Chris Hedges's Blog, page 158

House Panel to Escalate Trump Impeachment Inquiry

WASHINGTON—The House Judiciary Committee will vote Thursday to establish rules for hearings on impeachment, escalating the panel’s investigations of President Donald Trump even as many Democrats remain wary of the effort.

The resolution is a technical step, and the panel would still have to introduce impeachment articles against Trump and win approval from the House to bring charges against Trump. It’s unclear if that will ever happen, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged caution on the issue, saying the public still isn’t yet supportive of taking those steps.

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Even if the House did recommend impeachment charges against the president, the Republican-led Senate is unlikely to convict him and remove him from office.

Still, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler has said that the committee will move forward with impeachment hearings this fall, bolstered by lawmakers on the panel who roundly support moving forward. The vote on Thursday will set rules for those hearings, empowering staff to question witnesses, allowing some evidence to remain private and permitting the president’s counsel to respond to testimony.

The committee says that the resolution is similar to procedural votes taken at the beginning of the impeachment investigations into Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

“The adoption of these additional procedures is the next step in that process and will help ensure our impeachment hearings are informative to Congress and the public, while providing the president with the ability to respond to evidence presented against him,” Nadler said in a statement. “We will not allow Trump’s continued obstruction to stop us from delivering the truth to the American people.”

The committee has also filed two lawsuits against the administration after the White House repeatedly blocked the panel from obtaining documents and testimony. Pelosi has said she wants to see what happens in court before making any decisions on impeachment.

The first hearing under the new impeachment rules would be with Corey Lewandowski on Sept. 17, the panel also announced Monday. Lewandowski was frequently mentioned in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which the committee has been investigating. According to Mueller’s report, Trump asked Lewandowski to deliver a message to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking him to limit Mueller’s probe.

The committee has also invited two other witnesses mentioned in the report, former White House aides Rick Dearborn and Rob Porter. The White House has previously blocked former employees from testifying, but Lewandowski never officially worked for the White House.

The resolution that the committee will consider Thursday would set parameters for the panel’s impeachment hearings in an attempt to give lawmakers more powers to investigate the president. It would allow committee lawyers to question witnesses for an additional hour — 30 minutes for each side — beyond the five minutes allowed for committee lawmakers. Evidence would be allowed in private session to protect the confidentiality of sensitive materials, and any full committee or subcommittee hearing could be designated by Nadler as part of the committee’s probe into whether to recommend articles of impeachment.

The procedural vote comes as the panel broadens its impeachment probe beyond Mueller’s report, which has consumed most of the committee’s energy since it was released in April. The Judiciary panel, along with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, announced Friday that they are demanding information about the spending of taxpayer money at the president’s hotels and properties, partly to inform the impeachment investigation.

The committees said there have been “multiple efforts” by Trump and administration officials to spend federal money at his properties, including Vice President Mike Pence’s stay last week at a Trump resort in Doonbeg, Ireland .

Aside from reviewing his use of Trump’s properties, the Judiciary panel is also expected to investigate hush money payments Trump made to kill potentially embarrassing stories, and has subpoenaed the Department of Homeland Security to explore whether the president offered pre-emptive pardons for lawbreaking. More subpoenas are likely.

Meanwhile, several other committees are also investigating the president — though not under the auspices of impeachment, which is the jurisdiction of the Judiciary panel.

In one of those probes, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff wrote former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and demanded that he appear for testimony on Sept. 25. In the letter, dated Friday, Schiff said that Flynn had failed to comply with the panel’s June subpoena or “cooperate with the committee’s efforts to secure your compliance.”

Flynn admitted lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States and awaits sentencing.

The intelligence panel said also Monday that it will investigate possible efforts by Trump and his personal lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to pressure the government of Ukraine to assist Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign.

The intelligence panel, along with the House Foreign Relations Committee and the Oversight committee, are demanding records related to those efforts. The committees said in a joint release that the record request is a “first step in a broad investigation into this matter.”

Giuliani said earlier this year that he would travel to Kiev to urge the government to investigate the origins of Mueller’s probe and the involvement of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch. Giuliani later scrapped that trip.

Climate Change Is Already Hitting Europe Harder Than Anyone Expected

Europe’s rapid warming means the world’s hottest property could now be on the continent. It has seen the strongest intensification of heat waves anywhere in the world in the last 70 years. The hottest of hot summers are now 2.3°C hotter than they used to be.

And winter extremes of cold are dwindling. The number of extremely cold days has fallen twofold or even threefold, and the coldest days are now 3°C milder than they used to be, according to readings from 94% of the continent’s weather stations.

This, say Swiss scientists, adds up to “a climate change signal that cannot be explained by internal variability.”

That is, thanks to a steady increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases driven by ever-increasing use of fossil fuels, Europe is warming even faster than global climate models predict.

“In at least one region of the globe, global heating is already happening, and at a rate faster than predicted”

“Even at this regional scale over Europe we can see that these trends are much larger than what we would expect from natural variability,” said Ruth Lorenz, a researcher from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, also known as ETH Zurich. “That’s really a signal from climate change.”

She and colleagues report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that they looked at observations and measurements from around 1,000 weather stations between 1950 and 2018 and then analysed the top 1% of the highest extremes of heat and humidity, and the top 1% of coldest days during the same timespan.

Since 1950, the number of days of extreme heat in Europe has tripled. The number of extreme cold days has been reduced, twofold in some places, and by a factor of three in others.

Accelerating change

For years, researchers have been predicting ever-greater extremes for Europe. They have warned that rising temperatures will hit the continent both economically and in health terms, and that as the thermometer rises so will the hazards of fire and drought.

Researchers have even checked the changes in land use in the last three decades to find that political changes – the collapse of the Soviet Union and the formation of the 28-state European Union – helped damp down what still proved one of the worst heat waves ever recorded, in 2003.

But research has largely focused on what could happen if global heating continues, and fossil fuel use continues to grow. What the latest study demonstrates is that in at least one region of the globe, global heating is already happening, and at a rate faster than predicted.

And the rate of change is accelerating. The number of extreme hot days overall has trebled since 1950, but the frequency of these has doubled just between 1996 and 2018.

Afghanistan Is Both Stalemate and Quagmire

This piece originally appeared on antiwar.com.

