"Governor says 20 people killed in El Paso; 21-year-old suspect in custody" by Cedar Attanasio, Michael Balsamo and Diana Heidgerd Associated Press, August 4, 2019
EL PASO, Texas (AP) — A young gunman opened fire in an El Paso, Texas, shopping area packed with as many as 3,000 people during the busy back-to-school season Saturday, leaving 20 dead and more than two dozen injured.
Gov. Greg Abbott called the incident in the Texas border city ‘‘one of the most deadly days in the history of Texas.’’ Police said authorities were investigating if it was a hate crime.
As are all crimes, for who commits a crime out of love?
The suspect was arrested without incident outside the Walmart near the Cielo Vista Mall, said El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen. Two law enforcement officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity identified the suspect as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius. El Paso police didn’t release his name at a news conference but confirmed the gunman is from Allen, near Dallas.
This is already stinking of something other than what is being presented.
Many of the victims were shot at the Walmart, police said.
‘‘The scene was a horrific one,’’ said Allen, adding that many of the 26 people who were hurt had life-threatening injuries.
The chief said police found a post online possibly written by the suspect.
‘‘Right now we have a manifesto from this individual that indicates, to some degree, it has a nexus to potential hate crime,’’ Allen said.
The shooting came less than a week after a gunman opened fire on a California food festival.....
There you go. They found a manifesto, supposedly in favor of the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand (you know, the one we can no longer see on JouTube and that led directly to censorship and gun confiscation in that country) and that looked for all the world like a military-type psy-op.
I was predisposed to wait until casting judgement on this mass casualty event. My initial reaction was a false flag with Gladio goons behind it. The compilation of events seem to indicate a strategy of tension gun grab in advance of some negative events that will becoming. The need to disarm the populace for whatever reason (economic collapse and chaos coming?), although this is being presented as a race issue.
--more--"
Related: At least 9 killed, 26 injured in Ohio shooting
That came overnight Saturday and on the heels of El Paso.
Time to start digging:
"A high-stakes gambler had VIP perks and a million in losses. But where did the cash come from?" by Dugan Arnett Globe Staff, August 3, 2019
UNCASVILLE, Conn. — As a part-time bookkeeper for mom-and-pop operations in the Boston suburbs, Antonis Mallios spent his workdays pushing paper and running errands, but amid the neon cacophony of the casino floor on weekend nights, the 44-year-old Milford man played a different role: high roller.
On a whim, Mallios could pick up the phone and have $250 in credit awaiting him at one of the casino’s high-end restaurants, though the truth was, he rarely had to. As a VIP at multiple casinos in the region, he had representatives regularly reaching out to him, offering up free meals, free hotel rooms, free cruises.
At Michael Jordan’s Steak House at Mohegan Sun — where he was regularly comped meals — Mallios dined on steak and garlic fondue. From the top floor of the Fox Tower at Foxwoods, in a room as big as some houses, he stared out over the scenic southeast Connecticut landscape.
His gambling tastes tended toward the high stakes. Within the cordoned-off confines of the casinos’ high-limit areas, he played the slots: $50 a spin, though sometimes as much as $200. He enjoyed the elevated status that came with big bets and was generous with the perks it afforded him, offering to arrange tee times on the casinos’ manicured golf links for friends, free of charge, but as his losses piled up to well more than $1 million, and as the perks kept coming, one question seemed to go largely ignored:
Where was all the money coming from?
So glad the Globe tracking down crooks and looters, and who cares when there is an A10 full-page ad for Encore Casino!?
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[flip to below fold]
Speaking of addictions:
"Death of RFK’s granddaughter is latest burden for Kennedys" by David M. Shribman Globe Correspondent, August 3, 2019
There are, and for decades have been, Kennedy haters — because of their religion, because of their liberalism, because of their wealth and fame. Franklin Roosevelt thought Joseph Kennedy Sr. was, along with Huey Long, one of the most dangerous men in the country, and some Americans long in the tooth and with long memory never have forgiven the ambassador for his impulse toward Nazi appeasement in the 1940s.
We know who wouldn't forgive him, and I believe Benjamin Freedman had something to say on the subject.
Some believe JFK was too late to civil rights, RFK too cozy with red-baiting Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, EMK (as the younger brother Ted was known in Kennedy and journalistic circles) too undisciplined in his private life. Even today the Martha’s Vineyard place-name Chappaquiddick retains a power all its own, more a metaphor than a cross-island bookend to Menemsha, but one of the Kennedys sent troops to desegregate Alabama schools.
The strange thing about Chappaquiddick is Kennedy probably wasn't even in the car. That's where all the forensic evidence would seem to point (meaning the movie reinforces the official story).
Another gave stirring landmark speeches in Indianapolis (after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) and in South Africa (where at the University of Cape Town he confronted racial separation and said “the cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans’’). A third spoke at the end of his own mortifying political defeat to President Carter in 1980 of commitment to enduring ideals (“the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die’’).
I'm going to leave the assassinations undisturbed today, except to say that they all have one thing in common: a threat to the establishment and powerful people with interests.
Step later today into the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum down near the UMass Boston campus and take a sharp left toward the gift shop. On its well-stocked shelves you will see a refrigerator magnet and a T-shirt emblazoned with an excerpt from President Kennedy’s 1962 Rice Stadium speech sending Americans on their mission to the moon in the 1960s. It says: “We choose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’’
Oh, yeah, the moon landing lie, maybe the biggest lie of all time, as JFK has now been turned into a myth and marketing device of received wisdom from the very authority, officials, and institutions that offed him.
That phrase, from a family that in triumph and tragedy made national purpose a national preoccupation, has been employed by tens of thousands of baby boomers to their colleagues and, more pointedly, to their children. The message: Do things not because they are easy but because they are hard.
Do it the hard way?
Now the Kennedy family must do yet another hard and unthinkable thing, to bury yet another child. It has been — far, far too often — their burden to bear. No longer the first family in our politics, they remain, in this moment, first in the hearts of their country.....
I feel bad for their family and anyone who loses a relative or loved one; however, in this case, the eliti$m of the pre$$ bleeds through as nearly 200 people a day die from drug overdoses. None of them are getting headlines.
--more--"
Finally, a glimmer of hope.
Time to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and $ober up (comes with full-page Total Wine ad on page A3).
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
"Trump fuels racial disharmony. Will it motivate or discourage black voters?" by Reid J. Epstein and Jonathan Martin New York Times, August 3, 2019
DETROIT — Mark Greer is a black Detroiter so outraged by President Trump’s regular stream of invective toward people of color that he does his best to avoid exposure to him.
So when he clicked on a YouTube link last month to watch an episode of “The Breakfast Club,” a morning radio show popular with African-Americans, he was angered by an ad that greeted him: a message from Trump’s reelection campaign.
“It just infuriated me because I felt like they were being slick, trying to slip it in there,” said Greer, 28, who works for a philanthropic organization. “I know better, but other people who are watching this might go, ‘Hmmm.’ ”
The president’s entire approach to people of color — his attacks on political leaders, his campaign’s social media strategy targeting the black electorate, his ability to fuel black opposition but also demoralize some black voters — is one of the most extraordinary political dynamics of the Trump era. No modern president has ever vilified black Americans or sought to divide people along racial lines like Trump, while also claiming to be a champion of their economic interests.
Up until now I figured all this race stuff was a replay of two years ago simply because the pre$$ is running out of things to cover. They have turned Trump's true statements into a race issue with their advocacy journali$m, and quite honestly, in recent days I have been totally put off to the pre$$. I'm not believing a damn word of there never-ending mixed messages and spin job distortions as they ceaselessly push the agenda.
Don't get me wrong, either. My analysis above is in now way an endorsement of the Orange Ogre who serves Jewish supremacism at every turn. That is the great unspoken in this whole debate about race and white supremacism: the very people screaming racist are the biggest racists in the room.
The online ad that Greer saw illustrates the audacious nature of Trump’s strategy. Even as the president sows racial disharmony, telling four Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back,” his reelection campaign is spending money on social media to put Trump before the eyes of black voters.
Are you sure it's not the Russians?
Related:
"A federal judge says a Burlington landlord didn’t create a hostile housing environment for his Somali-American tenant in Vermont. The Burlington Free Press reports Binti Mohamed had said Michael McLaurin told her and her children to ‘‘go back to Africa’’ and entered her apartment without warning, deliberately pulling back the curtain while she was in the shower, but Judge Christina Reiss wrote in a decision that Mohamed didn’t prove McLaurin intended to expose Mohamed’s body. McLaurin denied the allegations. Reiss wrote that McLaurin’s behavior was ‘‘offensive’’ at times, but his conduct was ‘‘insufficiently severe or persistent to create a hostile housing environment.” Mohamed accused McLaurin of violating the federal Fair Housing Act. She was the third Somali-American woman to do so since 2014. One woman settled out of court, and another woman’s case was dismissed (AP)."
