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This evening's music features The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. Enjoy!

"We're definitely in an era where the government wants to keep more secrets and it wants to come after anyone who's exposing those secrets and in many cases exposing government illegality. They're coming after the journalists and they're coming after the whistleblowers. It's not a good sign if the government is expending much energy trying to find out who journalists are talking to."

-- Laura Poitras

News and Opinion

The Leakers Who Exposed Gen. Flynn’s Lie Committed Serious — and Wholly Justified — Felonies

That Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn lied about what he said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was first revealed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has built his career on repeating what his CIA sources tell him. In his January 12 column, Ignatius wrote: “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.”

That “senior U.S. government official” committed a serious felony by leaking to Ignatius the communication activities of Flynn. ... In January, CNN reported that Flynn’s calls with the Russians “were captured by routine U.S. eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats.” That means that the contents of those calls were “obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of [a] foreign government,” which in turn means that anyone who discloses them — or reports them to the public — is guilty of a felony under the statute. [18 U.S. Code § 798 -js]

Yet very few people are calling for a criminal investigation or the prosecution of these leakers, nor demanding the leakers step forward and “face the music.” ... It’s hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people — from both parties, across the ideological spectrum — who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn.

It’s even more surreal to watch Democrats act as though lying to the public is some grave firing offense when President Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, got caught red-handed not only lying to the public but also to Congress — about a domestic surveillance program that courts ruled was illegal. And despite the fact that lying to Congress is a felony, he kept his job until the very last day of the Obama presidency. ...

But this is just the tawdry, craven game of Washington. People with no actual beliefs shamelessly take diametrically opposite views on fundamental political questions based exclusively on whether it helps or hurts their leaders. Thus, the very same Democrats who just three months ago viewed illegal leaking as a grave sin today view it as an act of heroic #Resistance.

Hoisted on His Own Petard: Flynn Was Brought Down by the Very Spying Machine He Helped to Build

Trump is a dangerously narcissistic and sociopathic individual, wildly unsuited to be running a country that has the capability to destroy the earth many times over, whether militarily or by rampaging climate change. And Gen. Flynn was a nut job who was pushing for a US confrontation with Iran. How could the downfall of such whackos, and hopefully chief political advisor Steve Bannon, be a bad thing?

Well, if the manner in which they’re brought to heel is by having secret government forces such as the intelligence services, which are unanswerable to anyone and which, clearly, have dirt on everyone, making them effectively immune from criticism and democratic control, handle the job, that means that we no longer live in anything approaching a democracy. It’s all just secret power games among elites in Washington, with the American people as simply spectators. Say what you want about Trump, but he was elected by voters the United States under the arcane rules laid down by the founders. If he’s going to be removed, it should be by an open process of impeachment, with charges brought publicly, debated publicly, and voted upon publicly by members of Congress who themselves are elected by the people. It should not be done by the strategically timed release of secret spying efforts by the intelligence agencies.

Good riddance to Flynn. He deserves to endure a fate that he helped to make possible. But let’s also see this as a warning that the national security state has crossed a major line and needs to be unravelled, scaled back tremendously, and put on a very short leash held by genuine Congressional defenders of the Bill of Rights.

Bashing Trump Doesn’t Make You A Rebel, It Makes You An Establishment Tool

The way people are championing a cause that’s also being championed by every multimillionaire on every channel on every show on every television as though they’re being in some way rebellious and counter-cultural is beyond my understanding. The resignation of a National Security Advisor (a registered Democrat, by the way) who was working against the oligarchic push toward a military confrontation with a nuclear superpower, who was one of the few people telling the truth about America’s arming of terrorists in Syria, and Democrats are singing and dancing like a bunch of Ewoks watching an exploding imperial death star.

