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"There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly."

-- Noam Chomsky

News and Opinion

Norman Solomon nails it. This article is worth a full read, here's a taste of the key points:

The Democratic Party Line That Could Torch Civil Liberties... And Maybe Help Blow Up The World

Many top Democrats are stoking a political firestorm. We keep hearing that Russia attacked democracy by hacking into Democratic officials' emails and undermining Hillary Clinton's campaign. ... Of course partisan spinners aren't big on self-examination, especially if they're aligned with the Democratic Party's dominant corporate wing. And the option of continually fingering the Kremlin as the main villain of a 2016 morality play is clearly too juicy for functionary Democrats to pass up -- even if that means scorching civil liberties and escalating a new cold war that could turn radioactively hot.

Much of the current fuel for the blame-Russia blaze has to do with the horrifying reality that Donald Trump will soon become president. Big media outlets are blowing oxygen into the inferno. But the flames are also being fanned by people who should know better.

Consider the Boston Globe article that John Shattuck -- a former Washington legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union -- wrote in mid-December. "A specter of treason hovers over Donald Trump," the civil libertarian wrote. ... As quickly pointed out by Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University, raising the specter of treason "is simply wrong" -- and "its wrongness matters, not just because hyperbole always weakens argument, but because the carefully restricted definition of the crime of treason is essential to protecting free speech and the freedom of association."

Is Shattuck's piece a mere outlier? Sadly, no. Although full of gaping holes, it reflects a substantial portion of the current liberal zeitgeist. ...

There's been a lot of talk lately about refusing to normalize the Trump presidency. And that's crucial. Yet we should also push back against normalizing the deflection of outrage at the U.S. political system's chronic injustices and horrendous results -- deflection that situates the crux of the problem in a foreign capital instead of our own.

Go read this. It is an amazing piece of writing.

Reminder: We Came Within An Inch Of Nuclear Annihilation In The Last Cold War

As we discussed yesterday, neocon Republicans have been forming a coalition with establishment Democrats in their mutual desire to begin a new Cold War with Russia. A recent neocon-authored Politico article strongly advocating another Cold War is getting praised and shared around by liberal pundits from all the establishment encampments you’d expect, from NPR to Bloomberg to the Washington Post. Since these individuals are the paid mouthpieces of the political establishment and not actual journalists as society understands that term, we can safely surmise that this is where the neoliberal oligarchs would like to see us headed, probably due to Russia’s insolent refusal to back away from the strategically valuable Syria, as well as its collaboration with China to weaken the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. 

You can smell it in the air. Every day now I’m having interactions with Democratic party loyalists who insist that a new Cold War is either an unfortunate inevitability or a desirable means to a desirable end, so I think it would be a good idea to clear up here and now just what such a conflict would entail. A lot of the folks I’ve been speaking with are blissfully unaware that we came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear holocaust at the height of the last Cold War, and nothing but dumb luck and the courage of a single Soviet submariner stood between our species and the abyss of total extinction.

Pictured above is a man named Vasili Arkhipov. You may never have heard of him, but he’s the reason you’re reading this sentence right now. He’s the reason there are birds in the sky and trees in the soil, and he’s the reason that all of your loved ones exist. If you were born after the 27th of October, 1962, he is the reason your lungs ever drew breath and your eyes ever gazed upon your mother’s face.

There are so very many things that can go wrong when tensions are escalated between two nuclear superpowers. You can’t account for everything. There’s no way to predict all the possible things that could go wrong in the chaos and confusion of a new Cold War. There are too many tiny moving parts. Too many things that can go far too wrong placed in the hands of fallible humans under impossibly stressful conditions.

WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived

In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor’s note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom.

The second story on the electric grid turned out to be far worse than I realized when I wrote about it on Saturday, when it became clear that there was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid” as the Post had claimed. In addition to the editor’s note, the Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate article admitting that “the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility” and there may not even have been malware at all on this laptop.

But while these debacles are embarrassing for the paper, they are also richly rewarding. That’s because journalists — including those at the Post — aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post (the paper’s executive editor, Marty Baron, recently boasted about how profitable the paper has become).

After spreading the falsehoods far and wide, raising fear levels and manipulating U.S. political discourse in the process (both Russia stories were widely hyped on cable news), journalists who spread the false claims subsequently note the retraction or corrections only in the most muted way possible, and often not at all. As a result, only a tiny fraction of people who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of the retractions. ...

