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"It’s refreshing to see that Putin has a sense of humor. Some of the grimmer Soviet leaders, such as Putin’s old boss at the KGB Yuri Andropov, might not have seen the comedy in Barack Obama sending US troops to Russia’s doorstep in Poland and Norway this week in retaliation for snooping into John Podesta’s inbox. This is when those Hitler analogies the Democrats like to throw around come home to roost."

-- Jeffrey St. Clair

News and Opinion

It's worth reading the whole thing.

Rachel Maddow Accidentally Reveals Establishment Plot To Force Russian Confrontation

So you know how Obama has been deploying thousands of troops to the Russian border and we’ve been all like — that’s weird. What’s going on with that? He’s out of office in a few weeks, why the provocation when he’ll be out of office soon? ... Well, now we know why. Maddow gave us a sneak peak of the grand plan — it’s all to blackmail Trump into going ahead with the stupid Russian confrontation. They’re going to make it so he either has to back out and look like he’s under Putin’s thumb, or be a good boy and go ahead with World War Three.

Check it out.

The 12-minute clip begins with Maddow detailing how the communist Soviet Union used to make a practice of bugging hotel rooms where the now-defunct KGB would spy on foreigners who stayed there. To cement the idea that the Soviet Union’s KGB is the same thing as Russia’s FSB in the minds of the viewers, Maddow points out the fact that the KGB is only two letters’ different from the FSB (I swear I’m not making this up, it’s at 3:43 of the video), then later deliberately says “the KGB— I mean, the FSB” in a mock self-correction to drive her point home. Because that’s all the proof you need on MSNBC now apparently. ...

Having made her case using so much reach that I feared for the integrity of her arm socket, she then went on to speak of the troops Obama has been amassing along Russia’s border, lighting up with glee when she talked about how upset this provocation is making the Russians. She then wrapped up by saying, in plain English,

“And here’s the question: Is the new President gonna take those troops out? After all the speculation, after all the worry, we are actually about to find out if Russia maybe has something on the new President? We’re about to find out if the new President of our country is going to do what Russia wants once he’s Commander-in-Chief of the US military starting noon on Friday. What is he gonna do with those deployments? Watch this space.”

A graphic with the words “WE’LL BE WATCHING!” accompanied these words, just to really give it that authentic 1984 flavor.

US intelligence investigating Russian links of leading Trump associates – report

Donald Trump’s transition team has been forced to distance itself from reports that American intelligence agencies have intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russia and associates of the president-elect.

On the eve of Trump’s inauguration as the 45th president of the United States, the business dealings of his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort were among the matters under investigation, the New York Times reported, citing current and former senior American officials.

Manafort, who stood down as Trump’s campaign chief in August 2016, has made millions from consulting work while working for pro-Russia oligarchs including Rinat Akhmetov, Dmitry Firtash and Oleg Deripaska.

The National Security Agency has conducted surveillance of Manafort’s business contacts, the Times said, for suspected links to Russia’s security service, the FSB.

Other Trump associates whose contacts are said to be under the microscope include Carter Page, an investment banker who worked in Russia and who was a foreign policy adviser to the campaign, and Roger Stone, whose involvement in Republican politics goes back to Richard Nixon.

Kremlin hits out at Obama, says was always ready for nuclear arms cuts

The Kremlin on Thursday disputed a statement by outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama on nuclear arms cuts, saying Russia had always been ready to consider making proportional cuts to its arsenal.

Obama said overnight he had told President Vladimir Putin he was ready to proceed with nuclear disarmament, but that Russia didn't want to negotiate.

Studies in the banality of evil:

C.I.A. Torture Detailed in Newly Disclosed Documents

Batches of newly disclosed documents about the Central Intelligence Agency’s defunct torture program are providing new details about its practices of slamming terrorism suspects into walls, confining them in coffinlike boxes and subjecting them to waterboarding — as well as internal disputes over whether two psychologists who designed the program were competent.
Continue reading the main story

The release of the newly available primary documents, which include information not discussed in a 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the C.I.A. torture program that was released in 2014, comes at the same time as an urgent legal battle is unfolding over the potential fate of the still-classified, 6,700-page full version of that report. ...

