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"There's one way to find out if a man is honest — ask him. If he says, "Yes," you know he is a crook."

-- Groucho Marx

News and Opinion

Is Hillary Clinton ‘Honest’?

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has offered a curious defense of Hillary Clinton’s “honesty,” refuting the public’s widespread view that she is a liar by narrowly defining what it means to be “honest” and arguing that she is less dishonest than she is a calculating and corner-cutting politician. ...

Kristof cites, for instance, that half of her campaign statements, as evaluated by PolitiFact, were rated either true or mostly true, comparable to how the group assessed statements by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Ted Cruz and much better than Donald Trump’s 22 percent. Leaving aside the “conventional wisdom” bias of this mainstream media organization, Kristof does seem to have a point. In a narrow definition of “honesty,” former Secretary of State Clinton may be “truthful” or kind of truthful half the time.

But Kristof misses the larger point that the American people are making when 56 percent of them rate her negatively and many call “crooked” and “dishonest.” They seem to be commenting on her lack of authenticity and perhaps her resistance to sincerely acknowledging major errors in judgment. She only grudgingly apologized for her pro-Iraq War vote and still insists that her bloody “regime change” scheme for Libya was a good idea, even as the once-prosperous North African nation slides into anarchy and deprivation – with the chief beneficiary the head-choppers of the Islamic State. ...

Being a successful President requires extracting painful lessons from one mistake and making sure you don’t make the same mistake again. But Clinton’s personal arrogance or defensiveness (it’s hard to figure out which is dominant) prevents her from that sort of self-criticism. ...

So, when one considers Hillary Clinton’s “honesty” more should be in play than simply whether she accurately describes her policy positions half the time. Honesty, as most people would perceive it, relates to a person’s fundamental integrity, strength of character, readiness to acknowledge mistakes and ability to learn from them. On that measure, the American people seem to have sized up Hillary Clinton pretty well.

As Saudis Continue Deadly Bombing of Yemen, Is Obama Trading Cluster Munitions for Riyadh’s Loyalty?

Obama: Sending Ground Troops to Syria Proves Fighting ISIS a Priority

Less than 24 hours after appearing on the BBC to publicly “rule out” sending any ground troops to Syria, President Obama has announced his decision to send another 250 ground troops to Syria, saying it proves that the US considers fighting ISIS a “priority.” ...

In an interview with Charlie Rose, incredibly, President Obama presented the decision to send 250 more ground troops as not “sending ground troops in to fight,” though he refused to rule out the possibility of them fighting, and they’re definitely being sent in.

State Dept never heard of Obama’s ‘no boots on the ground’ in Syria

Many killed in Aleppo as fierce fighting shatters Syria's fragile truce

Large-scale fighting has erupted in the Syrian city of Aleppo and the surrounding countryside, upending a fragile truce that was meant to pave the way for peace talks and threatening a siege of the opposition-held part of the city and a humanitarian catastrophe.

Government warplanes on Tuesday killed five civil defence workers in airstrikes on the emergency teams’ facilities, highlighting the growing ferocity of the conflict after the halt of the UN-mediated negotiations. ...

The latest fighting comes days after a halt in peace talks in Geneva that were brokered by Washington and Moscow, and the deployment of Russian artillery last week in support of an offensive that Syrian government officials have long pledged to pursue. ...

Government forces hope to encircle east Aleppo, which is held by the opposition, and are also fighting in the countryside to cut supply lines in the north from Turkey.

In Effort to Defeat ISIS, U.S. and Iran Impede One Another

Iraqi forces, backed by American airstrikes and advised by American officers, have been making strides in Anbar Province, slowly taking back territory from the Islamic State.

But in Falluja, a city in Sunni-dominated Anbar that has been in the hands of the Islamic State longer than any other in Iraq or Syria, civilians are starving as the Iraqi Army and militias lay siege to the city. And elsewhere in the province, Shiite militias supported by Iran are carrying out kidnappings and murders and restricting the movement of Sunni Arab civilians, according to American and Iraqi officials.

