Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features tunes that I ran across while putting together other features. Enjoy!

“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”

-- Victor Hugo

News and Opinion

When The Ideas That Run The World Change

Key ideologues created neoliberal thought long before Thatcher and Reagan. When things go to hell (stagflation is the end point of the 70s) for long enough, people become willing to change ideologies.

They choose from the available ideas. Ideas with muscle and money, or which appeal to elites (if the elites aren’t being changed), have a better chance. But the key point is that if your ideas aren’t there, and being considered in the crisis period, you’ve already lost.

The conservatives were and are right: ideas have consequences. Ideas are powerful. Next to physical facts, they are probably the most important factors in human existence (every invention is an idea first.)

We are probably in a transition period. If we aren’t, we will be soon. Take this into account. Whoever wins this transition period will rule, if not the world, then a significant chunk of it. Everyone else will be working out their ideas; resisting them or trying to do something orthogonal to avoid them. ...

Meantime, transition period, ho. Get to work, your enemies (and you have enemies) are.

UK, US and France may be complicit in Yemen war crimes – UN report

Britain, the US and France may be complicit in war crimes in Yemen by arming and providing support to a Saudi-led coalition that starves civilians as a war tactic, a United Nations report has said.

A UN panel of experts has for the first time compiled a list of 160 military officers and politicians who could face war crimes charges, including from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Houthi rebel movement and Yemeni government military forces. A secret list of those most likely to be complicit has been sent to the UN. ...

The UN panel, which includes a Briton, Charles Garraway, found the Saudi team had failed to hold anyone accountable for any strike killing civilians, raising “concerns as to the impartiality of its investigations”.

It also described the Saudi assessment of the targeting process as “particularly worrying, [since] it implies that an attack hitting a military target is legal, notwithstanding civilian casualties, hence ignoring the principle of proportionality”. ...

Set up by the UN human rights council two years ago, the panel appears determined to introduce some individual accountability into the conduct of the war.

Lawmakers make new push to end Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen

A group of Republican and Democratic lawmakers is making a new push to end the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen amid intensifying criticism of the air war following an attack on a rebel-run prison that may have killed more than 100 people Sunday.

The lawmakers’ goal is to prohibit U.S. logistical support for the coalition’s airstrikes through an amendment to the annual defense policy bill, a move that they hope would effectively ground the air campaign by banning the U.S. provision of spare parts that Saudi Arabia needs to maintain its planes. The measure would also restrict certain forms of intelligence-sharing.

The amendment, first presented by Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, already passed in the House’s version of the defense authorization, and now members of both chambers are pressing their colleagues not to remove it during conference negotiations with the Senate. ...

U.S. officials have long called for a political solution to end the war, but the Trump administration also has increasingly framed the conflict in terms of a larger regional standoff with Iran. ...

Pentagon officials argue that a decision last year to halt aerial refueling of Saudi jets has limited military support. But the United States continues to share certain intelligence on Yemen with Saudi Arabia, even as it moves ahead with massive arms sales to the kingdom.

The U.S. Deal With the Taliban Already Looks Like a Disaster

On Monday night, Zalmay Khalilzad, the top U.S. negotiator in Afghanistan, went on TV in Kabul and said he had agreed to a deal “in principle” to end America’s longest-running war and see the U.S. withdraw 5,400 troops from the country by the start of next year.

Within hours of the interview being broadcast, a Taliban suicide bomber strapped a bomb to a tractor and drove it into an international compound in Kabul. The resulting explosion killed 16 people and injured 100. The Taliban quickly claimed credit, saying the attack was designed to target foreigners as retribution for U.S. attacks on Afghan civilians.

The U.S. has held nine rounds of talks with the Taliban in an effort to end the 18-year conflict. But Monday's attack was a clear message that the Taliban has no intention of ending the cycle of daily violence that has taken a huge toll on Afghan civilians.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, told Tolo News that in exchange for the troop withdrawal, the Taliban agreed that Afghanistan would never again be used as a base for militant groups seeking to attack the U.S. and its allies.

The Atlantic Council wants more war, please:

Afghanistan: current US withdrawal plan risks 'total civil war', top envoys say

The majority of America’s ambassadors to Afghanistan since the removal of the Taliban government have condemned the US approach to negotiating a troop withdrawal, warning it risked a return to “total civil war”. Writing the day after a draft agreement was announced, the nine men, including a former deputy secretary of state, said they supported peace talks in Afghanistan.

