James Lovelock, the Prophet Eminent scientist says global warming is irreversible – and over 6 billion people will perish at the end of the century

"At the age of eighty-eight, after four children and a long and respected career as one of the twentieth century’s most influential scientists, James Lovelock has come to an unsettling conclusion: The human race is doomed.



“I wish I could be more hopeful,” he tells me one sunny morning as we walk through a park in Oslo, where he is giving a talk at a university. Lovelock is a small man, unfailingly polite, with white hair and round, owlish glasses. His step is jaunty, his mind lively, his manner anything but gloomy. In fact, the coming of the Four Horsemen – war, famine, pestilence and death – seems to perk him up. “It will be a dark time,” Lovelock admits. “But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting.”



James Lovelock, the Prophet – Rolling Stone

Opinion | John Brennan: President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash - The New York Times

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"That’s why the president revoked my security clearance: to try to silence anyone who would dare challenge him.
Mr. Brennan was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2013 to 2017.

When Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s internal security service, told me during an early August 2016 phone call that Russia wasn’t interfering in our presidential election, I knew he was lying. Over the previous several years I had grown weary of Mr. Bortnikov’s denials of Russia’s perfidy — about its mistreatment of American diplomats and citizens in Moscow, its repeated failure to adhere to cease-fire agreements in Syria and its paramilitary intervention in eastern Ukraine, to name just a few issues.

When I warned Mr. Bortnikov that Russian interference in our election was intolerable and would roil United States-Russia relations for many years, he denied Russian involvement in any election, in America or elsewhere, with a feigned sincerity that I had heard many times before. President Vladimir Putin of Russia reiterated those denials numerous times over the past two years, often to Donald Trump’s seeming approval.

Russian denials are, in a word, hogwash.

Before, during and after its now infamous meddling in our last presidential election, Russia practiced the art of shaping political events abroad through its well-honed active measures program, which employs an array of technical capabilities, information operations and old-fashioned human intelligence spycraft. Electoral politics in Western democracies presents an especially inviting target, as a variety of politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright by Russian intelligence operatives. The very freedoms and liberties that liberal Western democracies cherish and that autocracies fear have been exploited by Russian intelligence services not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation, increasingly via the growing number of social media platforms.

Having worked closely with the F.B.I. over many years on counterintelligence investigations, I was well aware of Russia’s ability to work surreptitiously within the United States, cultivating relationships with individuals who wield actual or potential power. Like Mr. Bortnikov, these Russian operatives and agents are well trained in the art of deception. They troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found.

In my many conversations with James Comey, the F.B.I. director, in the summer of 2016, we talked about the potential for American citizens, involved in partisan politics or not, to be pawns in Russian hands. We knew that Russian intelligence services would do all they could to achieve their objectives, which the United States intelligence community publicly assessed a few short months later were to undermine public faith in the American democratic process, harm the electability of the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, and show preference for Mr. Trump. We also publicly assessed that Mr. Putin’s intelligence services were following his orders. Director Comey and I, along with the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael Rogers, pledged that our agencies would share, as appropriate, whatever information was collected, especially considering the proven ability of Russian intelligence services to suborn United States citizens.

The already challenging work of the American intelligence and law enforcement communities was made more difficult in late July 2016, however, when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, publicly called upon Russia to find the missing emails of Mrs. Clinton. By issuing such a statement, Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.

Such a public clarion call certainly makes one wonder what Mr. Trump privately encouraged his advisers to do — and what they actually did — to win the election. While I had deep insight into Russian activities during the 2016 election, I now am aware — thanks to the reporting of an open and free press — of many more of the highly suspicious dalliances of some American citizens with people affiliated with the Russian intelligence services.
Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.

The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of “Trump Incorporated” attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets. A jury is about to deliberate bank and tax fraud charges against one of those people, Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman. And the campaign’s former deputy chairman, Rick Gates, has pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators.

Mr. Trump clearly has become more desperate to protect himself and those close to him, which is why he made the politically motivated decision to revoke my security clearance in an attempt to scare into silence others who might dare to challenge him. Now more than ever, it is critically important that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his team of investigators be allowed to complete their work without interference — from Mr. Trump or anyone else — so that all Americans can get the answers they so rightly deserve.

