Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues piano player Eurreal "Little Brother" Montgomery. Enjoy!

"When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

-- provenance unknown

News and Opinion

Brett Kavanaugh crossed a partisan line and the Supreme Court may never recover

It was Sen. Lindsey Graham who said the one thing Friday everyone can agree with. “There’s the process before Kavanaugh,” the South Carolina Republican told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “And the process after Kavanaugh.” ...

But regardless of what the FBI investigation ultimately uncovers, Kavanaugh’s decision to engage in overt partisan brawling — to berate Democrats and declare himself the victim of political revenge plot that dates back Bill Clinton — struck many experts as crossing a line from which the Supreme Court, should Kavanaugh be appointed, may not be able to recover. “With Kavanaugh’s decision to kind of fight back on explicit partisan grounds, one consequence of that is it just drags the Supreme Court right into the center of a bitter partisan feud,” said Jens David Ohlin, a vice dean and law professor at Cornell Law School. “And that’s not going to be good for the Supreme Court at all.” ...

“It’s pretty hard to see how a judge who says those things could maintain the appearance of impartiality on a case that involves the Democratic Party, like some of the hyper-partisan redistricting cases,” added David Super, a Georgetown Law professor who studies constitutional law, suggesting that a Justice Kavanaugh may need to recuse himself from such a case. While Justice Thomas came out swinging in 1991, and, like Kavanaugh called the whole preceding a “circus,” Super says Kavanaugh went further. “There were some lines Justice Thomas chose not to cross, that Judge Kavanaugh did, particularly in terms of partisanship,” he said. ...

Overall, just 37 percent of Americans told Gallup this year that they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the nation’s highest court. Historically, an average of 44 percent of Americans say they have at least a lot of confidence in it. Just 11 percent of Americans said this year they have a lot of confidence in Congress.

The White House is doing all it can to stop the FBI looking into Kavanaugh

The White House is severely limiting the renewed FBI background check into Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, according to multiple reports, some even indicating the probe, which began Friday, could be wrapped up as soon as Monday.

Those weekend reports were backed up Monday by Frank Figliuzzi, who served as the FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence from 1987 to 2012, who told MSNBC that sources inside the bureau say the White House is keeping a tight check on the investigation. ...

The FBI was reportedly given a list of just four people to interview, including Deborah Ramirez, who last week came forward to accuse Kavanaugh of shoving his penis in her face during a drunken dorm party while they were classmates at Yale. She was interviewed Sunday according to CNN.

Not on the FBI’s list, however, is Chad Ludington, a professor from North Carolina who became the latest Yale classmate of Kavanaugh to challenge the nominee’s claims made about his drinking. Ludington said that during his time at Yale, he frequently saw Kavanaugh “staggering from alcohol consumption,” often becoming “belligerent and aggressive” while intoxicated and even recalled Kavanaugh throwing a beer in someone’s face, “starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.” Ludington told the Washington Post he planned to tell his story to the FBI at its office in Raleigh Monday.

John Oliver on Brett Kavanaugh: 'We should never forget what he represents'

What Oliver said he failed to understand was exactly why the Republicans were so keen to get him on the supreme court. “Why? Why this particular asshole? Why is he the hill that conservatives are willing to die on?” he asked. He continued: “After all of this, I genuinely can’t see a single reason for pushing Kavanaugh over a replacement candidate because you know, deep down, any judge they choose is almost certainly going to restrict abortion rights.”

Oliver ultimately decided that it was “a fuck you to Democrats and a fuck you to women”. Given how many Republicans reacted positively to both Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh, he summarised their response as: “We believe you, we just don’t care.”

He finished by saying he believed Kavanaugh would be confirmed but that “we should never forget how that happened or what he represents”.

Kavanaugh accuser Julie Swetnick to be excluded from FBI investigation

The FBI will not interview Julie Swetnick, the third woman to accuse Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, according to multiple reports and the Republican senator Lindsey Graham, highlighting the narrow scope of the agency’s supplemental investigation into Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee.

