Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 861

“Ted Cruz is a liar”: Marco Rubio becomes Cruz’s latest target in South Carolina

Typically, at this point in a presidential primary cycle, the negative campaigning kicks into high gear as candidates head into the notoriously dirty "First in the South" primary state of South Carolina. However, Donald Trump has been yelling about rapists and calling his rivals idiots for months now, so the campaigns' turn to the Palmetto state merely continues the long tradition of mudslinging that has marked the GOP Civil War of 2016. “Ted Cruz is a liar," opened an email to supporters blasted out by Marco Rubio's campaign Tuesday night. “First it was lying about Marco on fundamental issues like life and marriage; now Cruz and his supporters’ attempts to slander and distort Marco’s record have reached a new low,” Rubio campaign spokesman Alex Conant wrote. One ad by a pro-Cruz Super Pac was already pulled down this week after a legal review found it misleading in its claim that Rubio supported so-called “sanctuary cities.” The Rubio campaign is now accusing Cruz's campaign of using “dishonest push-polls” to attack their candidate. According to the Washington Post, some South Carolina Republicans have received phone calls that ask, "Did you know that Marco Rubio and the Gang of Eight are for amnesty” and for allowing Syrian refugees to freely enter the U.S.? The Cruz campaign denies any involvement with robo-calls, but Rubio's camp is still fighting back, releasing a robo-call of their own to “alert” voters in South Carolina. “These tactics are becoming all too common in this race and indicative of our opponents’ campaigns that are willing to say or do anything to win an election,” Rich Beeson, Rubio’s deputy campaign manager, told the Post. “This is nothing more than a deliberate effort to peddle false information in the hopes of deceiving voters.” Rubio's reactionary robo-call features top South Carolina surrogate Trey Gowdy, who himself was the center of another campaign tactic the Rubio campaign complains originates from the Cruz campaign. Gowdy, chairman of the House Benghazi Committee, denounced the Cruz campaign's “underhanded tactic” in a statement released by the Rubio campaign this week, accusing the Cruz campaign of being behind a fake Facebook account that purported to be Gowdy reneging his endorsement of Rubio and switching allegiance to Cruz. “It’s official, I have changed my mind. My previous endorsement of Marco Rubio was a grave mistake,” the fake post said. “The recent South Carolina debate revealed his total lack of integrity, intellect and foresight . . . To all my Christian and Conservative friends in South Carolina, I hereby formally endorse Ted Cruz.” “In the last week, we have seen a systematic effort by Senator Cruz and his allies to spread false information and outright lies in the hopes of winning votes by appealing to our lowest common denominator,” Gowdy wrote in response to the fake Facebook account. “This has been a pattern now with Ted,” Rubio said at a campaign stop in South Carolina on Wednesday, reminding the crowd of the Cruz campaign's behavior the night of the Iowa caucuses when they misleadingly suggested to precinct captains that Ben Carson had dropped out of the race. “He has spent the last two weeks literally just making stuff up,” Rubio remarked. “I just think it’s very disturbing [that] you can just come and make things up about people and believe no one is going to call you out on it. And it’s now become a pattern, so we have to clarify that we can’t let that stand unchallenged.” For his part, Cruz is fending off attacks against his own campaign this week as well. Politico reports that Cruz's campaign sent a letter to TV stations across South Carolina demanding that they cease airing an from the conservative super PAC American Future Fund that goes after Cruz's record on immigration from the right.

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Big Brother’s big fraud: Cops attack encryption to distract from expanding surveillance

Nearly three years after Edward Snowden’s explosive revelations, many Americans are once again losing a disproportionate amount of sleep over terrorism and seem ready to re-embrace extensive and extralegal surveillance as an ordinary fact of life. Last week, it was revealed that the New York Police Department has secretly deployed Stingray devices, which vacuum up the location of mobile phones by posing as a cell tower, on a large scale and without first seeking a warrant. The NYCLU, through a freedom of information request, discovered that they had done so more than 1,000 times since 2008, picking up data not only on suspects but also on an untold number of innocently-bystanding New Yorkers’ en masse. But this startling end run around the Fourth Amendment, like the recent revelation that NYPD uses X-ray vans that can see through buildings, has gotten little public attention. In large part, that's because law enforcement is exploiting returning public terrorism fears with very loud, panicked warnings that the problem is not too much surveillance but too little—that in particular, the encryption of iPhones and other technology is allowing for crime and terror suspects to “go dark” and avoid detection. In the wake of last year's Paris attacks, New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton took up CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey’s national security state "going dark" hyperbole, using the bloodshed as a pretext to push for legislation that would force companies like Apple to create a backdoor into encrypted devices. “ISIS, taking advantage of the technology that the head of the FBI has been complaining about, I’ve been complaining about, going dark, the ability to go dark, I think you’re going to see that playing a significant factor in this event,” Brennan said in November. It was later reported that, in fact, the attackers used unencrypted text messages. And so the argument’s instrumental nature—a distraction—was further clarified: law enforcement is exploiting new surveillance technology, including the bulk collection of metadata; crafting loopholes in existing Fourth Amendment law; and keeping their fresh abuses a secret. National security state defenders hide metadata collection programs and then, when they are exposed, are eager to downplay its significance, as President Obama put it with regard to the NSA’s dragnet: “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” It is a rather artful exercise in propaganda. The media too often plays along. “What law enforcement is saying, especially the FBI, [is] 'Well, we can’t get access to communications because they’re encrypted and this is hampering our law enforcement investigation',” says Jennifer Lynch, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But what’s really happening is that law enforcement is relying more and more on metadata generated by our communications,” providing troves of information on a person’s location and relationships. “That is more beneficial to law enforcement and it can’t be encrypted,” Lynch explains. Security officials keep the public focus on the limits of surveillance rather than on its excesses; at the very same time, the frequent exposure of new surveillance capacities perversely functions to normalize those excesses. If widespread surveillance is ordinary, it cannot be shocking. Instead, the anomaly becomes whatever surveillance capability lies just beyond law enforcement's capability or authorization. In October, President Obama announced that he would not back a move to require cop-accessible backdoors into encrypted devices, conceding Silicon Valley's point that doing so would leave them vulnerable to criminals and nefarious foreign governments. It now turns out, however, that this may have been another feint. Just yesterday, a federal magistrate judge in California ruled in favor of the government, ordering Apple to hack into  San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook's iPhone 5c for the FBI. Apple has refused to comply, saying the order to create such software,  effectively a skeleton key, for one iPhone would in fact leave all iPhones vulnerable and make encryption a dead letter. Your television might be tapped Digging below the politically-weaponized rhetoric, it's clear that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have ample and growing opportunities to surveil not only telecommunications metadata but its content as well. Indeed, some cell-site simulators can also monitor call, text message and email content, according to the New York Times. But we can’t know for certain how Stingray or any device is being used: law enforcement, it’s now clear, treats new surveillance technologies as a secret until forced to do otherwise. Cops have used Stingrays in recent years to catch criminal suspects minor and major but hide it from judges, defense attorneys—and also from a general public whose phone data is getting caught up in investigations. The secrecy is both breathtaking and by design: Agencies sign non-disclosure agreements with StingRay manufacturer Harris Corporation, or with the FBI, forbidding the disclosure of information about how the technology works and even that it played any given role in an investigation. Instead of a warrant, police often seek a “pen register order,” an antiquated tool to secure call histories that does not require that police show probable cause. The secrecy imposed on Stingray is extreme, and it might not be anomalous. Rather, it suggests a real possibility that law enforcement is currently deploying other new surveillance capabilities in secret. “I wonder if these NDAs are happening with other kinds of technologies,” says Lynch. “There’s gotta’ be something else on the horizon…The next thing could already be here.” Particularly concerning is the possibility that law enforcement is secretly tapping into the so-called Internet of Things, the now standard consumer goods connected to the web—televisions, refrigerators, cars, watches, toys, alarm systems—which often capture audio and video. The possibility that these devices could be hacked or tapped is very real: Samsung has warned users of its smart TV that "spoken words" including "personal or other sensitive information...will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party."   The police can look through walls and might be tapping your television, but security officials are still freaking out about dangerous people “going dark” on their encrypted iPhones. It appears to be “pure misdirection,” as Natasha Lomas writes at TechCrunch, geared to facilitate a “landgrab” of “as much access to data as possible…narrowing the debate to focus on specific technologies such as end-to-end encryption makes sense as a way to distract attention from other potential surveillance avenues, such as IoT and location metadata.” The general public is increasingly caught up in a high-tech dragnet, from facial recognition technology that renders one’s likeness into a unique record to license-plate readers tracking people’s movements en masse and trawling for municipal debtors. If you’re inclined to trust the state to use these tools responsibly, consider that Los Angeles City Council has considered using readers to identify cars driving through areas known for prostitution, and then sending “Dear John” letters to the owners’ homes. What could go wrong? Novel forms of police surveillance like Stingray have been emerging fast—much faster than courts have been able or willing to apply sensible Fourth Amendment safeguards governing their use. They are, however slowly, catching up. In recent years, the Supreme Court has ruled that placing a GPS device on a suspect’s car and using that to track the suspect’s movements constitutes a search, and also that police must generally obtain a warrant before searching a phone, in part because it includes locational data. Law enforcement’s approach to Stingray, however, sets a disturbing precedent, suggesting that new surveillance devices will be deployed clandestinely as part of a legal strategy seeking to minimize the harm of future adverse rulings by lengthening a given technology’s period of ungoverned secrecy to the maximum. In September, the Justice Department announced guidelines requiring agents to seek a warrant before using devices like stingray—except, however, for “exceptional circumstances.” That’s a big caveat, leaving open the possibility that DOJ might not enforce the rules—rules that could in any case be changed by a future Attorney General. The Department of Homeland Security's directive, according to the ACLU, is even more permissive. Telecommunications are now integrated into nearly every facet of our daily lives, rendering even the most banal sundry into potential spyware. The Fourth Amendment, as traditionally applied to the search of homes, pockets and cars, has long been viewed by police as a procedural hindrance. Now, new technology offers law enforcement the irresistible temptation to omniscience. Only transparency, oversight and debate can ensure that constitutional safeguards survive the digital revolution.Nearly three years after Edward Snowden’s explosive revelations, many Americans are once again losing a disproportionate amount of sleep over terrorism and seem ready to re-embrace extensive and extralegal surveillance as an ordinary fact of life. Last week, it was revealed that the New York Police Department has secretly deployed Stingray devices, which vacuum up the location of mobile phones by posing as a cell tower, on a large scale and without first seeking a warrant. The NYCLU, through a freedom of information request, discovered that they had done so more than 1,000 times since 2008, picking up data not only on suspects but also on an untold number of innocently-bystanding New Yorkers’ en masse. But this startling end run around the Fourth Amendment, like the recent revelation that NYPD uses X-ray vans that can see through buildings, has gotten little public attention. In large part, that's because law enforcement is exploiting returning public terrorism fears with very loud, panicked warnings that the problem is not too much surveillance but too little—that in particular, the encryption of iPhones and other technology is allowing for crime and terror suspects to “go dark” and avoid detection. In the wake of last year's Paris attacks, New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton took up CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey’s national security state "going dark" hyperbole, using the bloodshed as a pretext to push for legislation that would force companies like Apple to create a backdoor into encrypted devices. “ISIS, taking advantage of the technology that the head of the FBI has been complaining about, I’ve been complaining about, going dark, the ability to go dark, I think you’re going to see that playing a significant factor in this event,” Brennan said in November. It was later reported that, in fact, the attackers used unencrypted text messages. And so the argument’s instrumental nature—a distraction—was further clarified: law enforcement is exploiting new surveillance technology, including the bulk collection of metadata; crafting loopholes in existing Fourth Amendment law; and keeping their fresh abuses a secret. National security state defenders hide metadata collection programs and then, when they are exposed, are eager to downplay its significance, as President Obama put it with regard to the NSA’s dragnet: “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” It is a rather artful exercise in propaganda. The media too often plays along. “What law enforcement is saying, especially the FBI, [is] 'Well, we can’t get access to communications because they’re encrypted and this is hampering our law enforcement investigation',” says Jennifer Lynch, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But what’s really happening is that law enforcement is relying more and more on metadata generated by our communications,” providing troves of information on a person’s location and relationships. “That is more beneficial to law enforcement and it can’t be encrypted,” Lynch explains. Security officials keep the public focus on the limits of surveillance rather than on its excesses; at the very same time, the frequent exposure of new surveillance capacities perversely functions to normalize those excesses. If widespread surveillance is ordinary, it cannot be shocking. Instead, the anomaly becomes whatever surveillance capability lies just beyond law enforcement's capability or authorization. In October, President Obama announced that he would not back a move to require cop-accessible backdoors into encrypted devices, conceding Silicon Valley's point that doing so would leave them vulnerable to criminals and nefarious foreign governments. It now turns out, however, that this may have been another feint. Just yesterday, a federal magistrate judge in California ruled in favor of the government, ordering Apple to hack into  San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook's iPhone 5c for the FBI. Apple has refused to comply, saying the order to create such software,  effectively a skeleton key, for one iPhone would in fact leave all iPhones vulnerable and make encryption a dead letter. Your television might be tapped Digging below the politically-weaponized rhetoric, it's clear that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have ample and growing opportunities to surveil not only telecommunications metadata but its content as well. Indeed, some cell-site simulators can also monitor call, text message and email content, according to the New York Times. But we can’t know for certain how Stingray or any device is being used: law enforcement, it’s now clear, treats new surveillance technologies as a secret until forced to do otherwise. Cops have used Stingrays in recent years to catch criminal suspects minor and major but hide it from judges, defense attorneys—and also from a general public whose phone data is getting caught up in investigations. The secrecy is both breathtaking and by design: Agencies sign non-disclosure agreements with StingRay manufacturer Harris Corporation, or with the FBI, forbidding the disclosure of information about how the technology works and even that it played any given role in an investigation. Instead of a warrant, police often seek a “pen register order,” an antiquated tool to secure call histories that does not require that police show probable cause. The secrecy imposed on Stingray is extreme, and it might not be anomalous. Rather, it suggests a real possibility that law enforcement is currently deploying other new surveillance capabilities in secret. “I wonder if these NDAs are happening with other kinds of technologies,” says Lynch. “There’s gotta’ be something else on the horizon…The next thing could already be here.” Particularly concerning is the possibility that law enforcement is secretly tapping into the so-called Internet of Things, the now standard consumer goods connected to the web—televisions, refrigerators, cars, watches, toys, alarm systems—which often capture audio and video. The possibility that these devices could be hacked or tapped is very real: Samsung has warned users of its smart TV that "spoken words" including "personal or other sensitive information...will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party."   The police can look through walls and might be tapping your television, but security officials are still freaking out about dangerous people “going dark” on their encrypted iPhones. It appears to be “pure misdirection,” as Natasha Lomas writes at TechCrunch, geared to facilitate a “landgrab” of “as much access to data as possible…narrowing the debate to focus on specific technologies such as end-to-end encryption makes sense as a way to distract attention from other potential surveillance avenues, such as IoT and location metadata.” The general public is increasingly caught up in a high-tech dragnet, from facial recognition technology that renders one’s likeness into a unique record to license-plate readers tracking people’s movements en masse and trawling for municipal debtors. If you’re inclined to trust the state to use these tools responsibly, consider that Los Angeles City Council has considered using readers to identify cars driving through areas known for prostitution, and then sending “Dear John” letters to the owners’ homes. What could go wrong? Novel forms of police surveillance like Stingray have been emerging fast—much faster than courts have been able or willing to apply sensible Fourth Amendment safeguards governing their use. They are, however slowly, catching up. In recent years, the Supreme Court has ruled that placing a GPS device on a suspect’s car and using that to track the suspect’s movements constitutes a search, and also that police must generally obtain a warrant before searching a phone, in part because it includes locational data. Law enforcement’s approach to Stingray, however, sets a disturbing precedent, suggesting that new surveillance devices will be deployed clandestinely as part of a legal strategy seeking to minimize the harm of future adverse rulings by lengthening a given technology’s period of ungoverned secrecy to the maximum. In September, the Justice Department announced guidelines requiring agents to seek a warrant before using devices like stingray—except, however, for “exceptional circumstances.” That’s a big caveat, leaving open the possibility that DOJ might not enforce the rules—rules that could in any case be changed by a future Attorney General. The Department of Homeland Security's directive, according to the ACLU, is even more permissive. Telecommunications are now integrated into nearly every facet of our daily lives, rendering even the most banal sundry into potential spyware. The Fourth Amendment, as traditionally applied to the search of homes, pockets and cars, has long been viewed by police as a procedural hindrance. Now, new technology offers law enforcement the irresistible temptation to omniscience. Only transparency, oversight and debate can ensure that constitutional safeguards survive the digital revolution.Nearly three years after Edward Snowden’s explosive revelations, many Americans are once again losing a disproportionate amount of sleep over terrorism and seem ready to re-embrace extensive and extralegal surveillance as an ordinary fact of life. Last week, it was revealed that the New York Police Department has secretly deployed Stingray devices, which vacuum up the location of mobile phones by posing as a cell tower, on a large scale and without first seeking a warrant. The NYCLU, through a freedom of information request, discovered that they had done so more than 1,000 times since 2008, picking up data not only on suspects but also on an untold number of innocently-bystanding New Yorkers’ en masse. But this startling end run around the Fourth Amendment, like the recent revelation that NYPD uses X-ray vans that can see through buildings, has gotten little public attention. In large part, that's because law enforcement is exploiting returning public terrorism fears with very loud, panicked warnings that the problem is not too much surveillance but too little—that in particular, the encryption of iPhones and other technology is allowing for crime and terror suspects to “go dark” and avoid detection. In the wake of last year's Paris attacks, New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton took up CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey’s national security state "going dark" hyperbole, using the bloodshed as a pretext to push for legislation that would force companies like Apple to create a backdoor into encrypted devices. “ISIS, taking advantage of the technology that the head of the FBI has been complaining about, I’ve been complaining about, going dark, the ability to go dark, I think you’re going to see that playing a significant factor in this event,” Brennan said in November. It was later reported that, in fact, the attackers used unencrypted text messages. And so the argument’s instrumental nature—a distraction—was further clarified: law enforcement is exploiting new surveillance technology, including the bulk collection of metadata; crafting loopholes in existing Fourth Amendment law; and keeping their fresh abuses a secret. National security state defenders hide metadata collection programs and then, when they are exposed, are eager to downplay its significance, as President Obama put it with regard to the NSA’s dragnet: “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” It is a rather artful exercise in propaganda. The media too often plays along. “What law enforcement is saying, especially the FBI, [is] 'Well, we can’t get access to communications because they’re encrypted and this is hampering our law enforcement investigation',” says Jennifer Lynch, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But what’s really happening is that law enforcement is relying more and more on metadata generated by our communications,” providing troves of information on a person’s location and relationships. “That is more beneficial to law enforcement and it can’t be encrypted,” Lynch explains. Security officials keep the public focus on the limits of surveillance rather than on its excesses; at the very same time, the frequent exposure of new surveillance capacities perversely functions to normalize those excesses. If widespread surveillance is ordinary, it cannot be shocking. Instead, the anomaly becomes whatever surveillance capability lies just beyond law enforcement's capability or authorization. In October, President Obama announced that he would not back a move to require cop-accessible backdoors into encrypted devices, conceding Silicon Valley's point that doing so would leave them vulnerable to criminals and nefarious foreign governments. It now turns out, however, that this may have been another feint. Just yesterday, a federal magistrate judge in California ruled in favor of the government, ordering Apple to hack into  San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook's iPhone 5c for the FBI. Apple has refused to comply, saying the order to create such software,  effectively a skeleton key, for one iPhone would in fact leave all iPhones vulnerable and make encryption a dead letter. Your television might be tapped Digging below the politically-weaponized rhetoric, it's clear that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have ample and growing opportunities to surveil not only telecommunications metadata but its content as well. Indeed, some cell-site simulators can also monitor call, text message and email content, according to the New York Times. But we can’t know for certain how Stingray or any device is being used: law enforcement, it’s now clear, treats new surveillance technologies as a secret until forced to do otherwise. Cops have used Stingrays in recent years to catch criminal suspects minor and major but hide it from judges, defense attorneys—and also from a general public whose phone data is getting caught up in investigations. The secrecy is both breathtaking and by design: Agencies sign non-disclosure agreements with StingRay manufacturer Harris Corporation, or with the FBI, forbidding the disclosure of information about how the technology works and even that it played any given role in an investigation. Instead of a warrant, police often seek a “pen register order,” an antiquated tool to secure call histories that does not require that police show probable cause. The secrecy imposed on Stingray is extreme, and it might not be anomalous. Rather, it suggests a real possibility that law enforcement is currently deploying other new surveillance capabilities in secret. “I wonder if these NDAs are happening with other kinds of technologies,” says Lynch. “There’s gotta’ be something else on the horizon…The next thing could already be here.” Particularly concerning is the possibility that law enforcement is secretly tapping into the so-called Internet of Things, the now standard consumer goods connected to the web—televisions, refrigerators, cars, watches, toys, alarm systems—which often capture audio and video. The possibility that these devices could be hacked or tapped is very real: Samsung has warned users of its smart TV that "spoken words" including "personal or other sensitive information...will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party."   The police can look through walls and might be tapping your television, but security officials are still freaking out about dangerous people “going dark” on their encrypted iPhones. It appears to be “pure misdirection,” as Natasha Lomas writes at TechCrunch, geared to facilitate a “landgrab” of “as much access to data as possible…narrowing the debate to focus on specific technologies such as end-to-end encryption makes sense as a way to distract attention from other potential surveillance avenues, such as IoT and location metadata.” The general public is increasingly caught up in a high-tech dragnet, from facial recognition technology that renders one’s likeness into a unique record to license-plate readers tracking people’s movements en masse and trawling for municipal debtors. If you’re inclined to trust the state to use these tools responsibly, consider that Los Angeles City Council has considered using readers to identify cars driving through areas known for prostitution, and then sending “Dear John” letters to the owners’ homes. What could go wrong? Novel forms of police surveillance like Stingray have been emerging fast—much faster than courts have been able or willing to apply sensible Fourth Amendment safeguards governing their use. They are, however slowly, catching up. In recent years, the Supreme Court has ruled that placing a GPS device on a suspect’s car and using that to track the suspect’s movements constitutes a search, and also that police must generally obtain a warrant before searching a phone, in part because it includes locational data. Law enforcement’s approach to Stingray, however, sets a disturbing precedent, suggesting that new surveillance devices will be deployed clandestinely as part of a legal strategy seeking to minimize the harm of future adverse rulings by lengthening a given technology’s period of ungoverned secrecy to the maximum. In September, the Justice Department announced guidelines requiring agents to seek a warrant before using devices like stingray—except, however, for “exceptional circumstances.” That’s a big caveat, leaving open the possibility that DOJ might not enforce the rules—rules that could in any case be changed by a future Attorney General. The Department of Homeland Security's directive, according to the ACLU, is even more permissive. Telecommunications are now integrated into nearly every facet of our daily lives, rendering even the most banal sundry into potential spyware. The Fourth Amendment, as traditionally applied to the search of homes, pockets and cars, has long been viewed by police as a procedural hindrance. Now, new technology offers law enforcement the irresistible temptation to omniscience. Only transparency, oversight and debate can ensure that constitutional safeguards survive the digital revolution.

