I know, I know. You’re like me. You have a backlog of books to read that make Sisyphus’ task look like .

Still, being aware that the books exist, and maybe picking just one for the summer, might not be all that crazy.

Ralph Nader, writing in Recommendations for Engrossing Summer Reading and Viewing, suggests:

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Taleb (Random House, 2018). Taleb writes: “The necessity of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster. Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.” Taleb includes people who spearhead military interventions and make financial investments for others. This book is a must-read for those who make or will make decisions affecting others.

Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America by James Fallows and Deborah Fallows (Pantheon, 2018). For five years, the Fallows have been flying their single-engine prop airplane into dozens of towns to understand what the people there see as their community’s problems and how they are handling them. If you are similarly concerned about your town or city, there is no better book to Continue Reading »

Cleveland politicians and the staff and the board of the Greater Cleveland Congregations are praying that voters have forgotten all about last fall’s boondoggle. If he were still writing—in a recent conversation he told me that he doesn’t miss the keyboard in the least–-Roldo Bartimole would be all over this story of continuing greed and institutional theft in Cuyahoga County.

We can all be thankful that Sam Allard—at least until he gets lured away by a more lucrative offer—is on the beat.

Allard, writing in Well, at Least We Weren’t Planning to Pay for the Q Transformation with Cavs Playoff Revenue, OH WAIT for Scene follows the (lack of) money:

On the same day that the greatest basketball player of all time signed a four-year contract with the Los Angeles Lakers, Cuyahoga County made its first debt payments on the bonds borrowed for the $140 million engorgement of the arena in which he will no longer regularly compete.

According to payment schedules produced by KeyBanc Capital Markets for Cuyahoga County, more than $4 million was forked over to investors yesterday, beginning a 17-year repayment schedule that will undoubtedly be subject to continual restructuring.

Based on that initial schedule, published in October, 2017, the county should have paid 914,593.75 in interest on its Series A bonds, $867,054.55 in interest on its Series B bonds, and $1,235,000 in principal / $1,494,937 in interest on its Series C bonds. Payments are scheduled every six months for all three sets of bonds through 2034, with higher interest payments in the earlier years of the schedule.

That $4 million, and the subsequent payments over the next 17 years have to come from somewhere. The odds of LeBron James ever returning to Cleveland (fool hims once, shame on him, fool him twice…) are somewhere south of a billion to none. The odds of another Cleveland championship team playing in the Quicken Arena are worse.

No one should be surprised, Sam (and Roldo) told us so.

…paying off the Q Deal gets a heck of lot dicier if the Cavs fail to regularly make and advance in the NBA playoffs.

Why? Because the bulk of the public portion of the Q Deal’s financing comes from an eight percent admissions tax on events at the Q. As that tax is currently structured, a portion goes to the city’s general fund, and the other portion goes to Gateway bonds for paying off the original construction of the Gund Arena.

When July of 2023 rolls around, the portion of the admissions tax that currently goes toward paying off the Gund will start paying off the Q’s renovation. And until that time, that portion of playoff admissions tax revenue will go toward paying off the Q renovation instead of the Gund. That playoff revenue stream was projected at approximately $8.7 million.

We noted how foolish it was to project playoff success from 2024-2034, presumably long after LeBron James will be playing in the NBA. But it was also dangerous to project playoff success in the near-term. It’s now possible that the LeBronless Cavs may not make (or advance past the first round of) the playoffs at all for the remainder of this period (2016-2023) when playoff revenue will help finance the renovation.

As the county’s financial adviser Tim Offtermatt said during a Cleveland City Council hearing last year:

If [the Cavs] don’t [make the playoffs from 2016-2023], however, then the debt service of course still needs to be paid. Gateway, at that point, would look to the various reserves to fund the debt service. And if there was no money in the reserves—

He was cut off by Councilman Zack Reed that day. But what he would have said is that if there was no money in the reserves, the Cavs would front the county money in the form of “contingent rent” to make their debt payments on time.

Once again taxpayers are left holding the back while the rich get richer and richer and richer.

When I was in the Cub Scouts we learned the rhyme Leaflets three, let it be as a handy way to identify poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac. That worked for us. Microbiologist John Jelesko, however, says that the rhyme over simplifies the case. Jelesko was:

…cutting up a downed tree with an electric chainsaw. What he didn’t realize was that his power cable had been dragging through poison ivy. So at the end of the day, as he coiled the cord around his palm and elbow, he inadvertently launched a career-bending science experiment.

“Within 48 hours, I had your classic case of poison ivy on my arm. And as a scientist, I said, ‘This is interesting, how bad can it be? I’ll just leave this untreated,’ ” he recalls, sheepishly. “In about two weeks, I had learned just how uncomfortable poison ivy rash could be.”

Uncomfortable sounds like an understatement. Jelesko says he barely slept while fighting the urge to “claw my itching flesh off.” Eventually, he went to his family doctor, who prescribed oral steroids.

The experience sparked years of research into a plant he calls a “familiar stranger.” He has studied the chemical, urushiol, that triggers that tell-tale rash, and the plant’s biology overall. The tricky thing about avoiding poison ivy, Jelesko says, is the plant is highly adaptable and can take many different forms in different environments.

