Chris Hedges's Blog, page 286

Reckoning With Failure in the War on Terror

Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, as Max Blumenthal points out in his meticulously researched book “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump,” was made possible not only by massive social inequality and concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the oligarchic elites but by the national security state’s disastrous and prolonged military interventions overseas.

From the CIA’s funneling of over a billion dollars to Islamic militants in the 1970s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union to the billion dollars spent on training and equipping the radical jihadists currently fighting in Syria, the United States has repeatedly empowered extremists who have filled the vacuums of failed states it created. The extremists have turned with a vengeance on their sponsors. Washington’s fueling of these conflicts was directly responsible for the rise of figures such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden and ultimately laid the groundwork for the 9/11 attacks. It also spawned the rabid Islamophobia in Europe and the United States that lies at the core of Trump’s racist worldview and has been successfully used to justify the eradication of basic civil liberties and democratic rights.

The misguided interventions by the national security apparatus have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, over 5 million desperate refugees fleeing to Europe, the destruction of entire cities, the squandering of some $5 trillion of U.S. taxpayer money, rampant corruption and criminality. The mandarins of national security, rather than blunt the rise of radical jihadism, have ensured its spread across the globe. The architects of this imperial folly have a symbiotic relationship with those they profess to hate. The two radical extremes—the interventionists in the national security apparatus and the radical jihadists—play off of each other to countenance ever-greater acts of savagery. The more perfidious your enemy, the more your own extremism is justified. We are locked in a macabre dance with the killers we created and empowered, matching war crime for war crime, torture for torture and murder for murder.

The binary view of the world imagined by right-wing ideologues such as Richard Pipes during the Cold War, defined as a battle to the death against godless communism, has been reimagined by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American neocons such as Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, Steve Bannon, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and leaders of the Christian right including Gary Bauer and William Bennett to become a battle to the death between the “barbarity” of Islam and the “civilized” ethic of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a rebranding of the Cold War, so useful to the retrograde forces of capitalism in crushing popular dissent and so profitable to the arms industry. Its most prominent voices are a bizarre collection of neofascist ideologues and quack conspiracy theorists such as Bannon, Sean Hannity, Stephen Miller and Pam Geller, who claims that Barack Obama is the love child of Malcolm X.

This ideology, like the ideology of anti-communism, erases not only history but context. Those who oppose us are removed from the realm of the rational. They are seen as incomprehensible. Their hate has no justification. They are human embodiments of evil that must be eradicated. They hate us for our “values” or because they are driven by a perverted form of Islam. The failure, as Blumenthal writes, to place these conflicts in context, to examine our own complicity in fueling a justifiable anger, even rage, dooms us to perpetual misunderstanding and perpetual warfare. Our response is to employ greater and greater levels of violence that only expand the extremism at home and abroad. This demented project, as Blumenthal writes, collapses “the fragile space where multi-confessional societies survive.” It bifurcates political space into competing forms of extremism between the jihadists and the counter-jihadists. It creates a strange and even comforting “mutually reinforcing symbiosis” that depends “on a constantly escalating sense of antagonism.”

The methods used on a wary public by the national security state, especially the FBI and the intelligence agencies, to justify and advance these wars are increasingly unsavory. Muslims, many suffering from emotional and mental disabilities, are baited by law enforcement into “terrorist” plots that few of them could have conceived or organized on their own. The highly publicized arrests and quashing of these nascent “terrorist plots” exaggerate the presence of radical jihadists within the country. They keep fear high among the U.S. population. Trevor Aaronson, the author of “Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terror,” found that nearly half of all terror prosecutions between Sept. 11, 2001, and 2010 involved informants, including some with criminal backgrounds who were paid as much as $100,000 by the FBI. Aaronson noted that during the last year of the George W. Bush administration the government did not prosecute anyone arrested in a terrorist “sting.” But such stings exploded under Barack Obama, a tactic that Blumenthal writes was “designed to cast his administration as just as tough on terror as any Republican”—the Obama administration “announced an arrest resulting from a terrorism sting every sixty days.” This suggested, Aaronson writes, “that there are a lot of ineffective terrorists in the United States, or that the FBI has become effective at creating the very enemy it is hunting.”

The longer and more confusing the “war on terror” becomes, nearly two decades on, the more irrational our national discourse becomes. The paranoid and racist narratives of the far right have poisoned the mainstream dialogue. These racist tropes are repeated by the White House, members of Congress and the press.

“Islamophobia had become the language of a wounded empire, the guttural roar of its malevolent violence turned back from the sands of Iraq and the mountain passes of Afghanistan, and leveled against the mosque down the turnpike, the hijabi in the checkout line, the Sikh behind the cash register—the neighbors who looked like The Enemy,” Blumenthal writes.

Far-right parties are riding this rampant Islamophobia, fueled by the catastrophic failures in the Middle East, to power in Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Sweden, Poland and Hungary. This toxic hatred is also a central theme of the Trump administration, which demonizes Muslims, especially Muslim refugees, and seeks to bar them from entering the United States.

