Saturday, January 21, 2017

21 January - Netvibes - oldephartteintraining

The Atlantic Wire

A Short History of 'America First' - President Trump’s speech Friday will go down as one of the shorter inaugural addresses, but it will also be remembered for its populist and often dark tone. “From this day forward,” Trump said at one point, “it’s going to be only America first. America first.” Trump appears to have first used the phrase last March in an interview with The New York Times when he denied he was an isolationist. “I’m not isolationist, but I am ‘America First,’” he said. “So I like the expression. I’m ‘America First.’” Trump insisted publicly that he wrote his own speech, going as far as to tweet a picture of  himself  holding a pen and piece of paper in his hotel at Mar-A-Lago. But as The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, Trump’s speech was at least in part written by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, two of Trump’s senior advisers. Bannon, as has been widely reported, was previously CEO of Breitbart, the conservative news site that he’s described as a platform for the alt-right, a movement that combines elements of white nationalism and economic populism. “I don’t think we’ve had a speech like that since Andrew Jackson came to the White House,” Bannon told the Journal. “It’s got a deep root of patriotism.” That maybe true, but Bannon’s stated positions, white-nationalist support for Trump, and the president’s tepid disavowal of that support are only likely to raise more questions about what he meant by “America first.” The phrase in itself might provide comfort for those of Trump’s supporters who have long railed against what they see as lawmakers in Washington catering to special interests, corporations, and other countries at the expense of, in their view, the American worker. But the phrase “America first” also has a darker recent history and, as my colleague David Graham pointed out Friday, was associated with opponents of the U.S. entering World War II. The America First Committee (AFC), which was founded in 1940, opposed any U.S. involvement in World War II, and was harshly critical of the Roosevelt administration, which it accused of pressing the U.S. toward war. At its peak, it had 800,000 members across the country, included socialists, conservatives, and some of the most prominent Americans from some of the most prominent families. There was future President Ford; Sargent Shriver, who’d go on to lead the Peace Corps; and Potter Stewart, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice. It was funded by the families who owned Sears-Roebuck and the Chicago Tribune, but also counted among its ranks prominent anti-Semites of the day. “It had to remove from its executive committee not only the notoriously anti-Semitic Henry Ford but also Avery Brundage, the former chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee who had prevented two Jewish runners from the American track team in Berlin in 1936 from running in the finals of the 4x100 relay,” Susan Dunn, the historian, wrote on CNN last April. But charges of anti-Semitism persisted, and were compounded with perhaps one of the most infamous speeches given by one of AFC’s most famous spokesmen, Charles Lindbergh. In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, Lindbergh expressed sympathy for the persecution Jews faced in Germany, but suggested Jews were advocating the U.S. to enter a war that was not in the national interest. “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences,” Lindbergh said. “Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” He insisted he was not “attacking either the Jewish or the British people,” but “I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.” The speech was labeled as anti-Semitic. Dorothy Thompson, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, who had reported from Europe, wrote: “I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh is pro-Nazi. I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh foresees a new party along Nazi lines.” Those sentiments were echoed widely. Three months after Lindbergh’s speech, on December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, prompting the U.S. to enter World War II. Three days later, the AFC disbanded. But echoes of “America first” have persisted in the years and decades since. Most recently it was employed by Pat Buchanan, who used it as the slogan for his presidential run in 2000 on a Reform Party ticket. Buchanan, who has labeled World War II an “unnecessary war,” had also campaigned against free trade. Indeed, Trump, who sought the Reform Party nomination at the time, called Buchanan “a Hitler lover.” NPR’s Ron Elving argues that “assuming he is aware of at least some of that history, Trump is demonstrating his confidence that his adoption of a phrase can supersede its past.” The president may say he wants “America first” to mean “we will not be ripped off anymore,” but shaking off the phrase’s ugly past, especially after an inauguration speech that offered little outreach to the millions of Americans who fear what his presidency may bring, could prove difficult. 10:45
Barack Obama and Hidden Figures: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing - Barack Obama Was the Perfect Pop-Culture President Todd VanDerWerff | Vox “Obama was as comfortable on Fox News as he was on The Daily Show or reading mean tweets on Kimmel. He could play games with Jimmy Fallon or talk policy with journalists, and act demonstrably different with both. It often seemed like he truly understood pop culture, particularly hip-hop and prestige TV, the two most dominant cultural forms of his era. It was like he chose a persona for each occasion—goofy but proud dad, cool guy, serious wonk—and then stepped into it.” Juice and the Theater of Black Nihilism Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib | MTV News “The easy thing would be to mention the cycle of imitation in life and art, but I think there are violences so common that calling them imitation when spilled onto a big screen is somewhat reductive. What I find myself more interested in, with both Khalil Sumpter and with Bishop in Juice, is what so rarely happens with black people who live and die and do wrong today: an ability to visualize a complete life behind simply a finger that pulls a trigger, and a willingness to understand what drove them there. In this way, Bishop and all of his complexities were the perfect vehicle for Tupac’s entry into film.” Frank Ocean as an Emersonian Hero Sophie Atkinson | The Rumpus “The irony of all this is that, as Emerson recognizes, someone who couldn’t care less about how they come across is all the more charismatic and convincing. Emerson talks of an honor developed by carving out your own path regardless of external opinion … Reddit didn’t obsess about Ocean’s release-date dipshittery earlier this year because it hates Ocean, but because, like most of us, it’s in love with him. It’s the same vibe that person you went on two dates with and forgot to text back gives off when you run into them at a party. They want you more because they know you’re not consciously rejecting them; your priorities are just elsewhere.” Hidden Figures and the Ambitious Working Mother Stacia L. Brown | The New Republic “Rare is the civil rights-era biopic that gives us this vantage of the black experience. Though discrimination is at play throughout, scholarship and tenacity are even more prominent. Though hushed household tensions do arise between men and women, they are quashed in favor of the family’s health and the woman’s upward mobility. Plenty of factors must have contributed to Hidden Figures winning the box office for its first two wide-release weekends, but the gifts it bestows and restores are what make it an invaluable viewing experience.” Is La La Land a Good Musical? Rob Harvilla | The Ringer “If any song here will endure once awards season is over, bet on ‘City of Stars,’ a fine, understated bit of Chet Baker worship, with a delicate gravity not worth flouting. The melody is so sturdy and unflashy that it can carry Gosling, not the other way around; simplicity is a plus when your singer can’t handle much complexity. It’s also a bit of an earworm, and if you’ve had it stuck in your head for weeks, you are entitled to your discouraging words.” What’s at Stake if Trump Kills the NEA Marc Hogan | Pitchfork “For free-market libertarians and religious conservatives, the idea of federally funded art was probably always going to be a tough sell. But for the rest of us, to put this in context: what Trump would be destroying here is barely a rounding error in terms of the overall U.S. budget, but of great value to the artists it goes to support.” A Man in Himself Is a City: Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson Charles Taylor | Los Angeles Review of Books “We can’t ignore the soulful stoicism on Adam Driver’s face. It’s the look of a man who has accepted his life and his responsibility for maintaining it. There is, in the way he nuzzles the still-sleeping Laura when he wakes in the morning—tenderly, exploringly, the edge of hunger kept at bay—in the way he wakes to the aroma of her baking and says the word ‘cupcakes,’ savoring it and relishing its familiarity, the ability of a man who, as a poet should, appreciates the ordinary moments given to him. And yet, in some part of him, we see the uncertain longing for something more.” The Gender Fluidity of Krazy Kat Gabrielle Bellot | The New Yorker “P. G. Wodehouse compared it favorably to Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’; Jack Kerouac later said it influenced the Beats. The strip ran from 1913 until 1944, the year that Herriman died. It is set in a dreamlike place called Coconino County, where a black cat named Krazy loves a white mouse named Ignatz, who throws bricks at Krazy’s head. Krazy interprets the bricks as ‘love letters.’ Meanwhile, a police-officer dog, Offisa Pup, tries to protect Krazy, with whom he is smitten. The structure of the strip was built on reversals: a cat loves a mouse, a dog protects a feline, and, at a time when anti-miscegenation laws held sway in most of the United States, a black animal yearns for a white one.” How the Far-Right Is Changing U.S. Publishing Colin Robinson | The Guardian “Why all the furore over Yiannopoulos? Those objecting to Dangerous seems more concerned about its anticipated tone than any pernicious, new ideas it may contain. With the start of the Trump presidency comes fear of a new, more vituperative tenor in the mainstream, cementing a national lurch to the right. The American far right is characterized by, as Angela Nagle puts it, ‘a slippery use of irony’; its ‘hip elitism’ allows prejudice to be disguised as harmless entertainment. Yiannopoulos, with his Hugh Grant-like bashfulness and potty mouth, perfectly fits this tawdry bill.” 06:00
Donald Trump's Nostalgic, Lulling Inaugural Concert - The slogan “Make America Great Again” has been subject to a lot of debate—when, exactly, are we to believe America was greater before? The Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial Thursday night offered a few answers. From the looks of it, America was great when Lee Greenwood wrote “Proud to Be an American” in the Reagan ’80s, and maybe again when the song became a theme song for the first Gulf War, under George H.W. Bush. It was great under George W. Bush, too—both pre-9/11 when 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite” soundtracked drives to the mall, and post-9/11 when the nation joined in vengeance to Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.” The red-jacketed members of the Army Fife and Drum Corp suggested yet another Great time: 1781. Sam Moore, the “Soul Man” singer of the civil-rights era, was there too, but only to sing “America the Beautiful”—it seems 1967 was Not Great. The Frontmen of Country reprised hits from across their members’ heydays in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s, yet each of their twangy-melancholic tales of heartland heartache seem, on purpose, out of time. Then there were the lesser-knowns: Utah’s the Piano Guys, inventively defiling a grand piano for a One Direction tune, and DJ Ravi Drums, that friend of yours who badly overestimates how much you want to watch him dominate Rock Band. Both may have built fledgling careers during the Obama era, but this concert marked them as national discoveries of the Trump one. Nearby, at the recently christened National Museum of African American History and Culture, the anti-Trump Peace Ball spotlighted some artists with more recently renewed credentials for relevance: Solange Knowles, the experimental R&B sister of Beyoncé and the creator of one of the most acclaimed albums of last year, and Esperanza Spalding, a new jazz generation’s adventuresome champion. They depart from Trumpchella’s entertainers not only in hipness or in race—though those things are true, and matter—but in content. Their music breaks borders between genres; their words often challenge America rather than comfort it. On Thursday, Solange sang “Don’t Touch My Hair,” a swatback at the national history of white people helping themselves to the bodies of black people. Throughout D.C. over the inaugural, other musicians who have pushed forward the sound and sentiment of pop music will play protest gigs: art-rockers The National and Sleater-Kinney at a Planned Parenthood benefit; the iconoclastic future-dance star Janelle Monae on the route for the Women’s March, whose participants boast Beyoncé’s blessing and a chant freshly written by Fiona Apple. Trump meanwhile keeps reaching back, likely due to a blend of preference and limited options. The 75-year-old Paul Anka will sing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” for the inaugural dance; the 16-year-old Jackie Evancho, first made famous by singing a 1918 aria on YouTube, delivered “The Star Spangled Banner.” The music seemed a sedative, calling on America to calm down and let it all happen.This divide was crystallized in a statement from Inauguration Committee Chair Tom Barrack, who said he’d not asked Trump friend Kanye West to perform at the celebrations that were “going to be typically and traditionally American.” He didn’t quite say West was not “typically and traditionally American,” but it’s nonetheless the implication of this inauguration’s entertainment. Black music of recent vintage, it would seem, has no place in this national center. Ditto formally interesting music of any sort. (Though, in fairness, the Piano Guys tearing up a violin bow was sort of like if John Cage were making children’s music, and it’s always a hoot to see Toby Keith swing a Solo cup around onstage.) If the music seemed a sedative, that was probably the point; the speeches were full of embattled uplift, calling on America to calm down and let it all happen. Jon Voight cursed “propaganda” that had denigrated the president-elect, and one of the Piano Guys said “it’s time to put all of our differences aside, it’s time to unite our hearts, our minds.” His band then launched into an original number called “It’s Going to be OKAY,” expertly alchemized nitrous oxide from the same tank as Pharrell’s “Happy,” but much less potent. It offered, perhaps unintentionally, what for many is the only believable sort of comfort—not that things would soon be Great, but that they’d be okay rather than, say, apocalyptic. Earlier on Thursday, news broke that Trump’s administration would try to end the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The concert, then, dovetailed as the vision of a government that, when it comes to entertainment, values comfort and nostalgia over the creation of new art. The suggestion to not think too much, to lean back, might explain how Trump, when he finally took the stage, could tell one of his obvious lies. About having a concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he said, “I don’t know if it’s ever been done before, but if it has, very seldom. … We didn’t know if anyone would come tonight, this hasn’t been done before.” It of course has been done before, most recently by Barack Obama, who had Mary J. Blige, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, and others at the Lincoln Memorial eight years ago. That show’s very existence, and the vision it offered, is now meant to be forgotten. It was not Great. 20 Jan
'America First': Donald Trump's Dark, Populist Inaugural Address - President Donald Trump took office on Friday with an inaugural address that was striking for both its bleakness and its fiery, populist promises for a better future. “Today we are not transferring power not from one administration to another, or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people,” the 45th president said. Reciting a litany of horribles including gangs, drugs, crime, poverty, and unemployment, Trump told the nation, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” Related Story Live Coverage of the Presidential Inauguration The inaugural address was unusually dark and political, delivered in a forum where new presidents have tended to reach for a language of unity, positivity, and non-partisanship. In many ways, the speech drew directly from the tone and approach of Trump’s often very-negative campaign rally speeches, once again showing that the “pivot” many observers have long expected Trump to make toward a more unifying and detached tone, is not coming. President Trump so far looks much the same as candidate Trump, and his speech was a strange milestone in a strange rise to power, one that was viewed as impossible just months ago. Yet the speech also offered a serious contrast from Trump’s most notable formal speech of his brief political career, his comments when accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in July. That speech verged into the authoritarian, as Trump told voters, “I am your voice.” In Cleveland, he also said of the nation’s challenges, “Only I can fix it,” a highly personalized approach. On Friday, standing on the western front of the U.S. Capitol, however, Trump traded that in for a populist approach, arguing that his unlikely ascension to the president represented the vesting of power less in himself than in the masses. “That all changes, starting right here and right now, because this moment is your moment,” he said. “It belongs to you.” That dismissal of political leadership is surprising for a Republican president who takes office with a unified Republican Congress, though it fits with his anti-establishment tone. While these words appealed to the nation as a whole—despite running one of the most racially and ethnically divisive campaigns in American history, he said that “when you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice”—he seemed in some moments to be delivering his promises more to the people who came out to see those campaign speeches, and who stood before him on the mall. “January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day that the people became the rulers of this nation again,” Trump said. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.” Yet many Americans were not in that group—Trump won millions of votes fewer than Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival who looked on as he took the oath—a fact underscored by the attendance at Friday’s inaugural, which appeared to be more sparse than the two ceremonies for former President Obama. While new presidents have often sought to overcome that division, Trump seemed less troubled by it. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” Trump said, a potential rebuke to the tradition of pluralism and patriotic dissent that has been a defining characteristic of American democracy. “At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.”In that way and in others, Trump’s inaugural address presented a curious contrast with Obama’s first inaugural address, delivered eight years ago. Obama took office in the midst of a massive economic crisis, with Americans losing their jobs by the thousands, and the outgoing president was historically unpopular. Yet Obama’s address, while acknowledging those challenges, reached for a tone of optimism. Trump, by contrast, enters office at a time when the nation is more politically divided than it has been in decades, but is by most other metrics in better shape. The unemployment rate is at its lowest in years, and crime rates are near historic lows. This is not the picture one would get from hearing Trump’s speech out of context. Nor did Trump offer the customary tributes to the nation’s past greatness, either in the form of presidents of yore or great moments. Where Obama’s two speeches invoked Concord, Gettysburg, and Normandy, and Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall, Trump said, “Now we are looking only to the future.” The future he envisions for the United States is one that is inward-looking, seeking to concentrate on how America can help its own people and withdrawing from the world—while also hoping the world withdraws from America. “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first,” Trump said, using a controversial phrase, associated with opponents of entering World War II, that Trump reclaimed for himself during the campaign. “For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we've defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America's infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay,” Trump said. But that will change, he vowed:  “We will follow two simple rules: Buy American, and hire American.” Rather than harp explicitly on immigration, his biggest buzzword during the campaign, Trump instead made a mantra of citizenship: “At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.” He also made a contrast between those citizens and the political class, a frequent target. “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country,” he said. As for foreign policy, Trump promised stronger American borders, and he said the nation would “eradicate completely” radical Islamic terrorism. Aside from those cases, though, he offered an isolationist view of U.S. power, rejecting the muscular approach of presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan in favor of leading solely by example. “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow.”“We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first,” he said, an apparent message to nations like Russia, whose territorial expansions in Eastern Europe the Obama administration fiercely opposed. “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow.” There was one more characteristic that distinguished Trump’s inaugural address. It was a speech that made unusually specific promises, eschewing the abstract uplift of his recent predecessors. Toward the end of his speech, which spanned roughly twenty minutes, he warned, “We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, constantly complaining but never doing anything about it.” That could be read as a warning to the other leaders on the dais, but it is also, he seemed to acknowledge, a challenge to himself. “The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action,” President Trump. He has cut his work out for himself. 20 Jan
The Otherworldly Genius of The Good Place - When NBC’s The Good Place premiered last September, even early fans seemed uncertain of its future. It was, after all, a non-workplace sitcom with an unusually ambitious premise: A woman named Eleanor (Kristen Bell) dies and finds herself in a non-denominational heaven reserved for only those who led the most selfless and ethical of lives. The problem is she was a terrible person on earth who ended up in the so-called “good place” by mistake, so to avoid being sent to “the bad place,” she hides her identity and tries to become a better person in the afterlife. My colleague David Sims praised the show’s debut but wondered how the story’s apparent plottiness would work in a genre that tends to be more episodic: After watching the first episode, it’s hard not to wonder how long a show with this ambitious a plot could really run—sitcoms are usually about reverting to the status quo at the end of every episode, while The Good Place’s storytelling feels more like that of a serialized sci-fi drama. The show’s first season, which ended Thursday, proved that a half-hour network comedy can, in a way, do both: embrace an ambitious, carefully plotted narrative structure, while recognizing the need to revert, to have things go back to the way they were so they can play out differently the next time around. There are plenty of other current shows blurring the line between comedy and drama. But unlike those hybrids (BoJack Horseman, Atlanta, Insecure, You’re the Worst), The Good Place is, tonally, 100 percent sitcom. It has, however, the spine of a twist-y, reality-questioning show like Lost or Westworld—a fact illuminated most clearly by a two-part finale so wonderfully conceived it would be foolish of NBC not to give the show a second season. (Spoilers for the entirety of The Good Place ahead.) For about 95 percent of season one, The Good Place (created by Michael Schur) was simply a delightful comedy. It was dense with jokes and populated by well-defined characters played by great actors. It managed to keep extending its premise in unexpected ways every time the story hit a possible momentum-killer—like Eleanor settling down into her ethics lessons with her soul mate Chidi (William Jackson Harper), or revealing to the neighborhood’s chief architect Michael (Ted Danson) that she belongs in the Bad Place. But a show that initially looked like it would follow a flawed woman’s noble efforts at self-improvement, while riffing on philosophical and spiritual concepts, turned out to be much more. The “what the fork”-inducing final episodes revealed plenty: the existence of a neutral “Medium Place” of “eternal mediocrity” whose sole inhabitant is a cocaine-and-masturbation-loving corporate lawyer who died in the ’80s. The fact that Eleanor’s neighbor Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto) died by suffocating inside a safe during a robbery gone wrong. The peculiar nature of the all-knowing judge “Shawn,” who detests hearing emotional testimony and who uttered the actual sentence, “I’ve ruled the fart inadmissible as evidence.” That one of Eleanor’s crimes on earth was “a brief Instagram flirtation with Kid Rock.” But the biggest reveal, of course, was that The Good Place is not The Good Place at all. It’s the Bad Place—or a Bad Place, only without the requisite lava monsters or physical agony. It’s an experimental hell designed by Michael to trick Eleanor, Jason, Chidi, and their neighbor Tahani (Jameela Jamil) into torturing each other forever; the four of them were specifically chosen because their unique insecurities and anxieties would ensure that they’d make each other miserable forever. Everyone in “The Good Place” but them (and a Siri-like robot named Janet) is playing a part. It’s a Truman Show/No Exit-style nightmare posing, quite convincingly, as a celestial paradise until Eleanor ruined the plans by doing something Michael didn’t expect her to—confessing. Even before this final discovery, The Good Place slotted in neatly with other recent metaphysically minded shows. But the sitcom’s massive twist felt distinct (and more satisfying) for a couple of reasons. One, unlike Mr. Robot for instance, The Good Place possessed a regard for rules and consequences when it came to its invented world—the neighborhood had an architect, and when something went wrong, there was an observable cause-and-effect reaction. Eleanor starts behaving badly in the afterlife? Giant shrimp fly out of the sky and Ariana Grande starts blasting. Michael can’t find the cause of the disturbances? He has to go into retirement. As mundane or bureaucratic as The Good Place’s laws seemed, they helped the world feel orderly. With any luck, The Good Place will get to continue its own grand experiment for at least a couple more years.Two, The Good Place’s status as a sitcom—typically more formulaic, circumscribed by genre conventions, including episode length—may have helped it from getting as bloated or messy as some of its peers in the drama category (Westworld, The OA). Humor aside, The Good Place was a far less frustrating exploration of alternate worlds, while still retaining quite a bit of complexity. There’s some clear meta-commentary going on, with Michael emerging as a sort of grand architect-slash-storyteller, akin to Westworld’s Robert Ford. The Good Place also asked questions of how motivation and intent shape moral character, while playing with bigger ideas about social engineering and the vaguely sadistic nature of consuming stories. After all, most viewers thought they were enjoying a quirky comedy all season. The sly joke implied by the finale: What does it say about us that we had such a rollicking time watching four people make each other utterly miserable? The structural sitcomminess—where the show has to revert to the status quo—of The Good Place also came through in the final moments of season one, albeit in a more surprising way. After Eleanor announces that she figured out that The Good Place is a sham, Michael has a mini tantrum (Danson’s transformation from fidgety nice guy to devious mastermind was incredible to see), and then asks his bosses for a second chance: He wants to erase the memories of Eleanor and her doomed neighbors (even more Westworld vibes) and redesign the “Good Place” so that Eleanor never feels the need to confess, or to figure out the truth about the afterlife. Which, naturally, sets the foundation for season two. Had the first season not been such a pleasant surprise—consistently funny and smart and engaging—the prospect of a season-two “do-over” might seem automatically stale. (And even if, heaven forfend, the show doesn’t get renewed, the finale would nonetheless have been an appropriate ending.) But The Good Place looks to be setting its sights even higher, and with any luck, it will get to continue its own grand experiment in form and storytelling for at least a couple more years. Which means more torture and emotional conflict and stomachaches and feelings of inadequacy and secret “bud holes” for Eleanor and her friends—but a lot of fun for those of us watching. 20 Jan