The two sets of newly available documents present a vivid contrast in perspectives, as the C.I.A. cables recount in bloodless bureaucratese the infliction of techniques that Mr. Zubaydah recalled experiencing in harrowing terms.

For example, when interrogators at a C.I.A. black site prison in Thailand confined Mr. Zubaydah in a cramped box on Aug. 5, 2002, they observed to headquarters that he showed “signs of distress,” according to one of the cables from a group the government declassified as part of a lawsuit against the psychologists who designed the program. The lawsuit is being brought by detainees represented by lawyers including from the American Civil Liberties Union. The A.C.L.U. provided the documents to The New York Times.

Mr. Zubaydah remembered the box experience in more vivid terms.

“I felt I was going to explode from bending my legs and my back and from being unable to spread them not even for short instants,” he wrote to his lawyers in 2008, noting that the box was so short and tight he could not sit up or change positions. “The very strong pain made me scream unconsciously.” ...

Another group of documents produced in discovery from that lawsuit, first provided by the A.C.L.U. to The Washington Post, showed that in mid-2003, about a year after the agency hired the two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and J. Bruce Jessen, to design a torture regimen for Mr. Zubaydah, unidentified C.I.A. employees raised sharp questions about their ethics and competence to judge whether the techniques they had orchestrated were harmful or effective.

CIA documents expose internal agency feud over psychologists leading torture program

Newly released CIA documents expose a bitter internal feud over the qualifications and ethics of two former military psychologists who pushed the agency to adopt interrogation methods widely condemned as torture.

A series of internal emails reveal that the CIA’s own medical and psychological personnel expressed deep concern about an arrangement that put two outside contractors in charge of subjecting detainees to brutal measures including waterboarding, then also evaluating whether those methods were working or causing lasting harm. ...

The files, which also include documents that shed light on the death of a CIA prisoner in Afghanistan, were made public as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and J. Bruce Jessen, by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Jim and Bob have both shown blatant disregard for the ethics shared by almost all of their colleagues,” a second CIA memo concluded.

The records reveal that internal opposition to the agency’s reliance on the two men was more extensive and intense than has been previously disclosed. More than 13 years after those emails were sent — and eight since the program was dismantled — the controversy has yet to fully subside.

The Ugly Specter of Torture and Lies

January 17 was an unusually good day for truth and human rights on both sides of the Atlantic. Even before President Obama commuted whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s long prison sentence, the British Supreme Court ruled unanimously that government ministers cannot claim “state immunity” or other specious grounds to avoid legal accountability in cases of abduction (rendition) and torture. The decision was heralded by Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, and other human rights groups.

The lawsuit against Britain’s former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and a former senior intelligence officer was brought by Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a militant opponent of Muammar Gaddafi. He was kidnapped with his pregnant wife from Bangkok in March 2004 based on a tip from MI6, the British intelligence service. Taken to a secret CIA prison in Thailand, they were blindfolded, hooded, hung from hooks on the cell wall, beaten, and blasted with loud music. A few days later the CIA flew them to Tripoli, where Belhaj was jailed and tortured by the Libyan regime for six years. He says he was also interrogated by British intelligence officers.

Owing to an edict by President Obama, Bush administration officials have never been tried for their complicity in more than 60 renditions of CIA prisoners, but Britain’s senior officials may face justice thanks to their Supreme Court ruling, which cited legal authorities ranging from the Magna Carta of 1215 to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. ...

The British government, which has spent more than £600,000 to fight the Belhaj case, claims that a full airing of the facts would seriously damage relations with the United States. President Obama could have knocked that assertion down at any time and welcomed the truth. Instead, he consistently refused throughout his two terms in office to convene a truth commission or hold anyone accountable for illegal rendition and torture (short of death). He even invoked the “state secrets” doctrine to block private lawsuits against government officials for torture. ...