The arrival of millions of Muslim refugees in Europe from states such as Libya, Syria (which alone has produced a million refugees in Europe), Iraq and Afghanistan has dramatically bolstered the appeal of European neofascists. Nearly 73 percent of those who voted in Britain for the nation to leave the European Union cited the arrival of immigrants as their most important reason for supporting the referendum.

The radical jihadists have long expressed a desire to extinguish democratic space in the West. They are aware that the curtailment of civil liberties, evisceration of democratic institutions, especially the judicial system, and overt hatred of Muslims push Muslims in the West into their arms. Such conditions also increase the military blunders of the United States and its allies abroad, providing jihadists with a steady supply of new recruits and failed states from which they can operate. Their strategy is working. In the year before the 2016 presidential election, violence against Muslims in the United States soared, including shootings and arson attacks on mosques. Public disapproval of Muslims, according to opinion polls, is at a record high.

The Democratic Party, signing on to the forever crusade by the national security state in the name of humanitarian intervention, is as complicit. The Obama administration not only accelerated the sting operations in the United States against supposed terrorists but, in its foreign operations, increased the use of militarized drones, sent more troops to Afghanistan and foolishly toppled the regime of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya to create yet another failed state and safe haven for jihadists.

The radical jihadists, in an irony not lost on Blumenthal, are often deliberately armed and empowered by the U.S. national security apparatus, along with Israel, as a way to pressure and topple regimes deemed antagonistic to Israel and the United States. Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, in audio leaked from a closed meeting with Syrian opposition activists, admitted that the U.S. had used Islamic State as a tool for pressuring the Syrian government. He also acknowledged that Washington’s complicity in the growth of IS in Syria was the major cause for Russian intervention there.

In a 2016 op-ed titled “The Destruction of Islamic State Is a Strategic Mistake,” Efraim Inbar, the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, argued that “[t]he West should seek the further weakening of Islamic State, but not its destruction.” He said the West should exploit IS as a “useful tool” in the fight against Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah. “A weak IS is, counterintuitively, preferable to a destroyed IS,” Inbar concluded. Inbar went on to argue for prolonging the conflict in Syria, saying that extended sectarian bloodshed would produce “positive change.”

Earlier in 2016, Israel’s former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon had said similarly, “In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State.”

Israel seeks to create buffer zones between itself and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. It sees its neighbor Syria, because of its alliance with Iran, as a mortal enemy. The solution has been to cripple these traditional enemies by temporarily empowering radical Sunni jihadists and al-Qaida. There are numerous reports of Israel, along with the United States, using its aircraft and military in Syria to aid the very jihadists Washington and Jerusalem claim to want to wipe from the face of the earth.

This intractable morass, Blumenthal argues, led directly to the demonization of Russia. Trump’s anti-interventionist rhetoric, however disingenuous, triggered what Blumenthal calls “a wild hysteria” among the foreign policy elites. Trump calls the invasion of Iraq a mistake. He questions the arming of Syrian jihadists and deployment of U.S. forces in Syria. He is critical of NATO. At the same time, he has called for better relations with Russia.

“Joining with the dead-enders of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, who were desperate to deflect from their crushing loss, the mandarins of the national security state worked their media contacts to generate the narrative of Trump-Russia collusion,” Blumenthal writes. “Out of the postelection despair of liberals and national security elites, the furor of Russiagate was born. This national outrage substituted Russia for ISIS as the country’s new folk devil and painted Trump as Russian president Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate.”

“Almost overnight, hundreds of thousands of liberals were showing up at postelection rallies with placards depicting Trump in Russian garb and surrounded by Soviet hammer-and-sickle symbols,” Blumenthal writes. The FBI and the intelligence community, organizations that have long spied upon and harassed the left and often liberals, became folk heroes. NATO, which was the instrument used to destabilize the Middle East and heighten tensions with Russia because of its expansion in Eastern Europe, became sacrosanct.

“In its obsession with Moscow’s supposed meddling, the Democratic Party elite eagerly rehabilitated the Bush-era neoconservatives, welcoming PNAC [Project for the New American Century] founder William Kristol and ‘axis of evil’ author David Frum into the ranks of the so-called ‘resistance,’ ” Blumenthal writes. “The Center for American Progress, the semiofficial think tank of the Democratic Party, consolidated the liberal-neocon alliance by forging a formal working partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, the nest of the Iraq war neocons, to ‘stand up to Russia.’ ”

Those in the alternative media who question the Russia narrative and chronical the imperial disasters are in this new version of the Cold War branded as agents of a foreign power and hit with algorithms from Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to deflect viewers from reading or listening to their critiques. Politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who push back against the war lust are smeared with the same nefarious charge. It is, as Blumenthal writes, a desperate bid by the war industry and the interventionists to mask the greatest strategic blunder in American history, one that signals the end of American hegemony.

“In the face of their own failure, America’s national security elites had successfully engineered a new Cold War, wagering that the reignited conflict would preserve their management of savagery abroad and postpone the terrible reckoning they deserved at home,” Blumenthal concludes.

