Krugman writes: "Zombies have long ruled the Republican Party. The good news is that they may finally be losing their grip - although they may still return and resume eating conservative brains. The bad news is that even if zombies are in retreat, vampires are taking their place."
Economist Paul Krugman. (photo: Getty Images)
Zombies, Vampires and Republicans
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
21 June 17
ombies have long ruled the Republican Party. The good news is that they may finally be losing their grip — although they may still return and resume eating conservative brains. The bad news is that even if zombies are in retreat, vampires are taking their place.
What are these zombies of which I speak? Among wonks, the term refers to policy ideas that should have been abandoned long ago in the face of evidence and experience, but just keep shambling along.
The right’s zombie-in-chief is the insistence that low taxes on the rich are the key to prosperity. This doctrine should have died when Bill Clinton’s tax hike failed to cause the predicted recession and was followed instead by an economic boom. It should have died again when George W. Bush’s tax cuts were followed by lackluster growth, then a crash. And it should have died yet again in the aftermath of the 2013 Obama tax hike — partly expiration of some Bush tax cuts, partly new taxes to pay for Obamacare — when the economy continued jogging along, adding 200,000 jobs a month.
Police Hunt and Kill Black People Like Philando Castile. There's No Justice
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32158"><span class="small">Steven W. Thrasher, Guardian UK</span></a>
Wednesday, 21 June 2017 08:37
Thrasher writes: "Police harassment and violence, and the ways the system facilitate and enable it, are not exceptional to the US. They are part of what makes the US what it is."
'While tragic, these deaths seem normative in my understanding of American history at large and within my own family.' (photo: Richard Tsong-Taatarii/AP)
Police Hunt and Kill Black People Like Philando Castile. There's No Justice
By Steven W. Thrasher, Guardian UK
21 June 17
Police harassment and violence, and the ways the system facilitate and enable it, are not exceptional to the US. They are part of what makes the US what it is
ather’s Day weekend was a grim occasion to remind black parents that they are continuously hunted down by police in the United States. The weekend was bracketed by two stories of black adults killed by police in front of young, black children.
Before our timelines began to be filled with pictures of smiling dads over the weekend, black folks across the nation were accosted by news that Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted in the shooting death of Philando Castile. Castile, who had been stopped at least 46 times by police in his short 32 years on this Earth, was shot in front his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter – the entire tragedy being streamed on Facebook Live.
In an impassioned and furious speech after the shooter was acquitted, Valerie Castile, Philando’s mother, yelled: “This city killed my son, and the murderer gets away,” asking: “What’s it going to take?”
And not 48 hours later, news began to come out that an equally cruel police killing had happened: Charleena Lyles called Seattle police because of an attempted burglary. According to the police, they found her wielding a knife and shot her dead. Outrageously, Seattle police said: “There were several children inside the apartment at the time of the shooting, but they were not injured.” Those children – who family say were ages 11, four and one – were not injured, except for the small matter that they watched police kill their mother.
The particulars of how the police justified the killing of Philando Castile and Charleena Lyles are not important. Like Lyles, Castile was killed for a reason his mother summed up a while ago: he was “black in the wrong time and place”.
Lyles may have had a knife, but that’s not a capital offense. Her family says she had mental health problems, which makes people especially vulnerable to police killings. Castile had a gun, which he had a permit to carry and tried to tell the police about before they killed him.
This gun-soaked country is eager for everyone to have guns except for black people – and the system has acquitted the shooters of Tamir Rice (who was playing with a toy gun), John Crawford (who was shopping for a toy gun) and Mike Brown (who did not have a gun at all) alike.
Sandra Bland’s death began when she allegedly didn’t use a turn signal. Trayvon Martin was going to the store for Skittles. Yet in the deaths of all of these black people, no one was found to be culpable – except the deceased themselves.
Over Father’s Day weekend, I found myself wishing I could muster feeling surprised about any of these acquittals, and I felt ashamed I didn’t have the sense of acute outrage these families deserve. But I know that this is how the system works and therefore can’t be surprised.
I’ve been thinking about how the writers Joy James and Jo?o Costa Vargas ask: “What happens when instead of becoming enraged and shocked every time a black person is killed in the United States, we recognize black death as a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy? What will happen then if instead of demanding justice we recognize (or at least consider) that the very notion of justice” in the US “produces and requires black exclusion and death as normative?”
While tragic, these deaths seem normative in my understanding of American history at large and within my own family. Father’s Day weekend made me think of my own late father, of course, who died when I was 25. And whenever I think of my dad, in addition to the love and drama and laughs we shared in our too few years together, I think about the toll racism had on him – particularly regarding how police hunted him.
