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October 27, 2019
How sad that we are STILL fighting for this 60 years later!
JFK's brilliant argument for universal healthcare has to be heard đ
How sad that we are STILL fighting for this 60 years later!Follow Occupy Democrats for more.
Posted by Occupy Democrats on Sunday, October 27, 2019
Right now, out in sunny California, 50,o00 people have been forced to evacuate their homes. That’s just in Los Angeles, where at least four wildfires are currently ravaging the nation’s second-largest city. The largest is the Tick fire, which is burning through the canyons north of town and scything towards heavily residential areas at pace, The New York Times tells us. All schools in the San Fernando Valley have been closed due to “air-quality and safety concerns.” An entirely separate blaze, known as the Kincade fire, has burned 16,000 acres of Sonoma County. 13,000 firefighters are battling it, but it’s so far only 5 percent contained.
The 2019 fire season has actually been a let-off from previous years, particularly the one just past. Only 300 structures have been destroyed so far, compared to 23,000 in 2018. 163,000 acres have burned, compared to 1.6 million (!) last year, though the 2019 season is far from over.
In fact, as David Wallace-Wells detailed this year for New York magazine, the fire season never really ends anymore. Both scientists and firefighters have suggested dropping the “season” term. It is always fire season, and fire season is always getting worse, because it is always getting hotter and drier. About half of the 88 cities in Los Angeles county are classified as “Very High Fire-Hazard Severity Zones,” raising the prospect that in the future, the gleaming jewel of the Westâour great American dream factoryâwill come to resemble a very particular kind of hell. After all, as Wallace-Wells tells us, some of these fires grow an acre a second. Some grow three times faster still. You cannot outrun fire traveling 60 miles per hour on the Santa Ana winds.
All this, of course, is just one spasm of our almighty planet’s sprawling reaction to the great disturbance we have caused in it. Someday, we will appreciate that if you put the 4 billion-year history of Earth on a 24-hour clock, human history is the equivalent of one second. We are ants crawling about on a particularly fancy rock in a galactic backwater, one that is determined to maintain an equilibrium we have disrupted. If need be, it will sweep us off like the ants we are, with increasingly powerful storms and incredible rain events and oppressive heatwaves and rising seas and epidemic diseases and failing crops and yes, raging wildfires. In the meantime, we will likely tear each other apart to escape the near-term consequences. But like those fires traveling on the Santa Ana winds, there will be no outrunning them in the end.
And all the while, we squabble over taxes and The National Debt and whether the president should be impeached for selling out the national interest in favor of his own when dealing with foreign countries like Ukraine. He should be, of course: he violated his oath of office and abused his power. But someday, assuming we make it that far, future generations will surely wonder why we did not remove him from the world’s most powerful office simply because he denied the existence of a fundamental threat to human civilization as we know it. The president has not just said the climate crisis is a Chinese hoax, or suggested he has some different opinion on whether it’s a problem compared to the scientistsâyou know, people who have devoted their lives to studying this phenomenon. He has actively rolled back our efforts in pretty much every department, to combat a crisis that will upend not just our children’s lives, but our own.
Surely, this constitutes a high crime against humanity. His apparatchiks will laugh at the suggestion now, and call it liberal delusion. But soon enough, they won’t be laughing. The people who actually know a goddamn thing about this say we have 12 years to change course in order to avoid this onrushing doom. The president wants to dig more crap out of the ground. He’d like to force New York State to do it, to abandon its commitment to future generations so some energy executivesâwho perhaps have some sort of relationship with the presidentâcan make a buck.
Donald Trump, for his part, likely figures he’ll be dead and it won’t matter. This is also his view on The National Debt, but at least that’s an overblown problem. His radical solipsism permits him to dismiss small concerns like the future of the human species, not to mention all the other species, which are currently dying off at a prodigious pace in what scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction event. Meanwhile, his rich cronies probably believe they can make enough money to outrun whatever the consequences may be if they’re still around when the time comes. That will require covering an acre a second. Better get your track spikes on.
