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I'm Old Enough to Remember When We All Agreed the Nazis Were the Bad Guys |
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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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Saturday, 04 August 2018 13:38 |
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Pierce writes: "On Thursday evening, while channel surfing, I came upon the live feed from Netroots Nation down in New Orleans."
White supremacists spread messaging about 'saving' the white race, or materials meant to attack racial, religious, and sexual minorities. (photo: Erik S Lesser/EPA)
I'm Old Enough to Remember When We All Agreed the Nazis Were the Bad Guys
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
04 August 18
Not so, apparently, in Omaha, Nebraska.
 n Thursday evening, while channel surfing, I came upon the live feed from Netroots Nation down in New Orleans. There was a woman named Colette Pichon-Battle who runs an organization called the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, and she gave one of the best talks about how to organize around issues and candidates that I ever have heard, not least because she had no time at all for petty squabbling and litmus tests and My Issue Is The Only Issue On Earth.
This is because she and her organization represent people at the sharp end of climate change and environmental discrimination, and the sea and the poisons don't give a damn about who you voted for in the 2016 Wisconsin primary.
I know, I know, everybody down here like to act like they don't know Mississippi and Louisiana exist. But if you don't know, you better ask somebody, because Mississippi has been doing some real organizing on the ground...And what does this have to do with Netroots, Colette? Well, I'm going to tell you. We cannot continue to spend all our money on elections and not give some of those resources to the ground. There are people who are taking hits...they're taking hits that don't make good T-shirts. They're taking hits that don't make good hashtags, but they're taking the hits nonetheless.
This is the grassroots organizing. It's not these organizations that you've heard of, and it's probably a church that you don't want to go into, and it might be somebody who believes something that you don't want to believe, but you have to invest in that infrastructure because we might win...And, also, we might lose and there are people who know how to survive even in the most hostile of territories. Just ask any of us from any of these Gulf states and we'll tell you what survival looks like. We'll tell you how you don't give up hope even when you're faced with all this ridiculousness. We will tell you how to join hands with someone who doesn't particularly like you, but we gotta know that we're in it together.
That's the real stuff right there—a coalition politics that is neither soft nor diluted. Dr. King would understand it. So would Huey Long, for that matter.
I'd like to thank the president* and his many fans for what they've contributed to the national debate. From 1011Now in Omaha:
A giant swastika was burned into the lawn at Memorial Park, just a week after Nazi books were displayed in little libraries across the city. "It's the 21st Century. Why are we still dealing with this?" said Dylan Castro. Castro came across the vandalism while visiting the park. "It's s--- like this that makes me look over my shoulder when I'm walking around, even in the daytime," said Castro. The Nazi regime symbol was burned into the Memorial Park lawn, a place that honors American soldiers who fought against Nazi Germany in World War II. "It's hard to feel like we're a community when this keeps happening," said Castro.
I long for the days when we all could at least be on the same side regarding World War Fcking Two.
And speaking of enabling the worst, I've always hated the Newseum in Washington, not least because they charge you admission and then ask you for "donations" as you leave. I've hated the whole thing from the start because it is a monument that Al Neuharth, the deceased chief of Gannett, and one of the worst union-busting vampires of his generation of publishers, built for himself so his heirs could wank themselves into a stupor in perpetuity.
But seriously, what in the unholy, hairy fck is this all about? From Poynter.org:
The seven-level interactive museum is located in the heart of the nation's capital. According to its website, the non-profit museum’s mission is “to increase public understanding of the importance of a free press and the First Amendment. In an email to Poynter, Sonya Gavankar, director of public relations for the Newseum, said the merch is an example of how the museum tries to foster an environment that encourages free speech. “We recognize why you’re asking the question,” she said. “As a nonpartisan organization, people with differing viewpoints feel comfortable visiting the Newseum, and one of our greatest strengths is that we’re champions not only of a free press but also of free speech.
I expect to see "Fuck Trump" T-shirts and hats in the gift shop on my next trip to the Newseum, which will be never.
“The MAGA hat and the FBI hat are two of our best-selling items.”
Yeah, that's something old Al Neuharth would have understood right there.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Water Keeps Rising" (Kristin Diable): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here are some scientists in what was then called Rhodesia, saving animals marooned on islands that were formed when they dammed up the Zambezi River. Those are some pretty damn amazing porcupines there. History—and porcupines—are so cool.
