Why Did WikiLeaks Help Dox Most of Turkey's Adult Female Population?
Thursday, 28 July 2016 13:19
Singal writes: "Whatever else you might say about WikiLeaks, it's hard to think of an institution that squanders goodwill more efficiently. Even the people most sympathetic to its aims and ideals have had a hard time defending it recently."
Rally in support of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (photo: Reuters)
Why Did WikiLeaks Help Dox Most of Turkey's Adult Female Population?
By Jesse Singal, New York Magazine
28 July 16
hatever else you might say about WikiLeaks, it’s hard to think of an institution that squanders goodwill more efficiently. Even the people most sympathetic to its aims and ideals have had a hard time defending it recently. Just over the last couple of weeks, whoever ran its Twitter account posted tweets that are either anti-Semitic or deeply weird (the fact that WikiLeaks founder and head Julian Assange ranted about Jewish reporters to a British journalist in 2011 certainly makes it harder to view the posts in a charitable light). Then it was revealed that some of the Democratic National Committee documents it leaked last week — timed intentionally to do maximum damage to Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances, according to Assange — contained personal information, including credit card and Social Security numbers, of DNC donors.
In the past, WikiLeaks has tended to defend itself against (frequent) charges of recklessness, indiscretion, and negligence by citing an absolute commitment to free speech and transparency. But these defenses are increasingly less credible, as WikiLeaks seems unable (or unwilling) to rigorously process its leaks — or even fact-check its own claims. The recent fiasco of the “Erdogan emails” (which, as we’ll see, actually have very little to do with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in any meaningful sense) is a shocking demonstration.
Shortly after the attempted coup that rocked Turkey two weeks ago — in which a small subset of the Turkish military briefly and very unsuccessfully tried to seize power from President Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP — WikiLeaks started amping up the hype for an document dump. “Waiting for our new 100k+ doc release on the leadup to the #TurkeyCoup?” tweeted WikiLeaks on July 18. “Explore our past publications on #Erdogan https://search.WikiLeaks.org/?q=erdogan.” Then, later that day, “Coming Tuesday: The #ErdoganEmails: 300 thousand internal emails from Erdo?an’s AKP - through to July 7, 2016.”
As promised, the next day WikiLeaks published a page announcing the release of “part one of the AKP Emails.” “The material was obtained a week before the attempted coup,” the site explained. “However, WikiLeaks has moved forward its publication schedule in response to the government’s post-coup purges. We have verified the material and the source, who is not connected, in any way, to the elements behind the attempted coup, or to a rival political party or state.” In response, Turkey swiftly blocked access to wikileaks.org, which some took as proof that the leak’s contents were legit. “How to authenticate a leak,” tweeted Edward Snowden, linking to a Reuters article headlined “Turkey blocks access to WikiLeaks after ruling party email dump.” WikiLeaks offered the same interpretation of the government’s actions, tweeting, “Erdogan government officially orders WikiLeaks to be blocked after publishing 300k emails from his party, AKP.”
For people who don’t read Turkish, it was easy to leave it at that and take WikiLeaks’ claims at face value: The site had published a huge trove of emails from Turkey’s ruling party, and Turkey had then blocked WikiLeaks to prevent people from viewing this newly aired dirty laundry.
This wasn’t quite the case, however. Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish sociologist with a focus on technology and censorship who is based at the University of North Carolina, was initially stranded in Turkey because of the coup, so, for the first day or so after the documents were posted, she didn’t have much time to look into them. But soon she noticed that her fellow Turkish and Turkey-focused activists and researchers were tweeting that the WikiLeaks emails weren’t actually from the AKP or the government at all — and, worse, they contained private citizens’ personal information.
When she checked into what journalists in Turkey were saying about the leak on Twitter, and looked into the emails herself, she found that indeed, WikiLeaks hadn’t actually released a trove of government emails. Rather, it had released what appears to be big chunks of archives from various far-from-top-secret online discussion groups. One such Google Group, called “All Together for Turkey” (
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
), has 77,000 members and is dedicated to general political discussion, she said. Elsewhere in the document dumps are thousands of mentions of other, similar-sounding Google and Yahoo groups — there are many emails containing the address
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
, for example, which Tufekci said translates roughly to “We are Turkey,” and which looks like a forum dedicated to sharing news stories. Overall, Tufekci said, she and other activists have now been poring over the archives for a week and there’s no sign anyone has found emails that weren’t taken from online discussion groups (though she was quick to add that she “can’t rule out” there are more meaningful emails buried somewhere in the huge stash).
As with the archives of any big, sprawling discussion groups, the emails contain “lots of nonsense,” Tufekci said — jokes and conspiracy theories and recipes and so on. But whatever is in there, “It’s so clearly not government emails,” she said. “As soon as you start looking, you can tell, absolutely.” Tufekci pointed out that just a tiny fraction of the emails contain an AKP address, “akparti.org.tr,” in the “From” field — she sent me a link to a search that revealed 683 such emails, a minuscule slice of the total stash of about 300,000. In some of these cases, she told me, people had simply posted to the discussion groups email responses they had gotten from AKP officials they were bugging about a job opening or whatever else. (When you put “akparti.org.tr” in both the “From” and “To” fields, the number dwindles yet further, to 275, with many of the results clearly spammy, even to a non-Turkish-speaker.) Once word of this spread among Turkish scholars and activists, some anti-censorship activists — the sorts of people who would have been excitedly lapping up a genuine link of AKP emails — began publicly expressing disgust at the document dump, which had no meaningful connection to the Erdogan or his ruling party.
