Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Texas blues singer Angela Strehli. Enjoy!

"If I were doing the Security Council today, I'd have one permanent member, the United States, because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world. All international laws are invalid, meaningless attempts to constrict American power."

-- John Bolton.

News and Opinion

This is an older article (2015) showing Trump's new National Security adviser, John Bolton at the top of his bloodthirsty, warmongering game. I wanted to use my little soapbox here to remind folks that Bolton is pretty much evil incarnate; there seems to be no challenge that America might face in the world that does not in Bolton's warped mind call for the mass slaughter of human beings:

To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran

For years, experts worried that the Middle East would face an uncontrollable nuclear-arms race if Iran ever acquired weapons capability. Given the region’s political, religious and ethnic conflicts, the logic is straightforward. As in other nuclear proliferation cases like India, Pakistan and North Korea, America and the West were guilty of inattention when they should have been vigilant. But failing to act in the past is no excuse for making the same mistakes now.

In theory, comprehensive international sanctions, rigorously enforced and universally adhered to, might have broken the back of Iran’s nuclear program. But the sanctions imposed have not met those criteria. ...

The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.

Rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium-enrichment installations and the Arak heavy-water production facility and reactor would be priorities. So, too, would be the little-noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan. An attack need not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to five years. The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.

Trump’s Most Alarming Foreign Policy Move Yet? Warmonger John Bolton Named National Security Adviser

John Bolton Chairs an Actual “Fake News” Publisher Infamous for Spreading Anti-Muslim Hate

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s pick to be his new national security adviser, has a long association with a group infamous for its role in publishing “fake news” and spreading hate about Muslims.

Bolton wears many hats. He serves as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor to Fox News, and controls a Super PAC that used money from the billionaire Mercer family to help elect congressional Republicans. But one role that has received relatively little scrutiny is his work as chair of the Gatestone Institute, a nonprofit that focuses largely on publishing original commentary and news related to the supposed threat that Islam poses to Western society. He has served in that role since 2013. (Bolton did not respond to an email seeking comment.) ...

Just this week, the Gatestone Institute published stories claiming that the “mostly Muslim male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East” in Germany are fueling a “migrant rape crisis” and that “Muslim mass-rape gangs” are transforming the United Kingdom into “an Islamist Colony.”

The website routinely portrays Muslim migrants and refugees as an existential threat to Europe and the United States, claiming that immigrants bring “highly infectious diseases,” genital mutilation practices, and terror to any nation that accepts them. The site spent years sharply criticizing the Obama administration for having a “traditional Muslim bias” against Christians. ...

The Gatestone website has not only influenced U.S. politics, but also attempted to influence recent European elections in France, the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany. The site has promoted far-right, anti-Muslim populists running for office across the continent. In Germany, politicians from Alternative for Germany, or AfD, the rabidly anti-immigrant far-right party, regularly shared Gatestone articles on Facebook and Twitter during the election last year. Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Muslim firebrand, is a guest author on the site.

And now its chair will be the national security adviser to the president of the United States.

Experts Use One Word To Describe Trump's New National Security Adviser: "Dangerous"

In a speech last year to an Iranian militant group once labeled terrorists by the U.S. for their attempts to overthrow the Iranian government, John Bolton vowed “that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution will not last until its 40th birthday.” Today, Bolton is President Trump’s newly minted National Security Advisor. He joins newly-installed Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, as a certifiable Iran war hawk.

Bolton is “extreme by Attila the Hun standards,” said Robert Deitz, who was Senior Councillor to former CIA Director Michael Hayden from 2006 to 2009 and general counsel at the National Security Agency from 1998 to 2006.

To several U.S. foreign policy career professionals who spoke with VICE News, Bolton’s nomination appears to herald the dawn of a newly aggressive America First foreign policy, one that is even more likely than past administrations to turn to military solutions over diplomatic niceties. One prime example: Bolton's position on Iran, where has spoken out unequivocally in favor of regime change.

Even many of his fellow Republicans find the ex-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations overzealous. But what what really makes Bolton “dangerous” isn’t just his beliefs, one former Republican official told VICE News — it’s his expert-level understanding of bureaucratic infighting and tactics, which will likely make him a powerful voice driving foreign policy within Trump’s notoriously chaotic administration. “Bolton is masterful at extending his own influence,” said Matthew Waxman, former executive assistant to George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Waxman went on to work in Bush’s Defense and State Departments, where he watched Bolton operate up close.

