339 search results for "certification"

Those testing swabs you’ve heard so much about? For the COVID-19 test Donald Trump swears on grandfather Friedrich’s brothel anyone who wants one can get? Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker told the CBS show “Face the Nation” on May 3 that his office had arranged for the Trump administration to ship the state 600,000:

“Much of what came out of the White House for many weeks was not helpful,” Pritzker said. “We needed the White House to lead on the Defense Production Act to help us get swabs, to help us get VTM [vital transport medium], to help us get reagents. That really hasn’t much happened.”

But at least the swabs were on the way.

WTTW News in Chicago reported Thursday night, however, there has been a slight mix-up:

Some arrived without issue: A shipment of 5,000 came on May 4, then another 39,600 arrived a week later, on Monday.

But this week, Illinois got what appeared to be – at first glance — some 23,000 cotton baby swabs.

Packages marked “Comforts for Baby: Cotton Swabs” arrived in a cardboard shipping box; 180-count packs that look the same as what Illinois received are selling for $1.50 on Instacart. 

“What are we supposed to do with these?” a spokeswoman with the Pritzker administration said. “Not helpful.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) swears on its public-safety mandate the confusion lies only in the packaging. The swabs are, in fact, not cotton as labeled but the polyester material required for upper respiratory sampling. To expedite delivery, the supplier simply used existing packaging for the test-grade supplies. A letter from the manufacturer swears on its stockholders’ letterhead the supplies it sent are good for swabbing uncomfortably deep into a patient’s sinuses. Yet, what was delivered are the length of a Q-tip and not individually packaged.

Washington, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania received similarly packaged swabs, CNN reports this morning:

The FDA said it had worked with US Cotton to design the swabs, which are shorter than the swabs used by technicians, doctors or nurses to collect samples to test people for Covid-19 infection.

CNN reported on the shorter swabs in April:

“The type of testing at the front of the nose used in this study is notable because it allows self-collection by patients thereby limiting exposure of healthcare providers; it is more comfortable for patients and it can be performed by a swab that is more readily available and manufacturable at scale,” the FDA said in a statement.

The shorter swabs are designed for at-home testing, but it is not clear that is the type swab these states requested. CNN added for clarity, “Commercially available cosmetic Q-tips are not suitable for use in testing because their cotton fibers absorb too much snot.”

Jordan Abudayyeh of the Illinois governor’s office called the mislabeled shipment another Trump administration effort to “check a box and say we sent them.”

“It’s helpful for (the Trump administration) to say, ‘We sent swabs.’ But it’s more helpful if you say, ‘We sent you swabs where you can actually use and deploy right now without having to take additional steps between now and then,'” she said.

In March, Illinois was expecting a shipment of 300,000 N95 respirator face masks from the Trump administration. Basic surgical masks arrived instead.

Sorry about the “Baby Shark” reference. I swear on my great granduncle’s schooner I shipped a different headline.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

They’re sending in the stormtroopers. I wonder what took them so long:

The Trump administration is deploying law enforcement tactical units from the southern border as part of a supercharged arrest operation in sanctuary cities across the country, an escalation in the president’s battle against localities that refuse to participate in immigration enforcement.

The specially trained officers are being sent to cities including Chicago and New York to boost the enforcement power of local Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, according to two officials who are familiar with the secret operation. Additional agents are expected to be sent to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, Detroit and Newark, N.J.

Among the agents being deployed to sanctuary cities are members of the elite tactical unit known as BORTAC, which acts essentially as the SWAT team of the Border Patrol. With additional gear such as stun grenades and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification, the officers typically conduct high-risk operations targeting individuals who are known to be violent, many of them with extensive criminal records.

The cities are already militarized so I suppose this isn’t really an escalation in that sense. But targeting the Latino communities specifically (you know they aren’t going into say, Polish neighborhoods) does take it to the next level.

There was a time when the wingnuts all used “states’ rights” and “local control” to justify their racism. It was always nonsense, of course. If they had the power they always wanted to inflict their racist values on everyone in the country. They finally found their true champion.

NC 9th’s Aunt Bee pickle
by Tom Sullivan

The strange tale of election-rigging in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District gets stranger. Courtesy of Judd Legum’s
newsletter, “Popular Information,” the state Board’s decision to put on hold certification of the race in which Republican Mark Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes just got stranger:

The decision comes after substantial evidence of improprieties involving absentee ballots. A series of affidavits submitted suggests that a man named Leslie McCrae Dowless, who was hired by the Harris campaign through a contractor, systematically falsified, manipulated, and potentially destroyed absentee ballots — particularly in Bladen County. Harris won Bladen County by 1,557 votes, more than his margin statewide. [districtwide, TS]

In fact, requests for absentee ballots in Bladen ran at 7.5 percent, while elsewhere in the district it was under 3 percent. Furthermore, the high percentage of the requests that went unreturned in Bladen and Robeson Counties — as many as 3,400 — suggests ballots collected by contractors working with Dowless were falsified or destroyed. Of voters in Bladen requesting absentee ballots, 19 percent were Republicans, yet Harris received 61 percent of the absentee vote.

