weird governance is no governance at all...,

msnbc |  Rachel Maddow reports on the poisoning of Flint, Michigan residents when their water supply was switched, and shows explicitly how responsibility for the tragedy falls to Governor Rick Snyder and his radical, anti-democratic policies.

In Detroit, city-backed water shut-offs ‘contrary to human rights,’ say UN experts

Implementation of Placing the Flint Water Plant into Operation (pdf)

Genesee County offers Flint $3.9 million for short section of old water pipeline

“Beer water” Flint, Mi

Year before water change, state knew of risks in Flint

High Lead Levels in Flint, Michigan - Interim Report (pdf)

High Lead Levels In Michigan Kids After City Switches Water Source

Listen to “Not Safe to Drink,” a special documentary about the Flint water crisis

Elevated lead found in more Flint kids after water switch, study finds

COMMENTARY: MDEQ Mistakes and Deception Created the Flint Water Crisis

Gov. Snyder says action coming on Flint’s water woes

Snyder finally says lead in Flint water may be problem

Governor Snyder on Flint Water Crisis | MiWeek Clip

Board rejects petition seeking to recall Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder

Petition language to recall Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder flops again at Board of State Canvassers

weird science is no science at all...,

Cambridge | Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

Full Text

valodya and scot free have a lot in common..,

CNN |  Vladimir Putin has his man in the U.S. presidential race: Donald Trump. On Thursday, the Russian president reportedly declared Trump to be the "absolute leader" of the race.

Putin -- a natural if brawny showman who has posed fishing shirtless, shooting shirtless and horseback riding shirtless -- also said of Trump: "He's a very lively man, talented without doubt."

Thus did the man who embodies the parody of homoeroticism from the 1970s endorse one who embodies the parody of a blow-hard executive from the 1980s. But while Moscow has long been interested in American politics, what inspired the man who has essentially run Russia since 2000 to take the unusual step of commenting on the election process of an adversary?

Two things: empathy and desire.

Whether he knows it or not, Putin practices a key tenet of statecraft identified by Mel Brooks. His darkly comical musical "The Producers" features the number "Heil Myself!" (also known as "Springtime for Hitler"), in which a campy rendition of the German dictator sings, "It ain't no mystery, if it's politics or history, the thing you gotta know is, everything is showbiz."

The line could be the leitmotif of the reality show that is Trump's campaign.

The Donald's approach to politics likely reminds Putin of himself and he empathizes. Not only do the two men share a love for spectacle and an appreciation of its ability to move low-information voters, but Putin also sees Trump's self-reference as something Moscow can exploit.

if you want to go to war, valodya will take you to war...,

ICH |  “Tense” does not even begin to describe the current Russia-Turkey geopolitical tension, which shows no sign of abating. The Empire of Chaos lavishly profits from it as a privileged spectator; as long as the tension lasts, prospects of Eurasia integration are hampered.

Russian intel has certainly played all possible scenarios involving a  NATO Turkish army on the Turkish-Syrian border as well as the possibility of Ankara closing the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles for the Russian “Syria Express”. Erdogan may not be foolish enough to offer Russia yet another casus belli. But Moscow is taking no chances.

Russia has placed ships and submarines capable of launching nuclear missiles in case Turkey under the cover of NATO decides to strike out against the Russian position. President Putin has been clear; Russia will use nuclear weapons if necessary if conventional forces are threatened.
If Ankara opts for a suicide mission of knocking out yet another Su-24, or Su-34, Russia will simply clear the airspace all across the border via the S-400s. If Ankara under the cover of NATO responds by launching the Turkish Army on Russian positions, Russia will use nuclear missiles, drawing NATO into war not only in Syria but potentially also in Europe. And this would include using nuclear missiles to keep Russian strategic use of the Bosphorus open.

That’s how we can draw a parallel of Syria today as the equivalent of Sarajevo 1914.

Since mid-2014 the Pentagon has run all manner of war games – as  many as 16 times, under different scenarios – pitting NATO against Russia. All scenarios were favorable to NATO. All simulations yielded the same victor: Russia.

And that’s why Erdogan’s erratic behavior actually terrifies quite a few real players from Washington to Brussels. 

Let Me Take You on a Missile Cruise

The Pentagon is very much aware of the tremendous heavy metal Russia may unleash if provoked to the limit by someone like Erdogan. Let's roll out an abridged list.

Russia can use the mighty SS-18 – which NATO codenames “Satan”; each “Satan” carries 10 warheads, with a yield of 750 to 1000 kilotons each, enough to destroy an area the size of New York state.

The Topol M ICBM is the world's fastest missile at 21 Mach (16,000 miles an hour); against it, there’s no defense. Launched from Moscow, it hits New York City in 18 minutes, and L.A. in 22.8 minutes.

Russian submarines – as well as Chinese submarines – are able to launch offshore the US, striking coastal targets within a minute. Chinese submarines have surfaced next to US aircraft carriers undetected, and Russian submarines can do the same.

The S-500 anti-missile system is capable of sealing Russia off from ICBMs and cruise missiles. (Moscow will only admit on the record that the S-500s will be rolled out in 2016; but the fact the S-400s will soon be delivered to China implies the S-500s may be already   operational.)
The S-500 makes the Patriot missile look like a V-2 from WWII.

Here, a former adviser to the US Chief of Naval Operations essentially goes on the record saying the whole US missile defense apparatus is worthless.

russia perfected its kung fu while uhmurkah uselessly shot its wad in the desert...,

fp |  It comes at different times, and in different forms. But as they have charted the war in southeast Ukraine over the past year, drones flown by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have run into the same problem: Russian troops on the ground are jamming them into virtual blindness.