When they saw Afghanistan, all they could think of was Iraq. Indeed, most military thinkers are perennially driven by the tunnel-vision of personal experience; rarely a good thing. Indeed, the generals and colonels managing the foolish, politically driven 2009-12 Obama “surge” into Afghanistan – what he’d absurdly labeled the “good war” – had few fresh ideas. Convinced, and feeling vindicated, by the myth that Baby Bush’s 2007-09 Iraq surge had “worked,” most commanders knew just what to do and sought to replicate these tactics in the utterly dissimilar war in Afghanistan. That meant the temporary infusion of some 30,000 extra troops, walling off warring neighborhoods, and plopping small American units among the populace.

Some of us, mostly captains who’d cut our teeth in the worst days of the Iraq maelstrom, were skeptical from the start. I, for one, had long sensed that the “gains” of that surge were highly temporary, that the U.S. military had simply bought the fleeting loyalty of Sunni insurgents, and that the whole point of the surge – to allow a political settlement between warring sects and ethnicities – had never occurred. The later rise of ISIS, breakdown of centralized governance, and rout of the U.S.-trained Iraqi Army in 2013-14 would prove my point. But that was in the future. From my viewpoint, the legacy of surge 1.0 had really only been another 1,000 or so American troop deaths – including three of my own men – and who knows how many Iraqi casualties.

Then again, no one cared what one lowly, if dreamy yet cynical, officer thought anyway. I was a tool, a pawn, a middle-managing “company man” expected to carry out surge 2.0 with discipline and enthusiasm. And so I tried. My team of cavalry scouts raised a dubiously loyal local militia, partnered with the often drug-addicted, criminal Afghan Army and police, and parsed out my squads to live within the local villages semi-permanently. That’s when things got weird.

Impressed by the minor, momentary drop in violence – such deceptive stats were a way of life in the US Army – these early measures had allegedly produced, both my squadron commander, and his boss, the brigade commander, suddenly took interest in my troop. Now they wanted to expand on what we were doing and toss in their own misguided two cents. What was needed, my colonel informed me, was to wall off the nearest contested village – Charcusa – with tall concrete “T-walls.” That way, so his twisted logic went, the Taliban couldn’t get in. See, for him, a complex war was that simple. In an oddly prescient foreshadowing of his future commander-in-chief, Donald Trump’s, border tactics, my squadron commander never saw a problem a section of wall couldn’t solve.

Now, once again, it was my turn to attempt to pour a dose of reason all over his best laid plans. This rarely ended well. Thus, I explained that surrounding the small agricultural village with concrete barriers would separate farmers from their fields, and thus their livelihood. Besides, even if we created a few guarded exits to the fields, the T-walls would seal off the many canals the villagers used for drinking and irrigation, essentially drying out the whole joint. Oh, and the Taliban could climb, I reminded him. The Taliban were probably already in the village, related to the villagers, and didn’t wear uniforms or big Ts on their foreheads. The aesthetic nightmare of walling off a village would alienate the people and cause psychologically deep reactions of insecurity combined with resentment of us Americans. I tried, well, every single argument I could muster.

Mister “lower-caters-to-higher” was far from pleased. See, the real brainchild of the Charcusa concrete bonanza was actually the brigade commander, and my lowly unit certainly couldn’t defy his wishes. Heck, my squadron commander’s own evaluation and career progression might be on the line. Weighed against that, what did tactical commonsense or the livelihood of meaningless Afghans matter? The brigade commander had himself been a battalion commander in Western Baghdad during surge 1.0, where he and others, gleefully walled off the area neighborhoods and divided conflicting Muslim sects. It “worked” in urban Baghdad, so why not rural, no electrical grid, religiously homogenous, Southern Afghanistan? There it was again: a colonel who saw an Afghan problem and reflexively sought to apply an uncreative Iraqi solution.

Well, after weeks of wrangling, and certainly another blight on my leadership reputation with the squadron commander, my irrigation ditch argument won out with the more practical elements on the brigade staff…sort of. There’d be no concrete barriers, the commander reluctantly conceded, but we just had to “throw a bone” to the brigade commander’s Baghdad-based vision. The solution: I was ordered to surround the village after all, only with thousands of strands of menacing, ugly, triple strand concertina (barbed) wire. I wasn’t going to stop this one, and hardly bothered.

For days on end my weary troopers turned the village of Charcusa into what discomfiting resembled a concentration camp. Not that it worked, or mattered. The results produced amounted to little more than the few hundred cuts on my soldiers’ hands. Within a couple years my unit was gone, and so were our successors. Today, most of Kandahar is again contested by the Taliban, the rusting barbed wire naught but a monument to American obtusity. Still, it pleased both of my bosses, one off which told me I’d done a “great” job with the concertina wire mission, a macabre gold star of sorts for my own impending evaluation.

So today, on that wars rolls in an ongoing combination of stalemate and quagmire. Just this week, another American soldier was killed by a suicide car bomb. His death, ultimately, changes nothing as the Afghan War now has a preposterous inertia all its own. As for my colonel, he got the next promotion and his own brigade. His boss, the king of concrete himself, well he’s a rising star and a prominent general officer today. Now that President Trump has foolishly called off seemingly promising peace talks with the Taliban, maybe my old brigade commander will lead the next phase of an Afghan War with no end in sight. If he does, expect more of the same. He’ll have his troops and their Afghan mentees needlessly walling off more tiny villages in no time…

Series note: It has taken me years to tell these stories. The emotional and moral wounds of the Afghan War have just felt too recent, too raw. After all, I could hardly write a thing down about my Iraq War experience for nearly ten years, when, by accident, I churned out a  book  on the subject. Now, as the American war in Afghanistan – hopefully – winds to something approaching a close, it’s finally time to impart some tales of the madness. In this new, recurring, semi-regular series, the reader won’t find many worn out sagas of heroism, brotherhood, and love of country. Not that this author doesn’t have such stories, of course. But one can find those sorts of tales in countless books and numerous trite, platitudinal Hollywood yarns.

With that in mind, I propose to tell a number of very different sorts of stories – profiles, so to speak, in absurdity. That’s what war is, at root, an exercise in absurdity, and America’s hopeless post-9/11 wars are stranger than most. My own 18-year long quest to find some meaning in all the combat, to protect my troops from danger, push back against the madness, and dissent from within the army proved Kafkaesque in the extreme. Consider what follows just a survey of that hopeless journey…

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Joe Biden Must Be Stopped

The man quickly identified himself as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. He didn’t need to tell me that he was hopping mad.