Affidavit from Bladen County absentee voter suggests something a little strange. #ncpol #nc9 #ncga pic.twitter.com/DrLuLhp5oa— Jim Morrill (@jimmorrill) November 29, 2018

Here's another affidavit from a Bladen absentee voter. One reason why state officials apparently looking into such cases. #ncpol #nc9 #ncga pic.twitter.com/qC1EpVLsXp— Jim Morrill (@jimmorrill) November 29, 2018

Helping people request absentee ballots is permissible. Collecting absentee ballots is illegal and known as harvesting.

Another person filed an affidavit saying McCrae Dowless said he was hired by Harris to work the absentee ballot operation in Bladen County. If Harris won, McCrae Dowless said he would be paid $40,000 in cash.

As the problems in North Carolina’s 9th District have garnered national attention, one important aspect of the story has gone unreported: McCrae Dowless’ criminal record. Records from the North Carolina Department Of Public Safety obtained by Popular Information reveal McCrae Dowless has been convicted of multiple crimes.

Kiting checks, insurance fraud, parole violation, etc. … just the sort you want running an absentee ballot program.

Vox’s Dylan Scott adds:

This isn’t the first time Dowless’s name has come up in relation to voting shenanigans: In 2016, several people filed complaints about campaign workers hired by Dowless who were collecting absentee ballots, as WECT reported at the time. (Confusing matters even further: Dowless was, at the time, alleging voter fraud undertaken by Democrats. There’s a lot going on here.)

Dowless was paid as a contractor by the Harris campaign in 2018, the Charlotte Observer reported. He denies any wrongdoing.

Michael Bitzer of Old North State Politics provides a handy chart to display how Bladen’s and Robeson’s absentee non-return rates diverge from the rest of the district:

The key takeaway is if the state Board decides to call for a new election, it may if there is evidence the election was conducted unfairly, even if the amount of fraud might not have been substantial enough to alter the outcome.

“By my statutory reading and interpretation, it doesn’t matter whether there are enough votes that may or may not necessarily change the outcome,” Bitzer told Vox.

That outcome is, as they might say in Mayberry, an Aunt Bee pickle, and may well land parties back in court again. Republicans have spent quite a lot of time there since taking full control of state government in 2013.

They will be back there again anyway. Voters approved a “blank check” voter ID constitutional amendment in November, the blanks to be filled in by Republican legislators during the current lame-duck session. That work is in progress. As soon as Republicans override Gov. Roy Cooper’s expected veto, they will be back in court defending it. One estimate puts the costs of that defense at $12 million. (The state spent nearly $5 million defending its last voter ID law, and losing.) For reference, their 2012 Amendment One prohibiting same-sex marriage did not survive court scrutiny after passage.

“This tells me that the election system is broken, even ore [sic] reason voter ID is needed,” one commenter wrote on the state Democratic Party chair’s Facebook page.

That, despite presenting IDs having no role in absentee ballot fraud or this kind of suspected election-rigging. But like tax cuts being their economic cure-all, whatever the election malfeasance, voter ID is the Republican answer. Even though impersonation fraud, the only kind voter ID might reliably catch at the polls, is all but an imaginary problem.

Don’t believe me? How about the Heritage Foundation’s accounting from a period covering about 2 billion general election votes? I took a look through it the other day.

“Stronger than a blue wave”
by Tom Sullivan

The expression is so well known “With Surgical Precision” could replace “First in Flight” on North Carolina’s license plates. The line refers to the federal court ruling against the state’s voter ID law passed by the GOP-controlled legislature in 2013. The heavily gerrymandered congressional districts the legislature drew in 2011 have been in court ever since. Adjusted once by court order and ruled again unconstitutional, pending appeal they were still in use on November 6.

The blue wave that swept across the country in November and gained Democrats 40 seats in the House of Representatives broke against the red levee Republicans erected in North Carolina, the New York Times explains. The status quo held there and in Ohio as well. Although the statewide vote split almost evenly, Republicans won 10 of the 13 congressional seats. Certification of the close 9th District contest is held in abeyance pending an investigation into possible absentee ballot fraud.

Voting November 6 under court-ordered nonpartisan maps, Pennsylvania shifted its congressional balance from 13 Republicans and five Democrats to nine Republicans and nine Democrats, the New York Times explains.

Republicans in North Carolina publicly admit their maps are a partisan gerrymander. They simply deny that makes them illegal.

“We’re in charge … That’s the way it works,” said Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party.

