House Committee sues Treasury for Trump tax returns
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/house-committee-sues-treasury-for-trump-tax-returns.html
Nationwide #CloseTheCamps Protests Call For Shutting Down Migrant Detention Centers Amid Outrage Over Conditions
https://www.newsweek.com/nationwide-protests-close-camps-migrant-detention-conditions-1447083
Joaquin Castro
Verified account @JoaquinCastrotx
Our border patrol system is broken. And part of the reason it stays broken is because it’s kept secret. The American people must see what is being carried out in their name. The @HispanicCaucus led a delegation of members of Congress to visit 2 border patrol facilities.
https://twitter.com/JoaquinCastrotx/status/1145837840405860353
Joaquin Castro Smuggles Device Into Migrant Detention Facility, Captures Photos Of ‘Prison-Like’ Cell
https://www.newsweek.com/joaquin-castro-smuggles-device-migrant-detention-facility-captures-photos-prison-like-cell-1447025
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1145855501533663232
Rep. Joe Kennedy III
Verified account @RepJoeKennedy
Spent the morning in TX at Clint and El Paso detention facilities. Big takeaways -- 1) @CBP was very resistant to Congressional oversight. They tried to restrict what we saw, take our phones, block photos and video. Atmosphere was contentious and uncooperative.
https://twitter.com/RepJoeKennedy/status/1145791291986460672
Judy Chu
Verified account @RepJudyChu
"If you want water, just drink from a toilet." That's what border patrol told one thirsty woman we met on today's #DemsAtTheBorder trip. These are the same CBP personnel who threatened to throw burritos at members of Congress. Changes must be made. #DontLookAway
https://twitter.com/RepJudyChu/status/1145779501080743939
Ex-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder Who Oversaw Flint Water Crisis Named Harvard Fellow: Harvard is facing fury for handing a fellowship to Snyder, whose cellphone was recently seized in a criminal probe of the drinking water catastrophe.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/harvard-appoints-michigan-gov-rick-snyder-flint-water-crisis_n_5d1a379ae4b03d61163fd36d
#NeverAgainIsNow: 36 Arrested As Hundreds of Jewish Protesters Block Road to Migrant Detention Center
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/01/neveragainisnow-36-arrested-hundreds-jewish-protesters-block-road-migrant-detention
Jewish protesters block entrance to Trump administration's 'concentration camps' for migrants
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-migrant-camps-us-border-detained-concentration-camps-new-jersey-aoc-a8982186.html
Trump to Tucker Carlson: Homelessness Is a ‘Phenomenon That Started Two Years Ago’
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-to-tucker-on-fox-news-homelessness-is-a-phenomenon-that-started-two-years-ago
Vets To Give Out Thousands Of USS John McCain Shirts At Trump’s July 4 Event
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/veterans-john-mccain-donald-trump-july-4_n_5d1a43ace4b07f6ca581c21e
Two Wyoming coal mines close, send 700 workers home after bankruptcy filing
https://trib.com/business/energy/two-wyoming-coal-mines-close-send-workers-home-after-bankruptcy/article_773100d1-b5b4-57d8-af49-842518b9e219.html
June was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/june-hottest-month-ever-earth-2019-weather-heatwave-hot-a8984691.html
A 30-Year-Old Father Died After Being Detained For Weeks By ICE | The Honduran man had previously been sent back to Mexico under a Trump administration program requiring Central American immigrants to wait outside the US.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/hamedaleaziz/immigrant-father-dies-ice-custody-honduras-mexico
Trump 'demands US military chiefs stand next to him' at 4th of July parade and they will because they love him
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/salute-to-america-trump-4th-july-military-parade-tanks-aircraft-salute-to-america-washington-army-a8983776.html
Trump Administration Misses Deadline to Print Census Forms
https://www.thedailybeast.com/2020-census-trump-administration-misses-deadline-to-print-census-forms
An area of Amazon rainforest roughly the size of a football pitch is now being cleared every single minute, according to satellite data. The rate of losses has accelerated as Brazil's new right-wing president favours development over conservation. The largest rainforest in the world, the Amazon is a vital carbon store that slows down the pace of global warming. A senior Brazilian official, speaking anonymously, told us his government was encouraging deforestation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48827490
Donald Trump Aide Blasted Obama For Visiting Cuba In 2016, Calling It Equivalent To Going To North Korea
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-aide-blasted-obama-cuba-north-korea-1447087
A black hospital patient went on a walk with an IV drip. Police arrested him on suspicion of stealing medical equipment
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/us/illinois-man-with-iv-arrested/index.html
Alaska Governor’s “Unprecedented” Higher Education Cuts Could Shutter Entire Departments
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/alaska-governor-guts-state-higher-education-funding.html
Antarctica has lost more ice in four years than the Arctic has in 34 years
https://www.euronews.com/2019/07/02/antarctica-has-lost-more-ice-in-four-years-than-the-arctic-has-in-34-years
UK Tesco suspends chicken sales from ‘ethical’ farm after video shows injured birds being kicked and hurled into crates - The Animal Justice Project said the footage shows the suffering of high welfare chickens who are raised for meat production.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/chicken-tesco-animal-abuse-video-investigation-rspca-red-tractor-a8982861.html
UK warns China of serious consequences if Hong Kong rights not honored
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-extradition-britain/uk-warns-china-of-serious-consequences-if-hong-kong-rights-not-honored-idUSKCN1TX0XU
Oregon governor ready to use executive privilege to pass carbon tax legislation to avoid another Senate walk out on climate change bill
https://www.apnews.com/06323bf0b26a4c468b0db0be8c1f1d65
Military spends more on Viagra than on transgender recruits. So why ban trans?
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article232079172.html
Roy Moore “likely failed” a December 2017 polygraph he took in an effort to clear his name from accusations made against him by women during the Senate race that year, according to a lawsuit filing Monday. Attorneys for Leigh Corfman, who maintains she was sexually molested as a 14-year-old by the then-32-year-old Moore in 1979, filed the motion in Montgomery County circuit court in an ongoing effort to reopen Moore’s deposition in the defamation lawsuit she filed against him in January 2018.
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/roy-moore-likely-failed-polygraph-test-corfman-says.html
https://www.al.com/news/2017/11/roy_moore_accused_of_sexual_mi.html
https://www.al.com/news/2018/01/roy_moore_accuser_leigh_corfma_1.html
Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore. Temperatures lead to what appears to be largest local die-off in 15 years, raising fears for broader ecosystem
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/28/california-mussels-cooked-heat?CMP=share_btn_tw
Over 200 major companies sign Supreme Court brief in favor of LGBTQ workers, arguing that excluding sexual orientation and gender identity from federal civil rights law “would undermine the nation’s business interests.”
https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1146136716425748483
The Trump administration is seeking to impose hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines on some unauthorized immigrants for failing to leave the U.S. after being ordered to do so, according to government documents obtained by NPR.
https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1146130220300345345
Trump and R.N.C. Raised $105 Million in 2nd Quarter, a Sign He Will Have Far More Money Than 1n 2016 | Campaign officials said they received 725,000 individual donations online, with supporters giving an average of $48. In some cases, they said, people may have donated more than once. An R.N.C. official said the small-dollar enthusiasm for Mr. Trump was something unprecedented in Republican politics, and noted that for the first time ever, the R.N.C. attracted a larger share of donations under $200 than the Democratic National Committee.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/us/politics/trump-fund-raising-2020.html
Chris Jansing
Verified account @ChrisJansing
Should Dems worry? @MichaelSteele “This is a staggering number...if he’s just in this last quarter $105 million with 2 quarters left in the year, by the end of the year he could be at close to a half a billion before he even turns the corner into the primary season”
https://twitter.com/ChrisJansing/status/1146132225123115009
Fox hosts used to decry the notion of talking to dictators. Not anymore. Hours after President Trump crossed into North Korea on Sunday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham was slamming “liberals” for criticizing Trump’s “historic” meeting. “Liberals once believed that it was a sign of strength for a president to go to extraordinary lengths for peace,” Ingraham tweeted. “President Trump did this today in North Korea. Historic, regardless of the outcome.” It was a far cry from Ingraham’s tweet about President Barack Obama three years earlier: “It's 5p ET, which means Pres Obama must be meeting with some dictator somewhere. Are there any left?” As with much of Fox’s coverage of Trump’s presidency, issues that hosts and pundits used to admonish Obama about are copacetic now that Trump is president, examples of which you can watch in the video above. When Obama criticized Fox News’s coverage of him, host Sean Hannity called it “bullying.” Now according to Hannity, there is a “destroy-Trump media” out to get the president. Fox ran countless segments on golf trips during Obama’s eight years. Now its hosts jokingly take bets for when Trump will golf next. When both presidents added an identical number of jobs to the economy, Obama was the one “aggressively sustaining mediocrity.” If both presidents reached out to authoritarians around the world, Obama was “sleeping with the enemy” while Trump is displaying his “genius.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/02/fox-hosts-used-decry-notion-talking-dictators-not-anymore/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/01/trump-is-giving-kim-jong-un-major-concessions-he-may-now-be-asking-less-return/?utm_term=.18eb3091c132
https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/1145297120217448449
https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/717457553639227392
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_0rcz_6lN0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly8wfEBAz60
https://twitter.com/RiegerReport/status/1095725098202525703
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrp87nUVRrc
https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/07/01/fox-gushes-over-trumps-dmz-photo-op-while-foreign-policy-experts-slam-him-granting-legitimacy-north/224098
FBI, DOJ ‘Deprioritize’ Investigating Far-Right Violence
https://www.voanews.com/usa/report-fbi-doj-deprioritize-investigating-far-right-violence
Chinese border guards put secret surveillance app on tourists' phones: Software extracts emails, texts and contacts and could be used to track movements
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/02/chinese-border-guards-surveillance-app-tourists-phones
US partially lifts ban on Huawei following extensive lobbying campaign
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/07/us-lifts-ban-on-huawei-after-lobbying/
Bipartisan bill aims to stop child pornography trafficking on Defense Department's network
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/02/politics/house-bill-defense-department-network-child-pornography/index.html
This Is Who Sells Those Crappy Shampoo Packets AOC Found in Migrant Detention: The Bob Barker Company was once accused of profiting off sweatshop labor, among other strange and disturbing episodes in its past.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3n9qz/this-is-who-sells-those-crappy-shampoo-packets-aoc-found-in-migrant-detention
Vegan chocolate chip cookie dough and raspberry cheesecake donuts
https://i.redd.it/nnugk86idw731.jpg
Trump Administration Drops Bid To Put Citizenship Question On 2020 Census
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-census-citizenship-question-2020_n_5d1bbeaae4b07f6ca5857afe?8nh
Trump Facebook Ads Use Models to Portray Actual Supporters
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2019-07-02/trump-facebook-ads-use-models-to-portray-actual-supporters
MSNBC Won't Air Trump's July 4th Event Live
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/451453-msnbc-wont-air-trumps-july-4th-event-live
Federal judge blocks Barr order on indefinite detention for asylum seekers
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/451456-federal-judge-blocks-barr-order-on-indefinite-detention-for-asylum
Mark Kelly raised $4.2 million during his second quarter in the Arizona Senate Race, exceeding first quarter haul
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2019/07/02/mark-kelly-arizona-democratic-senate-hopeful-raised-4-2-million-during-2nd-quarter/1631551001/
Congress Investigates Rollback of the Clean Car Standards – an Epic Oversight Hearing
https://blog.ucsusa.org/jonna-hamilton/congress-investigates-rollback-of-clean-car-standards
2012 HUD report reveals that San Antonio failed to properly spend funds approved by Congress to combat the housing crisis while Julian Castro was mayor of the city.
https://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/julian-castro-san-antonio-hud-money-106848
With Apologies to ‘The Washington Post,’ What Bernie Sanders Says About Economic Inequality Is Especially Meaningful | The senator should not be taking heat for using “numbers that add up” to make a point about economic injustice.
https://www.thenation.com/article/washington-post-bernie-sanders-2020/
The Small American Business in a Trump Campaign Ad Is Actually in Tokyo
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/trump-campaign-ad-american-business-tokyo.html
Oregon just passed the most robust paid time off maternity and sick leave for workers in the United States
https://www.ktvz.com/news/oregon-lawmakers-ok-paid-family-and-medical-leave/1090710712
Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Thank You KD For Everything, It Has Truly Been Magical. We Lost You Because Of An Existential Crisis (Can't Feel Fulfilled With Those Cats....) But You Found A Deeper Meaning To Basketball And To Life All The While Dazzling Us.
Thank you. For everything. Finals MVPs and championships aren't even the beginning of the list of things I'm grateful to you for.
For 3 magical years, you took the brunt of the NBA/sports media and the brunt of the social media and the brunt of half the Dubs fanbase and the brunt of the rest of the entire NBA fanbase that endlessly attacked you and I can't even begin to imagine how emotionally and psychologically hard that must have been. The lack of respect for one of the greatest players to put that uniform on and the fact that you took all that abuse and put your career on the line to help Golden State win and win and win again.
How hard it must have been to stay positive, stay focused and always keep the team first on and off the court.
I don't think any other super star player in the entire league could have made Golden State as fluid and potent and focused and completely and totally feared as you did. All other top-tier players would have only made Golden State worse because of ego.
You suffered a raw deal from worthless fans who did not appreciate you.
In Golden State, you saw the bond those guys had, how much they loved playing together, and how much they loved the game. They brought in a lot of great people to run the organization. However, they'd already won a title and gone through a lot together. You were constantly pitted against the championship core. It was never the Warriors, it was KD and the Warriors.
I also believe that although you were undoubtedly the best player on the Golden State Warriors, you knew deep down the team would never be your team.
KD & Steph on the same floor was a level of efficiency and potency and technical skill perfection and sublime grace and supreme creativity this game had not seen since the Jordan era. It will be missed by all involved, all who watched whether or not they admit it, but no one will miss it more than KD.
He will never replicate the level of basketball mastery he achieved in Golden State. He will never play with teammates of this caliber with this high of an IQ. He was like an artist in his prime. These fleeting moments don't last, but it's extremely sad (heart ripped to shreds....) when they end prematurely. KD and Steph looked like and played like a synthesis of Olympic figure skaters and elite Russia-school ballet dancers and wild gazelles, so many of the technical/mechanical movements and plays-designs KD and Steph made were straight out of the figure skating and ballet playbooks done with Gold Medal excellence. Dumb worthless NBA "fans" and the entire realm of sports media and social media etc failed to comprehend the sheer unparalleled choreographed routines-of-beauty these two wild gazelle figure skater dancers performed, shift after shift after shift, game after game after game, year after year after year.
This last season we all clearly saw that you were suffering an existential crisis and we knew and you knew that the third year was the final year. We knew you selflessly agreed to remain for one more season to try for a rare, historic, three-peat championship for a team you still clearly did not feel a part of playing a fast-paced game system that failed to integrate your even-paced/midrange/isolation-style of play for a state you clearly did not feel at home in. Golden State, my team, failed you in many ways, and I will be forever sorry for that. Golden State is also the team that taught you 1) championships are a mere fleeting moment of glory that amount to nothing compared to friendship and family and the life you live off the court and 2) it's not the team that makes the player nor the player that makes the team, it's the player who plays the game like nobody else and builds the game and team he wants and who has the ultimate freedom to play on his own terms in his own style with whom he wants when he wants where he wants and how he wants with no care about what the media or fans say, it's players like you who go down in the record books as the greatest, it's players like you who come like the wind and touch everything with a bit of golden glory and then like the wind sail on. You must do everything you must do to fulfill yourself, to build the team you want and build the life outside-of-basketball you want. Golden State does not define nor exhaust the possibilities and the meaning of being a great basketball player or a human being, Golden State is/was merely a championship pathway, not a life pathway.
I'm rooting for you every step of the way forever. Come back stronger from the Achilles heal, win for old school Brooklyn, take pride in and enjoy the opportunity of building up an average struggling team, take pride in boosting Brooklyn, lead the least likely of teams to a championship season for yourself and for them, endlessly add to your indescribably crazy legacy. And carry on being the equally indescribably Kierkegaardian and Kafkian human being you are.
Please New York and Brooklyn fans take care of him, you're g-d damned fucking blessed to have him.
Monday, July 1, 2019
Kevon Looney has agreed to a three-year, $15M deal to return to Golden State.
https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/1145843892488736769
I'm crying again, I can't believe it, now work magic and bring Andre Iguodala back.....
Last Days In A Lonely Place (2007) [Short Film; Philip S. Solomon]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoSI9_I3sO8
Deep Friendship: Kevin Durant's Choice Showed What He Values — Something Stephen Curry And The Warriors Couldn't Quite Give Him [theathletic]
https://theathletic.com/1055842/2019/07/01/thompson-kevin-durants-choice-showed-what-he-values-something-stephen-curry-and-the-warriors-couldnt-quite-give-him/
By Marcus Thompson II June 30, 2019
Kevin Durant's Choice Showed What He Values — Something Stephen Curry And The Warriors Couldn't Quite Give Him
"Stephen Curry flew straight to the New York area from Shanghai, China. But he wasn't going to pitch Kevin Durant on why he should stay with the Warriors. It was already too late. He was on the plane when the news broke that Durant was leaving for Brooklyn.
And Curry didn't turn the jet around or cancel the trip. Because it wasn't about recruiting. It was about respect. It was about thanks.