It’s just one part of a sophisticated Russian electronic warfare (EW) effort in Ukraine that has proved a sobering experience for the U.S. Army. Faced with how the newly modernized Russian army is operating in Ukraine and Syria — using equipment like the Krasukha-4, which jams radar and aircraft —American military officials are being forced to admit they’re scrambling to catch up.

Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of U.S. Army units in Europe, hasdescribed Russian EW capabilities in Ukraine as “eye-watering.” Ronald Pontius, deputy to Army Cyber Command’s chief, Lt. Gen. Edward Cardon, told a conference this month that “you can’t but come to the conclusion that we’re not making progress at the pace the threat demands.”

The electronic war was on display from the start of the Russian incursion into Crimea in the spring of 2014. Not long after Russian EW equipment began rolling into the region, Ukrainian troops began to find that their radios and phones were unusable for hours at a time. Meanwhile, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, an international conflict-monitoring group, has consistently reported that its drones watching the conflict in eastern Ukraine have been “subject to military-grade GPS jamming,” forcing monitors to scrub missions taking stock of the war below.

At the forefront of the push to get the U.S. Army up to speed is Col. Jeffrey Church, the Army’s chief of electronic warfare. But it won’t be easy. Dealing with falling budgets, a lack of EW equipment, and a force that is shrinking by tens of thousands of troops, Church says that he has managed to train only a few hundred soldiers — a fraction of the EW forces that are fielded by potential adversaries like Russia and China.

“They have companies, they have battalions, they have brigades that are dedicated to the electronic warfare mission,” Church said in an interview with Foreign Policy. Those units are deploying “with specific electronic warfare equipment, with specific electronic warfare chains of command,” he said.

Currently, 813 soldiers make up the Army’s EW mission, for which just over 1,000 positions have been authorized. And other Army units are guarding against Church’s attempts to peel away soldiers from their ranks to join his. The staffing squeeze is only expected to get worse as the overall Army contracts: At its peak during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army had about 570,000 soldiers; it is on pace to be down to 450,000 by the end of 2017. That number could slide even further, to 420,000 over the next several years, if Washington deadlocks over a long-term budget deal in the coming months.

At the moment, U.S. Army battalions typically assign two soldiers to the EW mission, and they will “have to do 24-hour operations” in battle against sophisticated enemies, Church said. That includes planning and coordinating with other battalion units as well as ensuring that their own jammers and advanced communications tools are working. “There’s too much to do for those guys in a battalion,” Church said. “So how do you maintain in a high-intensity environment against a peer enemy?”

war is a racket

thedailybeast |  Turkey’s relationship with with ISIS is… complicated. Critics have accused the Turkish government of allowing, if not encouraging, the terror group’s activities along Turkey’s border.

On Nov. 24, a Turkish warplane shot down a Russian attack plane that apparently briefly strayed into Turkey’s airspace. One Russian crew member died. Moscow retaliated with economic sanctions and, in early December, accused Turkey of facilitating ISIS’s illicit oil exports, which reportedly account for half of the terror group’s revenue.

On Dec. 3, the Russian defense ministry released imagery—apparently provided by the Persona or Resurs-P2 satellites—that allegedly depict thousands of ISIS oil tankers headed for a Turkish port. At least, that was the Russian claim. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, denied the allegation in no uncertain terms. “Shame on you—those who claim we buy oil from Daesh are obliged to prove it,” Erdogan said, using a slang term for ISIS. “If not, you are a slanderer.”

Whatever the truth, the imagery is a stark reminder that Russia’s campaign in Syria isn’t just an air, ground, and sea war. Moscow’s Middle East intervention also extends hundreds of miles into space.

mr. miracle vs. the cephalopod molluscan establishment

Whenever there is an economic contraction, the victims of that contraction are prone to seize upon the nearest and weakest visible minority - and blame that minority for their plight. (Killer-ape ethology 101) In the U.S., the nearest, weakest, and most at-risk minorities are illegal mexicans and enemy muslims. It's really as simple as that.

The economic contraction is very far from over. Prospects for the white, poorly educated worker in the US are bleak at best. "Beneath the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we can see further contraction just around that signpost up ahead. Over the next decade, the service sector will provide 95% of all the new jobs. Manufacturing, which shed more than two million jobs between 2004 and 2014, will shrink by an additional 800,000, to only 7% of the workforce. Of the 15 occupations with the most projected job growth, only four ask for a bachelor’s degree; eight require no formal education credentials; nine offer median annual wages under $30,000.

Trump is the only candidate that has spoken consistently about jobs. While he has yet to spell out how he'll accomplish creating some, people are hanging on his words of promise. Because he's not beholden to elite corporate donors, from either the vampire squid parasite camp, or, the kochtopus extractive wealth camp - the poor, white, and pissed sense that he might at least try to keep his word.

What's most fascinating about Trump to me is, how he's attracting malcontents of all economic backgrounds, and, his rhetorical and strategic emphasis on maintaining good relations with working and working class black folks. Trump is in fact "the least racist candidate" we're ever likely to see, nothwithstanding his red meat overtures to the poor, white, and pissed.  The Hon.Bro.Preznit had amoment in 2008 when he pretended to himself and to others that he could hold his nose and engage with the unwashed. Sadly, the interpersonal skills and psychological skills required to engage this portion of the electorate were not present in his tool kit. To add injury to that insult, those in the teatardic GOP pretending to speak for the unwashed - further compounded the challenge/complexity required to so engage. As a practical matter, they made it impossible for him to carry through on this part of his agenda without infuriating his own deeply cathedralized electoral base.