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Flat irons, curlers, hairspray: Watching the 2016 Westminster dogs get primped for their big day is actually sickeningly adorable

They're teased, combed, blown out, cut and dried to look their best. Watch the contestants at the 2016 Westminster Dog get ready for the big day.

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Conservative war hypocrisy: Donald Trump is getting celebrated for saying the same thing that ruined the Dixie Chicks

In July of 2003, the Dixie Chicks, a platinum-selling Texas-based country band, was playing a show in England when lead singer Natalie Maines decided to address the contentious debate over whether or not the United States should invade Iraq. "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all," Maines told the London audience. "We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." Looking back on what happened, it's almost hard to fathom how completely out of control the conservative response got. After all, it was hardly a surprise that the Dixie Chicks were liberal, having released songs denouncing domestic violence, celebrating female sexuality and yes, even songs with pacifist themes. And of course, Maines was right, and not just in retrospect. It was obvious to anyone who wasn't caught up in war fever at the time that the Bush administration was relying on disingenuous arguments in order to get a war that he and his advisors wanted for purely ideological reasons. But announcing that the emperor isn't wearing clothes is never a popular stance, and the Dixie Chicks became the biggest scapegoats of the entire war mania season: Bonfires of their records were held across the country, DJs who played their music were fired, their songs fell off the charts and basically, they were ruined. They put out one more record that sold well, but the stress and the loss of reputation in country circles eventually led to their collapse. The whole incident is worth recounting because here we are, almost 13 years later, and the lead in the Republican primary race, Donald Trump, is saying far more incendiary things about both George W. Bush and the Iraq War than Maines did, and not only is not hurting him in the polls, but may even be helping him. During the CBS debate in South Carolina, Trump openly accused Bush of lying about Saddam Hussein concealing weapons of mass destruction to get us into Iraq. He's since softened a little, saying, "I don’t know if he lied or not," but "there are no weapons of mass destruction." What's astounding about all this is that Trump is basically right, something that almost never happens, even when it comes to his own historical record of opinions on the war. Barring the development of mind-reading technology, we can't know whether or not Bush deliberately lied or not about weapons of mass destruction. But what is true, as Hillary Clinton helpfully reminded us during a Democratic debate, is that the Bush administration got war authorization by making promises that they'd let weapons inspectors do their job, and then they reneged on that promise, invading before the inspectors had a chance. Not only does that justify calling Bush a liar, but it suggests the administration was afraid the inspectors would prove there were no WMDs in Iraq, taking away the pretense for a war that Bush wanted for reasons that had nothing to do with WMDs. The reason there was such a vicious response to the Dixie Chicks (and to other celebrities who spoke out about the war) at the time was to deflect attention from the obvious bad faith and manipulative moves coming from the Bush administration. Ruining the Dixie Chicks was part of a larger right-wing campaign to send a message: Any dissent, or even questions, about the Bush administration's willingness to cut corners and violate trust in their rush to war would be met with accusations of anti-Americanism, threats, intimidation, and possibly even the ruin of your career. The campaign was incredibly effective, and likely one of the major reasons that Democrats caved and extended Bush trust that he clearly didn't deserve. Now the very same people, conservative voters, who would rain ruin upon you back then if you dared even hint at criticizing Bush, are now rushing to vote for a man who accuses Bush of lying, or at least distorting evidence, to get his ill-advised adventure war in Iraq. What's changed? Part of it is the passage of time, of course. But mostly it goes back to the tribalism that defines conservative politics. Donald Trump is one of theirs: A bully, a bigot, a misogynist, and a self-identified member of the conservative tribe. The Dixie Chicks, in contrast, were perceived as a subversive force, threatening male dominance with their musical chops and refusing to apologize for it by putting out explicitly feminist songs. (I hung out at a country bar sometimes during this era, and men would always whine that we were "man-haters" when my friends and I played "Goodbye Earl," a song that apparently offends by suggesting that wife-beaters are worthless scum.) The attacks on the Dixie Chicks worked, too, helping end a revivalist period in country music and ushering the end of the corporate-friendly "bro country" that is as uninspiring as it is sexist. Conservatism is and has been, for a long time at least, far less about policy specifics and far more about this kind of tribalism. In a remarkable piece for The New York Times, Trip Gabriel interviews Trump supporters and finds them praising Trump for saying exactly the sort of things that would have brought hellfire on the heads of liberals just a few short years ago, about how you've "got to ask tough critical questions" and how they don't like being "dictated to from Washington." You know, exactly the sort of sentiments that would get you called un-American in 2003. This inconsistency doesn't feel inconsistent to the right, however. The support for the war never had anything to do with a sincere belief that Hussein was a threat that had to be dealt with before weapons inspectors could do their job. A Republican wanted the war, liberals opposed it, and that's all they needed to know. "The issues themselves have only ever been important as a boundary marker, a way to delineate Us from Them," Adam Lee at Daylight Atheism writes. The war's salience as a boundary marker has declined and so conservative voters aren't particularly worried about justifying it any longer. What hasn't changed is this all-consuming hatred for all things liberal, especially anything perceived as a threat to white Christian male dominance. The Dixie Chicks were right about the Iraq War, but they were women and liberals who talked back, and that ultimately why they were such a threat. Trump isn't a liberal or a woman who is talking back — on the contrary, he relishes any opportunity to insult and degrade women he thinks don't know their place — and that, ultimately is the only thing that really mattered.In July of 2003, the Dixie Chicks, a platinum-selling Texas-based country band, was playing a show in England when lead singer Natalie Maines decided to address the contentious debate over whether or not the United States should invade Iraq. "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all," Maines told the London audience. "We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." Looking back on what happened, it's almost hard to fathom how completely out of control the conservative response got. After all, it was hardly a surprise that the Dixie Chicks were liberal, having released songs denouncing domestic violence, celebrating female sexuality and yes, even songs with pacifist themes. And of course, Maines was right, and not just in retrospect. It was obvious to anyone who wasn't caught up in war fever at the time that the Bush administration was relying on disingenuous arguments in order to get a war that he and his advisors wanted for purely ideological reasons. But announcing that the emperor isn't wearing clothes is never a popular stance, and the Dixie Chicks became the biggest scapegoats of the entire war mania season: Bonfires of their records were held across the country, DJs who played their music were fired, their songs fell off the charts and basically, they were ruined. They put out one more record that sold well, but the stress and the loss of reputation in country circles eventually led to their collapse. The whole incident is worth recounting because here we are, almost 13 years later, and the lead in the Republican primary race, Donald Trump, is saying far more incendiary things about both George W. Bush and the Iraq War than Maines did, and not only is not hurting him in the polls, but may even be helping him. During the CBS debate in South Carolina, Trump openly accused Bush of lying about Saddam Hussein concealing weapons of mass destruction to get us into Iraq. He's since softened a little, saying, "I don’t know if he lied or not," but "there are no weapons of mass destruction." What's astounding about all this is that Trump is basically right, something that almost never happens, even when it comes to his own historical record of opinions on the war. Barring the development of mind-reading technology, we can't know whether or not Bush deliberately lied or not about weapons of mass destruction. But what is true, as Hillary Clinton helpfully reminded us during a Democratic debate, is that the Bush administration got war authorization by making promises that they'd let weapons inspectors do their job, and then they reneged on that promise, invading before the inspectors had a chance. Not only does that justify calling Bush a liar, but it suggests the administration was afraid the inspectors would prove there were no WMDs in Iraq, taking away the pretense for a war that Bush wanted for reasons that had nothing to do with WMDs. The reason there was such a vicious response to the Dixie Chicks (and to other celebrities who spoke out about the war) at the time was to deflect attention from the obvious bad faith and manipulative moves coming from the Bush administration. Ruining the Dixie Chicks was part of a larger right-wing campaign to send a message: Any dissent, or even questions, about the Bush administration's willingness to cut corners and violate trust in their rush to war would be met with accusations of anti-Americanism, threats, intimidation, and possibly even the ruin of your career. The campaign was incredibly effective, and likely one of the major reasons that Democrats caved and extended Bush trust that he clearly didn't deserve. Now the very same people, conservative voters, who would rain ruin upon you back then if you dared even hint at criticizing Bush, are now rushing to vote for a man who accuses Bush of lying, or at least distorting evidence, to get his ill-advised adventure war in Iraq. What's changed? Part of it is the passage of time, of course. But mostly it goes back to the tribalism that defines conservative politics. Donald Trump is one of theirs: A bully, a bigot, a misogynist, and a self-identified member of the conservative tribe. The Dixie Chicks, in contrast, were perceived as a subversive force, threatening male dominance with their musical chops and refusing to apologize for it by putting out explicitly feminist songs. (I hung out at a country bar sometimes during this era, and men would always whine that we were "man-haters" when my friends and I played "Goodbye Earl," a song that apparently offends by suggesting that wife-beaters are worthless scum.) The attacks on the Dixie Chicks worked, too, helping end a revivalist period in country music and ushering the end of the corporate-friendly "bro country" that is as uninspiring as it is sexist. Conservatism is and has been, for a long time at least, far less about policy specifics and far more about this kind of tribalism. In a remarkable piece for The New York Times, Trip Gabriel interviews Trump supporters and finds them praising Trump for saying exactly the sort of things that would have brought hellfire on the heads of liberals just a few short years ago, about how you've "got to ask tough critical questions" and how they don't like being "dictated to from Washington." You know, exactly the sort of sentiments that would get you called un-American in 2003. This inconsistency doesn't feel inconsistent to the right, however. The support for the war never had anything to do with a sincere belief that Hussein was a threat that had to be dealt with before weapons inspectors could do their job. A Republican wanted the war, liberals opposed it, and that's all they needed to know. "The issues themselves have only ever been important as a boundary marker, a way to delineate Us from Them," Adam Lee at Daylight Atheism writes. The war's salience as a boundary marker has declined and so conservative voters aren't particularly worried about justifying it any longer. What hasn't changed is this all-consuming hatred for all things liberal, especially anything perceived as a threat to white Christian male dominance. The Dixie Chicks were right about the Iraq War, but they were women and liberals who talked back, and that ultimately why they were such a threat. Trump isn't a liberal or a woman who is talking back — on the contrary, he relishes any opportunity to insult and degrade women he thinks don't know their place — and that, ultimately is the only thing that really mattered.

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Lucinda Williams goes home: “The Ghost of Highway 20″ and the “time warp” of the South