For seasoned observers of the American military involvement in Iraq — going back more than 25 years to the start of the Persian Gulf war — it is all part of a depressingly familiar pattern: battlefield gains that do not bring stability in their wake.

“Unfortunately, as has been a trademark of American involvement with Iraq at least since 2003 (and arguably since 1991), military success is not being matched with the commensurate political-economic efforts that will ultimately determine whether battlefield successes are translated into lasting achievements,” Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a longtime Iraq analyst, wrote recently in an online column. ..

The situation in Anbar has grown increasingly muddled as the Obama administration has stepped up its military support to Iraq, announcing that it will deploy Apache helicopters and position more troops closer to the front lines. It has touted victories in Anbar as an important step toward liberating the country from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and as a prelude to a campaign, possibly this year, to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

U.S. weighs disclosure of number of surveilled Americans -spy chief

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on Monday his office is considering options to obtain and publicly disclose an estimate of the number of U.S. persons caught incidentally in Internet surveillance intended for foreign targets. ...

The comments came in response to a bipartisan letter sent last week by 14 lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives pressing Clapper to provide a public estimate of the number of Americans ensnared in data grabs of foreign Internet communications traffic. They said the estimate is needed to gauge possible reforms to a controversial surveillance law due to expire at the end of 2017.

That law enables an Internet surveillance program known as Prism that was first disclosed in a series of leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden nearly three years ago.

Prism gathers messaging data from Alphabet Inc's Google , Facebook Inc, Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc and other major tech companies that is sent to and from a foreign target under surveillance.

Intelligence officials say data about Americans is "incidentally" collected during communication with a target reasonably believed to be living overseas. Critics see it as back-door surveillance of Americans without a warrant.

Spy Chief Complains That Edward Snowden Sped Up Spread of Encryption by 7 Years

The Director of National Intelligence on Monday blamed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for advancing the development of user-friendly, widely available strong encryption.

“As a result of the Snowden revelations, the onset of commercial encryption has accelerated by seven years,” James Clapper said during a breakfast for journalists hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. ...

When pressed by The Intercept to explain his figure, Clapper said it came from the National Security Agency. “The projected growth maturation and installation of commercially available encryption — what they had forecasted for seven years ahead, three years ago, was accelerated to now, because of the revelation of the leaks.”

FCC Green Lights 'Crushing' Charter Cable Mega-Merger

When the deal is complete, two-thirds of the nation's high-speed Internet subscribers will be under the control of just two corporations, Charter and Comcast.

The Obama administration has given the green light for Charter Communications to complete its $90 billion takeover of two other major cable providers, a move which critics warn will grant the Internet giant "crushing monopoly power" to drive up prices and control bandwidth, with almost no accountability or competition.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Tom Wheeler on Monday circulated an order to approve Charter's acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks.

The merger will combine the nation’s second-, third-, and sixth-largest cable-TV and Internet service providers (ISPs) and effectively place two-thirds of the nation's high-speed Internet subscribers under the authority of just two corporations, Charter and Comcast.
"Thanks to this merger both Charter and Comcast now have unprecedented control over our cable and Internet connections," declared Craig Aaron, president and CEO of the press freedom and open internet advocacy group Free Press. "Their crushing monopoly power will mean fewer choices, higher prices, no accountability and no competition."

Venezuela court blocks another opposition tactic to oust Maduro

Venezuela's Supreme Court shot down on Monday one of the opposition's main tactics to oust socialist leader Nicolas Maduro with a ruling that any constitutional amendment to reduce the presidential term could not be retroactive.

Having won control of the legislature last year due to public ire over an economic crisis, the opposition coalition is seeking to remove Maduro via popular pressure, constitutional reform or a recall referendum.

However, government-leaning institutions are thwarting it at every turn: the National Election Council is dragging its feet on the referendum, and the Supreme Court is striking down measures passed by the opposition in parliament.

In its latest judgment, the court said that while modification of the six-year presidential term was viable in principle if approved in a referendum, "it cannot take effect retroactively or be applied immediately."

