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Did Tillerson Lose His Job Over Stopping a Saudi Invasion of Qatar? |
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Thursday, 02 August 2018 13:21 |
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Cole writes: "Emmons suggests that Tillerson lost his job over his intervention, given the sway evil genius Yousef al-Otaiba (UAE ambassador in Washington, DC) has over Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner."
Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. (photo: Getty)
Did Tillerson Lose His Job Over Stopping a Saudi Invasion of Qatar?
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
02 August 18
 lex Emmons at The Intercept interviewed two former State Department officials and one intelligence official who confirmed to him that in early June, 2017, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been on the cusp of invading Qatar, but were stopped by Rex Tillerson. Emmons suggests that Tillerson lost his job over his intervention, given the sway evil genius Yousef al-Otaiba (UAE ambassador in Washington, DC) has over Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
As I noted in a Nation article last February, high Qatari officials had repeatedly alleged that their intelligence told them of an impending Saudi invasion in June of last year.
Emmons speculates that a primary motive for the planned invasion was that Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman wanted Qatar’s $300 bn sovereign wealth fund and future revenues from the sale of Qatari natural gas. Saudi Arabia itself is blowing through its own dollar reserves and faces a bleak future if it does not repair its spendthrift ways or find a new source of income other than the failing oil business.
It is a plausible speculation. Otherwise, it is difficult to see what Saudi Arabia and the UAE could possibly get from this move, which has hurt them in world opinion. Mohamed Bin Salman has acted so erratically and recklessly that he has scared off foreign investors almost entirely. His plan for an Aramco Saudi IPO appears to be in severe trouble.
Of course, the cover story is that Qatar supports the Muslim Brotherhood and “terrorism” and its freewheeling Al Jazeera television channel provokes critical thinking in the Arab publics. In essence, the Saudi and United Arab Emirate absolute monarchies were afraid of the democratization that began during the 2011 Arab Spring youth movement, and have used their oil billions to crush it. Qatar was on the other side of that struggle, supporting moves toward electoral democracy and the inclusion of the Muslim religious right in politics, and crushing it would be the final nail in the coffin of any sort of popular liberties in the Arab world.
On the other hand, Emmons’ fine piece does unduly discount some other actors. Secretary of Defense James Mattis surely acted behind the scenes to protect the US-leased al-Udeid air base, from which 80% of US sorties against extremists in the region are flow. Mattis is said by some Qataris to have a special connection to al-Udeid Base and a special affection for Emir Sheikh Tamim Al Thani. In fact, a Mattis intervention with King Salman surely would have carried much more weight than one from Tillerson.
Then, many Qataris to whom I spoke when I was there the first half of this year were convinced that a Turkish parliament vote to allow sending troops to Qatar was what deterred the Saudis. (A couple hundred Turkish troops subsequently turned up in Qatar, putting some teeth into the threat).
In the end, I think the article is a little US State Department-centric. Tillerson no doubt played a role (and Exxon-Mobil will likely do well out of Qatar’s expansion of its natural gas exports).
But Mattis also likely swung into action, and he wasn’t thereafter sacked. And Turkey was enormously important.
The plot has failed, leaving the old Gulf Cooperation Council in permanent limbo, it seems to me. The Qatari stock market and the economy have completely recovered from the momentary wobble in confidence of summer 2017, and prognostications for the future are bright. Qatar has become a Singapore (which was cast out of Malaysia in 1965), though I think it will take time for the Qataris to adjust to that status. It isn’t a bad fate, if managed properly. I’ve been to Singapore several times, and it is nice.
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FOCUS: Beware the Slippery Slope of Facebook Censorship |
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Thursday, 02 August 2018 11:53 |
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Taibbi writes: "The death-pit for civil liberties is usually found in a combination of fringe/unpopular people or ideas and a national security emergency."