Lucinda Williams has been putting out artfully written, beautifully played records for decades now, and it’s tempting to take her for granted. But as her latest, “The Ghost of Highway 20,” shows, these don’t come without a deep expenditure of feeling. Williams is definitely not dashing these off. Some of “The Ghost of Highway 20” (her second double album in a row) grew out of the recording sessions for her 2014 album “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone,” but it has a different feel and a different emotional range. It’s not quite a concept record, but it’s very much an album about the small-town and small-city South and the roots music that emerged from those places. The album also became a tribute to her father, the poet Miller Williams, who died of complications from Alzheimer’s in January of 2015. Williams has never been shy about her father’s influence, but this album bears his stamp more than most. “Highway 20” includes a song about his decline, “If My Love Could Kill,” as well as an opening track called “Dust,” based on one of his poems. Williams, who has toured incessantly over the last few years, spoke to us from her hotel in New York, where she was preparing for her Tuesday night appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” (Williams took a brief break during the conversation to receive a delivery of mouthwash and toothpaste, which she was eager for after a long time on the road. “That’s not very rock ‘n’ roll sounding, is it?” she asked.) The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. This new album, “The Ghost of Highway 20,” feels a little different from your last one: It seems focused on the music and culture of the South. You’ve toured like crazy across your career, and gone back to places that you knew as a child. How much have those places changed since you first got to know them? Are some of them the same? Some of them are. The seed that was planted – the idea for the song “The Ghost of Highway 20” – was a couple years ago when we went to Macon, Georgia, to play the Cox [Capitol] Theatre. There we were in downtown Macon, and it had hardly changed. It was like a time warp or something. Other than that they’ve renovated the theater a bit. But there was one of those unisex black beauty salon-barber shop places that looked like it had been there since … Since Otis Redding was there. Yeah, right, exactly. I started school in Macon in the early ‘60s. That’s where my dad took me to see Blind Curley Brown, this street singer/preacher/guitar player – he used to sing down there on the street. It was my first exposure to that kind of music; my 5-year-old-brain absorbed that. Then he took me with him when he went to visit a niece of Flannery O’Connor in Milledgeville, which was near Macon. So I was very young, but those experiences had, needless to say, a major impact on me. Before we lived in Macon, my brother was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and my sister was born in Jackson, where my dad taught. When I went back to Macon, it was like a big circle. When the tour bus pulled onto the highway, I looked out the window and saw all these exit signs for these towns … There’s Vicksburg, there’s Jackson, there’s Monroe, Louisiana – one of the towns my mother lived, where she’s laid to rest. So there’s all that personal stuff, but it’s also a big Civil War area. The Delta blues players who are from around there … The whole place is filled with the spirits of the memories. Before I wrote that song, I came up with the idea for a label, Highway 20 Records. We were gonna call it Gravel Road Records but someone had already taken that name. But I’ve always been thinking – and America has always been fascinated with this idea of roads and highways and travel. That goes back on your albums, especially – so many of them have at least one road song. Exactly. I traveled around – by the time I was born, my dad was teaching at different colleges, until 1971 when he achieved tenure at the University of Arkansas. But until then, we lived all over the South. And he and my mother traveled, when they were growing up, because both of their fathers were Methodist ministers. So my mother lived in different towns around Louisiana, and my dad lived in different towns around Arkansas. And there’s all the folklore and Woody Guthrie traveling and the hoboes on the trains and Kerouac’s “On the Road” – the pioneers going out West. It’s all about travel. And I love Route 66 – that whole Americana … Thinking about the South makes you think about your dad. Obviously he was a huge inspiration to you. What were the most important things he taught you? We were extremely close. We had an extremely close bond growing up. One of the things he said was as a writer never to censor yourself. Maybe it’s because I was exposed to poets and other Southern writers … As a teenager I read everything I could get my hands on by Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. I identified with their writing. I’d seen the people they were writing about. One time I was doing an interview and [the interviewer] asked me, “Are there really people like that in the South? Does that world really exist?” And I said, “Yeah, absolutely.” Another time, someone in Europe asked me, “If you travel in the South now, can you see all those things on the side of the road that you’re talking about?” And I said, “Unfortunately now, you’d probably have to be on the interstate. You’d probably have to get off the interstate, get on the two-lane highways to find it all.” My dad would write about everything from a cat sleeping in a window to a wreck on a highway. There was no shame or guilt associated with [anything]. So he taught me never to censor myself … People used to ask me, when my songs were first getting discovered and listened to, about how dark my songs were. “They’re so dark, you have so many dark songs!” So that goes back to the beginning of your career, then? But compared to a lot of poetry your songs are not all that dark. No they’re not – that’s what I’m saying. But the majority of people don’t read poetry, I guess, or they look at it as different things. Probably with the “Sweet Old World” album, because that record had “Pineola” and “Sweet Old World” on it – both songs about suicide. For me it goes back to all the traditional folk songs I grew up listening to – all those Scottish and English ballads… Like the Child Ballads … Yeah – the Child Ballads. “Banks of the Ohio,” “Barbara Allen,” this imagery ... “Long Black Veil.” All those mountain songs were so incredibly dark, and deep ... Like that song that Ralph Stanley sang at the Grammys that year, “O Death” ... That inspired my song “Death Came.” Most people … I guess it’s a lack of education. There’s a lot of sad songs on the new album. Do sad songs or angry songs purge the emotions from you? Do they have a cathartic effect? Yes, they’re very cathartic, very therapeutic. Whenever I’m talking to people who don’t get it I try to explain to them, “OK, I’m an artist first and foremost. Just like a painter, or a poet, so the art is gonna come from me. I’m gonna do it, I have to do it – I do it as a release. It’s my life force. That’s how I deal with things.” Sometimes I cry. When I cry I know I’ve hit on something ... There’s certain songs when I’ve written then, I just sort of break down. That’s when I know, “OK, this is gonna be good. This is gonna touch people.” Then the craft of it is putting it all together so that it sounds good … But it all comes from me first. Your voice is also deeper and darker on this record. Were you trying to sing differently? Not really… But my voice is developing into that more. It’s just the nature of the songs. I did Steve Earle’s radio show recently and he really hit the nail on the head. He said, “I’ve never heard you this way before – just the sound of it.” He mentioned Chet Baker – who I’d always loved, and he’d always loved, the Chet Baker’s vocals were recorded, right in your face. Do you mean the early or the late Chet Baker? The one album that sticks out in my mind, which my dad listened to all the time, was an album called “Baker’s Holiday.” Right – the Billie Holiday tribute. I’ve always loved that sound. I’m thrilled that this album is so different. I didn’t make the same album. A big part of this album is [electric guitarist] Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz [who played acoustic and electric guitar on the album and co-produced it]. Bill Frisell is all over this record. He was only on a few tracks of the last one. We recorded some of them around the period, and it became obvious which songs were going to fit together. Not surprisingly, the majority of the songs Bill played on fit together – and those are the songs on this album. He’s just such a phenomenal … A lot of people think of him as a jazz guitarist. But if you let him go, he can play anything. He does all of these harmonics on his guitar. I don’t know what to do with the next album … I told [manager/husband] Tom [Overby], I don’t know if I want to make another album without Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz … It’s like a cocoon almost, the way both of them play, them together … And Bill’s sound is so signature, it just seems to wrap itself around the songs, give them a cushion. There aren’t a lot of instruments on these particular tracks – it’s pretty straightforward. This album is on your own label, Highway 20 … What kind of freedom do you get by doing that that you couldn’t do before? Well, that last double album – that wouldn’t have happened. After my contract with Lost Highway was over, we were shopping for a new label, and that was what Tom asked one of the labels. What would you think if we put a double album out? They were like, “No.” Right off the bat. It was like, “See ya.” My prolific-ness – which started shortly after my mother’s death, which was 2004, I started churning out a lot of songs. Right around the time of the “West” album. Owning your own label allows you to put a song like “Compassion” first [on “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone”] – a stripped-down acoustic thing. Just to make all your own decisions. Not worry about the length of some of the songs. On this album, we had to make a second CD because of that [almost 13-minute] song “Faith and Grace.” You’ve got a lot of long songs on this album. You see, I love that! You get more emotion that way? Yeah – it’s just more organic and natural. If you saw us play live, that’s how it would be. Instead of feeling that you have to edit everything down. That song “Faith and Grace” – we actually did shorten it, believe it or not. The original version is like 19 minutes long. That’s a Staples Singers song, right? I think it’s traditional. The version I got it from was Mississippi Fred McDowell, on an older album he did with his wife and some church people sing on it. Fantastic song – I adapted it, moved the lyrics around. Took the “Jesus” out of it to make it spiritual rather than religious. But that was one of those that just went and went – just a meditative, transcendental thing. David Bianco, our engineer, took the track and did a remix, “A Little More Faith and Grace.” It’s so good! We’re gonna release the remixed version on Record Store Day. When we got done with that track, I said, “That reminds me of John Coltrane’s 'A Love Supreme' or something." I remember working on “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” working with Rick Rubin – it was supposed to come out on his label, American. Long story short, I sent him some of the songs, and one of them was “Drunken Angel.” He thought it was too long. He said, “You need to take out a couple of verses.” I said, “Like hell!” Can you believe that, though?Lucinda Williams has been putting out artfully written, beautifully played records for decades now, and it’s tempting to take her for granted. But as her latest, “The Ghost of Highway 20,” shows, these don’t come without a deep expenditure of feeling. Williams is definitely not dashing these off. Some of “The Ghost of Highway 20” (her second double album in a row) grew out of the recording sessions for her 2014 album “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone,” but it has a different feel and a different emotional range. It’s not quite a concept record, but it’s very much an album about the small-town and small-city South and the roots music that emerged from those places. The album also became a tribute to her father, the poet Miller Williams, who died of complications from Alzheimer’s in January of 2015. Williams has never been shy about her father’s influence, but this album bears his stamp more than most. “Highway 20” includes a song about his decline, “If My Love Could Kill,” as well as an opening track called “Dust,” based on one of his poems. Williams, who has toured incessantly over the last few years, spoke to us from her hotel in New York, where she was preparing for her Tuesday night appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” (Williams took a brief break during the conversation to receive a delivery of mouthwash and toothpaste, which she was eager for after a long time on the road. “That’s not very rock ‘n’ roll sounding, is it?” she asked.) The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. This new album, “The Ghost of Highway 20,” feels a little different from your last one: It seems focused on the music and culture of the South. You’ve toured like crazy across your career, and gone back to places that you knew as a child. How much have those places changed since you first got to know them? Are some of them the same? Some of them are. The seed that was planted – the idea for the song “The Ghost of Highway 20” – was a couple years ago when we went to Macon, Georgia, to play the Cox [Capitol] Theatre. There we were in downtown Macon, and it had hardly changed. It was like a time warp or something. Other than that they’ve renovated the theater a bit. But there was one of those unisex black beauty salon-barber shop places that looked like it had been there since … Since Otis Redding was there. Yeah, right, exactly. I started school in Macon in the early ‘60s. That’s where my dad took me to see Blind Curley Brown, this street singer/preacher/guitar player – he used to sing down there on the street. It was my first exposure to that kind of music; my 5-year-old-brain absorbed that. Then he took me with him when he went to visit a niece of Flannery O’Connor in Milledgeville, which was near Macon. So I was very young, but those experiences had, needless to say, a major impact on me. Before we lived in Macon, my brother was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and my sister was born in Jackson, where my dad taught. When I went back to Macon, it was like a big circle. When the tour bus pulled onto the highway, I looked out the window and saw all these exit signs for these towns … There’s Vicksburg, there’s Jackson, there’s Monroe, Louisiana – one of the towns my mother lived, where she’s laid to rest. So there’s all that personal stuff, but it’s also a big Civil War area. The Delta blues players who are from around there … The whole place is filled with the spirits of the memories. Before I wrote that song, I came up with the idea for a label, Highway 20 Records. We were gonna call it Gravel Road Records but someone had already taken that name. But I’ve always been thinking – and America has always been fascinated with this idea of roads and highways and travel. That goes back on your albums, especially – so many of them have at least one road song. Exactly. I traveled around – by the time I was born, my dad was teaching at different colleges, until 1971 when he achieved tenure at the University of Arkansas. But until then, we lived all over the South. And he and my mother traveled, when they were growing up, because both of their fathers were Methodist ministers. So my mother lived in different towns around Louisiana, and my dad lived in different towns around Arkansas. And there’s all the folklore and Woody Guthrie traveling and the hoboes on the trains and Kerouac’s “On the Road” – the pioneers going out West. It’s all about travel. And I love Route 66 – that whole Americana … Thinking about the South makes you think about your dad. Obviously he was a huge inspiration to you. What were the most important things he taught you? We were extremely close. We had an extremely close bond growing up. One of the things he said was as a writer never to censor yourself. Maybe it’s because I was exposed to poets and other Southern writers … As a teenager I read everything I could get my hands on by Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. I identified with their writing. I’d seen the people they were writing about. One time I was doing an interview and [the interviewer] asked me, “Are there really people like that in the South? Does that world really exist?” And I said, “Yeah, absolutely.” Another time, someone in Europe asked me, “If you travel in the South now, can you see all those things on the side of the road that you’re talking about?” And I said, “Unfortunately now, you’d probably have to be on the interstate. You’d probably have to get off the interstate, get on the two-lane highways to find it all.” My dad would write about everything from a cat sleeping in a window to a wreck on a highway. There was no shame or guilt associated with [anything]. So he taught me never to censor myself … People used to ask me, when my songs were first getting discovered and listened to, about how dark my songs were. “They’re so dark, you have so many dark