Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago bluesman Big Smokey Smothers. Enjoy!

"You're beautiful, more beautiful than me
You're honorable, more honorable than me
Loyal to the Bank of America

You're sharpening stones, walking on coals
To improve your business acumen
Sharpening stones, walking on coals
To improve your business acumen

Vested interest, united ties
Landed gentry, rationalize
Look who bought the myth
By jingo, buy America

Enemy sighted, enemy met
I'm addressing the real politic
Look who bought the myth
By jingo, buy America

"Let us not assassinate this man further, Senator, you've done enough.
Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" ...

Exhuming McCarthy, exhuming McCarthy (meet me at the book burning)"

-- Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Michael Mills, Michael Stipe

News and Opinion

Glenn Greenwald on Hillary Clinton & the "New McCarthyism"

Congressional Dems Call on FBI to Investigate Their Political Adversaries’ Kremlin Ties

Leading House Democrats on Tuesday sent a letter to FBI Director James Comey, which they promptly published, asking the agency to investigate whether the Trump campaign and the Russian government have entered into a joint plot “to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.” Although the House Democrats say that they do not whether such a conspiracy with Moscow exists, they say that “serious questions have been raised” – specifically about whether Trump supporters worked in tandem with Kremlin agents to hack Democratic Party computer systems, and “about overt and covert actions by Trump campaign officials on behalf of Russian interests.”

As grounds for their suspicions, these top Democrats cite certain associations between Trump advisers and various Russians, suspicious visits by them to Moscow, and statements Trump supporters made that are critical of the United States of America or which advocate better relations with Moscow. These statements and policy views, these top Democrats suggest, demonstrate possible disloyalty to the United States which should be investigated.

For instance, “one of Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisers, Carter Page, traveled to Moscow to give a speech that was harshly critical of the United States and its ‘hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change.'” The top Democrats also note that another Trump adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, “traveled to Moscow in December 2015 and joined Vladimir Putin at the head table during a dinner honoring the Kremlin-backed media network RT,” and then “gave a speech that was highly critical of the United States” (the House Democrats do not mention that Gen. Flynn was appointed by President Obama in 2012 to head the Defense Intelligence Agency, and they are cryptic about whether they believe the General is a full-scale Russian operative or merely an unwitting Useful Idiot).

This letter was clearly part of a coordinated plan by Democrats to call for an FBI investigation into their domestic political adversaries for possible Russia links. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sent a similar letter to Comey yesterday asking him to investigate “evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.” Reid explicitly harkened back to the era of American politics when this type of rhetoric was common, saying that “the prospect of a hostile government [Russia] seeking to undermine our free and fair elections represents one of the gravest threats to our democracy since the Cold War.”

Who needs evidence? US election system reportedly hacked, media outlets blame Russians

The US is pissing off everyone in northern Syria

When US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter asked Turkey on Monday to "stay focused" in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) and stop attacking US-backed Kurdish forces, Turkish officials responded with a suggestion of their own.

"Americans should revise their policy of supporting (the Kurdish-led force) at all costs," Turkish presidential spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin said in a Turkish newspaper on Tuesday. ...

Experts on the region say the US has mismanaged its relationships with allies who have wildly differing objectives in Syria. ...

It must have come as a shock to the Kurds when, just a few weeks after they fought a bloody battle to evict IS from the town of Manbij at America's request, Biden showed up in Turkey and said the Kurds would need to withdraw from the town in order to accommodate the Turks, says Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

"Of course the Kurds feel betrayed, and they were betrayed," he said. "I'm sure the US Special Forces who worked with the Kurds over the past two months are feeling very embarrassed, because they feel like they lied through their teeth as they gave encouragement to the Kurds to do the heavy lifting."

The question now, Landis says, is whether this will affect future US plans to use the Kurds as the tip of its anti-Islamic State spear, especially in the battle to take the group's de facto capital, Raqqa. The new US general in charge of the US war against IS has said the US and its allies intend to take Raqqa by next August — and the US is depending on its Kurdish allies to comprise the main ground fighting force in the effort.

Landis points out that the Kurds have no strategic interest in going to Raqqa since it's a Sunni Arab city far east of their territory.

This is an interesting article, it's well worth clicking the link and reading in full.

