#demands for congressional courage

[beardedmrbean]

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award.

The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats.

That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics.

All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area.

It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Other nations heeded such advice with more limited shutdowns (including keeping schools open) and did not experience our losses.

Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence.

The Biden administration tried to censor this Stanford doctor, but he won in court

Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government.

Others questioned the six-foot rule used to shut down many businesses as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.” Yet not only did the rule result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, the media further ostracized dissenting critics.

Again, Fauci and other scientists did little to stand up for these scientists or call for free speech to be protected. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the result of massive social and economic costs.

I spoke at the University of Chicago with Bhattacharya and other dissenting scientists in the front row a couple of years ago. After the event, I asked them how many had been welcomed back to their faculties or associations since the recognition of some of their positions.

They all said that they were still treated as pariahs for challenging the groupthink culture.

Now the scientific community is recognizing the courage shown by Bhattacharya and others with its annual Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom.

So what about all of those in government, academia, and the media who spent years hounding these scientists?

Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden’s social-media censorship

Biden Administration officials and Democratic members targeted Bhattacharya and demanded his censorship. For example, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) attacked  Bhattacharya and others who challenged the official narrative during the pandemic. Krishnamoorthi expressed outrage that the scientists were even allowed to testify as “a purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation.”

Journalists and columnists also supported the censorship and blacklisting of these scientists. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik decried how “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford allowed these scientists to speak at a scientific forum. He was outraged that, while “Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement,” he was an event organizer. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled “The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.” 

Then there are those lionized censors at Twitter who shadow-banned Bhattacharya. As former CEO Parag Agrawal generally explained, the “focus [was] less on thinking about free speech … [but[ who can be heard.”

None of this means that Bhattacharya or others were right in all of their views. Instead, many of the most influential voices in the media, government, and academia worked to prevent this discussion from occurring when it was most needed.

There is still a debate over Bhattacharya’s “herd immunity” theories, but there is little debate over the herd mentality used to cancel him.

The Academy was right to honor Bhattacharya. It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.

[samueldays]

Racial Gerrymandering

This New York Times Article (archive) can be practice in noticing the thing separately from the name. It doesn't use the word "gerrymandering", but that is what it's calling for.

Most other states would be ashamed of the tongue lashing issued against the government of Alabama on Tuesday by a trio of federal judges, all of whom were clearly furious that the state ignored their order to create a second majority-Black congressional district.

This is court-ordered racial gerrymandering, but I suppose the NYT doesn't want such negatively-loaded terms near their client race.

In doing so, Alabama illustrated how contempt for the law — not to mention for equal representation and basic fairness — is an animating value in whole swaths of America. There are days when it feels as if defiance is defining large parts of the country, as represented by so many politicians who feel comfortable only when they are resisting someone else’s agenda rather than coming up with their own.

The journalist cries out 'basic fairness' as he demands your state be gerrymandered. Journalism delenda est. When the NYT has the reputation of the Daily Mail, I will be happy.

The journo's take on 'equal representation' is race-first quotas, and as for 'law', the Voting Rights Act talks about the right to vote and participate in the political process with an end in mind of electing a representative; the court interpreted "opportunity [...] to elect representatives of their choice" very broadly to demand blacks as a racial collective must get two set-aside districts so they can racially win two elections to get representatives, plural, of their choice to be elected. This has a severe case of Proves Too Much regarding every other protected class minority. Reductio ad absurdum.

An aggravating context, then, is the fact that congressional districts are a finite and small number in a zero-sum game. To be specific, Alabama has seven. Demanding two of those for a specific minority is a hell of a lot.

Demanding any districts be racial set-asides at all is dubious gerrymandering, but from a glance at the census data, Alabama's population does not even divide neatly into racial sevenths to gerrymander with. The state is majority white, between one and two sevenths black, less than one seventh hispanic, less than one seventh 'other'. How do you feel about a court-mandated hispanic-majority district too? 🙄

The census brings me to another issue: the implicit requirements of surveillance state and segregation that are needed to get these black-majority districts.

To make it informationally possible to draw black-majority districts, one needs to know where the blacks live, in great detail, with recent updates. It is not obvious that the state tracking this is a good thing.

And to make it topologically possible to draw black-majority districts, one needs the blacks to clump very tightly together. The more black-majority districts one tries to draw, the more every other district in Alabama must be a whiteland. Again, zero-sum game. (Math below.)

Perhaps you want to argue that this is still worth it! But to argue for the racial gerrymandering you should face the costs and trade-offs. You should have the courage to say "I want segregation, so I can have black-majority districts", because a high degree of segregation is a prerequisite to black-majority districts. Can't draw black-majority districts through a thoroughly integrated population.

The NYT instead decides to go with guilt-by-association to George Wallace, pretending it's a continuous history from a man who wanted segregation to Alabama refusing segregated districts. Piss on journalists.

---

Electoral district math: at seven districts, each one gets 14-15% of the population. (The current districts are all in this range.) Alabama has a 26% black population. To be the majority in two districts, one has to assign at least 8 percentage points of blacks to each. That's 16% in those two, leaving 10% for the other five. Possibly even more lopsided if the black majority districts are to have more margin for error and discrete subdistricts.

Splitting the remaining 10% or less gives an average of two percentage points or less in the remaining five districts. In practice some will cluster unevenly around that average, because Alabama's black population is very unevenly distributed.

Meanwhile, the majority-black districts by necessity have fewer whites than average for the state, so the remaining districts must have more whites than average, in a state that was over two-thirds white to begin with. Moving people around between districts does not change their sum.

The cost of two majority-black districts is that the other five districts will be so white, the whites in one of those districts outnumber the blacks in all five of those districts put together. 5:1 is a lower bound, 10:1 is likely to happen due to nonlinear scaling.

Trivia: with arbitrarily complex boundaries, you could gerrymander Alabama to have a whole 3 majority-black districts with a slim eight-to-seven majority, at the cost of the other 4 districts getting white:black ratios exceeding thirty-to-one.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Bill Bramhall | Copyright 2021 Tribune Content Agency: "The Big Lie"

* * * *

Rudy recants the Big Lie.

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

JUL 27, 2023

On Wednesday, a small measure of accountability was achieved when Rudy Giuliani retracted a heinous lie promoted to overturn the 2020 election. The truth prevailed, as it always does (over time). The retraction provides vindication and validation to those who believe in the truth. That hard-won victory was achieved because of the courage and determination of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two women who volunteered to count ballots in Georgia’s 2020 election. Their victory spotlights one of the most maddening aspects of the MAGA era: Watching politicians lie with impunity.

It is not just that MAGA politicians lie with impunity. It is the fact that they know they are lying, and they know you know they are lying. But they don’t care. The lie is the point. Once spoken, it is impossible to completely undo the damage caused by a lie. And the damage caused always exceeds the narrow point of the lie. In a culture where leading members of a major political party do not condemn lies but celebrate them, lies become a solvent that dissolves the sinew of truth that binds our nation.

Who benefits from a culture of lies? A party that believes it cannot fairly compete for control of a government grounded in principles, truth, and decency. A party that knows it has no future and nothing to lose by debasing itself in a cesspool of deceit. A party that has expelled its principled members to make way for grifters, narcissists, and criminals. The Republican Party.