“It’s remarkable,” he says, with a laugh. “There’s just an enormous amount of things with this plant that are currently unknown.”

Here he offers insights into how to recognize Toxicodendron radicans (the plant’s scientific name) before you risk touching it—and what to do when it’s too late.

The axiom, “leaves of three, let it be,” is accurate, says Jelesko, but those leaves can come in many shapes, even on the same plant. You’re safe if the plant has thorns — poison ivy doesn’t, but it does sometimes have little pale green berries.

Several years ago we had half-a-dozen or so trees—mostly Ash that were killed by an infestation of Emerald Ash Borer (curse you Walmart)—cut down and one member of the crew (who must have been new to the job) ended up in the emergency room that night with a massive poison ivy rash.

I mark most of my trees in the summer to track which ones are infested and then cut the vine near the base of the tree in late autumn when the leaves have all dropped. Even then I make sure to wear a long-sleeve shirt and gloves and cut the vine with a long-handled pruning tool.

First, note to the headline writer at The Intercept: I think Right-Wing, Business-Funded is redundant, but hey, that’s just me.

Lee Fang, Nick Surgey, writing in Right-Wing, Business-Funded Groups Are Preparing to Use the Janus Decision to Bleed Unions, Internal Documents Show, however, do have an story to tell:

Just moments after the Janus vs. AFSCME ruling came down, several conservative think tanks launched campaigns to leverage the pivotal Supreme Court decision as a means of starving unions of funds and eventually disbanding them altogether. The effort is aimed at encouraging public-sector workers in 22 states to withhold minimum bargaining fees from their labor unions, a shift made possible by the Janus decision. As labor comes under attack, the advocacy groups will launch decertification campaigns to nullify certain unions in certain jurisdictions.

I seriously doubt that the reaction took several moments. As soon as the Court agreed to hear Janus, the union-busters—like General Dwight David Eisenhower on the eve of the Normandy Invasion—had two action packages ready to go and fingers were poised over the send buttons awaiting the court’s pronouncement.

Americans need unions to rebuild a strong middle-class like we had during Eisenhower’s presidency. The 1 Percent need unions to go away. Forever.

Withholding the funds and dismantling the unions could have profound effects on American politics—a feature, not a bug, of the conservative activism following Janus. Many public-sector unions and the activists who work with them are affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the organizing they carry out is dependent on the hundreds of millions of dollars they expect to collect in union fees in the coming years.

“In the short-term, labor unions are going to feel the pinch,” said Moshe Marvit, a fellow with the Century Foundation. “They will simultaneously have to devote far more resources to keeping their current memberships, while having to adjust to less money coming in from free-riders. This will leave unions with less resources to spend on political issues and candidates that affect working people.”

The decision prevents unions that represent public employees from collecting an “agency fee” for the cost of bargaining on behalf of the workers in the union, meaning that government employees in unions no longer must contribute dues to pay for the fair-share cost of collective bargaining.

The well-funded effort is being coordinated by the State Policy Network, an organization that steers a national patchwork of right-wing think tanks to advance policies favored by business lobbyists and GOP donors. The right-wing groups’ strategy was spelled out in a series of documents by anti-union operatives over recent months. The Intercept obtained copies of some of documents from State Policy Network think tank.

This is how think stink tanks work. Quietly, behind the scenes, with great stealth and evil intent.

Congressman John Robert Lewis is one of the greats. The youngest speaker at the 1963 March On Washington and, in my mind, the heir to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. He has the presence, he has the cadence and most importantly, he has the chops.

Anne Branigin, reporting in Civil Rights Icon John Lewis Implores Americans to ‘Turn America Upside Down to Set it Right Side Up’ for The Root, writes:

Congressman John Lewis has made a life out of getting into “good trouble.” The civil rights icon who marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., and was the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington implored a crowd in Atlanta on Saturday to keep fighting for equal rights.

“Look, you know, I’ve been talking for some time and getting in trouble. It’s time for some of us to get in good trouble, necessary trouble,” Rep. Lewis (D-Ga.) told the crowd at the Families Belong Together rally.

“In the final analysis, we may have to turn America upside down to set it right side up, but whatever we do, do it in an orderly, peaceful and nonviolent fashion,” he said.

When the view don’t make sense, changing your perspective makes perfect sense. Branigin continues:

Lewis told the crowd Saturday, “there is no such thing as an illegal human being.” As USA Today reports, Lewis wrote a letter earlier this month condemning Trump’s immigration policy as a “shame, a disgrace and an outrage,” adding that Atlanta is among the worst places in the U.S. for an undocumented immigrant.

“It doesn’t matter if you are black or white, Latino, Asian American or Native American. We are one people and one family,” said the Georgia Democrat. “Maybe our foremothers and our forefathers came to this land in different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.”

