Chris Hedges's Blog, page 429

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Rocks but Can’t Capture Mercury

Focused primarily on lead singer Freddie Mercury, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a pop opera about Queen, the British rock quartet. While the film more closely conforms to the MTV “Behind the Music” formula of sex, drugs and arena rock than the historical record, the result is an avalanche of wildly uneven storytelling and ridiculously entertaining performances in a PG-13 version of an X-rated life.

Meaning that it intermittently captures the opening lines of the song that gives it its title: “Is this the real life?/ Is this just fantasy?/ Caught in a landslide/ No escape from reality.”

Meaning that as a Mercury biopic it might be questionable, but as an extended-play music video of Queen’s music it’s irresistible—and I was never an aficionado. Nearly 50 years after Queen surfaced with its unique mix of synthesizer, click-track and polysyllabic lyrics (name-checking Galileo, Scaramouche and Figaro, among others), its music sounds even more danceable than it once did.

Rami Malek, the Egyptian-American actor best known for the TV series “Mr. Robot,” plays Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara in what is now Tanzania and raised mostly in the U.K. Although Malek is, well, mercurial in at least two senses of the word, he wears prosthetic teeth to lend him the musician’s pouty overbite and early on it’s a significant distraction. Malek keeps sucking in his cheeks as if to keep the bridge in place. Happily, as Fattah becomes Freddie, Malek grows increasingly comfortable and forceful in the role.

While Bryan Singer (“The Usual Suspects,” “X Men”) is the film’s credited director, he was booted and replaced by Dexter Fletcher. Whether it is because Singer was replaced or because two of Queen’s surviving members (creative consultants Brian May and Roger Taylor) wanted this to be the Queen story, not solely that of Freddie (who died in 1991), the film feels as though it is the product of a committee of sensibilities rather than one unified vision.

In this movie bookended by Queen’s 1985 appearance at the Live Aid concert, credit Malek for his ability to incarnate the pansexual—or is it omnisexual?—singer to give the film a center. In the establishing scenes Freddie simultaneously flirts with Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), a stylish young woman, while cruising a passing lad. Freddie, this androgynous diva in a unitard, wants it all, sexually and musically. As unclassifiable as Freddie’s affectional preference is Queen’s music, ranging the spectrum from anthem to aria, often in the same song.

The film has it that Freddie loved Mary emotionally and men carnally, that only belatedly—after a diagnosis that he was HIV-positive—did he come to terms with his sexual preference.

Accurate? I have no idea. I wasn’t there. But I did flinch during a sex-and-drugs montage that seems to take place in 1980 and felt positively ahistorical. The camera follows Freddie from behind slowly walking down a corridor, like a convict toward the gas chamber, into the strobe lights of a gay bar blasting the Queen hit “Another One Bites the Dust.” As if somehow Freddie knew—even before scientists had established a connection between unprotected sex and the transmission of HIV—that the pleasure he was seeking there would kill him.

It is perhaps best not to think too hard about the story in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It is perhaps enough just to enjoy Malek and the music.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Murder Counts Filed in Random Killing of 2 African-Americans

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The white man accused of opening fire in a Kentucky grocery store and parking lot, killing two black people, was indicted Wednesday on murder charges, but it’s too soon to determine if the death penalty will be sought, a prosecutor said.

The suspect, Gregory A. Bush, was indicted by a grand jury on two counts of murder, one count of criminal attempted murder and two counts of first-degree wanton endangerment stemming from the attack at a Kroger store in suburban Louisville last week.

Jefferson County Commonwealth’s Attorney Tom Wine told reporters Wednesday that he first wants to talk to the victims’ families before deciding whether to pursue the death penalty against Bush, 51.

“Quite frankly, it is too early to talk to them about that weighty decision,” Wine said.

The prosecutor said he’ll talk to the families “at the appropriate time,” after they’ve had time to grieve.

Bush’s indictment means his case will proceed to Jefferson County Circuit Court in Louisville.

Bush was seen on surveillance video trying to enter a historically black church minutes before the Kroger shootings but was not able to enter the church, police said. The police chief of the town outside Louisville where the shooting happened said he believes the killings were racially motivated.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Monday denounced the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre and Kentucky grocery store shooting as hate crimes and said the death penalty should be applied.

Meanwhile, prosecutors on Wednesday identified the man they say first confronted Bush during the shooting as Dominic D. Rozier. The attempted murder charge against Bush stemmed from their exchange of gunfire, authorities said.

Rozier does not face any charges for firing at Bush, Wine said.

“There is no indication that he acted other than in self-protection for himself and for others,” Wine said of Rozier.

The wanton endangerment charges stemmed from the threats posed against Rozier’s wife and the 12-year-old grandson of one of the victims during the shooting, prosecutors said.

According to an arrest report, Bush walked into the Kroger, pulled a gun from his waist and shot a man in the back of the head, then kept shooting him multiple times. The report says Bush then reholstered his gun, walked outside and killed a woman in the parking lot. Each victim died of multiple gunshot wounds.

The victims were identified as Maurice Stallard, 69, and Vicki Lee Jones, 67. Bush, who is being held in a local jail, did not know either victim, Wine said.

Federal investigators are examining if there were any violations of federal law, including potential civil rights violations such as hate crimes, U.S. Attorney Russell M. Coleman in Louisville said.