But they warned the current approach risks spawning more violence and insecurity, because negotiators have cut the Afghan government out of discussions and have planned the departure of US troops before sealing a full peace agreement.

“We believe that US security and values, including support for women, require that a full troop withdrawal come only after a real peace,” said the open letter, published by the Atlantic Council.

Trump administration, military officials at odds over CIA's Afghanistan role

The Trump administration and military officials may be in disagreement over the choice to keep CIA presence in Afghanistan if troops are pulled from the nation, according to a Monday New York Times report.

The Times reports that some White House advisers have proposed secretly expanding the agency's presence in the nation - a move that some current and former officials have expressed skepticism about.

Some officials told the paper they want CIA-backed forces in the country as part of a counterterrorism force. They claim it could quell worries that the U.S. will be left with little ability to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a base of operations if the U.S. pulls troops, as President Trump suggested will happen last week.

But others, such as Seth G. Jones, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former adviser to the commanding general of American Special Operations forces in Afghanistan, tell the Times they are skeptical of the plan, which they said could be impractical and ineffective.

Current and former officials told the Times that for CIA militias to be effective, some American military teams would need to remain in the country.

CrossTalk on Brexit: BoJo & Europe

Boris Johnson to seek election after rebel Tories deliver Commons defeat

Boris Johnson has announced that he will ask parliament to support plans for a snap October general election after suffering a humiliating defeat in his first House of Commons vote as prime minister. Former cabinet ministers including Philip Hammond and David Gauke were among 21 Conservative rebels who banded together with opposition MPs to seize control of the parliamentary timetable on a dramatic day in Westminster.

The move was aimed at paving the way for a bill tabled by the Labour backbencher Hilary Benn, which is designed to block a no-deal Brexit by forcing the prime minister to request an extension to article 50 if he cannot strike a reworked deal with the EU27.

Johnson lost the vote by 328 to 301, a convincing majority of 27 for the rebels.

The PM had earlier described the legislation, drawn up by a cross-party coalition including the senior Tories Oliver Letwin and Dominic Grieve, as “Jeremy Corbyn’s surrender bill”. After his defeat, Johnson said he would never request the delay mandated in the rebels’ bill, which he said would “hand control of the negotiations to the EU”.

If MPs passed the bill on Wednesday, he said, “the people of this country will have to choose” in an election that he would seek to schedule for 15 October. The prime minister will need a two-thirds majority to secure a general election under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, and Jeremy Corbyn quickly made clear his party would not vote for the motion unless and until the anti no-deal bill had passed.

The rebels hope to push the legislation through all its parliamentary stages by the end of the week – though they face a fierce battle in the Lords, where scores of Conservative peers are lining up to table wrecking amendments.

The Purge!

Spanish PM unveils progressive policies to head off snap election

Spain’s acting prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has announced hundreds of progressive policies intended to persuade the anti-austerity Unidas Podemos alliance to back his efforts to form a government and avoid the country’s fourth general election in as many years. Sánchez’s Socialist party (PSOE) won the most seats in April’s general election but fell short of a majority in congress and has refused to govern in coalition with the far-left grouping.

Sánchez has instead suggested a “shared progressive programme” designed to end the standoff and win over Unidas Podemos, unveiling on Tuesday 370 policies including proposals to clamp down on excessive rent rises, introduce low-emission zones in towns and cities, and expand free public nursery education. ...

Iglesias gave the policies a cautious welcome, telling Spanish TV that while they “sounded good”, he and his colleagues would need to study them in detail before making any decisions. Even if Sánchez manages to win over Unidas Podemos – which is far from certain – he would still need the pro-independence Catalan Republican Left party to abstain during the investiture vote.

Tensions between Catalan separatists and pro-unity parties remain high and are likely to rise still further when the supreme court delivers its verdict next month in the trial of the 12 regional independence leaders accused of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds over their alleged roles in the failed bid to secede from Spain two years ago.

If the manoeuvring and horse-trading fail to yield a government by 23 September, another general election will be held on 10 November.