While 87 of the state’s 100 counties lie within a single congressional district, that surgical precision came in how Republicans chose to divide the other 13. Woodhouse tells the Times it was impossible to keep those intact and still maintain equal-population districts:

The results can be seen clearly in Guilford County, home of Greensboro, North Carolina’s third-largest city and a Democratic stronghold. The legislature split the city between the Sixth and 13th Districts, which had the effect of dissolving its voters into the red seas of North Carolinians outside the city limits and leaving the city represented entirely by Republicans in Congress.

Of the 57 counties where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans, only 17 have a Democratic representative in Congress. But every county where Republicans outnumber Democrats has a Republican representative.

The results are also clear on the boundary between NC-10 currently represented by Rep. Patrick McHenry and NC-11 held by Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Mark Meadows, both Republicans. The amoeba-like appendage added to NC-10 in 2011 reaches out to split the heavily Democratic city of Asheville (mine), making NC-11 a safe Republican seat while making NC-10 only marginally less Republican. Democrat Heath Shuler held the NC-11 seat for three terms, but declined to run again after redistricting rendered the district unwinnable.

Both McHenry and Meadows comfortably held their seats this year.

Trump’s Himmler

by digby

Oh dear God:

A Trump appointee’s decision to personally review requests to release migrant children from jail-like “secure facilities” created a bureaucratic bottleneck that dramatically increased the amount of time kids spent locked up.

Office of Refugee Resettlement chief E. Scott Lloyd ― who first attracted national interest when a federal court slapped down his attempt to ban a teenage migrant who’d been raped from obtaining an abortion ― told subordinates last year that he’d have to personally sign off before any kids could be released from ORR’s secure facilities.

As a result, hundreds of kids spent extra time in the jail-like facilities, which have been associated with far more allegations of abuse and mistreatment than the shelters and homestays that hold most of the children in ORR custody.

Over the past two years, migrant children in federal custody have been forcibly injected with psychotropic drugs at a Shiloh Residential Treatment Center outside Houston, according to court filings. (The psychiatrist responsible for prescribing the medications lost his board certification nearly a decade ago, according to Reveal.) Others were pepper-sprayed or locked in restraints with bags over their heads as punishment for misbehaving at Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center in Virginia.

Lloyd decided to make release decisions himself after reading news reports that some unaccompanied minors released from ORR custody later allegedly committed gang-related crimes, he told a congressional subcommittee last year. In a deposition for a New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging his new policy, which a federal judge halted with an injunction last month, Lloyd said he made the decision without an agency review and in consultation with just two colleagues.

Release requests were subsequently delayed for months as they mounted on the desk of a single bureaucrat.

One of the plaintiffs in the NYCLU lawsuit, a 17-year-old boy who has not been publicly identified, spent eight months locked in a juvenile detention hall after his arrest on gang-related charges that were never proven. Though it lacked evidence of criminal activity to justify his incarceration, ORR cited the boy’s gang-related tattoos as one of the reasons for his extended detention. The boy has no tattoos, according to the NYCLU.

At least 700 children spent time in facilities with severe security restrictions because of the delay, the NYCLU says.

Lloyd’s decision to make his personal signature a requirement for release from these secured facilities isn’t an anomaly. It’s part of a pattern. With almost no experience working on immigration issues or child care, the low-level bureaucrat has unilaterally made sweeping changes at the agency, blocking minors’ abortions, keeping kids incarcerated longer and making it harder for parents to recover their kids.

Who is this evil bastard?

Lloyd had little immigration policy experience when President Donald Trump appointed him in March 2017. His only major immigration work, before he assumed control of an agency charged with helping tens of thousands of refugees, involved research and advocacy for Christians persecuted in Iraq, which he carried out as a policy worker with the Knights of Columbus and described in a 2016 CPAC panel titled “We Are All Infidels Now.” His support for Iraqi refugees put him at odds with the Trump administration’s first travel ban, which barred Iraqi nationals from entering the United States. (A later iteration removed Iraq from the list of restricted countries.)

Lloyd’s main policy experience before his appointment was in the fight against abortion rights. From 2009 to 2011, he worked at a Catholic law firm called LegalWorks Apostolate, run by prominent activists opposed to abortion, including the attorney Stuart Nolan. Lloyd sat on the board of the Front Royal Pregnancy Center, an organization that aims to dissuade women from terminating pregnancies. Some of his policy proposals were outside the mainstream of American politics: In a 2011 article for the blog Ethika Politika, he suggested that state lawmakers craft a law that would require women to gain consent from men before obtaining an abortion.

That background had little to do with immigration, but it seems to have appealed to Maggie Wynne, the anti-abortion leader whom Trump installed to transition the federal Department of Health and Human Services shortly after the 2016 election. Wynne recruited Lloyd to work at ORR, and he offered to direct the agency, according to the NYCLU deposition.