Ken Martin was angry that my colleagues and I were handing out a flier—providing some inconvenient facts about Joe Biden—to delegates and activists as they entered the New Hampshire Democratic Party convention on Saturday. The headline, next to Biden’s picture, quoted a statement he made last year: “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble.”

While not flattering to the current frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, the carefully documented RootsAction flier offered information that news coverage has rarely mentioned—and that party activists as well as voters overall should know.

But Martin had a very different perspective. He heatedly told me that distributing such a flier was divisive and would harm the cause of defeating Donald Trump.

I’m as eager to defeat Trump as anyone. At the same time, we need primaries for good reasons—including fact-based scrutiny of candidates’ records before they’re nominated. I tried to assure Martin that I’m as eager to defeat Trump as anyone. At the same time, we need primaries for good reasons—including fact-based scrutiny of candidates’ records before they’re nominated. However, I found it difficult to get words in edgewise, as Martin continued to denounce the leafleting.

After a few minutes, I asked: “Do you want to have a conversation, or do you want to lecture me?” Martin’s reply came in a split-second: “I want to lecture you.” Give him credit for honesty.

A few hours later, Martin addressed thousands from the convention podium and—in more restrained tones—focused on blaming nonresponsive voters for the failures of Democratic candidates to inspire them. “In 2016 we had 10 percent of Democrats who voted for Donald Trump,” he said. “We had 53 percent of white women who voted for Donald Trump. We had a tripling of the third-party vote throughout our country. And probably most discouraging to me: as consistent Democratic base voters, people who always show up in elections, many of them didn’t show up to vote at all.”

A logical question would be: Why did many of them not show up to vote at all? But Martin wasn’t going there. Instead, he went on: “You see, Democrats, we’ve got great candidates on full display today and I can guarantee you one of them is going to be the next president of the United States. But we have to come together, we have to come together. Let’s not confuse unanimity with unity, we’re Democrats, we don’t agree on everything. But I will tell you, if we’re not unified we will not win this election. We have to come out and support whoever the Democratic candidate is.”

Martin is in major positions of power within the Democratic Party, not only at the DNC but also as chair of the party in Minnesota (the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party) and as president of the Association of State Democratic Committees. For the bulk of the party leadership, in sync with frontrunner Biden, self-critical assessments are essentially off-limits. The boilerplate calls for “unity” serve to distract from tough-minded examination of the reasons for widespread distrust and low vote rates.

Refusals to examine the patterns of the past render many party leaders unable to recognize or acknowledge what a disaster a Biden campaign against Trump would so likely be. It’s of little use to plead for strong turnout from “Democratic base voters” after nominating a weak and uninspiring candidate.

“A core challenge for the Democratic Party will be to raise the voter participation rate while drawing presently apathetic and uninvolved nonvoters and occasional voters into the process — largely younger people and African Americans,” the report “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis” said two years ago. The report (which I co-authored as part of a task force) pointed out that “a party doesn’t grow by simply tallying up members and scolding them into showing up.”

The specter of Joe Biden as the party’s nominee runs directly counter to what the Autopsy called for: “To flourish, the Democratic Party needs an emphatic mission and a clear moral message that excites and provides a purpose that is distinct from the otherwise cynical spectacle of politics. Inspiring programs for truly universal health care, racial justice, free public college tuition, economic security, new infrastructure, green jobs and tackling the climate crisis can do this. This is about more than just increasing voter turnout. It is about energizing as well as expanding the base of the party.”

As presidential candidates crisscross the country, only two are showing how to energize activism on a large scale while inspiring voters. That was apparent again inside the arena in New Hampshire, where Bernie Sanders (who I continue to actively support) and Elizabeth Warren delivered high-voltage progressive speeches that left others in the dust.

Biden’s mediocre speech at the New Hampshire convention on September 7 is already a historic record of a dismal candidate for president whose nomination promises to be a disaster. To pretend otherwise is hardly a service to the crucial task of defeating Donald Trump.

The Carnage of War Is Tearing Humanity Apart

Do you remember July 8, 2011? Where you were? What you did? Whom you talked to? Anything at all?

I couldn’t pin down one single thing for that day. I couldn’t even locate an email I had sent or a photo I might have taken. It’s all evidently lost in the ether, known only to tech and telecom firms. But maybe, unlike me, you have a diary or save your calendars or just happen to have fantastic recall. Maybe you remember it because it was the day NASA launched the Space Shuttle on its 135th and final mission.

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Unlike me, Abdul Hamid Frefer recalls every detail of that eighth of July. It was a Friday and he remembers exactly where he was, who he was with, what he saw, what he heard, even what he said. It’s tattooed on his brain, but more than that, it’s written on his body — only not in a conventional sense. Writing isn’t just words. IfItWereJustWordsThisWouldBeEasyToRead. Writing doesn’t exist without the blank spaces between the words. It’s these blank spaces that are especially integral to Frefer’s story because his is a tale of absence, one that’s been retold — and that he’s been reminded of — every day since.

For Frefer, there was life before July 8, 2011, and life after; life, that is, before the moment his world changed forever and then what followed. The last thing he heard before that unforgettable moment was “Run!”

“But there was nowhere to run,” he told me.

After all, no man can outrun a rocket.

When that rocket hit, the shockwave burst his eardrums and he was knocked to the ground. White noise dissolved into unbearable pain. When he tried to lift his left leg, he watched his shoe fall off — with his foot still in it. Only skin held his right leg below the knee to the top of that limb.

“Go!” he remembers screaming at his friends. “I’m dead anyway! Save yourself!” They did go. They saved themselves. But not before saving him. They wrapped Frefer in a blanket, hoisted him up and took off running.

Revolutionary Road

I met Abdul Hamid Frefer in the coastal city of Misrata earlier this year while on assignment in Libya. Bald with lively brown eyes and a bristly, close-cropped white beard, he was dressed in a loose-fitting, baby-blue ensemble that resembled silk pajamas. I noticed his black metal crutches immediately, but didn’t initially grasp that he was missing his left foot and his right leg below the knee.

Eight years before, at age 39, Frefer’s heart had been touched by fire. To be exact, the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable seller pushed past the brink by corruption and police brutality. On December 17, 2010, a policewoman confiscated his cart and wares, slapped him, and spit in his face. Humiliated, stripped of his livelihood, and deeply in debt, he went to the governor’s office. “If you don’t see me, I’ll burn myself,” he reportedly said. The governor refused to meet him and Bouazizi was true to his word.