songs!” So that goes back to the beginning of your career, then? But compared to a lot of poetry your songs are not all that dark. No they’re not – that’s what I’m saying. But the majority of people don’t read poetry, I guess, or they look at it as different things. Probably with the “Sweet Old World” album, because that record had “Pineola” and “Sweet Old World” on it – both songs about suicide. For me it goes back to all the traditional folk songs I grew up listening to – all those Scottish and English ballads… Like the Child Ballads … Yeah – the Child Ballads. “Banks of the Ohio,” “Barbara Allen,” this imagery ... “Long Black Veil.” All those mountain songs were so incredibly dark, and deep ... Like that song that Ralph Stanley sang at the Grammys that year, “O Death” ... That inspired my song “Death Came.” Most people … I guess it’s a lack of education. There’s a lot of sad songs on the new album. Do sad songs or angry songs purge the emotions from you? Do they have a cathartic effect? Yes, they’re very cathartic, very therapeutic. Whenever I’m talking to people who don’t get it I try to explain to them, “OK, I’m an artist first and foremost. Just like a painter, or a poet, so the art is gonna come from me. I’m gonna do it, I have to do it – I do it as a release. It’s my life force. That’s how I deal with things.” Sometimes I cry. When I cry I know I’ve hit on something ... There’s certain songs when I’ve written then, I just sort of break down. That’s when I know, “OK, this is gonna be good. This is gonna touch people.” Then the craft of it is putting it all together so that it sounds good … But it all comes from me first. Your voice is also deeper and darker on this record. Were you trying to sing differently? Not really… But my voice is developing into that more. It’s just the nature of the songs. I did Steve Earle’s radio show recently and he really hit the nail on the head. He said, “I’ve never heard you this way before – just the sound of it.” He mentioned Chet Baker – who I’d always loved, and he’d always loved, the Chet Baker’s vocals were recorded, right in your face. Do you mean the early or the late Chet Baker? The one album that sticks out in my mind, which my dad listened to all the time, was an album called “Baker’s Holiday.” Right – the Billie Holiday tribute. I’ve always loved that sound. I’m thrilled that this album is so different. I didn’t make the same album. A big part of this album is [electric guitarist] Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz [who played acoustic and electric guitar on the album and co-produced it]. Bill Frisell is all over this record. He was only on a few tracks of the last one. We recorded some of them around the period, and it became obvious which songs were going to fit together. Not surprisingly, the majority of the songs Bill played on fit together – and those are the songs on this album. He’s just such a phenomenal … A lot of people think of him as a jazz guitarist. But if you let him go, he can play anything. He does all of these harmonics on his guitar. I don’t know what to do with the next album … I told [manager/husband] Tom [Overby], I don’t know if I want to make another album without Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz … It’s like a cocoon almost, the way both of them play, them together … And Bill’s sound is so signature, it just seems to wrap itself around the songs, give them a cushion. There aren’t a lot of instruments on these particular tracks – it’s pretty straightforward. This album is on your own label, Highway 20 … What kind of freedom do you get by doing that that you couldn’t do before? Well, that last double album – that wouldn’t have happened. After my contract with Lost Highway was over, we were shopping for a new label, and that was what Tom asked one of the labels. What would you think if we put a double album out? They were like, “No.” Right off the bat. It was like, “See ya.” My prolific-ness – which started shortly after my mother’s death, which was 2004, I started churning out a lot of songs. Right around the time of the “West” album. Owning your own label allows you to put a song like “Compassion” first [on “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone”] – a stripped-down acoustic thing. Just to make all your own decisions. Not worry about the length of some of the songs. On this album, we had to make a second CD because of that [almost 13-minute] song “Faith and Grace.” You’ve got a lot of long songs on this album. You see, I love that! You get more emotion that way? Yeah – it’s just more organic and natural. If you saw us play live, that’s how it would be. Instead of feeling that you have to edit everything down. That song “Faith and Grace” – we actually did shorten it, believe it or not. The original version is like 19 minutes long. That’s a Staples Singers song, right? I think it’s traditional. The version I got it from was Mississippi Fred McDowell, on an older album he did with his wife and some church people sing on it. Fantastic song – I adapted it, moved the lyrics around. Took the “Jesus” out of it to make it spiritual rather than religious. But that was one of those that just went and went – just a meditative, transcendental thing. David Bianco, our engineer, took the track and did a remix, “A Little More Faith and Grace.” It’s so good! We’re gonna release the remixed version on Record Store Day. When we got done with that track, I said, “That reminds me of John Coltrane’s 'A Love Supreme' or something." I remember working on “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” working with Rick Rubin – it was supposed to come out on his label, American. Long story short, I sent him some of the songs, and one of them was “Drunken Angel.” He thought it was too long. He said, “You need to take out a couple of verses.” I said, “Like hell!” Can you believe that, though?Lucinda Williams has been putting out artfully written, beautifully played records for decades now, and it’s tempting to take her for granted. But as her latest, “The Ghost of Highway 20,” shows, these don’t come without a deep expenditure of feeling. Williams is definitely not dashing these off. Some of “The Ghost of Highway 20” (her second double album in a row) grew out of the recording sessions for her 2014 album “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone,” but it has a different feel and a different emotional range. It’s not quite a concept record, but it’s very much an album about the small-town and small-city South and the roots music that emerged from those places. The album also became a tribute to her father, the poet Miller Williams, who died of complications from Alzheimer’s in January of 2015. Williams has never been shy about her father’s influence, but this album bears his stamp more than most. “Highway 20” includes a song about his decline, “If My Love Could Kill,” as well as an opening track called “Dust,” based on one of his poems. Williams, who has toured incessantly over the last few years, spoke to us from her hotel in New York, where she was preparing for her Tuesday night appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” (Williams took a brief break during the conversation to receive a delivery of mouthwash and toothpaste, which she was eager for after a long time on the road. “That’s not very rock ‘n’ roll sounding, is it?” she asked.) The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. This new album, “The Ghost of Highway 20,” feels a little different from your last one: It seems focused on the music and culture of the South. You’ve toured like crazy across your career, and gone back to places that you knew as a child. How much have those places changed since you first got to know them? Are some of them the same? Some of them are. The seed that was planted – the idea for the song “The Ghost of Highway 20” – was a couple years ago when we went to Macon, Georgia, to play the Cox [Capitol] Theatre. There we were in downtown Macon, and it had hardly changed. It was like a time warp or something. Other than that they’ve renovated the theater a bit. But there was one of those unisex black beauty salon-barber shop places that looked like it had been there since … Since Otis Redding was there. Yeah, right, exactly. I started school in Macon in the early ‘60s. That’s where my dad took me to see Blind Curley Brown, this street singer/preacher/guitar player – he used to sing down there on the street. It was my first exposure to that kind of music; my 5-year-old-brain absorbed that. Then he took me with him when he went to visit a niece of Flannery O’Connor in Milledgeville, which was near Macon. So I was very young, but those experiences had, needless to say, a major impact on me. Before we lived in Macon, my brother was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and my sister was born in Jackson, where my dad taught. When I went back to Macon, it was like a big circle. When the tour bus pulled onto the highway, I looked out the window and saw all these exit signs for these towns … There’s Vicksburg, there’s Jackson, there’s Monroe, Louisiana – one of the towns my mother lived, where she’s laid to rest. So there’s all that personal stuff, but it’s also a big Civil War area. The Delta blues players who are from around there … The whole place is filled with the spirits of the memories. Before I wrote that song, I came up with the idea for a label, Highway 20 Records. We were gonna call it Gravel Road Records but someone had already taken that name. But I’ve always been thinking – and America has always been fascinated with this idea of roads and highways and travel. That goes back on your albums, especially – so many of them have at least one road song. Exactly. I traveled around – by the time I was born, my dad was teaching at different colleges, until 1971 when he achieved tenure at the University of Arkansas. But until then, we lived all over the South. And he and my mother traveled, when they were growing up, because both of their fathers were Methodist ministers. So my mother lived in different towns around Louisiana, and my dad lived in different towns around Arkansas. And there’s all the folklore and Woody Guthrie traveling and the hoboes on the trains and Kerouac’s “On the Road” – the pioneers going out West. It’s all about travel. And I love Route 66 – that whole Americana … Thinking about the South makes you think about your dad. Obviously he was a huge inspiration to you. What were the most important things he taught you? We were extremely close. We had an extremely close bond growing up. One of the things he said was as a writer never to censor yourself. Maybe it’s because I was exposed to poets and other Southern writers … As a teenager I read everything I could get my hands on by Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. I identified with their writing. I’d seen the people they were writing about. One time I was doing an interview and [the interviewer] asked me, “Are there really people like that in the South? Does that world really exist?” And I said, “Yeah, absolutely.” Another time, someone in Europe asked me, “If you travel in the South now, can you see all those things on the side of the road that you’re talking about?” And I said, “Unfortunately now, you’d probably have to be on the interstate. You’d probably have to get off the interstate, get on the two-lane highways to find it all.” My dad would write about everything from a cat sleeping in a window to a wreck on a highway. There was no shame or guilt associated with [anything]. So he taught me never to censor myself … People used to ask me, when my songs were first getting discovered and listened to, about how dark my songs were. “They’re so dark, you have so many dark songs!” So that goes back to the beginning of your career, then? But compared to a lot of poetry your songs are not all that dark. No they’re not – that’s what I’m saying. But the majority of people don’t read poetry, I guess, or they look at it as different things. Probably with the “Sweet Old World” album, because that record had “Pineola” and “Sweet Old World” on it – both songs about suicide. For me it goes back to all the traditional folk songs I grew up listening to – all those Scottish and English ballads… Like the Child Ballads … Yeah – the Child Ballads. “Banks of the Ohio,” “Barbara Allen,” this imagery ... “Long Black Veil.” All those mountain songs were so incredibly dark, and deep ... Like that song that Ralph Stanley sang at the Grammys that year, “O Death” ... That inspired my song “Death Came.” Most people … I guess it’s a lack of education. There’s a lot of sad songs on the new album. Do sad songs or angry songs purge the emotions from you? Do they have a cathartic effect? Yes, they’re very cathartic, very therapeutic. Whenever I’m talking to people who don’t get it I try to explain to them, “OK, I’m an artist first and foremost. Just like a painter, or a poet, so the art is gonna come from me. I’m gonna do it, I have to do it – I do it as a release. It’s my life force. That’s how I deal with things.” Sometimes I cry. When I cry I know I’ve hit on something ... There’s certain songs when I’ve written then, I just sort of break down. That’s when I know, “OK, this is gonna be good. This is gonna touch people.” Then the craft of it is putting it all together so that it sounds good … But it all comes from me first. Your voice is also deeper and darker on this record. Were you trying to sing differently? Not really… But my voice is developing into that more. It’s just the nature of the songs. I did Steve Earle’s radio show recently and he really hit the nail on the head. He said, “I’ve never heard you this way before – just the sound of it.” He mentioned Chet Baker – who I’d always loved, and he’d always loved, the Chet Baker’s vocals were recorded, right in your face. Do you mean the early or the late Chet Baker? The one album that sticks out in my mind, which my dad listened to all the time, was an album called “Baker’s Holiday.” Right – the Billie Holiday tribute. I’ve always loved that sound. I’m thrilled that this album is so different. I didn’t make the same album. A big part of this album is [electric guitarist] Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz [who played acoustic and electric guitar on the album and co-produced it]. Bill Frisell is all over this record. He was only on a few tracks of the last one. We recorded some of them around the period, and it became obvious which songs were going to fit together. Not surprisingly, the majority of the songs Bill played on fit together – and those are the songs on this album. He’s just such a phenomenal … A lot of people think of him as a jazz guitarist. But if you let him go, he can play anything. He does all of these harmonics on his guitar. I don’t know what to do with the next album … I told [manager/husband] Tom [Overby], I don’t know if I want to make another album without Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz … It’s like a cocoon almost, the way both of them play, them together … And Bill’s sound is so signature, it just seems to wrap itself around the songs, give them a cushion. There aren’t a lot of instruments on these particular tracks – it’s pretty straightforward. This album is on your own label, Highway 20 … What kind of freedom do you get by doing that that you couldn’t do before? Well, that last double album – that wouldn’t have happened. After my contract with Lost Highway was over, we were shopping for a new label, and that was what Tom asked one of the labels. What would you think if we put a double album out? They were like, “No.” Right off the bat. It was like, “See ya.” My prolific-ness – which started shortly after my mother’s death, which was 2004, I started churning out a lot of songs. Right around the time of the “West” album. Owning your own label allows you to put a song like “Compassion” first [on “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone”] – a stripped-down acoustic thing. Just to make all your own decisions. Not worry about the length of some of the songs. On this album, we had to make a second CD because of that [almost 13-minute] song “Faith and Grace.” You’ve got a lot of long songs on this album. You see, I love that! You get more emotion that way? Yeah – it’s just more organic and natural. If you saw us play live, that’s how it would be. Instead of feeling that you have to edit everything down. That song “Faith and Grace” – we actually did shorten it, believe it or not. The original version is like 19 minutes long. That’s a Staples Singers song, right? I think it’s traditional. The version I got it from was Mississippi Fred McDowell, on an older album he did with his wife and some church people sing on it. Fantastic song – I adapted it, moved the lyrics around. Took the “Jesus” out of it to make it spiritual rather than religious. But that was one of those that just went and went – just a meditative, transcendental thing. David Bianco, our engineer, took the track and did a remix, “A Little More Faith and Grace.” It’s so good! We’re gonna release the remixed version on Record Store Day. When we got done with that track, I said, “That reminds me of John Coltrane’s 'A Love Supreme' or something." I remember working on “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” working with Rick Rubin – it was supposed to come out on his label, American. Long story short, I sent him some of the songs, and one of them was “Drunken Angel.” He thought it was too long. He said, “You need to take out a couple of verses.” I said, “Like hell!” Can you believe that, though?