Speaking of water rising, and you may be sensing a theme here, a dam near Lynchburg, Virginia was threatening to collapse on Friday afternoon, threatening to send 17 feet of water cascading into the city. Water over the dam is never a good sign. The College Lake dam was built by the Virginia Highway Department in 1930, and it's been listed as a high-risk structure for seven years now. Three years ago, the city commissioned a study of the future of the dam. I hope they've got all those documents to high ground by now. And another Infrastructure Week comes to an end.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, LiveScience? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
Much like today's hippopotamus, the creature — a member of the now-extinct genus Paleoparadoxia (Greek for "ancient paradox") — was a water-loving beast that gulped down aquatic plants for dinner, the researchers said. The new analysis shows that much can be learned by studying long-forgotten museum fossils, said the study researchers, who detailed the unexpected rabbit hole they went down while investigating the bone's past.
Is there intrigue involved in this story? Of course, there is! Also, another dam.
first dam. An interview with Azuma’s oldest son offered a slightly different story. According to the son, he found the fossil while working on the third dam with his father. Because of these conflicting accounts, it's unclear which year and what dam the fossil is from, the researchers said.
However, the son also knew that the fossil wasn't a dinosaur bone, and that it belonged to a desmostylus, so it's possible that the son had communicated with a scientist about the bone, but that the scientist did not formally report it, the researchers said. Despite this, shortly after the fossil's discovery, people in the village began calling it a dinosaur bone. The femur was so famous that it was put on exhibit at the village hall. Luckily, the fossil was removed shortly before a devastating fire destroyed most of the city, including the village hall, on Feb. 22, 1954, as the researchers learned.
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RSN: After Snowden |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 04 August 2018 11:38 |
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Kiriakou writes: "Five years have passed since Edward Snowden told Americans that our government was spying on us. Before he said anything, most of us believed that it was illegal for the NSA (or the CIA or any of the other myriad intelligence agencies) to spy on Americans. Indeed, the NSA's charter expressly forbids it. But Snowden came forward with the proof. And it was damning."
John Kiriakou. (photo: The Washington Post)
After Snowden
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
04 August 18
 ive years have passed since Edward Snowden told Americans that our government was spying on us. Before he said anything, most of us believed that it was illegal for the NSA (or the CIA or any of the other myriad intelligence agencies) to spy on Americans. Indeed, the NSA’s charter expressly forbids it. But Snowden came forward with the proof. And it was damning.
The revelations began a national debate on what, exactly, Americans want their three-letter agencies to do to keep them safe. Nobody wants to see another day like September 11, 2001. We all want security. But we also want to maintain our civil rights and civil liberties.
Personally, I would rather face another terrorist attack than give up my right to privacy. But that’s just me. Where does the rest of America stand after five years? And where is Congress in all this?
First, let’s look at Ed Snowden. I think the guy is a bona fide hero. Without him, we wouldn’t have any idea of the depths to which US intelligence agencies were spying on us and retaining the information in massive depositories in Maryland and in the Utah desert.
Believe it or not, there have been a lot of public opinion polls about Snowden over the past five years. And the results haven’t changed terribly much in that period, except very recently. A 2015 poll commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that 64 percent of Americans held a negative view of Snowden, versus 36 who held a positive view. Snowden’s approval rating in Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Spain was found to be over 80 percent.
A year later, after a petition on the White House website calling for President Obama to pardon Snowden attracted more than 160,000 signatures, a Rasmussen poll found that 15 percent of Americans considered Snowden to be a “hero,” 30 percent considered him a “traitor,” and 45 percent said he was somewhere in the middle.
By 2018 things had changed. A Time Magazine poll found that 54 percent of Americans believed Snowden had done the right thing versus 38 percent who thought he should be prosecuted. Why the sudden change? Because Snowden’s revelations had finally found voices on both the left and the right on Capitol Hill.
Much of the NSA’s overreach is a result of the 2001 Patriot Act. Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) proposed the bill on October 23, 2001, in response to the September 11 attacks and the concurrent anthrax attacks in the US. It was passed into law the next day by a vote of 357-66 in the House and 98-1 in the Senate, with Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) the only dissenting vote. The Act allowed the indefinite detention of immigrants; it gave law enforcement officers the authority to search a home or business without the owner’s or occupant’s consent or knowledge; it expanded the use of “National Security Letters,” which allow the FBI to search telephone, email, and financial records without a warrant; and it allowed expanded access for law enforcement agencies to business records, including library and financial records.