The GOP has capitalized on the holes in the Hon.Bro.Preznit's interpersonal bucket. Since Reagan, the GOP establishment has had a thirty five year run of hollowing out both the middle and the working classes by redistributing wealth up. This took a lot of bait and switch and divide and conquer. The problem with bait and switch and divide and conquer is that you can only fool people for just so long.

The poor, white and pissed are well aware they've been handed a bad bill of goods by the GOP establishment and by the recent kochtopus teatardic fork off the same. As a life long democrat and experienced donor who has repeatedly bought and paid for various and sundry political trash including Clintons, Trump early on clearly demonstrated that he doesn't give a damn about the democrat donor class or its lying democrat trash politicians.  Yet more fascinating given his run as a nominal republican, Trump doesn't have a rat's ass stashed in his kit bag for either one of the lying and conniving wings of the GOP or its clown-car cavalcade of buffoons it's down to fielding.

As in business, so in politics for Trump. Trump is not a businessman. Trump is a business, man. Politically Trump is building his own brand. He's already shown his contempt for the democrats and their lame-duck figurehead, and despite running as one, he absolutely, positively, doesn't give a damn about the GOP's lying, conniving, and increasingly tenuous big-lie brand either.

No matter how far Trump goes with this fascinating political gambit, he wins.

Politics is all about self-interest. La Raza and CAIR are no friends of mine, we have no coalitional interests in common, and I fully and fundamentally understand and accept killer-ape ethology as the collective order of your species present day. With regard to all the pearl-clutching, vapor-catching, and hand-wringing about Trump's purported racism - phukkum.Muslims aren't a race, and neither last time I checked are Mexicans.

That said, I'm a non-muslim American and I have interests in common with the poor, working, and pissed in America. I have an economic interest in preventing illegal workers from depressing wages and I have an economic and nationalist interest in thwarting the reconquista. Years ago it may have been true that illegal immigrants were mainly doing jobs that Americans wouldn't (e.g., agriculture), but now the number of illegal workers has mushroomed and made huge inroads into core working-class jobs, especially construction-related. To add insult to injury, the working-class pays for Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other programs immigrants are eligible for, as well as higher property taxes due to the high cost of ESL services provided to the children of illegal immigrants.

Illegal immigration has pushed up the cost of living for many middle-and-lower-middle class Americans, by significantly increasing the demand for affordable housing at a moment when little is being built. In the game of musical chairs on the deck of the Titanic (continuing economic contraction) the NAFTA/TPP globalization that both democrat and republican elites have embraced, the cost of housing is easily any working person's greatest expense. In cities all across America, landlords are happy to rent out apartments designed to house, at most, a 3-to-4 people, and allow 8-10 immigrants to live in them - despite the toil this takes on the tenants living below or next door to them.

Both partisan camps of the now fully and embarrassingly feminized establisment have done nothing but call Trump and his working-class followers names - without a minute of thought as to the economic reality of their lives. Both democrat and GOP establishment (2parties1ideology) have been so busy with their anti-Trump pearl-clutching that they failed to notice that Trump's key policies (e.g., higher taxes for the rich, protect social security, rein-in Wall Street excesses, etc.) are closer to Bernie Sander's than to Granny Goodness.

As I pointed out years ago, the only way to beat the establishment oligarchs is to unite the working classes and the left of center masses against them.  But driven by the classist Cathedralized arrogance of the democrat elites, embodied in the uppity Hon.Bro.Preznit, the democrat party has blown its opportunity to accomplish that aim. 

It's a unique moment in America to see a largely populist movement exploited by a billionaire no less, to counter the oligarchic establishment donor class.

Trump has moved people from pure ideology to practicality with his rhetoric: underneath all the 'get rid of immigrants and refugees" talk is a subtext that says, "more of the pie for you."  That's keeping it 100% with killer-apes. Everything else is empty and mendacious political conversation...,

joe bageant: moving to the center of elite consensus

joebageant |  Over the last many weeks we have all been subjected to endless news stories about Senator Obama's campaign "Move to the Center". Leaving aside the political illiteracy which underlines this phrase, the use of it reveals important clues about the rhetoric of electoral campaigns, whom they target and what they are trying to communicate.

Put simply, what "Moving to the Center," means is: moving towards power and money.

"Moving to the Center" is not a move to where the center of public opinion is, but it is a move to the center of where elite consensus is. Once the boundaries of that elite consensus are understood, then we can comprehend the limits of our public choices and more importantly what will be allowed within the confines of our electoral system.

It is important to understand that elite consensus itself is not static and can shift in moderate degrees, but it has definitive boundaries of which you can not cross and still be a viable player within the electoral system. These boundaries exist to the left and right within that consensus, but the institutional bias of the system is much harsher towards any moves to the left. This is because in its essence elite opinion is anti-populist and primarily concerned with protecting the fundamentals of the established economic order.

Every national campaign is in fact a dual conversation, one targeting voters while the other is directed towards the political, media, and economic elites. The purpose of the message targeting the first group is to win votes. The messages to the latter group is designed to form elite consensus, first for it not to correlate against you and secondly to have it help you win and eventually govern.

Surviving the contradictions of these dual dialogues is the primary element that makes a successful national campaign.

Let's examine the primary public policy issues and areas of discussion, and examine what the boundaries of elite opinion are on how they contradict or mirror public opinion.

Uppity Dr. Baraka REDUX Originally Posted 4/12/08

The "condescending, elitist, UPPITY" Dr. Baraka had the audacity to touch and diagnose the angry and cancerous boil accumulating on the atrophying carcass of the American economy;

"But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

I wrote about this a couple years ago at Vision Circle. Baraka has spoken to and will now be compelled to fully engage around one of the most challenging bulwarks of reality evasion in America. Joe Bageant understood it and spoke to it very, very well.

