by Lowell
Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Sunday, December 23.
- Indonesia tsunami: 222 dead and ‘many missing’ after Anak Krakatoa erupts – latest updates
- GOP discord on wall prolongs shutdown fight
- Shutdown to stretch on until at least Thursday as Senate adjourns with no deal over budget, Trump’s border wall (“Lawmakers go home for holidays as federal workers are left in limbo”)
- White House says Erdogan promised Trump he’d finish off ISIS in Syria
- Departing Mattis said to cancel Israel trip, as Israel feels ‘betrayed’ on Syria (“TV report says US defense secretary was set to hold talks with in Israel next week on Iran and Syria; senior Israeli officials said to harshly criticize Syria pullout decision”)
- For Trump, ‘a War Every Day,’ Waged Increasingly Alone (“At the midpoint of his term, the president has grown more sure of his own judgment and more isolated from anyone else’s than at any point since he took office.” Very dangerous combo.)
- US envoy Brett McGurk quits over Trump Syria pullout
- You Can’t Serve Both Trump and America (“The departure of Jim Mattis is proof that you cannot have it all.” Bottom line: if you serve Trump, you are working for a corrupt traitor to our country.)
- The Kurds: Betrayed Again by Washington (“Time and again, powerful allies on whose support they thought they could rely abandoned them.”)
- Trump Thinks His Border-Wall Bravado Can Hide His Pullout From the ISIS Fight (“In speeches, press conferences, TV interviews, and tweets, Graham is accusing the president of ignoring his military commanders and national security officials. Graham calls the Syria pullout a ‘big win’ for Russia— ‘They are ECSTATIC,’ he tweeted on Thursday—and a ‘sign of American weakness’ to Iran and North Korea. At a press conference that day, Graham charged that the pullout was ‘akin to surrendering.'”)
- Earth Has Seen CO2 Spike Before. It Didn’t End Well. (“It’s unclear exactly what happened 252 million years ago as the planet warmed, but 90 percent of species went extinct.”)
- Trump cancels Mar-a-Lago Christmas trip over shutdown (What a guy, huh?)
- ‘A rogue presidency’: The era of containing Trump is over
- Here’s how Trump has achieved Russia’s policy goals (“It’s not just abruptly pulling out of Syria against the advice of mostly everyone. The list goes on.”)
- Laura Ingraham taunted David Hogg over college rejections. He just said he got into Harvard. (Hahaha, Laura Ingraham, you just got owned.)
- Trump’s school safety commission goes after black children instead of the NRA (Betsy DeVos strikes again.)
- Trump shuts down government in fight over wall he promised Mexico would fund (“This is the third shutdown of 2018.”)
- The Russian effort to divert votes to Jill Stein was more extensive than previously thought (“More than a thousand tweets were sent about the Green Party candidate by Russian operatives looking to help Donald Trump.”)
- GOP Leaders Won’t Tolerate Trump’s Chaos for Much Longer (“I have never wavered from my oft-stated convictions that (a) Trump will not finish out his term, and (b), the end will be triggered by a presidential meltdown that forces the Vichy Republicans in Washington to mount an insurrection — if only to save their own asses, not the country. This week was a big step toward that endgame, and surely one of the most remarkable weeks in American history.”)
- Shutting Down the Government Isn’t a Harmless Game
- Mystery Filing Appears to Ask High Court to Act in Mueller Probe
- Trump Won’t Try to Fire Fed Chairman Powell, Treasury Secretary Says
- The GOP Ends Its One-Party Rule In Shambles
- Simcha Rotem, last surviving fighter in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, dies at 94 (“Rotem fought Nazis in city streets, later helped rebels flee through sewers”)
- Top 28 Virginia Political Stories of 2018
- Bill Bolling column: How and why I went to work for JMU
- Va. has trove of McAuliffe papers, but you can’t read them yet
- What local politicians are saying about the government shutdown
- Cyclists could someday circle the region on their own version of the Capital Beltway (“When completed, the ‘Bicycle Beltway’ would offer connections to more than two dozen Metro stations.”)
- Expanding the Long Bridge is key to region’s growing rail needs, officials say
- Herring rebuffs Dominion donations — a signal of change in Virginia politics? (“Still, there may be other politicians who follow Herring’s lead, especially since the Clean Virginia advocacy group says it will ensure financial support of up to $2,500 a year for any sitting House member or $5,000 for any sitting state Senator who agrees not to take money from Dominion.”)
- Governor Northam announces solar energy system installation (“Sun Tribe Solar submitted the winning bid for installations at the Virginia Department of Forestry headquarters in Charlottesville, the Virginia Public Safety Training Center in Hanover and Haynesville Correctional Center on Virginia’s Northern Neck.” That’s nice, but we need orders of magnitude more solar than this, also energy efficiency and offshore wind, plus of course killing the fracked-gas pipelines.)
- Hampton city planners endorse Colonial Downs’ bid for off-track betting center
- Even a short shutdown could jeopardize millions in grants to Virginia for bay, battlefields, trails
- Charlottesville’s Bellamy wants Preston Avenue renamed because of Confederate namesake
- D.C.-area forecast: Dreaming of a bright Christmas
