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FOCUS: From Blood Sport to Cold War |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23383"><span class="small">Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Monday, 06 August 2018 10:35 |
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Parker writes: "It's a given that political candidates will target each other with as much oppositional propaganda as they can get away with. But with the Kremlin now playing a third-party shadow role in U.S. elections, the usual game seems to be shifting from blood sport to cold war."
Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Reuters)
From Blood Sport to Cold War
By Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post
06 August 18
 t’s a given that political candidates will target each other with as much oppositional propaganda as they can get away with. But with the Kremlin now playing a third-party shadow role in U.S. elections, the usual game seems to be shifting from blood sport to cold war.
Given Russia’s well-established preference for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, it’s possible, if not likely, that the next round of election meddling will be geared toward keeping the Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
For Democrats, this added pressure from Russia could easily begin to feel like a threat. Imagine believing that you’re not only running against a Republican but also against a former KGB agent who seems to be in cahoots with your very own president.
What else should one think?
During a rally Thursday evening in Pennsylvania, Trump once again referred to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation as the “Russian hoax.” This, amid the intelligence community’s stepped-up warnings about new Russian interference. And, let’s not forget the 12 Russians whom Mueller indicted last month for hacking Democratic Party computer networks.
Mueller is not generally known as a hoaxer.
But Trump remains the slick salesman, entertainer and pot stirrer he’s always been. Just hours before his stick-it-to-’em jamboree, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and several national intelligence officials convened a media briefing to address Russian attempts to impact the midterm elections.
That is, with a slight modification. In her statement, Sanders assured gathered media that the administration “will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections from any nation-state or other dangerous actor,” clearly indicating that the focus would not be only on Russia.
As it should be, given that others would also like to meddle in our affairs. But as the gathered officials made clear — including Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen — Russia is of central concern here and now. Wray said that Russia “continues to engage in malign influence operations” that target “the integrity of our democratic institutions.” Coats said: “We continue to see a pervasive messaging campaign by Russia to try to weaken and divide the United States.”
Then why is the president undermining his own advisers?
Although Trump is referring primarily to Mueller’s core mission — to determine whether the Trump campaign was involved in the Russian interference — he seems more than willing to minimize the importance of what we already know. Thus, the question has to be: Why, if there’s no concern about collusion, would Trump keep pounding Mueller while defending Putin?
One can only conclude that either there’s a smidge of guilt, a problematic family connection, a dossier embarrassment — or the president of the United States doesn’t care that Russia tried to ruin Clinton so that he could become president. He seems to care so little, in fact, that he’s essentially calling the U.S. intelligence community a pack of liars and Mueller a hoaxer. Meanwhile, last month in Helsinki, Trump said Putin was an “extremely strong and powerful” denier.
If Putin says he didn’t do it, then does Trump take him at his word? Yet, when teams of skilled, honorable investigators tackle the problem and present indictments based on facts, Trump insinuates that they’re making it up?
This reversal of loyalty to his own people, not to mention the country he is tasked with leading, is so preposterous that normal people are at serious risk of joining lemming colonies. It is impossible to use logic with the illogical; it’s futile to explain the obvious to the willfully thick; and when it comes to Trump’s base, witness only the rally this week in Florida where CNN reporter Jim Acosta was the target of dozens of Trumpers extending their middle digits and shouting, among other salutations, “You suck!”
Perhaps, some in Trump’s camp see things like steady job growth and low unemployment and say to themselves, Who cares how he got elected? And if Russia likes Trump, why is that necessarily bad? The president, they would note, has been checking off his list of campaign promises without so much as changing his expression.
One could make such an argument, but this would be a narrow view and an unserious response to other facts. These include what almost any Russian would surely tell you — that Putin is playing Trump like a fiddle — and that something was stinky in Helsinki.
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Brett Kavanaugh Was Involved in 3 Different Crises of Democracy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Monday, 06 August 2018 08:42 |
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Pierce writes: "There were three crises in democracy immediately prior to the current one, and all of them benefitted Kavanaugh's political mentors and helped him build his career."
