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This evening's music features delta blues musician Kansas Joe McCoy. Enjoy!

“Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.”

-- Hunter S. Thompson

News and Opinion

Decisively re-elected, Rouhani defies hardliners, pledges to open Iran

President Hassan Rouhani pledged on Saturday to open Iran to the world and deliver freedoms its people have yearned for, throwing down a defiant challenge to his hardline opponents after securing a decisive re-election for a second term. Rouhani, long known as a cautious and mild-mannered establishment insider, reinvented himself as a bold champion of reform during the election campaign, which culminated on Friday in victory with more than 57 percent of the vote. His main challenger, hardline judge Ebrahim Raisi, received 38 percent.

In his first televised speech after the result, Rouhani appeared to openly defy conservative judges by praising the spiritual leader of the reform camp, former President Mohammad Khatami. A court has banned quoting or naming Khatami on air. "Our nation's message in the election was clear: Iran's nation chose the path of interaction with the world, away from violence and extremism," Rouhani said.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whose country has had no diplomatic relations with Iran since 1980, said he hoped Rouhani would use his second term to end Tehran's ballistic missile program and what he called its network of terrorism. Iran denies any involvement in terrorism and says its missile program, which U.S. President Donald Trump recently targeted with new sanctions, is purely for defense purposes.

Although the powers of the elected president are limited by those of unelected Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who outranks him, the scale of Rouhani's victory gives the pro-reform camp its strongest mandate in at least 12 years to seek the sort of change that hardliners have thwarted for decades.

As Iranian Voters Reject Hardliner, Trump Embraces Saudi Monarch & Vows to Isolate Iran

Iran’s Moderates Win Election, but It Won’t Matter to Trump

Donald Trump arrived in Saudi Arabia this weekend to launch a new Middle East coalition designed to confront Iran, just as Tehran announced the re-election of President Hassan Rouhani, the man who dared to engage diplomatically with the United States. Rouhani won a commanding victory: fifty-seven per cent in a four-way race, with seventy-per-cent turnout. He fended off a challenge from a populist right-wing cleric, Ebrahim Raisi, a rising political star backed by hard-line power centers such as the Revolutionary Guards. Street celebrations erupted Saturday night from Tehran to Mashhad, the eastern city with Iran’s holiest shrine.

President Trump’s trip symbolizes a formal U.S. reversal on Iran. There is no foreign-policy issue over which Trump and former President Barack Obama disagree more. Trump’s mobilization of Sunni Arab regimes to challenge predominantly Shiite Iran risks increasing regional and sectarian tensions in the energy-rich Gulf. New sanctions, some imposed last week by the White House and others in the pipeline in Congress, threaten to undermine the spirit of diplomacy created during two years of arduous negotiations between Tehran and the world’s six major powers. It produced a deal, in 2015, containing Iran’s nuclear program—the most important nonproliferation treaty in more than a quarter century. ...

For Iranians and the outside world, the stakes in Iran’s Presidential election were not just who holds office for the next four years or the nuclear deal. The outcome will also influence the future direction of the revolution at a time when its original masterminds are aging, ailing, or dying off. ... “We’ve entered this election to tell those practicing violence and extremism that your era is over,” Rouhani said, on May 8th. “The people of Iran shall once again announce that they don’t approve of those who only called for executions and jail throughout the last thirty-eight years.” The thirty-eight years is a reference to Raisi, a former Attorney General and one of four judges who served on a panel linked to the execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988. ...

In a post-election speech, Rouhani said, “Our nation’s message in the election was clear: Iran’s nation chose the path of interaction with the world, away from violence and extremism.”

