Month: July 2019

Staring into the abyss
by Tom Sullivan

Several commentaries this morning would have weakened my knees had I not been sitting down.

Digby pointed Saturday to a New York Times op-ed by Roger Cohen that throws a spotlight on the acting president’s inability to exhibit a flicker of humanity. Donald Trump faced a Yazidi woman once held in sexual slavery by ISIS. She pleaded for help for what is left of her family and refugee community. Donald Trump sat stone-faced and indifferent at his desk — he wouldn’t even stand to greet her. Someone scheduled this Oval Office meeting for him. Trump is not even listening.

“They killed my mom, my six brothers,” Nadia Murad tells him. Trump responds: “Where are they now?”

In a mass grave, she replies. Murad shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for her “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.” Trump was probably wondering why she received the prize and not him.

“Where are they now???” Cohen writes, continuing:

Why this extraordinary attitude from Trump? Well, at a guess, Murad is a woman, and she is brown, and he is incapable of empathy, and the Trump administration recently watered down a United Nations Security Council resolution on protecting victims of sexual violence in conflict.

ProPublica reports on the psychic numbing of a Border Patrol agent at the agency’s McAllen, TX detention center:

The Border Patrol agent, a veteran with 13 years on the job, had been assigned to the agency’s detention center in McAllen, Texas, for close to a month when the team of court-appointed lawyers and doctors showed up one day at the end of June.

Taking in the squalor, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the poor health and vacant eyes of the hundreds of children held there, the group members appeared stunned.

Then, their outrage rolled through the facility like a thunderstorm. One lawyer emerged from a conference room clutching her cellphone to her ear, her voice trembling with urgency and frustration. “There’s a crisis down here,” the agent recalled her shouting.

At that moment, the agent, a father of a 2-year-old, realized that something in him had shifted during his weeks in the McAllen center. “I don’t know why she’s shouting,” he remembered thinking. “No one on the other end of the line cares. If they did, this wouldn’t be happening.”

Asked to comment on Vice President Mike Pence’s dismissal of reports of inhumane conditions, the agent called them “more substantiated than not,” but thought “concentration camp” was overstating things. “Gulag felt too strong. Jail didn’t feel strong enough,” Ginger Thompson writes:

He came around to this: “It’s kind of like torture in the army. It starts out with just sleep deprivation, then the next guys come in and sleep deprivation is normal, so they ramp it up. Then the next guys ramp it up some more, and then the next guys, until you have full blown torture going on. That becomes the new normal.”

The agent shared a journal entry he made to help process his work there:

“What happened to me in Texas is that I realized I had walled off my emotions so I could do my job without getting hurt,” he said. “I’d see kids crying because they want to see their dads, and I couldn’t console them because I had 500 to 600 other kids to watch over and make sure they’re not getting in trouble. All I could do was make sure they’re physically OK. I couldn’t let them see their fathers because that was against the rules.

“I might not like the rules,” he added. “I might think that what we’re doing wasn’t the correct way to hold children. But what was I going to do? Walk away? What difference would that make to anyone’s life but mine?”

When asked whether he simply stopped caring, he said: “Exactly, to a point that’s kind of dangerous. But once you do, you feel better.”

But the agent continues doing the work in conditions he describes as a “scene from a zombie apocalypse movie” because he needs to feed his family and maintain their health coverage. He couldn’t dwell on why the children are so filthy and lethargic. He has a job to do.

At Quora, Mike Jones finds parallels between the agent’s psychic numbing and what happened to camp workers in Germany. Those camps didn’t start in 1933 with Jews, but with other “undesirables.” But by 1937, there were hundreds of camps. “Many prisoners died there from abuse or simply from being worked to death,” Jones writes, “but they still weren’t places people were specifically sent to die; it was just that no one cared whether they died or not.”

The mass killings came later, eventually growing to industrial scale. Locals cooperated or looked the other way. They had jobs to do, families to feed. Jones includes black-and-white photos of seemingly normal Germans going about their seemingly normal lives working as cogs in a genocidal machine.