With a noted supporter of torture now moving into the White House, the folly of Obama’s approach is clearer than ever. That’s why a spokesman for the human rights legal defense organization Reprieve declared, “this case isn’t just about history. . . In 72 hours, a would-be torturer will take the reins of Earth’s most powerful security state. We enter the Trump era with not a soul held to account for Britain’s past role in rendition. . . Our intelligence agencies may well be pressured to help America torture again.”

Speaking of the banality of evil, Obama has become the most transparent liar, ever.

Drone strikes killed one civilian in 2016, Obama administration says

U.S. forces conducted 53 drone strikes against terrorists last year, killing at least 431 enemy combatants and one civilian, according to an intelligence community report released Thursday night. ...

The Center for Civilians in Conflict said it was disappointed that the report wasn't more detailed, and noted that it falls well short of numbers reported by most independent observers. "They know, better than anybody, how many civilians are actually killed, and it’s important for official figures to match reality," said the center's executive director, Federico Borello. ...

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the report, acknowledged Thursday that there are "differences" between governmental and non-governmental numbers. And the report contained this caveat: "The 2016 figures released today should be considered in light of the inherent limitations on the ability to determine the precise number of combatant and non-combatant deaths given the non-permissive environments in which these strikes often occur."

The numbers also do not include airstrikes in combat zones, which include Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Socialist party heading for implosion in French elections

Gérard Singer, a retired clerk in the French social security system, was queuing up for a Socialist party rally on the edge of Paris in the freezing cold, and the mood was grim. “The Socialist party is in the shit,” he sighed.

Singer had come to hear Benoît Hamon, the leftwing outsider who is gaining ground in the party’s primary contest to choose its candidate for the presidential election in the spring. But the large crowds turning out to the final rallies before the first round of the primary vote this Sunday have done little to temper the sense of impending doom. No matter which candidate it chooses, the party seems almost certain to be defeated in the main event.

After five years under the Socialist president François Hollande, the French electorate has shifted firmly to the right. The far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen and the staunchly rightwing, socially conservative François Fillon of the Republicans are the favourites to reach the final round of the election in May. The Socialists, meanwhile, seem to be heading for implosion, bitterly divided between pro-market modernisers and a leftwing flank that argues true socialist values have been betrayed.

The real debate on the French left is taking place outside the Socialist party, between two charismatic figures who have made the Socialists seem irrelevant. On the centre-left, Hollande’s rebellious former economy minister Emmanuel Macron is breathing down the necks of Fillon and Le Pen with his maverick “neither left nor right” campaign, with key Socialists increasingly jumping ship to join him. And on the hard left, the firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has Communist party backing, is rising in the polls, relegating the Socialists to an embarrassing and demoralising fifth place.

While Others Bickered About What’s Happening In Syria, Tulsi Gabbard Went There To Find Out

One of the most confusing and controversial figures on the political left today is Hawaiian Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, whose bold independence defies all the convenient boxes people like to put each other into for the sake of cognitive simplicity. ... Gabbard has consistently come up on the progressive side of every single issue, from leaving her high-level position at the DNC to endorse Sanders when all the other staff illicitly kept their positions and tried to rig the election for Clinton, to her criticism of Clinton’s warmongering, to her flying to Standing Rock with thousands of other war veterans to act as a human shield from law enforcement’s militarized brutalization of the water protectors, to her outspoken opposition the no-fly zone in Syria that neoliberals the world over have been braying for.

Of all the areas where she stands in cool defiance of the corporatist agenda, it is her stance against interventionism in Syria that is pushing against the political establishment most aggressively. Gabbard recently authored a piece of congressional legislation titled the Stop Arming Terrorists Act (or as I like to call it the Stop Arming Terrorists You Fucking Idiots Act), which openly accuses the US government of supporting terrorist organizations with money, arms and intelligence to facilitate regime change wars around the world, and calls for a ban on this evil behavior. ...

While everyone else was in their comfy homes bickering and arguing about moderate rebels and no-fly zones, Gabbard said “the hell with this” and went charging right into the belly of the beast. Taking another member of the critically endangered species democrat antiwaricus named Dennis Kucinich along for the ride, Gabbard flew to Syria on what her aides are describing as a fact-finding mission, visiting both the nation’s capitol Damascus and the war-ravaged city of Aleppo. The House Ethics Committee approved the trip, but it was kept secret from everyone else.

