Trump’s EPA Is Poisoning Our Children | The Nation
What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
Monday, August 13, 2018
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."
Sunday, August 12, 2018
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
Saturday, August 11, 2018
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
Friday, August 10, 2018
Thursday, August 09, 2018
Review: In ‘BlacKkKlansman,’ Spike Lee Journeys Into White America’s Heart of Darkness - The New York Times
"...Rather than add his voice to the chorus trying to explain how we got here, Mr. Lee (who shares screenwriting credit with Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott) muses that we might have been here all along. Which doesn’t mean that nothing has changed, but rather that the racist attitudes and ideas Ron finds among the Klansmen (and around the police department’s station house, too) are durable and tenacious facts of our national life..."
What it’s like to be a California inmate fighting wildfires - The Washington Post - Modern day slavery in America.
"The people who fight raging wildfires in the West withstand unthinkable heat and smoke. To save lives and property, they work through the night by the light of the flames, subsist on military-style rations and depend on the total commitment of all members of a crew. Some lose their lives; they all go out knowing they might. And when they conquer a fire, they go home. For a good number — those who serve on inmate fire crews — home, so to speak, is prison.
What it’s like to be a California inmate fighting wildfires - The Washington Post:
Clerk Calls Cops on New Mexico Student For Being 'Arrogant and Black' - The Daily Beast
"A store clerk in Santa Fe, New Mexico reportedly called the cops on a 22-year-old college student because he was “arrogant” and “black.” The employee was caught on cellphone video by student Jordan McDowell, who told local station KRQE that he was racially profiled when he went into the store to buy Sour Patch Kids candy. “And I want him out of the store right now,” the clerk can he heard saying on video talking on the phone. After a pause, the clerk says: “Because he’s being arrogant, because he’s black.” McDowell, who attends Xavier University, said the store clerk accused him of being “sketchy” before she called the cops. “There’s nothing right about this, there’s nothing right to call the police on someone just because of their skin tone,” McDowell told KRQE. “I just want everyone to know you still have a voice, you can speak up, you still can do your part and that’s what I’m going to continue to do.” The store employee didn't comment to the station but a manager told the network that the clerk’s behavior was “unacceptable.”
Clerk Calls Cops on New Mexico Student For Being 'Arrogant and Black' - The Daily Beast
Ten months without power: the Puerto Ricans still without electricity | World news | The Guardian
Almost a year after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island’s ailing power infrastructure, the Ruiz family is one of 1,000 still off the grid
Diana Vera-Maldonado, Jose Ruiz Gonzalez and their children in front of their house with the disconnected power line. Photograph: Angel Valentin for the Guardian
They have eaten by candlelight for the past 10 months, powerless and isolated.
Their small home, with its wooden walls and tin roof, nestled high up in the hills of Utuado municipality, somehow survived Hurricane Maria without a scratch. Most others in the surrounding area of this mountainous region were swept apart by the wind. But the hurricane’s raw strength last September didn’t leave everything on their property unscathed. It uprooted a mango tree a few metres down their steep pathway, which crashed onto a pylon that had brought electricity up the slope for 23 years and cut this family of four off from the grid for almost a year.
They were among the remaining 1,000 households in Puerto Rico – almost all living in poorer, remote communities – without electricity in July after Maria practically knocked out the island’s entire ailing power infrastructure...
Ten months without power: the Puerto Ricans still without electricity | World news | The Guardian:
Almost a year after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island’s ailing power infrastructure, the Ruiz family is one of 1,000 still off the grid
Oliver LaughlandOliver Laughland in Utado, Puerto Rico
@oliverlaughlandWed 8 Aug 2018 06.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 8 Aug 2018 22.04 EDTShares3025 Diana Ivelisse Vera Maldonado, Jose Ruiz Gonzalez, and their children in front of their house with the disconnected power line. Diana Vera-Maldonado, Jose Ruiz Gonzalez and their children in front of their house with the disconnected power line. Photograph: Angel Valentin for the GuardianThey have eaten by candlelight for the past 10 months, powerless and isolated.
Their small home, with its wooden walls and tin roof, nestled high up in the hills of Utuado municipality, somehow survived Hurricane Maria without a scratch. Most others in the surrounding area of this mountainous region were swept apart by the wind. But the hurricane’s raw strength last September didn’t leave everything on their property unscathed. It uprooted a mango tree a few metres down their steep pathway, which crashed onto a pylon that had brought electricity up the slope for 23 years and cut this family of four off from the grid for almost a year.
They were among the remaining 1,000 households in Puerto Rico – almost all living in poorer, remote communities – without electricity in July after Maria practically knocked out the island’s entire ailing power infrastructure.
Wednesday, August 08, 2018
The Day Donald Trump Told Us There Was Attempted Collusion with Russia | The New Yorker
"Earlier on Sunday, Trump wrote another tweet, one that repeated a common refrain: journalists are the enemy of the people. “I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People,” it read. In a way, he did provide a great service. He allowed us to move away from a no-longer-relevant debate about whether or not he and his campaign had done anything wrong. Our nation can now focus on another question: What do we do when a President has openly admitted to attempted collusion, lying, and a coverup?"
The Day Donald Trump Told Us There Was Attempted Collusion with Russia | The New Yorker
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