The corporate state, its legitimacy in tatters, seeks to make us afraid in order to maintain its control over the economic, political and military institutions. It needs mortal enemies, manufactured or real, at home or abroad, to justify its existence and mask its mismanagement and corruption. This narrative of fear is what Antonio Gramsci called a “legitimation doctrine.” It is not about making us safe—indeed the policies the state pursues make us less secure—but about getting us to surrender to the will of the elites. The more inequality and injustice grow, the more the legitimation doctrine will be used to keep us cowed and compliant. The doctrine means that the enemies of the United States will never be destroyed, but will mutate and expand; they are too useful to be allowed to disappear. It means that the primary language of the state will be fear. The longer the national security state plays this game, the more a fascist America is assured.

Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen Resigns

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned on Sunday amid the administration’s growing frustration and bitterness over the number of Central American families crossing the southern border, two people familiar with the decision said.

President Donald Trump thanked her for her work in a tweet and announced U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan would be taking over as acting head of the department. McAleenan is a longtime border official who is well-respected by members of Congress and within the administration. The decision to name an immigration officer to the post reflects Trump’s priority for a sprawling department founded to combat terrorism following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Though Trump aides were eyeing a staff shake-up at Homeland Security and had already withdrawn the nomination for another key immigration post, the development Sunday was unexpected.

Nielsen traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday with Trump to participate in a roundtable with border officers and local law enforcement. There she echoed Trump’s comments on the situation at the border, though she ducked out of the room without explanation for some time while Trump spoke. As they toured a section of newly rebuilt barriers, Nielsen was at Trump’s side, introducing him to local officials. She returned to Washington afterward on a Coast Guard Gulfstream, as Trump continued on a fundraising trip to California and Nevada.

But privately, she had grown increasingly frustrated by what she saw as a lack of support from other departments and increased meddling by Trump aides, the people said. She went into a meeting with Trump at the White House in Sunday not knowing whether she’d be fired or would resign, and she ended up resigning, they said.

Her resignation later, obtained by The Associated Press, had not a whiff of controversy unlike others who have left from the administration.

“Despite our progress in reforming homeland security for a new age, I have determined that it is the right time for me to step aside,” she wrote. “I hope that the next secretary will have the support of Congress and the courts in fixing the laws which have impeded our ability to fully secure America’s borders and which have contributed to discord in our nation’s discourse.”

There have been persistent tensions between the White House and Nielsen almost from the moment she became secretary, after her predecessor, John Kelly, became the White House chief of staff in 2017. Nielsen was viewed as resistant to some of the harshest immigration measures supported by the president and his aides, particularly senior adviser Stephen Miller, both on matters around the border and others like protected status for some refugees. Once Kelly left the White House last year, Nielsen’s days appeared to be numbered. She had expected to be pushed out last November, but her exit never materialized. And during the government shutdown over Trump’s insistence for funding for a border wall, Nielsen’s stock inside the White House even appeared to rise.

But in recent weeks, as a new wave of migration has taxed resources along the border and as Trump sought to regain control of the issue for his 2020 re-election campaign, tensions flared anew.

Arrests all along the southern border have skyrocketed in recent months. Border agents are on track to make 100,000 arrests and denials of entry at the southern border this month, over half of which are families with children.

Nielsen advocated for strong cybersecurity defense and often said she believed the next major terror attack would occur online — not by planes or bombs. She was tasked with helping states secure elections following Russian interference during the 2016 election.

She dutifully pushed Trump’s immigration policies, including funding for his border wall, and defended the administration’s practice of separating children from parents, telling a Senate committee that removing children from parents facing criminal charges happens “in the United States every day.” But she was also instrumental in ending the policy.

Under Nielsen, migrants seeking asylum are waiting in Mexico as their cases progress. She also moved to abandon longstanding regulations that dictate how long children are allowed to be held in immigration detention, and requested bed space from the U.S. military for some 12,000 people in an effort to detain all families who cross the border. Right now there is space for about 3,000 families and facilities are at capacity.

U.S. Pulls Forces From Libya as Fighting Approaches Capital

BENGHAZI, Libya — The United States has temporarily withdrawn some of its forces from Libya due to “security conditions on the ground,” a top military official said Sunday as a Libyan commander’s forces advanced toward the capital of Tripoli and clashed with rival militias.

A small contingent of American troops has been in Libya in recent years, helping local forces combat Islamic State and al-Qaida militants, as well as protecting diplomatic facilities.

“The security realities on the ground in Libya are growing increasingly complex and unpredictable,” said Marine Corps Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, the head of U.S. Africa Command. “Even with an adjustment of the force, we will continue to remain agile in support of existing U.S. strategy.”

He did not provide details on the number of U.S. troops that have been withdrawn or how many remain in the country.

Footage circulating online showed two apparent U.S. Navy transport craft maneuvering off a beach in Janzour, east of Tripoli, sending up plumes of spray as American forces were ferried from the shore.

India also evacuated a small contingent of peacekeepers. The Indian foreign minister, Sushma Swaraj, said the country’s 15 Central Reserve Police Force peacekeepers were evacuated Saturday from Tripoli because the “situation in Libya has suddenly worsened” and fighting has moved into the capital city.