I think working class anger is at a more fundamental level and that it is about this: rank and status as citizens in our society. I think it is about the daily insult working class people suffer from employers, government (national, state and local), and from their more educated fellow Americans, the doctors, lawyers, journalists, academicians, and others who quietly disdain working people and their uncultured ways. And I think working class anger is about some other things too:

Good luck and godspeed. If he can successfully engage these folks, alay their anger and mistrust, he has a better than even chance of becoming president and potentially even functioning as a catalyst for constructive change. This is easily the most interesting moment thus far in the democrat primary.

t.west been tryna show you pussies cats where scot free is headed...,

in Apokolips Mr. Miracle=Hitler and RT=ISIS...,

NYTimes |  Welcome to Weimar America: It’s getting restive in the beer halls. People are sick of politics as usual. They want blunt talk. They want answers.

Welcome to an angry nation stung by two lost wars, its politics veering to the extremes, its mood vengeful, beset by decades of stagnant real wages for most people, tempted by a strongman who would keep all Muslims out and vows to restore American greatness.

“We’re going to be so tough and so mean and so nasty,” Donald Trump says in response to the San Bernardino massacre. People roar. He calls for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” People roar. “People want strength,” he says. People roar. His poll numbers go up. Pundits, even the longtime guru of Republican political branding, Karl Rove, shake their heads.

Trump is a clown. No, he is not. He is in earnest. And he’s onto something. It is foolish not to take him seriously.

A near perfect storm for his rabble-rousing is upon the United States. China is rising. American power is ebbing. The tectonic plates of global security are shifting. Afghanistan and Iraq have been the graveyards of glory. There is fear, after the killing in California inspired by the Islamic State, of an enemy within.

Over more than a decade, American blood and treasure have been expended, to little avail. President Obama claims his strategy against Islamist jihadist terrorism, which he often sugarcoats as “violent extremism,” is working. There is little or no evidence of that.

A lot of Americans struggle to get by, their pay no match for prices.

Along comes Trump, the high-energy guy. He promises an American revival, a reinvention, even a renaissance. He insults Muslims, Mexicans, the disabled, women. His words are hateful and scurrilous. They play on fears. They are subjected to horrified analysis. Yet they do not hurt him. He gets people’s blood up. He says what others whisper. He cuts through touchy-feely all-enveloping political correctness. This guy will give Putin a run for his money! His poll numbers rise.

It would be foolish and dangerous not to take him seriously. His bombast is attuned to Weimar America. The United States is not paying reparations, as Weimar Germany was after World War I. Hyperinflation does not loom. But the Europeanization of American politics is unmistakable.  Fist tap Rohan.

all around the dial the same song....,

BBG |  Andrew Lack is the Chief Executive Officer and Director of the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Prior to being selected by the BBG, Lack served as the Chairman of the Bloomberg Media Group. He joined Bloomberg in October 2008 as CEO of its Global Media Group and was responsible for expanding television, radio, magazine, conference and digital businesses.

Previous to joining Bloomberg, Lack was Chairman and CEO of Sony Music Entertainment, where he led the company’s roster of prominent international artists and vast catalog of recorded music from around the world. Before joining Sony Music Entertainment, he was president and chief operating officer of NBC, where he oversaw entertainment, news (including MSNBC and CNBC), NBC stations, sales and broadcast and network operations. He was responsible for expanding the Today show to three hours and creating the show’s street-side studio in New York’s Rockefeller Center.

From 1993 to 2001, Lack was president of NBC News, which he transformed into America’s most-watched news organization through NBC Nightly News, Meet the Press, Today and Dateline NBC.

Variety |  NBCUniversal isn’t finished tinkering with MSNBC.

While the cable-news network’s daytime schedule has largely been reworked since February, there are likely more changes to come, said Andrew Lack, the veteran TV-news executive who rejoined the company in April to supervise both NBC News and MSNBC.

“It’s just the beginning. We are early days. These were important steps, the first few steps, but there is a lot more we are thinking about. It’s a long game, as I have said, and we are just at the beginning of it,” he said in an interview about MSNBC last week. “We have got a lot of parts and pieces we have got to fit into this puzzle.”

His remarks indicate the final form for MSNBC, devoted over the past few years to presenting the news through a progressive lens, has yet to be achieved. MSNBC’s ratings have dropped significantly over the past two years as it veered away from coverage of breaking news. The network’s viewership losses have outpaced those of the collective cable-news juggernaut: While the total median viewership for Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC over a 24-hour period fell 7% in 2014, according to Pew Research Center analysis of Nielsen data, MSNBC’s tumbled 14%.

Change at the network in recent weeks has been swift and definite. Already, regular hosts like Ed Schultz and Reverend Al Sharpton have been moved off the weekday daytime grid.  Fist tap Rohan.

Mr. Miracle kwestins Apokolips committment to peace

presstv |  US Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has implied that Israel is supporting Daesh (ISIL) by “sending massive amounts of money” to the Takfiri terrorists in Syria and Iraq.

Trump made the remarks in a recent interview with the Morning Joe show, shortly before he cancelled his trip to Israel.

“Some of our so-called allies that we work with and that we protect militarily, they are sending massive amounts of money to ISIS and to al-Qaeda and to others,” he said, using an alternative acronym for the terrorist group.

Asked about who he was talking about, Trump said “you know who it is. What do I have to bring it up for? You know who it is.”

He said that he will not mention US allies which support Daesh because of his relationship with Israelis, but noted that no one talks about Israel, even though everyone is aware of support Israel and other states provide to ISIL.