After NBC News and the other outlets said Swetnick would not be questioned, the White House, which has stood by Kavanaugh through the fallout from an explosive Senate hearing on Thursday, denied it was limiting the investigation. On Saturday Donald Trump said on Twitter he wanted the FBI “to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion”.

Pack the Supreme Court

Brett Kavanaugh moved one step closer to the United States Supreme Court on Friday. Despite telling brazen lies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and despite Christine Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony, Republicans on the committee voted in favor of advancing Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate for a vote. Only a new FBI investigation into Ford’s allegations, limited in time to one week, now stands in the way of Donald Trump entrenching a hard-right conservative majority on the Supreme Court for a generation or more.

To be clear, such a majority on the court would be an utter disaster for women, for people of color, and for the poor. One upside of Kavanaugh’s raw and angry rant on Thursday — he referred to the Democrats on the panel as “you people,” a “disgrace,” and accused them of exacting “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” — is that it exposed the Supreme Court for what it is: a partisan on the political battlefield, not a disinterested defender of the Constitution.

So it’s past time for liberals and the left to consider court packing: When they next have control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, Democrats should add at least two new seats to the Supreme Court and then fill them, ideally, with left-wing, well-qualified women of color. They could even call it “court balancing.” ...

This might sound extreme, but it isn’t. The Constitution allows for Congress to decide the number of Supreme Court justices. “There is nothing magical about the number nine,” HuffPost’s Zach Carter observed in June. “The court was founded in 1789 with just six justices and has included as many as 10, from 1863 to 1866 — when a Republican legislature intentionally shrank the court size to seven justices to prevent President Andrew Johnson from making any appointments.” ...

“The idea of expanding the size of the Supreme Court will get traction if the Democrats take the White House and Congress in 2020,” constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at University of California, Berkeley, told the Los Angeles Times in July. “It is the only way to keep there from being a very conservative Court for the next 10-20 years.”

This is an excellent, detailed analysis of Brett Kavanaugh's testimony. If you are still interested in that sort of thing, it's a good read. Here are a couple of excerpts:

The Unbearable Dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh

Kavanaugh’s choice to lie about things that are easily disproved speaks to a kind of hubris, or entitlement, that befits someone of his pedigree. He insinuated that he was of drinking age during the summer of 1982 because, back then, in Maryland, 18-year-olds could legally imbibe. With artful wording, he testified that drinking was “legal for seniors,” even though it was decidedly illegal for him — a rising senior who wouldn’t turn 18 until the following year. At other moments, he claimed ignorance about the consequence of plainly relevant evidence — railing against the suggestion that his high school yearbook, a totem to debauchery and sexual frustration, could be relevant to the issue of whether he committed blacked-out sexual assault in high school. “Have at it, if you want to go through my yearbook,” he told Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., with disdain. As though the inquiry itself was made in bad faith. ...

Kavanaugh's apparent willingness to perjure himself over accusations of underage drinking or sexual innuendo — which alone don’t necessarily bear on his suitability for the bench — is troubling both because of what it implies about his integrity, and because of what it suggests about his reasoning as an adjudicator. How should we judge someone who, during his testimony, repeatedly misrepresented facts and dissembled when pressed for detail? Should we understand these moments as lies, or as misinterpretations rooted in substandard analytical rigor? And given the importance of the position at hand, which is worse?

Some of this may seem like parsing hairs, but the law, in large part, is parsing hairs. Easy questions don’t make it to the Supreme Court. Slam-dunk cases settle out. Outside of constitutional issues, the Supreme Court only agrees to hear cases that are so subject to interpretation, they’ve been inconsistently decided between states or federal circuits. Analytical precision, therefore, is a big part of the job. That being the case, it was concerning to hear a federal judge clamor for “due process” as he sidestepped an opportunity to call witnesses, hear evidence, or have his name cleared by a federal investigation. How should we view a federal judge who seems not to understand, or who for political reasons ignores, that he is not, in fact, on trial, but at a job interview? Who, either due to a lack of understanding or a surfeit of political ambition, emotes as though the stakes were that of a criminal proceeding, in which the high burden of proof would militate in his favor? Do we want a justice who artfully aims for what’s “technically” true (and misses often), or one whose integrity is, well, unimpeachable?