Whatever the motives, the effects of these false stories are exactly the same as those of whatever one regards as Fake News. The false claims travel all over the internet, deceiving huge numbers into believing them. The propagators of the falsehoods receive ample profit from their false, viral “news.” And there is no accountability of the kind that would disincentivize a repeat of the behavior. (That the Post ultimately corrects its false story does not distinguish it from classic Fake News sites, which also sometimes do the same.)

A large faction of Israeli society, including a significant portion of its government, appears to be eager for the shackling of the institutions of civil society. This will not end well.

Israeli soldier convicted over killing of wounded Palestinian attacker

An Israeli soldier who killed a wounded Palestinian attacker in the West Bank city of Hebron in March last year has been found guilty of manslaughter at the end of one of the country’s most polarising court cases in recent memory.

A three-judge military court sitting in Tel Aviv said Sgt Elor Azaria, a medic who was 19 at the time, had acted outside the army’s rules of engagement when he killed Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, shortly after Sharif and another Palestinian had stabbed and wounded a soldier at an Israeli military checkpoint.

The other Palestinian involved in the knife attack was shot and died immediately, but Sharif was alive when Azaria killed him.

Reading for more than two hours from the verdict, chief judge Col Maya Heller said Azaria shot Sharif out of revenge. The court ruled that accounts of the incident that he had given were “unreliable and problematic” and his defence contradictory and flawed.

“We found there was no room to accept his arguments,” she said. “His motive for shooting was that he felt the terrorist deserved to die.” ...

Outside the court there were clashes between Azaria’s supporters – some far-right fans of Beitar football club – and the police. Some supporters chanted death threats against the Israeli army chief, Gadi Eizenkot, insinuating he would face the same fate as Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime minister killed 20 years ago by an ultranationalist Israeli. ...

The shooting on 24 March last year prompted international condemnation after being captured on video by a Palestinian human rights activist.

In the footage the wounded Sharif is surrounded by soldiers, medics and settlers. Azaria then appears and unslings a weapon before shooting Sharif in the head.

Israeli soldier Azaria found guilty of manslaughter for shooting wounded Palestinian

Republican senators introduce bill to move US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem

Three Republican senators have introduced legislation to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s official capital and move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv, a plan backed by Donald Trump but likely to ignite fierce protests.

After being sworn into the 115th Congress in Washington, Ted Cruz of Texas, Dean Heller of Nevada and Marco Rubio of Florida unveiled the Jerusalem Embassy and Recognition Act.

Similar moves by Republican majorities over the past two decades have come to nought, but this time they have a sympathetic president-elect in Trump. He has repeatedly pledged to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem and nominated a US ambassador who shares that view.

Critics warn that the move could unleash a wave of violence and further rattle the Israel-Palestine peace process and the future of a two-state solution.

Syria Ceasefire Holds Amid Rebel Complaints

Five days in, Syria’s ceasefire, brokered by Turkey, Russia, and Iran, continues to hold across most of the nation. Rebels continue to grouse, however, as the status of al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front remains a bone of contention surrounding the terms of the ceasefire, and fighting in Nusra territory is being presented as a violation by other rebel groups. ...

So far, the rebels are using this dispute as an excuse not to discuss planned peace talks in Kazakhstan, which are to be scheduled for mid-January, but so far they are not withdrawing from the ceasefire outright either. Indeed, the ceasefire does seem to be holding well across much of the country and if nothing else has brought locals some calm in much of the country.

US Warplanes Fly Over ISIS’ Syrian City of al-Bab, But Don’t Strike

The Pentagon has confirmed that, in response to Turkish r4equests for military aid in the ongoing invasion of the ISIS city of al-Bab, in northern Syria, US warplanes flew over the city, though they did not conduct any airstrikes or apparently do anything else. ...

Turkey did, however, get foreign air support yesterday, when Russian warplanes attacked ISIS targets around the outskirts of al-Bab. This was also a surprise, as Turkey had publicly requested help from the US-led coalition, not the Russians, but it is likely the US comments about overflights are meant to emphasize that they did something in al-Bab too.

ISIS Will Lose the Battle of Mosul, But Not Much Will Remain

Winners and losers are beginning to emerge in the wars that have engulfed the wider Middle East since the US and UK invaded Iraq in 2003. The most striking signs of this are the sieges of east Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, which have much in common though they were given vastly different coverage by the Western media. In both cities, Salafi-jihadi Sunni Arab insurgents were defending their last big urban strongholds against the Iraqi Army, in the case of Mosul, and the Syrian Army, in the case of east Aleppo.