Several members of Congress who opposed the law sounded the alarm almost immediately, saying that Americans would lose their civil liberties in the name of national security. But they didn’t gain much traction until Snowden went public with his revelations. It’s taken five years, but Snowden and his document release really have begun to have an impact on the intelligence community and its collection programs. Not all the news is good. But at the very least, there is a public debate, and that’s thanks to Ed Snowden.
First, pressure from the Congressional Progressive Caucus and from the right-wing Freedom Caucus resulted in the NSA ending its policy under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that allowed it to search literally all internet data that passed through its computers for certain search terms and to collect that data if any part of the communication passed outside of the US, even if one or both parties to the conversation were Americans. NSA now limits collection to communications coming from or going to a foreign national. We only learned about this program from Snowden.
When it comes to actual legal changes – those mandated by acts of Congress – however, we’re just not there yet. In May, Congress voted mostly along party lines to renew a provision of the Patriot Act that allows the warrantless internet surveillance. Snowden warned us about this in 2013 and nobody seemed to care. It’s still law, even though Donald Trump has complained about it and accused Democrats of using it against him in the 2016 election.
When I sat down to write this article, I really wanted to talk about the success of Snowden’s revelations. For some reason, I thought there were more. There certainly have been some great leaps forward. Americans are far better informed now than they were in 2013. But the government is still spying on us with impunity. The courts are no help. Our only hope is to elect like-minded supporters of privacy and civil liberties. Or we can hope for another Snowden to shake things up again.
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.
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Did Alleged Russian Spy Maria Butina Cause a Leadership Shake-Up at the NRA? |
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Saturday, 04 August 2018 08:26 |
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Corn writes: "On May 7, the National Rifle Association released a curious press release declaring that Oliver North, the key player in the Iran-contra scandal and an NRA board member, was 'poised to become' the group's president."
Maria Butina. (photo: Zuma Press)
Did Alleged Russian Spy Maria Butina Cause a Leadership Shake-Up at the NRA?
By David Corn, Mother Jones
04 August 18
Weeks after the feds raided Butina’s apartment, the gun group’s president made a hasty exit.
n May 7, the National Rifle Association released a curious press release declaring that Oliver North, the key player in the Iran-contra scandal and an NRA board member, was “poised to become” the group’s president. Earlier that day, Peter Brownell, then finishing his first term as NRA president, had announced that he would not seek a second annual term in order to devote more time to his family business, a firearms retail company.
This changing of the guard—and how it happened—was odd. For fifteen years, the NRA leadership had followed a specific pattern: an officer was elected by the board to serve two consecutive annual terms as second vice president, then two as first vice president, and, finally, two as president. But the Brownell-to-North transition broke this orderly process. North at the time was serving in neither vice president position. And his ascension was a surprise—even to North. The day of the move, North told NRATV, “I didn’t expect this to be happening…This was very sudden.” (North also remarked, “A coup is being worked against the president of the United States and every conservative organization on the planet.”)
This development puzzled NRA watchers. North had not been in the line of succession. He was not prepared for the position and said he would need weeks before he could assume the post. Brownell was the first NRA president in a decade and a half not to seek a second term, and the first vice president, Richard Childress, was passed over. Childress claimed that because of his own commitments he could not even serve as interim president. That job went to the second vice president, Carolyn Meadows. The NRA had been known as an outfit with a strict hierarchy. But now all that was being thrown aside in what North called an “unexpected” and “sudden” action.
What wasn’t publicly known at the time was that on April 25—two weeks before this seemingly hasty NRA leadership makeover—FBI agents in tactical gear raided the apartment of Maria Butina, a 29-year-old Russian who three months later would be charged by federal prosecutors for allegedly serving as a secret agent for the Russian government in the United States. For years, Butina and her mentor, Alexander Torshin, a Russian official tied to Vladimir Putin, had hooked up with the NRA and other conservative groups, allegedly as part of what the Justice Department called a covert influence operation. Butina, who ran a gun rights group in Russia, and Torshin, who has been accused of money laundering (a charge he denies), had attended NRA events and other right-wing get-togethers, and during the 2016 campaign used their NRA contacts to try to arrange a meeting between Putin and Donald Trump. (It didn’t happen.) During this operation, according to prosecutors, Butina relied upon the assistance of conservative consultant Paul Erickson, her romantic partner and an active NRA member.
