Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues singer, songwriter and tenor saxophone player A.C. Reed. Enjoy!

“All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”

-- Vladimir Lenin

News and Opinion

Glenn Greenwald - worth a full read:

As the Obama DOJ Concluded, Prosecution of Julian Assange for Publishing Documents Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom

The Trump Justice Department inadvertently revealed in a court filing that it has charged Julian Assange in a sealed indictment. The disclosure occurred through a remarkably amateurish cutting-and-pasting error in which prosecutors unintentionally used secret language from Assange’s sealed charges in a document filed in an unrelated case. Although the document does not specify which charges have been filed against Assange, the Wall Street Journal reported that “they may involve the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the disclosure of national defense-related information.”

Over the last two years, journalists and others have melodramatically claimed that press freedoms were being assaulted by the Trump administration due to trivial acts such as the President spouting adolescent insults on Twitter at Chuck Todd and Wolf Blitzer or banning Jim Acosta from White House press conferences due to his refusal to stop preening for a few minutes so as to allow other journalists to ask questions. Meanwhile, actual and real threats to press freedoms that began with the Obama DOJ and have escalated with the Trump DOJ – such as aggressive attempts to unearth and prosecute sources – have gone largely ignored if not applauded.

But prosecuting Assange and/or WikiLeaks for publishing classified documents would be in an entirely different universe of press freedom threats. ... The Obama DOJ – despite launching notoriously aggressive attacks on press freedoms – recognized this critical principle when it came to WikiLeaks. It spent years exploring whether it could criminally charge Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing classified information. It ultimately decided it would not do so, and could not do so, consistent with the press freedom guarantee of the First Amendment. After all, the Obama DOJ concluded, such a prosecution would pose a severe threat to press freedom because there would be no way to prosecute Assange for publishing classified documents without also prosecuting the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and others for doing exactly the same thing.

Last year, the Trump DOJ under Jeff Sessions, and the CIA under Mike Pompeo, began aggressively vowing to do what the Obama DOJ refused to do – namely, prosecute Assange for publishing classified documents. ... But the grand irony is that many Democrats will side with the Trump DOJ over the Obama DOJ. Their emotional, personal contempt for Assange – due to their belief that he helped defeat Hillary Clinton: the gravest crime – easily outweighs any concerns about the threats posed to press freedoms by the Trump administration’s attempts to criminalize the publication of documents. This reflects the broader irony of the Trump era for Democrats. While they claim out of one side of their mouth to find the Trump administration’s authoritarianism and press freedom attacks so repellent, they use the other side of their mouth to parrot the authoritarian mentality of Jeff Sessions and Mike Pompeo that anyone who published documents harmful to Hillary or which have been deemed “classified” by the U.S. Government ought to go to prison. ...

Recall that the DNC itself is currently suing WikiLeaks and Assange for publishing the DNC and Podesta emails they received: emails deemed newsworthy by literally every major media outlet, which relentlessly reported on them. Until this current Trump DOJ criminal prosecution of Assange, that DNC lawsuit had been the greatest Trump-era threat to press freedoms – because it seeks to make the publication of documents, which is the core of journalism, legally punishable. The Trump DOJ’s attempts to criminalize those actions is merely the next logical step in this descent into a full-scale attack on basic press rights.

WikiLeaks Lawyer Warns U.S. Charges Against Assange Endanger Press Freedom Worldwide

A judge just ordered Trump to reinstate CNN’s Jim Acosta’s White House press pass

A federal judge ordered the White House to reinstate CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s credentials Friday after President Donald Trump banned him last week following a tense exchange in a press briefing. U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly said that the Trump administration likely violated CNN and Acosta’s Fifth Amendment rights and also likely caused “irreparable harm” in its conduct. The judge also said that Acosta’s First Amendment rights outweighed the Trump administration’s right to orderly press conferences.

The judge did not rule on the underlying case but granted CNN an injunction to restore Acosta's press pass until the full case is heard in court. ...