The capture of east Aleppo means that President Bashar al-Assad has essentially won the war and will stay in power. The Syrian security forces advanced and the armed resistance collapsed more swiftly than had been expected. Some 8,000 to 10,000 rebel fighters, pounded by artillery and air strikes and divided among themselves, were unable to stage a last stand in the ruins of the enclave, as happened in Homs three years ago, and is happening in Mosul now.

But what gives the rebel defeat in east Aleppo its crucial significance is not so much the battle itself, but the failure of their foreign backers – Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – to come to their aid. Ever since 2011, the advance and retreat of government and rebel forces in Syria has been decided by the quantity of arms, ammunition and money they could extract from their outside backers. President Assad always looked to Russia, Iran and Shia paramilitaries from Lebanon and Iraq. ... If the rebels’ traditional allies did not help them when they still held east Aleppo, it is unlikely that they will do so after they have lost it.

In the longer term, the Iraqi government will probably take Mosul, though by then it may not look much different from east Aleppo. ... The Arab Spring of 2011 saw revolution, but also counter-revolution: Saudi Arabia and Qatar, followed by the oil-rich Sunni monarchies of the Gulf, sought to take over the leadership of the Arab world that had once been dominated by Egypt, Iraq and Syria. The Gulf states have proved incapable of fulfilling their new role and their various initiatives have produced or exacerbated calamitous wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen.

Oil, Arms and Militant Wahhabism is the Basis of US-Saudi Relationship

White House Rejects Trump's Request to Halt Guantanamo Transfers

With little more than two weeks left in the Obama administration, and Congress on notice of a series of looming detainee transfers, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday for a cessation of Guantanamo prisoner releases. The Obama administration swiftly rejected the request.

Expect announcements of additional transfers before Inauguration Day, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters. Trump will "have an opportunity to implement the policy that he believes is most effective when he takes office on Jan. 20," he added.

Of the 59 captives currently held at the detention center, 23 are cleared for release to other countries with security assurances that satisfy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. Ten are charged with crimes and the remaining 26 are held as indefinite detainees in the war on terror, or "forever prisoners." Carter has sent notices to Congress of planned transfers for most, but not all, of the 23 cleared captives that could begin later this week.

It was unclear what prompted the president-elect to tweet on the topic with such urgency on Tuesday. "There should be no further releases from Gitmo," the president-elect said, using the shorthand for the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba. "These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield."

Nixon Tried to Spoil Johnson’s Vietnam Peace Talks in ’68, Notes Show

Richard M. Nixon told an aide that they should find a way to secretly “monkey wrench” peace talks in Vietnam in the waning days of the 1968 campaign for fear that progress toward ending the war would hurt his chances for the presidency, according to newly discovered notes.

In a telephone conversation with H. R. Haldeman, who would go on to become White House chief of staff, Nixon gave instructions that a friendly intermediary should keep “working on” South Vietnamese leaders to persuade them not to agree to a deal before the election, according to the notes, taken by Mr. Haldeman.

The Nixon campaign’s clandestine effort to thwart President Lyndon B. Johnson’s peace initiative that fall has long been a source of controversy and scholarship. Ample evidence has emerged documenting the involvement of Nixon’s campaign. But Mr. Haldeman’s notes appear to confirm longstanding suspicions that Nixon himself was directly involved, despite his later denials.

“There’s really no doubt this was a step beyond the normal political jockeying, to interfere in an active peace negotiation given the stakes with all the lives,” said John A. Farrell, who discovered the notes at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library for his forthcoming biography, “Richard Nixon: The Life,” to be published in March by Doubleday. “Potentially, this is worse than anything he did in Watergate.”

Anti-surveillance clothing aims to hide wearers from facial recognition

The use of facial recognition software for commercial purposes is becoming more common, but, as Amazon scans faces in its physical shop and Facebook searches photos of users to add tags to, those concerned about their privacy are fighting back.

Berlin-based artist and technologist Adam Harvey aims to overwhelm and confuse these systems by presenting them with thousands of false hits so they can’t tell which faces are real.

The Hyperface project involves printing patterns on to clothing or textiles, which then appear to have eyes, mouths and other features that a computer can interpret as a face.

This is not the first time Harvey has tried to confuse facial recognition software. During a previous project, CV Dazzle, he attempted to create an aesthetic of makeup and hairstyling that would cause machines to be unable to detect a face.

