Suger Coats-ing The Problem, Con't

Over the weekend I noted that Donald Trump was moving to get rid of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats for the crime of protecting America's voting systems from Russian hackers:

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats has installed a new czar to oversee election security efforts across the spy world, he announced on Friday. 

A veteran agency leader, Shelby Pierson, has been appointed to serve as the first election threats executive within the intelligence community, or IC, Coats said.

"Election security is an enduring challenge and a top priority for the IC," said Coats.

"In order to build on our successful approach to the 2018 elections, the IC must properly align its resources to bring the strongest level of support to this critical issue. There is no one more qualified to serve as the very first election threats executive than Shelby Pierson, whose knowledge and experience make her the right person to lead this critical mission."

That was apparently too much for Trump as he's now actively looking for Coats's replacement.

President Donald Trump recently spoke to top House Intelligence Republican Devin Nunes about replacements for the country’s intelligence chief — the latest sign that Dan Coats’ tenure may be short-lived.

Nunes, who grabbed national attention with his controversial allegations of Obama administration surveillance abuses, met with Trump and other senior White House officials last week to discuss who could take over for Coats at the Office of Director of National Intelligence, according to three people familiar with the get-together.

Coats has run ODNI since early in the Trump administration, but his job security is the subject of constant speculation, especially after he gave public testimony on North Korea, Iran and Syria that divergedfrom Trump’s prior comments on the issues. The ODNI chief oversees the government’s intelligence agencies, coordinates the country’s global information-gathering operation and frequently briefs the president on threats each morning.

The meeting between Trump and Nunes has only fueled more chatter about Coats’ departure. The pace of Trump’s discussions with allies about potential replacements has ramped up in recent weeks, the people said.

Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who served as national security adviser John Bolton’s chief of staff, has been discussed as a possible ODNI replacement. Fleitz left his White House post in October 2018 to serve as president and CEO of the Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank that has been sharply critical of “radical Islam.”

Some within the intelligence community have also promoted the ODNI’s current No. 2, Sue Gordon, as be a logical replacement for Coats. Gordon is a career intelligence official who is generally well-liked within the organization.

Fleitz is one of Bolton's anti-Muslim warmongers who would almost certainly get us into war with Iran, and Gordon has made it clear she believes Silicon Valley should be collecting data for the US government.  But the real danger may be Nunes himself getting the job.

Trump and Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, are closely aligned on intelligence issues. Both have pushed accusations that career officials — particularly under the Obama administration — have been misusing their power to target political enemies and manipulating intelligence findings for political purposes.

Because of these similar views, some on Capitol Hill and in the intelligence community think Nunes himself could be in the mix for an intelligence post, even if it’s not at ODNI.

“The president would certainly consider Devin Nunes for the director’s position and I eventually see him serving in some capacity in this administration,” said one member of Congress who speaks to Trump frequently. He noted, however, that he sees “all of Devin’s efforts being directed towards a reelection effort in Congress.”

Such speculation has provoked some anxiety at the top of ODNI, according to one person with direct knowledge.

Nunes, who served on Trump’s presidential transition team, made national headlines within the intelligence community in early 2017 when serving as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Nunes made a much-discussed “midnight run” to the White House in March 2017 to obtain what he described as classified information. He later said that information bolstered accusations that the Obama administration had improperly “unmasked” the names of Trump associates whose conversations were vacuumed up by intelligence agencies monitoring foreign agents’ communications in 2016. Normally, the names of U.S. citizens who show up in intelligence reports are kept secret unless there is an overwhelming national security need to expose them.

Let's not forget Nunes has already helped Trump obstruct justice.  Now he may end up as America's top spymaster as a reward.

Regardless, if Coats is replaced, and it seems more a matter of when and not if, expect the new DNI's first act to be rolling back that election threats czar.

We can't have anybody dedicated to stopping Russia's manipulation of Trump's re-election, can we?

The Sad, Sad State Of Statehood

The vast majority of Americans remain against DC statehood in a new Gallup poll with 64% against and only 29% for, even the majority of Democrats are against it, as are self-described liberals, voting rights and representation for the District's mostly black residents be damned.

The latest results are based on a June 19-30, 2019, Gallup poll, conducted in advance of congressional hearings on a bill to make Washington, D.C., a state. Although the Constitution does afford Washington, D.C., electoral votes in presidential elections, the district does not have a voting member in the House or Senate. Moreover, Congress has the ability to review and to block any policies passed by the Washington, D.C., mayor and city council.

A 1978 proposed constitutional amendment to grant Washington, D.C., voting representation in Congress failed, and in 1993 the U.S. House of Representatives voted against legislation to make the nation's capital a state. In 2016, D.C. residents approved an advisory referendum supporting statehood. Earlier this year, the House included a nonbinding endorsement of statehood for D.C. among various good-governance proposals. A separate bill proposed by Washington Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton to grant the district statehood will be taken up by a House committee later this year. Even if successful in the House, the bill has little chance of being considered by the Republican-led Senate.