Facebook web page. (photo: Getty)
Beware the Slippery Slope of Facebook Censorship
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
02 August 18
The social network is too big and broken to properly function, and these “fixes” will only create more problems
 ou may have seen a story this week detailing how Facebook shut down a series of accounts. As noted by Politico, Facebook claimed these accounts “sought to inflame social and political tensions in the United States, and said their activity was similar — and in some cases connected — to that of Russian accounts during the 2016 election.”
Similar? What does “similar” mean?
The death-pit for civil liberties is usually found in a combination of fringe/unpopular people or ideas and a national security emergency.
This is where we are with this unsettling new confab of Facebook, Congress and the Trump administration.
Read this jarring quote from Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) about the shutting down of the “inauthentic” accounts:
“Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation… I also expect Facebook, along with other platform companies, will continue to identify Russian troll activity and to work with Congress…”
This was in a story in which Facebook stated that it did not know the source of all the pages. They might be Russian, or they might just be Warner’s idea of “sowing division.” Are we comfortable with that range of possibilities?
Many of the banned pages look like parodies of some paranoid bureaucrat’s idea of dangerous speech.
A page called “Black Elevation” shows a picture of Huey Newton and offers readers a job. “Aztlan Warriors” contains a meme celebrating the likes of Geronimo and Zapata, giving thanks for their service in the “the 500 year war against colonialism.”
And a banned “Mindful Being” page shared this, which seems culled from Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts bit:
“We must unlearn what we have learned because a conditioned mind cannot comprehend the infinite.”
Facebook also wiped out a “No Unite The Right 2” page, appearing to advertise a counter-rally on the upcoming anniversary of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Facebook was “helped” in its efforts to wipe out these dangerous memes by the Atlantic Council, on whose board you’ll find confidence-inspiring names like Henry Kissinger, former CIA chief Michael Hayden, former acting CIA head Michael Morell and former Bush-era Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff. (The latter is the guy who used to bring you the insane color-coded terror threat level system.)
These people now have their hands on what is essentially a direct lever over nationwide news distribution. It’s hard to understate the potential mischief that lurks behind this union of Internet platforms and would-be government censors.
As noted in Rolling Stone earlier this year, 70 percent of Americans get their news from just two sources, Facebook and Google. As that number rises, the power of just a few people to decide what information does and does not reach the public will amplify significantly.
In a way, this is the other shoe dropping after last week’s much-publicized brouhaha over Infowars lunatic Alex Jones. Jones had four videos removed from YouTube and had his Facebook page banned for 30 days, though he seemed to find a way around that more or less instantly.
These moves were celebrated across social media, because who doesn’t hate Alex Jones?
The complainants in the Jones case included parents of Sandy Hook victims, who have legitimate beef with Jones and his conspiratorial coverage. The Infowars reports asserting the grieving parents were green-screen fakes were not just demonstrably false and rightfully the subject of a defamation suit, but also seemingly crossed a separate line when they published maps and addresses of family members, who experienced threats.
When Jones and his like-minded pals cried censorship and bias, they came across as more than a little disingenuous. After all, right-wingers have consistently argued on behalf of the speech rights of big corporations.
Conservative justices have handed down rulings using the First Amendment to hold back regulation of big tobacco and the gun industry, and to justify unlimited campaign spending. Citizens United was a crucial moment in the degradation of the First Amendment, essentially defining corporate influence as speech.
As many pointed out last week, the Jones ban was not a legal speech issue – not exactly, anyway. No matter how often Jones yelped about “Hitler levels of censorship,” and no matter how many rambling pages he and his minions typed up in their “emergency report” on the “deep state plan to kill the First Amendment,” it didn’t change the objectively true fact their ban was not (yet) a First Amendment issue.
The First Amendment, after all, only addresses the government’s power to restrict speech. It doesn’t address what Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter can do as private companies, enforcing their terms of service.
So it’s true, there was no First Amendment issue with the Jones ban. But that’s the problem.