We all need to get rowing voting…

I’m as guilty as the next person of over simplifying complex problems—yes, I know there’s more to President Donald John Trump than Seth Meyers’ slamming of Trump back in 2011, but the rationale feels so right—but I get where Briahna Gray, reporting in There’s an Easy Answer to Why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Won: Socialism for The Intercept, is going:

It seems that no one can stop talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old former bartender who ousted 10-time incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley from his seat in New York’s 14th Congressional District last Tuesday.

But some people should.

As I’ve written before, each electoral contest between now and 2020 will be scrutinized for its predictive value, parsed for insights into how to beat Donald Trump. But some of the insights from the prognosticators who ignored the Ocasio-Cortez campaign until she won are, well, not very insightful.

Myriad horse-race callers seem hellbent on divorcing Ocasio-Cortez’s core ideology from any causal analysis of her win, with no discernible motive other than to preserve the party’s failing strategies, and the strategists paid to enact them, for another election cycle. Others downplay the radical nature of her policy platform by claiming her leftism for the center and pretending that her choice to identify as a democratic socialist is a distinction without a difference.

Lest anyone confuse enthusiasm for Ocasio-Cortez, a vocal member of the Democratic Socialists of America, with enthusiasm for democratic socialism, Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker was quick to distance Ocasio-Cortez from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.—the politician who has done the most to popularize democratic socialism over the past few years.

“While Ocasio-Cortez borrowed some of Sanders’s language and policy ideas,” he writes, “she also embodied a more varied conflict with power.” How? According to Wallace-Wells, where “the Sanders movement has sometimes seemed as pedantic and single-minded as its hero, fixated on the influence of billionaires,” Ocasio-Cortez is distinguishable on the basis that “she gave interviews to The Cut and Vogue,” traveled to the Texas tent camp where migrant children are being held, and, “dressed in white,” decried the human rights abuses there.

If Wallace-Wells’s point is that Ocasio-Cortez handles intersectionality better than Sanders, it’s well-taken: She is more articulate on the subject of identity than any politician I’ve ever heard. But the political relevance of her Vogue interview or sartorial choices remain elusive to this reporter.

After further examples of disingenuous analysis of Ocasio-Cortez, Gray drives to the point—too deep in the story for my liking, but once an editor always an editor: it’s the democratic socialism, stupid.

What gave Ocasio-Cortez’s platform its power is not just her rhetorical acuity—the fact that she’s frank where others are euphemistic. She’s able to be frank because her ideology is internally consistent and uncompromised by the influence of money—just as others are euphemistic where the truth would upset their donors.

Nor can her popularity be boiled down to the fact of her racial identity and the similarly brown demographics of her district — despite many attempts to do so. Wallace-Wells, for instance, notes early in his article that the 14th District is half Hispanic and only one-fifth white. “Crowley lost because of the changing demographics in his district,” writes Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. That implication is so pervasive that Ocasio-Cortez felt the need to push back, tweeting: “Some folks are saying I won for ‘demographic’ reasons. 1st of all, that’s false. We won w/voters of all kinds.”

And she’s right. The southwestern part of the district (located in northwest Queens) was where Ocasio-Cortez performed best, with 60 to 100 percent of voters choosing her over Crowley, even though that area is only 15 to 40 percent Hispanic.

Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist message is not an incidental part of a larger demographic story. And her socialism shouldn’t be treated as a virus opportunistically riding the vector of her Latina form. Socialism is inextricable from Ocasio-Cortez’s success because it’s the secret behind her ability to do what the Democratic Party has long failed to do—articulate a holistic progressive vision for America.

There it is. There is why the Democratic party in America is all but indistinguishable from the Republican Party: the party lacks the ability to articulate a holistic progressive vision for America. The party leadership lacks the empathy to understand the words of America’s greatest Socialist: Eugene Victor Debs who on 18 September 1918 said in a statement to the Federal Court in Cleveland, Ohio, upon being convicted of violating the Sedition Act:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

That’s leadership. That is what Ocasio-Cortez brings to the fight.

[Update on 4 July at 0521: While the Democratic Party’s Machine struggles in the Bronx, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not alone…]

While Trevor Noah has been doing a yeoman’s job of talking about our current, world-wide refugee crisis—you should also watch his interviews with Karen Bass and Mike Shinoda—I have been struck by the lack of any mention of our most horrific act of heartlessness: turning away the German transatlantic liner St. Louis and her 937 European (mostly Jewish) refugees seeking asylum in 1939.

The St. Louis returned to Europe and the passengers scattered. By the end of the Second World War, 254 would die in the camps.

How many refugees are President Donald John Trump, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and all the other Trumpies, will to see die for their cause?

How many are We The People willing to see die?

Seymour Myron Hersh needs no introduction.

I’ve written a bit about him in recent weeks following the publication of Reporter: A Memoir so I was fascinated to find that Jeremy Scahill had sat down with Sy to talk in Intercepted Live From Brooklyn With Sy Hersh, Mariame Kaba, Lee Gelernt, and Narcy

Scahill begins:

JS: I believe Sy just said to me, “What the fuck is this?”

SH: What the fuck is this? I mean. [Audience laughs.] The first, the last time I did one was in my kitchen, with Jeremy. Is that true?

JS: Yes. I believe your wife walked in and was like, “What the hell is this?” You said, “Oh, that’s that kid who wrote that book about Blackwater. You probably know who he is.” She didn’t.