Ex-Senate Aide: Judge Brett Kavanaugh Has Lied Every Time He Has Testified Under Oath

'Lying to Congress Is a Federal Crime': Sanders Demands FBI Investigate Whether Kavanaugh Committed Perjury

In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) demanded that the newly reopened FBI investigation into Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh examine both the serious accusations of sexual assault against him and whether he lied to Congress in his testimony.

"In order for this FBI investigation regarding Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to be complete," Sanders wrote, "it is imperative the bureau must not only look into the accusations made by Dr. Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and Julie Swetnick, it should also examine the veracity of his testimony before the Judiciary Committee."

The Vermont senator went on to call on the Senate to not "constrain" the FBI probe to one week, arguing that a truly thorough probe could take longer.

"If you are concerned with a delay in this confirmation process, remember that Senate Republicans refused to allow the Senate to consider Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court for nearly a year," Sanders wrote. "In addition to investigating the accusations made by multiple women, a thorough investigation should include a review of Judge Kavanaugh’s numerous untruthful statements in his previous testimony before Congress."

Lying to Congress is a federal crime.

The FBI must examine the veracity of Kavanaugh’s statements under oath in addition to the sexual assault allegations against him. Kavanaugh's truthfulness with the Senate goes to the very heart of whether he should be confirmed to the court. pic.twitter.com/TsNOTm4fxK

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 29, 2018

Even prior to the emergence of credible sexual assault allegations against him, Kavanaugh—who on Thursday repeatedly refused to endorse an FBI probe into the allegations against him—was accused by several Democratic senators of lying to the Senate during hearings for his nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2004 and 2006. In his letter to Grassley on Saturday, Sanders listed some of these examples, as well as statements Kavanaugh made "under oath regarding his treatment of women and his use of alcohol," which "appear not to be true."

Kimberlé Crenshaw: How Society Embraces Male Denials, from Clarence Thomas to Brett Kavanaugh

US justice department sues California over new net neutrality law

The US justice department has sued the state of California, just hours after the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, signed legislation to restore internet protections known as net neutrality. The justice department said it would take California to court on grounds that the federal government has the exclusive power to regulate net neutrality.

US attorney general Jeff Sessions said in a statement that “states do not regulate interstate commerce - the federal government does,” after California became the largest state to enact its own rules requiring internet providers to treat all web traffic equally. “Once again the California legislature has enacted an extreme and illegal state law attempting to frustrate federal policy,” Sessions said in the statement.

Big Tech Is Appealing to Congress to Help Get Around California’s New Online Privacy Law

After California passed the most sweeping online privacy law in the nation this summer, big tech went back to the state legislature to weaken it. While that effort fizzled before the end of the state’s legislative session, a more insidious strategy emerged this week: going around California and appealing to Congress.

Alastair Mactaggart, who led the California effort, told The Intercept that a Wednesday hearing in Congress left him concerned that Congress might pre-empt the state legislation at the behest of giant tech firms. ... Mactaggart, a Bay Area real estate developer, became an unlikely activist when he bankrolled a ballot measure that, among other things, would require tech companies to reveal what personal information they collected on users, allow users to opt out of the sale of their data to third parties, and impose fines for data breaches. Tech firms fought it vigorously, but were hampered by a series of scandals like Facebook’s release of data to Cambridge Analytica, and widespread popular support for some limits on persistent surveillance.

Tech firms, fearing being locked into a policy they could only change at the ballot, encouraged the state legislature to get involved. The California House and Senate passed a law substantially similar to the initiative, with unanimous support in both chambers. Gov. Jerry Brown signed it in June. The law doesn’t take effect until January 2020, and big tech’s hope was to water it down before that date. Industry representatives went to Congress this week after failing to get California lawmakers to narrow the definition of “selling” data, which would have rendered some of the protections of the law moot. The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on Wednesday where leaders of six tech and telecom companies — Amazon, Google, Apple, Twitter, AT&T, and Charter Communications — endorsed a federal consumer privacy standard. In their conception, this would pre-empt any state data protection laws.