The pre-Internet system for dealing with defamatory and libelous speech was litigation, which was pretty effective. The standard for punishment was also very high. In the 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan — the bedrock case for libel law involving a public figure — the court went out of its way to make sure that complainants needed to prove reckless or knowing disregard for fact.
Among other things, the court worried that absent such a tough legal standard, outlets would play it too safe with speech, and “make only statements which ‘steer far wider of the unlawful zone.’”
This mostly worked. Historically there were few analogs to Infowars that got anything like wide distribution because of the financial threat, which scared publishers most of all. In order to have power to distribute widely you needed resources, but you put those resources at risk if you defamed people.
That all changed with digital media. Way back in 1996, when mastodons roamed the earth and people used dial-up to connect to the Internet, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act. It contained the following landmark language:
“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
Essentially this meant that Internet providers wouldn’t be treated like news organizations. In the eyes of the law, they were less like CBS or Random House than they were bookstores or newsstands.
The rule allowed platforms to grow exponentially without the same fear of litigation. Companies like Facebook and Google became all-powerful media distributors, and were able to profit from InfoWars-style programs without having to be liable for them.
This led to the flowering of so much obnoxious speech that the First Amendment acquired a reputation as a racist con, and online media distributors, instead of being sued themselves as publishers, began to be viewed as potential restorers of order, beneficent censors.
Now, at a moment of crisis and high political tension, the public seems unable to grasp the gravity of allowing the government or anyone else to use that power.
It is already a scandal that these de facto private media regulators have secret algorithmic processes that push down some news organizations in favor of others. Witness the complaints by outlets like Alternet, Truthdig and others that big platforms have been de-emphasizing alternative sites in the name of combating “fake news.”
But this week’s revelation is worse. When Facebook works with the government and wannabe star-chamber organizations like the Atlantic Council to delete sites on national security grounds, using secret methodology, it opens the door to nightmare possibilities that you’d find in dystopian novels.
The sheer market power of these companies over information flow has always been the real threat. This is why breaking them up should have long ago become an urgent national priority.
Instead, as was obvious during the Senate hearing with Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year, politicians are more interested in using than curtailing the power of these companies. The platforms, for their part, will cave rather than be regulated. The endgame here couldn’t be clearer. This is how authoritarian marriages begin, and people should be very worried.
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Should Democrats Bother Fighting Brett Kavanaugh's Confirmation? History Suggests Yes |
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Wednesday, 01 August 2018 13:20 |
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Toobin writes: "Should Democrats surrender and allow Kavanaugh to take his seat on the Court? Such an approach would be wrong politically and unsound historically."
Brett Kavanaugh's long paper trail, both as a judge and as a Republican political appointee, gives Democrats a great deal of material to exploit. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Should Democrats Bother Fighting Brett Kavanaugh's Confirmation? History Suggests Yes
By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
01 August 18
 ad news for Donald Trump has been good news for Brett Kavanaugh. The past several weeks have been among the most tumultuous of Trump’s Presidency—with a widely panned European tour and summit with Vladimir Putin, and a series of embarrassing disclosures from Trump’s onetime lawyer Michael Cohen. The unfolding scandals have had the effect of pushing Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, to an afterthought in news coverage. The near-blackout on Kavanaugh has stalled any political momentum against his nomination. How can Kavanaugh be defeated if no one is paying attention to him? For the judge and putative Justice, no news is good news.
Kavanaugh’s smooth ride so far has raised the question of whether it’s even worthwhile for Democrats and liberals to fight his nomination. Trump selected Kavanaugh from a list of prospective nominees assembled by the right-wing Federalist Society. If the Senate rejected Kavanaugh, the President would surely just turn to the next person on the Federalists’ list, who may be even more conservative than Kavanaugh. In light of that possibility, one theory goes, shouldn’t Democrats surrender and allow Kavanaugh to take his seat on the Court?
