Cop Murders Innocent Man On Video

It's difficult to comprehend the horror of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc&feature=youtu.be

Incredibly, the cop was found innocent in court because he felt his life was being threatened:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mesa-police-shooting-daniel-shaver-seen-crawling-begging-in-disturbing-video/

Cops are treating every encounter as though they're invading Fallujah. This is terrifying.

Hong Kong Light Show

Hong Kong skyline at 8:00 p.m. every day, seen from Kowloon, across Victoria Harbour:

Wingsuit Flyers Jump INTO Plane

Two guys jumping into a Pilatus Porter:

Trump's Cringe-Worthy Interview With The New York Times

Click here for excerpts of an interview Trump gave to Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times.

What can I say? The man's an idiot.

Quo Vadis, MSNBC? (with a p.s.)

Click here for an article at Crooks & Liars by Nicole Belle, entitled "Framing The Debate, MSNBC Edition: Joan Walsh Out As Contributor."

MSNBC, the allegedly "liberal" news channel, notified Joan Walsh that they are terminating her contract as a contributor ... The reason the MSNBC executives gave to her agent were "budgetary" concerns.

This is interesting:

When President Obama was in office, MSNBC leaned in, offering shows to People of Color, like Tamron Hall, Melissa Harris-Perry, Al Sharpton, Karen Finney and Joy Reid (sadly, only Reid remains). Now that we're in the Trump era, with Trump and his flunkies calling out the corrupt media, MSNBC head Andy Lack is clearly tacking to reflect that: white, conservative primarily male pundits.

Joan Walsh, Melissa Harris-Perry, Sam Seder, and Al Sharpton have been given the boot (Sharpton from his own program, although he still appears as a commentator; Seder was reinstated after a viral campaign of support). Lawrence O'Donnell was threatened with non-extension of his contract, but he, too, was saved by a viral campaign of support. (The article also includes Tamron Hall and Karen Finney among lefties who have been released or downgraded, but I'm not familiar with either of them.)

On the other hand, right-wingers Hugh Hewitt, Joe Scarborough, and Nicole Wallace have their own programs; Greta Van Susteren was given a program which was rapidly terminated, apparently after no one was tuning in to watch her. Other right-wingers making regular appearances include Charlie Sykes, Peggy Noonan, Steve Schmidt, George Will, and until his recent dismissal in disgrace Mark Halperin (and, the article says, Megyn Kelly, although I'm unaware of this and have never seen Kelly on MSNBC). They can afford these people, but not Joan Walsh? (I have to add that the above list includes two people I like, and who I feel have rehabilitated themselves from their hard-core Republican pasts: Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace.)

Where are you going, MSNBC?

P.S.: after writing the above, I was pleased to read Digby's comments on the Joan Walsh dismissal by Digby at Hullabaloo. In her article entitled "Oh MSNBC, you've made a huge mistake," she expresses the same thoughts I did (although better than I did, of course.)

I was particularly pleased to find that she agreed with me about Schmidt and Wallace:

I like the Never-Trump apostates like Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt. As Republicans they are very good at harsh criticism and they are turning it on their own party and the president for a change. It's good to know that while Republicans may have wrong ideas about policy they aren't all batshit crazy and falling into line behind Donald Trump.

Sexual Harrassment At Fox News, Despite Rupert Murdoch's Denials

Click here for a video from Brian Stelter's Reliable Sources. It's ex-Fox personality Tamara Holder fighting back against Rupert Murdoch's airbrushing of Fox's offenses -- in fact, Fox was a cesspool of misogyny.

Holder sued and won a money judgement against Fox. By the terms of the settlement, she signed an NDA -- a nondisclosure agreement -- promising not to speak out against Fox on the subject of the lawsuit. She says she expects to be sued by Fox (she's a lawyer), but she says Murdoch has violated the terms of the settlement by disparaging and defaming her, in the way that he brushed off the claims against Fox. Holder claims:

"Either Mr. Murdoch is a liar, or he's delusional and old and needs to get out."

An Economic Argument Against B.C.'s Site C Dam Project

Click here for an article at DESMOGCA (Clearing the PR Pollution), entitled "Why the Site C Dam Fails Economic Test: NDP Critic."

The gist of the article is that Site C was originally proposed by Bill Bennett in 1980. At that time, the government wildly overestimated future demand for power. Had it proceeded at that time:

BC Hydro, its owners (that's us) and its ratepayers (that's us as well) would have lost their shirts. In fact, it would have undermined the very foundations of BC Hydro and the government's finances.

The project was revived under Christie Clark's Liberal government:

The Liberal cabinet has ordered BC Hydro to proceed with the Site C project. In announcing the project, Clark and BC Hydro justified the action by predicting an increase in domestic demand of 40 per cent over the next 20 years. Even with BC Hydro's inflated forecast, according to economist Robert McCollough, Site C will initially be a money loser. Delaying the dam for five years would save $1.19 billion.

However, just as in 1980, BC Hydro's forecast is proving to be fundamentally wrong. Over the past 10 years, energy demand has been flat, even dropping slightly from 2007 to this year.

And since the 2013 energy-demand forecast the government used to justify Site C, domestic demand has cratered.

The reasons for this are numerous — low economic growth, the decline of our energy-consuming pulp and paper and forestry sector, increasing industry energy efficiency, high electricity rates that depress demand, and a small but growing number of consumers who are going “behind the meter” with alternative energy sources. The latter trend is likely to continue to grow in B.C. as it has in our export markets such as California.

Opponents of the project claim that alternative energy sources -- chiefly wind and solar -- are better options:

Moreover, the cost of generating electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind is going down because of technological and manufacturing advances. There has been massive deflation in the cost of generating electricity.

Flip phone technology, say the opponents:

We are going to be paying for Site C for about 70 years, and we have locked ourselves into a very old technology. Our current dams are paid for and will always be competitive for that reason, but not Site C.

It is like entering into a 70-year contract for a flip phone at exactly the wrong time. In fact, would you sign any high cost 70-year deal for your hand-held device when prices are dropping?

Here's a question that opponents of the project should be asked in polling questions:

“Would you support building Site C at a loss to export power, subsidizing B.C.'s competitors and leaving BC Hydro ratepayers with large domestic rate increases? Would you support Site C if it cost jobs? Would the agricultural land lost to Site C development be worth it then?”

Genesis Of The U.S. Civil War

I don't have time to read this article, which was posted on Quora, but it seems like a good one, so I'm saving it here to read in the future (too bad there are three maps in the Quora post which didn't copy over):

Even at the time of the Revolution, the economies of North and South had been different. In the North, wealth was invested in commercial activities. The South, on the other hand, was agricultural. Wealth, here, was invested in land and slaves. Alexander Hamilton’s vision for the North was its transformation into an industrial powerhouse that could in time rival Britain, the nation with the most advanced manufacturing of the day. Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the South was for a republic of property-owning farmers, property in land, and property in slaves. There was the recognition that slavery was immoral and the vague hope that someday it would fall into obsolescence, but slave labor was to remain the backbone of the economy.

And so it did. Decade after decade, nearly all the available capital in the South was reinvested into land and more slaves. When a canal-building frenzy began, where did it take place? It was in the North. When a railroad-building frenzy began, where were the vast majority of the tracks built? It was in the North. And when immigrants decided to move to the United States, where did they settle? It was in the North. What, after all, was a propertyless immigrant to do in the South? Buy land? With what money? Hire himself out as a day laborer? He’d have to either work as a slave or an overseer of slaves, a line of work most people who didn’t grow up flogging people didn’t have the stomach for. And so, the economy and population of the North grew apace, and the South stagnated.

One of the most underappreciated aspects of economics is how much it shapes culture and politics. Let’s start with politics. As a Northern capitalist who wanted to invest in manufacturing, the worst thing that could happen from your perspective would be for the local marketplace to be flooded with goods manufactured abroad. What you wanted was for a system that would keep foreign goods more expensive than local ones, which you could achieve with a tax on foreign imports: a tariff. The other thing you would want, in order to decrease your costs, was for the government to invest in what was at the time called internal improvements: roads, bridges, canals, and railroads. This would facilitate commerce by reducing the costs and times of transportation. Goods could be carried farther, faster, and cheaper. More people could afford those goods. And producers would have an incentive to augment production. This would have a stimulative effect on the economy as a whole, as the businesses that supplied the manufactures would also grow.