“Trump's own mismanagement has held him back,” Waxman told VICE News. “Bolton has the skills and Washington smarts to help Trump carry through on the most dangerous parts of his agenda.”

John Bolton is probably going to make things worse on the Korean peninsula

The appointment of John Bolton as national security adviser completes what some experts are calling a “war cabinet” of military hawks surrounding President Donald Trump, a move that will raise tensions on the Korean Peninsula before a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Bolton has long advocated for the use of military intervention to solve the crisis on the Korean Peninsula, a belief that lead Pyongyang to call him “human scum and a bloodsucker” in 2003.

As recently as last month, Bolton dismissed the use of continued diplomatic efforts to bring about peace in the region in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. Instead, he advocated for three drastic measures: a strike against the Hermit Kingdom’s nuclear facilities, a strike against a test missile prior to launch, or the assassination of Kim Jong Un followed by an invasion.

All these options, Bolton readily admits, would cause collateral damage for South Korea.

“All these scenarios pose dangers for South Korea, especially civilians in Seoul, which is within the range of North Korean artillery near the Demilitarized Zone,” he wrote. “Any military attack must therefore neutralize as much of the North’s retaliatory capability as possible together with the larger strike.”

Trump’s new national security adviser was an early client of Cambridge Analytica

President Donald Trump’s brand-new national security adviser, it turns out, was an early adopter of Cambridge Analytica’s profiling services.

John Bolton — the former U.S. ambassador and current Fox News pundit named to the NSA post Thursday — founded a political action committee and became one of Cambridge Analytica’s first customers in 2014, hiring the British data firm to gather and exploit the psychological profiles of millions of Facebook users, according to company documents and former employees who spoke to the New York Times. CA is now at the center of a widening scandal for Facebook over its handling of user data in the 2016 election.

“The Bolton PAC was obsessed with how America was becoming limp-wristed and spineless and it wanted research and messaging for national security issues,” Christopher Wylie, a member of the founding team at CA, told the Times.

Meet the American Professor Suing Cambridge Analytica for His Psychographic Profile

Just read it. It has the ring of truth.

Taibbi: The Legacy of the Iraq War

The Iraq invasion, one of the great crimes of this or any age and destined to be a crossroads event in the history of America's decline, was instead a cold, calculated, opportunistic power grab, aimed as much at future targets, and even our own population, as at the Iraqi "enemy." As citizens, we haven't started to reckon with any of this. We write it off rather than deal with it. In fact, when we think of Iraq at all, we often describe the invasion as a mistake. ...

It's understandable. There are superficial plot elements from the Iraq narrative we lean on to soothe ourselves that the invasion was caused by an unlikely confluence of accidents and errors, not the inherent venality of our system. We remember things that look on the outside like dumb miscalculations. First in line is the press corps that somehow all at once committed mass malpractice, falling for a plainly absurd WMD fable. It wasn't a systemic problem caused by knee-jerk belief of government sources and the exclusive handout of network air-time to spooks, retired generals, and military strategists – no, we just all fell for the same error. ...

It was just a big misunderstanding, all of it. An "oops" moment, as some commentators called it even back then. Bullshit. The invasion was no mistake, and nobody above the age of eight believed the WMD story. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. We all knew what was going on.

Far from being an error, the war was a perfect expression of everything we stood for then, and still stand for now. ... The propaganda goal was to sell a war without victims. When Barack Obama declared the Iraq War over in 2011, the public still hadn't completely embraced the idea, among other things because many thousands of Americans were still coming home in bags or without arms and legs. ... The concept of bloodless war – like some twisted Rand Corporation interpretation of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck" – has as a result become firmly submerged in the American unconscious. Fifteen years after those historic marches preceding the invasion, we still drone-bomb with mind-numbing regularity, killing about 6,000 people in Iraq and Syria last year alone. But protests are basically nonexistent. ...

This is the legacy of the Iraq war. It began with a crude congressional dog-and-pony show giving Bush approval for the invasion, and was followed by an equally thin presentation to the U.N. by sad-sack Colin Powell. These two transparently stupid pre-war petitions secured for the war the tiniest of fig-leafs of domestic and international legal legitimacy. A decade and a half later, authorities no longer need to ask anyone permission to do anything. They've created in the interim an entirely separate, secret set of rules giving them the right to kill, imprison, torture, or spy on anyone.