In the GOP’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, Trump and his co-conspirators falsely accused two civic-minded election volunteers of being “vote scammers” who delivered “suitcases” of fraudulent votes for Biden into a Georgia election center. The lie was so transparently false that no one truly believed it. But the lie was the point.

The Georgia Secretary of State immediately disproved the lie with a careful explication of the video on which the lie was based. But the truth did not stop Trump or Rudy Giuliani from repeating the lie about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The lie, once uttered, took flight and gave permission to 80% of Republicans to claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. And it destroyed the lives of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

They had to flee their homes, disconnect their phones, and stop using their names because of death threats. Two private citizens were repeatedly and falsely attacked—by name—by the President of the United States and his mob lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. And leading Republicans did not merely stand by in silence. They supported the baseless lie by voting against the Congressional count of electoral ballots, demanding that the ballots be returned to the states for sham “investigations” of non-existent fraud to create an excuse for overriding the will of the people.

In the GOP culture of lies, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were acceptable collateral damage, innocent victims whose lives did not matter to the Republican Party.

But Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss fought back. They sued Rudy Giuliani for defamation. They demanded that Giuliana turn over his phone so they could examine his text messages about the 2020 election to prove that Giuliani knew he was lying about Freeman and Moss.

Giuliani resisted their efforts to secure his phone, but they persisted. In desperation, Giuliani finally admitted that he lied about Freeman and Moss. He made the admission as part of a legal strategy to argue that the contents of his phone are no longer relevant to proving that he lied about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. See CNN, Rudy Giuliani concedes he made defamatory statements about Georgia election workers.

In the stipulation, Giuliani says he “does not contest” the following:

That his statements about Freeman and Moss were “defamatory per se” [a concession that the statements were false and injured the reputation of Freeman and Moss].

That his statements about Freeman and Moss were false.

Freeman and Moss suffered damages because of Giuliani’s intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Those admissions gut the claims of Trump, Giuliani, and others that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election in Georgia. The admissions are a HUGE deal that are orders of magnitude more significant than the stories about Hunter Biden that are headlining every news source known to man. A key conspirator in the attempted coup has admitted that one of the central lies animating the coup is false.

That is big news, not merely because the truth prevailed. It is big news because, on the day the news broke, the GOP was unfazed that its “stolen election narrative” was gutted. It is big news because it demonstrates that Trump had no reasonable basis to believe his lies about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

And it is big news because finally, for once, there is blazing clarity in exposing the falsity of the Big Lie. Those occasions are rare. But when they occur, we should catch our breath and savor the moment of truth. And thank the two women who brought us to this point: Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[planetofsnarfs]

audio version available above

You’ve heard the story. Thursday’s congressional session turned nasty when Marjorie Taylor Greene (R/Georgia) accused Jasmine Crockett (D/Texas) of not being able to properly read due to “fake eyelashes,” and the United States descended another step into a New Normal where stupidity is wisdom, childishness is courage, and cruelty is Christianity.

Greene is a zealot theocrat who apparently “learned” American history from pseudohistorian David Barton’s Post-it notes. She has proudly proclaimed, “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”Pluralistic democracy ain’t her thing.

She’s also the dullest of Crayons. In the past, Greene gaffes have included warnings about the “Gazpacho police,” a secret Bill Gates scheme to grow fake meat in a “peach tree dish,” and of course, those Jewish space lasers purposefully burning California forests so the Evil Libs can ram climate change policy down America’s throat. (Another gem from MTG. She once reasoned that ice age people didn’t pay taxes for environmental policy and did just fine.)

Yeah. She’s as sharp as soup. And she’s part of the larger cult of MAGA mindlessness that worships the convicted sexual predator and salivating Day One Dictator who once inquired about��nuking hurricanes and has made millions selling merch of his own mugshot.

But beyond the stupidity, what frustrates me most is the celebrated cruelty. MTG’s eyelashes jab was ad-hom bullying that should have prompted the entire House Oversight Committee to oust her and issue a formal apology. Alas, New Normal allows Greene to hair-pull a professional lawmaker with only a limited rebuke, some click-baity media attention, and a collective national shrug: “Eh…America’s wheels came off long ago. I guess we’ll watch the crash.”

I also don’t condone Crockett’s childish return volley. Many of my fellow lefties cheered “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body” as warranted retaliation, a defensive return swing. Yet where they see rightly turned tables, I see a surrender of necessary high ground when critical times require an adult in the room. The “they made us do it” rationalizations ring false, as they reduce our representatives down to petty reactionaries instead of tone-setting agents of high-ground restoration.

Millions of U.S. Christians are cheering Marjorie Taylor Greene, or at the very least, they consider her outbursts a kind of fearless kick at the Devil. They’ve skipped past the best teaching of Jesus (humility, charity, forgiveness, love) to embrace Old Testament justice. The biblical Yahweh was proudly jealous, territorial, vengeful, even lethal. He took what he wanted, subjugated the Other, and shredded the opposition. God’s holy-war violence was largely punative, and MAGA America seems far too ready to exact similar retribution. “They dare to defy; we must make them pay.”

And who is “They?” American Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Mormons, JWs, spirituals, seculars, atheists, even Catholics and progressive Christians. Cruelty culture is defined by its enemies. Hence, theirs is a micronation of borders and walls, indigenous and foreigners, patriots and traitors. The planet is a temporary resource to be scraped and raped. American roads are most free when clogged with exhaust fumes and Trump flags. Dominance demands they razor-wire the rivers, crush the non-capitalists, and even shoot the dog.

It’s true that the Christ of scripture wasn’t always a good guy (check Dr. David Madison’s work on “bad Jesus”), but it’s astounding to see so many Christians ignore the New Testament love verses to instead praise the more savage savior Donald Trump. 

I Timothy 6 says not to love money? Trump loves money. 1 Cor 5 commands not to associate with an immoral brother or sister in the faith? Trump is immoral. Philippians 2 teaches humility? Trump is an egomaniac. Romans 12 says not to take revenge? Trump smirks that he “loves getting even with people.” Matthew 5 tells Christians to turn the other cheek? Trump tells his crowd to “knock the crap” out of a protester.

And his minions cheer. Stupidity is wisdom, childishness is courage, and cruelty is Christianity.

I don’t know where this road takes us, but like you, I feel the gravity of the descent. The hateful and spiteful no longer hide in the shadows, and even those who might think Marjorie Taylor Green is an idiot might still empower her for the one characteristic they most admire: her inhumanity.

[arpov-blog-blog]

..."Special counsel Jack Smith's team has uncovered previously undisclosed details about former President Donald Trump's refusal to help stop the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol three years ago as he sat watching TV inside the White House, according to sources familiar with what Smith's team has learned during its Jan. 6 probe.

Many of the exclusive details come from the questioning of Trump's former deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, who first started working for Trump as a teenager three decades ago and is now a paid senior adviser to Trump's reelection campaign. Scavino wouldn't speak with the House select committee that conducted its own probe related to Jan. 6, but -- after a judge overruled claims of executive privilege last year -- he did speak with Smith's team, and key portions of what he said were described to ABC News.

New details also come from the Smith team's interviews with other White House advisers and top lawyers who -- despite being deposed in the congressional probe -- previously declined to answer questions about Trump's own statements and demeanor on Jan. 6, 2021, according to publicly released transcripts of their interviews in that probe.

Sources said Scavino told Smith's investigators that as the violence began to escalate that day, Trump "was just not interested" in doing more to stop it.

