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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Phillip Walker

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Texas blues guitarist Phillip Walker. Enjoy!

^{Phillip Walker - Beaumont Blues}

"We are living on a dying planet,
We're killing everything that's alive,
And anyone who tries to deny it
Wears a tie
And gets paid to lie"

-- Joe Walsh

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News and Opinion

Army of Ukraine lobbyists behind unprecedented Washington blitz

As tensions with Russia reach a boiling point, lobbyists from Ukraine are working feverishly to shape the U.S. response. Firms working for Ukrainian interests have inundated congressional offices, think tanks, and journalists with more than 10,000 messages and meetings in 2021, according to an analysis of Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, filings for a forthcoming report from the Quincy Institute. To put this extraordinary campaign into perspective, the Saudi lobby — known for being one of the largest foreign lobbies in D.C. — reported 2,834 contacts, barely a quarter of what Ukraine’s agents have done. ...

More specifically, the far-reaching campaign has been focused on stopping the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which Ukrainian officials argue is as much of a threat to their security as Russian troops. If completed, the pipeline would allow Russia to export natural gas directly to Germany and the rest of Europe, jeopardizing the billions Ukraine currently earns from transiting Russian gas to Europe.

Congress has been the primary target of Ukraine’s agents, with over 300 House and Senate staff and members of Congress on the receiving end of more than 8,000 emails, phone calls, and meetings with Ukraine’s lobbyists. Agents representing the Ukrainian Federation of Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry, or UFEOGI, the largest association of energy companies in Ukraine, have flooded Capitol Hill with headlines like “Ukrainians call on U.S. Senate to sanction Putin’s pipeline weapon,” and others claiming “Moscow regards concessions as a sign of weakness.”

The lobbyists seem to have found a friendly ear in Senate Republicans, in particular Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). In January, they distributed a tweet from the prime minister of Ukraine that said Nord Stream 2 is “no less an existential threat to our security & democracy than Russian troops on our border.” The sentiment was echoed, nearly verbatim, two days later by Cruz, who said he was hoping to “lift the existential threat posed by Nord Stream 2.” ...

Finally, think tanks were contacted more than 1,100 times by Ukraine’s agents, and more than half of these were directed at one in particular: the Atlantic Council. This extraordinary outreach included multiple meetings with Atlantic Council scholars, like ex-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, who has advocated for a more militarized approach to Russia amid the Ukraine crisis. Herbst recently told NPR that President Joe Biden should “send more weapons to Ukraine now. By all means, get additional U.S. and NATO forces up along Russia’s border.” Herbst was also at the center of an Atlantic Council kerfuffle last March, when he and 21 other Atlantic Council staff signed a letter opposing the work of two Atlantic Council colleagues who suggested a restraint-based approach to dealing with Russia.

Biden Claims Russian Invasion 'IMMINENT' With ZERO Evidence

Russian Official Denounces 'Peak Hysteria' Following Putin-Biden Call Over Ukraine

Following the one-on-one call between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin on Saturday, a top Russian official accused the U.S. government of stoking dangerous "hysteria" and blasted anyone leaking unfounded claims about Moscow's intention to launch an imminent invasion of Ukraine.

"Hysteria has reached its peak," Yury Ushakov, Putin's top foreign policy advisor, told reporters on a conference call following the phone conversation between the two heads of state.

In his comments, according to Agence France-Presse, Ushakov bemoaned reports in the American press—those citing unnamed or anonymous U.S. officials—that claimed Russia had specific plans, or even a date, that an invasion would occur. On Friday, the U.S. State Department said an invasion could happen "any day," but offered no evidence to back up such claims.

"We don't understand why false information about our intentions is being passed to the media," said Ushakov, who further accused authorities in the U.S., Europe, and Kiev of "sabotaging" efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution.

In an official readout of the Biden-Putin call issued Saturday afternoon, the White House said it was made clear that "if Russia undertakes a further invasion of Ukraine, the United States together with our Allies and partners will respond decisively and impose swift and severe costs on Russia."

While the statement said Biden also made clear Washington is willing to continue with diplomatic efforts, it added that the U.S.—along with its allies—"are equally prepared for other scenarios," a not-so-veiled reference to possible military action.

Russia has said repeatedly that its demand for an end to the eastward expansion of NATO, including future inclusion of Ukraine into the alliance, is central to its national security interests. Moscow has also called for autonomy for the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine and a return to peace accords contained in the Minsk agreements.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier on Saturday, in a call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said his country has no plans to invade Ukraine and condemned "the propaganda campaign unleashed by the United States and its allies concerning 'Russian aggression' against Ukraine pursues provocative goals."