Not Justice & Not Enough: Tamir Rice Family Gets $6M Settlement for Police Killing of 12-Year-Old

Tamir Rice’s Family Should Spend Money Warning of Toy Guns, Say Cops Who Shot Him With Real One

The Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association released a statement responding to the [$6 million settlement with Tamir Rice's family]. Rather than acknowledging any error on the police’s part, the association suggested that the Rice family use the funds to “educate the youth of Cleveland in the dangers associated with the mishandling of both real and facsimile firearms.”

England's Doctors Walk Out of Emergency Wards in First Ever All-Out Strike

The first ever all-out strike by doctors in the history of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) began in England on Tuesday, as junior doctors continue to protest against new contracts they say are unsafe and are being forced upon them.

Thousands of junior doctors — a term used for medical practitioners who are working while still going through their years of training — walked out of both routine and emergency care. It is the latest in a series of strikes over working hours and pay but is the first that has affected intensive care and maternity and accident and emergency wards. ...

There are more than 55,000 junior doctors in England, around a third of all medical staff. Doctors who belong to the trade union British Medical Association (BMA) have been in a long-running dispute with the government over planned changes to their contracts, which would mean an extension of their standard working hours to include evenings and Saturdays.

At the moment, any hours worked between 7pm and 7am, or at any time over the weekend, are classed as antisocial and are consequently paid more. The contract is being changed to make basic hours (and pay) last from 7am to 10pm, and 7am to 7pm on Saturdays, as part of a government manifesto pledge to create a "seven-day National Health Service."

The Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has offered an 13.5 percent basic pay rise but the BMA says this is offset by an overall reduction in the pay for antisocial hours, particularly Saturday pay — disputed by the government which says three quarters of doctors will take home a pay rise. While the BMA agrees with the government drive to create a seven-day NHS it says there is a dire shortage of doctors and funding.

Tired, poor, huddled millennials of New York earn 20% less than prior generation

Scoff all you like at hoverboard hipsters and Brooklyn baristas: life is tough for millennials trying to chase down their American dream in New York City. The city’s millennials make about 20% less than the generation before them, according to a new report released by New York City comptroller Scott Stringer.

Entering the workforce during the greatest economic downturn in living memory, millennials – despite attending college at much higher rate than Gen X – have been stuck in low-wage jobs and might never make up that 20% gap.

The report defines millennials as those born between 1985 and 1996.

“This generation is at a crossroads,” Stringer said. “They worked hard, got an education and then faced roadblocks to getting a good-paying job. ...

“The percentage of young adults working in low-wage industries who have a bachelor’s degree grew from 23% to 33% between 2000 and 2014,” the report found.

And while low-wage industries have hired more young people over the years, they have also lowered their wages. The report found that while hospitality and retail sectors created 91,000 new jobs for young people, wages in the two sectors fell by 16% from 2000 to 2014. The arts and entertainment sector, which is considered a mid-wage employer, hired 16,000 millennials during that same time – but their income fell by 26%. And while wages in finance went up by 14%, the jobs available to millennials dropped by 11,000.

Millennials Poll Shows Sanders' Revolution Reshaping US Electorate

Bernie Sanders is changing the face of American politics, a new poll from Harvard's Institute of Politics suggests.

According to the survey released Monday, Sanders remains the most popular presidential candidate for so-called millennials between the ages of 18-29, 54 percent of whom view him favorably, compared to 31 percent who harbor unfavorable views.

Just 37 percent of respondents say they see Sanders rival Hillary Clinton favorably, compared to 53 percent who do not.

More importantly, regardless of how Sanders fares in Tuesday's primaries, or in the race for the nomination overall, there's little doubt that the senator from Vermont is making a lasting impact, polling director John Della Volpe told the Washington Post on Monday.

"He's not moving a party to the left. He's moving a generation to the left," Della Volpe said of Sanders. "Whether or not he's winning or losing, it's really that he's impacting the way in which a generation — the largest generation in the history of America — thinks about politics."

This third party would keep Hillary honest: Bernie Sanders backers must become a Tea Party of the left

In early April President Obama warned against the danger of a Tea Party of the Left, which might “stake out positions so extreme, they alienate the broad public.” The media correctly understood this as a warning to Bernie Sanders’ supporters.