Did the FBI investigation of Butina lead to Brownell’s quick retreat from the NRA leadership? The NRA did not respond to a request for comment. And neither did Brownell. “He’s not taking calls,” the receptionist at his company says.
Brownell did have history with Butina. In 2015, she organized a trip to Russia for an NRA delegation that included Brownell, top NRA donor Joe Gregory, and David Clarke, then the Milwaukee County sheriff. During that jaunt, the NRAers met with Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister, who had been sanctioned by the Obama administration in 2014 in retaliation for Putin’s intervention in Ukraine. Rogozin led the ultra-right party Rodina, and his government portfolio included a matter of particular interest to this delegation: the arms industry. He had the task of overseeing Russia’s military-industrial complex and rejuvenating the nation’s weapons-making business.
While Brownell, then the NRA’s first vice president, and his NRA colleagues were in Moscow, they visited the headquarters of ORSIS, a private arms manufacturer. Accompanied by Butina, they watched a video extolling the ORSIS T-5000, a highly accurate sniper rifle that had been identified by the Pentagon as a threat to American troops. They toured the company’s manufacturing plant and observed rifles being made. They also test-fired ORSIS rifles at an on-site shooting range. The firm presented the NRA group with watches bearing the company’s logo. Weeks later, the company produced a promotional video showing the NRA delegates gushing over the T-5000. The video was posted on YouTube. That is, Brownell and the others, who had been escorted to the ORSIS offices by Butina, were helping ORSIS sell a rifle that worried US military planners.
During that visit, Brownell and the NRA delegation met Svetlana Nikolaeva, the president of the parent company of ORSIS. (She appears in that promotional video with the NRA crew.) In what was likely not a coincidence, Nikolaeva’s oligarch husband, Konstantin Nikolaev, provided financial support to Butina, according to private testimony Butina gave to Senate investigators this year before she was charged. (One document filed by federal prosecutors maintains that Butina has “ties to the Russian oligarchy.”)
The Butina case has been an embarrassment for the NRA, which has yet to comment on it, and, more important, it has raised questions about interactions between the gun lobby and Russia, including the possibility of Russian sources funneling money to the NRA. (According to a BuzzFeed report, Butina and Erickson engaged in financial transactions totaling nearly $300,000 that were flagged by banking investigators as suspicious.) A previous NRA president, David Keene, who was part of that delegation to Russia, enthusiastically pledged his assistance to Butina and her Russian organization. And Brownell was smack-dab in the middle of the NRA-Butina connection.
If Brownwell’s departure as top gun at the NRA was not related to the Butina case, then the gun lobby was quite fortunate he was gone by the time this scandal exploded.
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RSN: Voting Threats Haven't Mattered to National Leadership for Decades |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Friday, 03 August 2018 12:45 |
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Boardman writes: "Does anyone here have confidence that the American voting system is secure, stable, and designed to protect the voting rights of every eligible American voter?"
Voters stand in line waiting to cast their ballots. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
Voting Threats Haven't Mattered to National Leadership for Decades
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
03 August 18
From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
– Traditional Scottish prayer
Two years after Russia interfered in the American presidential campaign, the nation has done little to protect itself against a renewed effort to influence voters in the coming congressional midterm elections, according to lawmakers and independent analysts.
– Washington Post, August 1, 2018
 oes anyone here have confidence that the American voting system is secure, stable, and designed to protect the voting rights of every eligible American voter?
There’s no good reason to believe that after more than two decades of Democratic spinelessness in the face of a consistent Republican assault on voting integrity. The Russians may be long-leggedy beasties, but it’s Republicans who have been going bump in the night for all these years, disenfranchising American voters unlikely to vote Republican.
How’s this for a proposition: the Democrats elected Donald Trump when they decided not to contest the election of 2000 and allow a partisan Supreme Court to decide the election without allowing a full count of the votes. That election floundered as a result of Florida governor Jeb Bush presiding over a state effort to purge and cage presumably non-Republican voters, especially non-white voters. The purge-and-cage effort made the election closer than it would otherwise have been and produced a fundamentally invalid vote result from a state-distorted electorate.