A Song to Honor–Elijah…a Man of Great Honor..!, this Song was First Sung on national T.V. at a Time of Great loss and Sorrow, with every Americans Eyes were filled with Tears , -Yes Judy,.. Gave America Hope ,-just as Elijah ..Still Gives us All HOPE ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RBOBFTnW04
Former special counsel Robert Mueller testifies before the House Intelligence Committee hearing on his report on Russian election interference, on Capitol Hill on July 24, 2019.Andrew Harnik / AP file
Beryl Howell, the chief judge for the Washington, D.C. district court, ordered DOJ to turn over the materials by Wednesday, Oct. 30.
“The Department of Justice claims that existing law bars disclosure to the Congress of grand jury information,” Howell wrote in the 75-page ruling. “DOJ is wrong.”
The ruling â which DOJ is expected to appeal â would allow House investigators to see redacted portions of the report that involve Donald Trump Jr.’s trump tower meeting with Russians promising dirt on rival candidate Hillary Clinton, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s sharing of internal polling data with a Russian business associate, and “information about what candidate Trump knew in advance about Wikileaks’ dissemination in July 2016 of stolen emails from Democratic political organizations and the Clinton campaign,” the judge noted.
Howell found that despite public protestations from the Trump administration that House Democrats have not actually launched a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, one is underway.
The White House Counsel’s office has refused to cooperate with the inquiry, arguing it’s illegitimate because the House didn’t hold a formal vote to declare one.
Howell said that standard is “cherry-picked and incomplete, and more significantly, this test has no textual support in the U.S. Constitution.”
“Even in cases of presidential impeachment, a House resolution has never, in fact, been required to begin an impeachment inquiry,” Howell wrote.
The Judiciary Committee “has shown that it needs the grand jury material referenced and cited in the Mueller Report to avoid a possible injustice in the impeachment inquiry,” and that the “need for disclosure is greater than the need for continued secrecy.”
“Impeachment based on anything less than all relevant evidence would compromise the publicâs faith in the process,” she added.
Howell, who was nominated to the bench by Trump predecessor Barack Obama, also shot down DOJ’s argument that an impeachment proceeding is not a form of judicial proceeding.
“Contrary to DOJâs position â and as historical practice, the Federalist Papers, the text of the Constitution, and Supreme Court precedent all make clearâ impeachment trials are judicial in nature and constitute judicial proceedings,” Howell wrote.
The judge ordered the information turned over by next week, saying White House stonewalling has added to the urgency.
“The White Houseâs stated policy of non-cooperation with the impeachment inquiry weighs heavily in favor of disclosure. Congress’s need to access grand jury material relevant to potential impeachable conduct by a President is heightened when the Executive Branch willfully obstructs channels for accessing other relevant evidence,” she wrote.
House Judiciary chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said he was “gratified” by the judge’s ruling.
“The court’s thoughtful ruling recognizes that our impeachment inquiry fully comports with the Constitution and thoroughly rejects the spurious White House claims to the contrary. This grand jury information that the Administration has tried to block the House from seeing will be critical to our work,” Nadler said.
Howell appeared to tip her hand on how she felt about some of DOJ’s legal arguments during an Oct. 8 hearing in the case, when a Justice Department lawyer said the agency should not have turned over grand jury information to Congress in the Watergate proceedings.
“Wow, OK,” Howell said.
Evan Vucci/AP
WASHINGTONâThe Government Employees (AFGE), the nationâs largest union for federal workers, has summarized and is publishing, in five installments, a secret Trump administration memo outlining in detail how President Donald Trump and his ideologues systematically plan to destroy federal worker unions. AFGE adds its own analysis. Part 1 and Part 2 have already appeared, with three more to come.
And private-sector workers and unions are next on Trumpâs hit list, the memo promises.
The memo by Trump White House aide James Sherk, a former âfellowâ at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, is being posted and analyzed on AFGEâs website. It includes restoring Republican President George W. Bushâs ban on unionization of the nationâs 45,000 airport screeners. And thatâs just for starters.