It was easy to presume that if anyone could sway Durant, Curry would be the one. The point guard has been the Warriors' biggest magnet, drawing the key pieces to the dynasty, including Durant and Andre Iguodala and coach Steve Kerr. It was Curry's mojo that built this. It was his stamp of approval that sealed Durant's arrival. His trip to New York was seen as a last-ditch effort to keep Durant.
But Curry went to have one last moment with Durant as teammates. To tell him one more time how much he appreciated him for the three years they had. They'd won two championships together. Dominated the league together. Made history together. He was there to wish Durant happiness and peace, express his support for his decision. And when Curry got to Durant's apartment in Manhattan, Durant confirmed to Curry his decision that their time together was over. Face to face. Man to man. Friend to friend.
Neither Curry nor Durant responded to requests for comment. But what was probably unsaid, though, was what could have been. This moment illustrated one of the reasons, perhaps a significant one, Durant left — because Curry and Durant never really got to become Curry and Durant. It might have been the only thing that truly could have kept Durant in the Bay.
"He wanted that type of relationship," said one source friendly with Durant. "It just didn't work out like that."
Durant had so many options in free agency, it was nearly impossible to know what he wanted. He made sure of that, too, by keeping his desires close to the vest and challenging anyone who presumed to know what he coveted.
But since he has decided, accepting a free-agent contract offer to play for the Brooklyn Nets and the teams later working out a sign-and-trade that sends D'Angelo Russell to the Warriors, some of the mystery has been uncovered. It wasn't about money for Durant. He turned down the most he could get, which was $221 million from the Warriors, even with an Achilles injury that threatens his future earning potential. It wasn't about the best opportunity to win a championship. While Brooklyn will now be a major player in the East, the Warriors were a proven championship contender on the cusp of a three-peat before injuries. An argument can be made that the Nets are younger and the Eastern Conference is an easier route, but those advantages pale in comparison to the experience and chemistry the Warriors core had already developed.
And this, clearly, wasn't primarily about validating his legacy either. Undoubtedly, Durant has some critics he wants to rebut. But the biggest answer to his naysayers, the sure-fire way to make him the most legendary figure he could be, was to revive the Knicks. He passed on that, too."
"Multiple sources have said for months Durant and Kyrie Irving planned on being teammates. Durant wanted them to join the Knicks together while Irving preferred they take over Brooklyn. They are now both Nets.
The decision by Durant revealed what he valued most: friendship. That DeAndre Jordan, another of Durant's close friends, is also joining them in Brooklyn, reportedly, underscores exactly what was most important in Durant's heart.
The money? He has plenty of it and will get plenty more. The winning? You can bet he is sure they are championship-worthy. The legacy? Like he said before, y'all know who he is.
It seems the real driving force was the opportunity to play with his good friends. It's not surprising that such an opportunity matters to Durant. It always has, since he was a kid on the PG Jaguars AAU team. Camaraderie, fellowship, loyalty — truth is, these things have always been preeminent for Durant, even if some other desires and determinations tend to get in the way sometimes. He's still a guy who wants to hoop at high levels with his homies.
If that was his greatest desire, it makes sense why he's leaving — that was the one thing the Warriors couldn't give him.
Durant came to the Warriors in search of a bond. Three years ago, when they met in the Hamptons, the visible unity the Warriors displayed stood out to him. They were four dudes who enjoyed each other and let that connection infect their play. Durant especially wanted that bond with Curry. That's what drew him, according to many behind the scenes.
On paper, it made perfect sense. They are two humble guys, two players with a reputation for being selfless and easy going, two players who poured themselves into the game and have legendary work ethics.
But it never happened, not in the way that would keep Durant with the Warriors. To be sure, they got along. There was no behind-the-scenes fighting to speak of between the two. Ask Curry about Durant, he will rave about his talent and his heart. Ask Durant about Curry, he will lavish him heavily with praise. They were cool with each other. Still are. But their relationship could only go so deep because of their circumstances.
The biggest issue was timing. Durant arrived when Curry was 28 with two young daughters. Curry's emphasis on being a family man cuts into his ability to be especially close with new people. Plus, Curry keeps a familial hedge around him. His entourage is mostly blood relatives, in-laws, close friends, business partners and employees. While his teammates are usually welcome, being with Curry requires being with his family.
Durant came to the Warriors a single man, new to the area and a free spirit. Their lives were in completely different spaces. Their hobbies were different. Durant, too, had his family and close friends around him. But as they faded from the forefront — his mother, Wanda, his brother, Tony, and his childhood friend Charlie Bell were far less visible in the Bay the last two years — Durant was left with his business partner Rich Kleiman and longtime friend and trainer Randy Williams, along with his Nike reps.
Durant is not the type to force his way into situations. If he meets too much resistance, or doesn't feel the vibe, he is much more inclined to fall back.
They were friendly when together. They laughed incessantly. They supported each other. On many occasions, Durant used his platform to be supportive of Curry, buck back at his critics. Curry went out of his way to make Durant feel welcome. They both tried.
However, another reason they couldn't bond fully was because they were often being pitted against each other.
Definitely by the fans, and in the space Durant frequents: social media. Even when Durant announced he was signing with the Warriors, on Independence Day 2016, while many Warriors fans celebrated, others contended the Warriors didn't need Durant. Many fell in love with the 2015 and 2016 Warriors and scoffed when the team gave up its depth for Durant.
When the Warriors struggled, those struggles were pinned on Durant. His style of play was criticized. And Curry was the light under which Durant was scrutinized.
It wasn't just fans. The media was complicit in presenting the Curry vs. Durant narrative, nationally and locally. The debate of who was the team's best player continued in the background. How the team performed with either Curry or Durant absent was under constant watch.
And then there was the offense. Who runs it? Who has the ball in his hands? Who ends up iced out while the other gets fed? This discussion never ended.
Systemically, they had some issues. The Warriors preferred to move the ball, create offense by creating seams with motion. While Durant could play that game, that wasn't his preferred style, especially when paired with players who couldn't take advantage of the openings. And, invariably, Durant would get frozen out while Curry and Klay Thompson jacked up shots that would be ill-advised for others but were the foundation of what the Warriors built. And when the offense ran through Durant and it didn't work, Durant took the heat.
All of it was fair game. Criticism, analysis, opinions — it's part of the basketball landscape. It could be argued Durant should have been able to block it out, handle it better. It could be argued the Warriors should have adjusted the offense, adapted to its players. But the greater question is what was making Durant feel connected when everything else was trying to pull them apart?
That's where friendship comes in. That's where chemistry and the bond of players become valuable. The Warriors and Durant couldn't build in three years, under the most intense of heat, the kind of bond that would survive all this. It was probably too much to ask from the beginning if that's what indeed mattered most to Durant.
The original Warriors core isn't as connected off the court as it may seem. None of them are inseparable away from the game. Each of their lives pulls them in different directions. Curry has his family. Draymond Green became a dad in 2016, altering his life significantly. Iguodala, who is also now on his way out with a trade to the Memphis Grizzlies, and Shaun Livingston also have their own families. And Thompson did his bachelor thing.
Probably the players who spend the most time together, away from team events, are Curry and Iguodala on the golf course.
But this crew grew up together. They became All-Stars together, champions together. They didn't need the same type of fellowship. They've done their bonding dinners and team parties and group outings. The building of the Warriors, beginning with the Mark Jackson era when David Lee was a veteran leader, included numerous team-bonding events that created the chemistry the Warriors' core has. Now they have these brotherly relationships without needing to spend significant time with each other off the court.
The team outings and bonding sessions decreased over the years. The Warriors became a collection of players that bonded on the court and largely went their separate ways once work was done.
Durant is as affable as can be. When they were together, especially in his first season, he was easily one of the guys. Remember the barbecue at Curry's house in Durant's first year with the Warriors, featuring the SuperVillain balloons? They enjoyed each other's presence. But over time, Durant and the pack grew more and more distant. And this past season, Durant was much more alone. He and his teammates talked less.
Green's blowup on Durant in November seemed to doom any chance they had of staying together. But it actually prompted them to double down on each other. Curry was more aggressive about fostering unity, trying to fix what was fractured. Green went into reconciliation mode. Veterans like Iguodala and Livingston did their part to hold the locker room together. Durant had a tendency to be isolated but eventually, especially towards the end of the year, they locked in as a team.
By the end of the year, they seemed as tight as they'd been in a long time. But in hindsight, it seemed more like an unspoken pact to just enjoy whatever time they had left. They all seemed to buy-in. They looked unified. They talked about each other glowingly. Even while injured, Durant was engaged with his teammates.
When it was all said and done, they had respect for one another, appreciation for what they had, but not enough to stay together. It looked as if they might have found their stride in time to keep this group going. But in the end, it proved to be their best attempt at ending on a good note.
Maybe if Curry and Durant actually became the duo they seemed destined to be, on and off the court, they'd be ushering in a new era at Chase Center. Maybe if they linked up at different times in their lives, under different circumstances, in a different media landscape, they could have built something that could have survived.
But it didn't happen. Now Durant is headed to Brooklyn, having linked up with his good friends, with whom he already has a great rapport and a relationship established over many years. So Curry stopped in New York simply to say thank you. They had a relatively short time together, but it was a helluva ride."
By Marcus Thompson II June 30, 2019
Kevin Durant's Choice Showed What He Values — Something Stephen Curry And The Warriors Couldn't Quite Give Him
"Stephen Curry flew straight to the New York area from Shanghai, China. But he wasn't going to pitch Kevin Durant on why he should stay with the Warriors. It was already too late. He was on the plane when the news broke that Durant was leaving for Brooklyn.
And Curry didn't turn the jet around or cancel the trip. Because it wasn't about recruiting. It was about respect. It was about thanks.
It was easy to presume that if anyone could sway Durant, Curry would be the one. The point guard has been the Warriors' biggest magnet, drawing the key pieces to the dynasty, including Durant and Andre Iguodala and coach Steve Kerr. It was Curry's mojo that built this. It was his stamp of approval that sealed Durant's arrival. His trip to New York was seen as a last-ditch effort to keep Durant.
But Curry went to have one last moment with Durant as teammates. To tell him one more time how much he appreciated him for the three years they had. They'd won two championships together. Dominated the league together. Made history together. He was there to wish Durant happiness and peace, express his support for his decision. And when Curry got to Durant's apartment in Manhattan, Durant confirmed to Curry his decision that their time together was over. Face to face. Man to man. Friend to friend.
Neither Curry nor Durant responded to requests for comment. But what was probably unsaid, though, was what could have been. This moment illustrated one of the reasons, perhaps a significant one, Durant left — because Curry and Durant never really got to become Curry and Durant. It might have been the only thing that truly could have kept Durant in the Bay.
"He wanted that type of relationship," said one source friendly with Durant. "It just didn't work out like that."
Durant had so many options in free agency, it was nearly impossible to know what he wanted. He made sure of that, too, by keeping his desires close to the vest and challenging anyone who presumed to know what he coveted.
But since he has decided, accepting a free-agent contract offer to play for the Brooklyn Nets and the teams later working out a sign-and-trade that sends D'Angelo Russell to the Warriors, some of the mystery has been uncovered. It wasn't about money for Durant. He turned down the most he could get, which was $221 million from the Warriors, even with an Achilles injury that threatens his future earning potential. It wasn't about the best opportunity to win a championship. While Brooklyn will now be a major player in the East, the Warriors were a proven championship contender on the cusp of a three-peat before injuries. An argument can be made that the Nets are younger and the Eastern Conference is an easier route, but those advantages pale in comparison to the experience and chemistry the Warriors core had already developed.
And this, clearly, wasn't primarily about validating his legacy either. Undoubtedly, Durant has some critics he wants to rebut. But the biggest answer to his naysayers, the sure-fire way to make him the most legendary figure he could be, was to revive the Knicks. He passed on that, too."
"Multiple sources have said for months Durant and Kyrie Irving planned on being teammates. Durant wanted them to join the Knicks together while Irving preferred they take over Brooklyn. They are now both Nets.
The decision by Durant revealed what he valued most: friendship. That DeAndre Jordan, another of Durant's close friends, is also joining them in Brooklyn, reportedly, underscores exactly what was most important in Durant's heart.
The money? He has plenty of it and will get plenty more. The winning? You can bet he is sure they are championship-worthy. The legacy? Like he said before, y'all know who he is.
It seems the real driving force was the opportunity to play with his good friends. It's not surprising that such an opportunity matters to Durant. It always has, since he was a kid on the PG Jaguars AAU team. Camaraderie, fellowship, loyalty — truth is, these things have always been preeminent for Durant, even if some other desires and determinations tend to get in the way sometimes. He's still a guy who wants to hoop at high levels with his homies.
If that was his greatest desire, it makes sense why he's leaving — that was the one thing the Warriors couldn't give him.
Durant came to the Warriors in search of a bond. Three years ago, when they met in the Hamptons, the visible unity the Warriors displayed stood out to him. They were four dudes who enjoyed each other and let that connection infect their play. Durant especially wanted that bond with Curry. That's what drew him, according to many behind the scenes.
On paper, it made perfect sense. They are two humble guys, two players with a reputation for being selfless and easy going, two players who poured themselves into the game and have legendary work ethics.
But it never happened, not in the way that would keep Durant with the Warriors. To be sure, they got along. There was no behind-the-scenes fighting to speak of between the two. Ask Curry about Durant, he will rave about his talent and his heart. Ask Durant about Curry, he will lavish him heavily with praise. They were cool with each other. Still are. But their relationship could only go so deep because of their circumstances.
The biggest issue was timing. Durant arrived when Curry was 28 with two young daughters. Curry's emphasis on being a family man cuts into his ability to be especially close with new people. Plus, Curry keeps a familial hedge around him. His entourage is mostly blood relatives, in-laws, close friends, business partners and employees. While his teammates are usually welcome, being with Curry requires being with his family.
Durant came to the Warriors a single man, new to the area and a free spirit. Their lives were in completely different spaces. Their hobbies were different. Durant, too, had his family and close friends around him. But as they faded from the forefront — his mother, Wanda, his brother, Tony, and his childhood friend Charlie Bell were far less visible in the Bay the last two years — Durant was left with his business partner Rich Kleiman and longtime friend and trainer Randy Williams, along with his Nike reps.
Durant is not the type to force his way into situations. If he meets too much resistance, or doesn't feel the vibe, he is much more inclined to fall back.
They were friendly when together. They laughed incessantly. They supported each other. On many occasions, Durant used his platform to be supportive of Curry, buck back at his critics. Curry went out of his way to make Durant feel welcome. They both tried.
However, another reason they couldn't bond fully was because they were often being pitted against each other.
Definitely by the fans, and in the space Durant frequents: social media. Even when Durant announced he was signing with the Warriors, on Independence Day 2016, while many Warriors fans celebrated, others contended the Warriors didn't need Durant. Many fell in love with the 2015 and 2016 Warriors and scoffed when the team gave up its depth for Durant.
When the Warriors struggled, those struggles were pinned on Durant. His style of play was criticized. And Curry was the light under which Durant was scrutinized.
It wasn't just fans. The media was complicit in presenting the Curry vs. Durant narrative, nationally and locally. The debate of who was the team's best player continued in the background. How the team performed with either Curry or Durant absent was under constant watch.
And then there was the offense. Who runs it? Who has the ball in his hands? Who ends up iced out while the other gets fed? This discussion never ended.
Systemically, they had some issues. The Warriors preferred to move the ball, create offense by creating seams with motion. While Durant could play that game, that wasn't his preferred style, especially when paired with players who couldn't take advantage of the openings. And, invariably, Durant would get frozen out while Curry and Klay Thompson jacked up shots that would be ill-advised for others but were the foundation of what the Warriors built. And when the offense ran through Durant and it didn't work, Durant took the heat.
All of it was fair game. Criticism, analysis, opinions — it's part of the basketball landscape. It could be argued Durant should have been able to block it out, handle it better. It could be argued the Warriors should have adjusted the offense, adapted to its players. But the greater question is what was making Durant feel connected when everything else was trying to pull them apart?
That's where friendship comes in. That's where chemistry and the bond of players become valuable. The Warriors and Durant couldn't build in three years, under the most intense of heat, the kind of bond that would survive all this. It was probably too much to ask from the beginning if that's what indeed mattered most to Durant.
The original Warriors core isn't as connected off the court as it may seem. None of them are inseparable away from the game. Each of their lives pulls them in different directions. Curry has his family. Draymond Green became a dad in 2016, altering his life significantly. Iguodala, who is also now on his way out with a trade to the Memphis Grizzlies, and Shaun Livingston also have their own families. And Thompson did his bachelor thing.
Probably the players who spend the most time together, away from team events, are Curry and Iguodala on the golf course.
But this crew grew up together. They became All-Stars together, champions together. They didn't need the same type of fellowship. They've done their bonding dinners and team parties and group outings. The building of the Warriors, beginning with the Mark Jackson era when David Lee was a veteran leader, included numerous team-bonding events that created the chemistry the Warriors' core has. Now they have these brotherly relationships without needing to spend significant time with each other off the court.
The team outings and bonding sessions decreased over the years. The Warriors became a collection of players that bonded on the court and largely went their separate ways once work was done.