Looks like Jews sit in judgment of us all.
The objectives are twofold: First, to try to win over a handful of black voters. The campaign intends to highlight low rates of African-American unemployment and the criminal justice overhaul the president signed, a measure that is already a subject of his campaign’s Facebook advertising, but the more clandestine hope, and one privately acknowledged by Trump allies, is that the president can make black voters think twice about turning out for Democrats or expending energy on trying to change a system some African-Americans believe is unalterably stacked against them.
Yeah, it's all about "voter suppression" -- meaning it makes Democratic fraud harder to achieve.
For many voters of color in this crucial swing state, Trump’s racial invective is deeply hurtful on a personal level, but something they have come to expect from a president who has consistently denigrated them. Still, Democrats also sense that the president’s race-baiting presents a unique opportunity. After a disastrous dip in black turnout in 2016 in battleground states including Michigan, Democrats are now working to harness the disdain for Trump to motivate a group that may prove to be most pivotal in the 2020 election: the low-propensity voters of color who decide late whether or not to cast ballots in the election.
Oh, we are all so being played by these political a$$holes and pre$$ mouthpieces! It's all part of then political show and imagery with both benefiting!
Of course, the dip in turnout cost Clinton the election, if you buy the official narrative of anything these days. I don't, but it's there if you need to refer to it to point out the endless contradictions coming from the pre$$ on a daily basis.
Turnout figures show many stayed home in 2016, an election that marked the first decline in black participation rates in two decades. Increasing black turnout by just a few percentage points in urban areas of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania could thwart Trump’s reelection. Longtime black Democratic leaders say the only time they can recall black voters being so engaged in presidential politics was when they had the chance to elect, and then to reelect, Barack Obama.
Hillary turned them off or made them vote for Trump (his percentage was higher than any Republican presidential candidate in decades).
Early polling also points to a highly engaged black electorate. A June poll from CNN found that 74 percent of Democratic voters were extremely or very enthusiastic about voting next year, a higher figure than even in the years before Obama’s two elections. The figure was the same for white and nonwhite Democrats. Theodore R. Johnson, a scholar at the Brennan Center who has written extensively on black voters, said he was skeptical that African-American turnout would reach Obama-era levels, but noted that “if it just goes up from ’16, Trump is in trouble.” A record 66.6 percent of eligible black voters cast ballots in 2012, but that number fell to 59.6 percent four years later.
Johnson said the evidence from the Trump era indicates that African-Americans are highly motivated. He pointed to their turnout in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama and in last year’s midterm elections, in which the black vote jumped 11 percentage points above 2014 levels. The Trump campaign said it was eager to deliver its message to black voters.
Democrats posed as Russian bots in the Senate election and stole the midterms, which is why the NYT completely ignores it as it peddles its political narrative.
“President Trump has an excellent record benefiting black Americans, which we will enthusiastically communicate,” said Tim Murtaugh, a campaign spokesman. “Black unemployment has hit an all-time low, paychecks are rising, and the president is providing second chances to people through criminal justice reform.”
Trump doesn’t have to convert black voters with that message; just inhibiting enough of them from participating on Election Day would be a victory for his purposes, and leading black officials are voicing concern that, in addition to Trump’s own advertising, the combination of strict voter identification laws and even more aggressive foreign interference on social media could suppress black turnout.
In Detroit, black voters and officials articulated a desire for Democratic candidates to move beyond the president’s race-baiting and discuss issues pertinent to people’s daily lives.
Oh, all voters are sick of the pre$$ and ma$$ media framing and focus, huh?
“It’s time for us to kind of pull the plug and shift our message and shift our conversation,” Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, a Michigan state representative, said Tuesday at a gathering she hosted to watch the first night of the debates. “If we start kind of ignoring a lot of the ignorance that he shows, he won’t have as much of a fan base, a following, a platform.”
Oh, now voters are "fans!"
I don't know how much longer I can bring this offensively insulting shit to you, readers.
--more--"
Trump is now being compared to Reagan, in that his racist beliefs lead to racist policies and his presidency so toxic, on so many levels that he has triggered immense resistance to his worldview (excepting the case of Israel, of course).
"Just as the name of Tom Yawkey, the former Boston Red Sox owner and a racist, was removed from a Boston street near Fenway Park, and the name of slave owner Edward Devotion expunged from a Brookline public school, there’s been a push, especially by the nonprofit New Democracy Coalition, to remove Faneuil’s name from the grand hall. For now, Boston won’t be getting a memorial to enslaved black people auctioned at Faneuil Hall centuries ago, a missed opportunity for a city that has struggled to reckon with its tortured racist history. In the end, the only winner in this unfortunate debacle is Peter Faneuil....."
Oh, look, the current residents of Bo$ton and the Globe editorial staff also self-identify as victims of slavery! I am astonished and speechless at the hubris!
Btw, the bottom half of the page with the Trump and black voters article was an advertisement for The Preserve at Boulder Hills, and when you flip the page there is a full-page ad for Sandals staring at you as well. I $uppo$e as long has you hid the cla$$ divide behind race and gender it's okay, especially since the ruling cla$$ is plenty diversified.
Time to bury Bernie Sanders and his presidential aspirations:
"Democratic donor head count: Sanders has the most and gets the most. But there’s more" by Josh Katz and K.K. Rebecca Lai New York Times, August 3, 2019
NEW YORK — Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has a huge lead over other Democratic presidential candidates in the number of individual donors they have each accumulated so far.
It's one donor, one vote, as opposed to one dollar, one vote, and it is the clearest indication that Sanders should rightfully win the nomination.
This is the first time since the primary race began in earnest that we can estimate how many individual donors each candidate has attracted — a key indicator of how much they are catching on with voters.
Sanders is relying heavily on small donors to power his campaign, and he entered the 2020 race with a huge network of online donors who supported his 2016 presidential bid.
So why would they now abandon him?
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the other leading liberal in the race, is outpacing the rest of the field across much of the country — a sign that her strategy of relying on grass-roots donors, and refraining from holding high-dollar fund-raisers, is working.
She has become the establishment safety valve, and you are looking at what should be the Democratic ticket.
Some candidates are showing regional strength, including former vice president Joe Biden, who is doing well in Delaware and northeastern Pennsylvania, as well as in many places across the Southeast. Senator Kamala Harris of California is formidable in her home state, the nation’s most populous, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., has drawn strong support in some parts of the Midwest.
That paragraph made me laugh. They cite pitiful regional support in favor the corporate candidates.
Attracting individual donors has been particularly important in the 2020 race because the Democratic National Committee is using grass-roots fund-raising as one of the qualification standards for the debates. To qualify for the next round of debates in September, candidates will need to have at least 130,000 unique donors, in addition to meeting a polling requirement.
That is when I began to lose interest in this article.
The campaigns have been required to reveal their overall fund-raising totals, and many have released information about their number of donors, but it has not been possible until now to estimate how many donors each Democratic candidate has attracted.
The New York Times analysis is based in part on fund-raising records disclosed Wednesday by ActBlue, an online platform that processes donations for the Democratic candidates.
Although the number of donors is especially important in the 2020 primary race, the amount of money campaigns raise is ultimately what allows them to pay the bills. By that measure as well, Sanders leads in large parts of the country.
Overall, Sanders is leading his rivals in total money raised, but not by a huge margin — even though he has far more donors than any of them.
Most other candidates are drawing in more dollars per donor — an estimated average of roughly $80 for both Biden and Harris, for example. Sanders, on the other hand, has brought in an estimated $46 per donor.
Sanders’ campaign has tried to encourage larger contributions. “We have two choices: We need more donations or we need people to give just a bit more than they have before,” Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, wrote in an e-mail in the spring.
Although Sanders has a sprawling list of donors nationwide, geographic dominance does not necessarily translate into a cash advantage of the same magnitude. Just as population density differs in urban, suburban, and rural areas, the number of people who donate to political campaigns also varies widely based on geography.
Then why isn't it hurting Biden, Harris, and Buttigieg?
What's with the contradictions and mixed me$$ages within the very articles themselves anyway?
WTF?
Ranking as the top Democrat for individual donors in a densely populated urban area is far different from leading the field in an area where few people are donating to campaigns.
Yeah, but you still have the aggregate amount of money and the donors in the areas Bernie should be winning.
For example, Warren has more donors in a single ZIP code in Brooklyn than any candidate has in the entire state of Mississippi. Buttigieg has more donors in a single ZIP code in Washington, D.C., than any candidate has in South Dakota.
Anyone can find a kernel of corn if they dig through enough turds, 'eh?
Many Democratic candidates have struggled to develop a broad donor base across the nation, though in some cases they at least have bragging rights in their own backyard. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has the largest number of donors in most of her state, as does Governor Steve Bullock of Montana in his state.
Well, they SHOULD HAVE BRAGGING RIGHTS in their OWN BACKYARD; otherwise, might as well bury the campaign right there! If you can't win at home, with the voters who elected you....
