Month: May 2018

If Donald Trump wants to cede the affluent suburbs to the Democrats and lose the support of an even greater proportion of the formerly Republican white professional class, he could hardly do better than threatening people’s Audis and BMW’s. Where I live in the Philly suburbs, the Republicans are already on the verge of losing at least three House seats, and it seems like approximately a third of the vehicles on the road would match the description of being “German luxury cars.”

President Trump wants to impose a total ban on the imports of German luxury cars, according to a new report from CNBC and German magazine WirtschaftsWoche.

Several U.S. and European diplomats told the news outlets that Trump told French President Emmanuel Macron about his plans last month during a state visit.

Trump reportedly told Macron that he would maintain the ban until no Mercedes-Benz cars are seen on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Shares of Daimler, Porsche and Volkswagen were lower on Thursday, shortly after the weekly German business magazine published the report.

Of course, some of these cars are actually manufactured in America, so this wouldn’t cause a complete blackout of all makes of German luxury cars. On a substantive level, if we ignore the fallout from reciprocal actions that Germany would take, this could result in more car manufacturing jobs in America. German carmakers could open new or more plants here to avoid the importation ban, and American carmakers might be able to expand if they gain a greater share of the luxury car market. There’s a political upside in the sense that it would give Trump more credibility when he casts himself as a populist who doesn’t cater to rich people and their car preferences.

But, overall, this looks like a policy that would do some really serious damage to Republicans in some of the swingiest districts in the country.

There’s plenty in Andrew McCarthy’s new National Review piece Yes, the FBI Was Investigating the Trump Campaign When It Spied that I agree with even though overall it is one of the most misleading, poisonous and dangerous documents that I’ve seen in a long time. McCarthy’s effort is aimed at sustaining the president’s most recent #SpyGate gambit, which basically can be summed up as an allegation that he’s completely innocent of any improper relationship with the Russians and that the Deep State has been hounding him with a partisan witch-hunt of an investigation that began during the campaign when it improperly infiltrated his operation.

When discussing this issue, there’s a risk that you’ll get bogged down in an argument over semantics like the difference between a spy and an informant, or being the target of an investigation and being a subject of an investigation, or whether there’s a meaningful distinction between examining the behavior of numerous officials of a campaign and examining the campaign itself, or whether you can open a counterintelligence investigation of a campaign without investigating the candidate. McCarthy makes great use of these semantic questions, but most of them are ultimately sideshows.

To prove my point, I’m willing to concede the basic truthfulness of his headline. When the FBI used Stefan Halper to establish contact with Sam Clovis, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page it was using the tools of espionage (i.e., spying), and what they were looking for was evidence that the campaign was in any way involved in the hacking and subsequent distribution of electronic communications from Democratic organizations and officials. Potentially, this involvement could have included Donald Trump, so he was at least a subject of the investigation as well as the biggest possible target.

To be sure, there are plenty of people who are not willing to concede all of these points and they have good reasons for waging these fights over the meaning of words. Once we move beyond those debates, however, we can see more clearly.

In discussing these issues I have to find somewhere on the timeline to begin, and I can think of no better place than July 31st, 2016, which is the day the FBI acknowledges that they formally opened a counterintelligence operation into possible coordination between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian interference operation into our upcoming election.

This wasn’t something they took on lightly, and in naming the investigation Crossfire Hurricane they were perhaps acknowledging that they knew they were wading into Hell.  But they had received credible information from the Australians that Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos had been aware the Russians had obtained thousands of Clinton emails prior to them being released.  There were three reasons the FBI needed to follow-up on that lead. The first was that, while they had evidence that implicated the Russians in the hacks they didn’t have anything that could be called incontrovertible proof. And, even if they were confident that Russians were involved, anything that might help them understand how the operation was organized and authorized would be vital for both investigatory and prophylactic reasons.  Confirming that Papadopolous had foreknowledge and learning how he obtained it was therefore of paramount importance from both a legal and a national security point of view.

The second reason the FBI needed to look carefully at Papadoplous was to learn if he had shared what he knew not only in a drunken exchange with an Australian diplomat but also with members of the Trump campaign. And, if he had shared that information with people in the campaign, the FBI needed to know why no one in the campaign had told the FBI about it. If the campaign was not reporting it, perhaps they were instead seeking to exploit the crime to their own advantage.  And that would open campaign officials, and perhaps the candidate himself up to potential blackmail, as the Russians could always threaten to reveal what they had done.  Even if Trump had no awareness that some people in his orbit were coordinating with the hackers, he’d presumably want to know if people on his team had been compromised.

And that gets to the third reason for looking at Papadopoulos. If he was in some way compromised or even working as an agent of a foreign power, that would be a national security threat given his position as a foreign policy adviser who might reasonably be expected to land an important position in any future Trump administration.  There were all valid counterintelligence concerns.

Now, the counterintelligence investigation wasn’t formally opened until July 31st, 2016, but Stefan Halper made his first contact with Carter Page on July 11th when Page made an appearance at a Cambridge University symposium.  This discrepancy in the timeline has been used to raise doubts about when the FBI first began investigating the Trump campaign for possible collusion.  I definitely understand the suspicion here, but I think it’s probably overblown.