When he lit that match, the blaze that erupted would become known as the Arab Spring. When it set Libya alight in February 2011, dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s draconian response to the demonstrations touched off an uprising that soon became a revolution, transforming ordinary Libyan civilians into soldiers overnight.

“In 2011, we fought a war to dispatch a dictator” was how Frefer put it. “We struggled to build a free country. A democratic country with basic rights and free speech.”

On the morning of July 8, 2011, he was sitting in an abandoned home in Dafnia, a town about 40 miles from Misrata on the road to the country’s capital, Tripoli. The battlefront was fast becoming a charnel house for the under-armed citizen-soldiers of the revolution, as Gaddafi’s forces pressed closer to the rebel stronghold.

After cleaning and loading their rifles, Frefer and his comrades stacked the remaining ammunition in pickup trucks, 20 of which began rolling toward Gaddafi’s forces, while about 25 infantrymen, including him, followed. The previous night, however, Gaddafi’s forces had evidently advanced further than Frefer and his compatriots realized. “They must have watched us with binoculars. They saw us, but we didn’t see them,” he told me. Soon, a barrage of rockets was screaming toward them.

“Run!” someone yelled, but there was nowhere to run. His friend Mustafa and a neighbor from Misrata were both killed by the strike. For a while, they believed that a third man, also from the neighborhood, had bolted and never stopped running. Later, his comrades determined that he had, in fact, been nearly obliterated by a rocket. In all, Frefer told me, 36 revolutionaries died at Dafnia that day.

With the trucks involved in the battle and no way for a car to come forward, Frefer’s comrades began carrying — and soon dragging — him for the better part of half an hour before they could stop and tie tourniquets on both legs. Then they set off for a field hospital.

It’s common to lose consciousness from the physiological shock of traumatic injuries, or from blood loss, or both. But for that first mile, as his friends pulled him along the hard ground, Abdul Hamid Frefer remained fully conscious — and in burning agony. It was the same for the second mile. And the third. “I was conscious the whole time,” he told me. “And when I finally got to the hospital and they put me on an IV with a painkiller, the anesthesia didn’t work.”

It took him three years to recover. After one, he was using a wheelchair. After two more, he could finally move about with prostheses and crutches.

Men Without Legs and One-Eyed Women

In my line of work, I meet more amputees, war victims who are missing body parts, and terribly scarred individuals than the average American. There was the woman with bright white hair who survived a massacre by South Korean troops. Her left foot was nothing but a stump. No toes. Hardly a sole. Mostly just a heel. Her right foot was missing entirely. In its place, she had the functional equivalent of a tin can with a rubber disk at the bottom.

Then there was the six-year-old Congolese girl whose arm had been hacked off by a machete-wielding militiaman. And her aunt who lost both hands to the same attackers. And her great-aunt who lost several fingers.

In the same part of Congo, I met toddlers whose faces had been split by machetes. I met an elderly woman with a shattered arm who had been shot in the face with an arrow. And there was that man missing a chunk of his calf, which, he said, enraged militiamen had tried to force him to eat.

There was the South Sudanese man who had lost a leg after being shot by soldiers. And another who had lost an eye.

All of these people were civilians in the wrong place — home — at the wrong time. Abdul Hamid Frefer was not. At least, not entirely. A civilian at the dawn of 2011, by July he was a soldier of the revolution. Given the tremendous price paid by Libya’s rebels, he’s lucky to be alive.

Today, Libya is again — or rather, still — a country at war. For months now, Tripoli has been menaced by the self-styled Libyan National Army of warlord General Khalifa Haftar, a U.S. citizen, former CIA asset, and longtime resident of Virginia (who was lauded by President Donald Trump in an April phone call). Just as in Frefer’s war, the city of Misrata is still hemorrhaging young men. Its militias make up the bulk of the armed forces protecting the capital and the Government of National Accord, the U.N.-backed, internationally recognized government of Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj. (Two years ago, Mistrata’s militiamen also engaged in house-to-house fighting with Islamic State militants in the city of Sirte, as American drones and manned aircraft hunted those ISIS fighters from the skies.)

Frefer and I first ran into each other at his place of business, Misrata’s municipal offices. A member of the city council, he’s very much a man of his town. And both he and it bear the grim scars of that revolution. While the city itself hasn’t seen war since 2011, so much of it still bears battle scars. High-rise apartments pockmarked by thousands of machine-gun bullets sit empty. Other buildings still bear gaping holes from mortars and rockets. A warehouse remains largely roofless thanks to a NATO airstrike, in support of the revolutionaries, on a Gaddafi regime tank that had been parked inside. Almost a decade later, such urban landscapes like Abdul Hamid Frefer’s body, serve as an ongoing testament to war’s long legacy of destruction.

The Medium Is the Message

Since 2001, more than 1,500 U.S. military personnel have lost limbs to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 1995, the International Committee of the Red Cross alone has supplied 109,303 prostheses to replace Afghan arms and legs.

Giles Duley lost limbs in Afghanistan. Three of them. But he wasn’t an American, nor an Afghan. He wasn’t even a soldier. And to say that he was a civilian doesn’t quite capture his story.

For 10 years, Duley was a music and fashion photographer, shooting the likes of Oasis, Marilyn Manson, and Lenny Kravitz for GQ, Esquire, Vogue, and other publications. Then he threw his camera out a window, burned his film, and resolved never to shoot a photo again. But that decision didn’t last. Instead, he followed a circuitous path back into photography, one that led him into conflict and crisis zones like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and Lebanon.

In 2011, while on patrol with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he stepped on an improvised explosive device that nearly killed him and left him with just one intact limb, his right arm. “At first, I was devastated by what had happened, obviously,” he said in a 2012 TED talk.

“I thought my work was over, I thought — everything didn’t make sense to me. And then I realized: I never set out to Congo, to Angola, to Bangladesh to take photographs. I went to those places because I wanted to make some kind of change, and photography happened to be my tool. And then I became aware that my body was, in many ways, a living example of what war does to somebody. And I realized I could use my own experience, my own body, to tell that story.”

War stories like Duley’s have been written on so many bodies. They have been written on the faces of one-eyed women and men whose features were melted by incendiary agents. They are told in the very existence of one-armed children and legless men.

As Abdul Hamid Frefer recounted detail after detail of that distant July 8th, a smile slowly crept across his face. “I was just about dead when I got to the field hospital,” he told me. “The doctors were amazed that I was still alive — and conscious.” He felt lucky, or rather blessed, he said, to be alive. “It’s all God’s will” was a phrase he kept repeating.

