Clio calls.

June 6th, 1944, it was a day, The Longest Day according to some because (of course) advance units were already in motion on June 5th.

I duly bemoan the sad state of Historical Pedagogy (minds out of the gutter folks, could have used “instruction” but I like to be obnoxious) that allows the Atlantic Powers (I’m looking at you England and France too) to imagine that it was in any way (except one I shall mention at the end) pivotal and critical to the defeat of the European Axis Powers.

Nazi Germany was already beaten and had been for years.

Comrades! Allow me to send you greetings from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Worker’s Paradise! Each Independent Republic is a Representative Democracy of the Proletariat with a delegation in the United Federation. Political Parties? There is only one Political Party, just the way Madison and Jefferson intended.

WE ARE NOT RUSSIA!

Perish the thought.

The Red Steamroller

On June 22nd, 1941, Germany launched an attack on the Soviet Union. Poorly organized and led after recent purges and armed with slightly inferior equipment for the same reason, the Soviets suffered defeat after defeat as the Germans seemed able to attack at will.

The thing is though, the USSR is big, really big, and there are many distractions. The German offensive ground to a halt in the Fall rain and mud.

On December 2nd a German Combat Engineer Patrol reached Khimki. Scouts claimed they could see the Domes of the Kremlin. It was the closest they would get.

On December 5th the Red Army began the Moscow Strategic Offensive Operation.

What the Soviets had learned from their chief spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, in mid-September, was that Japan was committing a maximum effort to it’s Offensive on the United States and Britain in the Pacific (the action actually started with the Bombardment of Kota Bharu, 50 minutes before Pearl Harbor). They took 18 divisions, 1,700 tanks, and over 1,500 aircraft away from Siberian border where they had been held in Reserve (Japanese thrashed spineless corrupt Romanov oppressors in 1905) and transferred them West.

The Germans were taken by complete surprise and hampered by exceptionally low temperatures. In late December the Luftwaffe was able to achieve at least parity with the Red Army Air Force after ceding control of the Air for weeks. German lines stabilized about 62 – 155 miles behind their initial positions. Operations ceased around January 7th, 1942.

There were more purges, German ones, and Hitler assumed direct control of the Military, bypassing his General Staff which was populated by reliable yes-men.

Here’s another date- February 2nd, 1943. That was the end of Stalingrad, a place of no strategic importance whatsoever until Hitler decided to make a statement and lost a reinforced Army or two. Where are my Legions Varus? To be fair Hitler was no more strategically misdirected than the norm (consider Churchill’s “soft underbelly”), though he was remarkably persistent which is not an advantage if you have limited resources.

How about August 23rd, 1943? That was the end of the Battle of Kursk. Germany was never again able to mount an Offensive Campaign in the East.

June 6th, 1944? Important to be sure but mostly in that Conan sense-

What is best in life?

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear their lamentations.

The Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation began on January 12th, 1945 with the Vistula–Oder Offensive. By April 30th Hitler was dead and by May 3rd the German garrison surrendered.

Had Operation Overlord failed Germany still would have fallen.

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

Pivotal

I did mention there was a way in which the Invasion at Normandy was pivotal and that is this-

Without it you would have Vodka and Borscht as well as Vin and Baguettes in the Café on the Champs-Élysées.

Spring is sprung.

Dandelions

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

The D-Day invasion of World War II; Israel invades Lebanon to drive out Yasser Arafat; Remains of fugitive Nazi doctor Josef Mengele exhumed in Brazil; First drive-in theater opens in Camden, N.J.

“They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt

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D-day 75th anniversary: ceremonies in Normandy – live news

Follow live updates as world leaders join veterans to mark the 75th anniversary of the D-day landings in Normandy

Pope: ‘peace is based on respect for each person’

Aung San Suu Kyi finds common ground with Orbán over Islam

Hannah Ellis-Petersen

Thu 6 Jun 2019 06.12 BST

From her failure to speak out against ethnic cleansing to imprisoning journalists, the reputation of Aung San Suu Kyi in the west has taken a battering in recent months.

But the leader of Myanmar has found a new ally in far-right, staunchly anti-immigrant Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.

In a rare trip to Europe, state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel peace prize laureate who was once the figurehead of the fight for democracy in Myanmar, met Orbán in Budapest. There, the two leaders found common ground on the subject of immigration and Islam .