Chelsea Manning says life in the US is like being in prison

Chelsea Manning has compared life in the US to her time in prison because of surveillance systems, cameras and the presence of police. In her first public appearance in the UK, the whistleblower said her idea of freedom outside jail had not transpired. “I am constantly bombarded by reminders about how different, about how drastically different the world really is,” she said. “This whole notion that you get out of prison and you are free now turned out to be a bit of a downer in that sense.

“Because what happened, we really built this large, big prison, which is the United States, in the meantime – it was already happening, it just really intensified.

“You think about the surveillance systems, the cameras, or the police presence, and you think about the fact that we have walls around our country, and that is very much the same thing that is inside a prison … I see a lot of similarities between the world out here and the world that was in there.”

Jeremy Corbyn with Yanis Varoufakis at the Edinburgh Book Festival, August 20, 2018

Protests in Catalonia on first anniversary of independence vote

Tens of thousands of Catalans have congregated in Barcelona to mark the first anniversary of the region’s unilateral and illegal independence referendum as groups of pro-independence activists blocked roads, motorways and a high-speed rail line. Crowds of students filled the city’s central square on Monday, waving yellow, red and blue separatist flags and chanting ‘1 October, no forgiving, no forgetting’. Nearby, others let off smoke bombs and fireworks.

The demonstration came after members of the grassroots, direct-action Committees for the Defence of the Republic, occupied streets in Barcelona and Lleida as well as the motorways to Madrid and France. They also obstructed the train line between Figueres, Girona and Barcelona. Services were restored by 10am local time. In Girona, protesters stormed a government office, tearing down the Spanish flag and replacing it with the pro-independence estelada (starred) banner.

Catalonia’s nationalist president, Quim Torra, made a symbolic visit to a polling station in the small town of Sant Julià de Ramis, where police prevented his predecessor Carles Puigdemont from voting last October. Torra told the protesters to “keep up the pressure”. “Everything began on 1 October and everything goes back to 1 October,” he said. “The lesson of 1 October and its values are what we need as we face the coming weeks and months.” ...

Although pro-independence parties retained their majority in last December’s vote, the staunchly unionist Citizens party took the most seats and polls suggest Catalans are evenly split over whether to secede. The new socialist government of Pedro Sánchez has taken a more conciliatory approach than the conservative government it replaced, offering a vote on increased self-government but categorically ruling out a referendum on self-determination or independence.

U.S., Canada Reach Deal for North American Trade

Canada was back in a revamped North American free trade deal with the United States and Mexico late Sunday after weeks of bitter, high-pressure negotiations that brushed up against a midnight deadline.

In a joint statement, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said the agreement “will strengthen the middle class, and create good, well-paying jobs and new opportunities for the nearly half billion people who call North America home.”

The new deal, reached just before a midnight deadline imposed by the U.S., will be called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. It replaces the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, which President Donald Trump had called a job-killing disaster.

The agreement reached Sunday gives U.S. farmers greater access to the Canadian dairy market. But it keeps a NAFTA dispute-resolution process that the U.S. wanted to jettison and offers Canada protection if Trump goes ahead with plans to impose tariffs on cars, trucks and auto parts imported into the United States.

Oh, looky, Democrats have rediscovered the tactic of appearing to be interested in doing something for the 99% in order to bolster their election chances:

Elizabeth Warren Introduces Plan to Expand Affordable Housing and Dismantle Racist Zoning Practices

This week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., introduced the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act, one of the most far-reaching federal housing bills in decades. The legislation calls for a half-trillion dollar investment in affordable housing over the next 10 years, creating up to 3.2 million new units for low- and middle-income families.