Police harassed him when he first met his future wife, and when he drove to night school to get his college degree, and at least one time when I was a kid. The cops stopped him just to mess with his head.
Police harassment and violence, and the ways the system facilitate and enable it, are not exceptional to the US. They are part of what makes the US what it is.
“We are being hunted,” Valerie Castile said before the acquittal even came out. And so it makes sense that there was no redress for her son from a “justice” system that works hand in hand with the police who do the hunting.
Such a system saw fit not to hold accountable a police officer who killed Philando Castile in front of his girlfriend’s four-year-old, on Father’s Day weekend. And it’s unlikely this system will find the killers of a mom in front of her three children guilty of anything, either.
Cole writes: "Yara Bayoumi at Reuters reports on the complicated minuet being danced by Russia, the Syrian Air Force, and the United States."
A U.S. Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) in the Mediterranean Sea, June 28, 2016. (photo: Ryan U. Kledzik/Reuters)
Russo-US Dog Fights Over Syria?
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
20 June 17
ara Bayoumi at Reuters reports on the complicated minuet being danced by Russia, the Syrian Air Force, and the United States.
The Syrian Air Force was bombing positions of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a US euphemism for the leftist Kurds of the YPG. The US Air Force shot down the plane (apparently the pilot was able to eject and survive). The US is depending on the Syrian Kurds to take Raqqa city, where they already hold a few neighborhoods. It is the so-called capital of ISIL (ISIS, Daesh). Of all the military forces in the region, only the Kurds have been willing to provide ground forces to roll up ISIL in eastern Syria, with the help of US and coalition air support. If the US proved unable to protect the YPG Kurdish fighters from the regime and from ISIL, they would peel off.
The Kurds are generally considered neutral as between the Bashar al-Assad regime and the mostly Sunni fundamentalist rebels challenging him. The Syrian Kurds want at the least more ‘states’ rights,’ from the regime, but for the moment they enjoy semi-autonomy given that the regime is weak and bogged down in the fight against the rebels. The YPG Kurds have some Arab allies, but most of the fundamentalist Arab militias hate them, partly for being Kurds and partly for being secular leftists.
It is not clear why the Syrian regime chose to bomb the Kurds. It likely fears that the latter are taking over Raqqa province permanently, despite its large Arab population. After ISIL is defeated, Damascus is not going to be sanguine about an expanding Kurdistan that permanently detaches large swathes of Syria from its government. The US military make be sanguine about a Kurdish semi-autonomous zone stretching south from Hasaka all the way down to the borders with Jordan and Iraq. But this development is not acceptable to the Syrian regime.
The development is also not acceptable to Turkey, which has also bombed the Kurds allied with the US, despite Turkey being a member of NATO and a US ally. It is possible that Ankara and Damascus are coordinating in hopes of rolling back up the Kurdish fighters as the war winds down and the US becomes restless and leaves.
The problem with the US shooting down that Syrian plane is that the Syrian air Force is allied with the Russian Federation, and the Russian Aerospace forces often fly alongside the Syrian pilots.
The Russians complain that the US did not warn them before bombing in east Syria, and they should have under the agreement between Washington and Moscow.
And, Russia announced that it would possibly shoot down any US air craft operating in western Syria.
Those are about the most dangerous words I’ve heard in decades, since the era of the Cuban missile crisis or the dark Cold War film Fail Safe (1965) .
BBC Monitoring translated a statement of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov:
“Regarding what is happening ‘on the ground’ in Syria, it is necessary to completely respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria. So any actions ‘on the ground’ – and there are many participants, including those who conduct military operations – must get Damascus’ approval.” Source: TASS news agency, Moscow, in Russian 0555 gmt 19 Jun 17.
For its part the US military issued a statement saying it has no ambitions in Western Syria, doesn’t intend to fight there, and is not intent on ousting Bashar al-Assad:
WTF Is Going On With the Secret Senate Version of Trumpcare?
Tuesday, 20 June 2017 13:45
Dickinson writes: "We've been hit with an avalanche of news over the past week: Trump under investigation for obstruction of justice! House Whip was shot at baseball practice! Attorney General Sessions stonewalls Intel committee!"
WTF Is Going On With the Secret Senate Version of Trumpcare?
By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
20 June 17
Negotiated behind closed doors and primed for fast passage, the Republican bill could ruin your life
e've been hit with an avalanche of news over the past week: Trump under investigation for obstruction of justice! House Whip was shot at baseball practice! Attorney General Sessions stonewalls Intel committee! Tower inferno in London! As a result, the Senate GOP's campaign to advance Trumpcare is flying beneath the radar – exactly as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants it.