No major subgroups of Americans voice support for D.C. statehood. However, support is higher among left-leaning political groups than right-leaning ones. Self-described liberals (40%) and Democrats (39%) are among the groups showing higher support. Republicans (15%) and conservatives (14%) are among the subgroups least supportive. Thirty percent of independents approve of making D.C. a separate state.

Given Washington's strong Democratic leanings, making it the 51st state would almost certainly add one voting Democrat to the House and two to the Senate, and that likelihood may underpin Republicans' reluctance to make it a state.

There were modest party differences in 1992, when 24% of Democrats and 16% of Republicans favored making Washington a state, according to the Yankelovich survey.

DC statehood has never been popular for a number of reasons, but there's no conceivable way Republicans would ever allow it anyway. Besides, the DC statehood hearing in the House this week was postponed to clear the decks for the Mueller testimony on Wednesday.

I figure it'll probably be postponed indefinitely.  It's a political loser in an era where all the House Democratic leadership can produce is political losers that don't get Senate votes.

Not even Democrats want to fight for it.

StupidiNews!

• Marine researchers have found the lost French naval submarine Minerve, which disappeared more than 50 years ago off the French Mediterranean coast with 52 hands aboard.
• Iran says it has captured 17 CIA spies sentencing several to death, according to state media, this following an announcement last month that Iran had broken up a US spy ring.
• UK voters took to the polls Monday and have elected Boris Johnson as the country's next Prime Minister, Johnson will take over for Theresa May on Wednesday afternoon following her resignation.
• Venezuela's Information Minister is blaming saboteurs for a nationwide power blackout on Monday, the government says an "electromagnetic attack" has crippled the power grid.
• Legendary NASA flight director and engineer Chris Kraft has passed away at age 95, Kraft was NASA's first flight director and ran the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions.

Last Call For It's Still Mueller Time, Con't

Ahead of Wednesday's scheduled testimony by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Trump Regime is warning that anything not in the unredacted text of the Mueller Report is either classified or protected by executive privilege, and that Mueller cannot speak a word of it.

In extensive discussions since the former special counsel was subpoenaed to testify on June 25, department officials have emphasized that they consider any evidence he gathered throughout the course of his investigation to be “presumptively privileged” and shielded from public disclosure.

The Justice Department is “taking the position that anything outside the written pages of the report are things about which presidential privilege hasn’t been waived,” the former U.S. official said.

The White House and the Justice Department, meanwhile, have signaled they don’t intend to place lawyers in the room during Mueller’s highly-anticipated testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees on Wednesday.

Without a presence at the hearing, administration officials would have little recourse to prevent Mueller from going off-script and revealing details of his investigation that the White House considers off-limits. They are poised instead to rely on Mueller to self-police his remarks, indicating that they are confident the former special counsel will stick to carefully planned comments that mirror the public results of his investigation.

Their stance cuts against President Donald Trump’s own protestation that Mueller shouldn’t be allowed to testify, which he reiterated on Monday. “Highly conflicted Robert Mueller should not be given another bite at the apple,” Trump said in a Monday morning tweet.

The president has accused Democrats of trying to conduct a “do-over” of Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — a probe that he has falsely claimed “exonerates” him.

Mueller’s posture will likely deprive Democrats of an opportunity to get a clear answer from Mueller about whether he would have charged Trump with obstruction of justice if he were not the president — a reference to Mueller’s adherence to a Justice Department policy prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president — and other burning questions.

But some Democrats have said that even if Mueller simply reads from his report word-for-word, it would help educate the American public about Trump’s attempts to thwart the Russia probe.

Jim Popkin, a spokesman for Mueller, said he was unsure whether Mueller was in contact with the Justice Department about aspects of his investigation that the administration believes would be off-limits during his testimony.

“In terms of DOJ and the Hill, there have been discussions for purposes of scheduling and clearly … to understand what the expectations are,” Popkin told POLITICO. “But they have not seen the [opening] statement. They’ve not provided the statement to either DOJ or anyone in the House.”

Popkin emphasized that Mueller’s opening statement “will stick to the four walls of the report as much as that is possible.”

Mueller himself has stated that his congressional testimony would not go beyond what is contained within his report.

Considering 90% of America has no idea whatsoever what's actually in the text of the Mueller Report, it's not a bad idea to read the best parts to America live on TV.  But the second Mueller does that, House Republicans are going to scream bloody murder and try to interrupt or even end the hearings outright, and if House Republicans can't end the hearings, I fully expect Trump Regime lawyers will show up with US Marshals in tow to escort Mr. Mueller out of the building.

In other words, I don't expect much Wednesday other than a comic mess of House Republicans acting badly on TV, and we know for a fact that Americans simply don't care about that.

Finally, it was Mueller himself who asked for clarification from Attorney General Barr and the DoJ, and they gave it to him.  He never planned on going outside the "four walls" of the unredacted Mueller probe, but most likely the GOP will act like he did anyway, especially when he refuses to answer GOP questions about Peter Strzok texts or Carter Page.

