The Arab World Cancelled Meeting With Biden After Latest Israeli Atrocity

BBC  |  US President Joe Biden has said a deadly blast at a Gaza hospital appears to have been caused by Palestinian militants, backing Israel's account of the incident as he visits the country.

Mr Biden, who landed in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, said he was "deeply saddened and outraged" by the explosion.

Israel's military said it was caused by a failed Palestinian rocket launch.

But Palestinian officials said an Israeli air strike hit the hospital.

Health officials in Gaza have said almost 500 people were killed in the explosion, but no death toll has been confirmed.

Meanwhile, Mr Biden has announced that an agreement has been reached with Israel to allow humanitarian aid to move from Egypt into Gaza. However, Israel said it would not allow any aid to pass through its own territory until hostages being held by Hamas are released.

'Deeply saddened and outraged'

Mr Biden's high-stakes visit has been overshadowed by the blast at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on Tuesday evening, which has further inflamed tensions and sparked protests across the region.

He landed in Tel Aviv on Wednesday where he was greeted warmly by Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, before the pair hosted a joint news conference.

"I was deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday," Mr Biden said.

"Based on what I've seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you," he told Mr Netanyahu. "But there's a lot of people out there not sure so we have to overcome a lot of things."

Mr Biden was later asked by reporters what led him to conclude that Israel was not responsible, and said: "The data I was shown by my defence department."

In the news conference, he reiterated his support for Israel and condemned the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which launched an unprecedented attack on Israel from Gaza on 7 October that left 1,400 people dead.

At least 3,000 people have been killed in retaliatory Israeli strikes on Gaza, according to Palestinian health official.

Mr Biden had planned to travel from Israel to Jordan to meet King Abdullah, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, but that leg of the trip was cancelled after the hospital blast on Tuesday.

Jordan cancelled the meeting and condemned what it called "a great calamity and a heinous war crime". The White House, meanwhile, said the decision had been "made in a mutual way" and Mr Biden would call Mr Abbas and Mr Sisi on his return flight to the US.

Politicizing The Moment For Everything It's Worth

NYTimes  |  “I think what they’re missing is just how much this impacts a lot of us who exist while Black,” said Mr. Lucas, a Democrat, who has been mayor of this city of 508,000 people since 2019.

“The immediate answer anybody wants to have is, ‘Yeah, we’re a great place,’” Mr. Lucas said. He added: “I think we’re a wonderful place. But I think we’ve got a hell of a lot of things that we should confront to be the best place we can be.”

“If you live in a privileged part of town, a less privileged part of town may as well be across an ocean,” said Jason Kander, a former Missouri secretary of state who lives in Kansas City and who is white. He said his city “remains a place that is defined by the old-school red line,” and a failure to replicate the economic growth seen in largely white parts of town in mostly Black neighborhoods.

Old dividing lines have blurred some over the decades as Black families have moved west of Troost or north of the river, and the city’s record on race is complicated. Mr. Lucas is the third Black mayor of a city that remains majority white, and its first Black mayor, Emanuel Cleaver, now represents the area in Congress. 

But in interviews across Kansas City, residents described a place where progress has been uneven. Michele L. Watley, who lives in Midtown, said racism in the city was sometimes overt, like the time someone called the police on her after wrongly suggesting that she was stealing from a store. But often, she said, the bias was more subtle.

“It’s almost like this veil of nicety and smiles that kind of overlays microaggressions and all kinds of crazy stuff,” said Ms. Watley, who is Black and the founder of Shirley’s Kitchen Cabinet, a nonprofit organization that seeks to empower Black women.

At a Kansas City community center, Deja Jones, who is white, said she had noticed that her fiancé, who is Black, regularly faced racism around town, including once when she was in the car with him and parked close to a building to drop something off.

Next Day, Less Than Half A Mile From The HUGE KCPD Garrison At 27th & Prospect...,

kmbc  |  33-year-old Ahmad Simmons was shot and killed at 37th and Prospect on the morning of April 15. His murder happened two blocks away and a few hours after another homicide at 35th and Prospect.

A father and community activist is hoping to put rumors to rest one week after his son was killed at 37th and Prospect.

That area has seen a lot of violence recently, prompting Kansas City Police to step up patrols. Last week alone, Kansas City, Missouri, police reported more than 30 gunfire incidents where more than 200 rounds were fired.

