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This evening's music features Memphis blues singer, songwriter and piano player Rosco Gordon. Enjoy!

"Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top."

-- Edward Abbey

News and Opinion

The Neocons Are Crying About Losing Their Regime Change War In Syria

Senator John McCain and professional Senator John McCain imitator Lindsey Graham are upset that the current administration has no intention of deposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and they want you to know it. In statements released by both McCain and Graham, the Trump administration’s decision to focus on defeating ISIS instead of engaging in another full-fledged regime change war has “deeply disturbed” the two Republican senators who have built their entire careers on jingoistic advocacy of regime change wars.

“I am deeply disturbed by statements today by our Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations regarding the future of Bashar al-Assad in Syria,” McCain’s statement says. “Their suggestion that Assad can stay in power appears to be just as devoid of strategy as President Obama's pronouncements that ‘Assad must go.’”

What McCain’s slowly dying brain fails to comprehend is that choosing not to invest trillions of dollars and countless lives in a regime change invasion that would likely require many years of commitment and could lead to a direct military confrontation with the nuclear-armed Russia is itself a complete strategy. Leaving the Syrian government and its allies to defeat the international terrorist factions still trying to overthrow the Assad government does not require any further strategy. How much “strategy” does it take to allow Norway and Canada to retain their leaders and manage their own affairs? That’s how much strategy is required in choosing not to overthrow the undisputed leader of a sovereign nation. It is a very American elitist attitude to think that any “strategy” is required for allowing a sovereign nation to manage its own affairs.

With Trump approval, Pentagon expands warfighting authority

Week by week, country by country, the Pentagon is quietly seizing more control over warfighting decisions, sending hundreds more troops to war with little public debate and seeking greater authority to battle extremists across the Middle East and Africa.

This week it was Somalia, where President Donald Trump gave the U.S. military more authority to conduct offensive airstrikes on al-Qaida-linked militants. Next week it could be Yemen, where military leaders want to provide more help for the United Arab Emirates' battle against Iranian-backed rebels. Key decisions on Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan are looming, from ending troop number limits to loosening rules that guide commanders in the field. ...

The Defense Department has quietly doubled the number of U.S. forces in Syria. It has moved military advisers closer to front lines in Iraq. It has publicly made the case for more troops in Afghanistan. ...

Some changes are happening with little fanfare. While there is limited American appetite for large-scale deployments in Iraq and Syria, additions are coming incrementally, in the hundreds of forces, not the thousands. The result may be confusing for the public. Trump hasn't eliminated Obama's troop number limits. Thus, the caps of 503 for Syria and 5,262 for Iraq are still in effect. But the military is ignoring them with White House approval and using an already-existing loophole to categorize deployments as temporary.

Silence is Not an Option: Rev. Barber on Dr. King's Historic "Beyond Vietnam" Speech 50 Years Later

Pocan, Amash Invoke War Powers as Trump Mulls Pushing Yemen Into Famine

The White House is scheduled to consider this week a proposal from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to directly engage the U.S. military in Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthis in Yemen, including a planned United Arab Emirates attack on the port of Hodeida. ...

A bipartisan group of House members is demanding that President Trump seek Congressional approval before escalating U.S. involvement in Yemen’s civil war. Reps. Mark Pocan [D-WI], Justin Amash [R-MI]; Ted Lieu [D-CA] and Walter Jones [R-NC] are circulating a letter to the President that says, “Congress has never authorized the actions under consideration.” The letter continues:

“Engaging our military against Yemen’s Houthis when no direct threat to the United States exists and without prior congressional authorization would violate the separation of powers clearly delineated in the constitution...For this reason, we write to request that the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) provide, without delay, any legal justification that it would cite if the administration intends to engage in direct hostilities against Yemen’s Houthis without seeking congressional authorization.”

By invoking their war powers, Members of Congress can block the President from unilaterally moving to engage in military action. ... If enough Members of Congress complain now - in particular, if enough Members of the House sign the Pocan-Amash-Lieu-Jones letter - we can force Trump and Mattis to back down from taking this catastrophic step unilaterally, and force them to seek Congressional authorization before proceeding, which would mean they would have to make their case to the broad U.S. public, not just to the elite foreign policy establishment. And that’s a much higher burden of proof, because the broad public is much more skeptical of wars of choice than the foreign policy establishment is.