Such an approach would be wrong politically and unsound historically. There’s a reason that conservatives talk about their judicial agenda in abstractions rather than in specifics. It’s hard to quarrel with (or even to understand) what they mean when they say that they favor “judicial restraint” or “judges who interpret the law rather than legislate from the bench.” But the practical meaning of those vague terms is actually very clear. It means overturning Roe v. Wade and allowing states to ban abortion. It means interpreting the Affordable Care Act to allow insurance companies to exclude protections for preëxisting conditions. (The Trump Administration is backing a lawsuit to do just that.) Substantial majorities of the public support both Roe v. Wade and the preëxisting-condition protections. During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised that he would appoint Justices who would vote to overturn Roe, and there is every reason to believe that Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first appointee to the Court, would do so—based on their records and on the fact that they were on the Federalist Society’s list. Likewise, Kavanaugh’s approach to the interpretation of statutes suggests that he would rule against mandatory coverage for preëxisting conditions. If framed in the clearest terms, then, the politics of the Kavanaugh nomination favor rejection, not confirmation.
And what of the prospect of Trump naming an even more extreme nominee if Kavanaugh is rejected? History offers some lessons on this subject. In 1969, President Richard Nixon named Clement Haynsworth to succeed Abe Fortas, a crusading liberal, after Fortas resigned from the Court in a corruption scandal. Haynsworth was fairly moderate in his views, but his record on labor and civil rights was deemed insufficiently progressive, and the Senate voted him down, fifty-five to forty-five. Enraged by the rejection, Nixon explicitly sought to punish liberals by naming G. Harrold Carswell, who was noticeably more conservative than Haynsworth, to the seat. But a majority of the Senate kept up the fight and defeated Carswell, too, by a vote of fifty-one to forty-five. (The Carswell battle is best remembered for a dubious endorsement that the judge received from Senator Roman Hruska, a Republican of Nebraska: “Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They’re entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?” The late Richard Harris, a writer for The New Yorker, told the Carswell story well in his book “Decision,” from 1971.) In the end, Nixon nominated Harry A. Blackmun to fill the seat, and he served as a moderate for more than two decades. He was also, of course, the author of the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, in 1973.
The same story—a rejection of a conservative leading to an appointment of a moderate—took place in 1987, when Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork to succeed the retiring Lewis Powell on the Court. Bork had a distinguished record as an academic and an appellate judge, but his views were extreme—on some of the same issues that Kavanaugh’s are, such as the right to privacy and the scope of civil-rights laws. As a result, the Senate voted Bork down, fifty-eight to forty-two. (In later years, conservatives turned Bork’s name into a verb, to identify victims of an unfair confirmation process. In fact, Bork’s record and subsequent writings showed that he was just what his critics said he was: a thoroughgoing reactionary.)
Reagan—again, in part, to punish liberals—nominated a younger conservative, Douglas H. Ginsburg, to fill the seat. But that nomination blew up when Ginsburg admitted that he had used marijuana when he was an assistant law professor at Harvard, and Reagan eventually surrendered to political reality and nominated someone more moderate: Anthony Kennedy.
At some point in the process, all four of these nominees—Haynsworth, Carswell, Bork, and Ginsburg—seemed like shoo-ins for confirmation, much as Kavanaugh does today. And yet they were all defeated. And the Justices who took their places were closer to the judicial and political mainstream. To be sure, the analogies to Kavanaugh’s case can be overdrawn. The most obvious difference is that Democrats controlled the Senate when Nixon and Reagan made their nominations. And Nixon and Reagan were less right-wing than Trump has been, at least when it comes to judicial nominations. Trump and his allies can be expected to fight furiously for Kavanaugh precisely because Blackmun and Kennedy turned out to be more moderate than many anticipated. Still, the current Republican margin in the Senate (owing to John McCain’s absence) is just a single vote, and Kavanaugh’s long paper trail, both as a judge and as a Republican political appointee, gives Democrats a great deal of material to exploit. Most of all, they need to remember that fighting Supreme Court nominees, even against formidable odds, can succeed—and produce a better Court than anyone might have expected.