Mark your calendars for next Thursday, Sept. 23! The KCPD Explorer Program is open to youth ages 14-20 interested in careers in Law Enforcement. They are having an open house at East Patrol Division in the Community Room. Text "EXPLOREKC" to 41444 to RSVP! pic.twitter.com/jU80INDa94

— kcpolice (@kcpolice) September 15, 2021

Ahmad Simmons, 33, was shot and killed at 37th and Prospect on the morning of April 15. His murder happened two blocks away and a few hours after another homicide at 35th and Prospect.

His father says it was senseless and there was no reason for his son to die.

“When you speak about him, you speak about the ultimate kid that you would want to have,” Thomas Simmons said. “People right now are generally in disbelief, you know, who would kill the Taco Man?"

The 33-year-old was known for his food truck and his heart.

“You can kill people, but you can't kill who they were,” Thomas Simmons said. “This is a legacy, I'm sure, is going to live for years and years and years.”

Darren Faulkner works with KC Common Good – a nonprofit organization working to address the root causes of violence. He said Simmons’ death was likely a retaliation after the murder at 35th and Prospect a few hours earlier.

"There had been some rumors put out in the community that this was a gang hit,” Faulkner said. “Because of this rumor that was put out in the community, another person died. An innocent person died."

Faulkner said that rumor is all that it is, and the community needs to know that.

"I feel like that was part of the narrative that needed to be told to keep this from becoming even a worse situation than it is,” Faulkner said.

Simmons is hopeful other families will not have to feel his same pain.

"He's going to be missed. I mean, greatly missed by not only the people, his family. I mean, I'm sure this whole community,” Thomas Simmons said.

Thomas Simmons also said his son had never been in a gang.

 

The Role Of Mutually Transgressive Abjection In The American Apocalypse

notesfromdisgraceland |  The abject hovers at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable, but is itself unassimilable which means that we have to contemplate its otherness in its proximity to us but without it being able to be incorporated. It is the other that comes from within (so it is part of ourselves) that we have to reject and expel in order to protect our boundaries[3].

The abject is a great mobilizing mechanism. While the state of being abject is threatening to the self and others, the operation of abjecting involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability. Abjection seeks to stabilize, while the abject inherently disrupts[4].

When the mass of the excluded increases to a size impossible to ignore, they trigger rituals of abjection, which work themselves into identity politics.The repulsion and efforts to distance from the excluded — the abjection – which reinforces the self-awareness of the social standing of regular folks, are in conflict with the attraction by the powers the abject population enjoys and exudes. They are the power bottoms in this relationship as they define the location, robustness and porousness of the boundaries of the enclosure. Fascination with the abject’s power pulls the viewers in, while they remain at arm’s length because of the threats the abject exert.

This makes the excluded a tool that drives the wedge between different social groups and prepares the population for political usage of the abject as leverage.

Objectifying minorities has been institutionalized in America since its inception — from slavery and Jim Crow to ghetto and hyperghetto, prisons, wars, opioids, and other tools of soft and hard marginalization. However, with the rise of the white underclass in the second half of the 20^th century, American ideology has become highly nuanced around the questions of exclusion.

To a large extent, the Right wing has stuck to its white supremacists roots of yesteryear (either in a closeted form or explicitly) while centrists, both Left and Right, have shown greater initiative in modernizing the process. However, when it came to exclusion of the white underclass, the problem proved to be more difficult. Complicated by globalization, technology, the decline of American manufacturing, weaning off conventional energy sources and the general decay of demand for labor, low-skill jobs have been disappearing irreversibly, and the ranks of white underclass grew unstoppably together with their discontent.

Social outcasts and minorities are relatively easy to objectivize. Permanently excluded – criminals, drug addicts, homeless – they have already been cast out. The residual, white precariat, which has always been perceived as a building block of this country’s social fiber, remains still on the inside, but unable to get reintegrated within the context of modern developments.

In a white dominated/ruled society the marginalization of the excluded white subproletariat has been a political hard sell. They grew in size and have acquired a sense of entitlement minorities never could. Their sudden political awareness, no matter how fragile, has become an expression of pleasurable transgressive desires. As a new center of social subjectivity, they draw their power from this position, which serves as an inspiration for their own identity politics.

The emergence of 21^st century Right-wing populism represents the biggest innovation on that terrain. Right-wingers now recognize the abject as a source of political leverage and, instead of exclusion, their program revolves around subjectivizing them. Voluntarily casting oneself as abject — identification with the white subproletariat – has become a quest for authenticity, aimed at acquiring a stigma in order to become a credible voice of the marginalized. This is the core of the modern populist abject gambit.

