Slaughter of the Innocents?

By Nellie Bly
Washington Bureau

Who is Anne-Marie Slaughter, you are unlikely to ask?  She's had her ticket punched a number of times: Professor at Harvard Law School, Dean of the Wilson School at Princeton, Assistant Secretary of State for Policy Planning, among others.  All great jobs but none of them are likely to get you that P Street townhouse, are they?

So a few years back, she concocted a well-paying gig as the head of a posh new Washington gasbag hangar called New America Foundation.  It raised, to use the technical nonprofit-development term, s**tloads of money from chic corporate funders like Google and, as a token of its appreciation for its chair's efforts, paid Ms. Slaughter last year a mere $535,000.

What could go wrong with this blissful picture?  Funny you should ask:

The head of an influential think tank funded by Google is grappling with a mounting backlash — including from her own scholars and donors — over the firing of a leading critic of the tech giant.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president of the New America Foundation, pledged to re-examine her group’s policies for dealing with donors while defending the organization’s intellectual integrity.

She also told the think tank’s employees that New America was “under attack from many quarters,” and warned that they should expect heightened scrutiny.  But a group of the left-leaning think tank’s current and former fellows was collecting signatures on a letter to be delivered next week to Ms. Slaughter and New America’s directors, asserting that Ms. Slaughter’s handling of the situation has jeopardized the think tank’s reputation.

Other scholars affiliated with the think tank were quietly comparing notes on past instances in which they contend she placed donors’ interests over ideology. (New York Times, September 1, 2017).

Apparently a scholar in her employ produced a research paper describing the adverse effects of monopolies like, wait for it, Google.  And Google is willing to support open and searching academic inquiry as long as it likes the results.  When it doesn't – remember the old saw about money talks and bullsh*t makes increasingly defensive and lame rationalizations? 

Another Washington gasbag has a bad day

The Times story continued:

At issue is New America’s firing on Wednesday of a scholar named Barry Lynn, and its exiling of his entire 10-person initiative, called Open Markets, which had been pushing for more rigorous antitrust enforcement against Google and other tech giants.

Google officials — including its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt — had complained about Open Markets multiple times. Their grievances could not be easily ignored. The company, Mr. Schmidt and his family’s foundation had donated more than $21 million to New America since the think tank’s founding in 1999, according to voluntary disclosures and tax filings. . . .

Mr. Schmidt reached out to Ms. Slaughter to express displeasure with [Lynn's] statement, though Ms. Slaughter said “Google did not at any point threaten our funding.”

Of course he didn't.  Whatever else Ms. Slaughter is, she's not a total idiot.  But what kind of person acts from expediency when moral courage is called for? 

Indeed, who would disagree with the proposition that “deep and lasting damage [is] done when the gap between words and deeds becomes too great to ignore, when those who wield power are exposed as not saying what they mean or meaning what they say?”

And you can't argue with that, if for no other reason than it was written by a noted former Harvard Law and Wilson School Professor named Anne-Marie Slaughter.  On April 26, 2013, in The Washington Post.  You could look it up.

Anyone have any more advice for Ms. Slaughter?  How about this gem? “We must take responsibility for what we have done if we expect others to believe that we will do better from now on. We do not need to grovel.  But we should make clear that our hubris, as in the old Greek myths, has diminished us . . .”  Or so said Prof. Slaughter in Commonweal on February 15, 2008.

Anyone else we haven't heard from?  You there in the back with the bowl haircut:

Just as you will come to understand that there are arguments made in good faith on opposing sides, you must also learn to reject some arguments, or at least to choose among them. Arguments may be bad because they are illogical, because they do not fit the facts or the law, because they are silly or inconsequential. They may also be bad because they promote bad policies, or because they reflect values that we condemn: racism, degradation of human dignity, greed -- you fill in the blanks.

Thank you, Prof. Slaughter!  We have!

We could go on, but her final insight to the Times pretty much summed up her plight:

“There are unavoidable tensions the minute you take corporation funding or foreign government funding,” she said. “But the fact is that it’s very difficult to run a think tank these days with just foundation funding.”

I mean, my God, without corporate funding you'd be lucky to afford a duplex in the third alphabet.  With the other law professors and assistant secretaries.