While the ruling restores Acosta's access to the White House, Judge Kelly made it clear it is not a ruling on the facts of the case, which have yet to be heard. “I want to emphasize the very limited nature of this ruling,” Judge Kelly said. “I have not determined that the First Amendment was violated here.”

Yemen: Saudi-led coalition orders halt to Hodeidah offensive

The Saudi-led coalition has ordered a temporary halt to its offensive against Houthi rebels occupying Yemen’s main port city, Hodeidah, officials have said, raising hopes that a more lasting ceasefire can be reached to end fighting that threatens to push the country into full-blown famine.

Saudi and UAE-backed militias were told to pause the 12-day-old assault until further notice, several Yemeni military officials said on Wednesday night, adding that the offensive would resume if the Houthis attacked coalition positions. The coalition was prepared to restart its operation, known as Golden Victory, if progress towards new peace talks stalled, a source familiar with coalition operations said.

The decision appears to have been a response to calls from aid agencies for a cessation in hostilities, and to intense shuttle diplomacy efforts by the United Nations and the UK foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt. The UN special envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, is due to give a briefing on Friday. ...

Among the stumbling blocks that scuppered the last negotiations was an unmet Houthi demand for the evacuation of wounded fighters to neighbouring Oman – a request that the coalition has since granted before fresh talks planned for the end of the month in Sweden. Those talks received a boost on Thursday when the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, agreed a deal to allow Houthi negotiators to attend, after a phone call with Hunt.

Despite the pause in the offensive, it is feared ground militias loyal to the exiled Yemeni government will still seek to gain as much ground as possible before talks are scheduled to start. “The battles will not stop, except with the liberation of Hodeidah and the whole west coast,” one military official told AFP.

New Study Details 'Staggering' $6 Trillion (and Counting) Price Tag of Endless US War

While the human costs will remain impossible to calculate, a new analysis shows that the Pentagon barely scratched the surface of the financial costs of U.S. wars since September 11, 2001 when it released its official estimate last August regarding how much the U.S. has spent on fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs reports (pdf) that by the end of the 2019 fiscal year, the U.S. will have spent $5.9 trillion on military spending in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other countries, as well as veterans' care, interest on debt payments, and related spending at the Homeland Security and State Departments.

Our new estimate of how much the “war on terror” has cost since 9/11 is being released today in an event hosted by Senator Reed on Capitol Hill. The grand total: a staggering $5.9 trillion. Read the full report: https://t.co/Jf7ZEZVv8u

— The Costs of War (@CostsOfWar) November 14, 2018

The figure far exceeds the Pentagon's estimate of $1.5 trillion in total spending since September 11—a number that does not even account for combined State Department spending and the Pentagon's war fund, which totals $1.8 trillion according to the Watson Institute.

"We were told to expect wars that would be quick, cheap, effective and beneficial to the U.S. interest," said Neta Crawford, the author of the study, at a news conference hosted by Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) on Tuesday. "The U.S. continues to fund the wars by borrowing, so this is a conservative estimate of the consequences of funding the war as if on a credit card, in which we are only paying interest even as we continue to spend."

Despite already vastly outspending all other nations, report advises massive military spending hikes

Congress commissioned a report from the National Defense Strategy Commission on Pentagon readiness. It is relatively predictable what these reports would boil down to, because they always come down to the same conclusion. Despite vastly outspending every other country in the world on the military, the report concludes that US military superiority “has eroded to a dangerous degree,” and is facing a “crisis.” The solution they counsel is, as ever, a massive increase in military spending.

The report uses the typical scare-mongering to try to justify an increase in expenditures, claiming that the US “might struggle to win, or perhaps lose, a war against China or Russia,” and that the US might be “overwhelmed” in the even of two or more war fronts simultaneously.

'An Insult to the American People': Outrage After Pentagon Fails First-Ever Audit

After years of empty promises and demands from frustrated members of Congress, the Pentagon finally conducted its first-ever comprehensive audit—and unsurprisingly failed it, Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan revealed Thursday.

