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North Korea Offers Unconditional Surrender After Mike Pence Angrily Squints at It |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Monday, 17 April 2017 13:26 |
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Borowtiz writes: "In a major foreign-policy coup for the Trump Administration, North Korea offered to unconditionally abandon its nuclear program on Monday, after Mike Pence spent several minutes angrily squinting at the nation from just across the border."
Mike Pence at the DMZ. (photo: Lee Jin-Man/AP)
North Korea Offers Unconditional Surrender After Mike Pence Angrily Squints at It
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
17 April 17
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 n a major foreign-policy coup for the Trump Administration, North Korea offered to unconditionally abandon its nuclear program on Monday, after Mike Pence spent several minutes angrily squinting at the nation from just across the border.
Warning North Korea that the United States had jettisoned its policy of “strategic patience” and that “all options were on the table,” Pence fixed his steely glare on the isolated Communist nation and began furiously staring it down.
After Pence spent between five and six minutes demonstrating U.S. resolve by squinting indignantly, the government in Pyongyang released a statement indicating that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions were a thing of the past.
“We will henceforth abandon our nuclear program and dismantle all existing nuclear facilities,” read the official statement from North Korean President Kim Jong-un. “In exchange, we request that Mike Pence stop giving us that really mean look.”
Moments after the North Korean statement, Pence ordered his facial muscles to stand down, and the Vice-President’s face assumed a peacetime footing.
At the White House, press secretary Sean Spicer said that the successful U.S. action in North Korea should “send a strong message to barbaric dictators around the world that the United States stands ready to use the full force and fury of Mike Pence’s angry face.”
Spicer said that, after leaving North Korea, Pence was dispatched to Mosul, Iraq, where he is scheduled to spend several minutes angrily squinting at ISIS.
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FOCUS: The Democratic Party Is Undermining Bernie Sanders-Style Candidates |
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Monday, 17 April 2017 12:04 |
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Peck writes: "Since losing the presidency to a Cheeto-hued reality TV host, the Democratic party's leadership has made it clear that it would rather keep losing than entertain even the slightest whiff of New Deal style social democracy."
'The Democratic Party aims to make the Berniecrats' lack of political viability a self-fulfilling prophecy.' (photo: Travis Heying/AP)
The Democratic Party Is Undermining Bernie Sanders-Style Candidates
By Jamie Peck, Guardian UK
17 April 17
In Kansas, the Democrats barely lifted a finger to help James Thompson, a progressive who came painfully close to winning. That’s a losing strategy
 ince losing the presidency to a Cheeto-hued reality TV host, the Democratic party’s leadership has made it clear that it would rather keep losing than entertain even the slightest whiff of New Deal style social democracy.
The Bernie Sanders wing might bring grassroots energy and – if the polls are to be believed – popular ideas, but their redistributive policies pose too much of a threat to the party’s big donors to ever be allowed on the agenda.
Even a symbolic victory cedes too much to those youthful, unwashed hordes who believe healthcare and education are human rights and not extravagant luxuries, as we saw when the Democratic establishment recruited Tom Perez to defeat the electorate-backed progressive Keith Ellison for DNC chair.
The Democrats demonstrated this once more this week when, in a special election triggered by Trump’s tapping of Mike Pompeo for CIA director, a Berniecrat named James Thompson came painfully close to winning a Kansas Congressional seat that had been red for over two decades, and his party didn’t even try to help him.
If Thompson’s picture is not on the Wikipedia page for “left-wing populism,” it really should be. Following a difficult upbringing during which he was homeless for a time, he joined the Army and attended college on the GI bill. He went on to graduate from Wichita State University and Washburn University before going into practice as a civil rights lawyer. He owns guns and looks natural in a trucker hat.
In a Reddit AMA, Thompson said he was “inspired to run by Bernie” and talked about “progressive values” like universal healthcare, education, and a $15/hour minimum wage. He also spoke in favor of taxing and legalizing marijuana, regulating Wall Street and overturning Citizens United. It’s no surprise he received the endorsement of Our Revolution, the progressive political action organization spun out of Sanders’ candidacy.
After beating an establishment Democrat in the primary, Thompson promised to take on Trump and the Republicans, as well as the state’s unpopular Republican governor Sam Brownback and Kansas-headquartered oligarchs the Koch brothers.
In one campaign ad, Thompson shoots an AR-15 rifle at a target before delivering a broad, class-based appeal: “People of all colors, all races, all religions, they want the basic same thing … they want to be able to provide for their family, provide a good education for their kids. We’ve got to get back to this country being about the working class family.”