Yet if you look at the impact the Tea Party activists had in changing the direction of the Republican Party, it seems clear that this is precisely what the tens of millions of people who support Sanders need to do, and they need to start building it now, before the Democratic National Convention in July.

Without that kind of movement, willing to work both within and outside the Democratic Party, willing to defeat Democrats in primaries or even to run against them in a general election, the status quo will continue: subservience to Wall Street and the policies favored by the 1 percent whose money shapes elections on the national and state levels, the false belief that terrorism can be defeated by our own brand of terror (war through drones), fossil fuels will continue to be extracted from the earth and accelerate global warming, millions of people languishing in our prisons (many for nonviolent crimes), social services (child care, health care, elder care, etc.) will continue to be sacrificed on the alter of “no new taxes,” the economy will continue to depend on endless “growth” with devastating consequences for the life support system of the planet, the U.S. will continue to have the most expensive and least successful health care and pharmaceuticals in the advanced industrial countries, the values of selfishness and materialism that are the “common sense of global capitalism will continue to pollute friendships and families causing psychic pain and family instability, and cynicism toward government and despair at the possibility of fundamental change will give new opportunities for racist, sexist, xenophobic and fascistic forces to gain public credibility.

Pessimistic? No, this is exactly what happened in the past seven years of the Obama presidency, and it will only worsen unless there is some ongoing political movement capable not only of speaking to the economic pain so beautifully articulated by Bernie Sanders but also capable of addressing the hidden psychic injuries of the globalization of selfishness that impact not only the poor but almost everyone in the society.

Hillary's institutional patronage network is worried that after the establishment disposes of Bernie Sanders, her sad record of betrayal of the working classes will make Trump's populist appeals on trade and jobs look compelling to union workers. Time to crank up the machine!

US unions plan attack on Donald Trump in attempt to derail presidential bid

The prospect of a Donald Trump nomination has labor leaders scrambling to hold the line as the Republican frontrunner’s appeal to disaffected working-class voters threatens to upset the traditional political calculus.

The majority of America’s almost 15 million unionized workers can be usually be relied upon to back the Democratic candidate in a presidential year, but leaders are concerned by Trump’s populist message on trade and jobs – and his insistence that union workers are just one of many groups on a long list of those he claims “love” him. ...

In the coming months, the AFL-CIO, which has not endorsed a candidate in the primary but has encouraged members to support the Democratic nominee, will launch digital attack ads against Trump and will ramp up its door-knocking campaign. The Service Employees International Union, which has endorsed Clinton, has organized phone banks for her nationwide, including most recently in Pennsylvania in the hope of getting out the vote on behalf of Democrats.

Yet Trump is resonating with voters who are struggling to make ends meet and who are seeing their friends’ jobs shipped abroad, says John Cakmakci, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 951 in Michigan. And some of those voters are union members. Trump’s populist positions on trade and his rejection of Washington politics have earned him votes across the Rust Belt, where several battleground states are key to winning the election in November.

If You Want Solid Evidence That Clinton Is Corrupting the Political Process, Here It Is

Whenever Hillary Clinton is accused of being a shady politician, who uses underhanded and unscrupulous methods, her supporters become extremely defensive. They say that all such allegations against Clinton are simply products of the right-wing noise machine, and that if Clinton is seen as venal and conniving it is almost certainly due to sexism rather than anything Clinton has actually done. Longtime Clinton operative David Brock has argued that when you get down to it, all of the scandals and allegations surrounding Clinton are little more than “nothingburgers.” Salon’s Gary Legum says there are simply “credulous people willing to believe any variation of legerdemain, no matter how irrational and absurd, if the name ‘Hillary Clinton’ is attached to it.”

But a new report offers hard evidence that Clinton’s campaign is, in fact, engaged in some of the most underhanded and antidemocratic practices that afflict our political system. In fact, Clinton’s campaign is engaged in precisely the kind of money-driven secrecy and subversion that Democrats have long insisted were wrecking American politics.