Predictably, the liberal media has been losing its mind over this and trying to find ways to throw shade on Gabbard’s bold move without looking too ridiculous. The Atlantic ran a story about her trip titled “Tulsi Gabbard, The GOP’s Favorite Democrat, Goes to Syria,” and Politico ran one titled “Gabbard won't disclose who's paying for secret trip to Syria”. Many stories were published emphasizing how “controversial” Gabbard’s move was, often going to great lengths to point out how her anti-interventionist stance on Syria aligns with Donald Trump’s, as though that in itself is an inherently bad thing. The CIA trade rag Washington Post mentioned Trump's name four times covering the story, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Donald Trump. This is a transparent attempt by establishment media to capitalize on the aforementioned confusion within the political left by associating Gabbard’s move with a political enemy, despite her anti-war goal being in clear alignment with the progressive agenda.

'Voice dissent': protesters attempt to disrupt inaugural events in Washington

As Donald Trump’s election victory was cemented during celebratory inauguration events in the nation’s capital, the dissent and divisive discord his campaign produced was evident on the streets of Washington DC as throngs of protesters arrived to disrupt proceedings.

A group of protesters from the anarchist group black bloc smashed storefront windows and clashed with police shortly before the swearing-in ceremony was due to begin, and another group attempted to shut down one of the security points allowing access to the public viewing area of the inauguration on the National Mall on Friday morning. On Thursday night hundreds of activists clashed with police outside the National Press Club.

The small group at the checkpoint, organised by a group called Disrupt J20, linked arms as some members were led away by police wearing body armor. The organization claimed on social media that they had temporarily shut down a number of the dozen checkpoints around the Mall, with a group of Black Lives Matter protesters reportedly closing access at one location for over an hour.

Hundreds of protesters appeared to have gained access to the public viewing areas on the Mall, many chanting “not my president” and holding signs with slogans including “Can we impeach him today?” and “Fascist”.

DeploraBall: Trump lovers and haters clash at Washington DC event

Chaos erupted outside the DeploraBall on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration as protesters clashed with supporters of the president-elect.

“Nazi scum!” a masked man yelled through a police barricade at a woman in a sequined gown as she defiantly waved her ticket for the event. A woman held a sign that read “Look, Ma. It’s a racist misogynist” with an arrow pointed toward the guest line. In response a man flipped open his suit jacket to show her his shirt, which read: “Deplorable lives matter.”

Hundreds of protesters filled the street in front of the National Press Club, the chosen venue for the DeploraBall, a name inspired by a remark made by Hillary Clinton, who referred to some of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables”. Law enforcement blocked off the street to cars for the protest on Thursday night. Two rows of police in riot gear guarded the entrance to the club and much of the sidewalk.

A number of the ball’s attendees were thought to be associated with the “alt-right”, a far-right movement in the US that has praised the Republican president-elect. The event has also revealed friction within the movement, as the DeploraBall’s organizers distanced themselves from the extreme elements of the group. ...

From behind the police line, protesters flashed middle fingers and shouted obscenities and insults, calling the guests “fascists” and “racists”. “The red hats are better than white sheets,” one man said. “Watch your pussies, ladies,” a woman shouted at female attendees.

Green party's Trittin on Trump presidency | DW News

The world is already reacting to Donald Trump’s inauguration

The world isn’t waiting for Donald Trump’s inauguration to start responding to it. As Donald Trump prepares to be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States Friday, reaction from around the world has already gathered apace.

The President-elect’s controversial comments about NATO, Israel and China have left many world leaders unsettled, while his casual approach to diplomacy has taught the rest of the world that it would be foolish to predict his next move. His presidency has also been a source of excitement for some countries – with celebrations in Russia Thursday night.

In the U.K., many were expected to protest Trump’s inauguration on Friday, and one initiative had already taken to bridges around the country, where protestors draped banners with messages such as “bridges not walls,” “migrants welcome here,” “migration is older than language” and “act now.” ...