"We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it," Shanahan told reporters at a press briefing. While expressing irritation with the poor money management, he added, "it was an audit on a $2.7 trillion dollar organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial."

Although a 1990 federal law requires all U.S. government agencies to conduct annual financial audits, the Pentagon put it off until launching this one last December. Critics of the United States' astronomical military spending said the findings were precisely why lawmakers and the public have demanded Defense Department audits for decades.

This is exactly why we must #AuditThePentagon. The unchecked waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon is an insult to the American people. https://t.co/JLe5EKfmXk

— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) November 15, 2018

"The simple truth is that the Pentagon is an atrocious steward of the hundreds of billions of dollars taxpayers give them every year," Win Without War director Stephen Miles told Common Dreams. "Whether it is massively overpaying for spare parts, mismanaging large weapons programs, or failing at the basics business of doing business, this audit confirms that the Pentagon is in dire need of reform," he added. "Throwing endless money at the Pentagon is what has created these problems, and the solution rests in finally tightening the world's largest bureaucracy's fiscal belt."

Even while members of Congress have called for audits, they've passed bipartisan bills doling out billions of taxpayer dollars to the department. The John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2019, passed by lawmakers earlier this year allocated $717 billion to military spending, the bulk of which goes to the Pentagon.

The U.S. joined with Russia, China and North Korea in rejecting cyber pact. Nobody will say why.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday announced a grand accord signed by more than 50 nations and 250 organizations aimed at making the internet a safer place by putting limits on cyberwarfare.

But one key ally was missing from Macron’s new “arms control” for the internet age: The United States of America. Indeed, the U.S. joined a list of renegade countries with which it's typically at odds: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, all of whom have active cyberwarfare campaigns in operation.

The White House has been largely mum on its decision to keep America’s name off the accord, but former government officials and cyber experts say a lack of leadership, an "America First" foreign policy that shies away from multilateral agreements, and a fear of limiting its own offensive cyber capabilities are likely drivers behind the move.

Khmer Rouge leaders face 'Nuremberg judgment' on genocide charges

Two senior leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime will hear on Friday whether they are guilty of genocide charges, in a ruling experts say will bring down the curtain on the troubled UN-backed tribunal’s quest for justice. The Khmer Rouge’s former head of state Khieu Samphan, 87, and “Brother Number 2” Nuon Chea, 92, are the two most senior living members of the ultra-Maoist group that seized control of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The reign of terror led by “Brother Number 1” Pol Pot left about two million Cambodians dead from overwork, starvation and mass executions.

The two defendants were previously handed life sentences in 2014 over the violent and forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975. But Friday’s judgment at the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia (ECCC) will decide whether the pair are guilty of overseeing genocide against ethnic Vietnamese and the Cham Muslim minority, as well as a host of other crimes.

David Scheffer, who served as the UN secretary general’s special expert on the Khmer Rouge trials from 2012 until last month, said: “The verdict is essentially the Nuremberg judgment for the ECCC and thus carries very significant weight for Cambodia, international criminal justice, and the annals of history.”

The revolutionaries who tried to recreate Buddhist-majority Cambodia in line with their vision of an agrarian society attempted to abolish class and religious distinctions by force.

Brexit turmoil: What now for the Conservative Party?

Theresa May’s own party members are plotting to bring her down/h3>

Theresa May is likely to face a vote of no-confidence in her leadership, a move that could see the British prime minister ousted by her own party over Brexit, according to reports Friday. Conservative MP and hardline Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg publicly called for the vote Thursday, which would need the backing of 48 Conservatives to proceed.

Unconfirmed reports emerged Friday morning that the required 48 letters had been received. The editor of the BrexitCentral news site, citing an anonymous source, claimed that the threshold been reached, while Sky News reported that government whips had been ordered to return to London as a no confidence vote was likely.