Sy, I want to start off by, given that you were such an aggressive reporter for your entire career, but particularly under Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and you continue to break very significant stories, is Trump the worst or most dangerous president in U.S. history?

SH: Trump lies. He has a five-minute conversation and you repeat something he said and he says, “I don’t — I didn’t do it.” I’m not diminishing lying; lying is awful. But we had a president named Lyndon Johnson that told us for five months that there were no troops going to go to Vietnam and he had troops already in there and he sent more during that time. And so I don’t know what a lie means — that to me, that’s a lie.

Trump is — he’s evil, of course. He’s a buffoon of course. But, I hate to say it, he was elected. So, what do you do?

So, look, when I say what I think it means nothing because what I think is, you know, the answer is we really don’t know what goes on in his mind. He doesn’t read much, we know that. No, he just doesn’t. But, gee, I think a lot of people underestimate him. And this doesn’t mean I respect him or anything to do with. I always have a lot of trouble with this. This is a guy that took down 13 Republicans with maybe 270, 280 years of political experience. He beat them all.

This is a guy that took down two dynasties, the Bush dynasty and the Clinton dynasty. This is a guy who while he was playing footsie with his treats, with the press corps, you know: I’m going to go to Korea, I’m not going to go, I’m going to do this and dominating the news. He went up eight points. He got called out: How long has it been going on, what’s going on in Mexico with the kids, how many months? Four months? Finally somebody got, you know, somehow a tape got made of children crying and all of a sudden it’s a big story. Where was it a couple of months ago?

You mentioned Yemen. We’re talking about mass murder, particularly now there’s going to be a blockade of a main port that could end up killing — that’s getting reported, but the American role in it, besides supplying intelligence, we refuel the planes that are doing the bombing missions, we supply all sorts of intelligence support. We’re up to it up to our ass, and nobody really gets into that.

And so I would say: You want to go after Trump, forget about the tweets. And forget about Pruitt and that stuff, there’s always been Democrats that have been as much jerks in terms of thinking the office is theirs and the perks are theirs. Go look at what he’s doing down the line. I spoke the other week at a convention of journalists, the Investigative Reporters and Editors, which I obviously have been a fan, a supporter for decades. They had the third-largest crowd of students and would-be journalists last weekend in Orlando. I mean that’s not exactly a pleasure spot — maybe it is for some people, I don’t know, I shouldn’t … Sea World lovers. Anyway. But. [Sy laughs, and audience laughs.] There are 800 reporters in a down time for the market and they’re doing it because they sense journalism is a ticket out. We are still seen, even though it’s a bitterly divided country in a way that you could almost talk about civil war on the edge here, I always think about that movie, that brilliant movie about the family that took the little girl to a beauty contest in Florida. What was it called?

Audience: “Little Miss Sunshine.”

JS: “Little Miss Sunshine.”

SH: You gotta watch it again, because, the guy had a, his second point was: Wow, these people who do that stuff, they’re not in the same world. They’re Trump people, but they’re there. They vote. And so how do you bridge the gap?

And the conversation just gets better and better.

Enjoy.

Science Fiction (and Cleveland) lost a great today. Harlan Jay Ellison has died.

Ellison played a large role in my early reading. I still have my father’s copy of I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream shelved next to my The Essential Ellison: A 35-Year Retrospective which contains, as the title proclaims, everything I wanted to read of Ellsion’s.

In addition to the aforementioned I Have No Mouth, two other classics have stuck with me: “Repent Harlequin!” Said The Ticktockman from 1965 and A Boy And His Dog from 1969.

There are many more Ellison titles in my library. When I gave away half of my library two years ago, I found that I could not part with any of his works.

Jason Sheehan, writing in Goodbye To Harlan Ellison, ‘America’s Weird Uncle’ for NPR, had this to say in Ellison’s obituary:

Harlan Ellison is dead. He was 375 years old. He died fighting alien space bears.

Harlan is dead. He exploded in his living room, in his favorite chair, apoplectic over the absolute garbage fire this world has become. He’s dead, gone missing under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind many suspects. He went down arguing over the law of gravity with a small plane in which he was flying. Harlan took the contrary position. He won.

Harlan Ellison, science fiction writer and legendarily angry man, died Thursday. He exited peacefully (as far as such things go) at home and in his sleep. He was 84 years old.

Any one of those first lies seems to me more likely than the truth of the last one. Hard enough to believe that Ellison is gone — that something out there finally stilled that great and furious spirit and pried those pecking fingers from the keyboard of his Olympia typewriter (without, apparently, the aid of explosives). But a quiet farewell to this life that he loved so largely and this world that he excoriated so beautifully? If someone had asked me, I would’ve bet on the space bears.

Me? I think he’s off wandering with Blood…

In my teens I was taught that fat cells were forever. You could shrink them, but once the body created a fat cell, that cell was there for the rest of your life, always lurking for the liquid gold of fat to store and swell itself.

Thank to Mano Singham’s How fat cells work, I’ve learned that what I thought was true, just isn’t so.