While the U.S. and NATO countries in Europe have refused to accept this demand, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has urged against false information and unnecessary ratcheting up of tensions.

"I think there is too much information in the media about a deep, full-scale war," Zelenksy said on Saturday. "People are even naming dates."

"The best friend for our enemies is panic in our country," he added, "and all this information only creates panic, it doesn't help us."

Despite the flurry of diplomatic calls and statements on Saturday, an event in Russian territorial waters in the north Pacific triggered the Russian Defense Ministry to summon the U.S. military attache in Moscow after the country's Navy said it had detected a Virginia-class U.S. nuclear submarine in the vicinity of a battle group conducting drills in the region.

"The attache for defense issues at the US Embassy in Moscow has been summoned to the Russian Defense Ministry in connection with the violation of the Russian state border by the US Navy’s submarine," the ministry said in a statement.

According to the state-run TASS News Agency, the Defense Ministry informed the U.S. military attache that it considered the submarine's presence "a blatant violation of international law."

Ukraine will persist with NATO goal, Zelenskiy says as receives Scholz

'Nothing More Grotesque Than a Media Pushing for War,' Says Edward Snowden

Exiled American whistleblower Edward Snowden on Friday joined global critics who are decrying news outlets for encouraging war with their coverage of rising tensions between the United States and Russia—where he has lived since 2013—over Ukraine.

"There is nothing more grotesque than a media pushing for war," Snowden tweeted.

After a flood of responses—some highlighting that Russian President Vladimir Putin has stationed over 100,000 troops near his country's border with Ukraine and is conducting military exercises in Belarus—Snowden doubled down on his anti-war message.

"When you see snide quote-tweets of this from the boot-licking think-tank crowd, look at the ratio and remember that even if they're loud, they are in the minority," he said. "Being pro-war is not smart, cool, or sophisticated, and their performative outrage doesn't change that."

Snowden is far from alone in blasting a media march toward war that has been compared to the lead-up to U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

"Here we go again," Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, wrote in a Friday fundraising email. "With talk of war in Ukraine rising to a fever pitch, U.S. media outlets are once again beating the drums."

The investigative reporter, who has covered U.S. wars for decades, added:

The talking heads on cable news are almost drooling over the prospect of a ratings-boosting war. Retired Pentagon officials on the payroll of the defense industry are presented as "experts," often with no disclosure of their financial conflicts of interest.

And once the shooting starts, mainstream pundits will drop any remaining pretense of journalistic integrity and begin openly cheerleading for "the troops," like sports announcers rooting for the home team.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is the world's largest arms dealer and it spends more on "defense" than China, Russia, India, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Australia combined.

In a Friday opinion piece for Middle East Eye, journalist Joe Gill wrote that "in the 21st century, the media war is a critical element of any pre-war planning, and this appears to be reaching its crescendo."

"By talking up the inevitability of a war in Ukraine against Russia, Western intelligence agencies and their media outliers are implanting the idea that war has already started," he continued, noting that "Bloomberg even accidentally announced that Russia had invaded Ukraine (before apologizing)."

Ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden's call with Putin reportedly planned for Saturday morning, the White House continued to warn of a potential imminent invasion.

During Friday's White House press briefing, Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser, said that "Russian military action could begin any day now," citing "what we are seeing on the ground and what our intelligence analysts have picked up."

"We are not saying that… a final decision has been taken by President Putin," Sullivan noted, while also emphasizing that "any American in Ukraine should leave as soon as possible, and in any event, in the next 24 to 48 hours."

The adviser also insisted that "we are ready to continue results-oriented diplomacy that addresses the security concerns of the United States, Russia, and Europe consistent with our values and the principle of reciprocity."

However, the Biden administration has also signaled an unwillingness to agree to any of Russia's security demands—including Ukraine's exclusion from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—and deployed B-52 bombers with nuclear capabilities to the United Kingdom as well as 3,000 more troops to Poland.

A senior defense official said in a statement that the troops "are being deployed to reassure our NATO allies, deter any potential aggression against NATO's eastern flank, train with host-nation forces, and contribute to a wide range of contingencies."

Noting that "the U.S. and NATO are pouring in high-tech weaponry and training up Ukraine's armed forces, making it a much more militarily capable foe," Gill wrote Friday that "from where the Russians are sitting, the deployment of billions of dollars worth of new U.S. and U.K. military hardware on its borders is a sign of escalation, rather than defense."

He added that "the narratives repeated in the Western media are so thunderingly pro-Ukrainian and anti-Putin that it is hard to extract from the simplistic framing the complex nature of the conflict."

Bryce Greene delivered a similar critique last month in a Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting analysis of the corporate media's Ukraine coverage, writing that missing context, including "the crucial role the U.S. has played" in fueling regional conflict, "allows hawks to promote disastrous escalation of tensions."