John O. Brennan was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from March 2013 to January 2017."

Opinion | John Brennan: President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash - The New York Times

Sea life in 'peril' as ocean temperatures hit all-time high in San Diego | Environment | The Guardian

Sea life in 'peril' as ocean temperatures hit all-time high in San Diego | Environment | The Guardian

#RacisInChief Sarah Sanders' TERRIBLE Explanation Of Diversity In Trump's White House

40 Yemeni Children Dead by U.S.-Made Bomb? Outrage Mounts Over U.S. Role...

Omarosa on Her Secret Tapes & Trump’s Biggest Weakness | The Daily Show

Opinion | Documenting ‘Slavery by Another Name’ in Texas - The New York Times

"Americans who grew up with the fiction that slavery was confined to the South — and that the North had always been “free” — learned differently in 1991, when construction workers stumbled upon the skeletal remains of more than 400 Africans at a site in New York City that has since been designated the African Burial Ground National Monument. The catalog of injuries etched into the bones of the men and women who labored to build, feed and protect Colonial-era New York includes muscles so violently strained they were ripped away from the skeleton, offering a grisly portrait of what it was like to be worked to death in bondage.



A similar portrait is emerging in Sugar Land, Tex., a suburb southwest of Houston, where researchers are examining the remains of about 95 African-Americans whose unmarked graves were discovered this year. The dead are almost certainly victims of the second system of slavery that arose when Southerners set out to circumvent the 13th Amendment of 1865, which outlawed involuntary servitude except as punishment for criminal conviction.



Those states imposed what the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Douglas Blackmon rightly describes as “slavery by another name” — sweeping Negroes into custody for petty offenses like vagrancy, then turning them over to plantation owners and others who sometimes notified the local sheriff in advance of how much labor they needed. This practice, which persisted in various forms up to World War II, stripped African-Americans of the ability to accumulate wealth while holding them captive in dangerous, disease-ridden environs that killed many of them outright. The Sugar Land site offers present-day Americans a look at this shameful period from an unusual vantage point.


Opinion | Documenting ‘Slavery by Another Name’ in Texas - The New York Times

Trump Calls Omarosa Manigault Newman ‘That Dog’ in His Latest Insult - The New York Times

"WASHINGTON — President Trump added his former White House aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman, on Tuesday to the growing list of African-Americans he has publicly denigrated on Twitter, calling her “that dog” and a “crazed, crying lowlife” after her allegations against him of mental deterioration and racism.



Even for a president who consistently uses Twitter to assail his adversaries, the morning tweet about Ms. Manigault Newman was a remarkably crude use of the presidential bully pulpit to disparage a woman who once served at the highest levels in his White House.



In an interview on MSNBC, Ms. Manigault Newman responded that Mr. Trump treats women differently from men because he “believes they are beneath him” and that he talked in derogatory ways about minorities.



“He has absolutely no respect for women, for African-Americans,” she said.



In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has called Don Lemon, a CNN anchor, “the dumbest man on television.” He has questioned the intelligence of LeBron James, a star basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers. And he has repeatedly said that Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, has a “low I.Q.”



Mr. Trump has also deployed the “dog” insult for white people, including Arianna Huffington, a founder of HuffPost. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump tweeted that a onetime political rival and fellow Republican, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, “lies like a dog.”



Tuesday morning’s tweet was the latest in what has become an increasingly personal and malicious stream of Twitter posts from Mr. Trump, many of which are responses to his critics or aimed at questioning the integrity of the continuing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether Mr. Trump or his aides were complicit in it. In recent days, the president has again used Twitter to lash out at his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and at an F.B.I. agent who helped oversee the Russia investigation and who was fired for sending texts critical of Mr. Trump.



Mr. Trump’s advisers and allies described the tweet about Ms. Manigault Newman, in particular, as a reaction to the accusations that she makes about the president in “Unhinged,” her tell-all book about her year in the West Wing. Scholars called it an ugly historical echo of the country’s racial divisions.