Iran’s Victory for Moderation

The Iranian population’s political sophistication continues to impress. Despite a highly flawed political system where the elections are neither fair nor free, the overwhelmingly majority chose a non-violent path to bring about progress. They massively participated in the elections with a 75 percent turnout – compare that to the turnout in the U.S. elections in 2016, 56 percent – and handed the incumbent moderate President Hassan Rouhani a landslide victory with 57 percent of the vote. In a regional context, this election is even more remarkable. In most of the Middle East, elections are not even held. Take Saudi Arabia for instance, President Donald Trump’s choice for his first foreign trip.

There are a few things we can say about the meaning of the Iranian people’s collective action.

First of all, once again, Iranians voted against the candidate who was believed to be favored by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This is now a strong pattern. Secondly, the Iranians rebuked exiled opposition groups and Washington hawks and neocons who called on the Iranian people to either boycott the elections or vote for the hardline candidate Ebrahim Raisi in order to hasten a confrontation. Clearly, these elements have no following in Iran. Third, despite Trump’s undermining of the nuclear deal with Iran, and despite significant problems with the sanctions relief process which has left many Iranians disappointed in the nuclear deal, Iranians still chose diplomacy, detente and moderation over the confrontational line of previous Iranian administrations. Iran is today one of the few countries in the world where a message of moderation and anti-populism secures you a landslide election victory.

Outnumbering refugees two to one: how the world ignores war's greatest scandal

[W]hile the number of people uprooted by conflict outnumbers refugees by two to one, they have been largely ignored by the international community, according to a report by the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. ...

Last year, an estimated 6.9 million people were forced to leave their homes as a result of conflict and violence. Worst affected was the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 922,000 were displaced, a 50% rise on the previous year. Close behind was Syria (824,000), followed by Iraq (659,000), Afghanistan (653,000), Nigeria (501,000) and Yemen (478,000).

Disasters such as floods, storms and wildfires had an even greater effect, displacing 24.2 million people, more than three times the number uprooted by conflict. This trend was at its most acute in east Asia and the Pacific. In China, 7.4 million were forced from their homes, with 5.9 million affected in the Philippines and a further 2.4 million in India. Floods accounted for half of all people displaced by disasters.

In some cases, a complex mix of conflict and disaster has forced communities from their homes, the report’s authors noted. It pointed to the situations unfolding in Nigeria, South Sudan and Somalia, where drought combined with conflict and violence are fuelling displacement, severe food insecurity and famine. ...

Last year, more aid was spent on refugee resettlement within donor nations than in the countries where displacement crises originated. “What we focus on is the symptom of this breakdown of protection and human rights of people in their local communities. We just focus on the symptom, which is the people we see at our borders,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

50% of South Sudan's population could soon be gone

Crimes against humanity. Mass atrocities. Mass displacement. While these terms accurately describe the conflict in Syria, they are equally applicable to South Sudan’s continuing civil war. Left to its present trajectory of displacement and famine, roughly half of South Sudan’s population will have died of starvation or fled the country by the war’s fourth anniversary in December – an occurrence nearly unprecedented in modern history. ...

South Sudan sits at the nexus of intensifying competition among four of Washington’s core counter-terrorism partners – Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Sudan. To deflect collective international pressure to accept a political settlement to the war, South Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, has exploited a bourgeoning proxy conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia over the use of the Nile waters and other issues. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, has publicly accused Egypt of providing weapons to Kiir’s regime, and there are numerous reports that Sudanese and Ethiopian opposition groups operating from South Sudan have acquired arms from Cairo as well as of growing cooperation between Egypt and Eritrea, Ethiopia’s arch-rival.

Uganda and Ethiopia’s contest for hegemony within the Horn of Africa, Uganda and Sudan’s longstanding feud for influence in South Sudan, the demonstrated readiness of all four states to engage militarily across their borders, and the destabilizing demographic impact of the millions of South Sudanese who are seeking refuge in Ethiopia, Uganda, and Sudan compound the volatile regional puzzle.

There's something in the air...

