Washington Feels Like the Capital of an Occupied Country
Sunday, 09 September 2018 08:37
Applebaum writes: "There can be only one explanation for this kind of behavior: White House officials, and many others in Washington, really do not feel they are living in a fully legal state."
A protest in front of the White House in July of 2018. (photo: @AdamParkhomenko/Twitter)
Washington Feels Like the Capital of an Occupied Country
By Anne Applebaum, The Washington Post
09 September 18
n nations that have known the horror of dictatorship or foreign occupation, there are often long traditions of what Poland’s national poet once called “patriotic treason.” In Polish history, this kind of activity has ranged from armed resistance — in the 19th century against Russian occupation, in the 20th century against the Nazis — to peaceful efforts by bureaucrats who quietly tried to work “within the system” on behalf of their country. I once researched the story of a Polish culture ministry official who churned out Stalinist prose but also used her position, during the years of communist terror, to quietly help dissident artists.
In occupied countries, large public events can spontaneously take on political overtones, too. When the Czech hockey team beat the Soviet Union at the world championships in 1969, one year after the Soviet invasion of the country, half a million people flooded the streets in a celebration that became a show of political defiance. In 1956, 100,000 people came to the reburial of a Hungarian politician who had been murdered following a show trial. The funeral oratory kicked off an anti-communist revolution a few days later.
I am listing all these distant foreign events because at the moment they have strange echoes in Washington. Sen. John McCain’s funeral felt like one of those spontaneous political events. As in a dictatorship, people spoke in code: President Trump’s name was not mentioned, yet everybody understood that praise for McCain, a symbol of the dying values of the old Republican Party, was also criticism of the authoritarian populist in the White House. As in an occupied country, people spoke of resistance and renewal in the funeral’s wake. Since then, public officials have also described, anonymously, new forms of “patriotic treason” within the White House and in comments to Bob Woodward and the New York Times. As in an unlawful state, these American officials say they are quietly working “within the system,” in defiance of Trump, for the greater good of the nation.
There can be only one explanation for this kind of behavior: White House officials, and many others in Washington, really do not feel they are living in a fully legal state. True, there is no communist terror; the president’s goons will not arrest public officials who testify to Congress; no one will be murdered if they walk out of the White House and start campaigning for impeachment or, more importantly, for the invocation of the 25th Amendment, the procedure to transfer power if a president is mentally or physically unfit to remain in office. Nevertheless, dozens of people clearly don’t believe in the legal mechanisms designed to remove a president who is incompetent or corrupt. As the anonymous op-ed writer put it in the New York Times, despite “early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment,” none of the secret patriots “wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis” and backed off.
You can imagine why this would be. Leading members of Congress might resist invoking the 25th Amendment, which would of course be described by Trump’s supporters as a “Cabinet coup.” The mob — not the literal, physical street mob, but the online mob that has replaced it — would seek revenge. There may not be any presidential goons, but any senior official who signs his or her name to a call for impeachment or removal will certainly be subjected to waves of hatred on social media, starting with a denunciation from the president. Recriminations will follow on Fox News, along with a smear campaign, a doxing campaign, attacks on the target’s family and perhaps worse. It is possible we have underestimated the degree to which our political culture has already become more authoritarian.
Maybe we have also underestimated the degree to which our Constitution, designed in the 18th century, has proved insufficient to the demands of the 21st. In 2016, we learned why it matters that our electoral college — originally designed to put another layer of people between the popular vote and the presidency, or as Alexander Hamilton wrote, to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications” — has become a stale fiction. Now an important constitutional amendment seems, to the men and women who are empowered to use it, too controversial to actually use.
The result: institutional and administrative chaos; our military chain of command is compromised; people around the elected president feel compelled to act above the law and remove papers from his desk. The mechanisms meant to protect the state from an incompetent or dictatorial president are not being used because people in power no longer believe in them, or are afraid to use them. Washington feels like the capital of a state where the legal order has collapsed because, in some ways, it is.
RSN: The Times Op-Ed Is Whistleblowing, but the Author Should Come Clean
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Saturday, 08 September 2018 12:41
Kiriakou writes: "I'm less interested in the substance of the op-ed than about the kind of person the author it. I would call that person a whistleblower."
