Month: March 2015

Interestingly, it does not appear that California has a way to avoid proceeding with a ballot initiative that advocates the murder of homosexuals. The ballot measure was initiated by a lawyer from Huntington Beach named Matt McLaughlin:

For less than the cost of an Apple iPad, Matt McLaughlin started a statewide legal conversation.

An attorney from Huntington Beach, McLaughlin in late February spent $200 to propose a ballot measure that authorizes the killing of gays and lesbians by “bullets to the head,” or “any other convenient method.”

McLaughlin’s “Sodomite Suppression Act” now is testing the limits of free speech and raising the question: Why can’t the state’s initiative process screen out blatantly illegal ideas?

Simply by paying the $200 fee, McLaughlin has apparently compelled state Attorney General Kamala Harris to take formal action.

Yet the measure is likely to proceed to the signature-gathering stage. At the moment, its fate rests with state Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is charged with writing a title and summary for the proposal. Legal experts say she has little choice but to let the process continue and that McLaughlin is unlikely to face professional repercussions.

Naturally, Ms. Harris would rather not write up a title and summary of this initiative, but it appears that her hands are tied by the law and prior court rulings. And a lot of experts think giving her the discretion to blow off this submission as clearly illegal would be the more dangerous precedent.

Then there’s the issue of Mr. McLaughlin and his law license. It doesn’t appear that anything can be done about that either.

“It’s offensive to anybody with a rational mind, but I don’t know that it necessarily rises to the level of an ethics violation,” said Jonathan Arons, a legal ethics attorney in San Francisco.

David Cameron Carr of San Diego spent a dozen years at the State Bar disciplining lawyers and the last 14 defending them. He said while attorneys could be disciplined for acts of “moral turpitude,” that requirement relates to the ability to perform their work.

“This is not obviously the kind of act of moral turpitude that calls into question his fitness to practice law,” Carr said.

I guess we can quibble about what the word “obviously” means in this context, but it’s probably true that it’s not the kind of thing that normally costs someone their law license. I think an argument can be made that advocating murder and hate crimes calls into question his mental stability, but that doesn’t mean he has unhappy legal clients or is incapable of offering sound legal advice.

To get this initiative on the ballot, McLaughlin will need 365,880 signatures, which seems like an impossible number to me. So, while it’s highly offensive, it really only matters as an opportunity to revisit the ballot initiative process. Should the fees be higher than $200? What kind of discretion should there be about which initiatives should be allowed and who should have that discretion?

I’m no fan of ballot initiatives, but it does seem that there’s always someone who is intent on ruining things for the rest of us. Don’t you think?

There’s a new film you should see about the industry of Climate Change Denial: Merchants of Doubt. It will be shown in only a limited release, but you can also stream it on Hulu. Here’s the trailer:

And the “star” of the film is the Marc Morano, who runs the climate denial blog Climate Depot (link deliberately not provided), a former staffer of Senator James Inhofe (R – Big Oil). He openly admits in Merchants of Doubt that “I’m not a scientist, although I do I play one on TV occasionally. Okay, hell, maybe more than occasionally. [Laughs]” That’s one of his many jobs – debating real climate scientists on news outlets, among them Fox News and CNN. You can see him in the the trailer of the documentary also saying the following:

“Communication is about sales. Keep it simple. People will fill in the blanks with their own – I hate to say biases – but with their own perspectives in many cases. […]

We go up against a scientist, most of them are very hard to understand and very BORING“

But Morano is much more than merely a shill for hire. He is one nasty piece of work. A former producer of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, he also helped jump start the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry with his May 3, 2004 CNS article “Kerry ‘Unfit to be Commander-in-Chief,’ Say Former Military Colleagues” which CNS has conveniently scrubbed from its website, but which you can read in it entirety here. Morano was also instrumental in casting aspersions on Rep. John Murtha’s military record and the medals and citations Murtha was awarded, after Murtha came out in 2005 against any further deployment of troops to Iraq.

Now the Cybercast News Service, a supposedly independent organization with deep ties to the Republican Party, has dusted off the Swift Boat Veterans playbook, questioning whether Mr. Murtha deserved his two Purple Hearts. The article also implied that Mr. Murtha did not deserve the Bronze Star he received, and that the combat-distinguishing “V” on it was questionable. It then called on Mr. Murtha to open up his military records.