Durant is as affable as can be. When they were together, especially in his first season, he was easily one of the guys. Remember the barbecue at Curry's house in Durant's first year with the Warriors, featuring the SuperVillain balloons? They enjoyed each other's presence. But over time, Durant and the pack grew more and more distant. And this past season, Durant was much more alone. He and his teammates talked less.
Green's blowup on Durant in November seemed to doom any chance they had of staying together. But it actually prompted them to double down on each other. Curry was more aggressive about fostering unity, trying to fix what was fractured. Green went into reconciliation mode. Veterans like Iguodala and Livingston did their part to hold the locker room together. Durant had a tendency to be isolated but eventually, especially towards the end of the year, they locked in as a team.
By the end of the year, they seemed as tight as they'd been in a long time. But in hindsight, it seemed more like an unspoken pact to just enjoy whatever time they had left. They all seemed to buy-in. They looked unified. They talked about each other glowingly. Even while injured, Durant was engaged with his teammates.
When it was all said and done, they had respect for one another, appreciation for what they had, but not enough to stay together. It looked as if they might have found their stride in time to keep this group going. But in the end, it proved to be their best attempt at ending on a good note.
Maybe if Curry and Durant actually became the duo they seemed destined to be, on and off the court, they'd be ushering in a new era at Chase Center. Maybe if they linked up at different times in their lives, under different circumstances, in a different media landscape, they could have built something that could have survived.
But it didn't happen. Now Durant is headed to Brooklyn, having linked up with his good friends, with whom he already has a great rapport and a relationship established over many years. So Curry stopped in New York simply to say thank you. They had a relatively short time together, but it was a helluva ride."
Los Angeles Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs died Monday, the team announced. He was 27. | "It is with great sorrow that we report Tyler Skaggs passed away earlier today in Texas. Tyler has, and always will be, an important part of the Angels family. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife Carli and his entire family during this devastating time. - Angels Baseball" https://twitter.com/Angels/status/1145798021780840448 https://www.instagram.com/p/BzMSn5DBnse/
News Dump
Independent experts and former Obama officials say Obama not only didn't "beg" for a meeting with Kim Jong Un or Kim Jong Il, he never considered seeking one in any way. My fact check on Trump's latest imaginary history:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/fact-check-obama-never-begged-to-meet-with-kim-jong-un/index.html
Trump Republican administration considering to accept North Korea as a nuclear power: But for weeks before the meeting, which started as a Twitter offer by the president for Mr. Kim to drop by at the Demilitarized Zone and “say hello,” a real idea has been taking shape inside the Trump administration that officials hope might create a foundation for a new round of negotiations. The concept would amount to a nuclear freeze, one that essentially enshrines the status quo, and tacitly accepts the North as a nuclear power, something administration officials have often said they would never stand for. It falls far short of Mr. Trump’s initial vow 30 months ago to solve the North Korea nuclear problem, but it might provide him with a retort to campaign-season critics who say the North Korean dictator has been playing the American president brilliantly by giving him the visuals he craves while holding back on real concessions. While the approach could stop that arsenal from growing, it would not, at least in the near future, dismantle any existing weapons, variously estimated at 20 to 60. Nor would it limit the North’s missile capability.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/30/world/asia/trump-kim-north-korea-negotiations.html
The Best People - Thanks to Trump’s incompetence, there’s no one in charge at the Pentagon in the midst of multiple national security crises all created by Trump+Republicans
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/shanahan-trump-hiring-pentagon-defense-secretary.html
Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes | Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings. In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in May while in custody at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Texas. One member posted a GIF of Elmo with the quote, “Oh well.” Another responded with an image and the words “If he dies, he dies.” Created in August 2016, the Facebook group is called “I’m 10-15” and boasts roughly 9,500 members from across the country. (10-15 is Border Patrol code for “aliens in custody.”) The group described itself, in an online introduction, as a forum for “funny” and “serious” discussion about work with the patrol. “Remember you are never alone in this family,” the introduction said.
https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-border-patrol-facebook-group-agents-joke-about-migrant-deaths-post-sexist-memes
More Than 700 Migrants Forced To Share 4 Showers at Texas Border Patrol Station
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/bj9kdm/more-than-700-migrants-forced-to-share-4-showers-at-texas-border-patrol-station
EPA Wants Minimal Limits on Poison in Drinking Water
https://www.dcreport.org/2019/06/25/epa-wants-minimal-limits-on-poison-in-drinking-water/
The Russian government sent more than $1.4 million to a Florida-based company airing Kremlin propaganda in the nation’s capital over the last two years, according to recent foreign agent registration records. Florida-based company RM Broadcasting LLC has officially registered as a foreign agent with the Justice Department after a federal judge ordered it to do so in May. Marking DOJ’s first successful civil enforcement action under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in more than two decades, U.S. District Court Judge Robin Rosenberg ruled that RM Broadcasting should be registered as a foreign agent under FARA due to its relationship with Rossiya Segodnya, the Russian government’s media enterprise that owns Sputnik International and was created by Vladimir Putin to advance Russia’s interests abroad. A 2017 U.S. intelligence report found that Sputnik was part of “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine” that facilitated Russian interference and influence in the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump. Starting shortly after Trump’s election, RM Broadcasting agreed to act as the Russian media enterprise’s middleman brokering airtime on WZHF 1390, a Washington, D.C., area radio station owned by Way Broadcasting.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/07/russia-paid-radio-broadcaster-1-4-million-to-air-kremlin-propaganda/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6178436-6694-Registration-Statement-20190621-1.html#document/p3/a510016
https://www.opensecrets.org/fara/background
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/court-finds-rm-broadcasting-must-register-foreign-agent
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/05/foreign-media-broadcasters-get-mixed-signals-on-new-transparency-rules/
https://www.opensecrets.org/fara/foreign-principals/G6657
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
Trump Suddenly Fine With Chinese Telecom He Called A National Security Threat - The Art of the Deal apparently means making a huge concession to China, getting little in return, and putting U.S. national security at risk: Back in May, as in just a few short weeks ago, the Trump administration placed Chinese telecom giant Huawei on a trade blacklist following the unsealing of a Justice Department indictment that said the company had conspired to provide forbidden financial services to Iran, and concluded that it was “engaged in activities that are contrary to U.S. national security or foreign policy interest.” Placement on the Commerce Department’s “entity list” meant that U.S. businesses were largely banned from selling parts and components to Huawei and, as you can probably gather, was a pretty big deal. So big, in fact, that you wouldn’t expect the president to basically take it all back just over a month later, particularly if he was getting little in return for giving an apparent national-security risk a reprieve. But, surprise! On Saturday Donald Trump told the press that he’d decided to let U.S. companies sell to Huawei, despite literally putting Huawei on the trade blacklist in May, adding in a follow-up tweet that he’d done so at the behest of “High Tech companies” and Chinese president Xi Jinping, who’d both been lobbying hard for him to reverse course. The announcement was made in the context of the two sides resuming trade talks, and Trump agreeing to suspend imposing an additional $300 billion worth of tariffs that he’s been threatening for weeks.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/donald-trump-china-huawei
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-china-huaweitech/chinas-huawei-70-affiliates-placed-on-us-trade-blacklist-idUKKCN1SL2VW
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-to-allow-us-firms-huawei-deal-2019-6?r=US&IR=T
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1145097776658812929
https://www.ft.com/content/3bbb6fec-88c5-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2
.@JoeBiden on #NKorea: "After three made-for-TV summits, we still don't have a single concrete commitment from North Korea. Not one missile or nuclear weapon has been destroyed, not one inspector is on the ground. If anything, the situation has gotten worse."
https://twitter.com/KThomasDC/status/1145756266867908608
THANKS TRUMP AND REPUBLICANS AND ALL PEOPLE WHO SUPPORT THEM: Israel will be destroyed in half an hour if America attacks Iran
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-iran-israel/israel-will-be-destroyed-in-half-an-hour-if-america-attacks-iran-senior-iranian-mp-idUSKCN1TW2MO
Japan resumes commercial whaling for first time in 30 years. Fishermen set sail to hunt whales on Monday after country’s withdrawal from International Whaling Commission.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/01/japan-resumes-commercial-whaling-for-first-time-in-30-years
Bird spotted feeding chick cigarette butt in ‘devastating’ picture: 'Cigarette butts were the most common item of all types of rubbish collected from beaches globally, according to a report by Ocean Conservancy last year.'
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/bird-cigarette-butt-chick-picture-florida-beach-photograph-rubbish-a8980676.html
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) dropped a bombshell accusation after visiting an El Paso border station on Monday morning, claiming that officials forced some migrants to drink from toilets. "This is CBP on their best behavior, telling people to drink out of a toilet," she said. "And that was with them knowing that a congressional visit was coming."
https://www.kvia.com/news/border/migrants-told-to-drink-from-toilets-at-el-paso-border-station-congresswoman-alleges/1090951789
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says migrant women told to 'drink out of toilets' and subjected to 'psychological warfare', after detention centre visit: 'It is hard to understate the enormity of the problem. We’re talking systemic cruelty [with] a dehumanising culture that treats them like animals'
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/aoc-immigrant-detention-centre-texas-border-patrol-a8983566.html
"If you want water, just drink from a toilet." That's what border patrol told one thirsty woman we met on today's Dems At The Border trip. These are the same CBP personnel who threatened to throw burritos at members of Congress. Changes must be made.
https://twitter.com/RepJudyChu/status/1145779501080743939
A young Arctic fox has walked across the ice from Norway's Svalbard islands to northern Canada in an epic journey, covering 3,506 km (2,176 miles) in 76 days. "The fox's journey has left scientists speechless," according to Greenland's Sermitsiaq newspaper.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-48824181
Sanders Opposes Weapons Sales to Saudi Arabia, Calls on Trump to Obey Constitution
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-opposes-weapons-sales-to-saudi-arabia-calls-on-trump-to-obey-constitution
Judge says Duncan Hunter's personal relationships can be evidence in corruption trial
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/451203-judge-says-duncan-hunters-personal-relationships-can-be-evidence-in
Trump told the troops he gave them their first raise in years. He didn't.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/trump-didnt-give-troops-first-raise/index.html
New Texas law may help GOP keep secrets about its redistricting strategy
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas-legislature/2019/06/28/hide-evidence-new-texas-law-may-help-gop-keep-secrets-redistricting-strategy
Hong Kong police fire rounds of tear gas at protesters after day of unprecedented violence
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3015620/protesters-ram-legislature-hong-kong-marks-tense-handover
EPA Air Quality Chief Resigns Over Ethics Investigation. So little time, so much damage done. That's the legacy left by Bill Wehrum who spent only one and a half years as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) top air quality official before announcing that he will step down this weekend under the cloud of a federal ethics investigation over possible conflicts of interest. His resignation follows conflicting statement he made to Congress about his industry connections, according to Politico.
https://www.ecowatch.com/epa-air-quality-chief-resignation-2639004378.html
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/26/epa-bill-wehrum-1556621
Homeland Security admits it’s using abhorrent conditions at detention centers to deter migration
https://thinkprogress.org/dhs-oig-homeland-security-report-el-paso-detention-center-conditions-used-to-deter-migration-9b0420b7e70b/
More Than 140 Holocaust, Genocide Experts Think Ocasio-Cortez Should Be Allowed to Call Migrant Detention Centers ‘Concentration Camps’
https://www.newsweek.com/holocaust-genocide-experts-defend-ocascio-cortez-concentration-camp-1446911
Braindead LGBT/Q Idiots marching against only country in Middle East which gives them rights and was the first country on the planet to have given them rights
https://i.redd.it/hhnu29imrq731.jpg
Glastonbury: Sir David Attenborough hails plastic ban - “This great festival has gone plastic-free. That is more than a million bottles of water that have not been drunk by you at Glastonbury. Thank you. Thank you.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48819335
UK to deport aspiring astrophysicist, 23, to Pakistan where she faces death or forced marriage to cousin | A 23-year-old woman who has won offers to study astrophysics at some of Britain’s most prestigious universities, after living more than half her life in the UK, is to be deported to Pakistan, the country of her birth, where her father is demanding she marry her older cousin.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/pakistan-asylum-seeker-uk-home-office-immigration-honour-killing-a8968996.html
Democrats Expand Investigation into Personal Email Use by Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and Others
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-expand-probe-personal-email-ivanka-trump-jared-kushner-1446947
Trump’s foreign luxury resorts collide with his South Korea diplomacy: As Trump traveled to South Korea, a business deal was expanding between the Trump family business and a company partly owned by the Korean government.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/01/trump-resort-south-korea-government-1390736
DNC reportedly set to vote on climate debate in victory for youth protesters
https://thinkprogress.org/dnc-set-to-vote-on-climate-debate-victory-for-youth-protesters-sunrise-movement-bfa98af30dc1/
Tesco suspends sales of chicken from an 'ethical' farm after an undercover probe by Animal Justice Project revealed shocking abuse of the birds
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7198811/Tesco-suspends-sales-chicken-ethical-farm-undercover-probe-reveals-shocking-abuse.html
Remember when Julian Castro endorsed Beto
https://twitter.com/JulianCastro/status/986739472707604485
Paris bans nearly 3 million vehicles during weekdays in effort to crack down on pollution
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/451217-paris-bans-nearly-3-million-vehicles-during-weekdays-in-effort-to
An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen, Andrea Orzoff, Timothy Snyder, and Anika Walke, et al. On June 17, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, posted an Instagram live video discussing the detention camps along the southern US border as “concentration camps” in which she used the phrase “Never Again.” This drew sharp criticism the following day from Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, and others for allegedly misappropriating a slogan associated with the Holocaust. After several days of heated media and political debate, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released a statement on June 24 condemning the use of Holocaust analogies. We received the following open letter addressed to the director of the museum, Sara J. Bloomfield, delivered by the signatories on July 1. —The Editors | To Director Bloomfield: We are scholars who strongly support the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Many of us write on the Holocaust and genocide; we have researched in the USHMM’s library and archives or served as fellows or associated scholars; we have been grateful for the Museum’s support and intellectual community. Many of us teach the Holocaust at our universities, and have drawn on the Museum’s online resources. We support the Museum’s programs from workshops to education. We are deeply concerned about the Museum’s recent “Statement Regarding the Museum’s Position on Holocaust Analogies.” We write this public letter to urge its retraction. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences rely on careful and responsible analysis, contextualization, comparison, and argumentation to answer questions about the past and the present. By “unequivocally rejecting efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is taking a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide. And it makes learning from the past almost impossible. The Museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical. It has the potential to inflict severe damage on the Museum’s ability to continue its role as a credible, leading global institution dedicated to Holocaust memory, Holocaust education, and research in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies. The very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering; pointing to similarities across time and space is essential for this task. Looking beyond the academic context, we are well aware of the many distortions and inaccuracies, intentional or not, that frame contemporary discussions of the Holocaust. We are not only scholars. We are global citizens who participate in public discourse, as does the Museum as an institution, and its staff. We therefore consider it essential that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reverse its position on careful historical analysis and comparison. We hope the Museum continues to help scholars establish the Holocaust’s significance as an event from which the world must continue to learn.