Lloyd, a father of seven, soon turned his anti-abortion politics into ORR policy. He denied abortions to six children in ORR custody, instead coaxing them to seek counseling at Christian-run pregnancy centers and requiring them to notify their families of the pregnancies, according to lawsuits. One of those women eventually received an abortion, and in April, a federal judge blocked Lloyd’s policy of requiring unaccompanied children in ORR custody to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

Lloyd declined to be interviewed for this story. But in an email, Nolan described his former colleague as a victim of “character assassination” by critics and political opponents.

“In all the years I have known him, Scott Lloyd has displayed nothing but the highest integrity,” Nolan said. “He is a deeply compassionate person who is drawn to assist the most vulnerable among us.”

Advocates say Lloyd’s tightening of restrictions on release from ORR have had a dramatic impact on the children for whom the agency is responsible.

“Certainly under his leadership at ORR it’s been a disaster for children across the board,” said Brigitte Amiri, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represented the minor in ORR custody seeking an abortion. “Not just with respect to abortion issues. He’s put his personal stamp on things.”

Under Lloyd, ORR’s mission as a human services agency is drifting toward one of more actively partnering with the immigration enforcement system, his critics argue.

“They’re turning ORR into a detention agency,” Bob Carey, who headed the agency during the Obama administration, told HuffPost. “It does not reflect the intent of Congress. They are not equipped to become a juvenile detention agency.”

U.S. law bars Immigration and Customs Enforcement from detaining unaccompanied migrant children who cross the border without authorization. Instead, immigration authorities must transfer them to ORR, which holds them in contracted shelters until the agency finds a sponsor to care for them ― usually a family member. The goal, according to a 1997 consent decree called the Flores Settlement, is to promptly release children.

Tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors have moved through the shelter system annually since 2014. But at any given time, the agency holds a few hundred children in more secured facilities ― whether because of alleged behavioral problems, criminal infractions or the need for ongoing psychiatric treatment.

Last June, after Lloyd decided his signature was necessary before any child could be released, ORR began requiring all children accused of gang affiliations to be placed in secured facilities, according to filings in the Flores lawsuit.

But ORR typically classifies children as gang affiliates based on the word of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In multiple lawsuits, judges later found that ORR had no evidence to classify several children in its custody as gang members, and did not consult with local law enforcement or put a process in place to appeal its decisions.

There’s more at the link.

I keep hearing that we should not be talking about fascism.

Yes we should.

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Change Icelanders can believe in
by Tom Sullivan

Protests on Austurvöllur because of the Icelandic economic crisis (2008). Photo by Haukurth via Creative Commons.

Iceland has got a lot to teach the world:

Starting January 1, 2018, it is now illegal for employers to pay women less than men. In Iceland, both public and private employers with 25 employees or more will need obtain government certification of equal pay policies. Organizations that fail to obtain the certification will face fines.

The country, according to the 2017 Global Gender Gap Report, already has the most gender equity of any country. The report examines the gender gap across four dimensions: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.

The United States ranks 49th, just ahead of Kazakhstan but behind Uganda.

I’m curious just how serious those fines are. Still, how is such a thing possible? Well, almost half of Iceland’s parliament is female.

But in this country, women make up only 24.9 percent of all state legislators. In Congress, it is only 19.6 percent.

Iceland taught the world how to peacefully remove a corrupt government. The world didn’t listen. Now they’re teaching the world how to enforce equal pay. Your New Year’s resolution? Do something about those this November.

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

DOJ tells America’s second largest city to get lostby digby

Yesterday I noted that the radical Republicans rolled back the deductions for natural disasters that only happen out west and particularly in Blue States — wildfires and earthquakes. Ok. maybe that’s just being paranoid. But this really seems to indicate that the Trump administration is intent upon punishing California for failing to bow down to his greatness:

In 2015, a community policing initiative — one credited with helping curb violence in some of L.A.’s toughest housing projects — scored the Los Angeles Police Department high-level praise.

A captain and a sergeant who led the program were invited to Washington, D.C., earning coveted seats near the first lady during President Obama’s State of the Union address.

This year, L.A. officials applied for more than $3 million in federal funding to help bring the same program to Harvard Park, a South L.A. neighborhood scarred by violence.

The request was denied.

The U.S. Department of Justice hasn’t offered the LAPD an explanation of why the department didn’t receive any of the $98 million in grants recently awarded to scores of law enforcement agencies across the nation. A spokesman for the federal agency declined to comment when asked by The Times last week.

But after the Trump administration’s repeated threats to withhold federal money from cities that don’t cooperate with its immigration crackdown, some LAPD officials said they believe the move was retaliatory — and a troubling sign of what could come.