Cybercast News Service is run by David Thibault, who formerly worked as the senior producer for “Rising Tide,” the televised weekly news magazine produced by the Republican National Committee. One of the authors of the Murtha article was Marc Morano, a long-time writer and producer for Rush Limbaugh.

However, the most despicable thing he does now is post lies about, and misleading quotes (conveniently taken out of context) by, climate scientists on his website. Then he publishes their email addresses. In short he’s a serial harasser of scientists who publish peer reviewed scientific research linking climate change to the burning of carbon based fuels. You can imagine the result.

(cont.)

Climate ethicist Donald Brown, who has been the focus of Morano’s “reprehensible” tactics four times, called it “sheer intimidation.” In 2012, highly-regarded MIT climatologist (and Republican) Kerry Emanuel — another Morano target — wrote me, “I had heard about the hate mail and threats received by others, but am surprised at how little it takes these days to trigger hysterical and hateful responses from the ideologues out there.” Emanuel explained that some emails contained “veiled threats against my wife,” and other “tangible threats.”

Morano himself seems to think this is all just fun and games. Or so he has claimed, when he says in Merchants of Doubt how much he enjoyed coming up with new ways to “mock and ridicule” scientists when he worked for Inhofe. The truth is, there is nothing funny about what he does, as his own rhetoric is often tinged with the language of violence and hate, such as this example from an article in the March 2010 issue of Scientific Americanwhich he was quoted as saying climate scientists are perpetrating a “con job.”

“You have every aspect of our lives subject to regulatory control – down to the light bulbs we can put in – based on climate science,” Morano said. The researchers “never wanted to debate and they kept trying to demand the debate was over.”

“Whenever you have someone ginning up a crisis and wanting to take power, you’re going to have anger,” he added. “When you’ve been conned at a used car dealer, you don’t go back cheerily and politely to talk to them.” […]

“I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down” … “They deserve to be publicly flogged.”

Obviously, the scientists attacked by Morano’s one man cyber-bullying campaign are deeply affected by the hate mail and threats they receive as a result of Morano’s “little jokes” and deceptions, such as this one of Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider:

Here’s what [Morano] wrote (juxtaposed beneath a picture of Adolf Hitler on Climate Depot’s homepage):

Warmist Prof Stephen Schneider accuses sceptics of telling ‘Hitlerian lies about climate scientists’ – Complains of ‘hundreds’ of hate email – [Morano supplied two email addresses for Schneider here]
Schneider: ‘I get scared that we’re now in a new Weimar republic where people are prepared to listen to what amounts to Hitlerian lies about climate scientists’

[NB: Schneider didn’t actually accuse sceptics of telling “Hitlerian lies” – he was speaking of a neo-Nazi website that had included his name on a “death list” – but Morano somewhat conveniently failed to mention this rather important point.]

So, what possible reason could Morano have for prominently displaying these email addresses – as he does for many other stories that involve climate scientists he evidently despises – other than to encourage his readers who lap up his warped world vision to “get in touch”? I’ll let you fill in the gaps.

What exactly are Morano’s credentials as a climate expert – other than working for Rush Limbaugh and James Inhofe, and as a journalist for the right wing media outlet, Cybercast News Service? Desmogblog has the details on his “credentials” such as they are.

Marc Morano is the executive director and chief correspondent of ClimateDepot.com, a project of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). Morano is also the Communications Director at CFACT, a conservative think-tank in Washington D.C. that has received funding from ExxonMobil, Chevron, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars from foundations associated with Richard Mellon Scaife. According to 2011 IRS Forms (PDF), Morano was the highest paid staff member with a salary of $150,000 per year. Morano’s blog Climate Depot regularly publishes articles questioning man-made global warming.

Although he has no scientific expertise in the area, Morano has become a prominent climate change denier. He has been called “the Matt Drudge of climate denial”, the “King of the skeptics,” and a “central cell of the climate-denial machine.” He was also listed as one of 17 top “climate killers” by Rolling Stone Magazine. He has accused climate scientists of “fear mongering,” and has claimed that proponents of man-made global warming are “funded to the tune of $50 billion.”

When Morano was asked about his qualifications for speaking about an issue such as climate science, he responded by saying, “I have a background in political science, which is the perfect qualification to examine global warming.”