What I’ve described is the system first proposed by Alexander Hamilton, then taken up by the National Republicans, who later became the Whigs. In the North, this was seen as a recipe for national greatness. But in the South, it was seen as a set of policies designed to benefit one section of the country at the expense of the other. For what did the agricultural South care for these tariffs? All the South saw was that the goods they wanted to import were artificially more expensive, all so that Northern capitalistic interests would benefit. So, Southerners started opposing this whole system of high tariffs and infrastructure spending. It didn’t help that this system was funded by and associated with banking interests, which were seen as corrupt and elitist. In time, resentment against these policies would fuel support for Andrew Jackson, who famously won his battle against the Second Bank of the United States. But I digress…

So, we know what the South didn’t want. What, then, did it want? Land, more land, ever more land, and more Negroes. Manifest destiny, the belief that it was the destiny of the US to spread from the East to the West Coast, had a particular flavor in the South. In the Southern version, one of the explicit purposes of acquiring more land was to extend the empire of slavery. If you were a property-owning Southerner, what you feared most was the abolition of slavery. What was the most likely scenario for this to happen? More and more “free states” could be admitted to the Union, eventually leading to an overwhelming Northern advantage in Congress, which would then proceed to abolish slavery. So, what you needed to counter this dynamic was to acquire more land where slave-powered agriculture could be practiced.

Allow me a philosophical digression. You may skip over this entire passage if you want to get to the rest of the narrative.

Let us briefly discuss Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism. We are heirs to both. Neither of these two philosophies was democratic by our standards. They were both rooted in the belief that only property owners had a stake in society. And only a stake in society entitled a man to vote. But the Jeffersonian ideal envisaged a larger number of stakeholders than the Hamiltonian model did. And, over time, two pressures conspired to democratize America, at least if you had the good sense to be born a White male.

The first was competition between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. The latter were more sympathetic to immigrants and to poorer Americans. They saw that they had more to gain from an expansion of the electorate. The former, who did not want to appear to be the elitists they actually were, didn’t stand in the way.

The second pressure was competition between the states for residents. If you were a Western territory wanting enough population to apply for statehood, or a Western state wanting enough population to increase your clout in the House of Representatives, you could attract people by promising that they’d enjoy the right to vote even if they didn’t hold any property. After enough Western (today’s Midwest) states did this, the Eastern states had to follow suit if they didn’t want to lose too many of their residents.

Today, it is customary to see Jefferson as a fount of sagacity to whom we owe the democratization of the republic, at least among his admirers. For his detractors, he was a racist, a rapist, and a hypocrite. He is, after all, the man who wrote that Blacks were “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,” a sentence that was so painful to me when I encountered it as an adolescent that it indelibly carved itself into my mind.

Likewise, it is customary to see Hamilton as the genius without whom the North wouldn’t have been able to industrialize. He was the genius who put the nation’s financial house into order and paved the way for its ascension as the nation with the highest standard of living in the world, at least for his supporters. For his detractors, he was a power-hungry anti-democrat and a corruption-apologist who unleashed the forces of capitalism into American politics, leading to a system in which moneyed interests could dictate national policy and the poor would toil as members of an industrial proletariat from which they had few chances of rising.

Neither of these characterizations is fair. They were both men of their own place and time, both representing rather than founding the political philosophies with which they are today associated. They may have been exceedingly talented, but no single man, however brilliant, can determine the direction a culture or civilization will follow. Slavery would have flourished with or without Jefferson. And the same can be said of industrial capitalism with regards to Alexander Hamilton.

In time, the nation that would emerge over the course of the 19th century was the amalgamation of these two civilizations: we owe our wealth to our industrial development, and capital still plays an outsized role in our politics. On the other hand we are much more democratic than the founders ever envisaged, and race-based inequality still persists, as befits a society where race-based slavery was practiced for a long time. Latin America offers various examples of the same racial dynamics at work, oftentimes in a more virulent form.

Now let’s return to the topic of culture. Southern society was built around slavery. It was much less literate than its Northern counterpart. The society was lorded over by an aristocracy of slave-owners who were resented by politically-powerless poor whites, especially those living in mountainous regions where slavery was not widespread. For the individual planters, this was very lucrative. But at the aggregate level, it was a classic colonial society, where raw materials were exported and more expensive finished goods were imported. The south would ship out its cotton, then spend money on textiles manufactured in the North and in Britain. This meant that even as individual planters got rich, the region as a whole stagnated.

Their books were produced in the North. Many of their teachers came from the North. Much of Southern industry and railroad construction was financed by Northern capital. How was the South to react? Some called for more investment in industry, but as the price of cotton rose in the 1850s, continued investment in land and slaves was too profitable for individual planters to ignore.

In the North, one of the manifestations of the Second Great Awakening is that many Northerners came to view slavery as sinful and evil. Southerners pointed out, rightly, that the Bible didn’t condemn slavery. Churches like the Baptist and Methodist denominations started splitting into Northern (anti-slavery) and Southern (pro-slavery) factions. Abolitionists were a fringe group in the North. But their attacks really rankled Southerners.

As often happens when one’s way of life is under attack, Southerners started doubling down on their love of slavery. The founding generation had at least had the decency to be uneasy about the institution. But in the lead-up to the Civil War, Southerners started arguing that slavery was a positive good. Many of them started pushing for the reopening of the slave trade. After all, if slavery was good, and it was good and lawful to buy slaves in the United States, why should it be unlawful to buy slaves in Africa? This had no chance of passage in Congress. But Southerners had talked themselves into a position where any criticism of slavery was now seen as a criticism of Southern culture and honor.

With this background in mind, let’s talk about Mexico.

If you know anything about the Mexican-American border, you will be familiar with the history of people pouring across its borders illegally, with complete and utter disregard for the laws of the nation in which they were settling. I am talking, of course, of Americans moving into the Mexican territory of Texas. These Americans resented the fact that slavery was illegal in Mexico. So they brought in their slaves anyway. The Mexican government was far away, so could do little to check their behavior. In time, there were enough of them to start causing real trouble. Allying themselves with Mexican Tejanos who resented the centralization of power under Santa Anna, the Mexican dictator, they started a war of Independence. Santa Anna had the misfortune of being captured in battle, and had to agree to withdraw his armies south of the Rio Grande. The year was 1836.

Mexico, of course, refused to accept the independence of Texas. The Texans then petitioned the US for admission as a state. Initially, both the Whigs and the Democrats refused. Everyone knew what annexing Texas meant: war with Mexico. But soon enough, the politics of ambition prevailed, and President Tyler, who had become president after the death of William Henry Harrison in 1841, started pushing for annexation. The election of 1844 brought to power James K. Polk, who campaigned as a pro-annexation candidate and defeated Henry Clay. This was enough of a popular mandate for both houses of Congress to pass an annexation bill, which was signed into law by President Tyler even before Polk took office.

The Texans accepted the offer of annexation, and in December 1845 Texas was admitted as the newest state in the Union. There was going to be a war. Southerners were jubilant. Here was an opportunity to gobble up more land and expand slavery over all the territory to be conquered.

But Northerners, Whigs in particular, were not so keen on this war. Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a prophetic warning:

The US would surely conquer Mexico, he wrote, “but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which will bring him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”

What did it mean?

There was a careful balance of Northern and Southern power in the US government. So long as the nation didn’t expand, the balance would remain, and there wouldn’t be much to fight over. But with new conquests, the South would be as eager to expand slavery into the new territories as the North would be to keep it out. And the result would be sectional conflict.

The US did swallow the arsenic of Mexican territory, and the poison took hold. In the North, both the Democrats and the Whigs fractured. Anti-slavery elements in both, who strongly opposed the extension of slavery into any territory conquered from Mexico, broke off from their respective parties and formed the Free Soil Party, which would subsequently be absorbed into the Republican Party, after the demise of the Whigs.

Before long, there were fights over what to do with the newly acquired territory. Before long, there was a gold Rush in California that led tens of thousands of people to migrate there. Before long, California was eligible for admission into the Union, admission as a free state. Until that point people had been careful to admit states in pairs, one free and one slave.

