News 7/17/21 in News stories

All are clips from Washington Post articles

Biz Markie, whose ‘Just a Friend’ climbed the charts in 1989, dies at 57

Biz Markie, who was born Marcel Hall, had a hit with “Just a Friend,” about a would-be romance with a groupie. Propelled by its unabashedly off-key chorus, the single became a singalong staple and was used in television shows and commercials. “I asked people to sing the part,” he said, “and nobody showed up at the studio, so I did it myself.” ~WP

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U.S. judge blocks new applicants to ‘Dreamers’ program that protects immigrants who arrived illegally as children

The ruling allows immigrants protected through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals to keep their status. But U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen called DACA an “illegally implemented program” and blocked the government from issuing new permits to first-time applicants. More than 600,000 undocumented immigrants rely on the 2012 federal program to work legally and avoid deportation. ~WP

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U.S.-Mexico border apprehensions for the fiscal year surpassed 1 million in June

More than 1 million migrants have been taken into custody crossing the U.S.-Mexico border this fiscal year, federal officials said Friday, a milestone last reached in 2006. Many of those crossing have tried to enter the country multiple times, officials said, and are putting themselves in danger by attempting the journey during the searing summer months. ~WP

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With the Taliban making big gains in Afghanistan and some analysts predicting a “who lost the war?” debate, former president George W. Bush warned this week women and girls there will suffer “unspeakable harm” after the American withdrawal.

In an interview with Germany’s Deutsche-Welle, Bush also predicted Afghans who worked with U.S. forces are “just going to be left behind to be slaughtered by these very brutal people, and it breaks my heart.”

“The consequences are going to be unbelievably bad,” said the former president, who sent troops to Afghanistan nearly 20 years ago to hunt down Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks.

Bush is almost certainly right about the fate of women and girls under the Taliban, though at least some of the Afghans who partnered with America over the past two decades are on track to get evacuated.

But President Biden has rebutted those criticisms, and the growing chorus of hawks warning the American withdrawal is a mistake. He most notably did so in what we might call a “prebuttal” in a February 2020 interview with CBS News.

We’ll get to that question and answer session in a moment. It’s a fascinating look at Biden’s attitude toward Afghanistan and how the president approaches the question of when to send American men and women into combat.

First, though, the news out of war-ravaged Afghanistan this week all seems to be foretelling the same dark future.
There was the chilling video of Taliban fighters executing 22 Afghan commandos who were trying to surrender. NATO ally France told its citizens to quit the country, chartered a special July 17 flight to evacuate them, and warned there would be no others. Taliban fighters took control of an important border crossing into Pakistan (whether they still hold it is under dispute), after seizing others linking Afghanistan to Iran, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. And the Islamist militia grabbed ever more control over territory and infrastructure.

All of this has happened since Biden defended the American withdrawal — which is quite popular — in a July 8 speech, his first public remarks on the subject since he announced in April U.S. forces were pulling out.
My colleagues Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Dan Lamothe, and John Wagner reported:

“ ‘Let me ask those who want us to stay: How many more — how many thousands more Americans, daughters and sons — are you willing to risk?’ Biden said from the East Room of the White House, standing in front of the flags of the U.S. military branches. ‘I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome.’ ”

(The language was reminiscent of Biden climate envoy John Kerry’s 1971 rebuttal to politicians who urged a continued presence in Vietnam: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”)

White House aides also note that staying beyond the target withdrawal date set by President Donald Trump could have led Taliban fighters to target Americans, about 2,400 of whom have died in Afghanistan over 20 years of war.
Biden voted in favor of the Afghan war in September 2001. But by the time President Barack Obama was weighing a troop “surge” there, he was a committed skeptic. My colleague Greg Jaffe reported in February 2020 that the future president argued against the surge in a memo he wrote in longhand and sent to Obama via fax over Thanksgiving weekend in 2009.

Which gets us to Biden’s Feb. 23, 2020 interview with CBS.
Biden confirmed a report in The Washington Post he had declared in an internal administration debate he would not send his son to Afghanistan to fight for women’s rights.

“What I meant was there’s a thousand places we could go to deal with injustice,” he said. “The question is is America’s vital self-interest at stake or the vital self-interest of one of our allies at stake?”

Anticipating a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, “Face The Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked Biden “don’t you bear some responsibility for the outcome if the Taliban ends up back in control and women end up losing the rights?”

“No I don’t,” Biden replied. “Look, are you telling me that we should … go to war with China because what they’re doing to the Uyghurs, a million Uyghurs, out in the West in concentration camps? Is that what you’re saying to me?”

Biden continued: “Do I bear responsibility? Zero responsibility. The responsibility I have is to protect America’s national self-interest and not put our women and men in harm’s way to try to solve every single problem in the world by use of force. That’s my responsibility as president. And that’s what I’ll do as president.” ~ WP

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This weekend is set to bring the summer’s fourth major heat wave.

“Another weekend is set to bring another string of potentially record-breaking high temperatures to another part of the Western United States,”the New York Times reports. “This time, it is the northern Rockies and the High Plains, including parts of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah, that will be under a high-pressure system known as a heat dome, according to forecasts. That will set temperatures in those states soaring through the weekend and early next week, peaking on Monday.” ~WP

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“The health and climate consequences of the American food system cost three times as much as the food itself,”

by Laura Reiley: “The U.S. spends $1.1 trillion a year on food. But when the impacts of the food system on different parts of our society — including rising health care costs, climate change and biodiversity loss — are factored in, the bill is around three times that, according to a report by the Rockefeller Foundation, a private charity that funds medical and agricultural research.”

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“A man in a gladiator costume filmed the Jan. 6 mob for his mother, feds say: ‘Here comes the riot police, Mom,’ ”

by Katie Shepherd: “When Nathan Wayne Entrekin joined a crowd of rioters that pushed its way into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, he donned a Roman gladiator costume over jean shorts and a T-shirt despite the winter chill, federal investigators say. As the mob chanted, Entrekin allegedly filmed videos on his cellphone, narrating the action for his mother, who was back in Arizona. ‘Wow, Mom. I wish you were here with me,’ Entrekin said in one video, according to a criminal complaint. ‘It’s really exciting in here. It’s joyful and it’s sad at the same time. We can’t let Biden … be our president. We can’t … there’s no way.’ ~WP

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“Los Angeles County reimposes indoor mask mandate for all as coronavirus cases rise nationwide,”

by Fenit Nirappil: “Los Angeles County announced Thursday it will revive an indoor mask mandate applying to everyone regardless of vaccination status in response to rising coronavirus cases and hospitalizations linked to the highly transmissible delta variant. The order to take effect late Saturday in the county of 10 million people marks the most dramatic reversal of the country’s reopening this summer as experts fear a new wave of the virus.”