M. Night Shyamalan's Split Is a Creepy, Guilty Pleasure - To all of the shocking developments of the last 12 months, we may now add yet one more: M. Night Shyamalan has made a good movie. Or perhaps that’s overstating it a bit. The writer-director’s latest offering, Split, is more good-bad, a B-movie that earns itself no better than a solid B. That said, given the precipitous grading curve down which Shyamalan has been slaloming for well over a decade, this is a moderately remarkable achievement. A quick recap, for those who may have forgotten. After breaking into public consciousness with the celebrated The Sixth Sense in 1999, Shyamalan followed up with the quite-good Unbreakable, and the intriguing but not-quite-successful Signs. And then his filmmaking promptly fell off a cliff: The Village, Lady in the Water, The Happening (so terrible that it necessitated inventing the “spoilereview”), The Last Airbender, and After Earth. His most recent film, 2015’s The Visit, was less awful than its predecessors and therefore widely mistaken for being good, which it wasn’t. But now, with a very notable assist from actor James McAvoy, Shyamalan has succeeded in making a movie that’s actually worth seeing, at least for those in the proper mood. McAvoy stars as “Kevin”—or rather, as someone who was long ago known as “Kevin.” Over the subsequent years, his psyche has fractured into 23 distinct personalities, some of them more unpleasant than others. The movie opens with one of these personalities, Dennis, abducting three high-school girls from a birthday party at a mall in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Two of the victims (Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula) are well-adjusted, popular girls; the third—and principal protagonist—is a loner with psychic scars of her own (Anya Taylor-Joy, from last year’s The Witch). Dennis locks them away in a windowless room and tries to indulge his penchant for watching young women dance in various stages of undress. He is quickly reprimanded, however, by a stern woman, Patricia, who—in an ostentatious nod to Psycho—turns out to be another of Kevin’s many personalities. Off come Dennis’s glasses, on goes Patricia’s necklace and, boom!, the James McAvoy Masters Class in Acting is underway. Soon, we’ll also be introduced to Hedwig, a self-described 9-year-old boy; and Barry, a fashion designer who serves as the public face of the burgeoning menagerie. Patricia chides Dennis for his naughty behavior with the girls, reminding him that they have been seized for another, greater purpose, at the behest of an as-yet-unseen personality. And so begins the game of cat and mice: The girls try to escape by playing the alternating trio of Dennis, Patricia, and Hedwig off one another, and Dennis/Patricia/Hedwig tries to keep them under lock and key. In each of the “characters” McAvoy inhabits, he finds sparks of charm and wit.Meanwhile, Barry, the “good” personality, plays his own, less malevolent cat and mouse with the psychologist and specialist in Dissociative Identity Disorder (Betty Buckley) whom he regularly visits. But the more he tries to assure her that all is well with the gang in Kevin’s head, the more he persuades her that something is going very wrong. For its first two-thirds or so, Shyamalan keeps Split admirably creepy and well-paced, eliciting a nice performance from Taylor-Joy and solid ones from the rest of the supporting cast. (Buckley, in particular, was owed a decent role in recompense for the awful one Shyamalan saddled her with in The Happening.) The movie falls out of kilter in the final act, however. An unsavory backstory regarding Taylor-Joy’s character that appeared to be completely unnecessary is instead revealed to be a component of the movie’s painfully Shyamalanian final twist. (Seriously, dude. Not every one of your movies needs one of these. Consider this an intervention.) Moreover, once the film’s ultimate villain is unveiled, what ought to have been a 10-minute finale is stretched to twice that. (There is, however, an unexpected Easter Egg at the end for Shyamalan aficionados.) But the director’s strengths and weaknesses aside, it’s McAvoy’s performance(s) that elevate the film above its otherwise low-horror potential. (I was reminded of Edward Norton’s breakthrough role in Primal Fear, another B-movie elevated by an A+ split-personality performance.) In each of the “characters” McAvoy inhabits, he finds sparks of charm and wit—elements that have all too often been lacking in Shyamalan’s oeuvre. “He did awful things to people and he’ll do awful things to you, too,” the pre-adolescent Hedwig warns the kidnapped girls, before quickly adding, “I have blue socks.” And the twinkly delight that Patricia takes in a sandwich she has made for the girls—“It’s good. It’s got paprika”—is positively contagious. Thanks largely to McAvoy, Split is easily Shyamalan’s best film since Signs, and perhaps even Unbreakable. Moreover, along with The Visit, it suggests an obvious path for him moving forward. It may be the case—indeed, it certainly looks to be—that Shyamalan will never again rediscover the elegance and control he displayed so early on in The Sixth Sense. But the world needs second-tier, quasi-guilty-pleasure entertainments, too. And with Split, Shyamalan may have finally found himself the productive niche that eluded him for so long. 20 Jan
The Worst Presidential Inaugurations, Ranked - With malice toward none. The only thing we have to fear. Ask what you can do for your country. Presidential inaugurations will, at their best, inspire their audiences—not just in their respective moments, but for decades and centuries to come. But presidential inaugurations are also run by people, which means that, sometimes, they will go extremely wrong. Sometimes, it will be protests that will mar the best-planned ceremonies. Sometimes, it will be human pettiness (as when President Hoover, riding with Franklin Roosevelt in the motorcade to the Capitol in 1932, seems to have ignored Roosevelt’s attempts at conversations, instead staring stone-faced into the distance). Sometimes, however, inaugural exercises will encounter disasters of a more epic strain: storms, illness, death, extremely pungent cheese. With that in mind, here are some of the worst inaugurations in history, ranked in order from the mildly to the egregiously disastrous. * * * 7. John Adams, 1797 Adams is the least disastrous on this list because nothing overtly awful befell his installation as the second U.S. president. In fact, you can make a very good case—and many have—that Adams’s inauguration was one of the most pivotal moments in American history: Washington having left office after his second term was up, the installation of Adams was a demonstration of the new country’s commitment to a peaceful transition of power. It was in that sense a model of American democracy that would be emulated, with varying degrees of success, by other countries, and that should also place Adams’s inauguration on any best-inaugurations list you might want to make. On a human level, however, the inauguration was a decidedly sad affair—especially if you happened to have the mixed blessing to be, during the ceremony that would install John Adams as president, John Adams himself. Washington exited office just as beloved as he had been when he entered it, and Americans of the time were, just as their descendants would be, extremely adept at expressing their opinions. Adams’s inauguration was thus less of a welcome to the founder and more of a farewell ceremony to Washington. After Adams took his oath, the triumphant new president was greeted with people weeping—not of joy, but of sadness. 6. George W. Bush, 2001 This one makes the list through no fault of Bush himself, but rather because of the antics of his administration’s predecessor. Bill Clinton’s staff, still angry about the Supreme Court-decided outcome of the 2000 campaign, decided to leave their successors a West Wing that doubled as a kind of bureaucratic fun house. They smeared glue on desk drawers. They rerouted the White House phone lines (in one particularly egregious rewiring, they saw to it that calls to the new chief of staff would be directed to a phone in the closet). And, according to a report on the matter from the General Accounting Office, “messages disparaging President Bush were left on signs and in telephone voice mail.” (The New York Times, in its summary of that report, added: “A few of the messages used profane or obscene language.”) While pranks pulled from one administration to the next are typical—Clinton staffers faced similar antics from George H.W. Bush’s outgoing staff—the ones lobbed by Clinton’s team took things a step further. (As Representative Bob Barr, Republican of Georgia—and a harsh critic of Clinton’s—told the Times: “The Clinton administration treated the White House worse than college freshmen checking out of their dorm rooms.”) The GAO estimated the cost of repairs for the damage to be between $13,000 and $14,000. Nearly $5,000 of that was dedicated to replacing the White House’s computer keyboards—from which Clinton staffers had systematically removed the “W” keys. 5. William Taft, 1909 Taft was installed when presidential inaugurations were still held in March. Despite the spring-ish timing, though, Taft’s inauguration coincided with a blizzard that covered Washington in 10 inches of snow. That in itself wasn’t too much of a problem—Taft simply took his oath of office, as Reagan would decades later, in the Senate chamber. The issue, really, was the parade that followed the oath itself. The blizzard’s winds had toppled both trees and telephone poles; trains were stalled; streets were blocked. Still, the festivities carried on, despite 1909’s technological constraints. City workers—some 6,000 men, with 500 wagons—worked through the night to clear the parade path. In the end, the workers cleared 58,000 tons of snow from the parade route so that Taft’s carriage could pass with an appropriate amount of pomp. Taft, for his part, bore this all with good humor. As he would later joke: “I always knew it would be a cold day in hell when I became president.” William Taft and Franklin Roosevelt drive to the Capitol for Taft’s presidential inauguration ceremony on March 4, 1909. (George Grantham Bain Collection / Library of Congress)4. James Buchanan, 1857 The presidency of the man many historians deem to be one of the, if not the, worst in American history began in a manner that was appropriately plagued. Before his inauguration, the soon-to-be President Buchanan stayed, along with several of Washington’s luminaries, at the National Hotel, the largest in the city. The hotel ended up being the epicenter of an outbreak of a mysterious illness. The breakout (which would come to be known as the National Hotel disease) sickened, according to some contemporary accounts, 400 people, and claimed 36 lives, including those of three congressmen. The new president wasn’t immune from the illness: He was twice infected by it. Rumors—aided in their circulation by sensationalistic newspapers—spread that the victims of National Hotel disease had been poisoned by arsenic, and that the poisoning was the result of a botched assassination attempt on Buchanan (once called a “northern man with southern principles”) by radical abolitionists. “From every quarter of the country come in denunciations of what is styled—not without warrant,” the New York Times declared, “the determination on the part of interested parties to stifle inquiry and hoodwink suspicion concerning what has every appearance of being the most gigantic and startling crime of the age.” Historians now think the outbreak was dysentery—a result not of conspiracy, but of the hotel’s primitive sewage system. And Buchanan himself was fortunate to have survived it. Less fortunate, however, was the nation he led once he recovered: Many historians regard his failure to treat the threat of civil war seriously as “the worst presidential mistake ever made.” 3. Andrew Johnson, 1865 To be clear, the disaster is Johnson’s inauguration not as president, but as vice president for Abraham Lincoln during Lincoln’s second inauguration. How did he steal the show before the inaugural address that would come to be remembered as the best in U.S. history? Booze. Well, booze and bad luck. Johnson, when he arrived in Washington to take the oath of office, was recovering from a bout of typhoid fever. In an (apparent) attempt to self-medicate, he spent inauguration eve drinking. Come inauguration day itself, he was, unsurprisingly, hungover. And he had the misfortune of living during a time before IV-driven hangover “cures.” So? Johnson hair-of-the-dogged. He drank, apparently, three tumblers of whiskey in his attempt to chase away the effects of the evening before. Unsurprisingly, this backfired—to the extent that, when he came to the Senate chamber to deliver his own inaugural speech, he bombed. His speech was long and rambling and angry, attesting to his “humble origins and his triumph over the rebel aristocracy.” And “in the shocked and silent audience,” according to a Senate history of the matter, “President Abraham Lincoln showed an expression of ‘unutterable sorrow,’ while Senator Charles Sumner covered his face with his hands.” Johnson was so drunk and confused that, after he finally did sit down, he was unable to perform the day’s ceremonial task: to swear in the nation’s new senators. Some suggested, ironically, impeachment. Lincoln, however, supported his new vice president. “It has been a severe lesson for Andy,” he said. “But I do not think he will do it again.” 2. Andrew Jackson, 1829 Jackson’s inauguration on the one hand belongs on a Best Inaugurations of All Time list, and for roughly the same reason that it makes this Worst-Of list: the massive party that followed the inauguration itself. Jackson, true to his campaign’s populist messaging, was the first president to take the oath of office in a public ceremony—one that took place outside the Capitol. A crowd of some 20,000 appeared to see him do it. But oaths are short, and Jackie Evancho had not yet been born. What is a crowd of 20,000 to do to entertain themselves once the ceremony has ended? They made their way to the White House—where, even before Jackson came along, it was customary to have a post-inauguration reception to which people could come and shake the hand of the new president, perhaps have a glass of orange juice or a piece of cheese. What wasn’t customary was the crowds. In the rough manner of those parties in sitcoms that kids throw when their parents are out of town, things soon got out of control. Guests’ shoes muddied the White House carpets. Soon, the crowd got rowdier. They began looting rooms. They began breaking dishes. One representative from South Carolina wrote the next day to Martin Van Buren, describing the events and dubbing the party a “Saturnalia.” From the event meant to celebrate him and his presidency, Jackson had to escape, with the help of aides, through a window in the back of the White House. As for ending a party before the invention of electricity would allow you to simply turn the lights on? According to the Constitution Center, Antoine Michel Giusta, the White House steward, finally realized that the best way to get the drunken mob out of the White House was to take away its booze. Giusta moved the punch bowl outside, according to one report. “Other reports,” the Center notes, “indicated that staffers passed punch and ice cream through the White House’s windows to the crowd outside.” To make matters worse? The wives of Jackson’s cabinet members got into a loud argument during his inaugural ball, occasioned by two of the women mean-girl-ing a third because they deemed her social standing too low and her moral standing unfit for the role of a cabinet wife. The event and its radiating effects would haunt Jackson’s entire first term, and would lead to the resignation of several of his cabinet members—including one Martin Van Buren. Robert Cruikshank’s “President's Levee, or All Creation Going to the White House,” depicts the crowd in front of the White House following Andrew Jackson's first inaugural reception in 1829. (Library of Congress)1. William Henry Harrison, 1841 First, Harrison delivered what was, by most accounts from listeners, a terrible, rambling speech—about Rome, about the great scope of history. It was, at 8,445 words, the longest inaugural address in history. But also: The 68-year-old delivered that speech in the cold, without a coat or a hat. He followed it up by attending a parade and then three different inaugural balls.  That speech killed him. Harrison died a month after the inauguration, of pneumonia and pleurisy. 20 Jan
Why Trump Is Keeping Some Obama Appointees Around - Donald Rumsfeld is not joining the Trump administration, but one of his most famous rules is: “You go to war with the Army you have—not the Army you might wish you have.” Or the secretary of the Army, as the case might be. With the process of vetting and appointing, to say nothing of confirming, executive-branch officials well behind the optimal pace, incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said during a briefing on Thursday that “over 50” members of the Obama administration will temporarily remain in their posts to help smooth the transition to the Trump administration. Spicer did not name all of the officials, nor did he indicate whether others had been asked and declined to stay on. A message to the Trump transition team, asking for a full list, has not been answered. Reuters reported Thursday afternoon that some individuals on a list, dated Tuesday, of appointees being asked to stay on had declined to do so, including the principal deputy director of national intelligence, an undersecretary of state, and an assistant secretary of state. Here are the people Spicer mentioned: Robert Work, deputy secretary of defense (Work’s extension had actually already been reported.) Chuck Rosenberg, acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center Thomas Shannon, undersecretary of state for public affairs Susan Coppedge, a State Department ambassador-at-large focusing on human trafficking Brett McGurk, State Department special envoy for combating ISIS Kody Kinsley, assistant secretary of the treasury for management Adam Szubin, acting undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence It’s hardly novel for a president to hold some executive-branch officials over into a new administration. These cases are notable because of what else is known about the Trump transition. The president-elect has been slow to appoint officials, as my colleague Russell Berman wrote earlier this month. With the recent nomination of Sonny Perdue as agriculture secretary, Trump now has a full Cabinet, but below the top positions sit legions of unfilled spots. The Partnership for Public Service and Washington Post identified 690 key administration posts, of which 29 have nominees and none have been confirmed. By way of contrast, Politico notes that every one of Bill Clinton’s Cabinet members was confirmed within two days of his inauguration in 1993. Trump has been slow to fill those slots because his transition team has been slow to identify and vet figures, which is itself partly a result of tumult on the team—Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, the erstwhile head, was sacked shortly after the election—and of the fact that winning took even Trump by surprise. Several outlets reported that top Trump aides were surprised to realize that they had to replace all West Wing staff. The profusion of empty chairs is particularly worrisome because so many Trump appointees have little or no experience in government. Among Republicans with executive-branch experience, some don’t want to work for Trump out of moral or political conviction, while others, particularly in national security, believe they are being blacklisted for opposing him during the presidential campaign. As a result, some foreign-policy mandarins on both sides of the aisle are worried about whether the State and Defense departments are ready to face a crisis. “Unlike State, which can rely on its bureaucracy, the NSC has to be ready on Day One as most of its old team leaves,” Philip Gordon, a former top aide to Obama, told Michael Crowley. “In a normal world, even before a single presidential phone call or meeting or decision the NSC team would prepare background, points, facts, etc. They will not have a team ready to do that.” The conservative journalist Max Boot wrote in Foreign Policy: Not even deputy secretaries have yet been appointed at the State or Defense departments, much less the crucial undersecretaries and assistant secretaries who are responsible for fleshing out the broad parameters of the administration’s foreign policy. These are the obscure but important officials who do the real work of governing, teeing up the decisions that will be decided by the “principals” at NSC meetings and then translating policy guidance (which in this president’s case is likely to be quite broad) into specific actions. Keeping these officials in place is probably a wise move, then. What is intriguing about it is that many of them are working on the areas where Trump was most strident about his differences with Obama. McGurk leads up the effort against ISIS, while Trump lambasted Obama’s handling of the group and insisted he would beat it easily and quickly. Szubin’s brief involves tracking terrorists, another area where Trump claimed the Obama team had been deficient. (Senate Republicans have bottled up his bid for his job to be made permanent on the basis that he supported Obama’s Iran deal—which Trump also blasted.) The same goes for Rasmussen. Work manages the Pentagon, while Trump spent the campaign insisting the military was a weakened mess. Shannon, although a career Foreign Service office, manages the day-to-day workings of the State Department, which Trump also claimed was being poorly run. Keeping the 50-some officials on the job will help to produce a smoother transition that would occur without them, although the vast number of unfilled posts remains a cause for concern. But keeping them on will also likely help to preserve the policies and approach that Obama espoused. 19 Jan
The Poetry-Free Inauguration Makes a Comeback - Some of the most memorable inauguration moments have been because of poets: Robert Frost struggling to see what he’d written down and then improvising at John F. Kennedy’s swearing-in; Maya Angelou speaking of dinosaurs, God, and unity at Bill Clinton’s; Richard Blanco saying “hello, shalom, buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días” to Barack Obama’s second inaugural crowd. There is no indication that Donald Trump will have a poet at his inauguration. A hoax recently circulated online saying some verses praising “Melania the fair” and calling Obama a “tyrant” would be read, but in truth there is no poet on the schedule (though, as is customary, a number of religious leaders will deliver readings). The lack of poetry may seem like a break with precedent, or it may seem especially telling given news that Trump intends to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. But it’s not so unprecedented. Only five poets have recited their work at swearing-in ceremonies, each for Democratic presidents: Kennedy, Clinton, and Obama. (Jimmy Carter had a reading by James Dickey at an inaugural gala). But in that fact alone—the fact of presidential poetry as a partisan tradition—is a reminder of America’s cultural divides. In the weeks after the election, many Americans turned to poetry for guidance and comfort, as my colleague Megan Garber has chronicled. Now, Leslie Lawrence at WBUR’s website suggests that anyone yearning for some verse on Inauguration Day might want to revisit the works of Walt Whitman. (From Song of Myself: “Whoever degrades another degrades me.”) Does Donald Trump have a favorite poem? If so, he doesn’t appear to have told told anyone about it publicly. The closest thing might be Oscar Brown Jr.’s lyrics to Al Wilson’s 1960s R&B song “The Snake.” Trump made a habit of dramatically reading the rhyme aloud on the campaign trail to describe the dangers of immigration: A retelling of an Aesop fable, it’s about a woman rescuing a pretty snake who’s nearly been frozen to death. Once the snake has been let into her home, though, it bites her and she starts to die. “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in,” it tells her, with a grin. It’s a simple work whose meaning can apply to lots of situations—but it appears that neither it nor anything like it will be heard from the U.S. Capitol on Friday. 19 Jan
Sorry, Betsy DeVos: Guns Aren't a Bear Necessity in Schools - The confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees have had plenty of wild moments, but none seems to have captured the imagination of so many people as much as Betsy DeVos’s explanation for why it might be wise to allow guns in schools. DeVos, Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, fielded a question from Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, an outspoken advocate for gun control, on the matter of gun-free school zones. She responded by citing an example she’d heard from Senator Mike Enzi about a school in Wapiti, Wyoming, Enzi’s home state, that had a fence to keep grizzly bears out. Related Story What Betsy DeVos Did (and Didn't) Reveal About Her Education Priorities “I think probably there, I would imagine that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies,” DeVos said. Thus was whelped a sleuth of bear jokes at DeVos’ expense. But it turns out the bear-baiting was misplaced, or at least badly exaggerated. The backlash is perhaps unsurprising: From the Mama Grizzly to Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s divergent approaches to the Russian bear, Washington has become a den of polarized opinions. Yet encounters with bears at schools across the country turn out to be a somewhat common occurrence—and as bear populations bounce back, particularly in the east, more schools are joining the cub, so to speak. No example is quite so delightful as a 2015 episode at the high school in Bozeman, Montana. It turns out the bear was an early bird—despite the species’ reputation for sleeping at length, it couldn’t compete with the slumber of teenage humans, and arrived well before the starting school bell: The bear entered the school through an open garage door in the back of the building at around 7:30 a.m., nearly an hour before school started. Students and staff were in the building, according to Bozeman Public Schools Superintendent Rob Watson. The bear left through another open door after about a minute. The cub rattled around lockers, presumably looking for honey, and rattled some school officials. In a short video, a nervous voice asks the principal, “What do you want me to do, Kevin?” A bear visited a #Bozeman #Montana high school this morning! pic.twitter.com/vVJEOQqbe7 — The Senior List (@SeniorList) October 14, 2015 But as the Billings Gazette reports (as part of its “Montana Bears in the News Series”), the animal eventually ambled out of the school on its own, with no live ammunition needed. That seems to be the case for most bears’ scholastic excursions. In 2013, students in Montclair, New Jersey, were put on lockdown after a black bear was spotted near an elementary school. The bear was eventually found in a tree, shot down with a tranquilizer gun, and freed. Something similar happened in Ridgewood, New Jersey, the following year. That animal was “caused no harm,” The New York Times assured readers. In 2011, a bear cavorted outside Tualatin Elementary School in Oregon before being caught and released in the wild. Bears have been tranquilized or trapped when they got too close to schools in states from Connecticut to Florida to Idaho, though it’s just as common for them to simply clear out before anyone can do anything. In 1985, employees at a girls’ school in upstate New York tried to run one off but only succeeded in scaring it up a tree, from whence animal-control officials had to retrieve it. It turns out that what motivates the bears is the same thing that manages to get many teenagers up and moving on a daily basis: “They’re after food and sex,” a Connecticut state biologist told the Times in 2005. Sadly, not every encounter resolves itself peacefully; some come to a grizzly ending. In Irvington, New Jersey, in 2006, a frightened black bear scared officials, too, resulting in a lockdown of schools. But with the end of the school day nearing, it was decided that the bear had to go. As officers neared the animal, wielding tranquilizer guns, it became aggressive, and they decided to shoot it with a shotgun. “It was for our own safety,” said the impossibly well-named animal-control officer Jim Osorio. In 2015, authorities managed to catch a bear that had been menacing schools in Arvada, Colorado, but ultimately decided to euthanize her because of health concerns. A deadly outcome is less likely in Wapiti, Wyoming, though. Urged along by DeVos’s comment, Politifact’s Lauren Carroll called up the school superintendent there, who informed Carroll that in accordance with the district’s gun-free policy, there’s no firearm at the school, and the anti-grizzly-bear fence seems to do the trick. What’s more, Politifact found that guns are often ineffective against the animals. If DeVos remains concerned about the threat of bears at schools in the U.S., perhaps she’d do just as well to forget the guns and instead a take page out of the playbook of the president she hopes to serve: Build the wall. Unfortunately, the bears are unlikely to pay for it. 19 Jan