"As a result of this coverage, the interventionist mentality has trickled down to the public," Greene added, citing recent polls. "Perhaps if the public were better informed, there would be more domestic pressure on Biden to end the brinkmanship and seek a genuine solution to the problem."

Meanwhile, as Branko Marcetic pointed out at Jacobin earlier this week, progressives who have taken a forceful stand for a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine crisis, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), are "navigating a dangerous climate created by mainstream media—including liberal outlet MSNBC—that casts anti-war opinion as disloyalty."

Journalists who are critical about a potential war between the world's two nuclear superpowers—or even question Western governments' claims about a potential Russian invasion—are also being met with hostility.

Last week, as Common Dreams reported, Matt Lee of the Associated Press grilled a U.S. State Department spokesperson about the administration's refusal to provide any evidence backing up the claim that Russia is planning false flag operation as a pretext to invade Ukraine.

Referencing the George W. Bush administration's infamous lies about weapons of mass destruction, Lee told the State Department's Ned Price that "I remember WMDs in Iraq." As the journalist pushed for more than "a series of allegations and statements," Price accused him of wanting "to find solace in information that the Russians are putting out."

Recalling the exchange, Gill said Friday that "this kind of briefing can't help but recall, as Lee suggested, the feverish months in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq."

Ukraine Expert: Biden Admin's HAWKISH Rhetoric On Russian Invasion Makes War MORE Likely

Ukraine allocates $592m to maintain flights amid fears of invasion

Ukraine has allocated $592m (£437m) to guarantee the continuation of flights to and from the country, as fears of flying over its airspace led some airlines to scrap or divert flights as tensions between the west and the Kremlin mount over a possible Russian invasion.

The prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said the funds “were allocated to ensure flight safety in Ukraine for insurance and leasing companies” and would “stabilise the situation on the market of passenger air transportation and will guarantee the return to Ukraine of our citizens who are currently abroad”.

The Dutch carrier KLM had earlier cancelled flights to Ukraine after the Netherlands government issued a travel warning over the risks of flying in the region, while Germany’s Lufthansa said it was considering suspending air traffic.

A passenger plane operated by the Ukrainian charter airline SkyUp, which was on its way to Kyiv from Madeira in Portugal, was meanwhile diverted on Saturday to the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, after the plane’s Irish owner said it was banning flights in Ukrainian airspace.

Ukraine’s state air traffic service on Sunday advised airlines to avoid flying over the open waters of the Black Sea until Saturday because of Russian naval exercises involving more than 30 Russian ships near the Crimea peninsula. But an adviser to the president’s chief of staff said there was “no point” in further closing the skies and speaking after KLM’s suspension said it “somewhat resembles a kind of partial blockade”.

Proposal: Just Run All Western News Media Directly Out Of CIA Headquarters

I think it would be a lot more efficient and straightforward if all English-language news media were just run directly out of CIA headquarters by agency officials in Langley, Virginia. This way news reporters could eliminate the middleman and drop the undignified charade of presenting unproven assertions by western intelligence agencies as “scoops” that they picked up from “sources”.

I mean, right now the mass media are churning out stories about “intelligence” which says Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine very soon, citing government officials and anonymous sources. We are never shown the “intelligence”, and we are never shown any evidence of its veracity; we’re simply told what opaque and unaccountable government agencies want us to believe about a foreign government. We’re not even reminded by the publishers of these CIA press releases that western intelligence agencies have a very extensive history of lying about exactly this sort of thing, and we’re certainly not informed that Kyiv appears to be ramping up aggressions in eastern Ukraine.

Seriously, look at this absurd tweet by CNN’s Natasha Bertrand:

Scoop: US and allies have new intel that suggests Russia could be planning to attack Ukraine prior to end of Olympics, contrary to previous assessments. New intel comes as officials have dramatically ramped up the urgency of public warnings related to Ukraine in past 24 hours.

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) February 11, 2022

That’s not a “scoop”. That’s just a news media employee repeating something she was told either directly or indirectly by the western intelligence cartel. She’s literally just telling us what an immensely powerful spy intelligence agency told her to say. And that’s become the norm for mass media reporting on all nations the western power alliance doesn’t like, especially Russia.

So why mess around? Why not just move CNN’s office into the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley and have the CIA just publish its reports directly from there? I hear CNN needs a new president anyway. That way nobody needs to pretend they’re doing news reporting instead of intelligence agency stenography, the general public is clear that they’re being fed whatever story about reality the CIA wants them to believe, nobody feels like they’re being treated like a fool, plus it saves a commute for all the intelligence agency insiders who already work in the mass media.

