Month: December 2017

Human rights and bullets dipped in pigs blood
by digby

It’s very nice that “Donald Trump” (or whatever bot he has writing his tweets the subject) is supporting the protests and calling for human rights in Iran. But it’s just a teensy bit fatuous in light of his support for the crackdown by Erdogan in Turkey and Rodrigo Duterte’s mass extra-judicial killings in the Philippines. Not to mention Vlad.

He’s shown his “support” for human rights on other occasions as well:

Donald Trump at CPAC, March 6, 2014.

I was in Moscow a couple of ago, own the Miss Universe Pageant and they treated me so great. Putin even sent me a beautiful present with a beautiful note. I spoke to all of his people. You look at what he’s doing with President Obama, he’s like toying with him.

So he has the Olympics, the day after the Olympics, he starts with Ukraine. The day after. How smart? You know, he didn’t want to do it during the Olympics. Boom. The day after. So our athletes leave, we all leave, and the day after. And you know, when he goes in and takes Crimea, he’s taking the heart and soul because that’s where all the money is. I was surprised. I heard that the other day. They were saying, most of the wealth comes right from that area.

That’s the area with the wealth, so that means the rest of Ukraine will fall and it’s predicted to fall fairly quickly…. When you see what they are doing in Ukraine, it’s just a question of time.

And this:

What were your other impressions of the Soviet Union?

I was very unimpressed. Their system is a disaster. What you will see there soon is a revolution; the signs are all there with the demonstrations and picketing. Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.

You mean firm hand as in China?

When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world—

Why is Gorbachev not firm enough?

I predict he will be overthrown, because he has shown extraordinary weakness. Suddenly, for the first time ever, there are coal-miner strikes and brush fires everywhere- which will all ultimately lead to a violent revolution. Yet Gorbachev is getting credit for being a wonderful leader and we should continue giving him credit, because he’s destroying the Soviet Union. But his giving an inch is going to end up costing him and all his friends what they most cherish-their jobs.

It would be nice if we had a president who could make a case for human rights, but this isn’t one of them. He’s the guy, after all, who repeatedly proclaimed that he loves waterboarding and thinks it’s a good idea to perform mass executions with bullets dipped in pigs blood.

Lectures on human rights from this vicious imbecile aren’t going to be very effective I’m afraid. He’s been spewing this ugly rhetoric for more than 30 years.

He’s a disgusting blight on everything decent in this world.

Happy New Year, everybody.

cheers — digby

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The age old debate
by digby

If you read nothing else over this long week-end, take a minute to read this article by Joshua Zeitz in Politico Magazine called “Does the White Working Class Really Vote Against Its Own Interests? Trump’s first year in office revived an age-old debate about why some people choose race over class—and how far they will go to protect the system.”

It tracks the history of this question starting with W.E.B DuBois brilliant analysis which is as salient as ever, decades later. It’s a really great deep dive into this issue that Democrats who care about the working class of all ethnic and racial demographics and especially their kids should understand. This is a fundamental characteristic of American culture.

An excerpt:

Critically, Du Bois never insisted that the psychological wages of whiteness were wholly devoid of tangible value. What they forfeited in material benefits, working-class whites also recouped in limited power and privilege. “They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools,” he wrote. “The police were drawn from their ranks. … The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. On the other hand, the Negro was subject to insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority.” You couldn’t necessarily buy groceries with these benefits, but they were palpably meaningful.

David Roediger, a historian of class and race who writes with a Marxian lens, emphasized exactly this point in his classic volume, The Wages of Whiteness, published in 1991 (the title was a direct tribute to Du Bois). He encouraged a generation of scholars to consider that working-class whites may not have been unwitting dupes in their own economic subjugation; instead, they knowingly harvested certain real advantages of whiteness. While this pattern was most visible in the South, it also deeply influenced political culture in the North and West, where whiteness was no less central to popular conceptions of American citizenship. And Roediger’s focus was on Northern workers in antebellum cities—workers undergoing the jarring transition from pre-industrial forms of work and leisure to a more regimented existence as wage laborers.