Sources also said former Trump aide Nick Luna told federal investigators that when Trump was informed that then-Vice President Mike Pence had to be rushed to a secure location, Trump responded, "So what?" -- which sources said Luna saw as an unexpected willingness by Trump to let potential harm come to a longtime loyalist.

House Democrats and other critics have openly accused Trump of failing to do enough that day, with the Democrat-led House select committee accusing Trump of committing "an utter moral failure" and "a clear dereliction of duty." But what sources now describe to ABC News are the assessments and first-hand accounts of several of Trump's own advisers who stood by him for years -- and were among the few to directly engage with him throughout that day.

As the House investigation established, after Trump finished his remarks at the "Save America" rally early on Jan. 6, as protesters began making their way to the Capitol, Trump returned to the White House, where he and Meadows settled into chairs around a table in the Oval Office dining room to watch TV coverage of the event.

But, as also previously recounted in public reports, when Scavino and other White House officials learned that rioters had violently stormed the Capitol, they rushed into the dining room to urge Trump to help calm the situation.

According to what sources said Scavino told Smith's team, Trump was "very angry" that day -- not angry at what his supporters were doing to a pillar of American democracy, but steaming that the election was allegedly stolen from him and his supporters, who were "angry on his behalf." Scavino described it all as "very unsettling," sources said.

After unsuccessfully trying for up to 20 minutes to persuade Trump to release some sort of calming statement, Scavino and others walked out of the dining room, leaving Trump alone, sources said. That's when, according to sources, Trump posted a message on his Twitter account saying that Pence "didn't have the courage to do what should have been done."

Trump's aides told investigators they were shocked by the post. Aside from Trump, Scavino was the only other person with access to Trump's Twitter account, and he was often the one actually posting messages to it, so when the message about Pence popped up, Cipollone and another White House attorney raced to find Scavino, demanding to know why he would post that in the midst of such a precarious situation, sources said."

Scavino said he was as blindsided by the post as they were, insisting to them, "I didn't do it," according to the sources.

Some of Trump's aides then returned to the dining room to explain to Trump that a public attack on Pence was "not what we need," as Scavino put it to Smith's team. "But it's true," Trump responded, sources told ABC News. Trump has publicly echoed that sentiment since then."

[newswireml]

'Drive out Santos' caravan demands Rep. Santos be expelled from Congress#Drive #Santos #caravan #demands #Rep #Santos #expelled #Congress

A group of New York residents protested Saturday around the city’s 3rd congressional district calling to expel Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., from Congress after new allegations against the embattled Republican came to light.  The “Drive out Santos” caravan was organized by a number of groups calling for Santos’ expulsion, including MoveOn, Courage for America, and Concerned Citizens of…

[malenipshadows]

Why is common sense so uncommon?  Why are there so many politicians and so few statesmen and stateswomen?

Corden | Meyers | Kimmel | Colbert | Conan

[mariacallous]

On 24 October, 30 members of the House Democratic Progressive Caucus released a letter to President Biden calling for a “proactive diplomatic push” on Kyiv to work toward a ceasefire and “direct [US] engagement” with Moscow to end the Russia-Ukraine war. One week earlier, Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy’s no “blank check” for Ukraine comment raised questions about future congressional support for US assistance to that embattled country.

The letter, even though it has now been withdrawn, and McCarthy’s comment are unfortunate. Vladimir Putin will take encouragement from both as Russia wages its war. The suggestion of cracks in US backing for Ukraine will increase his incentives to continue fighting.

The war has not gone as Putin hoped. The Russian army failed to take Kyiv. More recently, the Ukrainian military, fighting with skill, courage and tenacity, has driven Russian forces back in the east and south of the country and appears poised to recover further territory.

Crucial to Ukraine’s success, however, is the flow of US arms. The Kremlin would like nothing more than a future Congress cutting funds for the weapons on which Ukraine depends.

Moscow also would welcome US pressure on Kyiv to seek a ceasefire or American readiness to negotiate directly with Russia on a ceasefire or broader settlement. While one can understand the desire for an end to the war, the sides at present have nothing to negotiate. The original Russian demands of Ukraine – including neutrality, demilitarization and recognition of Crimea as Russian and of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” as independent states – amount to the Ukrainians’ total capitulation.

Moreover, despite battlefield reverses, Russia’s demands have increased. Moscow now wants Kyiv to recognize its annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, even though Russian forces do not control all of those regions. Why should Kyiv engage in a negotiation that Russian demands mean would focus on how much Ukrainian territory to concede?

Revelations of torture chambers, summary executions, filtration camps and other war crimes in places such as Bucha, Mariupol and Izium have hardened the Ukrainians’ resolve to resist. From Kyiv’s perspective, Russia’s terms offer little more than surrender and subjecting more of its citizens to similar atrocities. Unsurprisingly, the Ukrainians will not agree.

Even a ceasefire now poses danger for Ukraine. Nothing suggests the Russians would withdraw as part of a ceasefire arrangement, so it would mean leaving Russian units occupying Ukrainian territory. Ukrainians have seen this before: the February 2015 Minsk II ceasefire left Russian and Russian proxy forces in control of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk. They never yielded that territory back. Moreover, Russia could exploit a ceasefire in place to regroup and rebuild its forces in order to launch new assaults at a time of its choosing.

For Ukraine, seeking negotiations in the current circumstances has zero appeal. As for “direct engagement” with Moscow, US officials should not negotiate with Russian officials over the heads of Ukrainians. Washington has no right to do that.

To be sure, a time may come for negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow. That will require significant changes in the Kremlin’s negotiating position, probably only after further battlefield losses. And any decision to negotiate while Russian forces remain on Ukrainian territory should be left solely to Kyiv.

Strong continued US financial and materiel support for Ukraine’s effort to drive the Russian military out thus is central to ending the war on acceptable terms.

Neither the authors of the now-withdrawn letter nor McCarthy seem to fully understand these points or the key US interests at stake. The United States has long had a vital national interest in a stable and secure Europe. A Russian victory, or an unsustainable peace that would collapse when Moscow chose to renew its war, would mean much greater instability in Europe.

Further, US officials must consider what Putin might do if bolstered by a win in Ukraine. He has talked of recovering “historic” Russian land, which is how he regards most of Ukraine. The Russian Empire once included the Baltic states. Might an emboldened Putin be tempted there?

Supporting Ukraine means the US providing money and arms and trusting the Ukrainians’ judgment on negotiations. Supporting the Baltic states, Nato members, would mean money, arms and the lives of American soldiers. It is better to stop Russia in Ukraine. Premature negotiations or cutting funding to Kyiv will not achieve that.

Steven Pifer, a nonresident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution and affiliate with Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, is a former US ambassador to Ukraine

[96thdayofrage]

WAR DAY 7️⃣1️⃣8️⃣1️⃣ 🍬 "That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites—there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz—and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves.

"The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that 'demonize' Israel; statements that apply 'double standards' for Israel; statements that 'delegitimize' the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses.

"The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; former U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.

"The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country. The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series 'The Lobby.' Israel managed to block 'The Lobby' from being broadcast.

"In the film, a pirated copy of which is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement.

"Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests."

—Shift to the Far-Right

"The investment by Israel and is backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent over $6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East. These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.

"The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel. This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real anti-Semites.

