Washington

With a fire burning just miles away, residents of a Washington town dig in

Published

2 hours ago

August 2, 2024

With a fire burning just miles away, residents of a Washington town dig in

Sentiments like these are common during high-stress wildfires throughout the rural West. As large, intense wildfires and evacuations become more common, some residents are growing tired of uprooting their lives and are growing inured to the risk — or more confident in their own abilities to manage it themselves.

That means some people are determined to stay in their homes even when authorities say they ought to leave, particularly when there are rifts in trust between communities and those managing wildfires and emergency response.

“Especially in rural communities, we’ve started seeing a lot more folks decide to stay and defend,” said Amanda Stasiewicz, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Oregon who studies evacuation decisions. “There’s a lot of mistrust going on there.”

As fire behavior grows intense because of climate change and overgrown forests, doubts can fester in rural communities as fire managers operate more conservatively than in the past.

“People were used to seeing fires attacked in different ways decades ago and now there’s a different reality,” Stasiewicz said. “Now, we’re seeing fires act more radically, make their own weather and be more unpredictable.”

This dynamic is playing out in rural communities elsewhere.

Some Northern California residents whose homes are threatened by the Park Fire — now more than 397,000 acres and the fourth-largest in state history as of Friday morning — have similarly decided not to evacuate, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. One couple told the Chronicle that they’d soured on evacuating after they had to wait 10 days to return home after the 2018 Camp Fire.

Some 94 large fires are burning across the West, which more than 29,000 wildland firefighters are working to suppress, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Of those blazes, 28 have active evacuation orders.

“When it gets like this, it’s all hands on deck, and they’re running out of resources,” said Brad Bramlett, a public information officer assigned to the Pioneer Fire.

The Pacific Northwest, in particular, is reeling this summer as some 51 major fires burn in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. A hotter and drier-than-normal spring and summer primed the landscape to burn.

As of Friday morning, the Stehekin area was under a red flag warning for dangerous fire weather, according to the National Weather Service. The Pioneer fire had grown to more than 33,700 acres and was about 12% contained.

In most years, the fire season would only have just begun.

Stehekin’s full-time population is about 85, and its residents take small-town living to the extreme. The community famously resisted telephone service into the early 2000s.

Surrounded by glaciated peaks and the clear waters of Lake Chelan, the town swells in population during the summer, as tourists take 2.5-hour ferry rides to access trailheads in North Cascades National Park that begin in Stehekin.

The Pioneer Fire began on June 8 and has been slowly creeping north. It’s burning in some of the most challenging terrain firefighters must deal with in the U.S., with steep slopes, rocky outcrops and few trails.

“As soon as I heard about it, it was, ‘OK, here we go,’” Courtney said. “We all know how dry and early spring has been. It felt like the fire season was going to be accelerated.”

Stehekin residents have been planning and preparing, Courtney said, removing brush near homes, constructing a floating dock in the harbor and holding community meetings.

Tourists were forced away on July 25, when emergency officials raised the evacuation level to 2 of 3.

Meanwhile, firefighters have flooded into Stehekin. More than 640 fire personnel are working the fire, though not all are based in the town. Johnston said she and her staff of six have served about 200 meals a day to crews.

On Sunday, emergency officials asked everyone in the town to leave.

Magnussen said emergency management officials can’t guarantee any kind of help, particularly if the boat dock — “the only way out,” as he described it — burns.

“When they choose to stay, they’re doing so at their own risk,” he said.

Courtney said she recognizes that but worries that leaving Stehekin now could mean she won’t be able to return for weeks, if not longer. She feels her self-reliant community, which is filled with people who have boats and are used to working the land, is prepared to fend off fire, for now.

Some previous close calls have also hardened her demeanor toward fire. Courtney witnessed the 2015 Wolverine Fire, which burned more than 60,000 acres near Stehekin, and last month, she joined family and friends a few miles “down lake” to save her uncle’s property after firefighters had left.

“My tolerance has gone up,” she said.

Stasiewicz said that based on her own focus groups, surveys and interviews, sentiments like Courtney’s are becoming more common in rural communities. Evacuation often carries a stiff financial cost, she said, and some rural residents worry their properties won’t be prioritized.

“We can sometimes see rural communities lose compared to more developed areas. There is this mentality, ‘Maybe we do have to take care of ourselves,’” Stasiewicz said.

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Washington

Harris events: Not your father’s campaign rallies (or Biden’s)

Published

8 hours ago

August 2, 2024

Press Room

Harris events: Not your father’s campaign rallies (or Biden’s)

There were hip gyrations from the stage. The playlist included “Girls in the Hood,” “Mamushi,” “Savage,” and “Body.” The candidate quoted Quavo.

A Joe Biden rally this was not.