According to the Daily Beast, a pro-Clinton SuperPAC called “Correct the Record” has spent $1 million “pushing back against” Bernie Sanders supporters on social media, “addressing” thousands of people on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram. What this amounts to in practice is creating hundreds of fake accounts, which then place campaign propaganda all over the web as if it came from ordinary supporters. This group is spending a fortune unofficially intervening in social media conversations, without other users knowing that the messages are being funded by a SuperPAC.

Actor Tim Robbins blames Sanders losses on ‘voter fraud’

In a tweet Monday afternoon, the actor called out The New York Times and CNN, suggesting the media is tipping the scales in favor of Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Hey NYTimes, CNN. Are you saying that 2+2=5? Are you really OK supporting a candidate with these numbers?#VoterFraud pic.twitter.com/LrxqLTaKbC

— Tim Robbins (@TimRobbins1) April 25, 2016

Worker: System blocked some ballots in Arizona primary

A poll worker who was on duty during Arizona's problematic presidential primary testified Monday that the computer system checking in voters would not allow her to give the correct ballots to 36 Democratic voters while she counted about 20 other voters that were listed in the wrong party. ...

Tucson resident John Brakey sued Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan and all 15 counties after the election. He contends long lines in Maricopa County suppressed the vote and statewide voter registration problems led to illegal vote counts. He wants the results of the March 22 primary decertified.

The attorney general says the primary results can't be challenged.

Post, an attorney, testified that a machine she was using to check in voters at a Maricopa County location failed to give 36 people the proper ballot.

"Every single time it happened to me it was a Democratic voter who wasn't able to access a Democratic ballot," she said.

Another 22 people at her location were listed in the wrong party, she said. Her polling place also ran out of ballots for at least two congressional districts.

Federal judge upholds North Carolina voter ID law said to be discriminatory

Lawsuits challenging changes to North Carolina’s election law failed to show it hampered the ability of minority voters to exercise political power, a federal judge ruled Monday in dismissing the cases.

US district judge Thomas Schroeder ruled against the US Department of Justice, the North Carolina NAACP chapter and named voters, who claimed the law was passed to discriminate against poor and minority voters in violation of the constitution and Voting Rights Act.

While North Carolina had a sordid history of freezing black voters out of the political process, Schroeder said, the plaintiffs did not show that the law hampered the ability of minority voters to exercise electoral politics.

The plaintiffs “failed to show that such disparities will have materially adverse effects on the ability of minority voters to cast a ballot and effectively exercise the electoral franchise” as a result of the 2013 state law, the judge wrote. That argument was made more difficult after black voter turnout increased in 2014, he added.

“There is significant, shameful past discrimination. In North Carolina’s recent history, however, certainly for the last quarter century, there is little official discrimination to consider,” Schroeder wrote.

Pro-Israel Billionaire Haim Saban Drops $100,000 Against Donna Edwards in Maryland Senate Race

In the final days leading up to Maryland’s Democratic voters going to the polls on Tuesday to choose their U.S. Senate nominee, Rep. Donna Edwards has been barraged by ads and mailers from the Super PAC backing her opponent, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, called the Committee for Maryland’s Progress.

A television ad assails Edwards as “one of the least effective members of Congress,” contrasting her career with Van Hollen’s legislative record. It mentions no foreign policy issues, despite the dominant issue motivating one of the Super PAC’s largest funders.

Recently released disclosures reveal that $100,000 — a sixth of what the Super PAC has raised —comes from a single source: a donation by pro-Israel billionaire Haim Saban.

Last week, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times wrote that the Maryland Senate race involves “slight differences in policy.” But on Israel and the Palestinians, Edwards has significantly departed from the status quo in votes and statements in ways that her opponent has not.

Obama's Offshore Drilling Proposal Based on Fossil Fuel Industry Research

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management used industry-funded reports to tout economic benefits of offshore drilling in Gulf and Arctic

A key component of President Barack Obama's push for offshore oil drilling—an economic analysis touting the benefits of opening up waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic—was based on studies conducted by the fossil fuel industry, a new investigation reveals.