While his candidacy initially seemed like a long shot in a district that had re-elected Pompeo just last year with 60.7% of the vote, in the weeks before the election, the race grew unexpectedly close.
This led to a sudden infusion of cash from the National Republican Congressional Committee to Thompson’s opponent Ron Estes, who in the end raised $459,000, $130,000 of it from the NRCC. He also received massive donations from representatives of big business and help from such national figures as Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, and the president himself, who tweeted about the race.
Estes spent much of his money on TV attack ads, like the one that claimed Thompson supports using tax dollars to fund late term abortions, as well as abortions performed because parents don’t like the gender of their baby.
Given our current political climate, you’d think the Democrats would have jumped at the chance to take back a Congressional seat and demonstrate opposition to Trump, but you’d be wrong. While Thompson managed to raise $292,000 without his party’s help, 95% of which came from individuals, neither the DNC, DCCC, nor even the Kansas Democratic Party would help him grow that total in any substantial way. His campaign requested $20,000 from the state Democratic Party and was denied.
They later relented and gave him $3,000. (According to the FEC, the Party had about $145,000 on hand.) The national Democratic Party gave him nothing until the day before the election, when it graced him with some live calls and robo-calls. He lost by seven percentage points.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Perez confirmed the DNC would not be giving Thompson a dime. “We can make progress in Kansas,” he said. “There are thousands of elections every year, though. Can we invest in all of them? That would require a major increase in funds.” Fact check: the DNC has a fund just for Congressional elections, of which there are just ten this year.
Contrast this with what Perez said just a few months earlier when he promised “a 50-state strategy” complete with “rural outreach and organizers in every zip code.” In a post-victory interview with NPR, he specifically name checked Kansas as a place Democrats could win. Why the sudden about face?
In defending their decision, party mouthpieces have taken the absurd line that giving Thompson money would have actually hurt his chances of winning, because then everyone would have known he’s a Democrat, and Kansans hate Democrats. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate these are the same people who keep saying the party doesn’t need a new direction.)
“You do not get to the single digits in a district like this if you’re a nationalized Democrat,” DCCC communications director Meredith Kelly told The Huffington Post. “End of story. That’s just the way it is. There are just certain races where it is not helpful to be attached to the national D.C. Democrats.” End of story, idiot.
Nobody must have told Kelly that Thompson was already attached to the “national DC Democrats” by virtue of being in their party, a fact Estes was happy to exploit in an attack ad that showed him waist deep in a literal swamp he hoped to drain.
“The liberals are trying to steal this election by supporting a Bernie Sanders backed lawyer, because they know he will vote how Nancy Pelosi tells him to,” he claimed. Seems Thompson got all the bad parts of being a Democrat this time around, and none of the good ones.
One person the party does not think will be hurt by their help is Jon Ossoff, who is running in a similarly red, but much wealthier, district in Georgia. To date, the DNC has raised some $8.3m for him and has committed to sending nine field staffers to organize on-the-ground efforts.
Although he is young, he’s an acolyte of the Democratic establishment, having worked for Representatives John Lewis and Hank Johnson, and he endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primary. He went to Georgetown followed by the London School of Economics and speaks fluent French. He has the support of several Hollywood celebrities.
Democrats think Ossoff is just the guy to bring his affluent suburban district back into the fold. (Clearly, losing a national election was not enough to reverse course on that most doomed of 2016 strategies: trading blue collar whites for wealthy, suburban ones.)
Georgia Democratic Party spokesman Michael Smith said this is the state organization’s chance to “deliver the White House its first electoral defeat.” Liberal bloggers are wetting their pants over this “weather vane” of early Trump backlash. It’s like Thompson’s campaign never even happened.
By refusing to fund the campaigns of anyone but centrist, establishment shills, the Democratic Party aims to make the Berniecrats’ lack of political viability a self-fulfilling prophecy: starve their campaigns of resources so they can’t win, then point to said losses as examples of why they can’t win.
If that means a few more red seats in Congress, so be it. The more they do this, though, the less of Bernie’s “political revolution” will be absorbed by the Democratic Party and the more will go shooting off into third parties and direct action.
Feel free to keep eating your own, Democrats. At this rate, we’ll have a socialist party in no time.
