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“We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as "vacuum cleaners", sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens. The tendency of intelligence activities to expand beyond their initial scope is a theme which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings. Intelligence collection programs naturally generate ever-increasing demands for new data. And once intelligence has been collected, there are strong pressures to use it against the target.”

-- Church Committee

News and Opinion

45 Years After COINTELPRO, FBI Still Thinks 'Dissent is the Enemy'

More than 60 groups sign letter calling for full investigation into government spying on protest groups

Forty-five years ago on Tuesday, peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and unearthed documents exposing the government's expansive COINTELPRO operations, which aimed to surveil, disrupt, and "neutralize" lawful activist groups, including war protesters, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the American Indian Movement, and the National Lawyers Guild.

Though the COINTELPRO revelations stirred widespread outrage and led to the eventual passage of reform legislation, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, such abuse of activists' First Amendment rights continues to this day.

More than 60 national and local groups on Tuesday sent a letter (pdf) to the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees expressing concern over the FBI's and Department of Homeland Security (DHS)'s "abuse of counterterrorism resources to monitor Americans’ First Amendment protected activity."

The groups, which include Center for Constitutional Rights, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Government Accountability Project, Greenpeace USA, National Lawyers Guild, School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), and Veterans for Peace, among others, are urging the Committees to conduct a full investigation, not unlike the Church Committee, "to determine the extent of FBI and DHS spying in the past decade." ...

Groups recently targeted by the FBI include SOAW, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and anti-Keystone XL Pipeline activists. Meanwhile DHS and local fusion centers, which operate as local sources of "counter-terrorism" intelligence gathering and sharing, monitored the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements as well.

What's more, the groups note, "documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the FBI continuously invokes counterterrorism authorities to monitor groups it admits are peaceful and nonviolent."

45 Years After COINTELPRO FBI Continues to Monitor Activists

The FBI vs. Apple Debate Just Got Less White

The court fight between Apple and the FBI prompted a slew of letters and legal briefs last week from outside parties, including many tech companies and privacy groups. But a particularly powerful letter came from a collection of racial justice activists, including Black Lives Matter. ...

“One need only look to the days of J. Edgar Hoover and wiretapping of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to recognize the FBI has not always respected the right to privacy for groups it did not agree with,” wrote the signatories, including arts and music nonprofit Beats, Rhymes & Relief, the Center for Media Justice, the Gathering for Justice, Justice League NYC, activist and writer Shaun King, and Black Lives Matter co-founder and Black Alliance for Just Immigration executive director Opal Tometi.

Those tactics haven’t ended, they argue. “Many of us, as civil rights advocates, have become targets of government surveillance for no reason beyond our advocacy or provision of social services for the underrepresented.”

In Washington and Silicon Valley, the debate over unbreakable encryption has an aura of elite, educated, mostly male whiteness — from the government representatives who condemn it to the experts who explain why it’s necessary.

But the main targets of law enforcement surveillance have historically been African-American and Muslim communities.

Snowden: FBI Claim That Only Apple Can Unlock Phone Is “Bullshit”

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden says the FBI’s ostensibly last-ditch attempt to unlock San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone is a sham. ...

“The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’” to unlock the phone, Snowden said during a discussion at Common Cause’s Blueprint for Democracy conference.

“Respectfully, that’s bullshit,” he said, over a video link from Moscow.

Snowden further explained on Twitter: “The global technological consensus is against the FBI,” he wrote — linking to a blog post on the American Civil Liberties Union website explaining exactly how the FBI could have bypassed the iPhone’s auto-erase function on its own. That’s “one example,” he wrote. ...

And that’s not to mention any shadowy tactics the spies from the government’s intelligence community might have. The NSA and CIA have worked for almost 10 years to develop ways to hack into Apple devices, as revealed by The Intercept last year.

This article is well worth a read - it points out some things that might be of great use to people organizing a revolution.

Apple, Trump, the government: can anybody find me someone to trust?

If you wanted proof that Americans trust Apple more than they trust their own government, look no further than the FBI encryption debate.