You can urge your Representative to sign the Pocan-Amash-Lieu-Jones letter here, here, here, or here.

Al Qaeda Is Attacking Major Syrian Cities with US Weapons — but You Wouldn't Know That from the Media

In the West, rare al-Qaeda-linked attacks are seized on to justify draconian anti-Muslim policies and growing racism and xenophobia. In Syria, however, the fact that frequent similar attacks are even al-Qaeda-linked at all is played down. ...

Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, a military alliance that represents an attempt to rebrand Syria's original al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat Al-Nusra, initiated an assault near the city of Hama on March 21, in collaboration with fighters from the so-called Free Syrian Army, or FSA, which has for years been supported by the U.S. and its allies. In the days before, the same al-Qaeda-linked group and another extremist Islamist militia, Ahrar al-Sham, launched two other attacks inside and on the outskirts of Syria’s capital, Damascus, targeting civilian areas under the control of the Syrian government.

In her coverage of the assault on Damascus, the Washington Post's Liz Sly provided a prime example of how this media whitewashing works: Sly did not even mention Tahrir al-Sham's links to al-Qaeda, referring to the group simple as "extreme." She also described a U.S.-vetted FSA faction that was fighting alongside rebranded al-Qaeda, Faylaq al-Rahman, as "moderate." Another disturbing development that has been virtually ignored by U.S. mainstream media are the videos of Tahrir al-Sham and the FSA-affiliated Jaish al-Izza, which is fighting alongside rebranded al-Qaeda in the Hama offensive, attacking the Syrian army with TOW anti-tank missiles, which were manufactured by the American weapons company Raytheon and supplied to CIA-vetted rebels. ...

U.S.-made TOW missiles have ended up in the hands of a variety of extremist groups in Syria, including ISIS. Before rebranding, Syria's official al-Qaeda afilliate Jabhat al-Nusra had taken anti-tank weapons from so-called moderate rebels, and close U.S. ally Saudi Arabia has also transferred TOW missiles to militants in Syria.

Scotland Yard looks at allegations of Saudi war crimes in Yemen

Scotland Yard is examining allegations of war crimes by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, the Guardian can reveal, triggering a possible diplomatic row with Britain on the eve of Theresa May’s visit to the Arab state. The Metropolitan police confirmed that their war crimes unit was assessing whether criminal prosecutions could be brought over Saudi Arabia’s devastating aerial campaign in Yemen. The force’s SO15 counter-terrorism unit revealed to a London human rights lawyer that it had launched a “scoping exercise” into the claims before Maj Gen Ahmed al-Asiri’s visit to the capital last week. ...

Officers are carrying out the scoping exercise to assess whether a full-scale investigation is justified into the war crimes allegations. It is understood that detectives are to examine whether there is an identifiable suspect and, if not, whether there is a realistic prospect of identifying one. If a suspect is identified, detectives will then consider whether they can make on-the-ground inquiries overseas, although that is likely to prove impossible in Yemen. ...

Asiri, who regularly appears in the media to defend Saudi Arabia’s campaign in Yemen, was pelted with an egg by protesters and subjected to an attempted citizen’s arrest before a seminar in London on Friday.

Excusing Bahrain’s Human Rights Abuses

The Trump administration has decided to remove any conditions regarding human rights from sales of F-16 fighter aircraft and other arms to Bahrain. The rationale for doing so is the idea that hard power considerations ought to come before softer concerns for the rights of someone else’s citizens. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker, in applauding the decision, said arms sales should be decided by American strategic needs and not commingled with any pressuring of “allies” to change domestic behavior. Bahrain hosts the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, and the island nation is hardly the only place where military access rights have been involved in the United States overlooking abusive domestic policies. Egypt comes to mind as another such country.

But at the center of the decision regarding Bahrain is, as David Sanger and Eric Schmitt put it in their coverage in the New York Times, “the Trump administration’s growing determination to find places to confront Iran.” ...