We'll see what goes down, but I would keep expectations low.  America has made up its mind that Trump isn't worth getting rid of.

She Has A Plan For That, Too

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is openly warning of an economic disaster headed our way (something I definitely agree with her on) saying that legislation is needed now in order to stave off the worst of the coming recession's effects.

“Warning lights are flashing. Whether it’s this year or next year, the odds of another economic downturn are high — and growing,” Warren (D-Mass.) wrote in a Medium post entitled "The Coming Economic Crash--And How to Stop It."

“I see a manufacturing sector in recession. I see a precarious economy that is built on debt — both household debt and corporate debt — and that is vulnerable to shocks. And I see a number of serious shocks on the horizon that could cause our economy’s shaky foundation to crumble,” she wrote.

Most of Warren’s proposals to head off the crisis are policies she has called for recently on the campaign trail such as forgiving over $600 billion in student loan debt, enacting her “Green Manufacturing Plan”, strengthening unions, providing universal child care and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

It is almost certain that President Donald Trump will not sign and the Republican-led Senate will not pass these policies, meaning that Warren’s prediction of a crash will likely be tested over the next two years.

The Democratic presidential candidate’s forecast of economic tumult flies in the face of much political conventional wisdom stating that Trump’s biggest re-election advantage is the economy. Unemployment levels recently hit a 50-year low, the majority of Americans think the economy is “good” or “excellent” and that it‘s a good time to find a job according to Gallup. The stock market continues to break records every few months.

The Trump administration and Republican allies in Congress often point to the economy’s performance as evidence of the president’s good stewardship even in the midst of self-created controversies and divisive policies. Trump himself often brags about the economy as well. Just last week on Twitter, he said the economy was “the best in our Country’s history” with the “Best Employment & Stock Market Numbers EVER”and that he has led the United States to the “Greatest Economic BOOM in the history of our Country.”

But Warren has long been arguing that the economy is not as strong as the toplines suggest. “The overall numbers about GDP or the stock market are great but they don’t reflect the lived experiences of most Americans,” she told reporters in May after a town hall in Nashua, N.H. “Go around a room like this. For most people, wages haven’t gone up in a generation and yet the cost of housing, the cost of health care, the cost of childcare, the cost of sending a kid to college have all gone through the roof. The middle class squeeze is real and it has gotten tougher for people over the last few years.”

Warren is correct on both accounts, and the warning signs in the bond and corporate lending markets are screaming alarms that we're in a 2006 scenario ahead of another 2008 meltdown.  And of course, the Trump regime's lax regulation of banks have only made this much worse.

Either way, we'll see if Warren is correct, because the Trump regime has no intention of passing anything.

The Aftermath Of Maria, Con't

Things have gotten so bad in Puerto Rico that Gov. Ricardo Rosello has left his party and will not seek re-election as the island calls for his resignation amid massive protests.

Puerto Rico’s governor on Sunday said he would not seek re-election next year but refused to resign as the island braced for more protests by demonstrators demanding he step down over leaked chat messages.

A day before a planned general strike and street demonstrations in the bankrupt U.S. territory, Ricardo Rossello, 40, said he respected the wishes of Puerto Ricans and would not seek a second term in November 2020 elections.

He also said he would resign as head of the New Progressive Party (PNP) but would remain as governor until the end of his term in January, 2021.

“I know that apologizing is not enough,” Rossello said in a video posted on Facebook. “A significant sector of the population has been protesting for days. I’m aware of the dissatisfaction and discomfort they feel. Only my work will help restore the trust of these sectors and lead the way to real reconciliation.”

His comments drew outrage from the many Puerto Ricans, with videos on social media showing San Juan residents leaning out of apartment windows banging pots and pans in a third day of so-called “cacerolazo” protests.

The July 13 publication of offensive chat messages between Rossello and top aides has unleashed simmering resentment over his handling of devastating 2017 hurricanes, alleged corruption in his administration and the island’s bankruptcy process.

“‘#Resign Ricky isn’t just a call for him to resign from the party, but from his seat as the top official,” tweeted Linda Michelle, an industrial engineer and Puerto Rico radio personality. “Whoever wasn’t sure about going to the march tomorrow has now made up their mind to go.”

Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative to the U.S. Congress, as well as Democratic presidential candidates and lawmakers have called for the governor to step aside after nine days of sometimes violent protests.

“Once again: Rosselló must resign,” tweeted U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in response to his video.

But Puerto Rico’s Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz, a member of the pro-statehood PNP, said Rossello’s actions “put an end to part of the controversies and trauma hitting our people” and his ruling party now had to rebuild confidence in their leadership.

In the online chats revealed by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism, the center-right governor and his top allies referred to politicians, celebrities and ordinary Puerto Ricans in misogynistic, homophobic and offensive terms.

