22 July 2017

You still mystify

Video: Naomi Klein and Jeremy Corbyn Discuss How to Get the World We Want

Bad Dems: Democratic Councilman Fernando Cabrera says life is harder for the rich - and if you're not rich, it's because you're lazy.

Andrew Cuomo's cruelty for cruelty's sake: "'Those Visits Were Everything': How Prison Visitation Cuts Devastate Families: Buried in the New York state budget is a proposal to cut weekday visits for over 20,000 inmates. For families of incarcerated people, this could mean barely having any real contact with their loved ones." Weekend visits are already crowded and noisy to the point where people can't even hear each other. This would make it so, so much worse.

"How Andrew Cuomo Keeps the Left in Check: There is plenty of room to mount a progressive challenge against the Democratic governor. Why hasn't anyone stepped up? [...] What Cuomo has done in the Senate is the most prominent example of how he has undercut New York's progressive architecture and neutered opposition from his left flank. On a legislative level, the coalition between the GOP and the renegade Democrats - known as the Independent Democratic Conference - allows Cuomo to control the pace of the reform coming out of Albany. It has hobbled the ability of the Democratic Party, which technically won a majority in the state Senate in 2012 and 2016 (Republicans won the majority in 2014), to push for progressive policies in areas like health care, voting reform, reproductive rights, and immigration. And it precludes the threat of a Democratic Senate majority leader with clout."

Ryan Cooper, "Somebody primary Andrew Cuomo: This is because despite his self-presentation as an effective technocratic manager who "gets things done," Cuomo is staggeringly inept, practically speaking. He's a sort of effective politician, in a vicious and narrowly short-term sense - good at using deceit, betrayal, and conspiracy to gain power for himself. He would have been a passable courtier for Louis XVI. But only someone who was stupendously ill-informed would let the subway rot as he has."

"Outrageous Massachusetts Drug Bill Would Send You to Prison and Steal Your Car - No Drugs Needed: The proposed measure redefines reality to make a drug crime out of literally nothing. With the support of state law enforcement, a Massachusetts Democratic state representative has filed a drug war bill that would send violators to prison for a mandatory minimum two years (five years for a second offense) and allow police to seize their vehicles - all without the presence of any actual drugs.

"Quit Your Job for a Better One? Not if You Live in Idaho: BOISE, Idaho - Idaho achieved a notable distinction last year: It became one of the hardest places in America for someone to quit a job for a better one. The state did this by making it easier for companies to enforce noncompete agreements, which prevent employees from leaving their company for a competitor."

"New Research Shows Guccifer 2.0 Files Were Copied Locally, Not Hacked: New meta-analysis has emerged from a document published today by an independent researcher known as The Forensicator, which suggests that files eventually published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona were likely initially downloaded by a person with physical access to a computer possibly connected to the internal DNC network. The individual most likely used a USB drive to copy the information. The groundbreaking new analysis irrevocably destroys the Russian hacking narrative, and calls the actions of Crowdstrike and the DNC into question."

"GOP source of fraud allegation vs. Bernie Sanders' wife admits info was hearsay: MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) -- A Republican lawyer who reported independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and his wife to federal officials was passing on information he heard from a GOP lawmaker who said he didn't have direct knowledge of the allegations."

"How much legal trouble is Donald Trump Jr. in? Some other critics of the administration, including Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat who was Clinton's running mate, have suggested the President's son might have engaged in treason by dealing with a foreign adversary -- but that is a possibility that many legal analysts reject. Both Constitution and federal law covering treason provide the United States be actively at war with the foreign adversary for such a charge."

David Dayen, "More Trump Populism: Hiring a Bank Lawyer to Attack CFPB Bank Rules: President Trump and Republicans in Congress have broadcast their every intention to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The president's budget attempted to defund it and leading Republicans have called for its director to be fired and replaced with a more Wall Street-compliant regulator. But much like the bulk of Trump's agenda, that assault remains in the aspirational phase, and the agency continues to do its work. Earlier this month, the CFPB released a major new rule, flat-out barring financial institutions from using forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts to stop class-action lawsuits. Now, Trump has sent out his lead attack dog to overturn the arbitration rule - a former bank lawyer who has used the very tactic the CFPB wants to prevent."

"Award-Winning Journalist Who Broke Story of Jewish Women Barred From Chicago 'Dyke March' Removed From Reporting Duties: An award-winning journalist who broke the story of the group of Jewish women ejected from an LGBTQ march in Chicago last month has been reassigned to non-journalistic duties at the paper which ran the original report, the Windy City Times. Gretchen Rachel Hammond - whose June 24 story caused a national storm after she detailed how three women flying Jewish Pride flags embossed with the Star of David were instructed to leave the gathering by organizers from the Dyke March Collective - confirmed to The Algemeiner on Monday that while she was still employed by the paper, she was not presently engaged in its reporting and writing operations."

"NY Times Rewrites History of Iraq War, Painting U.S. as Noble Democracy-Lover, Iran as Sinister Imperialist: The paper of record advances an amazing feat of reality inversion. The New York Times' Tim Arango took what could have been an interesting topic for war journalism - Iran's increased role in Iraq - and morphed it into a revisionist history of American and Saudi involvement in the Middle East. In doing so, Arango paints the U.S. as a noble, freedom-loving nation on a mission to improve the lives of average Iraqis, and Iran as a sinister imperial force working to expand its sphere of influence across the region."

What makes this news is that it's in The Harvard Business Review. "Is the U.S. Ready for a Single-Payer Health Care System? Ironically, as congressional Republicans have been trying to replace the Affordable Care Act, the ACA's popularity is at an all-time high, and the majority of Americans now believe that it is the federal government's responsibility to provide health care for all Americans. This shift in sentiment suggests that a single-payer system - a 'Medicare for all' - may soon be a politically viable solution to America's health care woes."

"Facial Recognition Coming to Police Body Cameras" - instead of using the bodycams to make a record of police behavior, it's being turned into another way to destroy the anonymity of the crowd.