“It’s important to understand the legacy, the history of the attack on black intelligence as a way of justifying our dehumanization,” said Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the chairman of the African-American studies department at Princeton University. He said there was “something deeply racial” about the way Mr. Trump described Ms. Manigault Newman on Tuesday.



Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, disputed the idea that Mr. Trump’s tweet about Ms. Manigault Newman was driven by racial animus, and defended the president by pointing out his willingness to lash out at people of all races.



The White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that President Trump had denied using the racial slur and that he had never used it in her presence.Published OnAug. 15, 2018CreditImage by Doug Mills/The New York Times



“The fact is the president’s an equal opportunity person that calls things like he sees it,” Ms. Sanders told reporters. Under persistent questioning by reporters, Ms. Sanders said she could not guarantee that Mr. Trump had never used the N-word, but said that he had denied using it and that he had never used it in her presence.



She said White House employees would not continue to work with him if they thought he was a racist. “If at any point we felt that the president was who some of his critics claim him to be, we certainly wouldn’t be here,” Ms. Sanders said.



She told reporters they should focus instead on the fact that Mr. Trump created 700,000 jobs for African-Americans in less than two years, far more than the 195,000 jobs for blacks that she said were created during the eight years of the Obama administration.



In fact, Labor Department statistics showed that African-American employment grew by about three million during President Barack Obama’s two terms. Hours after her briefing, Ms. Sanders made a rare apology, tweeting that her numbers were off.





The 487 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List

A detailed list of the journalists, politicians and places President Trump has insulted since declaring his candidacy.



Jan. 28, 2016

“Jobs numbers for Pres Trump and Pres Obama were correct, but the time frame for Pres Obama wasn’t,” she wrote, citing information that she had interpreted incorrectly from the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “I’m sorry for the mistake, but no apologies for the 700,000 jobs for African Americans created under President Trump.”



During a decades-long career in real estate and reality television, Mr. Trump has at times been embraced by African-American celebrities who have vouched for his willingness to look past racial stereotypes. Michael Jackson and Don King, the boxing promoter, at times called Mr. Trump a friend.



Ms. Manigault Newman became a celebrity herself on “The Apprentice,” Mr. Trump’s reality television show. Later, as a top White House aide, she often defended the president against charges of racial bias or xenophobia.



In addition to the tweet praising his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, for “quickly firing that dog,” Mr. Trump also called Ms. Manigault Newman “Wacky and Deranged Omarosa” in another tweet this week. And in yet another, the president said she was hated by other staff members inside the White House and was known to be “vicious, but not smart.”



Linda-Susan Beard, the director of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, said there is a long history in the United States of black women being compared to dogs.



“He’s drawing on a history of discourse that is so hate-filled and so historic that it all came together in these 34 words,” she said of Mr. Trump’s tweet about Ms. Manigault Newman, which was actually 35 words. “The statement is brilliant in its ability to do double duty: to offer an attack that is simultaneously racialized and gendered.”



On Tuesday, CBS News released a recording that Ms. Manigault Newman said was of two Trump campaign aides discussing how to react if a tape emerges with Mr. Trump using the N-word. Trump campaign officials had denied that such conversations took place.



A day earlier, NBC released a tape that Ms. Manigault Newman made of her speaking to Mr. Trump, which she said was recorded the day after she was fired. In the recording, the president said he knew nothing about the decision to fire her and told her, “I don’t love you leaving at all.”



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In December, Mr. Kelly fired Ms. Manigault Newman in the Situation Room, the most secure conference room in the White House. Ms. Manigault Newman has released a recording of that conversation, as well.



Ms. Manigault Newman has said she has more audio recordings, and in an interview on Monday on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” said she would cooperate with Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel leading the Russia investigation, if asked. “Anything they want, I’ll share,” she said.



The president’s latest attack on Mr. Sessions was packaged with other tweets assailing the Russia investigation, which Mr. Trump regularly calls a “witch hunt.” He said the inquiry never would have started if “we had a real Attorney General,” an apparent reference to the decision by Mr. Sessions to recuse himself in the Russia inquiry.



Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is currently on trial, accused of tax and bank fraud crimes. He is the first person to be prosecuted by the special counsel. Mr. Manafort’s lawyers rested on Tuesday without presenting a defense.