WikiLeaks ‘source is not Russian government and it is not a state party’ – Assange

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is still insisting that his organization was not in collusion with Russian state actors when it published hacked information about the Democratic Party during the U.S. presidential election, putting himself at odds with the findings of American intelligence officials.

“We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party,” Assange told Fox News conservative host Sean Hannity in an exclusive interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

Assange’s refutation of Russian involvement contradicts the joint report released by the FBI and the CIA on Dec. 29, which stated that Russians hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee over the summer and from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in the run-up to Election Day. The report says that hackers interfered in the election with the aim of securing a victory for Donald Trump. Trump has also continued to dispute those findings.

“They’re trying to delegitimize the Trump administration as it goes into the White House,” Assange told Hannity in the Fox News segmen, which will air on Tuesday. “They are trying to say President-elect Trump is not a legitimate president.”

Julian Assange said "a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta" - why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017

Blackwater founder says the EU should privatize border control

Erik Prince founded the private military contractor once known as Blackwater, which became notorious during the Iraq War for a series of scandals, including a 2007 massacre that left 17 Iraqis dead.

Today, Prince runs a Chinese government-backed firm called the Frontier Services Group. And in a new op-ed for the Financial Times, Prince says that he has the solution to the ongoing European migrant crisis, and that it involves working with companies that sound an awful lot like Blackwater.

Prince, an ex-Navy SEAL, says that a “public-private partnership” between European governments and “professional providers” should be struck in order to deal with border security. He advocates for armed border policing units that would be staffed by locals (predominantly Libyans), who would be mentored by instructors with a “European law enforcement background” over a 10-week course.

“There would be nowhere for migrant smugglers to hide: they can be detected, detained and handled using a mixture of air and ground operations,” Prince wrote. “This type of security operation could be established quickly and efficiently, for less than the cost of the EU’s current operations, through a public-private partnership.”

French Socialist primaries: Ruling party faces fight for survival

New York Gov. Cuomo wants to make free college tuition a reality

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday announced a plan to make tuition at state colleges and universities free for families earning less than $125,000 a year, a sign that the recent surge in student debt remains a politically potent issue even after the defeat of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. ...

Cuomo made the announcement at LaGuardia Community College in the New York City borough of Queens, where he appeared with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders made free college tuition a cornerstone of his failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination last year. And some of Sanders’ free tuition policy was ultimately adopted by the party’s eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton.

The Cuomo plan would offer free tuition at two-year community colleges, and four-year colleges and universities operated by the State University of New York and City University of New York systems. While splashy, it still is just a plan and will require a vote by the state Legislature.

North Carolina officer caught on video slamming female student to ground

A North Carolina police officer was caught on video lifting a high school student into the air and slamming her to the ground, prompting widespread outrage and calls for the policeman to be fired.

The footage, which went viral on Twitter on Tuesday, showed a school resource officer in the middle of a chaotic scene at Rolesville high school picking up the young woman and throwing her to the floor, leading to a thud and shouts from nearby students.

Police and school officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday night, but the local paper, the News and Observer, identified the officer as Ruben De Los Santos and reported that he was on paid administrative leave.

The video draws parallels to viral footage of a South Carolina sheriff’s deputy who was caught on camera last year wrapping his arm around a student’s neck in a classroom at Spring Valley high school. That officer, Ben Fields, flipped the student’s desk and dragged the girl across the floor before arresting her. He was eventually fired.

U.S. banks gear up to fight Dodd-Frank Act's Volcker rule

Big U.S. banks are set on getting Congress this year to loosen or eliminate the Volcker rule against using depositors' funds for speculative bets on the bank's own account, a test case of whether Wall Street can flex its muscle in Washington again.

In interviews over the past several weeks, half a dozen industry lobbyists said they began meeting with legislative staff after the U.S. election in November to discuss matters including a rollback of Volcker, part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform that Congress enacted after the financial crisis and bank bailouts.

Lobbyists said they plan to present evidence to congressional leaders that the Volcker rule is actually bad for companies, investors and the U.S. economy.

Big banks have been making such arguments for years, but the industry's influence waned significantly in Washington after the financial crisis. The Obama administration's regulators and enforcement agencies have been tough on banks, while lawmakers from both parties have seized opportunities to slam Wall Street to score political points.

Banks now see opportunities to unravel reforms under President-Elect Donald Trump's administration and the incoming Republican-led Congress, which appear more business-friendly, lobbyists said.

While an outright repeal of the Volcker rule may not be possible, small but meaningful changes tucked into other legislation would still be a big win, they said.