For him, that July day eight years ago is always present — as similar days are for so many other victims of armed conflict. Frefer’s body tells a story of one war, one day, one rocket, three miles of being dragged, three years of becoming mobile again. His is the story of one life built on the corporeal wreckage of war. But it says something larger, something more universal, too.

“I’m never going to be well. I still have pain,” Abdul Hamid Frefer told me as he rubbed what’s left of his right leg. His is a war story written on his own body in both absence and trauma. That limb, what remains of it, and its phantom half most certainly tell, as Duley put it, “what war does to somebody.” But Abdul Hamid Frefer’s body, just like Duley’s, says something more. It tells not just a story but perhaps the story of war. “My legs are gone,” said Frefer wincing and gritting his teeth, “but the pain remains.”

No One Is More Afraid of Socialism Than Donald Trump

As GOP fearmongering about the so-called looming socialist menace continues to intensify ahead of the 2020 elections, President Donald Trump has reportedly expressed concern behind the scenes that anti-socialist messaging may not be as popular or effective as Republican strategists appear to believe.

The Daily Beast, citing anonymous sources close to the president, reported Sunday night that “Trump has repeatedly told friends and donors that running against ‘socialism’ in a general election may not be ‘so easy’ because of its populist draw.”

During a recent private donor event, according to The Daily Beast, Trump warned if Democrats run on canceling student loan debt, for instance, “that’s a tough one” to campaign against.

Trump’s reported misgivings about framing his reelection message around opposition to “socialism” come as Republicans are working hard in the lead-up to the 2020 elections to label all Democrats as socialists, a playbook the GOP has drawn from for decades.

The campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the only 2020 Democratic presidential candidate running as a democratic socialist, said the president’s private fears show he’s concerned about being attacked as a phony populist whose policies have disproportionately benefited the wealthiest Americans.

“One of the reasons I feel so strongly about Bernie’s ability to beat Trump,” said Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir, “is because we know that the Democratic nominee will have to credibly explain that Trump betrayed the working class with false promises and that he does not put forward real solutions to help struggling people.”

“Bernie can and will do that successfully,” Shakir told The Daily Beast. “We’ll have a national debate about policies that help the one percent versus policies that lift the 99. I get the sense Trump knows the reckoning is coming and is worried about being exposed as a fraud. No Sharpie edits will save him.”

Let’s have a national debate about whether the public approves of the status quo –> socialism for the rich and large corporations. Or whether they truly want policies that lift the working class. https://t.co/UhL8j5fGTr via @thedailybeast

— Faiz (@fshakir) September 9, 2019

In a June speech outlining his vision of a democratic socialist society, Sanders—who is running on proposals to wipe out all $1.6 trillion in U.S. student loan debt and guarantee healthcare to all—said that while “Trump and his fellow oligarchs attack us for our support of democratic socialism, they don’t really oppose all forms of socialism.”

“They may hate democratic socialism because it benefits working people,” said the Vermont senator, “but they absolutely love corporate socialism that enriches Trump and other billionaires.”

Sanders argued a robust democratic socialist message that recognizes economic rights as human rights “is the only way to defeat oligarchy and authoritarianism.”

“When Trump screams socialism, all of his hypocrisy will not be lost on the American people,” said Sanders. “Americans will know that he is attacking all that we take for granted: from Social Security to Medicare to veterans healthcare to roads and bridges to public schools to national parks to clean water and clean air.”

How Trump Upended U.S.-Taliban Peace Talks

KABUL, Afghanistan — With a series of tweets, President Donald Trump has upended nearly a year of U.S.-Taliban negotiations on ending America’s longest war. He has “called off” the talks and asserted that a planned secret meeting between him and Taliban leaders at Camp David, set for Sunday just days before the 9/11 anniversary, is now canceled. Some question whether it was a face-saving attempt after the deal his envoy said had been reached “in principle” faced serious challenges.

The Taliban took half a day to respond, saying the abrupt decision hurt U.S. credibility after they had “finalized” a deal, but said the U.S. likely would return to negotiations. The two sides had still been talking on Saturday, they said — two days after Trump said he had “immediately” called off talks.

Here’s a look at the push for a deal that Trump had wanted quickly, calling it “ridiculous” that the U.S. was still in Afghanistan after nearly 18 years and billions of dollars spent.

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The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan with a harsh version of Islamic law from 1996 to 2001 and hosted Osama bin Laden as he masterminded the 9/11 attacks, say they no longer seek a monopoly on power. But the militant group now controls or holds sway over roughly half of the country. Many fear a full withdrawal of some 20,000 NATO troops would leave the weak and corrupt Afghan government vulnerable to collapse, or unleash another round of fighting in a war that has killed tens of thousands.

A DEAL WITH FEW DETAILS

The talks between Afghan-born U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban leaders in Qatar, where the insurgent group has a political office, have been so closely guarded that last week Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was shown — not given — the final draft. The Afghan government has been sidelined because the Taliban refuse to negotiate with what they call a U.S. puppet.

The Taliban negotiators have been led by Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of the group’s founders who was released by Pakistan last year after eight years in prison, apparently upon a U.S. request. He is believed to command enough respect to sell a deal to tens of thousands of fighters.

The deal once final would begin a U.S. troop withdrawal with the first 5,000 leaving within 135 days, Khalilzad announced on Monday. That would leave 8,600 troops who train and support Afghan forces after their combat role ended in 2014. In return, the Taliban would guarantee that Afghanistan would not be a launching pad for global terror attacks by groups including a local affiliate of the Islamic State organization and the remains of al-Qaida.

But problems quickly emerged. Even as Khalilzad explained the deal to the Afghan people during a nationally televised interview, the Taliban detonated a car bomb targeting a foreign compound in Kabul. Ghani’s office then raised loud objections, agreeing with several former U.S. ambassadors who warned that a hasty U.S. withdrawal without Taliban guarantees on ending violence could lead to “total civil war.” Far from guaranteeing a ceasefire, the deal includes only a reduction in violence in Kabul and neighboring Parwan province, where the U.S. has a military base.

Then on Thursday, a second Taliban car bomb exploded in Kabul and killed 12 people including a U.S. service member — which Trump blamed for his decision to cancel the talks. Khalilzad abruptly returned to Qatar for at least two days of negotiations. The new Taliban statement does not explain what happened next.