C'mon, New York Times. This is a new low in advocacy journali$m, even for you!
Former representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, whose fund-raising slowed significantly after a strong start, leads the field in donors in most of his state.
And the El Paso event can do nothing but help him.
--more--"
Related: Joe Biden is hitting the Cape and Nantucket later this month
I will give you one gue$$ why.
Time to bury Williamson’s candidacy:
"Marianne Williamson’s candidacy raises the question: Is there such a thing as too much democracy?" by Yvonne Abraham Globe Columnist, August 3, 2019
Spoken like a true eliti$t!
I’ve long believed that anyone who qualifies for the ballot should have the right to run for president, or any other office. I stood firm on this even after the 2000 election, when Green Party candidate Ralph Nader helped tip the presidency to George W. Bush. For better or worse, that’s democracy, but Lord, my conviction is being sorely tested this year. I’ve already had it up to here with the legions of Democrats on debate stages and off, some running just to raise their profiles, or sell books.
She just peddled a conventional myth regarding Nader as a spoiler.
Could there be such a thing as too much democracy?
If you are a one-party fa$ci$t, yeah!
I find myself pondering that heretofore unthinkable question, especially when it comes to Marianne Williamson, the self-help author who made splashes in the first two debates with her forceful pleas for environmental justice and reparations for slavery, and appeals for a moral and spiritual response to the “collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country,” as she put it Tuesday night.
She dismissed the policies her opponents were debating — “this wonkiness,” “this insider political game” — as unequal to the challenge presented by the cruelty of President Trump and his enablers.
It’s a provocative but also a meaningless distinction. Compassionate, well-thought-out policies and a strong moral message aren’t mutually exclusive. Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, among others, have woven the two together explicitly, and well.
Anyway, Williamson’s New Age-y framing has turned her into something of a phenom, spawning a plethora of kind-of-ironic-kind-of-not memes celebrating her as a crystal-loving hippie — light relief for bored (or shallow?) voters in the circus that is now our political system, but making Williamson into the kooky mascot of the Democratic field gives her way too little credit — and too much.
You gotta love the insults.
Too little, because, though you wouldn’t know it from her debate performances, she actually has positions on a bunch of issues, mostly mirroring those of her more progressive opponents. Plus, her supporters are not just the woo-woo types. She has some smart, politically involved voters in her fold, too, such as Jean Varriale, a financial services consultant from Westwood.
“She’s very inspiring and compassionate,” said Varriale, who came to know about Williamson from her best-selling books. “She talks about the divide between economic classes in this country and many other things that resonate with me. . . . She’s tapping into our moral core.”
Varriale was with Hillary Clinton “all the way” in 2016. If Trump wasn’t president, “we might not be having this conversation,” she said, but, though she’ll fully support whoever wins the nomination, she’s convinced only Williamson can inspire enough voters to beat Trump.
Well, it is a Clinton paper.
“What draws me to Marianne is that she is a truth teller and a brilliant visionary,” said Kathleen McDonald of Clinton, who leads the 40 or so Williamson volunteers in Massachusetts and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. “She leads with her soul and focuses on the root causes of our problems rather than just the symptoms,” but there’s plenty about Williamson that is neither inspiring nor the stuff of light relief. She has said and written some pretty destructive things about depression, for example, arguing that it’s overdiagnosed and overmedicated, thanks to Big Pharma. It is no defense of Big Pharma to say Williamson’s rhetoric over the years has added to the stigma of mental illness.
Just don't get your pills at the CVS.
Even more worrying, she has also given cover to anti-vaxxers, those who push the dangerous and scientifically invalid notion that life-saving vaccinations cause autism. She has labeled skepticism about vaccine safety “healthy,” and as recently as June called mandatory vaccination “Orwellian.” She apologized and attempted to clarify both positions recently, arguing that she is pro-vaccine and pro-science, but her record is long and suggests otherwise.
Oh, now we see why she isn't liked by Abraham. She is not on board with the tyrannical medical agenda.
UPDATE: Marianne Williamson Is Right: We Need a Spiritual Awakening—and a Real Investigation of 9/11
Even worse!
It’s a very good bet Williamson won’t win the nomination, but her growing prominence in the Democratic field gives her the biggest platform she’s ever had, and as we now know all too well, an entertaining fringe candidate can sometimes catch on.
Waa, waa, waa.
Meanwhile, Republicans and conservative trolls are reportedly working to help Williamson qualify for future debates, hoping she’ll turn off voters who might go for a Democrat next year.
You don't have to worry, Yvonne, you just did that for me.
Ugh, democracy. You’re great, but sometimes you’re a bit much.
OMFG, this from the self-appointed defenders of democracy and all that is good!
--more--"
She is showing how authoritarian she is at heart even as she criticizes such things.
Now to the Senate, where bills go to die:
"McConnell promised to end Senate gridlock. Instead, Republicans are stuck in neutral" by Sheryl Gay Stolberg New York Times, August 3, 2019
WASHINGTON — Seven months into a new era of divided government, the Republican-led Senate limped out of Washington last week after the fewest legislative debates of any in recent memory, without floor votes on issues that both parties view as urgent: the high cost of prescription drugs, a broken immigration system, and crumbling infrastructure.
They don't really want to fix those problems. That is why nothing is ever done.
What one does notice is that the war machine has been fully funded, the debt ceiling was raised, and Israel got all her aid money -- so they took care of the important business.
The number of Senate roll call votes on amendments — a key indicator of whether lawmakers are engaged in free and open debate — plummeted to only 18 this year, according to a review of congressional data. During the same time period in the 10 previous Congresses, senators took anywhere from 34 to 231 amendment votes.
To be honest, I'm glad they aren't doing anything. Any time they act, it just makes things worse.
The inaction stands in stark contrast to the promises of Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader. After his party took control of the Senate in 2015, McConnell vowed to end the gridlock that had gripped the chamber under his Democratic predecessor, Harry Reid, and pledged to allow both parties to offer amendments to legislation — even if it forced Republicans to risk taking politically unpopular votes.
“We’ll just take our chances,” he said at a news conference in early 2016. “You know, we’re big men and women. We’re prepared to vote on proposals that are offered from both sides.”
So what is the NYT saying, McConnell lied.
Instead, the Senate, once known as “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” is operating exactly as McConnell now wants it to: as an approval factory for President Trump’s judicial and administration nominees.
In his effort to remake the courts, McConnell is succeeding; so far this year, the Senate has confirmed 13 circuit court nominees, for a total of 43 since Trump took office in 2017, and 46 of his district court nominees, for a total of 99. By contrast, during the last two years of President Obama’s administration, with Republicans running the Senate, only 22 judicial nominees were confirmed.
Dysfunction in Washington, of course, is nothing new, and it is especially pronounced when the House and Senate are controlled by opposing parties. This year has been worse than most. It started off with a government shutdown that did not get resolved until three weeks into the new Congress.
In an analysis of the first six months of the new Congress, the Bipartisan Policy Center found fault with leaders in both parties for “not engaging in the kind of deliberation and debate that is necessary to develop quality bills.”
Maybe they should read some of them first.
The Senate’s legislative achievements have been confined largely to noncontroversial bipartisan measures — including a land conservation package and a bill cracking down on illegal telemarketing — and must-pass bills, including disaster relief and emergency aid for the border; an annual military policy measure; and a two-year budget deal lawmakers approved just before they left, but the budget deal, the product of negotiations between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, passed over the objections of roughly half the Senate Republicans. Lawmakers had little say in its content, and McConnell permitted debate on just one amendment, offered by Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, that would have cut spending and required a balanced budget.
That last part refers to the debt ceiling bill authorizing more borrowing and debt.
“The Senate was supposed to be the great deliberative body,” said G. William Hoagland, senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and a one-time adviser to Bill Frist, the former Republican leader. “You offered the amendments, and you debated the amendments and you actually had a debate. I got more out of last night’s Democratic debate on some policy issues than I’ve gotten the last few months out of the Senate.”
McConnell declined to be interviewed, but in a speech on the Senate floor in recent days, he blamed Democrats for creating delays and clogging up the Senate calendar by insisting on cloture votes — procedural votes that determine whether to cut off debate and proceed to a final vote — for most nominations. Senator John Thune, the No. 2 Republican, echoed that point when asked if he was surprised that so little legislation of consequence had passed.
“I was not surprised by it,” he said in an interview. “Obviously we’ve been busy with the personnel business of the Senate, which is a very time-consuming task — especially with the Democrats forcing cloture votes on every judge or other nominee we bring up.”
In the foreign policy arena, the Senate defied the president by voting to end military assistance for the Saudi-backed war in Yemen and to block Trump’s emergency declaration at the southwestern border. It passed a Middle East policy bill that rebuked Trump for withdrawing troops from Syria and Afghanistan and included a provision aimed at undermining the boycott Israel movement, but it rejected a bipartisan measure that would have required Trump to get permission from Congress before striking Iran.
