Month: April 2017

His first article as new columnist at The New York Times I find shallow-minded, dishonest and disturbed by a trend of right-wing activists gaining entry into a once liberal newspaper. No one loses its colored feathers as a opinion journalist and it made me wonder if he’s still on Murdoch’s pay while writing on the side for a “quality” liberal newspaper. Bill Kristol gave Stephens a hearty welcome as did the NYT editor. His first column gave a good response with over 1555 posts at last glance.

I won’t provide a link to his article as it isn’t worth the attention it already got and one can find the link here @BooMan in a front-page “Open Thread” by Martin Longman. What disturbs me in that thread is the complete breakdown of civil discourse here at the pond. The stated objective to introduce Bret Stephens at The New York Times reads as follows:

The New York Times has been defending the paper’s hiring of a climate science denier, fighting off
its critics with what it claims is a standard fashioned from hardened “intellectual honesty.”

Editorial page editor James Bennett, told the paper’s public editor Liz Spayd: “The crux of the question is
whether his work belongs inside our boundaries for intelligent debate, and I have no doubt that it does.
I have no doubt he crosses our bar for intellectual honesty and fairness.”

Our colleague Nick Kristof welcomed Bret to The Times earlier this week with a conversation on Facebook Live,
which you can watch here. As Nick makes clear in the video, he and Bret disagree on a lot of things, from
how to think about American policy in the Middle East to how best to address climate change. And as both
writers note, that’s a good thing; as strong-minded and open-minded people, they welcome the debate.

When Adolph Ochs set out the mission for The New York Times at the end of the 19th century, he said he
hoped to make its opinion pages a forum for “intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.”

I won’t put up a post in the front-page article as I consequently get trolled by a gang of vigilantes whose (broke)rage in support of HRC is with 100% certainty.

I have covered Bret Stephens / Rupert Murdoch a number of times here @BooMan …

○ Neocons Covert Action and Ukraine Watch
○ First Amendment Rights Muted by Criticism of Israel

Murdoch and Hacked Climategate Emails   by Oui @BooMan on July 21, 2011

News Corp and the Hacked Climategate Emails: Time for an Independent Investigation

(ThinkProgress) – There have been countless independent investigations into the scientists whose e-mails were hacked in November 2009.  And the scientists have been (quietly) vindicated every time (see “The first rule of vindicating climate science is you do not talk about vindicating climate science “).

But we still don’t know who hacked the emails! And now we know that one of the key investigative bodies tasked with tracking down the hackers — Scotland Yard —  were compromised at the time.

How were they compromised?  Neil Wallis— the former News of the World executive editor — became a “£1,000 a day” consultant to Scotland Yard in October 2009.  Last week he became the ninth person arrested in the metastasizing News Corp scandal “on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to section 1(1) Criminal Law Act 1977.”

Certainly Wallis had plenty of motive to join Scotland Yard just to keep an eye on the investigation into the phone-hacking scandal.  Indeed, the NY Times reports Wallis “was reporting back to News International while he was working for the police on the hacking case.”  But this also suggests how corrupt Wallis was — and how corrupted Scotland Yard was.  

○ Rupert Murdoch and full Israel support as insider “Stand With Us”

It’s quite interesting Louise Mensch worked with Rupert Murdoch’s Heatstreet to unveil the “truth” about the links between the Trump campaign and the Russians by means of bots and hacking. As Tory MP, Louise Mensch was on the committee hearing to investigate the Murdoch News Corp tabloid phone hacking scandal in 2011. She voted against the final report of the committee.

○ Britain’s Phone-Hacking Scandal and the Rise of Louise Mensch | TIME |

If there is still some escapism to the true colors of neoconphile Bret Stephens [RightWeb], this presentation must convert all doubters …

Bret Stephens: The next US president may not be pro-Israel | JPost – Feb. 11, 2016 |

Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens talks on 9/5/12 about the threat of Iran organized into “moral categories” of self deception, deception, clarity, friendship and courage. He’s one the most brilliant foreign policy minds of our time. It’s one thing to read his extraordinary columns but even more powerful to hear him speak about the Iranian nuclear program and the threat it means to the world.

Bret Stephens speaks on Iran and Israel at Stand With Us San Diego event (2012)

○ WSJ Editor Tells Israel to Ignore World after Obama Betrayal | Arutz Sheva |
○ APN, J Street, NIF respond to Bret Stephens’ characterization of President Obama on Israel | J Street – April 2012 |

○ Bret Stephens: Stance on Climate Change | DeSmog |

Final word to Ken Caldeira: I cancelled my New York Times subscription today …

○ Climate of Risk and Uncertainty

Underreported is Obama’s war on journalists …

○ Obama and the NSA Winning the War Against Journalists?
○ Obama’s call to lengthen Yemeni journalist’s prison term for reporting brutal Tomahawk strike killing dozens

If I where to use @patribotics as a source, I would certainly be banned from blogging.