Coleman said in a statement Wednesday that the investigation will be “thorough and prompt, aimed at collecting the evidence necessary to meet the standards required for charging under the federal hate crimes and related laws.”

Trump: Troops Sent to Border Could Reach 15,000

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the number of military troops deployed to the U.S.-Mexican border could go as high as 15,000 as he draws a hard line on immigration in the lead-up to the midterm elections.

With his eyes squarely on next Tuesday’s contests, Trump has rushed a series of immigration declarations, promises and actions as he tries to mobilize supporters to retain Republican control of Congress. His own Republican campaign in 2016 concentrated on border fears, and that’s his focus in the final week of the midterm fight.

“As far as the caravan is concerned, our military is out,” Trump said Wednesday. “We have about 5,800. We’ll go up to anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 military personnel on top of Border Patrol, ICE and everybody else at the border.”

Trump rejected the idea he was “fearmongering” or using the issue for political purposes, but his escalating rhetoric in the waning days of the campaign season call into question the denial. Trump has railed against illegal immigration, including several caravans of migrants from Central America slowly moving toward the U.S. border. The caravan is still nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from the border.

He’s also promised to end so-called catch-and-release policies by erecting tent cities to hold those crossing illegally. And this week he is asserting he could act by executive order to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for the children of non-U.S. citizens.

Trump’s comments on Wednesday appeared to catch the Pentagon off guard.

The Pentagon on Monday directed 5,239 active-duty troops to deploy to the border to assist Customs and Border Protection agents in Texas, Arizona and California. That is in addition to 2,092 National Guard troops who have been along the border for several months on a separate, but related, mission.

On Tuesday, Air Force Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, commander of U.S. Northern Command, which is supervising the new troop operation, disputed a news report that the active-duty total could reach 14,000.

“I honestly don’t even know where that came from.,” he said. “That is not in line with what we’ve been planning.”

O’Shaughnessy said the 5,239 number will increase, but he would not say by how much or when. Other officials have said that 2,000 to 3,000 additional active-duty troops are on standby for possible deployment to the border.

A deployment of 15,000 would bring the military commitment on the border to roughly the same level as in war-torn Afghanistan.

Trump on Wednesday did not back down from his controversial proposal to upend the very concept of American citizenship. In a morning tweet, he said the right to citizenship for babies born to non citizens on American soil “will be ended one way or the other.”

He also claimed that what he terms “so-called Birthright Citizenship” is “not covered by the 14th Amendment.”

However, the text of the amendment’s opening Citizenship Cause is this: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The citizenship proposal would inevitably spark a long-shot legal battle over whether the president can alter the long-accepted understanding that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil, regardless of his parents’ immigration status.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan asserted Tuesday that “obviously” Trump could not upend that policy by executive order, drawing a tweeted rebuke from Trump. He said Wednesday that Ryan “should be focusing on holding the Majority rather than giving his opinions on Birthright Citizenship, something he knows nothing about!”

Speaking to reporters before leaving the White House for a campaign rally in Florida, Trump compared his plan to act by executive order to President Barack Obama’s much-maligned decision to use executive action to provide protections from prosecution and a path to work status for some people brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

“If he can do DACA, we can do this by executive order,” Trump said, using the acronym for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Trump and his Justice Department have argued that Obama action was unlawful.

Trump and many top aides have long seen the immigration issue as the most effective rallying cry for his base of supporters. The president had been expected to announce new actions at the border on Tuesday, but that was scrapped so he could travel instead to Pittsburgh, where 11 people were massacred in a synagogue during Sabbath services.

Turkish Prosecutor Says Khashoggi Was Strangled, Dismembered

ISTANBUL — Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was strangled as soon as he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul as part of a premeditated killing, and his body was dismembered before it was removed, a top Turkish prosecutor said Wednesday.

Chief Istanbul prosecutor Irfan Fidan’s office also said in a statement that discussions with Saudi chief prosecutor Saud al-Mojeb over the killing yielded “no concrete result” despite Turkey’s “good-intentioned efforts to reveal the truth.”

The statement was the first public confirmation by a Turkish official that Khashoggi was strangled and mutilated after he entered the Saudi Consulate on Oct. 2. It also pointed to a lack of cooperation from Saudi officials in the investigation of the slaying.

“In accordance with plans made in advance, the victim, Jamal Khashoggi, was strangled and killed immediately after entering the Consulate General of Saudi Arabia,” the prosecutor’s office said.

“The victim Jamal Khashoggi’s body was dismembered and destroyed following his death by suffocation, again in line with the advance plans,” the two-page statement read.

The prosecutor’s statement that Khashoggi was killed immediately conflicts with a report by pro-government newspaper Yeni Safak earlier this month, which cited what it described as an audio recording of Khashoggi being tortured before being killed. The newspaper claimed that his fingers were cut off and that he was killed by being beheaded.

Turkey is seeking the extradition of 18 suspects in the journalist’s slaying who were detained in Saudi Arabia. It also is pressing Saudi Arabia for information about who ordered Khashoggi’s killing and the location of his remains.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called on Riyadh to disclose the identity of an alleged local collaborator said to have been involved in getting rid of Khashoggi’s body.