John Prine - That's How Every Empire Falls

Eliza Gilkyson - The Great Correction

Greg Brown - Trump Can't Have That

Iris DeMent - We Won't Keep Quiet

Comey set to testify publicly about why Trump fired him

Former FBI Director James Comey will testify in an open hearing before Congress, senators from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence announced Friday — giving Comey his first chance to publicly recount the events that led up to his sudden and unceremonious firing by President Donald Trump last week.

Several news reports have emerged in the wake of Comey’s firing, alleging that Trump demanded “loyalty” from the former FBI director, asked him to “let” the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn go, and told Russian officials that Comey was “crazy” and a “nut job.”

“I faced great pressure because of Russia,” Trump told Russian officials who visited him in the Oval Office the day after he fired Comey, according to a Friday New York Times report. “That’s taken off.” ...

The hearing will be scheduled after Memorial Day.

Major News Media does not deny breathlessly reporting insignificant trifles while the world burns.

General McMaster doesn’t deny that Trump called Comey a “nut job”

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster would neither confirm nor deny that President Trump told the Russians that fired FBI Director James Comey was a “nut job,” but he insisted that the comments, as reported, were taken out of context.

McMaster was one of the people present for a meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister earlier this month where the president reportedly revealed sensitive intelligence information and boasted of firing Comey, who was investigating Russia’s ties to Trump’s campaign.

In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that aired Sunday, McMaster said, “I don’t remember exactly what the president said. … But the gist of the conversation was that the president feels as if he is hamstrung in his ability to work with Russia to find areas of cooperation because this has been obviously so much in the news. And that was the intention of that portion of that conversation.”

America's obsession with rooting out communism is making a comeback

It was a scene straight out of the 1950s, but the year was 2017. Travis Allen, a Republican from southern California, took to the floor of the state assembly on 8 May to denounce communism. “To allow subversives and avowed communists to now work for the state of California,” he railed, “is a direct insult to the people of California who pay for that government.”

Allen was speaking out against a move to remove language from the California code that that bars members of the Communist party from holding government jobs in the state.

Anti-communist language remains on the books in several states, and in California at least, it’s not going anywhere. After facing backlash from Republicans, veterans and the Vietnamese American community, the bill’s sponsor, Democratic assemblyman Rob Bonta, announced last week that he would not move forward with the bill.

“I’ve been called a commie. I’ve been told to go back to China. I’ve had death threats,” Bonta told the Guardian. He described as “ironic and curious” the fact that one of his Republican opponents was “wrapping himself in the flag” while “supporting a law that blatantly violates our first amendment rights”, but said he respected the emotions that the issue had raised for refugees from communist regimes.

With intrigue about Russia driving the daily news cycle, cold war sentiments are bubbling up again, despite the fact that our erstwhile adversary is decidedly capitalist these days. It’s a marked reversal from just a year ago, when an astonishing number of Americans embraced the candidacy of a self-identified socialist, and a reminder of how deep anti-communist suspicion runs through the American psyche.

Trump declares 'rare opportunity' for peace as he lands in Israel

Donald Trump has arrived in Israel on the second leg of his first foreign tour as US president, declaring it as “a rare opportunity to bring security and stability and peace” to the region. ... In joint statements on the tarmac, Trump and Netanyahu referred to hopes of a wider peace deal in the region, comments that were heavy on rhetoric but light on details of how that could be achieved. ... Officials on all sides have played down hopes of an imminent breakthrough in peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians – described by Trump before his trip as his “ultimate deal”.

Among the officially invited guests at the airport were Israeli ministers, security figures, and religious leaders. Some ministers had been ordered to attend by Netanyahu after the prime minister reportedly discovered that a number planned to skip the reception.

Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s wife, was captured by a hot mic telling US first lady Melania Trump “the media don’t like us but the people do. Like you.” ...

As Trump arrived, Palestinians in the West Bank observed a general strike in solidarity with hunger-striking prisoners in Israeli jails. But in a sign of the difficulties ahead for Trump’s peace initiative, hundreds of protesters blocked roads in cities and towns of the West Bank as the hunger strike entered its 36th day on Monday. A Palestinian advocacy group said several of the hundreds of hunger-striking prisoners have been treated in hospital.