Politics A Piss-Poor Substitute For Science-Driven Public Health Policy...,

NYTimes |   Top federal health officials have told the White House to scale back a plan to offer coronavirus booster shots to the general public this month, saying that regulators need more time to collect and review all the necessary data, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, who heads the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned the White House on Thursday that their agencies may be able to determine in the coming weeks whether to recommend boosters only for recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — and possibly just some of them to start.

The two health leaders made their argument in a meeting with Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House pandemic coordinator. Several people who heard about the session said it was unclear how Mr. Zients responded. But he has insisted for months that the White House will always follow the advice of government scientists, wherever it leads.

Asked about the meeting, a White House spokesman said on Friday, “We always said we would follow the science, and this is all part of a process that is now underway,” adding that the administration was awaiting a “full review and approval” of booster shots by the F.D.A. as well as a recommendation from the C.D.C.

“When that approval and recommendation are made,” the spokesman, Chris Meagher, said, “we will be ready to implement the plan our nation’s top doctors developed so that we are staying ahead of this virus.”

Less than three weeks ago, Mr. Biden said that contingent on F.D.A. approval, the government planned to start offering boosters the week of Sept. 20 to adults who had received their second shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine at least eight months ago. That would include many health care workers and nursing home residents, as well as some people older than 65, who were generally the first to be vaccinated. Administration officials have said that recipients of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine would probably be offered an additional shot soon as well.

Mr. Biden cast the strategy as another tool that the nation needed to battle the highly contagious Delta variant, which has driven up infection rates, swamped hospitals with Covid-19 patients and led to an average of more than 1,500 deaths a day for the past week, according to a New York Times database. “The plan is for every adult to get a booster shot eight months after you got your second shot,” he said on Aug. 18, adding: “It will make you safer, and for longer. And it will help us end the pandemic faster.”

But the announcement of a late September target date for starting the booster campaign set off alarm bells inside the F.D.A. — apparently playing a role in decisions by two of its top vaccine regulators, announced this week, to leave the agency this fall.

Exemplary Case Study In The Uselessness Of The mRNA Neo-Vaccinoids

news.com.au |   Israel, the poster child for vaccination, recorded more new Covid-19 infections on Wednesday than at the peak of its second wave when few in the country of nine million were even jabbed.

The nation – wholly dependent on Pfizer – has a rolling average of 9300 daily cases. Where it once broke vaccination records, Israel has now broken a grim new record – the country with the highest seven day average of new cases per million.

Infectious diseases experts have said Israel may prove that the effectiveness of vaccines do indeed wane over time.

“This is a very clear warning sign for the rest of the world,” Dr Ran Balicer of Clalit Health Services, one of Israel’s main healthcare providers, told Science magazine last month

“If it can happen here, it can probably happen everywhere.”

However, the country’s politicians are insistent no new lockdown will be introduced and have pointed out that despite the surge in cases, serious illness and death among vaccinated Israelis remains low. 

HIGHEST CASES PER MILLION GLOBALLY

On Wednesday, Israel recorded 11,250 new Covid-19 cases with a seven day average of 9308 cases, according to the country’s health ministry.

That’s higher than the seven day average of cases of 8624 cases on January 17, the second wave peak, only a month after the country’s vaccine program began.

Daily fatalities were at 31 on Wednesday with a rolling average of 21 deaths per day.

The country is now recording 1891 cases per million people, according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data project, the most anywhere globally and three times the level in the US, for instance.

 

Membership In The American Ruling Class Means Never Having To Audition, Campaign, Or Fundraise

NYTimes  |  America’s most powerful people have a problem. They can’t admit that they’re powerful.

Take Andrew Cuomo. On a recent call with reporters, the embattled Mr. Cuomo insisted that he was “not part of the political club.” The assertion was confounding because Mr. Cuomo is in his third term as governor of New York — a position his father also held for three terms. Mr. Cuomo has also served as state attorney general and as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Or think of Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence. After her appointment was announced, Ms. Haines declared, “I have never shied away from speaking truth to power.” That is a curious way of describing a meteoric career that includes stints at exclusive universities, a prestigious judicial clerkship and important jobs in foreign policy and intelligence before her appointment to a cabinet-level office overseeing a budget of more than $60 billion.

This sort of false advertising isn’t limited to Democrats. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, for instance, has embraced an image as a populist crusader against a distant “political class.” He does not emphasize his father’s career as a banker, his studies at Stanford and Yale Law School, or his work as clerk to prominent judges, including Chief Justice John Roberts. The merits of Mr. Hawley’s positions are open to debate. But his membership in the same elite that he rails against is not.