John Kiriakou. (photo: The Washington Post)
The Times Op-Ed Is Whistleblowing, but the Author Should Come Clean
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
08 September 18
ashington has been buzzing this week in the wake of the New York Times op-ed by an unnamed senior Trump administration official saying that the president is, well, unhinged. I’ve been in Washington for 36 years, and I’ve only seen something like this a handful of times. Really, only Iran-Contra comes to mind, and Watergate before it. Las Vegas bookmakers are taking bets on who the author is, and the news networks can’t talk about anything else. I’m less interested in the substance of the op-ed than about the kind of person the author is. I would call that person a whistleblower.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is a legal definition of whistleblowing. It’s “bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety.” That’s pretty clear. And I think the author of the op-ed exposed abuse.
The whistleblower’s piece is a little self-serving: Paraphrasing, he or she said, “There are so many of us who want to save the country. We like what Trump stands for, but he’s insane. We are working to frustrate his worst inclinations. Thank God some of us take papers off his desk so that he doesn’t sign away the country, etc., etc.” That’s OK, though, because the bottom line is that the country actually is in danger right now.
The whistleblower notes that the root of Trump’s problem is that he’s utterly amoral and he doesn’t believe in anything; he has no guiding principles. He is “impetuous, adversarial, petty, and ineffective.” He engages in “repetitive rants” and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed, and occasionally reckless decisions.” A majority of Americans would probably agree.
The whistleblower was careful to use lingo in the op-ed that several different senior officials use, most likely in an effort to mask his or her identity. The whistleblower used the word “lodestar,” frequently employed by Vice President Pence. He or she said that meetings with Trump veer “off the rails,” a phrase that Chief of Staff John Kelley has used in interviews many times. He or she said that at least there are “adults in the room,” a phrase that multiple journalists have attributed to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Why remain secret, though? Why write anonymously? Anonymity actually diminishes the value of the revelation. Several of my conservative friends, for example, believe that the op-ed was written either by a junior nobody in the White House, by a Democrat pretending to be in the White House, or by the New York Times staff itself to embarrass Trump. They don’t want to talk about the message. They only want to talk about the messenger. What did the op-ed’s author think would happen?
The only thing the person can do to get this very important information to the American people – and to make it stick – is to out himself or herself. We need to know if this person is in a position of authority in the White House. We need to know if this person has access to Trump. We need to know if he or she is biased and has an axe to grind.
The message would be so much stronger without the anonymity. Look at what Ed Snowden has done, Julian Assange, Tom Drake, or, humbly, me. We laid our information out there, took responsibility for it, and took the heat that came with that responsibility. Even Barack Obama said that the writer should not have asked for anonymity. “That’s not how a democracy works,” he said.
I agree. I would tell the whistleblower to come clean. It’s time to go public, resign from the White House, sign a giant book deal, and accept your footnote in history. That would be a public service.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Wisconsin's Catastrophic Flooding Is a Glimpse of the Midwest's Drenched Future
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37482"><span class="small">Eric Holthaus, Grist</span></a>
Saturday, 08 September 2018 12:40
Holthaus writes: "Since the 1950s, the amount of rain falling in the heaviest storms has increased by 37 percent in the Midwest. But there's more to it than that."
Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin declared a statewide emergency last week, mobilizing the Wisconsin National Guard to assist flood victims if necessary. (photo: Wisconsin National Guard)
Wisconsin's Catastrophic Flooding Is a Glimpse of the Midwest's Drenched Future
By Eric Holthaus, Grist
08 September 18
n entire summer’s worth of rain has fallen across a broad swath of the Midwest in recent days. The resulting record floods have wrecked homes and altered the paths of rivers, in one case destroying a waterfall in Minnesota. The worst-affected region, southwest Wisconsin, has received more than 20 inches of rain in 15 days– more than it usually gets in six months.
Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin declared a statewide emergency last week, mobilizing the Wisconsin National Guard to assist flood victims if necessary. The Kickapoo River in southwest Wisconsin rose to record levels — as high as six feet above the previous high water mark — producing damage that local emergency management officials described as “breathtaking.”
Madison, home to the state’s flagship university, has seen the brunt of the flooding so far. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s center that specializes in studying lakes is itself flooded. “This is what climate change looks like,” Adam Hinterthuer, the center’s spokesperson, wrote in a blog post. On Twitter, the center posted maps of recent floods alongside projections for the worst expected floods later this century. They matched remarkably well.