U.S. Journalist & Activist Brandon Lee Shot in Philippines After Being Called “Enemy of the State”

Palestinian student to start classes at Harvard days after being barred from US

A Palestinian student who was denied entry to the US just days before he was scheduled to start classes at Harvard has been admitted to the country. ...

Ajjawi was denied entry on 23 August after spending eight hours in Boston Logan international airport. He had been living in Lebanon. The 17-year-old freshman said the denial had to do with politically oriented social media posts by friends.

A non-profit that awarded Ajjawi a scholarship said the US embassy in Beirut reviewed his case and reissued his visa.

A Guy Sued an Alabama Clinic Over His Girlfriend’s Alleged Abortion. A Judge Just Threw the Case Out.

A lawsuit once thought to be the first to give an aborted fetus legal rights has been tossed. Madison County Circuit Judge Chris Comer dismissed a case Friday originally brought by Ryan Magers against the Alabama Women’s Clinic, over an abortion that Magers’ girlfriend had allegedly received there in 2017.

Comer concluded that Magers can’t ask for monetary damages for wrongful death under Alabama law because, as an attorney for the clinic pointed out in July arguments, abortion remains legal in the state.

In July, Comer told both sides that he expected his decision to be appealed — regardless of which side he supported. Magers’ lawsuit is also among the first to take advantage of a 2018 Alabama ballot measure that made Alabama the first state in the nation to add a “fetal personhood clause” to its constitution. Under that measure, Alabama’s constitution now recognizes “the rights of unborn children, including the right to life.”

'Flat-Out Lying': Critics Reject Biden Effort to Re-Write History on His Support for US Invasion of Iraq

Count his role in supporting the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as another part of Joe Biden's long political career that the former vice president—who voted for the war as a senator—doesn't quite remember correctly.

In an interview with NPR published Tuesday morning, Biden told reporter Asma Khalid that he opposed the war from the very moment it began in March of 2003 despite voting for its authorization just months earlier.

Biden said that he believed then-President George W. Bush's claim that Bush needed the threat of war to pressure Iraq to give up its weapons program and therefore voted for the authorization to use military force. But once Bush unleashed the "shock and awe" bombing campaign on the country, the former senator said he had a drastic change of heart.

"Immediately, that moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment," said Biden.

As Khalid pointed out in her report from the interview, that's not backed up by the historical record:

In multiple public remarks made after the invasion began in 2003, Biden openly supported the effort. Biden publicly said his vote was a mistake as early as 2005, but not immediately when the war began in 2003.

"Nine months ago, I voted with my colleagues to give the president of the United States of America the authority to use force, and I would vote that way again today," Biden said in a speech at the Brookings Institution on July 31, 2003. "It was a right vote then, and it'll be a correct vote today."

In a statement, Bush spokesperson Freddy Ford told NPR that Biden was misremembering the events in question. "I'm sure it's just an innocent mistake of memory," said Ford, "but this recollection is flat wrong."

Biden tells @NPR that he turned against the Iraq War as soon as 'shock and awe' started. But 5 months after the invasion, he said "I would vote that way again today....It was a right vote then, and it'll be a correct vote today." https://t.co/RWvMsZP0Eq

— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) September 3, 2019

Biden's continued support for military action—even if he was publicly "against" the war—is no better, Stephen Zunes wrote in April:

Biden supported the subsequent bloody counter-insurgency war for the rest of his Senate career, speaking out against bringing the troops home or even setting a timetable for withdrawal. He even became a major advocate of splitting Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines, seen by most people familiar with the region as very dangerous and irresponsible.

The question asked by NPR was simple, wrote Splinter's Paul Blest on Tuesday, "but because this is Joe Biden giving an interview in the year 2019, he was physically unable to get through the whole thing without saying something that was obviously bullshit." ...

"Biden is flat-out lying," tweeted In These Times editor Sarah Lazare.

Progressive writer Henry Kraemer concurred. "Biden claiming to have been against the Iraq War from the start is arguably the most outlandish lie any Democrat has told this campaign," Kraemer said.

Biden Forgets Obama's Name & Tells Fake War Stories!