Because it must get pretty tedious, right? Where instead of just having your CIA employer tell you to run a story you have to go through this whole song and dance where an agency officer contacts you and says “Ooh buddy, have I got a scoop for you!” and then you type up what they say in newsy-sounding language citing “sources familiar with the matter” and present it as a news story.

Clearly that’s not news reporting. Clearly it’s nothing other than garden variety state propaganda. So why not just be forthright about it? I know the CIA has a lot going on right now, but surely it can make some space in all its domestic surveillance, lying, torturing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering and assassinations for a little more state media news punditry?

And of course we already know the answer. Propaganda doesn’t work if its targets know they are being propagandized. It needs to be administered by institutions who the public trusts to tell them the objective truth about what’s going on in the world. If the US and its Five Eyes allies simply controlled all media through the government like overtly totalitarian regimes, their propaganda would actually be far less effective than the systems of domestic perception management they have in place currently.

The CIA is officially forbidden from operating in the United States (though as we’ve seen many times since its creation and up to the present day this is treated more as a guideline than a restriction), but what it is not officially forbidden to do is contact the media directly or through a proxy under the pretense of feeding them a news story which just so happens to advance the interests of the agency. The plutocratic media who benefit from the same status quo that the CIA protects then uncritically funnel that information into the minds of the unsuspecting public, and before you know it they’re rending their garments over a foreign government they’d previously not thought much about.

In an actual free society with an actual free press, the very idea of this would be outrageous and if such a thing ever occurred it would be immediately condemned as journalistic malpractice with severe consequences for everyone involved. In an inverted totalitarian dystopia with the most effectively propagandized population on earth, it’s just treated as normal.

Biden STEALS Afghan Money Triggering Banking Collapse

Afghan Central Bank Calls US Theft of $7 Billion 'Injustice to People of Afghanistan'

The central bank of Afghanistan pushed back firmly Saturday against an executive order issued a day earlier by U.S. President Joe Biden to seize over $7 billion in foreign exchange assets—a move that humanitarians have denounced as unbelievably cruel given the suffering of the Afghan people as its economy and healthcare systems teeter on the brink of collapse with millions facing starvation and freezing winter temperatures.

In a statement posted online, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB) rejected the White House's claim that the seizure of billions in Foreign Exchange Reserves (FX) was done in the name of humanitarian assistance, instead calling it an "injustice to the people of Afghanistan."

The DAB said it "will never accept if the FX reserves of Afghanistan is paid under the name of compensation or humanitarian assistance to others" and demanded the reversal of Biden's decision and that all seized funds be returned. "The real owners of these reserves are people of Afghanistan," said the bank.

As Common Dreams reported Friday, condemnation of Biden's plan—which includes making half of the funds, approximately $3.5 billion, available to settle legal claims by families who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001—was swift and widespread.

Human Rights Watch was among those who said the Biden plan is deeply misguided. In a Friday statement, the group said the move is likely to bring more devastation to the innocent people of Afghanistan who had nothing to with the 9/11 attacks and should not be punished because the U.S. government despises the Taliban government that now rules the country.

"If implemented," said John Sifton, HRW's Asia advocacy director, "the decision would create a problematic precedent for commandeering sovereign wealth and do little to address underlying factors driving Afghanistan’s massive humanitarian crisis."

While Biden's plan to direct $3.5 billion of the seized fund to humanitarian assistance for Afghans "may sound generous," added Sifton, "it should be remembered that the entire $7 billion already legally belonged to the Afghan people. And yet, even if the U.S. gave it to a humanitarian trust fund, current restrictions on Afghanistan’s banking sector make it virtually impossible to send or spend the money inside the country."

Speaking with Al-Jazeera, Afghan-American activist Bilal Askaryar said the "people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11; that is an undeniable fact."

What Biden is doing, said Askaryar "is not justice for 9/11 families," but rather the "theft of public funds from an impoverished nation already on the brink of famine and starvation brought on by the United States' disastrous withdrawal" in 2021.

Media, Biden DEMAND Canada Declare WAR On Trucker Convoy

Key US-Canada border bridge to reopen after police clear blockade

Canadian police have cleared protesters from the Ambassador bridge linking the country to the United States, ending a six-day blockade and allowing North America’s busiest trade route to reopen.

Police moved in to clear and arrest the remaining protesters on the border bridge early on Sunday, trying to end one of the main demonstrations that have broken out across Canada against Covid-19 vaccine mandates and other restrictions to bring the pandemic under control.

After issuing warnings, police said arrests were being made and vehicles were being towed just after dawn near the bridge linking Detroit and the city of Windsor, Ontario.

By Sunday afternoon, most protesters had gone and vehicles that were blocking the way had been removed, and a US official said that the bridge would reopen later in the day.