The battle between the two giants of modern American society – the nation’s government and the world’s largest corporation – is a watershed moment in technology and corporate history. It’s an amazing new high in the rise of brands, considered by many to be a sort of religious force in the 21st century. And though the verdict is out on who the majority of Americans will support in this battle, with public opinion polls inconclusive, the reality is we’re seeing a corporation successfully take on one of our government’s basic premises: that it knows best how to keep us safe.

The public, broadly, has a mistrust of government and are looking for somewhere to place their faith. Some have drawn a connection between Apple’s role in this crisis, as keeper of the keys to citizen privacy, and the rise of fringe political figures – most significantly Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. He is benefiting from a trust vacuum by using the wealth and power generated by licensing his brand, experts say. ...

The FBI chose this case because of its seemingly simple dynamic: our democratically elected government needs access to an iPhone for the safety of the country – but Apple is refusing to help.

Yet among elite media, the tone is heavily weighted toward supporting Apple; the Washington Post proclaimed that Apple is “protecting America from itself” and NPR described CEO Tim Cook as a “national security hero”.

This allegiance to Apple shouldn’t be a surprise: Americans are suspicious of big business in abstract, but they adore the biggest one. Apple is the most trusted company in the world among “opinion elites” (ie well-informed members of the public), according to a Harris Poll (second only to Amazon among the general population) and the most valuable brand in the world, according to Forbes. Tech in general is beloved: 74% of Americans trust the technology sector to do what’s right, according to Edelman’s Trust Barometer. In contrast: only 39% of Americans trust the government to generally do “what’s right”.

Is forcing regime change worth this? Would that Obama, the neocons and Hillary had to answer that question, though I suspect the answer would be a carefully parsed and hedged update of Madelaine Albright's grisly statement.

Syrians under siege: 'we have no children any more, only small adults'

Sick children dying as lifesaving medicine waits at checkpoints, youngsters forced to survive on animal feed and leaves, and families burning their mattresses just to find something to keep them warm.

Schools moving underground for shelter from barrel bombs, the crude, explosive-filled and indiscriminate crates that fall from the sky and are so inaccurate that some observers have said their use is a de facto war crime.

The wounded left to die for lack of medical supplies, anaesthetics, painkillers and chronic medicine; children dying of malnutrition and even rabies due to the absence of vaccines, while landmines and snipers await anyone trying to escape.

The scenes are not from second world war death camps or Soviet gulags. They are the reality of life for more than a million Syrians living in besieged areas across the war-torn nation, according to a report by Save the Children.

Tanya Steele, the charity’s chief executive, said: “Children are dying from lack of food and medicines in parts of Syria just a few kilometres from warehouses that are piled high with aid. They are paying the price for the world’s inaction.” ...

[More accurately, they are paying the price for US imperialism and the ridiculous idea that the US has the right and/or duty to decide whom shall rule in another, sovereign country. - js]

The report is based on a series of extensive interviews and discussions with parents, children, doctors and aid workers on the ground in besieged zones.

It illustrates with startling clarity the brutality with which the conflict in Syria is being conducted, five years into a revolution-turned-civil-war that has displaced half the country and killed more than 400,000 people.

Jihadists use phosphorus in chemical attack in Aleppo - Syrian Kurds

EU-Turkey deal could see Syrian refugees back in war zones, says UN

A senior UN official says he is very concerned that a hasty EU deal with Turkey could leave Syrian refugees unprotected and at risk of being sent back to a war zone.

Filippo Grandi, the UN high commissioner for refugees , questioned the legality of an outline deal struck by the EU and Turkey.

“As a first reaction I am deeply concerned about any arrangement that would involve the blanket return of anyone from one country to another, without spelling out the refugee protection safeguards under international law,” he said on Tuesday. ...

Speaking to the European parliament in Strasbourg, Grandi said asylum seekers should only be returned to other states if there was a guarantee that that they would not then be sent back to the place they had fled. The country of return also had to ensure asylum seekers had access to work, healthcare, education and social assistance, Grandi said. ...