If this is the tip of the iceberg, we’re going to set back law enforcement and policing and public safety by decades.
— L.A. Police Commission President Steve Soboroff
Steve Soboroff, president of the civilian Police Commission that oversees the LAPD, said that he believes the Justice Department denied the funding request because of the LAPD’s well-publicized, hands-off approach to immigration enforcement. Soboroff said he worries future funding may also be at risk.

“Community policing is what policing’s all about. Militaristic policing, immigrant harassment is not,” he said. “By ignoring that, or prioritizing it beneath their issue of sanctuary cities and cooperation with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] — the priorities are wrong.”

“If this is the tip of the iceberg, we’re going to set back law enforcement and policing and public safety by decades,” he added.

The LAPD had planned to use the money to hire 25 officers for the community policing program in Harvard Park, one of the city’s deadliest neighborhoods. The roughly half-mile area saw eight homicides in 2016, nearly triple the number from the year before. So far this year, six people have been killed.

Officers assigned to the LAPD’s Community Safety Partnership program focus on getting to know residents instead of making arrests. They coach sports teams and lead mentoring programs. The goal is to foster a real relationship between the police and the community — one in which officers and residents know each other by name and work together to make the neighborhood safer.

The strategy, police say, has paid off. Violent crime dropped by more than 50% and arrests were cut in half during the program’s first three years in three Watts housing developments, officials have said. Police also credit the program for a three-year stretch without a homicide in Jordan Downs, one of the developments.

Commissioner Cynthia McClain-Hill said she was “curious — to say the least — about what program could have been more deserving.”

Why did they do this? Well, they didn’t exactly try to hide their reasons:

In announcing the grant awards last month, the Justice Department noted that 80% of the agencies that received funds earned extra points “based on their certifications of willingness to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.”

L.A. did not sign that certification, LAPD officials said.

The decision to tie federal funding to immigration enforcement has already prompted a flurry of coast-to-coast legal challenges, including those filed by L.A.’s city attorney and California’s attorney general.

The lawsuits have largely focused on two grants awarded by the Justice Department: one administered through Community Oriented Policing Services office, which the LAPD was just denied; and a second, the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant, which has brought L.A. more than $1 million during each of the last few fiscal years.

Opponents allege the executive branch is overstepping its constitutional authority by attaching new rules to the grants without congressional approval. They also contend that cities are safer when immigrants are willing to talk to local police without fear of deportation.

City Atty. Mike Feuer, who filed a lawsuit this fall, said putting civil immigration enforcement requirements on grants designed to improve community policing was “ironic — and at worst, very dangerous.”

​​​“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure our city is as safe as possible and not let this undermine public safety,” he said.

LA is one of the most diverse cities in the world. And it is obviously full of Mexican immigrants, legal and undocumented. The millions of people who live here are not have a hissy fit over it. Indeed, our diversity is celebrated and encouraged and the economy is flourishing.

I’m sorry there are places in America that are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of foreigners who don’t look exactly like them coming into their communities. But that’s no reason to take it out on us.

But that isn’t the only reason they are doing this. Trump and Sessions don’t believe in community policing, they believe in police taking the gloves off and dominating the community with sheer force and firepower. So anything that doesn’t fit their desire for total dominance is considered a waste.

California still has 14 asshole House Republicans who are enabling this president and his administration’s despicable treatment of Californians. It’s time to get rid of every last one of them.

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Only the best peopleby digby

The latest Trumpie to be caught in the maw is campaign supervisor Sam Clovis, Iowa politico who thought meeting with Russians was a-ok:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s senior White House adviser, Sam Clovis, who withdrew his nomination as the agency’s chief scientist this week after being linked to the special counsel’s ongoing Russia probe, confirmed in an Oct. 17 letter obtained by The Washington Post that he has no academic credentials in either science or agriculture.

But the former Iowa talk radio host and political science professor contended in the letter to the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee’s top Democrat, Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), that his time teaching and running for political office in the Hawkeye State steeped him in the field of agriculture.

Clovis informed Trump Wednesday that he would no longer seek the post given the controversy surrounding the fact that he was one of the top officials on the Trump campaign who was aware of efforts by foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos to broker a relationship between the campaign and Russian officials.

In a letter to the president Wednesday, Clovis explained that he did not think he could get a fair consideration from the Senate, which was slated to hold a hearing on his appointment on Nov. 9.

“The political climate inside Washington has made it impossible for me to receive balanced and fair consideration for this position,” wrote Clovis, who currently serves as USDA’s senior White House adviser. “The relentless assaults on you and your team seem to be a blood sport that only increases with intensity each day.”

Clovis said he would stay on at USDA, writing, ““I will remain a devoted and loyal supporter and will continue to serve at the pleasure of you and the Secretary of Agriculture.”

The post for which President Trump had nominated his campaign co-chair — USDA undersecretary for research, education and economics — has traditionally been held by individuals with advanced degrees in science or medicine. The 2008 farm bill specifies that appointees to the position should be chosen “from among distinguished scientists with specialized training or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics,” given that the official is “responsible for the coordination of the research, education, and extension activities of the Department.”