If there was ever any indication of the head-snapping transition that Democrats have gone through, it was the one that occurred on Tuesday night in Atlanta when 10,000 people danced and cheered to Megan Thee Stallion before Vice President Harris took the stage for a campaign rally to the strains of Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” Biden forecast this kind of a change four years ago when he talked about a bridge to a new generation, but that transformation didn’t take place until the past two weeks when he officially relinquished his grip on the party.

In Atlanta, the baton was fully passed to Kamala Harris. This was now her party. Her campaign. Her playlist.

In fact, Joe Biden never came up.

From the music to the outfits — and, most tellingly, the crowd size — it was clearer than ever that the shift to a new Democratic generation was complete.

By and large, it is the same campaign aides who were putting on Biden events that are now in charge of Harris ones. But the types of crowds interested in attending Harris events — and the musicians willing to perform at them — are very different. The new playlist, even if controlled by the same staffers who curated Biden’s soundtrack (a mix including Whitney Houston’s “Higher Love,” Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” and Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom”), has a certain Harris flair, and is put together based on her personal input.

Campaign aides say they are still thinking about how Harris events will be different, and they are determined to not only do large-scale rallies but want to put her in smaller settings as well. The coming days will provide more of a test case as Harris picks a running mate and launches a seven-state tour that will probably include a range of venues.

Harris is attempting to harness the surge in organic enthusiasm to display a show of force around her campaign launch. Aides want to do so in ways that are not only helpful to the vice president’s case but also work to get under Trump’s skin (The Trump campaign has scheduled a rally on Saturday in the same Atlanta arena that Harris filled on Tuesday).

The crowds to date in the Harris for president campaign are simply more energized. They’re bigger and louder. And it is a different tapestry than the Democratic Party has presented to a general electorate since at least 2016.

Biden is the candidate who works rope lines and owns small rooms, but has never been known as the one who can fill large arenas. Filling a middle school gymnasium, as he did last month, was reason for boasting, and success for him is the amount of time he spends on a rope line after the event rather than the number of total supporters who attend it. And four years ago, during the height of a global pandemic, the closest the president came to having large rallies was events where cars gathered, at a social distance, and honked their horns.

Harris, at least in the opening weeks of her candidacy, is drawing the kind of energy and excitement that Barack Obama drew in 2008 or that Donald Trump brought in 2016.

While Democrats have long had strong ties to the entertainment industry — attracting actors as donors and musicians as opening acts — the octogenarian who spent half a century as a politician and rarely dips into pop culture was not a source for inspiration. Biden’s prized possession is a car built in 1967 (a Corvette Stingray) and his favorite movie was made in 1981 (“Chariots of Fire”)

Biden often quotes Abraham Lincoln or Irish poets in his speeches. On Tuesday night, Harris was quoting hip-hop artists in hers.

“Trump … Does not walk the walk,” she said. “Or as my friend Quavo would say: He does not walk it like he talks it.”

Biden often says the Black community was among those that “brung me to the dance.” But he most definitely did not have the playlist, or energy — or the dance — that came from Atlanta.

The rally marked a debut of sorts for Megan on C-SPAN, which streamed the event live. She took the stage amid flashing strobe lights, and was dressed in a blue pantsuit, a white shirt with exposed midriff, and a blue tie. She riffed on one of Harris’s strongest campaign planks: abortion rights.

“Our future president — let’s get this done, Atlanta,” she told the cheering crowd. “We’re about to make history with the first female president. The first Black female president. Let’s get this done, honey.”

As she sang her song “Body” she told the crowd: “Now, I know my ladies in the crowd love their bodies — and if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for.”

Harris’s remarks were stylistically different from Biden’s, with her own cadence and without verbal digressions and the storytelling that Biden often relishes. But at the core, many of her policy aims did not significantly diverge from the ones that Biden promotes.

“Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” she said. “When our middle class is strong, America is strong.”

She talked about the need to tame inflation, and she spoke in sharp tones about immigration.

“He tanked — tanked — the bipartisan deal because he thought it would help him win an election,” Harris said. “Which goes to show, Donald Trump does not care about border security. He only cares about himself. I will bring back the border security bill, and I will sign it into law and show Donald Trump what real leadership looks like.”

She mocked Trump’s policy positions — called some of the things from him and his running mate “just plain weird” — and poked fun at her GOP rival for not fully committing to a debate. While Biden also often mentions Trump, she seemed to take more glee in poking at her new rival.

“Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider, to meet me on the debate stage,” she said, looking into the cameras. “Because as the saying goes, ‘If you got something to say, say it to my face.’”

Harris also echoed what has been a signature line in her brief time as a candidate, as she recalled her time as a prosecutor taking on “predators who abused women; fraudsters who ripped off consumers; cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.”

“So hear me when I say,” she added, pausing for effect. “I know Donald Trump’s type.”