“These people didn’t think of themselves as ‘evil,’ any more than the people chanting at the Trump rally do,” Jones explains. People elected the Nazis “out of fear of the communists” or in response to appeals to “true Germans.” There evolved a helplessness to change the system even among those inclined to change it.

Jones comments on the border camps here and now:

I know, there are a thousand reasons why we can’t change this. They broke the laws. The President says so. What will we do with all of them if we don’t do this? It will encourage others if we don’t do this.

Know this: those are all justifying inhuman behavior. I’m not saying the people running the camps or the people in the government are Nazis; every historical moment is different. But they’re using many of the same tools the Nazis used. And the same tools are being used against the Uighur in China. And the Rohingya in Myanmar.

They claimed the Rohingya were illegal immigrants, rapists, and terrorists. If I mentioned a Rohingya they actually knew, they would sometimes acknowledge maybe *that* Rohingya person wasn’t a criminal. They often argued that the Rohingya should be deported as a group anyway.— Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) July 21, 2019

It was heartbreaking. I was there just after Trump had declared his candidacy in the US, and it was the same rhetoric, almost word for word. A little over a year later in Myanmar, the military drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya over the border amid terrible atrocities.— Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) July 21, 2019

Same story, different countries, different disfavored minorities.

Reading those stories brought back a chilling story David Neiwert (Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump) recounted in 1997 from his college years. One of his professors told his German class of serving with the occupation forces in Europe after World War II. As part of his assignment to assemble information for the Nuremberg tribunals, he had spent time speaking with villagers who lived adjacent one of the concentration camps:

The villagers, he said, knew about the camp, and watched daily as thousands of prisoners would arrive by rail car, herded like cattle into the camp. Even though the camp never could have held the vast numbers of prisoners who were brought in, the villagers knew that no one ever left. They also knew that the smokestack of the camp’s crematorium belched a near-steady stream of smoke and ash. Yet the villagers chose to remain ignorant about what went on inside the camp. No one inquired, because no one wanted to know.

“But every day,” he said, “these people, in their neat Germanic way, would get out their feather dusters and go outside. And, never thinking about what it meant, they would sweep off the layer of ash that would settle on their windowsills overnight. Then they would return to their neat, clean lives and pretend not to notice what was happening next door.”

“When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside,” he said. “But they all had ash in their feather dusters.”

The professor looked out over the class, which now was more stunned than bored into silence. “We all like to think that what happened in Nazi Germany was something that occurred far away to people different from us, that it couldn’t possibly happen here,” he said. “But you’re wrong. The German people are very much like us. If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is look at yourselves now.”

Silence fell over the class. Some of the students wore looks of disbelief, and a few shook their heads. The professor sighed, picked his book back up, and returned to his explanation of conjugation of verbs. When the lesson was over, I heard my classmates complain about Professor Reed’s history lesson while exiting the room. “Why did he waste our time with that story?” one wondered. “That’s not what he’s paid to do,” said another. “Who gives a damn about his opinion anyway? What a joke, comparing us to Nazi Germany.”

I listened briefly and walked on my own way. The students may not have understood the professor’s point, I thought, but they certainly were living proof of it.

Image National Memorial for Peace and Justice “dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching …”

Jones concludes:

Send her back. Send them back. We’re really not racists. Jews will not replace us.

Do you honestly believe it can’t happen here?

Another piece of turkey, dear?

[h/t S.R.]

Jared is working on the inner-city vote

by digby

The Washington Post reports that the boy genius is the hidden hand behind Trump’s re-election campaign. This part made me laugh:

Kushner, 38, is the hidden hand of Trump’s 2020 campaign — rarely glimpsed in its Northern Virginia headquarters but signing off behind the scenes on everything from spending to digital initiatives to top-level hires.

He has asked Bill Stepien, a senior political adviser to the campaign, to provide him with a 10-year plan outlining how Republicans can win inner-city voters.