Rep. Grijalva: Power of the People Key to Stopping Repeal of Obamacare & Worst Instincts of Trump

Trump's presidential bully pulpit has a maximum message length of 140 characters. That's probably a good thing.

Trump's tweets keep US manufacturers on their toes

Donald Trump’s prolific and opinionated tweeting helped him win the US election, and now he is using Twitter to persuade big business to bend to his agenda and help “make America great again!” There was further evidence this week that Trump’s unusual approach is paying off after Ford cancelled plans to open a new plant in Mexico. ...

Trump has said he will rest his Twitter fingers when he is sworn in as the 45th president on 20 January. “I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at all,” he said in the same interview. However, he has continued to use Twitter during the transition period, taking aim at multinational companies as well as his political opponents and the media. ...

Carmakers Ford and GM were the latest firms to be targeted by Trump, raising the possibility that elements of US industrial strategy will be influenced and even formulated on social media.

General Motors is sending Mexican made model of Chevy Cruze to U.S. car dealers-tax free across border. Make in U.S.A.or pay big border tax!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2017

Hours after GM’s scolding, Ford, which has regularly been targeted by Trump over manufacturing in Mexico, announced it was scrapping plans for a $1.6bn plant in San Luis Potosi and instead would invest $700m in a Michigan assembly plant.

Trump’s tweets aren’t stopping ramp-up of F-35 production at Lockheed Martin

Despite criticism and threats from President-elect Donald Trump that the F-35 jet fighter program is “out of control,” Lockheed Martin will shift the majority of its assembly line workers to a new work schedule as it prepares to ramp up toward full production of the stealth fighter. ...

About 8,800 employees at Lockheed already work on the F-35. Lockheed officials said it had already built 184 combat-capable jets and planned to deliver about 50 this year. Current plans call for production to increase to about 160 a year by 2019.

Lockheed’s west Fort Worth complex has been undergoing a $1.2 billion upgrade to prepare for increased production of the fighter jet, being built for the U.S. military and several foreign nations.

In recent weeks, Trump has been engaging in a personal dogfight against the F-35. In a Dec. 12 tweet he said the F-35 program and its costs were out of control. Ten days later, after meeting with Lockheed’s CEO Marillyn Hewson, he attacked again, mentioning the “tremendous cost and cost overruns” of the F-35.

Trump said he asked Boeing to price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet. At $379 billion, the F-35 is the Pentagon’s most expensive military contract.

Hewson originally pointed to the company’s efforts to reduce the price of the F-35 to to $85 million “in the 2019 or the 2020 timeframe.” After Trump’s tweet about the F-18, Hewson issued a second statement assuring the incoming president that the company will lower the cost of the F-35.

NAACP Sit-In at Sen. Sessions' Office Puts AG Pick's Worrisome History in Crosshairs

Saying he represents "a threat to all of our civil rights," roughly 30 people led by the NAACP on Tuesday occupied the Mobile, Ala. office of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R.), President-elect Donald Trump's pick for attorney general.

The sit-in ended with the arrests of six demonstrators, including including NAACP president and CEO Cornell William Brooks. According to CNN, they face charges of criminal trespass in the second-degree.

Since his nomination in November, Sessions has been criticized by advocacy groups as "one more way the Trump administration shows its racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynist colors," and his nomination described as "a direct attack against" the nation's minorities. Democratic lawmakers are also gearing up to show their opposition to Sessions' leading the Justice Department. 

Outlining its opposition to Sessions, the NAACP in an earlier statement pointed to the senator's "record on voting rights that is unreliable at best and hostile at worst; a failing record on other civil rights; a record of racially offensive remarks and behavior; and dismal record on criminal justice reform issues."

The @NAACP & @AlabamaNAACP are occupying the Mobile office of @jeffsessions--untill he withdraws as a AG nominee or we're arrested.@tvonetv pic.twitter.com/7uceDDpz1Y

— Cornell Wm. Brooks (@CornellWBrooks) January 3, 2017

Rex Tillerson cuts ties with Exxon Mobil via $180m retirement package

Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, is severing ties with Exxon Mobil through a $180m retirement package one week before his Senate confirmation hearing begins.

Tillerson will surrender, if confirmed, all unpaid stock that was part of his pay package, more than two million shares. In exchange, the company will make a cash payment equal to the value of those shares to a trust to be overseen by a third party, according to a regulatory filing Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Because of the way the compensation is being dispensed, Tillerson will give up about $7m, compared with what he would have been paid had he retired in March as he had planned to do before the nomination.