The Senate GOP's secret plan to restructure one-sixth of America's economy, offer a massive tax cut to the wealthy and likely deprive tens of millions of Americans of health insurance – stripping the coverage guarantees of Obamacare from millions more – could hit the Senate floor for a lightning-fast vote before July 4th.
Here's what you need to know.
Hold up. Remind me what the House Trumpcare bill would do.
This is not a bill to improve health care; it's a bill to repeal taxes on very wealthy people.
The House-passed version of the American Health Care Act would strip $834 billion from Medicaid, deprive 23 million Americans of health insurance over a decade and spike premiums in the individual insurance market by 20 percent in the first year alone, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The legislation would leave many Americans with pre-existing conditions without access to affordable coverage, the CBO concludes, "if they could purchase it at all." In addition, the House bill would allow insurers to jack up premiums on rural and older-working-age Americans. In rural Alaska, a 60-year-old would be hit with insurance premiums of $28,000 a year.
The only real winners in Trumpcare are Americans in the top 0.1 percent, who would receive a $200,000 tax break.
This can't be popular.
It's not. A June 8th Quinnipiac University poll found Trumpcare wins just 17 percent support, and fails to even attract a majority of GOP support (42 percent). Half of Americans "disapprove strongly." A separate Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that just 8 percent of Americans want the Senate to pass the House bill as written. Even President Trump, who celebrated the House passage of the bill with an all-laughs Rose Garden ceremony, called that version of the bill "mean" in a visit to the Senate this week.
Is the Senate starting from scratch?
Nope. The Senate bill will be different, but it must build from the House bill. Both bills must:
1) Stick to budget restrictions known as "reconciliation" that allow the bill to pass without a filibuster – with the support of just 50 senators and a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence.
2) Retain a basic framework that enables a House and Senate "conference committee" to forge the competing bills into a single piece of legislation that could reach Trump's desk.
So what's in the bill?
Only the all-male team of 13 senators negotiating the legislation behind closed doors knows for sure. From what little is leaking to the media, the Senate appears to be making tweaks around the edges of the House bill. The senators are debating, for example, not whether to preserve Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, but whether to throw it off a cliff (the House version revokes funding in two years) or roll it down a ramp (senators are pushing for as long as seven years).
Will the Senate bill be as "mean" as the House package?
McConnell has a political incentive to pass the "meanest" bill he can muster. The House passed its version of the bill by appeasing hardcore conservatives. Were the Senate bill to move dramatically toward the center, it could create a crackup in the conference committee that needs to reconcile the two bills.
Does McConnell have a clear path to 50 votes?
Opponents of Trumpcare may find hope in the ideological dysfunction of the Senate. McConnell can lose only two GOP votes, and he starts out with a handful of unreliable senators – including a faction that could abandon the bill if it's too harsh, and another that could defect if it's not harsh enough.
On the far right, McConnell must contend with the trio of Sens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, who could bolt if the Senate bill is too generous, particularly in the refundable tax credits it offers Americans to defray insurance premiums. Paul insists he rejects these credits totally. "I'm not willing to vote for new Republican entitlement programs," he told reporters last week. (Cruz and Lee are on the task force crafting the bill.)
At the center, Sen. Susan Collins is already on the record saying she can't support anything like the House legislation, insisting "a bill that results in 23 million people losing coverage is not a bill that I can support." And Lisa Murkowski, a proponent of Medicaid expansion whose rural Alaskan constituents could be hit with massive premium spikes, said, "I just truly do not know" if she can support the Senate's overhaul.
So when will the Senate's Trumpcare bill get a public airing?
There will not be a public airing – at least not one that compares to the 80 days it took for Obamacare to clear the Senate in 2009.
McConnell is a master of the chamber's arcane rules. For Trumpcare, McConnell has invoked "Rule 14," which allows a bill to move to a vote on the Senate floor without committee hearings. The GOP strategy is to rush the legislation to a vote while keeping the public in the dark as long as possible. That includes not making the bill public until the CBO has already scored it, according to John Thune, the Senate's third-ranking Republican.
If this strategy succeeds, the public would have almost no time to digest the contents of the bill. "The question is how many hours will there be to review the actual text & CBO score before the vote," tweeted Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicare and Medicaid under President Obama. "It can be done in 28 – 8 hours of review + 20 [hours] debate," he estimated.