The solution, for the South, was easy. Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican war, one of their very own who owned tens of slaves, was in office. Surely, he would veto Californian entry into the Union until a slave state could enter at the same time. Surely, he would support the claims of Texas on territory that is now part of the state of New Mexico. But, far from being a southern sectionalist, Taylor actually proved to be a Southerner in the mold of Washington, a man who put the national interest ahead of those of the slaveholding South. Taylor supported the admission of both California and New Mexico as free states!

The South felt betrayed. Secession was threatened. Taylor told Southern leaders, including his ex-son-in-law Jefferson Davis, that if they attempted secession, he would ride South at the head of an army and hang them himself.

Before things could come to a head, Taylor suddenly died in office, which allowed Fillmore, a doughface—a Northerner with Southern sympathies—to accede to the presidency. The year was 1850.

What is a generation?

What does it matter for a person to be born at a specific time, rather than two to three decades earlier or later?

A generation is the difference between Michael Jackson and Bruno Mars. It’s the difference between Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama. It’s the difference between the NES and the PlayStation 4. It was also the difference between Henry Clay and William H Seward.

The first was born a year into the American Revolution. The second was born during the early months of the Jefferson presidency. The first believed in sacrificing Negroes at the altar of the preservation of the Union. The latter believed that the South had been appeased enough, and that it was high time for their barbarous practice of slavery to be thrown into the dustbin of history. The Constitution may have protected slavery, but there was “a higher law than the constitution.”

For the time being, the compromisers won. In the Compromise of 1850, initially proposed by Clay, but steered through to passage by Stephen Douglas, everyone got a bit of what they wanted, at the cost of swallowing some very bitter pills. But at each extreme, people seethed with resentment.

Southerners had much to be unhappy about:

Why had the sale of slaves been abolished in the District of Columbia? Why had the admission of California as a free state without a counterbalancing slave state been allowed? Why had the claims of Texas to Santa Fe not been supported? Now the state of Texas would be smaller, and its representation in Congress diminished. Why was the decision made to leave the legality of slavery in the New Mexico and Utah territories to popular sovereignty? By the rules of the Missouri Compromise, slavery should automatically have been legal in New Mexico. But since its current inhabitants had no desire to allow slavery, this would mean yet another free state.

Likewise, in the North, there was consternation in some quarters:

Why hadn’t the North insisted on banning slavery in all the acquired territories? And, most importantly, we acquiesced to a Fugitive Slave Act? Now we have to use the resources of our states to return escaped slaves to their masters? Now we have to be complicit in slavery? This will not do. This will most definitely not do.

Political hypocrisy is nothing new. Parties pretend to be troubled by a budget deficit, only to preside over larger deficits when they themselves take power. In 19th century America, the biggest act of political hypocrisy was the doctrine of states’ rights. The South did not want any Federal interference in its peculiar institution. That would have been a violation of states’ rights. But the South had no compunction supporting a law that would violate states’ rights like no other piece of legislation ever had: the Fugitive Slave Act. Thenceforth, every state would have to use its resources to return runaway slaves to their masters.

This was not very popular in the North. People started invoking “the higher law” in refusing to abide by it. Boston was ground zero for abolitionism. Again and again, even after the passage of this law, government officials would be sent to claim slaves, only to encounter massive resistance from local inhabitants, who would quickly help the former slave escape to Canada.

The South was furious. More than the loss of property, it resented what it perceived as an attack on its honor! Cries of secession grew louder.

It was in this explosive atmosphere that the Dred Scott decision landed like a bombshell.

Dred Scott was, much like the author of this narrative, a Negro. Unlike the author of this narrative, he had the misfortune of being born a slave, a mere piece of property. He was suing for his freedom, on account of having spent an extended period of time in the North, where slavery was illegal. After his master died, he had attempted to purchase his freedom from the widow, who refused. He then, with the help of some abolitionist lawyers, filed a lawsuit. A local court in Missouri had granted him his freedom, but this decision was reversed by the Missouri Supreme Court. Ownership of Mr. Scott and his family was then passed to the widow’s brother, Mr. Sandford, who resided in New York. A lawsuit was filed against Mr. Sandford, in a federal court, which found against Dred Scott. This decision was appealed to the Supreme Court.

In perhaps the most infamous decision ever made by the Court, Chief Justice Taney, disregarding the fact that there were free Black voters at the time of the nation’s founding, found that Negroes could never be citizens of the United States, because the founders had not intended to include them in the people to whom rights were guaranteed under the Constitution. Dred Scott, it was therefore concluded, had no right whatsoever to sue in Federal Court.

If Taney really believed this, then the case should have been dismissed. But he was determined to insert his pro-slavery views into national law. He further ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, because Congress had no right to ban slavery anywhere. Likewise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had allowed popular sovereignty to determine whether slavery would be legal in any state was also deemed unconstitutional, because it violated the right of a slave owner to take his property anywhere he wanted.

The South celebrated. The North decided to ignore the ruling. Appetite for appeasing the South was disappearing. The year was 1857.

The Whig Party had disintegrated, torn apart by the forces of sectional division. From its ashes, and from a coalition with the forces of the Free Soil Party, in 1856, a new party had appeared on the scene. It was a party explicitly dedicated to containing and eventually abolishing slavery. It was called the Republican Party.

Buchanan, who had warned that the Republicans were extremists who would precipitate war with the South, was elected. But by 1860, the Republican Party was better organized. More importantly, it benefited from a fracturing of the Democratic Party, in a process analogous to what had happened to the Whigs. Northern and Southern Democrats couldn’t agree on a platform, and couldn’t agree on whom to nominate. The North went with Stephen Douglas, the South with John C. Breckinridge. The Southerners had wanted an explicitly pro-slavery platform, and were in no mood to compromise with Northern Democrats, who favored leaving the matter to popular sovereignty.

Democratic divisions ensured that the Republican would win. The South had threatened secession so many times before that the North no longer took it seriously. The South had also talked itself into believing that Northerners were too effete to fight, and would never dare invade the South if and when secession did come.

Abraham Lincoln was, unsurprisingly, elected president.

The South, to the surprise of many Northerners, actually started voting for secession. President-Elect Lincoln said nothing. He would keep his silence until he took over the reins of government. Meanwhile, President Buchanan helplessly watched the Union collapse around him.

South Carolina demanded that the US abandon its port facilities in Charleston. After all, this was South Carolinian property, and if South Carolina was no longer in the Union, ownership of this port automatically reverted to the State. Major Robert Anderson, rather than surrendering, took an action that the South saw as belligerent: he moved his force from Fort Moultrie, which was indefensible, to Fort Sumter, which was much more defensible and guarded the entrance to the harbor.

The South saw this, not its subsequent bombardment of the fort, as the first act of the War.

Buchanan was still president. He tried to send supplies, but the supply ship was fired upon and gave up. This was the situation when Lincoln was inaugurated. The fort was fast running out of food and materiel. Lincoln announced to the Governor of South Carolina that he would be sending a supply ship with “provisions only,” and that if South Carolina did not resist this, no military action would be taken.

The Southern response was to demand the surrender of the fort. When this was not forthcoming, the bombardment started. Lincoln called for an army of 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion. Four more Southern states seceded and joined with the initial seven.

And the war was on.

Roy Moore spokesperson is literally dumbstruck -- for ten seconds -- to learn from Jake Tapper that you don't have to swear an oath on a Christian Bible to be allowed to take public office. (He knows! He's an elected official and he's done it three times! Donald Trump did it!



Dumb as a fencepost.

Click here for an article in The Guardian by Moustafa Bayoumi, entitled " Jared Kushner is wreaking havoc in the Middle East," subtitled "In his role as the president’s special advisor, Kushner seems to have decided he can remake the entire Middle East. The results could be devastating."

In his role as the president’s special advisor, Kushner seems to have decided he can remake the entire Middle East, and he is wreaking his havoc with his new best friend, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the 32-year-old who burst on to the international scene by jailing many members of his country’s ruling elite, including from his own family, on corruption charges.