After misleading people into believing it had leaked a giant cache of sensitive Turkish government emails, WikiLeaks dug itself deeper: “Here’s the full data for our Turkey AKP emails + more,” the organization tweeted on July 21, linking to a since-deleted page. That page hosted multiple databases containing Turkish citizens’ personal information. One included about 10 million rank-and-file AKP members, Tufekci said. Even more shocking, another contained what appears to be information for every female voter in 79 of Turkey’s 81 provinces — more than 20 million entries’ worth of addresses and cell-phone numbers. (Women who were AKP members appeared to have more information associated with them listed, Tufekci said.)
Disturbed by all of this, Tufekci took to Huffington Post to report her findings on Monday, highlighting both the misleading nature of WikiLeaks’ “Erdogan emails” claim and the mass doxing to which it had contributed: “According to the collective searching capacity of long-term activists and journalists in Turkey, none of the ‘Erdogan emails’ appear to be emails actually from Erdogan or his inner circle,” she wrote. “Nobody seems to be able to find a smoking gun exposing people in positions of power and responsibility.” She pointed out that the mass doxing of women was particularly harmful in light of the fact that “every year in Turkey, hundreds of women are murdered, most often by current or ex-husbands or boyfriends, and thousands of women leave their homes or go into hiding, seeking safety.”
WikiLeaks responded to Tufekci’s criticisms in a rather WikiLeaks-ian fashion: by accusing her, among other things, of shilling for a despot.
.@wikileaks I found the files through you & stuff you publicized. Emails also not "AKP" emails, merely a Google group, much private info.
Tufekci found the claim that she was “running flak for Erdogan” particularly amusing given her reputation as an anti-censorship, pro-human-rights voice on Turkey, and that it fit what appears to be the organization’s overall aversion to fact-checking. “Apparently they can’t even Google,” she told me. “My New York Times article about censorship in Turkey is a week old.” (In that column, she writes that “Press and internet freedoms have taken an especially drastic turn” under Erdogan in recent years.) “I’m gonna print [that tweet] and put it on my wall the next time I’m in Turkey,” she said.
Mostly, WikiLeaks’ complaints about Tufekci hinged on a technicality: In her article and her tweeting, she initially used the term “dump” to describe WikiLeaks’ actions, referring to both the emails the site hosted and the databases it linked to on its social accounts. WikiLeaks has latched onto the fact that while it hosted the (not actually) “Erdogan emails,” it merely linked to the doxing databases, providing easy access to them to millions of people. (Tufekci said her vague wording was intentional — she didn’t want to make it too easy for her followers to find the databases.) The site tweeted out “WikiLeaks did not publish the databases in question at any time. Please correct” to Tufekci and various other various people. WikiLeaks blocked Tufekci on Twitter, she said, after she started tweeting into the organization’s feed tweets from anti-censorship activists who were openly wishing the dump had never happened.
As bad as WikiLeaks’ mistakes were, they were only compounded by the respected outlets that uncritically echoed the organization’s claims — or, worse, unwittingly distorted the emails’ contents with context-free selections. Take this tweet from Lee Fang, an accomplished, respected investigative journalist:
New @wikileaks email mentions Denny Hastert, former Speaker of the House turned lobbyist for Erdogan turned felon https://t.co/M7Oucnf9LR
As Tufekci noted at the Huffington Post, “Even a cursory Google search of a phrase from that particular email would have revealed that it was actually a copied-and-pasted 2014 news article speculating about a Turkish businessman visiting the U.S.” I’m not singling out Fang, an acquaintance, as a particularly bad actor, either: The Christian Science Monitor fell for WikiLeaks’ claims in a particularly amusing manner.
Tufekci wrote:
This kind of misreporting was widespread. Parroting WikiLeaks’ claim, the Christian Science Monitor reported that 1,400 of the emails were allegedly related to Fethullah Gulen, a cleric who leads a secretive global network and who the government blames for the coup. This batch of 1,400 emails was actually merely a keyword search for the phrase “Gulen,” which also means “smiles” or “smiling” in Turkey, so ads for vacations by the Mediterranean (“Çe?me’s smiling face!”) were included in these allegedly incriminating “1,400 emails” along with pasted public news articles mentioning the name of the embattled cleric.
This sort of thing happened over and over as the rumors swirled out across Twitter, with journalists, cranks, conspiracy theorists, and other people who don’t read Turkish holding up utterly pedestrian content from online discussion forums as proof of … something. Tufekci compared the English-language response to a hypothetical foreign group gaining access to an archive of MetaFilter threads, publishing them online, and a sleuth — non-English-speaking — then plucking out a few that contained a 9/11 truther’s pasted emails to the government and presenting them as new evidence about the attacks’ true perpetrators.
Ultimately, Tufekci said, WikiLeaks’ apparent recklessness won’t just impact the individuals who have been doxed. The leaks could also directly benefit Turkey’s pro-censorship forces in their long-term goal to gain a tighter control over the information flow in and into the country. Especially relative to other Western, developed countries, Turkey has an abysmal reputation and record when it comes to press freedom and censorship, and in this case the censors can point to WikiLeaks and its philosophy of radical, heedless transparency doing very real harm to Turks — and it’s hard for the Zeynep Tufekcis of the world to argue with them.
If there is a bright side, it’s only that the cache of documents provided a prompt for gallows humor on Turkish Twitter during a stressful, uncertain time: For example, one of the “leaked” emails was a recipe for the tasty Turkish treat semolina halva, so Tufekci said that “Turkish Twitter took to debating whether the recipe that WikiLeaks exposed had too much sugar.”