The speaker of Puerto Rico’s house of representatives appointed an independent panel on Friday to investigate whether the chats warranted impeachment and gave it 10 days to deliver a report.

And my only question is where's the general strike in the US?  Where's the massive protests?  Where's the impeachment inquiry here stateside?

Why aren't we treating Trump like Rossello?

StupidiNews!

• British swimmer Adam Peaty has beaten his own 100-meter breaststroke record with the world's first time under 57 seconds.
• Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Hong Kong once again to demonstrate against Carrie Lam and her government as China considers much stronger crackdown measures.
• House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler says that the Mueller Reports "presents very substantial evidence" that Donald Trump should be impeached ahead of Wednesday's Muller testimony.
• In the wake of national elections, Philippines President Duterte says he will focus on "killing drug lords" as he wants to mandate the death penalty for convicted drug dealers.
• New York has passed a Green News Deal package of energy jobs and alternative power sources, including a major push for an offshore wind farm.

Last CallTrump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Rep. Elijah Cummings made it clear just how racist Donald Trump is talking with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week, and it's something Democrats need to be saying on a daily basis.

Rep. Elijah Cummings on Sunday said the events of the week since President Donald Trump’s “go back” tweet aimed at four progressive congresswomen of color reminded him of being a 12-year-old growing up in 1962 Baltimore.

“We were trying to integrate an Olympic-size pool near my house and we had been constrained to a wading pool in the black community,” the Maryland Democrat told George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s “This Week.” “As we tried to March to that pool over six days, I was beaten, all kinds of rocks and bottles thrown at me. And the interesting thing is that I heard the same chants. ‘Go home, you don't belong here.’ And they called us the ‘N‘ word over and over again.”

Cummings’ anecdote came days after a Trump rally in North Carolina during which some of the crowd chanted “send her back” in reference to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), an American citizen who was born in Somalia. Trump on Friday said that crowd was filled with “incredible patriots.”

“What it does, when Trump does these things it brings up the same feelings that I had over 50-some years ago and it's very, very painful,” the House oversight chairman said. “It's extremely divisive and I don't think this is becoming of the president of the United States of America.”

Cummings said though he has been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, he believes Trump is a racist, “no doubt about it.”

He also said he took issue with Trump’s tweet Sunday morning, which was along the same lines of the rhetoric the president has been doubling down on since last Sunday.

“I don’t believe the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our Country,” Trump tweeted. “They should apologize to America (and Israel) for the horrible (hateful) things they have said. They are destroying the Democrat Party, but are weak & insecure people who can never destroy our great Nation!”

Cummings rebuked Trump’s tweet and called the four progressive congresswomen — Omar, Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — “some of the most brilliant young people” he’s met.

“When you disagree with the president, suddenly you're a bad person,” Cummings said. “Our allegiance is not to the president, our allegiance is to the constitution of the United States of America and the American people."

It was bad enough in 2002 when dissent was enough to cost you a career.  When we get into that inevitable shooting war with Iran, what I'm afraid of is that dissent is going to be enough to cost you everything up to and including your life.

Some 82% of Republicans agree with Trump's "send her back" tweets.

They're all terrible people.

Coming Up Dry

It's a good thing 2020 Democrats taking on Trump are pulling in major fundraising hauls individually, collectively outraising Trump by two to one, because Tom Perez and the Democratic National Committee are doing an abysmal job of it at the national level, and that's a massive problem heading into House, Senate, and state races that will decide redistricting for the next decade.

The Democratic National Committee is getting smoked by its GOP counterpart in fundraising — and some major Democrats are panicked it could hurt their chances at defeating President Trump next year.

The DNC brought in just $22.9 million over the last three months including $9.5 million in June, according to a campaign finance report filed Saturday night with the Federal Election Commission. That’s less than half the Republican National Committee’s haul over the same time period: $51 million.

The DNC had just $9.3 million in the bank at the end of June, less than a quarter the $44 million RNC had — and that doesn’t even factor in the DNC’s $5.7 million in debt. The RNC and President Trump’s campaign had a combined $100 million in the bank.

The huge cash disparity puts Democrats behind the eight-ball in the time-and money-consuming process of building out strong voter contact programs in the states that will determine whether Trump gets reelected.

“They need to get their shit together. Now,” said Adam Parkhomenko, a Hillary Clinton campaign alumna who served as the DNC’s national field director for the final few months of the 2016 campaign.


READ: House Republicans are pressuring Amazon to carry books on gay conversion therapy

“When Hillary became the nominee in 2016 she was handed nothing, the DNC was nothing and there was nothing to build on,” he said. “You’d think we would have spent the last few years making sure this would never happen again, and it has.”

Trump’s campaign and the RNC are already using their massive cash advantage to sow the ground for next year’s election, spending more than $60 million this year alone on digital operations including $10 million on ads and building out a ground game infrastructure that takes months if not years to develop.

Democrats can’t keep up.