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/01/an-open-letter-to-the-director-of-the-holocaust-memorial-museum/
https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/statement-regarding-the-museums-position-on-holocaust-analogies
A complete list of signatories, now numbering more than three hundred and updated in real time, can be viewed here. The list of signatories given above will be brought up to date at intervals.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GnVLG593oY9ymTd_qBJ1mBXISmI4M3DOrEJ9_jiiO3U/edit
Svitek, TX Tribune: Democratic TXSEN hopeful MJ Hegar raises $1m!
https://www.twitter.com/PatrickSvitek/status/1145789914627411971
MJ Hegar running for the other Texas Senate seat
https://www.mjfortexas.com/
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/mj-hegar-1
Fox News hosts admit that they'd attack Obama for meeting with Kim Jong Un
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-hosts-admit-theyd-attack-obama-for-meeting-with-kim-jong-un
Democrats on a key House congressional committee are investigating allegations from a whistleblower within the State Department about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his family's use of taxpayer-funded Diplomatic Security -- prompting agents to lament they are at times viewed as "UberEats with guns". Congressional investigators, who asked for the committee not to be named as they carry out their inquiries, tell CNN that a State Department whistleblower has raised multiple issues over a period of months, about special agents being asked to carry out some questionable tasks for the Pompeo family. In April, for example, an agent was asked to pick up Chinese food—without Pompeo in the car. The whistleblower said this led agents to complain that they are now serving as "UberEats with guns," which has created a buzz within the department, according to multiple Democratic congressional aides who cited the whistleblower.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/pompeo-democrats-whistleblower-claims/index.html
New rules will give AG William Barr more say over immigration courts
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/AG-Barr-moves-forward-with-immigration-court-14063716.php
Saudi Buying of U.S. Treasuries Is Soaring Under Trump
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-30/saudi-buying-of-treasuries-is-soaring-under-trump
Study suggests Russian social media trolls had impact on 2016 election - Every 25,000 retweets of Russian accounts correlated to a 1% increase in Trump's poll numbers one week later. The study, conducted by a team headed at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and published in the peer-reviewed University of Illinois-Chicago journal "First Monday," suggests that — despite protests to the contrary by Republicans and Trump allies — the Russian disinformation campaign was successful in influencing the 2016 election.
https://www.axios.com/russia-interference-trolls-impact-2016-election-eff627d5-f1b3-48fd-8745-449262880e16.html
https://firstmonday.org/article/view/10107/8049
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/fact-check-obama-never-begged-to-meet-with-kim-jong-un/index.html
Trump Republican administration considering to accept North Korea as a nuclear power: But for weeks before the meeting, which started as a Twitter offer by the president for Mr. Kim to drop by at the Demilitarized Zone and “say hello,” a real idea has been taking shape inside the Trump administration that officials hope might create a foundation for a new round of negotiations. The concept would amount to a nuclear freeze, one that essentially enshrines the status quo, and tacitly accepts the North as a nuclear power, something administration officials have often said they would never stand for. It falls far short of Mr. Trump’s initial vow 30 months ago to solve the North Korea nuclear problem, but it might provide him with a retort to campaign-season critics who say the North Korean dictator has been playing the American president brilliantly by giving him the visuals he craves while holding back on real concessions. While the approach could stop that arsenal from growing, it would not, at least in the near future, dismantle any existing weapons, variously estimated at 20 to 60. Nor would it limit the North’s missile capability.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/30/world/asia/trump-kim-north-korea-negotiations.html
The Best People - Thanks to Trump’s incompetence, there’s no one in charge at the Pentagon in the midst of multiple national security crises all created by Trump+Republicans
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/shanahan-trump-hiring-pentagon-defense-secretary.html
Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes | Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings. In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in May while in custody at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Texas. One member posted a GIF of Elmo with the quote, “Oh well.” Another responded with an image and the words “If he dies, he dies.” Created in August 2016, the Facebook group is called “I’m 10-15” and boasts roughly 9,500 members from across the country. (10-15 is Border Patrol code for “aliens in custody.”) The group described itself, in an online introduction, as a forum for “funny” and “serious” discussion about work with the patrol. “Remember you are never alone in this family,” the introduction said.
https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-border-patrol-facebook-group-agents-joke-about-migrant-deaths-post-sexist-memes
More Than 700 Migrants Forced To Share 4 Showers at Texas Border Patrol Station
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/bj9kdm/more-than-700-migrants-forced-to-share-4-showers-at-texas-border-patrol-station
EPA Wants Minimal Limits on Poison in Drinking Water
https://www.dcreport.org/2019/06/25/epa-wants-minimal-limits-on-poison-in-drinking-water/
The Russian government sent more than $1.4 million to a Florida-based company airing Kremlin propaganda in the nation’s capital over the last two years, according to recent foreign agent registration records. Florida-based company RM Broadcasting LLC has officially registered as a foreign agent with the Justice Department after a federal judge ordered it to do so in May. Marking DOJ’s first successful civil enforcement action under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in more than two decades, U.S. District Court Judge Robin Rosenberg ruled that RM Broadcasting should be registered as a foreign agent under FARA due to its relationship with Rossiya Segodnya, the Russian government’s media enterprise that owns Sputnik International and was created by Vladimir Putin to advance Russia’s interests abroad. A 2017 U.S. intelligence report found that Sputnik was part of “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine” that facilitated Russian interference and influence in the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump. Starting shortly after Trump’s election, RM Broadcasting agreed to act as the Russian media enterprise’s middleman brokering airtime on WZHF 1390, a Washington, D.C., area radio station owned by Way Broadcasting.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/07/russia-paid-radio-broadcaster-1-4-million-to-air-kremlin-propaganda/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6178436-6694-Registration-Statement-20190621-1.html#document/p3/a510016
https://www.opensecrets.org/fara/background
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/court-finds-rm-broadcasting-must-register-foreign-agent
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/05/foreign-media-broadcasters-get-mixed-signals-on-new-transparency-rules/
https://www.opensecrets.org/fara/foreign-principals/G6657
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
Trump Suddenly Fine With Chinese Telecom He Called A National Security Threat - The Art of the Deal apparently means making a huge concession to China, getting little in return, and putting U.S. national security at risk: Back in May, as in just a few short weeks ago, the Trump administration placed Chinese telecom giant Huawei on a trade blacklist following the unsealing of a Justice Department indictment that said the company had conspired to provide forbidden financial services to Iran, and concluded that it was “engaged in activities that are contrary to U.S. national security or foreign policy interest.” Placement on the Commerce Department’s “entity list” meant that U.S. businesses were largely banned from selling parts and components to Huawei and, as you can probably gather, was a pretty big deal. So big, in fact, that you wouldn’t expect the president to basically take it all back just over a month later, particularly if he was getting little in return for giving an apparent national-security risk a reprieve. But, surprise! On Saturday Donald Trump told the press that he’d decided to let U.S. companies sell to Huawei, despite literally putting Huawei on the trade blacklist in May, adding in a follow-up tweet that he’d done so at the behest of “High Tech companies” and Chinese president Xi Jinping, who’d both been lobbying hard for him to reverse course. The announcement was made in the context of the two sides resuming trade talks, and Trump agreeing to suspend imposing an additional $300 billion worth of tariffs that he’s been threatening for weeks.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/donald-trump-china-huawei
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-china-huaweitech/chinas-huawei-70-affiliates-placed-on-us-trade-blacklist-idUKKCN1SL2VW
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-to-allow-us-firms-huawei-deal-2019-6?r=US&IR=T
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1145097776658812929
https://www.ft.com/content/3bbb6fec-88c5-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2
.@JoeBiden on #NKorea: "After three made-for-TV summits, we still don't have a single concrete commitment from North Korea. Not one missile or nuclear weapon has been destroyed, not one inspector is on the ground. If anything, the situation has gotten worse."
https://twitter.com/KThomasDC/status/1145756266867908608
THANKS TRUMP AND REPUBLICANS AND ALL PEOPLE WHO SUPPORT THEM: Israel will be destroyed in half an hour if America attacks Iran
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-iran-israel/israel-will-be-destroyed-in-half-an-hour-if-america-attacks-iran-senior-iranian-mp-idUSKCN1TW2MO
Japan resumes commercial whaling for first time in 30 years. Fishermen set sail to hunt whales on Monday after country’s withdrawal from International Whaling Commission.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/01/japan-resumes-commercial-whaling-for-first-time-in-30-years
Bird spotted feeding chick cigarette butt in ‘devastating’ picture: 'Cigarette butts were the most common item of all types of rubbish collected from beaches globally, according to a report by Ocean Conservancy last year.'
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/bird-cigarette-butt-chick-picture-florida-beach-photograph-rubbish-a8980676.html
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) dropped a bombshell accusation after visiting an El Paso border station on Monday morning, claiming that officials forced some migrants to drink from toilets. "This is CBP on their best behavior, telling people to drink out of a toilet," she said. "And that was with them knowing that a congressional visit was coming."
https://www.kvia.com/news/border/migrants-told-to-drink-from-toilets-at-el-paso-border-station-congresswoman-alleges/1090951789
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says migrant women told to 'drink out of toilets' and subjected to 'psychological warfare', after detention centre visit: 'It is hard to understate the enormity of the problem. We’re talking systemic cruelty [with] a dehumanising culture that treats them like animals'
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/aoc-immigrant-detention-centre-texas-border-patrol-a8983566.html
"If you want water, just drink from a toilet." That's what border patrol told one thirsty woman we met on today's Dems At The Border trip. These are the same CBP personnel who threatened to throw burritos at members of Congress. Changes must be made.
https://twitter.com/RepJudyChu/status/1145779501080743939
A young Arctic fox has walked across the ice from Norway's Svalbard islands to northern Canada in an epic journey, covering 3,506 km (2,176 miles) in 76 days. "The fox's journey has left scientists speechless," according to Greenland's Sermitsiaq newspaper.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-48824181
Sanders Opposes Weapons Sales to Saudi Arabia, Calls on Trump to Obey Constitution
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-opposes-weapons-sales-to-saudi-arabia-calls-on-trump-to-obey-constitution
Judge says Duncan Hunter's personal relationships can be evidence in corruption trial
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/451203-judge-says-duncan-hunters-personal-relationships-can-be-evidence-in
Trump told the troops he gave them their first raise in years. He didn't.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/trump-didnt-give-troops-first-raise/index.html
New Texas law may help GOP keep secrets about its redistricting strategy
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas-legislature/2019/06/28/hide-evidence-new-texas-law-may-help-gop-keep-secrets-redistricting-strategy
Hong Kong police fire rounds of tear gas at protesters after day of unprecedented violence
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3015620/protesters-ram-legislature-hong-kong-marks-tense-handover
EPA Air Quality Chief Resigns Over Ethics Investigation. So little time, so much damage done. That's the legacy left by Bill Wehrum who spent only one and a half years as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) top air quality official before announcing that he will step down this weekend under the cloud of a federal ethics investigation over possible conflicts of interest. His resignation follows conflicting statement he made to Congress about his industry connections, according to Politico.
https://www.ecowatch.com/epa-air-quality-chief-resignation-2639004378.html
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/26/epa-bill-wehrum-1556621
Homeland Security admits it’s using abhorrent conditions at detention centers to deter migration
https://thinkprogress.org/dhs-oig-homeland-security-report-el-paso-detention-center-conditions-used-to-deter-migration-9b0420b7e70b/
More Than 140 Holocaust, Genocide Experts Think Ocasio-Cortez Should Be Allowed to Call Migrant Detention Centers ‘Concentration Camps’
https://www.newsweek.com/holocaust-genocide-experts-defend-ocascio-cortez-concentration-camp-1446911
Braindead LGBT/Q Idiots marching against only country in Middle East which gives them rights and was the first country on the planet to have given them rights
https://i.redd.it/hhnu29imrq731.jpg
Glastonbury: Sir David Attenborough hails plastic ban - “This great festival has gone plastic-free. That is more than a million bottles of water that have not been drunk by you at Glastonbury. Thank you. Thank you.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48819335
UK to deport aspiring astrophysicist, 23, to Pakistan where she faces death or forced marriage to cousin | A 23-year-old woman who has won offers to study astrophysics at some of Britain’s most prestigious universities, after living more than half her life in the UK, is to be deported to Pakistan, the country of her birth, where her father is demanding she marry her older cousin.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/pakistan-asylum-seeker-uk-home-office-immigration-honour-killing-a8968996.html
Democrats Expand Investigation into Personal Email Use by Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and Others
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-expand-probe-personal-email-ivanka-trump-jared-kushner-1446947
Trump’s foreign luxury resorts collide with his South Korea diplomacy: As Trump traveled to South Korea, a business deal was expanding between the Trump family business and a company partly owned by the Korean government.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/01/trump-resort-south-korea-government-1390736
DNC reportedly set to vote on climate debate in victory for youth protesters
https://thinkprogress.org/dnc-set-to-vote-on-climate-debate-victory-for-youth-protesters-sunrise-movement-bfa98af30dc1/
Tesco suspends sales of chicken from an 'ethical' farm after an undercover probe by Animal Justice Project revealed shocking abuse of the birds
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7198811/Tesco-suspends-sales-chicken-ethical-farm-undercover-probe-reveals-shocking-abuse.html
Remember when Julian Castro endorsed Beto
https://twitter.com/JulianCastro/status/986739472707604485
Paris bans nearly 3 million vehicles during weekdays in effort to crack down on pollution
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/451217-paris-bans-nearly-3-million-vehicles-during-weekdays-in-effort-to
An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen, Andrea Orzoff, Timothy Snyder, and Anika Walke, et al. On June 17, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, posted an Instagram live video discussing the detention camps along the southern US border as “concentration camps” in which she used the phrase “Never Again.” This drew sharp criticism the following day from Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, and others for allegedly misappropriating a slogan associated with the Holocaust. After several days of heated media and political debate, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released a statement on June 24 condemning the use of Holocaust analogies. We received the following open letter addressed to the director of the museum, Sara J. Bloomfield, delivered by the signatories on July 1. —The Editors | To Director Bloomfield: We are scholars who strongly support the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Many of us write on the Holocaust and genocide; we have researched in the USHMM’s library and archives or served as fellows or associated scholars; we have been grateful for the Museum’s support and intellectual community. Many of us teach the Holocaust at our universities, and have drawn on the Museum’s online resources. We support the Museum’s programs from workshops to education. We are deeply concerned about the Museum’s recent “Statement Regarding the Museum’s Position on Holocaust Analogies.” We write this public letter to urge its retraction. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences rely on careful and responsible analysis, contextualization, comparison, and argumentation to answer questions about the past and the present. By “unequivocally rejecting efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is taking a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide. And it makes learning from the past almost impossible. The Museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical. It has the potential to inflict severe damage on the Museum’s ability to continue its role as a credible, leading global institution dedicated to Holocaust memory, Holocaust education, and research in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies. The very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering; pointing to similarities across time and space is essential for this task. Looking beyond the academic context, we are well aware of the many distortions and inaccuracies, intentional or not, that frame contemporary discussions of the Holocaust. We are not only scholars. We are global citizens who participate in public discourse, as does the Museum as an institution, and its staff. We therefore consider it essential that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reverse its position on careful historical analysis and comparison. We hope the Museum continues to help scholars establish the Holocaust’s significance as an event from which the world must continue to learn.
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/01/an-open-letter-to-the-director-of-the-holocaust-memorial-museum/
https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/statement-regarding-the-museums-position-on-holocaust-analogies
A complete list of signatories, now numbering more than three hundred and updated in real time, can be viewed here. The list of signatories given above will be brought up to date at intervals.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GnVLG593oY9ymTd_qBJ1mBXISmI4M3DOrEJ9_jiiO3U/edit
Svitek, TX Tribune: Democratic TXSEN hopeful MJ Hegar raises $1m!
https://www.twitter.com/PatrickSvitek/status/1145789914627411971
MJ Hegar running for the other Texas Senate seat
https://www.mjfortexas.com/
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/mj-hegar-1
Fox News hosts admit that they'd attack Obama for meeting with Kim Jong Un
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-hosts-admit-theyd-attack-obama-for-meeting-with-kim-jong-un
Democrats on a key House congressional committee are investigating allegations from a whistleblower within the State Department about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his family's use of taxpayer-funded Diplomatic Security -- prompting agents to lament they are at times viewed as "UberEats with guns". Congressional investigators, who asked for the committee not to be named as they carry out their inquiries, tell CNN that a State Department whistleblower has raised multiple issues over a period of months, about special agents being asked to carry out some questionable tasks for the Pompeo family. In April, for example, an agent was asked to pick up Chinese food—without Pompeo in the car. The whistleblower said this led agents to complain that they are now serving as "UberEats with guns," which has created a buzz within the department, according to multiple Democratic congressional aides who cited the whistleblower.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/pompeo-democrats-whistleblower-claims/index.html
New rules will give AG William Barr more say over immigration courts
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/AG-Barr-moves-forward-with-immigration-court-14063716.php
Saudi Buying of U.S. Treasuries Is Soaring Under Trump
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-30/saudi-buying-of-treasuries-is-soaring-under-trump
Study suggests Russian social media trolls had impact on 2016 election - Every 25,000 retweets of Russian accounts correlated to a 1% increase in Trump's poll numbers one week later. The study, conducted by a team headed at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and published in the peer-reviewed University of Illinois-Chicago journal "First Monday," suggests that — despite protests to the contrary by Republicans and Trump allies — the Russian disinformation campaign was successful in influencing the 2016 election.
https://www.axios.com/russia-interference-trolls-impact-2016-election-eff627d5-f1b3-48fd-8745-449262880e16.html
https://firstmonday.org/article/view/10107/8049
How the first U.S. city with no daily newspaper will help Trump in 2020 [inquirer.com]
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/youngstown-vindicator-closing-newspaper-trump-0hio-20190630.html
How the first U.S. city with no daily newspaper will help Trump in 2020 | Will Bunch
Updated: June 30, 2019 - 2:56 PM
by Will Bunch
Will Bunch | @will_bunch | wbunch@inquirer.com
In the American Heartland, the white working class was riled up. They were angry about immigrants — so many of whom didn’t even bother to speak English — and the economic advancement of African Americans. And so large numbers embraced right-wing extremism, especially the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. The white fury spilled over to politics, as far-right radicals co-opted state legislatures, city councils, even local school boards.
That scenario might sound like it’s ripped from 2019′s headlines, but this was Youngstown, Ohio, in the early 1920s. The then-booming region of northeastern Ohio known as the Mahoning Valley was a hotbed of America’s massive revival of the KKK in the years not long after World War I. The white backlash was inspired by a burst of immigration from predominantly Catholic Southern Europe, the prominence of black war veterans and their new demands for civil rights, and, bizarrely, the popularity of D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking film The Birth of a Nation and its nostalgia for white supremacy.
https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=9620&context=annals-of-iowa
https://www.history.com/news/kkk-birth-of-a-nation-film
Historian William D. Jenkins has written that at least 10,000 people in or around Youngstown joined the KKK by 1923, influencing mayoral elections there and in nearby Ohio towns like Niles, a Klan stronghold. Jenkins wrote that their so-called klaverns "worried about foreign speaking people, about the Catholic church and influence of the pope and the Catholic schools that were opening."
https://www.tribtoday.com/news/local-news/2017/08/ku-klux-klan-came-to-valley-in-early-1920s/
But the KKK’s reign of terror in the Mahoning Valley ended almost as quickly as it began, and a key player in restoring reason was the region’s daily newspaper, the Youngstown Vindicator. The paper and its longtime then-owner, William K. Maag, staked their reputations on virulently opposing right-wing extremism. In 1896, the paper had exposed Youngstown’s mayor, who was under the thumb of the racist anti-Catholic American Protective Association, and now in the 1920s it revealed hypocrisy and corruption among KKK leaders, covered violent marches that turned citizens against the Klan, and finally beat out a rival newspaper that had been sympathetic to the hate movement.
https://www.vindy.com/news/2019/jun/23/the-vindicator-underwent-many-trials-and/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Protective_Association
Nearly 100 years later, a political movement infused by anti-immigrant fervor has spread its tentacles all the way to the White House, and the demagogue surfing atop that wave just announced his 2020 campaign for a second term. But the Youngstown Vindicator, with its century-and-half legacy of award-winning journalism, won’t be there to cover it.