WikiLeaks didn’t respond to a Twitter request for comment, and an email to the organization’s press address bounced back with a “delayed delivery” note (I’ll update this story if WikiLeaks does eventually comment). It’s impossible not to wonder what the hell happened here: WikiLeaks clearly thought it had on its hands a giant trove of AKP emails. Who told them that? Why? And what was the thinking behind spreading the links to the doxing documents? Did WikiLeaks even know what it was linking to and have a sense of why it was doing so? Whatever the motives of the people who leaked all of this material to WikiLeaks, this is a striking example of what can happen when a powerful and unaccountable organization operates with impulsivity and little due diligence.
The weirdest, most Orwellian aspect of all this, of course, is that there are a lot of people — maybe millions, given the size of WikiLeaks’ social-media footprint — who continue to think WikiLeaks graced the world with a trove of documents connected to Erdogan and his AKP inner circle. This belief has been reinforced by endlessly overhyped and undercooked reporting and social-media activity, with the net result being that WikiLeaks has been able to present itself — as always — as a brave force for transparency and democracy. It appears that hardly any of the people who think WikiLeaks has exposed malfeasance on the part of the Turkish government know that what it has actually exposed is millions of Turkish people’s private information, for no reason it has yet been willing to explain. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, WikiLeaks has not deigned to clarify the actual contents of the “Erdogan emails,” nor explain the pro-democratic, anti-authoritarian benefits of helping to dox tens of millions of people. But at least the site’s fans have access to a new dessert recipe.
Tar Sands in the Atlantic Ocean: TransCanada's Proposed Energy East Pipeline
Thursday, 28 July 2016 13:13
Excerpt: "TransCanada - which was thwarted in its effort to drive Keystone XL through America's heartland - is now pursuing a project that would effectively create a waterborne tar sands pipeline that would threaten the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts."
Whale breaches near oil tanker. (photo: NOAA)
Tar Sands in the Atlantic Ocean: TransCanada's Proposed Energy East Pipeline
By Joshua Axelrod and Anthony Swift, NRDC
28 July 16
ransCanada—which was thwarted in its effort to drive Keystone XL through America’s heartland—is now pursuing a project that would effectively create a waterborne tar sands pipeline that would threaten the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. This proposed Canadian pipeline, Energy East, would bring as much as 1.1 million barrels per day of mostly tar sands oil from Alberta to Canada’s eastern seaport of Saint John, New Brunswick. From there, nearly 300 supertankers per year would form a high-risk “pipeline” down the entire U.S. Eastern Seaboard, from the tip of Maine to the Florida Panhandle, around Florida’s peninsula, and on to refineries along the Gulf Coast.
The tankers—representing a 300 percent increase in crude oil traffic in Nova Scotia’s ecologically critical Bay of Fundy—would pose a significant threat to endangered marine mammals and regionally critical fisheries in the form of deafening ocean noise and an increased risk of oil spills and ship strikes. Given that the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that emergency responders lack the tools to effectively contain and clean up diluted bitumen (the most common form of tar sands crude), the risk of a tar sands spill threatens vibrant and irreplaceable marine habitats all along the East Coast—along with economies that depend on them. The pipeline would also bring a significant increase in carbon pollution, equivalent to the annual emissions of as many as 54 million passenger vehicles, and lock in high-carbon infrastructure expected to operate for at least 50 years.
Despite the significant risks posed by Energy East, our analysis reveals that the scope of the forthcoming environmental review by Canadian authorities is sorely lacking. In this report, we offer a series of recommendations for reforming the current regulatory review process and propose several critical safety regulations for the United States and Canada, including:
Imposing a tar sands oil tanker moratorium in U.S. and Canadian waters until appropriate spill response techniques are developed to address a diluted bitumen spill into water.
Improving tanker operations to ensure that any impacts to marine mammals and ecosystems would be at a minimum.
Amending Canada’s Environmental Assessment Act to improve public participation in the review process and ensure consideration of the environmental, health, and economic impact in areas ranging from where the oil is produced to its final destination.
Getting the United States involved in the review process, ensuring that risks to shared resources are analyzed.
Permanently protecting especially vulnerable and special ocean regions to eliminate, as much as possible, the threat oil spills and other marine accidents pose to these critical areas.
FOCUS: The Only Defense America Has Against Donald Trump Is His Opponent
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
Thursday, 28 July 2016 10:37
Rich writes: "He is their voice - of rage - as he reiterated constantly from the podium. The only defense we have against Trump is his opponent. She must make sure that the other America, the America that is appalled, victimized, and scandalized by Trump and what he represents, goes to the polls to vote 'no.'"
Donald Trump. (photo: TIME)
The Only Defense America Has Against Donald Trump Is His Opponent
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
28 July 16
ost weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: the Trump show at the Republican National Convention, Ailes's ouster, and where the GOP goes from here.
Party conventions traditionally offer candidates a chance to reach voters who may not have paid close attention to the primaries, and to sharpen their tone for the general-election campaign. Was Donald Trump's RNC acceptance speech noticeably more presidential than his primary campaign? And if so, does that improve his chances against Hillary Clinton?