"These Obama voters snubbed Hillary Clinton - and 'they don't regret what they did': 'What we clearly see in the focus groups is they don't regret what they did.' 'They' are millennials of color who either didn't vote or voted third party. And for Cornell Belcher, the president of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, who was the pollster for the Democratic National Committee under then-Chairman Howard Dean and for both of Barack Obama's campaigns for the White House, this makes them the new swing voters the Democratic Party should be trying to win over."

"Contractor finds himself stuck in ATM, slips notes to customers: On Wednesday, police say the contractor was changing a lock inside the room that connects to the ATM. He managed to leave his phone in the truck, so he was unable to call for help when he found himself locked in. Since the ATM still works, people were stopping by to get cash, and the contractor decided to slip out notes through the receipt slot stating,'Please Help. I'm stuck in here, and I don't have my phone. Please call my boss.'"

"Hiding US Lies About Libyan Invasion: In 2016, when a British parliamentary report demolished the excuse for the U.S. and its allies invading Libya in 2011, it should have been big news, but the U.S. mainstream media looked the other way, reports Joe Lauria."

RIP: "James B. Nutter, Kansas City business and political power broker, dies at age 89: James B. Nutter, a titan in Kansas City's business and political circles, died on Friday. He was 89. Nutter, who founded home mortgage company James B. Nutter & Co. in 1951, was known as a businessman for his forward-thinking policies. James B. Nutter & Co. was among the first mortgage banking companies to offer Veterans Administration loans, extended loans in minority communities that other banks would overlook and eschewed the type of risky subprime loans that helped trigger the Great Recession. 'We lost market share because we didn't make those horrible loans, because it was wrong,' Nutter told The Star in 2012."

RIP: "Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win maths' Fields Medal, dies: The 40-year-old Iranian, a professor at Stanford University, had breast cancer which had spread to her bones. Nicknamed the "Nobel Prize for Mathematics", the Fields Medal is only awarded every four years to between two and four mathematicians under 40.

RIP: Martin Landau, star of Ed Wood and Crimes and Misdemeanors, dies aged 89. Before he began his acting career, Landau was a cartoonist, but I have always remembered him from the Outer Limits episode, "The Man Who Was Never Born". Of course, Mission Impossible was very nearly science fiction, and Space: 1999 was...well, something like that. He was an amazing actor and regarded by many as a great humanitarian.

RIP: "George A Romero: the zombie master whose ideas infected American cinema: With his satirical masterpiece Night of the Living Dead the director revolutionised low-budget film-making and inspired an epidemic of imitators, from World War Z to 28 Days Later."

Guy Saperstein says, "Jon Stewart Should Run for President." I can't really say that I agree, for a number of reasons, but watching this interview he did last year, I did feel a few inspirational moments.

Jon Schwarz, "The Incredible Lost History of How 'Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom' [...] Titled 'The Full Employment Mandate of the Federal Reserve: Its Origins and Importance' - WAIT, don't switch tabs and check Facebook! - it's a history of the economic policies of the civil rights movement, the movement's focus on capturing the Fed's power to generate full employment, how they partially succeeded, and why we have to fight right now to preserve their accomplishments. It deserves to be discussed and carefully studied by absolutely everyone on the left side of the political spectrum - Democrats, Greens, Hillaryites, Berners, Autonomous Collectives, and miscellaneous."

Matt Stoller in The New Republic, "The Return of Monopoly: With Amazon on the rise and a business tycoon in the White House, can a new generation of Democrats return the party to its trust-busting roots? [...] Amazon did not come to dominate the way we shop because of its technology. It did so because we let it. Over the past three decades, the U.S. government has permitted corporate giants to take over an ever-increasing share of the economy. Monopoly - the ultimate enemy of free-market competition - now pervades every corner of American life: every transaction we make, every product we consume, every news story we read, every piece of data we download. Eighty percent of seats on airplanes are sold by just four airlines. CVS and Walgreens have a virtual lock on the drugstore and pharmacy business. A private equity firm in Brazil controls roughly half of the U.S. beer market. The chemical giant Monsanto is able to dictate when and how farmers plant its seeds. Google and Facebook control nearly 75 percent of the $73 billion market in digital advertising. Most communities have one cable company to choose from, one provider of electricity, one gas company. Economic power, in fact, is more concentrated than ever: According to a study published earlier this year, half of all publicly traded companies have disappeared over the past four decades."

Lydia O'Neal and David Sirota in the IBT, "California Health Care Fight May Show Democratic Party Future In Trump Era [...] Amid calls for Democratic unity in the Trump era, the party's move in a deep blue state to block a health care initiative it previously supported has prompted labor movement protests - and promises of primary campaigns or recall efforts to unseat recalcitrant Democrats. More broadly, eight years after Barack Obama mounted a populist presidential campaign and then did not prosecute any major Wall Street executives, the episode has resurrected progressives' allegations that while Democrats may talk a good game, they are not nearly as committed to bold action as their rhetoric suggests."

Paul Street, "The Notion That White Workers Elected Trump Is a Myth That Suits the Ruling Class [...] Another difficulty with the white Trumped-proletarian narrative is that most whites without an allegedly class-defining college degree don't vote. Thanks in part to this silent election boycott, Trump got votes from approximately just a fifth of the 136 million white American adults who lack the higher ed diploma. The image of poor and working-class whites flocking to Trump is a media myth. Like fascist and other right-nationalist political movements of the past, Trump has drawn his main support from the more reactionary segments of the middle class and petite bourgeoisie. Trump Didn't Win the Working Class. The Democrats Lost It. The dismal Democrats have been losing white working-class votes for decades across the long neoliberal era because the party has abandoned workers' lunch-pail economic issues and the language of class in pursuit of corporate sponsorship and votes from the professional class. But there was no mass white working-class outpouring for Trump. Clinton's miserable, centrist campaign and Obama's neoliberal legacy depressed working- and lower-class voter turnout, opening the door for Trump to squeak by - with no small help from racist voter suppression in key states."