NYT Investigation: How Facebook Used A Republican Firm to Attack Critics & Spread Disinformation

Trump pretty much just admitted that he picked Whitaker to kill Mueller’s probe

Matt Whitaker’s unprecedented appointment to acting Attorney General has been slammed by legal experts on both sides of the aisle as unconstitutional and solely aimed at quashing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. On Wednesday, President Trump appeared to confirm at least part of his critics’ fears, in a revealing, off-the-cuff interview with the conservative website Daily Caller. ...

Trump said: “I knew him [Whitaker] only as he pertained, you know, as he was with Jeff Sessions. And, you know, look, as far as I’m concerned this is an investigation that should have never been brought. It should have never been had. It’s something that should have never been brought. It’s an illegal investigation. And you know, it’s very interesting because when you talk about not Senate confirmed, well, Mueller’s not Senate confirmed.”

Trump’s latest comments could add further evidence to a potential accusation that he obstructed justice — a question Mueller has also been tasked with investigating — according to three legal experts who spoke with VICE News.

Ohio Republicans just passed a “heartbeat” abortion bill even though the governor already vetoed it

Ohio’s Republican-controlled House passed one of the strictest abortion bills in the country Thursday, two years after Republican Gov. John Kasich — who has a track record of opposing abortion rights — vetoed the same bill.

The legislation, known as a “heartbeat bill,” prohibits abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detectable or as soon as six weeks, which is often before someone knows they’re pregnant. The language also makes no exceptions for rape and incest. The bill now heads to the Republican-controlled Senate and then likely, to Kasich’s desk, although it’s unclear if he’d veto again. The bill passed passed 58-35, just two votes short of having the option to override the governor’s veto.

Kasich has signed 18 abortion restrictions into law during his time as governor, according to the Dayton Daily News, but he wouldn’t put his stamp of approval on the heartbeat bill the state legislature passed in 2016. Kasich did sign a separate measure, however, that outlawed abortion after 20 weeks unless the mother’s life is in danger. If Kasich does veto this version, Republicans could also try again under incoming Republican governor Mike DeWine, who said outright that he would sign the bill.

Kentucky: white man charged with hate crimes after two black shoppers shot dead

A federal grand jury in Kentucky has charged a white man with three hate crimes in the shooting deaths of two African Americans last month at a grocery store.

The US attorney Russell Coleman announced the indictment on Thursday in Louisville against 51-year-old Gregory Bush. Bush is charged with three hate crimes, one for each person who was killed and one for attempting to shoot another person based on race or color. He was also charged with three firearms counts. He could face the death penalty if convicted. Bush was indicted previously in state court on two counts of murder and other charges. He pleaded not guilty.

Bush had stopped at a historically black church near the Kroger supermarket chain in suburban Louisville. Failing to get into the church, which was locked, he headed to the grocery. There, 69-year-old Maurice Stallard and 67-year-old Vicki Lee Jones were killed.

US civil rights agency decries Trump administration’s lax approach to police violence

America’s lead governmental civil rights body on Thursday issued a sharp rebuke to the Trump administration’s lax approach to police violence, recommending that the government “return to vigorous enforcement of constitutional policing”. The recommendations, from the US Commission on Civil Rights (CCR), came just a day after members of the American Public Health Association (APHA) took the unprecedented step of officially recognizing police violence as a “critical” public health issue. The national organization’s membership includes more than 25,000 public health professionals. ...

The Trump administration cooled federal oversight of troubled police departments under former attorney general Jeff Sessions who, until being fired earlier this month, aggressively pushed away from the kind of federal interventions his predecessors had embraced for investigating departments accused of widespread racism or excessive use of force.

In his last act as Trump’s attorney general, Sessions made it harder for the US justice department to monitor troubled local police departments, by curtailing the attorney general’s ability to enforce court mandated reforms known as consent decrees. Consent decrees had been used under the Obama administration to rein in a number of departments, including in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, following violent unrest in the wake of the killings of unarmed black men by police officers.