Clovis, who possesses a bachelor’s degree in political science, an MBA degree and a doctorate in public administration, repeatedly acknowledged his lack of background in the hard sciences when responding to Stabenow.

“Please list all graduate level courses you have taken in natural science,” the second of 10 questions requested.

“None,” Clovis replied.

“Please list all membership and leadership roles you have held within any agricultural scientific, agricultural education, or agricultural economic organizations,” the third question read.

“None,” Clovis replied.

“Please describe any awards, designations, or academic recognition you have received specifically related to agricultural science,” the fourth question read.

“None,” Clovis replied.

Then came the fifth question, which asked, “What specialized training or significant experience, including certifications, do you have in agricultural research?”

He answered: “I bring 17 years of agriculture experience integrated into both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses throughout my teaching career as reflected in my curriculum vitae as well as the Committee’s questionnaire.” And having twice run for statewide office, he added that “one cannot be a credible candidate in that state without significant agricultural experience and knowledge.”

Clovis, who has said the consensus scientific view that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have driven recent climate change is “not proven,” has published and taught extensively about homeland security and foreign policy. He lists 17 examples of publications and scholarly activity on those two topics since 1992 on his CV, along with six teaching stints that cover those issues along with business administration.

He does seem to have some credentials for political work but I think you can guess why Trump stuck him at the Department of Agriculture. He has very strict requirements about how people around him should look.

I’m guessing he’ll be resigning from the job he’s doing now soon to spend more time with his lawyers.

Who could be worse for CIA than Tom Cotton?

by digby

I wrote about the chilling rumors in DC about who might move into the CIA director’s slot if Mike Pompeo is moved over to Secretary of State for Salon this morning:

It may be that it took direct, vicious attacks on the mainstream media for its practitioners to understand the catastrophe of Donald Trump and cover him both factually and, more important, truthfully. They aren’t perfect, but they aren’t being the lapdogs we all saw during the Bush administration and thank goodness for that. Still, they have yet to kill some stale old tropes that desperately need to be thrown overboard. One of them is this idea that there are “grownups” out there somewhere who will come rescue us from the folly of our democratic choices.

Back in 2001, the entire press corps was delirious over the ascension of George W. Bush after the years of Bill Clinton and his hippie White House. Those so-called “grownups” wreaked havoc, and the press seemed to be chagrined enough by the Bush administration’s failures to let Barack Obama’s quiet dignity speak for itself. But with the election of Donald Trump and his infantile bullying, this meme has returned in a big way. I wrote about this latest iteration of the “finally, the adults are back in charge” line a few months ago, and it’s only become more frequent and more desperate as the administration sheds its original cast of characters in favor of what Trump refers to as “my generals.” (It’s like a remake of “Seven Days in May” around there these days.)

Well, it just got worse. The much-rumored upcoming departure of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has created lots of gossip about possible replacements, starting with UN ambassador Nikki Haley, known as “the Iran whisperer.” The other possibility being discussed is CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a Trump favorite who drives three hours a day from Langley, Virginia, to the White House to personally deliver the president his national security briefing just the way he likes it — short, sweet and with “killer graphics.“

If Pompeo were to be moved into Tillerson’s spot, that would open up the CIA job, and word is that Trump is considering Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas for that position. Cotton is only 40 years old and has had one term in the House and three years in the Senate, so he seems a bit young for the job. (In fact, he’s the youngest current U.S. senator.) But he’s apparently enough of a grownup to join the Trump babysitters’ club. Axios reported:

MSNBC and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt — who talks frequently to Cotton on and off the air, and first floated the idea of Cotton for CIA — told me that Pompeo, Cotton, SecDef Mattis and Chief of Staff Kelly would be “a quartet of serious intellectuals and warriors in the ‘big four’ jobs.” And you could add National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster as a fifth.

Hewitt also said that Cotton and Trump get along well and that he and Pompeo both “like and listen to the president” and “accept his realism in foreign affairs.” Trump’s views on foreign affairs are not of what is called the “realist” school, nor are they actually realistic, so I’m not sure what Hewitt’s referring to. But it sounds as though both men are champion Trump flatterers, which makes the president comfortable and happy.

On the substance, Cotton is a terrible choice. He comes from Arkansas, but he went to Harvard for both undergrad and law school. Then he served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army Ranger and worked in management consulting at McKinsey & Company, before embarking on his long-planned political career. (I wrote about him back in 2015, calling him Sarah Palin with a Harvard degree.)