Saudi chief prosecutor al-Mojeb met with Fidan twice and also visited the Turkish intelligence agency’s Istanbul headquarters this week before leaving for Riyadh on a private jet Wednesday.

Saudi Arabia has not commented directly on the prosecutor’s visit and al-Mojeb did not respond to journalists’ questions at the airport as he departed.

Fidan’s office said the Saudi delegation submitted a written statement and invited the Turkish delegation to come to Saudi Arabia bringing “evidence obtained during the course of the investigation.”

The Saudi representatives said the whereabouts of Khashoggi’s remains and whether the killing was premeditated or not would only come to light through a joint interrogation by Turkish and Saudi investigators, according to the statement.

The statement said Turkey renewed its request for the 18 suspects to be extradited. It did not say if Turkish officials would travel to Saudi Arabia.

On Wednesday, a lawmaker and spokesman for Turkey’s ruling party again called on Saudi Arabia to reveal where Khashoggi’s body is, who gave the orders for the killing and who the alleged Turkish collaborator is.

“Instead of trying to find out what (evidence) Turkey has, Saudi authorities should give the answers to these questions,” Omer Celik told reporters. “This is not an incident that could have taken place without a high-level order.”

Celik added: “We are not blaming anyone in advance but we will not allow anything to be covered up.”

Khashoggi, a 59-year-old columnist for The Washington Post, vanished after entering the consulate in Istanbul to pick up paperwork he needed for his upcoming marriage. His Turkish fiancee was waiting for him outside. A critic of the Saudi crown prince, Khashoggi had been living in exile in the United States.

Turkey alleges a hit squad from Saudi Arabia — including a member of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s entourage during a trip to the United States— went to Istanbul to kill the journalist and then tried to cover it up.

Under mounting pressure, Saudi Arabia changed its narrative about Khashoggi’s killing several times, eventually admitting Khashoggi died inside the consulate. Saudi Arabia only recently acknowledged Turkish evidence showed the slaying was premeditated.

Hurriyet newspaper columnist Abdulkadir Selvi, who is known to be close to the Turkish government, said the Saudi prosecutor revealed nothing new to Turkish investigators during his three-day visit and left with several questions unanswered.

“Rather than share the information he has, the Saudi prosecutor tried to learn what information and evidence Turkey has in its hands,” Selvi wrote Wednesday.

He added: “The chief prosecutor is not trying to shed light on the murder, he is trying to save the crown prince.”

Ralph Nader: Democrats Must Channel FDR and LBJ

The top Republican politicos must be thinking with adversaries like the Democratic Party, who needs friends. Since 2010 the GOP minority has taken over the majority of state legislatures, Governorships and now the three branches of the federal government.

Polls consistently show most Americans oppose the catastrophic Republican agenda. The American people support raising the frozen federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour; want to protect Obamacare; want law enforcement to punish Wall Street crooks and prevent consumer rip offs; support forming labor unions and protecting labor rights; favor prosecuting the student loan and the for-profit school rackets; want the Republican Party to stop voter suppression and judicial disenfranchisement, and want injured people to have access to the courts. Despite all of these unpopular Republican Party positions, the Republican Party keeps winning.

“With all the winning issues waiting for the Democratic Party to show the voters what it stands for, why is there is hesitation, cowardliness, and obsession with raising money from commercial interests?”

Even in next month’s elections, which are supposed to produce a blue wave of Democratic victories, the polls are tightening. Trumps polls are edging up, in spite of the belligerent loud mouth’s daily foul and lying invectives.

To see the anemic Democrats, watch the debates between the various candidates. A recent debate between Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill and Republican Josh Hawley, whose office of attorney general is a widely reported mess, is illustrative. Hawley had McCaskill on the defensive regarding the southern border wall. She kept Trumpeting how she has voted for $70 billion for the wall and border security. She did not advance her own immigration policy.

She agreed with Hawley on a GOP ruse, namely a federal reinsurance program for pre-existing conditions, instead of specifically strengthening Obamacare or, better, coming out for a more efficient full Medicare for everyone with free choice of doctor and hospital. She did not challenge Hawley with an explicit minimum wage target or where he stood on lifting poverty and crumbling infrastructure throughout the state. A few Democratic candidates have solidly put forth a “fight for $15 an hour” position. They also need a public works plan and an alternative tax agenda for fairness and job expanding, crucial public investments.

Too often the GOP candidates have the Democratic candidates on the defensive. The Democrats need to respond to the GOP’s cruel and misleading triad of lower taxes (for the super-rich that is), de-regulation (endangering your health and safety) and a strong defense (meaning further bloating the wasteful, redundant military budget and its boomeranging Empire abroad).

The Democrats are always backtracking because they largely have no military or foreign policy differing from the GOP; they have no stand against crony capitalism for corporate welfare, despised by both conservatives and progressives. They will not argue strongly for needed “law and order” regulation to prevent toxics from poisoning your air, water and soil.  They advance no law enforcement plan to protect your consumer dollars and prevent another Wall Street criminal collapse on jobs, savings, and pension funds that would result in another giant taxpayer bailout. Some Congressional Democrats even joined with Republicans this year to weaken the Dodd-Frank law.

