Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
The FDA approves the first birth control pill; FCC chief Newton Minow condemns TV programming; Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett fly over the North Pole; Journalist Mike Wallace and singer Billy Joel born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Men say they love independence in a woman, but they don’t waste a second demolishing it brick by brick.
North Korea has fired an unidentified projectile, the South Korean military says, less than a week after it tested several short-range missiles.
The projectile was fired from a location in North Korea’s north-west toward the east, according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
On Saturday, the country launched a number of projectiles from its east coast into the sea.
A US envoy has visited Seoul for talks on how to break the nuclear deadlock.
Singapore fake news law a ‘disaster’ for freedom of speech, says rights group
Bill passes that forces media to correct or remove content the government considers to be false
Staff and agencies
Singapore’s parliament has passed legislation against “fake news”, a move that has been criticised by rights groups, journalists and tech firms over fears it could be used to clamp down on freedom of speech.
The law, which passed on Wednesday, will require online media platforms to carry corrections or remove content the government considers to be false, with penalties for perpetrators including prison terms of up to 10 years or fines up to S$1m ($735,000).
Technology giants including Google and Facebook have said they see the law giving Singapore’s government too much power in deciding what qualifies as true or false.
EU says inspectors, not announcements, determine next steps in Iran standoff
Facing threats from Washington and Tehran, the European Union keeps calm and claims the middle ground when it comes to the Iran nuclear deal. Despite a tight deadline, many say there’s time for a diplomatic solution.
It ain’t easy being Brussels, the broker and bodyguard of thebeleaguered Iran nuclear deal that US President Donald Trump wants dead.
In an effort to not just depart from but destroy the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Washington has been threatening to sue European companies if they do business with Iran as allowed under the agreement. Iran is threatening to beef up nuclear enrichment activities in 60 days if they don’t.
Don’t expect any bureaucratic dramatics from the EU based on these threats. “While we do not accept any ultimatum,” said a senior EU official speaking on condition of anonymity, “Iran’s announcements are not a violation or a withdrawal of the nuclear deal. We will continue to abide by our commitment as long as Iran does.”
Government turns into a ‘criminal organisation’
The captured state of Guatemala
Guatemala has fought state corruption successfully, but almost unreported. Now President Morales has ordered the commission responsible for that success to leave the country. It’s all got too close.
by Clement Détry
On 19 February 2007 three Salvadoran members of the Central American Parliament (Parlacen) were heading for Guatemala in a 44 with 20kg of cocaine and $5m in cash hidden in a secret compartment. Just 20km across the border, Eduardo d’Aubuisson, William Pichinte, José Ramón González and their driver were stopped by police and taken to a spot near the village of El Jocotillo. Next morning, their remains were found in their burnt-out vehicle; autopsies revealed gunshot wounds. Four police officers were arrested for the murders soon after, but were killed while on remand. An official at the interior ministry suspected of having ordered the operation, Victor Rivera, also died a few months later.
Again in the age of ‘run, hide, fight,’ student heroes thwart a school shooter
When the shooter opened fire at STEM School Highlands Ranch in suburban Denver, 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo charged him, getting shot himself in the process but giving his classmates time to take cover or bolt.
Nui Giasolli had British literature class with one of the shooters who killed a student and wounded eight others Tuesday at the school, and she shared with CNN the story of terror and heroism that unfolded once bullets began to fly.
Istanbul residents ready for rerun of mayoral vote
Turks in Istanbul will vote for the second time on June 23 after Supreme Election Board’s decision to rerun polls.
Shortly before nightfall on the first day of Ramadan, before the evening call to prayer signified an end to the day’s fast, another important message was shared by the Supreme Election Board: the results from the city’s March mayoral election would be annulled and the opposition CHP mayor would cede his post to a temporary caretaker.
Now, Istanbul is set to hold a mayoral vote again on June 23 – a controversial decision that has divided the metropolis’ residents.
“I think it’s absurd,” said Aygul Ozkaragoz, a retired 70-year-old economist at Yeditepe University, who voted for the opposition.
By insinuation and timing it’s likely that the limited Tax Transcripts the New York Times released are filings related to his Casino ownership mandatory financial disclosure. I didn’t find much of a smoking gun because I’m looking for a wholesale Real Estate/Money Laundering scheme with branches at least in the Middle East and Russia.