Rather than completely reinvent the wheel on this portion of the controversy, I’d like to refer you to the piece I wrote on May 27th: On Stefan Halper and Carter Page. The short version is that Carter Page had long been of interest to the FBI’s counterintelligence team, dating back at least to 2013 when they approached him and told him he was being recruited by Russian spies. He was belligerent in his response and the FBI ultimately obtained a FISA warrant against him because they had credible suspicions that he had actually been successfully recruited. When Trump named Carter Page as one of a small handful of his foreign policy advisers, most people had no idea who he was. However, the FBI’s counterintelligence team must have felt much differently about his appointment given what they knew about him.

When Carter Page arrived in Cambridge in July 2016, he had just departed Moscow where he had spent three days. During that time he gave a speech at the New Economic School where he was critical of his own country and parroted Vladimir Putin’s critiques of U.S. foreign policy. It’s unclear how closely he was monitored on this trip, but by his own admission he met with several members of the Russian parliament and Russia’s deputy prime minister Arkadiy Dvorkovich. He also admitted watching a soccer match in a bar with Andrei Baranov, the head of investor relations at Rosneft, a gigantic state-run Russian energy company. During this lunch, Page admitted that he and Baranov discussed business deals and sanctions relief.

It seems reasonable to surmise that the counterintelligence team was watching Page during the Moscow leg of his trip and that they knew in advance that he would be traveling from there to Cambridge where Stefan Halper would be attending the same symposium. Halper undoubtedly serves as eyes and ears to the U.S. intelligence community on the Cambridge campus and has for a long time. So, asking him to befriend Page at the symposium was a simple matter of using an asset already in place.

It might be difficult to keep these things separate in retrospect, but there was a big distinction between the situation with Page on July 11th and the situation with Papadopolous on July 31st that caused the launch of a formal counterintelligence investigation. Carter Page was not suspected of having anything to do with the hacking. He was just suspicious on his own merits, and had been for at least three years. The counterintelligence team, in early July, had no reason to believe that the Trump campaign was aware that Page had been under scrutiny or might be acting as a foreign agent. In this sense, Trump really should have been glad to have the FBI looking out for the security and integrity of his campaign.

However, once Papadopolous’s foreknowledge of the hacks entered the scene, the picture changed dramatically. Both he and Page had been recruited by Sam Clovis to serve among a very small handful of announced foreign policy advisors to Trump. This created a triangle that needed to be explored. Since Halper had already established a relationship with Page, he was the logical person to explore this triangle. He used his connection to Page to make contact with Clovis and he used his contact with Clovis to make contact with Papadopolous. As far as we know, he didn’t try to recruit them or steal documents from them- things we associate with “spying”- but he did talk to them and report back. With Page and Clovis, he seems to have done nothing that aroused suspicion but with Papadopolous he tried to get him to admit that he knew about the Russian hacking. Information he gathered on Page was ultimately used in a successful application for a FISA warrant, which was also supplemented by the Steele Dossier that had reported on some of Page’s activities while he was in Moscow.

All of this is outrageous to McCarthy, but what he never does is offer us some alternative that the FBI should have taken rather than explore this triangle. When a campaign names someone as a foreign policy adviser who has been suspected but ultimately cleared of being a foreign agent, and then that advisor travels to that country and acts as Page did, should the FBI not revisit their prior investigation before running to the campaign to warn them and besmirch that advisor’s name? When a foreign policy advisor to a campaign has foreknowledge of a crime and that crime is not reported, should the FBI not try to figure out why it wasn’t reported before tipping off possible coconspirators within that campaign? When a key member of a campaign is known to have hired two foreign policy advisors with suspicious connections to a hostile foreign adversary and there is some reason to suspect criminal activity involving that foreign adversary, should the FBI not try to figure out how and why that happened?

It shouldn’t need to be said, but the problem here is that none of these things should have been happening. The FBI counterintelligence team is supposed to protect campaigns from foreign influence but that’s hard to do when all the signs are that the campaign is welcoming foreign help.  It’s easy to say that the FBI should keep their mitts off of anything related to elections, but they can’t ignore campaigns and protect them at the same time.

One thing to keep in mind here, too, is that we didn’t learn about any of this until after we had voted. If we had known even a little about this investigation it could have certainly changed public opinion enough to have changed the outcome of the election. If the FBI had been intent on damaging Trump’s prospects, there would have been leaks, but the FBI went so far as to lie to the New York Times in the last week of the campaign by denying that Trump’s campaign was under scrutiny.

It’s boring at this point to mention that Hillary Clinton didn’t get the same consideration from James Comey and the FBI, but that doesn’t make it any less true.  It seems to a lot of people that it’s not fair that the FBI thought the electorate had a right to know that Clinton was “extremely reckless” with classified information and that there were Clinton emails on pervert Anthony’s Weiner’s laptop but that the electorate had no right to know that a Trump foreign policy advisor had foreknowledge of the Russian hacks.

It seems to a lot of people like this disparity alone explains why Trump won and Clinton lost, making the FBI’s election tampering at least as consequential as anything the Russians did.