What kind of a deal does Kushner seem to be pushing for in the Middle East? Something like this:

This is, of course, not a deal at all. It’s an insult to the Palestinian people. Another Arab official cited in the Times story explained that the proposal came from someone lacking experience but attempting to flatter the family of the American president. In other words, it’s as if Mohammed bin Salman is trying to gift Palestine to Jared Kushner, Palestinians be damned.

Kushner seems to be acting totally without regard for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's views. But Tillrson's hollowed-out State Department is not capable of much anyway:

Here’s where state department diplomacy should kick in. The US ambassador to Qatar could relay messages between the feuding parties to find a solution to the stand-off. So what does the ambassador to Qatar have to say about the Kushner-Salman alliance? Nothing, since there still is no confirmed ambassador to Qatar.

What about the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia? That seat’s also vacant. And the US ambassador to Jordan, Morocco, Egypt? Vacant, vacant, and vacant. What about assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, a chief strategic post to establish US policy in the region? No one’s been nominated. Deputy assistant secretary for press and public diplomacy? Vacant.

It’s partly this vacuum of leadership by Tillerson that has enabled Kushner to forge his powerful alliance with bin Salman, much to the detriment of the region. And in their zeal to isolate Iran, Kushner and bin Salman are leaving a wake of destruction around them.

The article concludes:

There’s a long history of American politicians deciding they know what’s best for the Middle East while buttressing their autocratic allies and at the expense of the region’s ordinary people. (The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has traditionally provided the rationale for America and its allies in the region, and his recent sycophantic portrayal of bin Salman certainly didn’t disappoint!)

But the Kushner-bin Salman alliance also represents something else. Both the US and Saudi Arabia are concentrating power into fewer and fewer hands. And with fewer people in the room, who will be around to tell these men that their ideas are so damaging? Who will dare explain to them how they already have failed?

Obama, Trump Reactions To Controversial Court Decisions

After George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, President Obama stated:

“The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a case such as this reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury has spoken, that's how our system works.”

After Garcia Zarate was found not guilty of murder and manslaughter in the death of Kate Steinle (he was convicted only of being a felon in possession of a firearm), Donald Trump tweeted:

“The Kate Steinle killer came back and back over the weakly protected Obama border, always committing crimes and being violent, and yet this info was not used in court. His exoneration is a complete travesty of justice. BUILD THE WALL!”

Ian Reifowitz commented at Daily Kos:

Barack Obama believes that America succeeds when we come together around a shared vision of justice, fairness, democracy, and equality. Donald Trump believes that he succeeds—and that’s all he really cares about—when Americans are at each other’s throats.

Vancouver - Tokyo $561 in 2018

Click here for a Team Notey article by Dora Leung entitled "Round Trip Flights From Vancouver To Japan Will Be On Sale For $561 In 2018."

Another "Suck Up To Power" article from Thomas Friedman - Plus More

Click here for an article at Alternet.org by Adam Johnson, entitled "5 Worst Media Moments of Last Week. The #1 spot goes to a frequent sarcasm-on/favorite/sarcasm-off of mine, Thomas Friedman, for his NYT article entitled “Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, at Last."

Give me a break, Tom. Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is the new kingpin of the absolute monarchy that is Saudi Arabia; as Johnson points out, this is "despite the entire point of the Arab Spring being to oppose such forces."

Johnson's #2 pick goes to -- who else but the ubiquitous *President Trump: "Trump plays media like fiddle over bogus Iran-HBO hack case."

Whistleblowers have made it known that the White House is pressuring the DOJ to search for anything it can use to smear Iran, in hopes of thwarting the nuclear deal and starting the war with Iran so earnestly desired by administration hawks.

#3 is the revelation that the far-right Wellspring Committee donated more than $23 billion last year to push the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. It's too bad that groups like this are able to buy a Supreme Court seat, but it's downright shameful that it can remain hidden for such a long period of time.

Thanksgiving -- A Working Holiday For Donald Trump

Donald Trump decamped to Mar A Lago for the Thanksgiving weekend. An early-morning White House press release said it was to be a low-key, restful day for the *president. Apparently that didn't go over well, because it was soon followed by a correction: It was to be a full working day of meetings and phone calls.

Trump arrived at Mar A Lago at 8:30 a.m. He was on the first tee at 9:30.

Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. *President.

Colonias: An American Disgrace

I've read about colonias -- dirt-poor settlements along the U.S./Mexico border, mostly in Texas -- before. It's grinding poverty, of third-world proportions, among citizens of the U.S. Flood survivors in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico are in a bad way? In colonias, no access to clean water, power, or sewage disposal is permanent.

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Parker Abt, entitled "There’s a third-world America that no one notices."

Don't Forget: W Was A Terrible President

This is an excerpt from an article in the Boston Globe by Michael A. Cohen, entitled "Trump's dumpster fire shouldn't have people feeling fond of George W. Bush:

Let’s just do a brief rundown on W’s bill of iniquities.

Started the Iraq War, which killed nearly 4,500 US soldiers, took the lives of several hundred thousand Iraqis, had a price tag, in excess, of $3 trillion in direct and indirect costs, and plunged the Middle East into turmoil, helping spark the rise of ISIS.

• Presided over the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the meltdown of the global economy.

• Passed massive tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthiest Americans and did little to spur the economy.

• His job creation record was dismal and median incomes fell by 4 percent during his presidency, a never before achieved feat in modern US history.

• Those without health insurance grew by more than 20 percent; the poverty rate jumped by 26 percent, and W took a small budget surplus and turned it into a massive trillion-dollar deficit.

• On foreign policy, Bush alienated key allies, did nothing to prevent North Korea from getting a nuclear weapon, and caused the United States to step back on dealing with global climate change.

• He utilized torture, conducted warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, and oversaw the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists. Oh, and the worst terrorist attack in US history happened on his watch.

Bush’s record of failure — across so many policy areas — is unmatched in US presidential history. Even Richard Nixon, the only president ever to be forced from office, could count a number of policy successes. For W, the cupboard is bare.

Indeed, Trump will have his work cut out for him if he wants to leave the country in as great a shambles as Bush did.

W’s presidency also offered a preview of the current dumpster fire at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Like Trump, Bush staffed his administration with hacks, incompetents, and ideologues. Lobbyists were practically given oversight of environmental and business regulation with predictably awful results.

Like Trump’s band of mediocrities, the Bush administration was dismissive of science, facts, and truth-telling, and also like Trump, Bush’s White House openly sought to politicize the Justice Department.

He proposed a constitutional amendment in 2004 that would have prevented gay Americans from getting married and used that issue to mobilize religious voters in key swing states like Ohio. And in his reelection that same year, he engaged in divisive political rhetoric that portrayed Democrats and those opposed to his counter-terrorism policies as somehow unpatriotic. His presidency more than laid the groundwork for the angry, fractured politics and ideologically driven policy decisions that we are seeing today. And of course, Bush — like so many other prominent Republicans — largely remained silent as Trump took over the Republican Party.

Our political moment might seem bad (and believe me, it is), but it shouldn’t cause any American to look back at the Bush years with fondness. W was a disaster, and America is still paying the price.

British React To Trump's Ignorant Meddling

For no apparent reason except that he may have seen this on One America News Network, a conservative TV channel, Trump tweeted:

Just out report: "United Kingdom crime rises 13% annually amid spread of Radical Islamic terror." Not good, we must keep America safe!

Thanks, Donald, you ignorant twit. Crime in Britain and Wales, not the UK, is indeed up 13%, but that statistic does not refer to terrorism, Islamic or otherwise.

Labour MP Yvette Cooper, chair of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, said Mr Trump's comments could fuel hate crime.

She said: "Hate crime in the UK has gone up by almost 30% and rubbish like this tweet from Donald Trump is designed to provoke even more of it. If we are to properly tackle hate crime and every other crime, we have to challenge this kind of nonsense."

She also described it as inflammatory and ignorant. Ex-Labour leader Ed Miliband tweeted:

Spreading lies about your own country: sad. Spreading lies about others: sadder. What an absolute moron.

Another reaction:

Reminder: More people died in the Las Vegas shooting than in UK terror attacks this decade.

And some more:

Conservative backbencher Nicholas Soames, grandson of Sir Winston Churchill, called the US president a "daft twerp" who needed to "fix gun control".