The self-styled Libyan National Army, led by Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter, launched a surprise offensive against the capital last week, a move that could potentially drag the country back into civil war. Libya has been gripped by unrest since the 2011 uprising that overthrew and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi. In recent years, the country has been governed by rival authorities in the east and in Tripoli, in the west, each backed by various armed groups.

Fayez Sarraj, head of government in Tripoli, accused Hifter of “betraying” him.

“We have extended our hands towards peace, but after the aggression that has taken place on the part of forces belonging to Hifter and his declaration of war against our cities and our capital … he will find nothing but strength and firmness,” al-Sarraj said Saturday in televised comments.

Sarraj and Hifter held talks in Abu Dhabi in late February, their first confirmed meeting since November 2018, when they agreed that national elections were necessary, according to the U.N.

Hifter is seeking to capture the capital and seize military control of the whole country before U.N.-sponsored talks due to start next week that were designed to set a time frame for possible elections in the oil-rich country.

The U.N. envoy for Libya, Ghassan Salame, said the U.N. is determined to hold the planned conference.

Fighting was underway Sunday at the international airport, some 24 kilometers (15 miles) from central Tripoli, after Hifter claimed to have seized the area. The airport was destroyed in a previous bout of militia fighting in 2014. Hifter said his forces had launched airstrikes targeting rival militias on the outskirts of Tripoli.

The rival militias, which are affiliated with a U.N.-backed government in Tripoli, said they had also carried out airstrikes, slowing Hifter’s advance.

Armed groups behind the U.N.-backed government of national accord, or GNA, have announced an effort to defend Tripoli, vowing to recapture all areas seized by Hifter’s forces.

Col. Mohamed Gnounou, a spokesman for GNA forces, said in televised comments Sunday that the counteroffensive, dubbed “Volcano of Anger,” was aimed at “purging all Libyan cities of aggressor and illegitimate forces.”

The two sides reported that at least 35 people, including civilians, had been killed since Thursday.

The Health Ministry of the Tripoli-based government said in a statement that at least 21 people, including a physician, were killed and at least 27 wounded. Ahmed al-Mesmari, a spokesman for Hifter’s forces, said Saturday that 14 troops had been killed since the offensive began.

The fighting has displaced hundreds of people, the U.N. migration agency said. The U.N. mission to Libya called for a two-hour cease-fire on Sunday in parts of Tripoli to evacuate civilians and the wounded.

The LNA is supported by Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, France and Russia. It answers to the authorities based in eastern Libya, who are at odds with the U.N.-backed government.

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Magdy reported from Cairo.

Senate GOP Game Plan: More Trump Nominees, Fewer Bills

WASHINGTON — Mitch McConnell says the Senate will be in the “personnel business” this year. But the majority leader’s focus on confirming President Donald Trump’s nominees is coming at the expense of any big legislative priorities.

Nearly 100 days into the new Congress, the drive to confirm is adding more conservatives to the courts and putting more Trump appointees in government offices. But Trump’s promises to replace the Affordable Care Act, invest in infrastructure or cut middle class taxes have been essentially shelved.

The result is that the GOP-controlled Senate is on a very different path heading into the 2020 election than is the House, where the Democratic majority is churning out a long list of bills on ethics, gun violence and other topics that, while unlikely to become law, show voters their priorities.

Sara Binder, an expert on Congress at George Washington University, said there doesn’t seem to be much room in the Senate “to set out a policy agenda and make some progress toward it.” She added: “It does leave on the table quite a number of issues that don’t get any progress.”

Underlying his strategy, McConnell, R-Ky., engineered a rules change last week to speed the confirmation process, pushing past Democrats’ stalling of Trump’s picks for administration jobs and district courts.

“Look, we know you don’t like Donald Trump, but there was an election,” McConnell argued on the Senate floor to the Democrats, saying the president “is at least entitled to set up the administration and make it function.”

Democratic senators see a much more deliberative strategy. Rather than try to work with Democrats — and Trump — to pass bills that can be turned into law, they say McConnell is simply blocking bills from the House while spending his time packing the courts with conservatives judges as part of a broader legacy of reshaping the judiciary.

Already McConnell spent the first two years of the administration confirming a record 30 circuit court nominees. With seven more confirmed this year, he’s now turning to the district courts; four nominees already are teed up for Senate action.

“What Leader McConnell, President Trump and Republicans in the Senate are trying to do is use the courts to adopt the far-right agenda that Republicans know they cannot enact through the legislative process,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said during the floor debate.

In an earlier time, McConnell was an advocate of capitalizing on divided government to foster deal-making. Compromises between Democrats and Republicans ended a budget crisis during President Barack Obama’s administration and produced bills on other education and topics.

But so far this year, the big-ticket items have been elusive. Trump wanted GOP senators to try again to replace Obama’s health care law, but without a substantive plan, McConnell quashed that effort until after the 2020 election.