An angry tirade, devoid of facts and policies and delivered in a nonstop shout, is not presidential. It wasn’t really a speech, even though it went on for some 75 minutes. (If Trump had been listening to it instead of delivering it, he would have left before halftime.) But none of that really matters in the case of Trump, who has created his own reality and gotten untold millions of Americans to buy into it. Last night, he wasn’t trying to reach out to fence-sitters, centrists, or independents and convert them. What he wanted instead was to ratchet up the fears of any racists, nativists, Second Amendment zealots, and garden-variety hard-right Republicans who had somehow slept through the primaries and still might be rallied to register and vote. The speech was one long piercing dog whistle. And it just may have penetrated the mad dogs he wanted to reach and mobilize.
Watching it, I was struck once again by how ill-prepared the so-called liberal press is to deal with the Trump phenomenon. Commentators on CNN and MSNBC noted some of the downsides of his speech but gave high marks for style (“very forceful,” according to Wolf Blitzer; “rousing” at its conclusion, according to Chris Matthews) as if it were just another business-as-usual political speech to be graded (on a curve). There was lots of in-the-moment fact-checking by our top news organizations — no mean task given the dense web of deceit Trump was spinning — but the appeal of the Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with facts and will not be countered by facts. Trump is about anger, resentment, hatred — stark emotions that override rationality and are immune to its niceties. Trump is utterly ignorant about any issue you can name, and always has been, but those who will vote for him don’t care. He is their voice — of rage — as he reiterated constantly from the podium.
No, the only defense we have against Trump is his opponent. She must make sure that the other America, the America that is appalled, victimized, and scandalized by Trump and what he represents, goes to the polls to vote "no." Is Hillary Clinton up to it? I don’t know. Yes, she could win by a landslide. But she could well lose, and to believe otherwise is to live in the cocoon of, yes, the liberal media — the cocoon that gave us all of those poll analysts who said Trump could never win the nomination and who kept saying it was only a matter of time before the Republicans’ “best candidate” (that would be Marco Rubio, remember him?) would emerge from the pack to save the day.
A chilling article by Aaron Blake of the Washington Post tracking Clinton’s downward trajectory as the convention convened makes it clear how close this is going to be. While 49 percent of registered voters “strongly dislike” Trump, 47 percent feel the same way about Clinton — in other words, a statistical dead heat of detestation. She has got to rise above that — with a vice-presidential pick, to be announced imminently, who will rally voters rather than bore them, with a convention that isn’t a smug and relentlessly rational legal brief but a fierce rallying cry that also speaks to the emotions, if higher emotions than Trump’s. This is a war in which the country hangs in the balance. You don’t win wars with civility and bullet points.
And speaking of war: Trump’s speech did everything it could to incentivize an ISIS attack. Not only did it offer the provocation of sustained Muslim-bashing, but it set Trump up as the strongman America needs to stamp out terrorism overnight. Nothing could be more helpful to ISIS than a chaotic and self-immolating Trump presidency that weakens America, and little could be more helpful to Trump’s prospects than a terror attack this fall. You felt he was rooting for that last night.
The unexpected ousting of Fox News' Roger Ailes cast a shadow over the convention events this week. How much will his absence at Fox affect the power of the conservative Establishment?
The conservative Establishment has been in disarray from the moment Trump declared his candidacy, no matter what Fox News or anyone else had to say about it. But the constituency so brilliantly brought together by Fox News — essentially the Sarah Palin–tea party–Trump base of the GOP — is not the Establishment and will not be affected by Ailes’s departure. The network is financially essential to the Murdoch empire, not only because of its own huge profits but also because of its value as leverage to promote and monetize other Fox channels in the cable-satellite ecosystem. So it’s hard to imagine that any Murdoch heir with an eye on the bottom line will change its overall identity. Clearly the 85-year-old Rupert Murdoch appointed himself temporary leader in order to bar the door should any of the network’s most highly rated personalities try to bolt.
What will ultimately erode Fox News over time has nothing to do with politics: It will fall victim to the slow but inexorable death of television as we have known it, and particularly of cable news, which has an old audience (average age 68, and overwhelmingly white, in the case of Fox) and is increasingly obsolete as either a news or opinion delivery system in the new age of social media.
But while we wait for that, much more needs to be known about Ailes’s behavior and those who covered it up. Greta Van Susteren, Sean Hannity, Bret Baier, and Bill O’Reilly (who settled his own 2004 sexual-harassment case out of court) all stood up publicly for Ailes after the former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed her lawsuit. Did none of them have a clue as to what was going on? I imagine that’s what they’ll assert. As you may recall, the Murdochs claimed utter ignorance of the criminal phone-hacking done on behalf of their newspaper empire in the U.K. Can they get away with this in America — in a case that may have involved multiple instances of predatory sexual behavior over years in their workplace? If Ailes was the Bill Cosby of Fox News, the full story can hardly be swept under the rug by his resignation. It must be adjudicated in a court of law.
From the roll-call shouting match on its first day to Ted Cruz's pointed refusal to endorse his party's candidate, the convention has shown the deep divisions remaining within the GOP. Where does the party go from here?
The notion that the GOP is deeply divided is based on a conceit of the mainstream media: that the #NeverTrump crowd — roughly speaking, the defeated Jeb Bush–Marco Rubio–John Kasich political class, their donors, and the elite conservative Times–Washington Post–Wall Street Journal op-ed columnists who echo them — represent one-half of the supposed divide and that the insurgent Trumpists represent the other. But the two camps in this ostensible civil war are not evenly matched. The #NeverTrump crowd is actually the party’s fringe. Trump did win the Republican primaries decisively, and his voters are the true GOP.