What doesn’t seem outrageous is that the FBI investigated Carter Page, George Papadopolous and Sam Clovis.  In light of subsequent events, they were also justified in investigating Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone.  And it’s not just me saying this. This is also what Marco Rubio and Trey Gowdy have said. So, when McCarthy blasts Rubio and Gowdy for their cluelessness in dismissing the #SpyGate conspiracy theory, he’s really insisting rather that only some facts in this case should matter, while others are completely ignored.

There wasn’t and still isn’t anyway to investigate the Russian theft of electronic communications and general meddling in the campaign without also investigating the people in the Trump campaign who had direct contact with the Russians. We can all wish that those connections didn’t exist and that the FBI could have done a clean investigation with no monitoring of campaign officials, but the connections did exist and still do.

Another blast from the past. This song was such an optimistic take on an era that was only barely beginning.

At some future point in time, some other group of kids will, in their own unique way, conjure up some song to characterize a momentous shift in history and hopefully one signalling progress. I intend to still be alive when that happens.

I’ll try to post more later as time permits.

Well, lookee here:

John Bolton has chosen Fred Fleitz as the new NSC chief of staff. Fleitz is Senior VP of Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, an @splcenter designated hate group that @ADL_National condemns as “dedicated to advancement of myriad conspiracy theories & anti-Muslim extremism”

— Dylan Williams (@dylanotes) May 30, 2018

I recommend approaching the work of Nafeez Ahmed with some skepticism, but I do have to give him credit for the comprehensiveness with which his crowdsourced INSURGE Intelligence group investigated Vladimir Putin’s ties to Europe’s far-right and neo-Nazi political parties. There’s an absolute correspondence between those whom Putin favors and the parties and figures that got chummy with the Trump campaign. In addition to Marine Le Pen who showed up at Trump Tower in January 2017 to raise money with fascist fixer George “Guido” Lombardi, there’s Nigel Farage of Britain’s UKIP party, who dined with Steve Bannon in the White House in late February 2017 before meeting in early March with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. There’s Viktor Orbán in Hungary who was paid special attention during the campaign by Trump associates Carter Page and J.D. Gordon. There’s the Austrian Freedom Party that boasted of meeting with Michael Flynn. I think when Mr. Ahmed makes the following statement he is on solid footing.

In the last few years, far-right parties in Europe with entrenched Nazi heritage, sympathies and affiliations have effectively infiltrated the EU system to destroy it.

Winning seats in the European elections, while joining and forming political coalitions in the European Parliament, they have ramped up efforts to coordinate their activities with a view to exploit EU resources and funding. Though not always successful, these efforts have, nevertheless, boosted their credibility and appeal, both at home and on the international stage, contributing to significant electoral achievements in domestic elections.

Less known, however, is how deep these networks of coordination go, and the myriad of contradictory extremist and geopolitical interests behind them.

The networks of far-right coordination stretch across the Atlantic, from the United States, to the UK, to Europe, and to Russia. But of most concern is that embedded within these networks are core, competing neo-Nazi and white nationalist forces, eager to use international connections to tactically rebrand themselves and strategically expand their influence.

Ironically, two mainstream political forces experiencing the push and pull of these trans-Atlantic networks are the Republican Party in the US, and Eurasian expansionists in the Russian Kremlin. Many of the far-right groups that now have potential access and influence over Republicans have also been courted by President Putin and groups close to the Kremlin, as part of a Russian strategy to weaken the European Union and undermine NATO.

To get a sense of what it means that Fred Fleitz has been chosen as the National Security Council’s chief of staff, you need to understand both the role of Frank Gaffney and his Center for Security Policy in the international neo-Nazi movement and the way that movement is seamlessly connected to and promoted by Vladimir Putin.  While I cannot endorse everything Mr. Ahmed alleges and recommend double checking his sources and how he treats them, I do think his A Fourth Reich is rising across Europe — with ties to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is an excellent place to start your journey. It connects a lot of dots that need connecting, and it contains a lot of documentation that you can assess for yourself.

I also recommend you look at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s profile of the Center for Security Policy. The SPLC focuses primarily on the domestic role of the Center for Security Policy and on their Islamophobia, and certainly having a raving Islamophobe as NSC chief of staff has alarming national security ramifications and risks all on its own.

But it’s the way this movement has melded with Putin’s foreign policy objectives that is most urgent, and it’s admittedly confusing because Gaffney built his reputation in the 1980’s as an anti-Soviet, anti-Russian hawk. Even today, he is not known for speaking favorably of Russia or Vladimir Putin, which is why it’s essential to explore the absolute confluence of interests that have developed between Gaffney’s promotion of the European far right and Putin’s promotion of the same neo-Nazi parties and politicians.

This is kind of amazing for a couple of reasons:

In morning tweets, Trump quoted Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), who during a Wednesday morning television interview on CBS voiced sympathy for Trump’s past expressions of frustration with Sessions’s recusal from the inquiry.

“If I were the president and I picked someone to be the country’s chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, ‘Oh by the way, I’m not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office,’ I would be frustrated too,” Gowdy said, according to Trump’s tweets. “There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!”

After that, Trump added, in his own voice: “And I wish I did!”