○ The Carolina Conspiracy – Or, How Vladimir Putin Catfished A US Election With the Collusion of Team Trump

One of the most popular online conspiracists among Democrats is now the former Tory member of the UK Parliament and current Murdoch-rag-writer Louise Mensch, whose history of public humiliations and pure bigotry is far too long to chronicle.

But because she has now turned her deranged behavior to peddling any and all conspiracies about Trump and Russia, she has built a huge Twitter following among Democrats convinced that all of their critics are Kremlin spies and anyone who dies was murdered by the Putin/Trump axis to protect their conspiratorial cover-up.

That is as flagrantly insane as the most warped versions of birther and truther fever dreams that have tragically engulfed significant portions of the U.S. population. That tweet, by itself, should disqualify her from any form of serious consideration. But Mensch is now routinely cited as some sort of credible journalistic source on Russia conspiracies by unhinged, mainstream anti-Trump fanatics such as MSNBC and Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, who will launder any insanity as long as it promotes their Tom Clancy fever dreams of Trump as a Kremlin asset.
[Source: GG]

Early signs …

○ Loony Louise Mensch Accuses VICE Journalist of Treason for Criticizing Hillary Clinton (Oct. 16, 2016)

Louise Mensch @PatriBotonics here @BooMan …

○ So God bless America, and God Save the Queen
○ Louise Mensch, former Tory MP, now in employ by Rupert Murdoch

 
Update-1 :: A follow-up diary … topic was discussed in a front-page article by Martin Longman here.

○
Bret Stephens, WSJ/Murdoch Are Inseparable

His first article as new columnist at The New York Times I find shallow-minded, dishonest and disturbed by a trend of right-wing activists gaining entry into a once liberal newspaper. No one loses its colored feathers as a opinion journalist and it made me wonder if he’s still on Murdoch’s pay while writing on the side for a “quality” liberal newspaper. Bill Kristol gave Stephens a hearty welcome as did the NYT editor. His first column gave a good response with over 1555 posts at last glance.

Brexit summit: EU accepts united Ireland declaration

EU leaders have agreed Northern Ireland will automatically become part of the European Union if its people vote to join a united Ireland in a future Border poll.

At a summit in Brussels which concluded shortly before 3pm (Irish time) on Saturday, the leaders of the 27 remaining EU states also unanimously approved guidelines for how the bloc will conduct its Brexit negotiations with the UK

Brexit summit: EU accepts united Ireland declaration

European Council president Donald Tusk said the summit had approved the guidelines in less than a minute – a detail intended to emphasise the unity of the remaining EU-27 in advance of the negotiations with the UK.

“The most important thing to come out of today is the unity of the European Council,” European Parliament president Antonio Tajani said, while officials stressed that the summit had progressed as expected.

The declaration regarding Ireland paves the way for Northern Ireland to automatically become part of the EU if it ever wished to join the Republic in a United Ireland.

The declaration, known in Brussels as the “Kenny text”, says: “The European Council acknowledges that the Good Friday Agreement expressly provides for an agreed mechanism whereby a united Ireland may be brought about through peaceful and democratic means.

“In this regard, the European Council acknowledges that, in accordance with international law, the entire territory of such a united Ireland would thus be part of the European Union.”

The people of Northern Ireland now have a straight choice: to be part of a United Kingdom outside the EU or a United Ireland within the EU. I don’t expect the majority unionist community to opt for a United Ireland any time soon, but they at least now have a clear choice. And should Brexit turn out to be the disaster I expect, the balance of their political preferences may change somewhat in future years.

As head of the European Council – the highest decision-making body of the EU, made up the heads of governments of all members states – Mr Tusk has described the priorities of the EU side as being “people, money and Ireland”.

By this he meant that the first phase of the talks with the British must deal with the rights of EU citizens resident in the UK (and of British citizens resident in the EU), the size of the bill that Britain must pay for ongoing liabilities (EU programmes to which it has committed, pensions of British EU officials, etc) and the position of Northern Ireland and its Border with the Republic.

Only once these questions have been resolved will the EU begin discussions with the UK on the nature of their future relationship, which will include the shape of any trade deal.

The trade element of any future relationship is especially important to Ireland given its close economic ties with the UK, but also because any tariffs between the UK and the EU would have to be enforced on the Irish Border.

The degree of unanimity being displayed by the EU 27 has been quite remarkable, and must fill UK negotiators with foreboding. The full text of the EU27 negotiating guidelines is available here. They make no concession to the UK’s desire to commence trade negotiations in parallel with the withdrawal negotiations and emphasize that any such trade agreement can only be concluded once the UK is no longer a member of the EU.

