14 February 20
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13 February 20
The Night Socialism Went Mainstream
Russell Berman, The Atlantic
Berman writes: "It has taken a single week for Senator Bernie Sanders to achieve a distinction that eluded him for the entirety of his underdog campaign four years ago: The 78-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont is now, at least for the moment, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president."
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Russell Berman, The Atlantic
Berman writes: "It has taken a single week for Senator Bernie Sanders to achieve a distinction that eluded him for the entirety of his underdog campaign four years ago: The 78-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont is now, at least for the moment, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president."
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Then-chief of staff John Kelly at a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on July 31, 2017. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Ex-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly Speaks Out Against Trump
Edward Helmore, Guardian UK
Helmore writes: "The former White House chief of staff John Kelly has backed the fired impeachment inquiry witness Alexander Vindman, launching a spirited defense of the former National Security Council official and criticizing the Trump administration across a range of issues."
Edward Helmore, Guardian UK
Helmore writes: "The former White House chief of staff John Kelly has backed the fired impeachment inquiry witness Alexander Vindman, launching a spirited defense of the former National Security Council official and criticizing the Trump administration across a range of issues."
Kelly defended fired impeachment inquiry witness Alexander Vindman and criticized Trump’s policies
he former White House chief of staff John Kelly has backed the fired impeachment inquiry witness Alexander Vindman, launching a spirited defense of the former National Security Council official and criticizing the Trump administration across a range of issues.
Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, told an audience at Drew University in New Jersey on Wednesday evening that Vindman was simply following the training he had received as a soldier when he flagged his concerns about Donald Trump’s phone conversation with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, last summer.
“He did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave,” Kelly said. “He went and told his boss what he just heard.” Kelly’s comments were first reported in the Atlantic.
Vindman, a Ukraine policy specialist, complied with a congressional subpoena and spoke out about hearing Trump tie US military aid for Ukraine to an agreement by Zelinskiy to investigate Joe Biden, Kelly said.
Trump responded abrasively, tweeting: “He came in with a bang, went out with a whimper, but like so many X’s, he misses the action & just can’t keep his mouth shut, which he actually has a military and legal obligation to do.”
He added: “His incredible wife, Karen, who I have a lot of respect for, once pulled me aside & said strongly that John respects you greatly. When we are no longer here, he will only speak well of you.’ Wrong!”
In his address, Kelly spoke of Trump’s Ukrainian phone call.
“Through the Obama administration up until that phone call, the policy of the US was militarily to support Ukraine in their defensive fight against … the Russians. And so, when the president said that continued support would be based on X, that essentially changed. And that’s what that guy [Vindman] was most interested in.”
But when Vindman heard Trump tell his counterpart he wanted to see the Biden family investigated, he understood he was hearing an “an illegal order”, Kelly said.
He said: “We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.”
The former chief of staff also criticized the president’s attacks on certain media outlets – which Trump has often accused of being “fake news” and sought to sideline or restrict access to the White House – saying he did not view the media as “the enemy of the people”.
“The media, in my view, and I feel very strongly about this, is not the enemy of the people. We need a free media,” he said, according to the Daily Record.
Kelly continued: “That said, you have to be careful about what you are watching and reading, because the media has taken sides. So if you only watch Fox News, because it’s reinforcing what you believe, you are not an informed citizen.”
Kelly also questioned Trump’s intervention in the case of Eddie Gallagher, the Navy Seal convicted of posing with the body of a dead Isis fighter. Trump quashed Gallagher’s demotion and then ordered the navy to drop the revocation of his special forces status, leading to the resignation of the navy secretary, Richard Spencer.
The intervention, Kelly said, “was exactly the wrong thing to do. Had I been there, I think I could have prevented it.”
Kelly said he took issue with Trump’s policies in a number of key areas. He said migrants to the US are “overwhelmingly good people” and “not all rapists” – a reference to comments Trump made about Mexican immigrants in 2015.