Arrests at US-Canada Border Finally Bring End to Anti-Vax Blockade

In the face of accusations that Canadian officials have been too tolerant of anti-vax conspiracy theorists and anti-mandate advocates laying siege to public motorways in the country, law enforcement in Windsor, Ontario just before dawn Sunday finally began to make arrests and subsequently cleared the road leading to the U.S. border after days of protest.

According to the Windsor Star:

Police began another offensive Sunday morning, pushing south along Huron Church Road from the Ambassador Bridge to Tecumseh Road, clearing the few remaining protesters in the process.

After a relatively quiet night, police started making some arrests and towing vehicles.

"The police," reported the Toronto Star were "equipped with armoured vehicles, tear gas and rubber bullet guns, warned that protesters who did not leave would be arrested and charged with mischief."

Law enforcement first disrupted the protest encampment Saturday, but what first appeared like a stand-off later turned into what local reporters and others described as a "block party atmosphere" as police tolerated the ongoing presence and more protesters joined the fray.

Footage from the scene showed a number of vehicle leaving after the police said anyone remaining would be arrested and have their vehicle impounded:

"How hard was that?" asked political journalist and author John Ivison in response to footage of trucks departing under police threat. "Leave or be arrested."

While police appeared to have retaken complete control of the road, it was not clear when it would be reopened to regular traffic.

Thoughout the afternoon on Sunday, however, pockets of demonstrators remained even as police continued to make arrests sporadically.

The effort to end the blockade of the bridge in Windsor came as a similar "trucker protests" continued in the nation's capital city of Ottawa—where thousands gathered Saturday to voice their opposition to public health measures—and smaller demonstrations and blockades occurred elsewhere in the country. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told those participating in such protests on Saturday that it "was time to go home," but critics have continued to say that Trudeau and other officials have been too lenient and slow in their response. ...

Speaking with reporters Sunday morning, Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens said once police dealt with the final few individuals and vehicles remaining in the area, officials would figure out how to properly re-open the roadway.

According to local reporter Katerina Georgieva, with CBC Windsor News at 6, Dilkens said demonstrators in the future would be allowed to protest from public sidewalks in the area but that "it's not okay to choke off the busiest commercial border crossing between Canada and the U.S."

Biden’s supreme court short list narrows to three names

Joe Biden had zeroed in on a pair of finalists for his first supreme court pick when there were rumors last year that Justice Stephen Breyer would retire. But since the upcoming retirement was announced late last month, it has come with the rise of a third candidate, one with ready-made bipartisan support that has complicated the decision. ...

Two of the three judges now on Biden’s short list were evaluated last year by White House aides, although that early vetting did not include deep dives into their opinions or backgrounds, formal interviews or FBI background checks. They are Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, a recent appointee to the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, where she has served since June 2021, and Leondra Kruger, 45, a California supreme court judge since 2015 who would be the first person in more than 40 years to move from a state court to the supreme court if she were to be confirmed.

Jackson is seen as the top candidate. And she, too, has a proven record of bipartisan support: she was confirmed to the appeals court on a 53-44 vote. Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina voted for her.

But J Michelle Childs has rapidly become a serious third candidate after the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn, publicly announced his support for her, as did the state’s Republican senators, Graham and Tim Scott. Graham has made clear Childs is his preferred choice. The 55-year-old is a federal judge in South Carolina who has been nominated to serve on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. That nomination is on hold while she’s under consideration for the high court. ...

Among the three justices on Biden’s short list, Childs is considered the most moderate, and she has been criticized by progressives and labor groups who say her record is not sufficiently supportive of worker rights. She was previously a state court judge and has served as a federal trial court judge since 2010.

Black FedEx driver shot at by white men draws parallels to Ahmaud Arbery case

A Black FedEx driver who was allegedly shot at by a white father and son in Mississippi while delivering packages said he “can definitely see the similarities” between his case and that of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was murdered in 2020 by three white men while jogging in Georgia. ...

The father and son, Brandon and Gregory Case, were reportedly arrested and charged this week over the incident. According to Gibson, he was delivering packages on an evening route in Brookhaven, Mississippi, on 24 January when the two men allegedly chased him in a truck for several minutes and fired at least five shots towards his van.

“They came out of nowhere,” he said at a news conference on Thursday. “Even if [the van] was unmarked, civilians still can’t take the law into their own hands … I’m thinking this is a racism thing,” he added. ...

The Cases were arrested on 1 February, over a week after the incident. According to court records reviewed by the Washington Post, Brandon Case, 35, was charged with feloniously attempting to cause bodily harm with a firearm and a deadly weapon. His 58-year-old father, Gregory Case, was charged with unlawfully and feloniously conspiring to commit aggravated assault. The father and son were released from jail the next day on bail.