Republicans are quick to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., saying there’s almost nothing Senate Republicans and House Democrats can agree on. As if to prove the point, McConnell forced the Senate into a vote on the Green New Deal from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., highlighting Democratic tensions with the liberal flank of their party.

Yet it’s clear that Republicans have had their own difficulty with Trump, whose shifting positions have left them without fully shared policy priorities. For example, many Republicans oppose Trump’s tariffs as leverage in trade negotiations. One major bill that did pass the Senate rebuked Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Syria.

Trump opposed two substantive measures that cleared both chambers of Congress. He vetoed one that went against his national emergency to build the U.S.-Mexico border wall and has threatened to veto another that’s opposing U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen.

“If you’re talking about a big bold vision, yea, I’d like to do entitlement reform, I’d like to do tax reform 2.0 — there are a whole bunch of things on the economic agenda that I think we can do, but those things aren’t going to move in a Democrat House,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the second-ranking Republican.

“It’s just hard right now,” he said. “In terms of legislative expectations I think we’re being realistic and not setting the bar too high, but there are some things that I think can get done.”

One of the only jobs McConnell ever wanted was in the Senate, he says in his biography, “The Long Game.” But after more 30 years in office, the majority leader often seen as an institutionalist is steadily changing the way the chamber operates.

In many ways, he’s simply building on the moves made by a predecessor, Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who used the “nuclear option” to change the rules to more easily approve Obama’s Cabinet officials and most judges with a majority, rather than the 60-vote threshold in the 100-member Senate.

McConnell took it further, going “nuclear” to usher through Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and again with last week’s changes that slashed debate time on most nominees from 30 hours to two.

Some say it’s only a matter of time before the legislative filibuster, which sets a 60-vote threshold to advance most legislation, becomes the next to fall.

Not everyone opposes such changes. On Friday, presidential contender Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaking at the National Action Network, said if Democrats take control they should end the filibuster. She cited the filibuster’s role in stopping anti-lynching and civil rights legislation.

Even some Democrats see the hours of idle debate on lower-level picks as a waste of time.

“Our obligation as senators is not to try to revive the old Senate, but rather to figure out how we can build a new Senate that has its own customs and rules and institutional perogative that will work in a modern era,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.

But for now, the Senate has a singular focus.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who faces re-election next year, isn’t sure confirmations will be enough for voters. But in divided Washington, he sees few other options.

“The personnel business may be the whole game,” he said.

After 2016 Loss, Democrats Know They Need White Male Voters

UPPER ST. CLAIR TOWNSHIP, Pa. — When he moved to Pennsylvania about five years ago, it was a coin toss which party Brian Heitman would register with.

No longer.

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Heitman, who is 42 and white, has become a reliable Democrat. Last week, he voted for the Democratic candidate in a special state Senate election in Pittsburgh’s affluent southern suburbs.

“A decade ago I probably wouldn’t have even noticed this election was happening,” Heitman said, “but I’m making a point in voting in every one I can nowadays.”

The Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary may feature a historically diverse field of women and minorities, but in some ways it is testing how the party appeals to white men such as Heitman. Many Democratic politicians went into the last presidential campaign cycle taking little account of those voters, and banked on a coalition of women and minorities to carry them to victory. Trump’s victory proved that thinking wrong. Many in the party are determined now not to make the mistake again.

That’s left Democrats wondering whether the nominee should be someone who can cut deep into Trump’s base, picking off large numbers of working-class whites, whether it’s enough to win over affluent, college-educated, suburban men and whether party is moving to far left to win them both.

“The white male vote is indispensable, it’s a part of any winning coalition,” said Democratic pollster Ronald Lester, who worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. He noted that successful national Democrats perform well with white men, and that includes Barack Obama, whose strength among white men in the Rust Belt helped fuel his White House victories in 2008 and 2012.

Several candidates have jumped in with their own suggestions of how to do that.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who hasn’t said whether he is running, spoke to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in an appearance Friday that seemed designed to show how he could win back white working-class voters. Biden said some of his “sophisticated friends” don’t understand the need to treat laborers with respect.

“How the hell do we get to the place where a lot of you think the rest of the country doesn’t see you, or know you?” Biden asked the mostly male crowd.

When Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, announced his campaign earlier in the week, he said his more centrist approach could appeal to working-class voters like those in his district, which embodies the Rust Belt terrain that Trump won.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said her no-frills style has delivered white Midwestern voters before. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, uses his star appeal that helped him in Texas’ well-educated suburbs. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has said his economic populism will bring rural white voters back to the Democratic fold.

Polling makes clear why Democratic are searching for the right messenger.

White men make up typically make up about one-third of the electorate. In 2018, 41 percent of them voted for Democrats, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of the national electorate. While Democrats’ strength among women won headlines and was often credited with Democrats’ strong showing, white men also moved to the Democrats column. VoteCast showed Democrats won the votes of 46% of white male college graduates, a figure that has given some in the party hope.

“The revolt in these suburban districts wasn’t just about white women, it was also about white men,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster advising the campaign of former Gov. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo. “Just as there’s been a movement of white, college-educated women, there’s been a movement of white college-educated men.”

That shift is part of a long-term trend.

