Tag Archives: WorldNews

McCarthy on QAnon: ‘I don’t even know what it is’

Pants on fire 2.0! If he did not know what it is, why did he denounce by name last year?

mccarthykevin_012121gn2.jpg

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) claimed to not know what the QAnon conspiracy theory entails on Wednesday during a press conference, despite his own disavowal of the theory by name last year.Speakin…

US to cut off support for Saudi-led operations in Yemen amid humanitarian crisis

4995.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=8

National security adviser Jake Sullivan says US will also freeze arms sales to Saudi Arabia

The US has announced an end to its support for Saudi-led offensive operations in Yemen, citing the role the bombing campaign has had in creating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The announcement was made by the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in a preview of a speech Joe Biden is due to deliver at the state department.

Continue reading…

Kevin McCarthy’s remarkable flip-flop from “there’s no place for QAnon” to “I don’t even know what it is”

The Qowardly traitor to himself and everyone else…
US House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
McCarthy during his weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on January 21. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

The House Republican leader defends Marjorie Taylor Greene by insulting everyone’s intelligence.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy claimed during a Fox News interview last August that “there’s no place for QAnon in the Republican Party.” But it turns out there is a spot for the conspiracy theory that former President Donald Trump is fighting against a satanic pedophilic cabal run by prominent Democrats — and it’s on the House Education and Labor Committee.

During a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, McCarthy’s caucus decided not only to not sanction QAnon-embracing first-term Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — who in addition to QAnon has endorsed the murder of the House speaker and was filmed harassing a survivor of a school shooting she claimed was a staged attack — but is going forward with plans to place her on the education and budget committees.

Following Wednesday’s meeting, McCarthy said during a press conference that Greene made remarks “denouncing QAnon” — something she has not done publicly — then added, “I don’t even know what [QAnon] is.”

McCarthy proclaiming ignorance about a conspiracy theory that played a crucial role in motivating the January 6 insurrection that left five people dead is hard to believe, given that he’s had to repeatedly weigh in on the topic. But it’s indicative of how the theory has moved toward the mainstream of Republican politics in recent months — and the tacit acceptance of mainstream leaders of the party.

McCarthy said during the aforementioned Fox News interview that QAnon had no place in the party. But during the closing months of the 2020 campaign, he and other Republican leaders (including Trump) did nothing to ostracize Greene and other QAnon-backing Republicans. Then, after Greene and Lauren Boebert, another Republican who has expressed support for the conspiracy theory, won seats in Congress, McCarthy told reporters last November that “both of them have denounced” QAnon — something neither of them has done publicly.

Watch the evolution of McCarthy’s QAnon statements:

Kevin McCarthy went from saying “there is no place for QAnon in the Republican Party to “I don’t even know what [QAnon] is” in the span of six months pic.twitter.com/Hr9cwSHhxd

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 4, 2021

It’s not entirely clear exactly what Greene told her House Republican colleagues during Wednesday’s meeting. Politico reported that she “apologized to the conference for her past rhetoric about 9/11 and school shootings being hoaxes and other QAnon-adjacent conspiracies that she previously peddled,” but the Hill says she “defended her comments that past school shootings were staged by stating that she had personal experience with a school shooting.” One thing we do know from all reports about the meeting, however, is that her comments earned a standing ovation from some members.

Regardless of what she said in private, in public Greene has been completely unrepentant about recent revelations regarding her activities both on social media and in public, tweeting last Thursday that she “won’t back down” and will “never apologize,” and using the firestorm created by her comments as a fundraising opportunity.

I won’t back down. I’ll never apologize. And I’ll always keep fighting for the people.

For me, it’s America First!!!

Any elected politician that isn’t putting America First doesn’t deserve their position or the people’s trust.

Cont’d…

— Marjorie Taylor Greene (@mtgreenee) January 30, 2021

McCarthy’s approach stands in contrast to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who on Monday released a scathing statement that doesn’t mention Greene by name but makes no doubt that he views her professed beliefs as “cancer for the Republican Party and our country.”

“Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country,” McConnell said, before going on to mention a few of the many conspiracy theories she’s embraced. “Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality.”

The problem for McCarthy is that QAnon is more popular with the Republican base than people would like to believe — a YouGov poll conducted last month found that 30 percent of Republican voters respond positively to the conspiracy theory — so by denouncing it and banishing Greene from committees, the House Republican leader risks alienating a significant portion of the GOP base.

So instead of taking a firm stand against the types of conspiracy theories that motivated bands of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol last month, McCarthy is opting for feigned ignorance, while at the same time trying to weaponize the issue by pushing false equivalences in a statement he released Wednesday between QAnon believers and Democrats like Reps. Maxine Waters and Ilhan Omar.