“There are, but I’m not gonna say it, because I have a lot of relationships with people. But there are. And you know that. And everybody knows that. And nobody says it. Nobody talks about it,” Trump said.

The multi-billionaire businessman said the US government knows about it, suggesting checking records to insure his claims are true.

“All you have to do is check your records. Our government knows the countries,” he stated.

On Thursday, Trump cancelled his plan to visit Israel, saying he would reschedule “at a later date after I become President of the US.”

Granny Goodness - loyal and devout servant of Apokolips....,

mondoweiss |  Hillary Clinton gave a speech in Washington at the Saban Forum of Brookings that included more pandering to Israel than any speech I’ve heard from any American politician. It was endless. Israel is a brave democracy, a light unto the nations, a miracle, its “prowess in war” is “inspiring,” and we must take the US-Israel relationship to the “next level.”

Introduced by her good friend the Israeli-American megadonor, Haim Saban, Clinton bragged that she and Israel were born a few months apart, gave a shoutout to Israel’s former lawyer in the White House, Dennis Ross, and assured Ari Shavit the rightwing Israeli columnist that the military option was still on the table with Iran. In fact, she repeatedly slammed Iran as a bad actor and did all she could to distance herself from the Iran deal and from secretary of state John Kerry, who gave a more realistic speech the day before. She never mentioned the occupation, vaguely touched on settlements as a problem, and praised the late Clintonite Sandy Berger as a “steadfast friend to Israel.”

Just as the Republican candidates had attacked Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) at the Republican Jewish Coalition last week, Clinton said that BDS was hurting the U.S.’s ability to fight terrorism. This is language straight out of Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

Speaking of Netanyahu, Clinton was asked by Saban what she would do on her first day in office and she said dutifully:

on the first day I would extend an invitation to the Israeli prime minister to come to the United States hopefully within the first month, certainly as soon as it could be arranged to do exactly what I briefly outlined. To work toward very much strengthening and intensifying our relationship on military matters, on terrorism and on everything else that we can do more to cooperate on that will send a strong message to our own peoples as well as the rest of the world. So that is on my list for the first day.

Here are more incredible pander quotes. Now and forever we’re together, Clinton says; she’s even visited Israeli terror victims in hospitals:

what has Granny Goodness done to deserve a promotion?

WaPo | Seven years into the Obama presidency, it is fair to ask Clinton:

Are jihadists a bigger or smaller problem than when you took office as secretary of state?

Is Russia acting in concert with — or in opposition to — our Middle East interests? If the latter, can we say our Russia policy was a failure?

Aside from rhetoric, how is your policy regarding the Islamic State any different from the president’s?

What is the point of a Syrian-negotiated settlement, if Iran, Russia and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are in ascendancy and we are virtually absent? Is Secretary of State John Kerry wasting his time then?

Why do Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia openly complain about our lack of staying power and reliability?

With Israel, was it a mistake to focus so intently on settlements?

Would you have negotiated a deal with Iran that lifted the missile and conventional arms embargoes, did not restrict its missile program, allowed self-inspection, did not specifically tie sanctions relief to full disclosure of possible military dimensions (PMDs) and released $150 billion to Iran while it was still holding Americans against their will and destabilizing its neighbors? If not, why did you support the deal?

Where, other than Cuba and Iran, do we have better relations now than we did seven years ago?

You oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Wouldn’t that be a blow to our Asian allies and a boost to China?

Clinton, like the president, talks a good game. No one can filibuster better in a debate. She can recite meetings and paper agreements. She can boast of her frequent-flier miles. But in the real world, outcomes matter. For the Obama-Clinton-Kerry team, it is increasingly hard to see what positive achievements –tangible gains — they attained. It is easy to reel off a list of failures. Why then does Clinton deserve a promotion?

blackest chick on the planet escaped ultra-bibtards only to be betrayed by kneegrow racetards...,

guardian |  “Other people are operating on an autopilot that race is coded in your DNA, that there are different races of human beings and those races are called black, white, etc. As opposed to race is a fiction that was invented,” she says. “What I believe about race is that race is not real. It’s not a biological reality. It’s a hierarchical system that was created to leverage power and privilege between different groups of people.”

But race was real enough for her to call herself black.

“I think some people feel that if you question the reality of race you’re questioning racism, you’re saying racism isn’t real. Racism is real because people actually believe race is real. We’d have to really let go of the 500-year-old idea of race as a worldview in order to undo racism.”

But she does draw on the transgender experience to say that a person should not be defined only by what and who they were at birth or when they were younger. “Caitlyn Jenner has not been seen as a woman, and treated as a woman by other people, for her entire life. So what does that mean? What if somebody transitions as a teenager and their entire adult life we know them as a woman,” she says. “I hope we can reach some kind of term for the plurality of people and allow everybody to be exactly who they are on the spectrum of all these things. Religion, gender, race.”

There is one person Dolezal identifies with, a South African woman called Sandra Laing, who was born black to a white family in the apartheid era. Laing was legally classified white but shunned by the white community and as a teenager eloped to Swaziland with her Zulu boyfriend.

“It’s a story that resonates personally, because of the themes of isolation, of being misunderstood, of being categorised different ways, by different people, put in different boxes, emancipating myself from boxes, being put in other boxes, and it just seems to be like this struggle of finding your place in the world and owning that place and being free to celebrate it,” she says.

‘Blackface is not pro-black. That was a pretty harsh accusation’

Dolezal has made a point of describing herself as black, not African American, a distinction derided by Vanity Fair, but one that black Africans in the US would recognise. She describes African American as a particular historical experience. To be black is broader, unbound by dates or borders.