The bill also expands the protections of decades-old legislation to reduce discriminatory banking, ban housing discrimination, and desegregate neighborhoods. For example, Warren’s bill would make it illegal for landlords to discriminate against renters with federal housing vouchers, and would also impose new regulations on credit unions and nonbank mortgage lenders like Quicken Loans. The bill also incentivizes states and localities to loosen their racist and discriminatory zoning restrictions; eases the path for low-income families to move into more affluent communities; and provides federal assistance to first-time homebuyers from formerly segregated areas and those who saw their wealth decimated in the 2008 financial crisis.

Warren’s bill comes on the heels of two other federal housing bills introduced this summer by Democratic Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, of New Jersey and California, respectively. Harris’s bill, which came first, aims to provide financial relief to renters by creating a new refundable tax credit. Booker’s bill would also establish a refundable tax credit for renters and incentivize communities to curb their exclusionary zoning rules to increase housing supply. Booker, Harris, and Warren are all names frequently thrown around as 2020 presidential hopefuls, though none has actually announced their intent to run.

New “Dark Money” Documentary Shines Light Into the Shadows Cast by the Super-Rich

If you, like most Americans, believe you’re being screwed by the U.S. political system, and would like to know exactly how the screwing functions, tune into “Dark Money,” a new documentary premiering Monday, October 1 on PBS. The film, directed by Kimberly Reed, is one of the most expert dissections ever conducted of the subterranean tentacles quietly strangling U.S. democracy. (“Dark Money” was co-funded by Topic Studios, which is part of First Look Media, along with The Intercept.)

The movie is largely about the last decade of politics in Montana. This long-term, close-to-the-ground focus is cinematically unique, and makes it possible for “Dark Money” to illuminate three startling facts about how America now works.

First, the corporate hard-right is systematically investing in politics at an incredibly granular level, down to state and local races. Second, they’re not just trying to crush Democrats. Leaked documents examined in the movie show conspirators discussing a plan to “purge” all Republicans who don’t share their worldview — an ideology so conservative that it hasn’t been seen in full flower in the U.S. for 100 years. In fact, the politicians who appear in the film are largely Republicans who’ve been successfully targeted for the right-wing purge, who speak wistfully about Montana’s evaporating history as a small-d democracy. Third, dark money, while just one tributary of the Mississippi of cash flowing through the U.S. political system, is a key tool of the corporate right. It gets its name from the fact that certain kinds of non-profit corporations — unlike political campaigns and even Super PACs — currently do not have to disclose their donors.

Big out-of-state money therefore can flood into small races in the last weeks before an election with total anonymity, paying for the sleaziest ads and mailers imaginable, produced by organizations created solely for that purpose. ... This secrecy serves the corporate right both coming and going: Voters can’t judge whether big out-of-state interests are behind ads, and corporate funders won’t suffer brand damage when they back smear campaigns or push extreme candidates.

Hurricane Florence Released Tons of Coal Ash in North Carolina. Now the Coal Industry Wants Less Regulation.

Even as coal ash storage basins are leaking massive amounts of pollution in the wake of Hurricane Florence, the coal industry is working on a novel legal strategy to stop the federal regulation of this toxic byproduct of coal combustion. The very same week that coal ash turned some river water in North Carolina into gray pudding and the pollution amassed to the point that it could be seen from space, coal companies have been successfully limiting their liability for this contamination under the Clean Water Act.

The coal industry was already enjoying a banner year under the Trump administration — one capped by the rollback of a 2015 Environmental Protection Agency rule that had set basic limitations on the disposal of coal ash. The waste contains carcinogens and neurotoxins, including arsenic, boron, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, lead, lithium, and mercury, and is often stored in unlined pits. The 2015 rule required that any coal ash storage facility within five feet of a groundwater aquifer be closed. The new rule, which the EPA finalized in July, extended the time coal companies have to close those ash ponds by 12 months, allowed states to suspend the monitoring of some groundwater near coal ash waste sites, and removed a requirement that only engineers can sign off on changes to coal ash ponds. ...