Despite the charges, Gibson and his lawyers argue that the local police are not taking the case seriously and are calling for a federal hate crimes investigation.

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Clinton Campaign CAUGHT Spying On Trump Servers

Bipartisan members on Capitol attack panel say they expect Giuliani to testify

Bipartisan figures on the congressional committee investigating Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat said on Sunday they expected the former president’s close ally, Rudolph Giuliani, would comply with a subpoena to give testimony.

Giuliani is among a number of Trump sphere insiders who have so far refused to cooperate with the bipartisan House panel looking into Trump’s subversion efforts and the January 6 Capitol insurrection the then president incited that claimed five lives. Giuliani was scheduled to testify last Tuesday, after the committee issued a subpoena last month, but did not appear.

Elaine Luria, a Virginia Democratic congresswoman and member of the select committee, said Giuliani had already been in touch, seeming to confirm the substance of a New York Times report that Giuliani was in talks about options including an in-person interview or submitting a deposition.

Media Claims Trump FLUSHED WH Docs Down Toilet

Senate candidate who smoked blunt in ad burns Confederate flag in latest spot

Gary Chambers, a U.S. Senate candidate in Louisiana who went viral last month for smoking a blunt in a campaign ad, burned a Confederate flag while decrying restrictive voting laws in his latest video released on Wednesday.

In a one-minute video titled "Scars and Bars," Chambers is seen wearing a camo jacket as he pins a Confederate flag on a clothesline and ignites it with a lighter — right after he cites the famous Declaration of Independence line "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

As the flag burns, the Louisiana Democrat argues that inequality lingers and "remnants of the Confederacy remain" in the South. The candidate mentions gerrymandered districts and restrictive voting laws as "byproducts" of the Confederacy.

"The attacks against Black people, our right to vote and participate in this democracy, are methodical," he said. "Our system isn't broken. It's designed to do exactly what it's doing, which is producing measurable inequity."

MSNBC Says ONLY REPUBLICANS Serve The Rich!

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The Outrageous Story About the Postal Service Too Many Know Nothing About

The Republicans are about to win a major battle in their war on electric vehicles, this time with the second largest vehicle fleet in America owned by the US Postal Service. It's an outrageous story that most Americans don't know a thing about.

To understand what's going on with the Post Office right now, you first must know the backstory that, it seems, most media outlets aren't interested in discussing. It's an issue that's hitting millions of Americans right now.

One of our kids, for example, recently became the first member of our family to buy a fully 100% electric car. She was so excited and has loved it driving around Portland…until she had to drive to another state for a conference, when she discovered what a problem America not having an electric charging infrastructure causes.

The way to solve this problem, of course, is to have a substantial and massive increase in electric vehicles and that's exactly what the Post Office set out to jump-start back in 2006.

Transportation, after all, is the single largest source of global warming emissions from the United States. And the Post Office once thought they could do something about it.

Things were going well for the Post Office in 2006.

They were making money and had a surplus. They were therefore seriously considering replacing a large part of their fleet—the largest fleet of civilian vehicles in the nation—with electric and hybrid vehicles.

It would be a mighty boost for the electric car, and a huge slap in the face of the fossil fuel barons who had an outsized say in the Republican Party.

On May 17, 2006 Walter O'Tormey, the Post Office's Vice President, Engineering, unveiled a new hybrid gas/electric mail delivery vehicle in Boston to an audience of "nearly 100 industry representatives, environmentalists, and Postal Service employees," saying:

"As an agency that delivers mail to 145 million businesses and households six days a week, drives approximately 1.1 billion miles a year, and consumes more than 125 million gallons of motor fuel annually, we are in a unique position to demonstrate to the public and other businesses the growing viability and positive environmental and energy-savings benefits of alternate-fuel technologies."

In their 2006 annual report the Postal Service openly bragged about their ambition to move away from relying entirely on fossil fuels:

"With more than 216,000 vehicles, the Postal Service has the largest civilian fleet in the United States. We continue to evaluate various fuel types and alternative fuel vehicles including hybrid trucks, hydrogen fuel cell vans, electric step vans and liquid natural gas delivery vehicles."

If the Post Office pulled off a massive transition away from fossil fuels, it would jump-start the then-new electric, hybrid and fuel cell technologies, paving the way for wider use, a large national electric "refueling" infrastructure, and a significant reduction in greenhouse gasses.

Americans were excited by the possibility. Speaking on behalf of a coalition of mayors from all parts of the country to the World Congress on Information Technology annual conference in Austin on May 6, 2006, Austin Mayor Will Winn proudly announced:

"Transitioning the Postal fleet to plug-ins would serve as a springboard for the commercial production of delivery vehicles that could be extended to a wide variety of delivery services across America.