According to the American National Election Survey, white men without college degrees have consistently supported the GOP over the past two decades, while those with degrees — roughly one-fifth of the 2018 electorate — have increasingly moved toward Democrats. In 1996, when President Bill Clinton overwhelmingly won re-election, he only received 36% of the votes of white male college graduates, according to ANES. Hillary Clinton lost her race in 2016 but won 43% of them.

Strategists generally find that college-educated white men are more moved by social issues and Trump’s violations of political norms, while those without degrees are more concerned about economic issues and like candidates who may shake up the establishment. In Pennsylvania, Democrats have gained ground among both groups since Trump’s election, but some see the college-educated cohort as the most promising.

Democrats picked up three U.S. House seats in Pennsylvania in November, flipping suburban districts while also easily defending a U.S. Senate seat and the governor’s mansion.

“The current coalition — urban, suburban women and these college-educated males — will likely put Pennsylvania back in the Democratic column,” said Mike Mikus, a veteran Democratic strategist who lives in the affluent suburbs of the 37th state Senate district.

Trump won the traditionally Republican district by 6 percentage points in 2016. But after its Republican state senator was elected to Congress in November, Democrats targeted the seat. They counted on flipping its educated populace of lawyers, consultants and doctors who fill its colonial-style houses and shopping centers that spill over the ridgelines outside Pittsburgh.

“There are college-educated men who have, at least temporarily, put their Republican Party membership card in their pocket for a while,” Mikus said of his neighbors. But, he warned, these new Democratic voters may only be willing to tolerate so much in a party swinging to the left. “They are somewhat conservative. They don’t like paying a lot of taxes.”

Alfred Schnabel is one of them. The 42-year-old business analyst has kept his GOP registration but feels unwanted in either party. He is turned off by Trump and wary of Democratic presidential hopefuls such as Sanders.

“There seems to be a push to go super-progressive,” he said of Democrats.

Still, Schnabel volunteered for a local Democratic legislative candidate last year because he was infuriated at his state representative’s criticism of gay people, and his frustration at the GOP outweighs his concerns about Democrats. He chalks up his ability to evolve politically to his education.

“Going to college, I met people who were gay, people from other cultures,” Schnabel said. “That stayed with me.”

Mike Wessell is still a registered Republican but he was comfortable at the victory party last Tuesday night for the Democrat, Pam Iovino, who won the state Senate race comfortably.

“I’m not happy with the way President Trump has been running the country, or his ideology,” said Wessell, a corporate lawyer. He cited Trump’s immigration stance and denial of climate science.

Wessell worked on the campaign of Conor Lamb, the Democrat whose special election victory last year in a congressional district that overlaps with the 37th presaged Democrats’ new strength in the state. He even appeared in an ad for Democratic Sen. Bob Casey’s re-election campaign later that year with his wife, who is an active Democrat.

Wessell is also wary of Sanders, but he knows he won’t be voting Trump in 2020. He’s still hanging onto his Republican registration, though.

“I haven’t given up on my party,” Wessell said as a roomful of Democrats cheered their latest win.

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AP Polling Editor Emily Swanson and Associated Press writer Hannah Fingerhut in Washington contributed to this report.

The Death Penalty Is Getting Even Crueler

For years, most of the U.S. has been changing death penalty laws in the direction of phasing it out, or at least applying it in a more humane way.

In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that people with intellectual disabilities cannot be executed. In 2005, another ruling held that the U.S. cannot execute anyone for committing a crime as a minor.  Twenty states have banned capital punishment.

The most recent to ban it are Washington in 2018, Delaware in 2016, Maryland in 2013, Connecticut in 2012, and Illinois in 2011.

Unfortunately, our newly right wing-dominated Supreme Court recently made a move in the opposite direction.

The Eighth Amendment bans cruel and unusual punishment. Capital punishment has been becoming more unusual over the past decade or so. Now, with the court’s help, it’s becoming more cruel.

The state of Missouri is set to execute Russell Becklew, a man who suffers from a rare condition that will make death by lethal injection unbearably painful. He’s requested to be executed by a different method that will be quicker.

Established precedent was that inmates contesting their method of execution must provide an alternative that would cause less pain. Becklew has.

In the two previous cases that established this precedent, the court ruled that states should try to minimize pain when carrying out executions. In a new decision, Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch has just accepted an interpretation of this — promoted earlier by Justice Clarence Thomas — that it only means that states should not “intentionally” make executions more painful than necessary.

Why?

Honestly, why? If the prisoner is going to be executed anyway, and we are no longer debating his or her innocence, or the fairness in how we apply the death penalty, or whether it can ever be just to kill another human, what interest is there for the state in making the execution more painful?

Russell Bucklew has requested to be executed via a less painful method, and the court has just ruled against him. He will suffer more as a result. How does this benefit the American people in any way?

Humans make mistakes, and sometimes we execute the innocent. Even when the person executed is guilty, courts give harsher sentences to more marginalized peoples than to more privileged people for committing the same crime. The wealthy can hire top notch lawyers whereas the poor receive public defenders. People of color are disproportionately sentenced to death.