I suppose his background in political science and “smear campaigns” helps him keep his communications to his audience simple, so they can provide the proper “perspectives” to the “information” he “sells” regarding climate change. Simple enough to ratchet up unreasonable hate and threats toward real scientists earning far less than Mr. Morano does.

Meanwhile, in the wastes of Antarctica, brave researchers risk their lives flying in all sorts of weather in an antiquated Douglas DC-3 (You’d think with $50 Billion at their disposal they could afford something a little better to fly for hours over that deadly, frozen landscape) to do the hard work of real science – taking measurements of the ice sheets that are thinning rapidly in both West and East Antarctica.

Even if you’re lucky enough that there’s an ice runway where you want to land in Antarctica, that doesn’t mean the weather will allow you to. And then, even if your plane is equipped to fly for eight hours, at some point, you do have to find a way to stop flying. When that happens to the scientists of the International Collaboration for Exploration of the Cryosphere Through Aerogeophysical Profiling (ICECAP) team, they manage to land “in the middle of nowhere,” according to on-board geophysicist Jamin Greenbaum. Then they camp out. Eventually they’ll be able to make it back to their base.

Greenbaum tells me he’s never been scared. Even though the plane is an Indiana Jones-style Douglas DC-3 that served in World War II. It can deploy skis as landing gear when necessary, and the pilots are a Calgary-based crew, expert at flying in suboptimal conditions.

“We have had some harried situations,” Greenbaum said. For the past eight years he has done annual two-to-five-month deployments to Antarctica to survey the ice. He rides in the cargo hull of the plane, along with 1,000 pounds of ice-penetrating radar, lasers, and magnetic-field mapping equipment. “You know, it’s Antarctica; in 1,500 hours you’re going to have some bad weather. But no, I’ve never once gotten nervous.”

Sure hope Morano doesn’t decide to “release the dogs” by posting personal information about the scientists of the ICECAP team who so recently revealed the dangers of thinning ice from warming ocean current in both West and East Antarctica. But maybe he’ll be too busy enjoying his status as the “star” of the documentary about his deceitful and unethical tactics to smear bigger fish in the climate science community, to bother with the folks of ICECAP.

Kenner, 65, does admire people such as Marc Morano, a professional climate-change denier and founder of the Climate Depot Web site who is, arguably, the star of Kenner’s film [Merchants of Doubt]. […]

In “Doubt,” Morano recounts with glee how he has published the e-mail addresses of climate scientists, subjecting them to intimidation and flaming attacks from anonymous critics. (Several of the abusive e-mails are read aloud in the film by their recipients, in an evocation of Jimmy Kimmel’s “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” segments.) It makes for a semi-serious tone that masks Kenner’s more sobering message: We’re routinely being lied to, by people who are darn good at it.

Unfortunately, the efforts of people like Morano, who by any definition is a thug and character assassin, have had a lasting effect already on our ability to limit the effects of man-made climate change, as Harvard Professor, Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the book Merchants of Doubt, on which the film of the same name is based, points out.

“Scientists are worried. We’ve lost 20 years. If this keeps up as we’re going, we’re looking at a 6- to 10-foot rise in the sea level by 2100.” The film brings that point home graphically, showing a map of Boston and nearly all major coastal cities underwater. Reiterating the pandemic fear sweeping through the scientific community, Oreskes points to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) recommendation of a significant (some say 80 percent) reduction in emissions by 2050 as a necessary course of action. “The really crucial thing,” Oreskes says, “is to get started on emissions reduction, because once we do, technology and momentum will kick in. The hardest thing is to start.”

Yes, twenty critical years wasted thanks to hacks and mercenaries like Marc Morano. Years that we could have turned the tide to limit our exorbitant emissions of greenhouse gases. Years that we will never recover. And Morano is still out there right now, working hard to delay action on climate change for another twenty years, while being well paid to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions in the short term, and quite possibly by the end of the century, billions of human beings (not to mention all the other species going extinct because of global warming). Is it any wonder I labeled Morano “Evil” in my title? Trust me, it isn’t hyperbole.

March 23rd, 2010 was a Tuesday. It was also the day that this supposedly happened in the White House:

[Obama] immediately presented Mr. Netanyahu with a list of 13 demands designed both to the end the feud with his administration and to build Palestinian confidence ahead of the resumption of peace talks. Key among those demands was a previously-made call to halt all new settlement construction in east Jerusalem.