The "apparently impartial" analysis from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) justified the offshore drilling proposal unveiled last month as having potential for "increased wages, additional jobs, increased tax collection, revenue sharing, and proximity of supply and consumers economic," the nonprofit research group Public Accountability Initiative states in its report, Offshore Shilling: An Analysis of the Economic Studies Justifying the Department of Interior's Offshore Drilling Plan.

Yet "buried in the BOEM report's fine print, though, were footnotes shedding light on how the bureau came to its conclusions: it used studies from the same fossil fuel industry that could benefit from the expansion," write reporters David Sirota and Clark Mindock for the International Business Times.

Eight of the nine studies cited in the bureau's report came from authors or organizations with ties to the industry, including the American Petroleum Institute, the largest industry trade group with over 600 member organizations.

Four of the studies were directly funded by oil and gas companies or lobbying groups, while the other four were prepared by think tanks and "dark money advocacy groups" that also take funds from the fossil fuel industry, the Initiative reports.

None of them were peer-reviewed.

And perhaps least surprising of all, the economic numbers projected in the studies were found to have been severely exaggerated.

Michigan Officials Charged in Flint Water Poisoning, but Gov. Snyder Has Not Even Been Questioned

China Curbs Plans for More Coal-Fired Power Plants

Coal-fired power plants have propelled much of China’s economic rise for decades, helping make the nation the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Even with economic growth slackening, and other energy sources taking hold, new coal plants have been added.

Now Beijing is trying to slow things down.

In guidelines released on Monday, China halted plans for new coal-fired power stations in many parts of the country, and construction of some approved plants will be postponed until at least 2018.

The announcement, by the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration, means that about 200 planned coal-fired power generators — those seeking approval and those approved but not yet under construction — may not be completed, said Lauri Myllyvirta, who analyzes China’s energy production for Greenpeace. ...

In the face of the slowest economic growth in a quarter-century, electricity demand has fallen so sharply in China that some coal-burning power plants are operating only 40 or 50 percent of the time. Construction of wind turbines and solar panels has also eaten slightly into the market share of the coal plants.

Saudi prince: From 2020, we can survive without oil

Saudi Arabia’s cabinet approved Vision 2030 on Monday, a package of economic reforms designed to reduce dependence on oil revenues.

Under the proposal, the Middle Eastern kingdom will float part of national oil firm Saudi Aramco on the stock exchange and diversify its investments. ...

Historically, oil has accounted for 90% of national revenue. A crash in the oil price since mid 2014 has blown a hole in Riyadh’s budget, forcing it to draw on reserves.

The prince plans to increase the share of the national investment fund holdings overseas from 5% to 50% by 2020, broadening its sources of income.

Generous state welfare provision is also set to be slashed, including consumer fuel subsidies.

Also of Interest

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

Seven Stories From the Suicide Epidemic Plaguing Canada’s Indigenous Youth

What Does Justice for Slain Honduran Environmentalist Berta Cáceres Mean

Athens under pressure: city races to clear port's refugee camp before tourists arrive

Boston College ordered by US court to hand over IRA tapes

Clinton’s Digital Task Force Breaks Barriers To Defend Her Donors

A Voter’s Guide to Hillary Clinton’s Policies in Latin America

5 Things We’ve Learned About Hillary Clinton Since She Won the New York Primary

Trump States as Fact: “If You Collude in the Stock Market, They Put You in Jail.” Seriously?

Hidden Costs of US Air War

With Facebook No Longer a Secret Weapon, Egypt’s Protesters Turn to Signal

Scion of Brazil's Globo Media Empire Responds to Guardian Commentator's Criticism

How Wall Street enabled Detroit's collapse

A Little Night Music

Big Joe Williams - Baby Please Don't Go

Big Joe Williams - Throw A Boogie Woogie

Big Joe Williams - Mellow Peaches

Big Joe Williams - When I First Started Traveling

Big Joe Williams - Down In The Bottom

Big Joe Williams - Trouble Gonna Take Me To My Grave

Big Joe Williams - She Left Me A Mule To Ride