Mano references David Prologo’s How does your body ‘burn’ fat? at The Conversation ProLogo begins:

Many of us may be considering “burning some fat” so we feel better in our bathing suits out on the beach or at the pool. What does that actually mean, though?

The normal fat cell exists primarily to store energy. The body will expand the number of fat cells and the size of fat cells to accommodate excess energy from high-calorie foods. It will even go so far as to start depositing fat cells on our muscles, liver and other organs to create space to store all this extra energy from calorie-rich diets–especially when combined with a low activity lifestyle.

Historically, fat storage worked well for humans. The energy was stored as small packages of molecules called fatty acids, which are released into the bloodstream for use as fuel by muscles and other organs when there was no food available, or when a predator was chasing us. Fat storage actually conferred a survival advantage in these situations. Those with a tendency to store fat were able to survive longer periods without food and had extra energy for hostile environments.

But when was the last time you ran from a predator? In modern times, with an overabundance of food and safe living conditions, many people have accumulated an excess storage of fat. In fact, more than one-third of the adult population in the United States is obese.

The major problem with this excess fat is that the fat cells, called adipocytes, do not function normally.

The problem is that we evolved in a very different world where farmers and ranchers in the United States produce in excess of 7,000 calories per day per person living here. Since even a very hard working person is unlikely to need even half that much food, we are encouraged in many different ways to over eat. That’s how we became a obese nation.

Prologo’s final paragraph woke me up:

As a result, the body readjusts by decreasing the number and size of fat cells, which subsequently improves baseline metabolism, decreases inflammation, treats disease, and prolongs lives. If we maintain this situation over time, the body reabsorbs the extra empty fat cells and discards them as waste, [Emphasis mine, JH] leaving us leaner and healthier on multiple levels.

That is very good news.

Of all the characters in the immorality play that is the administration of President Donald John Trump, John Michael “Mick” Mulvaney is perhaps the most repugnant and that is an Olympic accomplishment. When I think of Mulvaney, Glossu Rabban Harkonnen leaps to mind.

Ralph Nader, writing in Mugger Mick Mulvaney—Trump’s Sadist-in-Chief is a bit less colorful, but a lot more specific:

Mr. Mulvaney’s title seems uninterestingly bureaucratic—director of the Office of Management and Budget. But as Trump’s chief hatchet man extraordinaire, Mugger Mick Mulvaney is easily one of the cruelest, most vicious presidential henchman in modern American history. From his powerful perch next door to the White House, he is carving a bloody trail against tens of millions of Americans who are poor, disabled, frail, and elderly. He has gone after defenseless children and injured or sick patients with little or no access to health care.

It is difficult to exaggerate the relentless, savage delight that this former Congressman from South Carolina—handpicked for Trump by the brutish, oil funded Heritage Foundation—takes in attacking the most vulnerable members of our society.

A human wrecking ball, Mugger Mick has pushed to eliminate the Meals-on-Wheels assistance for isolated elderly, to increase rents for poor tenants, to severely gut SNAP (food stamps) and nutritious food standards, and to diminish Medicaid. In addition the Trump administration wants to impose work requirements in Medicaid as a condition of eligibility. Many adult Medicaid recipients are already working. Where will the new jobs come from? Those who want to work but can’t find jobs are not Continue Reading »

Three weeks ago very few people, including myself, knew who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was. Now only the most under-rock-dwelling of Trumpies haven’t heard her name.

The reactions to her victory match Ocasio-Cortez’s own.

The 28-year-old—and youngest woman ever elected to our House of Representatives—Democratic Socialist is poised to go to Washington, D.C. in 2019. Her story is compelling and instructive. Paul Blest, reporting in Latinx Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Just Beat One of the Most Powerful Democrats in the House for Splinter, writes:

Ocasio-Cortez’s victory is arguably the biggest win for the left so far in the Trump era, and is indicative of the direction that the Democratic Party needs to go in—forcefully advocating for the working class, people of color, and immigrants, and articulating a clear vision of how this country can change for the better.

Not just the left, or progressives, but Bernie Sanders’ progressives. We’re feeling the Bern.

Mano Singham, in The reverberations of Ocasio-Cortez’s win writes:

We should not over over-interpret [Ocasio-Cortez’s win] though. Although it is definitely encouraging that a young, progressive Latina who identifies with the Democratic Socialists of America won, it does not necessarily mean that the leadership will follow suit. Nancy Pelosi is downplaying the wider implications of the election, suggesting that it is peculiar to that particular district. You can see the contempt with which the party establishment views democracy in the comment made by Bronx Borough president, Ruben Diaz, Jr. that “It’s unfortunate that [Crowley] had a primary. We need him in Washington DC. Washington is about consistency and seniority.” For such people, elections are such a nuisance.

Singham goes on to highlights why consistency and seniority is so important to the leadership:

One thing that has not been discussed as much is that she spoke out against the killings by Israel in Gaza, tweeting: “This is a massacre. I hope my peers have the moral courage to call it such. No state or entity is absolved of mass shootings of protesters. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity, as anyone else. Democrats can’t be silent about this anymore.” When asked in an interview why she took this stand, she “compared the Gaza protesters to civil rights activists in the United States” and added:

I think I was primarily compelled on moral grounds because I could only imagine if 60 people were shot and killed in Ferguson. Or if 60 people were shot and killed in the West Virginia teachers’ strikes. The idea that we are not supposed to talk about people dying when they are engaging in political expression just really moved me.