Mitch McConnell, Brett Kavanaugh and Mike Pence. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Brett Kavanaugh Was Involved in 3 Different Crises of Democracy
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
06 August 18
All of which he used to benefit himself.
 f all the perilous nonsense involved in the Great Penis Hunt of 1998, the most singularly indecent episode was the relentless fishing expedition into the suicide of Vincent Foster, the first White House counsel of the Clinton administration. On July 23, 1993, Foster shot himself to death under a tree in Fort Marcy Park in Virginia. Prior to taking his own life, Foster told friends that he was being overwhelmed by depression in the wake of the uproar over the firings of certain press corps pets in the White House Travel Office, which was another early chapter in the By-Any-Means-Necessary pursuit of the Clintons that continues in certain feverish quarters even today.
(In the note he left behind, Foster specifically mentioned The Wall Street Journal, the editorial page of which was at the time run by a conspiratorial nutball named Robert Bartley. I wonder if they have a copy of that note hanging on the wall of the editorial offices, next to Paul Gigot's Pulitzer.)
However, over the next couple years, the Republicans in the Congress, and their media allies in newspapers and on radio and TV, heedless of the pain endured by Foster's family, and by his colleagues in the White House, kept digging up Foster's corpse and flogging the Clinton Administration with it. The late charlatan Jerry Falwell promoted a bit of political porn called The Clinton Chronicles, which argued that Foster was merely another person that the Clintons had murdered. Various rightwing journalists excavated the open wound with promiscuous glee; one of these was Christopher Ruddy, who has re-emerged as a Trump Whisperer over the past two years when he should have been mowing the Foster family's lawn for the rest of his life. Congressman Dan Burton, who had current Trump aide David Bossie on his staff, famously shot a melon in his backyard to "prove" that Foster couldn't have killed himself.
Subsequent investigations failed to stop the onslaught. The autopsy concluded that Foster had committed suicide, so did a ludicrous Senate Banking Committee investigation headed by the ridiculous Al D'Amato. And, most important, so did Robert Fiske, the original Whitewater special prosecutor. In fact, it was this conclusion that was partly responsible for Fiske's being replaced by Kenneth Starr, who, because he is Kenneth Starr and a hack, opened the investigation again and handed it off to an ambitious lawyer in his office named...Brett Kavanaugh. From The Washington Post (emphasis added):
In early 1995, however, Kavanaugh offered his boss, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, the legal rationale for expanding his investigation of the Arkansas financial dealings of President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, to include the Foster death, according to a memo he wrote on March 24, 1995. Kavanaugh, then 30, argued that unsupported allegations that Foster may have been murdered gave Starr the right to probe the matter more deeply. Foster’s death had already been the focus of two investigations, both concluding that Foster committed suicide. “We are currently investigating Vincent Foster’s death to determine, among other things, whether he was murdered in violation of federal criminal law,” Kavanaugh wrote to Starr and six other officials in a memo offering legal justification for the probe. “[I]t necessarily follows that we must have the authority to fully investigate Foster’s death.”
His handling of Starr’s Foster probe helped elevate Kavanaugh’s career, but the lengthy inquiry enabled conspiracy theories to flourish and add to the tumult of the Clinton presidency. Once the Foster matter was closed, Starr’s office continued to investigate the Clintons and eventually veered into the president’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Kavanaugh pursued the Foster inquiry at Starr’s request, even though he and others in the office soon came to believe that Foster killed himself, according to two people who worked with him at the time. Ultimately, Kavanaugh’s report in October 1997 affirmed earlier findings of suicide. The Foster component of Starr’s investigation cost about $2 million and lasted three years.
(An aside—any Republican operative, whether they have their own cable TV show or not, who expresses surprise and shock that there are so many people who believe the fanciful conspiracy theories of the QAnon crowd should examine their own damn conscience and ask where they were when the Republicans in Congress and high-priced conservative lawyers thought the idea that the president had his White House counsel murdered worthy of not one, but two congressional investigations, and not one, but two special prosecutors. It didn't start with this president*, kids.)
