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FOCUS: Of Thee They Sing With Feeling |
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Wednesday, 20 September 2017 10:45 |
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Keillor writes: "The flag is the flag and hurray for it, but the sight of it is not so moving as being in a crowd singing about the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: WPR)
Of Thee They Sing With Feeling
By Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post
20 September 17
 ’ve been riding around the country on a bus for six weeks, doing a dog-and-pony show that, among many other things, included me walking into the crowd and humming a note and the audience singing, a cappella, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” and singing very well, sometimes awfully well, and if so, we swung into “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Love Me Tender” and two verses of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” including the one about sounding forth a trumpet and the jubilant feet. People had paid $40 to see the show but they were not disappointed to be the show. It was a beautiful thing.
In Baltimore, at an open pavilion in the Inner Harbor, not far from where Francis Scott Key wrote the words, a couple thousand people stood and sang the national anthem in the key of A, with gusto, the sopranos floating up high over “O’er the land of the free.” Everyone knew it except a few teenagers who Googled the lyrics on their iPhones.
I didn’t need to wave my hands or sing loud — I sang a quiet low bass. The crowd was astonished by how good they sounded, no help from me. People who were too cool to sing were prodded by spouses and got into the spirit of it. The tone-deaf hummed quietly.
What was surprising was the emotion in the crowd. They felt a naked love of country without anybody telling them to. You don’t get this from wearing a flag pin on your lapel, but when you stand in a crowd and sing about the purple mountains and the buffalo roaming and grace that taught my heart to fear and the Red River Valley, roses loving sunshine, singing in the rain and the bright golden haze in the meadow, it does pull people together no matter how they feel about the Second Amendment.
In years to come, this will be gone. We won’t know the words anymore. My daughter’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Ammundson, began each school day with a medley of patriotic tunes, and the kids loved it. That was rare back then and is even rarer now. So the common hymns will simply vanish except among us geezers with our ruined voices. Young people will walk around in the bubble of headphones listening to Etaoin & the Shrdlus and their anthems of alienation and wondering why they feel lousy.
The flag is the flag and hurray for it, but the sight of it is not so moving as being in a crowd singing about the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air.
History tells us that when the British attacked Fort McHenry in 1814, they were quite justified. American pirates had operated out of Baltimore Harbor to prey on British cargo ships. The bombardment was their tit for our tat. Key wrote his lines in a fever of righteousness hardly supported by the facts. But over the years, it has become our song, and if we let it become a showpiece for pop singers and ballpark organists, we will lose something precious forever.
The Pledge of Allegiance is a mystery to me, promising fealty to a piece of cloth — and “to the republic for which it stands” — what does that mean? Am I granting my support of gerrymandering, suppression of voting, rivers of campaign cash to buy time on the airwaves that belong to the people? I said the pledge in grade school. I don’t say it anymore. You can’t make me. But I love to sing about the dawn’s early light and the broad stripes and bright stars when I am standing next to other people who are singing it too. I would sing it with the same pleasure if I were standing between Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. It’s not about them or me, it’s about all of us and our survival.
I went to church in San Francisco on Sunday, and the closing hymn was the one about grace, how sweet the sound, that everyone and their cousin knows. If you put truth serum in the Communion wafer, you might be surprised at the diversity of theological opinion in the pews, but the hymn was there to lace us all back together. My feeling after 28 “My country, ’tis of thee” renditions is that people are longing for that. Enough of the showman. It’s time for some competence on behalf of the common good.
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Let Jeffrey Sterling Go |
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Wednesday, 20 September 2017 08:38 |
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Excerpt: "Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officials last week gave CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling a parting shot by adding a month of prison time to his sentence. Sterling was due to be released from the low-security prison at Englewood, Colorado, on December 14. He now won’t leave until January 16, 2018."
Jeffrey and Holly Sterling honeymooning on the beach in Jamica, June 2007. (photo: Reporters Without Borders)
Let Jeffrey Sterling Go
By John Kiriakou and Holly Sterling, Reader Supported News
20 September 17
Preface by Holly Sterling
Dear Friends,
My beloved husband Jeffrey was persecuted and wrongly convicted. The government has no shame in destroying an innocent man's life for almost two decades because he stood up for his constitutional rights and would not plead guilty to a crime he did not commit. Jeffrey has suffered tremendously in his fight for innocence and the truth to prevail. Please consider making a donation to the Sterling Family Fund to help assist with the overwhelming financial devastation inflicted by the government. Your financial contribution would aid in essential preparations for Jeffrey's release and allow him to focus on the beginnings of rebuilding his life.