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Kendrick Lamar won’t face backlash like Beyoncé: Socially conscious art, sexual expression and the policing of black women’s politics

Last week, Beyoncé took to the Super Bowl stage and performed the arguably "blackest" song of her career, "Formation," in which she pays homage to the Black Panthers, infamous for their denunciation of police brutality, and rejects the white beauty lens by celebrating her "negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils" and Blue Ivy's "baby hair and Afro." The morning after her performance, the Houston-bred icon's exploitation of black resistance on the most watched program in the world was the hot topic. The superstar was taken to task for the employing her blackness in both the song’s video and her half-time show to drive her brand and businesses, as one writer on Huffington Post noted how "Formation" “…just so happens to be released on the eve of her Super Bowl guest appearance ... and then there's more ... a new tour to spend your income tax refund check on!” Last night, just eight days later, rap's reigning conscious savior, Kendrick Lamar, took to the stage of the 58th Grammy Awards to perform a medley of his songs, including the anti-establishment anthem "Alright." Lamar delivered a performance lauded for its unapologetic blackness. His performance, complete with the visual symbolism of prison uniforms, chains and African drummers covered in body paint, was an audio-visual condemnation of white supremacy — most notably, European beauty standards and police brutality. Since his and Beyoncé's performances carried nearly identical messages, this morning I awaited the think pieces analyzing the Compton-bred lyricist's exploitation of black resistance on music's biggest televised stage. I have yet to see one among the dozens praising him. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post declared Kendrick’s performance “the only one worth watching,” while CNN raved about how the “fiery performance won Grammy night.” I suppose waiting for the critiques of Kendrick’s performance was pure cynicism. Experience taught me long ago that black women and black men are held to different and unequal standards in all things, even by each other. From the oft-cited statistic that 70 percent of children of black mothers are born out of wedlock, which places the blame at the feet of the mothers, to songs like Kanye West’s monstrously popular "Gold Digger," which paints black women seeking men of equal financial means as materialistic opportunists, black women are judged by insurmountable double standards. The difference in those standards is clearest and broadest within the rigid confines of how much of the black community defines what it means to be a conscious black woman, juxtaposed against the virtual carte blanche black men are given over their bodies, art and finances, without challenge to their commitment to black people. Beyoncé’s fashionably revealing reinterpretation of the the Black Panther Party's look, complete with fishnets, black leather leotard and blond weave, offered stark contrast to the conservative outfits typically donned by the ladies like Angela Davis, who’ve become synonymous with the Party. While the black man’s revolutionary uniform evolved from perfectly tailored suits and pompadours, to dashikis and Afros, to baggy jeans and cornrows, the metamorphosis for the black woman’s revolutionary garb reached final form decades ago. Black men, after all, whether in Levi’s or Kinte cloth, can still declare their allegiance to blackness no matter how they're dressed. Celebrating and embracing sensuality and fighting the revolution would seem to be mutually exclusive for the black woman, according to these double standards. So while Beyoncé’s reference in "Formation" to rewarding her man for good sex with Red Lobster precludes her from being for the revolution, Kendrick Lamar’s reference to both a threesome and rejecting capitalism within the same verse on A$AP Rocky’s "Fuckin' Problems" represents no conflict. Black men, after all, have the freedom of duality, to desire both sensual pleasure and freedom from the tools of oppression. Beyoncé risked losing fans when she condemned the crucial threat of state-sanctioned violence against black bodies — and to her critics, this represents not the evolution of her consciousness or a pledge to uphold and defend her people, but a publicity stunt to boost sales, thus driving her further to the top of the capitalist machine, an attitude hilariously parodied in the "Saturday Night Live" sketch "The Day Beyonce Turned Black." Kendrick Lamar’s six-minute performance fervently condemned police brutality against black people on music’s premiere awards show, where performances are directly responsible for immediate spikes in album sales — and this makes him a revolutionary. Black men, after all, are bold and heroic to stage performances expressing black rage in white spaces. Beyoncé's "Formation" seeks to destroy not only white supremacy, but also the black patriarchy, which tells us that free black women — like a bootylicious, booty-shaking, scantily clad, international pop star — cannot be a part of the revolution. Romanticized and fanatical as it may seem, Beyoncé in skimpy clothes on the Super Bowl halftime stage represents a resistance to oppression without respect to whom the oppressor may be. While Kendrick Lamar’s performance represent a powerful resistance as well, one can’t help but notice that his fight is only against structural racism — ignoring the misogynoir that keeps black women oppressed in both our blackness and womanhood.

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“They really don’t want this out”: The biggest Iraq War scandal that nobody’s talking about