In recent months, I have been asking numerous Congressional Democratic groups, such as the House Democratic Caucus and the Democratic National Committee, why the specific, abysmal and cruel Republican votes in Congress are not made into campaign headliners. No response. Why are they not making the stagnant, low wages an emblazoned cause for tens of millions of Americans? Why are they not telling people to go “Vote for a Raise,” –long overdue following years of workers being shortchanged by inflation, being denied raises for productivity advances, and being subjected to wage theft amounting to as much as $50 billion a year?

“America Needs a Raise,” can become a clarion call for getting out the vote and highlighting the vast inequalities of, say Walmarts CEO making $12,000 an hour, plus perks and benefits, while many of his workers sweat away at little more than $11 an hour.

So compromised by campaign cash are most Democratic candidates, excepting the few progressive insurgents, that they are not even rebutting the exaggerated and defective Republican boasts about the economy’s low unemployment rates for Hispanic and Black workers. Millions of workers have dropped out of the labor market, record millions are temps or work short weeks, wages are stagnant, rents higher, and at least a third of Americans are poor.

The Republicans are getting away with their phony sing-song of a robust economy in their political TV ads and debates. Again and again, too few Democrats will not stand for explicit policies that reflect majoritarian opinion and contrast with the plutocratic, big business interests of the Republicans.

With all the winning issues waiting for the Democratic Party to show the voters what it stands for, why is there is hesitation, cowardliness, and obsession with raising money from commercial interests? Moreover, four time losers at the Congressional level and their failed political consultants have refused to step aside and be replaced by fresh, young politicians insistent on defending the country from the worst, cruelest, most corrupt iteration of the Republican Party in history.

Imagine what FDR, Harry Truman, and LBJ would have done with this current crop of grim and greedy Republican corporatists such as super-rich Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who just told the country that cuts in Medicare and social security are necessary due to the deficits he and his GOP created with the giant tax escapes for the rich and big corporations. For starters, old style Democrats would be “raising hell” promoting the omnipresent message that America Needs a Raise!

Online Rants by Would-Be Shooters Create Dilemma for Police

BOISE, Idaho — Their anger is all over social media for the whole world to see, with rants about minorities, relationships gone bad or paranoid delusions about perceived slights.

The perpetrators of mass shootings often provide a treasure trove of insight into their violent tendencies, but the information is not always seen by law enforcement until after the violence is carried out. In addition, rants and hate speech rarely factor into whether someone passes a background check to buy guns.

The massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the pipe bombing attempts from last week and the Florida high school shooting this year have underscored the dilemma of law enforcement around the country in assessing the risk of people making online rants at a time when social media has become so ubiquitous.

“We can go out on Twitter and there are loads of people saying insane stuff, but how do you know which is the one person? It’s always easy after the fact, to go: ‘That was clear.’ But clearly everyone spouting their mouth doesn’t go and shoot up a synagogue,” said David Chipman, a retired agent of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and now senior policy adviser for the Giffords Center.

Robert Bowers, the man accused of opening fire at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, expressed virulently anti-Semitic views on a social media site called Gab, according to an Associated Press review of an archived version of the posts made under his name. The cover photo for his account featured a neo-Nazi symbol, and his recent posts included a photo of a fiery oven like those used in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Other posts referenced false conspiracy theories suggesting the Holocaust was a hoax.

It was only just before the shooting that the poster believed to be Bowers seemed to cross the line, posting: “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Authorities say Bower killed 11 people and injured six others, including four officers who responded.

Keeping tabs on social media posts has been used for years by law enforcement to try to identify potential threats. The task is enormous and it’s an inexact science. The volume of posts is significant and the question arises: Is something a true threat or free speech?

A message on the site Gab is displayed on an iPhone. (Jenny Kane / AP)

They are mindful of the fact that the First Amendment protects Americans’ right to express even speech that many in society find abhorrent — and have to make often-subjective decisions about what crosses the line.

Among more than 550 police departments across the country surveyed several years ago by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, about three-quarters said they regularly searched social media for potential threats.

Lt. Chris Cook, spokesman for the Arlington, Texas, Police Department, said the searches are often done manually, using keywords to try to identify troubling posts.

“It’s very time consuming, it’s very staff and resource intensive and you have humans involved in the process so there is the potential that law enforcement can miss something,” Cook said, adding that departments can’t rely on social media alone. The community needs to be involved to report any suspicious behavior.

“Everyone has to be our extra eyes and ears out there,” he said.

In one case where vigilance paid off, authorities say a black woman received troubling racist, harassing messages on Facebook from a man she didn’t know, prompting her to call police. The tip from the New Jersey woman led Kentucky police to a home where they found Dylan Jarrell with a firearm, more than 200 rounds of ammunition, a bulletproof vest, a 100-round high-capacity magazine and a “detailed plan of attack.” He was arrested just as he was leaving his driveway.

Bowers is not alone among alleged mass shooters in making racist or bigoted comments online.

Dylann Roof, convicted of the 2015 slaying of nine black churchgoers in South Carolina, had posted a 2,000-word racist rant and posed in photos with firearms and the Confederate flag. Nikolas Cruz, the teenager charged in the slaying of 17 students and adults at a high school in Parkland, Florida, hurled online slurs against blacks and Muslims, and went so far as to state he wanted to be a “professional school shooter.”