More than 2,400 U.S. service members have been killed in nearly 18 years of fighting in Afghanistan, and some observers are asking why the latest death would derail the U.S.-Taliban negotiations on the apparent brink of a deal. The Taliban have said the attacks strengthen their negotiating position.

“A difficulty created by announcing that the U.S.-Taliban deal was completed in advance of actually announcing the terms of the deal or being ready to sign is that space has been created for those unhappy with it — in Kabul or Washington — to try to modify or disrupt it,” Laurel Miller, Asia director for the International Crisis Group, said shortly before Trump’s announcement.

WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

It is not clear. It seems no one had anticipated a Camp David meeting between Trump and the leaders of an insurgent group that just months ago Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had described as “Taliban terrorists.”

On Saturday night the Taliban spokesman in Qatar, Suhail Shaheen, made no indication the process had derailed, tweeting about possible locations on the intra-Afghan talks on the country’s political future that were meant to follow a U.S.-Taliban deal. Those talks had been set to begin on Sept. 23, the Taliban’s new statement said.

The Afghan government did not directly comment on Trump’s announcement but repeated its plea for an end to violence. “We have always said that a real peace will come when the Taliban stop killing Afghans and implement a ceasefire and start direct negotiations with the Afghan government,” it said in a statement.

That prospect still looks challenging, as Trump’s tweets noted he had planned to meet “separately” with Taliban and Afghan leaders at Camp David.

President Ashraf Ghani now might see a clear path to a Sept. 28 presidential election that he has insisted must go forward. The Taliban have urged Afghans to boycott the vote and said polling stations would be targets.

Afghans would welcome any agreement that brings improved security and governance. But many have feared the U.S. would settle for an agreement that breaks down as soon as the last American soldier leaves. The prospect of a Taliban return has especially worried Afghan women, who secured new freedoms after 2001 but are still heavily restricted in the deeply conservative country.

“At the end of the day, this is a bilateral accord between the U.S. government and the Taliban. The Afghan government is not a party to it,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia program at the Wilson Center, ahead of Trump’s announcement. “This suggests the Trump administration may reach a point where it decides to sign off on the deal even if it still faces opposition from Kabul.”

But the Trump administration walking away from a deal is a development that all parties are now hurrying to digest.

___

Associated Press writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed.

Ex-S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford to Challenge Trump in Primary

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and congressman, has decided to launch a longshot Republican challenge to President Donald Trump, saying Sunday that he aims to put his Appalachian trail travails behind him for good as he tries to navigate a path to the presidency.

“I am here to tell you now that I am going to get in,” Sanford said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” ”This is the beginning of a long walk.”

When asked why he was taking on an incumbent who’s popular within the party, Sanford, who has acknowledged his slim chances by saying he doesn’t expect to become president, said: “I think we need to have a conversation on what it means to be a Republican. I think that as the Republican Party, we have lost our way.”

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He joins Joe Walsh, a former tea-party-backed, one-term congressman from Illinois, and Bill Weld, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, as primary challengers to Trump.

The 59-year-old Sanford has long been an outspoken critic of Trump’s, frequently questioning his motivations and qualifications during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election and calling Trump’s candidacy “a particularly tough pill to swallow.”

Ultimately, though, Sanford said he would support Trump in the 2016 general election, although he had “no stomach for his personal style and his penchant for regularly demeaning others,” continuing a drumbeat that the then-candidate release his tax returns.

As Sanford sought reelection to his post representing South Carolina’s 1st District in 2018, drawing a primary challenger who embraced Trump, the president took interest in the race. State Rep. Katie Arrington repeatedly aired ads featuring Sanford’s on-air critiques of Trump and attached the “Never Trump” moniker to Sanford, a condemnation in a state that Trump carried by double digits in 2016.

Although unlikely to have had a significant impact on the results, Trump endorsed Arrington just hours before the polls closed, tweeting that Sanford “has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign” and that “He is better off in Argentina” — a reference to Sanford’s secret 2009 rendezvous to South America for an extramarital affair while his in-the-dark gubernatorial staff told reporters he was hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Asked Sunday if that incident could be a distraction to his campaign, Sanford said that the aftermath had forced him to attain a new “level of empathy.”

“I profoundly apologize for that,” he added, noting that South Carolina voters subsequently forgave him politically and sent him back to Congress.

Days after his first-ever political loss , Sanford described Trumpism as “a cancerous growth,” warning the GOP that the cancer is spreading.

“We have a president that will tell numerous dis-truths in the course of a day, yet that’s not challenged,” Sanford said. “What’s cancerous here is in an open political system, there has to be some measure of objective truth.”

Sanford won three terms for U.S. House in the 1990s, then two four-year terms as governor before the affair marred the end of his second term. He returned to politics a couple of years later and won a special election to his old U.S. House seat in 2013, holding on twice more.

Throughout his political career, Sanford has played up his outsider credentials — both in the U.S. House, where he supported a box to check on federal tax returns to put $3 toward the national debt, and as governor, bringing a pair of squealing pigs to the state House and Senate chamber to protest what he call pork spending.

As the main focus of his presidential bid, Sanford has said he plans to zero in on holding down federal spending, an issue on which he has railed since his initial stint in the House. Known during his Capitol Hill years as a deficit hawk, Sanford expressed a determination to bring debt and fiscal restraint into the national conversation.

“Let’s go out and try to force a conversation about that which is not being talked about in this country,” Sanford said Sunday.

If he hadn’t decided to run for president, Sanford had said he might start a think tank devoted to fiscal conservatism.

Sanford won’t be able to compete in his home state of South Carolina, which on Saturday – along with Nevada and Kansas – announced it won’t hold presidential nominating balloting in 2020, erecting more hurdles for the longshot candidates challenging Trump.

Sanford’s possible presidential motivations immediately drew skepticism from a primary opponent and some South Carolina political observers who have watched him plot a political comeback before and questioned whether he was merely seeking publicity and relevance following a defeat in last year’s primary.

Last month, Sanford acknowledged his motivations in an interview with The Associated Press .

“It’s not as if I’m saying, you know, I think I can become president,” he said. “But I think you can change the debate, and you might even have an impact on the general election.”

Walsh said he welcomed Sanford’s candidacy but questioned his commitment.

“How the hell can you say ‘I’m going to primary the president of the United States, but I don’t think I can win, it’s not about winning’?” Walsh said in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Sunday after finishing a 9/11 memorial stair climb alongside firefighters. “My god. That makes no sense to me. … Why would you do this unless you really had a good reason?”