"I Could Have Died": Protesters Detail Violent Attack by Turkish President Erdogan's Guards in D.C.

Turkish guards who attacked protesters in D.C. might not have diplomatic immunity

The Turkish security guards who attacked protesters outside of the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday can claim diplomatic immunity — but that doesn’t mean they have it.

After Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the White House for a meeting with President Donald Trump, protesters carrying the flag of the Syrian Kurdish PYD party gathered outside of the Turkish embassy. A video that surfaced Thursday afternoon shows Erdogan standing by as his guards then attacked the protesters.

Amerika’nın Sesi Özel: #Erdoğan #Washington'daki olayların bitmesini aracında bekledi https://t.co/96IJVdVOpQ #amerikaninsesi pic.twitter.com/nh7nsyXwzL

— Amerika'nın Sesi (@VOATurkish) May 18, 2017

The State Department is working with D.C. police to investigate the guards’ role in the altercation and determine what diplomatic and legal options, if any, are available for addressing what D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham called a “brutal attack on peaceful protesters.” ...

In video shot in the midst of the attacks, men in suits can be seen punching and kicking protesters, some of whom are already on the ground.

#Erdoğan'ın korumaları kavgaya karıştı https://t.co/gsi1iQ68Ye #amerikaninsesi pic.twitter.com/Jv3g5E7AVA

— Amerika'nın Sesi (@VOATurkish) May 17, 2017

Julian Assange speaks after Swedish prosecutors drop rape case

Feds Hunted Down An Undocumented Immigrant Using Controversial Phone Tracker

As part of a dramatic uptick in the arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants promised by President Trump, the Detroit News reports that FBI and ICE agents used a powerful, secretive device to find Rudy Carcamo-Carranza, a 23-year-old restaurant worker living in Michigan. ...

Stingrays can be used across broad geographic areas, or as in the case of Carcamo-Carranza, to pinpoint a single person. According to an affidavit filed by the FBI’s Violent Gang Task Force and obtained by the Detroit News, federal agents hoped that “locating the target cellular device will assist law enforcement in arresting Carcamo-Carranza” on the basis that he was guilty of “unlawful re-entry after deportation.” The Detroit News notes that despite the involvement of the Violent Gang Task Force, Carcamo-Carranza’s “only brushes with the law involve drunken driving allegations and a hit-and-run crash.” ...

[T]his case, said Nathan Wessler, an attorney and technology expert at the ACLU, is “the first time I’m aware of [Stingray] use in an actual immigration enforcement operation.”

Trump to Pitch Deep Cuts to Anti-Poverty Programs, Medicaid

President Donald Trump plans to propose $1.7 trillion in cuts to a category of spending that includes major social and entitlement programs for lower-income Americans, as part of an effort to balance the budget within a decade. The White House will issue a formal budget request Tuesday that includes $274 billion in cuts over 10 years to means-tested anti-poverty programs, including food stamps, according to a Republican congressional aide and a White House document obtained by Bloomberg News. ...

The upcoming budget request for fiscal 2018, which include dropping the top individual tax rate to 35 percent, is already attracting criticism from Democrats. Trump’s proposal will also call for $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid, the health program for the poor, the Washington Post reported.

Trump is proposing to cut $193 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, over the next decade. The cuts, which would amount to an approximate 25 percent reduction, would be achieved in part by limiting eligibility for food stamps and by requiring work, according to the document. Spending on the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit would also be reduced by $40 billion, in part by requiring proof that recipients are authorized to work in the U.S. Traditional welfare payments, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, would be cut by $21 billion.