What Trey Gowdy didn’t explicitly say was that “the most important case in the office” of the U.S. Attorney General is a criminal inquiry into the president’s possible collusion with a hostile foreign power. But Trump didn’t dispute that this is, in fact, the true state of affairs.

The reason Trump is upset about Sessions recusing himself is because he expected that his attorney general would help obstruct an investigation of his own behavior. Every single time that Trump complains about Sessions in this context, he’s building an obstruction of justice case against himself. The reporting from the New York Times about this is crystal clear.

Special Counsel Bob Mueller has been focused like a laser on Trump’s treatment of his attorney general. And what he’s seeking to prove is that Trump did not want to fire Sessions for any other reason than his failure to help him avoid legal scrutiny. Mueller is looking carefully at a trip Sessions made to Mar-a-Lago in March 2017 to discuss the president’s faltering travel ban.

When they met, Mr. Trump was ready to talk — but not about the travel ban. His grievance was with Mr. Sessions: The president objected to his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Mr. Trump, who had told aides that he needed a loyalist overseeing the inquiry, berated Mr. Sessions and told him he should reverse his decision, an unusual and potentially inappropriate request.

Mr. Sessions refused.

The confrontation, which has not been previously reported, is being investigated by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, as are the president’s public and private attacks on Mr. Sessions and efforts to get him to resign. Mr. Trump dwelled on the recusal for months, according to confidants and current and former administration officials who described his behavior toward the attorney general.

The special counsel’s interest demonstrates Mr. Sessions’s overlooked role as a key witness in the investigation into whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct the inquiry itself. It also suggests that the obstruction investigation is broader than it is widely understood to be — encompassing not only the president’s interactions with and firing of the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, but also his relationship with Mr. Sessions.

One reason this is important is that it shows that Trump went behind being upset that Sessions didn’t disclose that, if confirmed, he might have to recuse himself from the investigation. Neglecting to tell the president about his conflicts of interest would indeed be a reason for Trump to be displeased, simply because Sessions wasn’t forthright during the vetting process. But, even after Sessions recused himself, the president asked him to reverse course so that he could be in position to obstruct justice. And he asked this knowing that Sessions was following the advice of Justice Department ethicists. Trump could try to argue that he had legitimate cause to want to fire Sessions because Sessions had withheld important information from him, like the fact that he had met privately during the campaign with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. But that defense is undercut completely by the fact that Trump was initially more interested in Sessions reversing his recusal decision than in firing him.

Trump subsequently railed against Sessions publicly and privately, and Mueller has questioned many witnesses to his private actions in this matter. Reince Priebus testified about Trump’s directive that he fire Sessions and also about an incident where he talked Sessions into rescinding a letter of resignation. All of this is to build a case which has been made in plane sight. The president has never really disguised the fact that he is angry at Sessions for not killing an investigation that has both criminal and counterintelligence implications for himself.

It’s also ironic that Trump would approvingly cite Trey Gowdy when Trey Gowdy had just completely destroyed his Spygate conspiracy theory on Fox News of all places.

Gowdy is best known for beating the Benghazi tragedy like a dead horse with his interminable congressional investigation. He was one of the few members of Congress invited to see classified information about FBI confidential source Stefan Halper, the alleged “spy” that the FBI used to “infiltrate” Trump’s campaign. After seeing the evidence, however, Gowdy said that not only was the president’s theory complete bullshit but that the president should be quite happy with how the FBI acted because he explicitly asked them to act that way.

Outgoing Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the House Oversight Committee chairman and a Trump supporter, said in an interview on Fox that the FBI was justified in using a secret informant to assist in the Russia investigation. Gowdy, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, attended a classified Justice Department briefing last week on the FBI’s use of the confidential source, identified as Stefan A. Halper.

“President Trump himself in the Comey memos said if anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it, and it sounds to me like that is exactly what the FBI did,” Gowdy told host Martha MacCallum. “I think when the president finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard.

Despite this, Trump was treating Gowdy in a different context as a credible source.

Like I said, “Amazing.”

If only Brexit had been run like Ireland’s referendum

In all the excitement of what happened in Ireland’s referendum on abortion, we should not lose sight of what did not happen. A vote on an emotive subject was not subverted. The tactics that have been so successful for the right and the far right in the UK, the US, Hungary and elsewhere did not work. A democracy navigated its way through some very rough terrain and came home not just alive but more alive than it was before. In the world we inhabit, these things are worth celebrating but also worth learning from. Political circumstances are never quite the same twice, but some of what happened and did not happen in Ireland surely contains more general lessons.

If the right failed spectacularly in Ireland, it was not for want of trying. Save the 8th, one of the two main groups campaigning against the removal of the anti-abortion clause from the Irish constitution, hired Vote Leave’s technical director, the Cambridge Analytica alumnus Thomas Borwick.

Save the 8th and the other anti-repeal campaign, Love Both, used apps developed by a US-based company, Political Social Media (PSM), which worked on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns. The small print told those using the apps that their data could be shared with other PSM clients, including the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and Vote Leave.