330 Million in Path of Hurricane Coverage

By Al Freedman
TV/Video Editor

From the top to the bottom of the media guide, from Channel 1 (Public Access Old Sludgebury) to 9879 (TV Azerbaijani) [Louise or some other intern: Please check – Ed.], America stands squarely in the path of Hurricane Irma coverage, the most powerful hurricane coverage in history except for Harvey, last week.

No one can escape Hurricane Irma coverage . . .

“There is no doubt that 330,000,000 million Americans are squarely in the path of buff men and women standing on beaches telling you how bad it's going to get,” said Spy media quote machine and Yale University Prof. Shaw Vellingit.  “With no original programming other than  sports in the way, there are no obstacles to Hurricane Irma hurricane coverage obliterating everything in its path.”

Among the most serious hazards, experts warn, are live shots of unspeakable horrors, like Florida Governor Skeletor warning his citizens to run for their lives, without any explanation of when they can go home and what services his state is willing to provide them (except for health care for the uninsured, of which there is none).

Equally frightening is the expected surge of coverage of the Grifter-in-Chief, his comb-over squashed under a cheesy cap that he will sell you for $40, escorted by Miss Bratislava 1992.  “We expect to see more coverage of the President shoving empty containers into the front seats of trucks and boasting about how big his hurricane is,” Prof. Vellingit predicted.  “Some experts fear that he will even tell the victims of the hurricane how famous they are thanks to him,” he added.

Experts warn that different parts of the country may bear the brunt of nonstop category-five hurricane coverage.  “With the Patriots already having sh*t the bed, there is nothing preventing the networks from running hurricane radar under coverage of whatever crappy game they are pumping into New England,” said the eminent scholar, who is the head of the Lieberman Center for Hot Air Studies at New Haven's world-renowned Yale University.

. . . no one

Prof. Vellingit said there would be no respite anywhere in the channel guide:  “While the center of the coverage is expected to pass over The Weather Channel and CNN, its effects can be felt as far away as PBS coverage of debates among scientists or Travel Channel's coverage of Andrew Zimmern eating his way through the contents of refrigerators washed up by the storm.”

Hurricane coverage is expected to peak Monday but its aftereffects will linger for days as every local station in a top 100 market sends some 23-year-old bubblehead to wander around wrecked trailer parks interviewing the wretched survivors, he predicted.

In other news, the President of the United States is under investigation for multiple impeachable offenses while Korea slides towards war, but until the threat of hurricane coverage passes, there won't be film of those tidbits at 11.

Beating the Labor Day traffic the Herald Editorial page way

By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator

The Labor Day weekend traffic leaving Boston for the Cape or any other bosky dell can be a bitch so if you're the Editorial Page Editor of the Boston Herald with a column to fill, what do you do?

Easy, if you're a C-level Fox News drivel repeater looking to attain the heights reached by, say, Katrina Pierson.  You excuse the Grifter-in-Chief's impeachable obstruction of justice by parroting a Fox News account of a letter sent by two GOP hacks implying that Comey cleared Hillary Clinton without regard to the "evidence" against her:

This week, high-ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee informed us that the former FBI director drafted a statement last spring exonerating Clinton — before more than a dozen key witnesses were even interviewed, including Hillary herself.

It proves two things: The political fix was in from the get-go, and Trump was right to fire Comey, no matter how controversial his ousting was spun.

Yesterday the president tweeted “Wow, looks like James Comey exonerated Hillary Clinton long before the investigation was over ... and so much more. A rigged system!”

And rigged it is.

With traffic like this, who has time to research a column?
Not Katrina Pierson wannabe Adriana Cohen

See how easy that was?  Bing, bang, boom, and you're across the Sagamore Bridge by noon.  Or perhaps you tapped it out on your phone while sitting in traffic on the Distressway.  Too bad another five minutes of research would have proven that the whole tale was utter bollocks:

The transcripts released to the Senate judiciary committee come from interviews of FBI aides to Comey, conducted as part of a personnel investigation of him by the Office of Special Counsel (which is unrelated to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.) In one exchange from the redacted transcripts, an unidentified FBI aide says that Comey first wrote a draft of the July statement in May 2016. 

"There were many iterations, at some point, there were many iterations of the draft that circulated," the unidentified aide said. 

The FBI has not responded to CNN's request for information. 