German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, speaking to Der Spiegel, was far less sanguine: “I don’t think a big trade war will break out tomorrow, but we will naturally insist that agreements are upheld.”

In France, far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen appeared delighted, and said the inauguration of Trump “opens a new era of cooperation between nations.” She praised Trump while simultaneously firing shots at her critics, saying that Trump had done more in a single tweet than former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and incumbent François Hollande had accomplished in a decade.

Donald Trump's first speech as US President: "it's unlikely he's going to succeed anywhere"

Oh my, a bloated bureaucracy will be missing 600 figureheads.

Donald Trump Will Take Office With a Skeleton Crew Running National Security

When Donald Trump takes the presidential oath of office on Friday, he will assume control of the same intelligence agencies he has been feuding with for several weeks. For national security, the transition is shaping up to be a rocky one.

Unlike President Barack Obama, who came to office with a relatively experienced national security team and allowed several of George W. Bush’s key personnel to stay on until his own choices were confirmed, Trump’s administration has reportedly demanded that many of Obama’s choices, including ambassadors, leave immediately. The Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security have all named interim successors who will run their agencies until Trump’s appointments are confirmed. They are Robert Work, Michael P. Dempsey, and Chip Fulghum, respectively.

The CIA says it has a similar arrangement in place for a person to run the agency should Trump’s nominee, Rep. Mike Pompeo not be confirmed by Friday, but it declined to say who. “The Agency obviously has contingency plans,” wrote Dean Boyd, a CIA spokesperson, in an email late Wednesday. “That’s all we can offer you.” ...

More than 50 Obama-appointed officials, including Robert Work at Defense and Adam Szubin at Treasury, would remain in place, the incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer said. That leaves more than 600 unfilled senior positions.

When will someone investigate Israeli influence and meddling in US elections?

Israeli Lawmakers Celebrate the New “King of the United States” With Evangelicals

Right-wing Israeli lawmakers in town for Donald Trump’s inauguration addressed prominent American evangelicals gathered at Greater New Hope Baptist Church in downtown Washington, D.C. on Thursday, lecturing them on the importance of moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and offering hope that President-elect Donald Trump would fulfill his promise to do so.

Speaking to a gathering that included a who’s who of Christian right leaders — including Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, Faith & Freedom Coalition founder Ralph Reed, and Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson — Israeli Knesset member Yehuda Glick, who belongs to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, spoke about Trump’s election in messianic terms.

He began his remarks by approvingly quoting Psalm 72, which speaks of welcoming a new king. “It is a prayer for King Solomon, and it is the prayer for all kings and especially a prayer for the king of the United States.”

He then pivoted to explaining his own path to politics — how he went from a hardline rabbi advocating permanent settlements in the Palestinian territories to being elected as a Likud lawmaker — describing his victory as a miracle.

“Tomorrow, 21 hours from now, and 14 minutes, there will be another miracle!” he said, speaking of Trump’s election to sustained applause.

“Trump throughout his campaign, again and again and again repeatedly spoke about Israel and Jerusalem,” he reminded them, his voice escalating as if giving a sermon. “We’re so close, friends of Jerusalem and Israel! […] He can choose to be a Cyrus! He can choose to say Jerusalem, all nations should recognize Jerusalem!”

Executive actions ready to go as Trump prepares to take office

Donald Trump is preparing to sign executive actions on his first day in the White House on Friday to take the opening steps to crack down on immigration, build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and roll back outgoing President Barack Obama's policies. ...

Trump is expected to impose a federal hiring freeze and take steps to delay a Labor Department rule due to take effect in April that would require brokers who give retirement advice to put their clients' best interests first.

He also will give official notice he plans to withdraw from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, Spicer said. "I think you will see those happen very shortly," Spicer said. ...

Trump is expected to sign an executive order in his first few days to direct the building of a wall on the southern border with Mexico, and actions to limit the entry of asylum seekers from Latin America, among several immigration-related steps his advisers have recommended.

That includes rescinding Obama's order that allowed more than 700,000 people brought into the United States illegally as children to stay in the country on a two-year authorization to work and attend college, according to several people close to the presidential transition team.