Irish voters were subjected to the same polarising tactics that have worked so well elsewhere: shamelessly fake “facts” (the claim, for example, that abortion was to be legalised up to six months into pregnancy); the contemptuous dismissal of expertise (the leading obstetrician Peter Boylan was told in a TV debate to “go back to school”); deliberately shocking visual imagery (posters of aborted foetuses outside maternity hospitals); and a discourse of liberal elites versus the real people. But Irish democracy had an immune system that proved highly effective in resisting this virus. Its success suggests a democratic playbook with at least four good rules.

Fintan O’Toole then goes on to outline what he sees as the four good rules for running a democratic referendum campaign. He is worth reading in full, but to summarise:

1. Trust the People
2. Be Honest
3. Talk to everybody and make assumptions about nobody (avoid tribalism)
4. The political has to be personalised.

The greatest human immune system against the viruses of hysteria, hatred and lies is storytelling. People were most influenced by the personal testimonies of women who had gone through the trauma of having to travel to the UK for an abortion. The political has to be personalised.

As time has gone on I have heard more and more stories about how yes canvassers were abused by their opponents. Of the hatred and vitriol direct at them in highly personalised terms. One bishops is saying that Catholics who voted Yes should consider going to confession as doing so could be a sin. The media are still full of it. I have responded to one article entitled  Anti-abortion movement has not given up and will not disappear by Breda O’Brien (a leading No campaigner and patron of the Iona Institute) as follows:

Breda – I have news for you… this is only the beginning. The next step is to wrest control of our taxpayer funded schools and hospitals from the Catholic Church and your ilk so that women can have proper healthcare and children can have a proper education. None of your magical thinking and pious sanctimonious moral superiority. You’ve called two thirds of the nation baby killers. They will not forgive you lightly. Calling Varadker patronising takes the biscuit. You have been condescending to us for your adult lifetime. Perhaps you should move to Northern Ireland while there is still a home for bigots there. You have nothing to offer a compassionate, caring, progressive society except more bile and bitterness.

In the meantime the government are moving with all haste to have the legislation required to give effect to the people’s decision passed as soon as possible – with parliament sitting through the summer if necessary. Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, the leader of the opposition, is trying to prevent his backbenchers, the majority of whom supported the NO side, from blocking the legislation. Some of the urgency is generated by the need to get the process as far as advanced as possible of the Pope’s visit to Ireland for the “World Meeting of Families” in August. But there is also a realisation that it may well be some time in 2019 before abortion services are actually available in Ireland:

Referendum aftershocks rumble on

The legislation must be carefully drawn up. The medical bodies have to formulate clinical guidelines to govern medical practice in the abortion areas. The drugs in the abortion pills have to be approved by regulatory authorities. The HSE has to figure out how it will organise and pay for the service. The agreement of doctors to provide the service has to be secured.

It will be, the Taoiseach explained, January next year at the earliest before the service is in place. And that’s probably being optimistic.

I’m reasonably sure the ready availability of free pornography leads to a lot of bad sex between consenting adults, but I can’t figure out how it could possibly cause a school shooting, let alone explain why there have been 23 school shootings already this year. But porn is what Tennessee Republican gubernatorial candidate Rep. Diane Black says is driving all this bloodshed.

Conservative people get exercised about the strangest things. For example, Megyn Kelly is upset that Starbucks will now formally allow people to sit in their stores even if they are not paying customers, and that they will allow anyone who enters to use the bathroom without confirming that they intend to buy anything. As a white person, I have always considered this a feature of the very concept of a coffee house, whether it’s some privately run affair in New Haven across the street from Yale’s campus or it’s a corporate franchise at the local mall. I have frequently used coffee houses when traveling because of their free WiFi. Even today, when WiFi is available almost everywhere I go, I still think first of coffee houses because they were the early adopters of giving the service away for free. I also think of coffee houses first when I’m looking for a bathroom that I can use without hassle and that I can expect to be at least moderately sanitary.

Coffee houses uniformly offer comfortable places to sit, with most of the quiet of a library but fewer of the stultifying expectations. Plus, yes, they have coffee and tasty things to nosh as your peruse the internet and check your social media and email. If coffee houses were to change and require a proof of purchase before you could be seated, that would vastly diminish their basic appeal, and even the way we think about them.

More than this, though, these relaxed norms aren’t as free as they seem. It’s expensive to get your coffee at a coffee house. Paying customers are willing to pay more than they would at a diner not only because the coffee is generally better but because they can drink their coffee without some ticking clock in their head that tells them they need to move on so the wait staff can makes some more tips. Even when you buy a cookie or a beverage, the coffee house has appeal because they welcome you to stay as long as you want.

So, when Starbucks makes these basic features of a coffee house formal, they’re not changing anything. At least, they’re not changing anything for white people.

Megyn Kelly doesn’t see it that way, however, because one of the things she feels will change is the prevalence of undesirables.

“They’re allowing anyone to stay and use the bathroom even if they don’t buy anything, which has a lot of Starbucks’ customers saying, ‘Really?’” Kelly remarked on her Today Show program. “Because now the Starbucks are going to get overwhelmed with people and is it really just a public space or is it not?”

“For the paying customers who go in with their kids, do you really want to deal with a mass of homeless people or whoever is in there — could be drug addicted, you don’t know when you’re there with your kids paying for the services of the place.”