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How China’s Liberals and Students Feel About Trump - Like many around the world who are coming to grips with a Trump presidency, ordinary Chinese are also trying to make sense of the events taking place across the Pacific. At The Washington Post, Wang Lixiong writes that the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States has raised questions in the minds of Chinese liberals about the model of democracy that the United States is presenting to the world. Chinese like me — pro-democracy liberals — have been pushing for years to end the one-party dictatorship in our country. Most of us long regarded the U.S. political system as a model. Now, with the presidential election of Donald Trump, a man whose grasp of both democratic concepts and ethical norms is questionable, we have been forced to ask some hard new questions. […] If the United States, a model for democracy in the world, can elect a Trump, why wouldn’t such a result be even more likely in China, where popular education in civic values and in the nation’s history is much weaker? Fifty years ago, Mao brought immeasurable disaster to China, but today, after years of Communist Party work to erase history and stimulate nationalism, Mao, in the popular Chinese imagination, is regarded as a hero. If Mao were to stand for election in China today, he would win in a landslide. In the United States, Trump will have to work within a mature system of checks and balances and will have to step down in either four years or eight. A Chinese Trump, on the other hand, would almost certainly turn into a Chinese Putin. It would not be surprising to see the Han Chinese, who make up more than 90 percent of the population, use democracy to suppress ethnic minorities, to launch an attack on Taiwan, or to bully Hong Kong. It is not beyond imagination that a Trump-style stimulation of popular passions in China could lead by democratic vote to support for launching a war on the United States. The main question that the U.S. election leaves with Chinese liberals is how to build a system that can avoid a Chinese version of the Trump phenomenon. [Source] The Washington Post’s Emily Rauhala spoke with Chinese PhD student Yin Hao, who has a passion for American politics, about his views on the rise of populism in the U.S., providing yet another perspective on what ordinary Chinese people think of the Trump phenomenon. Yin, a 30-year-old PhD student, spent the Obama era obsessing over U.S. politics. When he’s not conducting doctoral research on 3-D printing or singing karaoke, he translates American news and comedy clips, sharing his work with about 800,000 followers on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging site. […] Yin’s analysis? American journalists, he thinks, blinded by their confidence in American exceptionalism overestimated the strength of U.S. institutions and underestimated grass-roots rage. […] From the perspective of one-party China, he argues that the two-party system fuels populist politics, turning democracy into a personality contest. “For too long, the press focused on Trump’s personality and missed the real story — Trump’s supporters,” he said. To understand “Make America Great Again,” Yin looks to home. Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has promised the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” a slogan with similar appeal. Both messages are both, at their core, conservative, Yin said. They portray “a world in decay, where things will go bad if they do nothing.” “Good things always happen yesterday. They must preserve and protect. It’s about national pride, traditional values and military might,” he said. [Source] See also a Global Times video featuring children in China giving their views on America’s new president. Chinese propaganda authorities have issued a series of directives to try to limit the reporting on the election and inauguration of Trump. © cindyliuwenxin for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: donald Trump, U.S. election, United States, Wang LixiongDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall00:06
Ministry of Truth: No Independent Reporting of Trump’s Inauguration - The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. The name of the issuing body has been omitted to protect the source. All regions, all websites: Starting as of the issuance of this directive, no websites are to independently report on “American President Trump’s Inauguration.” Use only copy from authoritative media. Do not tamper with headlines, do not compile special reports, do not aggregate. News and commerce websites’ Weibo, WeChat, mobile apps, etc., must not cover the inauguration with pictures, video, or any other type of live broadcast. PC-accessible reports must not be in the top five lines of important news sections of the homepage; related headlines must not exceed two lines. Mobile clients strictly prohibit display on front screens, and do not surpass two lines. Closely manage to ensure that commentary, forums, BBS, microblogs, WeChat, and other platforms all adhere to the above requirements. Do not exaggerate or hype; manage negative and harmful expression of opinion. All regions, all websites must strictly implement the above requests. Any violating websites and the responsible network and information departments will be seriously held accountable. (January 20, 2017)[Chinese] Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th U.S. president today. Earlier this week, propaganda officials issued a directive limiting reporting on U.S.-China relations and on Trump in the run-up to the inauguration. Translation by Josh Rudolph. Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. See CDT’s collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truth since 2011. © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Directives from the Ministry of Truth, donald Trump, media censorship, U.S. relationsDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall20 Jan
Liaoning Governor Confirms Reports of Falsified Data - The governor of Liaoning Province acknowledged this week that his government had inflated economic growth statistics between 2011-2014, a rare admission in a country where official statistics are often doubted. Zheping Huang at Quartz reports: But China’s northeastern Liaoning province, which relies on steel production as its growth engine, had inflated its GDP figures from 2011 to 2014, said province governor Chen Qiufa on Jan. 17 in his annual work report, according to the state newspaper People’s Daily (link in Chinese). It is the first time the Chinese government has publicly admitted to faking official statistics at any level. Fiscal revenues were inflated by at least 20% during the period, and some other economic data were also made up, the People’s Daily said. Liaoning was the only province that fell into recession in 2016. In the first three quarters of last year, Liaoning’s GDP contracted 2.2% from the same period in 2015, thanks largely to a severe downturn in heavy industry. [Source] At the South China Morning Post, Frank Tang looks at the impact of the falsified data on both government policy and people’s lives: “The fake fiscal figures influenced the central government’s economic judgment and accordingly led to a lowering of the size of transfer payments to the province,” he said. It also meant local residents carried a higher tax burden because a bigger share of the province’s funds went to central coffers, he said. Citing the audit report, Chen said the inflation of fiscal data by city and county governments worsened each year from 2011. People’s Daily reported that by 2014, when the falsification of data was at a peak, some governments inflated their fiscal income by as much as 23 per cent. [Source] In July 2014, Liaoning was singled out by anti-corruption inspectors for faking economic data; following the visits by the inspection team, the province’s soaring official growth rate began to plummet, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal last fall. Last September, the Liaoning delegation to the National People’s Congress was disbanded after nearly half the province’s delegates were implicated in a vote-buying scheme. Official statistics in China have long been greeted with skepticism by economists and other observers. While Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign has targeted falsified data from local governments, official numbers are still not immune from doubt. With today’s release of the 2016 GDP growth rate of 6.7%, the accuracy of the number was immediately called into question. © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: GDP growth, Liaoning, local power, statisticsDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall19 Jan
Photo: Untitled, by 浩 严 - Untitled © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: 浩 严Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall19 Jan
Wang Jiuliang: Ghost Towns and Shattered Land - Photographer Wang Jiuliang uncovers the monumental waste created by development and progress. In his 2010 documentary “Beijing Besieged by Waste,” Wang exposed illegal garbage dumps encircling the capital and the lives of those eking out their existence scavenging from the trash. His latest film, “Plastic China,” follows a young girl in Shandong whose family recycles plastic from around the world. “Plastic China” won the International Documentary Film Festival Special Jury Award in November, and is an official selection for the Sundance Film Festival. Earlier this month, Wang talked about his latest project on the TED-esque platform Yixi. Wang’s ambitious investigation will track the source of the materials surrounding urban denizens: the stone extracted from leveled mountains for our bathroom sinks, the iron that poisons water and goes into steel frames, the coal-ravaged towns that power Beijing. Wang’s urgent message and shocking visual delivery echo Chai Jing’s viral film from 2015 on China’s choking smog, “Under the Dome.” For Wang, though, smog is just the beginning. Wang’s talk seems to have been scrubbed from the Yixi website, but the transcript is still available from Yixi’s public WeChat account as of this posting. CDT has translated the the talk and subtitled the video on YouTube. If the subtitles don’t display, press the “CC” button on the bottom right of the embedded video: Read more about the environment from CDT. © Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: air pollution, environmental destruction, industrial pollution, mining, pollution, smog, urbanization, Wang JiuliangDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall19 Jan
Ministry of Truth: Handle Trump Carefully - The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. The name of the issuing body has been omitted to protect the source. For all media, any recent reports about the United States must strictly conform with the central media; any news relating to China-U.S. relations must use Xinhua copy. Any news about Trump must be handled carefully; unauthorized criticism of Trump’s words or actions is not allowed. (January 13, 2017) [Chinese] Donald Trump will be sworn in as president of the United States on Friday, January 20. Since his election in November, tensions between his transition team and the Chinese government have flared over a number of issues including Taiwan, trade, and the South China Sea. Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. See CDT’s collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truth since 2011. © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Directives from the Ministry of Truth, donald Trump, media censorship, press freedom, South China Sea, Taiwan U.S. relations, U.S. relationsDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall18 Jan
Minitrue: Amend Headlines on Smog Forecast Request - The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. The name of the issuing body has been omitted to protect the source. With no exception, the headline “Local Meteorological Bureaus Nationwide are Requested to Halt Smog Forecasting and Warning Work,” must be modified. Related content is not to be hyped. (January 17, 2017) [Chinese] The above central directive comes after the following photo was leaked and shared widely online: All provincial, city, and county meteorological offices: On January 17, 2017 at 18:36 received a telephone notification from the China Meteorological Administration requesting the immediate cessation of smog forecasting and warning work. All work units are kindly requested to immediately stop making and distributing smog forecasts and warning material. In circumstances where visibility is less than 10 km on the basis of relative humidity, carry out forecasting and early warning work in accordance with fog procedures. Science and Technology Forecasting Bureau 1/17/2017 Following the leak, many Chinese news websites reported on the notice in the context of ongoing air pollution crises in many Chinese regions, inspiring the above central directive. While the information had already been circulated widely, the directive requests all websites to amend the original title, removing suggestions that the leaked instructions were meant to be applied nationwide. Deutsche Welle reports on suspicion that the leak showed government efforts to suppress air quality information:  China’s Meteorological Administration notified regional forecasters late on Tuesday to “immediately stop issuing smog alerts.” The leaked notice was widely shared on popular Chinese microblog Weibo and confirmed by state media. The government said a single department will now be responsible for issuing smog alerts to avoid mismatches between the different authorities. A representative from the China Meteorological Administration told government-backed online publication “The Paper” that “meteorological bureaus and the environmental protection administration often disagree when they issue smog-related information.” “A joint alerting mechanism will be formulated to consult how to and who should issue alerts for smog,” the representative added. Chinese officials use a color-coded system to issue smog alerts, topping out at red when severe pollution warnings are likely to last more than 72 hours.  The mechanism warns firms, schools and individuals of incoming smog and sets off a series of emergency measures, such has ordering cars off the road and closing highly polluting factories. [Source] The leak and subsequent directive to amend headlines in existing coverage comes three years after central Chinese authorities declared “war on pollution” in response to mounting public anger over toxic air pollution. Despite significant policy moves to address the domestic situation, and diplomatic indications of China’s willingness to assume a leadership role in global efforts to combat climate change, this year’s smog season has been a severe one so far. Last month, as Beijing was in the middle of a five-day “red alert” for air pollution, municipal authorities revealed plans to include smog on a list of “meteorological disasters,” much to the chagrin of experts who saw in the plan potential to give polluters a free ride. A subsequent propaganda directive ordered media outlets to refrain from commenting on the plan. The intensity of urban air pollution this winter may have inspired recent changes to the National Energy Administration’s newest five-year plan: an announcement in November showed goals to substantially increase coal power capacity by 2020 and decrease goals for alternative energy development; More recently the administration announced over $360 billion in planned investments into renewable energy. At The New York Times, Michael Forsythe reports that the construction of over 100 planned coal-fired power plants have been cancelled: The announcement, made by China’s National Energy Administration, cancels 103 projects that were planned or under construction, eliminating 120 gigawatts of future coal-fired capacity. That includes dozens of projects in 13 provinces, mostly in China’s coal-rich north and west, on which construction had already begun. Those projects alone would have had a combined output of 54 gigawatts, more than the entire coal-fired capacity of Germany, according to figures compiled by Greenpeace. The cancellations make it likelier that China will meet its goal of limiting its total coal-fired power generation capacity to 1,100 gigawatts by 2020. That huge figure, three times the total coal-fired capacity in the United States, is far more than China needs. Its coal plants now run at about half of capacity, and new sources of power, like wind, solar and nuclear, are coming online at a fast clip. Nevertheless, China’s capacity would have surged well past the 1,100-gigawatt mark by 2020 had it not begun canceling coal-fired plants in the works. The new announcements are in addition to cancellations detailed last year. [Source] More from Reuters‘ Josephine Mason: The projects worth some 430 billion yuan ($62 billion) were to have been spread across provinces and autonomous regions including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Shaanxi and other northwestern areas. […] “Stopping under-construction projects seems wasteful and costly, but spending money and resources to finish these completely unneeded plants would be even more wasteful,” said Greenpeace in a statement. [Source] Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. See CDT’s collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truth since 2011. © josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: air pollution, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, propaganda, smogDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall18 Jan
Photo: Guilin, China, by Chris Goldberg - Guilin, China © josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Chris Goldberg, chrisgoldDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall18 Jan
Photo: Scooter Mania, by Daniel Parks - Scooter Mania © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Daniel ParksDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall17 Jan
App Stores Required to Register - New statistics about mobile apps show that the Chinese market is the driving factor in the rapid growth of the app industry worldwide. Since last summer, Chinese authorities have taken steps to regulate apps in an effort to limit “illegal” content on the popular medium. In an apparent response to the new rules, Apple removed both the Chinese and English-language New York Times apps from their China-based App Store earlier this month. In a follow-up to the regulations passed in August, the Cyberspace Administration of China is now requiring all app stores to register with the government. Paul Mozur reports for The New York Times: In a notice published on its website, the Cyberspace Administration of China said late Friday that its offices across China should ensure that records are kept on the country’s many app stores, starting Monday. “Many apps have been found to spread illegal information, violate user rights or contain security risks,” the post read. It said the purpose of the registration was to ensure that it is clear who takes responsibility if apps, or app stores, are found to engage in illegal practices. Beijing has begun pushing harder to enforce a law passed last year that barred apps from engaging in activities deemed to endanger national security or disrupt social order, terms that are often broadly applied to discussion of politically sensitive topics. [Source] The new regulations effectively put the onus of regulation on the app stores and developers. While China’s major mobile companies all maintain their own app stores, third party stores have also proliferated, making oversight difficult. Eva Dou at The Wall Street Journal explains the challenges of regulating apps: But apps create a special challenge for government censors, experts say, because they often incorporate a wide variety of functions and serve as platforms for users to exchange information, making them harder to oversee. They are also multiplying quickly. “It’s almost impossible for the regulators to register and supervise all the millions of apps there one by one,” said Zhu Wei, deputy director of the Communications Law Research Center at the China University of Political Science and Law. “The government is managing the app stores, and stores are managing the app developers according to law.” [Source] While “illegal content” was one target of the new regulations over apps, the proliferation of malware is another, the BBC reports: Cheetah Mobile Security – a Beijing-based firm – reported that more than 1.4 million Chinese users’ mobile devices had been struck by infections as of January 2016, making it the worst afflicted nation. India and Indonesia were in second and third place. “[A] reason these countries have become the worst-hit ones is that third party app markets are prevailing in these areas, and most of these third party app markets have been contaminated by malware due to weak monitoring,” it said. CAC said the register was also intended to tackle the publication of “illegal information”. [Source] © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: apps, Internet censorship, Internet security, mobile phonesDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall17 Jan