Amnesty International has said it is absurd to describe Turkey as a safe third country, and that some Syrians have been returned to Syria and been shot at while trying to cross the Turkish border.

Amnesty’s Europe director, John Dalhuisen, said: “It’s a really grim day and it’s a really grim deal. It’s being celebrated by people who are dancing on the grave of refugee protection, who want to enforce Fortress Europe and who don’t want these refugees in our countries.

Top US General: More Troops Needed for ISIS War

Speaking today before the Senate Armed Services Committee, CENTCOM commander Gen. Lloyd Austin talked up the idea of sending additional US ground troops to both Iraq and Syria for the war against ISIS, saying that there was a clear need for “additional capability” to try to take ISIS’ major cities of Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria. ...

Exactly how many US troops are already in Iraq and Syria isn’t wholly clear either. Last month, the Pentagon claimed 3,700 troops in Iraq, only to admit shortly thereafter that in reality there were “well over” 4,000 troops there at any given time. In Syria, the number is smaller, but has varied in different estimates. ...

In Syria, the lack of any agreement with the Assad government makes throwing more troops into the country easier in practice, albeit dicey from an international legal perspective. US troops in Syria are believed to be centered around the Kurdish YPG’s territory in the northeast.

Oh looky, the Pentagon has another plan to bomb our way to peace in the Middle East. Let's try it again since it has worked so well every other time it's been tried!

Pentagon Plan: 30-40 Airstrikes Would Cripple ISIS in Libya

The Pentagon has reportedly developed a plan that they believe will “cripple” ISIS’ affiliate in Libya, allowing the various “Western-backed” militias to defeat them outright. The plan was presented to the White House at a meeting in late February.

The plan is said to involve “as many as 30 to 40” airstrikes across Libya, which further throws into doubt previous US claims that ISIS has some 6,000 fighters across Libya, as it is doubtful the average strike would be killing upwards of 200 people.

Administration officials say the plan is there, but is not “actively” being considered for the time being, because the US is focusing on installing a “unity government” in Libya first, before intervening militarily.

[Of course, the US is already "intervening militarily, as this WSJ
article noted back in February:

On Tuesday the Journal cited U.S. officials saying that the drones would be used “to protect U.S. special-operations forces in Libya and beyond.”

That’s the closest we’ve heard to official confirmation that the U.S. has special forces operating in Libya, though in December an undercover team conducting “key leader engagements” was accidentally outed on social media, leading to their hasty departure. What isn’t a secret is that the U.S. last week hit an Islamic State training camp near the city of Sabratha in western Libya, killing dozens of terrorists. That follows November’s U.S. air strike that killed Islamic State leader Abu Nabil.

So, it appears that Obama and the neocons are waiting just a little bit faster than they will let on officially. The French and the British are waiting pretty fast, too. - js]

Glenn Greenwald:

Nobody Knows the Identity of the 150 People Killed by U.S. in Somalia, but Most Are Certain They Deserved It

The U.S. used drones and manned aircraft yesterday to drop bombs and missiles on Somalia, ending the lives of at least 150 people. As it virtually always does, the Obama administration instantly claimed that the people killed were “terrorists” and militants — members of the Somali group al Shabaab — but provided no evidence to support that assertion.

Nonetheless, most U.S. media reports contained nothing more than quotes from U.S. officials about what happened, conveyed uncritically and with no skepticism of their accuracy: The dead “fighters … were assembled for what American officials believe was a graduation ceremony and prelude to an imminent attack against American troops,” pronounced the New York Times. So, the official story goes, The Terrorists were that very moment “graduating” — receiving their Terrorist degrees — and about to attack U.S. troops when the U.S. killed them. ...

Other than the higher-than-normal death toll, this mass killing is an incredibly common event under the presidency of the 2009 Nobel Peace laureate, who has so far bombed seven predominantly Muslim countries. As Nick Turse has reported in The Intercept, Obama has aggressively expanded the stealth drone program and secret war in Africa.