That party is all white — only 18 of the convention’s 2,472 delegates were black, in the estimate of the Washington Post. And Trump’s absurd expression of LGBT solidarity notwithstanding, it’s a homophobic party — its platform not only opposes same-sex marriage and same-sex civil-rights protections but endorses reparation “therapy” for young gay people. And it’s a nativist party that has corporate backers who talk about immigration reform but that in reality has done nothing to advance that cause even when a president sympathetic to it (George W. Bush) was in power.
Whatever Ted Cruz’s fate within the GOP, it would be ridiculous to say he differs from Trump on any of the issues so attractive to the base; even in his supposedly rebellious convention speech, he made a point of endorsing Trump’s signature issue, a wall along the Mexican border. Let us also remember that Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Rubio, Newt Gingrich, Sheldon Adelson, and nearly everyone else with true power in the Republican Party has signed on to the Trump GOP even if they make a show of holding their noses while doing so. TheWall Street Journal editorial page, once a platform of principled conservative opposition to Trump, is now rationalizing any outrageous thing he says or does on the grounds that Hillary Clinton would be worse. They are all selling their souls to the devil — but in truth they did so the moment John McCain cynically put Palin, all but indistinguishable from Trump, on his ticket eight years ago.
So what is the future of the GOP? Win or lose this fall, it will remain, as it has been for some time, the last outpost of old white America. Riding in on a wave of anti-Obama rage, Trump has made explicit the racial animus that was implicit in the Nixon-Reagan-Bush years. He not only wants to be the new Nixon, but the new Spiro Agnew, Jesse Helms, Lee Atwater, Pat Buchanan, and all of the rest combined. Even if he goes down, his followers are going to be creating havoc for years to come, doing their best to make real the horrific Armageddon-tinged portrait of the nation that Trump drew in his dark and corrosive acceptance speech. The white dead-enders are doomed by demography in the end, but not at the pace one might wish.
At Democratic Convention, Round One to the Progressives
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=14990"><span class="small">Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company</span></a>
Thursday, 28 July 2016 08:48
Excerpt: "That the system is so rigged has been a major theme of the Sanders campaign, and on Monday, it was reiterated by both Sanders and Warren as each called for the overturning of Citizens United and other court decisions that have flooded politics with money at a level beyond imagination."
Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders waves before leaving the stage after speaking at the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, July 25, 2016. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty)
At Democratic Convention, Round One to the Progressives
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company
28 July 16
The first night in Philadelphia was a celebration of progressive values, but Big Money still has a grip on the party.
hoot if you must these old grey heads, but these two semi-qualified observers of the passing political scene watched Monday night’s proceedings at the Democratic National Convention and saw past the heckles and opprobrium of the leather-lunged few. Instead, we witnessed an evening of progressive rhetoric and thoughtfulness unseen on a big political stage since the days of William Jennings Bryan, Wisconsin’s Fighting Bob La Follette, the Happy Warrior Al Smith and the crusaders of FDR’s New Deal. Not to mention Hubert Humphrey, Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, and a host of others who though history kept beating the drums for ordinary people against the organized might of Big Money.
Progressive big hitters were out on the field Monday and they successfully swung for the fences. Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were batting like the Yankees’ legendary Murderers Row, aided and abetted by such powerful players as Representatives Keith Ellison and Raúl Grijalva, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney and US Senator Jeff Merkley.
Michelle Obama was elegant and forceful as she looked back at her family’s years in the White House and endorsed Hillary Clinton. “I want someone with the proven strength to persevere,” she said. “Someone who knows this job and takes it seriously. Someone who understands that the issues a President faces are not black and white and cannot be boiled down to 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military in your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or a tendency to lash out. You need to be steady, and measured, and well-informed.”
Could anyone watching not feel a tingle down the spine as this remarkable woman traced the great arc of American history? We only prayed grandchildren were listening as she said that the story of America is “the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves — and I watch my daughters?— two beautiful, intelligent, black young women?— playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters — and all our sons and daughters —?now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.”
Elizabeth Warren did what only she can do, deconstructing the charade that is Donald Trump. “Trump thinks he can win votes by fanning the flames of fear and hatred,” she said. “By turning neighbor against neighbor. By persuading you that the real problem in America is your fellow Americans — people who don’t look like you, or don’t talk like you, or don’t worship like you… That’s Donald Trump’s America. An America of fear and hate. An America where we all break apart…
“When we turn on each other, bankers can run our economy for Wall Street, oil companies can fight off clean energy, and giant corporations can ship the last good jobs overseas. When we turn on each other, we can’t unite to fight back against a rigged system. Well, I’ve got news for Donald Trump. The American people are not falling for it.”
And then the hour belonged to Bernie Sanders. As he endorsed Clinton, he was gracious in defeat: “I understand that many people here in this convention hall and around the country are disappointed about the final results of the nominating process. I think it’s fair to say that no one is more disappointed than I am. But to all of our supporters — here and around the country — I hope you take enormous pride in the historical accomplishments we have achieved.
“Together, my friends, we have begun a political revolution to transform America and that revolution — Our Revolution — continues. Election days come and go. But the struggle of the people to create a government which represents all of us and not just the 1 percent — a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice — that struggle continues. And I look forward to being part of that struggle with you.”
Then and there, the old socialist from Vermont liberated Democrats to be the champions of everyday people again.
If only — and it’s a big if — if only the party can liberate itself from the stranglehold of Big Money. For off camera, out of sight and (for the moment) out of mind, one could sense the corrupting presence of the lobbyists of corporate America, the bag men of special interests, and the mercenaries there in Philadelphia with hefty infusions of campaign cash eager to bring the Democrats down from the ramparts of Les Mis and back to cold, cynical earth.
