 24 February 20
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24 February 20
Frank Rich | The Intelligence Community's Bill Barr Moment
Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "This is another Barr moment, with the new acting intelligence director, the utterly unqualified loyalist hack Richard Grenell, serving as a placeholder in that job, much as the utterly unqualified loyalist hack Matthew Whitaker did as acting attorney general until Trump recruited Barr."
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Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "This is another Barr moment, with the new acting intelligence director, the utterly unqualified loyalist hack Richard Grenell, serving as a placeholder in that job, much as the utterly unqualified loyalist hack Matthew Whitaker did as acting attorney general until Trump recruited Barr."
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Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Sanders Leads in 3 Key Battleground States, MI, PA and WI
Reader Supported News
Excerpt: "The Sanders campaign loves to say that his status as an Independent gives him a leg up in the battleground states. These numbers seem to bear that out."
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Reader Supported News
Excerpt: "The Sanders campaign loves to say that his status as an Independent gives him a leg up in the battleground states. These numbers seem to bear that out."
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a campaign rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders at Venice Beach, Calif. (photo: Monica Almeida/Reuters)
Ocasio-Cortez's Progressive PAC Makes First Round of Endorsements
Christopher Wilson, Yahoo! News
Wilson writes: "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced Friday her political action committee's first round of endorsements, which will include two progressive candidates challenging sitting Democratic members of Congress."
Christopher Wilson, Yahoo! News
Wilson writes: "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced Friday her political action committee's first round of endorsements, which will include two progressive candidates challenging sitting Democratic members of Congress."
“It’s time to elect a progressive majority in Congress accountable to strong, grassroots movements that push support for issues like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, racial justice and more,” said Ocasio-Cortez Friday, announcing the support of seven women via her Courage to Change PAC.
When the freshman lawmaker from New York announced in January she was starting her own PAC dedicated to electing progressive legislators, she said it would refuse to pay dues to the House’s campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). The congresswoman also said the PAC would support incumbents who vote for progressive causes, although the first round of seven endorsements all went to challengers.
Contributions will be used to make early investments in progressive challengers that can even the playing field against established incumbents, and bolster progressive leaders in Congress who take difficult but righteous stands,” reads the PAC’s website. Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign told the New York Times the organization had raised more than $300,000 in January.
Ocasio-Cortez won her seat representing parts of Queens and the Bronx by successfully downing Joe Crowley, a member of the Democratic leadership, in a 2018 primary. In her first year in office she proved an adept fundraiser, bringing in over $5 million to her campaign through grassroots donations aided by her massive online following, with more than 6 million Twitter followers.
The PAC could cause conflict with Democratic leadership, who went as far as creating a blacklist of campaign staffers who work for primary challengers to Democratic incumbents. One name on the Ocasio-Cortez PAC’s list of initial endorsements is Jessica Cisneros, a 26-year-old attorney challenging Rep. Henry Cuellar, a conservative Democrat, in southeast Texas.
Cisneros has earned the endorsements of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and DCCC Chairwoman Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois have supported Cuellar. That primary will be decided on March 3 as part of the massive Super Tuesday slate.
Another Courage to Change endorsement that could butt against Democratic leadership is of Marie Newman, who’s challenging Rep. Dan Lipinski for a Chicago-area seat. Lipinski is the only remaining anti-abortion Democrat left in the party’s congressional caucus, and Newman came within 2,200 votes of unseating him in 2018. Pelosi endorsed Lipinski in 2018, but the leadership support might be shifting in advance of the March 17 primary, as Bustos pulled out of a Lipinski fundraiser last year. Newman earned the endorsement of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot earlier this month.
Also in the first round of endorsements is Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, who is running in a Senate primary in Texas against the establishment choice of M.J. Hegar. The winner of that contest will face off against Sen. John Cornyn in November.
The PAC also backed Kara Eastman for Congress in Nebraska, where she defeated the DCCC-backed candidate in the 2018 primary before losing narrowly in the general election to GOP Rep. Don Bacon.
Her other endorsements were all for House races: Teresa Fernandez in New Mexico, Georgette Gómez in California and Samelys López in New York. In this first round of support, Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse the challengers attempting to primary Reps. Richard Neal of Massachusetts or Jerry Nadler and Eliot Engel of New York, all chairmen of powerful House committees.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson attends a 2016 awards breakfast in Washington for pro bono counsel. (photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
Judge Swats Down Roger Stone's Effort to Disqualify Her as Publicity Stunt
Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post
Weiner writes: "The federal judge who oversaw Roger Stone's trial and sentenced him last week to 40 months in prison dismissed his demand that she be taken off the case as a baseless smear on Sunday."