The rants did not affect their ability to buy guns. When purchasing a firearm, criminal background checks only look for any records showing a criminal past or mental health problems that led to an involuntary commitment.

“I always felt as an ATF agent, the way our laws were structured, ATF stood for ‘After the Fact’,” Chipman said.

There have been some changes, however, to make it easier to alert authorities to warning signs. “Red flag” laws have been enacted in 13 states in the past couple of years, allowing relatives or law enforcement with concerns about a person’s mental health to go to court and seek to have firearms removed at least temporarily.

But Erich Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, cautioned against using social media content to deny someone the constitutional right to own a firearm.

“I abhor hateful comments by the left or the right but I don’t think you lose your rights for simply uttering,” Pratt said.

He likened it to the Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report,” about law enforcement in the future using psychic technology to nab murderers before they commit a crime.

“It’s dangerous to go down this road of Minority Report with pre-crime,” he said. “Nobody should lose their rights without due process.”

Jacob Wohl Made These 5 Mistakes in Allegedly Framing Robert Mueller

1. Republican activist Jacob Wohl allegedly set up a phony company called “Surefire Intelligence,” charged with paying supposed women victims of special counsel Robert Mueller to allege sexual abuse. Wohl used his own email address to set up the site, and gave his mother’s telephone number as the contact. Anonymizing is difficult on the web, but Wohl wasn’t even trying. And if you are going up against the former director of the FBI with a covert op, being this transparent is political suicide. Wohl was ill-advised to be the one to announce the scam beforehand:

Very credible allegations are set to be made against Robert Mueller — The MSM is scrambling! They’re accusing me of offering to pay accusers with ZERO PROOF and ZERO EVIDENCE!

— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) October 30, 2018

2. According to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Wohl used his own photo-shopped image for a profile photo. I’ll bet you he used his own computer to start the shell company, so that his IP address was recorded as well.

Odd. Jacob Wohl says he doesn’t know nuttin’ about Surefire Intelligence, the firm tied to the bizarre Mueller allegations. Take a look at the photos below of Mathhew Cohen, head of ‘Surefire,’ and of Jacob Wohl. pic.twitter.com/Q1rAW4wkPO

— Jane Mayer (@JaneMayerNYer) October 30, 2018

3. The Atlantic’s Natasha Bertrand acquired an email from a woman identifying herself as Lorraine Parsons, “who told journalists that she had been offered roughly $20,000 by a man claiming to work for a firm called Surefire Intelligence—which had been hired by a GOP activist named Jack Burkman—‘to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller.’ ” This is a mistake on Wohl’s part inasmuch as he appears to have had “Simon Frick” share ‘way too much information’ with the alleged victim, who then was in a position to share it with the press.

4. Bertrand says that “Simon Frick” of Surefire, whose profile photo at LinkedIn is stolen from actor Christopher Walz, next approached Jennifer Taub, a professor at Vermont Law School. But “Frick” didn’t do any homework, and it turns out that Taub didn’t know Mueller, though she commented on him as a guest on CNN. Law professors are not usually targeted for scams, so this incident actually strengthens the case. But who offers law professors $20,000 to commit perjury?

5. The date on which “Surefire” alleged Mueller engaged in sexual abuse in his office—Aug. 2, 2010—Mueller went to Washington, D.C., for jury duty.

As an attempt to sully Mueller’s reputation, this sting operation was even less artful than Saudi Arabia’s attempted cover-up of the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi!

Wohl, a big Trump fan, says he began as a teenage hedge fund manager, and called himself “Wohl of Wall Street.” But it turns out that he is under investigation for the way he ran his accounts, according to The Daily Beast. Kelly Weill at DB adds, “A series of Craigslist ads solicited models to flatter his potential clients and a set of salacious websites registered to his name promoted models called ‘Wohl Girls,’ one of whom alleged that Wohl posted her pictures without her permission.”

If Wohl is behind the attempted Surefire fraud on Mueller, perhaps his biggest and sixth mistake was simply being completely unprincipled.

Authorities Probing Immigrant Saudi Sisters’ Mystery Deaths

NEW YORK—Police are investigating the mysterious deaths of two sisters from Saudi Arabia whose bodies, bound together with tape, washed up on New York City’s waterfront last week.

The sisters, Tala Farea, 16, and Rotana Farea, 22, were discovered Oct. 24 on a bank of the Hudson River, about 225 miles from Fairfax, Virginia, where they lived and were reported missing in August.

As of Tuesday, investigators still had not determined how they died. The sisters’ bodies were taped together and facing each other, but had no obvious signs of trauma, police said. They were both fully clothed.

Their mother told detectives the day before the bodies were discovered, she received a call from an official at the Saudi Arabian Embassy, ordering the family to leave the U.S. because her daughters had applied for political asylum, New York police said Tuesday.

Saudi Arabia’s Consulate General in New York said in a statement that it had “appointed an attorney to follow the case closely.”

New York City police sent a detective to Virginia to learn more about the sisters. Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said they were particularly interested in finding out what happened since they were reported missing and what led them to New York City.

“We are looking at all clues in their past life,” Shea said.

The medical examiner’s office was investigating the cause of death. The lack of obvious trauma appeared to rule out a theory they jumped into the river from the George Washington Bridge.