Sudan: Security forces ‘hiding corpses’ of protesters dumped in the Nile and ‘raping doctors’ amid brutal crackdown

Khartoum now a ‘ghost town gripped by fear’ after 101 people killed in surge of violence

Bel TrewMiddle East Correspondent @beltrew

The bodies of dozens of slain protesters have been pulled from the Nile in Khartoum and taken to an unknown location, opposition activists have claimed, after 101 people were killed across Sudan during a deadly crackdown on pro-democracy rallies.

Feared paramilitary group the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) allegedly retrieved at least 40 corpses from the river on Tuesday, according to Sudan Doctors’ Committee, who organised the main sit-in in the capital that was cleared the day before.

Protesters separately told The Independent they witnessed the paramilitaries hurling corpses into the river in the capital after opening fire on civilians.

Plastic Surgery and BotoxThe Pressure to Be Beautiful in South Korea

Lips plumped up during the lunch break, implants for a rounder head: Cosmetic surgery is extremely common in South Korea, even among men. The pressure to look good in the country is immense.

By Katharina Graça Peters and Suhwa Lee (photos), in Seoul

It’s been a few years since Park Jae Hun has had a relationship, but he hopes that’s all about to change. After all, he’s been doing what he can to improve his prospects.

He’s already had surgery on his eyelids and nose. Now the contours of his chin will be enhanced, and the corners of his mouth corrected to point upwards, so he’ll look friendlier. Park says that he’d like to have a beautiful girlfriend, adding: “Maybe this will give me better chances.”

Park, 29, is sitting in a café in the South Korean capital Seoul. His hair is thinning, so he sometimes wears a hairpiece, as he is today. After coffee, he’ll head over to the clinic for his appointment.

Syrian Kurds repatriate 8 people from IS group families to US

Two American women and six children from families of suspected Islamic State (IS) group members were repatriated to the United States on Wednesday in the latest transfers from a crowded camp in Syria.

Staggering homeless count stuns LA officials

By Maeve Reston, CNN

Updated 0435 GMT (1235 HKT) June 6, 2019

Look, a Tariff is a Tax placed on Consumers and Businesses of the Country imposing the Tariff as a disincentive to purchase Imports from a particular provider. By definition. Now there are other offensive (especially to Free Traders) economic actions that one can take like Blockades (depriving someone of a necessary Input) and Embargos (refusing to sell your goods to a specific customer, like China is going to do to us with Rare Earths if we provoke it), but those are not Taxes.

A tariff is a Tax.

Now Republicans, what do they hate? That’s right, they hate Taxes.

GOP lawmakers warn White House they’ll try to block Trump’s Mexico tariffs
By Erica Werner, Seung Min Kim, Damian Paletta, and Mary Beth Sheridan, Wasington Post
June 4, 2019

Defiant Republican senators warned Trump administration officials Tuesday they were prepared to block the president’s effort to impose tariffs on Mexican imports, threatening to assemble a veto-proof majority to mount their most direct confrontation with the president since he took office.

During a closed-door lunch on Capitol Hill, at least a half-dozen senators spoke in opposition to the tariffs President Trump intends to levy next week in an attempt to force Mexico to limit Central American migration to the United States. No senator spoke in support, according to multiple people present who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting.

The lawmakers told officials from the White House and Justice Department they probably had the Senate votes they needed to take action on the tariffs, even if that meant overriding a veto.

“There is not much support in my conference for tariffs — that’s for sure,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). He said senators hope that negotiations with Mexico will be “fruitful” and that the tariffs will not happen. Most GOP senators strongly oppose tariffs because they view them as taxes on Americans.

The contentious lunch meeting occurred just hours after Trump, during a news conference in London, reiterated his intention to impose the tariffs next week and said it would be “foolish” for Republican senators to try to stop him.

“Mexico shouldn’t allow millions of people to try and enter our country, and they could stop it very quickly and I think they will,” Trump said at a news conference alongside British Prime Minister Theresa May. “And if they won’t, we’re going to put tariffs on. And every month those tariffs go from 5 percent to 10 percent to 15 percent to 20 and then to 25 percent.”