Trump and Kushner are clearly counting on Kim and Kanye to make that happen.

This might be a bit of a problem, however:

By the way, you will note that Trump always, always, always leads with fucking money. This greedy heir to a fortune (which he flushed down the toilet with his incompetent “business deals”) is obsessed with money — and using it as a tool to manipulate everyone around him. His entire worldview comes down to the simple idea that his power derives from his ability to use the power of money to force others to bow down.

As president that is the entire world.

His reluctance to use violence to achieve that end can be seen for the lie it is when you look at his concentration camps on the border and his enthusiastic support for the death penalty. The only thing stopping him from going into war would be the fact that he believes it would cost money he could otherwise steal for himself. (He’s too stupid to understand what an economic blockbuster war-profiteering is, even as he loves the idea of selling massive amounts of arms to hostile countries.)

As for his alleged isolationism, he’s also on record saying that if there is a war he intends to take the resources of the countries involved, so there’s that. If he gets the chance to invade a country that provides an opportunity to steal, don’t think he won’t do it.

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“This president is inhuman. Something is missing. In his boundless self-absorption, he is capable of anything.”

by digby

Roger Cohen has written an op-ed in the New York Times about an episode that got lost in last week’s hubbub and I’m glad he did. I’m used to the daily onslaught of barbaric ignorance coming out of this White House but this one actually stunned me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so painfully insensitive from a political leader:

The triumph of indecency is rampant. Choose your facts. The only blow Trump knows is the low one. As the gutter is to the stars, so is this president to dignity. Johnson does a grotesque Churchill number. Nobody cares. The wolves have it; the sheep, transfixed, shrug.

Indignation is finite. Power, the Italians say, wears out those who do not have it. That’s Trump’s credo. I confess to moments when anger refuses to be summoned by the latest Trump outrage, since, anyway, nobody can remember Friday what was so unconscionable Monday.

Still, I cannot forget Trump’s recent treatment of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for her campaign to end mass rape in war. The Islamic State, or ISIS, forced Murad into sexual slavery when it overran Yazidi villages in northern Iraq in 2014. Murad lost her mother and six brothers, slaughtered by ISIS.

She now lives in Germany, and has been unable to return home, a point she made in her July 17 White House meeting with Trump. “We cannot go back if we cannot protect our dignity, our family,” she said.

Allow me to render the scene in the present tense. Trump sits there at his desk, an uncomprehending, unsympathetic, uninterested cardboard dummy. He looks straight ahead for much of the time, not at her, his chin jutting in his best effort at a Mussolini pose. He cannot heave his bulk from the chair for this brave young woman. He cannot look at her.

Every now and again, in a disdainful manner, he swivels his head toward her and other survivors of religious persecution. When Murad says, “They killed my mom, my six brothers,” Trump responds: “Where are they now?”

Where are they now???

“They are in the mass graves in Sinjar,” Murad says. She is poised and courageous throughout in her effort to communicate her story in the face of Trump’s complete, blank indifference.

Why this extraordinary attitude from Trump? Well, at a guess, Murad is a woman, and she is brown, and he is incapable of empathy, and the Trump administration recently watered down a United Nations Security Council resolution on protecting victims of sexual violence in conflict.

At the mention of Sinjar, Trump’s unbelievable response is, “I know the area very well, you’re talking about. It’s tough.”

Let’s play how-well-does-President-Trump-know-Sinjar? It’s a wildly implausible game.

Toward the end of the exchange, Trump asks Murad about her Nobel Prize. “That’s incredible,” he says. “They gave it to you for what reason?”

“For what reason?” Murad asks, suppressing with difficulty her incredulity that nobody has briefed the president. Nobody can brief this president. It’s pointless. He knows everything. “I made it clear to everyone that ISIS raped thousands of Yazidi women,” she says.

“Oh really?” says Trump. “Is that right?”