Tim Kaine and the Bipartisan Abettors of Atrocity

Kaine put out a smarmy, pious statement lamenting the millions of Yemenis who may starve and the tens of thousands already killed in a war that, he says, the US “stumbled into.”

It was this arrogant, arrant, brazen, soulless lie that outraged me to the top of my bent. Kaine knows — as does anyone who has simply read the news in the past few years — that it is an indisputable, established fact that the US did not “stumble” into the Yemen war. He knows the indisputable fact that the former leader of his party, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, very openly and deliberately and knowingly not only greenlighted the Saudi invasion but actively, openly and directly aided the slaughter in almost every way — with weapons, with bombs, with US forces helping aim and target the bombs, with US warships helping enforce a naval blockade against the desert country that has plunged millions of innocent people into famine … all to “restore” a “president” who was the hand-picked toady of the US and the Saudis in an “election” in which NO OTHER CANDIDATE WAS ALLOWED TO RUN.

Again, all of this was done openly, directly, unashamedly: you could read about it in the most respectable newspapers in the country. The Obama administration didn’t try to hide it. Indeed, in the last months of his presidency, Obama gave the Saudis a $115 million arms deal — the biggest in the 70 years of US-Saudi alliance — while Yemen was not only sinking into famine and ruin but also enduring one of the worst cholera epidemics in all of recorded human history.

So no, Senator Kaine, the United States did not “stumble” into the Yemen war. It plunged whole-heartedly into the putrid slaughter, under the direction of the progressive, scandal-free Democratic president, Barack Obama, with the full support of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Building on Obama’s foundation, Trump has expanded the US involvement in Yemen, with more blunderbuss bombing and troops on the ground. But he is only carrying forward the policy that Tim Kaine knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was willingly launched by his predecessor. Without, we should add, the slightest word of opposition from moral paragons like Sen. Tim Kaine — or Hillary Clinton, or, at the time, from Bernie Sanders, who said during his campaign that the Saudis should be more militarily involved in the region.

Stephen Hawking Advocated for Wealth Redistribution to Prevent Mass Poverty in His Final Reddit Posts

After Stephen Hawking passed away at the age of 76 Wednesday morning, Reddit users began sharing posts he wrote explaining his vision on a wide range of topics during what was his final question and answer session on the site two years ago. ...

“Have you thought about the possibility of technological unemployment, where we develop automated processes that ultimately cause large unemployment by performing jobs faster and/or cheaper than people can perform them?” a user asked Hawking during an “Ask Me Anything” event.

The professor [...] replied that “If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed.”

He added: “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

Kentucky and Arizona teachers rally to defend public education

Thousands of teachers marched at their state capitols on Wednesday in Kentucky and Arizona, demanding funding for public education, teacher pensions, health care, and in opposition to the privatization of education.

In Kentucky, despite the cold and snow, around a thousand educators rallied, as at least a dozen school superintendents shut schools for the day, allowing teachers to participate in the demonstration without penalty.

In Arizona, a single teacher in the Pendergast elementary school district triggered a shutdown of nine schools by organizing a “sickout” so the teachers could head for a demonstration in Phoenix, which drew a crowd of hundreds. Kayla Wilson, a 5th grade teacher at Pendergast Elementary with three years on the job, told the Arizona Capitol Times that she makes about $35,000 a year and owes more than $40,000 in student loans.

At the rally in Frankfort, Kentucky, teachers carried handmade placards reading, “Fighting for the future of our kids,” “Our money, our pension, just Vote No,” “Kentucky Fried Us,” “You’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest,” “We can’t put students first if they put teachers last,” and “I don’t have Social Security or a hedge fund,” among others.

Rally participants were well aware that behind the attack on teacher pensions is an attack on public education as a whole, and that the state government is moving rapidly to privatize education by defunding public education and discouraging teacher recruitment.

Eric Holder, Scott Walker and Tammy Baldwin call for action on Russian Twitter trolls' Wisconsin meddling

Bipartisan leaders from former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker called Friday for a federal response to news that Russian Twitter trolls sought to stoke racial division in the wake of the August 2016 unrest in Milwaukee's Sherman Park.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Thursday that Russia-linked accounts got thousands of retweets for their racially charged posts made only hours after the chaos in the Sherman Park neighborhood and less than three months before the 2016 presidential election won by President Donald Trump.