Lib Dem deputy leader Jo Swinson also responded to the president's tweet, accusing him of "misleading and spreading fear".

Tillerson was right. The man's a moron.

Comprehensive Putdown of "Big Hat" Sheriff David Clarke

Click here for Charlie Pierce's article at Esquire, entitled "Big Hat Enthusiast Attacks Political Opponent for Her Big Hat." It's in reference to Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who wears Stetson-type hats to honor her grandmother, and who attacked Trump for his insensitivity displayed during a phone call to a Gold Star mother.

Equivocal Thoughts About W

W spoke out strongly in opposition to Trump's policies. Like Charlie Pierce, I commend his speech -- but I can't forget or forgive W his botched presidency, and I can't disregard the fact that Bush's Republican party laid the groundwork for Trumpism. Charlie says (the title of his article):

Do I Applaud This Speech from George W. Bush?

I really don't know. We're on dangerous ground.

Charlie elaborates:

I watched C-Plus Augustus give a speech on Thursday morning that went off like a bit of a grenade in the national dialogue. A very long portion of it obviously was an attack on the current occupant of the office George W. Bush once held, and it was very effective speech, and I agreed with every diphthong, and I have no idea how to feel about that.

Here's the rest:

We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions – forgetting the image of God we should see in each other.

It’s hard to digest the phrase “degraded by casual cruelty” from a man on whose watch the United States formally became a nation that tortures people, and a man who willingly employed Karl Rove, and who accepted renomination in front of an audience wearing Purple Heart Band-Aids to mock John Kerry’s service in Vietnam. Also, too—Swift Boats.

America is experiencing the sustained attempt by a hostile power to feed and exploit our country’s divisions. According to our intelligence services, the Russian government has made a project of turning Americans against each other. This effort is broad, systematic and stealthy, it’s conducted across a range of social media platforms. Ultimately, this assault won’t succeed. But foreign aggressions – including cyber-attacks, disinformation and financial influence – should not be downplayed or tolerated. This is a clear case where the strength of our democracy begins at home. We must secure our electoral infrastructure and protect our electoral system from subversion.

Voter cadging. Purge lists. Florida, 2000 and Ohio, 2004.

Our identity as a nation – unlike many other nations – is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood. Being an American involves the embrace of high ideals and civic responsibility. We become the heirs of Thomas Jefferson by accepting the ideal of human dignity found in the Declaration of Independence. We become the heirs of James Madison by understanding the genius and values of the U.S. Constitution. We become the heirs of Martin Luther King, Jr., by recognizing one another not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Warrantless wiretaps. Patriot Act. Military tribunals. Gitmo.

Charlie concludes:

This speech is the sharpest point yet for those of us who have looked at big talkers like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, who criticize the president* without actually opposing him on any significant issue. It is something of a dilemma for those of us who have been saying that the president* is not an aberration, but the inevitable result of conservative politics, and that the Republicans should not be allowed to pretend that he’s not. What Bush did today—give a speech—is pretty much all he can do at this point. But, still, what elected him twice were the same politics that elected the incumbent. All the latter did was turn up the volume by being more shameless, more incompetent, and infinitely more of an asshat.

So, do I applaud? Do I marinate in my cynicism and remember that this proud defender of American democracy lied the country into a foreign policy debacle that is still ongoing, and that is now overseen by someone who couldn’t find Iraq on a map…of Iraq? Of all the strange places that the last election has taken this country, this has to be one of the strangest. You have to watch every step. The past is clutching your feet here like poison vines camouflaged as the comforting tendrils of citizenship.

NRA - Nonsensical Rifle Addiction

This is a clip from a Dutch TV show:

Dateline Philippines: "'War on drugs' becomes a war on human rights"

I've reproduced here in full the article referred to in my previous post, "I'm Glad To Be Out Of The Philippines." It's by Francisco S. Tatad in the Friday, September 15, 2017, issue of The Manila Times. He's a brave man: I wonder to what extent dissident reporters are harassed in the Philippines.

THIS is what happened when the House of Representatives voted to defund the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), by reducing its proposed P678 million appropriation for the next fiscal year to a mere P1,000, the average price of a congressman’s two-course meal in any of their favorite casino-restaurants, all because of the commission’s critical stand against the extra-judicial killings in President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous war on drugs. It is by far the boldest and most shameless show of blind support for DU30’s contempt of any criticism of his naked violations of human rights.

The game is not yet over, for the Senate appears determined to restore sanity and reason into the legislative process, and insist on giving the CHR the amount originally proposed. But this act of madness on the part of the House has made it indisputably clear that this present assembly of power-mad politicians, who no longer represent anything other than their own whimsies and proclivities, has become a clear and present danger to the Republic.

And how they gloated

Like cats that had just swallowed their canaries, they posed for pictures after their ignominious act, smiling and gloating and flashing DU30’s symbol of a clenched fist. But they had absolutely nothing to gloat about. They had become a total shame to public office, and are clearly no help to a morally and politically wounded President, wounded not only by the latest developments in the extra-judicial drug killings, but also by the unverified allegations about his eldest son Paolo’s involvement in illegal drug smuggling and with the Chinese Triad.

DU30 needs measures that will encourage and inspire people to have more confidence in him and his government, not anything like this. The original CHR budget had been proposed by the Office of the President, who obviously had wanted it passed. In reducing it to virtually zero, the House, led by the indecorously arrogant Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, outdid the President himself. But the President did not appear displeased with his lackey’s overzealousness. Did he actually have nothing to do with it? We want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but there has been so much duplicity and double-talk from this government.
Before this, DU30 showered then-US Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg, US President Barack Obama, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the leaders of the European Union, and UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, Agnes Callamard, among others, with sexual curses for expressing their concern about the extra-judicial killings carried out by the Philippine National Police and so-called “vigilantes”. Then, for the same reason, he threatened to “separate” economically and militarily from the US and align himself with China and Russia “against the world”. He also renounced all grants and assistance from the EU because of alleged conditionalities related to human rights.

Shooting human rights workers

In recent days, DU30 told the police to shoot human rights workers who would “interfere” in their “work.” “Work” usually involved killing alleged drug suspects while reportedly “resisting arrest”. Before the National Bureau of Investigation called it a “rubout,” this was the initial police narrative about Albuera Mayor Rolando Espinosa who was gunned down inside his detention cell at the Baybay, Leyte sub-provincial jail at 4 a.m. while allegedly resisting the service of a search warrant. This, too, was the same story about the 17-year-old Caloocan student Kian Loyd de los Santos, who was shot once in the back and twice in the head, despite his pleas to be freed because he had to prepare for his next day’s exams. In so many cases, the victim was unarmed, but ended holding a gun, which he was supposed to have fired before he ended as a corpse.

From May 23 onward, there was a brief lull in the killings because of the Maute Islamic State-influenced attack on Marawi City, which created a new front. But the war on drugs resumed with new kill quotas for the police, and an increased bounty of P20,000 per kill, according to highly informed police sources. A new point system for the police has also been reportedly put in place—-5 percent credit if no drug pushers or users are reported in a barangay; 8 percent credit if some pushers and users are arrested (a rare thing); and 25 percent if some pushers and users are killed.

In just 13 months of the DU30 presidency, some 14,100 human rights incidents were reported to have occurred. In all of Ferdinand Marcos’ 21 years, nine of which came under Martial Law, fighting bloody communist and Moro rebellions, some 9,400 incidents were reported to have occurred. In the Sineloa cartel, there were supposed to have been 100,000 incidents in eight years.

DU30’s staggering number is of course open to dispute. In his drug war, there has been no scrupulous documentation, nor due process, and the law that holds a policeman answerable in court for every fatal encounter with a suspect has been totally set aside. DU30’s command, often bathed in a torrent of cuss words, has replaced every law, regulation or manual on law enforcement.

Where the war begins

But not until the House decided to defund the CHR could anyone say with some certainty that the DU30 government has declared total war on human rights. It has become the undeniable reality. Unless the Senate succeeds in convincing the House to restore the CHR appropriation during the bicameral conference, DU30’s war on human rights will move to a higher level, and the brave effort of the constitutional fathers to create an in-house agency that looks after the promotion and protection of human rights within the government will wither on the vine.