Let me remind you gangstas that a 2014 Princeton University study showed clearly that the United States of America is an oligarchy, not a democracy. Here’s a five-minute video breaking down what that means and how it works in clear and simple terms. Basically, in the current system, your wishes have essentially no impact on your country’s legislation and policy unless you are very rich; your vote and the votes of the rest of the 99 percent change functionally nothing about the way your nation moves and behaves. So the fact that this guy was democratically elected to be the leader of the nation doesn’t mean that he’s actually in charge; ultimately, the real source of power is the large network of oligarchs and unelected manipulators collectively known as the Deep State. ...

This is not a defense of Trump; I see Trump as largely irrelevant and very low on the list of priorities America’s political left should be focusing on. This is simply a reminder to liberal Americans that you cannot attack Trump without propping up the Democratic establishment, and you cannot prop up the Democratic establishment without supporting the oligarchs who own it. When you celebrate the Deep State’s counteroffensives against the Trump administration, you are not cool, you are not anti-establishment, and you are not a rebel. You are a tool.

The Left Needs to Assess the Implications of the Flynn Scandal

The Clinton campaign repeated that time and again during the campaign — with disastrous results. Clinton talked about Russia and Trump talked about jobs in the rust belt. Guess who won the presidency?

Many so-called progressives are in effect making an alliance with the most war-mongering parts of the U.S. establishment. They are in effect buttressing incredibly dubious notions of U.S. victimology and demonizing official enemies that increase U.S. militarism and the likelihood for confrontation with the other nation on the planet that could destroy the planet a hundred times over. ...

If only all these liberals scrutinized presidents when they want to go to war like they do Trump when he wants to make peace with Putin.

Trump and Spicer Blame Russia Scandal on "Illegal Leaks" Rather Than Lies by Senior Officials

Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation. ...

The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside of the intelligence services, they said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.

The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls. ...

Several of Mr. Trump’s associates, like Mr. Manafort, have done business in Russia. And it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts might have been about business.

Russia rejects claims of links to Donald Trump's campaign as 'fake news'

The Kremlin has rejected as “fake news” reports that Donald Trump’s campaign team spoke frequently with high-ranking Russian intelligence agents over the course of last year.

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said a New York Times report quoting former and current US officials contained only “anonymous information” and that it was “very hard to differentiate real from fake” news. Sources in the report were laughable, Peskov added.

“This is absolutely a newspaper report that isn’t based on any facts and that doesn’t point to any concrete facts,” he said.

Conventional communications between Trump advisors and Russian officials were ongoing, Peskov said, adding that US diplomats travel around Russia and speak with Russian officials all the time. “This all has a place, it’s normal diplomatic practice,” he said.

Empire Files: Post-Soviet Russia, Made in the U.S.A.

US Change in Designation of Russian Missile Hyped as New Russian ‘Violation’

In 2008, Russia began testing a new missile, which in 2014 the Obama Administration said might have violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Today, eager to hype “new” Russian efforts, even if they’re almost a decade old, the New York Times declared these same 2008 missiles a violation of the “landmark arms control treaty.”

The “new” violation appears entirely speculative, and based on the fact that the Pentagon, which had previously designated the missiles the SSC-X-8, had removed the X in some recent reports, changing the name to SSC-8. The removal of the X would mean that from the US perspective, they no longer consider the missile to be an experimental model.

This designation change led to speculation that the missiles are possibly deployed at this point, and since Russia never publicly announced a deployment, the New York Times leapt to declare the missiles “deployed secretly,” reiterating the long-standing assumption that it violates the treaty.

Trump expects Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine: White House

"President Trump has made it very clear that he expects the Russian government to de-escalate violence in the Ukraine and return Crimea," White House spokesman Sean Spicer said at a daily news briefing. "At the same time, he fully expects to and wants to get along with Russia."

500 US troops arrive in Romania to bolster defense

Five hundred U.S. troops are arriving at a Romanian Black Sea port with tanks and hardware to bolster defense in the East European NATO nation. ...

U.S. Ambassador Hans G. Klemm said Tuesday the deployment underscores that "the strong U.S.-Romania strategic partnership exists in both word and deed."

He said the presence "expands our capacity ....in maintaining peace and security in southeastern Europe and the Black Sea region."