After a Madison campaign visit Friday on behalf of state Supreme Court candidate Rebecca Dallet, Holder said Congress should hold hearings on the Russian interference in Milwaukee and said the FBI and U.S. attorney's office should investigate, as well. ...

Walker spokeswoman Amy Hasenberg said that the Republican governor also wants a federal review. ...

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said in a statement that Russian President Vladimir Putin "directed an attack on our democracy." She said Congress should pass legislation to offer federal cyber-security grants to state election agencies.

The Russians are tweeting! The Russians are tweeting!

Did you recently take part in a demonstration against police violence in the United States? If so, you may be the latest dupe of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his army of tweeters. This is the implication of a March 15 report by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which claims that Russian-linked Twitter accounts were “stoking the flames of racial division” in August 2016 as hundreds of youth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin engaged in angry protests against the fatal shooting of 23-year-old Sylville Smith by a police officer.

The article has been trumpeted by Democratic and Republican politicians alike as the latest evidence that Russian “hacking” was responsible for the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Based on their hysterical statements, all taken from the same CIA talking points, one would think that the otherwise placid state of Wisconsin had fallen under virtual Russian control. ...

The Journal Sentinel report claims that on August 14, 2016, in the midst of three days of protests in Milwaukee, fake Russian Twitter accounts published 32 tweets using the hashtag #Milwaukee. The most prominently cited offender is a fake account intended to impersonate the Republican Party in the state of Tennessee named “Tennessee_GOP.” The report does not indicate why a supposedly “sophisticated” plot to sow tensions “on the streets of Milwaukee” would use as its vehicle a Twitter account impersonating the branch of a major party in another state, nor provide any proof that anyone in Wisconsin actually read any of the automated tweets. Instead, it simply reports that the tweets were retweeted more than 5,000 times.

More than 100 mainly young people took part in spontaneous demonstrations on the evening of August 13 in the neighborhood of Sherman Park, following the killing of Smith by 24-year-old police officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown. Both the officer and the victim were African American. While Smith had been carrying a gun, he had already thrown it away when Heaggan-Brown fired a fatal shot through the young man’s heart. In the ensuing unrest triggered by the killing, a handful of businesses were looted and several cop cars were set on fire. ...

The residents of Milwaukee did not need Russian bots to “sow dissension.” The real roots of the eruption of social anger on the streets of Milwaukee are to be found in the catastrophic social crisis which wracks the city and the systematic violence and abuse committed by police against workers and youth.

I bet Russian tweeters are behind this, too:

Protesters block I-5 in Sacramento, call for justice after deadly police shooting

Black Lives Matter protesters blocked Interstate 5 in Sacramento for more than 30 minutes during Thursday evening's commute.

Protesters stopped traffic in both the northbound and southbound lanes before being funneled onto the northbound I-5. The interstate, near the I Street and J Street exits reopened by 6 p.m.

Protesters are now marching through downtown Sacramento again, heading to the State Capitol.

Black Lives Matter protest now active on West steps of state Capitol. pic.twitter.com/ZuOXdOm2IL

— Mike Luery (@KCRALuery) March 23, 2018

The protesters are rallying against the deadly police shooting of Stephon Clark.

‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer

Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.

That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team. ...

Guccifer famously pretended to be a “lone hacker” who perpetrated the digital DNC break-in. From the outset, few believed it. Motherboard conducted a devastating interview with Guccifer that exploded the account’s claims of being a native Romanian speaker. Based on forensic clues in some of Guccifer’s leaks, and other evidence, a consensus quickly formed among security experts that Guccifer was completely notional.

“Almost immediately various cyber security companies and individuals were skeptical of Guccifer 2.0 and the backstory that he had generated for himself,” said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the cyber security firm ThreatConnect. ... Ehmke led an investigation at ThreatConnect that tried to track down Guccifer from the metadata in his emails. But the trail always ended at the same data center in France. Ehmke eventually uncovered that Guccifer was connecting through an anonymizing service called Elite VPN, a virtual private networking service that had an exit point in France but was headquartered in Russia.

But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation. ... Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow.