When the Israeli prime minister stalled, Mr Obama rose from his seat declaring: “I’m going to the residential wing to have dinner with Michelle and the girls.”

As he left, Mr Netanyahu was told to consider the error of his ways. “I’m still around,” Mr Obama is quoted by Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper as having said. “Let me know if there is anything new.”

It’s also the day that this actually did happen:

First lady Michelle Obama took daughters Malia, 11, and Sasha, 8, mother Marian Robinson and some pals to New York for a spring break trip where they hit Broadway shows, toured the Empire State Building and visited Harlem and Brooklyn…

…• Tuesday. Harlem was a focus. The Obama group toured the Studio Theater and the famous Apollo Theater. Mrs. Obama and friends dine at Aquavit, owned by Marcus Samuelsson, the guest chef at White House first state dinner for the Prime Minister of India. She ordered the tasting menu.

You can see that Michelle, Malia, and Sasha also spent Wednesday the 24th in the city, visiting the Sesame Street studios and the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and stopping for pizza and ice cream.

So, you know, it wasn’t actually possible that President Obama told Netanyahu to cool his heels and consider the errors of his ways while he had dinner with his family.

Why?

Because he was in the White House in Washington DC and his family was in New York City having dinner at Aquavit.

So, probably, Alexander Bolton could have been a little more definitive about this incident in his piece in The Hill:

The [Obama-Netanyahu] relationship hit a low point in March of 2010, when Obama interrupted negotiations and left the Israeli leader cooling his heels in a White House waiting room while he had dinner with the first lady, according to news reports at the time.

The White House later disputed those reports by asserting Michelle Obama was in New York that evening.

The alleged snub was seen as payback for Netanyahu’s approval of a controversial Jewish construction project in East Jerusalem.

How does a relationship reach a low point based on erroneous “news reports at the time”? Didn’t the White House do more than “dispute” those reports? Didn’t they completely disprove them?

And how about this next bit from Bolton?

Netanyahu poked Obama earlier this week, when he declared just before the Israeli elections that he no longer supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a goal that has long served as the basis of American-brokered peace talks.

Shall we list the ways in which “poked” is the wrong verb here?

[Cross-posted at Progress Pond]

What? No posts here on Obama’s Compulsory Voting comments yesterday?

Hmmmm…..

Still giving him a pass, eh?

OK. No surprise.

However…

They were all over the top of the Google News front page around noon today. (Thurs., 3/19/15) They were hard to miss for a while but a few hours later they have mysteriously disappeared. Google got the memo, apparently. However, they are still available. Google “compulsory voting obama” for all you need to know. Hurry though…that memo may only be the first of many.

Meanwhile…read on for more.
Like this:

The White House Press is trying to clarify comments made by President Obama in Cleveland yesterday, when he suggested that voting be “mandatory” in the United States.

“Kinda provocative huh?” quipped [Press secretary] Earnest when asked about Obama’s comments.

“The president was not putting forward a specific policy proposal,” Earnest said, clarifying that the nature of the president’s comment was part of a broader discussion about campaign finance reform and getting more Americans to vote.

Yeah.

Right.

What a concept!!! An ongoing fix-approval scheme. Prop up the two…or even three or more…so-called “candidates” (all of whom are sworn to uphold the Constitution of the Permanent Government of the United States of Omertica, of course), and then trumpet to the world that “All of the American people (except for the ones who are in jail or have ever been convicted of a [thought] crime) have spoken!!!”

Nice.

Brilliant, actually.

Here’s how Australia enforces it:

According to the Australian Electoral Commission website, under federal electoral law, it is compulsory for all eligible Australian citizens to enroll and vote in federal elections, by-elections and referendums.

“After each election, the AEC will send a letter to all apparent non-voters requesting that they either provide a valid and sufficient reason for failing to vote or pay a $20 penalty,” according to the website. “If, within the time period specified on the notice, you fail to reply, cannot provide a valid and sufficient reason or decline to pay the $20 penalty, then the matter may be referred to a court. If the matter is dealt with in court and you are found guilty, you may be fined up to $170 plus court costs and a criminal conviction may be recorded against you.”

Nice twice.

Aintcha tired of the whole Big Government farce yet?

I am.