Blaming Mr. Sessions for not shutting down the investigation is not a new tack for Mr. Trump. Mr. Mueller is already reviewing some of Mr. Trump’s tweets about Mr. Sessions as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into whether the president has tried to obstruct justice in the investigation.



Mr. Trump also questioned why the Russia investigation would not end with the firing of the F.B.I. agent, Peter Strzok.



“Strzok started the illegal Rigged Witch Hunt — why isn’t this so-called ‘probe’ ended immediately?” Mr. Trump tweeted.



A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 15, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Belittles A Female Critic As ‘That Dog’."



Trump Calls Omarosa Manigault Newman ‘That Dog’ in His Latest Insult - The New York Times

When it comes to lying, Trump is nonstop - The Washington Post

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Everybody in politics lies,” Hollywood mogul David Geffen once said of Bill and Hillary Clinton. “But they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.” Geffen had a point — but he had not yet seen President Trump in action. With apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda, when it comes to lying, the man is nonstop. On June 1, just less than 500 days into the president’s term, The Post had counted 3,251 false or misleading claims by the commander in chief. Trump continued that dizzying pace during Thursday’s NATO news conference, and then launched his visit to Britain by trashing that country’s prime minister and brazenly lying about it a few hours later. “I didn’t criticize the prime minister,” Trump said, shortly after criticizing the prime minister. He blasted Theresa May’s handling of Brexit and declared that her fiercest political rival, Boris Johnson, “would be a great prime minister.” Hours later, Trump dismissed the reprinting of his own words as “fake news,” even though the Rupert Murdoch-run Sun tabloid had his attacks on tape. Trump’s bizarre denials mirrored a claim the president made a week earlier when he tweeted that he had never supported a GOP-drafted immigration bill, this despite tweeting three days earlier, in all caps, that “HOUSE REPUBLICANS SHOULD PASS THE STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL.”

Soon after the second tweet was posted, Esquire’s Ryan Lizza wryly noted: “He didn’t even bother to delete the old one.” As with Tolstoy’s Prince Vasili, the president “like a wound-up clock, by force of habit said things he did not even wish to be believed.” But unlike Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton — our previous standard-bearers in presidential prevarication — Trump’s lies are not a defensive response to protect a political legacy. Trump’s lies are his legacy. The former lifelong Manhattan Democrat captured Republicans’ attention in 2011 when he swallowed whole and spit out the “birther conspiracy” that claimed President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. That cynical lie catapulted Trump into the Republican presidential conversation four years later. Trump would then launch his campaign for president by calling Mexicans “rapists” and warning that Mexico was “beating us at the border.” His “American carnage” inaugural address would repeat that latter claim 18 months later and set up a battalion of straw men that could easily be knocked down — if only Trump supporters had access to Google and 60 seconds to spare.

But the incoming president simply continued spreading his dark fantasy of open U.S. borders, while cursing a supposed rising tide of illegal immigration that made necessary the building of a border wall and the implementation of brutal policies — climaxing in a callous family-separation program. Never mind that Trump entered office at a time when more illegal immigrants were moving back to Mexico than were entering the United States; never mind that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States declined by more than 1 million in the decade leading up to his election. Never mind that the social ill that propelled the 45th president to power was nothing more than a grim fairy tale. The incoming president also touted the twisted tale that America was being ripped apart by rising crime rates. In his inaugural address,

Trump vowed to “make America safe again.” But even the fact-challenged incoming president by then had to know — this particular lie was corrected again and again in the press — that the United States was already celebrating record-low crime rates. His own hometown of New York City was experiencing a lower crime rate than at any time since accurate records began being kept during the 1950s. Another political plank, another lie. Trump’s campaign was also built on the bogus belief that the American military machine was in danger of being eclipsed by hostile forces. In his “carnage” speech, Trump assured Americans that he would “make America strong again.” But as Obama told Congress during his final State of the Union address,

“The United States is the most powerful nation on Earth. It’s not even close. We spend more money on our military than the next eight nations combined.” For those tempted to shout “Fake News” at Obama’s claim, do yourself a favor. Go next door, ask to borrow your neighbor’s Google machine , and look it up. Then, perhaps, you might stop repeating this former reality TV host’s lies, start focusing on what really ails America and leave the dark, twisted fantasies to Donald Trump.