This is not what DU30 needs. Not now, not ever. What DU30 needs most is a strong CHR, not an enfeebled or shriveled one. Instead of wishing the CHR out of existence, DU30 should exert every effort to make sure that the agency is able to perform all its functions under the Constitution and serve as a primary resource in making sure he remains constitutionally alert, as far as his human rights obligations are concerned.

As mandated by the Constitution, DU30 should help to enable the CHR to:
*Investigate on its own, or on complaint by any party, all forms of human rights violations involving civil and political rights;
*Provide appropriate legal measures for the protection of human rights of all persons within the Philippines as well as Filipinos residing abroad, and provide for preventive measures and legal aid services to the underprivileged whose human rights have been violated or need protection;
*Exercise visitorial powers over jails, prisons, or detention facilities;
*Establish a continuing program of research, education, and information to enhance respect for the primacy of human rights;
*Recommend to Congress effective measures to promote human rights and to provide for compensation of victims of violations of human rights, or their families;
*Monitor the government’s compliance with international treaty obligations on human rights;
*Grant immunity from prosecution to any person whose testimony or possession of documents or other evidence is necessary or convenient to determine the truth in any investigation conducted by it or under its authority;
*Request the assistance of any department, bureau or office or agency in the performance of its functions.

A glaring legal defect

Above all, DU30 must make sure the CHR operates on solid legal foundation. For although the CHR is a creation of the Constitution, it appears to lack the enabling legislation that defines “the term of office and other qualifications of the Members of the Commission.”

According to Section 17 (2) Article XIII of the Constitution, this “shall be provided by law.” Executive Order 163, issued by President Cory Aquino on May 5, 1987, does not have the power and authority of law, since her power to legislate as revolutionary president expired upon the promulgation of the 1987 Constitution on February 2, 1987 when she ceased to be revolutionary president.

Remedial action

No one has raised this legal issue before. But it is a glaring misreading of the Constitution, which has allowed the CHR to be funded regularly year after year until this unfortunate House incident. Without a ruling from the Supreme Court, the House cannot possibly unilaterally decide to withhold funding now, just because there is no law defining “the term of office and other qualifications of the Members of the Commission.” Perhaps the best course of action is some remedial legislation that cures the existing defect and further strengthens the commission.

It would be a mistake for DU30 or Congress to exploit this legal defect and throw out the CHR altogether. The constitutional mandate stands, and kicking the CHR in the butt is the last thing DU30 needs at this time. He is now under international attack precisely for his human rights record, the latest being the statement of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, Prince of Jordan, at the 36th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Zeid said that “in the Philippines, I continue to be gravely concerned by the President’s open support for a shoot-to-kill policy regarding suspects as well as by the apparent absence of credible investigations into reports of thousands of extra-judicial killings and the failure to prosecute any perpetrator”. DU30 needs to build his case against this.

Instead of simply allowing Ernesto Abella, the presidential spokesman, to argue foolishly that Zeid’s statement is “without factual basis,” DU30 could probably do better by showing the Geneva-based council that an independent constitutional body in his own country is making its own assessment of his human rights performance.

This means supporting the CHR’s continued existence, despite initial problems that may have arisen between him and CHR Chairman Jose Luis Martin Gascon. He has to decide that having a potentially critical CHR before him presents a greater opportunity to demonstrate his statesmanship and courage than simply getting rid of it because he cannot stand criticism.

I'm Glad To Be Out Of The Philippines.

Dateline: Hong Kong.

Just got off CX906 from Manila. I just spent a week in Manila -- and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was at the Shangri-La Makati, one of the best hotels I've ever stayed in. Everything was luxurious, the breakfast buffet was stupendous, and they provided an excellent lunch on the job -- a rarity. The room was great, and everyone I had contact with on the hotel staff was friendly, courteous, and helpful. I visited the Greenhills Market and did a little shopping -- Ralph Lauren Polo shirts, 3 for $25 -- and saw a couple of movies, American Made and American Assassin. I don't know that I'd recommend either of them, but they were all right.

So why the title of this post? Because when I arrived at the airport, I picked up a copy of the Manila Times ("Trusted since 1898," according to the masthead), and read three headlines:
1. Sandigan allows bail for Jinggoy.
          "A special division of the Sandiganbayan [an appellate court] has voted 3-2 to allow jailed former senator Jose "Jinggoy" Estrada to post bail in connection with the plunder case filed against him for allegedly misusing P183 million [Philippine pesos, about US$250,000], court sources told the Manila Times."
          This was the major headline, and it's a run-of-the-mill story about political corruption -- as I learned from the job I did all week, an arbitration involving billions of dollars and the government-run lottery corporation, there are plenty of these "plunder" cases, where influential politicians or their cronies siphon off huge amounts of taxpayers' money. So yes, there's political corruption in the Philippines. This was the least alarming of the three headlines.

2. Bells Toll In Drug War Protest.
          This one was considerably more disturbing. It got the picture: funeral workers handling a bodybag. Subheads were "War on drugs in the Philippines: Police say over 3,800 people killed in President Rodrigo Duterte's drugs war" and "Thousands of other people have been killed in unexplained circumstances; rights groups warn that police and state-sponsored gunmen are committing mass murder."
          Click here for the Wikipedia entry on Duterte (nickname, Digong). As Trump might say, he's a bad dude. Another nickname for him is DU30: the Urban Dictionary says "DU30 is a shorthand nickname for Filipino politician (and president as of 2016) Rodrigo Duterte, as a pun pronunciation of "thirty" as "terti" or "terte", so DU30 is said like
Du-terte."
          The big front page picture is a graph, showing the steady acceleration of killings of alleged drug dealers on the street, which started after Duterte was elected president in 2016, including 400 in August.
          "Church bells tolled across the mainly Catholic Philippines late Thursday as bishops rallied opposition to the 'reign of terror' that has left thousands dead in President Rodrigo Duterte's drug war. Duterte has made the drug war the top priority of his administration, and has regularly encouraged more bloodshed with comments such as describing himself as 'happy to slaughter' three million addicts."

3. "'War on drugs' becomes a war on human rights." (It's a long article; I've reproduced it in full in the next post.)
          It was proposed that the Philippine government fund the Commission on Human Rights to the tune of P678 million (US$13 million). However, they're setting the funding at a little less than that. The House of Representatives has just passed a bill setting this year's grant at P1,000 -- US$20.
          Yes, you read that right. That's less than the price of three Polo shirts at Greenhills Market. (And I thought Mark Meadows and the Freedom Caucus were a bunch of crazies.)
          The Senate -- like in the U.S., a more temperate body than the House -- seems likely to resist passage of such a bill.
          The article goes on to mention "the unverified allegations about [Duterte's] eldest son Paolo's involvement in illegal drug smuggling and with the Chinese Triad."
          "Like cats that had just swallowed their canaries, they posed for pictures after their ignominious act, smiling and gloating and flashing DU30's symbol of a clenched fist [fitting]." I don't entirely approve of Mr. Tatad's sentence structure and choice of adjectives, but the meaning is clear.
          "DU30 showered then-US Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg, US President Barack Obama [he famously called Obama a 'son of a whore'], UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the leaders of the European Union, and UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, Agnes Callamard, among others, with sexual curses for expressing their concern about the extra-judicial killings carried out by the Philippine National Police and so-called 'vigilantes'."
          "In recent days, DU30 told the police to shoot human rights workers who would 'interfere' in their 'work.' 'Work' usually involved killing alleged drug suspects while reportedly 'resisting arrest.'" Shooting human rights workers? Insanity.
          "From May 23 onward, there was a brief lull in the killings because of the Maute Islamic State-influenced attack on Marawi City, which created a new front. But the war on drugs resumed with new kill quotas for the police, and an increased bounty of P20,000 [about US$400] per kill, according to highly informed police sources."
          How does this compare to atrocities which have historically been committed in the Philippines? "In just 13 months of the DU30 presidency, some 14,100 human rights incidents were reported to have occurred." If that's the number reported, how many actually occurred? "In all of Ferdinand Marcos' 21 years, nine of which came under Martial Law, fighting bloody communist and Moro [Muslim] rebellions, some 9,400 incidents were reported to have occurred. In the [Mexican] Sineloa cartel, there were supposed to have been 100,000 incidents in eight years [that's just over 12,000 per year]." When your human rights record is in the same ballpark as Ferdinand Marcos, something's wrong.
          Recently, at the 36th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, Prince of Jordan, said: "In the Philippines, I continue to be gravely concerned by the President's open support for a shoot-to-kill policy regarding suspects as well as by the apparent absence of credible investigations into reports of thousands of extra-judicial killings and the failure to prosecute any perpetrator."
                   