Like the other five Arab countries along the south edge of the Persian Gulf, Bahrain is ruled by a Sunni monarchy. Unlike any of the others, the country has a Shia majority. An unhappy Shia majority, which the regime has given plenty of reason in recent years to become even more unhappy. The human rights situation in Bahrain is bad, and specifically bad for the Shia. The State Department’s human rights report on Bahrain has plenty to talk about, including lack of due process, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and curbs on freedom of expression. Underlying many of the abuses is systematic discrimination against Shia citizens. Freedom House ranks Bahrain among the worst ten percent of countries worldwide in overall personal and political freedom.

Bahrain has long had a special place in Iranian thinking, and at times in the past the thinking has included thoughts of possible Iranian sovereignty over the island. Those are not operative thoughts now, but there is no way that Iran would not seek to become involved on behalf of its co-religionists amid the bitterness and strife that have marked relations in the past decade between the Bahraini regime and its unhappy subjects. Iranian rhetorical and political support for the rights of the Bahraini majority has been obvious. What kind of material support may be provided is harder to say, given that most reports suggesting such support come from a Bahraini regime eager to play up the idea of Iranian interference.

What is clear is that the worse the human rights situation gets in Bahrain, the more opportunities there are for Iran to enhance its influence. Anyone who professes to worry about Iranian influence thus ought to worry about human rights in Bahrain.

Trump Meets Egypt's el-Sisi, Amid Wave of Repression, Jailings & Extrajudicial Killings in Egypt

Trump to welcome Egypt’s dictator

Egypt’s military ruler Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was never invited to the Obama White House, where he was viewed as a brutal tyrant with little regard for human rights and democracy.

On Monday, President Donald Trump will roll out the red carpet for him.

Reviled by activists for what they call the harshest political repression in Egypt’s history, Sisi has emerged as an early Trump favorite among world leaders. The two men first met during the presidential campaign in September, leading Trump to call Sisi a “fantastic guy,” and Sisi was the first foreign leader to reach Trump after his election.

Their meeting Monday will offer important clues about how Trump plans to engage with foreign dictators with poor human rights records. It is also key to Trump's effort to bolster ties with Arab allies in the fight against Islamists across the Middle East.

While Western governments have protested Sisi’s imprisonment of thousands of people on dubious political charges, Trump has openly praised the Egyptian autocrat’s ruthlessness. “He took control of Egypt. And he really took control of it,” Trump said in a September interview with the Fox Business Network. Sisi claimed the title of president after a June 2014 election in which his official vote total was 96.91 percent.

Russia offers 'election interference'

The Russian Foreign Ministry addressed election interference allegations as an April Fools' Day joke on Saturday.

The ministry said on its Facebook page that it had set up an automated telephone switchboard for embassies, offering in a fake voicemail the services of "hackers" and "election interference."

"You have reached the Russian embassy, your call is very important to us. To arrange a call from a Russian diplomat to your political opponent, press 1," the recording begins, in Russian and English.

"To use the services of Russian hackers, press 2. To request election interference, press 3 and wait until the next election campaign," the voicemail continues.

"Please note that all calls are recorded for quality improvement and training purposes."

Lithuania fears Russian propaganda is prelude to eventual invasion

Russia is trying to create a false history that denies the Baltic states’ right to exist, with alarming parallels to its justifications for the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, top Lithuanian officials have said. The country’s defence minister and officials from the army’s department of strategic communication have told the Guardian that they are taking very seriously the threat of disinformation campaigns orchestrated by Moscow that aim to destabilise the region.

“Russia is a threat,” the defence minister, Raimundas Karoblis, said. “They are saying our capital Vilnius should not belong to Lithuania because between the first and second world wars it was occupied by Poland. It’s history of course, but Russia is using this pretext. “Sometimes [the disinformation] is through [the government-run news agency] Sputnik, sometimes through their TV, but usually from politicians in the Duma.

“There are now reports that Klaipėda [Lithuania’s third largest city] never belonged to Lithuania; that it was the gift of Stalin after the second world war. There are real parallels with Crimea’s annexation [from Ukraine] … We are speaking of a danger to the territorial integrity of Lithuania.” ... Lithuania fears the campaign to rewrite history could be an effort to prepare the ground for a possible attack with conventional weapons – what the military calls “kinetic operations”.

