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"Personnel is policy."

-- Morton Blackwell

News and Opinion

Donald Trump May Select an Architect of Bush’s Torture Program to Run CIA

Donald Trump may select Jose Rodriguez, one of the primary architects of the George W. Bush torture program, to run the Central Intelligence Agency, according to a law firm with close ties to Trump.

Rodriguez, the former director of the National Clandestine Service, helped developed the CIA black sites, secret prisons operated in foreign countries where interrogators used a range of torture tactics, including the use of “waterboarding,” the simulated drowning technique once used by the Khmer Rouge and Nazi agents to glean information from detainees. ...

Rodriguez is unapologetic about his role in the program, telling 60 Minutes that “we did the right thing for the right reason,” even if it meant “going to the border of legality.”

Rodriguez not only crafted the Bush torture program, but played a key role in the cover up. Following revelations of the effort, Rodriguez worked directly to get rid of the evidence and destroyed 92 video tapes revealing the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.

In destroying the tapes, Rodriguez claimed that he was simply protecting agents in the field from reprisals from terrorists. But as one declassified email noted, Rodriguez was in fact concerned about public backlash from the brutal visuals. “Heat from destroying is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into [the] public domain — he said that out of context, they would make us look terrible; it would be ‘devastating’ to us,” the email noted.

A White Nationalist & Anti-Semite in the Oval Office: Trump Taps Breitbart's Bannon as Top Aide

Stephen Bannon and Reince Priebus to lead Trump's White House

Donald Trump has named Reince Priebus as his White House chief of staff, rewarding a loyalist to his party and its long-serving chairman by making him his top aide in the Oval Office. But he also named Steve Bannon, the head of his campaign and of the far-right website Breitbart, as his “chief strategist and senior counselor”.

The statement announcing Trump’s decision named Bannon first, despite the vague title of his role. It said he and Priebus would work as “equal partners”. ...

The White House chief of staff is considered one of the most powerful positions in Washington, charged with helping the president in almost every task and operating the complicated machinery of government.

Bannon stands on the far right of the party, far from Priebus’s dedication to fiscal issues over social ones. A former Goldman Sachs executive and early investor in the sitcom Seinfeld, Bannon has in recent years headed Breitbart News, which has been accused by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of antisemitism, and whose stories regularly traffic in racist and sexist stereotypes and conspiracy theories. ...

Neither of the appointees has served in elected office, although Priebus, 44, has worked in government since 2004 and as Republican National Committee chairman since 2011.

There is lots of good information in this article, it's worth a read.

Who Will Be President Trump’s Dr. Strangelove?

John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, emphasized the raw power of the NSC in a four-page staffing memo that he sent to President-elect Obama in 2008. “The White House really has two chiefs of staff,” Podesta wrote: the actual chief of staff and the national security adviser, who runs the NSC on the president’s behalf. The memo was among the hacked Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks in the run-up to the election.

Evidence of the NSC’s vast, opaque powers runs through postwar presidential history. As President Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger cemented his access to the Oval Office and outmaneuvered his rival, Secretary of State William Rogers, eventually taking Rogers’s job. Under President George W. Bush, the National Security Council was discussing the possibility of invading Iraq as early as July 2001, at the suggestion of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

It seems unlikely that a President Trump would invest anyone with the kind of trust held by Kissinger or Rumsfeld. Trump burned through a number of high-level campaign staff during the months leading up to the election, and the only consistent members of his inner circle are his immediate family. ...

“The president is the key person,” said David Rothkopf, the CEO and editor of Foreign Policy and the author of a book on the history of the NSC. “Trump has no experience dealing with the various agencies in question, nor with the White House apparatus. He has essentially no experience with anybody in the national security community. There’s going to be a kind of battle — Who’s going to teach him national security? Who’s going to show him the right way to run a meeting, how to delegate, how to use the NSC, how to use the agencies? If his professor is Trump himself, who doesn’t know anything, that’s one thing. If it’s [former Defense Intelligence Agency director and Trump adviser] Michael Flynn, a deranged maniac, that’s something else.”

Commander-In-Chief Donald Trump Will Have Terrifying Powers. Thanks, Obama.