The Eyeopener from CBC Radio Calgary (Highlights)

Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 20, 2017 - Today's podcast: French skills in the Conservative leadership race; I.T. expert turns the tables on laptop thief; comedian Ali Hassan19 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 19, 2017 - Today's podcast: Arlene Dickinson on Kevin O'Leary's political ambitions; Calgary weighs new parking rules for neighbourhoods; Alberta teachers make a Canadian checklist for the country's 150th.18 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 17, 2017 - Today's podcast: Calgarian witnesses nightclub shooting in Mexico; woman wanted on animal abuse charges spotted in Jamaica; Julie Van Rosendaal prepares game meat.16 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 16, 2017 - Today's podcast: Hayley Wickenheiser on her retirement; Palace Theatre name returns to historic Calgary building; Red Deer man builds epic ice castle in his front yard.15 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 13, 2017 - Today's podcast: Bringing back Calgary's downtown core; Banff RCMP shut down pot shop; the benefits of cursive writing.12 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 12, 2017 - Today's podcast: Premier Notley on Jane Fonda's oilsands tour; former Canadian ski racer Steve Podborski; the psychology of pet hoarding; two old friends reconnect for an organ donation.11 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 11, 2017 - Today's podcast: Woman charged with animal cruelty goes missing; Deborah Yedlin on Calgary’s grocery wars; Black Diamond gets a traffic light.10 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 10, 2017 - Today's podcast: Hotel group wants to see restrictions on short-term rentals; Mayor Nenshi on business tax changes; Minor Hockey Week in full swing; exploring the Danish concept of "hygge." 9 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 9, 2017 - Today's podcast: Two business owners comment on the economic climate in Calgary; Alzheimer's Awareness Month in Canada; we announce the final tally from our Food Bank Drive; looking back at last night's Golden Globes. 8 Jan
Eyeopener Podcast for Jan. 6, 2017 - Today's podcast: We introduce our new Eyeopener theme; Devonian Gardens remain closed for repairs; contemporary Canadian dance icon Louise Lecavalier. 5 Jan

di

Daily Kos

This week in science: I was strolling on the moon one day ... - First, they’re coming for the Affordable Care Act, then they’re coming for Medicare, and they’re even coming for the VA. But regardless of how much progress they make on those fronts, or how long it takes, or how much death and suffering they cause in the process, it turns out they’re greedily eyeing your health insurance, too: The legislation HHS nominee Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) has offered over the years include mainstays of GOP plans that would usher in a drastic change in how most people receive their health care coverage. The employer-based insurance market covers seven times more people than the individual market. "What he's getting at here, and a lot of Republicans feel pretty strongly about this, to get a functioning insurance market, you have to get away from businesses buying the insurance," explained Joe Antos, a health policy scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.  Employer-based health insurance costs money. Corporations could make a little more money if they could toss you off your plan and close up the insurance shop. If Republicans succeed, health insurance will be priced far out of reach for 99 percent of us and your only recourse, in the event of serious injury or illness, will be for you or your loved one to suffer and die as quickly and cheaply as possible.  The crocodilians are masters of survival, breezing through at least two massive extinction events and a score of smaller ones. And now one local giant among them has gained some fame and maybe even a little bit of love. Only 12 humans have walked on the moon to date. The last one to do so, on Dec 14, 1972,  died this week at age 82, leaving half of the original 12 moonwalkers still with us. Eugene Cernan is perhaps most remembered for his spur of the moment rendition of “I was strolling on the moon one day,” sung while he was strolling on the moon one day. The most backassward Orc-filled, popular vote-losing administration and extremist wackjobs to ever slide into power is now in office. These clowns aren’t just willfully ignorant, they are proudly, openly hostile to any field that values hard-won facts over more pleasing fiction. Modern science in the US, and by extension the entire world, has never been in greater danger, and it’s happening at a particularly critical moment: From the linked blurb, last year was about 1.26°C (~2.3°F) warmer than the 1880-1920 base period. More data and tables can be found at the GISTEMP website here. This is the first time since thermometers were invented that we’ve had three consecutive years of record heat. And on the data, as if there were any doubt, NOAA concurs. 19 min
Nearly 400 healthcare experts tell the Senate to reject Tom Price - Rep. Tom Price's (R-GA) nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services  should be rejected for two key reasons: first, his truly stunning corruption and second, because he would be a nightmare for the health of millions of Americans. Something like 400 health professionals—researchers and medical faculty members—have signed an open letter to Congress to tell them to reject Price. Their statement begins: Not only is Congressperson Price accused of compromising himself with insider knowledge concerning stock trades on the health care market, but he has long advocated for changes in our health care system that will have devastating consequences for millions of Americans. Together with other Republicans, Price seeks to privatize Medicare, drastically cut funding for Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program, eliminate the Affordable Care Act, end funding for the many services provided by Planned Parenthood, damage women’s access to reproductive health measures more generally, and enable discrimination against LGBT individuals seeking health care. Then follows the litany of programs he would destroy, from Obamacare to Medicaid and Medicare and Planned Parenthood, programs that cover a growing number of Americans.  And in fact, it's not just people who don't have employer-sponsored insurance who could lose out with Price. He's has his own healthcare plan, one which would: end coverage for preexisting conditions, reduce benefits for people who have employer-sponsored plans, reinstate insurance companies' ability to cap annual and lifetime limits on coverage, and end the guarantee of preventive care without copays. These are all things that everyone with any kind of insurance get through the Affordable Care Act. All of which Price would jettison. He's not going to be making the replacement law, but he would be the voice of the Trump administration in whatever it is Republicans might come up with. He'll be pushing his extreme vision for health care in America. Which looks even worse than what we had before Obamacare, because then we at least had decent Medicare, Medicaid, and Planned Parenthood. 15:09
Trump claims 'a million and a half' at his inauguration—delivers whooping lie in front of CIA - Donald Trump appeared at the CIA on Saturday, supposedly to reassure the intelligence community that he supported their work. But instead, Trump had other issues to discuss. Standing in front of the CIA’s memorial wall of agents who died in the line of service to the nation, Trump let fly, telling the CIA know who America’s real enemy is. “I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth. They made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community. ... exactly the opposite." Apparently Trump's Twitter account is part of the dishonest media. But after telling the story of how the rain miraculously stopped when he was delivering his speech on Friday, he had an example of the media’s dishonesty—the size of his inauguration crowd. "We had something like a million and a half people. It went all the way back to the Washington Monument. Then i turn on the media and they say we had 250,000 people. That's not bad. But it's a lie.  ... We caught them. We caught them in a lie, and it was a beauty." It was clear that Donald Trump was going to lie about this, but the scale of the lie is staggering, even for Trump. Even more staggering? That he would tell this monster whopper right to the face of people whose job it is to do information analysis. 14:19
Obama administration wants you to know you can sign up for Obamacare for another month - The Trump regime is just hours old, and it's already erased the Obamacare accomplishments web page. But they can't erase the archive or the achievement. President Obama promised that he would make quality, affordable health care not a privilege, but a right. After nearly 100 years of talk, and decades of trying by presidents of both parties, that's exactly what he did. Today, 20 million more adults gained access to health coverage. We've driven the uninsured rate below 10 percent — the lowest level since we started keeping records — and built stronger, healthier communities through advancements in public health, science, and innovation. Even if Obamacare is repealed—especially if it is repealed—that won't be forgotten, nor will Americans forget who took it away from them.  And Obamacare is still the law of the land. You can still sign up if you need to, until January 31. In regards to that, here's a parting gift from the Obama administration to the Trump regime. xCMS schedules https://t.co/03g8qvUdBz ads, outreach to continue under Trump. https://t.co/D2aDvzIvzm pic.twitter.com/N5FVBzwmpI— POLITICO Pulse (@POLITICOPulse) January 19, 2017 14:09
Major media outlets have some great coverage of the Women's March ... and then there's Fox News - It’s great to see the Women’s March getting wide coverage across the media spectrum, as hundreds of thousands from all walks off life gather around the country—Washington D.C. alone has an estimated 500,000 protesters, far eclipsing the sparse gathering for the inauguration of the popular vote loser—to show their opposition to the policies of the Trump Regime. From ABC to MSNBC ... … to CNN: … and CBS: Oh, and then there’s Fox News, where if you look carefully, you’ll see a teeny, tiny box noting a protest—singular!  Oh, Fox, if only the name Pravda wasn’t already taken …  13:29
Women's March On Washington (and everywhere else) much, MUCH larger than expected - 300,000 in New York City. 125,000 in Boston. 50,000 in Austin, Texas. 15,000 in St. Louis. 10,000 in Portland, ME. Across the country, the numbers for the Women’s March have turned out to be not just high, but higher than anyone would have predicted. Cities that had expected two thousand got ten. Areas that had planned on ten thousand got a hundred. The overflow crowds are also happening in Washington, D.C. where so many have turned up that it’s proving difficult to actually march. A massive turnout at the Women's March on Washington has forced a change of plans. With the entire planned route filled with hundreds of thousands of protesters, organizers can't lead a formal march toward the White House. Something similar happened in Chicago, where 150,000 protesters showed up. While the rally will go on, the march portion of the Women's March on Chicago has been canceled after a mushrooming crowd of 150,000 packed the downtown event Saturday. In Washington, the numbers have dwarfed those of Trump’s inauguration. A city official in Washington says the turnout estimate for the Women's March on the National Mall now stands at 500,000 people. That's more than double the initial predictions. That was at 9:40 AM. It’s still growing. 12:01
View from the Left: The White House press corps's 'slippery slope to collaboration' with Trump - The White House press corps is taking fire from all sides but, most pointedly, from the incoming administration and popular vote loser Donald Trump. I do not envy their predicament. Unfortunately, it looks as though they're preparing to simply enable their abuser in a futile effort that will do little to shed light on what Trump is actually doing. Witness this response from the vice president of the White House Correspondents Association, Margaret Talev, after Bloomberg's John Heilemann asked her how she felt about Trump's raucous press conference last week. MARGARET TALEV: Well for many of the reporters watching that, startled, because it's not the way you normally think of a president-elect or a president dealing with his press corps, particularly at a time that he's promising to unify the country and get off to a good start and all of that. But look I think as a press corps, we all need to have a tough skin and to differentiate between unusual or guerrilla tactics that we need to learn how to live with and things that cross a red line. And this is something that we're going to need to be mindful of and adjust to, but I think it's a matter of keeping the eyes on the prize, which is the ability to ask questions of incoming President Trump and his top staff on the record and get answers. And to have access to these buildings, into the briefing rooms, the venues, for these questions take place. I know Talev from when I worked as a White House correspondent in the early Obama years—she's both a good reporter and a good person. I also know the press corps takes seriously its responsibilities and is trying to make lemonade out of lemons. And yet her answer reminds me of two things: first, how much it resembles that of someone in an abusive relationship; and second, journalist Masha Gessen urging us all to "shift from realist to moral reasoning" in the age of Trump. 12:00
Education secretary nominee has been profiting off of student loan debt collection - Betsy DeVos has reached an ethics agreement with the government requiring her to divest from 102 different assets within 90 days of being confirmed as Donald Trump’s education secretary. Here’s the best part: DeVos listed on her financial paperwork a holding company that invests in Performant Business Services, Inc., which the Education Department hires to collect defaulted federal student loans. The probable future education secretary has been profiting from debt collection on student loans. What a commitment to affordable higher education and helping students avoid the burden of high debt!  DeVos will also divest from a series of companies intended to profit off of education, from software to textbooks to campus parking. Sign and send the petition to your senators: Block Betsy DeVos as education secretary. 11:08
Women's March on Everywhere—fantastic images from across the nation - Getting into DC this morning means crowded trains. Crowded sidewalks. Crowded streets. All with an energy, enthusiasm, and excitement that was singularly missing from the few how wandered into to see the American Carnage speech. This, not yesterday, is the best of America. The National Mall has flooded with pink, as demonstrators descend on the nation's capital Saturday for the Women's March on Washington. Just one day after President Trump's inauguration, marchers from across the country have gathered in the city to protest his agenda and support for women's rights. … The city's metro system reported 275,000 rides as of 11 a.m., according to Reuters. The wire service notes that number is "82,000 more than the 193,000 rides reported at the same point on Friday," the day of Trump's inauguration Massive crowds aren’t just limited to the National Mall. It’s everywhere. Everywhere. xThe #WomensMarch in downtown St. Louis! This is what democracy looks like. pic.twitter.com/mzb5xMZUKC— Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) January 21, 2017 10:00
Republicans chased into hiding by constituents angry over Obamacare repeal - It was a really rough week for Republicans, notwithstanding the inauguration of popular vote loser Donald Trump. The vote they took the week before to repeal Obamacare, even though they don't have a whisper of an agreed upon replacement plan, has enraged their constituents. On top of that, the popularity of the program has jumped, making it more popular than Trump, not to mention way more popular than the Republican congress. That anger was expressed out in public, which has got plenty of Republicans panicked. It all started with House Speaker Paul Ryan being shamed by a fellow Republican, a cancer survivor, on national television. xThe bad optics that began Paul Ryan's town hall: Ex-Reagan campaign worker thanks Obamacare for saving his life. pic.twitter.com/bacg2Qk3TL— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) January 13, 2017 "Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, I’m standing here today alive," said Jeff Jeans, a cancer survior. "I rely on the Affordable Care Act to be able to purchase my own insurance. Why would you repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement?" Ryan stood there with his sociopathic grin on his face and lied to this man about how they really were going to fix everything, but the damage—and national headlines—were done. And the floodgates for more protests were opened. Head below the fold for the goodness. 10:00

Democracy Now!

