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"Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing."

-- Edmund Burke

News and Opinion

Promises, promises: how Obama's State of the Union pledges were kept … or not

Fewer than half of Barack Obama’s biggest promises as president have been kept, according to a Guardian audit published on the eve of his final State of the Union address.

The analysis of six preceding state of the union speeches, two inaugurals and Obama’s first address to Congress in 2009 reveals a steady decline in both the number of policy pledges made by him, and their success rate, during an ambitious presidency marred by fierce battles with lawmakers. ...

“I campaigned on the promise of change – change we can believe in, the slogan went,” [Obama] recalled in 2010. “But remember this – I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I could do it alone.”

But few of his supporters would have imagined that a candidate who fought so hard against the legacy of George W Bush would be sending US troops back to Afghanistan and Iraq in 2016, or still struggling to close the Guantánamo Bay detention centre.

Protesters tell Obama: closing Guantánamo is your responsibility

Wearing orange jumpsuits and black hoods, two dozen protesters stood outside the White House on Monday to give short shrift to Barack Obama’s claim that the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay is beyond his control.

“It’s time to be honest,” sang Luke Nephew, 33, of the Peace Poets from New York. “You can’t blame it on Congress. President Obama, make good on your promise.” ...

Obama pledged during the 2008 presidential election campaign that he would close the military prison, which held foreign terrorism suspects without trial after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. The promise has been a regular feature of his State of the Union addresses and is expected to come up again on Tuesday.

The protesters noted that some 779 men have been held at the prison since it opened in 2002 and accused the administration of hypocrisy. One said: “I have news for President Obama. You cannot claim moral superiority while utilising methods that are immoral. If you’re going to condemn Isis for this act of terrorism, then you should also condemn the US government for acts of terrorism.”

I wonder how the Obama administration decides how many civilian deaths are "acceptable" for their bombing barbecues. Dartboard? Wheel of Misfortune?

Pentagon: US Bombs Giant Piles of ISIS Money, Destroying Millions

It’s not often that Pentagon airstrikes on what they themselves admit are civilian targets in residential areas, but they found one with a Sunday morning strike in the ISIS city of Mosul, where they destroyed a “cash collection and distribution point,” destroying what they believe was millions of dollars in cash. ...

There appears to have been no question on the Pentagon’s part that civilians were going to die, and officials went so far as to say commanders were willing to tolerate “up to 50 civilians” killed in the attack because of how important the pile of money is.

Formally, the Pentagon wouldn’t admit to any deaths in the strikes, but privately they say initial assessments put the death toll at somewhere between five and seven civilians hit in the strike, well within their tolerance for killings.

As U.S. Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, ‘Smaller’ Leaves Some Uneasy

Mr. Obama has long advocated a “nuclear-free world.” His lieutenants argue that modernizing existing weapons can produce a smaller and more reliable arsenal while making their use less likely because of the threat they can pose. The changes, they say, are improvements rather than wholesale redesigns, fulfilling the president’s pledge to make no new nuclear arms.

But critics, including a number of former Obama administration officials, look at the same set of facts and see a very different future. The explosive innards of the revitalized weapons may not be entirely new, they argue, but the smaller yields and better targeting can make the arms more tempting to use — even to use first, rather than in retaliation.

Gen. James E. Cartwright, a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was among Mr. Obama’s most influential nuclear strategists, said he backed the upgrades because precise targeting allowed the United States to hold fewer weapons. But “what going smaller does,” he acknowledged, “is to make the weapon more thinkable.”

Prince Mohammed bin Salman: Naive, arrogant Saudi prince is playing with fire

At the end of last year the BND, the German intelligence agency, published a remarkable one-and-a-half-page memo saying that Saudi Arabia had adopted “an impulsive policy of intervention”. It portrayed Saudi defence minister and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – the powerful 29-year-old favourite son of the ageing King Salman, who is suffering from dementia – as a political gambler who is destabilising the Arab world through proxy wars in Yemen and Syria. ...

A main reason for Saudi Arabia acting unilaterally is its disappointment that the US reached an agreement with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear programme. Again this looks naive: close alliance with the US is the prime reason why the Saudi monarchy has survived nationalist and socialist challengers since the 1930s. Aside from the Saudis’ money and close alliance with the US, leaders in the Middle East have always doubted that the Saudi state has much operational capacity. This is true of all the big oil producers, whatever their ideological make-up. Experience shows that vast oil wealth encourages autocracy, whether it is in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya or Kuwait, but it also produces states that are weaker than they look, with incapable administrations and dysfunctional armies.