"Racism, including anti-Semitism, is dangerous. It is not only bad for the Jews. It is bad for everyone. It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes. Netanyahu’s racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off of each other. They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence. The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence. These extremists are ideological twins.

"This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society. It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security. Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States. It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.

"It oversees hundreds of cyber-surveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad 'to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel.'

"Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion.

"They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means 'flame' and is the acronym for 'Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land.' Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there 'Death to the Arabs,' which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.

"Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits 'small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.”' Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims. This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military.

"There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States. The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21st century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies. The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society."

_____

🍬 Chris Hedges: Israel, the Big Lie. Israel is not exercising “the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S. Original to ScheerPost, republished in Consortium News, May 14, 2021.

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/05/14/chris-hedges-israel-the-big-lie/

[sayedhusaini]

Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer Its Power to Censor

by Moderator

📷(Stock Catalog / Flickr)By Glenn Greenwald / SubstackMuch is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week's anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a "whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen's star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook's dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants — along with Amazon and Apple — are all classic monopolies in violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country, or as Google suppresses Rumble videos in its dominant search feature as punishment for competing with Google's YouTube platform. Facebook and Twitter both suppressed reporting on the authentic documents about Joe Biden's business activities reported by The New York Post just weeks before the 2020 election. These social media giants also united to effectively remove the sitting elected President of the United States from the internet, prompting grave warnings from leaders across the democratic world about how anti-democratic their consolidated censorship power has become.But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers. Congress has taken no steps to curb the influence of these Silicon Valley giants because Facebook and Google drown the establishment wings of both parties with enormous amounts of cash and pay well-connected lobbyists who are friends and former colleagues of key lawmakers to use their D.C. influence to block reform. With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party's ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own interests.And that is Facebook's only real political problem: not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the entire executive branch and both houses of Congress. Haugen herself, now guided by long-time Obama operative Bill Burton, has made explicitly clear that her grievance with her former employer is its refusal to censor more of what she regards as “hate, violence and misinformation.” In a 60 Minutes

interview on Sunday night, Haugen summarized her complaint about CEO Mark Zuckerberg this way: he “has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful and polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach." Haugen, gushed The New York Times’ censorship-desperate tech unit as she testified on Tuesday, is “calling for regulation of the technology and business model that amplifies hate and she’s not shy about comparing Facebook to tobacco.”Agitating for more online censorship has been a leading priority for the Democratic Party ever since they blamed social media platforms (along with WikiLeaks, Russia, Jill Stein, James Comey, The New York Times, and Bernie Bros) for the 2016 defeat of the rightful heir to the White House throne, Hillary Clinton. And this craving for censorship has been elevated into an even more urgent priority for their corporate media allies, due to the same belief that Facebook helped elect Trump but also because free speech on social media prevents them from maintaining a stranglehold on the flow of information by allowing ordinary, uncredentialed serfs to challenge, question and dispute their decrees or build a large audience that they cannot control. Destroying alternatives to their failing platforms is thus a means of self-preservation: realizing that they cannot convince audiences to trust their work or pay attention to it, they seek instead to create captive audiences by destroying or at least controlling any competitors to their pieties.As I have been reporting for more than a year, Democrats do not make any secret of their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley power to police political discourse and silence their enemies. Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO's of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. At the last Congressional inquisition in March, one Democrat after the next explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not immediately start censoring more.A Pew survey from August shows that Democrats now overwhelmingly support internet censorship not only by tech giants but also by the government which their party now controls. In the name of "restricting misinformation,” more than 3/4 of Democrats want tech companies "to restrict false info online, even if it limits freedom of information,” and just under 2/3 of Democrats want the U.S. Government to control that flow of information over the internet:

The prevailing pro-censorship mindset of the Democratic Party is reflected not only by that definitive polling data but also by the increasingly brash and explicit statements of their leaders. At the end of 2020, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), newly elected after young leftist activists worked tirelessly on his behalf to fend off a primary challenge from the more centrist Rep. Joseph Kennedy III (D-MA), told Facebook's Zuckerberg exactly what the Democratic Party wanted. In sum, they demand more censorship:

This, and this alone, is the sole reason why there is so much adoration being constructed around the cult of this new disgruntled Facebook employee. What she provides, above all else, is a telegenic and seemingly informed “insider” face to tell Americans that Facebook is destroying their country and their world by allowing too much content to go uncensored, by permitting too many conversations among ordinary people that are, in the immortal worlds of the NYT's tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, “unfettered.”When Facebook, Google, Twitter and other Silicon Valley social media companies were created, they did not set out to become the nation's discourse police. Indeed, they affirmatively wanted not to do that. Their desire to avoid that role was due in part to the prevailing libertarian ideology of a free internet in that sub-culture. But it was also due to self-interest: the last thing social media companies wanted to be doing is looking for ways to remove and block people from using their product and, worse, inserting themselves into the middle of inflammatory political controversies. Corporations seek to avoid angering potential customers and users over political stances, not courting that anger.This censorship role was not one they so much sought as one that was foisted on them. It was not really until the 2016 election, when Democrats were obsessed with blaming social media giants (and pretty much everyone else except themselves) for their humiliating defeat, that pressure began escalating on these executives to start deleting content liberals deemed dangerous or false and banning their adversaries from using the platforms at all. As it always does, the censorship began by targeting widely disliked figures — Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and others deemed “dangerous” — so that few complained (and those who did could be vilified as sympathizers of the early offenders). Once entrenched, the censorship net then predictably and rapidly spread inward (as it invariably does) to encompass all sorts of anti-establishment dissidents on the right, the left, and everything in between. And no matter how much it widens, the complaints that it is not enough intensify. For those with the mentality of a censor, there can never be enough repression of dissent. And this plot to escalate censorship pressures found the perfect vessel in this stunningly brave and noble Facebook heretic who emerged this week from the shadows into the glaring spotlight. She became a cudgel that Washington politicians and their media allies could use to beat Facebook into submission to their censorship demands.In this dynamic we find what the tech and culture writer Curtis Yarvin calls "power leak.” This is a crucial concept for understanding how power is exercised in American oligarchy, and Yarvin's brilliant essay illuminates this reality as well as it can be described. Hyperbolically arguing that "Mark Zuckerberg has no power at all,” Yarvin points out that it may appear that the billionaire Facebook CEO is powerful because he can decide what will and will not be heard on the largest information distribution platform in the world. But in reality, Zuckerberg is no more powerful than the low-paid content moderators whom Facebook employs to hit the "delete” or "ban” button, since it is neither the Facebook moderators nor Zuckerberg himself who is truly making these decisions. They are just censoring as they are told, in obedience to rules handed down from on high. It is the corporate press and powerful Washington elites who are coercing Facebook and Google to censor in accordance with their wishes and ideology upon pain of punishment in the form of shame, stigma and even official legal and regulatory retaliation. Yarvin puts it this way:However, if Zuck is subject to some kind of oligarchic power, he is in exactly the same position as his own moderators. He exercises power, but it is not his power, because it is not his will. The power does not flow from him; it flows through him. This is why we can say honestly and seriously that he has no power. It is not his,