Naomi Klein on Trump Election: "This is a Corporate Coup D’état" - Journalists Naomi Klein, author of "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate" and Lee Fang of The Intercept talk about the role of corporations inside the Trump administration and the inauguration.20 Jan
Michael Moore Addresses 25,000 Protesters in NYC: "There's More of Us Than There are of Them!" - On Thursday night in New York City, up to 25,000 people rallied outside Trump International Hotel and Tower near Central Park on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration. The event called for people to take part in "100 Days of Resistance." Mayor Bill de Blasio joined a star-studded lineup of speakers that included actors Rosie Perez, Mark Ruffalo, Robert De Niro and Cher, along with activists from Greenpeace and the NAACP. We air filmmaker Michael Moore’s speech.20 Jan
Black Lives Matter Activists Chain Themselves Together to Block Inauguration Checkpoint - Protests are taking across the country today. We go live to an inauguration checkpoint where Black Lives Matter protesters are locked down and trying to block off the entrance to the inauguration.20 Jan
Michael Moore & Naomi Klein on Resisting Donald Trump as Protests Erupt Ahead of Inauguration - Democracy Now! broadcast our daily show live from WHUT on the campus of the historically black university, Howard University in Washington, D.C., less than four hours before Donald Trump became the nation’s 45th president. Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million votes, but he managed to win the Electoral College. He takes office as the least popular incoming president in at least a generation. We get an update from protests in Washington, D.C., and hear the speech Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore gave Thursday night, when nearly 25,000 people gathered in New York City to protest outside Trump International Hotel and Tower near Central Park. We are also joined live by Naomi Klein, journalist and best-selling author, whose most recent book is "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate," and Lee Fang, reporter with The Intercept who covers the intersection of money and politics.20 Jan
Headlines for January 20, 2017 - Protests Break Out Across U.S. Against Trump InaugurationAnti-Trump Protests Held in the Philippines, Palestine & BritainTrump's Approval Rating Plummets to 32% Trump Calls Kellyanne Conway "Baby" at Pre-Inauguration DinnerTrump Administration Missing Hundreds of Key Government OfficialsVeterans Demand McCain Reject Rex Tillerson for Sec. of StateThe Hill: Trump Team Preparing to Cut Budget by $10 TrillionU.S. Officials Launch Probe of Trump Associates' Ties to TrumpSteven Mnuchin Slammed by Lawmakers over ForeclosuresRick Perry Says He Regrets Calling to Abolish Energy Dept.Obama Grants 330 Commutations as Final Act as PresidentObama Leaves Office with 41 People Still Imprisoned at GuantánamoGambian Leader Yahya Jammeh Faces Midday Deadline, as Troops Move InEl Chapo Extradited to U.S., to Appear in Brooklyn Federal CourtHonduras: TV Reporter Igor Abisaí Padilla Chávez AssassinatedWayne Barrett, Reporter Who Took on Trump for Decades, Dies20 Jan
Dr. Sidney Wolfe on HHS Nominee Tom Price's "Cruel" Plans to Repeal the Affordable Care Act - President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for the Department of Health and Human Services, Georgia Congressmember Tom Price, appeared Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions for his confirmation hearing. Price is the chair of the House Budget Committee, a member of the Tea Party Caucus and one of the leading opponents of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. He opposes abortion and has voted to cut all federal funding for Planned Parenthood. He also supports privatizing Medicare. Congressmember Price’s hearing came only days after CNN reported Price invested thousands of dollars in the medical device maker Zimmer Biomet and then introduced a bill to benefit the company. For more, we speak Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group.19 Jan
Trump Picks Agribusiness & Chemical Industry Darling Sonny Perdue as Secretary of Agriculture - Trump has just nominated former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue to be secretary of agriculture. Perdue ran a grain and fertilizer business before becoming Georgia’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Environmental activists have slammed Perdue for receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidies for chemical corporations and factory farming. We speak to Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.19 Jan
Climate Denier Scott Pruitt Faces Protests at Senate Hearing as 2016 Is Declared Hottest Year Ever - On Wednesday, scientists with both NASA and NOAA—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—confirmed 2016 was the hottest year on record, topping the previous record set in 2015, which topped the previous record only one year earlier. The unprecedented warming of the planet due to human-caused climate change comes as Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt testified in front of the Senate Wednesday during his confirmation hearing to be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt has long denied the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. Dozens of people protested outside his hearing. At least three people were arrested. We hear Sen. Bernie Sanders questioning Pruitt, and speak to Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.19 Jan
Rashid Khalidi: Obama's Condemnation of Israeli Occupation Doesn't Match His Last 8 Years in Office - During Wednesday’s press conference, President Obama warned that the expansion of Israeli settlements was making a two-state solution impossible. "I don’t see how this issue gets resolved in a way that maintains Israel as both Jewish and a democracy," Obama said, "because if you do not have two states, then, in some form or fashion, you are extending an occupation. Functionally, you end up having one state in which millions of people are disenfranchised and operate as second-class occupant—or residents. You can’t even call them 'citizens' necessarily." We get response from Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University. He’s the author of several books; his most recent is titled "Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East."19 Jan
On Final Day of Obama Presidency, a Look at His Mixed Legacy & the Rise of Neo-Fascism in Washington - Today marks President Obama’s last full day in office. On Friday at noon, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts will swear in Donald Trump as the country’s 45th president. On Wednesday, in his last press conference as president, Obama defended his decision to commute the sentence of Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and condemned the Israeli occupation. He also warned Trump that he will not stay silent if he sees what he called the nation’s core values at risk. To look back at Obama’s legacy and what lies ahead with the new administration, we speak to Eddie Glaude, chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. He is author of several books, most recently "Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul."19 Jan
Headlines for January 19, 2017 - President Obama Gives Final News ConferenceObama Denies Clemency to Native American Activist Leonard Peltier2016 was Third Straight Hottest Year on RecordBernie Sanders Slams EPA Nominee Scott Pruitt at Confirmation HearingAmid Scandal, Tom Price Undergoes Confirmation Hearing for HHS HeadWilbur Ross, Nikki Haley Undergo Confirmation HearingsRick Perry Faces Confirmation Hearing to Head Agency He Vowed to AbolishHomeowners Facing Foreclosure by Mnuchin's Bank Urge Lawmakers to Reject His NominationTrump Taps Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue to Be Agriculture SecretaryTrump's Budget Director Didn't Pay $15K in Taxes; Trump's Army Sec. Accused of Punching Man in FaceHundreds Attend Queer Dance Party Protest at VP-Elect Pence's HouseWater Protectors Score Key Legal Victories in Fight Against Dakota Access PipelineCanada: Sabotage Against Alberta Pipeline Costs Company Half a MillionGambia: Tensions Rise as Longtime Leader Refuses to Relinquish PowerIndiana: Outrage as Republicans Push Law Dubbed "Block Traffic and You Die" BillJPMorgan Chase to Pay $55M to Settle Housing Discrimination LawsuitColombia: 2 Human Rights Defenders Assassinated19 Jan
Scahill: Blackwater Founder Erik Prince, the Brother of Betsy DeVos, Is Secretly Advising Trump - The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill has revealed Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater, has been quietly advising Trump’s transition team, including helping vet Cabinet picks. On election night, Prince’s wife, Stacy DeLuke, even posted pictures from inside Trump’s campaign headquarters. We speak to Scahill about his latest piece, "Notorious Mercenary Erik Prince Is Advising Trump from the Shadows."18 Jan
Jeremy Scahill: Did Education Nominee Betsy DeVos Lie to Senate About Ties to Anti-LGBT Foundation? - On Tuesday, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos faced intense questioning by Democratic senators during her confirmation hearing. DeVos is a longtime backer of charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools. She and her husband have also invested in a student debt collection agency that does business with the Education Department. On Tuesday, DeVos was repeatedly questioned over her role in her family’s foundations, which have poured millions of dollars into funding private Christian schools and anti-LGBT organizations, including the groups Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed as a hate group. During her testimony, DeVos claimed she had nothing to do with the family’s Prince Foundation, even claiming that multiple federal tax filings listing her as the foundation’s vice president were incorrect.18 Jan
Activists Call on Obama to Pardon Leonard Peltier, Warning He'll Die in Prison Otherwise - While President Obama shortened the sentences of Oscar López Rivera and Chelsea Manning and 207 other prisoners, Obama took no action on 71-year-old imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier. Peltier is a former member of the American Indian Movement who was convicted of killing two FBI agents during a shootout on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. He has long maintained his innocence. Peltier’s attorney Martin Garbus joins us here in New York.18 Jan
Oscar Lopez Rivera to Be Freed as Obama Commutes Sentence for Puerto Rican Independence Activist - On Tuesday, President Obama also commuted the sentence of longtime Puerto Rican independence activist Oscar López Rivera, who has been imprisoned for about 35 years, much of the time in solitary confinement. In 1981, López Rivera was convicted on federal charges including seditious conspiracy—conspiring to oppose U.S. authority over Puerto Rico by force. In 1999, President Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of 16 members of the FALN, but López Rivera refused to accept the deal because it did not include two fellow activists, who have since been released. Under Obama’s commutation order, López Rivera will be released on May 17. Oscar’s brother José López Rivera joins us from Chicago, as well as Democracy Now! co-host Juan González.18 Jan
Jeremy Scahill on Obama's Commutation of Chelsea Manning & Continued Demonization of Edward Snowden - While President Obama has commuted the sentence of Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the administration has indicated it has no plans to pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said last week, "The release of the information [Manning] provided to WikiLeaks was damaging to national security. But the disclosures by Edward Snowden were far more serious and far more dangerous." We speak to The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, author of the recent piece, "The True Scandal of 2016 was the Torture of Chelsea Manning."18 Jan
Chelsea Manning's Attorneys: Obama's Commutation Will Help "Save" Life of Jailed Army Whistleblower - In one of his final acts in office, President Obama shortened the sentences of 209 prisoners and pardoned 64 individuals on Tuesday. The list included Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who is now set to be freed on May 17, after Obama reduced her sentence from 35 years to seven. According to her attorneys, she is already the longest-held whistleblower in U.S. history. Manning leaked more than 700,000 classified files and videos to WikiLeaks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy. She has been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement and denied medical treatment related to her gender identity. We speak with Nancy Hollander, Manning’s appellate attorney, and Chase Strangio of the ACLU, who represents Manning in a lawsuit against the Pentagon for denial of medical care related to her gender dysphoria.18 Jan
Headlines for January 18, 2017 - Obama Commutes Sentences of Chelsea Manning & Oscar López RiveraObama Commutes Sentence of General James CartwrightActivists Continue Calling for Freedom for Leonard PeltierDid Betsy DeVos Lie to Senate About Her Involvement in Family Foundation?Trump Interior Pick Ryan Zinke Says He'd Review Reversing Ban on Arctic DrillingReport: 18 Million Could Lose Healthcare If Obamacare Is RepealedNearly 60 Congressmembers Will Not Attend Trump InaugurationWoman Sues Trump for Defamation, After Accusing Trump of Sexual AssaultRussian President Putin Defends Trump Against Sex Video ClaimsTrump on Tillerson: "He Goes into a Country, Takes the Oil, Goes into Another Country…"Nigerian Military Bombs Refugee Camp, Killing DozensNorth Dakota Pushes Bill to Protect Drivers Who Accidentally Hit Water ProtectorsActivists Arrested Resisting Pipelines in Texas, Tennessee & FloridaNYC: Activists Launch Encampment Outside Goldman Sachs HeadquartersMexico: Indigenous Environmental Leader Isidro Baldenegro López Assassinated18 Jan
Special Report: Obama's Controversial Policy of Immigrant Family Detention Could Expand Under Trump - As immigrant rights protests erupted Saturday in 50 cities across the country, we look at one of the most controversial policies President Obama passes on to Donald Trump: family detention. Since 2014, thousands of Central American women and children seeking asylum have been held in private jails. Despite complaints of medical neglect and poor oversight, the Obama administration resisted calls to end the practice. Now, advocates worry Trump could expand it, with even less oversight. Democracy Now! correspondent Renée Feltz reports from the Texas-Mexico border.17 Jan
Insane Clown President: Matt Taibbi Chronicles Election of "Billionaire Hedonist" Donald Trump - As a new study by Oxfam finds the world’s eight richest men control as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity, the group says it is concerned that wealth inequality will continue to grow following the election of Donald Trump, whose Cabinet members have a combined wealth of nearly $11 billion. We look at the rise of Trump, and those joining his administration, with award-winning Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. His new book comes out today, titled "Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus."17 Jan
Trump Attacks Civil Rights Icon John Lewis on MLK Weekend; Watch Lewis Recall Bloody Sunday 1965 - At least 42 Democrats plan to boycott Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration this Friday, after President-elect Trump used the weekend to attack civil rights icon John Lewis. On Friday, Democratic Congressmember Lewis questioned the legitimacy of Trump’s election during an interview on NBC News. Early on Saturday morning on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, Donald Trump hit back at Lewis on Twitter, saying he was "All talk, talk, talk–no action." Trump’s comments sparked a massive national backlash. Congressmember Lewis is a civil rights legend. In 1965, he was beaten almost to death by Alabama state troopers as he attempted to lead a voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The images from what came to be known as Bloody Sunday helped galvanize support for the Voting Rights Act signed into law months later. Congressmember Lewis described what happened on Bloody Sunday during a 2012 interview on Democracy Now!17 Jan
Headlines for January 17, 2017 - Outrage and Inaugural Boycotts Follow Trump Attack on Rep. John LewisPrivate Donations to Trump Inaugural Committee Top $100 MillionProtesters Nationwide Launch Campaign to #InaugurateTheResistanceThousands Rally in Cities Across U.S. Against Trump Deportation PlansTens of Thousands Protest Planned Repeal of Affordable Care ActHHS Nominee Tom Price Faces Accusations of Insider TradingTrump Communications Appointee Steps Down Amid Plagiarism RevelationsReport: Treasury Secretary Nominee Steven Mnuchin Worth $400 MillionOxfam: World's Richest Eight Men as Wealthy as 3.6 Billion PoorestJustice Department Finds Rampant Civil Rights Abuses by Chicago CopsCleveland: Officers to Face Disciplinary Charges in Tamir Rice DeathYemen: Death Toll from U.S.-Backed, Saudi-Led Campaign Tops 10,000Iraq: U.S.-Allied Forces Push Deeper into Eastern MosulObama Administration Sends 10 Guantánamo Prisoners to OmanNorth Dakota: Rubber Bullets and Tear Gas Fired at Water ProtectorsWhite House: "Stark Difference" Between Chelsea Manning, Ed Snowden17 Jan
Newly Discovered 1964 MLK Speech on Civil Rights, Segregation & Apartheid South Africa - In a Democracy Now! and Pacifica Radio Archives exclusive, we air a newly discovered recording of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On December 7, 1964, days before he received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, King gave a major address in London on segregation, the fight for civil rights and his support for Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. The speech was recorded by Saul Bernstein, who was working as the European correspondent for Pacifica Radio. Bernstein’s recording was recently discovered by Brian DeShazor, director of the Pacifica Radio Archives.16 Jan
"Back of the Bus": 3 Black Members of Congress Testified at End of Sessions's Confirmation Hearing - On Wednesday, at the second day of confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions faced unprecedented criticism. But only one Republican on the committee remained to listen. If the others had stayed, they would have heard the voices we bring you today. New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker’s testimony marked the first time a United States senator has opposed a fellow senator’s nomination for a presidential Cabinet post. He was joined by Congressmember Cedric Richmond (D-Louisiana), head of the Congressional Black Caucus, who said the decision to have three black members of Congress testify at the end of the hearing was the equivalent of being sent to the "back of the bus." We play the full comments made by civil rights legend Congressmember John Lewis (D-Georgia), who also testified Wednesday against Senator Jeff Sessions’s confirmation for attorney general.13 Jan
Trump's Pick for Defense Sec'y Made Millions in Defense Industry After His 2013 Retirement - During the confirmation hearing for retired General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, several senators asked whether he would support Defense Department projects in their home states, including Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). Mattis had a 41-year military career before he retired in 2013, and Politico reports his financial disclosure statement says that he is worth more than $10 million. Some of his wealth was garnered after he retired when he worked for General Dynamics, among other companies. We speak with retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich and Aaron Glantz, a senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.13 Jan
Defense Secretary Nominee James Mattis Pledges to Enforce Iran Nuclear Deal Criticized by Trump - Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, retired General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, testified at his confirmation hearing that Russia remains the "principal threat" faced by the United States, taking a much harder line than the president-elect. He also said he supports the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump has repeatedly criticized. We get response from Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council whose forthcoming book is titled "Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Legacy of Diplomacy," and from Andrew Bacevich, retired colonel and Vietnam War veteran.13 Jan
James Mattis Calls for U.S. Military to Be More Lethal at Defense Secretary Confirmation Hearing - President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, retired General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, testified Thursday at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mattis’s 41-year career in the Marine Corps included field commands in the Persian Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan. He led U.S. troops during the 2004 battle of Fallujah, earning himself the nickname "Mad Dog" Mattis. In May 2004, Mattis ordered an attack on a small Iraqi village that ended up killing about 42 people attending a wedding ceremony. He went on to lead United States Central Command from 2010 to 2013, but the Obama administration cut short his tour over concerns he was too hawkish on Iran. We host a roundtable discussion, starting with retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich, author of "America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History," and Aaron Glantz, a senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting whose latest investigation is headlined "Did defense secretary nominee James Mattis commit war crimes in Iraq?"13 Jan
Headlines for January 13, 2017 - House Poised to Vote to Repeal Affordable Care ActHouse Vote on Healthcare Repeal Follows Narrow Senate PassageSenate Votes Down Amendment to Allow Sale of Cheaper Canadian DrugsDefense Secretary Nominee James Mattis Calls Russia Biggest ThreatDr. Ben Carson Won't Rule Out HUD Money for Trump BusinessesCIA Nominee Mike Pompeo Reverses Position on TortureNSA to Share Vast Data Trove with All U.S. Intelligence AgenciesChristopher Steele, Author of Trump-Russia Dossier, Goes into HidingDOJ Inspector General to Probe FBI over Clinton Email InvestigationTrump Names Rudy Giuliani to Cybersecurity Post Despite ConflictsTrump Taps Two More Former Goldman Sachs EmployeesHuman Rights Watch: Trump Among Authoritarian Populists Posing ThreatU.S. to End "Wet Foot, Dry Foot" Cuban Immigration PolicyNeskonlith First Nations Leader and Activist Art Manuel Dies at 6613 Jan
Investigation: Did Trump's Defense Secretary Nominee James Mattis Commit War Crimes in Iraq? - Today, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, James "Mad Dog" Mattis, faces his Senate confirmation hearing. Mattis reportedly received his nickname "Mad Dog" after leading U.S. troops during the 2004 battle of Fallujah in Iraq, where he is accused of carrying out war crimes by our guest, Aaron Glantz, a senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.12 Jan
Do Exxon's Climate Denial & "Trail of Carnage" on Human Rights Make Tillerson Unfit for State Dept? - At the Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state nominee and former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, he refused to answer questions about the oil giant’s long history of denying the science of climate change, telling Senators that scientific literature on climate change is "inconclusive."During the hearing, human rights concerns were also raised repeatedly. Tillerson refused to label Saudi Arabia a human rights violator, and avoided condemning Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte over thousands of extrajudicial killings carried out under Duterte’s so-called "war on drugs." We are joined from San Francisco by oil and energy journalist Antonia Juhasz.12 Jan
Committee to Protect Journalists: Watch Out for "Leak Investigations" Targeting Journos Under Trump - During his press conference on Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump lashed out at reporters. He slammed CNN as "fake news," called BuzzFeed a "failing piece of garbage" and refused to answer questions from CNN’s Jim Acosta after his outlet reported that top intelligence officials had briefed Trump, President Obama and top lawmakers over claims that Trump representatives met repeatedly with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign and discussed the hacking of the DNC and the email of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. BuzzFeed later published a dossier, prepared by British former intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which contains unverified allegations, including a charge that Russian officials have a sex tape from 2013 involving Trump and hired sex workers. For more on the incoming Trump administration’s relationship with the press, we are joined by Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.12 Jan
Trump Ignores Ethics Experts Urging Him to Divest from His Businesses & Puts Sons In Charge Instead - At his first press conference since July, President-elect Donald Trump addressed questions about his business interests and asserted that, as president, he would be exempt from possible conflicts of interest. The Trump Organization is an umbrella company for his hundreds of investments in real estate, brands and other businesses. But Trump said he would not follow advice from ethics experts to divest or create a completely blind trust, and instead announced he will hand over management of the Trump Organization to his sons. The head of the Office of Government Ethics slammed President-elect Trump’s plan to separate himself from his business, calling it "wholly inadequate." We get response from John Wonderlich, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation.12 Jan
Headlines for January 12, 2017 - Secretary of State Nominee Rex Tillerson Questioned on Climate DenialAttorney General Nominee Jeff Sessions Opposed by Senate ColleagueTrump Assails Journalists in First Press Conference Since JulyEthics Chief: Trump's Plan "Wholly Inadequate" to Prevent ConflictsTrump to Name Supreme Court Nominee Within Two Weeks of InaugurationTransportation Secretary Pick Elaine Chao Breezes Toward ConfirmationProtest in Senate Office Building Marks 15 Years of Guantánamo PrisonPentagon Chief Nominee James Mattis Faces Opposition over WaiverTrump Taps Non-Veteran to Head Veterans AdministrationFBI Chief Won't Comment on Trump Inquiry, Weeks After Revealing Clinton ProbeTurkey: Parliamentarians Brawl over Presidential Power AmendmentsVolkswagen Executives Indicted as Company Ordered to Pay $4.3 BillionChelsea Manning Reportedly on "Short List" for Presidential CommutationSlain Civil Rights Leader Medgar Evers Honored with Historic Landmark12 Jan
Will Obama Grant Clemency to Puerto Rican Independence Activist Oscar López Rivera? - Congressmember Luis Gutiérrez says he has lobbied for President Obama to grant clemency to Puerto Rican independence activist Oscar López Rivera, but has so far not received a strong response. López Rivera has been in prison for about 35 years, much of the time in solitary confinement. In 1981, he was convicted on federal charges including seditious conspiracy—of conspiring to oppose U.S. authority over Puerto Rico by force. He was accused of being a member of the FALN, the Armed Forces of National Liberation, which claimed responsibility for more than 100 bombings to call attention to the colonial case of Puerto Rico. In 1999, President Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of 16 members of the FALN, but López refused to accept the deal because it did not include two fellow activists, who have since been released. In a rare video recording from prison, Oscar López Rivera said the charges against him were strictly political.11 Jan
We Challenged President Obama, He Listened & Acted: Rep. Luis Gutiérrez on Obama's Farewell & Legacy - We get response from fellow Chicagoan, Congressmember Luis Gutiérrez, on key achievements highlighted by President Obama during his farewell presidential address, which took place at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center Tuesday night. "Healthcare is important. It’s a basic fundamental human right. It’s not a political right. … There are 20 more million people covered by healthcare. Ironically, large numbers of rural white Americans that had no access to healthcare were the primary beneficiaries of Obamacare. So, I’m excited," Gutiérrez says. "Could we have done more? Could we have reformed our immigration system? Absolutely."11 Jan