Uber will pay $20 million to settle with FTC after promising drivers unrealistic earnings

The Federal Trade Commission has settled a lawsuit against Uber for $20 million, the result of a federal complaint that says the ride-hailing startup inflated the amount of money potential drivers could make as drivers for the ride-hailing service.

The FTC investigation found that Uber advertised hourly UberX driver earnings rates of $15 to $29 an hour on Craigslist, and that in 17 large U.S. markets fewer than 30 percent of drivers earned those advertised rates. In Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Boston, fewer than 10 percent of drivers made that hourly rate.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick promised drivers in San Francisco and New York — two of Uber’s most competitive markets — earnings of $74,000 and $90,000 a year, respectively, but fewer than 10 percent made at least those figures.

Additionally, the FTC charged that Uber’s car leasing program advertised affordable car loan payment rates for prospective drivers that didn’t line up with the reality.

The first execution under Virginia's new drug secrecy laws didn't go as planned

Virginia’s first execution in more than a year lasted 48 minutes, about a half hour longer than expected, raising questions about the controversial drug used in this case and several botched cases of capital punishment.

After receiving a cocktail of lethal injection drugs Wednesday night, 37-year-old Ricky Gray, convicted of murdering a family of four in 2006, was pronounced dead at 9:42 p.m at Greensville Correctional Center. Corrections officials hid Gray from view behind a curtain for more than 30 minutes, raising questions about the process. The prison said Thursday the delay was due to difficulty finding a vein to place the intravenous line, according to the Richmond Times Dispatch. Gray was also heard breathing heavily and “snored loudly several times” after receiving the injection, the Associated Press reported. ...

In Gray’s case, the Virginia Department of Corrections used midazolam, a drug at the center of the heated debate over the death penalty’s constitutionality. Midazolam has been used in several high-profile botched executions, like Joseph Wood’s in Arizona. Prison officials injected Wood, who finally died after two hours, with 15 times more lethal injection drugs than required.

Critics of midazolam equate its use to cruel and unusual punishment because of its questionable effectiveness in putting someone to sleep. Midazolam is used to sedate an inmate, followed by rocuronium bromide, which stops their breathing, and then potassium chloride, which stops their heart.

Trump's here. We have four years to write a better story

In 2016’s hall of corpses, the most loudly mourned might be that of the Liberal Political Consensus. The system served some well, and many more horribly, but it’s murdered, dead, done. In the new world, Hillary Clinton, the realistic, electable candidate, is neither, and institutions meant to keep populists out of power collapse like old soufflés.

Like millions of others, reasonable media centrists were blindsided; no wonder they now sound like they’re hitting hallucinogenics. When they’re not playing dress-up as “the resistance”, or blaming Russian-hacked gossip for Clinton’s thin electoral losses, they’re staging grand, last-ditch supplications to electors, the intelligence community, Congress … anyone who might save American democracy from the consequences of its choice.

What they don’t realize is there is no going back. Donald Trump may have lost by nearly 3m votes, but this election is a verdict on the status quo. To win, politicians must offer more radical dreams. These can be Trumpian con-jobs, or the humane democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders.

In four years, if the Democrats become an actual party for the working class, one that campaigns in all 50 states, fights voter suppression, doesn’t court a mythical White Working Class by kicking the brown, black and queer people who still have its back, if it runs candidates who talk in real words, not Goldman Sachs platitudes, and if it fights Trump till the bloody dawn … maybe it has a shot.

To do this, Democrats must learn from their prior sins. The party will be fighting a president they themselves empowered. The Democratic Clinton built mass incarceration, and the Democratic Obama administration championed assassination by drone. The deportations, the torture, the surveillance, the crony capitalism are all part of a system created by Democrats as much as Republicans, all reinforced by adult, bipartisan voices in respectable, badly cut suits. ...

We need to fight for each other, every last one of us. Not to “tolerate”, like one tolerates painful shoes, but to proudly say that this world belongs to all of us, and that we’re not going anywhere. Ethno-nationalists are escaping from neoliberalism’s cracks, just as they crawled forth from the rot of 19th century empires, singing the same false and bloody tune. On the page, and in the streets, we must write a better story.