The first 10 pages of “The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers” will rip your heart out. In the opening chapter of this new book, Joseph Hickman, a former U.S. Marine and Army sergeant, shares the brief and tragic life story of one Iraq War veteran. In a nutshell, a healthy young man shipped off to Iraq, was stationed at a U.S. military base where he was exposed to a constant stream of toxic smoke, returned home with horrible respiratory problems, was denied care by the VA, developed brain cancer and died. Thousands of soldiers have suffered similar fates since serving in the vicinity of the more than 250 military burn pits that operated at bases throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. Many who haven’t succumbed to their illnesses yet have passed along the legacy of their poisoning to their children. “The rate of having a child with birth defects is three times higher for service members who served in those countries,” according to the book. The impact on local civilian populations is even more widespread. Although collecting data in these war-ravaged areas is extremely difficult, the studies that have been conducted reveal sharp increases in cancer and leukemia rates and skyrocketing numbers of birth defects. The toxic legacies of these burn pits will likely continue to devastate these regions for decades. So what are the "burn pits"? When the U.S. military set up a base in Iraq or Afghanistan, instead of building incinerators to dispose of the thousands of pounds of waste produced each day, they burned the garbage in big holes in the ground. The garbage they constantly burned included “every type of waste imaginable” including “tires, lithium batteries, asbestos insulation, pesticide containers, Styrofoam, metals, paints, plastic, medical waste and even human corpses.” Here’s where the story gets even more infuriating. As a result of the privatization of many aspects of military operations, the burn pits were operated by Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), a former subsidiary of Halliburton, the company where Dick Cheney was CEO before ascending to the White House. During the Bush administration, Halliburton made nearly $40 billion from lucrative government contracts (despite many corruption scandals), Dick Cheney and his corporate allies got incredibly rich, and the soldiers whose lives have likely been destroyed by this reckless operation… are pretty much screwed. Top officials, including then-Gen. David Petraeus, initially denied that the burn pits were a health hazards, but mounting medical evidence contradicting the Defense Department’s position have brought this scandal into the spotlight. However, in a pattern that follows how Vietnam vets suffering from Agent Orange were treated, the Department of Veterans Affairs continues to deny medical coverage to most Iraq and Afghanistan veterans seeking treatment for burn pit-related illnesses. Joseph Hickman is hoping that his new book will help change that. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. This is one of the most devastating scandals to come out of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, so why hasn’t it gotten more attention? I think the Department of Defense does its best to squash this story and so does Veterans Affairs. They really don’t want this out at all. When the registry [for victims of burn pit pollution] came out, they even squashed the registry. It took them a year and a half past their due date to get it up, to actually have it running. If there were one thing that had the potential to bring it into the spotlight more, it was  Beau Biden’s recent death from brain cancer. As you write in the book, we obviously can’t be certain, but it seems that there is a very clear link between his death and his service in Iraq working in the vicinity of these burn pits and breathing in these hazardous fumes. Why wasn’t this enough to bring attention to this issue? I don’t know if it was political or not. When Beau died I was right in the middle of heavy research into the burn pits. I tried to contact his wife, Hallie, about two months after his death and I tried to contact the vice president; neither one would respond to me. It could have been my timing, too. I called at an awful time, really. This just happened last June, and maybe they haven’t absorbed it all yet. There are similarities to where he was stationed and how people died and it just brought up a lot of red flags for me. I think the case that you lay out in the book is pretty convincing. Although these wars started during the Bush years, Obama is now in his eighth year in office and still has not made this issue a priority. How much fault should we place on the Obama administration for the failure to address this problem? I think he holds a lot of responsibility for it, but I think the biggest problem is Congress and the Senate. Because when a soldier gets sick the first thing he [or she] does is write his congressman or senator if he’s not getting results from the VA or DoD. They still follow the chain of command, so that’s their last complaint, and the senators and congressmen have just really dropped the ball on this completely. And I think that is totally politically motivated, because a lot of these senators and congressmen they’re reaching out to are in bed with defense contractors. You specifically mention Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson as an example of a Tea Party politician who campaigned on a flag-waving platform of  building a strong military and supporting the troops, but then when he got into office voted to cut VA funding and didn’t make good on his promises. We’re seeing even more of this chest-thumping patriotism now in the presidential primary campaigns. Have you heard any of the presidential candidates address the topic of burn pits or the VA in a meaningful way, other than to use the VA as an attack line against Obama? No, none of them has mentioned the burn pits or soldiers suffering from the burn pits at all. Bernie Sanders has done a lot for veterans, probably more so than any other candidate, and he still hasn’t addressed this issue, either. You mention in the book that there were a few members of the military and KBR contractors that voiced concerns about the health hazards posed by the burn pits. Why was it so difficult for them to get their voices heard? One KBR employee was really harassed badly by KBR for coming forward. He felt he was threatened and he had a really hard time talking about it with me. He was really worried about repercussions. That’s really a reflection of the Obama administration. They haven’t defended whistle-blowers at all. They’ve attacked them. Obama’s presidency has been extremely disappointing in that area. I was surprised to learn in the book that Chelsea Manning was actually responsible for leaking some of the information about how the military was aware of the burn pit health hazards earlier than they let on. Several soldiers were absolutely shocked and surprised that Chelsea Manning released that document. It changed many of their minds about her. The military, for the most part, is a lot of Republicans or very conservative people. But when I shared this with several soldiers, it absolutely changed a lot of their views on Chelsea Manning. I said, “Look, she didn’t always give up things that were damaging to our country. These are really things that the administration doesn’t want you to see.” She showed that we got sick from the burn pits. You describe in the book how independent researchers have found a huge increase in birth defects, leukemia, cancer and other carcinogenic diseases among Iraqi and Afghan civilians living near the burn pits, which you contrast with the controversial World Health Organization report that contradicted those findings. There has been speculation that the U.S. used political pressure to influence the WHO report, which was quickly contradicted by several reputable medical journals. Has there been any confirmation or strong evidence in support of this theory? There’s a large group of epidemiologists that absolutely believe that that report was influenced by the U.S. government. Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a widely respected environmental toxicologist, has been there and seen the birth defects and how we literally destroyed that country with pollution. There are birth defects there that don’t even have medical names yet. One of the frustrating things you describe is that the Pentagon violated their own regulations but they still can’t be held legally responsible. As you say in the book, “under federal law the military can’t be held accountable, so nobody is to blame.” If no one can be held to account, what kind of positive outcomes can we hope for? They started the burn pit registry, which is modeled off of the Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome registries, which are failures. So we modeled it off a failed program. It took 27 years for the Agent Orange Vietnam veterans to actually receive any type of care, and they still don’t get the care they should. These numbers we’re talking about with the burn pits and Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome ... they’re so large that the government knows that if they treated all these soldiers the cost would be unbelievable. It’s something that they can’t afford, and I think that’s why it takes decades for them to treat them. The best way to help the soldiers involved in this is to actually believe what they’re saying. They believed in the soldiers when they sent them off to war. They believed they would go over there and get the job done, but when they come home and they complain of illnesses, they suddenly question their integrity. And that just has to stop. So there’s this dynamic where it’s in the VA’s interest to deny that soldiers really have these health problems in order to protect itself from being liable for covering those treatments. There are accounts in your book of hostile VA doctors telling patients that they’re healthy, but then independent doctors contradicting the VA’s diagnosis. Where does that culture come from? It’s because it’s a delayed casualty. It isn’t a limb missing or a bullethole in a person or something where there’s actually proof that their injury is service-connected, meaning they got their injury from the time they were in combat. So when they come in with these respiratory issues or cancers, it’s very hard for the soldier to prove that, “Hey, I got this on the battlefield,” because it’s not an injury that they received from their enemy. But the numbers show that there is a real pattern. You found the proof, so the denial is hard to grasp in the face of such mountains of evidence. Yeah, it’s to the point now where they can’t deny it, but they still fight tooth and nail not to give these veterans benefits. It’s just a budget issue now, and the soldiers are suffering from it. VA reform has been a big issue for some time now, so why haven’t we seen much progress or improvement? The VA has always been under-budgeted. The budget is just not there for them. Up until two years ago they were using a computer system that was - they didn’t have Windows, they didn’t have iOS, they were using stuff from 1985, 1986. This was just two years ago. That’s a fact. They needed a complete upgrade. It’s always been under budget, since I’ve been going there. There’s a lawsuit against KBR out there right now, and the biggest hurdle for the KBR lawsuit is [that] DoD will not speak against KBR for their misuse of the burn pits. And you can’t sue the government under the Feres Doctrine. A soldier can’t sue the government for his injuries, but he can sue a private contractor. But as long as the U.S. government stays solid on the issue and won’t speak out against KBR, it kind of creates a legal limbo where it’s their word against this massive corporation. The best testimony they could have is DoD saying, “Yes, you mistreated these burn pits.” But really, can the DoD even do that? Because they didn’t have any regulation in place for seven years on what they could burn or where they should be located or anything else. The DoD staying solidly aligned with KBR while soldiers are suffering is criminal. Did the military’s use of private contractors like KBR in some ways help to facilitate this crisis? KBR operated many of the burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are some regulations for contractors, but they’re not nearly as stringent, and the penalties are not nearly as harsh for contractors as they are for soldiers. So these contractors were super-careless with these burn pits. There were burning anything and everything in them, and they didn’t care and they didn’t think they could be held accountable. They’ve grown to the point where they feel that the government can’t operate without them. These companies have that arrogance. Contractors that were operating the burn pits in Iraq were actually told by their headquarters, “If they’re going to investigate us over these burn pits, don’t worry about it. If we pull out, they can’t run this base.” Have you ever heard Dick Cheney comment on this issue? His connections to Halliburton and KBR put him in a uniquely qualified position. Never once. Never once. I looked for anything like that and couldn’t find anything. End note: A portion of the proceeds from sales of "The Burn Pits" will be donated to the nonprofit organization www.burnpitspits360.orgThe first 10 pages of “The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers” will rip your heart out. In the opening chapter of this new book, Joseph Hickman, a former U.S. Marine and Army sergeant, shares the brief and tragic life story of one Iraq War veteran. In a nutshell, a healthy young man shipped off to Iraq, was stationed at a U.S. military base where he was exposed to a constant stream of toxic smoke, returned home with horrible respiratory problems, was denied care by the VA, developed brain cancer and died. Thousands of soldiers have suffered similar fates since serving in the vicinity of the more than 250 military burn pits that operated at bases throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. Many who haven’t succumbed to their illnesses yet have passed along the legacy of their poisoning to their children. “The rate of having a child with birth defects is three times higher for service members who served in those countries,” according to the book. The impact on local civilian populations is even more widespread. Although collecting data in these war-ravaged areas is extremely difficult, the studies that have been conducted reveal sharp increases in cancer and leukemia rates and skyrocketing numbers of birth defects. The toxic legacies of these burn pits will likely continue to devastate these regions for decades. So what are the "burn pits"? When the U.S. military set up a base in Iraq or Afghanistan, instead of building incinerators to dispose of the thousands of pounds of waste produced each day, they burned the garbage in big holes in the ground. The garbage they constantly burned included “every type of waste imaginable” including “tires, lithium batteries, asbestos insulation, pesticide containers, Styrofoam, metals, paints, plastic, medical waste and even human corpses.” Here’s where the story gets even more infuriating. As a result of the privatization of many aspects of military operations, the burn pits were operated by Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), a former subsidiary of Halliburton, the company where Dick Cheney was CEO before ascending to the White House. During the Bush administration, Halliburton made nearly $40 billion from lucrative government contracts (despite many corruption scandals), Dick Cheney and his corporate allies got incredibly rich, and the soldiers whose lives have likely been destroyed by this reckless operation… are pretty much screwed. Top officials, including then-Gen. David Petraeus, initially denied that the burn pits were a health hazards, but mounting medical evidence contradicting the Defense Department’s position have brought this scandal into the spotlight. However, in a pattern that follows how Vietnam vets suffering from Agent Orange were treated, the Department of Veterans Affairs continues to deny medical coverage to most Iraq and Afghanistan veterans seeking treatment for burn pit-related illnesses. Joseph Hickman is hoping that his new book will help change that. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. This is one of the most devastating scandals to come out of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, so why hasn’t it gotten more attention? I think the Department of Defense does its best to squash this story and so does Veterans Affairs. They really don’t want this out at all. When the registry [for victims of burn pit pollution] came out, they even squashed the registry. It took them a year and a half past their due date to get it up, to actually have it running. If there were one thing that had the potential to bring it into the spotlight more, it was  Beau Biden’s recent death from brain cancer. As you write in the book, we obviously can’t be certain, but it seems that there is a very clear link between his death and his service in Iraq working in the vicinity of these burn pits and breathing in these hazardous fumes. Why wasn’t this enough to bring attention to this issue? I don’t know if it was political or not. When Beau died I was right in the middle of heavy research into the burn pits. I tried to contact his wife, Hallie, about two months after his death and I tried to contact the vice president; neither one would respond to me. It could have been my timing, too. I called at an awful time, really. This just happened last June, and maybe they haven’t absorbed it all yet. There are similarities to where he was stationed and how people died and it just brought up a lot of red flags for me. I think the case that you lay out in the book is pretty convincing. Although these wars started during the Bush years, Obama is now in his eighth year in office and still has not made this issue a priority. How much fault should we place on the Obama administration for the failure to address this problem? I think he holds a lot of responsibility for it, but I think the biggest problem is Congress and the Senate. Because when a soldier gets sick the first thing he [or she] does is write his congressman or senator if he’s not getting results from the VA or DoD. They still follow the chain of command, so that’s their last complaint, and the senators and congressmen have just really dropped the ball on this completely. And I think that is totally politically motivated, because a lot of these senators and congressmen they’re reaching out to are in bed with defense contractors. You specifically mention Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson as an example of a Tea Party politician who campaigned on a flag-waving platform of  building a strong military and supporting the troops, but then when he got into office voted to cut VA funding and didn’t make good on his promises. We’re seeing even more of this chest-thumping patriotism now in the presidential primary campaigns. Have you heard any of the presidential candidates address the topic of burn pits or the VA in a meaningful way, other than to use the VA as an attack line against Obama? No, none of them has mentioned the burn pits or soldiers suffering from the burn pits at all. Bernie Sanders has done a lot for veterans, probably more so than any other candidate, and he still hasn’t addressed this issue, either. You mention in the book that there were a few members of the military and KBR contractors that voiced concerns about the health hazards posed by the burn pits. Why was it so difficult for them to get their voices heard? One KBR employee was really harassed badly by KBR for coming forward. He felt he was threatened and he had a really hard time talking about it with me. He was really worried about repercussions. That’s really a reflection of the Obama administration. They haven’t defended whistle-blowers at all. They’ve attacked them. Obama’s presidency has been extremely disappointing in that area. I was surprised to learn in the book that Chelsea Manning was actually responsible for leaking some of the information about how the military was aware of the burn pit health hazards earlier than they let on. Several soldiers were absolutely shocked and surprised that Chelsea Manning released that document. It changed many of their minds about her. The military, for the most part, is a lot of Republicans or very conservative people. But when I shared this with several soldiers, it absolutely changed a lot of their views on Chelsea Manning. I said, “Look, she didn’t always give up things that were damaging to our country. These are really things that the administration doesn’t want you to see.” She showed that we got sick from the burn pits. You describe in the book how independent researchers have found a huge increase in birth defects, leukemia, cancer and other carcinogenic diseases among Iraqi and Afghan civilians living near the burn pits, which you contrast with the controversial World Health Organization report that contradicted those findings. There has been speculation that the U.S. used political pressure to influence the WHO report, which was quickly contradicted by several reputable medical journals. Has there been any confirmation or strong evidence in support of this theory? There’s a large group of epidemiologists that absolutely believe that that report was influenced by the U.S. government. Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a widely respected environmental toxicologist, has been there and seen the birth defects and how we literally destroyed that country with pollution. There are birth defects there that don’t even have medical names yet. One of the frustrating things you describe is that the Pentagon violated their own regulations but they still can’t be held legally responsible. As you say in the book, “under federal law the military can’t be held accountable, so nobody is to blame.” If no one can be held to account, what kind of positive outcomes can we hope for? They started the burn pit registry, which is modeled off of the Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome registries, which are failures. So we modeled it off a failed program. It took 27 years for the Agent Orange Vietnam veterans to actually receive any type of care, and they still don’t get the care they should. These numbers we’re talking about with the burn pits and Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome ... they’re so large that the government knows that if they treated all these soldiers the cost would be unbelievable. It’s something that they can’t afford, and I think that’s why it takes decades for them to treat them. The best way to help the soldiers involved in this is to actually believe what they’re saying. They believed in the soldiers when they sent them off to war. They believed they would go over there and get the job done, but when they come home and they complain of illnesses, they suddenly question their integrity. And that just has to stop. So there’s this dynamic where it’s in the VA’s interest to deny that soldiers really have these health problems in order to protect itself from being liable for covering those treatments. There are accounts in your book of hostile VA doctors telling patients that they’re healthy, but then independent doctors contradicting the VA’s diagnosis. Where does that culture come from? It’s because it’s a delayed casualty. It isn’t a limb missing or a bullethole in a person or something where there’s actually proof that their injury is service-connected, meaning they got their injury from the time they were in combat. So when they come in with these respiratory issues or cancers, it’s very hard for the soldier to prove that, “Hey, I got this on the battlefield,” because it’s not an injury that they received from their enemy. But the numbers show that there is a real pattern. You found the proof, so the denial is hard to grasp in the face of such mountains of evidence. Yeah, it’s to the point now where they can’t deny it, but they still fight tooth and nail not to give these veterans benefits. It’s just a budget issue now, and the soldiers are suffering from it. VA reform has been a big issue for some time now, so why haven’t we seen much progress or improvement? The VA has always been under-budgeted. The budget is just not there for them. Up until two years ago they were using a computer system that was - they didn’t have Windows, they didn’t have iOS, they were using stuff from 1985, 1986. This was just two years ago. That’s a fact. They needed a complete upgrade. It’s always been under budget, since I’ve been going there. There’s a lawsuit against KBR out there right now, and the biggest hurdle for the KBR lawsuit is [that] DoD will not speak against KBR for their misuse of the burn pits. And you can’t sue the government under the Feres Doctrine. A soldier can’t sue the government for his injuries, but he can sue a private contractor. But as long as the U.S. government stays solid on the issue and won’t speak out against KBR, it kind of creates a legal limbo where it’s their word against this massive corporation. The best testimony they could have is DoD saying, “Yes, you mistreated these burn pits.” But really, can the DoD even do that? Because they didn’t have any regulation in place for seven years on what they could burn or where they should be located or anything else. The DoD staying solidly aligned with KBR while soldiers are suffering is criminal. Did the military’s use of private contractors like KBR in some ways help to facilitate this crisis? KBR operated many of the burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are some regulations for contractors, but they’re not nearly as stringent, and the penalties are not nearly as harsh for contractors as they are for soldiers. So these contractors were super-careless with these burn pits. There were burning anything and everything in them, and they didn’t care and they didn’t think they could be held accountable. They’ve grown to the point where they feel that the government can’t operate without them. These companies have that arrogance. Contractors that were operating the burn pits in Iraq were actually told by their headquarters, “If they’re going to investigate us over these burn pits, don’t worry about it. If we pull out, they can’t run this base.” Have you ever heard Dick Cheney comment on this issue? His connections to Halliburton and KBR put him in a uniquely qualified position. Never once. Never once. I looked for anything like that and couldn’t find anything. End note: A portion of the proceeds from sales of "The Burn Pits" will be donated to the nonprofit organization www.burnpitspits360.org

