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This evening's music features New Orleans songwriter and musician Chris Kenner. Enjoy!

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

-- Frederick Douglass

News and Opinion

How America Disgraces Itself

It had been an exhausting, interminable 18-20 months of presidential campaigning during which much of the business of thoughtful American governance had to yield space to the riveting follies of politics. Yet most other countries in the world, not locked into dictators or kings for life, conduct their elections far more briskly and get on with business. ...

The campaign indeed now seems far from over as we enter a new, extended, and possibly uglier period of speculation and spectacle in the parade of contestants now modeling for high office. ... Conspiracy theories (and yes, in theory conspiracies can exist) continue to flow about what might have been, including whether the FBI had intervened improperly and deliberately to swing the election to Trump. And now it is all eyes on Russia.

And now, in perhaps the most volatile delegitimization gambit ever, Trump is now whispered to be “Putin’s candidate,” a Russian pawn who has infiltrated the White House itself. The witch hunt on Russia conveniently displaces the entire substance of critically needed electoral and policy reform.

This is all very ugly stuff. Worse, it looks like questioning the electoral process and the legitimacy of the election itself may become a permanent feature of our domestic politics, inciting further divisiveness and bitterness on both sides of the political divide, rendering the country (even more) ungovernable. The bread and circuses of the interminable campaign extravaganza now seamlessly transition into the background noise of the entire Trump presidency itself. ,,,

But it is no wonder that the U.S. for all its massive military power and huge economy, is increasingly becoming an outlier on the international scene. Foreign statesmen both good and bad simply shake their heads in incredulous dismay at the decline of U.S. rationality, prestige and steadiness. But who can avert one’s eyes from a train wreck?

Yet this isn’t new. It’s not as if the U.S. has suddenly turned a corner with this election. U.S. foreign policy has grown ever more isolated from the world and from reality since at least 9/11. Life in this world of denial may even date from the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. That was when the U.S. received what must now be seen as palpably a curse — the transient domination of the entire global scene, when we trumpeted ourselves as the “sole global superpower.” We assumed that such was the new permanent order of the world. We’ve never gotten over it. We’re still trying to maintain that fiction and it’s not working. Trump will find that out painfully soon.

Our domestic political antics exclude us ever further from the ranks of more responsible, sober and clear-sighted states. The rest of the world is simply going to have to go on working around us in damage limitation mode as it has been doing since 9/11. Are we capable of limiting the long-standing damage to ourselves at home? The necessary very heavy lifting seems now almost a bridge too far.

What's Next for U.S.-Russia Relations? Stephen Cohen & Ken Roth on Trump, Hacking & Tillerson

VICE News
sues FBI - FOIA suit demands info on Trump, the Clintons, and Breitbart News

VICE News is suing the FBI, demanding the bureau release records related to its curious disclosures, behind-the-scenes actions, and apparent leaks in the days leading up to the U.S. presidential election.

The wide-ranging Freedom of Information Act lawsuit was filed Tuesday morning in conjunction with Ryan Shapiro, a doctoral candidate at MIT and research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Earlier this month, VICE News and Shapiro filed more than 50 FOIA requests with the FBI seeking documents about the bureau’s discussions regarding Donald Trump, along with other documents that would shed light on the FBI’s decision a week before the election to tweet newly posted records from a long-dormant Twitter account about Bill Clinton’s 2000 pardon of financier Marc Rich.

The FOIA lawsuit also seeks to compel the FBI to disclose records about:

• Allegations of the FBI violating the Hatch Act by allegedly using its authority to influence the course of the 2016 U.S. presidential election
• Internal discontent at the FBI regarding the bureau’s Hillary Clinton investigations
• All leaks of information by the FBI to the media and political operatives about FBI investigations of Clinton
• All FBI communications with Breitbart News; Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon, who Trump named his chief strategist and White House counselor after Bannon served as his campaign CEO; former Trump campaign manager Corey R. Lewandowski, Fox News, and Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Sean Hannity; former New York City mayor and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani; and Republican strategist and Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone
• White nationalist Richard Spencer, his National Policy Institute, and the “alt-right.”