___

Associated Press writer Hunter Woodall in Manchester, N.H., contributed to this report.

Corporate Media Is Misleading Us About Sanders’ Climate Plan

Climate change is an existential threat to human civilization. If only corporate media acted like it.

While the majority of corporate media do not outright deny the reality of the human-caused climate crisis, they are filled with another brand of insidious ideologues that I call climate minimizers. These downplay the threat that climate change poses to all of us by ignoring scientific data, avoiding discussion on the actual impact of climate change, and hyper-focusing on trivial details.

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These tendencies were on display in the corporate media response to presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ climate change plan. The Washington Post published at least three opinion pieces on the plan that focused on the political horse race:

“Bernie’s Climate Plan Will Take Us Nowhere,” editorial board (8/25/19)
“Trump’s Wall Is Child’s Play Compared to Bernie’s Climate Plan,” David Von Drehle (8/23/19)
“Bernie Sanders Offers a Massive Climate Plan. Environmentalists Cheer, but Will It Be Too Much for Voters?,” Hailey Fuchs and Michael Sherer (8/22/19)

The Wall Street Journal (8/25/19) evokes the Great Leap Forward.

Strangely enough, the Post did publish an editorial by Reaganite Hugh Hewitt (8/23/19) that seemed to grasp the most important point: “If you really think the world is on the edge of catastrophe, are you going to waste your vote on a pretend climate-change ‘policy,’ or go all in with Sanders?”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which previously endorsed Jair Bolsonaro (10/8/18) despite the threat he poses to the Amazon, penned a condescending editorial (8/25/19) filled with scare quotes and red-baiting that extended to the headline, “Bernie’s Green Leap Forward,” a clear allusion to Mao.

CNN (8/27/19) published an analysis by Ronald Brownstein, headlined “Bernie Sanders’ New Climate Plan Asks Democrats: Do You Want a Revolution or Not?

Mother Jones wrote two separate pieces where it rated Sanders’ climate plan a D- (8/23/19), and gave Joe Biden’s plan a C+ (8/24/19).

Many of these pieces perpetuated the same myths about climate change, either explicitly or implicitly.

Myth 1: Climate Change Is Not an Existential Threat

Since industrialization, human activity has already raised the global temperature by 1°C. The 2016 Paris climate agreement was based on preventing the global temperature from rising 2°C.

Since the Paris agreement, however, new data has come to light to show that a warming of 1.5°C  can have catastrophic consequences for the planet. We risk large-scale melting of Arctic sea ice and the West Antarctic ice cap. It will also do unprecedented damage to coral reefs. The most recent UN report projects a 1.5°C  warming could lead to the loss of many Pacific islands. At least 6% of insects, 8% of plants and 4% of vertebrates are projected to lose over half their habitat, which would lead to mass extinction.

If the global temperature warms by 2°C, we face an unprecedented climate catastrophe—and delaying net-zero emissions to 2050 will mean a 3°C rise in temperatures. The emeritus director of the Potsdam Institute, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, points out that the consequences for our planet would be dire:

Here is a very big risk that we will just end our civilization. The human species will survive somehow, but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last 2,000 years.

Numerous studies have shown that in order for climate change to be arrested at 1.5°C, we need to reach net-zero emissions by 2030.

Many editorials on climate change did not even consider this point. CNN’s editorial had a section headed “Is 2030 Too Soon?” If one examines any of the bodies of available research, however, it’s clear that 2030 is almost too late.

Myth 2: The Cost of Action Is Too High

In alarming uniformity, many of the pieces had the same trite opening:

“The proposal calls for $16.3 trillion in new spending over a decade to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in electricity production and transportation by 2030—nearly 10 times the amount former vice president and fellow Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has proposed spending.”  (Washington Post, 8/25/19)
“Start with its price: ‘a historic $16.3 trillion.’ That’s 10 times Joe Biden’s climate plan, which is wild already. For the record, America’s annual economy is about $21 trillion.” (Wall Street Journal, 8/25/19)
“The $16.3 trillion, 10-year climate plan he released last week envisions a rapid and comprehensive transformation of a key economic sector—in this case both the auto and utility industries—through a huge increase in federal authority and spending.” (CNN, 8/27/19)

Although they accurately describe the cost of Sanders’ program, none of the editorials attempt to educate people about the differences between Sanders and Biden’s plans. And, of course, they completely avoid discussing the actual effects of climate change as laid out in the 2018 IPCC UN report.

Sanders’ plan calls for “reaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by 2050 at latest.” Joe Biden’s climate plan, in contrast, would “ensure the US achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”

Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum (8/23/19) denounces the Sanders climate plan because it would “tax the rich” and “hobble the fossil fuel industry.”

They may sound similar to the layperson, but in climate change terms, their plans are vastly different. Net-zero emissions (or carbon neutrality) means that for every ton of anthropogenic CO2 emitted there is an equivalent offset of CO2 removed from the atmosphere. Carbon neutrality does not imply the discontinuation of fossil fuels.  Full decarbonization means zero unabated CO2 emissions—that is, without capturing carbon for storage—from energy generation and industrial processes.

According to estimates by multiple organizations, if we reach net-zero emissions by 2050, the temperature of the earth will likely warm to 3°C, which could be a civilization-ending event.  However, if we manage to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030, we are likely to arrest climate change at 1.5°C.

None of these critiques mention the fact that Biden’s plan may not be enough to save human civilization. Worse, Mother Jones (8/23/19, 8/24/19) gave Biden’s plan a higher grade!

Oddly enough, the right-wing Hugh Hewitt (8/23/19) seemed to grasp the argument regarding Sanders’ plan:

So Sanders has proposed what the rhetoric of climate-change apocalypse demands: All hands on deck, and damn the torpedoes, provided you don’t use any fossil fuels in mounting your charge.

Another point in regards to the concern-trolling about cost is that the plan will be paid for over 15 years—making the annual cost closer to $1 trillion. Nor do the critiques compare the cost of climate action to the damages from doing nothing, which Sanders estimates at $34.5 trillion by the end of this century. Outlets failed to put the climate plan’s cost in context by comparing it to the scale of the response to other, less serious crises, such as the $29 trillion bailout given to Wall Street after the 2007–08 financial crisis.

Myth 3: It’s Not Logistically Possible

The Washington Post‘s David Von Drehle (8/23/19) attacks the “risible fantasy” of trying to halt global warming before it threatens to end civilization.