Kucinich Pins Flynn Leak on Intel Community, Warns of Another Cold War

During an interview on the FOX Business Network’s Mornings with Maria, former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich said the intelligence community was responsible for leaking information that Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Flynn, had secretly discussed sanctions with Russian officials before the inauguration and argued their goal was to spoil the relationship between the U.S. and Russia.

“What’s at the core of this is an effort by some in the intelligence community to upend any positive relationship between the U.S. and Russia,” Kucinich said. ...

“And I tell you there's a marching band and Chowder Society out there. There's gold in them there hills,” he said. “There are people trying to separate the U.S. and Russia so that this military industrial intel axis can cash in.”

Toxic uranium admission: Pentagon confirms to RT use of depleted uranium in Syria

NBC News Appoints An Iraq War Cheerleader As Its New President

As NBC News faces growing questions about moving to the right, the network’s chairman, Andrew Lack, announced that Noah Oppenheim, a Today show producer who was an outspoken supporter of the Iraq War and has a lengthy history with conservative media, will be the new president of NBC News.

During 2003 and into 2004, Oppenheim was a pro-Iraq War pundit on MSNBC. On July 19, 2003, four months after the invasion, Oppenheim appeared on MSNBC Live to respond to a firestorm stemming from President George W. Bush’s false assertion in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraq’s supposed nuclear weapon capabilities. Oppenheim defended the Bush administration for misleading the public in order to make the case for war by saying that that intelligence business “is not an exact science” and you have to “make educated guesses.” ...

Oppenheim has also written multiple columns for the neoconservative outlet Weekly Standard. In an April 2001 column, he attacked civil rights activist Jesse Jackson’s activism as “shakedowns” and “an old-style protection racket,” complaining that “Jackson threatens boycotts and the stigma of being labeled racist by this country's most prominent black leader.” Five months after the 9/11 terror attacks, Oppenheim accused the American Muslim community of assuming a “see-no-evil posture” and lacking “resolve” to fight terrorism.

Oppenheim’s most notable Weekly Standard column came in 2004, when he, as an outspoken “supporter” of the Iraq War, traveled to Baghdad and castigated war reporters in Iraq of not doing enough to cover the good stories.

Deputy CIA director could face court deposition over role in torture

In a court filing on Tuesday, attorneys for two CIA contract psychologists who helped design the agency’s brutal interrogations for terrorism suspects have asked a federal judge to order Gina Haspel, a career CIA officer recently appointed as the agency’s No2 official, to provide a deposition discussing her allegedly pivotal involvement in an episode the CIA has tried repeatedly to put behind it.

“Ms. Haspel was centrally involved in the events alleged in plaintiffs Sulaiman Abdulla Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and Obaid Ullah, on behalf of Gul Rahman’s … suit against Defendants for actions they purportedly took while contractors for the CIA,” wrote Brian Paszamant, an attorney for ex-contractors Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell.

Salim, Ben Soud, Ullah and representatives for Rahman – who died in a CIA black site – filed a lawsuit in 2015 against Mitchell and Jessen for designing their torture regimens while in CIA custody. The Obama administration surprised many by not seeking to block the case under a veil of state secrecy.

Mitchell and Jessen contend that they ought not to be held liable for work they performed on behalf of the CIA. Salim, Ben Soud and Ullah, represented by the ACLU, argue that they have no other option for redress, as the government has declined to pursue criminal charges against architects of CIA torture.

The judge in the case, Justin Quackenbush, has already granted Mitchell and Jessen’s requests to depose other contemporary CIA officials, former clandestine service and Counterterrorism Center chief Jose Rodriguez and former chief attorney John Rizzo. Both are scheduled to deliver their depositions in March.

Rep. Lieu: The White House Lying & Stifling Dissent on Yemen Raid is Step Toward Authoritarianism

2 Years Into Yemen War, US Ramps Up Refueling of Saudi Jets

Saudi Arabian coalition jets bombing Houthi rebel sites in Yemen increasingly turn to U.S. Air Force tankers for refueling support almost two years after the conflict began.