The coal industry’s latest push aims to ensure that some of its waste can’t be regulated under the Clean Water Act. In two appeals court cases this week, judges agreed with power companies that the Clean Water Act didn’t apply to ash ponds that leaked waste from coal-fueled power plants into groundwater in Tennessee and Kentucky. Because a Hawaii appeals court reached an opposite decision, the issue may be soon headed to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Duke Energy, which owns all five of the dumps that have released coal ash in the wake of Hurricane Florence, recently sought the EPA’s guidance in shifting oversight of coal ash away from the Clean Water Act, which has long governed these discharges. In February, a lawyer from a law firm that has represented Duke Energy, emailed Susan Bodine, who heads the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, about coal ash liability, according to internal emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Waterkeeper Alliance. ...

An attachment Smith sent Bodine, which Bodine noted in the email was authored by a Duke Energy attorney, contained “Proposed Congressional report language” designed to ensure that some liability for coal ash would fall under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, or RCRA, rather than the Clean Water Act. One month later, very similar language was included in an explanatory statement that accompanied the federal budget, which, after the budget was passed, became a congressional directive to the EPA.

More Proof Trump EPA 'Working for Coal Millionaires' as EPA Plan to Weaken Mercury Regulations Revealed

A new proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would weaken a rule regulating toxic pollutants--including mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants—by eliminating government mandates that currently allow regulators to look at the health and environmental costs stemming from industrial waste and emissions.

The agency is proposing a major change to an Obama-era rule which states that when the government considers the cost of compliance with a regulation of a toxic chemical such as mercury, which has been found to harm the nervous systems of children and fetuses, it must also consider the "co-benefits" of the rule. As the New York Times reported Monday:

Under the mercury program, the economic benefits of those health effects, known as "co-benefits," helped to provide a legal and economic justification for the cost to industry of the regulation. For example, as the nation's power plants have complied with [the] rule by installing technology to reduce emissions of mercury, they also created the side benefit of reducing pollution of soot and nitrogen oxide, pollutants linked to asthma and lung disease.

The rollback was included on a "wish list" that coal CEO Robert Murray passed along to Energy Secretary Rick Perry shortly after President Donald Trump took office in 2017, due to the costs of compliance for the coal industry. Acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler counted Murray's company, Murray Energy, among his clients when he worked as a lobbyist before entering government. Bill Wehrum, another top EPA official who authored the proposal, has also represented energy companies as a lawyer.

"If finalized, this shameful plan would undermine standards that have already been widely implemented, exposing our kids to more toxic mercury and arsenic just so Andrew Wheeler and Bill Wehrum can appease a handful of their former clients in the coal industry," said Mary Ann Hitt, director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal program, in a statement. "If anyone needed further proof that Wheeler and Wehrum are still working for coal millionaires, this is it."

Also of Interest

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

Any Effective Anti-War Movement Must Readjust Its Understanding Of What War Is

How the Trump Era Lays Bare the Tension in the Marriage Between Conservatism and Capitalism

Here Are Five Questions the FBI Should Ask Mark Judge About Brett Kavanaugh

Kavanaugh clerk hire casts light on link to judge forced to quit in #MeToo era

Men Are Defending Brett Kavanaugh Because They're Afraid

Chris Hedges: Lynching the Past

The Fake Public Comments Supporting a Bank Merger Are Coming From Inside the House

DAPL Water Protector Sentenced To 3 Years In Prison

A Little Night Music

Little Brother Montgomery - Cow Cow Blues

Little Brother Montgomery - Up the Country

Little Brother Montgomery - Satellite Blues

Little Brother Montgomery - Brother, If You Want to Spread Some Joy

Little Brother Montgomery - Vicksburg Blues No. 2

Little Brother Montgomery - Home Again Blues

Little Brother Montgomery - No Special Rider Blues

Little Brother Montgomery - Doctor, Write Me a Prescription for the Blues

Little Brother Montgomery - Crescent City Blues