A site that called impeachment a "Jew coup" got White House press credentials for Davos. If you think this was an innocent oversight, you're an idiot https://t.co/k34gFcGWoV
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 27, 2020
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In the News
The recording of a dinner President Trump held with big-dollar donors in 2018 demonstrates just how alive and well special-interest access and influence remains in Washington.
By Kenneth P. Vogel & Eric Lipton @ NYTimes.com, Jan. 26
[....] While news of the recording primarily focused on Mr. Trump’s call for the removal of Marie L. Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine after a donor claimed she had disparaged the president, the recording revealed that Mr. Trump engaged in policy discussions with many other donors pushing their own agendas.
There was the New York real estate developer whose company’s project in South Korea was proposed to Mr. Trump as a possible site for his summit with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea.
There was the Canadian steel magnate who pushed the president to further limit steel imports to the United States, and whose companies donated $1.75 million to the super PAC.
Other attendees discussed government policies that could benefit their businesses, including building a highway for self-driving trucks and regulations that would help make trucks powered by gas compressors to be more competitive with electric-powered vehicles [....]
an easy conversational read and fascinating on effects of biased data:
Julián Castro, the former presidential candidate, was right when he called out the Democratic Party’s hypocritical support for the status quo. “Iowa and New Hampshire are wonderful states with wonderful people,” Castro said. But Democrats can’t “complain about Republicans suppressing the votes of people of color, and then begin our nominating contest in two states that hardly have people of color.”
The typical defense from Iowa officials is that their state can be trusted because it once voted for a black man (Barack Obama) — which is a pretty stark bit of paternalism.
In truth, the whiteness of Iowa and New Hampshire matters. Consider that Cory Booker and Kamala Harris were doing as well as Amy Klobuchar in early polls of more diverse states; they led Pete Buttigieg in some polls. But Booker and Harris are finished, in no small part because of their struggles in Iowa and New Hampshire. Klobuchar and Buttigieg still might break out.
Or consider that a candidate with strong white support (like Bernie Sanders) could win both Iowa and New Hampshire this year. That result would create a media narrative about Joe Biden’s campaign being badly wounded, even though Biden leads among two large groups of Democratic voters: African Americans and Latinos. Those voters, however, are told to wait their turn.
A photograph of Abdul Baqi taken after he was blinded by his father and brothers caused outrage in Pakistan after it was circulated on Facebook along with details of his horrific ordeal.
By Abdul Hai Kakar & Ron Synovitz @ RFERL.org, Jan. 22.
Abdul Baqi was blinded with a spoon by his own father and brothers at their home in southwestern Pakistan because he insisted on marrying a young woman that he'd fallen in love with.
"I can survive without my eyesight, but I can't live without love," Baqi recently told RFE/RL [....]says Baqi, 26, an ethnic Pashtun from the town of Loralai in the northeastern part of Balochistan Province. Baqi's horrific tale illustrates that women are not the only victims in Pakistan of so-called "honor crimes" -- a scourge of violence that has included acid attacks, blinding, and murder by relatives of victims accused of dishonoring their families [....]
Baqi says four of his brothers who have ties to the Taliban bound him, beat him with batons, and held him down as they used the handle of a spoon to gouge out both of his eyes. He says one younger brother, who was 18 at the time and had just returned from fighting as a Taliban militant in Afghanistan, held his head down with his foot and declared he was an "infidel" because his relationship with the woman was "un-Islamic." [....]
The tweet claimed that the boy was kidnapped by “Israeli settlers, assaulted and thrown in a water well"
By Seth J. Frantzman @ JPost.com, Jan. 25
US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib retweeted a claim that “Israeli settlers” had “kidnapped and executed” a Palestinian boy. In fact the boy was found by Israeli emergency services dead in a cistern on Saturday morning after going missing on Friday. Nevertheless, some Palestinian social media accounts incited against Israel, with small clashes resulting in East Jerusalem.
A Twitter account called “Real Seif Bitar” tweeted that the boy had been kidnapped and executed and showed a video of the boy’s body being found by emergency services. The tweet claimed that the boy was kidnapped by “Israeli settlers, assaulted and thrown in a water well, was found this morning frozen to death in Beit Hanina, Jerusalem after Israeli forces assaulted search teams.” Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi re-tweeted the allegation and added “the heart just shatters, the pain is unbearable, no words.” Congresswoman Tlaib then retweeted the Ashrawi tweet that included the allegations.
However Ashrawi apologized for her tweet. “My apologizes for re-tweeting something that’s not fully verified. It seems that the news of his being kidnapped is not certain.” She also tweeted other clarifications and then appeared to delete the tweet. Tlaib’s retweet was also was thereafter deleted but she did not apologize for spreading the false information [....]
By Deidre Shesgreen @ USAToday.com, Jan. 24, 6:52 pm
[....] "Do you owe Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch an apology?" Kelly asked Pompeo, who has declined to publicly defend the diplomat.
"You know, I agreed to come on your show today to talk about Iran," he responded.
Kelly pressed him [.....]
After the interview, Kelly said she was taken to the secretary of State's private living room, where Pompeo was waiting for her. "He shouted at me for about same amount of time as the interview itself. He was not happy to have been questioned about Ukraine," Kelly said, in an account released by NPR with the interview transcript.
She said he used the F-word and "many others" when he asking her if Americans cared about Ukraine. He then asked her if she could find Ukraine on a map.