Yes, that’s right. One reason this exchange marked me is that I found myself in 2015 in a Yazidi refugee camp in southeastern Turkey interviewing a survivor named Anter Halef. In a corner sat his 16-year-old daughter, Feryal. She sobbed uncontrollably. I had seldom seen such grief etched on a young face. Life had been ripped from her before she began to live. There was no road back for her. Her eyes were empty vessels left so by rape.

I have watched the Murad-Trump exchange several times. It is scary. This president is inhuman. Something is missing. In his boundless self-absorption, he is capable of anything.

Yes he is, which is why I can’t understand the complacency of the Republican leadership.  He talked about his power to kill millions just last week too:

This brutal ignoramus could end the world.

Don’t they care? Or are they all as inhuman as he is?

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Good news! Democratic presidents are now free to divert Pentagon money to fund their campaign promises. Right?

by digby

I understand why Democrats are blasting the Supreme Court for their decisions to allow Trump to pay for his stupid wall with Pentagon money (at least for now…) It’s a garbage decision, obviously. But the presidential candidates should secretly be glad.

Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and a number of 2020 candidates, are roundly condemning the Supreme Court’s decision late Friday to allow the Trump administration to tap into $2.5 billion of the Pentagon’s budget to build parts of a border wall at the US-Mexico border, describing it as a violation of the separation of powers for the sake of the president’s “vanity project.”

“This is a deeply regrettable and nonsensical decision and flies in the face of the will of Congress and the Congress’ exclusive power of the purse, which our founders established in the Constitution,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said last night.

The 5-4 ruling overturns a lower court’s decision last month that had blocked the president from using military funding to construct the border project while legal disputes were still ongoing. The 9th Circuit ruling had made permanent a lower court decision in May that prevented using military funds to build a border wall in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and had expanded the list to include California.

The 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision comes as a major victory for President Trump. After Congress repeatedly rejected Trump’s proposed funding for the wall—a clash that nearly prompted another government shutdown—Trump in February declared a national emergency to divert billions of dollars that would allow him to make good on a signature campaign promise.

Except for the part about making Mexico pay for it. But whatever. Taxpayers are alrady spending vast sums of money to put cash directly into his pockets and pay for his massively inept mismanagement of everything (16 billion to cover his absurd trade war) that aking cmoney from the military budget to fund his vanity project is just par for the course.

This means Democrats can also declare national emergencies whenever they want and divert money from the military budget to fund their campaign promises, right?

Right?????

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And the greatest chutzpah of the year award goes to … Ken Starr

by digby

For those who think the Republicans just went off the rails with Trump, you really need to think again. They’ve been totally shameless assholes for a very long time:

Ken Starr makes the ridiculous assertion to Fox’s Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier that Trump hasn’t done anything to justify an impeachment inquiry — unlike Bill Clinton’s lie about an extramarital blowjob.

You can’t make this stuff up.

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by digby

During the Bush years I remember Republicans used to commonly suggest that the congressional Democrats’ weak critiques of the administration demonstrated that they were all they cared about was power.  Here is one memorable line from John Hindracker:

By “the left” I’m including almost the entire Democratic Party, you can count the exceptions on your fingers, you can name them, Zell Miller, Joe Lieberman…The whole mainstream of the party is engaged in an effort that is a betrayal of America, what they care about is not winning the war on terror…I don’t think they care about the danger to us as Americans or the danger to people in other countries. They care about power.

That was in 2005 when the war in Iraq was obviously a total debacle and the Democrats, a majority of whom who had previously voted authorized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, were only belatedly starting to push back against the clear failure of the policies. They won the congress back in 2006.

Fast forward to today and see what we are dealing with. This is from Dana Milbank:

I will obnoxiously point out that I wrote about this too on Salon. It’s not just McConnell. It’s all of them.

Immediately after the hearing Republicans blocked two bipartisan election security bills that would require campaigns to alert the FBI and Federal Election Commission about foreign offers of assistance. On Thursday, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell blocked two more, one to require a paper ballot back-up and the other to fund the Election Assistance Commission saying that Democrats wanted to give themselves a “political benefit” which is actually true. They would like the benefit of free and fair elections.