[Prince Mohammed] suggests austerity and market reforms in the Kingdom, but in the context of Middle East autocracies and particularly oil states this breaches an unspoken social contract with the general population. People may not have political liberty, but they get a share in oil revenues through government jobs and subsidised fuel, food, housing and other benefits. Greater privatisation and supposed reliance on the market, with no accountability or fair legal system, means a licence to plunder by those with political power.

This was one of the reasons for the uprising in 2011 against Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. So-called reforms that erode an unwieldy but effective patronage machine end up by benefiting only the elite.

Hezbollah Claims Russia Directly Arming Them

Commanders of the Hezbollah militia have claimed, in comments to the Daily Beast, that they are closely working with the Russian government, and that Russia is directly providing them with “heavy weapons” with no strings attached. ...

Syria has struggled to arm Hezbollah in the fight, however, with Israel regularly attacking Syrian military sites believed involved in the transfer. Israel is almost certain not to attempt that with Russia, though the Hezbollah commanders insisted that Russia did not forbid them from using the arms against Israel.

Iran blames Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan over killing of Shia cleric in Saudi Arabia

Turkey has reacted angrily to claims in Iranian state media that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was involved in Saudi Arabia’s execution of a prominent Shia cleric.

Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was among 47 people charged with terror offences and killed, mostly by beheading, across the Saudi kingdom on 2 January.

The Turkish president has refused to condemn the killings, describing them as an “internal legal matter” for the Saudi authorities, amid improved ties between the two majority Sunni Muslim states.

The executions were carried out only days after Mr Erdogan visited Riyadh for talks with King Salman, and Iranian news reports were quick to draw a connection between the two.

Godwin is still the busiest man in town:

Polish press invokes Nazi imagery as war of words with EU heats up

Relations between Brussels and Poland’s hardline Eurosceptic government have deteriorated further after a Polish magazine published a cover portraying five leading EU politicians – including the German chancellor, Angela Merkel – in Nazi uniforms beneath the headline These people want to control Poland again.

This @TygodnikWPROST cover is outrageous, just like #Ziobro comments. My reaction via https://t.co/hU0AGJXIRR pic.twitter.com/flPhSK1JcH

— Guy Verhofstadt (@GuyVerhofstadt) January 11, 2016

The photoshopped image on the front of popular weekly Wprost showed Merkel, the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, European parliament president Martin Schulz, EU commissioner Günther Oettinger, and Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister, leaning over a map, echoing wartime photographs of Adolf Hitler and his generals.

In a post on his Facebook page, Verhofstadt, who heads the liberal Alde group in the European parliament, described the image as “outrageous”, adding that the EU was a “community of values” and that it was “the duty of all of us – commissioners, chancellors or not, to raise our voice when a government is endangering these principles and attacking democratic institutions”.

[See also: EU in Stress: the German-Polish Clash - js]

Days of Revolt: The New Black Militants

Companies, Scientists, and Activists Worldwide Call On Global Leaders to Protect Strong Encryption

Nearly 200 experts, companies, and activists in 42 countries have signed a letter demanding that world leaders take a stand in support of encryption technology, which protects nearly every internet transaction from banking and health records to emails and web browsing.

The letter, organized by Access Now, comes in response to the challenges being mounted against strong encryption by administrations — in the U.S. and worldwide — concerned that the technology gives criminals and terrorists a “safe space” to communicate and commit crimes with impunity.

“We’re seeing threats come up all over the world,” said Amie Stepanovich, U.S. policy manager for Access Now, to The Intercept. “This is a response to that — to draw clear lines in the sand between what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to the government acting on encryption.” ...

Access Now and many other partner groups are waiting on a response from the White House to their “We The People” petition asking the president to weigh in on strong encryption. It got over 100,000 signatures on October 27, requiring the administration to respond — which Access Now expects in the not too distant future. “They’re not sitting idly by,” said Stepanovich of Access Now to The Intercept. “They’re considering it, asking for more information. Last we heard was on Christmas Eve.”

Seeking Justice for Israeli High Seas Attack, Survivors Turn to US Court

Israel garnered global condemnation five years ago when it attacked a six-ship "freedom flotilla," bearing humanitarian aid, with the aim of breaking Israel's U.S.-backed blockade of Gaza. Israeli commandos violently assaulted the Turkish Mavi Marmara, which was part of the fleet, immediately killing nine people, with one additional person later succumbing to his wounds.

