Chip Roy accused his fellow lawmakers of waging a “proxy war” so they can “look all fancy with our blue and yellow ribbons”
Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) has condemned House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer for stating that the US is “at war,” presumably with Russia. Roy hammered Democrats and Republicans alike for deepening America’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict in order to “feel good about ourselves.”
In a video clip posted by Roy’s press office on Wednesday, the Texas Republican took aim at Hoyer for declaring on Friday that the US is “at war,” and that critics of the Democratic Party should “focus on the enemy” instead of rising energy costs at home.
“When I hear the majority leader of the other party say ‘a time of war’…I’m wondering when we voted to go to war?” Roy said.
“If we’re gonna have a proxy war, and we’re gonna give $40 billion to Ukraine, because we want to look all fancy with our blue and yellow ribbons and feel good about ourselves, maybe we should actually have a debate in this chamber,” he continued.
“I’m wondering when we voted to go to war?”
“If we’re gonna have a proxy war, and we’re gonna give $40 billion to Ukraine, because we want to look all fancy with our blue and yellow ribbons and feel good about ourselves, maybe we should actually have a debate in this chamber.” pic.twitter.com/ShJ8Ltcf5m
— Rep. Chip Roy Press Office (@RepChipRoy) May 18, 2022
Roy was one of 57 House Republicans who voted against the passage of the $40 billion military and economic aid bill for Ukraine earlier this month. However, the bill had strong bipartisan support and passed with 368 votes to 57. It is now expected to pass the Senate later this week.
Republican lawmakers opposing the bill either argue that the money would be better spent solving domestic issues or that pumping military aid into Ukraine risks drawing the US into war with nuclear-armed Russia, or both.
Roy, who described the bill as “garbage,” reiterated these arguments on Wednesday. “When the border of this country is wide open…and fentanyl is pouring in and we have $30.5 trillion of debt and gas prices are spiking and $1,100 to fill a tank of diesel, and we go ‘oh, blank check for $40 billion.”
“By the way, I’m looking at my colleagues on this side of the aisle on that same point,” he concluded.
Aside from supporting the $40 billion package making its way through Congress, the Biden administration has already given Ukraine nearly $4 billion worth of weapons since February, has placed an embargo on Russian oil and gas imports, and has imposed several rounds of economic sanctions on Moscow.
With the US arming Ukraine and sharing intelligence with Kiev’s forces, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has accused Washington of waging a “proxy war” against Russia, while Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev claimed on Tuesday that the West has used Ukraine as pretext to fight an “undeclared war” against Russia’s “very statehood.”
MADRID, May 18 (IPS) – While the attention of mostly Western media and politicians is quasi exclusively hoarded up by the proxy war in Ukraine and its consequences on the energy sector, the world’s big oil business continues to burn Planet Earth with its underreported though highly polluting, wasteful practice of gas flaring.
Lilia Nguyen’s perception of everything around her changed when she went to the border to help Ukrainian refugees shortly after the war began. The change has been felt by other young Poles.
Nearly 20% of all accounts on the platform are fake, the same research says
Almost half of President Joe Biden’s 22.3 million Twitter followers are fake. The findings were reported by Newsweek on Tuesday, citing analysis by SparkToro. The same measure was used by Elon Musk to pause his acquisition of the social media giant.
SparkToro, which operates a tool for identifying “fake” Twitter accounts from genuine followers, looked at the official @POTUS account and found that 49.3% were inauthentic. The screening process takes in several factors, from activity data to profile pictures, to make a judgment on whether there is a real person behind each account. The share of bots following Biden is higher than for most accounts, the company said.
Last week, billionaire Elon Musk paused his $44-billion acquisition of the platform, claiming that the company was wrong when it stated that less than 5% of Twitter accounts were “spam/fake”. He claimed the actual percentage to be closer to 20 and said the buyout price he offered to shareholders was based on the company estimate and an adjustment was in order.
Musk and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal exchanged a series of tweets about the issue, with the executive touting Twitter’s efficiency in removing inauthentic accounts from the platform. Twitter suspends 500,000 fake accounts a day “usually before any of you even see them” and locks millions each week on suspicion of sending spam, Agrawal said.
We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).
SparkToro said Musk’s assessment is accurate, based on their findings from a sample of some 44,000 active public Twitter accounts. They classified almost a fifth as fake.
The metric may vary significantly depending on whether dormant users are excluded from the sample. SparkToro also turned its attention to Musk’s followers and concluded that 23.42% of active accounts and 70.23% of all accounts subscribed to his posts were bots. Newsweek didn’t clarify whether the sample of Biden’s followers analyzed by the firm was filtered for activity.
On Friday, @ElonMusk said his deal to acquire Twitter was on hold pending an analysis of “spam/fake” accounts.
We’ve now completed an analysis of 44,058 public Twitter accounts who’ve tweeted in the last 90 days. 19.42% are likely spam or fake.
A 2018 SparkToro analysis of then-President Donald Trump’s personal account, @realDonaldTrump, found that of the 54 million followers he had at the time, 61% looked fake. Trump has since been de-platformed by Twitter.
WASHINGTON DC, May 18 (IPS) – Here’s the good news: there are a new set of breakthrough medicines to prevent and treat HIV, known as “long actings” because they can be taken every few months instead of every day, and they are coming on-stream. If, as they are rolled out, they are made available at scale, they could help save many lives and help end the AIDS pandemic.