Obama’s Imperial Mideast Policy Unravels

In the 1930s, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appeased his enemies. Today, U.S. President Barack Obama appeases his friends.

Barack the Appeaser is the key to unlocking the mysteries of U.S. policy in the Middle East and beyond. Confusing to begin with, U.S. actions reached new heights of absurdity last week when the Obama administration abandoned its long-standing Kurdish allies with virtually no notice and announced that it was backing a Turkish thrust into northern Syria instead.

Although the Turks claimed to be targeting ISIS (also known as Islamic State, IS, ISIL, and Daesh), it was plain from the outset that the real aim was to counter an offensive that had carried Kurdish forces some 20 miles west of the Euphrates River and put them in a position to control nearly the entire Syrian-Turkish border.

But there was a problem. Not only had the U.S. approved the same Kurdish offensive, but it had provided arms, money, and air support plus military advice in the form of some 250 US Special Operations forces embedded among members of the Kurdish militia known as the YPG. ...

But now the U.S. had decided to drop the Syrian Democratic Forces despite their sterling anti-ISIS record and back Turkey even though it didn’t seem very concerned about ISIS at all. ...

What is the reason for such a remarkable about-face? What makes the U.S. think it can get away with cultivating an alliance one moment and dropping it like a hot potato the next? The answer has to do with the phenomenon of liberal appeasement that Obama represents. ... In Obama’s hands, it has come to mean something different: an endless attempt to satisfy conflicting demands by a growing number of client states.

The states include not just Turkey but Israel, the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms, plus the dozen East European states that have entered NATO since 1999. ... Obama’s strategy has been to throw first one group a bone and then another in the hope of somehow keeping them from tearing each other apart. In other words, kick the can down the road until it becomes someone else’s problem.

Thus, the U.S. may have realized a short-term gain in its rapprochement with Turkey but at a long-term cost. It has jettisoned the one effective anti-ISIS force in its arsenal, it has all but destroyed its credibility, and it is undoubtedly prolonging the bloodshed in Syria as well. The entire maneuver is an expression of U.S. weakness rather than strength.

US Welcomes Brief Pause in Fighting Between Turkish Troops, Syrian Kurds

The White House has issued a statement “welcoming” the lack of fighting overnight between the Turkish military forces which invaded northern Syria last week and the Syrian Kurdish forces deployed further south along the Euphrates River.

While it lasted long enough for the US to get a statement out, however, Turkish officials were quick to downplay the lack of fighting as not by design, denying claims by the Kurdish forces that a ceasefire was in place, while Turkish-backed rebels insisted that the “pause” in attacking the Kurds was to be a brief one.

Glenn Greenwald: Clinton Believes Obama Has Not Been Militaristic Enough

The real US Syria scandal: Supporting sectarian war

The main criticism of US policy in Syria has long been that President Barack Obama should have used US military force or more aggressive arms aid to strengthen the armed opposition to Assad. ... But the question that should have been debated is why the Obama administration acquiesced to its allies funding and supplying a group of unsavoury sectarian armed groups to overthrow the Assad regime.

That US acquiescence is largely responsible for a horrible bloodletting that has now killed as many as 400,000 Syrians. Worse yet, there is still no way to end the war without the serious threat of sectarian retribution against the losers.

The Obama administration bears responsibility for this atrocity, because it could have prevented Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia from launching their foolishly adventurous war in Syria. None of them did so out of desperate need; it was a war of choice in every case. And each of the three states is part of the US security system in the Middle East, providing military bases to NATO or to the United States and depending on US support for its security.

But instead of insisting that those three Sunni allies reconsider their options, the Obama administration gave the green light at a conference in Riyadh at the end of March 2012 for proceeding with arming those who wanted to replace the regime, leaving the United States ostensibly free to be a peacemaker. As Hillary Clinton put it at the Riyadh conference: “Some will be able to do certain things, and others will do other things.” ...

Could senior Obama administration officials have been unaware that a war to overthrow Assad would inevitably become an enormous sectarian bloodbath? By August 2012 a US Defense Intelligence Agency report intelligence warned that “events are taking a clear sectarian direction,” and that the “the “Salafist[s], Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq]” were “the major forces driving the insurgency”. Furthermore, the Obama administration already knew by then that the external Sunni sponsors of the war against Assad were channeling their money and arms to the most sectarian groups in the field.