This particular mass killing is unlikely to get much attention in the U.S. due to (1) the election-season obsession with horse-race analysis and pressing matters such as the size of Donald Trump’s hands; (2) widespread Democratic indifference to the killing of foreigners where there’s no partisan advantage to be had against the GOP from pretending to care; (3) the invisibility of places like Somalia and the implicit devaluing of lives there; and (4) the complete normalization of the model whereby the U.S. president kills whomever he wants, wherever he wants, without regard for any semblance of law, process, accountability, or evidence.

Saudis, Houthis in Yemen Peace Talks

Nearly a year into the Saudi Arabian war in Yemen, and after multiple failed UN attempts to start peace talks, the Shi’ite Houthis and Saudi officials are reportedly engaged in peace talks of their own, with a Houthi delegation arriving in the Saudi kingdom for their first visit of the war. ...

Over the course of the war, the Saudis have taken the southern port of Aden, which is now former President Hadi’s “interim capital city.” The Houthis retain the capital of Sanaa, and much of the country’s north. The stalemate may be driving the talks, but the growing influence of al-Qaeda,, which has seized territory in the east with the other factions fighting busy one another is also likely a factor.

Daniel Holtzclaw: lawsuit claims police 'covered up' sexual assault complaint

When former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was on trial last year for the rapes and assaults of 13 different black women, a clear-cut picture emerged of not only a predator who exploited the uniform, but of detectives who worked decisively to stop him.

But in a challenge to the official narrative, seven of Holtzclaw’s accusers have filed a lawsuit saying they could prove the opposite: a sweeping failure of Oklahoma City and its police department to act on signs that there was a predator in their ranks. ... This is the third lawsuit to counter Oklahoma City’s story of how police captured Holtzclaw, and by far the most expansive, as it offers a damning set of new claims.

In the most pivotal new allegation to emerge, the lawsuit claims police covered up a complaint of sexual assault made 38 days before Holtzclaw was suspended. That complaint, supposedly made on 11 May 2014, has never been reported before this lawsuit. ...

Holtzclaw’s crimes took place over seven months in 2013 and 2014 while he worked the 4pm to 2am patrol. And the official narrative portrays Oklahoma City detectives as acting swiftly and deliberately as soon as he was named as a potential sex offender. The department suspended him from duty on 18 June 2014, just hours after daycare worker Jannie Ligons reported that he forced her to perform oral sex. (Ligons has allowed the press to identify her by name and spoken publicly about her assault.)

But Ligons challenged the official story in a 2015 lawsuit claiming that police were investigating Holtzclaw weeks before she was assaulted.

And the latest lawsuit is sure to reinvigorate questions about when police investigators had enough information to suspect Holtzclaw of sexual assault.

Teach for America Covertly Privatizing Public Education

Campaigns Promising the "Restoration" of the Middle Class Accept Poverty as Inevitable

In the last Democratic debate, held in Flint, Michigan - a city where, according to the most recent United States Census data, 41.6 percent of the population lives below the poverty line - presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders emphasized the importance of restoring the declining US middle class.

However appealing that almost universal bipartisan campaign meme is, it logically leads to a troubling conclusion: In order to have a "middle" class, one has to assume an ongoing "lower" class. In essence, a campaign promise to rebuild a "robust" middle class is based on the premise that a significant segment of people in the US will compose the bottom tier in the class structure - a tier that exists in a state of poverty. ...

Yes, higher taxes on the rich and increased levies on financial transactions can be redistributed to finance projects for the common good. In addition, raising the minimum wage - among other actions - will lift some people out of poverty, but not many, unless the basic capitalist structure of the economy is changed from an emphasis on survival of the fittest to the survival of everyone.

On the Democratic side of the presidential campaign, both candidates promise steps to reduce economic inequality (whether you believe both of them equally is up to you as a voter) - in part by reining in Wall Street, and in part by adopting a more nationalistic trade policy, in addition to other measures.

Sanders does offer important "superjumbo" ideas (in the words of author and historian Rick Perlstein), such as Medicare for All and no tuition at public colleges, but while seeking votes in a rust belt state such as Michigan, he has become entrapped in the context of a debate over "economic opportunity" and "bringing jobs back home." This debate contains some good positions - particularly Sanders' opposition to corporate-written international trade agreements - but these are not proposals for systemic change. They may incrementally mitigate poverty, but they don't address its existence as a class created by the very nature of the US economy - an economy that deems some people disposable.