"If The DCCC Continues To Pick Congressional Nominees, Instead Of Voters, The Democrats Will Never Win Back Congress [...] Bob Poe has been a major Democratic donor from Florida who was once chairman of the Florida Democratic Party and got a taste of what the DCCC is all about when he ran for Congress last cycle and was successfully opposed by a Pelosi New Dem pick, Val Demings, who predictably, has turned out to be one of the worst Democratic freshmen in Congress. It was hard to get Poe to tell his story but he did share a few words he thought would be helpful for DWT readers to understand. 'From the day Democrats became the minority in the House of Representatives in 2010 until today, I have received literally thousands of emails from the DCCC asking, begging and pleading for contributions to defeat Republicans and regain the majority. Countless donors large and small have donated millions in pursuit of that noble effort. But, what most donors don't know is the dirty little secret that the DCCC spends a significant amount of their scarce resources not defeating Republicans but in defeating Democrats. Each cycle, the DCCC involves itself in Democratic primaries-- even in races that are safely Democratic regardless of who wins the primary. This practice is dishonest and it needs to stop.'"

"The DCCC Thinks What Orange County Needs In Congress Is Another Multimillionaire Who Opposes Single Payer-- Meet Hans Keirstead. [...] "The DCCC strategy for 2018 is two-fold-- run dull, rich, inoffensive centrist candidates in districts Trump lost and pray for a BIG anti-Trump wave."

Amazingly, this is from Matt Yglesias: "Democrats should take the class warfare message to upscale suburbs: It worked for Jeremy Corbyn, and the opposite failed for Jon Ossoff. [...] But there's no reason to believe that more affluent, suburban communities are averse to a strong, policy-based critique of Republican Party economics. The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, after all, made some of its strongest gains in upscale parts of London - winning the Borough of Kensington for the first time ever, for example - and it certainly didn't shy away from drawing a strong economic contrast. "

Brent Budowsky in The Hill, "Sanders triumphs over Trump in healthcare's battle of ideas [...] During the July 4 recess, it was strange to watch many Republican members of the House and Senate trying almost desperately to avoid meeting constituents in public town halls where they would have to answer questions from unhappy voters who are angry, frightened and alarmed by the pending GOP healthcare plans." I'll believe in a Democratic landslide when it happens - I know the party can screw this up.

"Pussy Riot Founder Says American Liberals Scapegoat Putin To Distract From Democrats' Problems: Tolokonnikova: I think just the narrative should be different. I have questions about current narrative Democratic Party defending themselves and defending wealthy people who they do represent. And I think your narrative should be how oligarchs all around the world, they do unite, and though sometimes they don't have a lot of things in common, they don't have common views, but they have just one thing that they really want to do together to protect their wealth. I think you need to look at Putin and Trump from this perspective."

"The New Working Class: The Democrats are ensnared in a dynamic that is wrecking center-left parties around the north Atlantic. Sometimes labeled Pasokification, after the pattern of collapse of the Greek socialist party PASOK, it was diagnosed by scholars on the left decades ago. As the political scientists Adam Przeworski and John Sprague explained in their 1986 book Paper Stones, social democratic parties, built on the assumption that the working class would grow steadily in size and power them to majority, instead were forced to face the unexpected stagnation and decline of their proletarian bases. The only route to future electoral majorities would be to broaden their appeal to encompass sections of the middle class, but this would require diluting the party program, demoralizing and demobilizing its working-class base. Key milestones in this process included Tony Blair's ascent in Britain and the abandonment of Labour's 'Clause IV' - its commitment to 'common ownership of the means of production'; Bill Clinton's welfare reform; and the Hartz plan for labor market liberalization under the German Social Democrats. In the final reckoning, this process could lead these parties to be not only aloof from their old sources of support, but complicit in their social liquidation - certainly, this became true for the Democrats. The near-term victories they won occurred because the effects of their changed class allegiances had not fully sunk in, allowing them to temporarily have their cake and eat it too."

People still don't get that Cory Booker can not sell out to the right wing and corporations, since it is the right-wing that created him in the first place. "How the Booker Window Explains Centrist Implosion: The close makes the man."

"Democrats are doubling down on the same vanilla centrism that helped give us President Trump [...] But they were ad-libbing on the defensive, instead of setting the agenda for their own meeting, or sharing a vision for how to make a unified push for single-payer healthcare. Demonstrators didn't come to see legislators talk about their collective helplessness - they wanted a plan of action."

"Clinton lost because PA, WI, and MI have high casualty rates and saw her as pro-war, study says: Last fall I winced whenever Hillary Clinton or her surrogates promised regime change in Syria. Don't these people get it? Americans don't want to be waging more wars in the Middle East. Now an important new study has come out showing that Clinton paid for this arrogance: professors argue that Clinton lost the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in last year's presidential election because they had some of the highest casualty rates during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and voters there saw Clinton as the pro-war candidate. By contrast, her pro-war positions did not hurt her in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California, the study says; because those states were relatively unscathed by the Middle East wars."

"The Book That Predicted Trump's Rise Offers the Left a Roadmap for Defeating Him: Twenty years ago, Richard Rorty warned that 'a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left' would give rise to a populist demagogue. Is it ready now to take his advice? [...] Labor unions and unskilled workers will sooner or later realize that 'their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported,' he posited. And they will further realize that 'suburban white-collar workers, themselves desperately afraid of being downsized, are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.' At that point, 'something will crack,' he warned. 'The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.'"

"Back to Work: How Democrats can win over Americans left behind in the new economy: In the wake of Donald Trump's election, and amid the wilderness of uncertainty surrounding the presidential race in 2020, one thing is for sure: Democrats need to change the way they talk about the economy. Trump made sweeping promises about jobs that he almost certainly will not keep. 'We're gonna put our people back to work,' he told his supporters. 'I'm going to create jobs, great jobs,' he vowed. 'If you get laid off on Tuesday, I still want your vote. I'll get you a new job, don't worry about it.' Such vague and misleading assurances are almost impossible to combat - especially if Democrats stick to their normal, ineffectual script. Hillary Clinton promised a 'new bargain for the new economy' but she never actually pledged to give Americans what they need in this one. She vowed to provide tax relief to small businesses and invest in infrastructure, but she left it to voters to figure out how something as distant and programmatic as cutting taxes or building a bridge would get them a better paycheck. If Democrats want to win elections, they should imbue Trump's empty rhetoric with a real promise: a good job for every American who wants one. It's time to make a federal jobs guarantee the central tenet of the party's platform. This is the type of simple, straightforward plan that Democrats need in order to connect with Americans who struggle to survive in the twenty-first-century economy. And while a big, New Deal-style government program might seem like a nonstarter in this day and age - just look at the continuing battle over the Affordable Care Act - a jobs guarantee isn't actually so far-fetched.