And it’s not only politicians. Business figures love to present themselves as “disrupters” of stagnant industries. But the origins of the idea are anything but rebellious. Popularized by a Harvard professor and promoted by a veritable industry of consultants, it has been embraced by some of the richest and most highly credentialed people in the world.

Examples could be multiplied, but these cases are enough to show that the problem of insiders pretending to be outsiders cuts across party, gender and field. The question is why.

Part of the explanation is strategic. An outsider pose is appealing because it allows powerful people to distance themselves from the consequences of their decisions. When things go well, they are happy to take credit. When they go badly, it’s useful to blame an incompetent, hostile establishment for thwarting their good intentions or visionary plans.

Not Horny, Just Happily Singing "Bringing In The Sheaves"

WaPo  |  Over the past day, a lot of people have asked me how I feel. They are usually referring to my covid-19 diagnosis and my symptoms. I feel like I have a mild cold. But even more than that, I am angry.

I am angry that after I spent months carefully isolating myself, a single chaotic day likely got me sick. I am angry that several of our nation’s leaders were unwilling to deal with the small annoyance of a mask for a few hours. I am angry that the attack on the Capitol and my subsequent illness have the same cause: my Republican colleagues’ inability to accept facts.

When I left for Washington last week, it was my first trip there in several months. I had a list of things to accomplish, including getting my picture taken for the card I use when voting on the House floor. For the past two years, I appeared on that card completely bald as a result of the chemotherapy I underwent to eliminate the cancer in my right lung. It was because of that preexisting condition that I relied so heavily on the proxy voting the House agreed to last year, when we first began to understand the danger of covid-19.

I was nervous about spending a week among so many people who regularly flout social distancing and mask guidelines, but I could not have imagined the horror of what happened on Jan. 6.

To isolate as much as possible, I planned to spend much of my day in my apartment, shuttling to the House floor to vote. But the building shares an alley with the Republican National Committee, where, we’d later learn, law enforcement found a pipe bomb. I was evacuated from that location early in the afternoon.

The next best option would have been my office in the Cannon House Office Building, where just three of my staffers worked at their desks to ensure safe distancing. Before I arrived, security evacuated that building as well, forcing us to linger in the hallways and cafeteria spaces of the House complex. As I’m sure you can imagine, pushing the occupants of an entire building into a few public spaces doesn’t make for great social distancing. Twice, I admonished groups of congressional staff to put on their masks. Some of these staffers gave me looks of derision, but slowly complied.

Inexcusable Oxygen Theft By The Professional Managerial Class

The professional managerial class lives in an Atlassian/Tableau fantasy world (formerly Powerpoint and Excel) Their ability to ‘model’ and then ‘pitch’ (and fund) a decision (read, allocation of Other People’s Money), using an elaborate smokescreen of elementary finance and decision science that masks a few dumbed down operating assumptions (or worse, ‘benchmarks and kpi's’) carries a far higher paycheck and prestige than the hard work, expertise and experience required to discover real world inputs.

 

In fact, real world experience is actively harmful in PMC world. After all, it tends to result in ‘FUDs’ (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), and therefore no greenlight and no remunerative follow on workstreams (see ‘Bu!!sh!t Jobs)

 

Having a degree does not make one a member of the PMC, it is being in an institutional or professional setting where you are subject to pressure about your work product and process, despite the appearance of some degree of autonomy by virtue of elite status. It most certainly is not just about credentials or pay. And you don’t have to be senior either. 

 

Increasingly, if you want to get and hang on to a PMC job, that job will involve dishonesty or exploitation of others in some way. Industries such as finance have seized and held onto larger and larger proportions of the economy.  The same disproportionate growth can be seen in financialised healthcare and finacialised education.

 

In other words, being a member of the PMC critically includes that you are sufficiently not in control of your work process or product that if you object to widespread practices (either in the industry or at your place of employment) that you find morally offensive, you can expect to suffer serious career or income costs. Most people believe they can’t afford that and so go along with the program.

nakedcapitalism  |  In the years 2016-2020:

1)The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) attained class consciousness.

2) The PMC was and is embubbled by a domestic psyop.

3) The press replaced reporting with advocacy.

4) Election legitimacy is determined by extra-Constitutional actors.

5) “Fascism” became an empty signifier, not an analytical tool.

Let us look at each of these claims.

