Democratic Senator Breaks with Biden, Calls to Condition Israel Aid

In a somewhat surprising shift, one of President Joe Biden’s closest allies in the Senate, Chris Coons, has come out in favor of conditions on U.S. weapons aid to Israel.

Coons made the declaration on CNN, just days after Israel bombed a marked World Central Kitchen aid convoy on Monday night and killed seven aid workers, among them Australian, British, and American citizens. The organization, founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, had coordinated the convoy’s movements with the Israeli military, and its cars were clearly marked.

If Israel conducts an invasion of Rafah “at scale, if they were to drop thousand-pound bombs, and send in a battalion to go after Hamas and make no provisions for civilians or for humanitarian aid, then I would vote to condition aid to Israel,” Coons told anchor Sarah Sidner. 

“I’ve never said that before, I’ve never been here before,” Coons said, stressing his strong support for Israel and pointing out that Congress included an additional $3.3 billion of support for the country in its last appropriations bill.  

Despite Coons’s words, he did make similar comments on CNN in February, when he told Wolf Blitzer that he’d support restricting military aid if Israel conducted a full-scale campaign in Rafah without consideration to civilians or aid. 

Coons’s words follow statements by a number of Democrats suggesting that conditions be placed on aid to Israel. Senator Bernie Sanders said so back in November and, in March, was joined by six other senators in a letter to Biden urging a suspension of military aid to Israel if humanitarian aid was blocked. Last month, Politico reported that even Biden himself was considering such a measure. 

It’s clear that Israel’s war in Gaza and America’s continued support for the country is a political minefield for Biden. It has sharply eroded his popularity, particularly among Muslims and Arab Americans, in key swing states. A policy shift may be the only solution. 

Donald Trump has remade his name and image several times over, morphing from real estate mogul to New York socialite to reality-TV host to the far-right demagogue of a vitriolic national movement. But few people know Trump for his musical inclination. In his down time at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is the one man with the aux cord—and he’s got some interesting hits on rotation.

According to an Axios analysis of Trump’s musical routine at the Florida club, Trump prefers to stick to the same set list. That includes “Hello,” by Lionel Ritchie; “Suspicious Minds,” by Elvis; “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” by James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti; “November Rain,” by Guns N’ Roses; and, ironically, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” by the Rolling Stones.

He also, surprisingly, throws in numbers from two huge and wildly dramatic Broadway musicals: Phantom of the Opera and Jesus Christ Superstar.

But unfortunately for Trump, not all of his favorite artists love him back. Another standby for the GOP presidential pick is Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”—a single he loved so much that he tried to squeeze it into one of his campaign rallies, only to be roundly slapped down by the Irish singer’s estate for thinking of her at all.

“It is no exaggeration to say that Sinéad would have been disgusted, hurt and insulted to have her work misrepresented in this way by someone who she herself referred to as a ‘biblical devil,’” O’Connor’s estate wrote in a missive, ordering him to stop using her art.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a reputation for promoting pseudoscience. But in a recently surfaced interview, Kennedy makes one of his wildest claims yet: that the rise in mass shootings over the past 20 years is due to antidepressants and video games.

During a January interview with Turkish state-owned TRT World, Kennedy claimed that in the past 20 years in the United States, “there’s been no per capita increase in the number of guns we have in this country.

He argued that other causes needed to be studied, such as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), commonly used as antidepressants, and video games. Kennedy also claimed that the National Institutes of Health hasn’t been allowed to study the cause of gun violence in America since 1996.

Kennedy’s information on the number of guns in America isn’t true. In the past 20 years, gun manufacturing and imports have sharply increased, matching the rise in gun deaths. As far as the NIH being allowed to study the cause of gun violence, it appears that Kennedy’s information is out of date.

In 1996, Congress did pass the Dickey Amendment, which prohibited using any federal funding to “advocate or promote gun control.” The law effectively banned research on gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and in 2011, Congress amended the law to also include the NIH. But in 2019, Congress approved $25 million in funding specifically for the NIH and the CDC to research gun violence, and clarified that the Dickey Amendment didn’t specifically ban gun research.