Chris Hedges: The Death of the Republic

The deep state’s decision in ancient Rome—dominated by a bloated military and a corrupt oligarchy, much like the United States of 2017—to strangle the vain and idiotic Emperor Commodus in his bath in the year 192 did not halt the growing chaos and precipitous decline of the Roman Empire.

Commodus, like a number of other late Roman emperors, and like President Trump, was incompetent and consumed by his own vanity. He commissioned innumerable statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He used his position as head of state to make himself the star of his own ongoing public show. He fought victoriously as a gladiator in the arena in fixed bouts. Power for Commodus, as it is for Trump, was primarily about catering to his bottomless narcissism, hedonism and lust for wealth. He sold public offices so the ancient equivalents of Betsy DeVos and Steve Mnuchin could orchestrate a vast kleptocracy.

Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax, the Bernie Sanders of his day, who attempted in vain to curb the power of the Praetorian Guards, the ancient version of the military-industrial complex. This effort saw the Praetorian Guards assassinate Pertinax after he was in power only three months. The Guards then auctioned off the office of emperor to the highest bidder. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted 66 days. There would be five emperors in A.D. 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus. Trump and our decaying empire have ominous historical precedents. If the deep state replaces Trump, whose ineptitude and imbecility are embarrassing to the empire, that action will not restore our democracy any more than replacing Commodus restored democracy in Rome. Our republic is dead. ...

The outward forms of democratic participation—voting, competing political parties, judicial oversight and legislation—are meaningless theater. No one who lives under constant surveillance, who is subject to detention anywhere at any time, whose conversations, messages, meetings, proclivities and habits are recorded, stored and analyzed, who is powerless in the face of corporate exploitation, can be described as free. The relationship between the state and the citizen who is watched constantly is one of master and slave. And the shackles will not be removed if Trump disappears.

Amid F-Bomb and Uproar, Dems Face Demands to Get Behind Single Payer

California Democrats on Friday kicked off their three-day convention with a "raucous start" in Sacramento, where a wave of single-payer advocates demanded the party work towards a system that makes healthcare a human right. The gathering comes amid growing momentum nationwide for a single-payer, or Medicare-for-All, healthcare system, and as the Republican's widely scorned American Healthcare Act (AHCA) is days away from receiving its potentially problematic Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment.

In a evening rally and march that went from the capitol to the Sacramento Convention Center, a crowd of nurses and other healthcare activists urged support for SB562—the advancing Healthy California Act—which would create a universal health system for Californians, and could "send a message" and "be a catalyst for the nation."

.@RoseAnnDeMoro and @ninaturner for #SinglePayer, #SB562 "Don't wait for the Dems to lead. You, the activists, need to lead!" #FridayFeeling pic.twitter.com/lFFeOOMj5B

— RoseAnn DeMoro (@RoseAnnDeMoro) May 20, 2017

Of the fight for single payer, RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, which organized the action, thinks California Democrats "cannot be in denial anymore that this is a movement that can primary them."

Their message, however, was not warmly received by California Democratic Party chairman John Burton. Video captured and posted to Twitter by Politico reporter David Siders shows Burton telling them to "shut the fuck up and go outside."

'Shut the fuck up and go outside,' #CADem17 chair John Burton tells protesters b4 @TomPerez speaks pic.twitter.com/aKwhXl9n1u

— David Siders (@davidsiders) May 20, 2017

Senate Moves Forward With Bipartisan Bill to Rein in Jeff Sessions

Bluntly calling out Attorney General Jeff Sessions' hard-line stance on criminal justice as "wrong," a "mistake" and "aggressive," Senators Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, and Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, have pledged to fight for sentencing reform.

"We've been working on trying to get rid of some of the injustice of mandatory minimums and give judges more discretion," Paul said in a telephone press conference Wednesday. The Justice Safety Valve Act, introduced to the Senate by Paul, Leahy and Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley, would empower federal judges to give out sentences below the mandatory minimum in certain cases. The law could go a long way towards neutralizing Attorney General Jeff Sessions' memo, issued earlier this month, directing prosecutors to seek the toughest possible sentences, even in cases of non-violent drug offenders. The memo rolls back the criminal justice reforms that took place during the Obama administration. ...