You read that paragraph in total and it means they did absolutely nothing except protect Israel! They haven't ended the U.S. role in Yemen, they "rebuked" Trump for WITHDRAWING TROOPS, and won't stand in his way should he initiate war with Iran.
This article is really nothing but filler, folks. There really is no news here.
The Senate’s legislative record on domestic issues has been so thin that a number of Republicans were left grasping for words when asked to name the chamber’s most significant legislative achievement this year.
“Did we pass the opioid legislation this year, or was that last year?” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, asked her aide, who informed her that the bipartisan measure to address the opioid epidemic had passed in 2018. Capito paused, and a long silence ensued.
“Criminal justice reform!” declared Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, but the bill overhauling sentencing laws, which Grassley championed, passed at the end of the last Congress, he was told. Grassley waved his hand. “Close enough,” he said.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, put it this way: “We’re at a complete standstill on the big stuff.”
The House, with a Democratic majority under the leadership of Pelosi, left for recess a week earlier than the Senate with a long list of symbolic victories but few substantive ones, in part because the bills have passed almost universally along party lines. McConnell, who has cast himself as “the grim reaper” for progressive policies, has refused to take them up.
Democrats have seized on that refusal, accusing McConnell of turning the Senate into a “legislative graveyard” — a phrase Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, invoked in recent days when he complained to reporters about the state of affairs in the chamber, including McConnell’s recent decision to block legislation aimed at improving the security of elections.
“From health care to gun safety to climate change, Republicans just say no, despite the overwhelming consensus of the American people on these issues,” Schumer said, adding: “Leader McConnell’s Senate has been a big black hole. There has not been a single bill open for amendment all year. Not. One. Bill.”
Some Republicans say they do not blame McConnell.
“There are certain issues that the ideological divide is so great I think that if I were Mitch, I wouldn’t bring something up on the floor that would be anything more than a big debate club with no outcome,” said Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Floor time, he said, is the Senate’s “coin of the realm,” and it makes far more sense to allocate it toward judicial nominations and consensus bipartisan measures.
“When you’re in divided government like we are now,” he said, “you’ve got to set aside your more contentious issues.”
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Maybe the full-page ad for Logan Express on page A7 can help speed things up.
Related: McConnell trips, breaks shoulder in Kentucky
Yeah, right, the same way John Kerry got a leg broken while riding a bike during the Iran deal negotiations.
Looks like you better move on some gun control legislation, Mitch!
Also see:
"A bill renaming a Rhode Island post office in honor of a 19th-century abolitionist and suffragist has cleared the US Senate. Rhode Island’s congressional delegation introduced legislation in both chambers to honor Elizabeth Buffum Chace by naming the Central Falls post office after her. Democratic Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse say it passed the Senate Tuesday and must now clear the House of Representatives. Chace dedicated her life to advocating for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. The Rhode Island Historical Society says she married Samuel Chace in Fall River, Mass. Their home in Valley Falls, R.I., became a way station for escaped slaves and abolitionist speakers. They built their Central Falls home in 1858. Chace led the Rhode Island Women’s Suffrage Association in the late 1800s (AP)."
That is what else they are working on, huh?
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
On to the graveyard of empires:
"Violence in Afghanistan takes high toll on civilians despite the promise of peace talks" by Pamela Constable Washington Post, August 3, 2019
This is becoming torture, folks.
KABUL — The long-distance bus, traveling on a remote stretch of highway in western Afghanistan this week, was crammed with families, students, and workers. They were headed cross-country on a regularly scheduled 300-mile trip from Herat city to Kandahar city when a sudden, violent blast erupted beneath the bus.
A shock wave and shrapnel hurtled upward from a hidden mine, killing 34 passengers and leaving 17 more burned and bloody. The nearest hospital was many miles away in Herat. Hours later, news photos from there showed a small boy lying in bed, his face pocked with cuts, and a young man sitting up, both arms bandaged and his face badly swollen.
‘‘It was a shameful incident,’’ said Sakina Hussaini, a member of the Herat provincial council and a volunteer for a group that helps civilian victims of violence. She said Friday that she had attended nine funerals in the past week, including services for six members of one family.
The Taliban denied through a spokesman that it was responsible for Wednesday’s bus bombing, but Afghan officials said the insurgents had planted mines along the highway to target military convoys.
The Farah bus massacre was the worst attack during a week that left more than 200 civilians dead across the country as the Taliban and its pro-government adversaries fight to gain leverage in US-Taliban peace talks that began in September.
Also this week, 20 were killed in Kabul last Sunday in an assault on the political party headquarters of Amrullah Saleh, a vice presidential candidate in elections planned for Sept. 28. The attack also left 50 more people injured. No group has claimed the Kabul assault, but Saleh accused the Taliban, which he relentlessly opposes.
The heightened warfare on both sides has taken a significant toll on civilians, according to a report released this past week by the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan. The report said that 3,812 civilians had been killed or injured in conflict in the first half of 2019 — with more harmed by Afghan government forces or government-allied foreign forces than by the insurgents.
The overall number of civilian casualties in the first half of 2019 fell 27 percent over the same period in 2018 and was the lowest half-year casualty figure since 2012, but the report also notes a 27 percent increase in the number of civilian deaths from the first quarter to the second quarter of 2019.
The UN report said pro-government forces killed 717 Afghans and injured 680 in the first half of 2019, 30 percent more than in the first half of 2018, and that 363 civilians including 89 children were killed and 61 injured in American or Afghan airstrikes. It said that Taliban and Islamic State forces killed 531 Afghans and injured 1,437, including in targeted attacks on political, tribal, and religious figures.
UN officials called this high casualty level ‘‘shocking and unacceptable’’ and called on all groups in the conflict to do more to protect civilians. They said that last year was the deadliest for civilians in the 18-year war, with 3,804 killed and 7,000 injured.
American officials expect to resume talks shortly with the Taliban and hope by September to reach an initial agreement that would include withdrawing several thousand US troops in exchange for Taliban pledges to renounce Al Qaeda, honor a cease-fire, and meet soon with Afghan officials to negotiate a future political system and sharing of power, but the violence continued unabated as peace talks inched along. Statistics compiled by the US military showed that since resuming its offensive in April, the Taliban has killed or injured 1,158 civilians.
Is there anybody out there that takes seriously the idea of peace talks being promoted by a war pre$$?
I've been here blogging about such things for more than 12 years!! It's reached the point where I'll believe it when I see it, and not in some war pre$$ organ.
‘‘The Taliban’s commitment to reduce violence has proven empty,’’ said US Army Colonel Sonny Leggett, a spokesman for the US-led military mission here. ‘‘The Taliban . . . increased the number of suicide, roadside and car bombings that have left hundreds of innocent Afghans, including scores of women and children, dead and injured.’’
Yeah, we are killing more of them, but you know, let that not get in the way of the lying narrative provided by the U.S. military and their mouthpiece media!
Afghan university students walked inside of the Kabul University on Saturday, as new talks between the United States and the Taliban go on, in a bid to end 18 years of war in Afghanistan.(WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty Images)
Looks pretty peaceful to me, and who knew Afghanistan had trees?
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The last empire to die there:
"Russia targets anti-graft group as unrest grows" by Andrew Higgins New York Times, August 3, 2019
(The last article was by the Washington ComPost, but I must say that when I saw the New York Times byline on yet another Sunday Globe article I groaned out loud)
MOSCOW — As thousands of riot police flooded central Moscow Saturday to curb protests calling for fair elections, Russian authorities announced they had opened a criminal investigation into money laundering against an anticorruption organization led by Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition activist.
The case against his organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, was opened by the Investigative Committee, Russia’s version of the FBI, the state news agency Tass reported. It involved funding for the anticorruption group’s work of around $15 million in “money obtained by criminal means.”
The money-laundering case is a sharp escalation in the Kremlin’s drive to silence Navalny, the driving force behind a surge of public dissent in recent weeks, and to snuff out opposition to President Vladimir Putin, whose popularity has slumped as Russia’s economy continues to stagnate.
What is he down to, 60% approval in the face of this obvious covert destabilization by the U.S.? What's he doing, purging Facebook and JouTube accounts?
Folks, what you are getting here is a huge dose of anti-Russian, anti-patin propaganda for the lead Cold War pre$$ mouthpiece, the New York Times. Basically, I now discount all New York Times pieces regarding Russia, China, Iran, or anywhere else on this earth you care to name.
Fearful that even modest peaceful protests could snowball into a serious challenge to Putin and his so-far secret plans for what will happen when his supposedly final term ends in 2024, authorities have taken an increasingly hard line against all forms of public dissent.
Look at the qualifiers and implications in that paragraph. No evidence, no real news, just a hatchet job of speculation against the guy who most stands in the way of the EUSraeli Empire's plans.