But the administration did nothing to pressure its allies to stop it. In fact, it actually wove its own Syria policy around the externally fuelled war by overwhelmingly sectarian forces. And no one in the US political-media elite raised the issue.

Islamist Rebels Capture Key Christian Town in Western Syria, "Cleansing" Ongoing

The strategically important town of Halfaya in western Syria’s Hama Province has fallen to a group of Islamist rebels dominated by the al-Qaeda-linked Jund al-Aqsa. The town fell quickly in an overnight assault, overrunning both the limited military presence and pro-government locals.

The scary part, however, is that the population of the town is mostly Christians and Alawites. Jund al-Aqsa isn’t particularly friendly to either, but has made public their intention to inflict devastating casualties on the nation’s Alawite population.

One of the commanders involved in the capture of the town reported that a “cleansing” is currently ongoing, and that the rebel faction behind the push “will have more surprises in store” after the successful offensive.

U.N. says 10,000 killed in Yemen war, far more than other estimates

At least 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen's 18-month-old civil war, the United Nations on Tuesday, approaching double the estimates of more than 6,000 cited by officials and aid workers for much of 2016. ...

The new toll is based on official information from medical facilities in Yemen, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator Jamie McGoldrick told a news conference in the capital Sanaa. It might rise as some areas had no medical facilities, and people were often buried without official records.

The United Nations human rights office said last week that 3,799 civilians have been killed in the conflict, with air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition responsible for some 60 percent of deaths.

McGoldrick gave no breakdown on civilian casualties, adding the conflict has displaced three million Yemenis and forced 200,000 to seek refuge abroad. The United Nations had information that 900,000 of the displaced intended to try to return to their homes.

Another interesting article, worth a read:

The High Cost of American Hubris

At a time when Washington is experiencing the hubris of imperial overreach and the prospect of the eventual collapse that history shows is the inevitable endgame of all empires, it is time for concerned Americans across the political spectrum to begin to seriously consider what a new paradigm and policy platform representing sanity might look like. ...

Most Americans do not share the Neoliberal, Neoconservative, or Responsibility to Protect club’s messianic vision of an America that needs to recreate the world to fit some bastardized idea of imperial “democracy” that requires a Year Zero program to destroy the social, cultural and political foundations of target countries (see Iraq, Libya, and Syria).

The restoration of our democratic republic and the revitalization of our economy and society are intimately connected to pulling out of the militarist/imperialist projects that are killing our country, along with the casualties it is responsible for around the world. It was estimated last year by physicians’ groups that deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan from the U.S. “war on terror” (USWOT) are 1.3 million at the conservative end.

The casualties from the physicians’ groups does not even count the thousands dead in the Libyan civil war, precipitated by the US/NATO toppling of the Gaddafi government – a stable, secular government that had attained the highest standard of living in all of Africa – or our attempts to similarly support nihilistic jihadists who want to topple the Assad regime in Syria and the killing frenzy that has resulted in that country.

Other historians and political scientists, going further back in the American Empire’s reign, have estimated 20 million to 30 million people have perished as a result of Washington’s covert operations and overt military interventions that have occurred almost continuously since 1945.

The U.S. needs to take the lead on de-militarizing and using the freed-up focus and resources to begin engineering a soft landing for the inevitable imperial/economic decline that we are already experiencing. By any rational measure, our interventions have been disasters, creating more problems than they solve. There is a reason why we are known in other parts of the world as “The Empire of Chaos.”

We use our military to relentlessly kill and destroy because our political leaders no longer have the will or imagination to build something constructive. Militarism is the refuge of the morally and intellectually bankrupt.

Pentagon officials allowed government spending at strip clubs and casinos

Pentagon officials permitted their subordinates to use government charge cards to ring up nearly $100,000 in expenses at strip clubs and “adult entertainment establishments” and almost $1m at casinos, all without serious reprisal, a new report reveals.

Even after the US defense department’s official watchdog lambasted the expenses for adult entertainment and gambling, senior officials did not take “appropriate” disciplinary action, according to a report by the department’s inspector general released on Tuesday.

An audit of 30 government charge-card holders determined that defense department officials neither adequately reviewed travel vouchers for reimbursement nor took action to “eliminate additional misuse”. In fact, most of those audited – 22 out of the 29 who retained their travel vouchers – received “overpayments” on their requested reimbursements at the casinos or adult-entertainment centers, totaling $8,544.