The fake news people who brought you Judith Miller are right on top of this one...

Top Democrat's emails hacked by Russia after aide made typo, investigation finds

Russian hackers were able to access thousands of emails from a top-ranking Democrat after an aide typed the word “legitimate” instead of “illegitimate” by mistake, an investigation by the New York Times has found.

The revelation gives further credence to the CIA’s finding last week that the Kremlin deliberately intervened in the US presidential election to help Donald Trump. The president-elect has angrily denied the CIA’s assessment, calling it “ridiculous”.

In the run-up to the election, the US Democratic National Committee (DNC) received numerous phishing emails, the paper reported on Tuesday. One of them was also sent to John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. An aide, Charles Delavan, spotted the message sent to Podesta’s private account. It asked Podesta to change his password.

Delavan realised the email was a phishing attack and forwarded it to a computer technician. However, he made a typo, writing: “This is a legitimate email.” He added: “John needs to change his password immediately.”

The blunder gave Kremlin hackers access to about 60,000 emails in Podesta’s private Gmail account. According to US intelligence officials, Moscow then gave the email cache to WikiLeaks. The website released them in October, and the email scandal dominated the news cycle and was exploited by Trump.

How the Obama administration laid the groundwork for Trump’s coming crackdown on the press

In the summer of 2009, less than a year after President Obama took office, one of the first orders of business for the newly empaneled Senate Judiciary Committee was passing a long-stalled federal ‘media shield’ bill, which would finally provide a uniform level of protection to reporters who get subpoenaed to testify against their sources in court.

The bill, which had previously been scuttled by Republican Congress, now had strong support in a Democratic Congress, and seemingly, a newly-elected Democratic president, who had co-sponsored an almost identical bill when he was a senator.

But just as it looked like the bill would sail through Congress and make its way to the president’s desk, it was stopped in its tracks. President Obama suddenly reversed course from his previous position and announced he would oppose the bill if the Senate didn’t carve out a giant national security exception that would make the important protections within it all but meaningless.

Sen. Arlen Specter, then a Republican, called Obama’s reversal “unacceptable” at the time, adding: “The White House’s opposition to the fundamental essence of this bill is an unexpected and significant setback. It will make it hard to pass this legislation.” The Democrat’s main sponsor, Sen. Chuck Schumer expressed his dismay as well. National security leak cases are usually the only cases the federal government prosecutes that regularly ensnare journalists, so Obama’s decision essentially killed the bill.

Sadly, this incident was only the first of several moves by the Obama administration that laid the groundwork for a potentially unprecedented crackdown on the press by the incoming Trump administration.

[Click the link to check out the rest of this excellent essay. - js]

Seeking 'True Accountability,' First Civilian Drone Victim Appears in US Court

For the first time ever, a civilian survivor of a U.S. drone strike attended a hearing in U.S. court on Tuesday.

Faisal bin ali Jaber, a Yemeni environmental engineer who lost two innocent relatives to a 2012 covert drone strike, is seeking an official apology and declaration of error for the deaths of his brother-in-law, Salem, and nephew, Waleed. In September, three American ex-drone operators filed a legal brief supporting Jaber's claim.

Ahead of Tuesday's landmark hearing in Washington, D.C., Jaber wrote to President Barack Obama saying he would "happily drop the case in exchange for an apology" and acknowledgment that his relatives "were innocents, not terrorists."

As ABC News reported Tuesday:

Jaber claims that his relatives were given, through the Yemeni government, a bag containing $100,000 in U.S. currency in 2014 as compensation for the killing. But Jaber told ABC News that the U.S. has never acknowledged that it provided the money to his family.

Jaber said that an acknowledgment of responsibility for the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew on part of the United States is more important to him than money. "Instead of paying money in a secret way, the U.S. could announce a project in his name carried out by members of civil society in support of the village that was hit," he said, adding that creating educational projects in the village could also help prevent young people from joining terrorist groups such as al-Qaida.