It also would ban unions for the Defense Departmentâs 200,000 civilian workers, the hundreds of thousands of workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and workers at the Department of Homeland Security and the federal Office of Personnel Managementâthe governmentâs human resources agencyâitself. Trump also wants to abolish OPM.
Killing OPM and transferring its oversight of federal workers to unaccountable White House aides would bring back the spoils system of the 1880s and before, union leaders say.
âThe memo, laced with familiar half-truths and outright lies, is proof AFGE has been right all along in saying the administrationâs true goal in making changes to personnel rules is to âend collective bargainingâ in the federal sector. Itâs right there in their own words,â the union states. It also goes far beyond Trumpâs prior executive orders trashing federal worker rights.
Trumpâs executive orders donât plan to obliterate unions outright. His memo does.
âEnd collective bargaining,â the memo sets as a goal. âGovernment unions impede the efficiency of federal operations and direct the government to put the interests of government employees first. Curtailing collective bargaining in government serves the public good. The [Civil Service Reform Act] allows the president to exempt agencies from its coverage on the basis of national security concerns.â The New York Times and Politico first disclosed the memoâs existence.
Destruction of federal workers and their unions, including cuts in their pay and benefitsâalso part of Sherkâs memoâis part of an overall right-wing and corporate-backed drive to destroy unions in the U.S. and thus remove the biggest and most-effective obstacle to their agenda. That larger drive includes the U.S. Supreme Courtâs Janus decision and anti-worker rulings by the courts and the National Labor Relations Board.
One motive of the larger drive, Tom McCabe, CEO of the conservative Freedom Foundation, admitted to The Guardian in 2016, is to âde-fund the leftâ and thus destroy opposition.
AFGE revealed Sherk also âdiscusses ways to make it impossible for workers to unionizeâ in the private sector. âIt details steps to boost corporationsâ profits by cutting workersâ overtime pay and redefining workers as âindependent contractors,ââ who legally cannot unionize. âIt explains ways to shield mega-corporations from being liable for workersâ poor working conditions in franchises,â AFGE summarizes.
âThe administrationâs divide-and-conquer strategy with respect to organized labor is as disgusting as it is shameful. But it wonât work.
âAcross this country, our members and the members of every other labor union are getting educated, organized, and mobilized. As the largest union representing federal employees, AFGE will continue to resist the presidentâs mob mentality and disrespect for the federal workforce and the work they do.â
Sherkâs White House anti-union memo outlines further moves beyond Trumpâs executive orders, which AFGE, the Treasury Employees, and other federal unions have fought both in court and in Congress.
Those executive orders tossed unions out of their small offices in federal buildingsâwhere shop stewards met with membersâyanked their phones, fax machines, and computers, banned federal workers from communicating with lawmakers, and told the stewards they would have to represent workers on their own time and on their own dime, among other restrictions.
Trumpâs biggest order also made it easier to fire federal workers, depriving them of many of their due process rights, including the simple right of having some time to prepare to defend themselves and to argue their cases before unbiased decision-makers.
His ânational securityâ excuse would let Trump abolish unions for the screenersâBush used the same national security rationale to ban unions for themâdefense workers and at VA.
AFGE waged a long campaign to get the Democratic Obama administration to overturn Bushâs anti-union edict for the screeners, formally called Transportation Security Officers. And AFGE has defended VA whistleblowers who revealed bossesâ mismanagement of care for veterans, including mismanagement that led to dead vets.
While the memo hasnât been formally implemented yet, government-wide, AFGE notes Trump is already taking away some civil service protections for the screeners, whose pay is so low the TSOs have the lowest morale of any group of federal workers. One of every four TSOs quits within 16 months of being hired, AFGE says.
Bush also imposed a National Security Personnel System âmerit payâ plan on the DOD workers, to give bosses total sway over workersâ pay and promotions, leaving everything open to favoritism. AFGE and a 31-union alliance battling for the DOD workers fought that scheme in court, too, and won. Congress eventually banned DOD from implementing it.