The huge display of police muscle on Saturday seems to have deterred many people from joining the second weekend protest march, which had been called by Navalny’s organization and other opposition groups to denounce the exclusion of the dissident candidates from the September election.
After years of denouncing Navalny and like-minded Russians as a “nonsystem opposition” bent on overturning Russia’s established order, the Kremlin has prompted fury by making it impossible for them to enter the political system.
Konstantin Yankauskas, a would-be candidate barred from taking part in the September elections, was released from prison on Saturday — and then bundled into a police van waiting for him outside the detention center.
The crowds were far smaller than the July 27 rally outside Moscow City Hall. Instead of congregating in one place, Saturday’s protesters were scattered along an inner ring road. A group of protesters clapped as they walked past a statute of Vladimir Vysotsky, a late-Soviet-era counterculture icon.
Okay then, this destabilization effort is collapsing even faster than the one in Hong Kong.
As with last weekend’s protest, which the authorities condemned as a “mass disturbance,” Saturday’s march was peaceful, with violence coming only from police officers.
The hallmark of a destabilization effort, with the pre$$ coverage confirming it.
--more--"
Here is where the AmeriKan Empire may die:
"Defying US sanctions, countries have taken oil from 12 Iranian tankers" by Anjali Singhvi and Edward Wong New York Times, August 3, 2019
NEW YORK — China is receiving oil shipments from a larger number of Iranian tankers than was previously known, defying sanctions imposed by the United States to choke off Tehran’s main source of income, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
The Times examined the movements of more than 70 Iranian tankers since May 2, when the US sanctions took full effect.
Look at the Jew York Times doing the USraeli war machine's work!
Twelve of the tankers loaded oil after May 2 and delivered it to China or the Eastern Mediterranean, where the buyers may have included Syria or Turkey. Only some of those 12 tankers were previously known to have recently delivered Iranian oil, and an analyst said the scale of the shipments documented by The Times investigation is greater than what had been publicly known.
The hell with it, let's go to war with Iran right goddamn now, 'eh?
GOOD CHRIST!
The continued flow of oil underscores the difficulty the Trump administration has had in using sanctions to bring Iranian oil exports to zero after breaking with allies and partners on Iran policy. The Obama administration had worked with China, Russia, and three European allies on the 2015 agreement intended to restrict Iran’s ability to pursue a nuclear program. President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal and to impose sanctions was opposed by those countries.
I have been told the sanctions were squeezing Iran into screaming mercy.
“You can’t make these kinds of threats if you can’t operationalize it,” said Richard Nephew, a scholar at Columbia University and a former White House and State Department official who helped enforce Iran sanctions during the Obama administration.
“It adds up to a decision that makes them look weak and feckless,” he added. “That shows there are limitations to US power. China and other places are prepared to say, ‘No, we’re not going to follow the US lead.’ ”
There they go again, trying to goad him into war.
The Times reviewed data from MarineTraffic and Refinitiv, two ship-tracking services, as well as satellite imagery from Planet Labs and analysis from shipping and energy experts.
“US sanctions have not stopped Iran from moving oil to the Mediterranean and Asia,” said Noam Raydan, an analyst at ClipperData, which tracks global crude shipments.
It is not illegal under international law to buy and haul Iranian oil or related products. The Trump administration’s oil sanctions, which mainly went into effect in November after the United States pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement, are unilateral. The administration granted eight governments permission to continue buying Iranian oil despite the sanctions, but ended the exceptions May 2.
Then why did the Birish seize the tanker off Gibraltar?
US officials have said sanctions are aimed at cutting off money to the Iranian government to force leaders there to make political change, transform their foreign policy, and offer more concessions on the country’s nuclear and missile programs.
That, by definition, is terrori$m!
While Iran continues to export oil, the sanctions have had a substantial impact. In April 2018, before Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal, Iran exported 2.5 million barrels of oil per day. One year later, that figure was at 1 million, and in June, after the end of the exceptions or waivers, ships in Iranian ports loaded about 500,000 barrels per day, according to Reid I’Anson, an energy economist at Kpler, a London-based company tracking seaborne commodities.
Since the sanctions came into full effect May 2, low-level hostilities between Iran and the United States in the Persian Gulf have increased, despite attempts by European nations to reduce tensions and get Iran to comply with the nuclear deal, which it had been doing until it breached limits on nuclear fuel last month.
The State Department said any new purchase of Iranian oil after May 2 would be subject to sanctions.
Japan and South Korea, fearful of secondary sanctions imposed by Washington if they do business with Iran, have complied with the US sanctions. Turkish officials said in late May that they are halting imports of Iranian oil but do not agree with the US sanctions.
And now there are tensions between the two!
In July, British marines and port authorities in Gibraltar seized a supertanker that they said was carrying crude oil from Iran to Syria. Though the Europeans do not endorse the US sanctions on Iran, the shipment violated European Union sanctions against Syria.
Looks more and more like an act of piracy then.
The Trump administration is starting to intensify sanctions enforcement to try to end the exports to China, which continues to be the largest buyer of Iranian oil. On July 22, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced sanctions against Zhuhai Zhenrong, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, and its top executive, Li Youmin, for “violating US restrictions on Iran’s oil sector.”
Short of war, nothing will suffice.
To really tighten the screws on China, the Trump administration would need to punish the People’s Bank of China or other Chinese banks that engage in transactions with the Central Bank of Iran, Nephew said. The United States could also penalize the energy giant Sinopec, which, like Zhuhai Zhenrong, imports oil from Iran, but sanctioning the banks or Sinopec would have far-reaching consequences for global trade and deepen the divide between Washington and Beijing.
Yeah, $o?
--more--"
Chinese President Xi Jinping is contending with a slowing economy and a protracted trade war with the US.(NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images/file)
The man looks weary and unhappy, and who can blame him?
"Paramount and paranoid: China’s Xi and the Communist Party face a crisis of confidence" by Anna Fifield Washington Post, August 3, 2019
(The last article was by the New York Times, but I must say that when I saw the Washington ComPost byline on yet another Sunday Globe article I groaned out loud)
SHANGHAI — Chinese scholars and Communist Party cadres have a succinct way of describing the tectonic shifts taking place here: Deng Xiaoping made us rich, now Xi Jinping is making us strong.
The phrase sums up China’s economic rise that began under Deng four decades ago, and the hopes for a similarly significant geopolitical realignment under the current president.
Xi has devoted his seven years in power to strengthening the ruling Communist Party, and by extension the country. He has relentlessly quashed dissent, sidelined rivals, and demanded absolute loyalty.
After pledging to make the party ‘‘north, south, east, and west,’’ he has ensured that it is paramount not just in policymaking but in the military, business, education, and the law.
Now, Xi is facing challenges on multiple fronts and the Communist Party, riven with paranoia at the best of times, is seeing threats at every turn.
Maybe I should color the stuff in blue instead, because what we are seeing is a classic case of the pre$$ projecting America's problems onto a designated foreign enemy upon which war must be waged.
He has to contend not just with a slowing economy but also a protracted trade war with the United States, one that has entered a new confrontational phase with President Trump’s decision to impose more tariffs next month.
He is facing escalating Western criticism of Chinese policies toward ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang, where as many as 3 million people have been put into reeducation camps. He is dealing with an increasingly assertive Taiwan at the same time as a pro-democracy movement swells in Hong Kong.
The criticism is over the torture, and the protesters are being led like sheep to slaughter.
All of these loom as dangers to Xi’s authority as the party’s general secretary and are heightening a sense of alarm within a party long fearful of external threats.
‘‘A strong party is the key to a successful China, in Xi’s eyes. It is also the only way to fend off enemies abroad, most notably the US,’’ said Richard McGregor, an expert on the party and the author of a new book about Xi’s leadership.
Xi is trying to harden the party’s internal resolve to fend off these threats — most acutely, a United States that many observers say seems intent on containing China.
‘‘Xi has a legion of internal critics, including over his handling of relations with Washington,’’ McGregor said. ‘‘One way to bring them to heel is by demanding fealty and loyalty to the party, and by extension, to himself.’’
They are making him into a Hitler.
Then again, there is such a thing as too much democracy, right?
Since taking power, Xi has rewritten the party’s rules — including ending term limits, setting himself up to be leader indefinitely — and launched huge study campaigns to instill his personal ideology across society, starting with toddlers, through schools and universities and through the Central Committee Party School in Beijing. The party has developed an app through which Chinese can study ‘‘Xi Jinping Thought.’’
You know, like the Zionist vice grip on those here in AmeriKa.
The president this past week exhorted party members to ‘‘work hard to purify, perfect, reform and upgrade ourselves.’’ ‘‘No exterior forces are able to take us down, as we are the world’s largest political party; the only one who can defeat us is ourselves,’’ Xi wrote in Qiushi, the influential publication of Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, last week.
‘‘We should stay alert to the ubiquitous factors that could weaken our Party’s pioneering nature and contaminate our Party’s purity,’’ he said. ‘‘If we don’t take strict precautions and correct them in time . . . small problems will grow into big ones, minor slips will escalate into an irreversible landslide, probably even leading to a broader and subversive catastrophe.’’
