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."