"True accountability comes from owning up to our mistakes," he wrote to Obama.

Human rights group Reprieve, which is assisting Jaber in his case, noted that despite Obama recently "reaffirming his Executive Order to acknowledge and investigate civilian deaths by U.S. drones," as he vowed to do in July, the administration planned to argue Tuesday "that the U.S. courts have no business deciding whether strikes are lawful—even where war crimes are alleged."

Banned by 119 Countries, U.S. Cluster Bombs Continue to Orphan Yemeni Children

Villagers in al-Hayma, a coastal fishing village on the Red Sea in western Yemen, told The Intercept that on October 5 they heard rumbling around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Soon after, they saw a jet from the Saudi-led coalition circling over the coast.

“The warplane was hovering toward the shoreline before I saw something with parachutes falling down,” said Yahya Qassem Zabah, a local fisherman. “For a moment I thought that soldiers were landing. Then I heard a number of explosions soon after that.”

What Zabah saw was not a soldier parachuting toward the coast, it was a cluster weapon. In mid-air, its shell casing opened and released cylinder-shaped bomblets, which scattered as they plummeted to the beach. ...

The villagers recovered two empty shell casings and three parachutes, which [were] kept as evidence and showed to The Intercept. ... Researchers from Human Rights Watch identified the shell casings in photographs taken by The Intercept as a U.S.-made cluster bomb. The serial number documented in the photographs also begins with the five-number “commercial and government entity” (CAGE) code 04614 — indicating that the weapons were produced in the United States, by the Rhode Island-based company Textron Systems. ...

Due to their civilian toll, cluster bombs were banned by a 2008 treaty signed by 119 countries, but not by the U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. has sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia in recent years.

The Saudi coalition continues to use cluster bombs, and other U.S.-supplied weapons, to bomb civilian sites, including homes, factories, markets, hospitals, children’s schools, and a funeral. Human Rights Watch released a report last week documenting further attacks on a prison and water-drilling site.

US Trims Some Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia Over Yemen Civilian Deaths

In a surprise move, the United States has announced that they will halt sales certain munitions sales to Saudi Arabia today, citing growing concerns about “flaws” in Saudi targeting in the Yemen war, which is leading to a huge number of civilian deaths.

Officials quoted in Reuters described a “systemic, endemic” problem with Saudi targeting in the war, and decided that they could no longer sell certain “air-dropped” weaponry to the Saudis. The shift is surprising, as US officials have repeatedly claimed support for the Saudi war, but it isn’t necessarily a huge shift.

The US sells an enormous amount of arms to Saudi Arabia yearly, and officials aren’t providing clarity on just how big this “certain” sales halt amounts to. The expectation is that it is minor. Perhaps more problematic, the US is going to continue to provide mid-air refueling for the Saudi warplanes to continue the objectionable bombing campaign.

Robert Fisk weighs in with an excellent report, worth reading in full. Here's a taste:

There is More Than One Truth to Tell in the Terrible Story of Aleppo

Western politicians, “experts” and journalists are going to have to reboot their stories over the next few days now that Bashar al-Assad’s army has retaken control of eastern Aleppo. We’re going to find out if the 250,000 civilians “trapped” in the city were indeed that numerous. We’re going to hear far more about why they were not able to leave when the Syrian government and Russian air force staged their ferocious bombardment of the eastern part of the city.

And we’re going to learn a lot more about the “rebels” whom we in the West – the US, Britain and our head-chopping mates in the Gulf – have been supporting.

They did, after all, include al-Qaeda (alias Jabhat al-Nusra, alias Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), the “folk” – as George W Bush called them – who committed the crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001. Remember the War on Terror? Remember the “pure evil” of al-Qaeda. Remember all the warnings from our beloved security services in the UK about how al-Qaeda can still strike terror in London?