Tom Perez isn't the right person for the job.  Ironically, for all her other faults, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was a much better fundraiser, but overall the Dems have been outraised in every election this decade.

While their top presidential candidates are raising big money, the tedious years-long work of building out party voter files, identifying voters’ top concerns, and turning them out to vote is the purview of the national party, the DNC. The party’s current lack of cash could hamstring their eventual nominee and hurt down-ticket candidates, especially in states that aren’t presidential battlegrounds and are especially cash-strapped.

“This is a real problem that our party and the major donors are not facing,” said Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb, who said her party hasn’t “received a dime yet” of money the DNC promised to them earlier in the year and hasn’t been able to hire field staff she’d planned on.

The party’s fundraising woes began long before DNC Chairman Tom Perez took over in early 2017. The DNC has been outraised by the RNC in every two-year campaign cycle since 2010, following a disastrous move by President Obama to spin off his own campaign into a separate operation, starving the party of resources for years.

“Under President Obama we completely ignored our state and DNC infrastructure and now we’re paying a major price,” said Kleeb.

Other hurdles face the DNC. The GOP always has a natural advantage with big donors as the party of big business and billionaires. Small-dollar donors are rarely eager to give to a committee instead of a candidate — and the DNC’s perceived bias towards Clinton in the 2016 primaries badly damaged the DNC’s image. Democrats don’t have the White House, so they don’t have a fundraiser-in-chief, and a crowded presidential field is sucking up most donor attention and resources.

Democrats credit Perez for cleaning up some of the mess he inherited. The party has grown from 30 to 200 employees as fundraising has improved, and the DNC recently hired 1,000 rising college seniors to be full-time organizers after graduation.

The committee parted ways with longtime finance chairman Henry Muñoz in early May and replaced him with Chris Korge, a major Democratic Party donor. Under Korge, the DNC raised $3.2 million more in June than May. But with the Democratic National Convention just a year away, Perez is running out of time to right the ship.

“The one thing that has been changed is they replaced their finance chair with a guy who’s a very good money-raiser,” said former DNC Chairman Ed Rendell.

Korge argued the DNC is hitting its internal fundraising marks and promised it would raise more than it did during the 2016 cycle. While he admitted the GOP would vastly outraise them, he pointed out that the DNC and Clinton outspent the RNC and Trump by a wide margin in 2016 and Trump still won.

Dems continue to flub the farm team aspect of this and have for ten years.  It's how we lost the decade to Trump and the GOP, and unless a miracle happens, we will lose it to them again for another decade. 

The country won't survive that.  Not as a democracy.

Sunday Long Read: Membership Has Its Privileges

This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from NY Times Magazine and Yale poetry professor Claudia Rankine, who unpacks white male privilege by asking white men what they knew they could do in society that other groups could not.

In the early days of the run-up to the 2016 election, I was just beginning to prepare a class on whiteness to teach at Yale University, where I had been newly hired. Over the years, I had come to realize that I often did not share historical knowledge with the persons to whom I was speaking. “What’s redlining?” someone would ask. “George Washington freed his slaves?” someone else would inquire. But as I listened to Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric during the campaign that spring, the class took on a new dimension. Would my students understand the long history that informed a comment like one Trump made when he announced his presidential candidacy? “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” When I heard those words, I wanted my students to track immigration laws in the United States. Would they connect the treatment of the undocumented with the treatment of Irish, Italian and Asian people over the centuries?

In preparation, I needed to slowly unpack and understand how whiteness was created. How did the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person,” develop over the years into our various immigration acts? What has it taken to cleave citizenship from “free white person”? What was the trajectory of the Ku Klux Klan after its formation at the end of the Civil War, and what was its relationship to the Black Codes, those laws subsequently passed in Southern states to restrict black people’s freedoms? Did the United States government bomb the black community in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921? How did Italians, Irish and Slavic peoples become white? Why do people believe abolitionists could not be racist?

I wanted my students to gain an awareness of a growing body of work by sociologists, theorists, historians and literary scholars in a field known as “whiteness studies,” the cornerstones of which include Toni Morrison’s “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,” David Roediger’s “The Wages of Whiteness,” Matthew Frye Jacobson’s “Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race,” Richard Dyer’s “White” and more recently Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History of White People.” Roediger, a historian, had explained the development of the field, one that my class would engage with, saying, “The 1980s and early ’90s saw the publication of major works on white identity’s intricacies and costs by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, alongside new works by white writers and activists asking similar questions historically. Given the seeming novelty of such white writing and the urgency of understanding white support for Ronald Reagan, ‘critical whiteness studies’ gained media attention and a small foothold in universities.” This area of study aimed to make visible a history of whiteness that through its association with “normalcy” and “universality” masked its omnipresent institutional power.

My class eventually became Constructions of Whiteness, and over the two years that I have taught it, many of my students (who have included just about every race, gender identity and sexual orientation) interviewed white people on campus or in their families about their understanding of American history and how it relates to whiteness. Some students simply wanted to know how others around them would define their own whiteness. Others were troubled by their own family members’ racism and wanted to understand how and why certain prejudices formed. Still others wanted to show the impact of white expectations on their lives.