but someone else’s. . . .Zuck doesn’t want to do any of this. Nor do his users particularly want it. Rather, he is doing it because he is under pressure from the press. Duh. He cannot even admit that he is under duress—or his Vietcong guards might just snap, and shoot him like the Western running-dog capitalist he is….And what grants the press this terrifying power? The pure and beautiful power of the logos? What distinguishes a well-written poast, like this one, from an equally well-written Times op-ed? Nothing at all but prestige. In normal times, every sane CEO will comply unhesitatingly with the slightest whim of the legitimate press, just as they will comply unhesitatingly with a court order. That’s just how it is. To not call this power government is—just playing with words.As I have written before, this problem — whereby the government coerces private actors to censor for them — is not one that Yarvin was the first to recognize. The U.S. Supreme Court has held, since at least 1963, that the First Amendment's "free speech” clause is violated when state officials issue enough threats and other forms of pressure that essentially leave the private actor with no real choice but to censor in accordance with the demands of state officials. Whether we are legally at the point where that constitutional line has been crossed by the increasingly blunt bullying tactics of Democratic lawmakers and executive branch officials is a question likely to be resolved in the courts. But whatever else is true, this pressure is very real and stark and reveals that the real goal of Democrats is not to weaken Facebook but to capture its vast power for their own nefarious ends.There is another issue raised by this week's events that requires ample caution as well. The canonized Facebook whistleblower and her journalist supporters are claiming that what Facebook fears most is repeal or reform of Section 230, the legislative provision that provides immunity to social media companies for defamatory or other harmful material published by their users. That section means that if a Facebook user or YouTube host publishes legally actionable content, the social media companies themselves cannot be held liable. There may be ways to reform Section 230 that can reduce the incentive to impose censorship, such as denying that valuable protection to any platform that censors, instead making it available only to those who truly allow an unmoderated platform to thrive. But such a proposal has little support in Washington. What is far more likely is that Section 230 will be "modified” to impose greater content moderation obligations on all social media companies.Far from threatening Facebook and Google, such a legal change could be the greatest gift one can give them, which is why their executives are often seen calling on Congress to regulate the social media industry. Any legal scheme that requires every post and comment to be moderated would demand enormous resources — gigantic teams of paid experts and consultants to assess "misinformation” and "hate speech” and veritable armies of employees to carry out their decrees. Only the established giants such as Facebook and Google would be able to comply with such a regimen, while other competitors — including large but still-smaller ones such as Twitter — would drown in those requirements. And still-smaller challengers to the hegemony of Facebook and Google, such as Substack and Rumble, could never survive. In other words, any attempt by Congress to impose greater content moderation obligations — which is exactly what they are threatening — would destroy whatever possibility remains for competitors to arise and would, in particular, destroy any platforms seeking to protect free discourse. That would be the consequence by design, which is why one should be very wary of any attempt to pretend that Facebook and Google fear such legislative adjustments.There are real dangers posed by allowing companies such as Facebook and Google to amass the power they have now consolidated. But very little of the activism and

anger from the media and Washington toward these companies is designed to fracture or limit that power. It is designed, instead, to transfer that power to other authorities who can then wield it for their own interests. The only thing more alarming than Facebook and Google controlling and policing our political discourse is allowing elites from one of the political parties in Washington and their corporate media outlets to assume the role of overseer, as they are absolutely committed to doing. Far from being some noble whistleblower, Frances Haugen is just their latest tool to exploit for their scheme to use the power of social media giants to control political discourse in accordance with their own views and interests.

Correction, Oct. 5, 2021, 5:59 pm ET: This article was edited to reflect that just under 2/3 of Democrats favor U.S. Government censorship of the internet in the name of fighting misinformation, not just over.

[disillusioned41]

After Senate Republicans unanimously blocked debate on a far-reaching and popular voting rights bill, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont late Tuesday joined the chorus demanding an end to the 60-vote legislative filibuster and slammed the GOP for remaining "loyal to the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election."

"Now is the time for majority rule in the Senate. We must end the filibuster, pass sweeping voting rights legislation, and protect our democracy." —Sen. Bernie Sanders

"It is a disgrace that at a time when authoritarianism, conspiracy theories, and political violence are on the rise, not a single Republican in the United States Senate has the courage to even debate whether we should protect American democracy or not," Sanders said in a statement. "Meanwhile, in state houses and governor's mansions across the country, Republicans are shamefully working overtime to make it harder for poor people, people of color, young people, and people with disabilities to participate in the American democratic system."

Every member of the Senate Democratic caucus—including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the only Senate Democrat who has not co-sponsored the For the People Act—voted in favor of moving forward with debate on the bill Tuesday. But under current Senate rules, which Manchin and other conservative Democrats have refused to touch, a 60-vote supermajority is required to overcome a filibuster, effectively giving the Republican minority veto power.

Further spotlighting the undemocratic nature of the upper chamber, data shows that the 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus represent 43 million more people than the 50 Republicans in the Senate.

Following Tuesday's vote, Sanders said that "there's no issue in front of us right now that is more critical for the future of our country than protecting the fundamental right of every American to vote."

"If we are serious about calling ourselves a democracy we must make it easier for people to participate, not harder," the Vermont senator continued. "Now is the time for majority rule in the Senate. We must end the filibuster, pass sweeping voting rights legislation, and protect our democracy."

The outcome of Tuesday's vote was widely expected, and progressive activists are pledging to stage protests nationwide in the coming weeks to pressure Senate Democrats to end the 60-vote filibuster and pass legislation combating state Republicans' attacks on the franchise, which GOP lawmakers have justified by parroting Trump's false claims about widespread voter fraud.

But as progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers singled out the filibuster as a key obstacle standing in the way of voting rights legislation, neither President Joe Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris nor Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) mentioned in the 60-vote rule in their statements and remarks after Tuesday's vote.

Biden, who has faced criticism for failing to use his bully pulpit to build momentum for the For the People Act, vowed that "this fight is far from over" and that he will "have more to say on this next week."

Harris, for her part, said the White House will "lift up leaders in the states who are working to stop anti-voter legislation, and work with leaders in Congress to advance federal legislation that will strengthen voting rights."

Eliminating or weakening the filibuster would require the support of all 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus plus a tie-breaking vote from Harris, who has previously voiced support for scrapping the 60-vote threshold.

"[Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell led his caucus to embrace the legacy of Strom Thurmond and use Jim Crow-era tactics to block debate over desperately-needed reforms to protect voting rights and return power to the people," Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, said in a statement Tuesday, referring to the late segregationist senator from South Carolina who mounted a 24-hour talking filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

"The question now is whether congressional Democrats and President Biden join forces in order to repel the attacks on our democracy," Levin added. "Every elected official, including President Biden, must be all in to do what is needed to protect our democracy from Republican attack. Democracy is under threat. Fascism is rising. Time is running out. It's time for everyone to stop playing by Republican rules, or everyone will lose."