For those of us who frequent urban coffee houses, the sight of apparently homeless people is not particularly unusual especially in winter months or bad weather. Unless their smell is particularly offensive or they’re displaying signs of mental illness and making people nervous, their presence barely merits notice. And, by the way, those would both be fully justified reasons to ask someone to leave a place of business, whether a paying customer or not.

The new Starbucks policy, which I haven’t parsed, could conceivably make staff overly reluctant to kick people out who really should be kicked out. But, if it the training is done correctly, this shouldn’t be a problem. Anytime you try to formalize previously informal policies, you will run into a few problems. But it’s not like Starbucks just made itself a target for every homeless person in the country to treat their stores as a residence.

What Kelly means, whether she’s fully conscious of it or not, is that she wants coffee houses to be welcoming to people like her and to exercise some kind of rigorous admittance standards for anyone who doesn’t look right. But coffee houses can’t operate like Studio 54 with people at the door deciding who is beautiful and well-dressed enough to merit entry.

Of course, you could create a coffee house like that, but it would probably fail as a business because drinking coffee and surfing the internet and finding a place to use the bathroom are nothing like going to a fancy night club. Plus, if Studio 54 had only admitted white people, half the beautiful folks would have been stuck out on the sidewalk.

Yet, to the conservative mind, this policy is just one more example of political correctness run amok, with the familiar result that undeserving people get something for free at the expense and discomfort of decent white folks.

[Cross-posted from European Tribune – where dissent is NOT troll rated!]

Secretive court orders GCHQ to destroy stolen documents | Reprieve – April 2015 |

The UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has today ordered intelligence agency GCHQ to destroy illegally collected communications of a Libyan rendition victim.

Today’s decision marks the first time in the IPT’s fifteen-year history that it has upheld a complaint against the security services. It is also thought to be the first time the secretive tribunal has ordered an intelligence agency to give up surveillance material.

The messages to be destroyed are legally privileged communications belonging to former Gaddafi opponent Sami al-Saadi. Mr al-Saadi was kidnapped in a joint MI6-CIA operation and ‘rendered’ to Libya in 2004 – with his wife and four children between the ages of six and twelve.  The same month his colleague Libyan politician Abdul-Hakim Belhaj was also seized and delivered to Gaddafi, along with his pregnant wife Fatima Boudchar.

Both families have brought civil claims against the then-Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, former MI6 counter-terror head Sir Mark Allen, and the UK Government for their kidnap. The al-Saadi family settled their civil claim in December 2012 for 2.2 million pounds; the Belhaj claim comes before the Supreme Court this year.  A Metropolitan Police investigation into both kidnappings, Operation Lydd, is thought to be near conclusion and with the CPS for a charging decision.  

○ Abdel Hakim Belhaj gets £500,000 compensation as May apologises ‘unreservedly’ for UK’s conduct on rendition and torture in Libya
○ UK government trying to block release of files exposing Gaddafi links

From my recent diary …

○ CIA Heinous Crimes – A Trail of Blood

No further commentary needed.

How to Honor Memorial Day, by RAY MCGOVERN

(Ray McGovern was an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 years. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). )

How best to show respect for the U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and for their families on Memorial Day? Simple: Avoid euphemisms like “the fallen” and expose the lies about what a great idea it was to start those wars in the first place and then to “surge” tens of thousands of more troops into those fools’ errands.

First, let’s be clear on at least this much: the 4,500 U.S. troops killed in Iraq so far and the 2,350 killed in Afghanistan [by May 2015] did not “fall.” They were wasted on no-win battlefields by politicians and generals cheered on by neocon pundits and mainstream “journalists” almost none of whom gave a rat’s patootie about the real-life-and-death troops. They were throwaway soldiers.

And, as for the “successful surges,” they were just P.R. devices to buy some “decent intervals” for the architects of these wars and their boosters to get space between themselves and the disastrous endings while pretending that those defeats were really “victories squandered” all at the “acceptable” price of about 1,000 dead U.S. soldiers each and many times that in dead Iraqis and Afghans.

Memorial Day should be a time for honesty about what enabled the killing and maiming of so many U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and the senior military brass simply took full advantage of a poverty draft that gives upper-class sons and daughters the equivalent of exemptions, vaccinating them against the disease of war.

What drives me up the wall is the oft-heard, dismissive comment about troop casualties from well-heeled Americans: “Well, they volunteered, didn’t they?” Under the universal draft in effect during Vietnam, far fewer were immune from service, even though the well-connected could still game the system to avoid serving. Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Joe Biden, for example, each managed to pile up five exemptions. This means, of course, that they brought zero military experience to the job; and this, in turn, may explain a whole lot — particularly given their bosses’ own lack of military experience.

The grim truth is that many of the crëme de la crëme of today’s Official Washington don’t know many military grunts, at least not intimately as close family or friends. They may bump into some on the campaign trail or in an airport and mumble something like, “thank you for your service.” But these sons and daughters of working-class communities from America’s cities and heartland are mostly abstractions to the powerful, exclamation points at the end of  some ideological debate demonstrating which speaker is “tougher,” who’s more ready to use military force, who will come out on top during a talk show appearance or at a think-tank conference or on the floor of Congress.