The Baltimore Sun
✔
@baltimoresun
The Vindicator, the daily newspaper of Youngstown, Ohio, is shutting down after 150 years. http://bit.ly/2NnZkqh
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2:00 AM - Jun 30, 2019
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-nw-the-vindicator-younsgtown-closes-20190629-e7ukdntvubaytbl66dvruwhh5a-story.html
https://twitter.com/baltimoresun/status/1145210393758969856
On Friday night, the Vindicator stunned the journalism world when the family that owns Northeast Ohio’s largest newspaper (having resisted the chain ownership that’s gobbled up many similar news orgs) announced it will stop printing in late August, killing off 144 full-time jobs and also delivering a blow to 250 part-time news carriers. It’s another hit for a region that’s suffered 40 years of industrial job losses and is still reeling from GM’s shutdown of its giant Lordstown assembly line, but there’s a much deeper significance to this news.
https://triblive.com/local/regional/presses-to-stop-at-youngstowns-daily-newspaper-the-vindicator-on-aug-31/
https://www.inquirer.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/lordstown-gm-plant-closing-1972-strike-worker-alienation-mary-barra-trump-20181129.html
Ever since the rise of the internet sped up declines in print newspaper circulation and blew up that business model in the 2000s, media pundits have speculated when and where a significant American city will no longer have a daily newspaper, and now we know the answer: Youngstown, Ohio, in 2019. It’s hard to imagine a worse place or a worse time.
Even sadder, the grim announcement from Youngstown was the exclamation point on a Black Friday for journalism in the United States. On the same afternoon, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of the most iconic nameplates in American journalism history, was absorbed into the rival Advocate, a move that will also shrink the number of journalists covering a city coping with poverty, murder and climate change. But scores of other news orgs — including the one you now hold in your hands — are also coping this year with job losses, and this is in the so-called good economy.
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2019/in-new-orleans-two-rival-newspaper-organizations-become-one-this-weekend/
https://www.inquirer.com/business/philadelphia-inquirer-daily-news-buyouts-media-network-20190523.html
But journalism’s problems transcend mere dollars. Friday was also a painful day for American journalists because it marked the one-year anniversary of the newsroom shooting by an angry local resident that claimed five lives at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md. — highlighting the rising threats to a free press in this country. Halfway around the world, President Trump chose this day to joke with Russia’s Vladimir Putin — who’s had more reporters killed than the monster of Annapolis — about "getting rid of" journalists who produce what these two autocrats both call "fake news."
https://wtop.com/anne-arundel-county/2019/06/through-words-and-music-family-friends-and-community-come-together-to-remember-the-capital-gazette-shooting-victims/slide/1/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trumps-jokes-with-putin-over-eliminating-journalists-is-a-betrayal-of-america-so-is-ignoring-it/2019/06/28/b7ada93a-99be-11e9-916d-9c61607d8190_story.html?utm_term=.6cde709d4dd7
All of this is a reminder that the closing of Youngstown’s only daily paper is a blow not just to a struggling city that needs information, but to American democracy.
On the first front, the Vindicator had continued to do remarkable journalism right up to this summer’s bitter end. In the 1990s and 2000s, the newspaper and its veteran columnist Bertram de Souza played a critical role in exposing the corruption and buffoonery of wild-maned-demagogish-Trump-before-Trump U.S. Rep James Traficant. Even as its staff was slashed in half over the years, the Vindicator continued to produce award-winning reporting about the opioid crisis and other local issues.
https://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/james-traficant-dies-73-111373
https://www.vindy.com/news/valleys-opioid-crisis/
"It was the paper that first taught me the importance of journalism," reporter Karen Hall told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (another Ohio newsroom battered by job losses). "It was always scrappy and going after corrupt officials. I was in awe of that."
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2019/06/the-vindicator-youngstowns-daily-newspaper-will-close-after-150-years.html
After a decade in which a number of smaller towns than Youngstown have seen their local daily or weekly newspapers disappear, both academic studies and investigative reports have shown that costs to taxpayers on now-not-covered topics like municipal bond issues increase, while fewer people run for political offices or even vote in local elections they can no longer track from their front doorstep. And then there’s the ability of daily, professional journalism to not only check corrupt pols like Traficant but also waves of hysteria … like the KKK, or the xenophobia that’s such a force in modern politics.
https://www.cjr.org/local_news/american-news-deserts-donuts-local.php
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-newspaper-close-city-bond-finances-suffer/561422/
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/when-local-newspapers-shrink-fewer-people-bother-to-run-for-mayor/
That brings me to the broader point that should concern folks beyond the Mahoning Valley, which is that the death of the Youngstown Vindicator, the raft of other small-town newspapers, and maybe some other big ones over the next 16 months could have a huge impact on the 2020 election and whether Trump will win a second term to espouse his view that journalists are "the enemy of the people."
The loss of the Youngstown Vindicator every morning doesn’t mean that the region’s 200,000 will no longer be getting information. It just increases the likelihood they’ll be getting bad information — intentionally manipulated, and sometimes out-and-out fakery. After the 2016 election, BuzzFeed found that in the preceding months the top 20 fake or distorted news stories about Trump or Hillary Clinton from deliberately manipulative websites received more social media shares than the top 20 mainstream, actual news stories. This is in addition to the conservative, pro-Trump media bubble like Fox News that rose up during the generation that newspapers like the Vindicator shrank or died.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook#.emA15rzd0
There’s no reason to believe that 2020 will be any better. It may be worse, and Team Trump seems to be counting on that. Between December and May, Trump’s reelection campaign spent a whopping $4.6 million on Facebook ads — much, much more than the Democrats running to unseat him. What we don’t know is how much that’s going to be amplified between now and Nov. 3, 2020 by bad actors, whether it’s Putin’s henchmen in the Internet Research Agency or just teens in Macedonia looking to make a few dimes.
https://www.vox.com/2019/5/21/18634085/trumps-2020-campaign-is-buying-a-whole-lot-of-facebook-ads
https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-troll-farm-spent-millions-on-election-interference-2018-2
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38168281
We do know this: that Trump’s ads are going to play on the fears of voters, especially the senior citizens who used to be reliable newspaper readers. So far this year, Trump’s Facebook ads have targeted over-65 voters with scare stories about the surge in immigration at the southern border and the need to build a wall. In other words, the exact same kind of demagoguery that lured thousands in Ohio into the KKK just a century ago. The only difference between then and now is that the Youngstown Vindicator won’t be rolled up on the front porch to womp readers on the head with some common sense.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/16/18410513/facebook-ads-trump-campaign-immigration-2020
Bad news for America’s newspapers is good news for Donald Trump. I pray the 2020 election won’t be a vindicator of that, but it may be.
How the first U.S. city with no daily newspaper will help Trump in 2020 | Will Bunch
Updated: June 30, 2019 - 2:56 PM
by Will Bunch
Will Bunch | @will_bunch | wbunch@inquirer.com
In the American Heartland, the white working class was riled up. They were angry about immigrants — so many of whom didn’t even bother to speak English — and the economic advancement of African Americans. And so large numbers embraced right-wing extremism, especially the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. The white fury spilled over to politics, as far-right radicals co-opted state legislatures, city councils, even local school boards.
That scenario might sound like it’s ripped from 2019′s headlines, but this was Youngstown, Ohio, in the early 1920s. The then-booming region of northeastern Ohio known as the Mahoning Valley was a hotbed of America’s massive revival of the KKK in the years not long after World War I. The white backlash was inspired by a burst of immigration from predominantly Catholic Southern Europe, the prominence of black war veterans and their new demands for civil rights, and, bizarrely, the popularity of D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking film The Birth of a Nation and its nostalgia for white supremacy.
https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=9620&context=annals-of-iowa
https://www.history.com/news/kkk-birth-of-a-nation-film
Historian William D. Jenkins has written that at least 10,000 people in or around Youngstown joined the KKK by 1923, influencing mayoral elections there and in nearby Ohio towns like Niles, a Klan stronghold. Jenkins wrote that their so-called klaverns "worried about foreign speaking people, about the Catholic church and influence of the pope and the Catholic schools that were opening."
https://www.tribtoday.com/news/local-news/2017/08/ku-klux-klan-came-to-valley-in-early-1920s/
But the KKK’s reign of terror in the Mahoning Valley ended almost as quickly as it began, and a key player in restoring reason was the region’s daily newspaper, the Youngstown Vindicator. The paper and its longtime then-owner, William K. Maag, staked their reputations on virulently opposing right-wing extremism. In 1896, the paper had exposed Youngstown’s mayor, who was under the thumb of the racist anti-Catholic American Protective Association, and now in the 1920s it revealed hypocrisy and corruption among KKK leaders, covered violent marches that turned citizens against the Klan, and finally beat out a rival newspaper that had been sympathetic to the hate movement.
https://www.vindy.com/news/2019/jun/23/the-vindicator-underwent-many-trials-and/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Protective_Association
Nearly 100 years later, a political movement infused by anti-immigrant fervor has spread its tentacles all the way to the White House, and the demagogue surfing atop that wave just announced his 2020 campaign for a second term. But the Youngstown Vindicator, with its century-and-half legacy of award-winning journalism, won’t be there to cover it.
The Baltimore Sun
✔
@baltimoresun
The Vindicator, the daily newspaper of Youngstown, Ohio, is shutting down after 150 years. http://bit.ly/2NnZkqh
27
2:00 AM - Jun 30, 2019
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-nw-the-vindicator-younsgtown-closes-20190629-e7ukdntvubaytbl66dvruwhh5a-story.html
https://twitter.com/baltimoresun/status/1145210393758969856
On Friday night, the Vindicator stunned the journalism world when the family that owns Northeast Ohio’s largest newspaper (having resisted the chain ownership that’s gobbled up many similar news orgs) announced it will stop printing in late August, killing off 144 full-time jobs and also delivering a blow to 250 part-time news carriers. It’s another hit for a region that’s suffered 40 years of industrial job losses and is still reeling from GM’s shutdown of its giant Lordstown assembly line, but there’s a much deeper significance to this news.
https://triblive.com/local/regional/presses-to-stop-at-youngstowns-daily-newspaper-the-vindicator-on-aug-31/
https://www.inquirer.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/lordstown-gm-plant-closing-1972-strike-worker-alienation-mary-barra-trump-20181129.html
Ever since the rise of the internet sped up declines in print newspaper circulation and blew up that business model in the 2000s, media pundits have speculated when and where a significant American city will no longer have a daily newspaper, and now we know the answer: Youngstown, Ohio, in 2019. It’s hard to imagine a worse place or a worse time.
Even sadder, the grim announcement from Youngstown was the exclamation point on a Black Friday for journalism in the United States. On the same afternoon, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of the most iconic nameplates in American journalism history, was absorbed into the rival Advocate, a move that will also shrink the number of journalists covering a city coping with poverty, murder and climate change. But scores of other news orgs — including the one you now hold in your hands — are also coping this year with job losses, and this is in the so-called good economy.
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2019/in-new-orleans-two-rival-newspaper-organizations-become-one-this-weekend/
https://www.inquirer.com/business/philadelphia-inquirer-daily-news-buyouts-media-network-20190523.html
But journalism’s problems transcend mere dollars. Friday was also a painful day for American journalists because it marked the one-year anniversary of the newsroom shooting by an angry local resident that claimed five lives at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md. — highlighting the rising threats to a free press in this country. Halfway around the world, President Trump chose this day to joke with Russia’s Vladimir Putin — who’s had more reporters killed than the monster of Annapolis — about "getting rid of" journalists who produce what these two autocrats both call "fake news."
https://wtop.com/anne-arundel-county/2019/06/through-words-and-music-family-friends-and-community-come-together-to-remember-the-capital-gazette-shooting-victims/slide/1/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trumps-jokes-with-putin-over-eliminating-journalists-is-a-betrayal-of-america-so-is-ignoring-it/2019/06/28/b7ada93a-99be-11e9-916d-9c61607d8190_story.html?utm_term=.6cde709d4dd7
All of this is a reminder that the closing of Youngstown’s only daily paper is a blow not just to a struggling city that needs information, but to American democracy.
On the first front, the Vindicator had continued to do remarkable journalism right up to this summer’s bitter end. In the 1990s and 2000s, the newspaper and its veteran columnist Bertram de Souza played a critical role in exposing the corruption and buffoonery of wild-maned-demagogish-Trump-before-Trump U.S. Rep James Traficant. Even as its staff was slashed in half over the years, the Vindicator continued to produce award-winning reporting about the opioid crisis and other local issues.
https://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/james-traficant-dies-73-111373
https://www.vindy.com/news/valleys-opioid-crisis/
"It was the paper that first taught me the importance of journalism," reporter Karen Hall told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (another Ohio newsroom battered by job losses). "It was always scrappy and going after corrupt officials. I was in awe of that."
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2019/06/the-vindicator-youngstowns-daily-newspaper-will-close-after-150-years.html
After a decade in which a number of smaller towns than Youngstown have seen their local daily or weekly newspapers disappear, both academic studies and investigative reports have shown that costs to taxpayers on now-not-covered topics like municipal bond issues increase, while fewer people run for political offices or even vote in local elections they can no longer track from their front doorstep. And then there’s the ability of daily, professional journalism to not only check corrupt pols like Traficant but also waves of hysteria … like the KKK, or the xenophobia that’s such a force in modern politics.
https://www.cjr.org/local_news/american-news-deserts-donuts-local.php
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-newspaper-close-city-bond-finances-suffer/561422/
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/when-local-newspapers-shrink-fewer-people-bother-to-run-for-mayor/
That brings me to the broader point that should concern folks beyond the Mahoning Valley, which is that the death of the Youngstown Vindicator, the raft of other small-town newspapers, and maybe some other big ones over the next 16 months could have a huge impact on the 2020 election and whether Trump will win a second term to espouse his view that journalists are "the enemy of the people."
The loss of the Youngstown Vindicator every morning doesn’t mean that the region’s 200,000 will no longer be getting information. It just increases the likelihood they’ll be getting bad information — intentionally manipulated, and sometimes out-and-out fakery. After the 2016 election, BuzzFeed found that in the preceding months the top 20 fake or distorted news stories about Trump or Hillary Clinton from deliberately manipulative websites received more social media shares than the top 20 mainstream, actual news stories. This is in addition to the conservative, pro-Trump media bubble like Fox News that rose up during the generation that newspapers like the Vindicator shrank or died.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook#.emA15rzd0
There’s no reason to believe that 2020 will be any better. It may be worse, and Team Trump seems to be counting on that. Between December and May, Trump’s reelection campaign spent a whopping $4.6 million on Facebook ads — much, much more than the Democrats running to unseat him. What we don’t know is how much that’s going to be amplified between now and Nov. 3, 2020 by bad actors, whether it’s Putin’s henchmen in the Internet Research Agency or just teens in Macedonia looking to make a few dimes.
https://www.vox.com/2019/5/21/18634085/trumps-2020-campaign-is-buying-a-whole-lot-of-facebook-ads
https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-troll-farm-spent-millions-on-election-interference-2018-2
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38168281
We do know this: that Trump’s ads are going to play on the fears of voters, especially the senior citizens who used to be reliable newspaper readers. So far this year, Trump’s Facebook ads have targeted over-65 voters with scare stories about the surge in immigration at the southern border and the need to build a wall. In other words, the exact same kind of demagoguery that lured thousands in Ohio into the KKK just a century ago. The only difference between then and now is that the Youngstown Vindicator won’t be rolled up on the front porch to womp readers on the head with some common sense.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/16/18410513/facebook-ads-trump-campaign-immigration-2020
Bad news for America’s newspapers is good news for Donald Trump. I pray the 2020 election won’t be a vindicator of that, but it may be.
The Courts Won't End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them. While Democrats are fixated on 2020, Holder is fighting for fairer maps in 2021 and beyond. [motherjones]
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/07/the-courts-wont-end-gerrymandering-eric-holder-has-a-plan-to-fix-it-without-them/
The Courts Won't End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them.
While Democrats are fixated on 2020, Holder is fighting for fairer maps in 2021 and beyond.