The workers whom Roediger describes, and whom dozens more scholars would similarly study, understood that American citizenship was predicated on race and independence; Congress, after all, had opened citizenship to all “free white persons” in 1790. That law remained on the books into the 20th century. But what did it mean to be “white?” Congress never made that point clear. Indeed, there was no immediate consensus that certain new immigrants met the qualification. And what did it mean to be “free?” Their new status as wage earners—economically dependent on other men to earn a living—seemingly made many working men and women something less than free. Many non-black workers keenly understood that they might be left outside the boundaries of citizenship. They also resented new forms of industrial discipline that their employers foisted onto them. Many addressed these anxieties by drawing a sharp dichotomy between white and black—citizen and slave—and placing themselves on one side of that divide.

Read it all. It’s vital to understanding who we are and why this latest paroxysm of hate is so violent.

For more important reading on this issue, give this piece by Adam Serwer in the Atlantic a look and Jamelle Bouie’s Slate podcast called Reconstruction.

Happy New Year, everybody.

cheers — digby

Political Survivor
by Tom Sullivan

Part 1 of 2

From a post last December:

There is a lot of “old-boyism” in party politics. Mostly because people who have the time and/or resources to pursue party work are older. But older doesn’t always mean more skilled; experienced doesn’t always mean the right kind.

Political leaders tend to hang onto power and neglect cultivating heirs who have mastered technologies they don’t understand. They would rather turn over the reins to trusted chums. Kathy Sinclair was not in the club.

Sinclair had been the driving force in organizing an unofficial John Kerry campaign in western North Carolina in 2004. The newcomer from Chicago attended a meetup at a local tavern, and with no prior experience organized hundreds of volunteers in a region that would not be considered a part of a swing state until 2008.

Dennis Kucinich winning the presidential caucus here in 2004 was a deep embarrassment to seasoned party hands. Didn’t “those progressives” know favorite-son John Edwards was supposed to win? A Kucinich convention delegate won a key seat on the county executive board the next year, but bristled at the top-down culture. Party leaders stonewalled her, as she saw it, and she resigned.

The old boys got their club back. It didn’t last.

The Democratic committee in Buncombe County, NC began the transition to a more grassroots organization around 2007. It is a transition the DNC has yet to make nationally. Insiders often don’t know when it is time to pass the baton. They have forgotten what skilled managers know. Training their replacements is a key responsibility.

The problem here was, as it is nationally, lack of succession planning. Insiders hold power so closely for so long that there is no one to pass the baton to except another of their graying cohort.

When Ellie Richard, the Kucinich delegate, resigned her position as 1st vice chair in 2006, Sinclair, by then party secretary, ran to fill the vacancy. The position would give her responsibility for organizing precincts across the county, a power held closely by what amounted to a shadow party known downtown as the Courthouse Gang.

In North Carolina, when partisan elected officials die or resign their seats, members of their local committee elect a replacement for appointment by the governor. Keeping tight rein on who held those voting positions ensured the Courthouse could control who was in control. For Democrats, the same group votes to fill county committee vacancies.

With her organizing bona fides and name recognition, Sinclair figured the open position was within reach. She gathered names of committee members and began making phone calls to ask for their votes.

The county chairman was coy about Sinclair’s chances. All he would tell me was, “Let’s just say, she’ll have competition.”

The Saturday morning of the special election, the party headquarters was filled to bursting. Sinclair’s stunned supporters whispered, “Who are these people?” Precinct officers they had never seen at headquarters appeared for this vote, summoned by the Courthouse.

Party veterans presented one of their own: JoAnn Morgan, a native, a Courthouse employee and former county chair. After a tense relationship with progressive activists, the Courthouse was re-exerting control.

Sinclair lost. The vote wasn’t even close. Progressives were blindsided, and the defeat was crushing. Sinclair went home to lick her wounds.

For many activists, that would have been the end. Nevertheless, she persisted.