The escalating tension between Trump and Senate Republicans came on the eve of a critical meeting at the White House on Wednesday between U.S. and Mexican officials, led by Vice President Pence and including an array of top officials from the Mexican government. The goal on the Mexican side is to head off the tariffs — the country sends 80 percent of its exports to the United States and counts it as its top trading partner.

But Mexican officials have been confused about what precisely the White House is demanding in exchange for the tariffs to be withdrawn, and White House officials will not say exactly what Trump wants. Some White House officials believe the meeting will mark the beginning of earnest negotiations that will pick up in intensity after the tariffs have been in place for a while. But many GOP senators view the imposition of the tariffs as unacceptable, and even as they hoped for a positive outcome from Wednesday’s talks they weighed their options for stopping the levies.

The exact process for a vote to block the tariffs remained unclear, but the basic scenario arises from the national emergency Trump declared at the southern border earlier this year to get more money for his border wall. Imposition of tariffs on all Mexican goods requires a legal justification, and administration officials say the existing emergency declaration could provide the basis for that, although it’s also possible Trump would declare a new emergency.

But the law that provides for presidential emergency declarations also allows Congress to vote to overturn them. When Trump declared the border emergency earlier this year, Congress voted to overturn it, but Trump vetoed the measure and Congress failed to override the veto.

This time, opponents of Trump’s tariffs say they have enough support in the Senate to override a veto. If so, it would be the first successful veto override vote in the Trump presidency and a striking defeat for Trump — even if the House ultimately sustains the president’s veto. A two-thirds vote is required in each chamber to override a veto, and Republicans in the House have shown scant interest in defying the president.
…
Afterward, some Republicans emerged from the lunch convinced that opposition to Trump’s proposed levies on Mexico runs so deep that GOP senators could produce a veto-proof margin on a disapproval resolution.

“I sure do,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said when asked whether he thought there would be at least 20 Republican votes to reject Trump’s tariffs on Mexico — which would constitute a veto-proof margin in combination with Democratic opposition. “There’s just a weariness of tariffs as the only tool in the tool kit that gets used.”

But senators were uncertain after the lunch about how Trump would proceed if he does impose the tariffs, and his actions will dictate their response.
…
Trump shocked U.S. lawmakers and Mexican leaders last week by announcing that he would impose a 5 percent tariff on all goods imported from Mexico on June 10, and then increase the levies each month if Mexico doesn’t crack down on migrants.

GOP lawmakers warned White House officials that the tariffs could imperil the chances of passing an overhaul of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, but Trump has remained undeterred.

Trump’s tone as he addressed reporters in London contrasted with that of Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, who said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday that he thought his country had an 80 percent chance of reaching a deal.

Mexico has undertaken a vigorous offensive to avert the U.S. tariffs. Mexico’s economic minister, its agriculture minister and others are meeting with U.S. counterparts, and delegations of Mexican lawmakers and business leaders traveled to Washington to warn against the tariffs.

This may or may not turn out to be a big deal, but there is no doubt that the Tariff concept itself is deeply stupid (also Bigoted and Racist).

Yeah, been itching to do some serious Biden Bashing.

Plagiarism charge hits Biden climate change plan
By ZACK COLMAN and NATASHA KORECKI, Politico
06/04/2019

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign came under fire on Tuesday for putting out a $1.7 trillion climate change plan that appeared to copy a handful of passages from previously published documents.

The incident recalled the plagiarism incident that helped drive Biden from the 1988 presidential race, though Biden’s campaign team called the latest episode an error that was corrected.

“Several citations, some from sources cited in other parts of the plan, were inadvertently left out of the final version of the 22 page document,” a Biden spokesperson said in an email. “As soon as we were made aware of it, we updated to include the proper citations.”

Josh Nelson, vice president at the progressive group CREDO, first flagged the similarities on Twitter. The text contained the same language about technology designed to capture and store power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions as documents previously released by the nongovernmental organization Center for Climate and Energy Solutions as well as the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of environmental and labor groups.
…
Charges of plagiarism plagued Biden’s presidential campaign in 1987, eventually leading to his dropping out of the race. At least part of that scandal erupted when Biden appeared to lift lines of a speech from British Labor leader Neil Kinnock. Des Moines-Register political reporter David Yepsen, who was among the reporters to receive an opposition research video tape at the time showing Biden’s remarks laid out beside Kinnock, recalled the scandal then, which he described as explosive.