Given that the death penalty is applied imperfectly, even when lawyers, judge, and juries all do their best to make it as fair as possible, we should aim to move in the direction of less cruelty, not more.

Trump Is Painting a Red Target on U.S. Troops in Iraq

The Trump administration is considering designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization. This is an old Joe Lieberman idea from 2007, and it is a very bad idea. It keeps being done rhetorically (2007, 2017), and then announced again out of amnesia. It is illogical, but it is also practically speaking a potential disaster if it were actually thoroughly implemented.

The notion is illogical because the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is a state actor, not a non-state actor. Terrorists are civilians who commit violence against other civilians to achieve some political goal.

The IRGC is sort of like the US national guard. It isn’t the formal army, but it is an adjunct to it.

If the US has a problem with IRGC actions, they should accuse the Iranian government of war crimes. States commit war crimes. There are international laws and institutions for dealing with war crimes.

But the practical side of the issue is that Iraqi Shiite militias close to the IRGC are essentially the hosts and protectors of the some 5,000 US troops in Iraq.

Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Saturday for the Iraqi government to expel US troops from Iraq as soon as possible, lest they become entrenched. Iraqi PM Adel Abdul Mahdi is on a state visit to Iran. Iran is proposing dozens of joint projects, despite the US increasingly severe sanctions on Iran.

When ISIL took over 60% of Iraqi territory in 2014, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called for Iraqis to mobilize against the terrorist organization. Many Shiites took this call to mean they should form militias, since the formal Iraqi army had collapsed.

The Shiite-led Iraqi government reached out to the IRGC for help with training and logistics, and the IRGC appears to have sent a small number of troops into Iraq.

The IRGC planned out and helped execute the first major campaign against ISIL, at Tikrit. The US initially declined to join in because it was an Iranian-led campaign, but in the end whenthe Iraqi forces got bogged down, the US offered air support. IRGC offered strategic advice, but a lot of the heavy lifting was done by Shiite militiamen who formed a strong bond to the IRGC.

The formal Iraqi military is still small and week, and the Shiite militias are increasingly powerful, having formed civilian political parties, and having done well in elections.

So security is provided to US troops, essentially by the friends of the IRGC.

The Trump administration is painting a big red X on the backs of those troops.

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Infectious Mosquito Population May Double by 2100

Within 80 years the health of twice as many people as today could face a serious mosquito risk − and not only in the tropics.

One billion people are already in danger of mosquito-borne disease. As the world warms and climates become more hospitable to the insects that transmit dengue fever, yellow fever, Zika and other fearful viruses, that number could double by the end of the century.

And as Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus extend their range to the north and the south, and higher up the hill regions, tropical infections that already kill millions will spread into the temperate zones.

“Climate change is the largest and most comprehensive threat to global health security . . .  after the Zika outbreak in Brazil in 2015, we’re especially worried about what comes next”

At some point in the next 50 years, according to a study in the Public Library of Science journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, one billion people could become newly exposed not just to dengue and yellow fever, but to emerging diseases such as chikungunya, Zika, West Nile and Japanese encephalitis, all carried by just two species of mosquito.

“Climate change will have a profound effect on the global distribution and burden of infectious diseases,” the authors warn. “Current knowledge suggests that the range of mosquito-borne diseases could expand dramatically in response to climate change.”

As temperatures go up – the planet is already 1°C warmer on average than it has been for most of human history, thanks to profligate use of fossil fuels to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and is on course to hit 3°C warmer by 2100 – so does the scope for disease transmission by insects that flourish in a range of temperatures.

No let-up

Infections could begin to happen year-round in the tropics, and some people could be at risk during the warmer seasons almost everywhere else. Infections, too, could become more intense.

Rising temperatures open up new ranges for carriers of potentially lethal disease, and the latest study takes a closer look at what climate models predict about disease transmission by just two species.

“These diseases, which we think of as strictly tropical, have been showing up already in areas with suitable climates, such as Florida, because humans are very good at moving both bugs and their pathogens around the globe,” said Sadie Ryan, a medical geographer at the University of Florida, who led the study.

Mosquitoes grounded?

And her co-author Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University in Washington DC, said: “Climate change is the largest and most comprehensive threat to global health security. Mosquitoes are only part of the challenge, but after the Zika outbreak in Brazil in 2015, we’re especially worried about what comes next.”

Paradoxically, rising temperatures could be good news for some at-risk populations: both the Anopheles mosquito that carries the malaria parasite and the Aedes that is host to a number of diseases are most dangerous within a range of temperatures: as the thermometer rises, it could become too hot for malaria transmission in some places, or even too hot for mosquitoes.

“This might sound like a good news, bad news situation, but it’s all bad news if we end up in the worst timeline for climate change,” said Dr Carlson. “Any scenario where a region gets too warm to transmit dengue is one where we have different but equally severe threats in other health sectors.”

Israel’s Netanyahu Vows to Annex West Bank Settlements

JERUSALEM—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged Saturday to annex Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank if re-elected, a dramatic policy shift apparently aimed at rallying his nationalist base in the final stretch of the tight race.