The military assault wounded over 150 people total, according to the suit filed Monday night in federal district court in Washington, D.C.

The four plaintiffs—U.S. nationals David Schermerhorn and Mary Ann Wright, dual American-Israeli citizen Huwaida Arraf, and Belgian Margriet Deknopper—were among those who sustained physical and psychological injuries aboard the U.S. ship Challenger 1, which carried 17 people and was part of the fleet that was attacked. ...

The suit is being levied under exceptions to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which prohibits many lawsuits against foreign governments. "One of the exceptions is when there is damage, physical or emotional, to American citizens—and when a criminal act is committed on U.S. territory," explained Wright. "We are alleging that the Challenger 1 boat is an extension of U.S. territory."

Why is Ramsey Orta, Man Who Filmed Police Killing of Eric Garner, the Only One Criminally Charged?

Video Game Bans Muslim Professor Because His Name Is Like a Terrorist Financier’s

Muhammad “Zakir” Khan is a speech professor at Broward College in Florida and the executive director of the Transparency and Accountability Project, a police accountability database.

He’s also an avid video gamer. But when he tried to sign up for the beta test of an upcoming shooter game called Paragon, developed by Epic Games, he was informed that he would not be allowed to create an account because his name matches one on the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions list.

@EpicGames My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist. #Islamophobia pic.twitter.com/wKVAWZxFZx

— Zakir Khan (@Muzzakh) January 10, 2016

The “Specially Designated Nationals” list is a list of “individuals and companies owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of” countries that are subject to economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and national security goals. The list, maintained by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, also includes the names of “individuals, groups, and entities, such as terrorists and narcotics traffickers designated under programs that are not country-specific.” ...

If you type “Muhammad Khan” into the sanctions database, you get four hits. One is a financier for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani militant organization that operates out of disputed Kashmir.

But none of them is Muhammad Khan from Florida.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney promised to change the filter the company is using, saying that the new filter will not block solely based on names but instead on a combination of names and billing addresses.

The Oregon Standoff: A Community Divided

Bundy militia remove fence at Oregon wildlife refuge as protest escalates

Days after leaders of the armed occupation in Oregon insisted that they were trying to de-escalate conflicts at the wildlife refuge, the rightwing militia began destroying part of a US Fish and Wildlife Service fence on Monday.

The tactic, intended to allow privately owned cattle to graze on adjacent public land, is one of the most aggressive actions the occupiers have taken since they took over federal property at the Malheur national wildlife refuge headquarters last weekend. ...

Local ranchers – some of whom have said they support Bundy’s message but disapprove of his methods of protest – criticised the militia for cutting the fence on Monday afternoon. “There are better ways to go about it then what he’s doing,” Travis Williams, a 46-year-old Harney County rancher, told the Guardian. “It’s destroying public property … I’m a law-abiding citizen. I pay my grazing fees."

Tim DeChristopher on Bundy Takeover: Gov't is More Afraid of Civil Disobedience Than Armed Militias

Detroit teachers' sickout shuts down schools as officials scramble for recourse

More than half of Detroit public schools were closed Monday after teachers stayed home in what they called a large-scale sickout.

“We don’t have enough school books,” said Burgess Foster, a fifth-grade teacher. “I haven’t had a printer in six months to print out assignments. I’ve seen mice; I’ve heard about the bed bugs.”

The 48-year-old educator stood outside in frigid temperatures on Monday, calling in sick to join colleagues in protest of what they have called “abominable” working conditions across the school district.

Because of the sickout, Detroit Public Schools was forced to close 64 buildings, over half the district – a move that affected 31,000 students, or nearly 66% of the total student population. Nearly two dozen schools were again closed on Tuesday as a result of additional sickouts by teachers.

Fueled by frustration over large class sizes, lack of basic classroom amenities, and dilapidated buildings, teachers waged the sickout – an organized mass absence of work – seemingly as a cry for help, despite the questionable legality of the tactic: Michigan law prohibits government employees from going on strike. ...

The current emergency manager, Darnell Earley, who last week called the recent spate of sickouts “very unethical”, said the mass demonstration on Monday “adversely affected” the district’s employees. (Earley was also the emergency manager of nearby Flint when the city started using a local river as a water source, a decision that has been linked to lead contamination in residents’ household water supply.)