Paul and Leahy pointed out that rather than keep Americans safe, the drug war Sessions seems eager to revive ties judges' hands and needlessly ruins lives, all while being very costly to taxpayers. "We know it doesn't work, now we're trying to get something done that does work," Paul said.

Melting permafrost has flooded the global seed vault

The Global Seed Vault, which has been called “the Noah’s Ark of plant diversity,” has flooded after the permafrost around it thawed. The frozen safe house, designed to protect the seeds of tens of thousands of food crops from global disaster, opened in 2008 in Svalbard, Norway. The vault hold seeds from every country in the world to safeguard agriculture against man-made or natural disaster. ...

Encased in permafrost, the earth around the vault that has been frozen for thousands of years was meant to protect the seeds indefinitely. But according to The Guardian, unusually warm temperatures and heavy rain flooded the entrance to the vault — although the water didn’t reach the seeds inside. ...

Work is now underway to waterproof the tunnel that leads to the vault. Electrical equipment that was warming the tunnel has been removed and new pumps are being added. Workers are also digging channels to divert water away from the vault.

Exxon Climate Fraud Investigation Widens Over Missing 'Wayne Tracker' Emails

The probe of ExxonMobil by the New York Attorney General's Office is widening. Investigators have taken depositions of company executives and issued additional subpoenas to determine whether the company may have destroyed evidence connected to an alias email used by former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson.

The disclosure was made Friday in arguments filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a Manhattan federal court. He is seeking dismissal of a request by Exxon for an injunction that would halt his investigation into the oil giant involving whether it misled shareholders and the public about the risks of climate change.

Attorneys for Schneiderman did not elaborate in the 25-page document on the scope of the expanded investigation other than to suggest that it involved the recent disclosure that Tillerson, now U.S. secretary of state, used an email alias when discussing issues including climate change and the risk that it posed to the company.

New York and Massachusetts investigators denounced the company's attempt in federal court to derail their parallel inquiries as a vexatious legal tactic that has no chance of succeeding. "So far, this federal action's primary purpose has been to investigate the NYOAG's Investigation," the New York brief states. The filings by Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey represent the first round in a series of legal jousts expected over the course of the summer before U.S. District Court Judge Valerie Caproni.

Also of Interest

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

The Open Secret of Foreign Lobbying

How China Lobby Shaped America

Israel Lobby Pays the Political Piper

Saudis Win Hearts by Lining Pockets

All Power to the Banks! The Winners-Take-All Regime of Emmanuel Macron

Why Bernie Sanders Wasn’t Invited to CAP’s Ideas Conference

As Trump Travels to Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom’s D.C. Lobbying Surge Is Paying Off

Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas Has a Problem with Science – and with Voters

Someone Just Edited Seth Rich’s Reddit Posts

If Kim Dotcom Produces The Goods, Mainstream America Will Be Forced To Wake Up

The Off Ramps Never Used

Can Australia Please Stop Being Washington’s Bitch And Help Assange Now?

President Mike Pence? Dems should be 'careful what they wish for', experts say

A photojournalist spent months documenting
the next big pipeline fight in Louisiana

A Little Night Music

Big Joe and his Rhythm - It Ain't No Lie

Big Joe and His Rhythm - Your Money Can't Buy Me

Big Joe (McCoy) and his Rhythm - I'm All Right Now

Big Joe & His Rhythm - Oh Red's Twin Brother

Big Joe (McCoy) and his Rhythm - Sleeping By Myself

Harmon Ray w/ Big Joe & His Rhythm - Bessie Lee

Big Joe & his Rhythm - Got To Go Blues

Big Joe (McCoy) and his Rhythm - Come Over And See Me

Big Joe & his Washboard Band - When You Said Goodbye