In its statement, the Saudi Consulate General said embassy officials in Washington had contacted the family and “extended its support and aid in this trying time.” It said the sisters were students “accompanying their brother in Washington.”

Tala and Rotana moved to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia with their mother in 2015, settling in Fairfax, a suburb of Washington D.C., police said.

Rotana was enrolled at George Mason University, but left in the spring. A George Mason spokesman called the news of her death “tragic,” and said the university was cooperating with police.

Police said the sisters left their family home and were placed in a shelter after an earlier disappearance, in December 2017.

They were reported missing again Aug. 24.

Police initially struggled to identify the bodies as much of the city and the country was transfixed by another mystery: the package bombs sent to a dozen prominent Democrats and CNN’s New York City bureau.

Police released sketches of the sister’s faces and posted repeated calls for the public’s help in identifying them on social media.

“We are out to get justice for those two girls and find out exactly what happened,” Shea said.

 

Trump’s Endless Mendacity and the Dawn of American Fascism

American presidents lie. They always have. Just Google “Lyndon Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin,” “Bill Clinton and NAFTA” or “George Bush and weapons of mass destruction.” Even Honest Abe likely told a fib or two.

But no U.S. president has ever lied as prolifically, constantly, insidiously and dangerously as Donald Trump. He never stops. He’s the Energizer Bunny of endless falsehood.

It’s enough to make even Orwell’s head explode.

Trump, who received votes from just one in four U.S. adults in 2016, claimed that he would have won the popular vote over Hillary Clinton were it not for the voter fraud of undocumented immigrants. The alleged criminal votes were never cast.

Trump called his 2016 Electoral College victory “The biggest electoral victory since Ronald Reagan.” It was no such thing.

Trump lied about the size of his inauguration crowd even as aerial photographs of the event contradicted his boasts.

He has repeatedly and preposterously claimed that the Latinx immigrant population is full of murderers, rapists and gang members. It is not.

Trump claimed that President Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” just before his 2016 election victory. They were not.

He claimed to have as president-elect negotiated a deal to “save 1,100 jobs” at a Carrier plant in Anderson, Ind. He did no such thing.

He absurdly concocted a terrorist attack that never occurred, in Sweden, during his first month in office.

He claimed that the head of the Boy Scouts called him to say his speech was the best ever delivered to the Boy Scouts Jamboree. No such call ever took place. Trump’s terrible oration was widely reviled.

Trump claimed to have fired James Comey because the FBI director mishandled Hillary Clinton’s email scandal prior to the 2016 election, not because he was continuing to investigate Trump and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. That was another baldfaced lie.

He claimed that white-nationalist and neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Va., were “protesting very quietly,” and that liberal and left counter-protesters “didn’t have a [protest] permit.” False and false.

Trump laughably told oil workers in North Dakota that environmentalists “didn’t know why” they opposed the ecocidal, petro-capitalist Dakota Access and Keystone-XL pipelines. Ridiculous.

Trump lied repeatedly and viciously about the number of people who died during and after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

He ludicrously claimed to have led a strong federal response to the devastating storm in Puerto Rico. (He gave himself a “ten.”)

Trump absurdly claimed that his former national security adviser Michael Flynn didn’t do “anything wrong.” Flynn was later convicted for lying about his communications with the Kremlin during Trump’s presidential transition.

Trump farcically claimed that Paul Manafort never played a major role in his 2016 campaign. (Manafort chaired the Trump campaign up through the Republican National Convention that year.)

Trump falsely claimed that a Justice Department inspector general report exonerated him of collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. The report did neither of those things.

Trump ridiculously claimed that Michael Cohen was never a big player in his career or campaign. Cohen was Trump’s longstanding personal attorney and “fixer,” and he too has been convicted on federal charges.

Trump has claimed to know nothing about the illegal campaign finance payoff of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Cohen exposed that lie this summer.

After Cohen turned himself in to federal authorities, Trump said that Cohen pleaded guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that “were not crimes.” False. The violations are indeed federal crimes.

Trump unbelievably claimed not to have known that his son and son-in-law met with Russians claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton in Trump Tower in June 2016.

Trump helped concoct the White House lie that the real subject matter of that June 2016 meeting was U.S. adoption policy.

He says that China “has been attempting to interfere in the upcoming 2018 elections.” There is no evidence to support that charge.

He falsely claims to be a self-made billionaire, something that The New York Times shows to have been a lie. (His father staked his entire business.)

Trump says that he and the Republican Party passed a “middle-class” tax “reform.” He certainly knows that they enacted a plutocratic tax cut, a great windfall for big corporations and the richest 1 percent.

Trump absurdly claimed before the tax cut that “we [U.S.-Americans] pay more taxes than anybody in the world” (we don’t) and that the tax “reform” would “cost me a fortune.”

He absurdly said that “public lands will once again be available for public use” while handing over 2 million acres to private corporations for coal mining, oil drilling, uranium extraction and other environmentally disastrous industrial activities.

He falsely claimed that he was legally compelled to order a “zero tolerance” border policy last spring that separated Mexican and Central American children from their parents.

In defense of his good friends in the House of Saud, which sends kill teams to torture, kill and vivisect dissenting journalists in foreign embassies, Trump claims that Saudi Arabia has purchased $110 billion worth of military equipment from the U.S., and that this purchase has created upward of “1 million jobs.” His figures here are wildly exaggerated.