Not when the rebels, including al-Qaeda, were bravely defending east Aleppo, we didn’t – because a powerful tale of heroism, democracy and suffering was being woven for us, a narrative of good guys versus bad guys as explosive and dishonest as “weapons of mass destruction”.

Iran and Turkey's secret talks on Syria revealed

Iran and Turkey held secret talks on peace proposals for Syria in 2013 and as recently as this year, but the talks broke down amid mutual suspicions, according to a new report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) to be published on Tuesday. ...

The report is the latest of a series of accounts of failed diplomacy throughout the nearly six years of the Syrian conflict, which has cost the lives of up to half a million people. It says that in September 2013, three months after the election of pragmatist president Hassan Rouhani, Tehran presented Ankara with a peace proposal that had been formulated in consultation with Qassem Suleimani, the head of the powerful Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard.

The plan envisaged a ceasefire followed by a national unity government and constitutional reform aimed at constraining presidential powers. Most importantly, there would then be presidential and legislative elections under UN supervision. The plan was the subject of several months of shuttle diplomacy between the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, and his Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoğlu, but it eventually collapsed over the future role of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.

“We agreed on every detail, except a clause in the final phase of the plan which called for UN-monitored elections. Turkish leaders wanted Assad barred,” Zarif is quoted as saying in the report. “I noted that this should not be a concern in an internationally monitored election, particularly if, as Turkey holds, Assad has a dreadful record and a minority constituency. But Davutoğlu refused... and our efforts came to naught.”

Assad: West doesn't worry when terrorists attack Palmyra & destroy human heritage

The rebels of Aleppo will fight on, but Assad is taking their last power base in Syria

The defeat of the insurgents in east Aleppo came faster than was expected, though there are still some districts under their control. They were reported to number between 8,000 and 10,000 fighters in the enclave two weeks ago, of whom some 4,000 were experienced combatants belonging to Jabhat al-Nusra (formerly the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria) and their close ally the Ahrar al-Sham group.

The weakness of the resistance is probably the result of being under intense artillery fire for over a month without the ability to retaliate. Though the Syrian government and Russian air strikes have been the main focus of the foreign media, it is shelling by artillery which does most of the damage in East Aleppo and other besieged rebel strongholds in the rest of Syria.

The armed opposition were divided; different parties fought each other as recently as November. There was also probably a feeling among the rebels that the outcome of the battle was inevitable once it became evident that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, their allies since 2011, were not going to do anything to support them. ...

Rebels will fight on in Idlib, where they are likely to get support from Turkey, and in the south of Syria where they get aid though Jordan. But they have been losing their enclaves in Damascus as well as Aleppo, so the non-Isis forces will have difficulty continuing the struggle. What remains unclear is whether or not Isis will benefit from the defeat of the rest of the armed opposition.

French parliament votes to extend state of emergency until after 2017 elections

France’s parliament has voted to extend a national state of emergency until 15 July, after next year’s elections.

The security measures, in force since attacks in Paris that killed 130 people in November 2015, are now expected to be approved by the Senate on Thursday. It is the fifth extension of the state of emergency, which gives police extended powers of search and arrest.

The overnight vote in the National Assembly passed by 288 to 32, with only Left Front lawmakers, protesting ecologists and a handful of centre-right Republicans voting against.

The extension, which will give the country its longest uninterrupted state of emergency since the Algerian War in the 1960s, will span the two-round presidential election in April-May and June parliamentary polls.

The government has cited a heightened risk of jihadist attacks coinciding with the polls.

Unhappy Russians nostalgic for Soviet-style rule

A quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, life satisfaction in Russia and other ex-Soviet states remains stubbornly low, with enthusiasm wavering for democracy and open market economics, according to a survey.

The study found that only 15% of Russians think their households have a better quality of life, compared with 30% in 2010 when respondents were last asked, and only 9% see their finances as better than four years ago.

Just over half the respondents from former Soviet states also thought a return to a more authoritarian system would be a plus in some circumstances, said the findings from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank said.