[girlactionfigure]

He said, "To me there's no other choice." He saw a group of people being rounded up. The authorities said they were being deported. He didn't think twice, he quickly jumped onto the train and started handing out passports. He wanted to protect as many people as possible. Officials ordered him to stop, to get down, he ignored them. They started shooting at him, he still ignored them. After he had handed out all the passports he had, he escorted those people safely off the train and into a caravan of waiting cars. Raoul Wallenberg was born on August 4, 1912. Before he was born, his father had died of cancer. Three months after he was born, his maternal grandfather would die of pneumonia. His mother and grandmother, now both suddenly widows, would raise him together. "After November 1942, when the Nazis deported almost half of Norway's Jews to the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland, Sweden began extending diplomatic protection to many Jewish individuals and families throughout Europe, often forestalling their deportation," according to the Washington Post. Wallenberg was one of the many men and women who, according to the New York Times, "chose to risk their careers, and their lives, to defy official protocols and repressive laws to rescue Jews. Many were censured, punished or killed for their acts of courage." Wallenberg was "born into a family of great wealth and influence. He could have remained safely in neutral Sweden during World War II," said the New York Times. Instead, "in June of 1944, the 32-year-old Wallenberg . . . had volunteered to go to Budapest to help save Hungarian Jews. Although Wallenberg was sent as an attaché to the Swedish legation in Budapest, he became in effect the representative of the recently established U.S. War Refugee Board. Its mission was to rescue as many of the remaining European Jews as possible. And the largest community of surviving Jews was in Hungary," according to PBS American Experience. "Without concern for his own safety, he worked tirelessly to save thousands from certain death at the hands of the Nazis," said the New York Times. He would write to his mother, "Everywhere you see tragedies of the greatest proportions. But the days and nights are so full of work that one seldom has time to react." "In carrying out his mission, Wallenberg frequently put himself in danger," according to PBS American Experience. "On one occasion, armed Hungarian fascists began seizing Jews in one of the Swedish-protected buildings. Wallenberg arrived on the scene and shouted: "This is Swedish territory.... If you want to take them, you'll have to shoot me first." At other times he would board deportation trains, handing out passes and then demanding that the people holding them be let off the train." One witness recounted seeing Wallenberg intercept a trainload of Jews about to leave for Auschwitz: "... he climbed up on the roof of the train and began handing in protective passes through the doors which were not yet sealed. He ignored orders from the Germans for him to get down, then the Arrow Cross men began shooting and shouting at him to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing out passports to the hands that were reaching out for them. I believe the Arrow Cross men deliberately aimed over his head, as not one shot hit him, which would have been impossible otherwise. I think this is what they did because they were so impressed by his courage. After Wallenberg had handed over the last of the passports he ordered all those who had one to leave the train and walk to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in Swedish colours. I don't remember exactly how many, but he saved dozens off that train, and the Germans and Arrow Cross were so dumbfounded they let him get away with it." Raoul Wallenberg is remembered as a hero, who may have saved thousands of lives. People saved by Wallenberg include biochemist Lars Ernster, who was housed in the Swedish embassy, and Tom Lantos, later a member of the United States House of Representatives, who lived in one of the Swedish protective houses. In 2012, Wallenberg was posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress "in recognition of his achievements and heroic actions during the Holocaust." The New York Times would say, "The most important part of Wallenberg’s legacy lies in its lessons for the generations to come. It is incumbent on us to pass on his story to those who come after us not as part of a distant heroic myth, but as an example of the values that should inform the way we live our lives." "The truth is," according to the Washington Post, "that the Holocaust wasn't perpetrated by 'devils,' but by real men who chose to do what they did. Similarly, Wallenberg wasn't an "angel of rescue," nor a saint, but a very real man who, unlike so many others, chose to help. Even at considerable risk to his own life, he used his diplomatic status and organizational skills to aid as many individuals as he could -- saving hundreds personally, and assisting thousands of others." In an opinion piece in the New York Times, it asked, why do people like Wallenberg do what they do and answered, "All of these heroes seemed to have shared the sentiment of the martyred Lutheran pastor and Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote: 'Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. ... Not to act is to act.”

The Jon S. Randal Peace Page

[bountyofbeads]

Here is a detailed account of how Sondland snared Pompeo, why he must testify and be impeached if not resign.

If Pompeo doesn’t testify, he should be impeached

By Jennifer Rubin, Opinion writer | Published November 20, 2019 at 2:52 p.m. ET | Washington Post | Posted November 20, 2019 |

U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland implicated numerous senior officials and President Trump in a plan to extort Ukraine: No White House meeting until the Ukrainians announced an investigation into nonexistent dirt on former vice president Joe Biden. (The announcement was vital for political purposes; Trump could have cared less if any corruption was going on.) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to Sondland, played a key role in the plot and in obstruction of Congress. As such, Pompeo needs to appear as a witness or face impeachment himself.

Sondland made clear he was no rogue actor in the Ukraine plot, something we already knew from other witnesses and from the July 25 phone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In the call, Trump specifically mentions the Bidens, Burisma and the 2016 election (a reference to the repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered with the election). Pompeo was on that call and therefore understood the link between the White House visit and Trump’s political demands.

Here is what else we know about Pompeo’s involvement:

A text from William B. Taylor Jr. Jr. dated July 10 reflected that “S” (Secretary Pompeo) directed him to talk to Rudolph W. Giuliani about Ukraine.

In an email dated July 19 sent to Pompeo and a raft of senior officials, Sondland said that he had briefed Zelensky for the July 25 call and needed to “turn over every stone,” a reference to the Burisma and 2016 investigations, the same investigations Trump spoke about on the July 25 call, adding in Biden’s name.

Sondland on Aug. 11 sent an email to Pompeo’s counselor and a top aide, Lisa Kenna, stating he had helped draft a statement that would guarantee the “deliverables” need to have a big news conference; Kenna said she would pass it on to Pompeo, which in the absence of his testimony we must assume he read.

On Aug. 22, Sondland emailed Pompeo directly talking about a way to alleviate the “logjam” (the aid holdup). Pompeo said yes. Pompeo approved the plan and not unsurprisingly, “Sondland testified that because Pompeo listened in on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky, he would know that the ‘issues of importance to Potus’ were the investigations into 2016 and Burisma.”

The Post further summarizes:

Emails from Aug. 11 and Aug. 22 show not only that Sondland was updating Pompeo on his activities, but that the secretary was approving the plans to get Zelenksy to commit to the politically charged investigations.

In the Aug. 22 email, Sondland said he hoped that Zelensky could meet Trump in Warsaw, and that he would encourage Zelensky “to look him in the eye” and tell him that by mid-September he “should be able to move forward and with confidence on those issues of importance to Potus and the US.”

“Hopefully that will break the logjam,” he added. ... Sondland said he was referring to the 2016 and Burisma investigations — exactly what he had been referencing earlier that month, on Aug. 9, when he told then-Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker over texts that Trump “really wants the deliverable.”

In sum, Pompeo is complicit. Moreover, he now refuses to testify or produce documents, which likely will complete the picture of what he knew and when he knew it. He is obstructing Congress’s investigation, and even refusing to recuse himself from the matter.

Former Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller tells me: “The bill of particulars that have emerged about Pompeo’s involvement are incredibly damning. At the minimum, he knew about the scheme and did nothing to stop it while allowing the president to attack and run roughshod over his people.” Miller continues, “He should be up on the Hill testifying tomorrow, but we know he won’t because if he had to start telling the truth, rather than bullying and blowing off reporters, his answers would be damning to himself and the president.”

Former prosecutor Joyce White Vance agrees. “Sondland puts Pompeo right in the middle of Trump’s bribery scheme,” she says. ”And, Pompeo, who listened in on the July 25 call, knew what was at stake — Trump was forcing Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Bidens that was politically valuable to Trump’s 2020 campaign.” She makes a key point: “Pompeo, top of his class at West Point and a graduate of Harvard Law, knew it was wrong. But he hasn’t had the courage to come forward with the bravery of a [Marie] Yovanovitch or a [Lt. Col. Alexander] Vindman.”