Monday, we saw spirit and passion, ideas and aspirations, inspiring language, diversity (1182 black delegates as opposed to the GOP’s 18, and 2,887 women), values, even the tears of Bernie’s supporters and yes, the willingness to join forces to defeat Trump. But those progressive voices ringing out so beautifully that night are the very ones fighting to free their party from the grip of millionaires and billionaires while at the same time the Clinton forces embrace the one-tenth of one percent represented by the multi-billionaire and former Republican Mayor of New York Mike Bloomberg. He speaks at the convention on Wednesday night, part of the Clinton effort to give moderate members of the GOP another reason to dump Trump. Nonetheless, the optics are less than great.
We took time from the grace notes of unity and collaboration sounded at the convention to look over those Democratic National Committee emails dumped on the eve of the convention by WikiLeaks, communications that reveal just how low party fundraisers will stoop for cash, promising contributors access to the White House and other higher ups in exchange for their donations. In The Washington Post this week, Matea Gold wrote, “The leaked emails reveal the relentless art of donor maintenance that undergirds the system: the flattery, cajoling and favor-bestowing that goes into winning rich supporters. It’s a practice that the party fundraisers themselves often find dispiriting.”
To which Nicholas Confessore and Steve Eder at The New York Times added, “As is common in national politics, Democratic staff members kept detailed track of every dollar contributed by targeted donors, aiming to get each of the wealthiest givers to ‘max out,’ or contribute the maximum legal amount to each party account. The biggest national donors were the subject of entire dossiers, as fund-raisers tried to gauge their interests, annoyances and passions.”
Avarice is bipartisan, as has been seen at both this year’s Republican and Democratic conventions. For the first time, both parties received no public money for their conventions so they were completely beholden to private funding. What’s more, Democrats reversed previous policy and lifted a ban on corporate and lobbying dollars to pay for their big soiree. “After those limits were lifted,” Matea Gold noted, soon-to-be-former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz “and other top party officials showered corporate lobbyists with calls, emails and personal meetings seeking convention support and PAC contributions to the party, according to a spreadsheet logging the contacts.” This year’s sponsors include Lockheed Martin, Home Depot, AT&T, Xerox, Twitter, Microsoft and Facebook.
While in Philadelphia, according to Confessore and Eder, “Donors who raise $1.25 million for the party — or who give $467,000 — are entitled to priority booking in a top hotel, nightly access to V.I.P. lounges and an ‘exclusive roundtable and campaign briefing with high-level Democratic officials,’ according to a promotional brochure obtained by The Times.”
And then there’s this report by Megan R. Wilson at the Washington paper, The Hill: “Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has accepted more than $9 million in bundled donations from registered lobbyists, while the DNC has rolled back the lobbyist bans that Obama put into place.
“‘In 2008 and 2012, there was no integration with the [Obama] campaign,’ said Al Mottur, a senior Democratic lobbyist at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, adding that he would have liked to have helped. ‘Now, the campaign is welcoming — they’re open to us. That’s why I’ve done as much work for her as I’ve done on her behalf.’”
It’s an old story. Candidates seek the votes of citizens only to turn around and promise the only real access to donors. And once again representative government is disrupted because the winners so rarely govern as they campaigned. They can’t, because they are tethered to the demands, claims and tendered IOUs of the rich and privileged.
That the system is so rigged has been a major theme of the Sanders campaign, and on Monday, it was reiterated by both Sanders and Warren as each called for the overturning of Citizens United and other court decisions that have flooded politics with money at a level beyond imagination.
In her acceptance speech Thursday night, Hillary Clinton doubtless will say similar things and praise the progressive gospel of campaign finance reform, professing to shun the appeasement of Wall Street — the big banks, hedge fund managers, and private equity oligarchs.
All well and good, but if her actions and her party’s continue to prove otherwise, the rousing rhetoric of this week — and the historic nomination of the first woman as a presidential nominee — may fade to insignificance as an angry, disillusioned, and despairing public opens the door wide for the phony “I’m so rich I can’t be bought off” gospel of Donald J. Trump. Caveat emptor.
Obama at DNC: 'Reject Cynicism and Reject Fear' and Elect Hillary Clinton
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7033"><span class="small">Eyder Peralta, NPR</span></a>
Thursday, 28 July 2016 08:45
Peralta writes: "Democrats called on Americans to reject what they called the politics of fear and division of the GOP and elect Hillary Clinton during the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia."
Hillary Clinton joins President Obama after his address at the Democratic National Convention. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty)
Obama at DNC: 'Reject Cynicism and Reject Fear' and Elect Hillary Clinton
By Eyder Peralta, NPR
28 July 16
emocrats called on Americans to reject what they called the politics of fear and division of the GOP and elect Hillary Clinton during the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
Everyone from President Obama to Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine contrasted the Democratic vision of America with the vision offered by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
"America is already great," President Obama said. "America is already strong. And I promise you, our strength, our greatness does not depend on Donald Trump."
Obama reached back to the themes of his 2008 campaign. He came onstage to chants of "Yes, we can! Yes, we can!" And, as he did often during that campaign, he extolled his belief in American exceptionalism, rejecting Trump's assertions that the United States has lost its way.
Obama painted a picture of an America rooted in the same values his grandparents instilled in him: honesty, hard work, kindness and humility.
"America has changed over the years," Obama said. "But these values that my grandparents taught me — they haven't gone anywhere. They're as strong as ever; still cherished by people of every party, every race, every faith. They live on in each of us."