Israel Quietly Legalizes Pirate Outposts in the West Bank

One night in the fall of 1998, a self-professed “outpost entrepreneur” brought three trailers to a rugged hilltop in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and established his first pirate settlement.

Dozens of youthful supporters came to cheer on the entrepreneur, Shimon Riklin, whose wife, newborn and toddler joined him a few days later. A second family also moved in. To their initial surprise, nobody from the military or government came to remove them. “After six months,” Mr. Riklin said in a recent interview, “I understood it was a done deal.”

They named their outpost Mitzpe Danny, after a British immigrant stabbed to death by a Palestinian at the settlement across the highway, and went on over the next few months to help establish Mitzpe Hagit and then Neve Erez a short drive away. “I jumped from hill to hill,” Mr. Riklin said.

Today, more than 40 Orthodox Jewish families live in Mitzpe Danny, one of a string of outposts on a strategic ridge with breathtaking views southwest to Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives and east all the way to Jordan. They are part of an expansive network of about 100 outposts established mostly over the past two decades without government authorization.

At least one-third of these have either been retroactively legalized or — like Mitzpe Danny — are on their way, in what anti-settlement groups that track the process see as a quiet but methodical effort by the government to change the map of the West Bank, now in its 50th year under Israeli occupation, by entrenching the outposts that spread like fingers across it.

With the Israeli-Palestinian peace process dormant and the international community increasingly suspicious of the right-wing Israeli government’s commitment to the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state, the outposts are being seized on as evidence that the conflict may be impossible to unwind. In its July report, the so-called Quartet of Middle East peacemakers — made up of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia — listed it as a trend “imperiling the viability of the two-state solution.”

Brazil votes on Rousseff impeachment

Completing Coup, Brazil's Right-Wing Senate Ousts Rousseff

As expected, Brazil's Senate on Wednesday voted to impeach suspended President Dilma Rousseff.

The 61-20 vote to oust her from office means an end to 13 years of rule by the Workers' Party and the completion of her term by conservative Interim President and former Vice President Michel Temer, who, as the Guardian reports, "was among the leaders of the conspiracy against his former running mate."

As ABC News reports, the nation's first female president faced charges of "violating fiscal laws by using loans from public banks to cover budget shortfalls, which artificially enhanced the budget surplus." Critics of the process, however, have repeatedly argued the legal grounds for those charges are essentially non-existent and evidence suggests the charges were largely, if not exclusively, politically motivated.

During her speech to lawmakers on Monday, Rousseff rejected the charges levied against her and reiterated her belief the proceedings represented a coup. She warned, "I'm afraid that democracy will be damned with me."

Naomi Klein on the Ousting of President Rousseff

Encryption: FBI building fresh case for access to electronic devices

The FBI director, James Comey, has warned again about the bureau’s inability to access digital devices because of encryption and suggested investigators wanted an “adult conversation” with manufacturers.

Widespread encryption built into smartphones was “making more and more of the room that we are charged to investigate dark”, Comey said at a cybersecurity symposium.

The FBI sought a court order to force Apple to help it hack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California shooters, a demand Apple said would dramatically weaken security of its products.

The FBI ultimately got into the phone with the help of a third party, concluding the court case but leaving unresolved the underpinning legal questions.

Comey made clear on Tuesday that he expected dialogue to continue.

“The conversation we’ve been trying to have about this has dipped below public consciousness now, and that’s fine,” Comey said at a symposium organised by Symantec, a technology company. “Because what we want to do is collect information this year so that next year we can have an adult conversation in this country.”

Companies are making money from our personal data – but at what cost?

Companies and governments dip into the data streams of our lives in increasingly innovative ways, tracking what we do, who we know and where we go. The methods and purposes of data collection keep expanding, with seemingly no end or limit in sight.

These range from irritating infringements, including WhatsApp sharing your name and phone number with Facebook so businesses can advertise to you, or a startup that uses your phone’s battery status as a “fingerprint” to track you online, to major intrusions such as Baltimore police secretly using aerial surveillance systems to continuously watch and record the city. Or like the data brokers that create massive personalized profiles about each of us, which are then sold and used to circumvent consumer protections meant to limit predatory and discriminatory practices. ...

