Life and Times of Ogn Dulk

15 Not Fun Facts About Speaker Mike Johnson https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/house-speaker-mike-johnson-not-fun-facts.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=social_acct&utm_campaign=feed-part Here are some not-very-fun facts we’ve learned about the guy Republicans barely know, but decided to make leader of the House and second in line to the presidency. 1.He masterminded Trump’s election coup. If you’ve learned one unsavory fact about Johnson in recent days, it’s probably that he was a key architect of Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. As New York’s Jonathan Chait explained, Johnson’s work on this front is actually the “primary source of his leadership claim and the central reason he has managed to unify the party.” After publicly flirting with Trump’s voting machine conspiracy theories, Johnson honed in on the idea that the widespread use of mail ballots during the pandemic gave the House GOP an opportunity to make Trump president. Chait wrote: Leaning on his backg...

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Why Israel Is Acting This Way Oct. 14, 2023 An Israeli tank being driven in the desert. Credit...Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/14/opinion/international-world/israel-hamas-war.html2K By Thomas L. Friedman Opinion Columnist Sign up for Your Places: Global Update. All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox. With the Middle East on the cusp of a full-blown ground war, I was thinking on Friday morning about how Israel’s last two major wars have two very important things in common: They were both started by nonstate actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from Gaza now — after Israel had withdrawn from their territories. And they both began with bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150 Israeli civilians, including older peopl...

When Hamas Tells You Who They Are, Believe Them 31The Atlantic by Bruce Hoffman / October 10, 2023 at 02:39PM//keep unread//hide “Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf necessarily read it … But it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there was still time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe.” — William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich How many Israelis, or Jews, or anyone else for that matter, have read the 1988 Hamas Covenant or the revised charter that was issued in 2017? With 36 articles of only a few paragraphs’ length each in the former, and 42 concise statements of general principles and objectives in the latter, both are considerably shorter and more digestible than the 782-page original German-language edition of Mein Kampf. Moreover, unlike Hitler’s seminal work, which was not published in English until March 1939, excell...