At this point, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Donald Trump isn’t the only politician willing to accept foreign interference in our elections. The entire Republican Party now welcomes it as well.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the first volume of its report on the 2016 election interference Thursday and it contained a fairly shocking revelation. The election systems in all 50 states were targeted, a far bigger attack than we knew and apparently something that went almost completely undetected at the time. The report says that they did nothing with the information they gleaned but darkly suggest that its possible they may have been collecting information for a future date. This is, apparently, fine with President Trump and the Republican leadership.

Former solicitor general Walter Dellinger appeared on All In with Chris Hayes on Thursday night and made the important point that not all crimes are impeachable offenses, “nor does it need to be a technical violation of federal criminal code.” But he noted that a president who consciously fails to defend the US against a foreign military intelligence attack for his political benefit is surely impeachable. But the Democratic leadership is convinced that the best course for dealing with Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors is not to impeach but to beat him fair and square at the ballot box.

Considering all we have learned from both the Mueller Report and the SSCI about Russian election interference and sabotage, as well as the continued unwillingness of the president and Republicans to do anything about it, that seems willfully naive.

We have a huge problem. The people are losing (or have lost) faith in our election system. The right has been propagandized to think millions of unauthorized immigrants are voting for their political enemies. (This is a lie, of course.) So they no longer believe that any election that doesn’t result in a GOP victory is suspect. Even if the victory is huge, they find a way to persuade their voters that the result was illegitimate — birtherism, for instance.

This is a political tactic that is not based upon reality.

On the other hand, our elections truly have been compromised.  And it’s not just because of Russian interference and cyber-warfare.  This goes back to the vote suppression efforts of the Republicans and their demonstrated willingness to use any and all political leverage to seize power in 2000 — by refusing to count all the votes.

We have now had two GOP presidential victories won by tiny margins in the electoral college under dubious circumstances in the last 16 years. The latest is a previously unimaginable escalation in which a foreign adversary worked to install a friendly Republican president.  We know it is planning to do it again and the Republicans led by the president, the Attorney General and the Majority Leader of the US Senate are welcoming their help.

And here’s the rub, people. If the Democrats happen to win anyway, I hope you know that they will immediately flip the script and say the new Democratic president was the one helped by a foreign adversary and is an illegitimate president. After all, they have left the door open to the interference. Even if the Dems manage to win in a landslide they will say it was the combination of all the “illegals” voting and the help of the Chinese, or the French or our new enemy, the Swedes.

They don’t care if people think they are benefiting from Russian help. Their voters don’t believe it and even if they do, they don’t care. They are shameless.  But they know the Democrats do care about legitimacy and also have a tendency to fight amongst themselves — and they will exploit that.

Just saying. Be prepared.

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Generation when?
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Nguyen Hung Vu via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Generational tensions within any political party ideally should be less tense but rarely are. Ben Judah, author of This Is London, examines for The Atlantic the tug-of-war for the baton within the Democratic Party. Succession planning has been one of Democrats’ greatest weaknesses. Unless an Obama-level star comes along to jump the line, leadership too often passes via seniority rather than talent, as I explained in December 2016:

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. When reviewing resumes, it is wise to know the difference between an applicant who has 20 years’ worth of experience and one who has 1 year’s worth of experience 20 years in a row. Many experienced party hands are not versed in modern campaign-craft. They assign more weight to who might make a strong public servant than to whether they might make a strong candidate. (We need candidates who are both.) Nevertheless, they like to be the deciders of whose turn it is. There is a tendency to hang onto power and not to cultivate new leadership possessing skills they don’t understand. Old boys would rather turn over the reins to old chums — regardless of their skills — when they can’t chew the leather anymore.

Judah considers the “Millennial perspective” he and a new crop of progressives bring to party politics:

… the great events that shape your worldview are not a series of Western triumphs, but a succession of spectacular failures. Our formative experiences were the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and the election of Donald Trump. That makes it hard to defer to a veteran like Pelosi on strategy, when her generation has racked up so many failures.