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Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post
Weiner writes: "The federal judge who oversaw Roger Stone's trial and sentenced him last week to 40 months in prison dismissed his demand that she be taken off the case as a baseless smear on Sunday."
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Scout carries a campaign sign following the closing of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. (photo: Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images)
Let the Boy Scouts Die Out, Already
Matt Farwell, The New Republic
Farwell writes: "I was an active Boy Scout as a teenager because I had strong motivation: getting myself the hell out of the Scouting movement. It was a cultural rite and a family thing, one I hated-but the rule was that I couldn't leave until I'd reached the highest rank."
Matt Farwell, The New Republic
Farwell writes: "I was an active Boy Scout as a teenager because I had strong motivation: getting myself the hell out of the Scouting movement. It was a cultural rite and a family thing, one I hated-but the rule was that I couldn't leave until I'd reached the highest rank."
EXCERPT:
The whole Scouting organization was rotten, that’s been crystal clear to me since then; it seemed confirmed when disaster artist Robert Gates left the BSA presidency in 2016. When your outfit is abandoned by a Beltway maven who failed to predict the Soviet Union’s fall as an intel analyst, palled around with Iran-Contra conspirators as a CIA deputy director, and oversaw America’s post-9/11 wars of choice as the secretary of defense—twice—you know there’s some sinister shit afoot. Rats are always the first ones off a sinking ship.
The Boy Scouts have long known about the predators within their midst: Their own closely guarded “Perversion Files” tracked sexual abuse cases from 1944 to 2016. The numbers are staggering: 12,000 alleged victims—all children and teenagers—abused by 7,800 separately identified Scoutmasters. Think about those numbers, coming from an organization that held itself up as a pillar of American morality. That’s at least 72 years of horrifying, intimate abuse, hidden and concealed by an organization that taught its charges to “Do a good turn daily” while producing enough victims to fill an Army division. Many of these victims had no safe place to turn—as the new documentary The Church and the First Estate painfully shows. The film follows the story of Adam Steed, who was told by both his Scout and church leaders to forgive his abuser and forget the abuse but went to the police instead. The Scoutmaster accused by Steed admitted to molesting 24 other boys, ultimately receiving five months in jail and 15 years’ parole. It boggles the mind.
All this was going on while the Scouts fought unsuccessful battles in court to keep barring openly gay men from serving in their ranks. Meanwhile, the adult Scouting executives were making out like bandits—in 2009, a Charity Navigator report showed that the CEO of BSA was one of the top five earners in the nonprofit space, taking home a cool $1,577,600 in annual salary. The long con of Scouting paid off, until it didn’t. The glut of allegations and evidence is overwhelming—by the BSA’s count, it faces 275 abuse lawsuits across the U.S., plus thousands more additional claims, above and beyond the ones it’s already settled to the tune of $150 million it has paid in settlements since 2017. Even with $1.4 billion in assets, the organization faces so many credible abuse claims that its insurance policies are refusing to pay out.
Though I didn’t have the language to express it in my youth, I discovered that the Boy Scouts of America was full of men like Bob Gates: self-righteous, well-scrubbed creeps who kept their external aura of civic virtue shiny, obscuring the grubby evil in the institutions and traditions they oversaw. Reading through the lawsuits against the organization, it becomes clear that the BSA was an organization by predators for predators, optimized to groom and produce more predators. We should learn lessons from the victimized children’s stories, about accountability and justice: Judging from this preemptive bankruptcy, I doubt we ever will.
Malaysia's Prime Minister has also reportedly resigned from his party, Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia. (photo: Lim Huey Teng/Reuters)
Malaysia's Mahathir Submits Resignation to King
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has announced his resignation but was asked to stay on as interim leader by the country's monarch."
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Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has announced his resignation but was asked to stay on as interim leader by the country's monarch."
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The Rio San Antonio, in the headwaters basin of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, will lose federal protections under a new rule. (photo: Bob Wick/BLM California)
Trump Admin's Clean Water Rollback Will Hit Some States Hard
Tara Lohan, The Revelator
Lohan writes: "The Santa Fe River starts high in the forests of New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo mountains and flows 46 miles to the Rio Grande. Along the way it plays important roles for wildlife, irrigation, recreation and other cultural uses, and provides 40 percent of the water supply for the city of Santa Fe's 85,000 residents."
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Tara Lohan, The Revelator
Lohan writes: "The Santa Fe River starts high in the forests of New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo mountains and flows 46 miles to the Rio Grande. Along the way it plays important roles for wildlife, irrigation, recreation and other cultural uses, and provides 40 percent of the water supply for the city of Santa Fe's 85,000 residents."
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