"The Democratic Party's Deadly Dead-End [...] In 2002, when Margaret Thatcher was asked to name her 'greatest political achievement,' she smiled her best cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile and purred, 'Tony Blair and New Labour.' The true measure of the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution was not how Reagan and Thatcher changed their own parties' policies but that they remade their opposition in their own image and thus marginalized progressive politics for a generation in both their countries, clearing the way for the neoliberal transformation of society." There's an error in the piece, though - the author says the DLC never had a female leader. That's not true, they did: In 2008, the leader of the DLC was Hillary Clinton. It's almost impossible to find references to this on the web now, her name has even been deleted from the list of former leaders on Wikipedia. When the DLC shut down in 2011, all of their historical records were purchased by the Clinton Foundation. Web Archive does show this page, though - note the rotating images of their leaders at the top.

"Until Democrats Can Start Winning Seats In Kansas Again, They'll Never Be A National Party Again : Trump won Kansas' 4th district-- around Wichita-- by a big margin: 60.2% to 33.0%. But KS-04 isn't really Trump country. In the caucuses, Cruz came in first 7,963 (58.3%) to SeƱor Trumpanzee's 3,012 (22.0%). That same day Bernie swept every district in Kansas. He won the 4th with 69.8%-- 6,588 votes to Hillary's 2,846-- but with more than twice as many votes as Trump got! Think about that for a moment. Many in Kansas saw Bernie as the answer to their hopes and their fears... but by November they ultimately judged Hillary as the greater evil compared to Trump. While Trump was coming up with his 60.2% of the vote in KS-04, the incumbent Republican congressman, Mike Pompeo, was being elected over Democratic challenger Dan Giroux 60.7% to 29.6%. But soon after the election Trump appointed Pompeo CIA director, triggering a special election in what was regarded one of the safest Republican districts in America. But it wasn't quite as safe as the GOP (and the DCCC) assumed. After beating a conservative anti-Choice, Republican-lite candidate in the primary, Jim Thompson, a Berniecrat, won Wichita (the biggest city in the state) and Sedgwick County outright. The district-wide total saw Estes with 64,044 (52.2%) and Thompson with a startling 56,435 (46.0%), the best showing a Democrat has had in this district since 1992."

Ryan Grim, "Democrat Beto O'Rourke Takes the Bernie Sanders Fundraising Model Local in Run at Ted Cruz [...] O'Rourke did it in a surprising, and for Cruz, concerning way: $0 from corporate PACs, 46,574 individual donations, and more than 80 percent of the money coming from genuine Texans. In other words, this is not a Jon-Ossoff-style phenomenon where people around the country are throwing money at O'Rourke. What's significant here is what it says about the future prospects of candidates like O'Rourke, who was first elected to Congress in 2012. [...] He won his seat by beating an incumbent Democrat, Sylvestre Reyes, a former border control guard, from the left. Reyes had fought against a resolution O'Rourke had pushed as a city councilman in El Paso that called on the federal government to contemplate legalizing marijuana as a way to tamp down violence on the border. O'Rourke responded by taking him out, and the primary was a pivotal moment in drug policy politics, as it showed politicians there could be electoral consequences for being too trigger-happy in the drug war - a previously unthinkable proposition. Moreover, O'Rourke is a backer of single-payer universal health care. He's ardently pro-choice. And he took on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) at the height of the 2014 Israel-Gaza War, casting one of only eight votes against the Iron Dome rocket defense system. 'I tried to find him on the floor, but I couldn't,' then-Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va.,(who's had his own run-ins with AIPAC) later told the New Yorker. 'I wanted him to switch his vote. Now, he might not have switched it anyway, because - as shocking as it may be - he's in Congress solely to do what he considers to be the right thing. I'm afraid he may have a tough race in November.' O'Rourke did not have a tough race that November, despite electoral threats that were leveled at him after the vote."

"Bernie Sanders and the Progressive Left's Selfless Defense of Obamacare" I don't know if I buy this frame, since even if you didn't care about Obamacare you'd still find the included tax cuts and other clauses in the GOP bills unacceptable, and I really don't see any advantage in letting the GOP have their way, but it's an interesting way to look at it.

Remember when even Markos acknowledged the problem? "EXCERPT: Crashing the Gate: 'I don't get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys -- keep hiring them.' --Nationally prominent Republican official"

"The iron law of online abuse: You could call it something like Cohen's Law - named, of course, for Nick Cohen, the seething thing in the middle pages of the Observer - or the Iron Law of Online Abuse. It goes something like this: every single pundit or journalist who goes on a moral crusade against left-wing social-media crudery will have, very recently, done the exact same things they're complaining against. They will have used insults, personal attacks, expletives, epithets, or unpleasant sexual suggestions; they will have engaged in bullying or spiteful little squabbles; they will have indulged in some form of racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia; they will have encouraged political repression, violence, or censorship; they will have threatened to contact someone's editor or boss or the police or otherwise have conspired to ruin their life. Chances are that they won't have been very good at it, but they will have been mean; they will have used invective. This is always - always - true."

Andy Serkis on Colbert, Gollum reads Trump's tweets.

"If Norman Rockwell painted African-American culture today"

Queen Elizabeth's life in banknotes

Nick Lowe, "Cruel to be Kind"

09 July 2017

This happened once before....

Everyone will tell you radiotherapy is fatiguing. Oh, gods, it bloody is!