"I said yes, and he called out for aides to bring us a map of the world with no writing. I pointed to Ukraine," she recounted.
Pompeo then said: "'People will hear about this.'"
"I’m a US Army Veteran of OIF & OEF. There was a kid in my unit, got blown up once, “minor concussion” is what the docs said.
Now he is on more anti-seizure medications I can count, and he has a special service seizure response dog. He can’t drive a car because if he has a seizure he could lose control of the vehicle. His life and the lives of everyone in his circle were forever altered by that one fateful IED strike, and a “mild concussion.” "
-Austin in Colorado
The UN has called for international help to fight huge swarms of desert locusts sweeping through east Africa.
A spokesman for the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), called for aid to "avert any threats to food security, livelihoods, malnutrition".
Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are all struggling with "unprecedented" and "devastating" swarms of the food-devouring insects, the FAO has said. The agency fears locust numbers could grow 500 times by June.
Ethiopia and Somalia have not faced an infestation on this scale for 25 years, while Kenya has not seen a locust threat this size for 70 years, the FAO said earlier this week. South Sudan and Uganda are also at risk if the swarms continue to grow and spread [....]
Analysis by Mandisi Majavu (Senior Lecturer, Dept. Political and International Studies, Rhodes University) @ AllAfrica.com, Jan. 23 This article is republished from The Conversation Africa under a Creative Commons License.
One of the shameful achievements of the African National Congress (ANC) in its 25 years of governing post-apartheid South Africa is that it's living up to the political stereotype of what is wrong with post-colonial Africa - unethical and corrupt African leaders who exercise power through patronage.
The widespread corruption in post-apartheid South Africa is epitomised by what is now referred to as "state capture". The effects of the entrenched corruption are exemplified by frequent power cuts devastating the economy. Another example is the government's failure to keep the trains running.
Democratic South Africa appears to have morphed into a fully fledged predatory state. The lobby group Corruption Watch reported last year that more than half of all South Africans think corruption is getting worse [....]
A new book argues that many seemingly isolated rebellions are better understood as a single protracted struggle.
By Casey Cep @ NewYorker.com, Book Review section, Jan. 20
[....] abolitionists and slavers alike read the papers anxiously for news of slave revolts, taking stock of where the rebels came from, how adroitly they planned their attacks, how quickly revolts were suppressed, and how soon they broke out again.
In a new book, the historian Vincent Brown argues that these rebellions did more to end the slave trade than any actions taken by white abolitionists like Johnson. “Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War” (Belknap) focusses on one of the largest slave uprisings of the eighteenth century, when a thousand enslaved men and women in Jamaica, led by a man named Tacky, rebelled, causing tens of thousands of pounds of property damage, leaving sixty whites dead, and leading to the deaths of five hundred of those who had participated or were accused of having done so. Brown’s most interesting claim is that Tacky and his comrades were not undertaking a discrete act of rebellion but, rather, fighting one of many battles in a long war between slavers and the enslaved. Both the philosopher John Locke and the self-emancipated Igbo writer Olaudah Equiano defined slavery as a state of war, but Brown goes further, describing the transatlantic slave trade as “a borderless slave war: war to enslave, war to expand slavery, and war against slaves, answered on the side of the enslaved by war against slaveholders, and also war among slaves themselves.”
Understood as a military struggle, slavery was a conflict staggering in its scale, even just in the Caribbean. Beginning in the seventeenth century, European traders prowled Africa’s Gold Coast looking to exchange guns, textiles, or even a bottle of brandy for able bodies; by the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves constituted ninety per cent of Europe’s trade with Africa. Of the more than ten million Africans who survived the journey across the Atlantic, six hundred thousand went to work in Jamaica, an island roughly the size of Connecticut. By contrast, four hundred thousand were sent to all of North America. (The domestic slave trade was another matter: by the time the Civil War began, there were roughly four million enslaved people living in the United States.) [.....]
Listen to an exclusive preview of my new book, Why We’re Polarized, on The Ezra Klein Show podcast.
By Ezra Klein @ Vox.com, Jan. 23 (I haven't listened yet, going to.)
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is literally years in the making. It’s an excerpt — the first anywhere — from my book Why We’re Polarized. A core argument of the book is that identity is the central driver of political polarization. But to see how it works, we need a better theory of how identities form, what happens when they activate, and where they fit into our conflicts.
The term “identity politics” is generally used to diminish and discredit the concerns of weaker groups to clear the agenda for the concerns of stronger groups, which are framed as more rational, proper topics for political debate. But in wielding identity as a blade, we have lost it as a lens, blinding ourselves in a bid for political advantage. We are left searching in vain for what we refuse to allow ourselves to see.
To understand American politics, we need a better understanding of how identity works in politics, and in us. Many of us have been taught to only see identity in others. We need to see it in ourselves [....]
The plan is guaranteed to enrage critics and invite attacks from Democrats in an election year.
Trump invokes the "shit happens" defense because Brits drive on other side of road, so why shouldn't Americans run over kids and leave the scene/country?
US wrongly assigned immunity to consular official & wife working outside London.
By Alberto Luperon @ LawandCrime.com, Jan. 23
[....] “It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen and I’ve been here for 19 years,” said Talladega County Chief Deputy Joshua Tubbs, according to AL.com. “It’s the worst thing I’ve seen in my career.”
This is a different case from the one in Utah, where another 16-year-old boy allegedly shot his mother, and three of his siblings [....]