Perhaps this is why one day in New Haven, staring into the semicircle of oak trees in my backyard, I wondered what it would mean to ask random white men how they understood their privilege. I imagined myself — a middle-aged black woman — walking up to strangers and doing so. Would they react as the police captain in Plainfield, Ind., did when his female colleague told him during a diversity-training session that he benefited from “white male privilege”? He became angry and accused her of using a racialized slur against him. (She was placed on paid administrative leave, and a reprimand was placed permanently in her file.) Would I, too, be accused? Would I hear myself asking about white male privilege and then watch white man after white man walk away as if I were mute? Would they think I worked for Trevor Noah or Stephen Colbert and just forgot my camera crew? The running comment in our current political climate is that we all need to converse with people we don’t normally speak to, and though my husband is white, I found myself falling into easy banter with all kinds of strangers except white men. They rarely sought me out to shoot the breeze, and I did not seek them out. Maybe it was time to engage, even if my fantasies of these encounters seemed outlandish. I wanted to try.

Weeks later, it occurred to me that I tend to be surrounded by white men I don’t know when I’m traveling, caught in places that are essentially nowhere: in between, en route, up in the air. As I crisscrossed the United States, Europe and Africa giving talks about my work, I found myself considering these white men who passed hours with me in airport lounges, at gates, on planes. They seemed to me to make up the largest percentage of business travelers in the liminal spaces where we waited. That I was among them in airport lounges and in first-class cabins spoke in part to my own relative economic privilege, but the price of my ticket, of course, does not translate into social capital. I was always aware that my value in our culture’s eyes is determined by my skin color first and foremost. Maybe these other male travelers could answer my questions about white privilege. I felt certain that as a black woman, there had to be something I didn’t understand.

And so Rankine sets about to try to understand it, and it's one of the best reads I've had the pleasure of absorbing so far this year.

Hack The Planet, Con't

Somebody figured out that if the US intelligence community uses relatively hackable contractors that could be weak information security leaks, the same scenario applies to our Russian friends as well.

Red faces in Moscow this weekend, with the news that hackers have successfully targeted FSB—Russia's Federal Security Service, making off with 7.5 terabytes of data which exposed secret projects to de-anonymize Tor browsing, scrape social media, and help the state split its internet off from the rest of the world. The data was passed to mainstream media outlets for publishing.

A week ago, on July 13, hackers under the name 0v1ru$ reportedly breached SyTech, a major FSB contractor working on a range of live and exploratory internet projects. With the data stolen, 0v1ru$ left a smiling Yoba Face on SyTech's homepage alongside pictures purporting to showcase the breach. 0v1ru$ then passed the data itself to the larger hacking group Digital Revolution, which shared the files with various media outlets and the headlines with Twitter—taunting FSB that the agency should maybe rename one of its breached activities "Project Collander."

Digital Revolution has targeted FSB before. It is unknown how tightly the two hacking groups are linked.

BBC Russia broke the news that 0v1ru$ had breached SyTech's servers and shared details of contentious cyber projects, projects that included social media scraping (including Facebook and LinkedIn), targeted collection and the "de-anonymization of users of the Tor browser." The BBC described the breach as possibly "the largest data leak in the history of Russian intelligence services."

As well as defacing SyTech's homepage with the Yoba Face, 0v1ru$ also detailed the project names exposed: "Arion", "Relation", "Hryvnia," alongside the names of the SyTech project managers. The BBC report claims that no actual state secrets were exposed.

The projects themselves appear to be a mix of social media scraping (Nautilus), targeted collection against internet users seeking to anonymize their activities (Nautilus-S), data collection targeting Russian enterprises (Mentor), and projects that seem to relate to Russia's ongoing initiative to build an option to separate the internal internet from the world wide web (Hope and Tax-3). The BBC claims that SyTech's projects were mostly contracted with Military Unit 71330, part of FSB's 16th Directorate which handles signals intelligence, the same group accused of emailing spyware to Ukranian intelligence officers in 2015.

Nautilus-S, the Tor de-anonymization project, was actually launched in 2012 under the remit of Russia's Kvant Research Institute, which comes under FSB's remit. Russia has been looking for ways to compromise nodes within Tor's structure to either prevent off-grid communications or intercept those communications. None of which is new news. It is believed that some progress has been made under this project. Digital Revolution claims to have hacked the Kvant Research Institute before

The preparatory activities for splitting off a "Russian internet," follow Russian President Vladimir Putin signing into law provisions for "the stable operation of the Russian Internet (Runet) in case it is disconnected from the global infrastructure of the World Wide Web." The law set in train plans for an alternative domain name system (DNS) for Russia in the event that it is disconnected from the World Wide Web, or, one assumes, in the event that its politicians deem disconnection to be beneficial. Internet service providers would be compelled to disconnect from any foreign servers, relying on Russia's DNS instead.