I still have idiots in my feeds making up nonsense about how "the left" and Bernie Sanders "ignore" race and gender issues or want to pretend they don't exist or something. These are often accompanied by pictures of either Hillary surrounded by black people or Bernie speaking to largely white crowds. A few weeks back I was sufficiently annoyed by this that I started googling around for pictures of Sanders around people who weren't white, and noticed an interesting thing: Even when he was speaking to black crowds, there were few press pictures of him with attendees. And what pictures the press had published were usually tight-focused on just his face. Are there even photos of him speaking at the Apollo? I never saw them. (Apparently, the press didn't go to the Apollo. They went to another event where he spoke the same day at which they felt more comfortable - one out in the 'burbs where all those big stadiums are, and the crowds are mostly white. Then they complained that the crowd was white.) It's not easy to find pictures of him when he spoke at the NAACP, either. But I did find a couple of shots worth keeping around to remind people that the "black people don't like Bernie" crowd is not reality-based. Like this one, and like this one.
* In any event, there's that other canard, the one about Sanders supporters, but there is already plenty to debunk "BernieBro" mythology, just as there was a year ago, such as, "Sanders supporters are the least racist."

People are disturbed that Trump wants personal loyalty. I thought it was pretty scary back in 2007 when people in the White House thought they swore an oath to the president. I wonder if they actually did. But let's not pretend this "loyalty" thing is new. Party operatives always act like loyalty to the president is more important than policy or the oath to the Constitution. It was overt with Bush, and it was an entire party culture with Obama. No reason Trump wouldn't want the same thing.

As if flying isn't horrible enough already, "New TSA Policy May Lead to Increased Scrutiny of Reading Material: The TSA is testing new requirements that passengers remove books and other paper goods from their carry-on baggage when going through airline security. Given the sensitivity of our reading choices, this raises privacy concerns."

"Democrats Help Corporate Donors Block California Health Care Measure, And Progressives Lose Again: As Republican lawmakers grapple with their unpopular bill to repeal Obamacare, Democrats have tried to present a united front on health care. But for all their populist rhetoric against insurance and drug companies, Democratic powerbrokers and their allies remain deeply divided on the issue - to the point where a political civil war has spilled into the open in America's largest state."
* "Planned Parenthood Supports Shelving Single-Payer (Again)."

You know how sometimes you hear someone say "any Democrat is better than any Republican"? Well, sometimes it's just not true. "Sometimes House Democrats Are So Bad That It Doesn't Pay To Waste Resources Trying To Save Them-- Orlando Blue Dog Stephanie Murphy."
* Howie did a great Reddit thread discussing how to create elective victories for progressives. The first order of business does seem to be defeating sabotage by the Democratic Party.

"Elizabeth Warren: It's time for Democrats to run on single-payer health care: Elizabeth Warren suggests that the Democratic Party adopt the progressive agenda, including a single-payer plan. [...] 'President Obama tried to move us forward with health-care coverage by using a conservative model that came from one of the conservative think tanks that had been advanced by a Republican governor in Massachusetts,' she told The Wall Street Journal in an interview last week. 'Now it's time for the next step. And the next step is single payer.'"

I was delighted to see headlines the other day that four Barclays execs are being prosecuted. But I'm curious about how it's happening this late at all, what with statutes of limitations and all that. Still hasn't been explained to me, but Atrios asks the important question: "Who, exactly, did they piss off?"

Marcy Wheeler, "Democrats Need A Plan For National Voter Protection [...] The House Appropriations Committee just defunded the Election Assistance Commission, which is the only federal entity to help states prevent getting hacked. The head of Trump's 'Election Integrity' Commission, Kris Kobach - fresh off court sanctions for lying to a court - sent a letter to all the Secretaries of State, asking them for their voting rolls (including party affiliation). And then Trump named the loathsome Hans Van Spaskovsky, who has a history of suppressing the vote of people of color, to the Commission. It's probably no accident all this is happening as Trump and Mitch McConnell try to force through a massively unpopular change to ObamaCare. By making showy plans to cheat on a national scale, the Administration may be reassuring Republicans they can keep their job even by selling out their constituents in favor of a tax cut for the wealthy. They'll just do it by cheating even more obviously than they have in the past."

Atrios also quotes from a useful critique of the party leadership: "If you are a Democrat and think Ossoff blew an opportunity and fear more of the same in 2018, you need the DCCC's theory of the electorate to improve." (There's more.)

"Cops Sent Warrant To Facebook To Dig Up Dirt On Woman Whose Boyfriend They Had Just Killed: Everything anyone has ever said about staying safe while interacting with the police is wrong. That citizens are told to comport themselves in complete obeisance just to avoid being beaten or shot by officers is itself bizarre -- an insane inversion of the term 'public servant.' But Philando Castile, who was shot five times and killed by (now former) Officer Jeronimo Yanez, played by all the rules (which look suspiciously like the same instructions given to stay 'safe' during an armed robbery). It didn't matter. [...] To 'win' at killing citizens, you must start the spin immediately. Yanez spun his own, speaking to a lawyer less than two hours after killing Castile. Local law enforcement did the same thing. Documents obtained by Tony Webster show Special Agent Bill O'Donnell issued a warrant to Facebook for 'all information retained' by the company on Diamond Reynolds, Castile's girlfriend. This was to include all email sent or received by that account, as well as 'chat logs,' which presumably means the content of private messages. The warrant also demands any communications that may have been deleted by Reynolds, as well as metadata on photos or videos uploaded to Facebook. It came accompanied with an indefinite gag order. [...] The only upside -- and it's incredibly small given the surrounding circumstances -- is Facebook refused to hand over the information on the grounds that the indefinite gag order was unconstitutional. Faced with this pushback, Minnesota police withdrew the warrant. But in the end, Yanez was acquitted and Philando Castile is still dead -- a man who did nothing more than try to comply with an officer's orders."

A "study" was released that purported to "prove" that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle hurt employment. It used an unreliable control group and it completely ignored chains, but there you are. Econospeak debunks: "Words cannot describe the torment experienced by the data before they confessed what the University of Washington team got them to confess. I can only urge readers with an open mind to study Table 3 carefully. The average wage increase, from the second quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016, for all employees of single site establishments was 18 percent. Eighteen percent! That is an annual increase of almost 8 percent. For two and a quarter years in a row. Not bad. And the number of hours worked of ALL employees of single site establishments? Up 18 percent in a little over two years. That too is an increase of almost 8 percent per annum."