“The Sondland testimony puts Pompeo (as well as Trump, of course) squarely inside impeachment territory — and, under a normal Justice Department, in indictment territory as well,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. “There is no [Office of Legal Counsel] memo suggesting that a sitting secretary of state is immune from indictment and prosecution, and this one was deeply engaged, if Sondland is to be believed, in a conspiracy to commit bribery and extortion, to violate federal election law against foreign interference, and to obstruct justice, including obstructing congressional investigations.” (He also notes that Energy Secretary Rick Perry "is implicated as well. And [Giuliani] is up to his eyebrows in indictable federal felonies.”)

The House Intelligence Committee should make a criminal referral, subpoena Pompeo for testimony and proceed with impeachment proceedings if he doesn’t comply. The message to future secretaries of state must be that they must not participate in illegal schemes and that their oath is to the Constitution, not a president.

🍁☕🍂🥮🍁☕🍂🥮🍁☕🍂🥮🍁☕

5 takeaways from Gordon Sondland’s blockbuster testimony

By Aaron Blake | Published November 20 at 2:13 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted November 20, 2019 |

The most anticipated — and potentially most important — witness in the House’s impeachment inquiry is testifying Wednesday. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland is the figure closest to President Trump to take the stand, and in his opening statement, he directly connected Trump to the Ukraine quid pro quo.

Below are some key takeaways from his opening statement and testimony. We’ll add more throughout the hearing.

1. CONNECTING THIS TO THE PRESIDENT

Pretty much every witness to date has said there was something unholy about asking Ukraine to launch specific investigations, including one involving former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. But none of them has testified to the idea that Trump actually wanted the U.S. aid or a White House meeting to be conditioned upon those investigations.

In his opening statement, though, Sondland walked right up to the line, if he didn’t cross it.

“... [Trump attorney Rudolph W.] Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky,” he said. “Mr. Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement announcing investigations of the 2016 election/DNC server and Burisma. Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.”

At another point, Sondland said explicitly that special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker told him this was the case. Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) asked, “So, Mr. Volker told you that [Giuliani] was expressing the desires of the president of the United States?” Sondland responded, “Correct.”

Sondland also repeatedly said “everyone knew it” when asked about the quid pro quos — as if to emphasize that this was hardly a secret.

Sondland did stop short of saying he had direct knowledge of this being Trump’s desire, though. In a tense exchange with Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), Sondland eventually admitted he was connecting some dots:

TURNER: No one on this planet told you that Donald Trump was tying this aid to the investigation? Because if your answer is yes, then the chairman is wrong. And the headline on CNN is wrong. No one on this planet told you that President Trump was tying aid to investigations. Yes or no?

SONDLAND: Yes.

TURNER: So you really have no testimony today that ties President Trump to a scheme to withhold aid from Ukraine in exchange for these investigations.

SONDLAND: Other than my own presumption.

It’s tempting to say Sondland is implicating Trump. That’s not completely the case; he seems to still be walking a fine line about what he knew and could prove and what was plainly apparent to him and others. But he seems to be saying this was something that Trump blessed, which is significant.

2. POINTING FINGERS AND NAMING NAMES — INCLUDING POMPEO, MULVANEY AND PENCE

Whether Sondland is directly fingering Trump is up for debate. But he’s clearly pointing fingers. He said “everyone” was aware of the quid pro quo, and he indicated that includes acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Pence.

He said Pompeo had instructed him to work with Giuliani as late as Sept. 24 — which is notably after the whistleblower situation exploded into public view. He added later that Pompeo directed him about how to ease what Sondland described as a “logjam” with Ukraine. “Secretary Pompeo essentially gave me the green light to brief President Zelensky about making those announcements,” Sondland said.

He also passed along this text exchange with Mulvaney from July 19, six days before Trump’s call with Zelensky:

[Sondland said:] “I Talked to Zelensky just now … He is prepared to receive Potus’ call. Will assure him that he intends to run a fully transparent investigation and will ‘turn over every stone’. He would greatly appreciate a call before Sunday so that he can put out some media about a ‘friendly and productive call’ (no details) before Ukraine election on Sunday.” Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney responded: “I asked NSC to set it up for tomorrow.”

That implicates Mulvaney in these efforts even more. Witnesses had previously said Sondland indicated that he had coordinated the quid pro quo with Mulvaney, who is Trump’s top White House aide.

He was asked later more specifically if both Mulvaney and Pompeo were aware of the quid pro quo, and he responded “correct” for both.

A State Department spokeswoman, Morgan Ortagus, responded: “Gordon Sonland never told Secretary Pompeo that he believed the President was linking aid to investigations of political opponents. Any suggestion to the contrary is flat out false.”

Lastly, he indicated that he conveyed “concerns” about a quid pro quo to Pence before Sept. 1 meetings in Warsaw.

“I mentioned to Vice President Pence before the meetings with the Ukrainians that I had concerns that the delay in aid had become tied to the issue of investigations,” Sondland said. He added later in his testimony that Pence “nodded that he heard what I said.”

Pence’s office denied Sondland’s account. Chief of staff Marc Short said, “This alleged discussion recalled by Ambassador Sondland never happened.”

Sondland also said repeatedly in his opening statement that the State Department and the White House didn’t allow him access to the things he needed to provide accurate previous testimony — hence the inconsistencies and the clarifications, apparently. He brought this up repeatedly, especially when questioning from GOP counsel Stephen Castor turned more hostile.

Sondland doesn’t sound at all happy that he’s in this spot and seems to believe the administration and Giuliani put him in it. And it wasn’t just Trump he was prepared to rope into all this.

3. A BREAKUP IN THE ‘THREE AMIGOS’

Pence’s office wasn’t the only one taking exception to Sondland’s testimony; so did one of Sondland’s fellow “three amigos.”

Sondland said in his opening statement that Energy Secretary Rick Perry and the other member of the “three amigos” who spearheaded the Ukraine effort, special envoy Kurt Volker, handled initial communications with Giuliani after Trump told them to “talk to Rudy” on May 23.

“Secretary Perry volunteered to make the initial calls with Mr. Giuliani, given their prior relationship,” Sondland said. “Ambassador Volker made several of the early calls and generally informed us of what was discussed.”

The Energy Department issued a statement disputing that.

“Ambassador Sondland’s testimony today misrepresented both Secretary Perry’s interaction with Rudy Giuliani and direction the secretary received from President Trump,” it said. “As previously stated, Secretary Perry spoke to Rudy Giuliani only once at the president’s request. No one else was on that call. At no point before, during or after that phone call did the words ‘Biden’ or ‘Burisma’ ever come up in the presence of Secretary Perry.”

By the end of the hearing, members were noting that the amigos had been pulled apart.

“I lost my amigos?” Sondland joked, to laughter.

4. TRUMP TEAM DIDN’T CARE ABOUT ACTUAL INVESTIGATIONS, JUST ANNOUNCEMENTS

Sondland further undermined the idea that Trump truly cared about corruption in Ukraine, saying that he wasn’t under the impression that there was ever actually a desire for investigations — just announcements of them.

“He had to announce the investigations,” Sondland said of Zelensky. “He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it.”