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Legalization comes to Yankee country: Is this the year New England goes green?

No state east of the Mississippi has legalized marijuana, but that's very likely to change this year, and New England will be leading the way. Two of the six New England states will likely let the voters make the call in November, while the others all have legalization bills pending. So far, with the exception of Washington, D.C., where voters elected to legalize the possession and cultivation, but not the sale of marijuana in 2014, all of the legalization action has been in the West. The four states that have legalized it so far—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington—are all Western states. More Western states will likely legalize it this year, including the nation's most populous, California, as well as Arizona and Nevada. The Nevada Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act has already qualified for the November ballot, while the Arizona campaign behind that's state's Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act is well-advanced in signature gathering and appears poised to easily qualify for the ballot as well. Meanwhile, California's Control, Regulate and Tax Adult Use of Marijuana Act (AUMA) is late out of the gate, but well-financed and broadly supported. It, too, should be on the ballot in November. Another possible legalization state this year is Michigan, where the campaign behind the Michigan Marijuana Legalization, Regulation and Economic Stimulus Act just last week announced that it has 240,000 raw signatures and is aiming for 300,000 by March 15. But it needs 252,000 valid voter signatures to qualify, and with the rule of thumb for petition campaigns being that between 20% and 30% of raw signatures are likely to be invalidated, whether the Michigan initiative will qualify remains to be seen. But it's Yankee country that will see the most concentrated regional push toward marijuana legalization this year. Initiatives that make the ballot will go before New England populations that are showing majority support for legalization this year, and, while progress toward legalization through the legislative process can be achingly difficult, the region also appears poised to produce the first state to free the weed through the legislature, not the popular vote. Here's the rundown on New England legalization efforts this year. Chances are good that legalization will happen in two of them—the initiative states—and possibly in one or more of the other states: Connecticut. Earlier this month, Rep. Juan Candelaria (D-New Haven) introduced House Bill 5209, which would allow adults to use, grow, and sell marijuana. Candelaria introduced a similar bill last year that went nowhere. "I'm going to be pushing very hard," Candelaria said. "I'm going to be engaging my leadership in conversation to at least allow a public hearing." Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) said the same day he could only support medical marijuana. "That's as far as I'm comfortable going," the governor said. Maine. The legalization initiative from the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol has not yet officially qualified for the ballot, but is poised to. On February 1, the campaign turned in more than 103,000 raw signatures from its petition drive. It only needs 61,000 valid voter signatures to qualify for the November ballot, and should have a sufficient cushion to do so.  The most recent of Mainers' attitudes toward marijuana legalization, from the spring of 2015, had support at 65%. Massachusetts. The legalization initiative from the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol has already qualified for the ballot, but under Massachusetts law, the legislature must first take up the issue. If, as expected, it fails to adopt legalization, the campaign must then collect another 10,000 signatures to place the initiative on the November ballot. It should be able to do that easily, and if it gets on the ballot, it should win, although perhaps not as handily as Maine. There are no hot-off-the-press polls, but a 2014 poll had support at 53% and a Boston Globe poll from last year had a dead heat, with 48% in favor, 47% opposed. Numbers this tight means it's not a done deal, but given expected high voter turnout this election year, the Bay State should be able to pull it off. New Hampshire. The House actually passed a legalization bill in 2014, only to see it die in the Senate. This year, there are already three legalization bills filed, but two of them have already been deemed "inexpedient to legislate" in committee. The remaining legalization bill, House Bill 1610, is currently before the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee. Even if the bill were to pass the House, it faces a tough battle in the Senate. In addition to killing legalization in 2014, the Senate has at least twice killed decriminalization bills that passed the House. Rhode Island. Scott Slater (D-Providence) said he will file a marijuana legalization bill in the General Assembly this week, and Sen. Joshua Miller (D-Cranston) will file companion legislation in the Senate. As of Saturday, the bills have not yet been posted on the legislative website, but they are definitely coming. This marks the fifth consecutive year legalization bills have been filed in Providence, and they have previously been stifled, but there are signs progress could be made this year. The Senate bill has 17 cosponsors (out of 38 senators), and the House bill has more than 30 cosponsors. Republican House Leader Brian Newberry (R-North Smithfield) supports it, and House Speaker Nick Mattiello (D-Cranston), who has long opposed legalization, is now becoming "more open-minded" as eyes tax revenues from pot in the already legal states. Vermont. The Green Mountain State is the most likely to actually pass a legalization bill this year. Senate Bill 241, backed by Gov. Peter Shumlin (D), has already passed the Senate Judiciary and Finance committees and is moving toward a Senate floor vote. But the committees have amended the bill to kill home cultivation and to reduce the legalized amount from an ounce to a half ounce. And if and when the bill gets out of the Senate, it still faces a tough battle in the House. This could well be the year New England goes green. Winning in three states—Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont—would be a big victory; winning in more would be a very pleasant surprise. Not winning in any of them would be a huge setback for the marijuana reform movement, but at this point, that looks extremely unlikely. Phillip Smith is editor of the AlterNet Drug Reporter and author of the Drug War Chronicle. No state east of the Mississippi has legalized marijuana, but that's very likely to change this year, and New England will be leading the way. Two of the six New England states will likely let the voters make the call in November, while the others all have legalization bills pending. So far, with the exception of Washington, D.C., where voters elected to legalize the possession and cultivation, but not the sale of marijuana in 2014, all of the legalization action has been in the West. The four states that have legalized it so far—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington—are all Western states. More Western states will likely legalize it this year, including the nation's most populous, California, as well as Arizona and Nevada. The Nevada Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act has already qualified for the November ballot, while the Arizona campaign behind that's state's Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act is well-advanced in signature gathering and appears poised to easily qualify for the ballot as well. Meanwhile, California's Control, Regulate and Tax Adult Use of Marijuana Act (AUMA) is late out of the gate, but well-financed and broadly supported. It, too, should be on the ballot in November. Another possible legalization state this year is Michigan, where the campaign behind the Michigan Marijuana Legalization, Regulation and Economic Stimulus Act just last week announced that it has 240,000 raw signatures and is aiming for 300,000 by March 15. But it needs 252,000 valid voter signatures to qualify, and with the rule of thumb for petition campaigns being that between 20% and 30% of raw signatures are likely to be invalidated, whether the Michigan initiative will qualify remains to be seen. But it's Yankee country that will see the most concentrated regional push toward marijuana legalization this year. Initiatives that make the ballot will go before New England populations that are showing majority support for legalization this year, and, while progress toward legalization through the legislative process can be achingly difficult, the region also appears poised to produce the first state to free the weed through the legislature, not the popular vote. Here's the rundown on New England legalization efforts this year. Chances are good that legalization will happen in two of them—the initiative states—and possibly in one or more of the other states: Connecticut. Earlier this month, Rep. Juan Candelaria (D-New Haven) introduced House Bill 5209, which would allow adults to use, grow, and sell marijuana. Candelaria introduced a similar bill last year that went nowhere. "I'm going to be pushing very hard," Candelaria said. "I'm going to be engaging my leadership in conversation to at least allow a public hearing." Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) said the same day he could only support medical marijuana. "That's as far as I'm comfortable going," the governor said. Maine. The legalization initiative from the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol has not yet officially qualified for the ballot, but is poised to. On February 1, the campaign turned in more than 103,000 raw signatures from its petition drive. It only needs 61,000 valid voter signatures to qualify for the November ballot, and should have a sufficient cushion to do so.  The most recent of Mainers' attitudes toward marijuana legalization, from the spring of 2015, had support at 65%. Massachusetts. The legalization initiative from the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol has already qualified for the ballot, but under Massachusetts law, the legislature must first take up the issue. If, as expected, it fails to adopt legalization, the campaign must then collect another 10,000 signatures to place the initiative on the November ballot. It should be able to do that easily, and if it gets on the ballot, it should win, although perhaps not as handily as Maine. There are no hot-off-the-press polls, but a 2014 poll had support at 53% and a Boston Globe poll from last year had a dead heat, with 48% in favor, 47% opposed. Numbers this tight means it's not a done deal, but given expected high voter turnout this election year, the Bay State should be able to pull it off. New Hampshire. The House actually passed a legalization bill in 2014, only to see it die in the Senate. This year, there are already three legalization bills filed, but two of them have already been deemed "inexpedient to legislate" in committee. The remaining legalization bill, House Bill 1610, is currently before the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee. Even if the bill were to pass the House, it faces a tough battle in the Senate. In addition to killing legalization in 2014, the Senate has at least twice killed decriminalization bills that passed the House. Rhode Island. Scott Slater (D-Providence) said he will file a marijuana legalization bill in the General Assembly this week, and Sen. Joshua Miller (D-Cranston) will file companion legislation in the Senate. As of Saturday, the bills have not yet been posted on the legislative website, but they are definitely coming. This marks the fifth consecutive year legalization bills have been filed in Providence, and they have previously been stifled, but there are signs progress could be made this year. The Senate bill has 17 cosponsors (out of 38 senators), and the House bill has more than 30 cosponsors. Republican House Leader Brian Newberry (R-North Smithfield) supports it, and House Speaker Nick Mattiello (D-Cranston), who has long opposed legalization, is now becoming "more open-minded" as eyes tax revenues from pot in the already legal states. Vermont. The Green Mountain State is the most likely to actually pass a legalization bill this year. Senate Bill 241, backed by Gov. Peter Shumlin (D), has already passed the Senate Judiciary and Finance committees and is moving toward a Senate floor vote. But the committees have amended the bill to kill home cultivation and to reduce the legalized amount from an ounce to a half ounce. And if and when the bill gets out of the Senate, it still faces a tough battle in the House. This could well be the year New England goes green. Winning in three states—Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont—would be a big victory; winning in more would be a very pleasant surprise. Not winning in any of them would be a huge setback for the marijuana reform movement, but at this point, that looks extremely unlikely. Phillip Smith is editor of the AlterNet Drug Reporter and author of the Drug War Chronicle.