Glenn Greenwald has been saying for months that it's important to wait for facts from reliable sources before running with a story. Just about everyone forgot to do that, caught up in a partisan frenzy. "CNN Journalists Resign: Latest Example of Media Recklessness on the Russia Threat: Three prominent CNN journalists resigned Monday night after the network was forced to retract and apologize for a story linking Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund under congressional investigation. That article - like so much Russia reporting from the U.S. media - was based on a single anonymous source, and now, the network cannot vouch for the accuracy of its central claims." Of course, CNN is not alone among the establishment media in doing this non-journalism journalism.

"DHS Never Ran Audit to See If Votes Were Hacked: The Department of Homeland Security insists that no one hacked actual votes - but admits it never ran an audit to check."

Scott Ritter has his doubts: "Ex-Weapons Inspector: Trump's Sarin Claims Built on 'Lie'."
* "Why Won't the Media Tell the Real Story of Trump's Military Strike in Syria?: If you wish to understand the degree to which the supposedly free western media are constructing a world of half-truths and deceptions to manipulate their audiences, keeping us uninformed and pliant, there could hardly be a better case study than their treatment of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. All of these highly competitive, for-profit, scoop-seeking media outlets separately took identical decisions: first to reject Hersh's latest investigative report, and then to studiously ignore it once it was published in Germany last Sunday. They have continued to maintain an absolute radio silence on his revelations, even as over the past few days they have given a great deal of attention to two stories on the very issue Hersh's investigation addresses."

Jason Leopold, "Secret Report Contradicts US Position On Chelsea Manning Leaks: Prosecutors said WikiLeaks' disclosures about Iraq and Afghanistan posed a major threat to US national security. But it turns out the classified document they cited - newly obtained by BuzzFeed News - said almost the exact opposite. "

"Amazon Bites Off Even More Monopoly Power: Amazon on Friday announced plans to acquire Whole Foods, the high-end grocer. If approved by antitrust enforcers, the $13.7 billion deal would give Amazon control of more than 400 stores, an extensive supply chain and a new source of consumer data. Amazon will argue to federal authorities, most likely the Federal Trade Commission, that the deal should be blessed because the combined entity's share of the American grocery market will be less than 5 percent. But antitrust officials would be naĆÆve to view this deal as simply about groceries. Buying Whole Foods will enable Amazon to leverage and amplify the extraordinary power it enjoys in online markets and delivery, making an even greater share of commerce part of its fief." They can wipe out the very people who were benefiting from the existence of Whole Foods.
* "The big consequence of the Amazon-Whole Foods deal no one's talking about: Amazon has proved its power to disrupt markets. Now its proposed purchase of Whole Foods has some small farmers and food producers worried that they could be next in line. So say organic activists, farmers' advocates and economists who are just beginning to process the potential ramifications of Amazon's bid to buy Whole Foods, the country's largest organic retailer."

"How the Student Loan Industry, Trump, and Neoliberals Are Creating a Nation of Serfs: Most of the discussion about student debt in the United States has centered on its excessiveness, the negative impact it has on home-buying for the next generation, various refinancing schemes, and (for the grossly uninformed) how borrowers simply need to 'pay what they owe.' However, the untold story of student loan debt in the United States is that it is being used as a form of economic terrorism designed to not only redistribute wealth from everyday Americans to the elite, but also to undermine and degrade American democracy as a whole."

"Chicago won't allow high school students to graduate without a plan for the future: CHICAGO - To graduate from a public high school in Chicago, students will soon have to meet a new and unusual requirement: They must show that they've secured a job or received a letter of acceptance to college, a trade apprenticeship, a gap year program or the military. Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said he wants to make clear that the nation's third-largest school system is not just responsible for shepherding teenagers to the end of their senior year, but also for setting them on a path to a productive future."

"Missouri Republicans Lower St. Louis Minimum Wage From $10 To $7.70: If you thought the minimum wage only moved in one direction, then Missouri Republicans have a surprise for you. After St. Louis leaders raised the wage floor for workers within city limits, the state GOP recently passed what's known as a statewide 'preemption' law, forbidding localities from taking such matters into their own hands. On Friday, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R) said he would let the law go into effect, thereby barring cities and counties from setting a minimum wage higher than the state level."

"Nina Turner on Why Ossoff Lost in Georgia Special Election [...] I think also the message was that people are not looking for folks to run 'Republican lite.' Either you are going to run on the values of the Democratic party, be authentic about those principles and those values, or you're not. But people don't want a substitute for the real thing, and that is what Mr. Ossoff was doing. He was being a substitute for what a real Republican is, and that district is a very strong Republican stronghold, no doubt about it."

Pareen, "This Is Normal: What most of the worst people in Donald Trump's administration have in common is that they are Republicans. This simple fact is obscured sometimes by the many ways in which Trump is genuinely an aberration from the political norm - like his practice of naked nepotism rather than laundering the perpetuation of class advantage through a 'meritocratic' process - and by the fact that many of the most vocal online spokespeople for 'the resistance' ignore the recent history of the Republican Party in favor of a Trump-centric theory of How Fucked Up Everything Is. But it is necessary for liberals, leftists, and Democrats to actually be clear on the fact that the Republican Party is responsible for Trump. The Democrats' longterm failure to make a compelling and all-encompassing case against conservatism and the GOP as institutions, rather than making specific cases against specific Republican politicians, is one of the reasons the party is currently in the political wilderness."

Blimey, Noam Chomsky in the NYT: "On Trump and the State of the Union [...] The Sanders campaign showed that a candidate with mildly progressive (basically New Deal) programs could win the nomination, maybe the election, even without the backing of the major funders or any media support. There's good reason to suppose that Sanders would have won the nomination had it not been for shenanigans of the Obama-Clinton party managers. He is now the most popular political figure in the country by a large margin."

"KING: We are losing the battle against police brutality in America: It's hard for me to write this, but we must be honest about our status in the fight against police brutality in America. We are losing. I have two primary metrics for that conclusion. First, 2017 is on pace to be the deadliest year ever measured for the number of people killed by police in our country. We can never claim to be winning the battle against police brutality if American police are killing more and more people. Period. Secondly, even the most egregious officers, in the most heinous cases of police violence, with the most overwhelming evidence, are still beating the charges against them."