The Democratic party establishment, including Crowley, is solidly in the pocket of the Israel lobby. One of the party’s big megadonors is billionaire Haim Saban and he makes no bones about the fact that his main issue is support for the Israeli government and its atrocities and he is quite willing to chastise Democratic politicians whom he feels are insufficiently subservient to the demands of the lobby. He lashed out at 13 senators who had signed on to a Bernie Sanders-initiated letter that was critical of Israel’s “continuing control of Gaza’s air, sea and northern, southern and eastern borders, and its restrictions on the freedom of movement of people, legitimate goods and equipment in and out of Gaza, have made the humanitarian situation worse.”

I was struck by this brilliant, very low-budget, political ad from Ocasio-Cortez:

The key line, for me was: This race is [and ultimately all the races this fall are, JH] about people versus money. We’ve got people, they’ve got money.

Jeremy Scahill talked with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, , the Young Democratic Socialist Who Just Shocked the Establishment for The Intercept. His first question was about the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

JS: I want to start by talking about the way that ICE has evolved since its creation. You’ve been tweeting a lot in response to this ACLU report that came out, with 30,000 pages or so of documentation of how families, children, civilians are treated under the ICE program.

How has ICE’s actions changed from Obama to Trump? Is there anything that’s markedly different?

AOC: There are things that are markedly different. I would say that the basic infrastructure of ICE, its legal structures are the same, but the latitude and rather the extent to which the Trump administration is really bending these rules is at an absolutely new level. This idea of, most recently, separating children from their parents in order to kind of force the state to take over their custody is just an extremely different and draconian level to which ICE enforcement is now being taken.

The Trump Administration is changing these policies at a breakneck pace. So even the most prolific immigration lawyers in the country can barely keep up with the changes that they’re making here, and we’re seeing things that started in the Obama Administration—you know, ICE showing up at courtrooms and things like that—are just starting to become much more regular and commonplace.

JS: What’s your understanding of this policy that ends up separating parents from children? Like, where was that born?

AOC: So, basically the United States had a standing policy for minors who showed up at the border. And what that was originally designed for was occasionally you would have teenagers, mostly — people who were 14, 15, under 18, but old enough to kind of navigate the world on their own—and they would show up at our borders, and we kind of previously saw this hit a crisis when we had this wave of young people and children showing up at the borders of South Texas after the regime change in Honduras. And so we had a standing policy for when a minor showed up at the border unaccompanied—the U.S. government would intervene, there would be child custody services and things like that to help that child navigate that system. That is what we were initially dealing with.

Now what’s happening is parents who show up with their children at the border are getting separated from their children, and that has never happened before. Before, those families would be processed together. And now we are seeing things—I believe it was on MSNBC—where we’re actually seeing cases of a 53-week-old infant in court on their own separated from their mothers.

And many of these children, you know, have yet to see their parents ever again. And some of these children don’t even have legal defense. So this is beyond the pale. This is just totally beyond the pale.

JS: Jeff Sessions—at least for now—the attorney general, in defending this policy, said the following in a series of speeches in Arizona, which is known for its really harsh, draconian position on immigration, as well as in San Diego, California, which is in Southern California, this is Sessions.

”It’s an offense to enter the country unlawfully. If you smuggle an illegal alien across the border, then will prosecute you for smuggling. If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you. And that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don’t want your child to be separated, then don’t bring him across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that.

JS: Your response?

AOC: Well, first of all, we are seeing people showing up claiming refugee status. You know, we have this very clear case of this Congolese woman who showed up, refugee status, and if you are fleeing persecution in your home country, the United States refugee policy is that you can show up to our borders, claim refugee status, say, “I’m a refugee” and be classified as such.

We’ve had generations of Americans that have come from things like the Rwandan genocide and regime changes in Latin America show up and claim refugee status and we are doing this to those people too, so that’s the first thing.

But then the second thing is that when you have undocumented people show up in our border, usually what you do is turn them away, you know? That has been the historic policy of the United States—people who show up undocumented without a visa, we turn them away at our borders. But the idea of prosecuting anybody who just shows up at a checkpoint is an expansion of what we are doing in this country and in fact we are taking these people in and we’re putting them into this black-box detention system that we have allowed ICE to create.

And I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that ICE is now the second largest criminal investigative agency in the United States, second only to the FBI. And the fact that they operate without the accountability of the Department of Justice is extremely concerning to us all. There are threads here that stretch all the way to warrantless wiretapping and other forms of overreach. This is squarely in the category of civil rights abuses.

The whole interview is well worth your time. Give a listen…

Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr.—who has become the latest Trumpy to be confronted for basic dickishness—Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand Kirstjen Michele Nielsen and Stephen Miller could become nighthawks, but that might just be insufficient.