The Democrats are experiencing a clash of generations. As in all such clashes, each side thinks the other is delusional. When the Millennial left looks at the establishment, it sees leaders senescent with decades in the House, blindly clinging to bipartisan civility that no longer exists, unable to view men like Mitch McConnell as their opponents and not their colleagues, and believing that white voters are the only path to victory in 2020. The Millennials see themselves as the realists here.

That analysis of 2020 may be overstated but does reflect a familiar perspective. That includes the belief that taking corporate money that makes leading Democrats track more moderate. The money chase may sustain leadership’s moderation but is not the source of it. “Seasoned” party leaders from across this region who have never run for office or sought corporate funds exhibit the same defensive crouch Millennials perceive in Congress. They are still stroking scars from the electoral bloodbath of 1994 and Ronald Reagan’s domination of the 1980s battlespace. Caution is their watchword. It was not purchased with corporate donations. It did not filter down from Washington. It percolated up. Joe Biden is their preferred candidate.

Harvard-educated tech millionaire, founder of Justice Democrats and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti has become “chief strategist of a generational insurgency” challenging party elders’ sinecures, Judah writes:

In place of Brand New Congress’s failed model of bipartisan change, the Justice Democrats declared that they were “working to change the Democratic Party from the inside out.” And that meant an aggressive approach. “Challenging incumbents in primaries is the best way to make them start to listen to people over corporate donors,” the group declared. And, like the successful insurgent groups that transformed the Republican Party, it branded itself as openly radical.

Naturally, the powers are pushing back against the dirty hippies. Rahm Emanuel maligned Chakrabarti as “a snot-nosed punk.” There have been tense exchanges with Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Veterans steeped in the seniority system believe new members should wait their turns and learn from their elders. Insurgency is not how things work on The Hill.

This Congress being “among the oldest in history,” Judah observes. My post from June 2018 explains where that seniority model fails:

The Democratic Party in many ways has all the institutional vigor of a men’s fraternal organization. It is wedded to a culture of incumbency that rewards those — with or without talent — willing to toil in the trenches until it is finally their turn to take the reins. It elevates chummy political careerists, perhaps idealists to start, but ambitious enough to linger long enough to become institutionalized and thus everything voters hate, especially younger voters and non-voters.

That system is overdue for overhaul. Gov. Howard Dean told CNN in April, “Best thing that can happen is to have the party being taken over by 35 year-olds.”

But typical of many older and younger progressives, Justice Democrats’ idea of changing the Democratic Party from the “grassroots” is targeting Congress. In fact, much more happens at the local level. Party infrastructure needed for electing candidates and building the party’s bench for higher office is in disrepair. In about a quarter of counties across the country (mostly rural ones), Democrats are either unorganized or have no online presence. Perhaps, Justice Democrats can give the party a facelift with a new congressperson here and there. But building capacity for retaking state legislatures and electing a Democratic majority to the U.S. Senate will take efforts outside Washington, D.C. in states Hillary Clinton could not win in 2016.

It will take not simply rebranding but execution. Devising basketball strategy over game videos in the coach’s office gets one only so far. At some point, players have to practice sinking free throws and three-pointers.

Building those skills will require remaking the Democratic Party at the real grassroots. I was one of “those progressives” who’d ruin everything local Democrats built. Too far left, we didn’t understand how the world worked. We weren’t raising money. Then we took control, started winning races, and raised more than ever. And when it was time to make way for younger, fresher talent, we passed the baton willingly. (That story appears here and here.) It didn’t take long for our successors to surpass what we had done. That’s how you grow any healthy organization.

That transformation is only now making its way, slowly, to Congress.

Today, Congresswoman @RepAOC and I sat down to discuss working together to meet the needs of our districts and our country, fairness in our economy and diversity in our country. pic.twitter.com/eVp1LS0Gpw— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 26, 2019

Friday Night Soother

by digby

A rare Malayan Tapir was born at Chester Zoo on July 18. The calf, which has been revealed as a boy, arrived to proud mum, Margery (age 7) and dad, Betong (age 6).