GOP was a neo-fascist white-identity party when Trump was still a life-long democrat...,

thedailybeast |  I’ve been reading recently about Bill Clinton’s presidency for a project I’m working on, and I just got to the part about the Oklahoma City bombing. What stood out to me, reading over this material in the Era of Trump, is the way a number of congressional Republicans at the time played footsie with the then-burgeoning far-right militia movements in the run-up to the bombing itself.

If you have no memory of that time, here’s what happened in a nutshell. Right-wing militia movements started growing in the late 1980s. In August 1992, federal agents shot and killed a survivalist in Idaho named Randy Weaver, and his wife and son, after a months-long standoff after Weaver had missed a court date (it was on a weapons charge, but the government really wanted him to flip and become an informant on Aryan Nations, and he said no). It became an iconic moment in those circles.

When the dreaded son of the 60s Clinton was elected, membership in such groups spiked further. Then just three months into Clinton’s term came the FBI storming of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, resulting in 76 deaths. The next year Clinton and Congress passed, over the NRA’s objections (yes, this was possible, although it did help lose the Democrats their House majority in 1994), an assault-weapons ban. Finally, in April 1995, on the second anniversary of the Waco siege, Timothy McVeigh exploded his truck bomb in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

What’s relevant to us today is the way Republicans and the mainstream conservative movement pandered to these militant far-right groups. Many didn’t merely criticize the ATF and the FBI, which was entirely reasonable under the circumstances, but went beyond that to stoke these peoples’ paranoia about government and suggest/not suggest, in that same way we’re familiar with on those non-answer/answers about Obama’s citizenship, that armed resistance was acceptable. Texas Senator Phil Gramm, who was prominent and respected and at one point a plausible presidential candidate, was probably the highest-profile pol to use such rhetoric, arguably aside from Newt Gingrich himself. And of course Republican and conservative movement stoking of fears about immigrants has been constant.

This was also the time when right-wing talk radio was just exploding (there was no Fox News just yet). Aside from all the normal racial and xenophobic ranting, the AM airwaves were also full of defenses of these movements. G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate infamy, once advised his listeners that if they saw an ATF man approaching, “Go for a head shot; they’re going to be wearing bulletproof vests.”

There’s no serious counterpart to this on the liberal left. You could compare it I guess to Leonard Bernstein’s radical chic back in the day, but unlike Phil Gramm, Bernstein wasn’t a United States senator whose presidential candidacy was being taken seriously by serious people. The difference may simply stem from the fact that radical left-wingers don’t typically vote in our corrupt capitalist system, while radical right-wingers more typically do. But whatever the reason, the difference is there and has been for a good 20 years at least.

chiraq to the potomac: trump didn't vote to kill a million muslims in iraq

davidswanson |  Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for pointing out that the U.S. media is acting as though Donald Trump just invented bigotry this week (one of those ugly details I'm happy to miss by never watching television). But not only is explicit bigotry toward Muslims not new, implicit bigotry toward Muslims has been the foundation of the largest public project in the United States for the past quarter century.

The driving forces behind war planning in Washington are power, domination, profit, politics, and the inertia of war planning as a path toward career success. These sociopaths are happy to bomb Germans or Yugoslavians. The value they place on sailors in Pearl Harbor or contemplated victims of Operation Northwoods, or U.S. troops stop-lossed into insanity is negligible. They don't think twice about overthrowing a democracy in Iran and laying the groundwork for Islamic power. They have no qualms about arming Muslim radicals in Afghanistan or Iraq, and toppling secular governments in Iraq or Libya or Syria. That most ISIS weaponry is U.S. weaponry seized from Iraq can only please the profiteers who will sell the weapons to combat ISIS. Their best friends are the killer Muslims running Saudi Arabia and nearby kingdoms. Their Christian hatred for Islam is as real as Karl Rove's integrity or Donald Trump's hair.

But you can't keep dumping $1 trillion a year into U.S. militarism without an enemy as frightening as -- actually it has to be more frightening than -- the Soviet Union and nuclear holocaust. In the irrational world of fear, a throat slitting is as frightening as a nuclear bomb, in fact more so. Many, many people in the United States, when they stop to think about it, recognize that the wars of recent decades have been counterproductive, creating enemies rather than eliminating them, endangering rather than protecting, costing a mountain of lives and of dollars, savagely destroying the natural environment, eroding civil liberties in the name of wars for "freedom," and brutalizing morality, justifying murder, torture, kidnapping, etc. But with fear and hatred of Muslims thrown into the mix, all of that clear understanding is erased by the need to kill Muslims. Suddenly a rich stew of World War II myths and Hollywood entertainment reminds everyone that only war works and nothing else is acceptable.

Donald Trump didn't vote for the war on Iraq that killed a million Muslims. He didn't vote to fund it and escalate it over and over again. Hillary Clinton did that. Which is not to say that Trump wouldn't have done so too, or worse, if he thought it would get him on TV more. The point is that the hatred is not new. Without it, basic U.S. policy would be understood as irrational. 

mr. miracle the blueprint, the foundationstone, the embodiment of the paradigm...,

jhu |  Hustle's most revelatory chapter focuses on black churches. And it's illuminating precisely for how Spence connects the content of "prosperity gospel," a variant of evangelical Christianity, to the political imaginations of churchgoers. Rarely do academics—or journalists for that matter—look at what is presented in churches as political content, outside of how churchgoers impact elections. (For example, the emergence of the Christian right as a voting block in the 1970s.) Spence argues that what is said in church from the pulpit represents a neoliberalization of the black church.