'Naked Attack on the Free Press': Trump Allies Reportedly Raising $2 Million for Campaign to Discredit Journalists

Right-wing operatives allied with President Donald Trump are attempting to raise at least $2 million to fund a campaign to discredit journalists and editors at major U.S. media outlets like the Washington Post, Buzzfeed, New York Times, and HuffPost.

That's according to a three-page fundraising pitch for the effort reviewed by Axios, which reported Tuesday that the group of Trump allies "claims it will slip damaging information about reporters and editors to 'friendly media outlets,' such as Breitbart, and traditional media, if possible."

One person involved in raising funds for the campaign, according to Axios, is Republican operative Arthur Schwartz, an informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr. and aggressive defender of the White House. ...

Axios reported that the fundraising effort is a sign that "Trump's war on the media is expanding."

"The prospectus for the new project," according to Axios, "says it's 'targeting the people producing the news.'"

Axios's story comes just over a week after the New York Times reported that network of Trump allies is planning an operation to scour the social media accounts of journalists—as well as members of their families—in an attempt to find and publicize "potentially embarrassing" posts.

Sen. Joe Manchin Is Out, but an Actual Progressive Is Making a Serious Run for West Virginia Governor

After months of deliberation, Sen. Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate and a frequent Donald Trump ally, announced on Tuesday that he will not run for governor of West Virginia in 2020. Manchin’s decision to pass on a challenge to billionaire Republican Gov. Jim Justice practically clears the field for Stephen Smith, a 39-year-old community organizer who is running a progressive-populist campaign like no other in the state’s recent history.

Smith’s anti-establishment campaign, dubbed West Virginia Can’t Wait, recently out-raised all of its Republican opponents — including the incumbent — combined, almost entirely through small-dollar donations. And in late July, his campaign became the first in West Virginia history to unionize, ratifying a collective bargaining agreement with Campaign Workers Guild.

“West Virginia needs a movement, not a king,” Smith’s campaign said in a statement following Manchin’s announcement. “No elected official–not Jim Justice, not Joe Manchin, not me–can save us. We have to save ourselves. So while the media and political class were watching this soap opera unfold, our volunteers were busy building a people’s political machine around the state.” ...

Smith holds many of the standard progressive policy positions, like support for Medicare for All and tuition-free college, but he rejects the progressive label. Instead, he refers to the movement as a “people’s campaign” and explicitly names class enemies.

Conventional wisdom has long held that Democrats in so-called red states should side with conservatives if they want to get re-elected. But Smith’s campaign argues that West Virginia was never “Trump Country” to begin with. It’s the state that handed Trump his second-largest margin of victory in 2016, but it’s also where all 55 counties went for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Voters are often told politics is a contest between the left and the right, campaign manager Katey Lauer said on the strategy call, but the fight they’re picking is an “up-down one” against the wealthy few and the politicians they help elect.

Voting Rights Advocates Celebrate 'Huge Win for Democracy' as NC State Court Strikes Down GOP's Gerrymandered District Map

State officials have two weeks to redraw North Carolina's district map following a unanimous ruling Tuesday by a state court which found that Republicans in the state were guilty of partisan gerrymandering.

Wake County Superior Court ruled 3-0 that the state's map was unconstitutional and must be redrawn immediately—in time for the 2020 elections.

The case was brought by the watchdog group Common Cause after Republicans in the State Assembly drew the map, giving more political power to the voters likely to support them.

How much destruction is needed for us to take climate change seriously?

News of Hurricane Dorian’s first casualty came early on Monday morning from the Bahamas Press. A seven-year old boy named Lachino Mcintosh drowned as his family attempted to find safer ground than their home on the Abaco islands. Dorian is reportedly the strongest hurricane to have ever hit the Bahamas and the second most powerful Atlantic storm on record. Five deaths have been reported so far, and more are likely. The Bahamian MP and minister of foreign affairs, the Honorable Darren Henfield, offered a bleak update form the area he represents to reporters: “We have reports of casualties, we have reports of bodies being seen.”

Rising temperatures don’t make hurricanes more frequent, but they do help make them more devastating. Each of the last five years have seen Category 5 storms pass through the Atlantic, brewed over hotter than usual waters. How many more people have to die before political leaders treat climate change like the global catastrophe it is?