All of these non-violent protests are protected political speech of the most basic kind. The proper response to the objectionable speech of President Donald John Trump, his administration and his supporters is more speech.

That is precisely what is happening.

Calling out general dickishness is a good idea.

[Update on 3 July at 0504: Tom Tomorrow has his take as well…]

Harley-Davidson motorcycles are so iconic that the company has actually tried—unsuccessfully—since 1994 to trademark the engine’s distinctive potato-potatoe sound. Then there was that moment when the company went public and bikers roared down Wall Street to the New York Stock Exchange to ring the closing bell.

In some sense, however, that bell was a something of a death knell for the legend as the vibe changed from Peter Fonda’s rebel on Captain America in Easy Rider—which partially made up for Marlon Brando’s imported British Triumph in The Wild Ones—by the 21st century Harley—as my brother, and Harley owner, Chris told me a while ago–was an old-fart’s bike.

Phillip Inman, Graeme Wearden and Dominic Rushe, reporting in Trump criticizes Harley-Davidson for ‘waving white flag’ by making bikes overseas for The Guardian, explain:

Harley-Davidson plans to shift the production of some of its bikes out of the US in response to Europe’s new tariffs on motorcycle imports.

In a stock market filing, the company said the EU’s reaction to Donald Trump’s steel tariffs, which will add $2,200 (£1,657) to the average cost of a motorcycle exported from the US to Europe, will result in up to $100m of extra charges over the next couple of years.

The decision is the most high-profile example to date of the potential impact of a widening trade dispute between the US and its largest trading partners. It came amid reports of US plans to escalate its trade spat with China, reports that led to sharp selloffs in global stock markets on Monday.

Trump said he was “surprised” that Harley-Davison [sic] “would be the first to wave the White Flag”.

“I fought hard for them and ultimately they will not pay tariffs selling into the E.U., which has hurt us badly on trade, down $151 Billion. Taxes just a Harley excuse—be patient! #MAGA,” he wrote on Twitter.

I’ve often wondered how anyone could force a casino, the best business for printing money I know of, into bankruptcy.

That tweet contains the perfect answer to my question.

Perhaps one of the best-known crowd chants to come out of the civil rights movement is No Justice, No Peace!

Trump’s minions are feeling the burn.

Rebecca Fishbein, writing in Maxine Waters: Do NOT Let the Trump Team Eat in Peace! for Jezebel, lays out the story:

On Saturday, Congresswoman Maxine Waters urged constituents at an immigration rally in Los Angeles to continue to harass the fuck out of everyone in the Trump administration until they no longer resemble spineless little weasels intent on stripping the United States of what’s left of its admittedly tepid dignity. She said this in a slightly more eloquent fashion, of course.

According to the Hill, at the rally Waters seemingly addressed a number of recent incidents in which Trump administration officials were ejected from restaurants—including one in which DHS Secretary Kristjen Nielsen was shouted out of a Mexican restaurant by a group of protestors, and another in which a Virginia restauranteur refused to serve Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on “moral grounds.” Though some elected officials, including Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, have deemed the public protest of Trump officials “not appropriate,” Waters couldn’t give a shit about civility, particularly in light of the havoc wreaked on migrant families thanks to Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy:

I have no sympathy for these people that are in this administration who know it is wrong what they’re doing on so many fronts but they tend to not want to confront this president. For these members of his cabinet who remain and try to defend him they’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store, the people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president ‘no I can’t hang with you, this is wrong this is unconscionable and we can’t keep doing this to children.

President Donald John Trump’s supporters white people got indignant.

Waters’s call for relentless protest preceded a fun missive from the Washington Post’s editorial board, titled, “Let the Trump team eat in peace.” Though the board called out Trump’s human rights-violating border policies, they also claimed recent attempts to shout down Team Trump were not “a healthy development,” deeming it a Pandora’s box of sorts:

We nonetheless would argue that Ms. Huckabee, and Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Miller, too, should be allowed to eat dinner in peace. Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment. How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?

Never mind that abortion rights protectors and patients alike have long been subject to both relentless protest and more harrowing forms of harassment, and often without the support of loudmouth internet conservatives with big Twitter followings. In a country as divided as this one, it does seem like giving everyone, including people you don’t agree with, carte blanche to scream nonstop at their enemies could backfire hard. Then again, folks who signed up for the most outwardly (emphasis on outwardly) bigoted administration in the history of the modern United States made a choice, and they chose poorly. Trump’s made no secret of who he is (a racist charlatan reality TV star) or what he stands for (money, for himself), and his administration’s gotten right in line to do his bidding. They know what they’re doing, and who they’re hurting, and they don’t care.

The story takes an even darker route when a bit of history is thrown into the mix as Ashley Reese, reporting in These Are the ‘White Moderates’ MLK Warned Us About for Jezebel, writes:

Democratic leadership—centrists and so-called progressives—got in on the action too, denouncing Waters and the direct action of everyday citizens. In the process, they managed to make themselves look as unequipped as ever to effectively take a stand against Trumpism.