Weighing just 5kg at birth, the ‘precious’ youngster follows a 13-month-long (391-day) pregnancy.

Baby tapirs have distinctive coats when first born, made up of a series of spots and stripes to help camouflage them on the forest floors in their native South East Asia. This pattern will slowly change over the first six months to the unique black and white pattern of their parents.

Around half of the world’s Malayan Tapirs have been lost in the last 40 years, with fewer than 2,500 estimated to remain in across Malaysia, Sumatra, Thailand and Myanmar. Hunting, illegal logging, and mass deforestation as land is cleared for unsustainable palm oil production are reasons for the decline in numbers. The species is currently listed as “Endangered” on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN’s) Red List of Threatened Species.

Sarah Roffe, Team Manager, said, “It’s wonderful to hear the pitter-patter of tiny, spotty Malayan Tapir feet again for only the second time ever in the zoo’s long history.”

“Mum Margery is ever so good with the baby. She’s very attentive but also gives him chance to explore and find his feet.”

“The precious calf is another big boost for the international breeding programme, which is working to ensure the already endangered species do not become extinct. In the wild, the Malayan Tapir population has crashed in recent times, largely due to the widespread conversion of their forest habitat to palm oil plantations. If people want to help this wonderful species, then we’d urge them to demand that the palm oil contained in the products they use is from sustainable sources.”

The Malayan Tapir is related to both the horse and the rhinoceros. It is an‘odd-toed’ ungulate (or hoofed mammal), with four toes on each front foot and three on each back foot.

To celebrate the youngster’s arrival, keepers at the zoo asked the public to help them to give him a name. The results of the online poll were recently revealed, and the calf’s new name is…Rony!

Via zooborns

Yes Putin did want Trump to win. He said so.

by digby

I just felt it was important to remind everyone of this today for some reason. From right after the Helsinki debacle:

One of the key exchanges in the Trump–Putin press conference in Finland doesn’t appear in full in the White House transcript, or at all in the Kremlin’s English-language transcript of the event. The Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asked, “President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?” But how exactly did Vladimir Putin respond to those pointed questions?

If you listen to the English translation that was broadcast during the press conference, the Russian leader said, “Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.–Russia relationship back to normal.” This rendering of Putin’s remarks leaves open the possibility that he’s stating “Yes, I did” in reference not just to wanting Donald Trump to win the 2016 presidential race, but also to ordering Russian officials to help Trump win, even though Putin repeatedly denied Russian interference in the election and collusion with the Trump campaign throughout the rest of the news conference.

Putin made it clear that he wanted Trump to win. There was some controversy as to whether he actually admitted to directing his officials to help him.

You be the judge…

Epstein Found Injured in Jail. Suicide Attempt? Or Attempted “Suicide?”
by Spocko

This story about Epstein’s injuries in jail broke on Thursday July 25th.

On July 15th I wrote about what powerful people implicated in Epstein’s crimes might do to shut it all down. Destruction of evidence? Obstruction of justice? Murder of perpetrator? All of the above? Here is what I wrote:

So I’m thinking. “Let’s say you work for a foreign government or royal family and there is evidence of your client raping a child? Let’s say you know he was listed in the Epstein 74 page indictment that was sealed, what would you do to stop that from being released?”

It reminded me of Deborah Jeane Palfrey case (dubbed the D.C. Madam)

She was convicted on April 15, 2008 of racketeering, using the mail for illegal purposes, and money laundering. Slightly over two weeks later, facing a prison sentence of five or six years, she was found hanged. Autopsy results and the final police investigative report concluded that her death was a suicide.

What legal tricks, leverage and favors will be called in? Who will be threatened?

So far there are two attorney’s who are petitioning to keep their clients names out of the Epstein case. They are saying that the child rape accusation are just accusations and therefore they shouldn’t be made public.