Since April 2015, the Air Force has logged 1,778 tanker sorties for the operation, Air Forces Central Command spokeswoman Capt. Kathleen Atanasoff told Military.com on Tuesday. That includes 1,069 over the past year, an increase of 360, or 50 percent, from the 709 in the previous period.

"These operations are ongoing, with aircraft refueling occurring daily," Atanasoff said in an email.

Abandoning two-state solution is 'no joke', Palestinian officials say

Palestinians have angrily warned the United States against abandoning a two-state solution to the conflict with Israel, after a White House official said peace did not necessarily have to entail Palestinian statehood.

As Donald Trump and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, prepared to meet in Washington on Wednesday, Palestinian officials said the only alternative would be a single democratic state for Jews, Christian and Muslims together – or an “apartheid” state that would be “a disaster and a tragedy for both Israelis and Palestinians”.

On Tuesday, in a sharp reversal of US policy, a senior White House official briefed journalists in Washington that it was up to the Israelis and Palestinians themselves to decide on the shape of any future peace, adding: “Whether that comes in the form of a two-state solution if that’s what the parties want, or something else.”

Trump, while giving peace “high priority”, would not try to “dictate” an agreement, the official said.

The remarks, appearing to distance the US from one of its defining foreign policy pillars of the last two decades and a premise long regarded as central to the Middle East peace process, caught Palestinian officials by surprise.

Calling on the wider international community to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with Palestinians to protect the two-state solution, Saeb Erekat, senior Palestinian negotiator, warned that undermining the long-standing strategy was no joke.

Americans withholding their taxes to fight Trump

Andrew Newman always pays his taxes, even if he hates what the government is doing with them. But not this year. For him, Donald Trump is the dealbreaker. He’ll pay his city and state taxes but will refuse to pay federal income tax as a cry of civil disobedience against the president and his new administration.

Newman is not alone. A nascent movement has been detected to revive the popularity of tax resistance – last seen en masse in America during the Vietnam war but which has been, sporadically, a tradition in the US and beyond going back many centuries.

“My tax money will be going towards putting up a wall on the Mexican border instead of helping sick people. It will contribute to the destruction of the environment and maybe more nuclear weapons. I think there will be a redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy elite and Trump’s campaign for the working man and woman was an absolute fraud. If you pay taxes you are implicated in the system,” said Newman, an associate professor of English and history at Stony Brook University on Long Island, part of the State University of New York.

“The government wants our money and if a lot of people were thinking about this kind of peaceful protest, it would get their attention,” he added.

The Stephen Miller Story: From Pestering Latino Students in High School to Drafting Muslim Ban

Refugees seeking urgent medical care imperiled by immigration crackdown

Fourteen-year-old Dhakhil had been so badly injured at an Iraqi refugee camp that physicians thought his leg would need to be amputated. But thanks to a team of surgeons in Boston, the Yazidi teenager will be able to walk again.

The operation to repair Dhakhil’s badly shattered leg nearly didn’t happen because of Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration.

“He arrived 48 hours before the ban,” Carrie Schuchardt, Dhakhil’s caretaker in the US, told the Guardian. “And we know if he had come to [Boston’s] Logan airport on the Friday instead of the Wednesday, there is a good chance he would have been turned away. He would have lost his leg, possibly his life.”

Before the travel ban was halted, the Cleveland Clinic said it had nine patients scheduled to travel from the affected countries to the US for medical care, while Johns Hopkins had at least 11 patients scheduled to receive treatment who were affected by the ban.

“These are very, very ill patients,” Pamela Paulk, president of Johns Hopkins Medicine International, told Stat, a US health news website. “In most cases, these are not cases to be postponed.”

In a statement, the Mayo Clinic medical facility said: “We have several patients who would have needed to cancel or delay their appointments at Mayo Clinic if the order had not been challenged by the courts.”

The Mayo Clinic said that it also knew of 80 staff, physicians and scholars affiliated with the medical system who were affected by the order.