No Labels Rears Its Ugly Head, Droopy Dawg Lieberman Babbles On

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders go on the policy attack

Tensions escalated between the two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination during a presidential forum on Monday, as polls show the race tightening in the final weeks before voting begins

Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who are locked into close primary races in Iowa and New Hampshire, sharpened their attacks on one another over gun control, tax policy and Wall Street reform at the Iowa Black and Brown Forum, hosted by Univision at Drake University in Des Moines on Monday. ...

Sanders also defended his 2005 vote for a law that shields gun manufacturers and sellers from lawsuits, which Clinton has continued to hold up as evidence that he is weak on gun control.

“It’s not a mistake,” Sanders said of his vote. “Like many issues of legislation, it’s complicated.” Sanders has said he would be willing to revisit the law.

On immigration, Clinton promised she would not be the next “deporter-in-chief” if elected. But she could not answerwhether she would deport children, saying the issue was more complicated than that. When the moderators pressed her for a more straightforward response, Clinton said only that children would receive “due process”. ...

Clinton, who until recently held a comfortable lead in Iowa, has ratcheted up her attacks on the Vermont senator’s record on guns, and earlier on Monday opened up a new line of attack on the Vermont senator over his health care policy.

FBI expands investigation of Clinton

The FBI has expanded its investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her time as secretary of State to determine whether her Clinton Foundation work violated public corruption laws, according to Fox News.

"The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed," one of the sources told Fox.

Critics of Clinton have questioned whether her work with her family's foundation during her time as secretary of State may have constituted a conflict of interest, and whether the foundation's donors wielded influence over her while she was in office.

Killer Mike Educates Stephen Colbert

MoveOn Endorses Sanders Following Massive Membership Vote

Sanders wins advocacy group's official support with most membership votes in its history

With a record-setting 79 percent of 340,665 votes cast by the group's members, MoveOn Political Action officially endorsed Sanders for president in 2016.

"His refusal to accept the status quo of the wealthiest Americans using their power to influence politicians matters to me. If we’re going to push back against the rising oligarchy in our country, we need people like Bernie Sanders representing us in government," said one member, identified as Matt R. from Reston, Virginia.

In fact, according to feedback from voters, the top reason Sanders won their endorsement was his "lifelong commitment to standing up to corporate and 1% interests to fight for an economy where everyone has a fair shot."

Second on the list was his support for initiatives such as police demilitarization and an end to failed policies like mass incarceration and the so-called War on Drugs. ...

For her part, Clinton received 14 percent of the vote, and O'Malley garnered .9 percent.

Sanders is First to Sign 'Fix Democracy' Pledge Rejecting Fossil Fuel Cash

Bernie Sanders is the first presidential candidate to sign onto an ambitious "Fix Democracy" pledge launched Monday by Greenpeace and more than 20 other climate justice organizations.

In doing so, Sanders vows to reject campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry and to support a "people-powered democracy" marked by full voting rights for all and public funding for campaigns.

"A critical way for candidates to show they support a people-powered democracy is by rejecting fossil fuel money and supporting voters rights," said Annie Leonard, executive director at Greenpeace USA. "So far only Bernie Sanders has agreed to fossil fuel-free funding and protection of voters rights. It's time for Hillary Clinton and anyone with serious White House aspirations to match Sander's leadership. Our democracy has to stop being sold at auction to the highest bidders."

Bayer revises position to propose extra protections for bees from pesticides

The pharmaceutical giant had initially accused the EPA of overstimating the impact of pesticide on pollinators but now admits report is ‘scientifically sound’

Pharmaceutical giant Bayer has said it has put forward proposals for extra protections for bees after initially accusing the Environmental Protection Agency of overestimating the harm caused to the vital pollinators by a widely used pesticide.

A preliminary risk assessment released by the EPA last week found that that imidacloprid, one of the world’s most common pesticides, can cause honeybee populations to fall in some circumstances.

The agency determined that imidacloprid in nectar at levels of 25 parts per billion or above were harmful to colonies, which have suffered an alarming decline in abundance over the past year.

Two crops – citrus and cotton – exceeded this level for imidacloprid, which is in the neonicotinoid class of insecticides, while bees visiting potatoes, rice, corn and wheat didn’t face as great a risk. Further work needs to be done to assess the threat of imidacloprid upon bees that interact with other plants. ...

The EPA is in the process of reviewing the impact of three other neonicotinoids – clothianidin, thiamethoxam, and dinotefuran – as well as how other species, such as butterflies and aquatic animals, are affected by pesticides. This work is set to be unveiled in December.