John Perkins

What Will 2017 Bring? - It’s a question on many minds as we begin this new year. It is perhaps asked more now than ever before in my life-time – and that spans 7 decades. All we can say for sure is that we are in for big changes . . . on many fronts. Each of us is faced with the decision: Will we sit back and accept changes imposed by Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and Big Business? Or will we take actions that guide humanity to a saner world? I’ve had the opportunity to travel across this magnificent planet, speaking at a wide variety of events and talking with individuals from a multitude of jobs and lifestyles. Everywhere, I encounter more and more people who are committed to taking actions that will change consciousness. They realize that consciousness change is the key to altering what we call objective reality. They know that the big events in this world are molded by the ways we perceive ourselves and our relationship to all that is around us. By changing perceptions, we change the world. In a few days, I leave for a two-month journey that will take me to venues in the United States, Guatemala, Costa Rica, the Bahamas, and Ecuador. I will be speaking at the Conscious Life Expo, the Heartbeat Summit, and many other places. Every one of these is oriented toward using changes in our perceived reality to influence the way human beings impact each other and the world. What will 2017 bring? That depends on you. I encourage each and every one of you to make a New Year’s resolution right now that will commit you to taking the path that leads to action. The events of this past year, including those in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and the US serve as wakeup calls. One of the facts we awaken to is that business is the driving force behind politics and governments. Whether a leader’s name is Trump or Putin, Merkel or Xi Jinping, he or she serves at the pleasure of banks and other global corporations. And those banks and corporations depend on us – you and me – to buy their goods and services, work for, manage, and invest in them. Without us, they go the way of Woolworth’s, Polaroid, Pan Am, Bethlehem Steel, and so many others that have become corporate dinosaurs. However you feel about the new Oval Office occupant, know that his power base is the business community. However you feel about climate change, pipelines, vanishing forests, urban violence, wars, and just about every other issue, know that the twists and turns of that issue are shaped by business. However you feel about Monsanto, Exxon, Nike or any other business know that that business depends on its customers, workers, managers, and investors – us. Consumer movements work. They ended apartheid, installed seat belts, cleaned up polluted rivers, labelled fats, sugars, calories, and proteins in our foods, opened corporate doors wider to women and minorities, and so much more. In each of these areas we need to go further and we also need to expend these movements. We must insist that every company we support in any way be committed to serving us, the public, the world, future generations – not simply the bottom line. We must change the perception of what it means to be successful. That is our job and our pleasure. You have the power. Social networking makes it easier – and more fun – than ever to launch campaigns that will change the perception of what it means to be “successful.” It’s time for you and me to use all the tools at our disposal to show those who would drive us down a path of distraction, lethargy, depression, and mayhem that we simply will not stand for it. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for and we are here now. 2017 is our year! It will bring what we demand. Best wishes, John The Love Summit organized by the nonprofit Dream Change that John founded nearly 30 years ago is a powerful example of a movement that is going global to change businesses. 1 Jan
Message from the Legendary Elder Siblings - I write this in-flight, returning from a magical trip to the Kogi of Colombia. I write this having seen and heard the airport TV reports of the trauma that continues to dominate US politics, as well as those in many other countries. Last year my Ecuadorian partner, Daniel Koupermann, and I took a group to the amazing lands of the Kogi – people who have a message for us all. They came down from their mountain hideaways to meet us and to spread their message of the need for change. They were so impressed by the deep spirituality and commitment of that 2015 group that they invited us to bring another similar group – and this time to be the first ever to live among them, to sleep in their community, and to sit in their sacred ceremonial lodges. For the 19 of us it was a life-changing trip. We were surrounded by breathtaking scenes: the emerald Caribbean and palm-fringed beaches, the Sierra Nevada mountains that rise 18,000 feet up from the ocean to glacier-covered peaks, the rain forests, and the sparkling rivers that cascade from the glaciers into the Caribbean. But most of all it was the Kogi who impressed us! I have to admit that I was shocked – ecstatically – by the extent to which the Kogi invited us to share their lives and ceremonies. These up-til-now illusive people totally opened the doors to their homes and hearts to us. They invited us to come and learn from their Mamos (wise elders/teachers/shamans/spiritual leaders), to answer a call that dates back to a time when their forefathers retreated from the onslaught of Spanish conquistadors and the destructive nature of European cultures. Their Mamos told us of how their ancestors had fled up the valleys of the glacial rivers into the mountains. Choosing to remain isolated for centuries, they developed a new dream of the Earth, a revelation that balances the brilliant potential of the human mind, heart and spirit with all the forces of nature. To this day they remain true to their ancient laws and traditions—the moral, ecological, and spiritual dictates of a force they identify as “the Mother”—and are still led by sacred rituals. In the late 1900s, their Mamos understood that they are the Elder Siblings and that they had to come down and share that powerful message with the modern world, the people they call the Younger Siblings – us. They have shared their history with others. What was unique this time was their enthusiasm for embracing this group on very personal levels. I write this while flying home and it is all too close to me to be able to express in detail at this moment (a book to come, I think!) but I will say that the bonding we all felt is symbolized by a ceremony when a Mamo and his wife in whose community we had spent the night invited us to witness their 5-year-old son training to become a Mamo. We traveled many miles down from their community and stood with them on the bank of a glacial river where it meets the Caribbean while the young man gently offered the river the commitments we had all made and blown into tiny pieces of cotton from a local plant. The Kogi message, although similar to the one I received more than 40 years ago when I was a Peace Corps volunteer living with the Shuar in the Amazon and then again 20 years later from the Achuar, is more urgent now than ever. It is the message that birthed nonprofits, including Dream Change and the Pachamama Alliance. It is the message of the North American indigenous people and all those who join them at Standing Rock. It is a message that now has issued forth from indigenous cultures and organizations around the world. It is a message of hope, one that says we can transformer ourselves from societies that adhere to systems that threaten to destroy us to ones that will sustain us and future generations. I’ve written many times about the necessity to move from a Death Economy, based on warfare and ravaging the very resources upon which it depends, to a Life Economy, based on cleaning up pollution, regenerating destroyed environments, and developing new technologies that recycle and life-styles that give back more than they take from our Living Earth. Now, flying back from the Kogi, I feel rejuvenated and recommitted to spreading the message that is the underlying principle behind that economic shapeshift that needs to happen. We know we are facing severe crises. We know the climate is changing and that we humans are devastating the air, water, and land that support all life on this planet. We know that our government is incapable or unwilling to turn things around. It is easy to be discouraged. EXCEPT we also now know what our Elder Siblings understood long ago, that We the People must transform ourselves and our institutions. That is the message of the Kogi. It is the message of the Shuar, the Achuar, the people at Standing Rock and all our brothers and sisters around the globe. It is the message of the rising oceans, flooding rivers, melting glaciers, the hurricanes, the political traumas, and all the other crises. We are blessed to be hearing this message, to be inhabitants of this incredible organism that is our Living Earth and to be able to understand that the crises are themselves the message that it is time for us to come out of our isolation and create the change we want and know in our hearts, minds, and souls is necessary.13 Dec 16
JFK’s Advice for this Hour of Change and Challenge - As I travel around the world speaking at venues that range from corporate summits to rock festivals and from consumer groups to universities, I hear deep dissatisfaction with the current global political/economic system. This is reflected in Brexit, and in movements sweeping Iceland, Italy, Greece, and so many other countries. And it was reflected, perhaps most strongly, in the US elections. People everywhere understand that although the system that’s been in place for roughly a century has created amazing science, technology, medicine, and arts, it has run its course. It is not serving We the People. Not on any continent. It is broken. And it can’t be fixed with old tools. Perhaps more than any other message to take away from the 2016 US presidential election – as well as movements around the globe – is that people are discouraged and are demanding something different. Those on the right look for a conservative, authoritarian government while those on the left favor a progressive, socialistic one. Bernie’s popularity and Trump’s victory symbolize these two opposite ends of the spectrum. Hillary stood in the middle and symbolized the status quo. When I finish giving speeches, during the question-and-answer period, people often ask if I don’t think things have to fall apart before we can move into a new phase. I believe we would be wise to accept the recent events as symbols that things have fallen apart. People are waking up to the fact that our space station is headed for disaster and we must change course. Those who feel discouraged by the results of the recent election and those who are euphoric share a motivation to change our space station’s navigational system. This new administration and Congress will have impacts. The Supreme Court, health care, regulations governing Wall Street, energy, transportation, education, and the environment, as well as international relations: all of these will change. But let us understand that these are symptoms. The illness is much bigger. It is a systemic disease. And we must heal it. We must ask: how do we pull back from the brink of disaster? How do we maneuver human societies in ways that will direct us away from systems that are obviously failing, to ones that are themselves renewable resources? Since the illness is the political/economic system itself, we must change it. Regardless of policies implemented by national governments, we all need to dedicate ourselves to converting a Death Economy, based on militarism and excessive consumption, into a Life Economy, based on cleaning up pollution, regenerating environments, and developing sustainable non-extractive technologies. When the US felt threatened by the Soviet domination of space, President John Kennedy in September 1962 said, “We meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance.” He then announced his intention to beat the Soviets by being the first nation to send men to the moon. “And,” he added with an optimistic statement that seemed almost beyond possibility, “it will be done before the end of this decade.” Although he did not live to see it, the President’s promise was fulfilled; Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in July 1969. We are at such a time now. This hour of change and challenge, hope and fear, knowledge and ignorance, demands our involvement. It is imperative for each of us to be creative, to take actions, to understand that democracy truly is based on all of us participating in the great adventure that is the next ten years. John Kennedy’s promise is a promise for each of us to make now: It will be done before the end of the decade.10 Nov 16

Channel NewsAsia Singapore News

PM Lee hands out red packets to needy elderly in Teck Ghee - Senior residents in Teck Ghee were greeted with some early festive cheer on Saturday morning when Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong visited the area and handed out red packets ahead of Chinese New Year.08:23
Singapore will have to ‘wait to see’ what Trump’s policies are and adapt: Shanmugam - Singapore will have to adopt a wait-and-see approach when it comes to the trade policies under the new US administration and adapt accordingly, said Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam on Saturday (Jan 21).08:20
Singapore will remove road charge once Malaysia's is implemented at all borders: High Commission - Singapore will remove its Reciprocal Road Charge once Malaysia's road charge is implemented at all its borders, including Thailand, Brunei and Indonesia, the Singapore High Commission in Kuala Lumpur and the Singapore Consulate-General's office in Johor Baru said in a statement on its Facebook page.07:42
Singapore will have to ‘wait to see’ Trump’s policies and adapt: Shanmugam - Singapore will have to adopt a wait and see approach when it comes to the trade policies under the new US administration and adapt accordingly, said Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam on Saturday (Jan 21).06:40
Singapore will remove road charge once Malaysia's is implemented at all borders: High Commission - Singapore will remove its Reciprocal Road Charge once Malaysia's road charge is implemented at all its borders, including Thailand, Brunei and Indonesia, the Singapore High Commission in Kuala Lumpur and the Singapore Consulate-General's office in Johor Baru said in a statement on its Facebook page.04:35
PM Lee hands out red packets to needy elderly in Teck Ghee - Senior residents in Teck Ghee were greeted with some early festive cheer on Saturday morning when Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong visited the area and handed out red packets ahead of Chinese New Year.04:30
The young are suffering from an options paralysis: Najip Ali - "There is a lot of fear. Fear and insecurity. They worry about things like how many “likes” do I have? How many “dislikes” on Facebook? " says entertainer Najip Ali of today's youth. 03:52
Fire breaks out at construction site in Whampoa, no one injured - No one was injured in the fire that broke out at a construction site in Whampoa on Saturday (Jan 21), said the Singapore Civil Defence Force.03:42
Singapore will remove road charge once Malaysia's is implemented at all borders: High Commission - Singapore will remove its Reciprocal Road Charge once Malaysia's road charge is implemented at all its borders, including Thailand, Brunei and Indonesia, the Singapore High Commission in Kuala Lumpur and the Singapore Consulate-General's office in Johor Baru said in a statement on its Facebook page.02:40
Singapore will remove road charge once Malaysia's is implemented at all borders: High Commission - Singapore will remove its Reciprocal Road Charge once Malaysia's road charge is implemented at all its borders, including Thailand, Brunei and Indonesia, the Singapore High Commission in Kuala Lumpur and the Singapore Consulate-General's office in Johor Baru said in a statement on its Facebook page.02:21

Channel NewsAsia Front Page News

Handball: Record crowd sees France battle into quarter-finals - Defending champions France battled past Iceland 31-25 to reach the world handball championships quarter-finals in Lille on Saturday in front of 28,010 people, a record crowd for the tournament.40 min
Clement praises '90-minute' Swansea after Liverpool stunner - New Swansea City manager Paul Clement praised his side's "90-minute" performance after the Welsh strugglers recorded a first ever league victory at Liverpool on Saturday.54 min
Guardiola blames missed chances, not referee for City draw - Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola disguised any feelings of injustice behind criticism of his side's finishing after watching them waste a chance to make up ground at the top of the Premier League on Saturday.15:15
Women lead mass anti-Trump marches across US - Led by women in pink "pussyhats," hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Washington and cities across the United States on Saturday in a massive outpouring of defiant opposition to President Donald Trump.15:11
Biathlon union drops investigation into 22 Russian athletes - Biathlon's governing body (IBU) has dropped proceedings against 22 of the 29 Russians who were placed under investigation last month following the McLaren report due to lack of evidence, it said on Saturday.15:10
Liverpool, Tottenham drop points, Rooney record - Liverpool's defensive gremlins returned again as their Premier League title ambitions suffered a painful body blow in a shock 3-2 home defeat by relegation battlers Swansea City on Saturday.15:10
Women lead mass anti-Trump marches across US - Led by women in pink "pussyhats," hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Washington and cities across the United States on Saturday in a massive outpouring of defiant opposition to President Donald Trump.15:00
Trump to CIA: "I am with you 1,000 per cent" - President Donald Trump told the CIA on Saturday it had his full support as he paid a visit to mend fences after publicly rejecting its assessment that Russia tried to help him win the US election.14:40
Egypt snatch late winner to eliminate Uganda - Abdallah El Said scored a last-minute winner to give Egypt a 1-0 victory over Uganda in African Nations Cup Group D on Saturday and eliminate the East Africans from the competition.14:10
France's Hollande criticizes protectionism as 'worst response' - France's President Francois Hollande on Saturday criticized protectionism and with his Chilean counterpart said that Europe would look to strengthen ties with Latin America, speaking a day after U.S. President Donald Trump took office.14:00

Channel NewsAsia World News

In challenge to Trump, women protesters swarm streets across US - Women took to the streets in unexpectedly large numbers in major U.S. cities on Saturday to stage mass protests against U.S. President Donald Trump, in an early indication of the strong public opposition the Republican may face in office.59 min
Women lead mass anti-Trump marches across US - Led by women in pink "pussyhats," hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Washington and cities across the United States on Saturday in a massive outpouring of defiant opposition to President Donald Trump.15:11
Trump vows his full support to CIA after feud about Russia hacking - U.S. President Donald Trump sought to mend fences with the CIA on Saturday, telling officers he had their back after he criticized spy agencies for their investigation into Russian hacking.15:05
Trump to CIA: "I am with you 1,000 per cent" - President Donald Trump told the CIA on Saturday it had his full support as he paid a visit to mend fences after publicly rejecting its assessment that Russia tried to help him win the US election.14:40
Tens of thousands join anti-Trump global march - Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of London, Paris and other cities worldwide on Saturday in solidarity with women-led marches in the United States opposed to President Donald Trump.14:22
Tens of thousands join anti-Trump global march - Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of London, Paris and other cities worldwide on Saturday in solidarity with women-led marches in the United States, opposed to President Donald Trump the day after his inauguration.14:10
Tens of thousands join anti-Trump global march - Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of London, Paris and other cities worldwide on Saturday in solidarity with women-led marches in the United States, opposed to President Donald Trump the day after his inauguration.14:02
France's Hollande criticizes protectionism as 'worst response' - France's President Francois Hollande on Saturday criticized protectionism and with his Chilean counterpart said that Europe would look to strengthen ties with Latin America, speaking a day after U.S. President Donald Trump took office.14:00
Car bomb explodes in central Tripoli, near Italian embassy - security official - A car bomb exploded late on Saturday close to the recently re-opened Italian embassy in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, but appeared not to have caused casualties, a security official said.13:55
Women stage massive anti-Trump protests across U.S - Women turned out in unexpectedly large numbers in major U.S. cities on Saturday to stage mass protests against U.S. President Donald Trump, in a sign of the strong public opposition the Republican may face in office.13:50

Channel NewsAsia Asia Pacific News

France's Hollande criticizes protectionism as 'worst response' - France's President Francois Hollande on Saturday criticized protectionism and with his Chilean counterpart said that Europe would look to strengthen ties with Latin America, speaking a day after U.S. President Donald Trump took office.14:00
Gambia's Jammeh arrives at Banjul airport after stepping down - Gambia's Yahya Jammeh arrived at the airport in the capital Banjul on Saturday in the company of mediator Alpha Conde, the president of Guinea, after stepping down from power, a Reuters witness said.14:00
NEWSMAKER - Unpredictable Jammeh relinquishes generation-long grip on Gambia - He vowed to rule Gambia for "a billion years".10:20
Malaysia’s road charge to be implemented at all borders this year: Ministry - Deputy Transport Minister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi says the Singapore Government's willingness to retract its Reciprocal Road Charge is a welcome move.08:30
Smoking out the source of China's smog - It was clear someone did not want the story of Songting, a village in the Hebei province deemed the "source of Beijing's smog", to be told. On Channel NewsAsia's first visit to the village, we were tailed by a white car so we did not stop until we had left the area. 07:54
Singapore will remove road charge once Malaysia's is implemented at all borders: High Commission - Singapore will remove its Reciprocal Road Charge once Malaysia's road charge is implemented at all its borders, including Thailand, Brunei and Indonesia, the Singapore High Commission in Kuala Lumpur and the Singapore Consulate-General's office in Johor Baru said in a statement on its Facebook page.07:42
Australia car-ramming death toll climbs to 5 after baby dies - A three-month-old baby boy who was injured in the car-ramming incident in the Australian city of Melbourne on Friday (Jan 20), died in hospital on Saturday evening, bringing the death toll to five.06:50
Singapore will remove road charge once Malaysia's is implemented at all borders: High Commission - Singapore will remove its Reciprocal Road Charge once Malaysia's road charge is implemented at all its borders, including Thailand, Brunei and Indonesia, the Singapore High Commission in Kuala Lumpur and the Singapore Consulate-General's office in Johor Baru said in a statement on its Facebook page.04:35
Blast kills at least 21 in Pakistan vegetable market, says official - An explosion in a busy vegetable market killed at least 21 people on Saturday in Pakistan's remote northwestern tribal region, an official said, in an attack jointly claimed by the Pakistani Taliban and a branch of the sectarian militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.03:10
Asian media decry isolationist Trump, fear economic, diplomatic turmoil - A day after Donald Trump became U.S. President and vowed to put "America First", Asian media decried his isolationist policies, fearing they will chill the global economy and sow widespread international discord.02:53