Craig Holman: Trump Administration Gearing Up to Be "Most Scandal-Ridden in History"

Treasury Nominee Steve Mnuchin’s Bank Accused of “Widespread Misconduct” in Leaked Memo

OneWest Bank, which Donald Trump’s nominee for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, ran from 2009 to 2015, repeatedly broke California’s foreclosure laws during that period, according to a previously undisclosed 2013 memo from top prosecutors in the state attorney general’s office.

The memo obtained by The Intercept alleges that OneWest rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.

In the memo, the leaders of the state attorney general’s Consumer Law Section said they had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” in a yearlong investigation. In a detailed 22-page request, they identified over a thousand legal violations in the small subsection of OneWest loans they were able to examine, and they recommended that Attorney General Kamala Harris file a civil enforcement action against the Pasadena-based bank. They even wrote up a sample legal complaint, seeking injunctive relief and millions of dollars in penalties.

But Harris’s office, without any explanation, declined to prosecute the case.

Mnuchin, the former CEO of OneWest, was already facing challenges in his upcoming Senate confirmation hearings on account of his bank’s ruthless foreclosure practices, ranging from locking out one homeowner during a Minneapolis blizzard to foreclosing on another over a 27-cent payment shortfall.

[See also: Mnuchin Nomination for Treasury Shines Harsh Light on U.S. Politics - js]

Climate Campaigners Announce New Major Mobilization to Resist Trump

Not willing to sit idle as Donald Trump and his cabinet take office and roll out an avowedly pro-fossil fuel, anti-regulation agenda, campaigners are preparing for a multi-faceted affront to the new administration. Tuesday marked the beginning of the 115th Congress, and thus also marked "Day 1 of the official pushback against Trump's climate agenda," according to 350.org's Duncan Meisel. "Their first job is to review Donald Trump's nominees for cabinet," Meisel wrote in an email Tuesday, "and ours is to make sure they reject the slate of climate deniers he has picked for every major climate and energy related position in his administration."

Pointing specifically to Trump's selection of ExxonMobil's CEO Rex Tillerson for secretary of state, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt for EPA head, former Texas Governor Rick Perry for Department of Energy, and Rep. Ryan Zinke for Department of Interior, campaigners are asking constituents to flood their elected officials with calls and in-person visits to make clear they do not support a climate-denier cabinet.

As part of the near-term "resistance mode," as 350.org co-founder Jamie Henn put, campaigners are also organizing a Day Against Denial on January 9 that will include rallies, phone-ins, and direct conversations with legislative staff "to pass along the message that we, as constituents and voters, do not accept Trump's dangerous nominations," according to the website. ...

In an email to supporters on Monday, Henn announced the People's Climate Mobilization, on April 29, 2017 in Washington, D.C..

There Were a Crazy Number of Record Highs in 2016

2016 will be remembered for many things. One of them will be heat.

It was the hottest year on record globally. While the world is still waiting for confirmation of just how high the record was, there’s a lot of data to digest from the U.S. Nearly every square inch of the country was dramatically warmer than normal.

The blistering pace of record-high temperatures across the country is the clearest sign of 2016’s extreme heat. Record-daily highs outpaced record-daily lows by 5.7-to-1 in 2016, according to preliminary data from the National Centers for Environmental Information. That’s the largest ratio in 95 years of record keeping. Put another way, 85 percent of extreme temperature records set in 2016 were of the hot variety.

That fits with the fact that 2016 will be the second-hottest year on record for the U.S. during which 98 percent of weather stations had a warmer-than-normal year.

Also of Interest

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

Venezuela on the Brink

Beyond Anti-Trump

Literary Agents - Rethinking the legacy of writers who worked with the CIA

The Real Face of Washington (and America) - Thank You, Donald Trump

Al From writes an anti-populist, stay-the-course screed for the DLC Democrats

Why Corporations Are Helping Donald Trump Lie About Jobs

The U.S. Government Thinks Thousands of Russian Hackers May Be Reading My Blog

American students are applying to Canadian universities in droves this year

A Little Night Music

Lloyd Price - Stagger Lee

Lloyd Price - Question

Lloyd Price - Just Because

Lloyd Price - Where Were You (On Our Wedding Day?)

Lloyd Price - Oooh Oooh Oooh

Lloyd Price - Oh, Lady Luck

Lloyd Price - Three Little Pigs

Lloyd Price - Where Y'at?

Lloyd Price - Lady Luck

Lloyd Price - The Chicken And The Bop