In Atlanta and elsewhere, there are calls-and-response. There is a rollicking feeling that often doesn’t exist amid polite applause at Biden’s events. When Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) on Tuesday night chided Trump for being “too scared to debate Vice President Harris,” the crowd began chanting, “Too scared! Too scared!”

When Harris referenced Trump’s legal problems and guilty verdicts, the crowd yelled, “Lock him up! Lock him up!”

Biden has acknowledged his milquetoast taste.

“Isn’t it really dull when you have a president known for two things: Ray-Ban sunglasses and chocolate chip ice cream?” he said last month during a gathering in Harrisburg, Pa., as he sought to inject life into his reelection campaign.

Two weeks later, he was out of the race. And now he’s hoping to propel to victory a president known for things far less dull.

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Washington

Bob Good loses recount and becomes first ousted House GOP incumbent – Washington Examiner

Published

16 hours ago

August 2, 2024

Press Room

Bob Good loses recount and becomes first ousted House GOP incumbent – Washington Examiner

Freedom Caucus Chairman Bob Good (R-VA) suffered defeat in the recount for his June primary, making him the first House Republican incumbent to lose a primary challenge this election cycle.

Good lost the recount to John McGuire, a former Navy SEAL, who won the primary by just 374 votes. The recount, which began Thursday morning, narrowed the race by just four votes with Good losing by 370.

Because the margin of victory in the primary was above half a point, Good was responsible for paying for the recount himself. Circuit Judge Claude Worrell II said ahead of the recount that he estimated the cost of the recount at $96,500. If the updated results had revealed Good as the winner, the congressman would have been refunded.

Good is the first House Republican to lose his seat in a primary upset and the second House member overall, the first being “Squad” Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). The Virginia lawmaker is also the first House Freedom Caucus chairman to ever lose reelection.

Good, who has led the hard-line conservative caucus since January, has said he would resign early from his position as chairman if he loses the recount so a new leader can be elected before his term ends. The Washington Examiner reached out to Good’s campaign to see whether he plans to step down following the recount.

McGuire had the backing of several of Good’s Republican colleagues, including Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), a Freedom Caucus member and the only one from the caucus to endorse Good’s challenger. Davidson was ousted from the caucus on July 8 after throwing his support behind McGuire. Following Davidson’s ousting, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) said he would be leaving the caucus, as well.

The former Navy SEAl also had an endorsement from former President Donald Trump after Good threw his support behind Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in the GOP presidential contest. Good later switched his endorsement to Trump after DeSantis suspended his campaign, but that wasn’t enough to appease the former president, who spent months calling Good a backstabber.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

With McGuire’s win now solidified, he will go on to face Democratic candidate Gloria Witt. The seat is rated “solid Republican” with a 7-point advantage for the GOP with Good as the incumbent. It is likely to still favor Republicans with McGuire as the Republican candidate.

The Washington Examiner reached out to Good and McGuire’s campaigns for comment.

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Washington

Washington must recalculate its strategic approach to the Middle East – opinion

Published

23 hours ago

August 1, 2024

Press Room

Washington must recalculate its strategic approach to the Middle East – opinion

Subject to decisions pending in Tehran in response to the double-targeted killings of senior Hezbollah and Hamas officials, Israel now seems on the brink of a multi-front regional conflagration.

Is victory assured? At what cost? Could White House Special Envoy Amos Hochstein’s diplomatic ploy eventually prevail? The initiatives are left to Iran and its proxies, but should Israel identify imminent preparations for attack, it will likely act to preempt.

To date, Israel and Hezbollah have been engaged in a limited war of attrition. On October 8, 2023, Hezbollah joined Hamas in waging war on Israel. Lebanon’s Iranian proxy declaratively sought to apply tactical pressure on Israel’s Northern front.

It seemingly succeeded, effectively forcing the IDF to split its forces, with a recorded northern deployment of between three to five Divisions, manned by a reservists call-up, amounting to a force of roughly 300-thousand troops.

During the initial stages of the war, Jerusalem’s War Cabinet deliberated whether to launch a two-front offensive against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant voted in favor, while former War Cabinet Ministers Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot voted against.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ministers and MK’s at a 40 signatures debate, at the plenum hall of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, on July 17, 2024. (credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH90)

Netanyahu and the US

Ultimately, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ruled in favor of the latter position after President Joe Biden held a phone conversation with the Israeli premier and threatened to pull US military support unless the IDF limits its retaliatory strikes to territories south of the Litani River and refrain from targeting Lebanon’s critical infrastructure, altogether.

Nine months later, the Biden Administration remains proactively determined to de-escalate daily cross-border hostilities, leveraging crucial ammunition shipments as one of its methods to effectively control Israel’s battle intensity versus Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In doing so, Washington hopes to buy enough time to secure a temporary arrangement, utilizing Parliament Speaker Nabi Berri, leader of the Shi’ite Amal Movement, as a mediator.