Sharing the Burden?

We should be honest about this reality, especially on Memorial Day. Pretending that the burden of war has been equitably shared, and worse still that those killed died for a “noble cause,” as President George W. Bush liked to claim, does no honor to the thousands of U.S. troops killed and the tens of thousands maimed. It dishonors them. Worse, it all too often succeeds in infantilizing bereaved family members who cannot bring themselves to believe their government lied.

—snip—

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is said to have described the military disdainfully as “just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” Whether or not those were his exact words, his policies and behavior certainly betrayed that attitude. It certainly seems to have prevailed among top American-flag-on-lapel-wearing officials of the Bush and Obama administrations, including armchair and field-chair generals whose sense of decency is blinded by the prospect of a shiny new star on their shoulders, if they just follow orders and send young soldiers into battle.

This bitter truth should raise its ugly head on Memorial Day but rarely does. It can be gleaned only with great difficulty from the mainstream media, since the media honchos continue to play an indispensable role in the smoke-and-mirrors dishonesty that hides their own guilt in helping Establishment Washington push “the fallen” from life to death.

We must judge the actions of our political and military leaders not by the pious words they will utter Monday in mourning those who “fell” far from the generals’ cushy safe seats in the Pentagon or somewhat closer to the comfy beds in air-conditioned field headquarters where a lucky general might be comforted in the arms of an admiring and enterprising biographer.

—snip—

`Successful Surges’

The so-called “surges” of troops into Iraq and Afghanistan were particularly gross examples of the way our soldiers have been played as pawns. Since the usual suspects are again coming out the woodwork of neocon think tanks to press for yet another “surge” in Iraq, some historical perspective should help.

Take, for example, the well-known and speciously glorified first “surge;” the one Bush resorted to in sending over 30,000 additional troops into Iraq in early 2007; and the not-to-be-outdone Obama “surge” of 30,000 into Afghanistan in early 2010. These marches of folly were the direct result of decisions by George W. Bush and Barack Obama to prioritize political expediency over the lives of U.S. troops.

Taking cynical advantage of the poverty draft, they let foot soldiers pay the “ultimate” price. That price was 1,000 U.S. troops killed in each of the two “surges.”

And the results? The returns are in. The bloody chaos these days in Iraq and the faltering war in Afghanistan were entirely predictable. They were indeed predicted by those of us able to spread some truth around via the Internet, while being mostly blacklisted by the fawning corporate media.

Yet, because the “successful surge” myth was so beloved in Official Washington, saving some face for the politicians and pundits who embraced and spread the lies that justified and sustained especially the Iraq War, the myth has become something of a touchstone for everyone aspiring to higher office or seeking a higher-paying gig in the mainstream media.

Campaigning in New Hampshire, [then] presidential aspirant Jeb Bush gave a short history lesson about his big brother’s attack on Iraq. Referring to the so-called Islamic State, Bush said, “ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was president. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out … the surge created a fragile but stable Iraq. …”

We’ve dealt with the details of the Iraq “surge” myth before both before and after it was carried out. [See, for instance, “Reviving the Successful Surge Myth”;  “Gen. Keane on Iran Attack”; “Robert Gates: As Bad as Rumsfeld?”; and “Troop Surge Seen as Another Mistake.”]

But suffice it to say that Jeb Bush is distorting the history and should be ashamed. The truth is that al-Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before his brother launched an unprovoked invasion in 2003. “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” arose as a direct result of Bush’s war and occupation. Amid the bloody chaos, AQI’s leader, a Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, pioneered a particularly brutal form of terrorism, relishing videotaped decapitation of prisoners.

Zarqawi was eventually hunted down and killed not during the celebrated “surge” but in June 2006, months before Bush’s “surge” began. The so-called Sunni Awakening, essentially the buying off of many Sunni tribal leaders, also predated the “surge.” And the relative reduction in the Iraq War’s slaughter after the 2007 “surge” was mostly the result of the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad from a predominantly Sunni to a Shia city, tearing the fabric of Baghdad in two, and creating physical space that made it more difficult for the two bitter enemies to attack each other. In addition, Iran used its influence with the Shia to rein in their extremely violent militias.

Though weakened by Zarqawi’s death and the Sunni Awakening, AQI did not disappear, as Jeb Bush would like you to believe. It remained active and when Saudi Arabia and the Sunni gulf states took aim at the secular regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria AQI joined with other al-Qaeda affiliates, such as the Nusra Front, to spread their horrors across Syria. AQI rebranded itself “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” or simply “the Islamic State.”

The Islamic State split off from al-Qaeda over strategy but the various jihadist armies, including al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front, [then] seized wide swaths of territory in Syria — and the Islamic State returned with a vengeance to Iraq, grabbing major cities such as Mosul and Ramadi.

Jeb Bush doesn’t like to unspool all this history. He and other Iraq War backers prefer to pretend that the “surge” in Iraq had won the war and Obama threw the “victory” away by following through on George W. Bush’s withdrawal agreement with Maliki.