This is an excellent essay. I wanted to put everything that I read in bold. If you have the time, click the link and read the whole thing.

The Financial System is a Larger Threat Than Terrorism

In the 21st century Americans have been distracted by the hyper-expensive “war on terror.” Trillions of dollars have been added to the taxpayers’ burden and many billions of dollars in profits to the military/security complex in order to combat insignificant foreign “threats,” such as the Taliban, that remain undefeated after 15 years. All this time the financial system, working hand-in-hand with policymakers, has done more damage to Americans than terrorists could possibly inflict.

The purpose of the Federal Reserve and US Treasury’s policy of zero interest rates is to support the prices of the over-leveraged and fraudalent financial instruments that unregulated financial systems always create. If inflation was properly measured, these zero rates would be negative rates, which means not only that retirees have no income from their retirement savings but also that saving is a losing proposition. Instead of earning interest on your savings, you pay interest that shrinks the real value of your saving.

Central banks, neoliberal economists, and the presstitute financial media advocate negative interest rates in order to force people to spend instead of save.  The notion is that the economy’s poor economic performance is not due to the failure of economic policy but to people hoarding their money. The Federal Reserve and its coterie of economists and presstitutes maintain the fiction of too much savings despite the publication of the Federal Reserve’s own report that 52% of Americans cannot raise $400 without selling personal possessions or borrowing the money.

Negative interest rates, which have been introduced in some countries such as Switzerland and threatened in other countries, have caused people to avoid the tax on bank deposits by withdrawing their savings from banks in large denomination bills. ... The response of depositors to negative interest rates has resulted in neoliberal economists, such as Larry Summers, calling for the elimination of large denomination bank notes in order to make it difficult for people to keep their cash balances outside of banks.

Other neoliberal economists, such as Kenneth Rogoff want to eliminate cash altogether and have only electronic money. Electronic money cannot be removed from bank deposits except by spending it. With electronic money as the only money, financial institutions can use negative interest rates in order to steal the savings of their depositors.

Geithner Gets Morgan-Chase Gravy

You’ve gotta give former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner a lot of credit. That is, of course, if you can still afford to float an “undisclosed” line of credit at an “undisclosed” interest rate after the wealth-denuding Crash of 2008. Luckily for the former point-man on all things bailout, some of the financial wizards who blew one of history’s biggest speculative bubbles can afford to give him all the credit he could ever want.

According to Bloomberg, that’s exactly what JP Morgan Chase just did when it gave Geithner enough credit to buy into a $12 billion equity fund. That “buy-in” will help him leverage “his own position in the fund” so he can reap a potential “20–30%” windfall on his investment. It’s a tidy little reward for the man who left the top spot at the New York Federal Reserve in January of 2009 to run the Treasury Department at perhaps the most critical juncture facing Wall Street since the start of the Great Depression. ...

Now that Geithner is back walking “The Street,” he’s pursuing his own champagne wishes and caviar dreams as President of private equity firm Warburg Pincus. The fund manages $37 billion in assets and, according to the New York Times, it invests in “energy, health care, financial services, industrial and business services and technology, media and telecommunications.” That’s quite a smorgasbord of industries that, not coincidentally, have a lot of interaction with Federal regulators and Congressional busybodies. ...

Now it’s Geithner’s turn to cash in. The former head of the New York Federal Reserve, former Treasury Secretary and long-time “public servant” in two administrations reportedly choose the less-well-known Warburg Pincus because he “specifically did not want to work for a company that he either directly or indirectly regulated at the Treasury or the Fed.”

Geithner, whose net worth was a comparatively meager “$239,000 to $6 million” when he left office in 2013, was “concerned with worsening the perception of mistrust that many Americans feel toward government and Wall Street,” according to CNBC. ...