A person familiar with the matter pushed back on the notion that Comey had already reached a conclusion that affected the investigation.  The person said back in spring 2016, agents and Justice Department officials were talking about how the investigation would end and there was a belief that the evidence was going in a direction to not support bringing charges. 

This individual said by April 2016 the FBI had reviewed most of the evidence and didn't find evidence suggesting that Clinton had violated federal law. The person said the FBI wanted to interview her but didn't believe it was going to change the outcome.  The source also said Comey was not involved in the day-to-day steps of the investigation, so even if he reached a conclusion it wouldn't have affected the result of the investigation. 

A second person familiar with the matter told CNN that Comey had not already made up his mind, and that it did not influence the investigation. The second source says the FBI had already reviewed much of the evidence by spring and it was becoming more clear that it was not likely to support bringing charges.

Oops.

Of course Adriana might have been able to figure this out had she asked herself or the Internet whether anything had ever been unearthed to call into question Comey's conclusion on the merits that Clinton had not violated any criminal law.  In her defense, it's so hard to think these things through when you're trying to decide whether to detour onto Morrissey to avoid a gawker blocker at the old Globe plant.

Who saw this coming?

By Don Kent
Chief Meteorologist

Last week Harvey was as its name implied just a harmless mass of warm moist water vapor chugging away near the Yucatan.  Now it's expected to hit the Texas coast as a Category 3 hurricane, bringing with it,  in the words of the normally staid National Hurricane Service, “LIFE-THREATENING AND DEVASTATING FLOODING.”

What happened?

According to scientists who observe climate for a living, the rapid intensification of the storm over the Gulf of Mexico was due to the enormous energy trapped in the ever-hotter waters of the Gulf of Mexico, in many places in excess of 90°.  Here's one scary Tweet for ya':

We've heard that them he-man tall-in-the-saddle Texans staring into the face of this cataclysm are whining about why they didn't get more advance warning so they could stock up on long-necks and ammo.  But those of us who have paid even scant attention to the warnings of climate experts over the past 25 years haven't been so surprised.

In fact, just last week at the movies a nice grandfatherly guy with a friendly Southern accent named Al told his audience that ever more severe storms were a likely consequence of climate change because warmer oceans store more potential energy that hurricanes feed on.  I wonder what Maureen Dowd would think of him?

In fact, the pace of ocean warming since 1970 has been to quote one study, “robust.”  This is why real climate scientists (that is to say, not former community-college history instructors now shoveling reactionary anti-science talking points for The Washington Post) fear more dangerous hurricanes and other ocean storms.  The Union of Concerned Scientists has summarized the relevant learning thusly:

Because of this link between warm oceans and hurricane behavior, warming of the surface ocean can increase the intensity of hurricanes, with the stronger ones getting the biggest boost.

While hurricanes that make landfall are comparatively rare, they are responsible for vast economic damage in the United States.

Two other factors may also be contributing to the rising intensities of hurricanes. First, warm air holds more water vapor than cold air—and the rising air temperatures since the 1970s have caused the atmospheric water vapor content to rise as well.

This increased moisture provides additional fuel for hurricanes. Indeed, hurricanes indicate a trend toward producing more torrential downpours, both in the historical record and in climate models that project future conditions.

Second, as ocean temperatures rise, there is also less cold, subsurface ocean water to serve as a braking mechanism for hurricanes. When strong storm winds churn up cold subsurface water, the cooler waters can serve to weaken the storm. But if deeper waters become too warm, this natural braking mechanism weakens. Hurricane Katrina, for example, intensified significantly when it hit deep pools of warm water in the Gulf of Mexico.

You could hardly blame Texans for not paying attention to climate change and its likely effect on them (inundation).  Their former governor, now a coatholder in the Grifter-in-Chief Regime, spends his days promoting well-washed coal as the solution for all of our woes.  Their current governor, like every other Republican plutocrat and whackjob that Bubba has put in charge of their state, thinks the whole global-warming thing is just a lot of cow pie:

[M]any scientists believe that certain human activities impact the climate. Others dispute the extent to which any activity has a particular level of influence on the climate, which is why this matter needs to continue to be investigated.

Hope the Noahide flooding that will cripple Texas for months if not years doesn't cause all that investigating to slow down too bad.

But not to worry – the cowboy libertarians of Texas are happy to get off their high horse and head to the Federal chuck wagon when it comes to paying for their climate change denial.  When Hurricane Ike wiped out Galveston a few years ago, Texas was perfectly happy to load up the saddlebags with over $12,000,000,000 in federal aid to pump itself out.