His one term as a congressman was unremarkable, but he flew into the Senate like a whirlwind and immediately embarrassed the entire Republican caucus by catching them all on their way out of town and getting them to sign an ill-considered letter he wrote to the Iranian government telling them that the nuclear agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. As former Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson wrote at the time:

The document was crafted by a senator with two months of experience under his belt. It was signed by some members rushing off the Senate floor to catch airplanes, often with little close analysis. Many of the 47 signatories reasoned that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s endorsement was vetting enough. There was no caucus-wide debate about strategy; no consultation with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has studiously followed the nuclear talks (and who refused to sign). 

This was a foreign policy maneuver, in the middle of a high-stakes negotiation, with all the gravity and deliberation of a blog posting. In timing, tone and substance, it raises questions about the Republican majority’s capacity to govern.

Those questions have now been answered. It has no such capacity.

Cotton is clearly an intelligent man, but his instincts are highly Trumpian. It’s seems likely that he’s among the advisers who pushed the president toward decertification of the Iran deal based on no evidence. As CIA director, he would have no compunction about doing whatever is necessary to “find” evidence to achieve his long-cherished goal of a war with Iran. (It wouldn’t be the first time the CIA director declared a “slam dunk” in such a situation.)

According to Molly Ball of The Atlantic, Cotton’s Harvard thesis reveals his philosophy:

Cotton insists that the Founders were wise not to put too much faith in democracy, because people are inherently selfish, narrow-minded, and impulsive. He defends the idea that the country must be led by a class of intellectually superior officeholders whose ambition sets them above other men. Though Cotton acknowledges that this might seem elitist, he derides the Federalists’ modern critics as mushy-headed and naive. 

“Ambition characterizes and distinguishes national officeholders from other kinds of human beings,” Cotton wrote. “Inflammatory passion and selfish interest characterizes most men, whereas ambition characterizes men who pursue and hold national office. Such men rise from the people through a process of self-selection since politics is a dirty business that discourages all but the most ambitious.”

On the surface, such a belief would seem to be an odd mix with the allegedly populist Donald Trump and his “alt-right” white nationalist allies, but it really isn’t. Trump himself is a big believer in eugenics and Steve Bannon is looking for a few good men to lead his army into the big final battle. Tom Cotton may be just the grownup they’ve been looking for.

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Eye in the sky, by and by
by Tom Sullivan

Armed MQ-9 Reaper from General Atomics.

Not the GoPro quadracopters mind you, I’m talking about the big Corellian ships now.

There is plenty enough to worry about in U.S. policing. A “get tough” president. A U.S. attorney general with a far too-interesting backstory. Racial profiling. The “officer survival movement.” Excessive force. Shooting the mentally ill. And militarization.

On that last one…. Blogger Barry Summers and I joke that it will take a military drone crashing into a school bus before people begin to take this seriously. (Barry sent in this drone accident report shortly before this posted.) Or, alternatively, if a rumor got going that the gummint has a surveillance drone capable of seeing into Ted Nugent’s gun safe and counting his AR-15s.

The former already came close to happening in Pennsylvania. The Washington Post chronicled their safety record in “Crashes mount as military flies more drones in U.S.“:

Shortly after the day’s final bell rang and hundreds of youngsters ran outside Lickdale Elementary School with their book bags and lunchboxes, a military drone fell from the sky.

The 375-pound Shadow reconnaissance drone skimmed the treetops as it hurtled toward the school in Jonestown, Pa. It barely missed the building, then cartwheeled through the butterfly garden and past the playground. The aircraft kept rolling like a tumbleweed and collided with a passing car on Fisher Avenue. People called 911. The rescue squad arrived in a hurry. Luckily, no one was hurt.

The April 3 near-disaster was the latest known mishap involving a military drone in the United States. Most U.S. military drone accidents have occurred abroad, but at least 49 large drones have crashed during test or training flights near domestic bases since 2001, according to a yearlong Washington Post investigation.

That report on drone crashes is from 2014.

This report from Defense One comes on the heels of the Charlottesville police helicopter crash:

By 2025, enormous military-style drones – close relatives of the sort made famous by counterterrorism strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq – will be visible 2,000 feet above U.S. cities, streaming high-resolution video to police departments below. That is the bet that multiple defense contractors are placing, anyway, as they race to build unmanned aircraft that can pass evolving airworthiness certifications and replace police helicopters. And if that bet pays off, it will radically transform the way cities, citizens, and law enforcement interact.

That has not happened so far because the sense-and-avoid technology required for versions of the big military drones, such as the MQ-9 Reaper, to fly freely in civilian airspace is still unperfected. But General Atomics has a lot invested in seeing their drones go commercial. Who, you might ask, could make that happen simply by waiving the sense-and-avoid requirement or by choosing not enforce it?

But freely doesn’t mean autonomously. The General Atomics MQ-9B still requires a ground-based human pilot to fly it.