Spain has a veto on any agreement that applies to Gibraltar and bilateral agreements between Cyprus and the UK (in relation to Sovereign Base areas) and Ireland and the UK will be recognised insofar as they are compatible with EU law. The transfer of EU agencies currently situated within the UK is asserted to be exclusively a matter for the EU 27 even though the UK had indicated it wanted to discuss their future within the context of the A50 negotiations.

The guidelines are also quite explicit that no Brexit deal can offer the same benefits as EU membership:

European Council (Art. 50) guidelines for Brexit negotiations

18. The European Council welcomes and shares the United Kingdom’s desire to establish a close partnership between the Union and the United Kingdom after its departure. While a relationship between the Union and a non Member State cannot offer the same benefits as Union membership, strong and constructive ties will remain in both sides’ interest and should encompass more than just trade.

Thus without drama or histrionics, the EU has set the scene for a very difficult set of negotiations for the UK.

Bleeding Heartland has an excellent article on the state of Democratic Politics in Iowa.  It includes a sophisticated analysis of the issues in light of the ANES survey.

Iowa had one of the largest ’12 to ’16 swings in the country.  Obama always considered the state a bellwether and the personal connection he felt to the state was the reason his final 2012 campaign event was there.

I not sure I agree with everything, or even most of what is written.  But it is interesting.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Main Street, Cold Spring, NY painting.  The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I’ve begun to apply paint, carefully delineating the various elements.  Note the overhang and pointed turret just beyond.  The trees look silly but they will change.  The perspective will improve, especially for the path.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

So many people should get punched in the nuts for making this happen.

It was Fusion GPS in Washington DC who gave Orbis the contract to find dirt between the Trump campaign and Russia!

[Highlights and links added to article are mine – Oui]

UK was given details of alleged contacts between Trump campaign and Moscow | The Guardian |

The UK government was given details last December of allegedly extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow, according to court papers.

It was not previously known that the UK intelligence services had also received the dossier but Steele confirmed in a court filing earlier this month that he handed a memorandum compiled in December to a “senior UK government national security official acting in his official capacity, on a confidential basis in hard copy form”.

…
Since the memo became public in January, Steele had not spoken about his role in compiling it but he and his company, Orbis Business Intelligence Limited, have filed a defence in the high court of justice in London, in a defamation case brought by Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian venture capitalist and owner of a global computer technology company, XBT, and a Dallas-based subsidiary Webzilla.

Gubarev, who was named along with his company in the December memo as being involved in hacking operation, has denied any such involvement and is also suing Buzzfeed in the US courts for publishing the December memo alongside Steele’s earlier reports on election hacking.

A statement by Steele’s defence lawyers, endorsed by the former MI6 agent, said Orbis was hired between June and November last year by Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research consultancy to look into Trump’s links with Russia.

In that period, Steele produced 16 memoranda citing mostly Russian sources as describing a web of alleged contacts and collusion between Trump aides and Russian intelligence or other Kremlin representatives.

The document said that he passed the memos to Fusion  on the understanding that Fusion would not disclose the material to any third parties without the approval of Steele and Orbis. They did agree to Fusion providing a copy to Senator John McCain  after the veteran Republican had been told about the existence of Steele’s research by Sir Andrew Wood, a former UK ambassador to Moscow and an Orbis associate, at a conference in Canada on 8 November.

Senator McCain handed a copy of the Steele memos to James Comey, the FBI director, on 9 December.

After delivering these reports, the court papers say Steele and Orbis continued to receive “unsolicited intelligence” on Trump-Russia links, and Steele decided that to draw up another memo with this new information which was dated 13 December.

He handed one copy over to the senior British national security official and sent an encrypted version to Fusion with instructions to deliver a hard copy to Senator McCain.

The defence argues that Steele and Orbis were under a duty to pass on the information “so that it was known to the United Kingdom and United States governments at a high level by persons with responsibility for national security”.

Steele and Orbis say they never gave any copies to news organisations although Steele said he gave off-the-record briefings about the dossier to a small number of journalists in late summer and early autumn 2016. The defence brief argues that neither Steele nor Orbis is liable for Buzzfeed’s decision to print the document.

Lawsuit against BuzzFeed over publishing ex-spy’s dossier moves to federal court | McClatchy |

A defamation suit [pdf] brought against online news site BuzzFeed for its publishing of an intelligence dossier that alleges Kremlin ties to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been transferred to federal court.

The suit, brought by Cyprus-based tech mogul Aleksej Gubarev, was transferred at BuzzFeed’s request from a local Florida court to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami.