Now here’s the rub: if corporations and governments are going to up the ante by treating data as an asset, then we – the targets of this data imperative – should respond in kind. Many common practices of data collection should actually be treated as a form of theft that I call data appropriation – which means capturing data from people without consent and compensation.

People often do not even know how their data is taken and used, let alone how to give meaningful consent. Data brokers, for instance, aim to provide their services from the shadows, while amassing billions and trillions of data points about people worldwide. ...

When companies do seek consent, it is typically through terms of service agreements – overly long contracts are full of dense legal language that users are expected to “agree” to without understanding. It is a remarkable victory for the data appropriators that acquiescence has become the standard model for obtaining “consent”.

Data appropriation is a form of exploitation because companies use data to create value without providing people with comparable compensation. While some might argue that Google and Facebook pay us for our data with “free” services, this still does not account for the multitude of data appropriators that have no intention to provide some kind of mutual benefit to those whose data they possess.

The data as an asset paradigm has helped create a lucrative market for data – the data broker industry alone generates around $200bn in annual revenue – which cuts out the people that data is about.

Fight for $15: Chris Christie vetoes minimum wage hike in New Jersey

Republican Governor Chris Christie on Tuesday vetoed an attempt to raise New Jersey’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour in the next year and to at least $15 an hour over the next five.

Christie said raising the minimum wage would burden small businesses and described the proposal as the “heavy hand of government”.

Announcing his decision at an event at a market in Pennington, the governor said raising pay was the job of business owners.

“All of this sounds great, raising the minimum wage, when you’re spending someone else’s money,” he said.

Democrats, who control the statehouse, and liberal groups have put the legislation at the center of their agenda. The legislature sent Christie the measure in June.

Democratic leaders say they will pursue a constitutional amendment to raise the minimum wage without the need for Christie’s approval.

Homeland Security to reconsider locking up immigrants in private prisons

It's been a rough couple weeks for the private prison industry. On Monday, 11 days after the Department of Justice said it would end the use of for-profit prison contractors, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a plan to evaluate whether to "move in the same direction" with facilities where undocumented immigrants are detained.

Almost immediately after DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said the agency will "review our current policy and practices concerning the use of private immigration detention," share prices for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, the two largest private prison companies, plummeted. CCA's stock fell more than nine percent, while GEO's value tumbled by six percent.

But while investors are wary, private prison industry watchers are skeptical about whether DHS is actually is serious about cutting ties with CCA and GEO. The companies currently operate 46 immigration detention centers that house roughly 24,000 people, 70 percent of the detainees held by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is part of DHS. ...

CCA recently sealed a four-year, $1 billion deal with DHS to house Central American asylum seekers at two detention centers in Texas. CCA has earned $689 million from DHS contracts since 2008, and GEO received $1.18 billion from the agency over the same period, according to figures cited by Reuters,

Police push to fire officers involved in fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald

Top police brass in Chicago continued their push on Tuesday to fire multiple officers involved in the fatal shooting of black teenager Laquan McDonald.

Police superintendent Eddie Johnson filed administrative charges against five officers, including Jason Van Dyke, the officer who shot McDonald 16 times at close range in 2014. Van Dyke has been charged with first-degree murder in McDonald’s death. He has pleaded not guilty.

All five officers lied in police reports or to investigators about McDonald’s death, according to the charges filed by Johnson. Four of the officers face additional misconduct charges for their handling of police dashboard cameras. The cases will proceed through a multi-step review by the Chicago police board, an independent civilian body. The initial status hearing for these cases is scheduled for 19 September.

Women in burkinis and men in suits

"No woman in a burqa (or a hijab or a burkini) has ever done me any harm. But I was sacked (without explanation) by a man in a suit. Men in suits missold me pensions and endowments, costing me thousands of pounds. A man in a suit led us on a disastrous and illegal war. Men in suits led the banks and crashed the world economy. Other men in suits then increased the misery to millions through austerity. If we are to start telling people what to wear, maybe we should ban suits."

-- Henry Stewart

Iconic Olympics protester John Carlos admires Colin Kaepernick's courage

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick is sitting down during the pregame playing of the National Anthem to protest the treatment of people of color in the United States. And lots of people have an opinion about it. ...