The EBRD, created 25 years ago to invest in former communist countries, questioned households across ex-Soviet bloc for more than a decade for its “Life in Transition” project, polling 51,000 households in 34 countries from Estonia to Mongolia.

Government Watchdog Conducting New Investigation Into Pentagon Whistleblower Retaliation

The watchdog wing of Congress has quietly launched an investigation into the “integrity” of the Pentagon’s whistleblower protection program. The previously unreported investigation, started in late October, expands on an ongoing effort by the Department of Justice on this same issue.

The Government Accountability Office, which serves as the investigative arm of Congress, has been looking into the extent to which Department of Defense whistleblower policies “meet executive branch policies and goals,” reassure employees of their rights to raise concerns “without fear of reprisal,” and require officials to report to Congress, among several other areas of concern. ...

The nonprofit Government Accountability Project, which is devoted to protecting whistleblowers, provided The Intercept with documentation on the new investigation. According to the group, the investigation will also likely target senior Pentagon officials accused of destroying evidence that would have exculpated former senior NSA official Thomas Drake, who raised internal complaints about what he believed to be NSA misconduct and waste before ultimately approaching journalists. ...

The new effort also follows conclusions made last spring by a separate government watchdog group, the Office of Special Counsel, which is specifically tasked with providing protection to federal whistleblowers. The OSC said there was “substantial likelihood” senior Pentagon officials might have violated “laws, rules or regulations” in Drake’s case by destroying records of his cooperation with Congress and a Pentagon audit concerning his complaints.

The Department of Justice originally said the destruction was “pursuant to a standard document destruction policy,” but that assertion has since been challenged by Drake’s lawyers and the OSC.

Google Publishes Eight Secret FBI Requests

Google revealed in October it had been freed from a gag order preventing it from talking about a secret FBI request for customer data made in 2015.

The internet search company chose at the time not to publish the actual subpoena, but it is now releasing redacted versions of that letter and seven others, as well as correspondence with the FBI pertaining to their release.

While these letters are merely a handful out of several hundred thousand subpoenas major tech companies receive every year — the overwhelming majority of them still under seal — Google’s release gives some insight into the types of information being demanded by the FBI, and demonstrates Google’s record of fighting those demands in court. ...

Google’s release on Tuesday also revealed that the FBI has been asking the internet search company for what’s known as “electronic communication transactional records” as recently as 2015. Key national security attorneys who have represented major technology companies and telecoms have told The Intercept in prior interviews that this type of request goes beyond what the FBI is authorized to make. While the FBI has been pursuing legislation that would officially give them that power, fixing what FBI Director James Comey has called a “typo” in the law.

Philippines: President Duterte admits personally killing criminals when he was mayor

Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte says he personally killed criminals

Rodrigo Duterte has announced he personally killed suspected criminals when he was mayor of his home city of Davao in the Philippines, cruising the streets on a motorcycle and “looking for trouble”.

The country’s president made the comments in a speech late on Monday night as he discussed his campaign to eradicate illegal drugs, which has seen police and unknown assailants kill around 5,000 people since he became president on 30 June.

“In Davao I used to do it personally. Just to show to the guys [police officers] that if I can do it, why can’t you,” he was quoted as saying by AFP, talking of his two decades as mayor of the southern city of 1.5 million people.

“And I’d go around in Davao with a motorcycle, with a big bike around, and I would just patrol the streets, looking for trouble also.

“I was really looking for a confrontation so I could kill.”

The former mayor was nicknamed “Duterte Harry”, after the fictional and ruthless police inspector played by Clint Eastwood, for his support for vigilante death squads that killed hundreds of suspected criminals.

Unarmed 73-year-old man killed by police in Bakersfield, California

A Bakersfield police officer shot and killed an unarmed 73-year-old man on Monday. Family members said Francisco Serna was suffering from dementia and was shot nine times as he took a walk outside his home in the early hours of the morning.