Been tired of it since the JFK coup and subsequent assassinations. I would have voted for JFK but I was too young. I thought all along that LBJ was in some way complicit in the act. Still do. Too many coincidences for my taste, starting with Dallas. LBJ Central. Bet on it.

I would have voted for RFK as well. But no. Mistah RFK. He dead too.

After that? There has never been a major presidential candidate for whom I would have voted. Not one. Sue me.

On second thought, nevermind. Don’t sue me. Save your outrage. The PermaGov is ramping up to do just that on your behalf.

Watch.

And…WTFU.

PLEASE!!!

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller

AG

Because there are no foreign languages, not even Aramaic. There is English, and then there’s “We’re All Gonna Die!”

In light of Shaun King’s diary about Martese Johnson (pictured above before and after his brutal arrest by Alcohol and Beverage Control Police in Charlottesvillle, Virginia), I have decided to come clean about a crime I committed when I was in my Freshman year of college at Colorado State University.

The year was 1974, and I was seventeen years old. My birthday is in late September, and school started in late August that year. At the time, Colorado had a law that allowed the sale of some alcoholic beverages to 18 year-olds, so long as the content of the beverage did not exceed 3.2% alcohol by volume. It was a Friday night and most of my fellow dorm mates were going out to the local 3.2% beer club for a night of drinking until – well, you know.

Unfortunately, a few weeks shy of my 18th birthday, I was too young to be admitted to that bar, but I desperately wanted to go and party with my buddies. Lucky me, a friend from my high school who was in the same dorm still had his temporary driver’s license (a non-picture ID) and he gave it too me. He even had the same first name as me – Steve. “Don’t worry,” he said, no one checks that closely.” So off I went for my first chance to join my new college friends for a night of drinking cheap, watery Coors’ beer, get drunk and maybe jack up my courage enough to talk to a girl or two.

Outside the bar/club I joined a line of students waiting to get in. My friend, the one who gave me the “fake ID” had already entered about a half hour before me, just to be on the safe side. When I reached the door to the club, I nervously handed over my “ID” to the bouncer. He looked at it and then at me.

“Is this really your name?” he asked shining a flashlight into my face.

“Yes,” I answered, of course it is.”

“Repeat it to me,” he said.

I’m, Steve …” and then I hesitated for a moment before I was able to get out the last name of my friend. He gave me one of those looks that meant Bullshit! but that’s not what he said next.

“You know this is a temporary license that’s expired.”

“I lost my photo license,” I lied. “It’s all I have.” By this time I was close to pissing myself, to be honest. Then, after examining the fake ID I’d given him once more, the bouncer asked me for the birth date of my friend. Damn, I thought. I hadn’t bothered to memorize that information. This was supposed to go off without a hitch. I asked the bouncer why he needed to know. Wrong response.

“This isn’t you, is it?” I continued to lie, but he pulled me out of the line with one hand and up against the outside wall on the other side of the door away from the line. I told him if he wasn’t going to let me in, then I was going to leave. He held up his arm to stop me. “Sorry, that isn’t our policy. You stay right here and don’t move.” I did what he said. He was after all, about twice my size, or so it seems looking back in time to that moment now. He spoke into a walkie-talkie to someone, probably his manager. Then he told me the police were on their way.

“What are they going to do with me?”

“That’s entirely up to them, but attempting to get into a bar with a fake ID is against the law. We could lose our license. That’s why we take these matters very seriously.” We didn’t speak after that. He went back to checking ID’s and letting kids go into the bar. I slunk against the outer brick facade wall and tried to make myself as a small as possible. I’d never been in trouble like this before. Never had any interactions with law enforcement. My heart was pounding. Was I going to go to jail? Would I get kicked out of school? What would I tell my parents. They thought of me as a super straight-arrow who did well in school, and had even been a National Merit Scholarship Semifinalist. Heck, I still attended church on Sundays.

About ten minutes later the police car showed up, and two officers got out. Both middle-aged white guys. They walked over and had a brief chat with the bouncer, and then they turned their attention to me.

“Okay kid, what’s your real name?” I was done lying. I told them. They asked if I had any real ID, and I pulled my driver’s license out. The one that showed that my 18th birthday was three week away. “Are you a student?” one of them asked. I nodded, told them I was a freshman and the name of my dorm. One of them left to confirm what I said. That took roughly another ten minutes. Meanwhile, I felt everyone in line was watching me. To say I was humiliated is an understatement. The cop who stayed behind with me asked if I aware I had broken the law? What could I say but yes. He shook his head. I felt sure I was going to be arrested.