"Texas Couple Exonerated 25 Years After Being Convicted of Lurid Crimes That Never Happened. The couple's prosecution in 1992 was part of a wave of cases across the country amid an episode of mass hysteria known as the Satanic Panic. Beginning in the 1980s, accusations flew that the childcare industry had been infiltrated by bands of Satanists hell-bent on brainwashing and sexually abusing young children. The Kellers' exoneration closes a decades-long chapter of profound injustice for a couple that paid an exceptionally high price for the credulousness of local law enforcement."

Remember Whitewater? Remember how Republican operatives turned what was no more than a failed financial decision into a federal case just to attack the Clintons? Well, Vermont has a rich, right-wing crackpot, too, and he has been doing his damnedest to turn a bad financial decision by Jane Sanders into a federal case, too. It shows every sign of being, as Bernie put it, "nonsense," but he's gotten the FBI involved and the difference between this and Whitewater is that Clintonite Democrats have been working right alongside him to promote the story of the vast corruption of Jane and Bernie. Interestingly, they are linking to the Politico story without having read it, or perhaps hoping no one will read past the headline.

"How Andrew Cuomo broke the New York subway [...] Cuomo, who has been governor since 2011, is basically the exact opposite of this visionary leader. Instead of recognizing the absolutely vital nature of the subway, he has been shockingly hostile to public transit in general, deliberately undermining and underfunding it from the beginning of his term. He has done nothing about the cost problem. Lacking both a price fix and sufficient outside revenue to stabilize its finances, the MTA has repeatedly resorted to fare hikes and borrowing to cover its spending, leading to a huge debt overhang. (On the other hand, Cuomo did spend billions on a lousy bridge after coring out all the transit additions that were supposed to go with it.)"

Juan Cole, "What Trump Didn't Know About Herat When He Barred Robotics Students From Visiting the U.S.: The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, has denied visas to six Afghan high school students from the city of Herat to accompany their invention in robotics to the United States for a demonstration. The girls made the 500 mile journey from the western city to the capital of Kabul to apply for visitor visas. They were rejected. Their project, however, was accepted by First Global Challenge, which organizes events for teenage high school students."

David Dayen, "This Is How the Trump Administration Will Privatize Our Infrastructure: Public-private partnerships have been disasters for American cities. Naturally, Trump loves them."

Matt Stoller, "If Silicon Valley's Billionaires Want To Fix Our Rotten Politics, They Should Start At Home: We've returned to the point where the enlightened businessmen decide to save the Democratic party. It never works."
* "Progressives Skewer Silicon Valley Billionaires' Newest Political Pet Project: 'Win The Future' is drawing criticism as a tone-deaf attempt to reshape the Democratic Party."

"Centrist Democrats are now the great defenders of social justice? Please. [...] It follows that there is no way to achieve a full measure of justice for all downtrodden groups without a huge left-wing economic reform. Full employment and a completed welfare state would strike a massive blow against racism and sexism - and even protect against police brutality. Strong protections for workers' rights would help prevent abuse of immigrants. An attack on monopolies and Wall Street swindlers would help minority businesses and work against racist banking practices. Left-wing economics would not completely solve social justice problems, of course. Much else would need to be done. But it would help a lot - and better still, it would help virtually every oppressed group simultaneously."

"Dems try new slogan: 'Have you seen the other guys?'" How can anyone take these people seriously?

"'Bipartisanship' means 'I don't understand what politics is': What is politics? Politics is a struggle between competing interests. What is politics not? Politics is not an ultimately unimportant game that you play in order to make friends. If you write about or participate in politics for living, please do not fuck this up."

Josh Barro has an interesting take, since no one can admit that no, we don't actually need to raise taxes on the working/middle-classes to pay for health care. It's probably the right take within the context of a discourse that still acts like we're on the gold standard. Of course, it is also based on an incorrect premise, since (a) Warren says we need to support Medicare-for-All and (b) Sanders doesn't actually oppose markets. But making a list of corporate practices that make life miserable and talking about putting a stop to them - well, that actually sounds like a good thing to do. "The formula Democrats need: less Clintonism, less Sandersism, more Warrenism. [...] Democrats should make a list of corporate practices that grind people's gears and ask whether there's a compelling economic rationale for them. If there isn't, they should propose to prohibit them, penalize them, or at least have the government stop subsidizing them. And they should explain how doing so will make it easier for people to buy the things they need to live the way they want, with their own earnings." It's still going to take some work - this is about a restoration of a lot of things we've lost in the last few decades, like those old post-Depression SEC regs, and taking antitrust seriously again. Selling it to the public shouldn't be that hard, though - I mean, everybody hates Comcast.

Ryan Cooper, "Kill the private health insurance industry before it kills you [...] Bill Clinton's experience convinced Democrats that they couldn't risk offending the health-care industry when attempting reform. But Barack Obama's effort to buy them off clearly didn't work either. ObamaCare and Medicaid are the most politically vulnerable parts of the health-care system. The former is vulnerable precisely because it has so many compromises and handouts for private insurance. But the moment Republicans took power, they immediately plotted to destroy those weak points, with the savings shoveled into the pockets of the rich."

"Even the IMF says austerity doesn't work. It's the zombie idea that will not die: Politicians say that it's sound finance, when in fact it's a tool used to demonise immigrants and profit from 'working-class concerns'."

Interview by Jon Schwarz, "Ralph Nader: The Democrats Are Unable to Defend the U.S. from the 'Most Vicious' Republican Party in History: "Do you want me to go through the history of the decline and decadence of the Democratic Party? I'm going to give you millstones around the Democratic Party neck that are milestones."