Bakersfield lies in Kern County, California, where a Guardian investigation last year revealed that law enforcement officers killed more people per capita than any other county in the US. The Bakersfield police department and the Kern County sheriff’s department are the two largest law enforcement agencies in the county.

Police said in a statement that officers had received a report of a man armed with a gun in Serna’s neighborhood. When officers arrived in the area after 12.30am on Monday, a witness pointed to Serna standing in a driveway before an officer fatally shot him, according to the police account.

The Bakersfield police spokesman, Sgt Gary Carruesco, later confirmed to the Guardian that Serna did not have a firearm and no weapon was recovered from the scene. Carruesco said the department expected to release the name of the officer who opened fire later on Tuesday.

Serna’s son Rogelio Serna, said in a Facebook post that his father had been “murdered” by police and the family wanted “the truth to be told”.

Pfffttt!!!

A new Oklahoma law requires anti-abortion messages in all public bathrooms

A new anti-abortion public awareness campaign is taking aim at Oklahoma’s public bathrooms.

According to the terms of a new law, all restaurants, public buildings, hospitals, and small businesses will need to install signs that point out various family planning resources for pregnant women as an alternative to abortion. ...

The text of the Humanity of the Unborn Child Act says it is part of a public health campaign “for the purpose of achieving an abortion-free society” that will “clearly and consistently teach that abortion kills a living human being.”

The law is already receiving pushback because it does not allocate any state funding for the signs; instead, it leaves it up to the businesses themselves to foot the bill, an estimated $2.3 million dollars total.

Ohio governor vetoes "heartbeat bill" but bans abortion after 20 weeks — even for rape victims

Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Tuesday vetoed a so-called heartbeat bill that would have outlawed abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy and instead signed a different bill banning abortions after 20 weeks. The 20-week ban makes no exception for cases involving rape or incest.

The only exception is when continuing a pregnancy past 20 weeks endangers the woman’s life or poses a “serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” The committee working on the bill removed diabetes and multiple sclerosis from the list of conditions justifying an exception to the law, the Columbus Dispatch reported. ...

Kasich, a moderate Catholic Republican who ran for president this year, has described himself as being against abortion with the exception of cases involving rape or incest. Including S.B. 127, he has enacted 18 anti-abortion provisions since he took office in 2011. The heartbeat bill is the only one he has not signed.

Now, any doctor who performs abortions in Ohio after the 20-week mark could lose his or her medical license and be slapped with fourth-degree felony charges.

Rick Perry, Trump's Energy Secretary Pick, is Close Ally to Oil Industry & Dakota Access Pipeline

Trump's cabinet of millionaires and billionaires get an exclusive tax benefit potentially worth millions

When President-elect Donald Trump named ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his pick for secretary of state Tuesday, he added yet another member to his cabinet of millionaires and billionaires who will be able to take advantage of an obscure tax provision that will likely save them millions of dollars by joining the new administration.

While leaving the private sector for the world of public service is often seen as an act of financial sacrifice, the government has adjusted its rules in recent decades to entice the wealthy. Congress tightened conflict of interest laws for administration officials in 1989. It also put in place, at the urging of President George H.W. Bush, a provision to “minimize the burden” for the wealthy taking a government position. But far from a burden, public service has become profitable.

The rule allows members of the executive branch to sell off assets tax-free and then reinvest that money in low-risk assets like government bonds and mutual funds. Administration officials will have to pay the 15 percent capital gains tax whenever they sell their low-risk assets — the tax is only deferred — but the benefit comes from turning high-risk assets into low-risk assets, tax-free.

“The ability to defer paying tax on capital gains is a huge tax benefit,” said Lily Batchelder, a tax law professor at NYU and the former deputy director of the White House National Economic Council. “It’s like the government is giving you an interest-free loan equal to the amount of tax you would have otherwise owed when selling the asset.”

Trump’s cabinet — by far the wealthiest since the 1989 reform — is poised to divert unprecedented sums through the tax rule.