In the years after the 9/11 terror attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal adviser David Addington dramatically expanded the powers of the presidency, asserting the unilateral right in wartime to ignore legal limits on things like torture and government eavesdropping. Congressional Democrats generally caved, but made a few efforts to push back.

The Democrats went silent on executive overreach when Obama was elected, however.

When the New York Times revealed Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, 60 percent of registered Democrats thought the program was “unacceptable.” But after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a dramatically larger surveillance apparatus in 2013, a 61 percent of Democrats said the opposite — presumably because they trusted the man in charge.

The Obama administration has counted on that trust repeatedly. When defending the drone program in 2012, instead of referencing its legal standards, administration officials reassured the New York Times that Obama is “a student of the writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,” and that CIA director John Brennan is like “a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”

After eight years of trusting the President with expanding military power, liberals must now reckon with the fact that Obama will pass the same capabilities to a man who has proposed killing terrorists’ innocent family members, who has said he would do “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” and who has suggested dipping bullets in pigs’ blood is sound counterterrorism strategy.

U.S. Fingerprints on Attacks Obliterating Yemen’s Economy

The Saudi-led coalition has bombed Yemen for the last 19 months, trying to oust a rebel group aligned with Iran that took control of the capital, Sana, in 2014. The Saudis want to restore the country’s exiled president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who led an internationally recognized government more aligned with its interests.
But instead of defeating the rebels, the campaign has sunk into a grinding stalemate, systematically obliterating Yemen’s already bare-bones economy. The coalition has destroyed a wide variety of civilian targets that critics say have no clear link to the rebels. ...

Publicly, the United States has kept its distance from the war, but its decades-old alliance with Saudi Arabia, underpinned by tens of billions of dollars in weapons sales, has left American fingerprints on the air campaign.

Many strikes are carried out by pilots trained by the United States, who fly American-made jets that are refueled in the air by American planes. And Yemenis often find the remains of American-made munitions, as they did in the ruins after a strike that killed more than 100 mourners at a funeral last month.

Graffiti on walls across Sana reads: “America is killing the Yemeni people.” ...

The sweeping destruction of civilian infrastructure has led analysts and aid workers to conclude that hitting Yemen’s economy is part of the coalition’s strategy.

“The economic dimension of this war has become a tactic,” said Jamie McGoldrick, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator for Yemen. “It is all consistent — the port, the bridges, the factories. They are getting destroyed, and it is to put pressure on the politics.” ...

The destruction in Yemen could cripple its economy long into the future, and it is unclear how the country will rebuild. ...

“For Saudi Arabia, we are all Houthis,” said Haroon al-Sadi of the state-owned Amran Cement Factory, which once employed 1,500 people before it was bombed twice.

Plant workers showed us the remains of munitions they had collected, including pieces of at least one CBU-105, a cluster bomb unit that contains 10 high-explosive submunitions. They are manufactured by Textron Defense Systems of Rhode Island.

Trump Likely to End US Backing of Syria Rebels, May Back Assad

Trump revealed in an interview on Friday that he fully expects to end the US aid to “moderate” rebels in Syria, saying that the US “have no idea who these people are,” and insisting that the focus of the war should be on ISIS, not on starting a fight with Syria and Russia.

The debate between the war on ISIS and the war on Assad is one that’s been raging in the Obama Administration for years, with the CIA and State Department often seeking to move away from the ISIS conflict and toward the war of regime change. The Pentagon was seen leaning the other way, toward fighting ISIS, and Trump is also clearly on that side.

Syria’s state media is even going so far as to say that they expect Trump will try to come to some sort of “understanding” with Russia that would see the US entirely move out of the rebellion business and toward targeting ISIS, even if it is to the benefit of Assad.

Julian Assange faces Swedish prosecutor in London over rape accusation

A senior Swedish prosecutor has begun interviewing Julian Assange at Ecuador’s embassy in London, six years after he was accused of rape by a woman in Stockholm. ...

Ingrid Isgren, Sweden’s deputy chief prosecutor, arrived at the small central London embassy at 9.30am on Monday, accompanied by another woman. ... Three days have been set aside for the interview, which follows years of legal and diplomatic wrangling between Sweden and Ecuador.

According to the arrangements agreed by the two countries, the questioning will be carried out by an Ecuadorean prosecutor, putting questions that have already been submitted by the Swedish prosecution authority.