Newsweek, "Democrats Want a Socialist to Lead Their Party More Than a Capitalist [...] The poll published this week from Morning Consult/Politico asked respondents what they thought of Pelosi's job performance. Forty-one percent of Democrats thought she should stay as minority leader while 27 percent thought she should be replaced. Thirty-six percent of Democrats thought things had gone mostly well for the party under Pelosi while 19 percent said mostly bad and 27 percent said neither good nor bad. But when asked if a hypothetical replacement should be a socialist or capitalist, more Democrats opted for socialism. Thirty-five percent said it's somewhat or very important the replacement be a socialist while 31 percent felt the same for a capitalist."

"Democrats are still obsessed with Jill Stein. They should start obsessing over nonvoters instead. [...] There are two categories of non-two-party votes in the contemporary American political climate, and they're regarded differently. The first is the third-party vote, which, especially on the left side of the aisle, is considered burglary. The second is total abstention, which is considered inevitable, and therefore hardly factors into the mainstream media's election postmortems. In neither scenario does the losing major party (in this case the Democrats) take responsibility for failing to move potential voters to act on its behalf. [...] If these are the only variables of interest to us - the number of ballots affirmatively cast for Trump, Clinton, Stein, and maybe Johnson - then yeah, the Stein-as-spoiler argument makes some sense. But here's another number, one that ought to change your perspective: 87,810. That's how many Michigan voters showed up to the polls, cast ballots, and declined to vote for a presidential candidate at all."

John Nichols in The Nation, "A Progressive Electoral Wave Is Sweeping the Country: The Trump-obsessed big media are mostly ignoring it, but Bernie-inspired activists are winning across the country - including in districts that went for Trump in 2016. [...] Too radical? Too bold? Not at all. Backed by a coalition that included veteran activists who fought segregation, along with newcomers who got their first taste of politics in Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign, Lumumba won 55 percent of the vote in a May Democratic primary that saw him oust the centrist incumbent mayor and sweep past several other senior political figures in Mississippi's largest city. A month later, he secured a stunning 93 percent of the vote in a general election that drew one of the highest turnouts the city has seen in years. [...] This is the frustrating part of Lumumba's 'shock waves around the world' calculus: His election should have sent a shock wave. The same holds true for the election of progressives in local races from Cincinnati to St. Louis to South Fulton, Georgia, in a season of resistance that began with the Women's March on Washington and mass protests against President Trump's Muslim ban but has quickly moved to polling places across the country."

"What Is the Far Right's Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority: Nancy MacLean, author of an intellectual biography of James McGill Buchanan, explains how this little-known libertarian's work is influencing modern-day politics."
* Sam Seder talked to MacLean about this on The Majority Report.

Beat the Press, "Thomas Friedman Whines About His Lost TPP: Thomas Friedman, who is legendary for his boldly stated wrong assertions, got into the game again making absurd claims about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the great loss the U.S. suffers from it going down.

Laura Flanders interview with Naomi Klein on No is Not Enough: Yes to the People's Movement. It's not enough to object to Trump, we have to be ready to promote positive policies to counteract the immoral proposals that are bound to come.

"Why the Democrats Won't Wake Up [...] Longtime sixth-district resident and scholar Billy Michael Honor nailed it in Huffington Post, observing that Ossoff's comfortably centrist and noncommittal message 'lacked any compelling progressive vision for the future. It also lacked any way to substantively convince the average politically uninterested citizen why they should give a damn about the Democratic Party. The message simply says, 'vote for us, we won't be as bad as the other group.'"

Weirdly, in Britain: "Top Tories in revolt against May over public spending Theresa May is facing a chorus of Tory demands for a radical overhaul of state funding for public services as cabinet ministers and senior Conservative MPs back higher pay for millions of NHS workers, more cash for schools and a 'national debate' on student debt. The prime minister's waning authority was highlighted as her health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and education secretary Justine Greening lobbied for an easing of austerity and senior Conservative MPs insisted public services would be in growing peril without an urgent loosening of the purse strings."

I ran into this thing from the wayback machine with clips of Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump at various times advocating single-payer (or some kind of real, national health care) - never mind what Jimmy Dore is saying, it's just a reminder of how much we forget.

Meanwhile in Canberra, will a new generation become fans of the late John Brosnan? Perhaps it is already happening: "John Brosnan's 1960s pre-internet fanzines sought by new fan at National Library." Not so sure about the comparison to Seinfeld, however.

"How Paul Robeson found his political voice in the Welsh valleys: African American star Robeson built his singing career in the teeth of racism in the early 1900s. But his radicalism was spurred on in Britain - by a chance meeting with a group of Welsh miners. [...] I knew that, in the winter of 1929, Paul had been returning from a matinee performance of Show Boat [in London] when he heard male voices wafting from the street. He stopped, startled by the perfect harmonisation and then by the realisation that the singers, when they came into view, were working men, carrying protest banners as they sang. [...] Some 50 years later, [his son] Pauli Robeson visited the Talygarn Miners' Rehabilitation Centre and met an elderly man who'd been present on that day in 1929. The old miner talked of how stunned the marchers had been when Robeson attached himself to their procession: a huge African American stranger in formal attire incongruous next to the half-starved Welshmen in their rough-hewn clothes and mining boots."

"This woman's name appears on the Declaration of Independence. So why don't we know her story?"

"Jimi Hendrix Park Opens at Last, With a Purple Flourish: SEATTLE - Jimi Hendrix's looping signature greets visitors at the park bearing his name, here in his hometown. The eye-catching purple script is among many personal touches that pay homage to the musician in Jimi Hendrix Park, which was formally christened in 2006 but didn't open until Saturday, after a decade of permit delays and financial woes."

RIP: Norman Pollack, 1933-2017: "Norman's legacy stands tall, from his days in the civil rights movement to his tenure at Yale and Michigan State University, he never stopped fighting for social justice."

RIP: Pete Shotton, 75, one of the original Quarrymen, the group formed by his best pal, John Lennon, which eventually became The Beatles. I missed this when it happened in April.

"Russian Photographer Captures The Cutest Squirrel Photo Session Ever

The Foreigner Official Trailer #1 (2017) Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan Action Movie HD. Nah, he doesn't look a bit like him. At all.

I was going to link to the Beatles' "No Reply" on YouTube here to go with the title of this post, but it seems to have been effectively purged, because all I could find were covers. *frowny face*