The other cop returned. “He checks out,” was all he said. Apparently, he talked to my Residential Assistant for my floor, a tee-totaling Mormon. “Okay Steve, lets all get in the car, shall we.” They put me in the back seat. At that point I was grateful I hadn’t been handcuffed.

“You ever been in trouble with the law, before, Steve?” This was the cop sitting in the passenger seat. No, I told him, never. He asked me if I understood what I did was not only illegal, but stupid. “Hell, you turn 18 in just a few weeks. You should have just waited.” Yeah I said, I should have.

They backed the car out of the parking lot, and drove out onto the street that led back to the campus. “What’s happens now” I asked.

“Now? We’re going to take you back to your dorm.”

“You’re not going to arrest me?” I was surprised to say the least. The cops glanced at each other. I swear I saw one of them smirking, but maybe that’s just how I chose to remember this bit of my past.

“Not this time,” one of them said. “But we see you again trying to pull a stunt like this and next time you won’t get off so easy. You will be arrested. Understood?” I nodded, relieved, but that apparently wasn’t good enough.

“No,” the cop said, you need to tell me ‘I understand, officer, and it won’t happen again.’ Say it.” I repeated the line word for word, and that seemed to satisfy them. Shortly thereafter we pulled up to my dorm, and one cop opened the rear door and helped me out. “Have a good rest of your weekend,” he said, “and stay out of trouble.” Then he got back in and they left.

So, that’s my story. Not terribly exciting. No getting slammed to the ground and beaten bloody. No charges for resisting arrest or using a fake ID or anything else. As far as I know, no record of the incident was ever made. I got off scot-free. No harm, no foul. No arrest. And I made damn sure I waited until I was 18 before I went back to that bar.

Unlike Martese Johnson, nothing bad happened to me. Of course, I am white. The cops were white. Maybe that had something to do with it. By the way, like Martese Johnson, I would go on to become an Honors student and be accepted into the Colorado State chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (a non-residential, academic achievement society that has Greek letters only, so please don’t confuse it with the scum at Penn State or the University or Oklahoma).

I suppose I will never know if a black student at CSU back then would have been treated the same way I was for the same offense. I’d like to think so. But then, I see the picture of a bloodied Martese Johnson after his brutal beating, a kid who according to witnesses also did nothing that required such a brutal assault by the law enforcement officers of the Alcohol and Beverage Control police who arrested him, and I do wonder.

Actually that’s a lie. I don’t wonder at all.

According to the Washington Post’s Matea Gold, Team Clinton wants to raise a billion dollars for the campaign. And if Jeb raises more, they’re not really worried about that.

Without a strong primary challenger, Clinton will have the luxury of amassing huge sums of money this year while Republicans duke it out in a costly primary fight.

This comes at a time when support for Hillary among Democrats has softened a bit, although it is still remarkably strong by historic standards.

Support for Clinton’s candidacy has dropped about 15 percentage points since mid-February among Democrats, with as few as 45 percent saying they would support her in the last week, according to a Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll. Support from Democrats likely to vote in the party nominating contests has dropped only slightly less, to a low in the mid-50s over the same period.

Even Democrats who said they were not personally swayed one way or another by the email flap said that Clinton could fare worse because of it, if and when she launches her presidential campaign, a separate Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.

The polling showed that nearly half of Democratic respondents – 46 percent – agreed there should be an independent review of all of Clinton’s emails to ensure she turned over everything that is work-related.

The email flap, by itself, is probably only a ripple. The bigger issue is going to be a lack of desire by progressive organizers to engage in an eighteen-month slog of defending the Clintons against attacks, both legitimate and delusional.

I know I have no energy to lift even a pinkie-finger to defend the Clintons. And I know I am not alone.

By contrast, I have spent ten solid years fighting the Republicans every single day, including weekends. My energy for defending Democratic candidates against them has never flagged.

It may be true that there will be no strong primary challengers for Hillary, but I find that prospect deeply enervating.

On the other hand, with a billion dollars, I’m sure she can buy plenty of defenders.