However, a senior Israeli intelligence official ascertained, “Berri has no leverage over Hezbollah,” rather, “it is the other way around.” Hezbollah evidently maintains the upper hand in negotiations, irrespective of the Biden Administration’s hopes and aspirations.

The majority of Israel’s defense and political elites seemingly believe the rationale articulated by Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.

“On that day, when the shooting stops in Gaza, we will stop the shooting in the south [of Lebanon],” Nasrallah insisted in one of his many televised addresses. In daily conversations with Israeli intelligence officials and military officers, broad sentiments of wishful thinking linger vis-à-vis achieving a negotiated solution.

“Even Netanyahu hopes for a diplomatic outcome”, one official told me, as he subsequently professed that Jerusalem would much rather fight Hezbollah once fully equipped with a long list of new military technologies on the verge of operational integration.

Nevertheless, despite hopes for a peaceful resolution, no one in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv is under delusion. Tens of thousands of displaced Israelis will not return to their homes unless a sense of security is achieved.

Moreover, in stark contrast to popular belief regarding Iran supposedly restraining Hezbollah, the Ayatollah regime has a vested strategic interest in fueling the war within current established parameters, as it remains evasive of paying any substantive toll for its belligerent activities, while its heavily armed Lebanese proxy showcases battle-discipline, worthy of most Western militaries, with clear pre-planned objectives. Nevertheless, prospects for miscalculation are seemingly intensifying with every passing day.

Despite popular belief, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s intensive efforts to catalog regional hostilities as a response to the Palestinian plight is a cheap ruse. The current multi-front Mideast war is not a simple case of causality rooted in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Rather, we’re witnessing the prudent implementation of Iran’s strategic schemes, as was envisioned by its slain IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani, as part of which Hamas is a key factor in Iran’s ars bellica, for both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Last week, in a conversation with Major General (Res) Gershon Ha-Cohen, a former General Staff and Northern Corps’ commander, he cautioned that US White House Envoy Amos Hochstein was seeking to formulate a deal that would undoubtedly spell ‘defeat marred by painful concessions for Israel.’

Hochstein essentially seeks to force Israel’s hand to concede border-lands in exchange for a temporary withdrawal of Hezbollah operatives several miles northward. “What’s to stop those operatives from returning to the south [of Lebanon], five minutes after an agreement is signed?” General Ha-Cohen questioned with an evident sense of frustration. “They demand of us an irreversible concession in exchange for a reversible act.”

Purportedly ignoring Iran’s grand strategy, the Biden Administration is doubling down on pressuring Israel to accept the proposed deal for a Northern ceasefire. Israeli National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer met with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during the course of which they demanded assurances.

In the event that Hezbollah breaches the terms of a proposed US-led arrangement, the United States would support Israel in waging a full-scale war against Hezbollah, with the aim of destroying the Iranian proxy once and for all. ‘Without such an assurance,’ Hanegbi and Dermer insisted, Israel’s ‘northern residents would not gain the sense of security necessary to return to their homes,’ a Jerusalem pre-requisite for any diplomatic solution.

Washington must recalculate its strategic approach to the Middle East. It cannot push to de-escalate the region without asking some tough questions on a so-called ‘strategic day after.’

Does the Biden Team’s approach benefit US strategic interests for decades to come? Or does it play into the hands of its adversaries, including Iran, Russia, and China? Despite the Biden-Harris Administration’s evident conviction of the former, regional actors, including allies and adversaries alike, are seemingly convinced of the latter.

The only way forward is for Washington to reassert its dominance in the Middle East. To do so, without the need to commit additional military assets to the CENTCOM Area of Responsibility (AOR), it should reinvigorate tangible support for its Mideastern allies and partners, including Israel, in confronting the so-called Axis of Resistance led by Iran.

The United States must counter Tehran’s grand strategy by pushing for an expansion of the Abraham Accords and reviving military support for its regional partners, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to confront Iran’s regional encroachment via its proxies.

Washington must revitalize its maximum economic pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic proper and enforce its sanctions by all means necessary. European powers, for their part, must stand in support of the United States by triggering the snap-back mechanism before it expires in October of 2025, aimed at derailing Tehran’s nuclear train as it races at full steam ahead.

As for Israel and the pragmatic Arab camp, they must join forces to implement a campaign of reality-building to push back on Iran’s malign encroachment by effectively inserting much-needed hope for a future of peace and prosperity for all peoples of the Middle East.

Jonathan Hessen is a nonresident senior fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, editor-in-chief of TV7 Israel, and CEO of HGS. He specializes in geostrategy and security issues related to the Middle East and Europe.

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