1) The PMC attained class consciousness. As Thomas Frank has shown (Listen, Liberal!), the PMC has replaced the working class as the Democrat Party base[1]. During the period 2016-2020, the PMC, collectively, experienced Trump’s election as literal, actual trauma (as pain, as an energy suck, as constant stress, as depression, etc. Parents wept to tell their children, and so forth. That the burden of such trauma is — with respect to the post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by, say, soldiers. abuse victims, or the homeless — quite slight may lead some — well, me — to mock it (“How was brunch?”), but the trauma is deeply felt and real). Importantly, as Steve Randy Waldman has urged, the class position — and hence the class consciousness — of the PMC is marked by “predatory precarity“; the predation comes from what a professional must do to maintain their class position in a financialized economy driven by rent-seeking; the precarity comes from the fact that their class position is maintained, not by the ownership of capital, or the inheritance of a title, but by expensive “positional goods” like credentials. Trump’s right-wing populism, with its distrust of experts — the same meritorious experts whose Esq.s were on every foreclosure notice or dunning letter, and whose M.D.s were on every surprise medical bill — struck directly at both exposed nerves. Not only might they not be consulted on how best to rule, their very credentials might turn out to be worthless. Hence the rage, the fear, the hate, certainly universally expressed in the press, but also in such organizations as Indivisible, the Women’s March, etc. The PMC as a class came to consciousness screaming Make it stop!

2) The PMC was and is embubbled by a domestic psyop. Make it stop! was, however, followed hard upon by I didn’t do it! Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, describes how Robbie Mook deployed RussiaGate to delegitimize the newly elected President in a meeting with the rest of the defeated Clinton camp the day after Election Day 2016. RussiaGate became the Goebbelsian propaganda operation that it was — if there had been anything to it, Pelosi would have impeached Trump for it, Mueller Report or no[2] — through an unholy alliance of the Democrat Party apparatus, the intelligence community, and the press. All were variously motivated — “There in stately splendor, far removed from the squalid village below, they fight their petty battles over power and money” (Bob and Ray) — but the effect on the PMC was extraordinary: To this very day, any opposing or dissenting force to the liberal Democrat orthodoxy of the day can be dismissed with a one-liner about Putin! I’ve never seen anything like it.[3] Both (1) and (2) combined to drive turnout, voluntering, donations, and everything else. (That the Democrat base is too slim to rule on its own is another issue entirely.)

America vs. The Police: Militarized Local Gangs Organized To Protect Their Own

thestreet  |  Please consider a few key snips from FDR's Letter on the Resolution of Federation of Federal Employees Against Strikes in Federal Service, August 16, 1937, emphasis mine.

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. 

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."

Roosevelt was discussing strikes, but public unions threaten them all the times, especially teachers' unions. They demand money "for the kids". The school boards are padded with teachers demanding more money "for the kids".

Collective bargaining cannot possibly exist in such circumstances. Unions can and have shut down schools. The unions do not give a damn about the kids.

Notice I said "unions" do not give a damn. Many, if not most, teachers do care for the kids, but the union does not. The unions can, and do, protect teachers guilty of abusing kids. It is nearly impossible to get rid of a bad tenured teacher or a bad cop.

Unions also threaten to shut down mass transportation.

None of this is in the public interest.

Abolish Public Unions Entirely

Union leaders have a mandated goal of protecting bad cops, bad teachers, and corrupt politicians. Unions blackmail politicians and threaten the public they are supposed to serve.

Union leaders will do anything to stay in power, the kids and the public be damned.

The only way to deal with the situation is to "effectively" abolish public unions entirely.

The key word is effectively. What do I mean by that? Take away 100% of their power as opposed to ending their right of association.

Recommended Steps

1. National right-to-work laws
2. Abolishment of all prevailing wage laws
3. Ending public unions ability to strike
4. Ending collective bargaining by public unions

Consider Illinois' prevailing wage laws: Prevailing wages are union wages. Municipalities and businesses have to pay prevailing wages. If they do not hire union workers, they get picketed.

Why bother hiring non-union workers if you have to pay union wages in the first place?

As a direct result, municipalities and businesses must overpay for services in Illinois.

Illinois is Bankrupt

Not only do public unions protect bad cops, bad teachers, and bad employees in general, Illinois is bankrupt after giving in repeatedly to union contract demands and pension spiking.

NO FEDERAL BAILOUT FOR PRITZKERVILLINOIS!!!

thecentersquare |  Pension contributions amount to nearly one-fourth of the state’s annual budget and it’s still not at the level actuaries estimate would bring down the level of unfunded liabilities. This is because the “Edgar Ramp,” enacted in 1995, that set contributions to track with the statute, rather than actuarial suggestions. 

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has said the state’s budget would have been balanced had it not been for the pandemic-related revenue shortfalls, something that’s been disputed. 