Gubarev’s defamation suit against BuzzFeed demanded a response by Feb. 28, which has been extended. Since the lawsuit was filed, BuzzFeed has redacted Gubarev’s name from the document and apologized.

In a statement to McClatchy, BuzzFeed spokesman Matt Mittenthal said, “We have redacted
Mr. Gubarev’s name from the published dossier, and apologize for including it.”

○ Trump’s lawyer launches legal action against BuzzFeed for publishing `completely fabricated’ dossier | Washington Times – April 24, 2017 |

How Ex-Spy Christopher Steele Compiled His Explosive Trump-Russia Dossier | Vanity Fair – March 2017 |

In 2011, Glenn Simpson, along with two other former Journal reporters, launched Fusion GPS, in Washington, D.C. The firm’s activities, according to the terse, purposefully oblique statement on its Web site, centered on “premium research, strategic intelligence, and due diligence.”

In September 2015, as the Republican primary campaign was heating up, he was hired to compile an opposition-research dossier on Donald Trump. Who wrote the check? Simpson, always secretive, won’t reveal his client’s identity. However, according to a friend who had spoken with Simpson at the time, the funding came from a “Never Trump” Republican and not directly from the campaign war chests of any of Trump’s primary opponents.

But by mid-June 2016, despite all the revelations Simpson was digging up about the billionaire’s roller-coaster career, two previously unimaginable events suddenly affected both the urgency and the focus of his research. First, Trump had apparently locked up the nomination, and his client, more pragmatic than combative, was done throwing good money after bad. And second, there was a new cycle of disturbing news stories wafting around Trump as the wordy headline splashed across the front page of The Washington Post on June 17 heralded, Inside Trump’s financial ties to Russia and his unusual flattery of Vladimir Putin.

Simpson, as fellow journalists remembered, smelled fresh red meat. And anyway, after all he had discovered, he’d grown deeply concerned by the prospect of a Trump presidency. So he found Democratic donors whose checks would keep his oppo research going strong. And he made a call to London, to a partner at Orbis he had worked with in the past, an ex-spy who knew where all the bodies were buried in Russia, and who, as the wags liked to joke, had even buried some of them.

Today’s quote is really more of an excerpt from Rev. William J. Barber II’s book THE THIRD RECONSTRUCTION: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement:

Between 1865 and 1900, interracial alliances in every Southern state arose to advance public education, protect the right to vote, and curb corporate power by reaching across the color line. These fusion coalitions outraged white Democrats because they led to raising taxes for public education. The fusion coalitions attacked the divisive rhetoric of white solidarity and pointed out the common interests of most black and white Southerners. As the fusion coalitions gained traction, more than a quarter of white voters in the South cast their ballots for interracial coalitions and the coalitions started to take political power. In the 1890s, a fusion coalition of Republicans and Populists in North Carolina swept the state legislature, won both U.S. Senate seats, and took the governorship. Together with their counterparts in other Southern states, these blacks and whites working together in the South passed some of the most progressive educational and labor laws in our nation’s history.

But fusion politics in the South were met with a violent backlash. As these coalitions began to emerge, extremists who called themselves Redeemers started a campaign to “redeem” America from the influence of black political power and progress. They immediately sought to deny the vote to blacks through violence, intimidation, and the passage of laws that, together, came to be called Jim Crow—a systematic, de jure denial of equality and rights, often achieved via the concept of “separate but equal.” From 1890 to 1908, ten Southern states wrote new constitutions with provisions that included literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses that denied black people the franchise not because they were black but because their enslaved grandfathers had not been able to vote. As early as 1875, restrictive state provisions had been upheld by an ultraconservative, radical Supreme Court. Later, in the twentieth century, when the Supreme Court began to find a few of the provisions unconstitutional, states devised new legislation to continue the disenfranchisement of most blacks.

Everywhere and always, the Redeemers howled about the use of tax money to support public education, especially for black children, and sought to suppress the African American vote. Driven by fear, they incited “race riots” in New Orleans, Wilming­ton, Atlanta, Springfield, and other cities, arming poor whites and playing on old fears in order to destroy interracial democracy and create a Jim Crow political economy rooted in low taxes, low wages, and fewer and fewer voters.

When we pay attention to this long history, a pattern emerges: first, the Redeemers attacked voting rights. Then they attacked public education, labor, fair tax policies, and progressive leaders. Then they took over the state and federal courts, so they could be used to render rulings that would undermine the hope of a new America.

We need to keep retelling the forgotten history of America, and Rev. Barber does it very well.

Trump: “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”
[REUTERS  Fri Apr 28, 2017]

Well it’s really Obama’s fault–he made it seem so effortless.