NPR Guest Warns Against Living Wages With Fantasies of $16 Apples

To comment on Donald Trump’s naming retired Marine Gen. John Kelly as his Department of Homeland Security secretary, NPR‘s Morning Edition (12/9/16) brought on George W. Bush’s Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff.

A more independent observer might have brought up Kelly’s oversight of the US’s Guantánamo internment camp, where he has defended the force-feeding of hunger-strikers, a procedure condemned by human rights groups as torture.

But Chertoff didn’t even mention Guantánamo, focusing instead on the need to keep allowing immigrant workers into the United States because you can pay them less:

I think the reality is, if you look at a large number of jobs being done by people who come across illegally, they’re doing jobs no one else wants to do. I guess you could pay, you know, $15 or $20 an hour. But then an apple would cost, you know, $16. And that’s not going to work economically.

That makes sense—if you think it takes roughly an hour to pick one apple. As FAIR alum Peter Hart noted on Twitter (12/9/16),  “Is this #fakenews or just stupid?”

Virginia voter ID law upheld by federal court after Democratic challenge

A federal appeals court has upheld a Virginia law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, rejecting a challenge from Democrats who argued that it suppressed voting by minorities and young people.

A three-judge panel of the fourth US circuit court of appeals ruled on Tuesday that the law did not violate the Voting Rights Act or impose an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.

The ruling comes just months after a different panel of the same court struck down a North Carolina law that required voters to produce a photo ID and also scrapped same-day registration and shortened early voting periods. But the panel that issued Tuesday’s ruling found that the facts in the North Carolina case “are in no way” like those in the passage of Virginia’s bill.

Virginians can obtain free photo IDs at voter registrar offices, but Democrats argued that few people knew about that option because the state had done little to spread the word.

Electoral College Revolt Growing Into 'Powerful Show of Force'

With the Electoral College vote less than a week away, Harvard University constitutional law professor Lawrence Lessig says 20 Republican members are considering voting against Donald Trump—more than half the number needed to potentially block the real estate mogul's election. 

The 538 delegates to the Electoral College will gather at state capitols on Monday, December 19 to cast their votes for president. Ahead of that day, Lessig's Electors Trust group "has been offering pro bono legal counsel to Republican presidential electors considering ditching Trump and has been acting as a clearinghouse for electors to privately communicate their intentions," Politico explains. Lessig further outlined his arguments for doing so in an op-ed posted Tuesday at Medium.

He said Tuesday: "Obviously, whether an elector ultimately votes his or her conscience will depend in part upon whether there are enough doing the same. We now believe there are more than half the number needed to change the result seriously considering making that vote."

That claim "contradict[s] the assertions of Republican National Committee sources who report that a GOP whip operation intended to ensure Republican electors remain loyal to Trump found only one elector—Chris Suprun of Texas—would defy Trump," Politico pointed out. 

But that could be because, as Salon reports, "Trump's campaign is pressuring Republican electors into voting for them under 'threats of political reprisal.'"

NOAA Issues 'Jaw-Dropping' Assessment on 'Unprecedented' Arctic Warming

Latest Arctic Report Card finds that region's temperatures continue upward climb twice as fast as global temperature increase

If President-elect Donald Trump's appointments of a "band of climate conspiracy theorists" weren't already stoking fears for the ever-warming planet, the latest Arctic Report Card from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) may well provide the ignition.

The annual assessment, released Wednesday, finds that "persistent warming" is driving "extensive changes" to the region. In fact, the average air temperatures were "unprecendented"—the highest on observational record—and "Arctic temperatures continue to increase at double the rate of the global temperature increase," NOAA states.

"Rarely have we seen the Arctic show a clearer, stronger, or more pronounced signal of persistent warming and its cascading effects on the environment than this year," said Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA's Arctic Research Program.

Scientists Racing to Archive Climate Data Before Denier-in-Chief Trump Takes Office

Anticipating the worst under the incoming administration, a group of scientists are frantically trying to archive government climate data before President-elect Donald Trump's "band of climate conspiracy theorists...storm the castle," as one put it.