That indicates this was all about the headlines created by the announcement, and not the actual substance of the evidence.

He was pressed on this later, but was a bit cagey. He said he never heard “anyone say that the investigations had to start or had to be completed. The only thing I heard from Mr. Giuliani or otherwise was that they had to be announced in some form. And that form kept changing."

Sondland added: “The way it was expressed to me was that the Ukrainians had a long history of committing to things privately and then never following through.”

This is merely the latest piece of evidence contradicting the idea that Trump was worried about corruption in Ukraine. Giuliani’s own public comments indicated this was a political effort aimed at helping Trump. Second, Trump himself hasn’t shown an interest in any investigations besides ones that involve the United States and his political interests. And third, an aide in Ukraine, David Holmes, testified last week that Sondland had told him Trump didn’t “give a s---” about Ukraine and only wanted the investigations.

Despite this extensive evidence, the idea that this was actually about corruption has remained a GOP talking point.

5. ‘TALK TO RUDY’ WAS A DIRECTIVE FROM TRUMP

Related to Takeaways No. 1 and 3 is this: Sondland believed Trump urging them to talk to Giuliani was a directive — which isn’t quite how Volker testified about it.

In his testimony Tuesday, Volker was asked about Trump’s May 23 order that he, Sondland and Perry were to “talk to Rudy,” and he suggested it wasn’t a direct order.

“I didn’t take it as an instruction, I want to be clear about that,” Volker said, adding: “You know, when we were giving him our assessment about President Zelensky and where Ukraine is headed, he said, ‘That’s not what I hear. I hear terrible things; he’s got terrible people around him. Talk to Rudy.' And I understood in that context, him just saying, that’s where he hears it from. I didn’t take it as an instruction.

Volker said it was just “part of the dialogue.”

But Sondland is clear on this point: It was an directive.

“In response to our persistent efforts to change his views, President Trump directed us to ‘talk with Rudy,’ ” Sondland said. “We understood that ‘talk with Rudy’ meant talk with Mr. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.”

Castor tried to poke holes in that, urging Sondland to say it wasn’t actually an order. Sondland, though, made clear he viewed it as necessary if they were to get what they wanted out of a relationship with Ukraine.

“Our conclusion, and the conclusion of the three of us, was that if we did not talk to Rudy, nothing would move forward on Ukraine,” he said.

That doesn’t exactly make this sound optional. And it again connects this whole effort to Trump — in a way Volker declined to.

Sondland also, notably, disagreed with Volker’s testimomy that he wasn’t aware of quid pro quos.

“I strongly disagree with that portion of his testimony," Sondland said. "It was absolutely a requirement.”

🍁☕🍂🥮🍁☕🍂🥮🍁☕🍂🥮🍁☕

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

Philadelphians Abigail Leedy, 17 years old and skipping school for the day, and Dwight Wilson, 24, led a group of more than 20 activists to the office of their congressman, Rep. Dwight Evans (D-Pa.), on Dec. 10, 2018. The group, affiliated with the climate advocacy organization Sunrise Movement, was there to demand that House members support a new select congressional committee to draft a Green New Deal.

Advocates say a select committee, which Democrats could create as soon as January, would be the most effective way to prepare such sweeping legislation—the Green New Deal is meant to both combat climate change and boost the economy. The proposal burst onto the national scene in November 2018, when Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y) joined a sit-in organized by Sunrise and Justice Democrats at the office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the presumptive next House Speaker. But now, youth activists are beginning to feel the frustration of political reality, many for the first time.

When the protesters arrived at Evans’ office, he was not in. A staffer expressed Evans’ support for their climate activism and recommended they make a formal appointment.

He also had some unsolicited advice. “Why have 40 people here?” he asked. “Why not [target] Republican offices? Show some courage.”

Tensions quickly escalated. The staffer implored the young people to “learn a little about about House procedure and how it works” before making potentially unrealistic demands of Democrats. The Sunrise youth insisted they understood the political complexities, and reiterated the need for urgency.

“To say we’re gonna talk about it another day isn’t enough,” said Rachie Weisberg, a 25-year-old Philadelphia urban farmer.

Ultimately, both sides agreed to talk further, but the young activists left feeling discouraged: “That sucked,” one said. “It felt very rude and infantilizing and terrible.”

Reached by email, a spokesperson for Evans tells In These Times that “Congressman Evans is reviewing the [Green New Deal] proposal, which would constitute a sweeping set of changes.”

The activists made up one of more than 50 delegations to Democratic congressional offices that day to garner support for the Green New Deal proposal.

After the lobbying visits, the protesters sat in at the offices of House leadership. By day’s end, they had racked up nearly 150 arrests and support from Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), likely new leader of the House Rules Committee, for the select committee. Both Pelosi and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who will become House Majority Leader, demurred; on Twitter, Hoyer voiced support for the protesters’ “passion.” Pelosi has neither endorsed nor dismissed the idea.

As of Wednesday morning, 13 House members had signed on since the action, including Congressional Progressive Caucus chairs Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), bringing the total number of supporters in the House to 35.  All 13 were visited by activists Monday, and more visits are planned today and tomorrow.

The Green New Deal is, by all accounts, a bold proposal; Ocasio-Cortez and the youth-led Sunrise Movement compare it to the 1960s moonshot or post-World War II work programs. It would be the first climate legislation to marry ambitious environmental plans—converting to entirely renewable energy sources in 10 years, revamping the grid, modernizing and “greening” homes, businesses and infrastructure—with socioeconomic reforms to ensure equity, such as a climate-oriented jobs guarantee and a universal basic income.

(Continue Reading)

[bellboy905]

The president’s bid to coerce Ukraine into investigating the Biden family was public knowledge for months before it became grounds for an impeachment inquiry. Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani told the New York Times in May, “We’re meddling in an investigation... because that information will be very, very helpful to my client.” Giuliani made clear that he was acting with the president’s “full support.”

Thus, the Trump administration’s public position was that it was leveraging the power of the U.S. presidency to strong-arm a dependent state into launching a (baseless) investigation into one of its domestic political rivals. Using America’s finite diplomatic capital to advance the president’s personal political interests, in a manner that undermines democratic norms, is a straightforward abuse of power. But since the president’s lawyer was openly copping to it, our media and political class refused to recognize it as such. Only after a whistle-blower recoded the administration’s public policy as a concealed conspiracy... could they acknowledge what they already knew.

This was not abnormal. Throughout Trump’s presidency, our political elite has struggled to see all the malfeasance that he refuses to hide.

[...]

We lack the courage of our sensory perceptions. The unambiguous truth of our political situation, like that of our climate crisis, demands actions that we are too comfortable and cowardly to take. For congressional Republicans, internalizing that truth would require putting the preservation of constitutional government above the maintenance of conservative power. For the mainstream media, it would require privileging liberal democracy above the fiction that America still has two political parties committed to upholding that form of government. And for the rest of us, it would mean putting the duties of citizenship above the more immediate demands of our employers, family members, and Netflix queues.

So, Congress pretends that it needs an inquiry to determine whether Trump is upholding his oath of office, the political press pretends that the Republican Party isn’t a greater threat to American democracy than Vladimir Putin, and we all collectively pretend that the people of Hong Kong don’t put us to shame, as we watch the president’s bribery-intake facilities operate in peace.... But the weight of our collective cognitive dissonance is getting heavier by the day.