The Democrats rolled over then, fighting tactically rather than on principle, and here we are as a country, deep in denial about the integrity of our election system. Instead of addressing real and persistent Republican attacks on voting rights, we imagine nearly omnipotent Russian hacker ghoulies and ghosties somehow subverting a popular will that hasn’t been able to express itself fully in a long time. The reality of Russian efforts is at best uncertain, based on available evidence. But “Russian interference” remains an article of bipartisan faith, which serves as a convenient excuse for ignoring the real and present dangers American officials inflict on American voters year after year in state after state.
Possibly the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee and released damning emails to the public. And that’s bad because? The emails showed the DNC to be a corrupt enterprise. Whoever is responsible for the leak, its revelations should be seen as a public service. And it might have been seen as a public service had it led to actual change in the Democratic Party leadership, had it opened the party to the non-corporate voices it has suppressed at least since the Clinton presidency. The DNC emails made no cultural difference; the party is still at war with its progressive members, and that war puts the midterms at greater risk than they should be.
The mindlessness of “leadership” response to the Russian “threat” was neatly expressed, probably inadvertently, by Democratic senator Mark Warner of Virginia, co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on August 1:
Twenty-one months after the 2016 election, and only three months before the 2018 elections, Russian-backed operatives continue to infiltrate and manipulate social media to hijack the national conversation and set Americans against each other. They were doing it in 2016; they are still doing it today.
Even if Warner is precisely correct, so what? First of all, free speech in a globalized world gets tricky. Does that mean we want to clamp down on free speech the way more authoritarian countries do? One hopes not. But of course there are those who fervently hope to control free speech to the point of extinction.
So how many Russian operatives does it take to hijack a national conversation? And let’s assume, despite evidence to the contrary, that a national conversation is actually happening on social media, where there are millions and millions of voices clamoring to be heard and a much smaller number actually listening. And even with those who listen, there’s no way to determine what they actually hear. Does Mark Warner really believe in the alternative reality where Russian-backed operatives have more influence than right-wing operatives at Fox News and elsewhere have had for a generation across all media?
Why doesn’t Mark Warner address a real threat to democratic process and demand that his own party have free and fair primary elections? Oh right, that might be a threat to him and his fellow legislators. Or he might address voting in Virginia, where Republicans continue to poison the well by claiming imaginary voter fraud, as they have for years across the country with almost no evidence.
As for substance, the Russian-backed operatives seem mostly to work with political judo, leveraging common American memes to inflame one side or another, even if those sides are already inflamed. American politics have been inflamed for a long time, and the Russians didn’t do it. Republicans did most of it, with climate denial and racism and religious bigotry and voter suppression of all sorts and attacks on the environment and enriching the rich and where does the list of destructive attacks on decent values end?
The deep irony of our present moment was palpably expressed, most likely by accident, by Republican senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the other co-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Known as a “moderate” Republican, Burr said on August 1, referring to the Russian ghoulies and ghosties:
This issue goes far beyond elections…. We’re fighting for the integrity of our society. And we need to enlist every single person.
Well, the current Republican control of government would not have happened in a society with any real integrity. It’s taken a lengthy, bipartisan effort to gets us into the morass of today. The Russians are surely grateful for the gift of chaos that they could never have achieved on their own, but can now take some advantage of. And the beautiful part of it is that the Russian nibbling gives those responsible for devouring American integrity a great excuse to ignore their own very real responsibility for knocking down an already fragile system. “The integrity of our society” has never been a reality, only an aspiration at best. The degradation of American society since 1980 has been deliberate and ruthless, to the point that “Make America Great Again” resonates rationally despite its masking of duplicitous purposes.
Richard Burr claiming to be “fighting for the integrity of our society” is ironic to the point of bald hypocrisy, given the record of North Carolina Republicans enacting racist voter suppression laws that even the US Supreme Court rejected. This was after the Supreme Court enabled racist voting legislation with its 2013 decision gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That element of the integrity of our society was not yet 50 years old when Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion based on a masterpiece of doublethink and denial:
Our country has changed. While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.
As it turned out, “current conditions” included a North Carolina legislature that promptly passed the racist voting legislation even the Supreme Court couldn’t stomach. When the Supreme Court struck down that racist law, the North Carolina legislature went back to work trying to achieve the same racist end by different racist means. Those are the current conditions of the integrity of our society. The Russians have little or nothing to do with any of it. Demonizing the Russians is a bipartisan diversion. The real existential threat to the integrity of our society has long held office.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
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.
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hat should special counsel Robert S. Mueller III do if his probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election uncovers crimes dealing with or motivated by money? Is he supposed to look the other way?