When it comes to lying, Trump is nonstop - The Washington Post

Trump’s EPA Is Poisoning Our Children | The Nation

Trump’s EPA Is Poisoning Our Children | The Nation

The "Bolton Effect" Trumps Announces US Abrogation of Treaty Banning Weapons In Space - Outer Space Treaty

The "Bolton Effect"  #IdiotInChief has just announced his intention to abrogate America's treaty which bans weapons in space.  "The Outer Space Treaty, as it is known, was the second of the so-called "non-armament" treaties; its concepts and some of its provisions were modeled on its predecessor, the Antarctic Treaty. Like that Treaty it sought to prevent "a new form of colonial competition" and the possible damage that self-seeking exploitation might cause."



Outer Space Treaty

Peter Strzok fired from the FBI

"Washington (CNN)The FBI has fired Peter Strzok, an agent who was removed from the Russia probe last year for sending text messages disparaging President Donald Trump, Strzok's lawyer said Monday.



Aitan Goelman, Strzok's attorney, said FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich ordered the agent's termination on Friday. Goelman said that the deputy director's decision comes after the head of the office that normally handles disciplinary actions decided Strzok should instead face a demotion and 60-day suspension.

"The decision to fire Special Agent Strzok is not only a departure from typical Bureau practice, but also contradicts (FBI) Director (Christopher) Wray's testimony to Congress and his assurances that the FBI intended to follow its regular process in this and all personnel matters," Goelman said in his statement.

The FBI declined to comment on Goelman's assertions.

Strzok played a lead role in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server and was involved in the FBI's recommendation that no criminal charges be filed against the former secretary of state. He later helped oversee the beginnings of the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and his involvement in both investigations has been seized on by Republicans as evidence of anti-Trump bias in the bureau and those investigating potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

The President tweeted about the firing Monday afternoon, calling Strzok a "total fraud" and repeated his claim that there was no collusion nor that he obstructed justice.

"Agent Peter Strzok was just fired from the FBI - finally. The list of bad players in the FBI & DOJ gets longer & longer. Based on the fact that Strzok was in charge of the Witch Hunt, will it be dropped? It is a total Hoax. No Collusion, No Obstruction - I just fight back!" Trump wrote, adding in another tweet, "Just fired Agent Strzok, formerly of the FBI, was in charge of the Crooked Hillary Clinton sham investigation. It was a total fraud on the American public and should be properly redone!"

Because Strzok, who is 48, was fired before his 50th birthday, he potentially stands to lose a portion of his pension benefits.

His firing was earlier reported by The Washington Post."

More than 100 large wildfires in US as six new blazes erupt. The fires have scorched states from Washington to New Mexico, with California among the hardest hit, | World news | The Guardian

"Six large new wildfires erupted in the United States, pushing the number of major active blazes nationwide to over 100, with more expected to break out sparked by lightning strikes on bone-dry terrain, authorities said on Saturday.



More than 30,000 personnel, including firefighters from across the United States and nearly 140 from Australia and New Zealand, were battling the blazes that have consumed more than 1.6m acres (648,000 hectares), according to the National Interagency Coordination Center."

More than 100 large wildfires in US as six new blazes erupt | World news | The Guardian

Opinion | Brian Kemp, Enemy of Democracy - The New York Times - This is the racist Republican candidate for Governor. #ResistanceIsNotFutile

"The Republican runoff for the governorship in Georgia last month seemed like a cage match to see who could best mimic President Trump. The primary combatants, Secretary of State Brian Kemp and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, ran on a platform of a hatred of “illegal” immigrants and a love of guns. It was a race to see who “could be the craziest,” as Mr. Cagle admitted. He thought he would win.



But he lost in a landslide. Shortly before the election, the president endorsed Mr. Kemp, and the political tide turned. He has a skill set that Mr. Trump desperately needed but was curiously silent about in his endorsement: He is a master of voter suppression.