In Chicago, city officials revealed to Aldermen this week that the COVID-19 crisis has cut into their revenues by an estimated $500 million. 

Chief Financial Officer Jennie Bennett told aldermen on Monday, according to WTTW, that the city could see a $2 billion deficit in the fall should the economy slide into a recession. 

Like Illinois, Chicago has seen its unfunded liabilities increase over the years as well. 

The city’s pension debt has grown by $7 billion since 2015, according to a Chicago Tribune analysis in late 2019 and is scheduled to cost more than $1 billion annually in the coming years.

“The latest point that we have is the product of years of effectively not balancing a budget,” Truth in Accounting Research Director Bill Bergman said. 

Its annual City Combined Taxpayer Burden report released in April showed Chicago taxpayers shoulder $122,100 in deferred costs from the multiple units of government they reside in. 

Open Source SARS-CoV2 Responses Around the World: Top Secret Response in America

mintpressnews |  As the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis comes to dominate headlines, little media attention has been given to the federal government’s decision to classify top-level meetings on domestic coronavirus response and lean heavily “behind the scenes” on U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon in planning for an allegedly imminent explosion of cases.

The classification of coronavirus planning meetings was first covered by Reuters, which noted that the decision to classify was “an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion.” Reuters further noted that the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Alex Azar, and his chief of staff had “resisted” the classification order, which was made in mid-January by the National Security Council (NSC), led by Robert O’Brien — a longtime friend and colleague of his predecessor John Bolton.

Following this order, HHS officials with the appropriate security clearances held meetings on coronavirus response at the department’s Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF), which are facilities “usually reserved for intelligence and military operations” and — in HHS’ case — for responses to “biowarfare or chemical attacks.” Several officials who spoke to Reuters noted that the classification decision prevented key experts from participating in meetings and slowed down the ability of HHS and the agencies it oversees, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to respond to the crisis by limiting participation and information sharing.

It has since been speculated that the decision was made to prevent potential leaks of information by stifling participation and that aspects of the planned response would cause controversy if made public, especially given that the decision to classify government meetings on coronavirus response negatively impacted HHS’ ability to respond to the crisis.

After the classification decision was made public, a subsequent report in Politico revealed that not only is the National Security Council managing the federal government’s overall response but that they are doing so in close coordination with the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. military. It states specifically that “NSC officials have been coordinating behind the scenes with the intelligence and defense communities to gauge the threat and prepare for the possibility that the U.S. government will have to respond to much bigger numbers—and soon.”

Grifter Scum: This is Why We Cain't Have Nothing Nice in Kansas City!

kcur |  After more than two years of litigation, a leadership fight over a Kansas City jazz landmark wrapped up Wednesday morning with nearly two hours of closing arguments.

But the verdict on who will lead the Mutual Musicians Foundation is not out yet. Circuit Court Judge Charles McKenzie said Wednesday he was taking the case under advisement. 

The bench trial started in late November at the Jackson County Circuit Court in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Tuesday marked the fourth and final day of testimony. 

"Each side is pointing fingers at taking away some of the money or resources of the foundation," jazz historian Larry Kopitnik told KCUR. 

Once the union hall for the Colored Musicians Local 627, the foundation is one of only two National Historic Landmarks in Kansas City (the other one is the Liberty Memorial). These days it is known for its after-hours jam sessions on Saturdays and Sundays.

THE DRAMATIC CONCLUSION

kbia | A judge has delivered a verdict in a lawsuit over control of Kansas City's Mutual Musicians Foundation, and it's a draw.   

Once the union hall for the Colored Musicians Local 627, the foundation is one of only two National Historic Landmarks in Kansas City (the other one is the Liberty Memorial). These days it is known for its after-hours jam sessions on Saturdays and Sundays.

Anita Dixon, who served as the board's vice president, often represented the organization as the spokesperson. But in August 2016, she was ousted after a heated board meeting. In a lawsuit filed in October 2016 and updated in March 2017, Dixon claimed other board members, including chairman James Hathaway, failed to comply with bylaws, took a cut from jam session entry fees, and retaliated against her. 

A counterclaim by the defendants, including Hathaway, alleged that Dixon used foundation funds for her own use, took artifacts, photographs, and other items, and left the foundation more than $8,000 in debt. 

After a bench trial, Circuit Court Judge Charles McKenzie on Friday ruled for the defendants; he denied Dixon's request for payment for damages and for the removal of the defendants as directors. 

But on the defendants' counterclaim of embezzlement and theft, McKenzie sided with Dixon. 