For Eric Booth, a climate scientist at the university, the whole thing is almost too much to comprehend. His research project on small stream water temperatures was washed away by the flooding. “The scale of what is happening is absolutely unbelievable to witness,” Booth wrote in an email. Booth’s own calculations showed that rainfall over the past 30 days is an approximately 1-in-1,000 year occurrence, assuming a stable climate. (That, obviously, isn’t a good assumption anymore.)
Flooding in the Madison area has boosted lake levels to all-time highs, reigniting a more than 150-year dispute between boaters (who like lake levels high to avoid damage to their boats), conservationists (who want to avoid damage to sensitive shoreline ecosystems and wetlands), and property owners downstream (whose land gets flooded when water is released too quickly). That conflict has creeped into Madison’s mayoral election, where candidates have called for a new lake management plan in the face of more frequent extreme storms.
By late this century, on a business-as-usual path, those storms could nearly double in frequency, according to University of Wisconsin research. As an editorial earlier this summer in the Des Moines Register said, “Climate change never feels more real than when you’re dragging wet carpet from a flooded basement.”
FOCUS: Stop Brett Kavanaugh - A Corporation Masquerading as a Judge
Saturday, 08 September 2018 11:53
Nader writes: "Observers say that confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to become President Trump's second pick for a lifetime job on the Supreme Court will make the Court more conservative. It is more accurate to say Kavanaugh will make the Court more corporatist."
Ralph Nader. (photo: Sage Ross/WikiMedia Commons)
Stop Brett Kavanaugh - A Corporation Masquerading as a Judge
By Ralph Nader, Nader.org
08 September 18
bservers say that confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to become President Trump’s second pick for a lifetime job on the Supreme Court will make the Court more conservative. It is more accurate to say Kavanaugh will make the Court more corporatist.
With Kavanaugh, it is all about siding with corporations over workers, consumers, patients, motorists, the poor, minority voters, and beleaguered communities.
Repeatedly Kavanaugh’s judicial opinions put corporate interests ahead of the common good—backing the powerful against the weak, the vulnerable, and the defenseless.
Apart from his declared views pouring power and immunity into the Presidency (which is why Trump wants him), Kavanaugh could be the most corporate judge in modern American history. Two meticulous reports on his judicial decisions, one by the Alliance for Justice (AFJ) and one by Public Citizen demonstrate that for him it’s all about corporations uber alles.
Kavanaugh has repeatedly ruled against efforts to combat climate change and the regulation of greenhouse gases. He also repeatedly ruled against protections for clean air. He has repeatedly sided with the wealthy and the powerful over all Americans. He has fought consumer protections in the areas of automobile safety, financial services, and a free and open internet. Kavanaugh has also repeatedly ruled against workers, workplace protections and safety regulations.
Do you want him to be on the Supreme Court?
Kavanaugh is a corporate supremacist to a fanatic level of protecting corporate cruelty and greed. Giving him an unaccountable lifetime position on the Court will weaken our democracy and empower the corporate state.
What will he do when cases involve robots harming workers or consumers; corporate algorithms corkscrewing consumers; corporations turning the governments against their citizens; and corporate criminals being bailed out by taxpayers?
Fortunately, Kavanaugh gives us more than a clue from his many judicial decisions and dissents, especially with healthcare cases coming before the Court. Public Citizen’s factually-based report on Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions in split-decision cases provides insight into his judicial philosophy.
He ruled 15 times against worker rights, 2 times for worker rights. On environmental protection, he ruled 11 times for business interests and 2 times for the public’s interest. On consumer and regulatory cases, he ruled 18 times for businesses and 4 times for consumer protection interests. In the area of antitrust or anti-monopoly, he ruled 2 times for the corporations and zero times for market competition.
He seems to love government power when it is arrayed against the people, ruling 7 times for police or human rights abuses versus zero rulings for the victims. But he rules against government agencies when they are protecting the interests of the people over those of corporations.
Even more extreme, he does not like human beings to sue corporations or sue the government. But if you are a corporation, the courthouse doors are always open.
Kavanaugh rules like he is a corporation masquerading as a human. But in his introductory statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he wanted us to see him a regular guy, weirdly remembering the row and seat number at two professional sports games his father took him to as a child and listing all the names of his sixth grade daughter’s basketball team.
Shame on Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) for severely restricting the voices from civil society allowed to testify before the Judiciary Committee. No wonder Code Pink had to protest from the galleries.