Dreamers Explained

The Dreamers are about 800,000 young people, children of parents who illegally entered the United States (sometimes decades ago). Like all undocumented people, they lived furtively in a shadowy gray netherworld until 2012, when the Obama administration passed DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). This Act provided for protection for people who met the following criteria:

- younger than 31
- no criminal record
- brought to the U.S. before they were 16
- are in or have graduated from high school or secondary training institutions (college, university)
OR
- are in or have been honorably discharged from the U.S. military.

In addition, in order to qualify, they have to apply and pay $495 each time for a two-year renewable permit and provide a great deal of personal information. Conviction of a criminal offense disqualifies them.

DACA supporters say the government is "exercising prosecutorial discretion." I've seen examples of this before; the authorities choose not to prosecute people for a particular offense, allowing scarce law enforcement resources to be utilized on other offenders deemed to be more serious.

Detractors (Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity, David Duke -- the usual suspects) don't see it that way. They see it as an Obama overreach, violating the law; as Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III put it, "an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the executive branch," or according to the Cheeto-in-Chief, "an end run around Congress that violates the core tenets that sustain our Republic" -- although for the five years the legislation has been in place, it has never been successfully challenged in court.

The average "Dreamer" came to the U.S. at the age of 6, and today is 25 years old. 93% of those over the age of 25 are working; more than half have a spouse, child, or sibling who is an American citizen.

Problem Steps Recorder In Windows

I've reproduced here a Bob Rankin article entitled "The Windows Problem Steps Recorder":

The Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) is one of the more obscure features of Windows, but it can be a very useful one. If you've ever tried to solve a computer problem over the phone, you understand how frustrating and time-consuming that can be. If you're a user who needs to show a problem scenario to a tech support rep, or someone who wants to visually document a how-to process for a friend or relative, you should know about the Problem Steps Recorder, and other desktop screen recording tools...

How to Use the Problem Steps Recorder

When you activate the Problem Steps Recorder (PSR), it takes a screenshot every time the mouse button is clicked. Text notes can be added to a screenshot. When PSR is stopped, the screenshots and notes are compiled in MHTML format and compressed into a ZIP file. This file can be emailed to a tech support rep, who can then review all of the steps a user performed that led to a crash or other problem.

But the Problem Steps Recorder isn't limited to "problem" situations. Another use for PSR is to compile a tutorial for another user. Let's say you want to show your mother how to attach a photograph to an email, or explain how to set a wifi password. Doing it over the phone can be very frustrating, and even if you're there in person, will they remember all the steps next time?

Maybe you're in an office setting, and you need to train new employees on how to set up a mail merge operation in Word, or give step-by-step instructions on how to download and install a particular program.

Problem Steps Recorder

With PSR, you can create a tutorial showing each step, so the user can review it as many times as necessary. This beats sitting next to the person and repeating the same procedure over and over until he or she gets it. Ready, Set, Record!

To start the Problem Steps Recorder on Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10, open the Start menu and type psr.exe into the Search box. Click on that item to run the Problem Steps Recorder.

There are only three options on the main menu. Obviously, "Start Record" is the first one you will want to choose; this begins the recording process. While PSR is recording, its title bar flashes the words "Recording Now" and its Taskbar icon shows a flashing red dot.

Now, just go through the steps that you want to record, clicking the mouse button each time you want to take a screenshot. If you click the "Add Comment" button in PSR's menu, you will be able to highlight a particular area of the screen and annotate it.

When you finish recording, click the "Stop Record" button. A "save as" dialog box will appear so that you can specify the location and name of the ZIP file to which this session should be saved. Now you can send this ZIP file to your Mom, an employee, a tech support person, or just save it for later use.

After opening the ZIP file, the recipient will find a MHTML document inside. Clicking on this file will launch Internet Explorer to display the file's contents. You (or the recipient) can then review the recorded steps as a slide show, or view a text version of the step-by-step actions. PSR and Other Alternatives for XP, Vista and Mac

The Problem Steps Recorder is only available on computers running Windows 7, 8 and 10. But the ZIP file that it creates can be opened and viewed by users who run older versions of Windows, such as XP or Vista. So what if you're not running Windows 7 or higher, and you want something similar to the Problem Steps Recorder?

Fortunately, PSR is not the only utility that lets you capture the screen and create a reusable step-by-step recording. ScreenRecorder is a free tool from Microsoft that works on XP and later Windows systems. You might even like it even better, because instead of taking screen shots, it creates a video of the process. The WMV file can be sent to another user, who can view it with the Windows Media Player.

Another free tool which acts as a desktop screen recorder is CamStudio. This free, open-source software can record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create video files in AVI or SWF formats. CamStudio can also add screen captions to your recordings or use your webcam to make a "picture-in-picture" video of you describing what's happening on screen.

If neither of those freebies does what you want, here are some other options. Snagit provides capabilities similar to PSR and also allows video recording of onscreen action. Snagit comes in versions for Windows and Mac OS X as well. And there's also My Screen Recorder, which records your PC desktop activity into standard WMV or AVI video files. It records everything you see on the computer screen, including the entire desktop, windows, menus, cursors - even video with sound. Both programs have a free trial version, and can be purchased for $50.

If you're someone who often gets called upon to help others with their computer problems, you might also consider a remote desktop tool, which lets you see and share the other person's screen in real time. See my related article Free Alternatives to GotoMyPC to learn about some free remote desktop options.

Duh!

Click here for an article by Charlie Pierce at Esquire entitled "C'mon, Florida."

Charlie explains that in 2004, Florida was hit by three major hurricanes: Frances, Jeanne, and Wilma. A big problem was that people trying to escape the storms couldn't find a functioning gas station: Electricity would go out in an area, leaving the stations without the power necessary  to pump their gas.

State legislators came up with a terrific solution to the problem: They passed a law that all stations had to have infrastructure in place that would allow them to run off an outside power source (a generator). In addition, all stations along designated evacuation routes were required to install the infrastructure retroactively if necessary (pre-2006).

Great idea, guys! Well done!

Just one small problem.

They left one tiny loophole in the law: Stations built after 2006, and stations along evacuation routes, were required to have the infrastructure -- but they weren't required to have the generator.

Duh!

Charlie says:

You have to be kidding me. You require the switches and the wiring, but you don’t require the gas stations to buy the generators that are the whole point of this exercise anyway? This is exactly like requiring factories to have sprinkler systems but not requiring those systems to be hooked up to any water supply. To borrow a phrase from Thursday’s blog—this is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

Company Town - Crosset, Arkansas

Depredations of Koch Industries:

Jake Tapper Debunks Another Trump Lie

Trump tweeted:

Will be going to North Dakota today to discuss tax reform and tax cuts. We are the highest taxed nation in the world - that will change.

He has made the "highest taxed nation in the world" claim any number of times -- and it's far, far from being true. Here's Jake Tapper's tweet in reply:

Tax revenue as percentage of GDP -- 🇺🇸 ranked #31 Corporate tax revenue as percentage of GDP -- 🇺🇸 #17 Tax revenue per capita -- 🇺🇸 #19

Paul Krugman On The Dreamers

Click here for Paul Krugman's take on Trump's decision to pass the DACA hot potato to Congress. He refutes the efforts of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to frame it as an economic issue -- Dreamers are stealing American jobs -- and argues just the opposite, that educated, hard-working young people, who will be paying significant taxes for decades to come, are an asset to the U.S. economy. (Just a reminder that Krugman is a Nobel-winning economist, so he knows what he's talking about.) He maintains that they fit the profile of educated young immigrants the country is seeking to attract.

Oh, and when he was a senator, Sessions did everything he possibly could to block any kind of immigration reform. The man's a racist, pure and simple, like his buddies Trump and Arpaio.