There is nothing newsworthy in the projects exposed here, everything was known or expected. The fact of the breach itself, its scale and apparent ease is of more note. Contractors remain the weak link in the chain for intelligence agencies worldwide—to emphasize the point, just last week, a former NSA contractor was jailed in the U.S. for stealing secrets over two decades. And the fallout from Edward Snowden continues to this day.

As anyone who works in the information security field can tell you, the biggest problem is people slipping up and putting data where it can be accessed, not getting around firewalls and security measures. Doesn't take much to break into your house if you leave the key under the mat.

Shame though that the Russians got hit by their own game.  Just a crying shame.

Last Call For The Late, Great, Planet Earth, Con't

Icelandic climatologists are mourning the country's first recordable glacier loss as the planet heats up and the Trump regime stands firmly athwart the globe as the world's biggest villain.

Iceland has lost its first glacier to rising temperatures. Now, scientists from Rice University and Iceland are planning to install a plaque near the sad pile of ice and snow formerly known as Ok Glacier. The researchers say it’s the first memorial to a disappearing glacier, but climate change ensures it almost certainly will not be the last.

laciers are more than just ice. They’re defined by receiving more mass from snow than they lose from summer melt, which allows them to slide down mountains and grind up rock. Climate change has, of course, changed the equation by causing more glacial melting, causing ice to recede around the world. An increasing number of glaciers have turned into stagnant, rotten ice patches or disappeared completely. The OK Glacier reached the latter status in 2014, making it the first glacier in Iceland to disappear. Researchers expect all glaciers to melt away by 2200 on the island, which led to them memorializing Ok.

The plaque will be installed on August 18 near Ok’s former stomping grounds in western Iceland. The plaque contains a melancholy message for future generations:

Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.

It also includes the figure “415 ppm,” a reference to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere recorded in May this year. Because the world keeps emitting carbon pollution, that record will be broken next year. But putting it on a plaque is perhaps the most poignant reminder of the choices we face. And this summer is a particularly somber atmosphere to do it.

The northern parts of the globe have borne the brunt of the rapid rise in carbon dioxide, warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. This summer has been one for the record books in particular, with Arctic heat helping drive this June to be the hottest June ever recorded. July is slated to follow suit and quite likely become the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. From Canada to Alaska to Siberia to Greenland, the impacts of the rising heat have become clearer than ever this summer. Installing an ode to a dead glacier in Iceland is the perfect eulogy to the increasingly imperfect world.

As the US east of the Mississippi broils under July heat this weekend, with temperatures in Cincinnati reaching the mid-90s today and tomorrow, the reminder is to get user to miserable summers like this, as they will be the new normal going forward.

We're not going to do a damned thing about it until it's far too late.

The Drums Of War, Con't

The military situation in the Strait of Hormuz just got significantly worse this week as Iran upped the stakes in retaliation for US sanctions by seizing a British oil tanker.

Britain on Saturday threatened Iran with “serious consequences” for seizing a British-owned oil tanker the previous evening as the government warned ships to avoid the crucial shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz.

The British government said in a statement after an emergency meeting that it had “advised U.K. shipping to stay out of the area for an interim period.”

The crisis has caught Britain at a singularly vulnerable moment. Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to resign on Wednesday. A leadership contest within the governing Conservative Party to determine her successor has all but paralyzed the government. And now the uncertainty about Britain’s internal direction is compounding the problem of forming a response to Iran’s seizure of the tanker.

The British defense minister, Penny Mordaunt, said in a television interview on Saturday that the ship had been intercepted in Omani, not Iranian, waters and called the seizure “a hostile act.” By Saturday afternoon, Britain had summoned the Iranian ambassador to register its protest, and a second emergency cabinet meeting was set to begin.

The capture of the tanker — two weeks after British forces impounded an Iranian tanker near Gibraltar — sharply escalates a crisis between Iran and the West after three months of rising tensions that last month brought the United States within minutes of a military strike against targets in Iran. A fifth of the world’s crude oil supply is shipped from the Persian Gulf through the narrow Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran, and oil prices spiked sharply on Friday even before the British warning.

But the next moves in the showdown over the tanker are likely to turn on the outcome of the British leadership contest, and the favorite, Boris Johnson, a flamboyant former mayor of London and former foreign minister, is famously unpredictable.

In other words, the odds of a joint US/UK operation against Tehran with the newly minted PM at the helm wanting to show strength (and Donald Trump definitely wanting to bury the Mueller testimony scheduled for this week on Capitol Hill) are significant.

I don't know for sure how this will shake out, but we already know Trump tried to attack Iran once and stood down for whatever reason.  A second such fake-out won't be in the cards, and when Trump does pull the trigger, all bets are off.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

What a surprise, as Donald Trump has now disavowed his disavowing of the "send her back" chant at his racism rally earlier this week, playing the village media for fools once again and laughing all the way home.