We have four years.

Trump’s White House Website Now Only Mentions "Climate" in His Plans to Ax Obama’s Policies

Today, the peaceful transition of power took place, with President Barack Obama passing the White House baton over to President Donald Trump.

Behind the glitz and glamor and pomp and circumstance came another key White House transition: the Trump White House has gotten rid of the climate change section of the White House website. The URL www.whitehouse.gov/energy/climate-change now takes those surfing the internet to a page which “could not be found.” ...

The new Trump White House website does have a portion on energy, which details his “America First Energy Plan.” The theme of putting “America first” served as the central thesis of Trump's inaugural address. 

“The Trump Administration is committed to energy policies that lower costs for hardworking Americans and maximize the use of American resources, freeing us from dependence on foreign oil. For too long, we’ve been held back by burdensome regulations on our energy industry,” reads that web page. “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.”

The “America First Energy Plan” web portal also promotes the use of “clean coal” and “reviving America’s coal industry,” as well as tapping into the U.S. bounty of shale oil and gas via the use of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). The term “fracking,” though, is not used.

Interior Secretary Nominee Zinke Supports Fracking and Drilling on Public Lands

The military polluted the City of Newburgh’s water — but their clean-up is “lagging”

A chemical spill more than two decades ago at an Air National Guard base located 60 miles north of New York City is at the center of a water crisis in the City of Newburgh. Now, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is accusing the Department of Defense of failing to quickly respond or conduct a thorough investigation.

The city of Newburgh declared a state of emergency in May 2016 and stopped drawing water from Washington Lake, which supplies water to the municipality’s 29,000 residents. A Department of Environmental Conservation investigation in March found that the lake was contaminated with perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, or PFOS, a pollutant used in fire fighting foam. The investigation also identified the source of the contamination: Samples from the nearby Stewart Air National Guard Base tested for high levels of PFOS. A spill of 4,000 gallons of liquid fire fighting foam at the nearby Stewart Air National Guard Base in the early 1990s likely caused the contamination, the Department of Environmental Conservation suggested. The spill didn’t raise alarms at the time, however, because scientists hadn’t yet studied the health effects of PFOS.

Today, PFOS has been linked to testicular, kidney, and thyroid disease, causing the EPA to issue a health advisory limit on the agent in 2009, which it revised and strengthened last year. And although PFOS isn’t regulated at the federal level, New York State has issued a temporary emergency rule to classify PFOS as a hazardous substance. Despite the change in Newburgh’s local water source, many residents continue to worry about the effects that drinking water from Washington Lake may have had on their health — and blame the military for the contamination.

Also of Interest

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

Without a path from protest to power, the Women's March will end up like Occupy

How the NYT Plays with History

Obama’s Perpetual Farewell Tour

Divide and Rule: Class, Hate, and the 2016 Election

CIA Docs Reveal Agency’s Longtime Obsession With UFOs, Magic

Treasury Pick Steve Mnuchin Denies It, But Victims Describe His Bank as a Foreclosure Machine

Trump’s Homeland Security Team Likely to Emphasize Facial Recognition and Biometric Surveillance

'The Resistance Starts Now': Harsh Crackdown on Anti-Trump Protesters in DC

Who’s Paying for Inauguration Parties? Companies and Lobbyists With a Lot at Stake

Major Fake News Operation Tracked Back to Republican Operative

Credentialism and Corruption: Deaton on Opioids, Trump

Roaming Charges: This Ain’t a Dream No More, It’s the Real Thing

A Little Night Music

Wilson Pickett - It's Too Late

Wilson Pickett - 634-5789

Wilson Pickett - I Found A Love

Wilson Pickett - Now You See Me, Now You Don't

Wilson Pickett - I Found a Love

Wilson Pickett - She's Lookin' Good

Wilson Pickett - Mini Skirt Minnie

Wilson Pickett - I'm In Love

Wilson Pickett - Land Of 1000 Dances

Wilson Pickett - Don't Fight It

Wilson Pickett - Funky Broadway

Wilson Pickett - Engine Number 9

Wilson Pickett - Barefootin'