ICE Arrested Nearly 700 People Last Week, Advocates Are Bracing for More to Come

Immigrant communities across the country are coping with the fallout from the Trump administration’s first immigration crackdown — a series of operations last week in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and San Antonio that led to more than 680 arrests, according to figures released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“The level of terror and fear in the community is very real,” Cristina Jimenez, executive director of United We Dream, one the nation’s leading immigrant advocacy organizations, told The Intercept. ...

ICE’s so-called targeted enforcement operations are not new; both the Bush and Obama administrations relied on such operations to deport thousands of people over the last decade. What is new, advocates say, is that the raids are now taking place under a Trump administration that has placed the removal of undocumented people at the center of its domestic policy agenda, while radically expanding the universe of individuals prioritized for deportation.

“The narrative of this administration, and unfortunately even prior administrations, has been this narrative of criminalizing the entire community and using that as a path to deport people, to not allow these people due process, to not respect people’s basic human rights,” Jimenez said. “Certainly, under this administration, things are going to get a lot worse than they were under the Obama administration and we’re already seeing that.”

Arizona unveils new death penalty plan: bring your own lethal injection drugs

As states have faced challenges to carrying out executions by lethal injection, various work-arounds and alternatives have been proposed, including the return of electric chairs and firing squads. Arizona may have come up with the most original concept yet: an invitation for lawyers to help kill their own clients.

With drugs that can legally be used for lethal injections in short supply, the Arizona department of corrections’ latest execution protocol states that attorneys for death row inmates are welcome to bring along their own.

The protocol says that “the inmate’s counsel or other third parties acting on behalf of the inmate’s counsel” may provide the department with a sedative, pentobarbital, or an anesthetic, sodium pentothal, if they can obtain it “from a certified or licensed pharmacist, pharmacy, compound pharmacy, manufacturer, or supplier”.

Attorneys, though, said the idea is ludicrous. Megan McCracken, a lethal injection expert at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, said the clause is “unprecedented, wholly novel and frankly absurd. A prisoner or a prisoner’s lawyer simply cannot obtain these drugs legally, or legally transfer them to the department of corrections, so it’s hard to fathom what the Arizona department was thinking in including this nonsensical provision as part of its execution protocol.”

Financial Backers of EPA Pick Scott Pruitt Have Faced Hundreds of Pollution Actions

Among the Pruitt donors with enforcement cases against them in recent years are Continental Resources, an oil company that contributed to Liberty 2.0, a pro-Pruitt Super PAC; Murray Energy, which was a co-party in eight of 14 lawsuits Pruitt filed against the EPA and contributed to his political campaigns; and Devon Energy, which raised money for the Republican Attorneys General Association when Pruitt led it and whose lawyers penned a letter that Pruitt sent to the EPA. Peabody Energy, whose executive Fred Palmer contributed to Pruitt’s 2014 re-election campaign for Oklahoma attorney general, is the parent company of 12 separate coal companies that have faced EPA enforcement actions. In addition to the energy companies, the agricultural company Monsanto, which contributed to Pruitt’s 2010 and 2014 election campaign, has been named in 96 formal administrative cases, according to EPA records. It’s impossible to tally a complete list of the enforcement cases filed against Pruitt donors because some donations, such as those to the most recent pro-Pruitt PAC, Protecting America Now, can be made secretly. ...

While the vote on Pruitt’s nomination has been delayed as a result of a Democratic boycott, the ACLU and the Center for Media and Democracy sued the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office in an effort to obtain more than 3,000 of Pruitt’s emails with energy industry groups and corporations, including Koch, Exxon, and Murray. On Friday, the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office released 411 of the emails, which document frequent communications and regular meetings between Pruitt and energy companies and industry groups.

Donald Trump lifts anti-corruption rules in 'gift to the American oil lobby'

Donald Trump moved on Tuesday to expunge rules aimed at forcing oil companies to disclose payments made to foreign governments in order to secure lucrative mining and drilling rights.