The fall of 2006 was a “blue moon” election in North Carolina (as 2018 will be). There were no national or statewide races in contention. The 11th District race for Congress was, locally, the marquee race atop the ticket.

Former NFL quarterback Heath Shuler ran against and defeated Rep. Charles Taylor, an eight-term Republican and associate of Russian bankers. Shuler’s was an energetic and well-funded campaign. (Full disclosure: As NCDP’s Get Out The Vote Coordinator for NC-11, I answered to the campaign.)

Progressives outside the South may have a low opinion of Shuler. (The Blue Dog left Congress in 2013 to become a Duke Energy lobbyist for a few years.) Still, sending home “Chainsaw Charlie” was a shot in the arm to local Democrats. Progressive campaign veterans now had a win under their belts and solid organizing chops.

In December 2006, a core team met at a local Greek restaurant to plan taking on the Courthouse in the party committee’s 2007 spring elections.

By established practice, the county chair appointed a committee to “nominate” a slate of candidates for the six county executive posts. The list would be presented to the county convention essentially as a fait accompli. Progressives knew anyone named was likely in the pocket of the shadow party. Convention delegates deserved a choice. Sinclair and company planned to give them one.

Ensuring continuity of leadership is the chair’s responsibility, but maintaining control was a Courthouse goal. The last thing old party hands want is democracy breaking out in the Democratic Party. “Division in the party” is the traditional bugaboo veterans invoke to discourage contested races. Contested races here meant the Courthouse might not get its way.

In 2007, it would not.

(conclusion tomorrow)

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Trump’s Own Party
by digby

This piece by Michael Grunwald in Politico is the best “Trump’s first year” analysis I’ve yet read. It’s long and thorough and it hits all the highlights. He talks at length about the assault truth and the various ways in which Trump has changed the presidency and the potential for changes in the country and the world. It’s bracing, to say the least. I recommend reading the whole thing but this part of the introduction struck me as the most important insight:

The most consequential aspect of President Trump—like the most consequential aspect of Candidate Trump—has been his relentless shattering of norms: norms of honesty, decency, diversity, strategy, diplomacy and democracy, norms of what presidents are supposed to say and do when the world is and isn’t watching. As I keep arguing in these periodic Trump reviews, it’s a mistake to describe his all-caps rage-tweeting or his endorsement of an accused child molester or his threats to wipe out “Little Rocket Man” as unpresidential, because he’s the president. He’s by definition presidential. The norms he’s shattered are by definition no longer norms. His erratic behavior isn’t normal, but it’s inevitably becoming normalized, a predictably unpredictable feature of our political landscape.

It’s how we live now, checking our phones in the morning to get a read on the president’s mood. The American economy is still strong, and he hasn’t started any new wars, so pundits have focused a lot of their hand-wringing on the effect his norm-shattering will have on future leaders, who will be able to cite the Trump precedent if they want to hide their tax returns or use their office to promote their businesses or fire FBI directors who investigate them. But Trump still has three years left in his term. And the norms he’s shattered can’t constrain his behavior now that he’s shattered them.

If the big story of the Trump era is Trump and his unconventional approach to the presidency, two related substories will determine how the big story ends. The first is the intense personal and institutional pushback to Trump—from the otherwise fractious Democratic Party; the independent media; independent judges; special counsel Robert Mueller; advocates for immigrants, voting rights, the poor, the disabled, the environment and other #Resistance causes; and ordinary citizens, who have made Trump the least popular first-year president in the modern era.

The second substory is the sometimes grudging but consistent support—the critics call it complicity—that Trump has enjoyed from the Republicans who control Congress. The uneasy marriage of convenience between Trump and the congressional GOP explains his two big legislative victories, the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and last month’s $1.5 trillion tax cut. It also explains Capitol Hill’s see-no-evil approach to investigating activities that would have triggered endless outrage and probable impeachment hearings in a Hillary Clinton administration.

In fact, this dynamic explains a lot about politics in the Trump era. Trump’s job security depends on support from GOP legislators. Their job security depends on Trump’s base showing up to support them in 2018, and on Trump improving his approval ratings enough to avert a Democratic wave that would bounce them out even if his base does show up to support them in 2018.