Excellent. Worth a full read:

Climate Change Policy Is Proving Difficult To Enact Even in Liberal States with Democratic Control

Democrats in Washington state this winter exploded onto the political scene. In November, an unabashed progressive, Manka Dhingra, won a special election that flipped control of the state Senate and unified control of government, uncorking pent-up legislation that had long been gathering energy. ... And so the party pushed hard on a historic climate policy that would be the country’s first statewide carbon tax, intended to both curb greenhouse gas emissions and raise revenue for critical state programs. ...

But just ahead of a major vote in the state legislature, the bill was pulled in the Senate. Inslee and state Sen. Reuven Carlyle — the bill’s sponsor — claimed that they were “one or two” votes short of the 25 needed to sail their measures through to the House (though without a floor vote, it’s impossible to know). It was the second time in as many years a carbon tax had failed to pass muster in the Evergreen State. In 2016, a ballot initiative known as I-732 — another carbon tax — lost by nearly 20 points in November 2016, as climate activists themselves rallied against it. Days after the Washington vote last week, a similar policy to Carlyle’s measure faltered in Oregon.

States like Washington offer a preview for what climate politics might look like after Trump is out of office. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, residents there discuss climate change more than in almost any other state in the union and overwhelmingly support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. There’s political space to parse out what kind of policy should be enacted to deal with climate change rather than whether such policies are worth discussing in the first place. As the climate debates in some blue states are also helping show, policy conversations tend to become much harder once there are actual policies on the table. That’s especially true when it comes to climate change, a policy field lacking in both living examples to draw from and intellectual infrastructure.

Asked why carbon taxes keep failing in Washington, [Aiko Schaefer, director of an environmental justice organization] notes that — in addition to the enormous opposition from the fossil fuel industry — advocates for policies like cap-and-trade and carbon taxes tend to overemphasize the how policies function, rather than the types of change they could bring about. “Often climate policies are talked about more in terms of their mechanics rather than what they accomplish. ... “Our opponents in the oil industry always say that a carbon tax is going to cost you more money,” she says, “When you talk about a carbon tax, you’re in the box of talking about money. But the truth of the matter is that we are already paying for the pollution that they’re creating — for flooding, for forest fires, to clean up pollution. We are already paying for carbon pollution, and every day they are not.”

Aggressive Police Tactics Escalate Against TransMountain Pipeline Protests in Canada

U.S. Supreme Court allows Flint water contamination lawsuits

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday gave the green light to two class-action lawsuits filed by residents of Flint, Michigan who are pursing civil rights claims against local and state officials over lead contamination in the city’s water supply.

The justices left in place a July 2017 ruling by the Cincinnati, Ohio-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that revived the litigation after the lawsuits were thrown out by a lower court. The high court rejected separate appeals filed by the city of Flint, Genesee County’s drainage commissioner and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality officials.

The 6th Circuit decided that the civil rights claims brought by the plaintiffs under federal law could proceed, ruling they were not precluded by a statute that sets the standards for drinking water, the Safe Drinking Water Act. That law has its own provisions for people to file suit over unsafe water, although they cannot seek monetary damages like those available under civil rights law. ...

The crisis prompted several lawsuits against the city, state, Republican Governor Rick Snyder and several individual city and state officials. Two of those suits were the subject of the Supreme Court appeals.

Also of Interest

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

Noam Chomsky on the Populist Groundswell, U.S. Elections, the Future of Humanity, and More

John "Bring on the Bombs" Bolton: The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First

At Trial of Omar Mateen’s Wife, Judge’s Questioning Reveals a Huge Hole in Prosecution’s Case and Deceit by Prosecutors

The DCCC Just Endorsed a Democrat in a Texas Runoff. Her Opponent is Thrilled.

Deconstructed Podcast: We Need to Talk About Inequality (With Bernie Sanders)

Parkland students: Our manifesto to fix America's gun laws

The 3 lessons Jeremy Corbyn's movement can teach US progressives

Oregon mega-dairy, accused of polluting groundwater, won’t be shut down

A Little Night Music

Joe Louis Walker & Angela Strehli - Don't Mess Up A Good Thing

The Vaughan Brothers & Angela Strehli - Lonely Teardrops

Angela Strehli - Cut You Loose

Angela Strehli - You Don't Love Me

Angela Strehli & Friends - Big Town Playboy

Angela Strehli - Go On

Angela Strehli With Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble - C O D

Angela Strehli - Can't Stop These Teardrops

Angela Strehli - Where The Sun Never Goes Down

Angela Strehli - Never Like This Before

Angela Strehli - That Two Bit Texas Town