Netanyahu has promoted Jewish settlement expansion in his four terms as prime minister, but until now refrained from presenting a detailed vision for the West Bank, seen by the Palestinians as the heartland of a future state.

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For American Jews, Trump Is Key Figure in Israeli Election



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An Israeli annexation of large parts of the West Bank is bound to snuff out any last flicker of hope for an Israeli-Palestinian deal on the terms of a Palestinian state on lands Israel captured in 1967.

A so-called two-state solution has long been the preferred option of most of the international community. However, intermittent U.S. mediation between Israelis and Palestinians ran aground after President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital early in his term. The Palestinians, who seek Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem as their capital, suspended contact with the U.S.

More recently, Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a plateau Israel captured from Syria in 1967. The move was viewed in Israel as a political gift by Trump to Netanyahu who is being challenged by former military chief Benny Gantz.

Polls have indicated a close race, though Netanyahu’s Likud Party is expected to have a better chance than Gantz’s Blue and White slate to form a ruling coalition. Polls forecast more than 60 out of 120 parliament seats for the Likud and smaller right-wing and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties

On Saturday, Netanyahu gave an interview to Israel’s Channel 12 TV at the top of the prime-time newscast. Netanyahu portrayed the U.S. policy shifts on Jerusalem and the Golan Heights as his achievements, saying he had managed to persuade Trump to take these steps.

Netanyahu pledged that he would not dismantle a single Jewish settlement and that Israel would retain control of the territory west of the Jordan River — the West Bank. More than 600,000 Israelis now live on war-won lands, two-thirds in the West Bank.

The interviewer asked why he hadn’t annexed some of the larger settlements during his current term. “The question you are asking is an interesting question, whether we will move to the next stage and the answer is yes,” he said, adding that the next term in office would be fateful. “We will move to the next stage, the imposing of Israeli sovereignty.”

“I will impose sovereignty, but I will not distinguish between settlement blocs and isolated settlements,” he said. “From my perspective, any point of settlement is Israeli, and we have responsibility, as the Israeli government. I will not uproot anyone, and I will not transfer sovereignty to the Palestinians.”

In any partition deal, the more isolated Jewish settlements would likely have to be uprooted to create a viable Palestinian state.

Saeb Erekat, a veteran former Palestinian negotiator, said he held the international community, especially the Trump administration, responsible for Israel’s policies.

“Israel will continue to brazenly violate international law for as long as the international community will continue to reward Israel with impunity, particularly with the Trump administration’s support and endorsement of Israel’s violation of the national and human rights of the people of Palestine,” he said in a statement.

U.S. Wants 2 Years to Find Migrant Kids Separated From Families

SAN DIEGO—The Trump administration wants up to two years to find potentially thousands of children who were separated from their families at the border before a judge halted the practice last year, a task that it says is more laborious than previous efforts because the children are no longer in government custody.

The Justice Department said in a court filing late Friday that it will take at least a year to review about 47,000 cases of unaccompanied children taken into government custody between July 1, 2017 and June 25, 2018 — the day before U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw halted the general practice of splitting families. The administration would begin by sifting through names for traits most likely to signal separation — for example, children under 5.

The administration would provide information on separated families on a rolling basis to the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued to reunite families and criticized the proposed timeline on Saturday.

“We strongly oppose a plan that could take up to two years to locate these families,” said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney. “The government needs to make this a priority.”

Sabraw ordered last year that more than 2,700 children in government care on June 26, 2018 be reunited with their families, which has largely been accomplished. Then, in January, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s internal watchdog reported that thousands more children may have been separated since the summer of 2017. The department’s inspector general said the precise number was unknown.

The judge ruled last month that he could hold the government accountable for families that were separated before his June order and asked the government submit a proposal for the next steps. A hearing is scheduled April 16.

Sheer volume makes the job different than identifying children who were in custody at the time of the judge’s June order, Jonathan White, a commander of the U.S. Public Health Service and Health and Human Services’ point person on family reunification, said in an affidavit.

White, whose work has drawn strong praise from the judge, would lead the effort to identify additional families on behalf of Health and Health and Human Services with counterparts at Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement. Dr. Barry Graubard, a statistics expert at the National Cancer Institute, developed a system to flag for early attention those most likely to have been separated.

The vast majority of separated children are released to relatives, but many are not parents. Of children released in the 2017 fiscal year, 49 percent went to parents, 41 percent to close relatives such as an aunt, uncle, grandparent or adult sibling and 10 percent to distant relatives, family friends and others.

The government’s proposed model to flag still-separated children puts a higher priority on the roughly half who were not released to a parent. Other signs of likely separation include children under 5, younger children traveling without a sibling and those who were detained in the Border Patrol’s El Paso, Texas, sector, where the administration ran a trial program that involved separating nearly 300 family members from July to November 2017.

Saturday marks the anniversary of the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute every adult who enters the country illegally from Mexico. The administration retreated in June amid an international uproar by generally exempting adults who come with their children. The policy now applies only to single adults.