"The commercial market would also provide the economic certainty needed by automakers to make the production investments necessary for the mass production of plug-ins.

"The plug-in technology is available right now and represents a realistic near-term solution to the serious problems of over-reliance on foreign oil, out of control gasoline prices, as well as greenhouse emissions."

Given that postal vehicles typically have a 30-year lifespan, this would produce a huge tilt in the balance of alternative-versus-fossil-fuel vehicles on the road.

But the possibility of that transition happening to the nation's largest vehicle fleet was, in a word, intolerable to the morbidly rich rightwingers who'd made their fortunes drilling, refining, shipping and selling fossil fuels, particularly oil, diesel and gasoline.

The Post Office had to be stopped, and Republican Congressman John McHugh (NY) was just the man to do it. He'd been a member of the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and was deeply in the pocket of right-wing interests.

As Wikipedia notes in an exercise of gentle understatement:

"[McHugh] was chairman of the Oversight Committee's Postal Service Subcommittee for six years and worked to pass legislation to significantly reform the U.S. Postal Service for the first time since it was demoted from a Cabinet-rank department with passage of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (Pub.L. 109–435) in 2006."

ALEC, which writes corporate-friendly legislation and relies on its membership of Republican lawmakers around the nation to pass that legislation, just happened to have a model 2006 bill known as the Unfunded Pensions Liabilities Act, which called on state governments to account for exactly how they plan to fund future retiree benefits.

Adapting that ALEC concept to the Post Office, McHugh's bill was passed by a voice vote in a Republican Congress and signed by Republican President George W. Bush. There is no record whatsoever of who voted or how they voted on the legislation.

It was preceded, however, by a virtual waterfall of op-eds and PR efforts by groups affiliated with the Koch network including the Reason Foundation, the National Taxpayer's Union, and the CATO Institute.

What the law did was ram a poison pill down the throat of the Post Office.

It required the USPS to pre-fund its Retiree Health Benefits Fund for seventy years into the future, forcing the Post Office to take the money they planned to spend on electric vehicles and set it aside for the health benefits of future retirees who weren't even born yet (and should be eligible for Medicare, anyway).

It's an obligation that no other private business or government agency has ever had to comply with before.

Costing the Post Office $5 billion a year, it succeeded in stopping their plan to electrify their fleet dead in its tracks.

And it set it up more cleanly for eventual privatization, once enough infrastructure like postal drop boxes and million-dollar high-speed sorting machines was destroyed—a process Reagan called "Starve the Beast"—that "customers" were complaining about the service and public opinion finally agreed the Post Office would work better in private hands.

Reagan had tried to do the same thing to Social Security and the IRS, and Trump doubled down on that plan, offering tens of thousands of staffers early retirement to gut both agencies; they're now so hobbled by underfunding and worker shortages that Social Security disability claims can take two years, and extremely wealthy people are no longer generally audited at all because of the cost and manpower needs determined by their complexity.

Which brings us to Louis DeJoy.

The Post Office is finally on the verge of getting out from under that $5 billion-a-year prefunding burden so they can now start buying that new fleet they proposed in 2006.

Postmaster General DeJoy was strongly encouraged by the Biden administration to give the contract to a company that would manufacture electric and electric/hybrid vehicles.

But DeJoy essentially told Biden to go screw himself: he's going to buy fossil-fuel vehicles for 90% of the fleet instead.

The Washington Post laid it all out in the open to an article last week titled: Biden Officials Push to Hold Up $11.3 Billion USPS Truck Contract, Citing Climate Damage, noting:

"The Biden administration launched a last-minute push Wednesday to derail the U.S. Postal Service's plan to spend billions of dollars on a new fleet of gasoline-powered delivery trucks, citing the damage the polluting vehicles could inflict on the climate and Americans' health.

"The dispute over the Postal Service's plans to spend up to $11.3 billion on as many as 165,000 new delivery trucks over the next decade has major implications for President Biden's goal of converting all federal cars and trucks to clean power."

And it's not just the White House that's outraged. CNN reported yesterday:

"Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, called for DeJoy's resignation.

"'Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to spend billions on brand new gas-powered vehicles is in direct contradiction to the stated goals of Congress and the President to eliminate emissions from the federal fleet,' Connolly said in a statement. 'If Mr. DeJoy won't resign, the Board of Governors has got to fire him -- now.'"

Because Republican senators are holding up confirmation of Biden's Postal Board of Governors' appointees, DeJoy can't be fired by the current Trump-appointee-dominated board, a fact that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse pointed out last week, demanding the Senate move the Democratic nominees forward over GOP objections.