And when it came time to denounce Trump, Obama did not shy away. He said: "That's why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end."
In a statement, the Trump campaign said that the Democrats pushed a "vision of America that doesn't exist for most Americans."
"Instead of dealing with reality, they spoke in cheap, petty terms beneath the dignity of a convention," Stephen Miller, senior policy adviser, said in a written statement.
The night was also marked by tension among delegates on the floor of the Wells Fargo Center. When Tim Kaine was — by acclamation — officially nominated as the party's vice presidential candidate, supporters of Bernie Sanders chanted that they wanted a roll call vote.
Leon Panetta, the former CIA chief and secretary of defense, was interrupted by chants of "No more war!"
But Vice President Biden changed the mood almost immediately simply by walking onstage to the theme of Rocky.
Biden portrayed Clinton as a person who knows about the problems of the middle class and who has always been in public life. Clinton "knows," he repeated over and over. And Trump has no clue, he said.
Then he used one of his favorite words: "He's trying to tell us he cares about the middle class. Give me a break! That's a bunch of malarkey!"
Kaine accepted his nomination as the vice presidential nominee and during his speech, he mocked Trump.
"There's nothing suspicious in my tax returns, believe me," Kaine said.
A normal presidential candidate, he said, doesn't ask you to believe him. Instead, he tells you how he plans to get things done.
"Folks, you cannot believe one word that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth," he said.
Toward the end of his own speech, Obama tied together all of the big themes of this election: Trump, he said, doesn't adhere to that "common creed." Clinton, on the other hand, does, he argued.
"We don't fear the future; we shape it, we embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own," Obama said. "That's what Hillary Clinton understands — this fighter, this stateswoman, this mother and grandmother, this public servant, this patriot — that's the America she's fighting for."
We live blogged the night as it developed, so keep reading if you want a play-by-play.
Update at 10:53 p.m. ET. President Obama Takes Stage:
After a video that detailed his tenure in the White House — his speeches during mass shootings, his handling of the Great Recession, his Supreme Court nominations, passage of the Affordable Care Act, and a Supreme Court decision making same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states — Obama took the stage.
Update at 10:37 p.m. ET. Kaine Contrasts Clinton And Trump:
Sen. Tim Kaine spent much of his speech contrasting Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. His son, a Marine, just deployed to Europe, Kaine said, and he would "trust Hillary Clinton with our son's life."
As for Trump, he said, anyone who has ever believed his promises has been "hurt."
Trump, he said, has run a campaign full of requests for voters to believe him.
"There's nothing suspicious in my tax returns, believe me," Kaine said as he imitated Trump.
A normal presidential candidate, he said, doesn't ask you to believe him. Instead, he tells you how he plans to get things done.
"Folks, you cannot believe one word that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth," he said.
Update at 10:08 p.m. ET. Kaine Accepts Vice Presidential Nomination:
Kaine, who is still speaking, just accepted the party's nomination for vice president.
"Can I be honest for a second?" he asked. "I never expected to be here."
Update at 9:58 p.m. ET. Arrests Outside The Arena:
NPR's Will Huntsberry sends us this update from the sit-in outside the arena:
"Protesters are now being led away in plastic handcuffs, after being warned three times to stop blocking the entrance. Roughly 25 were arrested by my count."
Update at 9:27 p.m. ET. Biden Delivers Impassioned Defense Of Clinton And America:
Vice President Biden united the crowd simply by walking onstage to the theme of Rocky.
He received a standing ovation and then launched into an impassioned defense of Hillary Clinton and the United States.
He portrayed Clinton as a person who knows about the problems of the middle class and who has always been in public life. "Hillary gets it," he said. Biden also referenced the history Clinton would make if she is elected president.
"We all understand what it will mean for our daughters and granddaughters when Hillary Clinton walks into the Oval Office as president of the United States of America," Biden said. "It will change their lives. My daughters and granddaughters can do anything any son or grandson can do, and she will prove it."
Clinton "knows," he repeated over and over. And Trump has no clue, he said.
Biden then tried to indict Trump by using one of his favorite words: "He's trying to tell us he cares about the middle class. Give me a break! That's a bunch of malarkey!"
Biden closed his speech by conjuring American exceptionalism.
"We do not scare easily," Biden said. "We never bow, we never bend, we never break when confronted with crisis. No, we endure, we overcome, and we always, always move forward. That's why I can say with absolute conviction, I am more optimistic about our chances today than when I was elected as a 29-year-old kid to the Senate."
Update at 9:07 p.m. ET. Another Sit-In:
NPR's Will Huntsberry reports there is a sit-in going on outside the arena:
"Democracy Spring activists are attempting to block an entrance to the convention. As the protesters have attempted to block entrances, police have pushed and moved them out of the way. A small stream of attendees is currently being led around the protest. Currently there have been no arrests or detentions. Democracy Spring is a collective that wants to get dark money out of politics, have publicly funded elections and abolish superdelegates."
Update at 9:02 p.m. ET. Panetta Interrupted:
Leon Panetta, the former CIA chief and secretary of defense, was interrupted by chants of "No more war!"
Panetta was trying to give a speech in which he praised Clinton for her smarts, strength and courage.
"I have worked alongside nine presidents, Republican and Democrat, all experienced, all believing in the U.S. role in world leadership and I can tell you this — that in this election, there is only one candidate for president who has the experience, the temperament, and the judgment to be commander in chief. And that's Hillary Clinton," he said before the chants began.
Panetta powered through the rest of his speech even as some delegates shouted, "Lies! Lies! Lies!" and turned on their phones' flash to be more visible.