Maybe when Governor Abbott, Loathsome Ted Cruz, and John “All-Hat” Cornyn attempt to raid the Treasury to clean up the mess left by Harvey and their own bought-and-paid-for fact-free climate change denialism, America should tell them that their hurricane victims don't need federal money.  Just like the sick poor of Texas, condemned to suffering and death by Texas's refusal of Medicaid expansion.

Why We Fight: Chapter 97,453

KABUL, Afghanistan — The senior security official in northeastern Takhar Province was deferential when he telephoned Commander Bashir Qanet. After all, he was talking to one of the most powerful government supporters in the province, who has hundreds of militiamen under his command.

 “Please could you stop killing your own people?” he asked the commander, whose irregulars had just opened fire on a couple of dozen pro-government worshipers inside a mosque, during prayers, killing five and wounding 37. 

The commander responded with a profane comment about the caller’s wife — the worst possible insult to an Afghan — and slammed the phone down. At that point the death toll of Afghan civilians attributed by the authorities to Commander Qanet’s three-month-long rampage in Takhar was about 30 (seven in just the last week), none of them insurgents, but the police and security officials as of Friday had been powerless to stop him or his followers. 

“Game of Thrones” has nothing on 2017 Afghanistan when it comes to violence in politics and crassness in war, not to mention plots almost too complex to follow. Just to be clear: Both men on the phone call were supposed to be on the same side, putatively supporting the beleaguered government in Kabul. The country may be in the midst of a steadily worsening, existential war against a determined Taliban insurgency, but Afghanistan’s leaders in the government camp often seem mostly at war with one another. 

That has hurt the government’s efforts to tame the insurgency. It is no coincidence that many of the places where the insurgents have made their biggest gains have been in the northern provinces, where warlords have long held power — and often are deeply resented.

This week, the largest city in the north, Mazar-i-Sharif, was in turmoil after Asif Mohmand, a provincial councilman, posted on Facebook the week before to scold a supporter of the famously vain governor of Balkh Province, Atta Muhammad Noor, whose picture has been pasted all over the northern capital on giant posters. There is not even an election going on.

 “Twenty times I told you not to put up another poster of that pimp and miscreant Atta,” Mr. Mohmand told the supporter in a video online. “This time when I catch you, I’ll kill you, you shameless fool, I’ll pump 30 bullets into your forehead, and then help myself to you.” (It was not clear what he meant by the last phrase.) . . . .

According to the normally authoritative New York Times,
infighting among Afghan government officials is
hampering the fight against the Taliban.

Governor Atta, a notorious warlord himself and hardly one to shy away from a fight, sent his gunmen and a contingent of police officers to meet the provincial counselor’s plane when it landed, only to encounter Mr. Mohmand’s own armed supporters there to defend him from arrest. The ensuing firefight raged through the terminal and its parking lots, killing two, wounding 17 and temporarily shutting down Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport. 

These violent disputes in Balkh and Takhar Provinces are the most recent evidence of the infighting that is diverting resources from the fight against the insurgency and undermining public support. Similar government supporters have taken place in other parts of the country, including the capital, Kabul, where the first vice president, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was forced into exile this year after the authorities charged him with the kidnapping, torture and rape of a political opponent. 

The infighting could be traced to ethnic tensions, grudges dating back to the civil war in the 1980s and ’90s and the government’s shaky American-brokered coalition of bitter political rivals that is long past its expiration date. Parliament should have been disbanded two years ago and the executive branch is split between two antagonistic leaders — President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah. 

The result is the central government does not really control large swaths of its own territory, even where the Taliban is not a factor. Instead, it cedes authority to warlords, some in government and some just aligned with it, who are too powerful to be subdued and often too angry at one another to focus on their common enemy, the Taliban. Such infighting among the warlords is precisely what helped catapult the Taliban to power in 1996. 

And many of those warlords are still on the scene, on the government side.. . .

– The New York Times, Aug. 19, 2017

Crimestoppers, North Carolina edition

By Leo Frank
Southern Bureau Chief of The Massachusetts Spy

Civic beautification ain't free, at least according to law enforcement in Durham County, North Carolina, the state that, notwithstanding its pretensions to civilization, somehow isn't too busy to hate.