Like a World War.
Making the situation even more delicate, the party is now entering a sensitive period.
This month, party leaders both current and retired will repair to the beach resort of Beidaihe, about 200 miles east of Beijing, for their annual policy conclave. It was a ritual first begun by Mao Zedong in the 1950s.
I'm sorry, folks, but this slop is really becoming intolerable.
The meeting is highly secretive — the state media don’t announce that it has begun or that it has ended, let alone what is discussed — and last summer, Beijing was awash with speculation that party elders had taken Xi to task for mismanaging the trade war.
Sort of like a Bilderberg meeting, huh?
This year, Trump’s threat to impose tariffs of 10 percent on the remaining $300 billion of untaxed Chinese exports to the United States could provide Xi with more cover, said Bill Bishop, publisher of the widely-read Sinocism newsletter.
‘‘It should be an easy argument to make that no one can manage Trump and so those trying to blame Xi have other, ulterior motives, and that even if China agrees to humiliating concessions there is no guarantee the US side will keep its word,’’ Bishop wrote.
I'm glad Trump is helping him out, and the Chinese are no fools!
The other key event that is concerning party leaders is the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which Xi plans to mark in October with a massive military parade.
I wonder what will be the fallout.
With the anniversary drawing near, Chinese television regulators ordered all soap operas and costume dramas off the air for the 100 days leading up to National Day on Oct. 3, replacing them instead with patriotic shows that engender love for the motherland.
All things being equal, we call it the homeland over here, and we get the implication from the WaComPo.
--more--"
"Protesters, police face off in Hong Kong as rallies continue" by Yanan Wang Associated Press, August 3, 2019
HONG KONG — Standoffs between demonstrators and authorities have become a weekly occurrence in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese territory that has been roiled by a summer of fiery protest. What began as demonstrations against a now-suspended extradition bill has ballooned into a broader call for greater democratic freedoms and government accountability.
The U.S. generated destabilization campaign is a daily occurrence in my pre$$.
The now-familiar cycle of rallies, police interventions, and clashes between the two sides has splintered the city. Several pro-democracy rally participants expressed disappointment in what they viewed as abusive and negligent behavior from police in recent weeks. After thugs dressed in white beat up people inside a commuter rail station, leaving 44 injured, Hong Kong residents accused the police of deliberately being slow to respond. Police, meanwhile, said their resources were stretched because of the ongoing protests.
What a bunch of naive idiots. They expect the police to rush to their defense after trashing them during the protests, and the thugs episode is looking more and more like a self-inflicted injury to gain sympathy and support for a fading movement that is doing nothing but pissing off most people.
‘‘I feel so hurt,” said Zarine Chau, a 56-year-old security guard who was at the pro-democracy march. She said she rarely got involved in politics in the past, but felt moved to do so after seeing videos of police swinging their batons at protesters.
‘‘Why doesn’t the government answer to us?’’ Chau asked.....
Oh, the poor Chinese snowflake!
As for me, I don't expect my government to answer us, and recognize it for what it is. It's easier that way.
--more--"
"Snubbed by North Korea, Pompeo hits other Asian turbulence" by Matthew Lee Associated Press, August 3, 2019
BANGKOK — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left Thailand on Saturday with his hopes for resuming nuclear talks with North Korea dashed, while facing an escalating trade war with China and a potentially devastating breakdown in relations between key American allies Japan and South Korea.
Why in the world would the North Koreans want to meet with that asshole, and now those allies could be hit with secondary sanction over Iranian oil!
After three days in Bangkok that the Trump administration had expected could herald an end to the impasse in North Korea negotiations, Pompeo instead departed without progress on that front as Pyongyang continued to launch ballistic missiles, heightening unease over prospects for a denuclearization deal. Pompeo expressed disappointment that the North had sent neither its foreign minister nor a counterpart for the chief US negotiator to the Thai capital.
‘‘I always look forward to a chance to talk with him,’’ Pompeo said on Friday after it became clear he would not be seeing the North Koreans. ‘‘I wish they’d have come here.’’
It's the Korean equivalent of flipping him the finger, and I think the North Koreans have given up on talks with this administration and decided to move on -- as has, quite frankly, the whole world.
Yet despite what he and other US officials say are ongoing lower-level contacts with Pyongyang, there is no date or venue set for a resumption in negotiations more than a month after President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jung Un met at the De-Militarized Zone separating the two Koreas. At that time, administration officials said they believed a new round of talks was just weeks away.
In one of several signs of heightened tensions in Asia, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Saturday he was in favor of deploying ground-based missiles to the region, a day after the United States formally pulled out of a Cold War-era arms treaty that directly limited such weapons.
World War III is nigh, and it is gonna be good!
Esper, speaking to reporters on his way to Australia, said he would like to see the deployment within “months” but did not specify an exact timeline, the types of weapons the United States would deploy, and where they would be positioned.
Such a move would likely anger China and North Korea, two countries that have long opposed the deployment of US military hardware anywhere near their borders. On Friday, the United States announced it would withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces agreement.
Yeah, and they are going to test some new missiles now!
In Seoul, thousands of South Koreans, waving banners and chanting anti-Japan slogans, marched to express their anger at Japan’s decision to downgrade South Korea’s trade status amid an escalating diplomatic row.
That is what it's about? A minor trade issue?
What that last paragraph looks like is another destabilization campaign in an attempt to remove Moon!
--more--"
Then, after reading all that war propaganda, one is treated to this:
"An alternative to US world dominance" by August 2, 2019
The United States today finds itself strategically adrift. The Trump administration’s penchant for bluster and grandstanding, the absence of coherent and consistent policy direction, and the perpetual churning of senior officials all testify to a condition of dangerous disarray. Add to that the reluctance or inability of the Congress to offer anything approximating meaningful oversight and you have a circumstance not seen since Vietnam nearly destroyed the postwar tradition of American statecraft.
Yet to hold Trump responsible for this crisis is to misconstrue the problem. In a fundamental sense, his presidency represents an apotheosis. An approach to policy conceived by Trump’s several predecessors in the aftermath of the Cold War has failed. That failure is irrevocable, even if that fact has yet to sink in with more than a few political insiders. In the ungainly person of Donald Trump, the chickens have come home to roost.
Future scholars will enshrine the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the presidential election of November 2016 as the era of imagined US global primacy. History itself had seemingly conferred on America the status of “sole superpower,” called upon to transform the world in its own image.
Leaders of both political parties repeatedly affirmed this cosmic claim. Examples are legion, but in 1998 Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said it best. “If we have to use force,” she declared, “it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”
And the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to sanctions is worth it, you hubristic and hypocritical war criminal.
From our present vantage point, Albright’s pomposity invites derision.
(SAUL LOEB)
Time to come home!
Yet her remark captures the essence of a worldview then pervading official Washington. Members of the media echoed this assertion of duty and prerogative, especially when urging US authorities to redress some far-off injustice or atrocity, whether in East Africa, the Balkans, or a similarly distant land of marginal importance to the United States. Corporate leaders, especially those with a stake in the sprawling military-industrial complex, concurred. Global primacy linked to military activism was good for business. Ordinary Americans found little reason to object. Chanting “We’re number one!” was great fun.
Only by keeping in mind this expectation of primacy can we decipher the linkages between such sundry post-Cold War undertakings as creating the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, deregulating banking, enlarging NATO, framing the response to 9/11 as a global war of indeterminate duration, conjuring up an “axis of evil” to justify pursuit of a Freedom Agenda, expanding the empire of American bases abroad, adding Africa and cyberspace to the existing panoply of US military commands, and, of course, intervening in various countries (some more than once) with or without prior congressional assent. Properly understood, all of these are of a piece: neoliberalism plus neo-militarism plus neo-imperialism formed a template meant to keep the United States “number one” in perpetuity.
Yet policy particulars matter less than the three overarching themes to which these various initiatives gave collective expression. The first of those themes was hubris, neatly articulated by George W. Bush in his West Point speech of 2002 when, with all the certainty of a devout Marxist, he proclaimed the existence of “a single surviving model of human progress.” America itself embodied that model, the American way of life describing the future of humanity. So believed the younger Bush. So believed his father and Bill Clinton and even, albeit with caveats, Barack Obama. After the Cold War, an exalted conception of America’s historical role and responsibilities had become a precondition to being elected president.
The second theme was military omnipotence. Over and over again, since the end of the Cold War, Americans have been told that theirs is the greatest military in the entire world, the greatest in recorded history, the greatest since God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Military greatness, we have been propagandized to believe, is the ultimate manifestation of national greatness. If ever there was a self-evident truth to add to those specified in the Declaration of Independence, this apparently is it. President Trump’s grandiose Fourth of July celebration of the armed forces merely paid tribute to this widely shared conviction.