Isgren will be able to ask for clarification of Assange’s answers, but cannot put fresh questions to him. The interview, which will be conducted with the aid of translators, will then be transcribed and sent to the Swedes.

Prosecutors have said they will seek to take a DNA sample from Assange, if he agrees.

Colombian government and Farc reach new peace deal

A new peace deal reached between the Colombian government and leftist Farc guerrillas aims to broaden support after voters last month narrowly rejected an original accord to end more than 50 years of conflict. ...

Although the text of the new agreement was not immediately published, the president, Juan Manuel Santos, laid out certain changes in a televised speech. Some are little more than clarifications of the often-vague language of the text. Other modifications are more substantial.

Under the new agreement, Farc commits to declare and hand over all their assets, which will be used for reparations to victims of the conflict, a provision not included in the first accord and demanded by leaders of the no vote.

Many Colombians who rejected the deal said they did so because they wanted to see guerrillas behind bars for the thousands of kidnappings and killings they were responsible for. The new agreement does not include jail time for former rebels but better defines the kinds of alternative punishment they will face under a special tribunal that will prosecute war crimes, according to Santos.

Critics had also balked at the idea of convicted criminals being able to hold public office. That provision remains unaltered in the new deal. ... It is not clear whether Santos will risk a new plebiscite to ratify the agreement or ask congress to approve it but even before the new text was published critics tweeted their objections.

Israeli ministers vote in favour of legalising outposts

The Israeli government has set itself on a collision course with international opinion – and its own legal system – after a ministerial committee voted unilaterally in favour of a bill to “legalise” outposts Israel previously regarded as illegal.

Critics say that if the proposed bill passes into law it will allow the “theft” of any Palestinian-owned land, while others, including those on the right, say it endangers Israel’s international standing.

The vote by the ministerial committee for legislation on Sunday evening came despite the bill being opposed by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, who described it as indefensible.

While all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem are regarded as illegal by most of the international community, outposts built by hardline settlers without Israeli government approval have also been treated as illegal by Israel.

The opposition leader, Isaac Herzog, said the proposed legislation was a “serious stain on Israel law books, because it authorises theft and robbery. There is no precedent, nothing like it, in which the Israeli government authorised a law that allows taking land from private people.”

Trump to Seek ‘Ultimate Deal’ Between Israel, Palestinians

Despite top figures in Israel’s far-right government seeing his election as the end of the peace process, President-elect Donald Trump is talking about his serious interest in the challenge of trying to reach “the deal that can’t be made.”

During the campaign, Trump had presented his experience as a deal-maker as a major boost for making a push at peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, fueling considerable disquiet during the Republican primary for promising to approach the talks as a neutral broker.

There has been considerable split both in the expectations from outside of the Trump campaign on what he will bring to the peace process, and also within, as Trump’s campaign aides within Israel certainly didn’t do anything to harm the far-right’s impression that he’d roll over and let them do whatever they want.

Hundreds of thousands take to the streets to demand that President Park resigns

Responding to public outcry, South Korean prosecutors will question President Park Geun-hye this week about alleged political corruption. The move comes after hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of Seoul for a third weekend in a row.

The protesters are calling for Park’s resignation after it was revealed that she shared secret documents with her longtime advisor Choi Soon-sil, even though the religious leader didn’t hold an official position in the government. Choi, who has denied South Korean prosecutors’ charges of abuse of power and fraud, is also accused of using her influence to direct millions of dollars in donations to her own foundations. ...

Park, who became the country’s first woman president when she began her five-year term in February 2013, has admitted sharing some documents with Choi and has now publicly apologized twice. Yet with her approval rating plummeting to 5 percent, it’s clear that the people of South Korea want her to step down.

This is why South Korea is a democracy pic.twitter.com/KsftEkVQ23

— Daniel Tudor 다니엘 튜더 (@danielrtudor) November 12, 2016

Did you just hear the thump of a shoe dropping?

China threatens to cut sales of iPhones and US cars if 'naive' Trump pursues trade war

US president-elect Donald Trump would be a “naive” fool to launch an all-out trade war against China, a Communist party-controlled newspaper has claimed.