The opinion of John Carlos, however, carries a relatively unique amount of weight. When the bronze medalist in the 200 meters took the podium at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, he bowed his head and raised one black-gloved fist as the National Anthem played. Today, the image of Carlos and Tommie Smith, the gold medalist in the event who struck the same pose, is iconic, appearing on posters and T-shirts.

But at the time, Carlos was reviled — banned from the Olympic Village, torn apart in the press, and the subject of death threats made to him and his family.

Carlos spoke to VICE News Tuesday.

VICE News: What do you think of Kaepernick's protest?

John Carlos: He made the right call. He's trying to bring attention to a problem, and for that, people said he's unpatriotic. Well, I thought that every soldier that represents the US, they would defend the right of freedom, freedom of speech. Now they want to take his right away? It's also in the same vein as what happened 48 years ago to me, in terms of the name calling and slandering.... He can't exclude himself because he's a football player. You have to admire his courage. I think we're coming to a time in our history where black people are starting to say that you have to make a choice. There's no more neutrality in equality, and justice, and a fair playing field. ...

VICE News: You've said that the aftermath of your 1968 protest was "hell" for you — it cost you your friends and your marriage. What would you tell Kaepernick now?

John Carlos: I would tell him this: You done jumped into the pool of social activism. This is not one moment that you jumped in. This is a movement you jumped in. And you're gonna see a storm before you see the heavens and the blue sky.... It's a vicious world out there.

Establishment Darling Debbie Wasserman Schultz Defeats Progressive Challenger Tim Canova

The Democratic establishment notched a victory in Florida's 23rd Congressional District on Tuesday, as incumbent Debbie Wasserman Schultz soundly defeated progressive challenger Tim Canova.

With all precincts counted late Tuesday night, former Democratic National Committee chair Wasserman Schultz—who was ousted from that post right before the party convention in July and now has a role in Hillary Clinton's campaign—had roughly 57 percent of the vote to Canova's 43 percent.

But "[e]ven in the face of a loss," the Sun Sentinel reported, "Canova told supporters...that he saw a victory for the cause of reclaiming democracy from 'the corporate oligarchy'."

"Look how far we've come," the first-time candidate said. "We're fighting for American democracy. This is a rigged system and everyone knows it."

And in his concession speech, Canova couldn't help but lob one more dig: "I will concede Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a corporate stooge," he said.

[See also: Hedge Fund Billionaires Help Push Wasserman Schultz to a Primary Win - js]

Silicon Valley is finally opening its pockets for Hillary Clinton

In the land that fetishizes the new, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has had a tough go of it. In 2008, Silicon Valley's tech community overwhelmingly backed Barack Obama's tech-savvy campaign over the establishment-favorite Clinton.

Silicon Valley has voted Democrat in every presidential election since 1984 and the tech industry broadly has been among the most generous to Democrats. And yet this year the tech elite has been slow to back Clinton financially. Tech's plutocrats have largely stayed on the sidelines, until recently, while the rank-and-file tech employees donated heavily to Bernie Sanders through groups like "Coders for Sanders."

As of the end of July, Sanders had outraised Clinton in the tech community handily with a haul of $6.2 million to Clinton's $3.4 million, according to the political data analysis firm Crowdpac. At the same point in 2008 and 2012, Obama had netted $5.8 million and $8.8 million respectively from techies.

But now that they're facing a choice between Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, Silicon Valley's checks and bitcoins are finally transferring to the Clinton campaign account. ...

Josh Becker, CEO of legal analytics firm Lex Machina in Menlo Park and member of Clinton's National Finance Committee, concedes Obama was an easier sell in 2008 than Clinton in 2016. Over the last month, however, he said the donations have started coming in. "The opposition being Donald Trump helped," he said.

Another Clinton donor, another email that wasn’t turned over

Abigail Disney wanted something from Hillary Clinton, and she knew exactly how to ask.

What she wanted was something that seemed right up Clinton’s lane: more emphasis on women’s issues at a coming meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, the star-studded session the Clintons host each year.

And what Disney did was what well-connected Clinton donors did: She reached out directly to Secretary of State Clinton and Clinton’s top aides at the State Department.

“The problem is she keeps emailing hrc directly and is quite anxious to talk,” Clinton aide Huma Abedin wrote via email on July 23, 2012, to two officials at the Clinton Global Initiative.