The third theme was a belief that the present defines the future. The history unfolding in the aftermath of what Francis Fukuyama famously called “the end of history” was sure to follow a fixed trajectory. Few members of the foreign policy elite possessed the imagination to consider the possibility of history veering in an altogether different direction that might undermine American preeminence.
Acting on these dubious themes during the quarter-century following the Cold War resulted in war, rivers of red ink, horrendous trade deficits, massive economic inequality, and more war, thereby creating the conditions that vaulted Donald Trump to the presidency.
A half-century ago Richard Nixon worried about the United States becoming a “pitiful, helpless giant.” Today, the United States may be neither pitiful nor helpless, but it is plainly confused and deeply divided, with many citizens baffled that the preeminence deemed rightly theirs when the Cold War ended is now slipping away. In 2016, the baffled voted for Trump; in 2020, they may well do so again.
Or not vote at all again.
The presidential campaign now getting underway presents an opportunity to confront this post-Cold War pattern of failure and disappointment. While foreign policy alone won’t determine who wins the Democratic nomination or eventually the White House, any candidate offering a plausible alternative to neoliberalism, neo-militarism, and neo-imperialism stands to receive a sympathetic hearing.
Yeah, that's why Sanders is so popular.
Granted, promoting honest consideration of such an alternative approach won’t be easy. The foreign policy establishment will fiercely resist any effort to curtail its influence. Yet change is imperative.
Did he just say there is a Deep State?
After all, the unipolar moment, if it ever existed, has ended. The emerging order of the 21st century will be fluid, complex, and messy. While it may be premature to specify the precise pecking order of status and clout, no one nation will be able to call the shots – not China and not the United States. Global hegemony is a mirage.
Similarly, military dominion is probably unachievable and is certainly unaffordable. The Pentagon’s emphasis on “power projection” since the end of the Cold War has cost the United States dearly in blood and treasure while producing few positive outcomes. The exertions, travails, and sacrifices of US troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan have yielded this overarching lesson: Armed force is more effective when used to deter and defend than in pursuit of regime change or nation-building.
Finally, geopolitics, which centers on ordering competition between nations, is destined to take a backseat to planetary politics, centered on collaboration to address common threats. Reigning precepts of American global leadership will have to adjust accordingly. Rather than exporting their way of life with its insatiable appetite for consumption and propensity for waste, Americans will find themselves obliged to modify that way of life, emphasizing sustainability and then persuading others to do likewise.
The implications of basing US policy on these alternative themes are immense. Among other things, the canonical lessons of World War II and the Cold War, above all the tendency to equate compromise with so-called appeasement, will no longer apply. A radical commitment to dialogue should become a signature of American statecraft, with force once more a last resort. Ostentatious threats of violence, with “all options” seemingly always “on the table,” should cease.
In the near term, what might the application of this alternative approach imply? In the Middle East, where the grotesque misuse of American power has fostered widespread instability, the United States should lower its military profile. America’s proper role in regional disputes there, for example between Saudi Arabia and Iran, ought to be that of honest broker, not participant. In East Asia, where allowing US-China relations to devolve into a new Cold War will revive the danger of war on an apocalyptic scale, US policy should focus on affirming common interests, combating climate change not least among them.
Diplomacy is hard. It requires persistence and flexibility along with clarity of purpose. Yet at this juncture, can anyone, apart perhaps from the present national security advisor and a remnant of neoconservatives, possibly fancy that war is easy?
In his famous 1821 Independence Day address, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams warned Americans against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Doing so, he said, would plunge the United States “beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”
Almost two centuries ago, Adams anticipated the situation in which the United States finds itself today. Yet extrication is possible: Policies based on prudence, realism, and restraint will allow the United States to engage the world on terms of its own choosing, while once more upholding freedom’s true standard.
Andrew Bacevich is cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.
That is the Soros and Koch operation, and the turn-in occupied the same bottom two inches of the page as the article last week (who didn't see this coming, either?).
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Also see:
UK emergency workers race to cut water levels at damaged dam
More problems for Boris, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater (too much Scotch).
Gotta keep punching, though.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
"Overflowing toilets, bedbugs and high heat: Inside Mexico’s migrant detention centers" by Kirk Semple New York Times, August 3, 2019
ACAYUCAN, Mexico — Migrants have been held in a wrestling arena, at a fairground, and in government offices. They’ve been forced to sleep in hallways, on an outdoor basketball court.
Mexico’s detention centers have at times reached triple, quadruple, and even quintuple their capacity. Detainees at some centers have endured extreme heat, bedbug infestations, overflowing toilets, days without showers, and shortages of food and decent health care.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador campaigned for the presidency last year on promises that his migration policy would break from his predecessors’ emphasis on enforcement and focus instead on respecting migrants’ human rights and treating them with dignity, but under threat from the Trump administration, he has reversed course and overseen a sharp increase in migrant detentions and deportations.
This iron-fisted approach has helped lower the number of migrants trying to cross the southwest border of the United States, but it has also resulted in a crisis in Mexico’s detention centers that, critics say, is subjecting adults and children to inhumane conditions, exposing the Mexican government’s lack of preparedness, and serving as a glaring rebuke of López Obrador.
Under pressure from critics, including the government’s human-rights ombudsman, the López Obrador administration has acknowledged in recent days the sorry state of the detention system and has promised improvements. In the meantime, however, conditions remain grim.
Interviews with several asylum seekers released in recent days from a large detention center here in Acayucan, a small city in southeastern Mexico, painted a picture of hardship and scarcity. People slept on thin mattresses wherever they could find space. Others didn’t even have that, and stretched out on the ground. They spoke of poor-quality food — and not enough of it, and some said that even the drinking water would frequently run out.
Conditions within the detention system have been criticized for years, but the failings have become more evident in recent months amid the enforcement crackdown. In April, after overseeing a sharp drop in detentions and deportations during his first four months in office, Lopez Obrador suddenly started to get tough on illegal immigration. Spurred by President Trump’s threats to close the border with Mexico to thwart illegal immigration, the Mexican government moved quickly to increase detentions and deportations.
This is once again all New York Times advocacy journalism and agenda pushing.
These efforts accelerated in June when Trump threatened to impose punitive tariffs on Mexico, but while the Mexican government may have been quick to respond to Trump’s demands, it apparently made little effort to prepare its detention network for the resulting stress.
The National Migration Institute, which oversees the migrant detention system, had already been struggling in the face of Lopez Obrador’s effort to bring down the cost of government. As part of this austerity program, the agency’s budget was cut 23 percent this year. Since spring, reports of the deteriorating conditions have multiplied.
What good is electing a lefti$t if all they are going to do is serving bankers?
“There is concern about the violation of rights for people who will inevitably go to immigration stations,” the Citizens Council of the National Migration Institute, a group that advises the migration agency, said in a statement in mid-June. “Due to the increase in immigration containment, the stations become saturated, causing overcrowding and precarious conditions,” yet the situation has barely improved.
When the pre$$ starts flogging the open-air concentration camps that are Gaza and the West Bank, maybe I'll listen. Or if they dig into the famine and cholera of Yemen. As it is, nothing is more offensive than having Jewish supremacists wave the migrants at us.
In an interview in his office, Edgar Corzo Sosa, rapporteur for migrant issues at the National Human Rights Commission, an autonomous government agency, said that in “a normal migration flow,” space in the system would be sufficient, but Mexico is experiencing what he called “an intense migration flow.”
This after we were told for so long it was a contrived crisis by Trump.
Corzo picked up a document — the government’s daily population count for each of the detention centers — and began citing statistics.....
Who believes government statistics anymore?
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Related:
"Maine health officials say they’re aware of cases of chickenpox at a Portland facility being used to house asylum seekers, and they’re working to contain the viral disease. The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement Saturday that people staying at Portland Expo are considered exposed to the disease. Maine CDC said later in the day there are a ‘‘limited number’’ of chickenpox cases. Portland Expo is a basketball arena that’s being used to house asylum seekers while they seek permanent housing. They face an Aug. 15 deadline to leave the facility. Portland city officials say they’re working with Maine CDC to limit exposure. The city is informing volunteers who visited the Expo on July 26 or later to watch for symptoms and check vaccination records. The disease is best prevented with a vaccine (AP)."
Yeah, they want to get the needles into them, and I hope the reporter has been vaccinated.
Of course, you are a racist if you suggest the migrants are bringing diseases with them. Must be why the Globe only ran a brief on page B2.
So when is your court date?
"In court without a lawyer: the consequences of Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ plan" by Miriam Jordan New York Times, August 3, 2019
(Another New York Times byline. Why not just call it the New York Times Sunday Globe?)
SAN DIEGO — Outside one of the nation’s busiest immigration courts, dozens of migrant families streamed out of a pair of buses that had just pulled in from the Mexican border, all of them hoping to fight deportation and ask for refuge in the United States.