The chapter opens with a brief discussion of two New York Times articles from the Detroit area following the 2008 economic crash that hit the automotive industry and the region hard. One, "Detroit Churches Pray for 'God's Bailout,'" was a report from the Greater Grace Temple, one of Detroit's many churches that, at the time, held special services to help its congregations through a difficult time. Spence notes that in the photo that ran with the article, three white luxury SUVs shared the stage with the church's leader, Bishop Charles H. Ellis III. The article reported that the vehicles were on loan from local dealerships and that Bishop Ellis, "urged worshipers to combat the region's woes by mixing hope with faith in God." Spence sees the vehicles as having two symbolic values. For those who worked in the automotive industry, it was a symbol of what they depended on to survive. For those who didn't work making automobiles, the SUVs were status symbols, reminders of what they could have if they would only hustle harder.

The following year, another Times reporter visited Pontiac, about 30 miles outside Detroit, to write about the automotive industry's role in creating a black middle class in that area, and how the industry's collapse was decimating those families. Titled "GM, Detroit, and the Fall of the Black Middle Class," the article told its story through a profile of Marvin Powell, a longtime autoworker, one of the 600 who still worked making trucks at General Motors' Pontiac Assembly Center. Powell worked the only shift the plant maintained after getting rid of nearly two-thirds of its workforce through buyouts, early retirement, and layoffs.

Prosperity gospel frames the problem of poor people as a problem of those who do not improve their human capital, not as something wrong with the system in which they must live.

During the reporting of the story, Powell learned that GM was planning on shutting down all of its factories for 10 weeks, which would leave him without his $900-per-week paycheck for that period. Powell said he might use the freed-up time to try and become a chef and start a catering company, adding that he had never intended to be a "GM lifer."

He attributed his positive outlook in trying circumstances to being a Greater Grace congregant, where he led a Sunday school class and was one of the church's armor bearers, an honorary position. His leadership role in Greater Grace had made him an esteemed figure at the auto plant, and his co-workers had encouraged him to run for a union leadership role. He demurred from that, but they sought him out for advice, nevertheless. What was he going to do when the plant closed? Powell told them that he couldn't control the plant's closing, so he didn't worry about it. He also said, "I tell them that God provides for his own, and I am one of his own."

That leapt out at Spence. Born and raised in Detroit as the son of a Ford autoworker, he was struck by Powell's resilience in the face of so much economic upheaval. But he was also taken aback by the way Powell conceptualized the situation. The autoworker didn't consider a union leadership position as providing him with an opportunity to fight for his and his co-workers' jobs. Instead, as Spence writes, "in Powell's opinion those who choose God will be saved from the worst of the economic crisis while those who don't, won't." Spence identifies this idea as part of the message spread by prosperity gospel, a doctrine that started in white churches in the 1950s and sprang to national attention through 1980s televangelism. It has taken strong root in black megachurches over the past two decades. Spence visited a black church in Baltimore County led by a charismatic prosperity gospel preacher who argued that everything associated with the economic crisis—debt, poverty, unemployment—was caused by a "poverty mindset." The minister reasoned that this mindset causes people to spend their money instead of saving it, causes "them to lay around when they should be hustling." And this mindset was the direct result of somebody having a bad relationship with God.

Spence writes: "Note the logic here. People are materially poor because they don't think right. Their inability to think right makes it impossible to receive God's blessings"—which can come in the form of spiritual or material reward. And the only way to right that bad personal relationship with God is for a person to change how he or she thinks—to improve their human capital through spiritual pursuits. These spiritual pursuits, it should be noted, often take the form of sermons and books that congregants can buy and workshops they can pay to attend, in addition to supporting the church by tithing.

For Spence, prosperity gospel, through prolific and celebrated pastors such as Creflo Dollar, founder of the mammoth World Changers Church International in Georgia, transforms "the Christian Bible into an economic self-help guide people can use to develop their human capital." It's a way to make questions about who lives comfortably and who lives in poverty a matter of which one spiritually deserves to do so. This notion, Spence writes, represents a neoliberalization of the black church—not only because the prosperity gospel frames the problem of poor people as a problem of those who do not improve their human capital (not as something wrong with the system in which they must live), but also in how the increasingly multi-millionaire leaders of black megachurches compete for their congregants' tithes and spiritual consumerism. Such a practice not only creates vast economic disparities between ministers and congregants—Spence notes an AtlantaBlackstar.com news website article that named eight black preachers who make more than 200 times what their churchgoers do—but it shapes parishioners' political imagination.

Fighting poverty, debt, and whatever economic adversity a congregant faces thus becomes only a spiritual matter for the individual, not the collective concern of a political organization. And getting people to see the political content in a church service is something Spence hopes readers will take away from the book. "What I want is for people to read it and see their world through new eyes," he says, adding that he hopes that by pointing out how prosperity gospel reproduces neoliberalism's disparities, readers might begin to seek other solutions to dealing with it.

There are possibilities for finding ways out of the neoliberal situation other than simply buying into the hustle, Spence says. Throughout the book, he offsets his charting of how neoliberalism seeped into black politics by citing contemporary instances of grassroots activism and political organizing to combat neoliberal advances. They may be modest, they may be temporary victories, but the examples he cites—the Urban Debate League that cultivates policy debate among city high school students; the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement that organizes communities to develop more equitable public policies; the Baltimore Algebra Project and Leaders of the Beautiful Struggle that in 2008 blocked Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley's attempt to spend $108 million in taxpayer money to build a new prison to house juveniles charged as adults—actively oppose the neoliberal turn in public policies.

mandingo king not a businessman, he's a business, man!

espn |  Ten years ago, at age 20, LeBron James left a successful agent who had negotiated more than $150 million in deals for him so he and three friends with no experience could run his business.