House Democrats, meanwhile, are moving forward with a floor vote to do what Republicans will not and strip Greene of her committee assignments. During a hearing on Wednesday, rules committee chair Jim McGovern (D-MA) acknowledged the unprecedented nature of the vote Democrats are planning to force, but said “if the new precedent here is that a member of this House is calling for assassinations … if that’s the standard that we remove people from committees, I’m fine with that.”

‘It’s Embarrassing’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Tests the Limits of Some Voters

In her Georgia district, voters saw Ms. Greene as a conservative voice that would be impossible to ignore. Now the revelation of past social media posts has unsettled some who backed her.

In her Georgia district, voters saw Ms. Greene as a conservative voice that would be impossible to ignore. Now the revelation of past social media posts has unsettled some who backed her.

President Biden’s early immigration overhaul has overlooked one growing problem: A massive court backlog

Doubt it has been overlooked – it was ignored by Trump for 4 years and will be fixed as soon as possible…
Immigration detainees wait at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Texas.

Advocacy groups and immigration attorneys warn that Biden’s overall success could be limited if he’s unable to tackle another problem that has been growing for years: the ever-growing case backlog in federal immigration courts.

Credit: Eric Gay via AP POOL

In his first weeks in office, President Joe Biden has made his administration’s approach on immigration policy clear: reviewing or replacing four years of his predecessor’s hardline approaches.

In less than three weeks in office, Biden has sent to Congress a massive immigration reform bill that would provide a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, issued executive orders to refortify the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and ordered a review of interior enforcement policies and the controversial Migrant Protection Protocols.

Advocacy groups and immigration attorneys have cheered those early steps, but warn that Biden’s overall success could be limited if he’s unable to tackle another problem that has been growing for years: the ever-growing case backlog in federal immigration courts. Without addressing the backlog, they say, Biden’s mission of achieving a fair and equitable immigration system won’t be complete.

“The immigration courts and the backlog are not a physical border wall, but it is a paper border wall,” said Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at the Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which uses Freedom of Information Act requests to track immigration court cases. “It’s one of the ways to keep people from participating in society in a full and complete way.”

As of Jan. 1, there were 1.3 million cases pending before the country’s immigration courts, including about 360,000 asylum cases, according to TRAC data. That’s more than double the 542,411 cases pending when Donald Trump took office in 2017. Texas courts have about 162,000 pending cases, the second-largest total behind California’s 187,000. The backlog includes people from more than 200 countries.

The backlog means that asylum seekers and other undocumented immigrants often have to wait years between hearings. In El Paso courts, there was an average wait time of 715 days — or just under two years — between when a person was given a notice to appear before a judge and the next hearing. And that’s a relatively quick turnaround: The average was nearly four and a half years in Dallas courts and 4.8 years in Houston courts, according to the TRAC data.

The backlog grew under Trump despite the former president adding hundreds of immigration judges. But that wasn’t enough to contain the “tsunami of new cases filed in court” under the Trump administration’s enforcement-heavy approach, a TRAC report states.

Leaders from both parties, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have supported appointing even more immigration judges. But simply adding more judges misses the point, said Gregory Chen, director of government affairs for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Instead, he said judges need more freedom to use their discretion to remove or dismiss cases from their dockets that involve people the federal government doesn’t deem a security or flight risk, including thousands of cases that have been pending for years.

There are also 460,000 cases in the current backlog involving immigrants who could qualify for legal status, Chen said.

“Just adding more judges doesn’t make the system more fair or independent,” he said. “[The Department of Justice] is not a judicial body, and so what we’ve seen happen is the law enforcement and immigration enforcement priorities have interfered with the court’s independent operation and ability to be impartial.”

There is also growing pressure on Biden to address the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who have been placed in the Migrant Protection Protocols program, which sends most asylum seekers back to Mexico as they wait for their asylum hearings in American courts. As of last month, more than 70,400 people had been enrolled in the program.

Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order requiring Department of Homeland Security officials to “promptly review and determine whether to terminate or modify the program.” Advocates are calling for the outright end to the program, which they say Biden promised on the campaign trail.

“There’s nothing to review about a policy that leads to people getting beaten, tortured and kidnapped regularly, as they wait like sitting ducks on the southern border,” said Erika Andiola, the chief advocacy officer for Texas-based Refugee and Immigrant Center or Education and Legal Services, or RAICES. “Everyone impacted by it over the past two years should be welcomed into our country with open arms.”

Because none of Biden’s early executive orders mentions the court backlog, Kocher said he hopes Biden’s proposed immigration bill addresses it.

“Biden has been in office for less than a month, so it is too early to draw conclusions about where the court backlog fits within his priorities,” he said. “The only thing we know for certain is, these 1.3 million people must be taken into account or the integrity and legitimacy of our immigration system will continue to be undermined and mired in dysfunction.”

14263216.gif