In the Palfrey case it was between consenting adults. Not sex trafficking and raping children. Will the media protect child rapists? And if the lawyers can’t fix it, then what? What if names go to the media? Will the fixers lean on the media like they did on ABC in the D.C. Madam case?

“In combination with Palfrey’s statement that she had 10,000 to 15,000 phone numbers of clients, this caused several clients’ lawyers to contact Palfrey to see whether accommodations could be made to keep their identities private.[13] Ultimately, ABC News, after going through what was described as “46 lb” [21 kg] of phone records, decided that none of the potential clients was sufficiently “newsworthy” to bother mentioning.” I wonder if any of those people are “newsworthy” now?

Lisa Bloom, a lawyer who represents some of the Epstein accusers, tweeted Thursday that neither her clients nor she “wish suicide upon anyone, not even a recidivist predator who has tricked and hurt so many women.”

Check out these two stories below from NBC and ABC

When powerful people who are implicated in this case read these stories what messages are they getting from officials and the people on the inside? “We can’t hurt him, but he might ‘hurt himself?’ If you know what I mean, wink, wink.”

NBC New York
“Accused pedophile and wealthy Manhattan financier Jeffrey Epstein was found injured and in a fetal position inside his cell at a New York City jail, according to sources close to the investigation.

Epstein, who is being held in Metropolitan Correctional Center as he awaits his trial for conspiracy and sex trafficking, was found semi-conscious with marks on his neck, two sources told News 4. Investigators are trying to piece together exactly what happened, saying details remain murky.

Two sources tell News 4 that Epstein may have tried to hang himself, while a third source cautioned that the injuries were not serious and questioned if Epstein might be using it as a way to get a transfer.”

ABC New York

An attorney for a cellmate of accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein told ABC News Epstein was not assaulted in jail. Sources confirm to ABC News that Epstein was found unresponsive in his New York jail cell with marks on his neck.  As part of their investigation, police are talking to other inmates at the jail, including a man named Nick Tartaglione. Tartaglione is a former police officer, now accused of killing four people in a drug dispute.

“I don’t know what investigators are looking at,” Tartaglione’s attorney, Bruce Barket, said about Epstein. “I do know what happened and I don’t think that there’s any hint that anybody assaulted Mr. Epstein.”

Barket said Tartaglione told him what happened to Epstein.

Barket, though, declined to provide specific details, saying it wasn’t his place to discuss somebody else’s client.

“There was no assault on Mr. Epstein,” Barket reiterated. “There’s no hint of an assault on Mr. Epstein.”

In the movie there are “fixers” who shut up the witnesses, get rid of “loose ends” and sweep the details under the rug. Usually it is shown as one or two people who do this like Winston ‘The Wolf’ Wolfe, the charismatic fixer in Quentin Tarantino’s classic film Pulp Fiction.

In this case seen we know that there are multiple forces working on destroying evidence and covering for the people involved. If Epstein has leverage over Presidents, Prime Ministers and Princes, that means that state actors will be involved. Groups with resources and leverage. It also means that private individuals might provide “favors” for looking the other way or making “mistakes.”

Remember the murder of Jamal Khashoggi? He was a journalist, not a criminal. He was tortured and killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a 15-member team brought in from Saudi Arabia for the operation. And our President didn’t condemn the killing of a good man.  The people who ordered it weren’t shunned on the world stage.

We are told that pedophiles get a “tough time” in prison. We have been conditioned to expect a “suicide” like in the D.C. Madam case.  If Epstein is killed and the videos and evidence disappear some people will be relieved, they will have gotten away with it, again. Like in his previous case. We can’t let those people rest easily.

Currently the people in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center are like the heroes from movies where the good guys have to protect a bad guy until he can testify.  The system has to protect a morally repugnant individual in order for justice to be served. In this case it involves more than just his crimes, it will also expose child rapists, human traffickers and the people who kept the system going.

I echo what Lisa Bloom said, “We want him to stay alive to face the justice and accountability which is so long overdue,” Bloom tweeted. “And it’s coming.”
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