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FOCUS: Stop Swooning Over Justin Trudeau. The Man Is a Disaster for the Planet |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=19600"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 17 April 2017 10:25 |
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McKibben writes: "He's mastered so beautifully the politics of inclusion: compassionate to immigrants, insistent on including women at every level of government. Give him great credit where it's deserved: in lots of ways he's the anti-Trump, and it's no wonder Canadians swooned when he took over. But when it comes to the defining issue of our day, climate change, he's a brother to the old orange guy in DC."
'But when it comes to the defining issue of our day, climate change, he's a brother to the old orange guy in DC.' (photo: Sean Kilpatrick/AP)
Stop Swooning Over Justin Trudeau. The Man Is a Disaster for the Planet
By Bill McKibben, Guardian UK
17 April 17
Donald Trump is a creep and unpleasant to look at, but at least he’s not a stunning hypocrite when it comes to climate change
 onald Trump is so spectacularly horrible that it’s hard to look away (especially now that he’s discovered bombs). But precisely because everyone’s staring gape-mouthed in his direction, other world leaders are able to get away with almost anything. Don’t believe me? Look one nation north, at Justin Trudeau.
Look all you want, in fact – he sure is cute, the planet’s only sovereign leader who appears to have recently quit a boy band. And he’s mastered so beautifully the politics of inclusion: compassionate to immigrants, insistent on including women at every level of government. Give him great credit where it’s deserved: in lots of ways he’s the anti-Trump, and it’s no wonder Canadians swooned when he took over.
But when it comes to the defining issue of our day, climate change, he’s a brother to the old orange guy in DC.
Not rhetorically: Trudeau says all the right things, over and over. He’s got no Scott Pruitts in his cabinet: everyone who works for him says the right things. Indeed, they specialize in getting others to say them too – it was Canadian diplomats, and the country’s environment minister Catherine McKenna, who pushed at the Paris climate talks for a tougher-than-expected goal: holding the planet’s rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
But those words are meaningless if you keep digging up more carbon and selling it to people to burn, and that’s exactly what Trudeau is doing. He’s hard at work pushing for new pipelines through Canada and the US to carry yet more oil out of Alberta’s tarsands, which is one of the greatest climate disasters on the planet.
Last month, speaking at a Houston petroleum industry gathering, he got a standing ovation from the oilmen for saying “No country would find 173bn barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.”
Yes, 173bn barrels is indeed the estimate for recoverable oil in the tar sands. So let’s do some math. If Canada digs up that oil and sells it to people to burn, it will produce, according to the math whizzes at Oil Change International, 30% of the carbon necessary to take us past the 1.5 degree target that Canada helped set in Paris.
That is to say, Canada, which represents one-half of 1% of the planet’s population, is claiming the right to sell the oil that will use up a third of the earth’s remaining carbon budget. Trump is a creep and a danger and unpleasant to look at, but at least he’s not a stunning hypocrite.
This having-your-cake-and-burning-it-too is central to Canada’s self-image/energy policy. McKenna, confronted by Canada’s veteran environmentalist David Suzuki, said tartly “we have an incredible climate change plan that includes putting a price on carbon pollution, also investing in clean innovation. But we also know we need to get our natural resources to market and we’re doing both”. Right.
But doing the second negates the first – in fact, it completely overwhelms it. If Canada is busy shipping carbon all over the world, it doesn’t matter all that much if every Tim Horton’s stopped selling donuts and started peddling solar panels instead.
Canada’s got company in this scam. Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull is supposed to be more sensitive than his predecessor, a Trump-like blowhard. When he signed on his nation to the Paris climate accords, he said, “it is clear the agreement was a watershed, a turning point and the adoption of a comprehensive strategy has galvanised the international community and spurred on global action.”
Which is a fine thing to say, or would be, if your government wasn’t backing plans for the largest coal mine on earth. That single mine, in a country of 20 million, will produce 362% of the annual carbon emissions that everyone in the Philippines produces in the course of a year. It is, obviously, mathematically and morally absurd.
Trump, of course, is working just as eagerly to please the fossil fuel industry – he’s instructed the Bureau of Land Management to make permitting even easier for new oil and gas projects, for instance. And frackers won’t even have to keep track of how much methane they’re spewing under his new guidelines. And why should they? If you believe, as Trump apparently does, that global warming is a delusion, a hoax, a mirage, you might as well get out of the way.
Trump’s insulting the planet, in other words. But at least he’s not pretending otherwise.
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How Berkeley Became Epicenter of Violent Trump Clashes |
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Monday, 17 April 2017 08:20 |
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Excerpt: "Berkeley is one of America's most liberal cities, with a long history of left-wing activism. Trump supporters used the city as a setting for a Patriots Day rally Saturday. But the situation goes beyond protests and counter-protests."