Watch out for a cruel man with a folksy smile. Watch once again the Democratic Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee minimizing Kavanaugh’s bias for corporations— except for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).
Given the lives, injuries, and sickness at stake; given the dictatorially approved taxpayer-funded corporate welfare and bloated corporate contracts with governments draining the peoples’ necessities, given Kavanaugh’s mindless support for corporate dollars corruptly buying elections, maybe the motto against this awful nomination should be “Kavana-ugh!”
FOCUS: I Wrote Some of the Stolen Memos That Brett Kavanaugh Lied to the Senate About
Saturday, 08 September 2018 10:48
Graves writes: "Much of Washington has spent the week focusing on whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court. After the revelations of his confirmation hearings, the better question is whether he should be impeached from the federal judiciary."
Brett Kavanaugh. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT)
I Wrote Some of the Stolen Memos That Brett Kavanaugh Lied to the Senate About
By Lisa Graves, Slate
08 September 18
He should be impeached, not elevated.
uch of Washington has spent the week focusing on whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court. After the revelations of his confirmation hearings, the better question is whether he should be impeached from the federal judiciary.
I do not raise that question lightly, but I am certain it must be raised.
Newly released emails show that while he was working to move through President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees in the early 2000s, Kavanaugh received confidential memos, letters, and talking points of Democratic staffers stolen by GOP Senate aide Manuel Miranda. That includes research and talking points Miranda stole from the Senate server after I had written them for the Senate Judiciary Committee as the chief counsel for nominations for the minority.
Receiving those memos and letters alone is not an impeachable offense.
No, Kavanaugh should be removed because he was repeatedly asked under oath as part of his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings for his position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit about whether he had received such information from Miranda, and each time he falsely denied it.
For example, in 2004, Sen. Orrin Hatch asked him directly if he received “any documents that appeared to you to have been drafted or prepared by Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.” Kavanaugh responded, unequivocally, “No.”
In 2006, Sen. Ted Kennedy asked him if he had any regrets about how he treated documents he had received from Miranda that he later learned were stolen. Kavanaugh rejected the premise of the question, restating that he never even saw one of those documents.
Back then the senators did not have the emails that they have now, showing that Miranda sent Kavanaugh numerous documents containing what was plainly research by Democrats. Some of those emails went so far as to warn Kavanaugh not to distribute the Democratic talking points he was being given. If these were documents shared from the Democratic side of the aisle as part of normal business, as Kavanaugh claimed to have believed in his most recent testimony, why would they be labeled “not [for] distribution”? And why would we share our precise strategy to fight controversial Republican nominations with the Republicans we were fighting?
Another email chain included the subject line “spying.” It’s hard to imagine a more definitive clue than that. Another said “Senator Leahy’s staff has distributed a confidential letter to Dem Counsel” and then described for Kavanaugh that precise confidential information we had gathered about a nominee Kavanaugh was boosting. Again, it is illogical to think that we would have just given Miranda this “confidential” information for him to use against us. But this is precisely what Judge Kavanaugh suggested in his testimony on Wednesday. He is not that naďve.
In the hearing this week, Sen. Leahy also noted that the previously hidden emails showed that Miranda asked to meet Kavanaugh in person to give him “paper” files with “useful info to map out [Sens. Joe] Biden and [Dianne] Feinstein, and others.” The promised information included “Biden-speak.” Again, this would not have been a normal information exchange.
In response to Leahy’s questions this week, Kavanaugh made the outlandish claim that it was typical for him to be told what Democrats planned to ask at these combative hearings over controversial nominees, and that this was in fact the “coin of the realm.” As a Democrat who worked on those questions, I can say definitively that it was not typical at all. Kavanaugh knows this full well.
At the time, Kavanaugh was working with Miranda and outside groups to try to force these nominees through the Senate over Democratic objections, and it would have been suicide to give them our research, talking points, strategies, or confidential letters. The GOP senators, their staff, the White House, and outside groups were working intensively to undermine the work of Democratic senators to block the most extreme of President Bush’s judicial nominees.
The Leahy talking points given to Kavanaugh were from my in-depth research into why the Senate had compelling historical precedent for examining Miguel Estrada’s Department of Justice records, which the White House counsel’s office was refusing to surrender. Other confidential materials Miranda shared with Kavanaugh related to investigations Democrats were pursuing over how Judge Priscilla Owen had handled an abortion case involving parental consent and about the overlap between her funders and groups with business before the courts of Texas. We would never have provided that information—key to our strategy to try to block what we considered extremist judicial nominations—to Miranda or to the White House.