According to the judgment, both parties will be responsible for their own attorney fees, but the costs of the litigation would be paid by Dixon.  

Dixon's response to the verdict: "Of course, sadness."  

She added, "Essentially, we're back where we started. The judge didn't give them what I wanted. And the judge didn't give them what they wanted against me." 

Hathaway's attorney, Roy King, described the verdict as a "summary judgment," short and final. King told KCUR he's advised his client not to comment in the event that an appeal is filed within the 30-day window. 

"If it looks like there's a viable appeal, I will," said Dixon. "But, if not, I'm going to throw myself into making a difference, wherever I go, whatever I do." 

BootyJudge and Harriot Had a Slap Fight, McWhorter Earns His Blue Check by Calling It Out

TheAtlantic |  A beautiful illustration of the difference between Twitter and the real world is the viral status of Michael Harriot’s attack on Mayor Pete Buttigieg in The Root as a “lying MF.”

theroot |  I don’t enjoy fighting. I don’t even fight very well. In fact, if I combined my amateur fist-fighting record, my jiu-jitsu sparring, all of my slap-boxing exhibitions, and the time Zevalon Jackson slapped me for talking smack while running a Boston on her in spades, my winning percentage is well below .500. But I believe fisticuffs are a legitimate way to settle disputes while arguments are usually pointless exercises to get one party to proclaim why the other party is wrong. I’d rather you beat me up.

So when I received a text message from South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign about an article I wrote, I genuinely hoped that he was going to send four or five of his thugs over to rough me up and that would be it. (And if you don’t believe there are Pete Buttigieg supporters out there willing to throw hands, then you probably aren’t on Twitter. I think they should call themselves the “Pete Patrol.” Or the “Buttigang.”)

I figured one of his surrogates would argue with me for a few minutes and I could continue my day trying to be a thorn in the side of white supremacy (The third thing you should know is that I actually keep a small photo of the mouse from Pinky and the Brain beside my bed that says: “What are you going to do today, Michael?” The answer is always the same: “Fuck with white people.”)

Luckily, as soon as I agreed to take a phone call, the phone rang. The voice sounded vaguely familiar and I knew it wasn’t a surrogate or a campaign volunteer when the person said:

“I don’t think I’ve ever been called a ‘lying motherfucker’ before.”

It was Pete Buttigieg.

Well, I thought. Maybe he does want to fight.

Not Just Financial Vultures and Vampires Sucking the Life Out of the Commons...,

counterpunch |  Fires are raging everywhere in California these days, and firefighters are having enormous trouble keeping up. Chronically understaffed local fire departments simply don’t have the resources to handle act one of what climate change has in store for us.

California’s wealthy aren’t particularly worrying about that lack of resources — because they have more than enough of their own. They can afford to shell out up to $25,000 per day for one of the private firefighting services that are popping up in California wherever the rich call home.

In a deeply unequal America, none of this should surprise us. Public services almost always take it on the chin in societies where wealth starts furiously concentrating. Why should inequality have this impact? A little incendiary parable — on tennis — might help us understand.

Does Eric Ciaramella Have a Husband? Is the Husband Mad?

redstate |  Eric Ciaramella, the alleged whistleblower, was a young man on a mission. This Ivy-league graduate, said to be fluent in Russian, Ukrainian and Arabic, a favorite among Obama Administration officials, was introduced to us by investigative reporter Paul Sperry on Thursday. Washington insiders, including the mainstream media, have known his identity for quite some time, and for obvious reasons, have remained silent. Even after Sperry outed him this week, we’re hearing crickets from those on the left. The conservative media, however, which understands that history is repeating itself, has gone into overdrive to expose the truth.

Here’s what we know about Eric Ciaramella (EC):

He submitted a whistleblower complaint on August 12th.

He is a registered Democrat.

He is a CIA analyst who specializes in Russia and Ukraine. He ran the Ukraine desk at the National Security Council (NSC) in 2016.

He was detailed over to the NSC in the summer of 2015 and worked for then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

He worked for former Vice President Joe Biden when he served as the Obama administration’s “point man” for Ukraine. He may have flown over to Ukraine with Biden on Air Force Two.

He worked for former CIA Director John Brennan and appeared to have been a highly valued employee.

In June 2017, then-National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster appointed EC to be his personal aide.

EC did not have direct knowledge of the July 25th conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It is very possible he learned about the call from NSC Director for European Affairs Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified last week before Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee.

EC contacted at least one of Schiff’s staff members prior to filing his complaint. Two of EC’s colleagues from the NSC were hired by Adam Schiff this year, one of whom, Sean Misko, was hired in August.