Media Monarchy

#PumpUpThaVolume: January 20, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Gorillaz, Arcade Fire, Sturgill Simpson and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for January 20, 2017. ♬20 Jan
#MorningMonarchy: January 20, 2017 - Liberal lawsuits, "Trained to Kill" and Obama's legacy + this day in history w/Iran's Inaugural hostages and our song of the day by Ghost on your Morning Monarchy for January 20, 2017.20 Jan
#BookSmarts: “Trained to Kill: The Inside Story of CIA Plots Against Castro, Kennedy, and Che” - Continuing where we left off discussing "Suddenly", we reach an inauguration day that brings America back to fractious times we've seen before - with the publication of the new book, "Trained to Kill: The Inside Story of CIA Plots Against Castro, Kennedy, and Che".20 Jan
#NewWorldNextWeek: Finger Photos, Robot Uprising, #Inauguration Madness (Audio) - This week on the New World Next Week: Researchers warn of fingerprint theft from peace sign photos; more human workers made redundant by AI; and madness swirls around the inauguration spectacle in Washington DC.19 Jan
#NewWorldNextWeek: World Braces for #Inauguration Madness (Video) - This week on the New World Next Week: Researchers warn of fingerprint theft from peace sign photos; more human workers made redundant by AI; and madness swirls around the inauguration spectacle in Washington DC.19 Jan
#PumpUpThaVolume: January 19, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Jack Scott, Wiley, Hospitality and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for January 19, 2017. ♬19 Jan
#MorningMonarchy: January 19, 2017 - Fiery protests, institutional abuse and Obama's legacy + this day in history w/"You Nazty Spy!" and our song of the day by OK Go on your Morning Monarchy for January 19, 2017.19 Jan
#PumpUpThaVolume: January 18, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Kevin Krauter, Strand of Oaks, Chavez and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for January 18, 2017. ♬18 Jan
#MorningMonarchy: January 18, 2017 - Caffeine consumption, the hot chocolate market and Obama's legacy + this day in history w/Marion Barry and our song of the day by Right Said Fred on your Morning Monarchy for January 18, 2017.18 Jan
#PumpUpThaVolume: January 17, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays The Routes, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Red Porch Kid and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for January 17, 2017. ♬17 Jan

NATO Latest News

Visit to NATO by the Minister of Defence of Japan - The NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg, will meet with the Minister of Defence of Japan, H.E. Ms. Tomomi Inada, on Thursday 5 January 2017.20 Jan
Flags at NATO at half-mast in solidarity with Turkey - All flags outside NATO ‎headquarters in Brussels are at half-mast today in solidarity with Turkey after the terrorist attack in Istanbul during the New Year's celebrations.20 Jan
NATO Secretary General congratulates President Donald J. Trump on his inauguration - On behalf of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, I congratulate Donald J. Trump on his inauguration as the 45th President of the United States of America.20 Jan
Defence Ministers Meetings20 Jan
NATO Secretary General: in times of turmoil, we need strong institutions - NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stressed the importance of strong institutions and transatlantic cooperation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday (19 January 2017). Mr. Stoltenberg took part in a plenary session on ‘Redefining Europe’s Security Agenda’, together with EU High Representative Federica Mogherini, Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski, Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan and the Director of Europol, Rob Wainwright.19 Jan
The NATO Archives marks the 60th Anniversary of the Report on Non-Military Cooperation - The end of 2016 saw the NATO Archives fully implicated with events commemorating the 60th anniversary of one of the most important texts in the history of the Alliance. Approved by the North Atlantic Council on 13 December 1956, the Report on Non-Military Cooperation in NATO is a landmark document whose principle recommendations laid the foundation for NATO’s evolution toward increased political consultation amongst its Allies.19 Jan
NATO Secretary General to attend the World Economic Forum - The Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg, will attend the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday 19 January and Friday 20 January 2017.18 Jan
NATO welcomes Georgia’s reform progress - NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg praised Georgia’s ongoing reform efforts on Tuesday (17 January 2017) in talks with the State Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, Victor Dolidze, and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs David Dondua. The ministers met with the Secretary General before participating in a meeting of the NATO-Georgia Commission.17 Jan
Visit to NATO by the State Minister of Georgia on European and Euro-Atlantic Integration - NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg will meet the State Minister of Georgia on European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, Mr. Victor Dolidze on Tuesday 17 January 2017.16 Jan
Central Asian experts discuss energy security issues - A conference entitled “25 Years of Independence: Energy Security Issues in Central Asia and Beyond” took place in Ashgabat on 14-15 December 2016 with the participation of experts from Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The event in Turkmenistan provided an opportunity to reflect on security challenges and regional cooperation strategies in particular in the energy sector.16 Jan