“In fact, they’re overwhelmingly good people,” Kelly said. “They’re not all rapists and they’re not all murderers. And it’s wrong to characterize them that way. I disagreed with the president a number of times.”
Trump’s border wall, he added, doesn’t need to extend “from sea to shining sea”.
Kelly’s 75-minute address also touched a number of international topics. He said he considered the administration’s efforts to convince North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to abandon the country’s nuclear weapons program hopeless.
Kelly said: “I never did think Kim would do anything other than play us for a while, and he did that fairly effectively.”
Asked why he had accepted the White House position, Kelly said he didn’t know Trump before 2016, but had been “fascinated – not necessarily in a good way – but fascinated as to what that election meant to our country”.
When he was approached to become secretary of homeland security, he said, his wife urged him to accept the position. “I, frankly, think he needs you and people like you,” she told him.
Michael Bloomberg. (photo: Monica Sschipper/Getty)
Mike Bloomberg Can't Hide How He Helped Terrorize Black People With Stop and Frisk Policing
Kali Holloway, The Daily Beast
Holloway writes: "Weighing the relative racism of different candidates in the hopes of arriving at the choice as to who will do the least damage is nothing new to black voters. In fact, it's a big reason why Mike Bloomberg and his bottomless coffers have been attracting black folks concerned first and foremost with ousting Donald Trump, who became president by appealing to white resentment."
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Kali Holloway, The Daily Beast
Holloway writes: "Weighing the relative racism of different candidates in the hopes of arriving at the choice as to who will do the least damage is nothing new to black voters. In fact, it's a big reason why Mike Bloomberg and his bottomless coffers have been attracting black folks concerned first and foremost with ousting Donald Trump, who became president by appealing to white resentment."
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US troops prepare to board a transport plane. (photo: Getty)
Senate Paves Way to Limit Trump's War Powers After Killing Cotton Amendment
Marianne Levine and Andrew Desiderio, Politico
Excerpt: "The Senate on Thursday passed a resolution limiting President Donald Trump's authority to attack Iran without congressional approval, delivering the president another bipartisan foreign-policy rebuke and flexing its constitutional power over military actions."
Marianne Levine and Andrew Desiderio, Politico
Excerpt: "The Senate on Thursday passed a resolution limiting President Donald Trump's authority to attack Iran without congressional approval, delivering the president another bipartisan foreign-policy rebuke and flexing its constitutional power over military actions."
EXCERPTS;
The vote to defeat Cotton’s amendment comes as the Senate is set to vote on Kaine’s War Powers resolution on Thursday afternoon. The measure would curb military action against Iran without approval from Congress.
As written, the bill has support from at least five Senate Republicans, giving it the votes needed to pass by a simple majority. Those five Republican senators — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Todd Young of Indiana, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky — are expected to join all 47 Democrats in favor of the resolution.
“In terms of the big picture, I want to make sure this resolution passes and that Congress finally does its darn job,” Young said before casting his vote to kill the Cotton proposal.
Kaine’s resolution would require Trump to cease all hostilities targeting Iran within 30 days unless approved by Congress. The effort, spurred by the U.S. airstrike that killed Soleimani on Jan. 2, was on hold during the Senate’s three-week impeachment trial.
Colin Kaepernick was notified by the NFL on Tuesday that he will have a private workout for NFL teams in Atlanta on Saturday. He last played an NFL snap during the 2016 season. (photo: Charles Skyes/AP)
Colin Kaepernick to Release Memoir Detailing Story of 'My Evolution'
Jarrett Bell, USA Today
Bell writes: "Colin Kaepernick's voice is getting stronger. That much is clear as the former NFL quarterback plans to announce Thursday he is writing a memoir to be released this year through his newly formed company, Kaepernick Publishing, in a partnership with Audible."
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Jarrett Bell, USA Today
Bell writes: "Colin Kaepernick's voice is getting stronger. That much is clear as the former NFL quarterback plans to announce Thursday he is writing a memoir to be released this year through his newly formed company, Kaepernick Publishing, in a partnership with Audible."