But DeJoy is itching to sign the contract for all those gas and diesel vehicles, and he still has the power to do so.

So, now that the possibility of electrifying the nation's (now second) largest fleet of vehicles is pretty much dead and they're planning to go ahead with fossil fuels, Republicans in Congress are fine with eliminating the retirement prefunding dead weight on the Post Office.

The vote in the House this week was 342-90 to end the prefunding requirement and give DeJoy the money to buy the gas-powered vehicles. Now it goes to the Senate, where the AP noted:

"Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said he expects his chamber to 'move quickly' on the measure. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he's planning a vote before a recess that starts after next week. The bill has 14 GOP sponsors and, with strong Democratic support expected, seems on track to gain the 60 votes most bills need for Senate passage."

When asked Wednesday night on MSNBC why Congress had crippled the Post Office with that bizarre prefunding requirement in the first place, Senator Peters—one of the truly good guys in the US Senate—answered that he had no idea.

As is the case with most members of Congress; the pre-funding was essentially slipped into the bill at the behest of the fossil fuel industry and, at the time, got virtually no publicity. Thus, I tweeted him:

It was incomplete on my part to miss the privatization bonus in the tweet, and the vendor will supply gasoline vehicles as well, but you get the point.

Like so many other weirdnesses in American politics, when you pull back the veil you find the hands of a fossil fuel industry that values profits and right wing ideology over the future of our children, our nation and the planet.

While banks and asset managers are promising to divest from fossil fuels, they are expanding investments in high-carbon foods and commodities tied to deforestation.

As global banking giants and investment firms vow to divest from polluting energy companies, they’re continuing to bankroll another major driver of the climate crisis: food and farming corporations that are responsible, directly or indirectly, for cutting down vast carbon-storing forests and spewing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. These agricultural investments, largely unnoticed and unchecked, represent a potentially catastrophic blind spot.

“Animal protein and even dairy is likely, and already has started to become, the new oil and gas,” said Bruno Sarda, the former North America president of CDP, a framework through which companies disclose their carbon emissions. “This is the biggest source of emissions that doesn’t have a target on its back.”

By pouring money into emissions-intensive agriculture, banks and investors are making a dangerous bet on the world’s growing demand for food, especially foods that are the greatest source of emissions in the food system: meat and dairy. Agriculture and deforestation, largely driven by livestock production, are responsible for nearly one quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. By 2030, livestock production alone could consume nearly half the world’s carbon budget, the amount of greenhouse gas the world can emit without blowing past global climate targets.

“It’s not enough to divest from fossil fuel,” said Devlin Kuyek, a senior researcher at GRAIN, a non-profit organization that advocates for small farms. “If you look at emissions just from the largest meat and dairy companies, and the trajectories they have, you see that these companies and their models are completely unsustainable.”

Those trajectories could put global climate goals well out of reach. The American banks that are the four leading financiers, globally, of fossil fuels —JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America—all, to varying degrees, have made climate action more of a priority. But these and other major global banks continue to funnel dollars into companies that trade in “soft commodities,”including beef, soy, timber and palm oil, that are linked to the destruction of forests and critically important ecosystems.

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Also of Interest

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

The Ultimate End of NATO

Mother of Guantánamo detainee ‘still waiting’ for US and German apologies

When Cruelty Is The Point - U.S. Decides To Kill More Afghan People

The US War Machine Is Just A Rich Man’s Mafia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

U.S. Sends Nuclear Submarine To Harass Russia Near Japan

Russia Says Israeli Airstrikes are a ‘Crude Violation of Syria’s Sovereignty’

The Great International Convoy Fiasco

The Fed Responds to Report that Fed Chair Powell Traded During FOMC Blackout Periods

Why Does Lauren Boebert Want to Annihilate the Sage-Grouse? Follow the Money

Climate & Punishment: How Incarcerated People Face Increasing Threat of Fires, Floods & Extreme Heat

CNN Compares Rogan Controversy To 1/6, Genocide

Krystal Ball: Obama GUARANTEES Dem Midterm SHELLACKING

Hillary Clinton Hired Tech Corp To "INFILTRATE" Trump Cmpgn, Dig Up Russia Connection: Durham Report

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A Little Night Music

Phillip Walker - Think

Phillip Walker - Special Built Woman

Phillip Walker & Otis Grand - She's Gone

Phillip Walker - Laughin' and Clownin'

Phillip Walker - The Bottom Of The Top

Phillip Walker - I Got A Sweet Tooth

Phillip Walker & Otis Grand - Young Devil

Phillip Walker - Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark

Phillip Walker with George Harmonica Smith - The Blues Show, Live At Pit Inn

Valentines Day Bonus:

Big Bill Broonzy - The Glory Of Love

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