In contrast, Stolichnaya aside, Russia supplies us with nothing to speak of and buys nothing from us to speak of. Russia struggles to keep body and soul together even as it tries to shoo protesters away from from Pushkin Square and keep the lid clamped on sinister Kremlin antics.
While China is closing in on America as the world’s No. 1 economy, raggedy, sorry-ass Russia lags far back in the pack. No. 11. Behind Brazil. Behind India. With No. 12 Mexico nipping at its heels. Yet Russia is our favored hobgoblin of choice.
From its earliest days of history, from the 1540s and Ivan IV, possibly even earlier, Russia has been a country insecure about its status. And maybe more so now than ever before. Worn down to all but irrelevant tundra by the ham-handed rule of the Bolshevik commissariat and now by the Putin kleptocracy, insecure Russia sees America pressing taunting alliances right up to its Eastern European doorstep.
NATO, which is to say America, has committed itself, at least on treaty paper, to go to war in defense of — to take just two examples — Slovenia and Slovakia, former turfdoms of the Soviet Union, Eastern European backwaters with combined populations less than New Jersey’s.
How many Americans are eager to take a stand against Rooskies in Ljubljana? How about other potential hotspots, say
Tskhinavali or Sokhumi? Our theoretical, far-flung national interests — interests that Trump, dense and oafish, was never capable of grasping — keep us Deplorables thumbing frantically through the geography books looking up obscure place names.
Only the ultra-sophisticated few supposedly are able to apprehend the nuanced factors that engage our concerns in such remote places as South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And those who worry whether our military aid is egging on a government in Ukraine that’s as hotheaded as it is corrupt are dismissed for being faint of heart. Let Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo go on rusting and rotting. We gotta bail out Kiev!
Meanwhile, our foreign-policy sophisticates — State Department, Pentagon, intelligence community — go on poking a stick at the Russian bear even as they cozy up to the Chinese dragon. With the show trials having put a “pro-Russia” Trump in the dock, Republicans now feel compelled to demonstrate their own anti-Kremlin bona fides, to match the Democrats.
Republicans know full well that their former bellicosity vis-a-vis Russia is going to afford them little protection now that the other party has enthusiastically taken up the odious banner of McCarthyism, with news media cheering that party onward.
To keep up with the related matters, you have to turn to foreign news media. Our own media are too busy monitoring the telltale signs of ubiquitous white supremacy; ferreting out the subversions of farright militia insurgencies, and auditing the “microaggressions” of gender “cisnormativity” against the “sexual nonbinary” community to bother paying attention to other developments.
Other developments, such as the U.S. B-1B Lancer bombers with cruise missiles now based in Norway, a NATO ally that shares its northernmost border with Russia. (A border with a wall, incidentally, aimed at keeping illegal immigrants from entering Norway via Russia).
Gen. Jeff Harrigan, CO of the U.S. Air Force in Europe, was quoted in the (foreign) media as saying the bombers and their air crews and ground maintenance personnel are intended to demonstrate America’s “operational readiness.”
That’s hopefully a far cry from a “Dr. Strangelove” scenario. Still, it does make it all the easier for Vladimir Putin to portray America as a Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper just hankering to drop the big kaboomer.
The B1-B arrangement not only stokes Russia’s historic paranoia — the very result Norway’s foreign policy had previously sought to avoid to the extent possible. The U.S. bombers also are reported (in the foreign media) to be making Norwegians, too, just a tad uneasy.
Meanwhile, it’s not hard to imagine that there would be something akin to mass hysteria in America were news to break that Russian Tu160s with air crews and ground personnel had been based outside of, say, Managua.
Other (foreign ) media reports bring news of America’s Seawolf-class nuclear subs making port calls in the far-north Norwegian city of Tromso, in missile terms just a shout and holler from Russia’s military-laden Murmansk Peninsula. And at the other end of Russia, off the Kola Peninsula, comes yet more (foreign) news of U.S. naval exercises just outside the mangy, surly bear’s neighborhood. (Bear-baiting? With loudspeakers blaring “Nyanya-nya-nya-nya!”?)
As noted, these are times of a resurgent McCarthyism. It is back with a viciousness surpassing even that of the nasty original version in the early 1950s. The original version never succeeded in staging even one impeachment show trial, never mind two.
Out of extreme caution let it be stipulated, therefore, that nothing said here was intended to make a case for Putin’s regime. It was intended only to urge at least a modicum of rational proportionality in dealing with it.
DEAR ABBY » My girlfriend and I call each other horrible, disparaging names as a form of “love.” Recently, I asked her to stop calling me names like that because it was fun at first, but now not so much. For me, it was just too negative.
DEAR NO D-A » No, it is not too much to ask. Jokes can get old and stale, and the name-calling stopped being cute or fun for you a while ago. People who love each other are sensitive to the other person’s feelings and don’t do what your girlfriend is doing. If she persists, it may be time to step back and reevaluate this relationship because her “just being herself” WILL become a turnoff.
DEAR ABBY » My husband of 34 years has really bad table manners. He smacks when he chews, makes gulping noises when he drinks liquids and stuffs huge amounts of food in his mouth. He once swallowed a whole hard-boiled egg all at once and almost choked. It’s gross.
I love him, but his lack of manners is embarrassing, especially when we are invited out or are over at a friend’s house. What can I do?
— Rolling my eyes in
tennessee
DEAR ROLLING » Have you talked to him about this?
If you have, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Hand him a mirror or record a video of him eating so he can see for himself how unappealing he looks when he does this. If that doesn’t persuade him to slow down and take smaller bites, consider putting less food on his plate before serving it. I can’t guarantee this will work, but it’s worth a try.
P.S. A whole egg? OUCH!
DEAR ABBY » After recently having gone through a divorce, my brother has now decided to start a family. He claims he loves her, but I’m afraid she’s taking advantage of him. They are both in their mid-30s and blinded by lust. They plan on marrying “maybe a year from now.”
I don’t know what to think. On the one hand, I’m happy he has moved on and found a new life. On the other hand, I’m afraid for him, knowing he’s vulnerable. How do I cope?
— Bewildered sis in
vermont
DEAR SIS » Your brother is talking about getting married a year from now. Unless he’s putting the cart before the horse by starting a family before the wedding, he seems to be handling things quite well and not rushing into a commitment he can’t get out of. Calm yourself. Let this play out and get to know his girlfriend. If you do, you may find you like her.
Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www. DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.
Abby shares more than 100 of her favorite recipes in two booklets: “Abby’s Favorite Recipes” and “More Favorite Recipes by Dear Abby.” Send your name and mailing address, plus check or money order for $16 (U.S. funds) to: Dear Abby, Cookbooklet Set, P.O. Box 447, Mount Morris, IL 61054-0447. (Shipping and handling are included in the price.)