“Someone on the campaign really screwed this up and it’s the kind of sideshow story he doesn’t need. It raises all these bad things out of the past,” Yepsen said Tuesday. “Everybody who is working for Joe Biden should understand this bit of our history and be particularly mindful of not making that same mistake again.”

Biden rolled out his climate policy on Tuesday after facing weeks of criticism from the Democratic Party’s left flank for reportedly considering a plan to strike a “middle ground” on the issue. It won praise from environmental groups who welcomed its call to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and ban oil and gas drilling on public lands. Biden also said he would reject campaign contributions from fossil fuel executives and corporations.

While scientists, including the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, envision a massive build out of carbon capture technology to meet ambitious climate targets, many in the progressive wing are skeptical of the technology. They see carbon capture as a way to extend the lifeline of coal, oil and natural gas and delay a transition to less-polluting forms of energy that don’t rely on extracting fuel.

Nelson told POLITICO the carbon capture section of Biden’s plan looked familiar. He said he’s spent the past several years advocating against coal-fired power.

“As soon as I read it, it did not sound like language that would come from a presidential campaign and it sounded more like something that could come from a coal industry trade group or a coal company directly,” Nelson said in a phone interview.

More on why I hate Joe “Barely a Democrat” Biden and the Democrats who love him.

Cody’s Showdy

Oh… you want “electable” because actual Democratic ideas are too scary.

Did you miss me?

A Love Letter to Detroit – Listener

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy assassinated in Los Angeles; The Six-Day War erupts in the Mideast; Birth of the Marshall Plan; First reported AIDS cases in the U.S.; Former President Ronald Reagan dies.

Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.

Bill Moyers

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Australia reels from worst rampage killing in decades for a country thought to have solved this issue

By James Griffiths, CNN

Updated 0627 GMT (1427 HKT) June 5, 2019

Nearly half of all child deaths in Africa stem from hunger, study shows

Almost 60 million children deprived of food despite continent’s economic growth, in what is ‘fundamentally a political problem’

Saeed Kamali Dehghan

Wed 5 Jun 2019 07.00 BST

One in three African children are stunted and hunger accounts for almost half of all child deaths across the continent, an Addis Ababa-based thinktank has warned.

In an urgent call for action, a study by the African Child Policy Forum said that nearly 60 million children in Africa do not have enough food despite the continent’s economic growth in recent years.

A child dies every three seconds globally due to food deprivation – 10,000 children every day – but although figures show an improvement in child hunger at a global level, it is getting worse in some parts of Africa, where the problem is largely a question of political will.

D-Day: Is joint commemoration possible?

June 6, 1944 marked the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime. 170,000 soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy in the biggest landing maneuver in history. Looking back, every nation involved sees it differently.

Just 15 years ago, Gerhard Schröder became the first German chancellor to participate in a D-Day memorial service. It marked 60 years since Allied troops captured the beachhead to Europe, suffering heavy losses, to liberate the continent from Nazism. Ten years later, Angela Merkel was the second chancellor to attend the ceremony. Merkel will again be present for the commemoration of the 75th anniversary; it won’t be in Normandy this time, but in the British city of Portsmouth, where a large number of the landing troops embarked on June 5, 1944.

These days, it is almost taken for granted that, whenever the victorious powers celebrate the last major turning point in the course of World War Two in Europe, high-ranking German officials will be in attendance. D-Day, the beginning of the end of the Nazis’ hold on western Europe, is viewed in the same way as the German surrender on May 8, 1945: As Germany’s then-President Richard von Weizsäcker said in 1985 on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, it was “a day of liberation” — for Germany, too.

Can a former Janjaweed commander determine Sudan’s future?

The battle for Sudan’s future reached a critical point with the brutal crackdown on a protest camp in Khartoum. Much of it depends on how the ambitions of interim vice president and ex-Janjaweed chief, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, are handled.

ABC raid: Australia police search headquarters of public broadcaster

Police have raided the Sydney headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC), in a second day of searches targeting journalists.

Officers arrived at the public broadcaster with search warrants naming two reporters and the news director. The ABC has protested over the raid.

The police action is related to articles about alleged misconduct by Australian forces in Afghanistan.

On Tuesday police searched the home of a News Corp journalist, sparking alarm.

The leading journalists’ union said the two raids represented a “disturbing pattern of assaults on Australian press freedom”.