To me, the Post story is overly generous to Kavanaugh, using his involvement in the Foster investigation, and his subsequent statements asserting that presidents should not be pestered by special prosecutors while in office, as being indicative of an "evolution" in Kavanaugh's legal thinking. Me? I think it marks him as a jumped-up hack with a nice CV who will do whatever he's told. There were three crises in democracy immediately prior to the current one, and all of them benefitted Kavanaugh's political mentors and helped him build his career: the Great Penis Hunt, the burglary of the 2000 election, and the Bush administration's descent into the dark side. Brett Kavanaugh was involved in all three of them. That would be a no, then, on his nomination.
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The NRA Says It's in Deep Financial Trouble, May Be 'Unable to Exist' |
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Sunday, 05 August 2018 13:56 |
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Dickinson writes: "In the new document - an amended complaint filed in U.S. District Court in late July - the NRA says it cannot access financial services essential to its operations and is facing 'irrecoverable loss and irreparable harm.'"
An attendee passes by a large banner advertising a handgun during the NRA convention at the Georgia World Congress Center on Thursday, April 27th, 2017, in Atlanta. (photo: AP)
The NRA Says It's in Deep Financial Trouble, May Be 'Unable to Exist'
By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
05 August 18
A new legal filing by the powerful gun group against the state of New York paints a grim picture
 he National Rifle Association warns that it is in grave financial jeopardy, according to a recent court filing obtained by Rolling Stone, and that it could soon “be unable to exist… or pursue its advocacy mission.” (Read the NRA’s legal complaint at the bottom of this story.)
The reason, according to the NRA filing, is not its deep entanglement with alleged Russian agents like Maria Butina. Instead, the gun group has been suing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state’s financial regulators since May, claiming the NRA has been subject to a state-led “blacklisting campaign” that has inflicted “tens of millions of dollars in damages.”
In the new document — an amended complaint filed in U.S. District Court in late July — the NRA says it cannot access financial services essential to its operations and is facing “irrecoverable loss and irreparable harm.”
Specifically, the NRA warns that it has lost insurance coverage — endangering day-to-day operations. “Insurance coverage is necessary for the NRA to continue its existence,” the complaint reads. Without general liability coverage, it adds, the “NRA cannot maintain its physical premises, convene off-site meetings and events, operate educational programs … or hold rallies, conventions and assemblies.”
The complaint says the NRA’s video streaming service and magazines may soon shut down.
“The NRA’s inability to obtain insurance in connection with media liability raises risks that are especially acute; if insurers remain afraid to transact with the NRA, there is a substantial risk that NRATV will be forced to cease operating.” The group also warns it “could be forced to cease circulation of various print publications and magazines.”
In addition to its insurance troubles, the NRA court filing also claims that “abuses” by Cuomo and the New York State Department of Financial Services “will imminently deprive the NRA of basic bank-depository services … and other financial services essential to the NRA’s corporate existence.”
The lawsuit presents these financial risks as catastrophic. Without access to routine banking services, the NRA claims, “it will be unable to exist as a not-for-profit or pursue its advocacy mission.” The lawsuit accuses New York’s government of seeking to “silence one of America’s oldest constitutional rights advocates,” pleading to the court: “If their abuses are not enjoined, they will soon, substantially, succeed.”
The lawsuit stems from actions taken by New York financial regulators to halt the sale of an illegal, NRA-branded insurance policy. The NRA actively marketed “Carry Guard,” a policy to reimburse members for legal costs incurred after firing a legal gun. In May, the state of New York found that Carry Guard “unlawfully provided liability insurance to gun owners for certain acts of intentional wrongdoing.” The NRA’s insurance partners agreed to stop selling the policies and pay a $7 million fine.
The NRA complaint alleges that New York was not content to block this single insurance product, but instead campaigned to sever the NRA’s ties to a wide range of financial service providers, from insurance companies to banks.
The NRA did not respond to a request for more detail about its financial distress, but its most recent financial disclosure also shows it overspent by nearly $46 million in 2016.