During the acrimonious race for the White House Trump repeatedly lashed out at China, vowing to punish Beijing with “defensive” 45% tariffs on Chinese imports and to officially declare it a currency manipulator. ...

“If Trump wrecks Sino-US trade, a number of US industries will be impaired. Finally the new president will be condemned for his recklessness, ignorance and incompetence,” the newspaper said in an editorial.

The Global Times claimed any new tariffs would trigger immediate “countermeasures” and “tit-for-tat approach” from Beijing.

“A batch of Boeing orders will be replaced by Airbus. US auto and iPhone sales in China will suffer a setback, and US soybean and maize imports will be halted. China can also limit the number of Chinese students studying in the US.”

“Making things difficult for China politically will do him no good,” the newspaper warned.

German coalition backs foreign minister for presidency

The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is likely to take over as the country’s president early next year after securing cross-party backing from Angela Merkel’s conservatives, a move expected to trigger a significant reshuffle at the top of German politics.

The parties that form Germany’s coalition government on Monday agreed to put forward the senior Social Democrat politician as their candidate to take up the presidency from 12 February, ending weeks of wrangling between the centre-right and the centre-left.

Steinmeier, a former SPD party leader, vice-chancellor in Merkel’s second coalition government and runner-up in the 2009 elections, has consistently received some of the highest popularity ratings in German politics but was opposed as a candidate by the chancellor until she struggled to field her own candidate.

Merkel said on Monday that Steinmeier was “excellently suited” to the post. “At a time when there’s unrest and instability around the world, sending a signal of stability - and so the conservatives supporting Steinmeier’s candidacy - is in my view right and important,” she said.

While the role is mostly ceremonial, German presidents have some influence in setting the tone on foreign policy as well as retaining powers to veto laws they believe violate the constitution.

Wall Street Heads Spin Over Trump Weighing Dimon for Treasury and Restoring Glass-Steagall

Yesterday, CNBC announced that anonymous sources had told the cable business news outlet that Trump’s advisers were considering JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon for U.S. Treasury Secretary. The rumor nugget was quickly spread by other media outlets. The likelihood is that the rumor is coming from Jamie Dimon’s hyper-charged public relations machine rather than from Trump’s closest advisers. ...

Wall Street is also in a tizzy over whether Donald Trump will make good on his promise to restore a 21st Century version of the Glass-Steagall Act which would ban banks dealing in and underwriting securities from also owning commercial banks holding taxpayer-backed insured deposits.

The Republican Party platform promised the following:

“The Dodd-Frank law, the Democrats’ legislative Godzilla, is crushing small and community banks and other lenders…We support reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which prohibits commercial banks from engaging in high-risk investment.”

... Wall Street’s main motive for repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which occurred in 1999 during the Bill Clinton presidency. Wall Street can use OPM – other people’s money, the life savings of the little guy sitting in low-earning deposit accounts – to make high-risk gambles for the bank. If the bets pay off, Jamie Dimon and his fellow Wall Street CEOs become billionaires over time. If the bets blow up the bank, as we saw at Citigroup after its CEO Sandy Weill became a billionaire from obscene bonuses and stock options, the taxpayers are forced to bail out the bank to prevent a banking panic and a run on every big bank in the country. Restoring the Glass-Steagall Act is simply about ending heads we win, tails you lose on Wall Street.

Labor movement braces for three-front battle with Trump, Congress and courts

After spending tens of millions of dollars in hopes of electing Hillary Clinton, the labor movement fears that President-elect Donald Trump, the Republican-controlled Congress and the supreme court will be hostile to labor and take numerous steps to hobble unions.

These steps can range from appointing a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that does business’s bidding to erasing an array of Obama administration regulations, including one making overtime pay available to millions more workers.

“These are going to be some challenging times,” said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which has 1.3 million members. “We’re just going to have to hunker down.”

Saunders, who is chairman of the AFL-CIO’s political committee, fears that Congress might enact a so-called national right-to-work law, which would prohibit any requirement that employees at unionized private-sector workplaces pay union fees. Saunders also worries that the supreme court – after Trump nominates a presumably conservative justice to fill the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia’s death – will rule that government employees can’t be required to pay union fees.