The newest version of the drone can autonomously take off and land. A single operator can both fly the plane and operate the “sensor ball,” a globe full of high-resolution sensors and thermal imaging sensors manufactured by defense contractor Raytheon. The newest version of the camera has 720p HD resolution, enough to show faces in a crowd from 2,000 feet up. And optics are rapidly improving.

During the MQ-9B test in Grey Butte, journalists peeked out the door of the ground-control trailer to the tiny, barely visible plane overhead. Back inside, the monitors showed that we could easily easily distinguish each another, pick out clothing patterns, discern other markings, etc. It looked like a view from 30 feet up, not 2,000.

That’s what has privacy advocates on edge. For good reason.

Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore in 2015. Protests broke out a year later after all the police officers charged in Gray’s death were acquitted. Some of the protests became violent. Persistent Surveillance Systems recorded them all with its eye in the sky:

… a small Cessna airplane equipped with a sophisticated array of cameras was circling Baltimore at roughly the same altitude as the massing clouds. The plane’s wide-angle cameras captured an area of roughly 30 square miles and continuously transmitted real-time images to analysts on the ground. The footage from the plane was instantly archived and stored on massive hard drives, allowing analysts to review it weeks later if necessary.

Since the beginning of the year, the Baltimore Police Department had been using the plane to investigate all sorts of crimes, from property thefts to shootings. The Cessna sometimes flew above the city for as many as 10 hours a day, and the public had no idea it was there.

The MQ-9B with its 79-foot wing span can remain aloft for far longer than 10 hours. Up to 40 hours or more, says General Atomics.

Last March, the Electronic Privacy Information Center sent a letter expressing concerns about the proliferation of drones to John Thune (R, SD), Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation, and to Ranking Member Bill Nelson (D-FL). EPIC takes the FAA to task for failing to safeguard the public’s privacy and safety:

Drones are now regularly equipped with high definition cameras that increase the ability of a user to conduct domestic surveillance. The DJI Inspire 1 is a high-end, commercially available hobbyist drone about the size of a small desktop printer and weighs less than seven pounds, yet it can transmit high definition video to an operator up to five kilometers away and can stream that video live to YouTube. Even lower-end hobbyist drones costing less than $100 can stream live video. The Hubsan X4 Star Pro, a drone that can fit in the palm of your hand, utilizes a front facing high definition camera with 720P resolution that can stream live video up to 300 meters away. Drones can be used to view individuals inside their homes and can facilitate the harassment and stalking of unsuspecting victims. Drones can also be modified with tools that can enable them to gather personal information using infrared cameras, heat sensors, GPS, automated license plate readers, and facial recognition devices.

Drones also pose risks to security and cybersecurity. Close calls between drones and traditional aircraft have risen significantly as their use becomes more widespread. Furthermore, the very features that make drones easy to operate also make them susceptible to cyberattacks. Hackers have the ability to exploit weaknesses in drone software to take over operation of a drone and access the camera and microphones.

Remember, EPIC is talking about small hobbyist and commercial drones, not the “big Corellian ships.” But The American Conservative is. Texas Sen. John Cornyn’s Building America’s Trust Act (introduced August 3) aims to put the southern border region under near-constant surveillance:

The bill would require unmanned drones to be flown at the border 24 hours a day, five days a week. That would effectively put anyone living near the border under a state of perpetual surveillance for no reason other than their geographical location. This is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans.

Under this bill, each Border Patrol drone would log 6,240 hours of flight time per year. That would be a drastic increase from the Obama years. According to a 2014 report by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, four drones flown by Border Patrol logged a combined total of only 5,102 hours that year.

Not only does constantly flying drones near the border jeopardize basic privacy rights, it also takes an insane amount of money. The same December 2014 report found that Border Patrol’s drone program cost a whopping $12,255 per flight hour. That means, if the Building America’s Trust Act is passed, the government would spend $76.47 million per year, per drone at the border.

At roughly $12-15 million just to buy one, where does General Atomics expect local police departments to come up with that kind of money? What’s clear is, General Atomics expects the money will be ready when their drones are.

As for how they might be used, a 1989 case involved a police helicopter spotting marijuana growing in a Florida greenhouse. The Supreme Court ruled that aerial surveillance evidence is inadmissible in court only if the helicopter is flying so low as to kick up dust and wind, becoming the equivalent of a home invasion, Patrick Tucker writes at Defense One. Not a problem with the persistent eye in the sky:

That’s good news for General Atomics and hawkish police departments, bad news for anyone concerned about growing surveillance powers of law enforcement. Even if the eye in the sky isn’t carrying Hellfire missiles, there’s something deeply dystopian about a machine whose cousin track[s] Al-Qaeda across Afghanistan [being] turned to track communities of color in places like Baltimore.

Plus, tech experts correct me if I’m wrong, but all that drone surveillance data routes through through an uplink to military satellites. Who controls those?

In the sweet by and by
We shall meet in that beautiful storage

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