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**MARCH 7, 2024**
On the Prospect website
New York City's Last Dictatorship
After 20 years, New York reconsiders mayoral control of its education
system. BY LIZ ROSENBERG
Conflicts of Interest Surround the DOJ Antitrust Budget Cut
The Senate Appropriations Committee, which struck the deal to cut the
Antitrust Division's budget, has a revolving-door problem. BY DAVID
DAYEN
Controlling Birth Control
On the eve of over-the-counter birth control pills, the GOP can't
possibly convince Americans that the right to contraception is wrong.
BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
Meyerson on TAP
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**** The Incoherence of Our Gaza Policy
We provide Palestinians life's necessities by air and sea, and provide
Israel the arms to deny them those same necessities.
It's been quite some time since I took my first-year algebra class at
Paul Revere Junior High (Euclid, as I recall, had only recently died),
but I still remember one problem we were asked to solve. It concerned a
bathtub that a faucet was filling with water at one end while an open
drain was removing that water at the other end. We were supposed to
figure out at what point the water would reach a certain level, or at
what point the person filling and draining the tub would be committed to
an institution, or something like that.
I've remembered this problem lo these many years because it sometimes
serves as the perfect metaphor for a policy so self-contradictory that
its formulators need to be, at minimum, seriously questioned. And so it
was that the mystery of the tub popped into mind when I read
earlier today that in his State of the Union address tonight, President
Biden will announce that the United States will build a floating pier
off the shore of Gaza from which humanitarian aid will flow to the
Palestinians, a great many of whom are in dire need of food, water, and
medicine. Whether the pier will supplant or merely complement the
airdrops of aid that the U.S. has already commenced is not yet clear.
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In another part of the forest, The Times of Israel reported
today that the U.S. has made more than 100 arms sales to Israel since
October 7th-all of them just under the threshold which would require
the administration to seek congressional approval for the sales. These
sales have doubtless helped the Netanyahu government pursue its
not-quite-openly-stated policy of immiserating the Palestinians and
making life so impossible in Gaza that many are compelled to move
elsewhere. That's clearly
**not** the preferred policy of the Biden administration, but the more
it provides arms to Bibi, the more it looks like Bibi's useful idiots.
Now that it's floating the floating pier idea, administration policy
resembles even more closely that filling, draining tub. We giveth and we
taketh away, but we sure ain't the Lord.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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