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“There’s something ‘X-Men’ about it”: Alex Gibney and “Daily Show” alum Kahane Cooperman on “The New Yorker Presents,” their new mutant storytelling show

“The New Yorker Presents,” which debuts today on Amazon Studios, is not quite like anything that has come before it. It’s a news program filtered through the elegant lens of the New Yorker, meaning it has a certain amount of high-quality dramatic flair built into it. The episodes are all little documentaries, but to be more exact, they’re little portfolios of even smaller documentaries—a 10-minute segment here, a five-minute interview there. And breaking up the reportage and information are little moments of lightness or levity—a glimpse into the process of a cartoonist that might last just 60 seconds; a series of snapshots of New York City through the eyes of a blind person, that might last just two minutes. In one episode, Steve Buscemi plays God and Brett Gelman his sole prophet, who is ordered to run around a Food Bazaar parking lot in a bathing suit, prophesying the end of days. It’s a Shouts & Murmurs column come to life, or perhaps a cartoon’s punch line taken to the nth degree. And it’s just one of the many little vignettes that “The New Yorker Presents” offers its viewers. The series is Amazon Studios’ first “reality” or documentary series, and also its first to be released serially—two episodes per week—instead of the all-at-once dump that has characterized streaming platforms. The series is also the New Yorker’s first foray into television. The result is a surprisingly pleasant and bite-size hybrid of two very different sensibilities, one that offers that difficult-to-imitate combination of breadth and depth that reading the New Yorker provides. At times, of course, it suffers from the same twee mustache-twirling superiority that the magazine does—somewhere in the middle of a film version of a Miranda July short story, you might find yourself wondering, why does this exist—but at its best, it offers a beautiful and high-quality visual component to the New Yorker’s greatest strengths, whether that is a trip to a fried-chicken institution in Harlem or a journey into the dozens of shootings by police in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Executive producer Alex Gibney is a documentary filmmaker renowned for “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief” and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which won an Oscar. He brought on former “Daily Show” showrunner Kahane Cooperman to run “The New Yorker Presents” right after former host Jon Stewart announced his retirement. I sat down with them both to hear how this odd but lovely little news program came to be. Did you guys get pizza delivered to you by drone, like “Transparent” did? Kahane Cooperman: [Laughs] The only drones in our show are used to get beautiful footage for our pieces. Alex Gibney: How come we didn’t get any pizza? KC: I don’t know, that’s not fair! Look, win a Golden Globe and then maybe you can get some pizza. AG: I’m taking this to Netflix. KC: I’m gonna text them right now. This actually leads into one of my real questions. How did this project end up on Amazon? AG: The Amazon part was pre-me. Amazon and Condé Nast, I think, had formed some kind of common cause and then my company was approached to see if I would be interested in coming on as executive producer. They didn’t have a particular plan at that time, just that they knew they wanted it to be a half-hour show. So I got the gig, and I went in and talked to [New Yorker editor] David Remnick. He was very much of the mind that he wasn’t interested in seeing just the recapitulation of New Yorker pieces. The idea of doing riffs and also doing it with different authors, much like the New Yorker, was very exciting and appealing to him. I had had some experience doing that. I had done a series on the blues with Martin Scorsese and there were eight feature film directors, each one doing a different area of the blues but doing it their own way. So then I thought, “Well, now what do I do, I have to have somebody to really do it.” The day after Jon Stewart said he wasn’t coming back I thought, “Ah!” and called up Kahane Cooperman. You guys had worked together before? KC: Never! I had met him a few times socially. So you just knew? AG: I knew. And I knew that she had been there for a long time and I thought, “Wouldn’t this be a perfect fit.” We had done the pilot, and Amazon liked the pilot and said we’re going to do the series, now we needed a showrunner, someone who was really going to put it together. I like that the show has segments. It rolls forward a lot like the way that a news show does—like “The Daily Show.” KC: I think it’s maybe one of the reasons that Alex thought of me. Not just the show I was coming from, but that I have, I think, an unusual hybrid résumé. I come from a filmmaking tradition and a storytelling background, but I’ve applied it to this television production. So somehow I’ve emerged like a mutant who can straddle both worlds, which is what I think he needed for this. It’s kind of a mutant show, too. KC: It is! In the best way possible. AG: There’s something “X-Men” about it. KC: Some mutants are really hot. [Laughs] AG: She only had one day off [between “The Daily Show” and “The New Yorker Presents"]. KC: Two. I had a weekend in between the two. I just had to jump right in. And it never gave me a moment to feel completely overwhelmed and intimidated by the idea of taking this incredible institution of the New Yorker and using it as a springboard for this whole other new kind of show—which is a pretty daunting thing. And working with both in-house and out-of-house teams of filmmakers, all simultaneously, all at different phases of production, to create more than 50 films in a number of months at a really high standard. It was a huge, huge undertaking. “The New Yorker Presents” is a bit of an ambiguous title. How does this program fit in with the mission of the magazine? AG: I think they would be happy if [the show] got more people to read the New Yorker and it celebrated what [the magazine] did. But I think there’s another aspect to that “Presents” model. Martin Scorsese does that with [the phrase] “Martin Scorsese presents,” which is a way of saying, I’m getting out of the way, but I’m showing you something that I think you’ll really enjoy and that I believe in. It’s a way of saying: That spirit that you like in the magazine, for those of you who read the magazine, that spirit will be here, but for those of you who haven’t read the magazine, check it out. It’s kind of a celebration rather than a promotion, if you know what I mean. It’s a celebration of storytelling. The episodes are all finished, but they’re being released on Amazon twice a week. How do you make something feel timely and relevant with that kind of a release schedule? KC: It’s a really good question, and it’s one we talked about a lot, because we’re not on nightly and it takes a while to turn around these films to have them be at the quality we want. They all get fact-checked by the New Yorker; we license from the writers themselves; everything takes time. What that allows you to do is—it gives you great time, to explore certain issues more in-depth. What we can’t do yet, but what we’d like to do, is perhaps come up with a mechanism in future seasons—should we be so lucky—to address things a little more topically and quickly. We’ve talked about some ways to do that. What I will say is that in this season, we didn’t originally include an Adam Gopnik essay about guns and gun control, but given the unfortunate and escalating build of gun incidents—not that we need any more to let us know that it’s a terrible epidemic—but when San Bernardino happened most recently, we were all compelled, even though we were kind of close to being done with our production period, to do something on that subject. Because we don’t want to have a full season of “The New Yorker Presents” and not anywhere in the mix address the gun issue. So that was, for right now, as close as we could get to being topical—but then again, you also have to be a little careful. You can’t make it all about one incident because, god forbid, there could be another incident between then and when you do it. But you can address the more universal issues of it. Luckily with the New Yorker, and with a prolific writer like Adam Gopnik, it was easy to cull from several different essays that he’s written over the years in the aftermath of various attacks — he was a collaborator [on the segment] — to come up with an essay that addresses the gun issue in a more evergreen way. AG: You want to be part of the national conversation, the conversation that’s happening now. So does the New Yorker. And I think — Amazon willing — going into a season two, we would find a way to be a bit more responsive. Amazon, too, has issues in terms of how they’re posting the stuff on the site—there are technical issues. So, to begin to work those things out so that we can slot in something, I think would be a goal for next season. KC: We would love to, if there’s a way to figure it out, keep a kind of modular, open slot at the top of each episode that we could then fill. AG: —not unlike the magazine— KC: —that we could then fill with something incredibly current. I think that we could build a machine in-house to turn that kind of stuff around fast at a high-quality level. But there’s also technical issues that are no small thing. Watching each half-hour episode sort of feels like reading the New Yorker. How do you create that feeling as you’re curating the segments? KC: I loved doing this job. One of my favorite things was figuring that out. My conceptual idea was to create a bank of all the films first and not preconceive any episodes, and wait to see how those films come in and how they feel and what emotional rigors they put you through, and then, based on that and topic and voice, see what might go with what. I keep saying I “DJ-ed” the episodes—but I kind of did! I had all these films, and then almost cafeteria-style, I was able to pick what might go with what. And because no episode is alike, and no piece is alike — they’re different subjects from different voices in different styles from different filmmakers, nonfiction, fiction, humor, poetry, cartoons — how do you make all of these very different things feel like they’re from the same universe? I had to ask myself what that universe was, [because that would become] the connective tissue between everything that makes it, in the end, feel like it’s part of a whole. That universe is our interstitial dips into behind the scenes of the New Yorker, which is the source. And then also our dips behind the windows and doors of the city that the New Yorker is an icon of. That is what we used as our glue. Because really, those moments, those shorts, are no different than our views into the worlds that our longer pieces show you. They’re all showing you someone’s life behind a door or window or whatever. Both of your past work, whether it’s “The Daily Show” or “Going Clear,” has tended toward a strong point of view. The New Yorker theoretically has a more objective standard. Was showing a balanced point of view something that you had to consider, in the Adam Gopnik guns essay, for example? Were you assuming the audience leans a certain way politically? KC: I’m not assuming anything about our audience. We’re starting with the writer, especially on our essay pieces, that’s one person’s point of view. So if we’re choosing to do an essay piece, and we happen to do two Adam Gopnik essays, you’re taking your cues from the writer’s point of view. In our other pieces—“The Agent,” [Alex’s] film, has a very strong point of view. It’s [his] point of view, but I also think that point of view was in the original article. AG: It was in the original article. I think many articles in the New Yorker have a strong point of view, but they are so rigorously fact-checked. I wouldn’t call them objective, but they feel fair. They’re also truthful, in the sense that they’re not factually inaccurate. But they may take a point of view. As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, “I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view.” Which is, I think, a part of the spirit of the New Yorker. Another way of saying it, there’s a great quote by the physicist Richard Feynman, who said, “It’s great to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.” Lastly—you’ve got luminaries all over this series, from Marina Abramovic to Steve Buscemi. How did you get all of the great talent to work on and participate in this show? AG: That’s where the New Yorker helps. Everybody wants to be a part of this, because there’s such a well of good feeling about that magazine that you say “New Yorker” and it’s like… [whooshing noise]. KC: Some of the actors we got were personal relationships. We used a casting agency. But people are excited by the New Yorker—and rightfully so.

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Jabbing “obstructionist” Senate, Obama outright rejects GOP talking point that he can’t nominate Scalia’s successor

President Obama on Tuesday responded to demands by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans that he forego a Supreme Court nomination following the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Obama — speaking at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Leaders Summit in California— extended "heartfelt condolences" to the family of Scalia, whom he called, "a giant on the Supreme Court."

Asked what he would do if McConnell blocked his SCOTUS nominee:

"The Constitution is pretty clear about what's supposed to happen now: When there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the President of the United States is to nominate someone. The senate is to consider that nomination and either they disapprove of that nominee or that nominee is elevated to the Supreme Court.

"Historically, this has not been viewed as a question."

"I'm amused when I hear people who claim to be strict interpreters of the Constitution suddenly reading into it a whole series of provisions that are not there," Obama continued, with an overt jab at Republican lawmakers who've bended over backwards in the days following Scalia's death to deny the President his Constitutional duty to appoint Supreme Court justices. "We've almost gotten accustomed to how obstructionist the Senate has become when it comes to nominations," Obama added. "In some ways, this argument is just an extension of what we've seen in the Senate, generally." That said, Obama suggested, "This would be a good moment for us to rise above" gridlock and obstructionism on Capitol Hill. Regardless of anticipated resistance from the right, Obama said he intends "to nominate, in due time, a very well-qualified candidate. If we are following basic precedent, then that nominee will be presented before the committees, the vote will be taken and, ultimately, they will be confirmed."

President Obama on Tuesday responded to demands by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans that he forego a Supreme Court nomination following the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Obama — speaking at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Leaders Summit in California— extended "heartfelt condolences" to the family of Scalia, whom he called, "a giant on the Supreme Court."

Asked what he would do if McConnell blocked his SCOTUS nominee:

"The Constitution is pretty clear about what's supposed to happen now: When there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the President of the United States is to nominate someone. The senate is to consider that nomination and either they disapprove of that nominee or that nominee is elevated to the Supreme Court.

"Historically, this has not been viewed as a question."

"I'm amused when I hear people who claim to be strict interpreters of the Constitution suddenly reading into it a whole series of provisions that are not there," Obama continued, with an overt jab at Republican lawmakers who've bended over backwards in the days following Scalia's death to deny the President his Constitutional duty to appoint Supreme Court justices. "We've almost gotten accustomed to how obstructionist the Senate has become when it comes to nominations," Obama added. "In some ways, this argument is just an extension of what we've seen in the Senate, generally." That said, Obama suggested, "This would be a good moment for us to rise above" gridlock and obstructionism on Capitol Hill. Regardless of anticipated resistance from the right, Obama said he intends "to nominate, in due time, a very well-qualified candidate. If we are following basic precedent, then that nominee will be presented before the committees, the vote will be taken and, ultimately, they will be confirmed."

President Obama on Tuesday responded to demands by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans that he forego a Supreme Court nomination following the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Obama — speaking at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Leaders Summit in California— extended "heartfelt condolences" to the family of Scalia, whom he called, "a giant on the Supreme Court."

Asked what he would do if McConnell blocked his SCOTUS nominee:

"The Constitution is pretty clear about what's supposed to happen now: When there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the President of the United States is to nominate someone. The senate is to consider that nomination and either they disapprove of that nominee or that nominee is elevated to the Supreme Court.

"Historically, this has not been viewed as a question."

"I'm amused when I hear people who claim to be strict interpreters of the Constitution suddenly reading into it a whole series of provisions that are not there," Obama continued, with an overt jab at Republican lawmakers who've bended over backwards in the days following Scalia's death to deny the President his Constitutional duty to appoint Supreme Court justices. "We've almost gotten accustomed to how obstructionist the Senate has become when it comes to nominations," Obama added. "In some ways, this argument is just an extension of what we've seen in the Senate, generally." That said, Obama suggested, "This would be a good moment for us to rise above" gridlock and obstructionism on Capitol Hill. Regardless of anticipated resistance from the right, Obama said he intends "to nominate, in due time, a very well-qualified candidate. If we are following basic precedent, then that nominee will be presented before the committees, the vote will be taken and, ultimately, they will be confirmed."

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