Respectfully and with much gratitude,
Holly Sterling
Click here to support Sterling Family Fund organized by Laurie Lewandowski
 ederal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officials last week gave CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling a parting shot by adding a month of prison time to his sentence. Sterling was due to be released from the low-security prison at Englewood, Colorado, on December 14. He now won’t leave until January 16, 2018. The BOP says that there is nothing untoward about the move. It’s just that there aren’t enough open beds in a St. Louis halfway house to let him go. That contention is disingenuous at best.
Sterling is a former CIA officer who was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison on a multitude of Espionage Act convictions, despite the fact that the government never proved that he actually had had anything to do with espionage. The convictions rested on a book written by former New York Times journalist James Risen, one chapter of which discussed a botched CIA operation to damage the Iranian nuclear program with faulty technical plans.
Risen’s book was published soon after Sterling filed a racial discrimination suit against the CIA, arguing that he was denied an overseas assignment because, as his supervisor told him at the time, he would attract attention “as a big black guy speaking Farsi.” Sterling’s suit was dismissed on national security grounds (“We’d love to defend ourselves, but to do that we’d have to release classified information”) by the hanging judge who would later oversee Sterling’s conviction and send him to prison.
After the book was published, the CIA argued that Sterling was Risen’s source, claiming that Sterling was seeking revenge against the Agency for having his suit dismissed. Prosecutors pointed to metadata indicating that Sterling and Risen had had a handful of phone conversations over the course of 18 months, and that Sterling was probably giving Risen classified information. That’s it. No proof. There were no recordings, no emails, no witnesses, no in-person meetings, no nothing. Just the CIA telling Sterling’s jury, “Take our word for it.”
Sterling left for prison at Colorado’s FCI Englewood in mid-2015. The BOP has a regulation that prisoners will be assigned to prisons within 500 miles of their homes. It’s supposed to be an effort to keep families intact. But Sterling was sent to a prison nearly 900 miles from home. The BOP said – again, disingenuously – that it was a bed space issue.
The BOP set out from the very beginning of Sterling’s sentence to make it as difficult as possible. A year ago, Sterling suffered a heart attack in prison that went undiagnosed and then untreated until activists petitioned Colorado Democratic senator Michael Bennett to inquire about his health. Sterling was denied medication until further activism forced some action. In April, he was sent to solitary confinement for several days for “standing too closely” to a corrections officer, an unprovoked outrage that was later dismissed by more senior prison officials.
Sterling was eligible to be released from prison as early as next month. He asked repeatedly why he had been given no official release date, despite the fact that the date is supposed to be calculated a year before the latest possible release date (that is, a release date with no good behavior time calculated into it.) After much hemming, hawing, and gnashing of teeth, the BOP told him that no date would be forthcoming until he met with a delegation from the federal probation office to discuss the terms of his release, an unusual stipulation that almost no other prisoners must go through.
(I can tell you from first-hand experience that this is highly unusual. The BOP and the Marshals are completely separate federal entities. One does not need the other to give a prisoner his release date, which is calculated solely by the BOP at its calculations center in Texas. The federal probation office is a part of the Marshals Service. There is no reason whatsoever for this meeting to have taken place in person. For every other federal prisoner, including me, all of the necessary information was conveyed via email through the prisoner’s case manager. But the feds decided to give Sterling special treatment.)
When Sterling met with the delegation, they would not commit to a release date. When they left, he still had no idea when he would be released, although his case manager intimated that the date would be December 14.
On Thursday, word finally came from the BOP. Sterling would be sent to a halfway house – not to home confinement – on January 16. Again, from first-hand experience, I can tell you that the January date was chosen on purpose – it keeps Sterling away from home for one more Christmas. It’s another common form of harassment for prisoners the BOP doesn’t like. The BOP argues, though, that Sterling first must complete a mandatory “victim impact” class that is supposed to teach him how to stay away from drugs, abstain from violence, and reconnect with his children. His wife Holly told me that one of the questions he was asked in this class was, “If you see a woman dressed provocatively, does this mean that she wants you to rape her?” This is all despite the fact that Sterling has never taken a drug in his life, has no connection to violence, and has no children. Again, it’s all about control.
To make matters worse, Sterling will be sent to a halfway house 45 miles from his home, and BOP regulations forbid him from driving. Furthermore, the halfway house is in the center of the neighborhood that is the scene of St. Louis’s current riots. It’s not the best place to be an unemployed African-American man on federal probation right now.
And the harassment will only get worse. Probation officials already have told him that he must complete 16 “life skills” classes at the halfway house before he will be allowed to return home. The former CIA officer, attorney, and decorated fraud investigator will learn how to write a check, write a resume, get through a job interview, and rent an apartment.