The move was instantly panned. Social media was in its infancy -- James didn't have a Facebook page at the time -- yet he was widely chided for being naive and foolhardy.

But James has always had a talent for being able to take in a wider perspective and think for the longer term, even when many around him do not. It's the same skill that allows him to see two passes ahead on the floor or the driving lane no one else notices. Which is how James arrived at last Monday, when he and Nike announced his signing of a lifetime contract.

The deal, worth hundreds of millions on top of the hundreds of millions that Nike has already paid him in their 13-plus years together, was negotiated over the course of months, but it has really been under construction for years. When James signed his last Nike deal, in 2010, it included provisions to protect him. So when Kevin Durant signed a 10-year deal with Nike last summer for a reported $300 million after a bidding war with Under Armour, James knew he was going to be in position for a historic deal.

The timing, like so many of his cross-court bounce passes, was impeccable. Nike is having one of the best financial years in its history, is the best-performing stock of the year on Dow Jones and has astronomical growth projections.

chiraq to the potomac - democrat racial politics Machine rotten to its core!!!

Tribune |  Call it rebellion, or pent-up resentment based on legitimate grievances. Whatever you call it, he's weak now.

After decades of hibernation under Daley, black political Chicago has begun to reassert itself. Young African-American leaders push for recognition. Black politics isn't the Rev. Jesse Jackson's show any longer.

One of the casualties of the old order appears to be Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez. Rahm's buddy, David Axelrod, publicly criticized her for not charging Van Dyke with murder sooner, just as black activists were calling for her political head.

Now black politicians who supported Emanuel and said nothing about how he sat on the video are busy directing African-American animosity Alvarez's way. Many of them won't say Emanuel should resign, they're still worried he'll bite. But Alvarez? They want her out.

Alvarez was left without a chair when the music stopped. And now she's their offering.

Is it fair? No, but then there's nothing fair about Chicago politics. It's a power game. There's arithmetic and technique in getting out the vote, but great swells of emotion help too, and those who win know how to aim all that pent-up animosity at their targets.

It's all taking place before the March primary, as Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle pushes her candidate for state's attorney, Kimberly Foxx.

What's unsaid in polite circles but understood by all is that Foxx is black and Alvarez isn't. So the campaign for state's attorney becomes an exercise in political redemption and black political expectation, directed by Preckwinkle, who didn't have the steel to stand and challenge Rahm herself.

central casting has already tapped the secretary of opportunity to shore up Granny Goodness

whose image is more tarnished after 50 years?

NYTimes | Real estate companies, furniture makers and other businesses that have emblazoned the Trump name on their properties and products ought to think hard about whether they want to be associated with the outrageous things coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth as he campaigns for the Republican nomination for president.

Some businesses like NBC, Serta and Macy’s wisely distanced themselves from Mr. Trump and said that they would discontinue products that bear his name after he called Mexicans criminals and rapists earlier this year.

For years, Mr. Trump and his company positioned the Trump brand as a symbol of gaudy luxury. And they established a lucrative business licensing his name to real estate developers, hotel owners and other businesses. The Trump brand is used to sell products as wide-ranging as clothing, coffee pods and sofas.

Clearly many consumers who find Mr. Trump’s statements offensive will cringe at using products and services that have his name on them, even if he has little to do with the business in question. That’s why one Dubai-based retail company quickly removed Trump merchandise from its stores after Mr. Trump said Muslims should be barred from coming to the United States until officials “figure out what is going on.”

Of course, each business will make its own decision of whether and how they want to be associated with Mr. Trump. Some might have invested so much money and time in the Trump brand that they will stick with it, presumably hoping that the public furor over his comments will subside. (Given the rate at which he is insulting people, they might be waiting for a while.)

tried to tell you limp-wristed semi-cathedral pussies cats mr.miracle ain't no joke

WaPo |  He referred to Mexicans as “rapists,” questioned Sen. John McCain’s status as a war hero, ridiculed the physical appearance of his opponents, falsely claimed that “thousands” in New Jersey cheered as the World Trade Center fell and, this week, called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.

Despite predictions that such searing, divisive rhetoric and the resulting outcry would cripple his campaign, Donald Trump’s insults and controversial proposals have propelled him to the forefront of the 2016 presidential race — and kept him there.

And while it may seem like a lurching, chaotic campaign, Trump is, for the most part, a disciplined and methodical candidate, according to a Washington Post review of the businessman’s speeches, interviews and thousands of tweets and retweets over the past six months.

Trump delivers scores of promises, diatribes and insults at breakneck speed. He attacks a regular cast of villains including undocumented immigrants, Muslims, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, his GOP rivals and the media. He keeps the narrative arc of each controversy alive with an endless stream of statements, an unwillingness to back down even when he has misstated the facts — and a string of attacks against those who criticize him.

All the while, his supporters see a truth-talking problem solver unlike the traditional politicians who have let them down. Spending remarkably little, he dominates yet another news cycle, and his Republican rivals languish in his shadow.

the type of basic managerial isht the hon.bro.preznit's dept. of ed ignored and neglected...,

aljazeera |  Public schools are usually considered to be safe places for our children. But what if the school buildings, where many kids spend hours of their day, are damaging their health?

That’s a question that some Philadelphia parents, teachers and advocates are asking in their fight for better conditions — and more transparency.

A series of reports this year from the city’s controller, which inspected 20 of the city’s more than 200 schools, said the buildings were “deplorable and dangerous environment for kids.”

What does that look like? Rotting walls, standing water, mold and crumbling ceilings, are just some of the health hazards America Tonight saw through dozens of images obtained from the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. They offer a behind-the-scenes look at unsanitary and unsafe conditions — from asbestos to toilets clogged beyond repair.