With the percentage of workers in unions dropping to 11.1%, Joseph McCartin, a professor of labor history at Georgetown University, predicted a further decline for labor under Trump. “The status quo in labor policy is toxic for the union movement unless the status quo is changed in a positive way,” he said. Nonunion worker-advocacy groups, such as the Restaurant Opportunities Center and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, have become increasingly effective in pressuring employers, and McCartin said a Trump NLRB might seek to change definitions so that these groups would be considered labor unions, which would subject them to stricter rules on picketing and other activities.

Trump win is no catastrophe, it's politics - Stephen Cohen

Secret Facebook groups become Trump-era activist tools: 'This is a wake-up call'

Some say they now want to run for office. Others plan to write to their local mosques to express solidarity with American Muslims and refugees, or to start preparing for the midterm elections in Congress. They are organizing in secret Facebook groups they consider safe spaces with tongue-in-cheek titles like Pantsuit Nation and Bitches For Hillary – not just to mourn but to mobilize.

“This is a huge wake-up call,” said Meghan Myszkowski, 36, of Donald Trump’s win last week.

Myszkowski, a single mother and who runs a social media agency in Pasadena, California, is a member of several invitation-only Facebook groups where disappointed voters – particularly women – are pledging to ignite a novel liberal comeback in the US.

Pantsuit Nation was started during the Democratic primary and now has 3 million members, all by invitation only. A new group, Still Stronger Together, was created last Wednesday, just 12 hours after the election result became clear, and already has more than 6,000 members.

It specifically urges members to suggest ideas for fighting back against what they fear could be a wild conservative agenda from President-elect Donald Trump.

“Liberals were in an echo chamber and not listening to people outside the bubble. I want to start organizing for people to donate to Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the National Organization for Women. A friend of mine has started designing shirts with the proceeds going to these groups and we are talking about it in the secret groups. It’s a start, at least,” Myszkowski said.

Trump doubles down on promises to deport millions of people

Donald Trump doubled down on his tough talk on immigration during an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” set to air Sunday night, saying he plans to deport as many as 3 million undocumented immigrants.

“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers. … Probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,” Trump said. “We’re getting them out of our country. They’re here illegally.”

On the campaign trail, Trump often regaled his audience with tales of murders and rapes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. He often cited a statistic from the U.S. Sentencing Commission showing undocumented immigrants accounted for 9 percent of federal prison sentences for murder in 2013 but were 3.5 percent of the population.

Fact-checkers called Trump’s use of this stat misleading because so few cases are handled by the federal court system. Nine percent of federal murder cases in 2013 was a total of eight homicides.

Protesting Trump’s America: Nationwide Demos Continue Against Racism, Xenophobia & Islamophobia

Protests against Trump continue in cities around the country

Protests over Donald Trump’s presidential victory raged for a fourth day on Saturday in cities across the United States, from New York to Portland to Indianapolis to Miami to Atlanta to Birmingham, Alabama.

A protest in Manhattan kicked off around noon and drew thousands of people from all backgrounds and ages, chanting slogans including “We reject the president-elect,” “Build a fence around Mike Pence,” “Not my president,” and “My body, my choice.” Protesters marched up Fifth Avenue from Union Square and then congregated behind heavily policed barriers outside Trump Tower.

Trump was reportedly inside the tower, joined by Brexiteer Nigel Farage, who had arrived from the United Kingdom to celebrate Trump’s victory. Security staff occasionally emerged on balconies and took selfies showing the hoard of protesters behind them. A law enforcement official told NBC News that, at its peak, the protest drew approximately 25,000 participants.

After the Election: Don’t Panic, Think!

The unexpected shock of Donald Trump’s victory created mass hysteria, with crowds in tears going into the streets to protest – an unprecedented reaction to an uncontested election.

This hysterical opposition is not the best basis for building the new movement needed to oppose a widely rejected political establishment.

Most of the weeping and wailing comes not from Bernie Sanders supporters, who were prepared for the worst, but from those who believed the Clinton campaign claim that Trump represents nothing but various ways to “hate” other people: sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. The response is to hate Trump. This is sterile and gets nowhere politically. ...

Washington is not about to be ruled by Nazis, but by reactionary Republicans, which are bad enough but nothing new. If Trump is better than they are on some points, that should be noted and encouraged. An effective opposition should know how to distinguish between hot air and real issues, and to judge issues on their own specific merits.