He claims, without evidence, that there are “people of Middle Eastern descent” in the latest Central American migrant caravan moving through Mexico toward the United States’ southern border.

He baselessly insisted that “Democrats are paying members of the caravan to try and get into the U.S. to harm Republicans in the midterms.”

He has sent U.S. troops to guard the border on the absurd lie that the beleaguered caravan constitutes a “national emergency.”

He preposterously claims that it is the mainstream media, which he calls “the enemy of the people,” and not him that has created our current climate of hatred and violence—even as he applauds a Montana congressman for body-slamming a young reporter.

Trump’s evasion of responsibility follows a hate-filled campaign and 21 months of ax-grinding in the Oval Office that has seen him call immigrants criminal gang members, murderers and rapists, while maliciously describing his political enemies and media critics and journalists as “evil,” “low lifes,” “low IQ” and “the most dishonest people on Earth.” Along the way, the openly sexist Trump has referred to women as “animals,” “dogs,” “horse-face,” “fat” and worse. The white supremacist who killed 11 people in a Jewish synagogue last Saturday was egged into violent action by Trump’s ridiculous and hateful caravan rhetoric.

The Trump Lie Machine is going into head-spinning and soul-numbing overdrive as the midterm elections draw closer.

Trump claimed earlier this year that leftist violence will break out across the country if Democrats reclaim Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. The absurdity speaks for itself.

Trump said in Arizona recently that immigrants had illegally taken over a city council in California. The claim was complete nonsense.

Trump has recently and insanely suggested that people are “rioting” in California “to get out of Sanctuary Cities. …They’re demanding to be released from sanctuary cities.” (This may be the single craziest thing I’ve ever seen Trump claim. It is truly bizarre.)

Trump is ridiculously claiming the Democrats will kick seniors off health insurance, abolish insurance protections for people with health problems, destroy Social Security, abolish U.S. borders and (I am not making this up) give “illegal” immigrants “free cars.” That’s right: “free cars” for “illegals.”

Trump repeatedly—36 times across seven political speeches this fall—called the Democrats “radicals.” Of course, the Democrats are a deeply conservative, Big Business-friendly, imperial/pro-military, and depressingly centrist apparatus. There isn’t a single genuine radical in their entire party.

Trump says that the “new platform of the supposedly ‘radical’ Democrats is to abolish ICE” (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement). That is flatly false.

Trump lies and distorts so relentlessly and profusely that tracking and fact-checking his false statements has become a full-time job for journalists at home and abroad.

One of these journalists is Daniel Dale, the Washington bureau chief of the Toronto Star. He calculates that Lyin’ Don has made four false claims per day since being sworn into the presidency 21 months ago with his hand on the Bible.

When Dale was first assigned the Trump beat in September 2016, he found the Republican candidate “so incessantly dishonest” that his habit of twisting and inverting reality required a specific focus “separate from the day-to-day news coverage I was doing.” Dale looked forward to being “freed from this [ugly] task” of covering Trump’s persistent untruths once Hillary Clinton prevailed, as was widely expected. Trump won “and so, [he] had to continue.”

What accounts for this endless mendacity and rhetorical manipulation? Speaking to “Public” Broadcasting System “NewsHour” anchor and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Judy Woodruff last week, Dale theorized that Trump and the Republican allies and outlets who repeat his outlandish and bogus assertions want to drive media coverage and political discourse away from topics they wish to avoid—health care, the Mueller investigation and “anything else the president doesn’t want us to talk about,” such as Trump’s still unreleased tax returns, climate change and the party’s regressive tax cuts.

Dale is on to something there, no doubt, but the real meaning of the president’s Twitter-amplified Fibby Pulpit is deeper and darker than mere diversion and partisan spin. As Chris Hedges suggests in his latest book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” Trump and his party’s continuing defiance of reality suggests that the United States is sliding into “corporate totalitarianism”:

Trump and the Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are intensified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. … But Clinton did not pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.

The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of ‘fake news.’ They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted them with the revoking of net neutrality. … “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed,” Hanna Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. …

The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. … Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit – only there never was a report. … The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. … When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, and depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s faith in threats and force.

Consistency is discarded. The Trump administration has cited “states’ rights” in trying to roll back federal requirements that out-of-date coal and nuclear plants be shut down, even as it endeavors to federally negate the state of California’s right to enforce comparatively stringent emission regulations.

Republican Congressional candidates run campaign commercials proclaiming their commitment to retaining the Affordable Care Act’s provision prohibiting health insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions at the same time that the GOP is viciously challenging that provision in court.

Trump blames the nation’s bourgeois media and a timid, centrist Democratic Party for the hatred, incivility and demonization that pollute U.S. politics while he calls his opponents “evil” and celebrates violence against liberals and journalists.

It is important to understand, as Hedges does, that the Trump-led assault on veracity, evidence and our very ability to separate truth from falsehood has been able to gain traction only because a decades-long corporate coup has devastated and discredited public education, academia, organized labor and the legal and criminal justice systems. It has done all this and more while turning the Democratic Party into what the late Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin called the nation’s Inauthentic Opposition.