So after campaigning as an anti-establishment populist, Trump has mostly governed as a partisan corporatist, earning loyalty points from congressional Republicans by stocking his administration with movement conservatives and embracing their unpopular agenda, ditching his promises to protect Medicaid and close tax loopholes for hedge funds while consistently siding with business owners and investors over workers and consumers. Congressional Republicans, even those who once called him unfit to serve, have mostly ignored his antics and even his sporadic attacks on them, kissing his ring in public even as they roll their eyes in private. They’d prefer their tax cuts without the white nationalist retweets, but it’s a package deal.

Well, some would prefer that Trump not advertise the white nationalism but really,most of them are fine with it.

I think I had held out some hope that more Republicans would balk at Trump’s craziness. I know, I know. That was always a ridiculous bit of naivete. I guess I just thought that some actually believed in traditional values or took the principles of the Constitution seriously and would be concerned that someone like Trump is destroying all of it. I was wrong about that.

In truth, they have always claimed tax cuts are the answer to everything and now we know they meant it’s literally the only thing they ever truly cared about. I won’t make the mistake of ever taking them seriously about morality or patriotism again. Anyone who supports Donald Trump has shown that they care about neither.

As Grunwald says deeper into the piece:

Last month, Senator Lindsey Graham leapt to Trump’s defense on cable TV, denouncing “this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president.” He might have been thinking of an attempt by one Senator Lindsey Graham, who said of Trump in February 2016: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.” Senator Marco Rubio, who called Trump “dangerous” and a “con man” during the campaign, has also boarded the Trump train. So has Senator Ted Cruz, who refused to endorse Trump at the Republican convention after Trump mocked his wife’s looks, implicated his father in the JFK assassination and labeled him “Lying Ted.” The Never Trump movement, to the extent it is a movement at all, consists of a few conservative intellectuals, not Republican politicians. The Republican Party is now undeniably Trump’s party.

This is one of the crucial developments of 2017, because a few Republican politicians who decided to resist Trump substantively could have become a real check on his power. A few Capitol Hill Republicans have resisted Trump rhetorically, notably retiring senators Jeff Flake, who denounced the president as a disgrace to his office, and Bob Corker, who bemoaned the lack of “adult day care” in the White House, but they have not used their considerable leverage to try to change his behavior. With Democrats voting in lockstep against many Trump nominees and most of the Trump agenda, any Republican senator could have demanded, say, that he release his tax returns in exchange for their vote on his tax bill, or that the bill include some kind of protection for Mueller against presidential interference, or for that matter that Trump defray the costs of his constant jaunts to his private clubs. But Republicans have made it pretty clear that they don’t plan to stand up to Trump. None has pushed for more aggressive investigations of his activities, and some have actively shielded him from investigations, while calling for investigations of his rivals. And while White House aides have often leaked their dismay about Trump’s defense of neo-Nazis after Charlottesville, or his attacks on the FBI and the intelligence community, or his uninterest in briefings that have more than one page or don’t flatter his ego enough, none of those aides has resigned in protest.

A Republican congress is a Trump congress. And they are becoming more complicit by the day. It is vital that Democrats win back at least one House of Congress in 2018. It is everything.

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Shadowy men on a shadowy planet: Wormwood (***½)
By Dennis Hartley

“Sir, I am unaware of any such activity or operation, nor would I be disposed to discuss such an operation if it did in fact exist, sir.” – Captain Willard, from Apocalypse Now

“Boy…what is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?” – Joe Turner, from Three Days of the Condor

“Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” – From Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

When you peruse the history of the CIA (wait a sec…did I just hear a “click” on my phone?), at times it is indistinguishable from a campy 60s TV parody of the agency. Was there really a CIA psychotropic drugs research program called “MK-Ultra” (aka “Project Artichoke” and “Project Bluebird”) or am I conflating it with an episode of “Get Smart”?