Trump threatens to “solve” North Korea problem days ahead of meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping

It’s still several days before Donald Trump’s big summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but Trump is already negotiating. The president on Sunday set down a marker about how he wants the two countries to work together, warning that if China won’t cooperate on limiting North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, the U.S. would “solve” the problem on its own. ...

When asked why China should cooperate, Trump returned to his favorite China related subject: “Trade is the incentive. It is all about trade.” Trump has continuously criticized China’s economic policies and last week introduced a pair of executive orders designed to tackle the issues as he perceives them. Yet Trump’s decisive rhetoric appears to be hiding a state of confusion within the White House, where administration officials struggle to agree on a unified trade policy toward China.

Xi will meet Trump on Thursday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which the president refers to as his “Winter White House” — though no golf is expected to be played. With North Korea and economic policy set to dominate the conversation, Trump said last week that the meeting “will be a very difficult one.”

Ecuador election: Lenin Moreno headed for victory amid opposition fraud claims

Leftwing candidate begins celebrations after presidential runoff with implications for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

Ecuador’s ruling party candidate appeared to be heading for victory in a presidential runoff that would cement the country’s reputation as a bastion of the Latin American left and provide breathing space for the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.

However, the narrow 51% to 49% lead for Lenin Moreno was contested by the opposition candidate, Guillermo Lasso, prompting fears for heightened political tension in the days ahead. With 99% of votes counted, Moreno, a former vice-president under the outgoing president Rafael Correa, was on course to beat Lasso, a 61-year-old former banker.

The head of Ecuador’s electoral council, Juan Pablo Pozo, called on the opposition candidate to recognise the results. “Ecuador deserves the ethical responsibility from its political actors to recognise the democratic decision made by the people at the ballot box,” Pozo said.

However, Lasso, who had earlier claimed victory based on three exit polls that showed him leading by as much as six points, pointed to irregularities and demanded a recount. “This is very sickening. We’re not going to allow it,” he said, calling on supporters to protest against the results peacefully but firmly. “They’ve crossed a line.” Several thousand of his supporters picketed the electoral council headquarters on Sunday night chanting: “We don’t want fraud, we want democracy.”

Meanwhile, Moreno appeared on a stage flanked by Correa and Jorge Glas, the vice-president, as thousands of supporters waved flags in the lime-green colours of the Alianza País coalition and cumbia music blasted into the night.

Australian anti-war activist, prominent Assange supporter hacked by UK police

An Australian anti-war activist was among the victims of alleged illegal email hacking by UK police, according to whistleblower claims being investigated by the British police watchdog. Ciaron O’Reilly, a Ploughshares and Catholic Worker organiser, is one of 10 people named in a letter to the Green party peer Jenny Jones by an anonymous whistleblower who alleged the emails of those individuals were among those illegally monitored by a secretive Scotland Yard unit working with Indian police and hackers.

O’Reilly, a key supporter of Julian Assange, was contacted last week by a London law firm that confirmed his email account and password were identified in the letter, now being examined by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). He told Guardian Australia he was “outraged but not surprised” by the alleged intrusion of the Metropolitan police’s national domestic extremism and disorder unit into his private emails.

The Brisbane-born activist, who has twice served jail time for damaging US military equipment, said he was the kind of non-violent protester who “could end up in quite vulnerable positions with these [police], who kind of overrate our significance”. “But part of overrating our significance is justifying their budgets,” he said. “If I’m their problem, they haven’t got a problem. The reason I’m coming out publicly is to remind people how dangerous this is, because with areas like the secret police, there’s no accountability, there’s no transparency.”

South Sudan: UN warns of famine and human rights violations

Uganda at breaking point as Bidi Bidi becomes world's largest refugee camp

The central reception area of the Imvepi refugee settlement, in northern Uganda, is packed to the brim. Thousands of people are crammed into a patch of land meant to hold just a fraction of the current load. They’ve been waiting for days, stuck in an administrative backlog the government of Uganda attributes to lack of funding and an unceasing stream of people from South Sudan.

Famine, economic collapse and years of fighting have forced people out of South Sudan faster than from any other nation on the planet. The stream of arrivals, who averaged 2,800 each day in March, has begun to take a toll on the country’s southern neighbour Uganda, host to roughly half of the 1.6 million people forced to flee their homes.