But environmentalists have accused the EPA of being too slow to assess the harm caused by pesticides to bees and have urged the regulator to follow Europe in banning them. US bee colonies are in trouble, with a United States Department of Agriculture study in May finding that 42% of colonies have been lost over the past year, the largest loss on record. ...

Two studies published in Nature last year cited evidence that overuse of neonicotinoid pesticides was harming bee populations. One of the studies found that bees were drawn to neonicotinoids, which are derived from nicotine, possibly similarly to how humans are attracted to nicotine. This means that bees may prefer a food source that harms their nervous system.

Toxic “Reform” Law Will Gut State Rules on Dangerous Chemicals

A neew set of bills that aims to update the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act may nullify the efforts of states such as Maine and California to regulate dangerous chemicals. The Senate’s bill, passed last month, just before the holidays, is particularly restrictive. The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act — named, ironically, for the New Jersey senator who supported strong environmental protections — would make it much harder for states to regulate chemicals after the EPA has evaluated them, and would even prohibit states from acting while the federal agency is in the process of investigating certain chemicals.

The Senate’s version has some significant differences from the House bill — the TSCA Modernization Act, which passed in June — and the reconciliation process is now underway. If the worst provisions from both bills wind up in the final law, which could reach the president’s desk as soon as February, the new legislation will gut laws that have put Oregon, California, Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, and Washington state at the forefront of chemical regulation. ...

There is little question that the original Toxic Substance Control Act is broken, as even industry has recently begun to admit. TSCA, passed in 1976, was born from outrage about the health risks of asbestos and PCBs, and it gave the EPA the authority to regulate tens of thousands of toxic substances. But the process was heavily influenced by the chemical industry, which initially opposed regulation before helping to write the law. The final legislation grandfathered in the vast majority of some 82,000 chemicals now registered for commercial use. In the almost four decades since TSCA went into effect, the federal agency has required testing for only about 200 chemicals. Of those, just five were partially regulated at the federal level.

Reform of TSCA, which Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey worked on for more than a decade before his death in 2013, was supposed to close the loopholes. But, as with the original law, after first opposing the legislation, the industry not only got on board but ended up steering the process and flooding Congress with money. In fact, evidence emerged in March that the Senate version of the bill was written by the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s biggest lobbying group.

Since 2014, while Congress was hashing out TSCA reform, the top 10 chemical companies and organizations spent more than $125 million on lobbying. Dow Chemical Company and Koch Industries each spent more than $21 million, while DuPont spent more than $14 million, according to MapLight, a nonprofit group that monitors money in politics. The American Chemistry Council contributed more than $18 million, including $150,000 to the Super PAC supporting the gubernatorial bid of David Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana who co-sponsored the bill. Chemical industry contributions were significantly higher for the bill’s sponsors and co-sponsors than for other members of Congress.

All of which helps explain why the chemical industry loves the legislation meant to regulate it.

Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus will retire all elephants by May

The Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus is accelerating its phaseout of elephant acts, announcing that it will retire all of its touring elephants by May.

Feld Entertainment, parent company of the touring circus, said all of its Asian elephants will move to its elephant conservation center in Florida. Eleven elephants that are currently made to tour the country and perform tricks for people will be retired, bringing the herd at the center to 42.

Following growing pressure from animal welfare groups, Feld Entertainment said in March it would move all the pachyderms to the 200-acre conservation center by 2018. But the company said it had since realized the move will not take as long as expected.

Also of Interest

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

In Yemen, Civilians Suffer Relentless Bombing by Saudi-led Coalition

The Saudi Rules

Election Year Anti-Crime Posturing Could Derail Even Limited Sentencing Reform

Hillary Clinton Whiffs on Reforming Wall Street’s Ratings Agencies

Democratic candidates had a chance to prove bona fides on race. They failed

How Debt Conquered America

What’s Behind the Fed’s Decision to Raise Interest Rates in a Struggling Economy?

ObamaCare’s Neoliberal Intellectual Foundations Continue to Crumble

The Real Threat to Society: The .01 Percent Who Own Nearly 80 Percent of US Wealth

A Little Night Music

Joe Tex - That's Your Baby/I'll Never Do You Wrong

Joe Tex - Skip a Rope/Skinny Legs and All

Joe Tex - The Love You Save

Joe Tex - Hold What You Got

Joe Tex - One Monkey Don't Stop No Show

Joe Tex - Come In My House

Joe Tex - I Gotcha

Joe Tex - Aint Gonna Bump No More