Protesters clash during a Berkeley rally on Saturday. (photo: David Butow/LA Times)
How Berkeley Became Epicenter of Violent Trump Clashes
By Paige St. John and Shelby Grad, The Los Angeles Times
17 April 17
 erkeley, long a hotbed of political protest, has emerged as a flashpoint in the Trump era.
The latest example of this came Saturday, when clashes between backers and critics of the president resulted in 21 arrests.
Berkeley is one of America’s most liberal cities, with a long history of left-wing activism. Trump supporters used the city as a setting for a Patriots Day rally Saturday.
But it goes beyond protests and counter-protests.
A February scheduled appearance by conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was canceled amid a violent protest on the UC Berkeley campus. That sparked a national debate — in which Trump himself took part — about the line between the right to demonstrate and protecting free speech that some find objectionable.
Why Berkeley?
For one thing, the city, along with Oakland and San Francisco, has a long-established protest culture. The UC Berkeley campus is famously known as the home of the Free Speech Movement. So when pro-Trump forces decided to rally there, plenty of counter-protesters were at the ready to respond.
Saturday’s event brought out a small but robust crowd of Trump supporters.
Stewart Rhodes, founder of the citizen militia group known as the Oath Keepers, said he came from Montana with about 50 others to protect Trump supporters. They were joined by bikers and others who vowed to fight members of an anti-fascist group if they crossed police barricades.
“I don’t mind hitting” the counter-demonstrators, Rhodes said. “In fact, I would kind of enjoy it.”
Having said that, there were violent clashes in Huntington Beach, a decidedly less liberal place, a few weeks ago.
Berkeley is also a potent symbol because of its role as the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in 1964:
Before fall 1964, students' politicking had been limited to a small sidewalk strip thought to be off-campus and immune from university restrictions. Students such as Mario Savio returned from searing experiences as civil rights workers in the South and sought to expand campaigns in California, upsetting some state legislators.
After learning that the property was owned by UC, school authorities moved to shut down the area and ban the tables and pamphleting there. Activists challenged the rules by resuming their activities. Three months of confrontations, demonstrations and negotiations followed and became international news. Eventually, the restrictions were lifted with some limitations — a victory that paved the way for later protests supporting women's' rights and environmentalism and opposing the Vietnam War.
Who are these counter-demonstrators?
Many were simply Trump critics who felt a need to respond.
But officials have expressed concerns about a more militant, so-called “black bloc” of demonstrators.
The self-described anarchists or anti-fascists have left school and law enforcement officials struggling to cope with their tactics.
The term “black bloc” was used to describe the tight wedges of black-clad protesters in helmets and masks who appeared in street demonstrations in Germany in the 1970s, confounding efforts to single out, identify and prosecute individuals.
In February, UC Berkeley officials criticized what they described as a paramilitary force armed with bats, steel rods, fireworks and Molotov cocktails. They set a fire on campus and prevented Yiannopoulos from speaking.
“They didn’t come to lock arms and sing ‘Kumbaya,’” said Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor and spokesman for UC Berkeley, said at the time. “They came to [mess stuff] up,” he said, using stronger language.
The Times interviewed some of these people earlier this year.
They hailed their actions as a big success.
“It wasn’t just people dressed in black who were acting militantly and everyone else is peace-loving Berkeley hippies,” said Yvette Felarca, a political organizer of By Any Means Necessary, an immigration and affirmative action coalition that seeks to build a mass militant movement. “Everyone cheered when those barricades were dismantled. ... Everyone was there with us in political agreement of the necessity of shutting it down, whatever it was going to take. It shows we have the power.”
What happened on Saturday?
Fistfights broke out near Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, where Trump supporters had scheduled a rally. Fireworks and smoke bombs were thrown into the crowd, and a few demonstrators were doused with pepper spray.
Both groups threw rocks and sticks at each other and used a large trash bin as a battering ram as the crowd moved around the perimeter of the park. One bank boarded up its ATMs before the rally as a precaution.
About 250 police officers were deployed to the scene by mid-afternoon after officials sought assistance from the neighboring Oakland Police Department.
Twenty-one people were arrested, including some on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, according to Officer Byron White of the Berkeley Police Department. Eleven people were injured with at least six taken to a hospital for treatment, including one stabbing victim.
Police confiscated knives, stun guns and poles, White said.
So what’s next?
Another conservative figure, author Ann Coulter, is expected to speak at U.C. Berkeley later this month. And more protests are expected.
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