Among the truly wealthy Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio is a notorious mendicant and scam artist famous not just as a deadbeat but poor. “He doesn’t have any real money dear.”
On the other hand the very rich are different from you and me. During this 9 year downturn in his business Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio lost $3 with every breath.
Still has plenty for those Black Velvet pictures of Elvis in the gilt frames.
The documents cover only the broad picture of Trump’s income and losses in those years, not the details. But they demonstrate once again why it is so critical that the public obtain his full tax returns for more recent years. As Trump fights like a cornered mongoose to keep those returns secret, these documents offer hints about what exactly he’s trying to conceal.
As I’ve often said, if Trump’s tax returns showed only that he is a successful and shrewd businessman, he’d have plastered them on a billboard in Times Square. He is hiding something; the only question is how bad it is.
There are two explanations for what Trump is trying to conceal. The first is that there are scandalous or even criminal activities that he has engaged in — partnerships with shady characters, cases of money laundering — and the returns would point the way to discover them.
To understand why, you have to remember that the Trump Organization is not an ordinary corporation in the way you might think of it. In fact, it is an amalgam of approximately 500 separate partnerships and pass-through companies (which is why Trump almost certainly reaped millions of dollars in tax benefits from the 2017 tax law, which included a 20 percent deduction for pass-throughs). If we had Trump’s returns, each of those arrangements could be investigated, and no one who has reported on Trump’s business activities would say there aren’t shocking things to discover.
The second explanation for Trump’s determination not to allow the returns to become public is in some ways more innocent: that as so many have speculated, he’s not nearly as rich as he always says. Is it possible that Trump’s motives are only the most petty, shallow and vain ones? After all, we’re talking about Donald Trump.
Of course, both things could be true. Trump’s returns could show him to be less wealthy than he says, and also reveal instances of scandalous or criminal behavior. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say that’s what’s most likely.
…
Trump’s own personal greed and his sense that the rules don’t apply to him have never been in question. But why would he be so threatened by people learning that he isn’t as wealthy as he claims? Part of it is ego, of course; he plainly equates money with one’s value as a human being. But it’s also because he built his career on the belief that if he could convince people he’s impossibly rich, he’d become impossibly rich and remain so.
That’s what Trump has always sold, whether it was to the people he conned out of their life savings with Trump University or to the voters. I am hugely wealthy and hugely successful, and if you associate yourself with me you will reap the reflected rewards.
And if Trump isn’t so wealthy after all, what is he? A small-time grifter, a business failure, a gossip-pages lech, a reality-show buffoon.
That’s what he’s hiding, for sure. And maybe much more.
The man could go bankrupt running a Casino. It’s really the most scathing I can say.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
But don’t be fooled, the president’s divide-and-conquer strategy has disguised his efforts to reward his wealthy donors and funnel more wealth and power to those at the top
Donald Trump’s goal is, and has always been, division and disunion. It’s how he keeps himself the center of attention, fuels his base and ensures that no matter what facts are revealed, his followers will stick by him.
But there’s another reason Trump aims to divide—and why he pours salt into the nation’s deepest wounds over ethnicity, immigration, race and gender.
He wants to distract attention from the biggest and most threatening divide of all: the widening imbalance of wealth and power between the vast majority, who have little or none, and a tiny minority at the top who are accumulating just about all.
“Divide and conquer” is one of the oldest strategies in the demagogic playbook: keep the public angry at each other so they don’t unite against those who are running off with the goods.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hit the nail on the head in an interview with The Post’s Robert Costa on Wednesday morning. “The point is that every single day, whether it’s obstruction, obstruction, obstruction — obstruction of having people come to the table with facts, ignoring subpoenas … every single day, the president is making a case — he’s becoming self-impeachable, in terms of some of the things that he is doing,” she said.
Instructing witnesses not to appear, raising bogus privilege claims, blocking a legally required delivery of his tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee chairman — President Trump seems eager to duplicate the conduct that was the basis for Article 3 of the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon.
As Pelosi was making her observation, Trump upped the ante, issuing a bogus declaration of executive privilege over the full Mueller report in advance of the House Judiciary Committee’s vote on whether to hold Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt. [..]