Who, Us? Corporate Media Ignore Their Role in Trump’s Refugee ‘Invasion’ Panic

Left-wing media critics documented these failures almost in real time. Joshua Holland at The Nation (10/25/18) noted in late October how Trump was all but acting as the de facto segment producer for all those ubiquitous cable news panel shows that were spending all their time discussing a few thousand asylum seekers that were more than a thousand miles from the US southern border. Likewise, a study by the liberal media research site Media Matters (11/2/18) found that Trump might as well have been the front-page assignment editor for elite newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times, which simply couldn’t resist the siren song of his manufactured crisis. In all, those two papers published nearly 30 different stories about the migrant caravan on their respective A1 pages in the two weeks before Election Day. And on three different days, the Times devoted two front-page stories to what Trump had not-so-subtly began calling an “invasion.”

What is most striking, however, is the Post and Times’ unmistakable cognitive dissonance and institutional blindspot about this coverage. Throughout the weeks leading up to Election Day, these two news organizations dedicated analysis, blogs and opinion pieces—mostly online—to detailing the naked gamesmanship and misinformation behind Trump using the migrant caravan as a campaign bogeyman. But then the papers’ front pages and their “straight” political coverage routinely used Trump’s assumptions as the premises for framing their stories.

Case in point: On October 25, the Washington Post ran a business section analysis (10/25/18)—“Why False Narratives About the Migrant Caravan and Mail Bombs Won’t Go Away on Social Media—and an online factcheck (10/25/18)—“A Caravan of Phony Claims From the Trump Administration”—that sought to debunk the many lies and conspiracy theories fueling the migrant caravan narrative. But neither of these pieces bothered to look at how the Post’s own flood-the-zone coverage was exacerbating the story and giving it the oxygen to make the conspiracy theories more relevant. ...

This lack of self-awareness wasn’t confined to the Post. This week, New York Times White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Mark Landler wrote a similarly obtuse analysis piece (11/13/18) about the migrant caravan as campaign issue. ... However, this Times story also doesn’t bother to look in the mirror. In fact, it fails to mention the words “press” or “media” even a single time, although it does take what could be construed as an oblique potshot at cable news with a brief mention that the “caravan having faded from television screens.” Nowhere is there any mention of the 14 front page stories—averaging one a day—that their own newspaper ran on the migrant caravan in the two weeks before Election Day. ...

Just as with the corporate media’s obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 election — at the expense of robust policy coverage — what’s really at issue here is the broader framing and messaging the press sends through its disproportionate focus. If the last month is any indication, establishment news organizations like the Post and the Times still haven’t learned the key lessons about their flawed 2016 election coverage. And so they continue to fall for the feints of a president who leverages their deference for authority to mainline hate and bigotry in the service of his and his party’s political fortunes.

How Amazon's HQ2 Scam Screwed The Entire Country

New York is kicking a bunch of public school employees out of their offices to make room for Amazon

New York’s “progressive” leaders are moving public school employees out of their offices to make room for Jeff Bezos. More than 1,000 New York City public school employees will lose their offices to accommodate Amazon’s new secondary headquarters in Queens, a school official confirmed to VICE News.

The city’s Office of Pupil Transportation, Division of School Facilities, and Office of Food & Nutrition Services will be evicted from their current building in Long Island City, which will be taken over by Amazon as part of its HQ2 plan involving additional co-headquarters in Queens and Crystal City, Virginia. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, both Democrats, jointly announced their controversial plan to welcome Amazon to the city while offering the world’s most valuable company huge tax breaks.

Tomorrow's cartoon pic.twitter.com/qn4UbTPAVV

— Bill Bramhall (@BillBramhall) November 13, 2018

Amazon HQ2 Will Cost Taxpayers at Least $4.6 Billion, More Than Twice What the Company Claimed, New Study Shows

Amazon's announcement this week that it will open its new headquarters in New York City and northern Virginia came with the mind-boggling revelation that the corporate giant will rake in $2.1 billion in local government subsidies. But an analysis by the nation’s leading tracker of corporate subsidies finds that the government handouts will actually amount to at least $4.6 billion. But even that figure, which accounts for state and local perks, doesn’t take into account a gift that Amazon will also enjoy from the federal government, a testament to the old adage that in Washington, bad ideas never die.