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Judith Butler at home in Berkeley, Calif. (photo: Brain L. Frank/The New York Times)
Masha Gessen | Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage
Masha Gessen, The New Yorker
Gessen writes: "Judith Butler holds a peculiar place in contemporary Western culture. Like very few men and perhaps no other woman, Butler is an international celebrity academic."
Masha Gessen, The New Yorker
Gessen writes: "Judith Butler holds a peculiar place in contemporary Western culture. Like very few men and perhaps no other woman, Butler is an international celebrity academic."
EXCERPT:
One of the most striking passages in the book is about what you call “the contagious sense of the uninhibited satisfactions of sadism.” You write about the appeal of blatant and indifferent destructiveness. What did you have in mind when you wrote those phrases?
It’s unclear whether Trump is watching Netanyahu and Erdoğan, whether anyone is watching Bolsonaro, whether Bolsonaro is watching Putin, but I think there are some contagious effects. A leader can defy the laws of his own country and test to see how much power he can take. He can imprison dissenters and inflict violence on neighboring regions. He can block migrants from certain countries or religions. He can kill them at a moment’s notice. Many people are excited by this kind of exercise of power, its unchecked quality, and they want in their own lives to free up their aggressive speech and action without any checks: no shame, no legal repercussions. They have this leader who models that freedom. The sadism intensifies and accelerates.
I think, as many people do, that Trump has licensed the overt violence of white supremacy and also unleashed police violence by suspending any sense of constraint. Many people thrill to see embodied in their government leader a will to destruction that is uninhibited, invoking a kind of moral sadism as its perverse justification. It’s going to be up to us to see if people can thrill to something else.
BP Deepwater Horizon. (photo: US Coast Guard)
The Toxic Reach of Deepwater Horizon's Oil Spill Was Much Larger - and Deadlier - Than Previous Estimates, a New Study Says
Darryl Fears, The Washington Post
Fears writes: "The spread of oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was far worse than previously believed, new research has found."
Darryl Fears, The Washington Post
Fears writes: "The spread of oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was far worse than previously believed, new research has found."
EXCERPTS:
In their study, published Wednesday in Science, the researchers dubbed it “invisible oil,” concentrated below the water’s surface and toxic enough to destroy 50 percent of the marine life it encountered. Current estimates show the 210 million gallons of oil released by the damaged BP Deepwater Horizon Macondo well spread out over the equivalent of 92,500 miles.
But the oil’s reach was 30 percent larger than that estimate, the new study says. “Oil in these concentrations for surface water extended beyond the satellite footprint and fishery closures, potentially exterminating a vast amount of planktonic marine organisms across the domain,” the researchers wrote. The findings show that the government’s understanding of how oil flowed from Deepwater Horizon was limited and that it underestimated the extent to which marine life was killed or poisoned by toxic crude.
The study comes as the Trump administration is preparing to finalize a sweeping proposal that would allow the oil and gas industry to buy leases in every part of the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans, in addition to a leasing expansion in the Gulf. The administration’s bid to issue permits to several companies to map the Atlantic sea floor to search for oil and gas deposits has been stalled for more than a year by a federal court challenge.
In addition to the largest expansion of lease permits in American history, the administration has rolled back oil platform safety regulations meant to protect workers and avoid another event such as the fatal Deepwater Horizon explosion.
The April 20, 2010 Deepwater catastrophe was triggered by a blast that killed 11 workers and sank the oil platform. Thick, toxic oil billowed from a damaged well for five months off the Louisiana coast before workers finally managed to seal it. Spreading with squid-like tentacles, the oil reached Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
Although the oil was lighter in concentration than oil on the surface, it was extremely toxic, Berenshtein said. “Basically, when you have oil combined with ultraviolet light it becomes two times more toxic than oil alone. Oil becomes toxic at very low concentrations."
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