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FOCUS: An Ordinary Weekend in July, Nothing More |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47905"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website</span></a>
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Wednesday, 01 August 2018 12:04 |
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Keillor writes: "A walk under an umbrella is a form of meditation, and rain always makes me happy."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: NPR)
An Ordinary Weekend in July, Nothing More
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
01 August 18
 went for a walk in the rain Saturday under a big black umbrella, which I chose over the kittycat one as being more age-appropriate, seeing as I turn s-s-s-s-s-s-s-seventy-six in a week. Cat kitsch is for teen girls, not grandpas. A black umbrella, black shoes, jeans, white shirt, tan jacket with black ink stains on the lining. I’m a writer, I carry pens, they leak. So what?
A walk under an umbrella is a form of meditation, and rain always makes me happy. I grew up out in the country and rain meant that I could stay in and read a book and not have to go to Mr. Peterson’s farm and hoe corn. Hoeing corn was the most miserable work I’ve ever done. Nothing I’ve done since even comes close. That, to me, is the definition of the good life, to have something so miserable in your distant past that you can recall in moments of distress and think, “Well, at least this is not as bad as that.”
I walked down the street past couples eating lunch in a sidewalk cafe whose awning was dripping water on one couple and not on others, and I heard the woman say, “Do you want to move?” and the man said, “It’s up to you.” She said, “I asked you first.” He said, “Whatever you want.” In other words, they were married. This was Columbus Avenue in Manhattan and clearly they were out-of-towners. A New York woman who is being dripped on would pick up her plate and say, “I’m outta here” and the man would follow.
Life is unfair: some get leaked on and others don’t, as I am well aware, being one of the lucky ones. I had a good job for forty-two years that kept me amused and required no math and no social skills, and I married very, very well. In addition to beauty, wit, kindness, and va-va-va-voom, my wife is skilled at ordinary household chores such as repairing toilet tank floats and jiggering appliances to make them work.
She learned these things (and much more) by being a freelance violinist, living on very little money in low-rent apartment buildings with no super to come upstairs and repair a faucet. Her ambition was to play Beethoven and Mozart, and along the way she picked up the skills you need if you’re going to get along without much money. Music and art schools really should offer training in plumbing and carpentry since a prime requirement for any artist is survival and it helps to be self-sufficient. She never, for example, had the money to pay a shrink and so she learned to deal with depression by taking long walks. It helps.
The sun came out Sunday and we walked over to St. Michael’s on Amsterdam where we got married twenty-three years ago. The 10 a.m. service gave a person plenty to think about. The reading from the Book of 2 Samuel about King David seeing the naked Bathsheba and seducing her and then sending her husband into battle to die was like something right out of the newspapers, maybe involving Michael Cohen. So sad. Some would call it Fake Scripture but it made an impression on me. Same guy who wrote “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” could be a jerk as well. And then the miracle of the loaves and fishes from the Gospel of John.
So on our way home we stopped at a humongous omni-maxi-supermarket and wandered miles of aisles, looking for a few things and were stunned by the sheer variety. Loaves, for example. Rye bread but not only rye rye but eleven different kinds, plus flatbreads, round breads, yeast breads, sweetbreads, sourdough, leavened, seven-grain, breadsticks, braided, a vast breadth of breeds and brands of bread, everything but white.
And fish. Sufficient fish to feed the Finnish militia.
Which brings me to the subject of my birthday. No gifts, please. Nothing. I am giving a birthday dinner for myself and inviting four friends in their twenties rather than people my age so we can avoid the boring discussion about how beautiful life was before people went around texting on cellphones all the time. Life is good, especially when you get the misery out of the way early. Pity the child of wealth and privilege who never hoed corn. We bought four ears at the store and boiled them and ate them, salted and slathered in butter. Nothing better.
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