Donald Trump has been rightly criticized for golfing as Dorian devastated the Bahamas and drifted toward the US. But it’s as good a metaphor as any for the way elites across political lines have approached the crisis they have helped create and continue to fuel. One of the cruelest realities of global warming is that the people who have done the least to contribute to it tend to be among the first and worst hit. Nations like the United States have amassed tremendous wealth both by burning fossil fuels and exploiting land and labor from the places most threatened by rising temperatures through slavery, colonialism and their living legacies. Similar inequalities play out within nations, including in the US, where most people’s own carbon footprints are dwarfed by those of the billionaires and fossil fuel executives best equipped to insulate themselves from heavy weather. ...

Greenhouse gases don’t fit neatly within borders. Efforts to curb them can’t either. Like other wealthy countries, the US has a responsibility to pay its fair share for the damage it’s caused to the planet – not through predatory loans or disastrously managed charity but through solidarity. Bernie Sanders’ plan for a Green New Deal pledges $200bn to the GCF, makes climate a centerpiece of American trade and foreign policy and ends fossil fuel financing through institutions like the Import-Export Bank. An extensive, recently released blueprint of a Green New Deal for Europe lays out a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels, accounting for the emissions rich countries export abroad through trade and the need for a thoroughly democratic response to the climate crisis that doesn’t let the governments who have engineered this crisis call all the shots on how the world handles it.

“This Is a Climate Emergency”: Islands Devastated by Dorian Are on the Frontlines of a Dying Planet

Worth a full read:

Why Are Hurricanes Like Dorian Stalling, and Is Global Warming Involved

Hurricanes Harvey and Florence also stalled, leading to extreme rainfall. Research shows it's a global trend. Hurricane Dorian's slow, destructive track through the Bahamas fits a pattern scientists have been seeing over recent decades, and one they expect to continue as the planet warms: hurricanes stalling over coastal areas and bringing extreme rainfall.

Dorian made landfall in the northern Bahamas on Sept. 1 as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, then battered the islands for hours on end with heavy rain, a storm surge of up to 23 feet and sustained wind speeds reaching 185 miles per hour. The storm's slow forward motion—at times only 1 mile per hour—is one of the reasons forecasters were having a hard time pinpointing its exact future path toward the U.S. coast. ...

Recent research shows that more North Atlantic hurricanes have been stalling as Dorian did, leading to more extreme rainfall. Their average forward speed has also decreased by 17 percent—from 11.5 mph, to 9.6 mph—from 1944 to 2017, according to a study published in June by federal scientists at NASA and NOAA. The researchers don't understand exactly why tropical storms are stalling more, but they think it's caused by a general slowdown of atmospheric circulation (global winds), both in the tropics, where the systems form, and in the mid-latitudes, where they hit land and cause damage. ...

How that slowing is connected to global warming is still an area of debate. There are different mechanisms at work in the tropics and mid-latitudes, but, "in the broadest sense, global warming makes the global atmospheric circulation slow down," said NOAA hurricane expert Jim Kossin, co-author of the June study. He said scientists suspect the overall slowing of winds is at least partly due to rapid warming of the Arctic. The temperature contrast between the Arctic and the equator is a main driver of wind. Since the Arctic is warming faster than lower latitudes, the contrast is decreasing, and so are wind speeds. "There is a lot of evidence to suggest this is more than just natural variability," Kossin said.

Keiser Report: If you can’t stand the heat

Any proposal to avert the climate crisis must include a full fracking ban on public and private lands.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) September 4, 2019

Also of Interest

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

Here’s How Much the Democratic Party Charges to Be on Each House Committee

Meet the militantly pro-Israel Trump official directing the economic war on Iran

PMQs verdict: Johnson resorts to machismo and cheap jibes

What Does '12 Years to Act on Climate Change' (Now 11 Years) Really Mean?

Hurricane Dorian hammers the Bahamas – in pictures

Terry Gilliam says he disagrees with John Cleese's worldview

A Little Night Music

Inez & Charlie Foxx - Mockingbird

The Treniers - You Know, Yeah!

The Dixie Cups - Iko Iko

Miriam Makeba - Pata Pata

Trini Lopez - La Bamba

The Diamonds - Little Darlin'

Bobby Comstock - I Want To Do It

The Exciters - The Bag

The Precisions - Why Girl

Chris Montez - Let's Dance