Indeed, while newly released emails tend not to show evidence of improper actions by Clinton on behalf of donors, they flesh out the access those donors had and the symbiotic relationship among the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative and the State Department. They also raise anew questions of why they were not turned over by Clinton voluntarily, and what else is in remaining emails held back ostensibly because they were personal.

“It is troubling that emails keep spilling out that were not turned over to State by Hillary Clinton,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “This raises questions about what was saved and turned over and what wasn't.”

FBI recovers 30 deleted Clinton emails involving Benghazi attack

Approximately 30 of the 14,900 deleted emails recovered by the FBI from Hillary Clinton’s private email server may involve the 2012 attack on Benghazi, Libya, State Department lawyers said on Tuesday.

An undetermined number of those 30 emails were not included in the cache of 30,000 the former secretary of State voluntarily turned over to the State Department in 2014, government lawyers told U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta, according to multiple reports.

The agency has committed to releasing the newly uncovered documents under a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, but first it must weigh whether the emails are personal or work-related. Some may also be duplicates of the thousands it has already released.

"Using broad search terms, we have identified approximately 30 documents potentially responsive to a Benghazi-related request," State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement. "At this time, we have not confirmed that the documents are, in fact, responsive, or whether they are duplicates of materials already provided to the Department by former Secretary Clinton in December 2014.”

State Department lawyers said Tuesday it will need until the end of September to review and redact any classified information from the new emails. Mehta pressed the agency on why it would take so long to process so few documents and ordered the department to return in a week with more details about why it needs a full month.

Trump announces trip to Mexico for talks with President Peña Nieto

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has confirmed that he will travel to Mexico on Wednesday to meet President Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico City.

Moments before taking the stage for a rally in Everett, Washington, just north of Seattle, Trump tweeted that he had “accepted the invitation of President Enrique Peña Nieto, of Mexico, and look[ed] very much forward to meeting him tomorrow”. ...

Peña Nieto – who has previously compared Trump to Hitler and Mussolini – said via Twitter that he had invited both presidential candidates to Mexico “to discuss bilateral relations”, adding: “I believe in dialogue to promote the interests of Mexico in the world and to protect Mexicans wherever they are.”

African forest elephants may ​face extinction sooner than thought

Forest-dwelling elephants are likely to face extinction far more quickly than previously assumed because their sluggish reproduction rate cannot keep pace with rampant poaching and habitat loss, a new study has found.

The first comprehensive research into forest elephant demographics found that even if poaching was curbed, it will take nearly 100 years for the species just to recover the losses suffered in the past decade. The forest elephant population has crashed by more than 60% since 2002, with the species now inhabiting less than a quarter of its potential range of the Congo basin in Africa.

The research found that not only does it take more than 20 years for female forest elephants to begin reproducing, but they also give birth only once every five to six years. This reproduction rate means that population growth is around three times slower than savannah elephants.

As a result, forest elephants “appear to be significantly more sensitive to human-induced mortality” than their grassland-wandering relatives. Around one in three forest elephant deaths are due to poachers seeking to profit from the ivory trade, or for bushmeat, which is meat derived from non-domesticated wildlife.

Should forest elephants continue to suffer poaching losses, while their homes are razed for timber and agriculture, humans will be responsible for eradicating one of the largest creatures left on the planet.

Latest Attempt to Take Down ExxonKnew Denounced as 'Buffoonery'

Marking an escalation in the fight over ExxonMobil and climate change, U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), has scheduled a hearing for September 14 to probe the ongoing investigation by attorneys general into whether the oil giant misled the public and investors on global warming.

Smith chairs the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology, which last month issued subpoenas to the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York, as well as a slew of environmental groups over ExxonKnew. Each of those entities has refused to comply with the subpoenas, claiming they represent not only congressional overreach but also the fossil fuels industry's undue influence over policymakers. ...

"Maybe instead of this buffoonery, the House Science committee could call on, you know, a scientist, to re-explain the threat of climate change and the role of the fossil fuel industry in causing the crisis," said Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org, one of the groups to receive a subpoena. "Rep. Smith sounds like he could use a refresher course."  