Uganda is feeling the neglect. The country has one of the world’s most compassionate refugee policies, which grants migrants land to build a home and enjoy rights to travel and work that are practically unheard of elsewhere.

But without relief in sight, the cracks are beginning to show. A single settlement, called Bidi Bidi, hosts at least 270,000 refugees – more than any other place in the world. It was closed to new arrivals in December to prevent overcrowding. Since then, new settlements have opened roughly every two months.

Perhaps official Europe has more in common with Trump xenophobes than they would like to admit.

Europe Keeps Its Rescue Ships Far From the Coast of Libya — Where Thousands of Refugees Have Drowned

An average of 3,500 people have died each year while trying to make the journey to Italy from North Africa since 2014. Their vessels are overcrowded, unseaworthy, and have a near-nothing chance of making it to Europe. >Most of the boats sink just 20 to 40 miles from the Libyan coastThese are preventable deaths. Since 2014, the European Union has deliberately chosen to keep their coast guard patrol boats far from where the shipwrecks happen, a decision detailed in an internal letter obtained by The Intercept and other leaked documents. Saving more lives, the logic goes, will only encourage more refugees to come. The result is that rescue boats are kept away from where rescues are actually needed.

ICE Detained A US Citizen For Almost 3 Weeks

A U.S. citizen is suing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, claiming he was arrested and held in jail for almost three weeks because they didn’t believe he was in the country legally. ...

Rony Chavez Aguilar, who was born in Guatemala and became a U.S. citizen in 1999, was serving two weeks in county jail for drug charges. But instead of releasing him at the end of his sentence, Kentucky authorities held him for an extra two days so that he could be transferred into custody of the ICE Chicago field office, which covers Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin.

On March 9, the complaint alleges, the agency transferred Aguilar to the Boone County Jail in Kentucky, an ICE-contracted facility that holds people facing deportation. For 18 days, he was not allowed to see a lawyer or talk to a judge.

Protesting Trump's immigration policy? You might be accidentally helping him

An awkward question has begun to nag opponents of Donald Trump’s immigration policies: is the resistance inadvertently helping the administration? Few say it publicly but there is concern that the rallies and marches, alerts and tweets, workshops and press releases are helping the administration sow fear among undocumented immigrants.

The spectre of deportation so haunts communities across the United States that some people are afraid to report crimes and others have reportedly decided to return to Mexico and Central America before they get swept up.

Yet the perception of ramped-up deportations is, for now, false. Removals have not spiked since Trump’s inauguration, according to figures Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) supplied to the Guardian: 35,604 removals in January and February, versus 35,255 over the same period last year.

Mexico’s foreign minister said last month that under Trump there had been no rise in the number of deported Mexicans, and that numbers had in fact slightly fallen. Carlos García de Alba, Mexico’s consul general in Los Angeles, told the Guardian that up to Monday this week 193 Mexicans had been arrested in LA county since Trump’s inauguration, with roughly 50 deported – “much less than the average with President Obama”.

This reflects a White House strategy to rattle the 11 million-strong undocumented population, said Lizbeth Mateo, a prominent undocumented LA-based activist. “It is enforcement through attrition – instilling so much fear that people leave on their own.”

Connecticut cops may be first in U.S. to get weaponized drones

Connecticut cops could soon have a new crime-fighter in their arsenal: weaponized drones. State lawmakers are considering a bill that would allow police agencies to have drones outfitted with deadly weapons or tear gas, but civil rights advocates are worried that this could take policing into dangerous, uncharted territory.

The measure easily passed Connecticut’s Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and was sent to the House for approval. Republican state Sen. John Kissel, co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, said he anticipated weaponized drones would be used in “very limited circumstances,” such as a school shooting situation or a kidnapping. ...

If approved by the House and signed by Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy, Connecticut would be the only state in the country whose police have drones outfitted with lethal weapons. South Dakota cops have drones, but they are outfitted with “less-lethal” weapons, like Tasers.