Unfortunately, the MK-Ultra program would prove all too real for bacteriologist and former military officer Frank Olson. Olson had served as a captain in the Army’s Chemical Corps in the 1940s, which helped him snag a post-service civilian contract job with the Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratories (based out of Fort Detrick, Maryland).

Eventually (while still based out of Fort Detrick) Olson was recruited by the CIA to work with the agency’s Technical Services Staff, which led to his acquaintance with some of the architects of the aforementioned MK-Ultra research program. While on a retreat with a group of CIA colleagues in November of 1953, Olson was offered a drink that was spiked with an early form of LSD (unbeknownst to him). Just 10 days later, on the night of November 28th, 1953, Olson fell to his death from the 13th floor of a Manhattan hotel.

The NYPD called it suicide. And that was that. At least…that was the story at the time.

There is a lot more to this tale; specifically regarding what ensued during those critical 10 days between Olson’s LSD dosing at the retreat, and the evening that he died at the hotel.

Uncovering the details behind Olson’s demise has become an obsessive 60+ year quest for his son, Eric Olson. Eric’s relentless pursuit of the truth, a long slow white Bronco chase through the dark labyrinth of America’s clandestine community, makes for a hell of an interesting story in and of itself. This was not lost on documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who delves deep into the mystery with his new Netflix docu-drama, Wormwood.

Wormwood is essentially a 4-hour film divided into 6 episodes; with this sprawling running time, Morris has given himself lots of room to “delve”. Now, I feel that it’s my duty to advise you up front that “delving” into a mystery is not necessarily synonymous with “solving” it. So if you go in expecting pat answers, wrapped with a bow, I’m saving you 4 hours of your life now (and you’re welcome). However, if you believe the adage that it is not about the destination, but rather about the journey, feel free to press onward.

Morris has made many compelling documentaries, from his acclaimed 1978 debut Gates of Heaven, to other well-received films like The Thin Blue Line (1988), A Brief History of Time (1991), and The Fog of War (2003). Interestingly, Morris eschews his trademark “Inteterrotron” (giving a sense that the interviewee is “confiding” directly to the viewer).

Instead, Morris plunks himself across a table from his subjects and grills them, like they’ve stumbled into Sam Spade’s office. However, he does reprise his “reality thriller” formula (mixing interviews with speculative reenactments) which he essentially invented with The Thin Blue Line; although it has been so-often imitated that it now seems cliché.

While Morris’ penchant for this Rashomon-style construction in past projects has drawn criticism, it’s a perfect foil for Wormwood; because if there is one central takeaway from the series, it is this: when it comes to plausible deniability, the CIA has 50 shades of nay.

The “official” story as to what happened in that hotel room in September 1953 has been, shall we say, “fluid” over the years (all versions are recounted). Adding to the frustration for Olson’s surviving family members (as Eric Olson points out in the film), under current laws, any citizen may file a lawsuit against the U.S. government for negligence, but never for intent. Oops! Please pardon our negligence, just never mind our culpability.

The question of “culpability” feeds the conspiracy theory elements of the film; which Morris relays via the dramatic reenactments. These segments feature a melancholic Peter Sarsgaard, whose almost spectral characterization of Frank Olson haunts the proceedings like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. This is no accident, as Morris and Eric Olson himself make frequent analogies to Shakespeare’s classic tragedy about a son who investigates the truth behind his father’s suspicious death (hence the title of the film, taken from an aside by Hamlet, who mutters “Wormwood, wormwood” in reaction to the Player Queen’s line in the play-within-the play “None wed the second but who killed the first.”).

The Bard would be hard pressed to cook up a tale as dark, debased and duplicitous. Morris sustains a sense of dread recalling Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, and The Conversation. Of course, those were fiction; Olson’s story is not. Shakespeare wrote: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Wormwood not only confirms this, but reminds us why we need folks like Eric Olson and Morris around to cast light into dark corners where the truth lies obscured.