The rules, called the Cardin-Lugar regulations, were established under the Dodd-Frank Act, the wide-ranging financial regulations brought in after the last financial crisis. Energy industry executives, including the former Exxon boss and now secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, have lobbied hard against the rule, arguing it gives global rivals a competitive edge. ...

“Trump has given an astonishing gift to the American oil lobby. Oil, gas and mining companies listed across the EU, including Russian companies, have already disclosed $150bn of payments in resource-rich countries, with no ill effects. This makes a mockery of claims by US oil companies such as Exxon that greater transparency would damage companies’ competitiveness. If the European companies can do it, you have to ask – what are US companies trying to hide?” said Zorka Milin, senior legal adviser at the advocacy group Global Witness.

Trump's likely science adviser calls climate scientists 'glassy-eyed cult'

The man tipped as frontrunner for the role of science adviser to Donald Trump has described climate scientists as “a glassy-eyed cult” in the throes of a form of collective madness.

William Happer, an eminent physicist at Princeton University, met with Trump last month to discuss the post and says that if he were offered the job he would take it. Happer is highly regarded in the academic community, but many would view his appointment as a further blow to the prospects of concerted international action on climate change.

“There’s a whole area of climate so-called science that is really more like a cult,” Happer told the Guardian. “It’s like Hare Krishna or something like that. They’re glassy-eyed and they chant. It will potentially harm the image of all science.” ...

Happer also supports a controversial crackdown on the freedom of federal agency scientists to speak out about their findings, arguing that mixed messages on issues such as whether butter or margarine is healthier, have led to people disregarding all public health information.

“So many people are fed up of listening to the government lie to them about margarine and climate change that when something is actually true and beneficial they don’t listen,” he said, citing childhood vaccines as an example. “The government should have a reputation of being completely reliable about facts – real facts.”

Pope Francis appears to back tribal land rights in Dakota Access pipeline fight

Pope Francis appeared on to back Native Americans seeking to halt part of the Dakota Access Pipeline, saying indigenous cultures have a right to defend “their ancestral relationship to the Earth”.

The Latin American pope, who has often strongly defended indigenous rights since his election in 2013, made his comments on protection of native lands to representative of tribes attending the Indigenous Peoples Forum in Rome.

While he did not name the pipeline, he used strong and clear language applicable to the conflict, saying development had to be reconciled with “the protection of the particular characteristics of indigenous peoples and their territories“.

Francis spoke two days after a US federal judge denied a request by tribes to halt construction of the final link of the project that sparked months of protests by activists aimed at stopping the 1,170-mile line.

Speaking in Spanish, Francis said the need to protect native territories was “especially clear when planning economic activities which may interfere with indigenous cultures and their ancestral relationship to the Earth“.

Also of Interest

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

In an age of robots, schools are teaching our children to be redundant

Ecuador presidential election will show if continent's pink tide has truly turned

New Declassified CIA Memo Presents Blueprint for Syrian Regime Collapse

Ongoing US Involvement in Afghanistan War Is Almost Forgotten by US Corporate Media

Establishment Dems Hold Minorities Hostage And Demand Support For Corporatist Policies As Ransom

At a 2014 party at the “Breitbart Embassy," Steve Bannon promised a remaking of America

In California Farm Country, Trump’s Deportation Threat Looms Large

Federal officials arrest 'Dreamer' brought to US illegally as a child

Pence Places Conservative, Evangelical 'Allies' in All Corners of White House

How To Get Your Congressworm's Attention

A Little Night Music

Aretha Franklin - Today I Sing The Blues

Aretha Franklin - Who Needs You?

Aretha Franklin - Chain Of Fools

Aretha Franklin w/Ray Johnson "Mockingbird

Aretha Franklin - Are You Sure

Aretha Franklin - It Was You

Aretha Franklin - Spirit In The Dark

Aretha Franklin - I'll Keep On Smiling

Aretha Franklin - Pledging My Love (The Clock)

Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)

Aretha Franklin - Concertgebouw Concert Amsterdam 1968