The Amazon location in Long Island City, in the New York City borough of Queens, is situated in a federal opportunity zone, a Jack Kemp-era concept resurrected in the 2017 tax law that, in theory, is supposed to bring money into poverty-stricken areas. The northern Virginia site, in the Arlington neighborhood of Crystal City (which developers and local officials have rebranded as “National Landing”), is not directly in an opportunity zone but is virtually surrounded by other geographic areas that are.

Under the tax overhaul signed by President Donald Trump last year, investors in opportunity zones can defer payments of capital gains taxes until 2026, and if they hold them for seven years, they can exclude 15 percent of the gains from taxation. If investors carry the opportunity zone investment for 10 years, they eliminate taxes on future appreciation entirely. Investment managers have been salivating at the chance to take advantage of opportunity zones. Special funds have been built to cater to people holding unrealized capital gains — such as Amazon employees with large holdings of company stock.

Not only could Amazon benefit from the opportunity zone directly in Long Island City, but Virginia employees with unrealized capital gains will have an escape valve next door to an Amazon campus. “People who happen to be sitting around with long-term capital gains may now have vehicles for hiding them,” said Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that scrutinizes economic development incentive deals between cities and companies, and has analyzed the Amazon deal.

Florida: Senate race stays on knife edge as hand recount ordered

Florida’s election torment is set to continue after officials ordered a hand recount of ballots in the knife-edge US Senate race between the Republican Rick Scott and the Democrat Bill Nelson. After a troubled machine recount finished on Thursday, Scott had a lead of 12,603 votes, or 0.15 percentage points – within the threshold of 0.25 points that by state law triggers a manual recount. But the eagerly watched and acrimonious race for governor appeared to be over, with the Republican Ron DeSantis virtually assured of victory over Democrat Andrew Gillum, according to unofficial results posted on the Florida secretary of state’s website. Gillum, bidding to become the state’s first African American governor, did not have enough votes to force a manual recount.

Scott, currently the state’s governor, tweeted: “With the statewide machine recount finished, our margin of victory has increased by nearly 1000 votes. @SenBillNelson, it’s time to admit this race is over.” But there was no sign of Nelson throwing in the towel. His lead campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, announced a lawsuit against Palm Beach county, which failed to meet the recount deadline due to malfunctioning equipment.

“We have sued Palm Beach County and the Florida Sec of State to require a hand count of all ballots in the county due to systematic machine failure during the machine recount,” he tweeted. Elias also noted that Hillsborough and Broward counties were reporting incomplete results. “We are monitoring the situation but we will take steps to ensure that every lawful vote is counted.”

As chaos reigned, it emerged about three hours after the 3PM machine recount deadline that the heavily populated and Democratic-leaning Broward county had also missed the deadline – by two minutes - meaning the frantic process there was for naught. The county had previously claimed a successful recount, with Brenda Snipes, the county’s widely criticised elections supervisor, initially telling reporters: “We are excited to be at this point.” The Florida secretary of state will now use the first count totals from Palm Beach and Broward. ... But if the final statewide result narrows down to a few thousand votes, the blunders could prove costly and prompt yet more legal challenges.

'Stunning': After Court Rejects GOP Lawsuit, Democrat Wins as Maine Becomes First State to Use Ranked-Choice Voting in National Race

Maine's 2nd congressional district made history Thursday afternoon as it named Jared Golden the winner of his race for incumbent Rep. Bruce Poliquin's (R-Maine) seat, after the state used ranked-choice voting for the first time in a national race to determine the winner.

Shortly after a federal judge rejected Poliquin's lawsuit in which he attempted to halt the ranked-choice voting (RCV) process, election officials forged ahead in their tabulation of ballots and found that Golden won 50.53 percent of the vote, compared to Poliquin's 49.47 percent.