Hackable polling machines, voter roll purges, refusing to register voters until after an election, the use of investigations to intimidate groups registering minorities to vote — Mr. Kemp knows it all.



A supporter at Brian Kemp’s primary election night event in the Georgia governor’s race.CreditMelissa Golden for The New York Times



The Georgia state flag used from 1956 to 2001 on display at a polling station in Chickamauga last May.CreditDoug Strickland/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated Press

Voter suppression keeps Georgia a red state. Since 2005, Republicans have controlled the State Legislature as well as the governor’s office. Now most of the congressional districts are Republican. So are nearly 64 percent of the state representatives and 66 percent of the state senators.



That political power, however, bears no relation to the state’s demographics. Whites make up less than 60 percent of the state’s population but more than 90 percent of people who voted Republican in the primary. The state’s gerrymandered districts, drawn and redrawn by the Republican-dominated Legislature, mirror the inordinate and disproportionate power of this constituency.



But a change is coming. Black voter turnout, despite the barriers, is increasing — energized by a growing antipathy toward President Trump and his vision for and of African-Americans. Moreover, as the Pew Hispanic Trust reported, the ranks of the Republican Party are declining. In 2016, whites made up 57 percent of all registered voters in Georgia, down from 68 percent in 2004.



That’s why Mr. Kemp has worked diligently to fortify the Republicans’ crumbling bulwark since he became secretary of state in 2010. He has begun investigations into organizations that registered nearly 200,000 new Asian-American and African-American voters — efforts that resulted in the first majority-black school board in a small town.



His investigations yielded no charges, no indictments, no convictions, despite years of probing, suspects’ losing their jobs and Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents knocking on doors. Yet the intimidation had an impact. An attorney from a targeted organization told a reporter: “I’m not going to lie; I was shocked. I was scared.”



While Mr. Kemp insisted that these investigations were about preventing in-person voter fraud (which basically doesn’t exist), he was more candid when talking with fellow Republicans: “Democrats are working hard,” he warned in a recording released by a progressive group “registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines.”



“If they can do that, they can win these elections in November,” Mr. Kemp said. Therefore, even after the multiple investigations yielded no indication of fraud, thousands of people registered during these drives were not on the voter registration rolls, and a court ruling kept it that way.



Mr. Kemp also used Exact Match, a version of the infamous Crosscheck database, to put tens of thousands of citizens in electoral limbo, refusing to place them on the rolls if an errant hyphen, a stray letter or a typographical error on someone’s voter registration card didn’t match the records of the state’s driver’s license bureau or the Social Security office.



Using this method, Mr. Kemp blocked nearly 35,000 people from the voter rolls. Equally important, African-Americans, who made up a third of the registrants, accounted for almost 66 percent of the rejected applicants. And Asian-Americans and Latino voters were more than six times as likely as whites to have been stymied from registering.



But as diligent as he has been about purging eligible citizens from the voter rolls, Mr. Kemp has been just as lax about the cybersecurity of the state’s 27,000 electronic voting machines. Although there were a series of warnings about the ease with which they could be hacked, Mr. Kemp did not respond. Georgia’s electronic voting machines, which run on Windows 2000, leave no paper trail; as a result, there is no way to verify whether the counts are accurate or whether the vote has been hacked.



But the Department of Homeland Security warned him that hacking was a possibility. He ignored that until 2016, when, at a DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas, an organization took control over the way Georgia’s voting machines register and store votes, although it had little expertise in voting matters. Mr. Kemp finally accepted federal dollars, which he had refused for years, to update some of the machines. But his efforts were too little, too late.



That complacency was evident when groups sued the state, alleging that the 2016 presidential election and a 2017 special election had been hacked. Rather than being on high alert to get to the bottom of it, after Mr. Kemp received notification of the lawsuit, officials at Kennesaw State University, which provides logistical support for the state’s election machinery, “destroyed the server that housed statewide election data.” That series of events, including an April visit to the small campus by Ambassador Sergey Kislyak of Russia, raised warning flags to many observers. But not to Mr. Kemp, who said that there was nothing untoward in any of it; the erasure was “in accordance with standard IT procedures.”