Von Drehle in the Post (8/23/19) mused sarcastically about whether Sanders’ proposals are logistically possible:

Sanders will replace or scrap all aircraft, the vast majority of cars and trucks, most buses, trains and ships; hundreds of power plants; and much of the electrical grid—which is what he would have to do to reach his promised “100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation.” And he will do this by 2030. That’s 10 years. Boston’s Big Dig took 20.

The logistics of achieving carbon-neutrality by 2030 are actually not so complicated. Currently, the power generation sector emits 1.8 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, or nearly 33% of our emissions. According to experts, it takes approximately six years to construct a large-scale solar plant, while utility-scale wind operations can be installed within a year.

The transportation sector emits the second-largest source of greenhouse gases.  However, vehicle companies have already been selling 100% electric vehicles. Therefore, setting energy standards, not unlike what they are currently subject to, can speed up the transition. On top of that, giving financial incentives to people to trade-in their gas-guzzlers for cleaner energy will accelerate that process.

While the Journal and the Post’s editorial team seem to have an inherent bias against trains, high-speed rails are significantly more energy-efficient than cars or planes. Compared to planes or cars, high-speed rails can reduce carbon emissions by 80%.

The most important point about the logistical concerns is that none of this is new technology. Wind energy has already been used successfully; solar energy powers a significant portion of the world; grants to weatherize homes and upgrade automobiles have already been implemented in Australia; and high-speed rails have been touted for their comfort and ease of use.  The only missing ingredient is political will.

Myth 4: It’s Not Politically Feasible

While it is true that the entire Republican Party will not vote for this, and probably a good majority of the Democratic Party is also opposed to these measures, this seems more like a self-indictment of corporate media.

When the UN-IPCC released the climate report cited here, only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the United States covered it. North America had the least amount of media coverage on this issue. If corporate media were serious in their coverage of climate change, and perhaps if they didn’t platform avid climate-change deniers, voters could make more informed choices about whom they want to represent them in Congress.

Myth 5:  The American People Won’t Support it

The Fuchs/Scherer Post article (8/22/19) quoted Christy Goldfuss, a scholar at the Center for American Progress who worked on climate policy in the Obama White House:

If Americans are scared that this is going to negatively impact their economy, they will not be supportive of the most ambitious climate plan and they won’t be supportive of the Democratic nominee.

CNN (8/27/19) likewise consulted Paul Starr, a Princeton University sociologist and co-founder of the American Prospect, who speculated: “This is not what the country needs or is likely to support.”

Instead of consulting obviously conflicted think tank experts to speculate about hypotheticals, these pieces could have looked at the polls: 69% of registered voters, including 44% of Republican voters would support the Green New Deal, according to a recent study by Yale University.

Myth 6:  This Proposal Is Government Tyranny

CNN (8/27/19) says the “most fundamental question” about Sanders’ climate plan is its “shifting control away from the private sector.”

Many of these editorials seem to imply that it is not the role of the federal government to drive our energy policy. They also seem to think that the American people have some kind of deep fondness for for-profit energy companies.  CNN’s Brownstein (8/27/19) asserted:

The most fundamental question the Sanders plan poses, though, may not be technological. Instead, the key question is a political one: Will Americans accept as large a role for the federal government as he envisions?

The Post’s Von Drehle (8/23/19) stated, “Let’s make room for some ideas that don’t assume the next president will have dictatorial powers and a grove of money trees,” while the Post’s editorial board (8/25/19) insisted:

No central planner can know exactly how and where to invest for an efficient and effective energy transition… We do not know, precisely, what the most efficient path looks like. We are also certain that Mr. Sanders does not.

They are ignoring the fact that the president already has frightening, unchecked authority. For example, the president can drone a US citizen with impunity. It seems ridiculous to suggest that setting vehicle-fuel efficiency standards or building more power plants is more tyrannical than the current powers the president possesses, up to and including the ability to launch a nuclear war.

Ultimately, all these editorials engage in the same kind of climate minimization. They put their ideology first, and then hope that reality will conform to their ideology, which is precisely the wrong way to judge a climate plan. Instead, one must first consider the best scientific data, and measure the actions proposed against the requirements to avoid climate disaster. Reality cannot be retrofitted to accommodate the media’s neoliberal ideology.

Why Ocasio-Cortez Renewed Her Call for Trump’s Impeachment

A Friday report from Politico detailing how the U.S. Air Force is diverting resources to prop up President Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort in Scotland prompted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to call for impeachment.

“The President is corrupt and must be impeached,” the New York Democrat tweeted Friday night in response to the story, which was broken by reporters Natasha Bertrand and Bryan Bender.

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The President is corrupt and must be impeached. https://t.co/L4fS2pExDe

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 7, 2019

Politico details how the House Oversight Committee is investigating why a military flight to and from Kuwait stopped at the resort—and how that incident is part of a broader pattern of military spending in and around the Scottish resort.

The inquiry is part of a broader, previously unreported probe into U.S. military expenditures at and around the Trump property in Scotland. According to a letter the panel sent to the Pentagon in June, the military has spent $11 million on fuel at the Prestwick Airport—the closest airport to Trump Turnberry—since October 2017, fuel that would be cheaper if purchased at a U.S. military base. The letter also cites a Guardian report that the airport provided cut-rate rooms and free rounds of golf at Turnberry for U.S. military members.

Taken together, the incidents raise the possibility that the military has helped keep Trump’s Turnberry resort afloat—the property lost $4.5 million in 2017, but revenue went up $3 million in 2018.

Prestwick Airport has seen its own financial troubles as well and the Scottish government, which bought the airport in 2013, has expressed interest in selling it. The six-figure refueling stops from the U.S. military, however, are sure to raise questions, especially given the president’s 2014 comments that he would ensure Prestwick was “really successful” after selecting the airport as the hub for Turnberry.

In a letter from June requesting information, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the House Oversight Committee chair, said the military spending demands answers.

“Given the President’s continued financial stake in his Scotland golf courses,” wrote Cummings, “these reports raise questions about the President’s potential receipt of U.S. or foreign government emoluments in violation of the U.S. Constitution and raise other serious conflict of interest concerns.”

While the oversight committee has asked the military for documents relating to the unusual expenses, thus far there’s been no response.

“The Defense Department has not produced a single document in this investigation,” a senior Democratic aide told Politico. “The committee will be forced to consider alternative steps if the Pentagon does not begin complying voluntarily in the coming days.”