They filed into two packed waiting rooms at the busy federal compound southeast of San Diego. Mothers tried to soothe crying babies. Security guards escorted people to bathroom breaks. Inside the courtrooms, people waiting their turns before the judges slouched on wooden benches as the long hours wore on.
The hearings unfolding several days a week in Southern California are unlike most of the asylum proceedings that have dominated immigration court dockets since Central American families began arriving in large numbers at the southern border in 2014. For the 158 migrants brought in through the San Ysidro port of entry that day in July, their stay in the United States would be brief: Nearly all of them would be returned to Mexico at the end of the day to await, at a distance, what for some of them could be a life-or-death decision.
“I am afraid the Barrio 18 gang will beat me, rape my daughter to hurt me, cut us in pieces and kill us,” a Baptist preacher from El Salvador, who identified himself only as Carlos, wrote in his petition to the court. “I am a pastor of a church who preaches that youth should follow God instead of gangs.”
Is he the one that told you to migrate?
For decades, those who could reasonably argue they were fleeing persecution in their homelands could enter the United States and obtain temporary residence and often a work permit while they consulted with a lawyer and prepared to present a full asylum petition to the immigration court.
That all changed under a Trump administration program that began in January. The program requires many migrants seeking admission to the United States to be sent back to Mexico for the duration of their court proceedings, allowing them to cross the border only for their hearings.
The program is proving to be disastrously difficult for many asylum seekers, who show up for critical court hearings like the ones in San Diego with no legal representation and little understanding of what is needed to successfully present a case. Some have not even been informed of when their cases would be heard or were given the wrong date or the wrong courthouse, according to an analysis of immigration court data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Now they are "asylum seekers," not migrants or undocumented illegals. Wow.
Access to counsel is a challenge even for those pursuing their cases from within the United States: Only 37 percent of them have representation, but for those waiting in Mexico, the border can pose an insurmountable barrier. Even if a migrant can afford to pay, finding a lawyer willing to take the case of a client living in Mexico is a challenge. In San Diego, the two legal aid organizations accepting clients in Tijuana are overwhelmed.....
It's an insurmountable barrier even without a wall, huh?
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At least they were given a free lunch while they were here.
Pages A17-23 were all obituaries, and page A24 was the end of the section, but help arrived on page B1:
"Jewish center on Beacon Hill undergoes renovations, seeks to uncover its painted past" by Lauren Fox Globe Correspondent, August 3, 2019
The paint covers three other layers, the oldest of which, once uncovered, will show what the historic Beacon Hill synagogue looked like in the 1920s, when it welcomed Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, but what lies beneath the rest of the synagogue’s walls remains a mystery.
The last immigrant-era synagogue in downtown Boston, the Vilna Shul now operates as a cultural center. It closed last October for extensive renovations focused on making the building more accessible: creating a stairless entrance, installing an elevator, and putting a women’s restroom on the ground floor. Crews are also refurbishing the center’s community space and adding heating and air conditioning.
The $4 million project is on pace to be completed in late September, allowing the synagogue to reopen in time for the Jewish high holiday season. The project also coincides with the synagogue’s centennial, which Barnet Kessel, the Vilna Shul’s executive director, called “poetic.” The building’s cornerstone was laid in 1919.
I'm tired of the self-centeredness.
“The history here is rich,” said Kessel, 51. “The history that we’re writing today and tomorrow I think is equally as rich. To breathe life into it and make sure that it will survive for another 100 years, I’m not sure I could do anything more important with my life professionally.”
His whole existence is caught up in being Jewish.
The Vilna Shul also boasts pews from the 1840s that were originally housed in the African Baptist Church, which a Jewish congregation purchased as its place of worship before building the Vilna Shul. The congregation brought the pews with them to the new location.
Kessel said that the Vilna Shul attracts a wide range of visitors, and that everyone is welcome. Its programming is aimed not just at Jewish people but to demonstrate “the universality of the immigrant experience.”
Including British soldiers during the war.
Jewish residents settled on Beacon Hill in the late 19th century and in time had enough financial success to move to different parts of the city and the suburbs.
Then Palestine is really no different than anywhere else, is it?
Kessel doesn’t think it’s necessarily something physical in the Vilna Shul that might speak to current immigrant populations. It’s more the concept of “they were here.”
“They experienced what we’re experiencing today. And we know what happened to this community. And maybe that will happen to me and my community with hard work — a little bit of luck — but a lot of hard work.”
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Time to catch the first train out of here:
"A man was fatally struck by an Orange Line train at State Street station just after midnight Saturday morning, forcing a temporary suspension of service, according to MBTA Transit Police. Transit Police and Boston fire and EMS officials responded to a report of a person possibly hit by a train at State Street station about 12:14 a.m., Transit Police said in a statement. An initial investigation showed the unidentified man “appeared very unsteady on his feet” while on the platform, and “stumbled and fell into the right of way (pit area) and was struck by a northbound Orange Line train,” according to the statement. Transit Police Superintendent Richard Sullivan said the victim was an adult, but his age was not immediately available. Transit Police and Suffolk County district attorney’s office are investigating."
Is it possible alcohol was a factor?
Or something worse?
"Boston police arrest 16 around ‘Methadone Mile’" by Laura Crimaldi Globe Staff, August 3, 2019
For the second straight day, Boston police officers Friday arrested more than a dozen people in an area known as “Methadone Mile” as part of efforts to make the neighborhood safer following an attack Thursday during which a correction officer headed to work was beaten with a metal pipe.
They didn't care until one of their own was attacked!
The arrests were made Friday evening around the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Southampton Street, a neighborhood that includes homeless shelters, recovery services, Boston Medical Center, and the Suffolk County House of Correction.
All told, officers arrested 16 people, Boston police said. Seven of the people taken into custody faced arrest warrants for missing court appearances in pending criminal cases, and six were arrested for new drug offenses, ranging from drug possession to trafficking, police said. Four other people were picked up on straight warrants for crimes they were accused of committing prior to Friday and had not yet gone to court to answer for.
A spokeswoman for Mayor Martin J. Walsh declined to comment on the latest arrests, directing questions to Boston police. She issued a statement highlighting Walsh’s efforts to tackle the opioid epidemic by pushing for the construction of a recovery campus on Long Island, suing pharmaceutical companies implicated in the crisis, and spending more on public safety and quality-of-life initiatives.
Yeah, he's doing a great job.
“Helping people in recovery has been one of Mayor Walsh’s priorities since day one,” mayoral spokeswoman Samantha Ormsby said in the statement.
Uh-huh.
The pressure to improve neighborhood safety intensified Thursday morning after police said a correction officer for the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department was attacked by a group of men on Atkinson Street as he drove to work. During the confrontation, police said the officer was struck with a metal pipe and robbed of a watch, glasses, and cellphone. He was treated at BMC and released from the hospital later that day, his union said. The officer’s name hasn’t been made public.
Police have arrested two men in the attack.....
This doesn't make Rollins look very good, does it?
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I suppose it could have been worse:
"The man shot while he was driving during the afternoon rush hour commute in Revere Friday is a 34-year-old from outside Massachusetts who is in critical condition at Mass. General Hospital, State Police said in a statement Saturday morning. The shooting was jarring to some Revere residents who live nearby and spoke to the Globe Friday. Julianna Ayala, 31, who has lived in the area since 2001, said she arrived at the scene Friday afternoon to find stopped cars lining both sides of Route 1A. “It’s shocking,” Ayala said. Annette Mead, 53, has lived in Revere for five years, and said she never experienced violence in the area before......"
Related:
"A Roxbury man was arrested early Saturday after he allegedly stabbed a man at a store, according to Boston police. Vincent Norwood, 44, of Roxbury, faces a charge of assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon, Boston police said in a statement Saturday. Shortly before 3 a.m. Saturday, police responded to a call about a person found stabbed, police said. An unidentified male victim, who was treated for non-life-threatening injuries, told police he was approached by an unknown male, an unknown female, and another unknown male in a wheelchair, when he entered a business at 782 Commonwealth Ave. The victim told police that, while he was giving change to the suspect in the wheelchair, the other male became verbally aggressive toward him, stabbing him in the arm with a small knife, police said. After conducting a search, officers arrested Norwood in connection with the stabbing, police said. Police say they found a knife on Norwood when he was taken into custody near 141 Massachusetts Ave. Norwood is expected to be arraigned in Boston Municipal Court."
Also see:
Police investigate another accusation against prominent Bristol resident
Time to hop on a bike and get out of town.
Beaches on the Cape and Nantucket close after at least a dozen shark sightings
That's why they have the $ummer Blues, and even though sharks are ugly, we need them.
Springfield officer found dead in apparent swimming accident in Vermont
He was only in the water for a brief amount of time.
Governor Baker vetoes labor bill over cellphone privacy concerns
How ironic after the bottom half of page A13 carried a paid advertisement by the SEIU thanking Baker, DeLeo, Spilka for the new budget!
Time to bury this post.