The Clinton campaign was based the “identity politics” claim to protect women and minorities from their enemy, Trump. An opposition movement based on perpetuating that claim, with emphasis on how horrible Trump must be personally, is also likely to swallow other aspects of the Clinton campaign line, notably its anti-Russian propaganda. Incited by the mainstream media, the “left” opposition risks echoing the Clintonist accusation that “dictator” Trump is too friendly with “dictator” Putin. ... And the disappointed Clintonite opposition is likely to be out in the streets not to oppose wars, but to oppose Trump’s opposition to wars, all in the name of our shared democratic humanitarian values and opposition to “dictators”.

RAI with Former Weatherman Bill Ayers

Why the Trump Protests, Like the Wisconsin Uprising, Will Fail

The massive, continuing protests against President Trump, #NotMyPresident, are not a movement and will only benefit Trump. They are an emotional tactic devoid of strategy, and one that has made Trump stronger and stronger since it was first unleashed during the Republican primaries at the beginning of 2016. ‘Trump is a racist narcissist pig, unfit to exist, much less govern,’ or so the meme goes. But despite losing the popular vote he mat slammed Hillary and the Democrat Party. The GOP scaredy cats who were fleeing him en masse he actually rescued and rose them to control both houses of Congress.

As of this writing the Trump protests have not abated, and now this smells of serious failure, the type of total and complete butt kicking that Republicans gave to the so-called Wisconsin Uprising. Almost six years after those massive protests against Governor Scott Walker over his disemboweling of the union movement in Wisconsin, after years of big protests with tens of thousands in the streets and a recall election attempt, the GOP is stronger than ever in the Badger State, with hegemonic control of the government in Uprising Central, Madison.

Perhaps you missed this news, because the progressive Democrat pundits, The Nation and Mother Jones crowd, are absolutely skilled at ballyhoo and PR for the Blue Revolution, but completely unable to admit failure and analyze why the progressive Left keeps getting its heads handed to them on a plate. ...

Bernie has followed the lead of his fellow Vermont insurgent, Governor Howard Dean, in creating an organization called Our Revolution, Bernie’s new brand name for his former Feel the Bern movement, and apparently still the title of his forthcoming book. It joins Dean’s lobby group Democracy for America, Move On, and a handful of other clicktivist Democratic Party front groups, in trying to lead their Party back to the glory days of bygone eras that few alive even lived through! And guess what, this political revolution will absolutely rely on the funding of billionaires and multi-millionaires, their foundations and dark money groups, whose market positions have done very well, thank you, since The Donald seized power. ...

So here is what the future looks like folks, but you don’t need your shades, it’s not very bright. The Trump protests are a guaranteed loser, an emotional vent that will only translate into support and sympathy for him, as the totally failed Wisconsin Uprising made Scott Walker a superhero and gave the GOP complete control in that state. As the protests subside, the progressive vultures will rise — the Our Revolution, Brand New Congress, Democracy For America, Move On professionals — a well established clique feeding together, pushing and shoving, at the same trough, blasting the same PR memes into the progressive echo chamber, building their political revolution within the Democrat Party, already working as its fronts for 2018 and 2020. Any real political revolution will continue to be short circuited by the cooptation of this crowd of self-promoting Game Changers, hacks, flacks and pundits.

Betraying Water Protectors, Obama Set to Approve Dakota Access Pipeline

Even as water protectors continued to face off against police on Friday in North Dakota, news outlets reported that the Obama administration is set to approve the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as early as Monday.

Citing "two sources familiar with the timing," Politico said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could approve a disputed easement within days, which would allow pipeline construction—on hold since September—to continue across the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux's reservation. The Standing Rock tribe is vehemently opposed to the project, saying it threatens water supplies and sacred sites. 

Amid such opposition, Politico reported, "the prospect of a Monday announcement is raising concerns that nationwide protests planned for Tuesday could turn uncivil."

"That risk of escalating tension may yet prompt the administration to postpone its decision until later in the week," the outlet continued, "to add additional safety requirements to the easement that the Army Corps of Engineers first put on hold in September—or to change course entirely." ...

The Obama administration said late Friday afternoon that no decision has been made on the disputed easement for the Dakota Access pipeline.