October 25, 2019
By Heather Digby Parton   October 25, 2019
      U.S. Attorney General William Barr (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society, with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.
Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)
Barr is described as supremely confident in his beliefs, which is to say that his overweening arrogance is not an act put on someone who is overcompensating to hide insecurity. He believes in this theory and when it became obvious that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not long for the job, Barr and his legal cabal appear to have seen the clueless and corrupt Donald Trump as a perfect instrument to test their theory, and perhaps set legal precedents that would enable future right-wing presidents to use the full power of the presidency to dominate American politics without regard to democratic norms or congressional checks and balances. Indeed, they had been setting the stage for such a man for decades.
It’s also obviously the case that Barr, and perhaps his Reaganite cronies as well, are suffering from the malady known as Fox News Brain Rot, the symptoms of which are an extreme susceptibility to absurd right-wing conspiracy theories and an inability to believe anything that contradicts them. (Barr once said that there was more evidence for the bogus Uranium One charges than the Russian interference in the 2016 election, which confirms the diagnosis.)
That is the toxic combination of views has the Attorney General of the United States running all over the world seeking evidence to back up a ridiculous conspiracy theory in which Ukraine, the “deep state,” the Intelligence agencies of Italy, the U.K. and Australia, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee all conspired to frame Russia and Donald Trump in the 2016 election. They call this an investigation into the “origins” of the Russia investigation, which is also being handled by the Department of Justice’s inspector general and special counsel John Durham, appointed by Barr.
Barr’s personal intervention is outside the boundaries of the normal procedures, but that is yet another example of his “unitary executive” theory: He works for the president and the president has the power to assign him to any task, including being an international man of mystery. So far, Barr appears to be coming up goose eggs with the foreign intelligence services. The Wall Street Journal reported that he is “sparking discord in several foreign capitals, going outside usual channels to seek help from allies in reviewing the origins of a U.S. counterintelligence investigation begun during the 2016 presidential campaign.”
On Thursday night the Times set the political world aflame with a report that Durham has officially opened a criminal investigation into the matter. No one is sure what basis there is for this, but reports over the past week or so suggest Durham’s team is focusing intently on the people Donald Trump often rails against in his public statements, including former FBI agent Peter Strzok and possibly high-level intelligence community personnel such as former CIA chief John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper.
The timing of the story is obviously designed to counter the very bad news coming out of the House impeachment investigation in the House on a daily basis. This isn’t surprising. We’ve been expecting that Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., would hold parallel hearings into the origins of the Russia investigation, as promised. Graham is now balking because the Senate rules would require that he allow Democratic participation. (The fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee has released two substantial reports on the 2016 election, making clear that they came to the same conclusions as the FBI and the intelligence community regarding Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, also complicates matters for him.)
So Graham has been reduced to introducing a meaningless resolution saying that the House is being unfair, obviously hoping to appease Trump and keep his homegrown followers happy. According to the Daily Beast, it’s not working. In fact, TrumpWorld wants Graham to call House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to testify before Graham’s Senate committee, which would be a serious violation of congressional norms. He seems reluctant for the moment, but who knows what he’ll be willing to do as time goes on?
So for the moment the task of bringing the Fox News alternate-universe conspiracy theory to the mainstream falls to Barr and Durham. They have both reportedly been to Ukraine in recent weeks, presumably searching for that elusive “DNC server” that Trump constantly babbles about. Maybe they will manage to delight the Trump base by trying to prosecute some FBI and CIA personnel. Barr seems willing to push the boundaries beyond anything we could have imagined, so that’s not as outrageous as it sounds.
The only remedy for this is for Congress to reassert its own prerogatives and impeach the president and, if necessary, his henchmen. If they fail to hold him accountable for the vast abuse of power and corruption of his office, the precedents will be set and the “unitary executive” will become the working model for all Republican presidents, just as Barr intends. The next one will no doubt be more efficient at using it than Donald Trump.
Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.