For a report that is supposed to entirely exonerate Trump, he and his minions are going to extreme lengths to conceal its complete contents, to prevent the attorney general from testifying and even to try to keep Mueller from testifying. If he did not obstruct justice before, he certainly is obstructing Congress now. The House should exercise all of its powers to end Trump’s autocratic spasm. Our democracy is at stake.
Is President Trump an aberration whose defeat in 2020 would allow the nation to begin rebounding toward normalcy? Or does his ascendance reflect long-running national pathologies and deeply ingrained structural economic and political problems that will intractably endure long after he’s gone?
The answer to this question — which has been thrust to the forefront by the Democratic presidential primaries — is, in a sense, both. Trump represents both a continuation of and a dramatic exacerbation of those long running pathologies and problems.
As of now, Elizabeth Warren appears to be the Democratic candidate who most fully grasps the need to take both of those aspects of the Trump threat seriously. The Massachusetts senator is, I think, offering what amounts to the most fully rounded and multidimensional response to that threat.
In recent days, Warren has addressed the deeper issues raised by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report — and the reaction to it from Trump and Republicans — in by far the most comprehensive way.
In response, Warren again called for an impeachment inquiry, but she did more than that: She indicted the Republican Party as a whole for shrugging off Trump’s epic misconduct and wrongdoing.
Warren has also pointed out more forcefully than any rival has that Trump tried to derail an investigation not just into his own campaign’s conduct, but also into the Russian attack on our democracy — which Trump has refused to acknowledge happened at all, hamstringing preparations for the next attack.
As McConnell’s speech showed, the GOP is all in with that as well. And the GOP appears all in with Trump’s escalating efforts to treat House oversight of the administration as fundamentally illegitimate.
…
Warren is comprehensively treating Trump both as a severe threat to the rule of law in his own right, and as inextricably linked to a deeper pathology — the GOP’s drift into comfort with authoritarianism.
Trump’s authoritarianism and his corruption are two sides of the same coin. Trump’s tax returns, which he rebuffed a House request for — and which his government participated in, with dubious legality — may conceal untold levels of corruption, from possible emoluments-clause violations to financial conflicts to compromising foreign financial entanglements.
…
It’s strange that pundits take it on faith that Joe Biden would best win back blue-collar whites who overwhelmingly backed Trump in 2016. We’re constantly told Trump won them by campaigning against an economy “rigged” by plutocrats, getting left of Hillary Clinton, who hailed from the corporate wing of the Democratic Party and thus was vulnerable against Trump’s (fraudulent) populist attacks.
But Biden hails from the same precincts. Indeed, as Jamelle Bouie points out, Biden is implicated in many great elite failures that supposedly fueled Trump’s rise, including bipartisan neoliberal laxity toward Wall Street and the Iraq War.
By contrast, Warren has offered the most detailed populist prescriptions in response to the “rigged” economy of any candidate, including policies to tax extreme wealth and reconfigure corporate power.
If Warren proves unable to appeal to blue-collar whites, we’ll perhaps have to revise our story of 2016. But here again, Warren is the one with the biggest actual argument.
Trump exploited populist discontent and then embarked on a near-total betrayal via an embrace of GOP plutocracy, in the form of a massive corporate tax giveaway and a deregulation spree that further enabled elite corruption. These things, too, show Trump as both continuation and exacerbation — and Warren has offered the most systematic and comprehensive response to all of that, as well.
None of this is to say the other candidates don’t have great policies and virtues. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has in some ways offered a bigger response to inequality. Biden has said good things on Trump’s racism and on impeachment. Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) has taken on Trump’s lawlessness.
But only Warren has done all of these things, and only Warren has woven them all into a big story — one that treats Trump as both a unique threat and a symptom of so much of what’s gone so horribly wrong.
The logic of Impeachment is stark and inescapable. Crimes were committed. Impeach now or forfeit any right to do so in the future except in the case of closet consensual blowjobs by Democrats. It is time to stand for the Constitution as a Profile In Courage (Thomas Hart Benton is not the Senator you expect him to be unless you expect him to be Edmund G. Ross, they were both corrupt bigots).