The only upside here is that the worst is over. He will have to submit to the government’s nonsensical desire for control for another six or eight months, followed by two years of invasive, infuriating probation. But the hard part is over. Whether the government likes it or not, Jeffrey Sterling will soon be sleeping in his own bed. And just as importantly, he’ll be able to tell the media and the American people, about what their government is doing in their name.
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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Wednesday, 20 September 2017 08:20 |
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Knowles writes: "Could this cluster of disasters provide the lever that will move climate change in the U.S. from a 'debate' to an action plan?"
Hurricane Irma damage in northeast Florida. (photo: St. Johns County Fire Rescue)
Why Hurricanes Harvey and Irma Won’t Lead to Action on Climate Change
By Scott Gabriel Knowles, EcoWatch
20 September 17
t's not easy to hold the nation's attention for long, but three solid weeks of record-smashing hurricanes directly affecting multiple states and at least 20 million people will do it.
Clustered disasters hold our attention in ways that singular events cannot—they open our minds to the possibility that these aren't just accidents or natural phenomena to be painfully endured. As such, they can provoke debates over the larger "disaster lessons" we should be learning. And I would argue the combination of Harvey and Irma has triggered such a moment.
The damages caused by the storms will undoubtedly lead to important lessons in disaster preparation and response. For many, though, the most urgent call for learning has been to acknowledge at long last the connection between climate change and severe weather.
Will this cluster of disasters provide the lever that will move climate change in the U.S. from a "debate" to an action plan?
It's easy to view disaster history in this cause-effect way—to hop in time from disaster to disaster and spot the reforms as though they naturally emerge from adversity and commitment to change. But as a historian with a focus on risk and disasters, I can say this view can be misleading.
Generational reform
Early in the 20th century, the U.S. went through an era of profound concern over urban disasters that seemed to threaten city life itself.
In December 1903, the Iroquois Theatre Fire in Chicago killed more than 600 audience members due to faulty construction. Just over a month later, in February 1904, the Great Baltimore Fire consumed 140 acres of the city. That same month, a major fire ravaged Rochester. In June of the same year, more than 1,000 people died due to a fire aboard the General Slocum steamship in New York City.
Newspapers of the era were full of anger and fear over the dangers of fire and the unscrupulous actions of greedy builders and ship line operators. Despite the intensity of this 1903-04 disaster cluster, Americans would see many more such disasters (San Francisco 1906, Triangle Shirtwaist Fire 1911) before consequential reforms in fire safety were passed into law.
Eventually, those reforms did arrive, but not all at once, and not with one bill. The reforms were distributed in building codes, city plans and product safety standards that came into place by the 1930s. The disasters defined moments in time; reform was generational.
The aftermath of September 11 provides another telling example. The disaster led to multiple investigations and studies, including the best-selling 9/11 Commission Report. Perhaps the most lasting effect of September 11 was the restructuring of government that created the Department of Homeland Security.
However, we should be careful when we leap quickly from disaster to reform. The federal response to 9/11 appeared swift and decisive but was in fact following a script set in place over the previous decade through repeated attempts by some policymakers to reshape the government's capacity to respond to the terrorism threat.
It took years for scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology to finally explain the exact causes for the collapse of the Twin Towers. And in doing so, they uncovered fire, structural and evacuation vulnerabilities in the towers. These flaws were first witnessed in the 1993 bombing but dated back to the 1960s when the buildings were designed and built. The September 11 reforms did come, but only as part of a broad continuum of concern, research and debate over policy choices that had long preceded that terrible day.
Slow-moving disasters versus events
This brings us back to Harvey, Irma and the climate change connection. We have not seen any storm-day conversions on climate change in the Trump administration—indeed, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Sec. Scott Pruitt remarked that it was "insensitive" to even broach the topic while the storms were still active.
There is plenty of evidence in social psychology to indicate that individual perceptions of risk—or individual commitments to an ideology—cannot be easily shaken be external factors, even factors as dramatic as storms like Harvey, Irma or even Katrina.
This fits the historical pattern: Clustered disasters might sharpen our senses to the risks in our midst and even disturb our complacency, but they will not necessarily lead directly to new legislation or personal ideological shifts. Strong commitments to land use, profits and real estate development have historically militated against calls for caution, restraint and mitigation, even though these types of laws make Americans safer from disasters. This dynamic will not be altered by two hurricanes, no matter how terrifying their effects.