During his testimony, Kavanaugh conflated these adversarial proceedings with ones in which Democrats might have cooperated with the other side, like the Patriot Act and airline liability. But these weren’t hearings on some bill where senators would share their concerns across the aisle to try to get a bipartisan fix on problems in a piece of legislation. These were oppositional proceedings in committee and on the floor over controversial judicial nominees. Kavanaugh knew this just as intimately as I did—our sides fought over those nominations intensely.
It was also an area where Kavanaugh’s judicial nominations alliance had taken a scorched-earth approach, attacking Democrats ruthlessly. The White House’s closest allies went so far as to call Leahy and other Democrats on the committee “anti-Catholic,” even running attack ads.
Perhaps Kavanaugh was so blinded by his quest to get the most controversial Bush nominees confirmed in 2003 that he did not have any concerns about the bounty of secret memos and letters he was receiving—the full extent of which is not known because so many documents are still secret.
But, surely, reasonable questions about what he had been party to would have been considered after the story of the theft exploded in the news, Miranda was forced to resign, and the U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms began a bipartisan investigation into the files stolen from the Senate?
As of November 2003, when the sergeant-at-arms seized the Judiciary Committee’s servers, Kavanaugh would have been on notice that any of the letters, talking points, or research described as being from Democrats that were provided to him by Miranda were suspect and probably stolen from the Senate’s server.
But he did nothing. He did not come forward to the Senate to provide information about the confidential documents Miranda had given him, which were clearly from the Democrats.
Kavanaugh also apparently did nothing when the Senate referred the case to the U.S. attorney’s office for criminal prosecution. (Miranda was never prosecuted.)
Eventually, though, Kavanaugh went even further to help cover up the details of the theft.
During the hearings on his nomination to the D.C. Circuit a few months after the Miranda news broke, Kavanaugh actively hid his own involvement, lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee by stating unequivocally that he not only knew nothing of the episode, but also never even received any stolen material.
Even if Kavanaugh could claim that he didn’t have any hint at the time he received the emails that these documents were of suspect provenance—which I personally find implausible—there is no reasonable way for him to assert honestly that he had no idea what they were after the revelation of the theft. Any reasonable person would have realized they had been stolen, and certainly someone as smart as Kavanaugh would have too.
But he lied.
Under oath.
And he did so repeatedly.
Significantly, he did so even though a few years earlier he had helped spearhead the impeachment of President Bill Clinton for perjury in a private civil case. Back then Kavanaugh took lying under oath so seriously that he was determined to do everything he could to help remove a president from office.
Now we know that he procured his own confirmation to the federal bench by committing the same offense. And he did so not in a private case but in the midst of public hearings for a position of trust, for a lifetime appointment to the federal judiciary.
His actions were dishonorable and dishonest.
This week, as part of his efforts to be elevated to the highest court in the land, he has calmly continued to deceive, falsely claiming that it would have been perfectly normal for him to receive secret Democratic letters, talking points, and other materials. And if this absurd notion were somehow true, it would not even be consistent with what he testified to 12 and 14 years ago. Back then, he didn’t state it would have been normal for him to receive secret Democratic strategy materials.
Instead, he explicitly and repeatedly went out of his way to say he never had access to any such materials. These objectively false statements were offered under oath to convince the committee of something that was untrue. It was clearly intentional, with Kavanaugh going so far as to correct Sen. Kennedy when the senator described the document situation accurately.
That’s why—without even getting into other reasonable objections to his nomination—he should not be confirmed.
In fact, by his own standard, he should clearly be impeached.
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n nations that have known the horror of dictatorship or foreign occupation, there are often long traditions of what 
ashington has been buzzing this week in the wake of the 
n entire summer’s worth of rain has fallen across a broad swath of the Midwest in recent days. The resulting record floods have wrecked homes and altered the paths of rivers, in one case 
bservers say that confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to become President Trump’s second pick for a lifetime job on the Supreme Court will make the Court more conservative. It is more accurate to say Kavanaugh will make the Court more corporatist.
uch of Washington has spent the week focusing on whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court. After the revelations of his confirmation hearings, the better question is whether he should be impeached from the federal judiciary.