Timothy Geithner as well as current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and future denizens of the Treasury Department have long and profitable futures ahead of them. Like so many financialized “public servants” before them, they’ll be laughing all the way to the bank … and back again.

"We Are Pushing Real Revolution": Why Black Lives Matter Doesn't Have Faith in Any Candidate

Sanders scores upset in Michigan; Clinton takes Mississippi

Bernie Sanders scored a surprise upset over Hillary Clinton in Michigan on Tuesday, though she was expected to widen her delegate lead over the Vermont senator by winning Mississippi by a wide margin.

Sanders did not heavily contest Mississippi but saw Michigan as a chance to renew his momentum heading into other critical contests this month. ...

Having lost by huge margins to Clinton in the South, Sanders had fallen far enough behind in convention delegates that he’d have to bag three-fifths of remaining delegates just to break even with Clinton, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. ... Still, his Michigan victory undercuts the Clinton campaign's argument that Sanders is not competitive in larger, industrial states. ...

Sanders has been targeting young voters and disaffected white, working-class voters hurt most by the decline of the automotive industry over the past 20 years. While Clinton is also competing for this demographic, major labor unions including the Teamsters and United Auto Workers, traditional Democratic allies, have not endorsed a candidate. Early election results showed her advantage in the metro Detroit area was not enough to overcome Sanders' strength statewide. He even performed well in the Flint area despite Clinton's efforts to champion the city's water crisis.

The corporate media counted us out. The pollsters said we were way behind. But we won. Thank you, Michigan. pic.twitter.com/Iywg9N3B1z

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 9, 2016

Clinton is in danger of seizing up in Rust Belt after Michigan result

The big win of the night belonged to Sanders, who managed to pull off something he’s been trying to prove for his entire campaign: that he can compete with Hillary Clinton in states like Michigan, where African American voters make up roughly a quarter of the electorate. Clinton won fewer than two-thirds of African American voters in the state, significantly down from the 80-90% support she’s enjoyed elsewhere.

The victories for Trump and Sanders come after a week when both men’s chances were being played down. Sanders’ campaign had all but been left for dead after he failed to make significant inroads with minority voters on Super Tuesday. ...

Sanders spent a lot of time campaigning in Michigan and it’s apparently paid off – he’s performed far better in the state than anyone predicted. And it’s somewhat telling that he’s focused single-mindedly on trade. After all, the negative effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), Bill Clinton’s signature trade deal, are still felt acutely here. And Hillary was slow come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and voice criticism of Nafta. Those are trade positions Sanders has long held, and Clinton’s slowness to adopt them gave him another chance to paint her as politically opportunistic.

Clinton thought she had finessed the trade issue, by focusing on other problems in Michigan, like Flint’s lead-poisoned water and by skewering Sanders over his vote against the auto bailout (his campaign said it was part of a bigger vote against a bailout for Wall Street). But clearly she hadn’t. ...

A majority of Democrats and Republicans in Michigan have reported recent trade deals have given people like them the shaft. On the Democratic side, 6 in 10 Michigan voters thought trade takes away jobs and the majority of those voters supported Sanders; on the Republican side, four in 10 thought trade costs the country jobs and the majority of them supported Trump.

Sanders’ and Trump’s big wins in Michigan tonight, and those polling numbers in particular, should have Clinton very, very afraid.

Polls: Clinton lead down to single digits

Hillary Clinton's lead over Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders has narrowed, according to the latest national polls released Tuesday.

Clinton is favored to beat Sanders by 7 points, 49 to 42 percent, among registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in the ABC News/Washington Post poll.

That's the closest margin ever between the pair in the poll, which recorded a 52-point lead for Clinton, 68 to 16 percent, last July. It's also the first time Clinton has slipped below 50 percent from Democratic-leaning voters.

The pair hold their own edge among voters split up by gender: Clinton leads 55 to 34 percent among women, while Sanders leads 53 to 41 percent among men.