Better indicators of change, drawing from history, have proven to be events that cluster over much larger stretches of time. A "slow disaster" frame allows civil society and scientific researchers to build a case for change that is strengthened by disaster events. For example, the red alert about the toxicity of DDT raised by Rachel Carson in 1962 had immediate effects, but that was only one early step in a series of events that followed. It should be seen as part of a much more impactful and slower process of reform that led to the creation of the EPA in 1970 and a wave of environmental regulations that took effect in that decade.
This relationship between discrete disaster events and slow disaster eras is a critical one for us to understand. We might just now be at the very beginning of such an era in the public consciousness over the connections between disasters such as hurricanes, fires, droughts and the slow disaster of climate change.
It's frustrating for people who want quick government action on climate change to be told they should play a "slow disaster" game. And why shouldn't they be angered if they have experienced the loss of a loved one or a home in the disasters of these past weeks? Still, it's useful for us to see that even the most devastating disasters are probably points on a longer timeline—one that might lead to reform if and when broad-based political action prepares the way.
Indeed, disaster victims making common cause with scientists and engineers has been one proven way to bring about a type of learning from disaster that might be more effective towards achieving ambitious changes. These could include the U.S. reentering the global community on climate action and the passage of laws that would require climate change planning to affect future construction.
But the hurricanes of Harvey and Irma will be a catalyst for a new age of realism regarding the hazards of climate change only once civil society and our politicians recognize them as part of a pattern that stretches over decades, not weeks. Our urgency to learn from disaster is important, and it is a moral imperative. We would be wise to harness this urgency to form a generational commitment to reducing the suffering from disasters.
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Donald Trump's 'Independence' Is a Complete Farce |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Tuesday, 19 September 2017 13:37 |
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Rich writes: "Before this one brief shining moment of 'bipartisanship' goes up in smoke, we must relish the sheer delight of watching Trump stiff Ryan and Mitch McConnell in favor of his new besties, 'Chuck and Nancy.'"
Donald Trump. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Donald Trump's 'Independence' Is a Complete Farce
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
19 September 17
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: Donald Trump’s deal with the Democrats, Hillary Clinton’s election postmortem, and Steve Bannon’s 60 Minutes interview.
 fter President Trump’s decision last week to accept the debt-ceiling deal pushed by Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, shocked conservatives floated rumors that they’d target Paul Ryan’s Speakership to help their agenda, and the Times described Trump as “in many ways, the first independent” in the White House in more than a century. Is this the start of a broader opening for congressional Democrats?
Before this one brief shining moment of “bipartisanship” goes up in smoke, we must relish the sheer delight of watching Trump stiff Ryan and Mitch McConnell in favor of his new besties, “Chuck and Nancy.” It didn’t turn out well for the Vichy collaborators in World War II, and the same fate in one way or another will befall those Republican leaders who abandoned whatever principles they had once Trump occupied their party. History will be merciless to them, but how much fun to watch them reduced to thunderstruck supernumeraries in real time.
Still, this instance of victory for congressional Democrats was a one-off. The new coinage that Trump is somehow an “independent,” with its implicit invocation of the Teddy Roosevelts of American history, is a way of dignifying and normalizing erratic behavior that hasn’t changed from the start. It’s the latest iteration of those previous moments when wishful centrist pundits started saying things like “Today Trump became president” simply because he stuck to a teleprompter script when addressing Congress or bombed Syria. Trump is an “independent” in the same way a toddler is. He jumped at the Democrats’ deal solely on impulse. He remains a drama queen who likes to grab attention any way he can, especially when he thinks he can please a crowd, whether the mobs at his rallies or the press Establishment he claims to loathe but whose approval he has always desperately craved. The most telling aspect of this whole incident was his morning-after phone call to Schumer to express his excitement that he was getting rave reviews not only from Fox but CNN and MSNBC as well.
None of this amounts to a broader opening for congressional Democrats. The deal’s sole accomplishments were to (temporarily) prevent the government from defaulting or shutting down and make a first installment on Hurricane Harvey relief. That this can be greeted by anyone as any kind of breakthrough in governance shows just how low the bar has become for achievement by this Congress and this White House. Yet a Vichy Republican in the House, Peter King of Long Island, declared, “I think this could be a new day for the Republican Party” and a “gateway” to “bipartisan progress.” You have to ask, what gateway drug is he on to spew such nonsense? The Republican majority of which he is a card-carrying member shows no signs of delivering on health care, tax reform, infrastructure, or anything else. All it’s done is kept the lights on in the Capitol for another three months.