Previous posts with related themes:

Kill the Messenger
Mirage Men
Snowden
Fair Game
Criterion reissues The Manchurian Candidate
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Burn After Reading

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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On Twitter

–Dennis Hartley

Saturday Soother: A lucky cub survives the fires
by digby

I don’t even want to think about all the animals these epic fires in California have injured and killed. It’s too horrible to even contemplate. But here’s one story with a happy ending.

He’s doing fine!

The five-month-old cub was found in Santa Paula on Dec. 22 with burn injuries to all four of his feet. The cub was also very thin. He was captured and taken to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s investigations Lab in Rancho Cordova, where he was treated.

Dr. Jamie Peyton, the chief of Integrative medicine at the University of California, Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital, has been working with the CDFW in helping with the cub’s burns.

They are treating the burns by applying sterilized tilapia skin to the most severe injuries. The fish skin “creates a biologic bandage to protect the burn area and provides collagen to help speed healing,” the department said on its Facebook page.

We needed that happy ending, don’t you think?

[I’m not sure why this didn’t post in the usual Friday Night Soother slot, but I figure it’s good news any time. — d]

Follow the numbers
by digby

Ryan Struyk is one of the sharpest political analysts around and I’m always interested in what he has to say. Since everyone’s doing lists, he’s gathered some of the most important polling trends of the past year. You can click over to see them all, I’ll just highlight a couple that I think are particularly interesting. First some good news:

The number of Republicans in the American electorate has shrunk to its lowest in a quarter century after Trump’s election last year, according to numbers from Gallup.

Only 38% of Americans self-identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents during 2017, while 45% of Americans say they are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents.
That also means roughly one in eight people who identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning in November 2016 no longer do so. (The number of Democrats has held roughly steady over the same period.)

Keep that in mind when you see numbers about how the Republicans are sticking with Trump. That might be true but you have to ask how many people are sticking with the Republicans. That number is shrinking and it’s because the GOP is now the party of Trump and for some Republicans or GOP leaners that’s just not something they want to be affiliated with.

Now for the bad news:

US global reputation takes a hit under Trump

Perceptions about the United States and the President took a major hit on the world stage in 2017, according to numbers from the Pew Research Center. (Pew conducted surveys in 37 countries during the spring and reported global medians in June.) Check out this chart from Pew:

Good lord that’s bad. The US is way too powerful to be so mistrusted. I get it, of course. Most of us don’t trust the US under this leadership either at this point. But this is dangerous. Trump is an f-ing moron, we know that, so he thinks that the most powerful nation on earth should be “unpredictable” when the exact opposite is true. The most powerful nation on earth should be steady and solid so nobody makes the kind of mistake that could result in a tragic move that can’t be taken back. I think we’ve seen how that’s working out so far. Trump has the whole world jumpy. And that’s not good.

One bit of news that’s slightly unnerving is that as Trump is in office longer he’s starting to get credit for the growing economy he inherited. That’s not unusual but when that happens the president is usually pretty popular. So far that hasn’t happened, but you never know …

Trump has turned a lot of the normal expectations upside down so it’s unknown whether any of these trends are predictive. In the age of Trump, all bets are off. But we’ll keep watching the numbers just in case.

Another innocent, unarmed citizen shot by police
by digby

This story about a fatal police shooting as a result of a “swatting” prank is all over the news. Everyone is very upset that anyone would send police to someone’s home as a joke or an act of revenge. There is speculation that it was a video game grudge although they don’t seem to know exactly who it was.

A police officer in Wichita fatally shot a man while responding to an emergency call that authorities now say was a tragic and senseless prank.

The 28-year-old man, whom officials did not immediately identify, was killed around 6:20 p.m. Thursday after police responded to a report that there had been a shooting and hostages taken at the house, Deputy Wichita Police Chief Troy Livingston said at a Friday news conference.

“Due to the actions of a prankster, we have an innocent victim,” Livingston said, calling it a case of “swatting.”

Swatting, which has a long history in the online gaming world, refers to the practice of making an emergency call about a fake situation often involving a killing or hostages, in the hopes of sending police to the address of an adversary or random person.