Bernie, Hillary or Revolution in the Streets? Cornel West, Dolores Huerta, Black Lives Matter Debate

Sanders Sues Top Ohio Official over Discriminatory Voting Law

With only a week to go before the Ohio primaries, Bernie Sanders' campaign on Tuesday filed a lawsuit (pdf) in federal court against Ohio Secretary of State Jon A. Husted, alleging that the state's barring of 17-year-olds from voting in the primary plainly discriminates against young Latino and black voters.

Democratic voters in most states are permitted to vote in primaries, provided they will be 18 by the general election.

Voting rights advocacy group FairVote notes that "Ohio law plainly allows 17-year-olds to vote in primary elections, but the Ohio secretary of state has announced that 17-year-olds may not vote in Ohio's 2016 presidential primary. We disagree with that interpretation of Ohio law."

Sanders told the Washington Post, "This campaign is very proud of the fact that we are bringing many, many people into the political process. We want to continue to see that....Unfortunately, in the state of Ohio, there is an effort on the part of the secretary of state to do exactly the opposite."

Senators want Clinton aide who received immunity deal to talk

A pair of leading Republican senators are asking a former State Department official who reached an immunity deal with the Justice Department last week to answer their questions about Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

In a letter sent last week but released on Tuesday morning, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told the aide, Bryan Pagliano, that he should have no reason not to appear.

“Because the Department of Justice has granted you immunity from prosecution in this situation, there is no longer reasonable cause for you to believe that discussing these matters with the relevant oversight committees could result in your prosecution,” wrote Grassley and Johnson, who lead the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, respectively.

Pagliano is believed to have been in charge of setting up Clinton’s email server at her New York home while she was secretary of State. He also worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. ...

In addition to the letter to Pagliano last week, Grassley and Johnson also wrote to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking her to detail the immunity agreement.

Clinton, on her private server, wrote 104 emails the government says are classified

Hillary Clinton wrote 104 emails that she sent using her private server while secretary of state that the government has since said contain classified information, according to a new Washington Post analysis of Clinton’s publicly released correspondence.

The finding is the first accounting of the Democratic presidential front-runner’s personal role in placing information now considered sensitive into insecure email during her State Department tenure. Clinton’s ­authorship of dozens of emails now considered classified could complicate her efforts to argue that she never put government secrets at risk.

In roughly three-quarters of those cases, officials have determined that material Clinton herself wrote in the body of email messages is classified. Clinton sometimes initiated the conversations but more often replied to aides or other officials with brief reactions to ongoing discussions.

Clinton: The FBI hasn’t told me I’m being investigated

Hillary Clinton said late Monday the FBI has not informed her that she is the subject of a probe over her email practices as secretary of State.

“I’ve heard others say that neither you nor your lawyers have been apprised that you’re the target of the investigation,” Fox News anchor Bret Baier said to Clinton during a town hall in Detroit.

“Absolutely true,” the Democratic presidential front-runner replied.

“Have your or your lawyers been apprised that your current or former staff are targets of the investigation?” Baier asked.

“Absolutely not,” the former first lady responded. ...

The FBI formally confirmed its investigation of Clinton’s private email server early last month.

Tech CEOs & Republican Leaders Met Last Weekend to Plot to Stop Donald Trump

At Secretive Meeting, Tech CEOs And Top Republicans Commiserate, Plot To Stop Trump

Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute's annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering.

The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump. ...

A highlight of the gathering was a presentation by [Karl] Rove about focus group findings on Trump. The business mogul's greatest weakness, according to Rove, was that voters have a very hard time envisioning him as "presidential" and as somebody their children should look up to. They also see him as somebody who can be erratic and shouldn't have his (small) fingers anywhere near a nuclear trigger.

Sources familiar with the meeting -- who requested anonymity because the forum is off the record -- said that much of the conversation around Trump centered on "how this happened, rather than how are we going to stop him," as one person put it.

Are You Represented By a Climate Denier?

More than six in 10 Americans are represented by a climate denier in Congress, according to new research from the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF).

CAPAF researchers "classified any lawmaker who has questioned or denied the scientific consensus behind human-caused climate change, individuals who answered climate questions with the 'I’m not a scientist' dodge, those who claimed the climate is always changing, and individuals who questioned the extent to which human beings contribute to global climate change, as deniers."