President Donald Trump has reversed his previous criticisms of a North Carolina campaign crowd that chanted “send her back” about a Somali-born congresswoman.

Trump on Friday defended the rally-goers as “patriots” while again questioning the loyalty of four Democratic lawmakers of color. His comments marked a return to a pattern that has become familiar during controversies of his own making: ignite a firestorm, backtrack, then strongly reaffirm his original, inflammatory position.

When reporters at the White House asked if he was unhappy with the Wednesday night crowd, Trump responded: “Those are incredible people. They are incredible patriots. But I’m unhappy when a congresswoman goes and says, ‘I’m going to be the president’s nightmare.’”

It was another dizzying twist in a saga sparked by the president’s racist tweets about Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who moved from Somalia as a child, and her colleagues Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.

The moment took an ugly turn at the rally when the crowd’s “send her back” shouts resounded for 13 seconds as Trump made no attempt to interrupt them. He paused in his speech and surveyed the scene, taking in the uproar, though the next day he claimed he did not approve of the chant and tried to stop it.

But on Friday, he made clear he was not disavowing the chant and again laced into Omar, the target of the chant.

“You can’t talk that way about our country. Not when I’m president,” Trump said. “These women have said horrible things about our country and the people of our country.”

Two observations: First, I really hope somebody in Congress makes an issue of the overtime Donald Trump is directly causing while Capitol Police will beef up protective services around these four Democratic Congresswomen.  The potential for someone to get hurt here is massive.

Second, if Barack Obama had ever directed the words "You can’t talk that way about our country. Not when I’m president" to a white Republican in Congress, he would have been impeached and removed from office by the end of the week.

But as you all know by now, the racism is the selling point to the racist who voted for Trump.

Sugar Coats-ing The Problem

Last week Donald Trump made it clear that he not only wanted to fire Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, but eliminate the office Coats is occupying entirely as well.

President Donald Trump is reportedly planning a shakeup of his national security team. The news site Axios reported Friday that Trump is planning to oust Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and, along with several other outlets, identified the president’s preferred replacement as Fred Fleitz, John Bolton’s former deputy and a former CIA analyst best known for his association with a far-right, anti-Muslim think tank.

If appointed, Fleitz could play a key role in reducing the importance of the office itself—further empowering Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the process. A source told Axios that Trump wants to “downsize” the office and considers it “an unnecessary bureaucratic layer,” an argument identical to the one Fleitz made in a 2016 op-ed for the National Review. “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has developed into a huge additional layer of bureaucracy,” he wrote, “with far too many officials, that has made American intelligence analysis and collection less efficient and more risk-averse.”

With the Pentagon lacking a permanent leader since December and the National Security Council being remade in Bolton’s hawkish image, the intelligence community remains one of the few areas of the national security establishment that thus far has maintained some independence from Trump, (who compared intelligence analysts to Nazis just nine days before taking office). And that may be one reason Trump is eager to shake things up. He has long marginalized Coats, a former diplomat and Republican senator from Indiana, who leads the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies and serves as the president’s senior intelligence adviser. Trump “doesn’t listen to” Coats anymore, Axios reported, though their apparent lack of communication has been evident for quite some time. At the Aspen Security Forum last year, Coats acknowledged that he was unaware of Trump’s invitation for President Vladimir Putin of Russia to visit the White House and would have advised against it. A Senate hearing in January, in which Coats and other intelligence leaders exposed several contradictions between the views of the intelligence community’s and that of the President, provoked a series of angry presidential tweets. In them, Trump derided Coats and other intelligence leaders and told them to “go back to school.”

A big clue as to why Trump suddenly want Coats and the Director of National Intelligence position gone came up yesterday when the notoriously independent Coats decided to actually do something about the fact nobody was protecting US election systems against foreign hackers.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats has installed a new czar to oversee election security efforts across the spy world, he announced on Friday.
A veteran agency leader, Shelby Pierson, has been appointed to serve as the first election threats executive within the intelligence community, or IC, Coats said.

"Election security is an enduring challenge and a top priority for the IC," said Coats.

"In order to build on our successful approach to the 2018 elections, the IC must properly align its resources to bring the strongest level of support to this critical issue. There is no one more qualified to serve as the very first election threats executive than Shelby Pierson, whose knowledge and experience make her the right person to lead this critical mission."

Pierson has served within the intelligence world for more than 20 years. She was "crisis manager" for election security for the 2018 election within the office of the DNI and also has served in top roles in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, according to one official biography.

Her appointment isn't the only change Coats announced on Friday. He also is directing other agencies within the extended family of spy services to appoint their own executives responsible for election security efforts.
"These agency leads will work with the [election threats executive] to help ensure IC efforts on election security are coordinated and prioritized across all IC elements," Coats said.

Needless to say, with both Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell openly sabotaging an efforts to beef up election security, this move by Coats almost guarantees that Trump will fire him and replace him with Fred Fleitz very soon.