Can the Trumpcare fast-track be slowed in the Senate?
The only thing that could change McConnell's course is public outcry.
Pressure on Republican senators could force any one of them to condition their vote on a more open and deliberative process.
Pressure on Democratic senators could get any one of them to withhold "unanimous consent" on Senate business, grinding the chamber to a halt – at least long enough to grab a headline or two away from the Trump-Russia investigations.
What Republicans are trying to put into law is wildly unpopular. The health care of millions of Americans hangs in the balance. Senate Republicans' only ally is darkness.
FOCUS | Attention Evangelicals: Donald Trump Is Screwing You!
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Tuesday, 20 June 2017 11:58
Kiriakou writes: "Uniformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last week conducted a series of raids around southern Michigan, rounding up at least 114 Iraqi Christians and sending them to detention centers around the Midwest in advance of deportation back to Iraq. Many of the detainees will be deported to Mosul, a city at the center of the Iraqi government's war with ISIS. Newsweek reported that many of them will face 'certain death,' a fate that many of their compatriots already have met."
Evangelist Franklin Graham in Wisconsin. (photo: DeMoss Group)
Attention Evangelicals: Donald Trump Is Screwing You!
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
20 June 17
niformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last week conducted a series of raids around southern Michigan, rounding up at least 114 Iraqi Christians and sending them to detention centers around the Midwest in advance of deportation back to Iraq. Many of the detainees will be deported to Mosul, a city at the center of the Iraqi government’s war with ISIS. Newsweek reported that many of them will face “certain death,” a fate that many of their compatriots already have met.
Michigan is home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere around the Middle East, many of whom have found livelihoods with auto manufacturers and become active members of the community. Those targeted for arrest and deportation were almost entirely Iraqis who were found to have either overstayed their visas or had minor crimes in the past, as long as decades ago. Indeed, according to CNN, Moayad Barash, an Iraqi whom ICE snatched last week, had been arrested 30 years ago for possession of marijuana. He has never been in trouble again, and he has raised a family in Michigan. His children are American citizens. Barash’s case is typical.
Community activists and the American Civil Liberties Union have rallied to the immigrants’ side, but the process has only just begun. The ACLU filed a class action petition and a motion for a temporary restraining order in federal court last week, and an ACLU spokesman said that the deportations could not legally begin for at least another week. In the meantime, those arrested are still locked up, away from their families, with few resources to defend themselves.
So where are the evangelicals? A few have expressed concern, but by and large, they’re mostly silent. Evangelist Franklin Graham did say last week that he was “disturbed” that Iraqi Christians had been targeted for deportation. But he, like other evangelicals, supports the Trump travel ban and the negotiations with the Iraqi government whereby Trump removed Iraq from the list of banned countries in exchange for taking back undocumented Iraqis in the United States. Graham said that he hoped Trump would “have somebody investigate the cases” of the Iraqis. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.
And the truth of the matter is that there has been a slow-motion genocide against Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East over the past several decades, particularly in Iraq. Indeed, Congress last year voted unanimously to recognize the killings of Christians in the Middle East as genocide, singling out ISIS’s executions of Iraqis specifically.
In the meantime, the hypocrite-in-chief tweeted, “Christians in the Middle East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!” But he’s the one who is allowing it to continue by ordering the deportations in the first place.
It’s time for evangelicals to take stock of their political positions. Do they want to be on the side of Trump or on the side of human rights and religious freedom? Maybe it’s time for them to ask themselves an important question: Who would Jesus deport?
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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ombies have long ruled the Republican Party. The good news is that they may finally be losing their grip — although they may still return and resume eating conservative brains. The bad news is that even if zombies are in retreat, vampires are taking their place.
ather’s Day weekend was a grim occasion to remind black parents that they are continuously hunted down by police in the United States. The weekend was bracketed by two stories of black adults killed by police in front of young, black children.
ara Bayoumi at Reuters reports on the complicated minuet being danced by Russia, the Syrian Air Force, and the United States.
e've been hit with an avalanche of news over the past week: Trump under investigation for obstruction of justice! House Whip was shot at baseball practice! Attorney General Sessions stonewalls Intel committee! Tower inferno in London! As a result, the Senate GOP's campaign to advance Trumpcare is flying beneath the radar – exactly as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants it. 
niformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last week conducted a series of raids around southern Michigan, rounding up at least 114 Iraqi Christians and sending them to detention centers around the Midwest in advance of deportation back to Iraq. Many of the detainees will be deported to Mosul, a city at the center of the Iraqi government’s war with ISIS. Newsweek 