On Saturday, Slate meterologist Eric Holthaus posed the question: "Scientists: Do you have a US.gov climate database that you don't want to see disappear? Add it here," he wrote. "Please share."

The response was "overwhelming," Holthaus said Sunday, "We still need more input, more database names. I want to make sure no data is lost on Jan 20."

Suggestions range from NASA's scientific consensus on global warming, to the Environmental Protection Agency's map of the nation's worst greenhouse gas emitters, to NOAA's documentation of sea level trends.

In addition to the flood of responses, "Investors offered to help fund efforts to copy and safeguard key climate data. Lawyers offered pro bono legal help. Database experts offered to help organize mountains of data and to house it with free server space," the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

With nearly 60 government climate datasets flagged for preservation, Holthaus announced Tuesday that the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) would be taking leadership of the project under its Climate #DataRefuge website.

Well now, looks like EPA is a day late and a dollar short again. That clanking sound you heard yesterday was the knocking of executive knees as the EPA timorously announced its almost-findings about fracking. Or, perhaps it was the sound of professional green groups all eagerly grabbing at once to claim a half a loaf.

EPA Finally Concludes Fracking Pollutes Drinking Water

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirmed on Tuesday that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, contaminates drinking water—but claimed a lack of information makes it impossible to determine how widespread the risks are.

In a final report issued Tuesday, Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources, the EPA removed a finding included in a 2015 draft which indicated that fracking did not cause "widespread, systemic" harm. Fossil fuel industry lobbyists had praised that version of the draft—which also received misleading media coverage—claiming it vindicated the controversial drilling method that involves shooting chemical-laden water into shale rock at high pressure to release the gas trapped underneath.

And although Tuesday's report stops short of making declarative statements about the severity or frequency of the impacts of fracking, environmental advocates say the confirmation that it contaminates water is enough. Green groups had accused the White House of inserting the now-removed clause, noting that President Barack Obama supports fracking as part of his "all of the above" energy policies.

The EPA's own Science Advisory Board in August demanded a revision of the 2015 report, stating it was "lacking in several critical areas."

"The EPA has confirmed what we've known all along: fracking can and does contaminate drinking water. We are pleased that the agency has acted on the recommendations of its Science Advisory Board and chosen be frank about the inherent harms and hazards of fracking," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of the environmental group Food & Water Watch. "Today the Obama administration has rightly prioritized facts and science, and put public health and environmental protection over the profit-driven interests of the oil and gas industry."

Also of Interest

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

Latin America’s Schindler: a forgotten hero of the 20th century

American Martyr to Right-Wing Repression

Trump Homeland Security Adviser Helped Contractors Profit Off Harsh Deportation Policies

Still Unprosecuted for its Frauds in the Crash, Goldman Sachs to Be the Financial Brains of the Trump Era

Washington Post Backlash: Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, and Paul Craig Roberts Join Naked Capitalism in Second Demand Letter Retraction and Apology for Defamatory “Propaganda” Story

Questions for the Electors on Russian Hacking

The Never-ending ‘War on Terror’

A Mother and Child Trapped in Obama’s Brutal Family Deportation System

Venezuela Brings Toys to Poor Kids, Gets Called ‘Grinch’ on CNN

A Little Night Music

Chris Kenner - Sick and Tired

Chris Kenner - Land of 1000 Dances

Chris Kenner - Something You Got

Chris Kenner - Grandma's House

Chris Kenner - Packin' Up

Chris Kenner - That's My Girl

Chris Kenner - Shoo Rah

Chris Kenner - Don't Let Her Pin That Charge On Me

Chris Kenner - Never Reach Perfection

Chris Kenner - How Far

Chris Kenner - Fumigate Funky Broadway

Chris Kenner - A Very True Story

Chris Kenner - Johnny Little

Chris Kenner - You Will Be Mine

Chris Kenner - Don't Make No Noise