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Allies celebrate the end of World War Two; Native Americans holding the hamlet of Wounded Knee surrender; Coca-Cola invented.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.
Asia Bibi: Christian leaves Pakistan after blasphemy acquittal
Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian woman who spent years on death row after being convicted of blasphemy, has left the country, officials have confirmed.
Her conviction was overturned last year by the Supreme Court.
She was originally convicted in 2010 after being accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a row with her neighbours.
Asia Bibi has always maintained her innocence in a case that has polarised Pakistan.
Pakistani government officials did not reveal her destination, or say when she left.
Iran to announce partial withdrawal from nuclear deal
A year after Trump pulled the US out of the 2015 agreement, Iran takes ‘reciprocal measures’
Iran will announce its partial withdrawal from the nuclear deal signed with world powers, a year after Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement signed in 2015, Tehran has announced.
Wednesday’s “reciprocal measures” will be formally conveyed to ambassadors to countries remaining inside the deal – France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia. Foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will separately set out the technical and legal details in a letter to the EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini.
Iran insists the announcements will not amount to a complete withdrawal from the agreement, and may include a two-month deadline for the EU to implement its obligations before further Iranian steps are taken.
Sandra Bland: Family requests case be reopened after new footage of arrest emerges
The video shows the arrest from her perspective, and was not a part of the original trial
Newly released mobile phone footage shows a police officer pulling a stun gun and threatening to ‘light up’ a woman – days before she died in custody.
Police dash cam footage released at the time of Sandra Bland’s arrest shows officer Brian Encinia forcibly removing her from her car, and he later told investigators that his safety was “in jeopardy at more than one time” during the arrest.
But the latest 39-second video obtained by Houston’s WFAA and the nonprofit news organisation the Investigative Network, shows Ms Bland’s arrest from her perspective for the first time, and it’s led to the family demanding that the case be re-opened.
Sudan’s military council want protesters to back Sharia legal system
Sudan’s army rulers Tuesday stated that Islamic law should remain the guiding principle in the legal system, after protest leaders made no mention of Sharia law when handing in their demands for the future of their country.
The 10-member military council, which seized control of the country after president Omar al-Bashir was deposed in April, was given the plans for a new political and cultural beginning for the country by civilian activists.
The military council told reporters that the generals overall agreed to the proposals but had “many reservations”. These included that the protesters had not included Islamic Sharia law in their proposals.
We’ll soon know the exact air pollution from every power plant in the world. That’s huge.
Satellite data plus artificial intelligence equals no place to hide.
Tuesday brings a somewhat mind-blowing announcement in the world of power plants and pollution.
In a nutshell: A nonprofit artificial intelligence firm called WattTime is going to use satellite imagery to precisely track the air pollution (including carbon emissions) coming out of every single power plant in the world, in real time. And it’s going to make the data public.
This is a very big deal. Poor monitoring and gaming of emissions data have made it difficult to enforce pollution restrictions on power plants. This system promises to effectively eliminate poor monitoring and gaming of emissions data.
New York Times: Tax documents show Trump businesses lost more than $1 billion in a decade
It appears Trump lost more money than nearly any other individual US taxpayer year after year, the Times reports, according to the 10 years of tax information the newspaper acquired.
Trump ran for president branding himself as a self-made billionaire, touting his financial success, but he has been steadfast in his refusal to release his tax returns to the public, despite mounting pressure from Congress. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin formally denied a request from the House Ways and Means Committee for Trump’s last six years of tax returns, a period not covered by the documents reported by The Times on Tuesday.
Like Atrios I frequently remind people that Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio is not the worst ever. That’s simply an illusion of novelty and topicality, the worst ever was W, who was by every objective measure a War Criminal worthy of mention besides Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Kissinger.
What was Nancy and the Institutional Democrats’ attitude? “Look forward, not backward.” Move on. Nothing to see here except torture, and corpses, and tortured corpses and nothing to smell except the stench of Death, Cordite, and Napalm.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered herself of some curious thoughts regarding the current state of things, remarks that indicate that at least part of the Speaker’s brain gets it and that another part does not, and that, somewhere in between, something has to be done.