Mr. Trump’s endorsement, therefore, was no surprise. Mr. Kemp had pulled off an incredible feat: Georgia’s population increased, but since 2012, the number of registered voters has decreased. He, like Mr. Trump, has been steadfast in riding the voter-fraud train, regardless of how often and thoroughly the claim has been debunked. His work has winnowed out minorities who overwhelmingly vote Democratic and so threaten the Republican stranglehold on Georgia.



A Kemp victory in November is, therefore, transactional but essential for Mr. Trump. It means that there will be a governor, in a state that demographically should be blue, who is practiced and steeped in the nuances of disfranchisement. Mr. Kemp can rubber-stamp the Legislature’s voter-suppression bills that privilege the Republican Party, artificially increase the Republican representation in Congress and in the end protect a president facing mounting evidence of graft, corruption, conspiracy and the threat of impeachment.



Carol Anderson is a professor of African-American studies at Emory University. She is the author of “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide” and the forthcoming “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy.”



Opinion | Brian Kemp, Enemy of Democracy - The New York Times

A year after Charlottesville, white nationalist views creep into politics | World news | The Guardian

"No one would argue that the last year hasn’t been a rough one for the white nationalist movement in America. In fact, a not insignificant number of column inches has been written about how the movement is all but dead.



The leader of the National Socialist group the Traditionalist Workers party, Matthew Heimbach, has had a disastrous year ever since he was honeypotted into sleeping with his stepfather-in-law’s girlfriend while said stepfather-in-law filmed the whole thing through the window from an apple crate. Heimbach then severely beat his stepfather-in-law, shoved his wife and ended up charged with spousal abuse – and bereft of his political party.



Richard Spencer was compelled to abandon his college speaking tour because of relentless hounding by the antifa as well as lackluster crowds.



Andrew Anglin, founder of thewhite supremacist website the Daily Stormer, found himself the target of a barrage of lawsuits and spent most of the year in hiding.



The Traditionalist Workers party folded, and with it the Nationalist Front, Heimbachs’ big tent coalition of skinheads, neo-Confederates, the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis.



Far-right websites and social media accounts were de-platformed and forced into the online netherworlds of the social network Gab and various Russian hosting services. Paypal, GoFundMe and Patreon, all popular vehicles for white supremacist fundraising, kicked many of their most prominent racist users off their service.



Yet this only tells part of the story – one that has little to do with the relative health of the far right in America.



Whereas pseudo-political street thugs like the former Vice executive Gavin McInnes or the Washington state candidate for US Senate Joey Gibson (both of whom deny affiliations with white supremacists or the “alt-right”) have found public rallies and often violent clashes with counter protesters to be effective sites for recruiting, there is a large crop of nationalist political candidates who have learned to thrive in the shadows of their much louder ideological kinsmen.



These less flamboyant and less entertaining nationalists are riding the coattails of the far right into the political arena and, to mix a metaphor, they are only just now beginning to dip their toes into the electoral pool. In this light, the political movement embodied by Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch and Andrew Anglin isn’t the end goal in itself, but rather the vehicle by which their ideological detritus gets borne into the political bloodstream of America.



“Think about the alt-right as a way to reintroduce political ideas that has been relegated to the fringes back into the mainstream,” Ryan Lenz told me. Lenz is a freelance journalist and former investigator for the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks and monitors hate groups in America. “Over time it no longer becomes a third rail for politicians to discuss antisemitic and anti-black ideas. We’re not yet at a point where the political field is swept over by candidates who denigrate classes of people, but in this midterm cycle there are more than a dozen candidates who belong on the far right. Some of them are advocates of horrific ideologies, and who have received relatively little attention for their positions.”



In this way, the Nazis of Charlottesville and their leaders have served as an inoculation, numbing us to candidates and ideas that only a year ago would be completely unacceptable....



A year after Charlottesville, white nationalist views creep into politics | World news | The Guardian

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Tamara Johnson Shealey was live — with David Slavin and John Armwood. Tamara Johnson Shealey with David Slavin and John Armwood. Who Are These Candidates, midterms 2018?