GOP Lawmakers Now Admit Years of Obamacare Repeal Votes Were a Sham

It is hard to overestimate the role of the Affordable Care Act in the Republican resurgence. Over the last seven years, the GOP has won successive elections by highlighting problems with Obamacare, airing more than $235 million in negative ads slamming the law, and staging more than 50 high-profile repeal votes. In 2016 every major Republican presidential candidate, including Donald Trump, campaigned on a pledge to quickly get rid of it.

Now in total control of Congress and the White House, some GOP legislators are saying that the political assault on Obamacare was an exercise in cynical politics, and that an outright repeal was never on the table. “We have Republicans who do not want to repeal Obamacare,” said Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., on Sirius XM Patriot on Wednesday.

“They may have campaigned that way, they may have voted that way a couple of years ago when it didn’t make any difference,” Brooks continued. “But now that it makes a difference, there seems to not be the majority support that we need to pass legislation that we passed 50 or 60 times over five or six years.” ...

Republicans expected Hillary Clinton to win the election last year, and had not planned for being in a position to actually pass a repeal effort this year, said [Rep. Pat] Meehan [R-Pa., one of the lawmakers who came into power by riding the anti-ACA Tea Party wave in 2010]. But after Trump’s victory, the GOP leadership thought something had to be done on their campaign promises, and that’s why they attempted to move forward with the American Health Care Act.

Trump’s campaign comments keep getting him into legal trouble

A federal judge in Kentucky ruled Friday that a lawsuit accusing Trump of inciting violence against protesters at a campaign rally last March can move forward. Trump’s lawyers tried to get the case thrown out by arguing the president’s comments were free speech, but in his opinion, the judge noted that the First Amendment doesn’t protect incitement to commit violence.

During the March 2016 rally at the Kentucky International Convention Center in Louisville, three anti-Trump protesters — two women and a teenage boy — claim they were shoved and punched after Trump repeatedly directed his supporters from the podium to “get ‘em out of here.”

The incident, caught on video, went viral, and a little more than a month later, the protesters — Kashiya Nwanguma, Molly Shah, and Henry Brousseau — sued Trump for damages. Trump’s lawyers, however, argued that the then-presidential candidate didn’t intend to provoke violence. In his opinion Friday, U.S. district Judge David Hale disagreed.

Leading Democrat alleges joint effort to distract from Trump-Russia inquiry

Adam Schiff accused Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, of colluding in an “attempt to distract” the public from concerns over potential links between Trump and Russian meddling. Schiff, the committee’s top Democrat, said on CNN’s State of the Union that Nunes and the White House had made an “effort to point the Congress in other directions, to basically say, ‘Don’t look at me, don’t look at Russia, there’s nothing to see here’.”

Nunes threw his investigation into chaos last month by announcing, without consulting committee members, that he had received evidence that members of Trump’s presidential campaign were swept up in electronic surveillance of foreigners by the Obama administration. The congressman’s announcement gave a boost to efforts by Trump and his backers in the rightwing media to reframe Obama-era investigations of Russian interference – and possible collusion with Trump associates – as nothing more than politically motivated surveillance of the Republican presidential campaign.

Trump over the weekend continued to seize on Nunes’s original allegation that the identities of Americans caught up in the surveillance had been improperly “unmasked” by US officials, for internal use during the Obama presidency. “If this is true, does not get much bigger,” Trump said on Twitter. “Would be sad for US” On Sunday he added: “The real story turns out to be SURVEILLANCE and LEAKING! Find the leakers.”

Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel

White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The pattern of Rice's requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government's policy on "unmasking" the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like "U.S. Person One." ...

The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations -- primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration. ...

Rice herself has not spoken directly on the issue of unmasking. Last month when she was asked on the "PBS NewsHour" about reports that Trump transition officials, including Trump himself, were swept up in incidental intelligence collection, Rice said: "I know nothing about this," adding, "I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today."

White House staffer's tweet calling for primary challenge opens Republican rift

The internal strife rending the Republican party continued on Sunday, as one member of the House Freedom Caucus pledged to defend another if a primary challenge from a Trump-backed candidate, controversially threatened by a White House aide, should ever come to pass.

“Justin Amash is a good friend and one of the most principled members of Congress,” said Jim Jordan of Ohio, on CNN’s State of the Union. “Frankly, if he is primaried I’m going to do everything I can to help him.”