The lawsuit decries pressure from state regulators in the wake of the Parkland, Florida massacre — including a letter asking financial institutions to heed “the voices of the passionate, courageous, and articulate young people who have experienced this recent horror first hand” — and from the governor himself. In April, Cuomo tweeted: “I urge companies in New York State to revisit any ties they have to the NRA and consider their reputations, and responsibility to the public.”
In its complaint, the NRA paints these actions as a “malicious conspiracy to stifle the NRA’s speech and induce a boycott of the NRA.” Cuomo and state regulators, the NRA alleges, were intent on “suppressing the NRA’s pro-Second Amendment viewpoint” and had engaged in “unlawful conduct with the intent to obstruct, chill, deter, and retaliate against the NRA’s core political speech.”
In the filing, the NRA reveals that its longtime insurer broke off negotiations this winter and “stated that it was unwilling to renew coverage at any price.” [Emphasis in original.] The NRA claims it “has encountered serious difficulties obtaining corporate insurance coverage to replace coverage withdrawn.” In addition, the NRA contends that “multiple banks” have now balked at doing business with it “based on concerns that any involvement with the NRA — even providing the organization with basic depository services — would expose them to regulatory reprisals.”
The lawsuit seeks an immediate injunction to block state authorities from “interfering with, terminating, or diminishing any of the NRA’s contracts and/or business relationships with any organizations.” Without court intervention, the complaint reads, “the NRA will suffer irrecoverable loss and irreparable harm if it is unable to acquire insurance or other banking services due to Defendants’ actions.”
Cuomo also did not respond to a request for comment, but has previously waved off the NRA’s lawsuit as “a futile and desperate attempt to advance its dangerous agenda to sell more guns.”
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FOCUS: The Very American Killing of Nia Wilson |
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Sunday, 05 August 2018 12:16 |
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Felix writes: "On the night of July 22nd, an eighteen-year-old black woman named Nia Wilson and her older sister Lahtifa were exiting a bart station in Oakland, California, when a man suddenly approached and stabbed both sisters in the neck with a knife."
The details of the killing of Nia Wilson are particular in their horror, but her death also brings into brutal focus multiple American crises. (photo: Jim Wilson/NYT)
The Very American Killing of Nia Wilson
By Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker
05 August 18
n the night of July 22nd, an eighteen-year-old black woman named Nia Wilson and her older sister Lahtifa were exiting a BART station in Oakland, California, when a man suddenly approached and stabbed both sisters in the neck with a knife. The women were on their way back to Oakland after attending a party at their aunt’s house, in nearby Concord. Nia bled to death on the platform as Lahtifa, who suffered less grave injuries, attempted to soothe her: “We’re gonna get through this. I got you, you’re my baby sister.” Witnesses have said that Nia’s torso rapidly became soaked in her own blood. With a gauze bandage on her neck, Lahtifa told ABC News the next day that she had glimpsed the assailant wiping down his weapon before he dashed out of the station. Less than twenty-four hours later, a manhunt by the BART police ended when officers acted on a tip and apprehended John Lee Cowell, a twenty-seven-year-old white parolee. Camera footage showed that he had been riding the BART system back and forth in the intervening time.
In the past week, I haven’t been able to go very far online without encountering Nia Wilson’s face. Artists have rendered her selfies in saturated colors, or surrounded her image with a border of flowering mandalas. Searching #NiaWilson yields thousands of memorials; celebrities including Viola Davis and Anne Hathaway have called attention to her death. Wilson was naturally gorgeous, and her skill with makeup only enhanced her beauty. She was a cheerleader. She was trained in CPR. She was thinking of joining the military, maybe eventually becoming a paramedic. She was a budding rapper; at a vigil held the day after her killing, which drew thousands of mourners, people danced to one of her songs, which had an unmistakable Bay Area energy. We now know Wilson, and we will never know her. The details of her killing are particular in their horror, but her death also brings into brutal focus multiple American crises.