Ari BermanJuly/August 2019 Issue
On a frigid March morning, Eric Holder strode into a brick union hall on the west side of Milwaukee, across from a credit union and an auto body shop. The Merrill Park neighborhood was once the center of the city's Irish political machine, filled with stately Victorian houses—including the childhood home of Spencer Tracy—but it was now mostly African American and economically depressed.
http://neighborhoodsinmilwaukee.org/Merrill%20Park.pdf
Holder had dressed down from his usual suit and tie: He wore a black fleece jacket, white button-down, and dark blue jeans. He was warmly greeted by Angela Lang, the 29-year-old executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC), a local group that works to increase voter turnout in Milwaukee's black neighborhoods from an office in the union hall's basement, which was filled with campaign flyers and maps. It was the 68-year-old former attorney general's third visit to Milwaukee in a year, and Lang addressed him as "our No. 1 cousin."
https://www.blocbybloc.org/staff
https://www.wpr.org/former-us-attorney-general-eric-holder-campaigns-evers-barnes-milwaukee
The reason for Holder's visits was Wisconsin's assault on voting rights. The Wisconsin GOP had passed a voter ID law, designed to depress Democratic participation, that took effect before the 2016 election. As a result, turnout in Milwaukee's black neighborhoods dropped by more than 20 percent.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/voter-suppression-wisconsin-election-2016/
Not long after the election, Holder launched the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), a political action committee that aims to unrig the system that has entrenched Republican control of the country's most important swing states. He'd received the backing of top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, who in December 2018 folded his own political operation, Organizing for Action, into Holder's to give the fight against gerrymandering more clout. Now, while other top Democrats are focused on the White House, Holder has set his sights on neighborhoods like Merrill Park and on races like the one he was there to talk about, a state Supreme Court contest that had received virtually no attention outside Wisconsin.
https://democraticredistricting.com/
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/eric-holder-democrats-redistricting-233546
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/06/gop-paid-millions-to-gerrymandering-expert-behind-census-citizenship-question/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/obamas-political-group-shifts-focus-gerrymandering/578770/
https://medium.com/allontheline/what-ofa-has-accomplished-and-the-fight-ahead-2c3190060f8c
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/a-little-noticed-judicial-election-could-determine-wisconsins-political-course-for-a-decade/
"This state is in some ways ground zero for gerrymandering," Holder told two dozen BLOC canvassers who would knock on doors that afternoon for the progressive judge running in the race. "Last year they called it a blue wave, and yet you didn't flip one congressional seat here in Wisconsin. That's not because you didn't work hard or people didn't vote. It was because of gerrymandering." Republicans had so effectively gerrymandered the state that even when Democrats won 53 percent of the statewide vote in 2018, they took only 36 percent of the seats in the state legislature.
https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/5-things-know-about-wisconsin-partisan-gerrymandering-case
Holder views gerrymandering, which manipulates district lines to benefit one party, as part of a broader struggle for voting rights, since it effectively diminishes the value of certain communities' votes. "There is a direct connection between gerrymandering and voter suppression, not only here in Wisconsin but in places around the country," Holder told me before his speech at the union hall. "It is not a coincidence that you see the greatest amount of voter suppression in those states where you see the greatest amount of gerrymandering."
For decades, Democrats successfully fought these twin efforts at disenfranchisement in the courts. As Obama's attorney general, Holder led that charge, filing lawsuits against states like North Carolina and Texas that challenged Republican-backed laws curbing the right to vote. But this tactic was handed an enormous defeat in 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Shelby County v. Holder, ruling that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed federal approval to change voting laws. Last week, the court struck another blow, declaring that federal courts couldn't block partisan gerrymandering. Voting rights advocates face not only a hostile Trump administration but a growing number of federal benches controlled by conservatives. As the GOP's war on voting has intensified, the traditional ways of protecting ballot access are no longer reliable.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693/supreme-court-declines-republican-bid-to-revive-north-carolina-voter-id-law
https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2018/04/27/texas-voter-id-law-ruling-overturned-appeal-558857
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96
https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-eric-holder-delivers-remarks-supreme-court-decision-shelby-county-v
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-trump-judges/trump-chips-away-at-liberal-u-s-appeals-court-majorities-idUSKCN1M025I
So Holder is pursuing a new strategy, trying to elect down-ballot candidates who can deliver fairer maps and voting laws. The NDRC invested $350,000 in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, hoping that a liberal majority on the seven-member court might strike down any egregious gerrymanders in the next round of redistricting in 2021. "I don't think that 10 years or so ago, you would have a former attorney general campaigning for a state Supreme Court justice," Holder told me. "This is a recognition on the part of the Democratic Party, on the part of progressives, that we need to focus on state and local elections to a much greater degree than we have in the past."
But if Democrats are belatedly recognizing this need, few besides Holder are acting on it. He is playing a long game in a party driven by instant gratification and consumed by the mess in the White House. While the party's presidential contenders are attracting big crowds, donors, and volunteers determined to defeat President Donald Trump in 2020, Holder is focused on 2021.
https://www.wpr.org/eric-holders-group-spending-350k-help-supreme-court-candidate-lisa-neubauer
https://www.apnews.com/d6bd4fb1d65b4f94aa78c6c57d96623b
The Constitution requires states to redraw their political districts every 10 years. In 2011, after routing Democrats in midterm elections the previous fall, Republicans took control of critical swing states including Wisconsin, drawing electoral maps that cemented their power. Now history is at risk of repeating itself. If Democrats don't start devoting more attention and resources to state races, Holder warned the BLOC canvassers, 2021 could end up like 2011. The battle for control of state governments will determine the arc of American politics for the next decade, but it is already overshadowed by the 20-some Democrats running for president. Holder is fighting not just a well-funded Republican opposition but also his own party's narrow focus on the presidency.
https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2018/jun/15/fareed-zakaria/yes-democratic-party-nearly-its-weakest-point-cent/
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/the-supreme-court-could-finally-end-partisan-gerrymandering/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/politics/2020-presidential-candidates.html
"I understand people are going to be legitimately focused on the presidential race, as we should be," Holder said. "But it's going to be my job to make sure we don't lose sight of those other races that are going to be extremely important."
Until recently, Holder's strategy was a radical concept within the Democratic Party. Before the NDRC, there was no single group formulating a centralized strategy for gaining control of the redistricting process, as Republicans had done so successfully in 2010. That's where Holder came in. Never before had a Democrat of his stature devoted so much attention to such a wonky issue.
"I famously said I've got to make redistricting sexy," Holder recalled with a laugh as we sat in his Washington, DC, office at the law firm Covington & Burling, located in the glitzy new CityCenterDC complex. His corner office has views of the Washington Monument and busts of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson on the shelves. "My hope was—and I know President Obama's hope was—that my being directly involved would give this effort a degree of attention that it might not otherwise have," he said.
https://www.cov.com/en/professionals/h/eric-holder
http://citycenterdc.com/
Democrats didn't have a redistricting strategy because, for many years, they didn't need one. They controlled a majority of state legislatures for most of the post–World War II era, drawing electoral maps in twice as many states as Republicans in the 1980s and 1990s. Democrats were sitting pretty heading into the 2010 elections after winning big in 2006 and 2008, controlling more than 60 percent of state legislative chambers.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/partisan-composition.aspx
Then the GOP launched an aggressive bid to reclaim power at the state level, creating the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) to target state legislative races and put Republicans in charge of redistricting efforts after the 2010 census. The effort was overseen by former Republican National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie and advised by strategists like Karl Rove. "He who controls redistricting can control Congress," Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time.
http://www.redistrictingmajorityproject.com/
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/01/616216560/episode-845-redmap
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/business/dealbook/ed-gillespie-sard-verbinnen.html
https://books.google.com/books?id=FiuZCgAAQBAJ&q=rove&hl=de#v=snippet&q=rove&f=false
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703862704575099670689398044
Massively aided by the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision that allowed unlimited corporate political spending, REDMAP raised $30 million, including from oil, tobacco, and health insurance companies, three times as much as its Democratic counterpart. Republicans hoped to flip 25 to 30 House seats occupied by Democrats. They ended up winning 63, plus 20 new legislative chambers, giving them control of nearly every important swing state and the power to draw four times as many state legislative and House districts as Democrats. Nearly a decade later, Republicans still control every legislative chamber in heavily gerrymandered states like Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission/
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/06/how-the-republicans-rigged-congress-and-poisoned-our-politics/
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/04/gops-house-seats-are-safe-heres-why.html
https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_elections_results,_2010
http://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/partisan-composition.aspx
Democrats had no comparable strategy. And when the party controlled the White House and Congress after Obama's 2008 victory, it paid little attention to the states. By the end of Obama's second term, Democrats had lost nearly 1,000 state legislative seats. "This has been one of the big failures of our party," said former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who led the Democratic National Committee from 2001 to 2005. "We have not paid attention to the importance of redistricting—haven't put the time in historically."
http://web.archive.org/web/2/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/01/14/republicans-have-gained-more-than-900-state-legislative-seats-since-2010/
https://twitter.com/terrymcauliffe?lang=en
"One of the great deficiencies of the Obama operation during the eight years he was president," said Obama's former chief strategist, David Axelrod, "was that not enough attention was paid to legislative races." The president, consumed by the financial crisis and the Obamacare fight, didn't sustain a political operation that could combat the tea party wave and the GOP's surgical targeting of state races. Now, Axelrod said, this deficiency is something Obama, a former state senator, "feels acutely, feels some responsibility for, and wants to help remedy."
https://twitter.com/davidaxelrod?lang=en
McAuliffe and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi convened discussions during the 2016 Democratic National Convention about creating a group focused solely on redistricting. The initiative took on new urgency after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential race even as she won the popular vote, reinforcing the imperative that Democrats regain power at the state level. After the election, McAuliffe, Pelosi, and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer visited the White House to get Obama's blessing. "It was the president who said, 'I'll bring Eric in,'" McAuliffe recalled. Obama decided to make redistricting reform a central focus of his post-presidency and tapped Holder as his top lieutenant. Obama has hosted fundraisers for the effort, endorsed candidates in races the NDRC has targeted, and used his email list and social media profile to draw attention to the fight against gerrymandering. "In America, politicians shouldn't pick their voters," Obama said in a 2018 video promoting Holder's group. "Voters are supposed to pick their politicians."
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/obama-holder-redistricting-gerrymandering-229868
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/eric-holder-to-lead-democrats-attack-on-republican-gerrymandering.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obama-redistricting-gerrymander-video-ndrc_n_5b46127de4b0c523e26511fa
For Holder, the cause was personal. "The right to vote," he said when he launched the NDRC in 2017, was "a right that has been a part of my consciousness as long as I can remember." As a 12-year-old in 1963, Holder sat in his basement in East Elmhurst, Queens, and watched on a black-and-white television as Vivian Malone became one of the first black students to integrate the University of Alabama. Twenty-six years later, he would marry her younger sister, Sharon, an obstetrician. Vivian went on to lead a group that registered black voters in the South and worked in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. She died in 2005, before Holder became the first black attorney general. "Her not being able to see her brother-in-law become attorney general of the United States is one of those really unfortunate things," Holder told me in Wisconsin, his eyes welling up. "Even thinking about it now, I can get a little emotional."
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/nyregion/01holder.html
https://www.naacpldf.org/about-us/scholarship-recipients/vivian-malone-jones/
https://www.essence.com/news/sharon-malone-the-first-lady-of-justice/
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/us/vivian-malone-jones-63-dies-first-black-graduate-of-university-of.html
More votes, fewer seats
In some Republican controlled states, gerrymandering has made it all but impossible for Democrats to retake assemblies, even when they win a majority of the statewide vote.
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/20180610_Holder_Charts642-1.png
Challenging the GOP's redistricting edge required a multipronged approach: Holder's group has filed or assisted a dozen lawsuits against gerrymandered maps, supported local candidates whose races had implications for redistricting, and backed state ballot measures to establish independent redistricting commissions. "He's a uniting force between the different pieces of the Democratic ecosystem to get onto a shared strategy to rebuild Democratic power in the states," said Jessica Post, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and an NDRC board member. "Having a central electoral coordinating hub is really important."
https://www.dlcc.org/jessica-post
The Democrats' gains in 2018 were impressive. Holder's group raised $35 million—comparable to what REDMAP raised in 2010—helping Democrats flip about 300 state legislative seats, six legislative chambers, and seven governorships. In four states, including Wisconsin, Republicans lost sole control of state government, and with it their ability to single-handedly draw new districts. The NDRC targeted 230 state seats held by Republicans, focusing on suburban areas that were changing demographically; Democrats won 60 percent of them. Holder stumped for candidates in 24 states. "We gave financial support to races that otherwise might not have gotten financial support," he said. "I campaigned in races that would not have gotten that kind of high-level attention."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democrats-gain-hundreds-of-legislative-seats-and-secure-majority-of-state-attorneys-general/2018/11/07/cef1ebd6-e2aa-11e8-ab2c-b31dcd53ca6b_story.html?tid=pm_politics_pop
https://democraticredistricting.com/ndrc-announces-2019-2020-redistricting-targets/
Party control of state legislatures
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/20180610_Holder_Charts642-2.png?resize=990,713
Though he hoped to elect more Democrats, Holder's overriding goal was to make the redistricting process less skewed, putting him in conflict with some Democrats who wanted to maximize partisan gain. When New Jersey Democrats proposed giving legislative leaders more power over the drawing of district lines last year, Holder quickly denounced the plan. "I'm here for a fair process, not to gerrymander for Democrats," he told me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/nyregion/redistricting-new-jersey-democrats-republicans.html
Holder, who has never run for elected office, is an unlikely public face for a major political campaign. He's charismatic by the standards of a career lawyer, but no one would mistake him for Obama on the stump, though they do share a love of dad jokes. Still, Holder's devotion to technocratic details can be an advantage when it comes to the nuances of redistricting. Holder said he viewed the fight against gerrymandering as a "jigsaw puzzle" and delighted in figuring out which pieces went where.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-fight-over-partisan-gerrymandering-is-moving-beyond-the-supreme-court/
His efforts in Wisconsin began in March 2018, when the NDRC spent half a million dollars to elect Rebecca Dallet to the state Supreme Court, a huge amount for a state judicial race. Her victory brought Democrats one seat closer to ending the conservative majority on the court, which can rule on state voting laws. To increase African American turnout, Holder's group funded BLOC, which knocked on 35,000 doors in Milwaukee in the spring of 2018 and helped achieve higher turnout in Dallet's race in neighborhoods like Merrill Park than in a 2015 Supreme Court race.
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/courts/rebecca-dallet-wins--year-term-on-wisconsin-supreme-court/article_1e5524f8-e10f-50f5-bb69-b0837c2307db.html
https://mkemidterms.mediamilwaukee.com/engaging-milwaukees-black-voters-block-by-bloc/
Holder returned to Milwaukee last fall to campaign for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers, for whom BLOC knocked on more than 173,000 doors in black neighborhoods that statewide political candidates usually bypassed. Evers defeated Gov. Scott Walker by just 30,000 votes, giving Democrats veto power over the state's redistricting maps in 2021.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-democrats-finally-defeated-wisconsin-gov-scott-walker/2018/11/07/3377ed17-9cbe-4537-8b2a-acd0c37a8d35_story.html
Holder also continued the efforts he'd begun as attorney general by taking Republicans to court for infringing on voting rights. When Walker refused to hold special elections for vacant state legislative seats in February 2018, Holder's group sued and won. After the 2018 election, when Republicans cut back on early voting, Holder's group sued and won again.
Walker criticized Holder's work in Wisconsin on Twitter several months before the election; after losing, Walker became finance chair of a new group, the National Republican Redistricting Trust, focused on combating the NDRC. "My role is to counter Eric Holder's efforts," Walker tweeted. "He, with [t]he help of former President Obama, have raised some $200 million that they are using in court and on the campaign trail. Their goal is to secure Nancy Pelosi's control as Speaker for a decade or more." Walker dramatically overstated the amount raised by Holder's group, but it was telling that the former Wisconsin governor—whose party Holder had been desperately trying to catch up with—now thought Holder was ahead of him.
https://twitter.com/ScottWalker/status/979365203061149698
https://www.thenrrt.org/
https:/twitter.com/ScottWalker/status/1108827414564605959
The question now is whether Holder's group can lock in and expand the gains made in 2018. Over the next year, the NDRC plans to almost triple its staff to 30, and the absorption of Obama's vaunted Organizing for Action list will give Holder's group access to hundreds of thousands of new volunteers to work on state races. "The single most important thing that could be done at the grassroots level over the next few years is to make sure the rules of the road are fair," Obama said on a call with these volunteers in December 2018.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/obamas-political-group-shifts-focus-gerrymandering/578770/
Democrats are within six seats of flipping state legislative chambers in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Minnesota, Arizona, and Michigan. "We're much closer across the country than people think," said the DLCC's Post. But the GOP still controls 62 of 99 state legislative chambers nationwide and holds the governor's mansion and both legislative bodies in 22 states, compared to 14 for Democrats. The bulk of the NDRC's efforts will focus on five Republican-controlled gerrymandered states: Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina. Gaining seats there will mean targeting districts in conservative exurbs where Democrats came up short in 2018. Mark Gersh, a Democratic redistricting expert working with Holder's group, said the team is "trying to figure out whether Trump's plummeting popularity and behavior might enable us to go beyond the parts we know we can win, because there's not enough of them. We won all the low-hanging fruit last time."
http://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/partisan-composition.aspx
There's momentum, though. The once-wonky issue of voting rights has become a rallying cry for Democrats. In 2018, voters in five states approved ballot initiatives that curbed gerrymandering. When Democrats took control of the House, their first piece of legislation was a sweeping reform bill that called for independent redistricting commissions to draw all House districts. (The proposal died in the Senate after Republican leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on it.) Schumer said in March that the fight for voting rights should be one of the Democrats' top three issues, alongside climate change and income inequality.
https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2018/11/7/18072204/2018-midterms-political-reform-winner
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/03/house-passes-the-most-significant-democracy-reform-bill-in-a-generation/
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/andrew-gillums-next-campaign-registering-voters-in-florida.html
Voting rights are "part of a basket of issues that are motivating to people who feel like the character of our democracy is being threatened and that democracy itself is being manipulated," said Axelrod. But Democrats are still in jeopardy of ignoring the state and local races that will determine the country's voting maps. "Our concern is there's wall-to-wall coverage of Trump scandals, wall-to-wall coverage of crowd size and presidential announcements, and our job is to continue to make sure people know that the next decade of democracy is on the line in 2020," said Post.