Results from newer, federally funded studies are starting to come back. Last year, Stanford researchers looked at medical studies for connections between video games and gun violence and found “that video games do not cause violence, can substantially lower stigma and barriers to access, and hold the potential to inject wellness into our everyday lives.”

Kennedy’s views on vaccines and medicine are alarming beyond his stances on guns. He’s claimed that polluted water is making children transgender, that China and the U.S. are developing ethnic bioweapons designed to target certain races, and that WiFi causes cancer, and he has compared mask mandates to Nazi experiments. His running mate, Nicole Shanahan, has similarly disturbing views.

A stalwart of the Republican Party went scorched earth on Donald Trump’s promise to pardon January 6 rioters, suggesting to his fellow conservatives that Trump’s staunch defense of the “sons a bitches” should disqualify him from the presidency.

In an interview on MSNBC’s The Beat on Wednesday, Karl Rove, a senior adviser to President George W. Bush, tore into Trump’s decision to fight for people charged and convicted for committing acts of violence at the U.S. Capitol. Trump warmly refers to people who attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results as “hostages.”

“And what those people did when they violently attacked the Capitol, in order to stop a constitutionally mandated meeting of the Congress to accept the results of the Electoral College, is a stain on our history,” Rove said. “And every one of those sons a bitches who did that, we oughta find them, try them, and send them to jail.”

“And one of the critical mistakes made in this campaign is that Donald Trump has now said, ‘I’m going to pardon those people because they’re hostages.’ No, they’re not. They’re thugs. There were people—some of them had automatic weapons at a hotel in Virginia hoping to be able to be called up,” Rove continued, describing the ensuing chaos as the rioters ransacked Congress, hunted Nancy Pelosi, and chanted “kill them all.”

“And so, why Trump has done this is beyond me. If he had said, ‘You know what? I trust our jury system, I trust law enforcement, anybody who assaulted the Capitol oughta be’—I mean, he said it once or twice, but now he’s appearing in a video with people who assaulted police officers with an intent to take the Capitol by force.”

But Rove says there’s a lesson in all this for Democrats too. The Republican Party’s failure to hold their demagogue leader accountable for January 6 should not stop the liberal party from making it a centerpiece of their campaigns against him.

“If they were smart, they’d take the January 6 and go hard at it,” Rove told MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “And they would say, ‘He wants to pardon these people who attacked our Capitol.’ I worked in that building as a young man. To me, the Congress of the United States is one of the great examples of the strength of our democracy and a jewel of the Constitution.”

The Alabama state Supreme Court ruling in February that declared frozen embryos are children, effectively ending in vitro fertilization procedures in the state, is still wreaking havoc, despite recent state legislation that was supposed to protect the practice. 

Infirmary Health, a health care system in the city of Mobile, will stop IVF procedures at the end of 2024 due to litigation connected to the ruling, the Alabama Reflector reported Wednesday. The clinic, which was one of the health care groups sued in the initial case, faced even more lawsuits after the court ruling. 

“In order to assist families in Alabama and along the Gulf Coast who have initiated the process of IVF therapy in the hopes of starting a family, Mobile Infirmary has temporarily resumed IVF treatments at the hospital,” Infirmary Health said in a statement. “However, in light of litigation concerns surrounding IVF therapy, Mobile Infirmary will no longer be able to offer this service to families after December 31, 2024.”  

In March, Alabama’s legislature passed a law that extended criminal and civil immunity to IVF clinics for their work. But the legislation does not address when life begins, a sticking point that Infirmary Health noted at the time. Since not all embryos survive the IVF process, that could still leave room for lawsuits against the health care providers.

The Alabama court ruling has had a massive ripple effect. Donald Trump criticized the court ruling, Representative Nancy Mace put forward an inconsequential, nonbinding bill claiming to support the procedure, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been put on the spot regarding why Republicans haven’t decisively acted to support IVF.

Just last week, a Democrat, Marilyn Lands, won a special election for the Alabama state House in a deep-red seat. Lands ran on protecting access to abortion and IVF.

The ruling and ensuing events are a warning to other states regarding both health care and political upheaval. Democrats are attempting to capitalize on the pro-IVF momentum, ensuring that the treatment will remain an issue in November.