For instance: the C.D.C. has found that black women die by homicide at nearly three times the rate that white women do. In the immediate aftermath of Wilson’s killing, some members of her family, and of the larger black community, expressed uncertainty that the police would find her killer at all. Their mistrust was not unfounded; the Washington Post has identified “pockets of impunity” in American cities where police often fail to solve homicides. Oakland has two such clusters. In a 2007 essay titled “The Missing White Girl Syndrome,” Sarah Stillman described how certain victims—typically white, upper middle class, and beautiful—become “worthy” of public fascination. The mourning of Wilson on Instagram and Twitter is a shrewd and agonizing kind of revisionism: the ubiquity of her smiling face reframes our cultural devotion to the innocent and beautiful dead girl, who has not previously been imagined as having brown skin.
There is a blinkered symmetry to the way Americans have been taught to understand violence that is gendered and violence that is racialized: the victims of the former are white women; the victims of the latter are black men. The same violence, when visited upon black women, falls outside the recognizable parameters of victimhood, and thus fails to register. According to a study by Washington University published earlier this year, black women are more likely than any other demographic to have been unarmed when killed by law enforcement. (The #SayHerName hashtag, which has been used in recent days to mark tributes to Wilson, originated in the summer of 2015, to amplify the outcry over female victims of police brutality.) Black transgender women are murdered at a disproportionately high rate and have an abysmal life expectancy, a fact that is treated as an aberration rather than a systemic ill. As Linda Villarosa reported in the Times Magazine earlier this year, black women are three to four times as likely as white women to die in childbirth. And violence against black women is an often neglected part of our national history. In April, on the occasion of the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a commemoration of lynching victims, in Montgomery, Alabama, the Yale scholar Crystal N. Feimster, drawing on the journalism of Ida B. Wells, wrote in an Op-Ed for the Times, “When most Americans imagine lynching, they envision the tortured and mutilated body of a black man accused of raping a white woman. They rarely think of a black woman ‘stripped naked and hung.’ ”
The Alameda County district attorney is exploring whether Cowell, who has been charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder, should also face hate-crime charges. But hate crimes are notoriously difficult to prosecute. (Unless, perhaps, the victim is a policeman: last year, Texas passed legislation that will make attacking a police officer a hate crime; more than a dozen other states have introduced “Blue Lives Matter” bills.) As of today, Cowell hasn’t been tied to white-supremacist organizations. His past convictions were for battery and robbery. Cowell’s family, with whom he has a distant relationship, said in a statement that he suffered from untreated bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The San Francisco Chronicle reported over the weekend that Cowell and a black friend of his have matching tattoos. But casual, or even profound, camaraderie with the other is not inculcation against racism. What cannot easily be accounted for is the kind of racial hatred that is ambient or unconscious, that goes unsaid. “They are trying to say that he was sick and crazy,” Wilson’s oldest sister, Malika Harris, told the Times. “It was an act of racism.”
Wilson had a job interview lined up for the last week of July. She wouldn’t tell her sisters where, but she mentioned that she was nervous. She had also been planning to attend a party to commemorate the birthday of her high-school boyfriend, Josiah Pratt-Rose, who drowned in a lake, in 2016. Right after Pratt-Rose’s death, according to the Times, Wilson was at a street vigil for him when shots rang out and Reggin’a Jefferies, a girl who had been standing next to her, collapsed. Wilson stayed with Jefferies as she lay dying from a bullet wound to the neck. Until last week, Wilson had managed to thrive amid the ricocheting hazards of American life. Her killing is not, as Oakland’s mayor, Libby Schaaf, said, “senseless.” It is not, as implied by the San Francisco Chronicle’s headline—“Divergent Paths Met Tragically on Oakland Platform”—the result of some awful serendipity. It is a reflection of how this country values the lives of black women.
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t last weekend's Newport Folk Festival, Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit's Friday set featured a marquee special guest: David Crosby, who performed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Ohio" with the band. Isbell has covered the song before in concert multiple times, but this version unsurprisingly had extra grit and exuded a grimmer tone that was mesmerizing. Isbell and Crosby's harmonies were weary but wise, and the performance's multiple-electric guitar approach added tenacity. It didn't feel like a song nearing 50 years old; it was vital contemporary commentary.