…
Put aside the absolute certainty that, if Whoever J. Democrat wins in 2020 like LBJ in 1964, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago and his 40 percenters would react in exactly the same way. Look just at what Pelosi said. If she’s right, and I think she is, then we are in a deadly constitutional crisis right freaking now because a dangerous authoritarian yahoo is in the White House, and because there is nobody in his own party who’s willing to do anything about it. Which makes something else Pelosi said even stranger.
…
It seems to me that if Pelosi believes that the president* is venal and power-mad enough to discredit, if not defy, the results of a national election, she must realize that the crisis already is upon us. (And, no, this isn’t like the wingnut horror stories about how Barack Obama was going to cancel the elections because Jade Helm!, False Flag!, Seth Rich! For one thing, neither Obama nor his allies personally played into those crackpot scenarios.) If that is the case, waiting for 2020 and hoping that cooler heads prevail at the ballot box strikes me as negligent at best.
History tells us that the president* will attempt to delegitimize any unflattering poll results, discredit any unflattering news coverage, and do everything he can to make sure that his 40-Percenters stay ginned up and delusional. History also tells us that the Republican Party will follow right along, not just because he’s Trump, but because voter suppression and delegitimizing inconvenient election results has been the party’s M.O. at least since the Watergate midterms of 1974. They successfully delegitimized hand recounts and the clear provisions of Florida law in 2000, and the Supreme Court chimed in to help them. The architecture for this president* to discredit the 2020 numbers already is in place. It’s part and parcel of three decades of Republican conservatives and their attempt to delegitimize the franchise of people who don’t vote for them because their policies are perceived to be cruel and stupid.
I honestly don’t get the people who can’t see that the crisis is an immediate one. Congress has its procedures, and I respect that, and the committee vote is a small move forward, for sure. After all, the House and a dwindling number of federal courts are the only avenues of traditional checks and balances still functional against a robotic Republican power elite. But essentially to argue that impeachment should be off the boards not only in the House, but also on the campaign trail, is to rely on guard rails that aren’t there any more, and that had been rotting away for years, anyway.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Austerity for Democrats, stimulus for Republicans.
I made a bad economic call on election night 2016, predicting a Trump recession. But I quickly realized that political dismay had clouded my judgment, and retracted the call three days later. “It’s at least possible,” I wrote on Nov. 11, 2016, “that bigger budget deficits will, if anything, strengthen the economy briefly.”
What I didn’t realize at the time was just how much bigger the deficits would get. Since 2016, the Trump administration has, in practice, implemented the kind of huge fiscal stimulus followers of John Maynard Keynes pleaded for when unemployment was high — but Republicans blocked.
Contrary to what Donald Trump and his supporters claim, we are not seeing an unprecedented boom. The U.S. economy grew 3.2 percent over the past year, a growth rate we haven’t seen since … 2015. Employment has been growing steadily since 2010, with no break in the trend after 2016. Still, the long stretch of growth has pushed the unemployment rate down to levels not seen in decades. How did that happen, and what does it tell us?
The strength of the economy doesn’t reflect a turnaround of the U.S. trade deficit, which remains high. Nor does it reflect a giant boom in business investment, which proponents of the 2017 tax cut promised, but didn’t happen. What’s driving the economy now is, instead, deficit spending.
There are roughly 8 million plant and animal species in the world. One of them — homo sapiens — may soon wipe out a million of the rest. And we’re just getting started.
That’s the depressing bottom line from a comprehensive new United Nations report on biodiversity. Species are going extinct at a rate unmatched in human history — and the die-off is accelerating. It sounds melodramatic to say that we’re killing the planet, but that’s what the scientific evidence tells us. And ignorant, shortsighted leadership makes optimistic scenarios elusive.
Species extinction is one of those problems whose vast scale, in space and time, makes it difficult to comprehend, let alone address globally. As any paleontologist can tell you, species appear and disappear naturally at a gradual rate with no human intervention. And in the 3.5-billion-year history of life on Earth, there have been five abrupt mass extinctions when more than three-quarters of all living species were quickly wiped out. The most recent came 66 million years ago, when an asteroid strike is believed to have killed off the dinosaurs.
If there are intelligent observers 66 million years from now, their scientists may conclude that the sixth mass extinction was caused by us — and that we saw what we were doing but lacked the wisdom and courage to stop ourselves.