Democratic strategists working on down-ballot races say the presidential campaign is siphoning away resources. "It's harder to recruit people [to run], it's harder to get attention to these races, it's harder to raise money for them," said Amanda Litman, executive director of Run for Something, which recruits progressive candidates for local offices. "Quite a few of the donors we work really closely with have been hesitant to reengage, either because they're tapped out from 2018 or they're waiting for the presidential race to shake out."
https://runforsomething.net/
Litman's group is coordinating with the NDRC to recruit state legislative candidates to run in every district in the 12 states Holder is targeting in 2020, but she said reaching Run for Something's $3 million fundraising goal this year "is like pulling teeth." That's small change for presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, who each raised about twice that sum on the first day of their campaigns, but it could make the difference in flipping multiple state legislative chambers, Litman said.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bernie-sanders-raises-million-day-presidential-campaign/story?id=61181905
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/joe-biden-first-day-fundraising-haul
More money might have changed the outcome of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Lisa Neubauer, the progressive judge backed by Holder, was favored to win. But in the final week of the race, the Republican State Leadership Committee, the same group that bankrolled the GOP's takeover of the state legislature in 2010, launched a $1.3 million ad campaign for Neubauer's opponent, Brian Hagedorn, an ultraconservative judge and former chief counsel to Walker. Meanwhile, Republicans made Holder a talking point—a Facebook ad from Hagedorn admonished, "We can't let Eric Holder reshape Wisconsin's Supreme Court"—and Neubauer called on Holder and other outside funders to stay out of the race. Turnout surged in conservative, rural parts of the state, and Hagedorn won by about 6,000 votes, cementing a right-wing majority on the court through at least 2023.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/a-little-noticed-judicial-election-could-determine-wisconsins-political-course-for-a-decade/
https://www.jsonline.com/get-access/?return=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jsonline.com%2Fstory%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2F2019%2F03%2F14%2Flisa-neubauer-says-she-doesnt-want-eric-holders-help-court-race%2F3160817002%2F
https://twitter.com/brendan_fischer/status/1113406328473624576
The day after the election, Holder spoke at the annual convention of Al Sharpton's National Action Network. A dozen Democratic presidential candidates were there, and none had campaigned for Neubauer. "It seems I'm the only one here who isn't running for president in 2020," Holder joked. He'd flirted with his own long-shot presidential bid but decided against it, in part to remain focused on redistricting. He said "we should have won" the Supreme Court race and worried that the presidential contenders weren't talking enough about the down-ballot contests that Democrats need to win to reverse the GOP's redistricting edge.
https://nationalactionnetwork.net/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQt1sxQijfA&app=desktop
Holder was dismayed that he'd been the only prominent Democrat to campaign for Neubauer. "I'm still a little bit wound up about this one," he told me two weeks after the election. "This should be a wake-up call for us. I felt a little lonely out there in Wisconsin."
The Courts Won't End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them.
While Democrats are fixated on 2020, Holder is fighting for fairer maps in 2021 and beyond.
Ari BermanJuly/August 2019 Issue
On a frigid March morning, Eric Holder strode into a brick union hall on the west side of Milwaukee, across from a credit union and an auto body shop. The Merrill Park neighborhood was once the center of the city's Irish political machine, filled with stately Victorian houses—including the childhood home of Spencer Tracy—but it was now mostly African American and economically depressed.
http://neighborhoodsinmilwaukee.org/Merrill%20Park.pdf
Holder had dressed down from his usual suit and tie: He wore a black fleece jacket, white button-down, and dark blue jeans. He was warmly greeted by Angela Lang, the 29-year-old executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC), a local group that works to increase voter turnout in Milwaukee's black neighborhoods from an office in the union hall's basement, which was filled with campaign flyers and maps. It was the 68-year-old former attorney general's third visit to Milwaukee in a year, and Lang addressed him as "our No. 1 cousin."
https://www.blocbybloc.org/staff
https://www.wpr.org/former-us-attorney-general-eric-holder-campaigns-evers-barnes-milwaukee
The reason for Holder's visits was Wisconsin's assault on voting rights. The Wisconsin GOP had passed a voter ID law, designed to depress Democratic participation, that took effect before the 2016 election. As a result, turnout in Milwaukee's black neighborhoods dropped by more than 20 percent.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/voter-suppression-wisconsin-election-2016/
Not long after the election, Holder launched the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), a political action committee that aims to unrig the system that has entrenched Republican control of the country's most important swing states. He'd received the backing of top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, who in December 2018 folded his own political operation, Organizing for Action, into Holder's to give the fight against gerrymandering more clout. Now, while other top Democrats are focused on the White House, Holder has set his sights on neighborhoods like Merrill Park and on races like the one he was there to talk about, a state Supreme Court contest that had received virtually no attention outside Wisconsin.
https://democraticredistricting.com/
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/eric-holder-democrats-redistricting-233546
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/06/gop-paid-millions-to-gerrymandering-expert-behind-census-citizenship-question/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/obamas-political-group-shifts-focus-gerrymandering/578770/
https://medium.com/allontheline/what-ofa-has-accomplished-and-the-fight-ahead-2c3190060f8c
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/a-little-noticed-judicial-election-could-determine-wisconsins-political-course-for-a-decade/
"This state is in some ways ground zero for gerrymandering," Holder told two dozen BLOC canvassers who would knock on doors that afternoon for the progressive judge running in the race. "Last year they called it a blue wave, and yet you didn't flip one congressional seat here in Wisconsin. That's not because you didn't work hard or people didn't vote. It was because of gerrymandering." Republicans had so effectively gerrymandered the state that even when Democrats won 53 percent of the statewide vote in 2018, they took only 36 percent of the seats in the state legislature.
https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/5-things-know-about-wisconsin-partisan-gerrymandering-case
Holder views gerrymandering, which manipulates district lines to benefit one party, as part of a broader struggle for voting rights, since it effectively diminishes the value of certain communities' votes. "There is a direct connection between gerrymandering and voter suppression, not only here in Wisconsin but in places around the country," Holder told me before his speech at the union hall. "It is not a coincidence that you see the greatest amount of voter suppression in those states where you see the greatest amount of gerrymandering."
For decades, Democrats successfully fought these twin efforts at disenfranchisement in the courts. As Obama's attorney general, Holder led that charge, filing lawsuits against states like North Carolina and Texas that challenged Republican-backed laws curbing the right to vote. But this tactic was handed an enormous defeat in 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Shelby County v. Holder, ruling that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed federal approval to change voting laws. Last week, the court struck another blow, declaring that federal courts couldn't block partisan gerrymandering. Voting rights advocates face not only a hostile Trump administration but a growing number of federal benches controlled by conservatives. As the GOP's war on voting has intensified, the traditional ways of protecting ballot access are no longer reliable.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693/supreme-court-declines-republican-bid-to-revive-north-carolina-voter-id-law
https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2018/04/27/texas-voter-id-law-ruling-overturned-appeal-558857
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96
https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-eric-holder-delivers-remarks-supreme-court-decision-shelby-county-v
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-trump-judges/trump-chips-away-at-liberal-u-s-appeals-court-majorities-idUSKCN1M025I
So Holder is pursuing a new strategy, trying to elect down-ballot candidates who can deliver fairer maps and voting laws. The NDRC invested $350,000 in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, hoping that a liberal majority on the seven-member court might strike down any egregious gerrymanders in the next round of redistricting in 2021. "I don't think that 10 years or so ago, you would have a former attorney general campaigning for a state Supreme Court justice," Holder told me. "This is a recognition on the part of the Democratic Party, on the part of progressives, that we need to focus on state and local elections to a much greater degree than we have in the past."
But if Democrats are belatedly recognizing this need, few besides Holder are acting on it. He is playing a long game in a party driven by instant gratification and consumed by the mess in the White House. While the party's presidential contenders are attracting big crowds, donors, and volunteers determined to defeat President Donald Trump in 2020, Holder is focused on 2021.
https://www.wpr.org/eric-holders-group-spending-350k-help-supreme-court-candidate-lisa-neubauer
https://www.apnews.com/d6bd4fb1d65b4f94aa78c6c57d96623b
The Constitution requires states to redraw their political districts every 10 years. In 2011, after routing Democrats in midterm elections the previous fall, Republicans took control of critical swing states including Wisconsin, drawing electoral maps that cemented their power. Now history is at risk of repeating itself. If Democrats don't start devoting more attention and resources to state races, Holder warned the BLOC canvassers, 2021 could end up like 2011. The battle for control of state governments will determine the arc of American politics for the next decade, but it is already overshadowed by the 20-some Democrats running for president. Holder is fighting not just a well-funded Republican opposition but also his own party's narrow focus on the presidency.
https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2018/jun/15/fareed-zakaria/yes-democratic-party-nearly-its-weakest-point-cent/
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/the-supreme-court-could-finally-end-partisan-gerrymandering/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/politics/2020-presidential-candidates.html
"I understand people are going to be legitimately focused on the presidential race, as we should be," Holder said. "But it's going to be my job to make sure we don't lose sight of those other races that are going to be extremely important."
Until recently, Holder's strategy was a radical concept within the Democratic Party. Before the NDRC, there was no single group formulating a centralized strategy for gaining control of the redistricting process, as Republicans had done so successfully in 2010. That's where Holder came in. Never before had a Democrat of his stature devoted so much attention to such a wonky issue.
"I famously said I've got to make redistricting sexy," Holder recalled with a laugh as we sat in his Washington, DC, office at the law firm Covington & Burling, located in the glitzy new CityCenterDC complex. His corner office has views of the Washington Monument and busts of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson on the shelves. "My hope was—and I know President Obama's hope was—that my being directly involved would give this effort a degree of attention that it might not otherwise have," he said.
https://www.cov.com/en/professionals/h/eric-holder
http://citycenterdc.com/
Democrats didn't have a redistricting strategy because, for many years, they didn't need one. They controlled a majority of state legislatures for most of the post–World War II era, drawing electoral maps in twice as many states as Republicans in the 1980s and 1990s. Democrats were sitting pretty heading into the 2010 elections after winning big in 2006 and 2008, controlling more than 60 percent of state legislative chambers.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/partisan-composition.aspx
Then the GOP launched an aggressive bid to reclaim power at the state level, creating the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) to target state legislative races and put Republicans in charge of redistricting efforts after the 2010 census. The effort was overseen by former Republican National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie and advised by strategists like Karl Rove. "He who controls redistricting can control Congress," Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time.
http://www.redistrictingmajorityproject.com/
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/01/616216560/episode-845-redmap
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/business/dealbook/ed-gillespie-sard-verbinnen.html
https://books.google.com/books?id=FiuZCgAAQBAJ&q=rove&hl=de#v=snippet&q=rove&f=false
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703862704575099670689398044
Massively aided by the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision that allowed unlimited corporate political spending, REDMAP raised $30 million, including from oil, tobacco, and health insurance companies, three times as much as its Democratic counterpart. Republicans hoped to flip 25 to 30 House seats occupied by Democrats. They ended up winning 63, plus 20 new legislative chambers, giving them control of nearly every important swing state and the power to draw four times as many state legislative and House districts as Democrats. Nearly a decade later, Republicans still control every legislative chamber in heavily gerrymandered states like Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission/
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/06/how-the-republicans-rigged-congress-and-poisoned-our-politics/
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/04/gops-house-seats-are-safe-heres-why.html
https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_elections_results,_2010
http://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/partisan-composition.aspx
Democrats had no comparable strategy. And when the party controlled the White House and Congress after Obama's 2008 victory, it paid little attention to the states. By the end of Obama's second term, Democrats had lost nearly 1,000 state legislative seats. "This has been one of the big failures of our party," said former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who led the Democratic National Committee from 2001 to 2005. "We have not paid attention to the importance of redistricting—haven't put the time in historically."
http://web.archive.org/web/2/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/01/14/republicans-have-gained-more-than-900-state-legislative-seats-since-2010/
https://twitter.com/terrymcauliffe?lang=en
"One of the great deficiencies of the Obama operation during the eight years he was president," said Obama's former chief strategist, David Axelrod, "was that not enough attention was paid to legislative races." The president, consumed by the financial crisis and the Obamacare fight, didn't sustain a political operation that could combat the tea party wave and the GOP's surgical targeting of state races. Now, Axelrod said, this deficiency is something Obama, a former state senator, "feels acutely, feels some responsibility for, and wants to help remedy."
https://twitter.com/davidaxelrod?lang=en
McAuliffe and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi convened discussions during the 2016 Democratic National Convention about creating a group focused solely on redistricting. The initiative took on new urgency after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential race even as she won the popular vote, reinforcing the imperative that Democrats regain power at the state level. After the election, McAuliffe, Pelosi, and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer visited the White House to get Obama's blessing. "It was the president who said, 'I'll bring Eric in,'" McAuliffe recalled. Obama decided to make redistricting reform a central focus of his post-presidency and tapped Holder as his top lieutenant. Obama has hosted fundraisers for the effort, endorsed candidates in races the NDRC has targeted, and used his email list and social media profile to draw attention to the fight against gerrymandering. "In America, politicians shouldn't pick their voters," Obama said in a 2018 video promoting Holder's group. "Voters are supposed to pick their politicians."
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/obama-holder-redistricting-gerrymandering-229868
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/eric-holder-to-lead-democrats-attack-on-republican-gerrymandering.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obama-redistricting-gerrymander-video-ndrc_n_5b46127de4b0c523e26511fa
For Holder, the cause was personal. "The right to vote," he said when he launched the NDRC in 2017, was "a right that has been a part of my consciousness as long as I can remember." As a 12-year-old in 1963, Holder sat in his basement in East Elmhurst, Queens, and watched on a black-and-white television as Vivian Malone became one of the first black students to integrate the University of Alabama. Twenty-six years later, he would marry her younger sister, Sharon, an obstetrician. Vivian went on to lead a group that registered black voters in the South and worked in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. She died in 2005, before Holder became the first black attorney general. "Her not being able to see her brother-in-law become attorney general of the United States is one of those really unfortunate things," Holder told me in Wisconsin, his eyes welling up. "Even thinking about it now, I can get a little emotional."
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/nyregion/01holder.html
https://www.naacpldf.org/about-us/scholarship-recipients/vivian-malone-jones/
https://www.essence.com/news/sharon-malone-the-first-lady-of-justice/
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/us/vivian-malone-jones-63-dies-first-black-graduate-of-university-of.html
More votes, fewer seats
In some Republican controlled states, gerrymandering has made it all but impossible for Democrats to retake assemblies, even when they win a majority of the statewide vote.
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/20180610_Holder_Charts642-1.png
Challenging the GOP's redistricting edge required a multipronged approach: Holder's group has filed or assisted a dozen lawsuits against gerrymandered maps, supported local candidates whose races had implications for redistricting, and backed state ballot measures to establish independent redistricting commissions. "He's a uniting force between the different pieces of the Democratic ecosystem to get onto a shared strategy to rebuild Democratic power in the states," said Jessica Post, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and an NDRC board member. "Having a central electoral coordinating hub is really important."
https://www.dlcc.org/jessica-post
The Democrats' gains in 2018 were impressive. Holder's group raised $35 million—comparable to what REDMAP raised in 2010—helping Democrats flip about 300 state legislative seats, six legislative chambers, and seven governorships. In four states, including Wisconsin, Republicans lost sole control of state government, and with it their ability to single-handedly draw new districts. The NDRC targeted 230 state seats held by Republicans, focusing on suburban areas that were changing demographically; Democrats won 60 percent of them. Holder stumped for candidates in 24 states. "We gave financial support to races that otherwise might not have gotten financial support," he said. "I campaigned in races that would not have gotten that kind of high-level attention."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democrats-gain-hundreds-of-legislative-seats-and-secure-majority-of-state-attorneys-general/2018/11/07/cef1ebd6-e2aa-11e8-ab2c-b31dcd53ca6b_story.html?tid=pm_politics_pop
https://democraticredistricting.com/ndrc-announces-2019-2020-redistricting-targets/
Party control of state legislatures
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/20180610_Holder_Charts642-2.png?resize=990,713
Though he hoped to elect more Democrats, Holder's overriding goal was to make the redistricting process less skewed, putting him in conflict with some Democrats who wanted to maximize partisan gain. When New Jersey Democrats proposed giving legislative leaders more power over the drawing of district lines last year, Holder quickly denounced the plan. "I'm here for a fair process, not to gerrymander for Democrats," he told me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/nyregion/redistricting-new-jersey-democrats-republicans.html
Holder, who has never run for elected office, is an unlikely public face for a major political campaign. He's charismatic by the standards of a career lawyer, but no one would mistake him for Obama on the stump, though they do share a love of dad jokes. Still, Holder's devotion to technocratic details can be an advantage when it comes to the nuances of redistricting. Holder said he viewed the fight against gerrymandering as a "jigsaw puzzle" and delighted in figuring out which pieces went where.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-fight-over-partisan-gerrymandering-is-moving-beyond-the-supreme-court/
His efforts in Wisconsin began in March 2018, when the NDRC spent half a million dollars to elect Rebecca Dallet to the state Supreme Court, a huge amount for a state judicial race. Her victory brought Democrats one seat closer to ending the conservative majority on the court, which can rule on state voting laws. To increase African American turnout, Holder's group funded BLOC, which knocked on 35,000 doors in Milwaukee in the spring of 2018 and helped achieve higher turnout in Dallet's race in neighborhoods like Merrill Park than in a 2015 Supreme Court race.