If loud, public confrontations are hard for some to stomach, they may consider the DSA protestors who bombarded Nielsen obnoxious. For those who don’t like name-calling, Miller being called a “fascist” might come across as nasty. And if refusal of service based on one’s political alliances seems unfair, what happened to Sanders looks terrible. But all of these incidents were non-violent confrontations made with marginalized people in mind. This wasn’t punching down, it was punching up. These encounters weren’t pleasant for Sanders, Nielson, or Miller, but it’s difficult to prioritize the feelings of White House staffers when they’re actively defending policy that separates migrant children from their families.

If you talk to Democratic leadership, however you’d have thought someone was assaulted, and that Waters was rallying for more carnage.

Trumpies are incapable of stopping there, however, as Trump’s bedtime bestie, Sean Hannity demonstrated.

Monique Judge, reporting in the mass shooting in Annapolis, Maryland for The Root, writes:

We keep talking about the dangerous rhetoric that is being thrown around by Donald Trump, those in his administration and the right-wing media that supports and enables them—but we keep getting shut down and told that we are the ones with the real problem, not them.

Even as they deny peddling propaganda, playing dirty politics and telling outright lies, they continue to give us examples that prove they are doing exactly that, and our job here at The Root is to lay those out for you.

Sean Hannity is the latest example of the crazy, dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric that is going to get someone killed. On Thursday, mere moments after learning of the shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Md., Hannity laid the blame for the incident at the feet of California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters.

Hannity is not a journalist, he’s an entertainer a shill currying the favor of the 1 Percent.

Real death threats, of course, have followed.

[Update on 27 June: Anthony McLeod Kennedy has announced his retirement as Senior Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. In light of this retirement, I’ve added two additional cases to this post—NIFLA v Becerra and Janus v AFSCME—below.]

The 5-4 court split on Carpenter v United States, surprised me. Kennedy was in the minority in this case. Joining with Roberts in favor of Timothy Carpenter were associate justices: Ruth Bader Ginsburg,, Stephen Gerald Breyer, Sonia Maria Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. I was surprised because I thought the rational would be driven by protecting powerful people from scrutiny and not protecting civil rights. I can be too cynical for my own good.

Alex Emmons, reporting in Supreme Court Rules That the U.S. Government Must Get a Warrant Before Accessing Cellphone Location Data for The Intercept, writes:

In a landmark privacy decision, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Friday that police must get a warrant in order to obtain your cellphone’s location data over an extended period of time.

The decision is a major victory for privacy advocates, who have long argued that the law has failed to keep pace with the amount of intrusive data we voluntarily hand over to private companies.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal justices on the court, declaring that even though the data is held by a third party, the government still needs a warrant to obtain it.

“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” said Roberts, writing for the majority. “In light of the deeply revealing nature of [cell-site location information], its depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact that such information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of Fourth Amendment protection.”

The court made the ruling in the case of Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted in 2013 of robbing Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in Michigan and Ohio. In order to build their case, the FBI obtained 127 days’ worth of location information for Carpenter’s cellphone – almost 12,900 location points – which they used to place him at the scene of the robberies.

While Carpenter is important case on police intrusion, the court’s ruling is also vital because the decision hinges on a matter of privacy. Privacy, of course, is the linchpin of Roe v Wade, possibly the single most pivotal court decision since Brown v Board of Education. Which is why Planned Parenthood has payed close attention to two other rulings handed down in Kennedy’s final days. Kennedy was in the majority ins the first case, NIFLA v Becerra, which:

challenged a 2015 California law that requires crisis pregnancy centers to disclose all available medical options and services to pregnant women. Also known as the Reproductive FACT Act, it requires state-licensed crisis pregnancy centers to inform women of the availability of free and low-cost comprehensive family planning, prenatal care, and abortion services. Unlicensed CPCs, including those that offer pregnancy testing or ultrasound imaging, are required to disclose to all clients that their facilities are not a state-licensed medical facility and have no licensed medical providers who provide or directly supervise the provision of services. Lower courts preliminarily upheld the law in three separate challenges, ruling that the disclosures that CPCs must make do not violate the First Amendment.

On June 26, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court ruling. In an 5-4 opinion written by Justice Thomas, the Court ruled that both the disclosures for licensed and unlicensed centers likely violate their First Amendment rights. Notably, the five-justice majority did so regardless of whether these fake women’s clinics lie to and deceive women.

Kennedy was also in the majority on the second case, Janus v AFSCME, where:

Reversing a decades-old precedent, the Supreme Court yet again ruled in a 5-4 decision that public sector workers who opt out of union membership cannot legally be charged any fees for the cost of collective bargaining. For years, many states protected collective bargaining by charging a lower fee to those who opt out of union membership but still benefit from the union’s bargaining activity on behalf of all employees of an organization. Since unions cannot collectively bargain for only some of an organization’s workers, this type of safeguard helped offset the costs of fighting for all worker’s rights, not just those who choose to join a union. Decided along the same lines of the other cases from the last week of the Supreme Court’s term, Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion, and Justice Kagan dissented.

The political battle for the soul of the United States of America is on. What happens between now and 6 November is vital.

In 1729, Dr. Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal, For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. Swift’s would be lost on our president.

Mano Singham has the story…