But the crisis in Syria and Iraq is among the fateful consequences of the U.S./UK attack 12 years ago and particularly of the “surge” of 2007, which contributed greatly to Sunni-Shia violence, the opposite of what George W. Bush professed was the objective of the “surge,” to enable Iraq’s religious sects to reconcile.

Reconciliation, however, always took a back seat to the real purpose of the “surge” buying time so Bush and Cheney could slip out of Washington in 2009 without having an obvious military defeat hanging around their necks and putting a huge stain on their legacies.

The political manipulation of the Iraq “surge” allowed Bush, Cheney and their allies to reframe the historical debate and shift the blame for the defeat onto Obama, recognizing that 1,000 more dead U.S. soldiers was a small price to pay for protecting the “Bush brand.” Now, Bush’s younger brother can cheerily march off to the campaign trail for 2016 pointing to the carcass of the Iraqi albatross hung around Obama’s shoulders.

—snip—

Keane and Kagan Ask For a Mulligan

The architects of Bush’s 2007 “surge” of 30,000 troops into Iraq, former Army General Jack Keane and American Enterprise Institute neocon strategist Frederick Kagan, in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned strongly that, without a “surge” of some 15,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops, ISIS would win in Iraq.

“We are losing this war,” warned Keane, who previously served as Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. “ISIS is on the offense, with the ability to attack at will, anyplace, anytime. … Air power will not defeat ISIS.” Keane stressed that the U.S. and its allies have “no ground force, which is the defeat mechanism.”

Not given to understatement, Kagan called ISIS “one of the most evil organizations that has ever existed. … This is not a group that maybe we can negotiate with down the road someday. This is a group that is committed to the destruction of everything decent in the world.” He called for “15-20,000 U.S. troops on the ground to provide the necessary enablers, advisers and so forth,” and added: “Anything less than that is simply unserious.”

(By the way, Frederick Kagan is the brother of neocon-star Robert Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century began pushing for the invasion of Iraq in 1998 and finally got its way in 2003. Robert Kagan is the husband of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who oversaw the 2014 coup that brought “regime change” and bloody chaos to Ukraine. The Ukraine crisis also prompted Robert Kagan to urge a major increase in U.S. military spending. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “A Family Business of Perpetual War.”] )

What is perhaps most striking, however, is the casualness with which the likes of Frederick Kagan, Jack Keane, and other Iraq War enthusiasts advocated dispatching tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers to fight and die in what would almost certainly be another futile undertaking. You might even wonder why people like Kagan are invited to testify before Congress given their abysmal records.

But that would miss the true charm of the Iraq “surge” in 2007 and its significance in salvaging the reputations of folks like Kagan, not to mention George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. From their perspective, the “surge” was a great success. Bush and Cheney could swagger from the West Wing into the western sunset on Jan. 20, 2009.

As author Steve Coll has put it, “The decision [to surge] at a minimum guaranteed that his [Bush’s] presidency would not end with a defeat in history’s eyes. By committing to the surge [the President] was certain to at least achieve a stalemate.”

—snip—

It was difficult drafting this downer, this historical counter-narrative, on the eve of Memorial Day. It seems to me necessary, though, to expose the dramatis personae who played such key roles in getting more and more people killed. Sad to say, none of the high officials mentioned here, as well as those on the relevant Congressional committees, were affected in any immediate way by the carnage in Ramadi, Tikrit or outside the gate to the Green Zone in Baghdad.

And perhaps that’s one of the key points here. It is not most of us, but rather our soldiers and the soldiers and civilians of Iraq, Afghanistan and God knows where else who are Lazarus at the gate. And, as Benjamin Franklin once said, “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”

Well…maybe a little commentary is in order.

Wake the fuck up, all of you well-meaning centrists!!!

You have been had by your own party.

The usual kneejerk deniers and thread pirates will undoubtedly jump into the comments section to try to change the subject from the ongoing guilt of the governing forces of the United States to…to what? To my own personal honesty? That of people like Ray McGovern and the few surviving Democratic politicians who still dare to call out the establishment of their party?

This is a sad, cynical…and ultimately losing, even if it “wins,” short term… effort, aided and abetted by a few career trolls who get off on channeling their own hatred online.

They may be able to eventually tank this blog, but they cannot tank the truth.

Bet on it.

I am.

AG

P.S. “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”

Words to live by.

Bet on that as well.

I recently wrote here:

you can’t “resist” if you do not understand the magical reality control system under which you live, so I guess the first thing we all need to try to do is:

WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!

Resistance is not only not futile, it is a positive necessity, win, lose or draw. And you cannot resist if you do not understand the reality of the situation.

We been had. We live under a Unitocracy. Two parties, two sides of the same counterfeit coin that has been minted by the controllers, WWE-style. Trump? We might as well have Vince McMahon as preznit. He’d be even closer to the truth of the matter. As things stand now? In 2020, we’ll get another “good guy”…Obama-style.

And the beatdown will continue.

WTFU!!!

RESIST!!!

VAYA!!!

It’s not necessarily about “winning.”

But it is about survival.

Bet on that as well.

VAYA!!!

Do not passively allow yourselves to be clowned.

If you read a post here with which you agree?

Recommend it.

A comment or reply?

Uprate it.

RESIST!!!

Any which way you can.

Please.