There is an illuminating article at Mondoweiss that shows how the New York Times completely rewrote a piece they published on Benjamin Netanyahu’s “racism.” The first piece was authored by Isabel Kershner and Rick Gladstone and went up at 5:13pm on Election Day. The second piece went up at 9:08pm and was no longer attributed to Rick Gladstone. It appeared with only Kershner in the byline, and it significantly softened the tone of the piece and excised an official statement from the Zionist Union Party, as well as critical quotes from one of their officials and from Dov Hanin, a Joint Arab List candidate.

Netanyahu is quite simply whitewashed in the second article. This new draft—doubtless penned when NYT editors realized Netanyahu would likely be the next prime minister—is significantly kinder. Its thesis is essentially that Netanyahu is not actually a racist and that he does not truly unequivocally oppose the two-state solution. It features lines such as:

• Mr. Netanyahu has a long history in power and has in the past demonstrated that he can change positions from campaigning to governing. His record is as a pragmatist, analysts said.
• “I am sure that Netanyahu, with his broad historical perspective, if he is prime minister again, will be thinking long and hard about what legacy he will want to leave behind with regard to the demographic makeup of the country and its standing in the world,” said Gidi Grinstein, founder of the Reut Institute, an Israeli strategy group. “In the end I would not rule out his going back to the two-state solution.”

Euphemistically, the esteemed publication writes “In the final days of a closely fought election race, Mr. Netanyahu threw all political and diplomatic niceties to the wind.” That is one way of saying that, in order to attract votes, the right-wing Israeli prime minister resorted to base racism, fear-mongering, and—in what Ali Abunimah pointed out is strikingly reminiscent of early-20th-century anti-Semitic tropes—conspiracy theories about powerful foreign interests supposedly conspiring to unseat him.

Obviously, Mondoweiss is a harsh critic of Israel under all circumstances, but they have demonstrated how America’s most prestigious newspaper shades their coverage. What had been a blunt assessment of Netanyahu’s racist anti-Arab tactics and jettisoning of the two-state solution became very quickly a combination of a lack of “niceties” and some version of “he didn’t really mean it.”

Maybe some people are so beholden to the idea that Israel is a good faith partner for some future two-state solution that they simply couldn’t believe their ears, but the Obama administration isn’t revising history virtually at the same moment it is made. This piece in Foreign Policy is a shot across the bow:

After years of blocking U.N. efforts to pressure Israelis and Palestinians into accepting a lasting two-state solution, the United States is edging closer toward supporting a U.N. Security Council resolution that would call for the resumption of political talks to conclude a final peace settlement, according to Western diplomats.

The move follows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decisive re-election Tuesday after the incumbent publicly abandoned his commitment to negotiate a Palestinian state — the basis of more than 20 years of U.S. diplomatic efforts — and promised to continue the construction of settlements on occupied territory. The development also reflects deepening pessimism over the prospect of U.S.-brokered negotiations delivering peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Shortly before this week’s election, the United States informed its diplomatic partners that it would hold off any moves in the U.N. Security Council designed to put Israel on the spot at the United Nations in the event that Netanyahu’s challenger, Isaac Herzog, won the election. But U.S. officials signaled a willingness to consider a U.N. resolution in the event that Netanyahu was re-elected and formed a coalition government opposed to peace talks.

Further confirmation of a rift comes in Michael Crowley’s piece in Politico:

Angered by Netanyahu’s hard-line platform toward the Palestinians, top Obama officials would not rule out the possibility of a change in American posture at the United Nations, where the U.S. has historically fended off resolutions hostile to Israel.

And despite signals from Israel suggesting that Netanyahu might walk back his rejection, late in the campaign, of a Palestinian state under his watch, Obama officials say they are taking him at his word.

The default position for many observers of the U.S.-Israel relationship is a hard cynicism about the prospects that the U.S. will ever hold Israel’s settlers accountable, but Jonathan Alter may be right when we writes, “A reckoning is coming—faster than expected—for Netanyahu, his Likud Party and maybe even for the State of Israel itself.”

Sometimes things stay the same until they change.

[Cross-posted at Progress Pond]

This New York Times article was removed within an hour or two and completely rewritten … only available in cached memory, thanking Internet Archive WayBack Machine.

Netanyahu Expresses Alarm That Arab Voter Turnout Could Help Unseat Him

JERUSALEM — Increasingly worried that he could lose Tuesday’s elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel lashed out at the country’s Arab voters, expressing alarm that a large turnout by them could determine the outcome. Opponents accused him of baldfaced racism.

Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks, in a video posted on social media, were seen by critics as the most strident in a series of assertions he has made in recent days to rally right-wing supporters to his argument that he is the only Israeli leader who will save the country from its enemies.

On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu said if his Likud faction was returned to power, he would never allow the creation of a Palestinian state, reversing a stance he had taken six years earlier. His statement was seen not only as validating Palestinian suspicions, but also risking further alienation between Mr. Netanyahu and the Obama administration, which supports a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mr. Netanyahu also openly acknowledged having promoted a settlement over the 1967 lines in southeast Jerusalem in order to block the expansion of the West Bank city of Bethlehem and its connection with Jerusalem, something that critics said harmed the contiguity of any future Palestinian state.

…
The Arab parties have maintained that they will honor their tradition of refusing to join any governing coalition. But their leader, Ayman Odeh, has indicated he would support Isaac Herzog — the leader of the center-left Zionist Union alliance, Mr. Netanyahu’s most important adversary — if Mr. Netanyahu is defeated.

“Right-wing rule is in danger. Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations,” Mr. Netanyahu said in the video. “The left-wing nonprofit organizations are bringing them in buses.”

He exhorted supporters of Likud to vote. “With your help and God’s help we will form a national government and protect the state of Israel,” he said.

The Zionist Union alliance denounced Mr. Netanyahu’s language as racial fearmongering.

h/t Mondoweiss New York Times published piece about Netanyahu’s racism, then rewrote all of it

○ UN backs away from including IDF on list of children’s rights violators after pressure from Israel

Obama snubs Netanyahu and criticises Israeli PM’s ‘divisive rhetoric’

More below the fold …

Obama snubs Netanyahu and criticises Israeli PM’s ‘divisive rhetoric’ | The Guardian |

The White House has made clear its dismay at Binyamin Netanyahu’s sweeping victory in the Israeli elections with a stinging rebuke of the “divisive rhetoric” used by the Israeli leader in the closing stages of the election.

President Obama has not called to congratulate Netanyahu, who is now attempting to build a coalition between rightwing parties and his own Likud, which won decisively in parliamentary elections on Tuesday.

But the White House said it would be forced to re-evaluate its policy on the Middle East peace process after Netanyahu abandoned a prior commitment to an independent Palestinian state, apparently to shore up support among conservatives in Israel.

Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, reaffirmed the president’s belief in the two-state solution, and strongly condemned Netanyahu’s decision to rally support with incendiary remarks about a high turnout among Israeli Arab voters. Netanyahu used a 28-second video on election day to warn that Israeli Arabs were being bussed to the polls “in droves”.

“The United States and this administration is deeply concerned about rhetoric that seeks to marginalise Arab Israeli citizens,” Earnest said. “It undermines the values and democratic ideals that have been important to our democracy and an important part of what binds the United States and Israel together.”

He added: “Rhetoric that seeks to marginalise one segment of their population is deeply concerning, it is divisive, and I can tell you that these are views the administration intends to communicate directly to the Israelis.”

Israeli Election I: Likud Victory

Common wisdom says your first impression is always best.  This holds true about the Israeli election.  A week ago I wrote a post predicting that whatever the result, the Likud and Israeli far-right would win the election, cobble together a governing coalition, and things would go from bad to worse in terms of Israel’s relations with the Arab world, U.S., and rest of the world.

Then earlier today, just a few hours ago, I began hearing about desperate speeches Bibi was making via social media and the press, in which he was pulling out all the racist stops in a last-ditch effort to appeal to the nationalist base and stave off a disaster.  My mistake was to believe the polls saying Bibi was finished.  I thought his last-minute effort would fail and Bibi would be history.

But the old battle-axe fooled all the analysts and pollsters, who predicted as recently as last Friday a centrist victory and Likud disaster.  As usual, Bibi knew his constituency better than the liberals and leftists who hoped for something different.  He knew what motivated the average voter.  He knew the red-meat phrases that set them salivating.  He knew, in short, that fear and racism trumped the public’s growing impatience with his rule.

Bibi’s closing message was, modeled on Louis XIV, “Apres moi, les Arabes!”  And it worked.

Is this checkmate for climate change-denying governors?

It reminds me of when the Feds denied highway funding to any state that didn’t raise it’s drinking age.

Highly coercive, but effective.