"The first time ranked-choice voting is used in the state of Maine [and] we'll have an instance where it will have made a difference—this is stunning," Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford University, told the Portland Phoenix ahead of the vote tabulation. "Either way it's going to validate the logic of it, and it's going to make for fairer elections."

Maine voters reaffirmed their support for RCV last June—after a previous vote in favor of the system was blocked by the legislature—ensuring that voters in the 2nd district could rank the four candidates for Poliquin's seat in order from their favorite to least favorite when they went to the polls on Election Day.

Trump Endorses Pelosi For Speaker

Policies of China, Russia and Canada threaten 5C climate change, study finds

China, Russia and Canada’s current climate policies would drive the world above a catastrophic 5C of warming by the end of the century, according to a study that ranks the climate goals of different countries.

The US and Australia are only slightly behind with both pushing the global temperature rise dangerously over 4C above pre-industrial levels says the paper, while even the EU, which is usually seen as a climate leader, is on course to more than double the 1.5C that scientists say is a moderately safe level of heating.

The study, published on Friday in the journal Nature Communications, assesses the relationship between each nation’s ambition to cut emissions and the temperature rise that would result if the world followed their example. The aim of the paper is to inform climate negotiators as they begin a two-year process of ratcheting up climate commitments, which currently fall far short of the 1.5-to-2C goal set in France three years ago.

US oil firm's bid to drill for oil in Arctic hits snag: a lack of sea ice

Plans to establish the first oil drilling operation in US Arctic waters have hit an ironic snag – a lack of sea ice caused by rapid warming in the region.

Last month, the Trump administration approved the go-ahead of the Liberty project to extract oil from beneath the Beaufort Sea, off Alaska’s north coast. The drilling would be the first of its kind in federal waters in the Arctic and follows Trump’s reversal of an Obama-era ban on fossil fuel activity in the polar region. But in order to get to the oil, Hilcorp Energy, the Texas-based company behind the project, has to construct a temporary gravel island about five miles offshore so it can drill in shallow water.

This nine-acre structure requires an expanse of landfast sea ice, or ice that forms each winter and attaches to the coast, which would then be covered in gravel and then concrete. However, a recent lack of shoreline ice has complicated Hilcorp’s plan to extract up to 70,000 barrels of oil a day, totaling around 150m barrels over two decades, from the site.

A spokesman for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which oversees offshore leasing, said Hilcorp originally forecast it would take a year to construct the island. But this plan has now been revised due to thinning sea ice, as first reported by Alaska Public Media. “To safely transport gravel offshore in the Arctic, the ice along the route of the ice road must be of adequate thickness,” the BOEM spokesman said. “Over the last few years, that thickness has not developed until unusually late in the season.” Hilcorp has now added another year to its timeline to get the drilling island completed, he said.

As 'Green New Deal' Demand Grows, Democrats Have Choice: Confront and Defeat Fossil Fuel Industry or Take Credit for 'Doomed' Planet

With Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) fighting to win back her position as House Speaker in the coming congressional term, climate action groups and the new contingent of progressives on Capitol Hill are arguing that with their new power in Congress, Pelosi and other Democrats must make clear whether they will decide to boldly push for visionary climate solutions like the Green New Deal or fail humanity and the planet by continuing their servitude to the fossil fuel industry.

Weeks after the UN released its report on the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions in order to avoid "potentially irreversible" effects of the climate crisis, critics say Democrats have the opportunity to stand firmly on the side of progressives who are advocating for a Green New Deal in order to help save the planet—instead of continuing to rely on incremental measures aimed simply at "exploring" the climate crisis. The Green New Deal is comprised of an ambitious set of proposals aimed at transitioning the U.S. to 100% renewable energy and employing millions of Americans to aid that transition. ...