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/courts/rebecca-dallet-wins--year-term-on-wisconsin-supreme-court/article_1e5524f8-e10f-50f5-bb69-b0837c2307db.html
https://mkemidterms.mediamilwaukee.com/engaging-milwaukees-black-voters-block-by-bloc/
Holder returned to Milwaukee last fall to campaign for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers, for whom BLOC knocked on more than 173,000 doors in black neighborhoods that statewide political candidates usually bypassed. Evers defeated Gov. Scott Walker by just 30,000 votes, giving Democrats veto power over the state's redistricting maps in 2021.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-democrats-finally-defeated-wisconsin-gov-scott-walker/2018/11/07/3377ed17-9cbe-4537-8b2a-acd0c37a8d35_story.html
Holder also continued the efforts he'd begun as attorney general by taking Republicans to court for infringing on voting rights. When Walker refused to hold special elections for vacant state legislative seats in February 2018, Holder's group sued and won. After the 2018 election, when Republicans cut back on early voting, Holder's group sued and won again.
Walker criticized Holder's work in Wisconsin on Twitter several months before the election; after losing, Walker became finance chair of a new group, the National Republican Redistricting Trust, focused on combating the NDRC. "My role is to counter Eric Holder's efforts," Walker tweeted. "He, with [t]he help of former President Obama, have raised some $200 million that they are using in court and on the campaign trail. Their goal is to secure Nancy Pelosi's control as Speaker for a decade or more." Walker dramatically overstated the amount raised by Holder's group, but it was telling that the former Wisconsin governor—whose party Holder had been desperately trying to catch up with—now thought Holder was ahead of him.
https://twitter.com/ScottWalker/status/979365203061149698
https://www.thenrrt.org/
https:/twitter.com/ScottWalker/status/1108827414564605959
The question now is whether Holder's group can lock in and expand the gains made in 2018. Over the next year, the NDRC plans to almost triple its staff to 30, and the absorption of Obama's vaunted Organizing for Action list will give Holder's group access to hundreds of thousands of new volunteers to work on state races. "The single most important thing that could be done at the grassroots level over the next few years is to make sure the rules of the road are fair," Obama said on a call with these volunteers in December 2018.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/obamas-political-group-shifts-focus-gerrymandering/578770/
Democrats are within six seats of flipping state legislative chambers in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Minnesota, Arizona, and Michigan. "We're much closer across the country than people think," said the DLCC's Post. But the GOP still controls 62 of 99 state legislative chambers nationwide and holds the governor's mansion and both legislative bodies in 22 states, compared to 14 for Democrats. The bulk of the NDRC's efforts will focus on five Republican-controlled gerrymandered states: Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina. Gaining seats there will mean targeting districts in conservative exurbs where Democrats came up short in 2018. Mark Gersh, a Democratic redistricting expert working with Holder's group, said the team is "trying to figure out whether Trump's plummeting popularity and behavior might enable us to go beyond the parts we know we can win, because there's not enough of them. We won all the low-hanging fruit last time."
http://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/partisan-composition.aspx
There's momentum, though. The once-wonky issue of voting rights has become a rallying cry for Democrats. In 2018, voters in five states approved ballot initiatives that curbed gerrymandering. When Democrats took control of the House, their first piece of legislation was a sweeping reform bill that called for independent redistricting commissions to draw all House districts. (The proposal died in the Senate after Republican leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on it.) Schumer said in March that the fight for voting rights should be one of the Democrats' top three issues, alongside climate change and income inequality.
https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2018/11/7/18072204/2018-midterms-political-reform-winner
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/03/house-passes-the-most-significant-democracy-reform-bill-in-a-generation/
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/andrew-gillums-next-campaign-registering-voters-in-florida.html
Voting rights are "part of a basket of issues that are motivating to people who feel like the character of our democracy is being threatened and that democracy itself is being manipulated," said Axelrod. But Democrats are still in jeopardy of ignoring the state and local races that will determine the country's voting maps. "Our concern is there's wall-to-wall coverage of Trump scandals, wall-to-wall coverage of crowd size and presidential announcements, and our job is to continue to make sure people know that the next decade of democracy is on the line in 2020," said Post.
Democratic strategists working on down-ballot races say the presidential campaign is siphoning away resources. "It's harder to recruit people [to run], it's harder to get attention to these races, it's harder to raise money for them," said Amanda Litman, executive director of Run for Something, which recruits progressive candidates for local offices. "Quite a few of the donors we work really closely with have been hesitant to reengage, either because they're tapped out from 2018 or they're waiting for the presidential race to shake out."
https://runforsomething.net/
Litman's group is coordinating with the NDRC to recruit state legislative candidates to run in every district in the 12 states Holder is targeting in 2020, but she said reaching Run for Something's $3 million fundraising goal this year "is like pulling teeth." That's small change for presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, who each raised about twice that sum on the first day of their campaigns, but it could make the difference in flipping multiple state legislative chambers, Litman said.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bernie-sanders-raises-million-day-presidential-campaign/story?id=61181905
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/joe-biden-first-day-fundraising-haul
More money might have changed the outcome of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Lisa Neubauer, the progressive judge backed by Holder, was favored to win. But in the final week of the race, the Republican State Leadership Committee, the same group that bankrolled the GOP's takeover of the state legislature in 2010, launched a $1.3 million ad campaign for Neubauer's opponent, Brian Hagedorn, an ultraconservative judge and former chief counsel to Walker. Meanwhile, Republicans made Holder a talking point—a Facebook ad from Hagedorn admonished, "We can't let Eric Holder reshape Wisconsin's Supreme Court"—and Neubauer called on Holder and other outside funders to stay out of the race. Turnout surged in conservative, rural parts of the state, and Hagedorn won by about 6,000 votes, cementing a right-wing majority on the court through at least 2023.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/a-little-noticed-judicial-election-could-determine-wisconsins-political-course-for-a-decade/
https://www.jsonline.com/get-access/?return=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jsonline.com%2Fstory%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2F2019%2F03%2F14%2Flisa-neubauer-says-she-doesnt-want-eric-holders-help-court-race%2F3160817002%2F
https://twitter.com/brendan_fischer/status/1113406328473624576
The day after the election, Holder spoke at the annual convention of Al Sharpton's National Action Network. A dozen Democratic presidential candidates were there, and none had campaigned for Neubauer. "It seems I'm the only one here who isn't running for president in 2020," Holder joked. He'd flirted with his own long-shot presidential bid but decided against it, in part to remain focused on redistricting. He said "we should have won" the Supreme Court race and worried that the presidential contenders weren't talking enough about the down-ballot contests that Democrats need to win to reverse the GOP's redistricting edge.
https://nationalactionnetwork.net/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQt1sxQijfA&app=desktop
Holder was dismayed that he'd been the only prominent Democrat to campaign for Neubauer. "I'm still a little bit wound up about this one," he told me two weeks after the election. "This should be a wake-up call for us. I felt a little lonely out there in Wisconsin."
Ilhan Omar, Aipac And Me [nyt]
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/opinion/israel-ilhan-omar.html
Ilhan Omar, Aipac And Me
The congresswoman and I have a lot in common — but not her stance on Israel.
By Thomas L. Friedman
March 6, 2019
I've been watching with more than a little interest the controversial statements about Israel and the Israel lobby by Ilhan Omar, a freshman Democratic congresswoman from the Fifth District of Minnesota, because it turns out that we have a lot in common — up to a point.
The first thing we have in common is that I was raised in the Fifth District of Minnesota, specifically the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. I lived there until I was 20. It was a freaky place — a crazy mix of Minnesota Jews (we called ourselves "the Frozen Chosen'') and Scandinavians that produced a uniquely tolerant civic culture and an interesting group of neighbors: Al Franken, the Coen brothers, Peggy Orenstein, Norm Ornstein, Michael Sandel, Sharon Isbin, Marc Trestman and lots of others you can find on the St. Louis Park Wikipedia page. Our little town was immortalized in the Coen brothers' 2009 movie "A Serious Man.''
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_Park,_Minnesota
I still feel very close to the community there and go home often. St. Louis Park welcomed Jews who wanted to get out of the inner city of Minneapolis back in the 1950s — when other suburbs still had restrictions on selling homes to "Hebrews.'' So I was proud to see St. Louis Park also welcome Muslim Somali refugees like Omar a half-century later, and then elect her to Congress.
The other thing that Omar and I have in common, as others have noted, is that we both don't like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) — the organization at the center of the Israel lobby — and have spoken in very blunt language about its strong-arm political tactics.
https://theintercept.com/2019/02/12/there-is-a-taboo-against-criticizing-aipac-and-ilhan-omar-just-destroyed-it/
But that is also where our differences begin.
I don't like Aipac because I strongly believe in the right of the Jewish people to build a nation-state in their ancient homeland — a nation-state envisaged by its founders to reflect the best of Jewish and democratic values. And I believe Aipac for many years has not only become a rubber stamp on the right-wing policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has resulted in tens of thousands of Israeli settlers now ensconced in the heart of the West Bank, imperiling Israel as a democracy. Aipac has also been responsible for making support for Israel a Republican cause, not a bipartisan issue, which poses a real danger to Israel's support in America in the long run, and particularly on college campuses.
I dislike Aipac because I am devoted to Israel as a Jewish democracy and because I believe that only a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians can ensure that. Given how Aipac has let itself become the slavish, unthinking tool of Netanyahu, who opposes a two-state solution, I believe Aipac works against Israel's long-term interests.
Aipac is a self-appointed lobby that does not represent my feelings as an American Jew. But neither does Representative Omar.
Everything I have heard from her leads me to conclude that she dislikes Aipac because she dislikes Israel, because she does not really believe the Jewish people have a right to an independent state in their ancestral homeland. She seems to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, known as B.D.S.
When Omar was asked at an August primary debate held in a St. Louis Park synagogue about her stance on B.D.S., she said that the movement was "not helpful in getting that two-state solution," Haaretz reported on Nov. 14.
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/muslim-trailblazer-ilhan-omar-admits-she-backs-bds-1.6654634
But after she was elected, Muslimgirl.com reported that on Nov. 11, her campaign told a reporter for the website that "Ilhan believes in and supports the B.D.S. movement and has fought to make sure people's right to support it isn't criminalized. She does, however, have reservations on the effectiveness of the movement in accomplishing a lasting solution."
http://muslimgirl.com/50283/ilhan-omar-why-advocating-for-palestine-is-not-anti-semitic/
According to Haaretz, her campaign confirmed that she had voted against an anti-B.D.S. bill while she was a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, explaining that she was inspired by how B.D.S. had worked to undermine apartheid in South Africa. "I don't want to be part of a vote that limits the ability of people to fight towards that justice and peace," she had said.
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-minnesota-muslim-candidate-becomes-target-of-alt-right-troll-1.6367804
I am not a B.D.S. supporter. The movement's main website says that it "does not advocate for a particular solution to the conflict and does not call for either a 'one state solution' or a 'two state solution.'" Rather, it calls for ending the Israeli "occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall, recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality" and "respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194."
https://bdsmovement.net/faqs
By being specific about the rights of Palestinians to return to their home and not unequivocally committing to a two-state solution, the movement leaves me and many others to believe that B.D.S. is just code for getting rid of the state of Israel. I do not believe in passing laws against B.D.S. — people can boycott whomever they want — but I do believe it is not a helpful movement at all. And I believe Omar's waffling on the issue, depending on her audience, is equally unhelpful and troubling.
[Hours after this column was published, Omar's spokesman Jeremy Slevin called me and shared this statement: "As she has said before, Representative Omar supports a two-state solution, which allows for both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own sanctuaries and self-determination."]
If she thinks the only reason that Americans support Israel is because of Aipac and campaign contributions, she is dead wrong. Americans' affinity with Israel is rooted in a respect for Israel's ability to maintain a democracy, albeit with flaws, in a sea of autocratic regimes; it is rooted in a Judeo-Christian religious affinity; and it is rooted in respect for Israel's contributions to technology, medicine and science. Aipac is the beneficiary of that support, not the cause of it.
But Aipac has abused that privilege. And it is utterly fooling itself if doesn't understand that there are more than a few Americans, especially on college campuses but not only there, who are enjoying watching Omar give it a punch right in the face. She is saying something others want to say but are afraid to do so — including some members of Congress, I am sure.
Why? Maybe it's because they watched how President Barack Obama put together a $40 billion, 10-year military aid package for Israel — a high-tech powerhouse that is not poor — and rather than receiving effusive thanks from Netanyahu, Obama was criticized by Bibi and his cat's paw, the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, as "not generous enough,'' because it required that aid to be spent purchasing American arms, benefiting our workers, not on Israeli-made arms. Aipac went along with Netanyahu's ungratefulness.
As Haaretz reported on July 28, 2016, "Last week, Graham visited Israel and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister said he was unhappy with both the level of aid the Obama administration was offering in the new deal and the conditions the administration was attaching to it.''
With Aipac's support, Netanyahu also got the Republican House to invite him to give one of America's highest honors — a speech to a joint meeting of Congress — over the objections of President Obama. Netanyahu used the opportunity to castigate the White House at the height of both the Iran negotiations and Netanyahu's own re-election campaign. That really made me mad as an American. Netanyahu used our Congress to attack our president and further his re-election campaign. No other foreign leader would have dared to do that.
Around 60 Democrats boycotted the speech, saying it was an overreach by Speaker John Boehner, Netanyahu and Aipac — one also designed to make it look as if Republicans were more pro-Israel than Democrats.
According to Talking Points Memo, the Israelis and Republicans worked out the details of Bibi's congressional speech "without notifying the White House," so that, Boehner said, "there was no interference" from the administration. Not only did that violate diplomatic protocol — an opposition party working directly with a foreign government — but of political protocol as well, with congressional Republicans developing their own foreign policy independent of, and at odds with, the White House.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/boehner-netanyahu-speech-white-house
Plenty of Americans resent that kind of overreach. And it was enabled by Aipac. On Feb. 28, 2015, The Washington Post reported: "Worried that lawmakers might boycott the speech altogether, a board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee prodded local AIPAC activists to apply pressure on Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to attend.''
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/netanyahus-planned-congress-speech-splits-us-jewish-organizations/2015/02/28/9df48886-bebe-11e4-bdfa-b8e8f594e6ee_story.html
But I come back to Omar. She is a brand-new member of Congress. She is free to raise any issues she wants. And one issue she seems to have seized on is the alleged dual loyalty of Jews to America and Israel. I am not dual loyal. I always put America first, but I want to see Israel thrive — just like many Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Indian-Americans and others feel about their ancestral homelands.
When I see that dual-loyalty charge coming from a congresswoman who first signaled opposition to B.D.S. and then support for it, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who has never been to Israel, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who, to my knowledge, has never criticized the Palestinian leadership for its corruption and failure — time and again — to seize on peace overtures from Israeli leaders who, unlike Netanyahu, actually wanted to forge a two-state solution, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who seems to be obsessed with Israel's misdeeds as the biggest problem in the Middle East — not Iran's effective occupation of four Arab capitals, its support for ethnic cleansing and the use of poison gas in Syria and its crushing of Lebanese democracy — it makes me suspicious of her motives.
So let me end where I started. Ilhan Omar represents, among other neighborhoods, a significant and liberal Jewish community — my hometown. I can tell you that a vast majority of Jews there would be proud if their congresswoman used her links to American Jews and Muslims to be a bridge builder for peace in the Middle East and America, not just another Aipac/Israel basher. She is young and very new to the national spotlight. Friends of mine back home tell me her humanistic instincts are impressive and authentic. I don't know if it's her or her advisers, but she's gotten herself into a bad place — a huge missed leadership opportunity.
Which only reinforces a fundamental rule I have: I love the Israelis and the Palestinians, but God save me from their American friends. When they recreate and fuel their conflict here in America, and on college campuses, they only sow more division, distrust and make things worse. And that's the last thing the good people in Israel and Palestine need.
Me: she also very publically endorses CAIR (dual loyalty to Islamic nations?) and spoke at CAIR events (dual loyalty to Islam nations?) and clapped for CAIR speakers who defined Israel as "Palestine" and called Israeli Jews "legitimate military targets" and "illegal zionist occupiers" who needed to be militarily removed from Israel and the West Bank and Jerusalem and she also clapped for CAIR speakers who defended European and American ISIS persons 1) guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and 2) were not allowed to return to the US or European nation they were originally from (dual loyalty to Islamic terrorism?). She has openly called for the state of Israel "Palestine" and has called for Jews to be removed from "Palestine". She has openly said they have a right of self-determination anywhere but "Palestine" (Israel). She really does need to be primaried out.
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