In an interview with the Wichita Eagle, the slain man’s family identified him as Andrew Finch, a father of two, and said he was not armed.

“I heard my son scream, I got up and then I heard a shot,” his mother, Lisa Finch, told reporters Friday.

But I think everyone might be missing the point:

“What gives the cops the right to open fire?” Finch said. “Why didn’t they give him the same warning they gave us? That cop murdered my son over a false report.”

The police didn’t even try to ascertain what was going on before they brandished their guns and fired.

Police are shooting unarmed people and getting away with it because they are going into situations as if they are invading Fallujah and average Americans who have no idea what’s going on  and don’t realize that they are living in a war zone fail to perfectly comply and are murdered on the spot.

I didn’t write about the cop who was acquitted down in Arizona after screaming incoherent orders at an unarmed citizen and shooting him as he was on his knees begging for his life. It was so grotesquely unjust that I couldn’t deal with it. But it’s the perfect example of the way Americans are having to deal with amped up robo-cops like the one in this video (who used his personal AR-15 with the words “you’re fucked” etched into it). Even if you try to comply they will kill you anyway and get away with it. That message has gone out loud and clear to police everywhere in this country.

So sure, SWATTing is bad. Don’t do it. After all, any time you send police to someone’s home you could be killing them. But the prank isn’t the real problem is it?

It wasn’t the dossier, fellas
by digby

The House Republicans led by Intelligence committee chairman Devin Nunes, a full blown Trump agent, want to smear the FBI as some kind of secret Clinton agents who used the manufactured Steele dossier in order to investigate Trump, but it’s never made any sense at all. The investigation of Trump began long before the Steele dossier came into being. And today the New York Times has dropped a little bombshell with some details about exactly what it was that made the FBI decide they needed to investigate the Trump campaign. It had nothing to do with the Steele dossier:

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

If Mr. Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. and is now a cooperating witness, was the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration, his saga is also a tale of the Trump campaign in miniature. He was brash, boastful and underqualified, yet he exceeded expectations. And, like the campaign itself, he proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation.

While some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have derided him an insignificant campaign volunteer or a “coffee boy,” interviews and new documents show that he stayed influential throughout the campaign. Two months before the election, for instance, he helped arrange a New York meeting between Mr. Trump and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.

Interviews and previously undisclosed documents show that Mr. Papadopoulos played a critical role in this drama and reveal a Russian operation that was more aggressive and widespread than previously known. They add to an emerging portrait, gradually filled in over the past year in revelations by federal investigators, journalists and lawmakers, of Russians with government contacts trying to establish secret channels at various levels of the Trump campaign.

The F.B.I. investigation, which was taken over seven months ago by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has cast a shadow over Mr. Trump’s first year in office — even as he and his aides repeatedly played down the Russian efforts and falsely denied campaign contacts with Russians.

They have also insisted that Mr. Papadopoulos was a low-level figure. But spies frequently target peripheral players as a way to gain insight and leverage.

F.B.I. officials disagreed in 2016 about how aggressively and publicly to pursue the Russia inquiry before the election. But there was little debate about what seemed to be afoot. John O. Brennan, who retired this year after four years as C.I.A. director, told Congress in May that he had been concerned about multiple contacts between Russian officials and Trump advisers.

Russia, he said, had tried to “suborn” members of the Trump campaign.

The rest of the details in the piece are all fascinating but the one that stands out is the fact that Papadopoulos spilled the information about the Clinton emails to an Australian agent in a bar in May of 2016, long before it was public, but we are supposed to believe he never mentioned it to the Trump campaign.

Does that sound right to you? Yeah, I didn’t think so. They knew. They said nothing to any authorities. They went on to meet with Russians about dirt on Clinton in June and Donald Trump Jr even said he “loved it” and would like them to release it later in the summer.Trump even publicly encouraged them to do more.

Trump is right when he says this isn’t collusion. It’s conspiracy and that, my friends is a crime.

By the way, this Australian connection is hardly the only one. The Guardian published this some time ago:

Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.

GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.

Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said.

The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said.

Another source suggested the Dutch and the French spy agency, the General Directorate for External Security or DGSE, were contributors.

It is understood that GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the US.

It is unsurprising that some members of he FBI might have been just a tad concerned that Trump might actually be elected. The fact that the Republicans are crucifying them today for having those concerns shows that they too are complicit. Devin Nunes and his crew are covering up something very, very big.

.

Just because it can be done….
by Tom Sullivan

Still from Minority Report (2002).

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. But then later there’s running and screaming.

It is time again to review that classic narrative where a scientist invents something amazing, then halfway through the story that something is threatening the hero, his girlfriend, the world, and a pair of cute kids.

A Google spinoff named Sidewalk Labs hopes to build a mini “city of tomorrow” along the Toronto lakefront. It will be greener, smarter, more inclusive, etc., etc. But also “transparent,” naturally.

The New York Times reports:

Quayside, as the project is known, will be laden with sensors and cameras tracking everyone who lives, works or merely passes through the area. In what Sidewalk calls a marriage of technology and urbanism, the resulting mass of data will be used to further shape and refine the new city. Lifting a term from its online sibling, the company calls the Toronto project “a platform.”

But extending the surveillance powers of one of the world’s largest technology companies from the virtual world to the real one raises privacy concerns for many residents. Others caution that, when it comes to cities, data-driven decision-making can be misguided and undemocratic.

[…]

Nothing is too prosaic to analyze: Toilets and sinks will report their water use; the garbage robots will report on trash collection. Residents and workers in the area will rely on Sidewalk-developed software to gain access to public services; the data gathered from everything will influence long-term planning and development.

It’s all about “efficiency.” Just as hearing terms like “right-sizing” and “shareholder value” around the office means it’s time to update your resume, you don’t have to be Fritz Lang to notice efficiency for some always seems to come at the expense of others.

Renee Sieber, a professor of geography and environment at McGill University, utters a word of caution:

“Democracy and the rights of citizens is inherently political; it’s not something you should shy away from,” said Ms. Sieber, who studies the use of data by citizen groups. “Governments need to be all about fairness.” If city government were concerned only with efficiency, she said, “you don’t send buses where it’s rural or poor.”

Get back to us when you’ve got jet packs and flying cars.

Even non-flying, self-driving cars are proving more of a challenge than expected. in reviewing a Wired article on the over-hyping of the technology, Yves Smith writes at Naked Capitalism:

The big problem is that the people engineering these systems have yet to come close to mastering basic design requirements. They think they know how to get there, but that is sort of like being able to describe what it would take to sail across the Pacific solo and actually doing it.

Because the sensors needed are not up to the operating requirements, Smith writes, designers are using “fudges”:

The self driving car proponents are also bizarrely eager to introduce a less than fully autonomous car, presumably to increase customer acceptance, when it is likely to backfire. The fudge is to have a human at ready to take over the car in case it asks for help.

First, as one might infer, the human who is suddenly asked to intervene is going to have to quickly asses the situation. The handoff delay means a slower response than if a human had been driving the entire time. Second, and even worse, the human suddenly asked to take control might not even see what the emergency need is. Third, the car itself might not recognize that it is about to get into trouble. Recall that Uber tried to blame a car accident when its self driving car was making a left turn on the oncoming driver, when if you parsed the story carefully, it was the Uber car that was in the wrong.

The newest iteration of the “human takeover” fudge is to have remotely located humans take over navigating the car. Help me. Unlike a driver in a vehicle, they won’t have any feel for the setting. That means an even slower reaction in what will typically be an emergency situation. This is a prescription for bad outcomes, meaning a much worse safety record than with people as drivers, fatally undermining a key claim for self driving cars, that they’d be safer than human operated ones.

I once heard because of the vehicles’ inherent instability, it was impossible for pilots to switch seats in an airborne helicopter. This sounds just as dicey.

But even dicier is entrusting technology companies with our privacy and democracy. We can’t even trust them not to slow down our phones without telling us.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.