He was posted to the NSC in the White House’s West Wing in mid-2017 and “left amid concerns about negative leaks to the media. He has since returned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.”

What Preference Falsification Hath Wrought

One Mouthy Gekko Doing THEE MOST Can Eff Up The Whole Lucrative Swamp Ecosystem...,

thehill |  Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Sunday that he thinks former CIA Director John Brennan's rhetoric is becoming an issue "in and of itself."

"John and his rhetoric have become an issue in and of itself," Clapper said on CNN's "State of the Union." "John is subtle like a freight train and he’s gonna say what’s on his mind." 

Clapper's comments came in response to an op-ed penned by Brennan in The New York Times this week, in which he wrote that President Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. 

Clapper said he empathized with Brennan, but voiced concerns for Brennan's fiery rhetoric toward Trump and his administration.

"I think that the common denominator among all of us [in the intelligence community] that have been speaking up … is genuine concern about the jeopardy and threats to our institutions," Clapper said.

Brennan's claims drew criticism from some in the intelligence community who said the timing was suspect. 

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on Thursday took aim at Brennan for "purport[ing] to know, as fact, that the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power."

“If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach. If he has some other personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion, it should be disclosed to the special counsel, not The New York Times,” Burr said.

Burr added that Trump has the “full authority” to rescind security clearance if the statements were “purely political and based on conjecture.”

Who Cares What These Overfed "Intelligence Community" Reptiles Think?

nakedcapitalism |  As those of us who still follow the news know, President Trump revoked former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance. (For those who came in late, Brennan organized torture and “extraordinary rendition”[1], and was a “vocal advocate” of giving the telcos immunity for Bush’s enormous program of warrrantless surveillance[2], under President George W Bush. Under President Barack Obama, Brennan organized the “kill list,” later rebranded as a “disposition matrix,” which Obama used in at least one case to kill a U.S. citizen with a drone strike, while avoiding any form of due process.) In response to Trump’s action, twelve “top” intelligence officials wrote and published a statement denouncing it (here). This is the key paragraph:

We know John to be an enormously talented, capable, and patriotic individual who devoted his adult life to the service of this nation. Insinuations and allegations of wrongdoing on the part of Brennan while in office are baseless.

(Scores of “ex-spies” later joined the original twelve.) In this post, I’m not going to discuss motive, whether Trump’s for revoking Brennan’s clearance, or the intelligence community’s outrage that he did so, or the media’s. Rather, I’m going to focus on the question of whether “the twelve” should have any standing to issue such a statement in the first place. After all, if torture, extraordinary rendition, warrantless surveillance, and whacking US citizens without due process are not “wrongdoing,” then what on earth can be?[3] To this end, I will first present a table sketching the careers and personal networks of “the twelve.” Next, I’ll look at those who did not sign the statement. After that, I’ll make a few brief comments about “the twelve” as a class. I’ll conclude by raising the issue of standing again. I hope this post will be especially useful to those who haven’t been following politics since 9/11, who may take our current institutional structures for granted (see especially footnotes [1] and [2]).

Treasonous SwampTard Tantrum

TBP |  As for Phil Mudd, he exploded in rage when the African-American gentleman pointed out that he himself had made a pile after his retirement from the government thanks to retaining his security clearances.  The gentleman should have added that Mudd’s wealth was really due not just to his clearances but to his membership in what has become known as the Deep State.  People like Mudd, who has held senior positions at the Agency and the FBI (he is a protégé of Robert Mueller, no less) are almost guaranteed huge salaries, bonuses and benefits at government contractors, think tanks, and consulting firms.  They have golden parachutes for life.  Mudd, with a look of injured outrage and indignation on his face, denied that he had ever made penny because of his clearances.  This may or may not be true in a technical sense, but, as Mudd knows very well, his claim is bullshit.  He is part of the club, he is protected from any chance of having to actually work for a living for the rest of his life.  Mudd’s performance was ridiculous for anybody who knows the score.

Of course, the real reason for his hissy fit is that he suspects (correctly, I think) that Trump is planning to cancel the security clearances of the swamp creatures like Mudd who have tried to undermine his presidency and the will of the American people.  The loss of the clearance may not have any direct effects on their earning power but it sends a powerful signal that they no longer are part of the inner circle.  That is a fate worse than death for the men who think they know what is good for the American people.

If I was Trump, any former senior official who said a peep against me would have his clearances pulled the next day.   These people are expected to conduct themselves in a professional manner, in or out of government.  Suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome is no excuse for the behavior of people like Brennan and Mudd.