Krugman finishes:

So this is a double blow to the U.S. economy; it will make everyone worse off. There is no upside whatever to this cruelty, unless you just want to have fewer people with brown skin and Hispanic surnames around. Which is, of course, what this is really all about.

Sessions Lies About Increase In Violent Crime

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Nicole Lewis entitled "Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s claim that a violent crime wave is sweeping the nation."

Here's a graph of the incidence of violent crime in the U.S. over the long term:



Sessions is fearmongering the specter of violent criminals (mostly immigrants and African-Americans) coming to kill us all in our beds, in order to press that dismal failure, the "war on drugs," to militarize the police so they can wage war on the American public, and just generally usher in a police state while trying to take the nation back to an idealized notion of the '50s that never really existed.

***** UPDATE

Click here for another article on Sessions' lies, this one an article by Kelly Macias at Daily Kos entitled "Jeff Sessions's constant claims that violent crime is on the rise are simply not true."

Houston - The Wild West

Click here for an article at Esquire by Charlie Pierce entitled "We're Nowhere Near Prepared for the Ecological Disaster That Harvey Is Becoming." He lays the blame for the Harvey disaster on the Reagan doctrine: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

The spell, of course, in this case, was cast 30 years ago, when it became political death to increase anybody's taxes who had any political influence at all. It was cast 30 years ago, when conservative movement politics pitched deregulation as a panacea. It was cast 30 years ago when the fiction of a "business-friendly" environment overcame Republican governors, and more than a few Democrats as well. It was cast 30 years ago when conservative movement politics declared that important decisions on things like the environment and public health were better left to the states, despite the fact that many states, like Texas, were unable or unwilling to pay to do these jobs properly. It was cast 30 years ago when conservative movement politics consciously moved away from empirical research and science, beginning the long march that has ended with a Republican party committed root and branch to all of these fanciful propositions, and to climate denial. It has filtered down through all the levels of politics, from the White House and the Congress, to the state houses and the local zoning boards.

Once, long ago, the conservative activist Grover Norquist famously said that he wanted to shrink "government" to a size at which it could be drowned in the bathtub. Well, people actually are drowning in Houston now, and so is the political philosophy that reached its height when Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural that government wasn't the solution, but the problem itself. We all moved onto a political flood plain then, and we're being swept away.

Has Trump Adopted An Ideology To Call His Own?

Click here for an article at Esquire by Charlie Pierce, entitled "Trump Finally Has an Ideology, and It Will Lead Us to Serious Trouble."

The premise of his story -- and I feel pretty much the same way -- is that he found comfort in Trump's seeming lack of ideology. He thought, as did I, that Trump's only concern was for his image as a celebrity, and his wallet. At least he wasn't a far-right wingnut like Cruz.

Pierce worries that someone -- Steve Bannon? Stephen Miller? -- has persuaded Trump that he needs to adopt some kind of ideology, at least for appearance's sake, to counter those who say he's a windsock, devoid of principle, adopting whatever course is expedient at the time (he can always change back again next week). And the ideology he seems to have adopted is pretty scary.

He's made common cause with the alt-right, giving tacit approval to the KKK and neo-Nazis, championing the cause of Confederate (racist) glorification. He pardoned fellow birther Sheriff Joe Arpaio because he holds the same bigoted, racist views. He's endorsed the new book of law-and-order freak Sheriff David Clarke. And he's lifted Obama's restrictions on military equipment -- tanks and other armored vehicles, grenade launchers, body armor, semi-automatic large-clip rifles -- to local police forces.

And he's supported to the hilt by his racist, bring-back-the-'50s buddy, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. He quotes CNN:

President Barack Obama issued an executive order in 2015 prohibiting the transfer of a host of equipment, including armored vehicles, grenade launchers, high-caliber weapons and camouflage uniforms following controversy over the "militarization" of the police response to unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. "We've seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like there's an occupying force as opposed to a force that's part of the community that's protecting them and serving them," Obama said at the time. "It can alienate and intimidate local residents and send the wrong message." President Donald Trump will sign a new executive order Monday rescinding Obama's directive and Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed the policy change during a speech at the annual conference of the Fraternal Order of Police in Nashville, Tennessee, where he received multiple standing ovations and appeared touched by the warm welcome.

And again:

"(W)e are fighting a multi-front battle: an increase in violent crime, a rise in vicious gangs, an opioid epidemic, threats from terrorism, combined with a culture in which family and discipline seem to be eroding further and a disturbing disrespect for the rule of law," Sessions said, as he walked the audience of mostly law enforcement officials through a broad tour of his policy changes at the Justice Department over the past several months. "The executive order the President will sign today will ensure that you can get the lifesaving gear that you need to do your job and send a strong message that we will not allow criminal activity, violence and lawlessness to become a new normal," Sessions added.

Trump has adopted enthusiastically the ideology of the "constitutional sheriffs" movement:

This is a profoundly disturbed vision of democracy whereby the local sheriff is presumed to be the highest legal authority within a jurisdiction. Therefore, they are empowered to interfere with even the lawful authority of state and federal officials. (The actions of the Bundy bunch, recently acquitted in federal court, were based in this theory.) Both Joe Arpaio and David Clarke are adherents of this movement and, with a hurricane bearing down on Houston, the president* found time to pardon Arpaio and to plug Clarke's new book-like product on the electric Twitter machine.

America won't begin to recover until the election of a Democratic president, Senate, and House -- something Trump may bring about with his protectionist views on trade and his plummeting popularity. All we need now is a good solid economic downturn (scrap NAFTA!).

Survey Of Trump Supporters -- The Horror, The Horror ...

Click here for an article by Mark Sumner at Daily Kos entitled "Trump supporters fall below 'deplorable' as they express for racism, treason, and slavery."

… Trump voters say they would rather have Jefferson Davis as President than Barack Obama 45/20. Obama wins that question 56/21 with the overall electorate.

That's Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. Is this not evidence of severe Obama-hatred? Here's a relevant quotation:

We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him. Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.—Jefferson Davis, 1861

Here's the response to another survey question:

Asked what racial group they think faces the most discrimination in America, 45% of Trump voters say it's white people ...

And another:

Asked what religious group they think faces the most discrimination in America, 54% of Trump voters says it's Christians ...

Here's a conclusion drawn by the pollsters:

PPP's newest national poll finds that Donald Trump's approval rating is pretty steady in the wake of the Charlottesville attack, probably because his supporters think that whites and Christians are the most oppressed groups of people in the country.

Here's another of the survey findings:

Overall 39% say they support monuments honoring the Confederacy… Trump voters support them by a 71/10 spread- to put those numbers into perspective only 65% of Trump voters oppose Obamacare, so this is a greater unifier for the Trump base.

Donald Trump Embraces Non-Violence (Just Kidding)

Trump on the campaign trail:

"Part of the problem is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore."

"In the good old days ... they used to treat them very, very rough."

"Knock the crap out of them ... I promise, I will pay for the legal fees."

He completely poisoned the rhetoric with his dozens of ugly, offensive comments on the campaign trail -- including some direct incitements to violence -- and now he professes to abhor the actions of his supporters? Yeah, right.

Pollyannas, And The Quest For A More Perfect Union

I'm struck by the number of politicians, pundits, and just plain folks who profess their abhorrence of the events at the "Unite the Right" fracas in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted in the death of Heather Heyer. "This is not my America," they wail, or "This is not what America stands for."

Sorry, but it IS America. This is the nation that was designed by those godlike figures revered by one and all, the "Founding Fathers" -- a group that included many slaveholders, who wrote what some call a divinely inspired document -- that was so astonishingly perfect it's only been amended 27 times.

To their credit, in the preamble to the Constitution they referenced their desire to form "a more perfect union" -- in other words, the country will evolve and improve. Those improvements have been steady, but there's still a long way to go -- and moments like the murder of Heather Heyer by a deranged young neo-Nazi take society backwards; some of those hard-fought steps forward will have to be taken again, just to get us back to where we were.

Yes, this IS America; it's what America has been since its inception. Don't deny it, don't hide from it, don't pretend things aren't the way they most assuredly are. Recognize the problem, admit the problem, and start working towards fixing the problem.