Think of this distinctively American “corporate-managed democracy” and “inverted totalitarianism” as the nation’s pre-existing authoritarian condition for the rise of an Amerikaner-style fascism.

In the face of what an authoritarian like Trump and his white-nationalist Republican Party have done over the last two years of one-party rule—an annulment of what’s left of the U.S. Constitution’s much-ballyhooed “checks and balances”—there’s no credible moral argument against the notion that progressives living in contested districts should choose the lesser of two evils in next week’s midterm elections. Adolph Reed Jr., Noam Chomsky and Arun Gupta’s warnings about the dangers of a Trump presidency have been richly born out. I, for one, should have paid them more heed.

Still, we on the left, what’s left of it, should nonetheless retain our capacity to be properly nauseated by a yard sign I recently saw in arch-liberal, super-blue Iowa City, Iowa. Surrounded by other, smaller signs with the names of a handful of dismal local and statewide Democratic candidates, it read “MAKE AMERICA GOOD AGAIN: Vote.”

Please. The notion that the richly bipartisan corporate totalitarianism of which Trump is the apotheosis can be reversed, and the nation made “good” simply by voting Herr Donald and the Republicans out of office is a childish fantasy.

That, too, is a Great Lie. As marchers celebrating a rare legal victory over a white supremacist U.S. police state in Democratically controlled Chicago chanted last month, “The whole damn system is guilty as Hell.” It’s the whole damn system that must be democratized from the bottom up. From the dismal dollar Democrats, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, “P”BS, Tom Steyer, the Gates Foundation, the Brookings Institution, the CFR, the Atlantic Council, the Obama and Clintons on the so-called left, to the radically reactionary Republicans, the Koch brothers, the Mercers, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Fox News, the Weekly Standard, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, Breitbart, right-wing talk radio, the Sinclair Broadcasting Co., the Federalist Society and more on the actual right, imperialism, racial inequality and class rule have brought us to this menacing pre-fascist moment.

Geoengineering Is Still Nowhere Close to Working

Scientists have established a strategic error in one version of the climate change debate: they still say geoengineering is no guarantee of a cooler world.

There is no practical technology available to cool the Earth, they say – except the obvious one of ceasing to stoke the fires with fossil fuels.

One new study looks at all the tested and yet-to-be-explored mechanisms for either lowering global temperatures by reducing sunlight, or by harnessing new and old ways to capture the extra carbon dioxide released by two centuries of industrial growth.

And, the authors report, the sure way to reduce the dangers of global warming and keep the planetary temperature increase to 2°C (3.6 F) or lower by 2100 is to switch to wind and solar energy sources and drastically cut fossil fuel emissions.

A second, separate study looks closely at an often-proposed form of geoengineering – the injection of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere to intercept sunlight and shade the planet – and delivers a cautious verdict.

Yes, it might reduce planetary surface warming. But the same technology could lead to continued ocean warming and ever-faster loss of the ice caps.

Geoengineering – the technological fix that would permit humans to go on burning coal, oil and natural gas – has been repeatedly dismissed as an answer by successive teams of researchers: either the outcome is uncertain, or the consequences potentially hazardous or politically dangerous.

European climate scientists report in the journal Nature Communications that they looked at the goals of the Paris Agreement – in which 195 nations in Paris in 2015 vowed to limit global warming to “well below” 2°C and if possible 1.5°C (2.7 F) above the average for most of recorded human history – and came to a simple answer: no proposed technological solution could make much difference to global warming, without also the impact of drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Plans to sow the soil with biochar as a form of carbon storage were probably impractical on any scale. Massive planting of trees to draw down carbon from the atmosphere might not work as planned. The addition of nutrients to spur phytoplankton blooms in the oceans would disrupt natural nutrient cycles and might increase the emissions of another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide. Plans to capture carbon directly from the air could be ferociously expensive – because humans released 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels in 2017.

No Significant Contribution

“None of the proposed technologies can realistically be implemented on a global scale in the next few decades. In other words, we can’t rely on these technologies to make any significant contribution to holding the average temperature increase under the 2°C limit, much less the 1.5°C limit”, said Mark Lawrence, scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany, who led the research.

And scientists at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado took a close look at perhaps the most-studied and much-disputed proposal to engineer the climate: the injection of sulphate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reduce incoming radiation.

This is in one sense nature’s way to cool down the planet a little: it happened, for instance, after the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 hurled enough ash into the stratosphere to lower planetary temperatures by 0.5°C for about two years.

And, the scientists report in Nature Geoscience, one version of the proposal could be made to work, and computer modelling predicted that it would minimise changes in the planetary surface temperature.

Seas to Rise

But it would also accelerate the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – a powerful force at work in the ocean – and lead to continued warming of the deep, and of the polar oceans.

So the ice caps would go on melting, and sea levels would rise. There would be unpredictable changes in the Indian, South American and African rainy seasons and in hurricane activity.

“Considerable uncertainty therefore surrounds the potential impacts of such shifts, and the relative magnitude of such impacts to those where geoengineering is not implemented”, they write.

They say their study highlights the need to better understand the risks of such actions, along with the sheer complexity of the planetary climate machine and “the need to better develop our understanding of the climate system before the character of a geoengineered climate can be estimated with confidence.”