As dozens of protesters who crowded into Pelosi's office on Tuesday said, the potential Speaker and other Democrats must use this pivotal moment—in which they control the House as well as having total legislative control of 14 states—to fight for a Green New Deal and against funding from the fossil fuel industry.

Pelosi has announced her intent to re-establish a Select Committee on Climate Change, which the Republicans eliminated in 2011—but the Sunrise Movement, which organized the sit-in, has scoffed at the notion that the panel was ever a sufficient means of addressing the crisis at hand. "It had no funding and no ability to put forward legislation—its purpose was to make connections and raise awareness. The time for messaging to the public about climate change is over, we need action," Varshini Prakash, Sunrise's co-founder, told Grist.

As California Fires Worsen, Environmentalists Demand a Green New Deal

Investigations point to energy corporation’s negligence in California wildfire

An investigation is now underway that will assess the culpability of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) in starting the Camp Fire, now the deadliest wildfire in the history of California. The company acknowledged Tuesday that it had submitted an “electric incident report” to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) on November 8, moments before the wildfire broke out. The report detailed a power failure on a transmission line in Butte County at 6:15 a.m., 15 minutes before the fire was reported as starting in the same area. ...

In a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, PG&E stated that if its equipment was found responsible for starting the fire, the cost of the damage would exceed its insurance coverage and hurt its financial standing. The company’s shares fell 21 percent on the following day. Its stock has fallen by 53 percent in total since the fire broke out.

Affected residents have filed a lawsuit against PG&E at the San Francisco Superior Court, accusing the company of negligence. “Rather than spend the money it obtains from customers for infrastructure maintenance and safety,” states the official complaint, “PG&E funnels this funding to boost its own corporate profits and compensation.” Oakland attorney Michael Danko, representing the plaintiffs, claims to have “overwhelming” evidence that PG&E is to blame. In addition to the incident report the company filed to the CPUC, Danko cites “witnesses who saw the fire start on a transmission line” as well as a resident who received an email from the utility a day before the fire broke out notifying her of sparking lines. ...

In addition to PG&E’s role in the Camp Fire, state regulators have also begun a probe into Southern California Edison (SCE) for its possible role in sparking the Woolsey Fire. SCE is a subsidiary of Edison International, a corporation with $41.44 billion in total assets. The CPUC has stated that the company’s electrical infrastructure may have broken down near ground zero of the blaze. On Thursday, SCE issued an incident report to the CPUC alerting that a substation circuit near the fire’s origin sent a “protective relay,” a function designed to trip a circuit breaker in the event of a malfunction such as over-current or over-voltage. The notification was sent automatically just two minutes before the inferno began.

While the culpability of either utility is yet to be proven, it is widely known that energy companies throughout the US routinely employ cheap materials and unsafe practices in the interest of cost-cutting. The vast majority of power in the US is circulated through overhead, rather than underground, power lines. Overhead lines, which are cheaper to build and maintain, are known to be a contributor to wildfires.

Also of Interest

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

Chuck Schumer Caved to Facebook and Donald Trump. He Shouldn’t Lead Senate Democrats.

Occupying Office of Another Key Democrat, Climate Activists Say "Best Chance at Survival" for Humanity Is Green New Deal

Caribbean swamped by seaweed that smells like rotten eggs

Billion-dollar US energy firm opposes Trump plan to roll back mercury rules

Jeff Bezos tells employees 'one day Amazon will fail'

A Little Night Music

A.C. Reed - Come On Home

A.C. Reed - I Got Money To Burn

A.C. Reed - I Wanna Be Free

A.C. Reed - Boogaloo Tramp

A.C. Reed - My Baby Been Cheatin'

Earl Hooker (A.C. Reed vocals) - She's Fine

Muddy Waters (A.C. Reed sax) - Tough Times

A. C. Reed - Talkin 'bout My Friends

A.C.Reed and the Sparkplugs 1994 1 of 3

A.C. Reed and the Sparkplugs 1994 2 of 3

A.C. Reed and the Sparkplugs 1994 3 of 3