Update at 8:32 p.m. ET. A Moment Of Contrast:
Following a performance of "What the World Needs Now Is Love," the crowd erupted into shouts of "Love trumps hate! Love trumps hate!"
It was a moment of deep contrast to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland where the defining chant was "Lock her up! Lock her up!"
Update at 8:23 p.m. ET. Gabby Giffords:
Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona representative who was shot during a mass shooting in 2011, was given the first standing ovation of the night.
She spoke about the need for gun control and said that if anyone could stand up to the gun lobby, it would be Hillary Clinton.
"Hillary is tough," she said. "Hillary is courageous. She will fight to make our families safer. In the White House she will stand up to the gun lobby; that is why I am voting for Hillary.
"Speaking is difficult for me, but come January I want to say these two words: Madame President."
Update at 8:03 p.m. ET. 'Ending Gun Violence':
The crowd at the arena grew quiet as Christine Leinonen began speaking.
Leinonen's son, Christopher, was killed in the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Plaintively, she pointed out that an assault weapons ban was in place when Christopher was born.
"Where was that common-sense gun law when he died?" she said. "I never want you to ask that question about your child. That's why I support Hillary Clinton."
Erica Smegielski, whose mother, the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School, was killed during a mass shooting, said that Clinton is the candidate to stand up to the gun lobby.
"I'm here alone, without my mother, while too many politicians cower behind the gun lobby instead of standing with American families," Smegielski said.
And what the world needs now, she said, is not another one of those politicians.
"We don't need our teachers and principals going to work in fear," she said. "What we need is another mother who's willing to do what's right. Whose bravery can live up in equal measure to my mom's."
Update at 7:46 p.m. ET. On Climate Change:
California Gov. Jerry Brown left no doubt that the Democratic Party believes that climate change is real.
"Trump says global warming is a hoax," Brown said. "I say Donald Trump is a fraud."
Update at 7:15 p.m. ET. Harry Reid Rips Republicans:
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid delivered perhaps the most stinging rebuke of Republicans and their presidential nominee, Donald Trump, that we've seen at the DNC. He said this about the Republican majority leader:
"I have never seen anything more craven than Mitch McConnell and what he has done to our democracy. His Republican Party decided that the answer to hardworking Americans' dreams is to slander our African-American president, stoke fear of Muslims, sow hatred of Latinos, insult Asians, and, of course, wage war against women."
And this about Trump:
"When Trump decided to run for president, he probably said to himself, 'I'm an egomaniac. I don't believe in science. I think women are inferior. Where would I feel at home?' "
And:
"Parents: You're right to worry about your children hearing what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth. Republicans: You should have been careful, also, because Donald learned it from watching you!"
Update at 7:07 p.m. ET. Excerpts From Obama's Speech:
The White House has released two excerpts from President Obama's speech. They show that Obama will paint an optimistic picture of the country.
"As I've traveled this country, through all fifty states; as I've rejoiced with you and mourned with you, what I've also seen, more than anything, is what is right with America," Obama will say. "I see people working hard and starting businesses; people teaching kids and serving our country. I see a younger generation full of energy and new ideas, unconstrained by what is, and ready to seize what ought to be."
Obama will also praise Clinton for having the experience and tenacity needed to be president.
"Even in the middle of crisis, she listens to people, and keeps her cool, and treats everybody with respect," Obama will say. "And no matter how daunting the odds, no matter how much people try to knock her down, she never, ever quits."
Update at 7:00 p.m. ET. Drama On The Floor:
The third day of the Democratic National Convention began with a little bit of procedural drama.
The convention took up a motion to nominate Tim Kaine as the party's vice presidential candidate. Rep. Marcia Fudge moved to approve the nomination by acclamation. Most of the delegates obliged and Kaine was officially nominated. But for about a minute, supporters of Bernie Sanders who oppose Kaine demanded a roll call vote.
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hatever else you might say about WikiLeaks, it’s hard to think of an institution that squanders goodwill more efficiently. Even the people most sympathetic to its aims and ideals have had a hard time defending it recently. Just over the last couple of weeks, whoever ran its Twitter account 
ransCanada—which was thwarted in its effort to drive Keystone XL through America’s heartland—is now pursuing a project that would effectively create a waterborne tar sands pipeline that would threaten the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. This proposed Canadian pipeline, Energy East, would bring as much as 1.1 million barrels per day of mostly tar sands oil from Alberta to Canada’s eastern seaport of Saint John, New Brunswick. From there, nearly 300 supertankers per year would form a high-risk “pipeline” down the entire U.S. Eastern Seaboard, from the tip of Maine to the Florida Panhandle, around Florida’s peninsula, and on to refineries along the Gulf Coast.
ost weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: the Trump show at the Republican National Convention, Ailes's ouster, and where the GOP goes from here.
hoot if you must these old grey heads, but these two semi-qualified observers of the passing political scene watched Monday night’s proceedings at the Democratic National Convention and saw past the heckles and opprobrium of the leather-lunged few. Instead, we witnessed an evening of progressive rhetoric and thoughtfulness unseen on a big political stage since the days of William Jennings Bryan, Wisconsin’s Fighting Bob La Follette, the Happy Warrior Al Smith and the crusaders of FDR’s New Deal. Not to mention Hubert Humphrey, Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, and a host of others who though history kept beating the drums for ordinary people against the organized might of Big Money.
emocrats called on Americans to reject what they called the politics of fear and division of the GOP and elect Hillary Clinton during the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