Fully 59 percent of the Republican House caucus and 70 percent of Republicans in the Senate fit the bill, the group said. These elected officials, who represent more than 202 million Americans, have raked in more than $73 million from fossil fuel industries over the course of their careers.

And their positions put them at odds with the vast majority of the general public. One recent poll showed that 76 percent of Americans said they believed climate change is occurring—including 59 percent of Republicans—while another found that a majority of Americans believe they are "morally obligated" to fight global warming. 

Energy Wars of Attrition

Many reasons have been given for the plunge in oil prices and various “conspiracy theories” have arisen to explain the seemingly inexplicable.  In the past, when prices fell, the Saudis and their allies in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) would curtail production to push them higher.  This time, they actually increased output, leading some analysts to suggest that Riyadh was trying to punish oil producers Iran and Russia for supporting the Assad regime in Syria.  New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, for instance, claimed that the Saudis were trying to “bankrupt” those countries “by bringing down the price of oil to levels below what both Moscow and Tehran need to finance their budgets.” Variations on this theme have been advanced by other pundits.

The reality of the matter has turned out to be significantly more straightforward: U.S. and Canadian producers were adding millions of barrels a day in new production to world markets at a time when global demand was incapable of absorbing so much extra crude oil.  An unexpected surge in Iraqi production added additional crude to the growing glut.  Meanwhile, economic malaise in China and Europe kept global oil consumption from climbing at the heady pace of earlier years and so the market became oversaturated with crude.  It was, in other words, a classic case of too much supply, too little demand, and falling prices.  “We are still seeing a lot of supply,” said BP’s Dudley last June.  “There is demand growth, there’s just a lot more supply.”

Threatened by this new reality, the Saudis and their allies faced a painful choice.  Accounting for about 40% of world oil output, the OPEC producers exercise substantial but not unlimited power over the global marketplace.  They could have chosen to rein in their own production and so force prices up.  There was, however, little likelihood of non-OPEC producers like Brazil, Canada, Russia, and the United States following suit, so any price increases would have benefitted the energy industries of those countries most, while undoubtedly taking market share from OPEC. However counterintuitive it might have seemed, the Saudis, unwilling to face such a loss, decided to pump more oil.  Their hope was that a steep decline in prices would drive some of their rivals, especially American oil frackers with their far higher production expenses, out of business.  ...

In the end, the oil attrition wars may lead us not into a future of North American triumphalism, nor even to a more modest Saudi version of the same, but into a strange new world in which an unlimited capacity to produce oil meets an increasingly crippled capitalist system without the capacity to absorb it.

Think of it this way: in the conflagration of the take-no-prisoners war the Saudis let loose, a centuries-old world based on oil may be ending in both a glut and a hollowing out on an increasingly overheated planet. A war of attrition indeed.

Economists Say China Has Turned the Corner on Planet-Warming Emissions — China Insists It Hasn't

For the world's largest producer of greenhouse gas, a possible drop in emissions would seem to be welcome news. But China has been swift to deny studies that suggest its output of carbon dioxide has already peaked. ..

Chinese carbon emissions are projected to remain relatively flat in the coming decades "and are likely to peak at some point in the decade before 2025," according to a London School of Economics (LSE) study. In fact, the study says, it's possible that Chinese emissions may have reached their high point in 2014, and "will fall modestly from now on."

China disagrees.

"You asked whether our emissions had peaked in 2014 — certainly not. In fact, our carbon dioxide emissions are still increasing," Chinese climate change envoy Xie Zhenhua said.

While this point is in contention, the dramatic slowing of growth in China's largely coal-fueled energy market is not. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows the country to have nearly tripled its energy consumption while rapidly industrializing and urbanizing between 2000 and 2013. In those years, energy use from dirty coal power plants increased more than 8 percent each year, while the country's gross domestic product averaged double-digit growth.

But since 2013, this growth has stalled, a fact that Fergus Green, lead author of the new study, said gives the world a fighting chance of preventing catastrophic climate change.

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