Donald Trump's rumored pick to head the EPA wants everyone to "love global warming"

Just hours after Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election was called for Donald Trump, a Breitbart News commentator declared, “The liberal Left just lost the ‘battle’ against climate change.” The Republican president-elect has called climate change a hoax, and now it’s reported that he may tap a man who’s proud to have placed third on Business Insider’s list of the “10 most respected global warming skeptics” to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

Pushing back against an almost unanimous chorus of scientists, Myron Ebell has provided journalists, politicians, and business with the opposing voice on global warming for years. In September, E&E News reported Ebell was Trump’s top choice to lead the EPA transition team that chooses the agency’s next chief administrator. ...

The potential pick outraged environmentalists. “It’s hard to say anything polite about Myron Ebell,” said Jamie Henn, communications director at 350.org, a grassroots climate organization active in more than 188 countries. “If you look up ‘climate denier’ in the dictionary, his photo is right there next to it.” ...

Like many climate skeptics, Ebell has been inconsistent on the issue, sometimes denying its existence, other times downplaying its importance in relation to industry’s needs. In 2004, he told BBC’s Today Programme that climate change was a European Union-led hoax, designed to weaken the U.S. economy. In 2007, he told Vanity Fair that “everyone knows CO2 is a greenhouse gas, [and] all things being equal, if you add CO2 to the atmosphere, you’ll get a little warming.” He has also urged the public to “love global warming” and embrace milder winters, implying that though climate change may be happening, people shouldn’t be too worried.

2016 will be the hottest year on record, UN says

2016 will very likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row, according to the UN. It means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been this century.

The scorching temperatures around the world, and the extreme weather they drive, mean the impacts of climate change on people are coming sooner and with more ferocity than expected, according to scientists.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, published on Monday at the global climate summit in Morocco, found the global temperature in 2016 is running 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. This is perilously close to to the 1.5C target included as an aim of the Paris climate agreement last December.

The El Niño weather phenomenon helped push temperatures even higher in early 2016 but the global warming caused by the greenhouse gas emissions from human activities remains the strongest factor.

“Another year. Another record,” said WMO secretary-general, Petteri Taalas. “The extra heat from the powerful El Niño event has disappeared. The heat from global warming will continue.”

As U.S. Elects Global Warming Denier, Thousands March in Marrakech Calling for Climate Justice

Trump seeking quickest way to quit Paris climate agreement, says report

Donald Trump is looking at quick ways of withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement in defiance of widening international backing for the plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Reuters has reported.

Since the US president-elect was chosen, governments ranging from China to small island states have reaffirmed support for the 2015 Paris agreement at 200-nation climate talks running until 18 November in Marrakesh, Morocco.

But, according to Reuters, a source in the Trump transition team said the victorious Republican, who has called global warming a hoax, was considering ways to bypass a theoretical four-year procedure for leaving the accord. ...

Alternatives were to send a letter withdrawing from a 1992 convention that is the parent treaty of the Paris agreement, voiding US involvement in both in a year’s time, or to issue a presidential order simply deleting the US signature from the Paris accord, the source told Reuters.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump’s triumph

We are living in a depression - that's why Trump took the White House

The Death Penalty Won Big on Election Day, But the Devil Is In the Details

Reckoning with a Trump Presidency and the Elite Democrats Who Helped Deliver It

The Establishment Strikes Back

Trump’s Decent Willing Executioners, Liberally Explained

Surveillance Self-Defense Against the Trump Administration

Chief Supreme Court Justice Roberts Rules for Protecting Corporations

'Like living on a waking dragon': New Zealanders count cost of earthquake

Canada's Indigenous communities face a clean drinking water crisis

10 Cartoonists React to Trump Winning the Election

A Little Night Music

Eddie Burns - When I Get Drunk

Eddie Burns - Gangster Blues

Eddie Burns - Hard Hearted Woman

Eddie Burns - Treat Me Like I Treat You

Eddie Burns - Hello Miss Jessie Lee

Eddie Burns - You better cut that out

Eddie Burns - Sunnyland Blues

Eddie Burns - Where Did You Stay Last Night

Eddie Burns - The Thing To Do

Eddie Burns - Mean and Evil

Eddie 'Guitar' Burns - Do it if you wanna