But let us cherish the high farce of this moment while we can. Gail Collins at the Times has written some quite amusing columns in which she tries to determine who is the worst member of the Trump cabinet. God knows the competition is stiff, from Ben Carson to Betsy DeVos to Tom Price and Ryan Zinke. (What does it say that Rick Perry can’t even make the short list?) However, last week’s Oval Office showdown is another argument for Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary whom Trump interrupted and then castrated in his surrender to Chuck and Nancy. Previous to this point, Mnuchin has bolloxed up the debt-ceiling negotiations, made false promises that will never be redeemed on a tax bill, and vociferously defended Trump (as his fellow Jewish cabinet member, Gary Cohn, did not) after the president talked about the “very fine” people among the white supremacists and Nazis in Charlottesville. Mnuchin also offended Republican Congressional leaders by mansplaining the debt ceiling to them in the Oval Office meeting (only in the Trump White House do men mansplain to other men); someone knowledgeable about the gathering described him as “odd and weird” to the Washington Post. Mnuchin and his wife, the actress Louise Linton, previously offended the country — and prompted an inquiry by the Treasury Department inspector general — when they flew to Fort Knox on a government airplane to watch the solar eclipse and hashtag luxury fashion products on Linton’s Instagram account.
As if that weren’t enough, Mnuchin has also indicated that he may not act on the previous Treasury decision to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. Perhaps he’ll instead choose Warren Beatty, whose film Rules Don’t Apply he helped finance. Beatty cast Mnuchin and Linton in small roles in that movie; in the transactional Trump White House, there would be no strictures on the Treasury Secretary returning the favor by slapping Bulworth on the $20.
Despite complaints from Democrats that Hillary Clinton has picked the “worst possible time” to return attention to the divisions of her party, her national book tour kicked off in Manhattan with lines reportedly reaching around the block. Is there room for her voice in progressive politics today?
There’s nothing but room. In the aftermath of Clinton’s shocking defeat, the Times has reported that there are as many as 20 potential presidential candidates for 2020, and why not? The more the merrier. Progressive politics needs all the voices it can get and the widest possible debate. Clinton should say her piece; she was at the eye of her own catastrophe, and there’s something to be learned from her afterthoughts.
But for all assigning of often-deserved blame to James Comey, misogyny in general, and Trump’s creepiness in particular, she doesn’t fully recognize that her top-down, consultant-heavy, carefully scripted style of presidential campaign is a relic of a vanishing era, and that some of her policy ideas are too. In What Happened, she writes that it was “a mistake” to give high-ticket speeches to the likes of Goldman Sachs on the eve of a presidential run. Yes, but it’s far from clear that she recognizes the reason she was blind to what she calls the “bad ‘optics’” of those speeches: the Democratic Establishment’s own deference to the financial industry’s policy preferences and donations in both her husband and Barack Obama’s administrations.
In any case, the future does not belong to Clinton no matter what happens or doesn’t on her book tour. The latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, released after Labor Day, found that a record low of 36 percent had “very” or “somewhat” positive feelings of Trump, and even fewer — 30 percent — felt that way about Clinton. (Obama was at 51 percent.) Trump and his claque at Fox News want to believe that she’s still running for president; they persist in re-litigating everything from the emails to Benghazi even as the one-year anniversary of Election Day 2016 approaches. Whatever the masturbatory benefits of this fixation on the right, the fact remains that history is moving on, rapidly now, from all things Clinton.
Steve Bannon began his post–White House media tour with a long 60 Minutes appearance over the weekend, and seems to be supporting it through anonymously sourced articles publicizing his access to the House Freedom Caucus, billionaire Robert Mercer, and the president (who continues to speak with Bannon “every two to three days”). Will Bannon be as much of a political force as these reports would make him seem?
Of course Bannon talks to Trump regularly — the proof is that the dissembling White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, so pointedly denied it after the 60 Minutes broadcast. And he will certainly be as much of a political bomb thrower as he’s always been.
It’s somewhat astonishing, as others have pointed out, that in a long interview Charlie Rose never asked Bannon about his collaboration with Mercer. Their plan to spend Mercer’s money in 2018 to challenge sitting Republican senators whom they see as disloyal to Trump, like Dean Heller of Nevada and Jeff Flake of Arizona, may create serious political havoc for the GOP. And when Bannon promises a “civil war” within the Republican Party over the fate of the Dreamers next year, he has both the media means (in Breitbart) and Mercer’s cash to fan the flames of anti-immigrant xenophobia and make that war as bloody as possible. However much power Bannon does or does not have in the White House, we can be certain that his sway over this president vastly exceeds that of Ryan and McConnell — and maybe even Chuck and Nancy.
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igger isn't always better. Too much of a good thing can be bad. Many anti-environmentalists throw these simple truths to the wind, along with caution.