Perhaps, Henn added, "this hearing should take on ExxonMobil as a corporate sponsor—they're certainly the money and influence behind it. Rep. Smith has zero authority or cause to subpoena us, the attorneys general, or any other groups looking to uncover the truth about Exxon's climate lies."

The latest developments come as conservatives attempt to spin a counter-narrative aimed at undermining the ExxonKnew effort.

Dakota Access Opposition Ramps Up in Iowa After Judge Rejects Restraining Order

An attempt by the Dakota Access Pipeline company to silence protests was foiled Tuesday after a federal judge in Des Moines, Iowa denied its request for a temporary restraining order.

For two years, activists in Iowa have been demonstrating against the highly-controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, which would carry as much as 570,000 barrels per day of Bakken crude from North Dakota to a transfer station in Illinois. All along the 1,172-mile route, resistance to the project has grown fierce as landowners, Indigenous people, farmers, and environmentalists have banded together in opposition.

Dakota Access, a subsidiary of the Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, alleged in its petition that planned acts of civil disobedience by local resistance groups Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI) and Bold Iowa "represent a risk to the physical safety of Dakota Access employees and representatives, and the protesters."

The activists, who are planning a peaceful, nonviolent demonstration at a construction site Wednesday, said that the suit was just another attempt by the pipeline company to "bully" the opposition.

"We have been in this pipeline fight for over two years, and have vowed to use all of the tools available to us in our fight," said Adam Mason, state policy director at Iowa CCI. "We will not be deterred or bullied by Big Oil."

California and EPA Poised to Expand Pollution of Potential Drinking Water Reserves

As the western United States struggles with chronic water shortages and a changing climate, scientists are warning that if vast underground stores of fresh water that California and other states rely on are not carefully conserved, they too may soon run dry.

Heeding this warning, California passed new laws in late 2014 that for the first time require the state to account for its groundwater resources and measure how much water is being used.

Yet California’s natural resources agency, with the oversight and consent of the federal government, also runs a shadow program that allows many of its aquifers to be pumped full of toxic waste.

Now the state — which relied on aquifers for at least 60 percent of its total water supply over the past three years — is taking steps to expand that program, possibly sacrificing portions of dozens more groundwater reserves. In some cases, regulators are considering whether to legalize pollution already taking place at a number of sites, based on arguments that the water that will be lost was too dirty to drink or too difficult to access at an affordable price. Officials also may allow the borders of some pollution areas to be extended, jeopardizing new, previously unspoiled parts of the state’s water supply.

The proposed expansion would affect some of the parts of California hardest hit by drought, from the state’s agriculturally rich central valley to wine country and oil-drilling fields along the Salinas River. Some have questioned the wisdom of such moves in light of the state’s long-term thirst for more water supplies.

“Once [the state] exempts the water, it’s basically polluted forever. It’s a terrible idea,” said Maya Golden-Krasner, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, which is suing California to force it to complete an environmental impact assessment of the proposed aquifer changes. California, she said, is still offering breaks to its oil industry. “We’re at a precipice point where the state is going to have to prioritize water over an industry that isn’t going to last.”

Also of Interest

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

Rumor Drives US Accusations That Russia Is Rigging Their Election

The Campaign to Blame Putin for Everything

Remember That Time Putin Bailed Out Obama?

Turkey Invades Syria, America Spins The Bottle

Black Activists in Missouri Are Fighting to Preserve the Right to Vote

Another heartbreaking story of the death and destruction that Hillary Clinton has created and supported:

Did Hillary Clinton stand by as Honduras coup ushered in era of violence?

Donald Trump Wins Over Secretive “Children of Israel” Megadonor

Big Energy Pays US State Governments to Ban the Protest Movement From Banning Fracking

New Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton latest in a flurry of finds

Political animals: the pets and beasts running in local elections

A Little Night Music

Smokey Smothers - I Got My Eyes On You

Smokey Smothers - Do Your Thing

Barrelhouse Chuck & Big Smokey Smothers - Searching For My Baby

Smokey Smothers - I'm Looking For You

Big Smokey Smothers - Sad Sad Day, Do The Thing

Big Smokey Smothers & Crowns - Take A Little Walk With Me

Smokey Smothers - Come on rock little girl

Big Smokey Smothers - I Can't Judge Nobody

Smokey Smothers - I've Been Drinking Muddy Water

Smokey Smothers - Honey, I ain't teasin'