Jordan was responding to a tweet on Saturday from Dan Scavino Jr, the White House social media director. Using his personal account, Scavino Jr wrote: “@realDonaldTrump is bringing auto plants & jobs back to Michigan. @justinamash is a big liability. #TrumpTrain, defeat him in primary.”

Amash responded, tweeting: “Trump admin & Establishment have merged into #Trumpstablishment. Same old agenda: Attack conservatives, libertarians & independent thinkers.”

Trump Administration Slapped With Lawsuits Over Blocked Energy Efficiency Standards

A coalition of state attorneys general—led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman—announced plans Monday to file a lawsuit against the Department of Energy (DOE) under President Donald Trump for blocking Obama-era energy efficiency standards for a variety of commercial and consumer products.

"Energy efficiency standards are vital to public health, our environment, and consumers. This is yet another example of how the Trump administration's polluter-first energy policy has real and harmful impacts on the public health, environment—and pocketbooks—of New Yorkers," Schneiderman said in a statement. ...

Included in the suit are the state attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, as well as the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the City of New York.

It's not the only lawsuit over energy efficiency standards. Also on Monday, the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Earthjustice announced (pdf) a plan to slap the Energy Department with a separate lawsuit.

Hundreds of Clean Energy Bills Have Been Introduced in States Nationwide This Year

State politicians have introduced measures to dramatically expand renewable electric power in nearly a dozen states in the first three months of 2017, some as ambitious as aiming to run entirely on renewables within a few decades; some would launch smaller-scale community solar ventures, like a pilot in Virginia; others would add tax breaks for solar users in South Carolina and Florida.

But other state legislatures are resisting the advance of clean power as it begins to transform the energy landscape. Less a new assault inspired by the Republican-led backlash against green energy under way in Washington, D.C., it's the continuation of campaigns by conservative groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Prosperity and the Heartland Institute with ties to the fossil fuel billionaires, the Koch brothers. Members of traditional energy companies, including utilities and fossil fuel companies, have also supported some attacks.

There are proposals to end the popular solar financial arrangement known as net metering in Indiana, Missouri and elsewhere. There are moves afoot to roll back statewide clean energy targets in North Carolina, New Hampshire and Ohio. There was even a bill to effectively outlaw utility-scale wind and solar in Wyoming, and a defiant measure seeking a two-year moratorium on new wind projects in North Dakota.

But many clean energy policy experts and advocates told InsideClimate News that despite the challenges, they remain encouraged by the conversations playing out at the state level. That's because they are seeing examples of bipartisan collaboration for clean energy and polls showing widespread support for cutting emissions from the electric grid. And there is widespread business support for a cleaner energy marketplace and for the Paris climate agreement generally. ...

The tumult at the state level will help resolve the direction the nation takes at a time when the world's progress toward meeting long-term climate goals appears to be in jeopardy.

Also of Interest

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

Chris Hedges: A Nation of the Walking Dead

New Evidence Undermines EU Report Tying Refugee Rescue Group to Smugglers

The Establishment May Be Using Russiagate To Pave The Way For Blatant Internet Censorship

Blaming Russia for Everything

Democrats’ Blind Obsession on Russia-gate

Ratf*ck A Go Go! Atlanticists and MI5 Go After Trump!

Shareblue Is Now Saying That ‘Bernie Bros’ Were Actually Russian Bots. Hold Me Back.

How Do We Reclaim Control Of Our Lives When the Economy Looms So Grim?

Why Hasn’t Citigroup’s Banking Charter Been Yanked?

Mexico City installs a penis seat on the subway to fight sexual harassment

Sumatran elephants: a fragile future – in pictures

Micronations: Run your own country

A Little Night Music

Rosco Gordon - Just A Little Bit

Rosco Gordon - Love For You Baby

Rosco Gordon - Cheese and Crackers

Rosco Gordon - Too Many Women

Rosco Gordon - Saddled The Cow (And Milked The Horse)

Rosco Gordon - Let 'Em Try

Rosco Gordon - Shoobie Oobie

Rosco Gordon - We're All Loaded

Rosco Gordon - You Got My Bait

Rosco Gordon - A Little Bit Of Magic

Rosco Gordon - Roscoe's Boogie