That's the moral to be drawn from the police and prosecutors' response to the dastardly War on Statues now being waged by a group of protesters who have the temerity to demand the removal of monuments celebrating treason, white supremacy, slavery, and historical revisionism, or, as they are known south of the Potomac, monuments to Confederate soldiers, generals, pols, and other insurrectionists.

Earlier this week, a group of protesters, unencumbered by assault weapons, Tiki Torches, clubs, shields, or ill-fitting khakis did the following deed, according to the Durham, N.C. Herald Sun: (PS Don't let children read the bloodcurdling details of the outrage)

Monday’s rally began around 6 p.m. as more than 50 people gathered in front of the now Durham County administration building. They chanted. They shared their experiences in Charlottesville, Virginia and demanded that people fight racism across the South.

Sheriff’s deputies recorded the event but did not intervene as a protester climbed a ladder amid applause and chants and slipped a yellow, bungie-like cord around the soldier’s head and arm.

Protesters chanted “We, we are The Revolution” and cried out, “You can’t stop The Revolution.”

They tugged the yellow cord.

And the statue did a somersault, collapsing against the stone pedestal in front of the old county courthouse on East Main Street. Demonstrators kicked and stomped the soldier in front of the cameras the sheriff says his officers are now using to identify those responsible.

The sole victim of the “riot.”

Oh, the humanity!  At the end of the mayhem, there lay Johnny Reb on the ground as dead as Trayvon Martin.  Of course, Johnny Reb is a statue and Trayvon was a real-life young man.  Oh, and there's one more difference, if the Durham County District Attorney has anything to say on the subject: unlike the murderer of Trayvon Martin, the desecrators of Johnny Reb will be convicted of a felony.

What felony, inquiring minds want to know?  The individuals allegedly involved in ridding Durham of an unsightly public nuisance are being charged with:

▪ NC Gen. Stat. 14-288.2(c) Participation in a riot with property damage in excess of $1,500 (Class H felony).
▪ NC Gen. Stat. 14-288.2(e) inciting others to riot where there is property damage in excess of $1,500 (Class F felony).

A riot?  What riot?  They came, they pulled down a statue commemorating treason, they danced around, and they went home.  Is that a riot?  We think of a riot as more like when Nazis drive cars into and club protesters who have the nerve to stand up to them, or as the Bigot-in-Chief would call it, “Both sides.”

Doesn't a riot have to involve some serious breach of the peace, or at least more serious than littering with bronze symbols of white supremacy?  Apparently not – even the Model Penal Code Section 250.1 says that a person is guilty of riot if “he participates with two or more others in a course of disorderly conduct; (a) with purpose to commit or facilitate the commission of a felony or a misdemeanor . . . ”  So riot is an inchoate offense, like conspiracy, only louder.

And incitement to riot?  In North Carolina, when someone urges someone else to riot and sometime later there's a riot, that's also a felony.  So if you're sitting in a coffee shop whining about how oppressed you are by state-sponsored symbols of racism and treason, and your interlocutors are thereby inspired to pull down the offending statue of Saddam Hussein [Surely, a Confederate soldier? – Ed.], you've committed a felony!  There's no requirement of imminence or clear and present danger.  You can look it up.  There may be another body of law that has something to say about that, assuming it's still in effect at time of trial.  You can look that one up too.

We're not aware of too many miscreants charged with rioting when they for example go out together and one of them buys beers for the others on a forged ID (or weed), but that would fulfill the requirements of the Model Penal Code for the crime of rioting.  Thanks, Herb.

And who says big piles of treason worship are worth $1,500?  How much would you pay for a life-size bronze Confederate soldier?  Since the GOP-rigged North Carolina Legislature has determined that cities and towns can't remove such odious memorials without their approval, the answer must be that tokens of segregation are indeed priceless.  By the way, we bet you could get a redneck with a welding gun to glue Johnny Reb's head back on for a lot less than that.

Now we suspect that in a few weeks this case will quietly be buried and those who rid Durham of its Jim Crow excrescence will go on with their lives, as Bree Newsome did when she pulled down the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina (a different place, apparently).  But in the current climate of neo-Nazi subversion of our constitutional order, sanctioned by the deranged bigot in the White House, loosely using criminal statutes with serious penalties for what are at best petty offenses could be dangerous.  Bigly.

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