National Post

Greg Palast

Join NAACP Voter Fund for Facebook LIVE broadcast of my film on How Trump Stole It - I have a simple request. I’m asking that, this Thursday, at 8pm ET/5pm PT, you join the NAACP-National Voter Fund, Rainbow/PUSH, Josh Fox of Climate Revolution and many, many more–and “share” the Facebook LIVE broadcast of my documentary–the film that exposes exactly how Trump and his cronies attacked the voting rights of a million minority voters to steal the White House. That’s all we are asking: Between 8pm and 9pm Eastern, on Inauguration Eve, you “share” the live-stream with your Facebook followers. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, follows my crew’s undercover investigations for Rolling Stone and BBC-TV. "...Mainstream journalism has often struggled to cover the manipulation of data and the distortion of reality driven by billionaires like the Koch brothers or even Donald Trump... Palast slices through all the B.S.”- The Village Voice Pass this on to your friends, your organizations, and anyone who wants to get un-stupid about the theft of the 2016 election. I’ll be leading an online discussion right after the broadcast: What do we do now? Starting now you can share the trailer on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/GregPalastInvestigates/videos/10154917384607128/ And share the trailer on Twitter simply by retweeting this tweet:https://twitter.com/Greg_Palast/status/820218502405619712 Please also indicate that you are "going" to our virtual event on Facebook — and share it with your friends: https://www.facebook.com/events/980244978772589/ On Thursday, January 19 at 8pm ET, go to https://www.facebook.com/GregPalastInvestigates/. (If you’re late, you can scroll back to the beginning.) The film (with the help of my friends Rosario Dawson, Shailene Woodley Ice-T, Willie Nelson and more), tells the story of the GOP’s weapon of mass vote destruction – and exposes the billionaires behind Trump and the vote trickery. The film was updated just this week. I guarantee: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll get revved up to resist. Trump didn’t win––his billionaire backers swiped it. We can take it back. Will you join me? - Greg Palast and the investigations team Make a tax-deductible donation to our Stolen Election Investigation *  *  *  *  * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive. Or support us by shopping with Amazon Smile.AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Sustainable Markets Foundation for the benefit of The Palast Investigative Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com The post Join NAACP Voter Fund for Facebook LIVE broadcast of my film on How Trump Stole It appeared first on Greg Palast.17 Jan
I get the Blues too… - A note to all who’ve made a donation to our Investigative Fund You are not only keeping us alive financially, but emotionally. Eventually, our stories make national news, but, in those months while the mainstream resists, your encouragement really means a lot. People ask me how I keep my sense of humor when I see all these horrors, from lost votes to lost lives. The truth is, I get the blues too. Support, good wishes, and remembering the tough world I came from are what gets me back on track. And here’s something they can’t steal from us:  a Happy New Year, from my family to yours. Thank you, Greg Palast, reporting Make a tax-deductible donation to our Stolen Election Investigation *  *  *  *  * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive. Or support us by shopping with Amazon Smile.AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Sustainable Markets Foundation for the benefit of The Palast Investigative Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.   The post I get the Blues too… appeared first on Greg Palast.30 Dec 16
A note in the snow - Last week, I flew to Detroit with my team at the request of a major west coast publication. When I landed, they got cold feet; assignment cancelled. Without funding to continue, I should have headed home. But I was getting tips of nasty doings with the ballots in Motown. I could get the evidence that Trump’s victory was as real as his tan. So I tucked my long-johns under my suit, put on my fedora, and headed out to meet the witnesses, see the evidence and film an investigative report on the Theft of Michigan. With almost no sleep (and no pay), my producer David Ambrose and I put together an investigative film—and donated it, no charge, to Democracy Now! and several other outlets. As to the airfares, hotels, cars, camera batteries, sound equipment, local assistants and the rest, the bills have piled high as the snow and uncounted ballots. So, here I was, literally out in the cold, hoping you'd see the value of top-flight investigative reporting. So, buddy, can you spare a dime? Or $100 or so? For that, I’ll send you my new film, the one that, back in September, told you exactly how Trump would steal it. Or a signed copy of the book that goes with it: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a tale of billionaires and ballot bandits. I want to thank all of you who donated to get me to Washington DC to testify at the ad hoc Congressional hearing and to speak with the Justice Department about the suppression of minority votes. (On Monday, I was joined at the Washington Press Club by the nation’s top voting rights attorney, Barbara Arnwine; civil rights legend Ruby Sales; Muslim activist Sameera Khan. They announced plans to take legal and political action against Crosscheck, the Trumpistas’ latest Jim Crow tactic, the one our team uncovered for Rolling Stone. Khan joined me at Justice to present them 50,000 signatures (we unloaded reams of paper on them) gathered by 18 Million Rising, the Asian American advocacy group, to light a fire under Justice. On Tuesday, I joined the presidents of the NAACP chapters of Michigan and Wisconsin and other front-line voting rights leaders, to plan next steps for this week, for this year, for this decade. My presentation to Justice, to Congressmen and rights advocates, to the press, was so much more powerful because I arrived in DC with the goods, the evidence, the film, the facts from Michigan, from the scene of the electoral crime. So, in the end, my assignment wasn’t cancelled: I went to work for YOU. Because I have faith that my readers agree that this work is important, that I’m not on some fool’s errand. The US media doesn’t want to cover the vote theft—because, hey, the count is over—and we should get over it. I am not over it. I am standing my ground. Let me know if you think I’ve made the right decision. Feed the team. I have nothing to offer you in return except some signed discs and books (or the Combo)— and the facts. Continue Supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation because it ain’t over and we’re not done. – Greg Palast   * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post A note in the snow appeared first on Greg Palast.18 Dec 16
The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin - By Greg Palast for Truthout Photo of Michigan ballot with bubble. (Image courtesy of Palast Investigative Fund, 2016)Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state's count by 10,704 votes. But hold on – a record 75,355 ballots were not counted. The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic. According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really? This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred Woodhams who told me, "You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it's probably not that surprising." Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles. Bubbles? Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don't fill the bubble completely, the machine records that you didn't vote for president. Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand recount initiated by Jill Stein, told me, "I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren't originally counted, because those don't scan into the machine." (I can only use her first name because she's terrified of retribution from Trump followers in the white suburb where she lives.) Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates. How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and Flint than in the white 'burbs and rural counties? Are the machines themselves racist? No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated. I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over two hours for the busted machine to be fixed. Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was fixed, Carlos explained, "Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones." It would not be possible to recount those dumped ballots. This is not an unheard of phenomenon: I know two voters who lost their vote in another state (California) because they didn't fill in the bubble – my parents! Meet mom and dad in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: How did Detroit end up with the crap machines? Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by "emergency" overlords appointed by the Republican governor. The GOP operatives refused the city's pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines. "We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget," Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. "No money was appropriated by the state." Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city's water supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race. The Human Eye Count There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in black ink or red, to determine the voters' intent: the human eye. That's why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted votes. While labeled a "recount," its real purpose is to count the 75,355 votes never counted in the first place. Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump's victory could vanish. Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan, you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat (or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the Democratic ballot but write in a protest name – popular were "Bernie Sanders" and "Mickey Mouse" – but their ballot, they knew, would count for Clinton. However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly tallied these as "over-votes" (i.e., voting for two candidates). The human eye would catch this mistake. But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette stymied Stein's human eye count. The Republican pol issued an order saying that no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of votes and voters did not match – exactly the places where you'd want to look for the missing votes. He also ordered a ban on counting ballots from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken – in other words, where there is evidence of tampering. Again, those are the machines that most need investigating. The result: The recount crews were denied access to more than half of all Detroit precincts (59 percent). I met with Stein, who told me she was stunned by this overt sabotage of the recount. "It's shocking to think that the discounting of these votes may be making the critical difference in the outcome of the election," she said. This story was repeated in Wisconsin, which uses the same Opti-Scan system as Michigan. There, the uncounted votes, sometimes called "spoiled" or "invalidated" ballots, were concentrated in Black-majority Milwaukee. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds for the human eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials authorized Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this instant replay produced the same questionable result. Adding Un-Votes to the Uncounted Stein was also disturbed by the number of voters who never got to cast ballots. "Whether it's because of the chaos [because] some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there's all kinds of mix-ups," she said. "So, a lot of people are filling out provisional ballots, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by Interstate Crosscheck." Interstate Crosscheck is a list that was created by Donald Trump supporter and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hunt down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two states in one election. An eye-popping 449,092 Michiganders are on the Crosscheck suspect list. The list, which my team uncovered in an investigation for Rolling Stone, cost at least 50,000 of the state's voters their registrations. Disproportionately, the purged voters were Blacks, Latinos and that other solid Democratic demographic, Muslim Americans. (Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US.) The Michigan Secretary of State's spokesman Woodhams told me the purpose of the mass purge was, "to clean our voter lists and ensure that there's no vulnerability for fraud. We've been very aggressive in closing vulnerabilities and loopholes to fraud." While Woodhams did not know of a single conviction for double-voting in Michigan, the "aggression" in purging the lists was clear. I showed him part of the Michigan purge list that he thought was confidential. The "double voters" are found by simply matching first and last names. Michael Bernard Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Anthony Brown. Michael Timothy Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Johnnie Brown. Woodhams assured me the GOP used the Trump-Kobach list with care, more or less. He said, "I'm sure that there are some false positives. But we go through it thoroughly, and we're not just canceling people." As to the racial profiling inherent in the list? Did he agree with our experts that by tagging thousands of voters named Jose Garcia and Michael Brown there would be a bias in his purge list? The GOP spokesman replied, "I've known a lot of white Browns." Jill Stein didn't buy it. Responding to both Michigan's and Trump's claim that voter rolls are loaded with fraudulent double voters, Stein said, "It's the opposite of what he is saying: not people who are voting fraudulently and illegally, but actually legitimate voters who have had their right to vote taken away from them by Kris Kobach and by Donald Trump." Crosscheck likely cost tens of thousands their vote in Pennsylvania as well. "It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be fixed," Stein concluded. "It's not rocket science. This is just plain, basic democracy." * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation After investigating the REAL story of the recount, we stopped by the Department of Justice and handed them our Crosscheck petition, signed by 50,000 people. We have a lot more work to do and thankfully, our efforts are starting to get notice. We're not done... Join us bySupporting the Stolen Election Investigation Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin appeared first on Greg Palast.18 Dec 16
Palast Report for Democracy Now!:By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted? - Investigative reporter Greg Palast has just returned from Michigan, where he went to probe the state’s closely contested election. Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes out of nearly 4.8 million votes cast. Green Party presidential contender Dr. Jill Stein attempted to force Michigan to hold a recount, but a federal judge ordered Michigan’s Board of Elections to stop the state’s electoral recount. One big question remains: Why did 75,335 ballots go uncounted? Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation My team and I just returned from Michigan to report the REAL story of the recount. I’ve also been responding to urgent requests in the recount states for our technical files and analysis. We're in Washington and stopped by the Department of Justice yesterday and handed them our Crosscheck petition, signed by 50,000 people. Join us by Supporting the Stolen Election Investigation Last stop for Democracy • PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large • Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo  • Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of the updated, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  THE THEFT OF 2016. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post Palast Report for Democracy Now!:By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted? appeared first on Greg Palast.13 Dec 16
Crosscheck Is Not Just Crooked, It’s Criminal - After reading my report on the Kobach/Koch/Trump operation, which has removed tens of thousands of minority voters from the rolls in the swing states that surprisingly shifted to Trump, former federal judge (and now Congressman) Alcee Hastings told me Crosscheck is a criminal violation of federal law. Hastings has called for criminal indictments and written an official Congressional member letter to ask for investigation. hastings-crosscheck-letter-to-ag-lynch Hastings’ demand for justice is backed by a petition to expose and end Crosscheck’s racist attacks on voting rights. So far it's been signed by 50,000 people, including 29,507 members of 18 Million Rising, the Asian-American rights group. The group is joined by co-signers Rep. Keith Ellison, Bill Gallegos of Climate Justice, Martin Luther King III and others. On Tuesday, December 13 I will join the leaders of 18 Million rising in Washington, D.C. to present the petition to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Stopping Crosscheck is the Standing Rock of racist vote suppression.  If we don’t open the investigations now, by January 21, Kris Kobach will be Homeland Security chief and Jeff Sessions Attorney General. Demand an investigation into Crosscheck, sign our petition — and then share it! For the full story, see the film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, the story of my investigation of Crosscheck. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. The post Crosscheck Is Not Just Crooked, It’s Criminal appeared first on Greg Palast. 5 Dec 16
The No-BS Inside Guide to the Presidential RecountSorry, no Russian hacker hunt - by Greg Palast for Truthout There's been so much complete nonsense since I first broke the news that the Green Party would file for a recount of the presidential vote, I am compelled to write a short guide to flush out the BS and get to just the facts, ma'am. Nope, they’re not hunting for Russian hackers To begin with, the main work of the recount hasn't a damn thing to do with finding out if the software programs for the voting machines have been hacked, whether by Putin’s agents or some guy in a cave flipping your vote from Hillary to The Donald. The Green team does not yet even have the right to get into the codes. But that's just not the core of the work. The ballots in the electoral “dumpster” The nasty little secret of US elections, is that we don't count all the votes. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—and all over America—there were a massive number of votes that were simply rejected, invalidated, and spoiled. They were simply, not counted.  Officially, in a typical presidential election, at least three million votes end up rejected, often for picayune, absurd reasons. The rejects fall into three big categories:  provisional ballots rejected, absentee and mail-in ballots invalidated and in-precinct votes “spoiled,” spit out by a machine or thrown out by a human reader as unreadable or mis-marked. So, as Robert Fitrakis, lead lawyer for the recount tells me, their first job is to pull the votes out of the electoral dumpster—and, one by one, make the case for counting a rejected provisional, absentee or “spoiled” ballot. Spoiled:  over-votes and under-votes How does a vote spoil? Most fall in the categories of “over-votes” and “under-votes.” In Michigan, the Green team has found a whole lot of people who voted for TWO candidates for President.  These are the “over-vote”—votes that will count for neither candidate. How odd.  While the schools in Detroit are not stellar, its graduates do know that they can only have one president. Then, some folks didn’t vote at all.  They are the “under-voter.” But, Fitrakis and team suspect, many of these under- and over-voters meant to vote for a candidate but the robot reader couldn’t understand their choice. Here’s how it happens.  Voters in Michigan and Wisconsin fill in bubbles next to their choice.  The cards, filled up with darkened bubbles for each race, are gathered and fed through an “optical scanner.” These robotic eyeballs mess up all the time. This is what Fitrakis, an old hand at vote-machine failures (both deliberate and benign), calls “the calibration problem.” Are machines calibrated with a Republican or Democratic bias? No, that's not how it works. But just as poor areas get the worst schools and hospitals, they also get the worst voting machines. The key is an ugly statistic not taught in third grade civics class:  According to the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will be disqualified as “spoiled” is 900% more likely if you’re Black than if you’re white. So the Green Party intends to review every single one of the six million bubble-filled cards. They’ll use the one instrument that can easily tell one bubble from two, or one bubble from none: the human eye. As you can imagine, This will require several thousand eyes.  The good news is, Fitrakis reports, that well over a thousand volunteers have already signed up.  Training by Skype begins Tuesday morning. Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation The team and I are off to Ground Zero:  Michigan. Wisconsin. Pennsylvania. To report the REAL story of the recount. I’m also responding to urgent requests in the recount states for our technical files and analysis. And then it’s on to Washington—to the Department of Justice—while there’s a bit of Justice left. Join us by Supporting the Stolen Election Investigation Last stop for Democracy Provisional or “placebo” ballots According to the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), Americans cast 2.7 million provisional ballots in the last presidential election.  About a million were simply discarded.  What?! Yes.  Discarded, not counted.  You show up at your normal polling station and they can’t find your name, or they don’t like your ID, or you’re supposed to vote in another precinct.  Instead of letting you vote on a regular ballot, you fill out a “provisional” ballot and place it in an envelope, sign your name, and under penalty of jail time for lying, affirm you’re a properly registered voter. The polls close—then the magic begins.  It’s up to highly partisan election officials to decide if your vote counts.  Hillary Clinton only won one swing state, Virginia, notably, the only one where the vote count was controlled by Democrats.  She lost all swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida—where the GOP set the rules for counting these ballots and their hacks acted as the judge and jury on whether a ballot should be counted. Wisconsin generally rejects votes cast in the wrong precinct, even if they’re legal voters—and, says Fitrakis, “even if their official precinct was just another table in the same high school gym—and they were mis-directed by poll workers.” (That’s why I sometimes call “provisional” ballots “placebo” ballots.  They let you feel you’ve voted, even if you haven’t.) In Wisconsin, provisional ballots were handed to voters—mostly, it appears, students—who didn’t have the form of ID required under new Wisconsin law. These ballots were disqualified despite zero evidence even one voter was an identity thief. Fitrakis says the Stein campaign will fight for each of these provisional votes where this is clearly no evidence the vote is fraudulent. Mail-in, Early and Absentee Ballots go Absent If you’ve gone postal in this election, good luck!  According to EAC data, at least half a million absentee ballots go absent, that is, just don’t get counted.  The cause: everything from postage due to “suspect signature.” Fitrakis told me that in his home state of Ohio, you need to put your driver’s license number on the envelope, “and if you don’t have a driver’s license and leave the line blank—instead of writing ‘no driver’s license’—they toss your ballot. From Palast's book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Ted Rall It’s a “gotcha!” system meant to knock out the ballots the officials don’t want to count.  (Remember, your mail-in ballot is anything but secret.)  Team Green will try to fight for each absentee ballot rejected for cockamamie reasons. If the recount doesn’t change the outcome, can we feel assured the election was honest? Sadly, no.  As Fitrakis says, “If a student is given a provisional ballot because they didn’t have the right ID, or the state simply lost their registration, we can fight for the ballot to be counted.  But most students who voted off campus didn’t know their right to get a provisional ballot and most probably didn’t get offered one. Students and others were discouraged from voting because they lacked the proper ID (300,000 by the estimate of the experts with the ACLU—that’s thirty times Trump’s plurality).  But if you didn’t cast any ballot, provisional or otherwise, no one can fight for it. And final decisions may come down to the vote of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, God forbid.  As Norman Stockwell, the editor of Madison-based The Progressive explained to me, formerly, elections law adjudications were made by a panel of non-partisan judges.  These were replaced by this new commission of partisan shills appointed by GOP Governor Scott Walker. Trump says millions voted illegally. Is he crazy? Crazy like a fox.  There’s a method in his madness that affects the recount. While the media dismisses Trump’s claim that there are "millions of people that voted illegally," they have not paid attention to the details of his claim.  Trump explains that millions of people are “voting many, many times,” that is, voting in two states in the same election. Trump’s claim is based on a list of “potential duplicate voters” created by his operative, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  Kobach (a top dog in Trump’s transition team)  directs a program for hunting down fraudulent voters using a computer system called, “Crosscheck.” It’s quite a computer:  Crosscheck identified a breathtaking 449,922 Michiganders who are suspected of voting or registering in a second state, a felony crime, as are 371,923 in Pennsylvania. I spent two years investigating the Trump/Kobach claim for Rolling Stone.  We obtained the “confidential” suspect list of several million citizens accused of voting twice.  In fact, it was no more than a list of common names—Maria Hernandez, James Brown, David Lee—that is, common to voters of color.  Read: Democrats.  A true and typical example: Michael James Brown of Michigan is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Kendrick Brown of Georgia. Page from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (FREE) Comic book penned by Keith Tucker About 54,000 voters in Michigan, five times Trump’s plurality, lost their right to vote based on this nutty double-voter accusation.  In Pennsylvania, about 45,000 were purged. The problem for Fitrakis:  While he eventually plans to file suit against Crosscheck purges, in the meantime, it’s not clear he can challenge someone whose lost their vote because of a false accusation of double voting.  And those who found their names missing and didn’t demand a provisional ballot—there’s no hope at all of recovering their vote. Is Jill Stein going to get rich? Fitrakis laughs at this one.  “The FEC [Federal Elections Commission] has very strict rules on recounts. The donations for the recount are sequestered in a specially designated account and all spending is restricted to the recount.” The big problem is that the cost is somewhat out of Stein’s control.  Each state will bill the campaign for the “pro-rated salaries and benefits” of its county and state officials working on the recount. To add to the cost and just plain drive the Green team crazy, the Wisconsin Election Board announced on Monday that each separate county elections clerk will decide if they’ll even let the Green volunteers directly view the ballots.  Fitrakis and partners will have to get a court order to get into each county.  How does one recount ballots without seeing them?  (Hmm, is the Wisconsin board, stooges appointed by the GOP Governor, fearful that the viewing the ballots will expose the game?) Hillary joins the fray What will the Clinton camp add to the recount? “Lawyers,” said Fitrakis, though he’s yet to see them.  The Clinton campaign is apparently helping find one voter in each Pennsylvania county, as one is required in each jurisdiction to file for a recount of that state. And what about that hack job? While Fitrakis is not looking for Russkies in the computer code, he says, “We’re more concerned with the private companies that control the keys to the kingdom—to match what’s on paper to the official count.”  The “keys” are the little machines, memory cards and other electronic gewgaws that are used to suck the data from the voting machine—which are carried off to another state for tabulation by a private contractor.  Will these tabulations at each step match what the volunteers find in the on-the-ground recount? One problem is that the tabulation software is “proprietary.”  A private company owns the code to the count—and the privateers will fight fiercely, with GOP help, to keep the ballot counting code their commercial secret. Push and Pray Pennsylvania In the end, the single biggest impediment to a full and fair recount is that 70 percent of Pennsylvania voters used what are called, “Push and Pray” voting machines—Direct Recording Electronic touch-screens.  Push the screen next to your choice and pray it gets recorded. Pennsylvania is one of the only states that has yet to require some form of VVPAT (“vee-pat”) or voter-verified paper audit trail that creates an ATM-style receipt. Therefore, the Keystone State recount will have to rely on hopes of access to the code, statistical comparisons to counties that used paper ballots—and prayer. Maybe it IS the Russians The possibility that a Putin pal hacked the machines was championed by University of Michigan computer sciences professor J. Alex Halderman who proposed, “The attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers…and spread malware into voting machines.” I imagine some squat, middle-pay-scale civil servant in chinos and a pocket protector who works in the Michigan Secretary of State’s office approached, one late overtime night, by some FSB agent in high heels and a slinky dress split halfway up her thigh. The svelte spy would lean against the bureaucrat provocatively and whisper, “My handsome dahling, would you mind sticking this little thumb drive into that big old computer of yours?” Professor Halderman, if you want to help the recount, put down the James Bond novels and pick up some Opti-Scan ballots.  We’ve got a lot of bubbles to read.  End PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of the updated, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  THE THEFT OF 2016. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post The No-BS Inside Guide to the Presidential RecountSorry, no Russian hacker hunt appeared first on Greg Palast.30 Nov 16
Exclusive: Jill Stein just called, Green Party filing for recount in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania - by Greg Palast Jill Stein just called to say that I am the first one to be informed that the Green Party is formally petitioning for a recount in 3 states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump’s margin is less than 11,600 in Michigan, 27,200 in Wisconsin and 68,000 in Pennsylvania. If just a few thousand votes are found in Wisconsin and Michigan, Hillary Clinton becomes president by 276 electoral votes verses 264 for Trump. Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation Stein told me “We’re filing in Wisconsin Friday because the votes were cast on proven hack-prone machines. This has been a hack-ridden election.” She said that it will be most difficult to recount the machines in Pennsylvania. When asked why the democrats are not bringing this action, Stein told this reporter that “Democrats do not act to protect the vote even when there is dramatic evidence” of tampering. The Green Party told us that Stein will be represented by experienced voting rights attorney’s John Bonifaz, Boston, MA and Robert Fitrakis, Columbus, OH. Stein said, “our voting system is on life support.” The presidential candidate also said, “The Green Party will continue to be the go to advocate for voting rights. That includes fighting vote suppression tactics such as the Interstate Crosscheck system.” Interstate Crosscheck is the program which wrongly purged hundreds of thousand of minority voters in this election, according to the investigation this reporter fro Rolling Stone Magazine. Stein received 50,700 votes in Michigan, five times Trump’s winning plurality, and 30,980 in Wisconsin, more than Trump’s margin. When asked the "Nader" question, "Isn’t it true that your votes in Wisconsin and Michigan, if they went to Clinton, would have blocked Trump?", Stein answered, "Not at all. Our polls showed that 61% of our voters would have simply sat out the election, and one-third of the remaining voters would have voted Trump." The candidate insisted, "We are the ‘un-spoilers.’" Stein said she acted when Clinton turned silent because, "Only candidates may formally demand a re-count and we have standing." * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post Exclusive: Jill Stein just called, Green Party filing for recount in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania appeared first on Greg Palast.23 Nov 16
Here’s what we do now A personal note by Greg Palast - Being right never felt so horrid. “This is the story of the theft of the 2016 election. It’s a crime still in progress.” So opens my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. And on Election night I waited for the returns to make a fool of me. Instead, the returns made the fool a President. And so, my vacation’s cancelled. My life’s cancelled; that is, a life of anything but sleuthing and exposing the details of the heist of our democracy. What’s at stake? No way around it, this is one frightening moment. Decades of progress created with sweat and determination face destruction.  Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed—and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and a howling anti-Semite as White House Senior Counselor. But the horror we face is countered by this one hard and hopeful fact:  Donald Trump did NOT win this election. Trump not only lost the popular vote by millions — he did not legitimately win the swing states of the Electoral College. Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio:  every one was stolen through sophisticated, and sickeningly racist vote suppression tactics. If you saw my report for Democracy Now! on election morning, it revealed that Ohio GOP officials turned off anti-hacking software on voting machines, forced Black voters to wait hours in line (while whites had no wait). And, crucially, I confirmed that purged tens of thousands of minority voters on fake accusations they’d voted twice.  I first exposed this bogus double-voter blacklist called Crosscheck, in Rolling Stone. It’s the sick excrescence crafted by Kris Kobach, the Trump transition team's maven who also created the Muslim-tracker software he’s bringing to the Trump administration. What can we do now? I have been INUNDATED with requests for my factual reports and findings by media and, most important, the front-line activist groups preparing for the fierce fight to protect our votes. Some examples: Rev. William Barber of the NAACP filed a suit based in North Carolina,  hoping to overturn the Trump "victory" — and protect the tiny margin of the Democrat’s win of the Governor’s mansion.  The NAACP cites my discovery of "Crosscheck" — in which North Carolina removed upwards of 190,000 voters on false charges they voted twice. They now need my facts. Congressmen Keith Ellison and Alcee Hastings of the Congressional Black Caucus, personally presented Attorney General Loretta Lynch with my investigative reports and demanded investigation — "and indictments."  That investigation must kick off immediately. They now need my facts. The Asian-American civil rights group 18 Million Rising has gathered 50,000 signatures to push the Justice Department to investigate my evidence of a massive attack on the Asian-American vote. They now need my facts. In Michigan, the ACLU is ready to take action on the purge scheme I uncovered, "Crosscheck," that wrongly gave the state to Trump. In Ohio, voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis is going into court with evidence, much that I uncovered, of racist voting games — from 5-hour-long lines in Black precincts to shutting off ballot security measures on the voting machines. The team need my facts. I expect to be in Washington at the Justice Dept and meeting with civil rights groups in December before the Electoral College meets. Information—plus film, video, investigative reports And beyond the voluminous files and confidential documents my team has uncovered that is sought by activists, we are deluged with requests for our film, videos, writings and more. And now we have US networks, even major comedy shows, asking for our material and, of course, new investigative findings. Information and facts make a difference With our investigative reports, with our hard and unassailable evidence, we can challenge the legitimacy of the Trump "election."  Most important, we must begin the difficult but necessary work of protecting and restoring voting rights.  The 2018 Election — and the threat of more stolen elections — is upon us. What we need to keep going...  Your extraordinary support and faith in our work funded my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which is now more relevant than ever and being seen by ever more audiences. Now we need your financial support again to keep this fight going. We just did not budget for the GOP's in-your-face steal of the Congress and White House.  All our resources went into raising the alarm before the election. So, now, I have to re-hire the staff, hit the road again. Ohio, North Carolina, Washington DC and who knows where, retain attorneys—and retain our team of technicians from cameramen to outreach organizers. Can this new work be done? Is there any choice? Honestly and personally, I was hoping for some rest and time off. But a lifetime of your work and mine is now in the balance. ● PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large ● Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy ● Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo. And does an angel have the $8K needed for our Washington work and filming?  If so, flap your wings. I can't thank you enough for all the years of support. Alas... our work is not done. Greg Palast and the Palast Investigations Team * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post Here’s what we do now A personal note by Greg Palast appeared first on Greg Palast.20 Nov 16
Ethnic Votes Stolen in Crucial States Help Fix US Election For Trump Reveals Greg Palast - By Ben Gelblum | The London Economic Throughout the US election campaign one of The Donald’s main refrains was “this election is rigged.” Turns out this particular Trump election rallying cry wasn’t a lie… Well, not entirely. Veteran election investigator Greg Palast has uncovered the sickening truth. I spoke to Palast about evidence of widespread systemic election rigging, robbing black, hispanic and asian American voters of their right to vote in crucial states. – Enough votes to swing the election away from the Hillary Clinton victory predicted in polls – explaining suspicious exit polls inconsistencies – and towards a shock result for Trump and Republican victory in the Senate. “Before a single vote was even cast, the election was already fixed by Trump operatives,” explains Palast. “This country is violently divided. There simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing black provisional ballots into the dumpster, new strict voter ID laws that saw students and low income voters turned away—the list goes on.” Palast has spent the past decade and a half investigating and identifying several techniques used to suppress ethnic minority and young votes – the voters that statistically vote Democrat. And this is surely the biggest and most unreported scandal of the most bizarre election any of us can recall. According to The Guardian, Palast is the “most important investigative reporter of our time – up there with Woodward and Bernstein.” The fast-talking fedora-topped reporter has investigated election irregularities for publications such as The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and BBC’s Newsnight, ever since the controversial Bush v Gore election in 2000. The 2000 election was too close to call without Florida, where votes were counted and recounted for weeks before George W Bush won the state by a margin of just 537 votes out of almost 6 million, and as a result the presidency. Palast uncovered the purge of 56,000 black voters in Florida – wrongly deleted from voter rolls as ex-felons. Now Palast’s investigative team are certain that vote suppression techniques were instrumental in last week’s Republican presidential and Senate victory. “For years I have been following the American election process which is nothing like in England,” says Palast. “Election manipulation is a very big factor in US elections. I found we had a massive problem in Florida in 2000, similarly in 2004 in Ohio with tens of thousands of invalidated votes. And now we are back at it again.” So why were Trump and his acolytes constantly drawing attention to vote rigging during the campaign? Trump was constantly banging on about debunked claims of large scale voter fraud, urging supporters to volunteer to monitor the polls, and creating an atmosphere where hysteria and conspiracy theories abounded. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, talked about busloads of people voting numerous times in some big cities. He also quipped that “dead people generally vote for Democrats, rather than Republicans.” Yet truly, you are more likely to be struck by lightning in the next year (a one in 1,042,000 chance, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) than to find a case of voter fraud by impersonation (31 in over a billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014, according to Loyola law school’s research). Trump allies often cited the fact that Mitt Romney failed to win a single vote in 59 out of 1,687 Philadelphia precincts that happened to be almost entirely black. But with their demographic make up it’s no surprise why and investigations by Philadelphia’s Republican Party and the Philadelphia Inquirer found nothing untoward. Nationwide, 93% of black voters voted for Barack Obama that year. In 2012, an Arizona State University study concluded: “while fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent.” Yet despite the lack of evidence or convictions for the crime of multiple voting, certain Republican figures devised draconian systems to prevent it, which have also served to deny electorally significant sections of the population of their right to vote. – Disproportionately ethnic votes, which are way more likely to be Democrats. And now the election is over, according to Palast, Trump’s increasing hysteria about vote rigging served as the ultimate smokescreen for a systematic denial of hundreds of thousands of crucial votes in the name of preventing fraud. – A ‘bigly’ enough scam to win Trump the Whitehouse. Palast started investigating Donald Trump’s increasingly hysterical claims that the election was rigged by people voting many times for Rolling Stone Magazine, and made some shocking discoveries in his report last August: The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters. As a response to constant paranoia about voter fraud, 30 mainly Republican states have adopted a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program (Crosscheck), according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. This system was devised in 2005 by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, better known as the anti-immigration fanatic responsible for Trump’s idea of building a wall on the US / Mexico border and getting Mexico to pay for it. Kobach, like Trump, has given lip service to conspiracy theories, especially ones that bolster fears of the growing influence of racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. And now, interestingly he has been rewarded by Trump with a job on his Transition Team as adviser on immigration. Kobach convinced other states, including crucial swing states such as Michigan and North Carolina, to share their voter lists to look for the same name potentially registered to vote in more than one state. Crosscheck supposedly matches first, middle and last name, plus birth date, and provides the last four digits of a Social Security number for additional verification. Seems like a sensible method to stop people voting more than once in separate states. Only it soon became clear that Crosschecking was neither accurate nor fair and was not being used as it should. Some states including Florida dropped out of the program due to doubts about the reliability of its data — though others joined despite them. Palast’s team discovered Crosscheck had amassed a list of 7.2 million voters accused of being potential double voters.  Yet despite such an enormous list of suspects, there has only been four arrests. “It is a crime to deliberately register to vote twice,” says Palast. “You go to jail for five years. And to organise double voting on a significant scale is practically impossible. They are basically arresting no one – about four arrests out of a list which identified around seven million potential double voters, and I doubt these arrests are even due to the list.” Palast’s team managed (legally) to get hold of over 2 million names identified as potential double voters and soon began to spot obvious mistakes. The failsafes of National Insurance number and date of birth meant to make the system foolproof were not attached and appeared to have been ignored. “The most common name in the world is Mohamed Mohamed,” explains Palast, scanning through the list of names, “so for example under this Trump hit list, Mohamed Said Mohamed is supposed to be the same voter as Mohamed Osman Mohamed – in fact about one out of four middle names don’t match and Jr and Sr don’t match – so for example with James Brown a very common black name – they are matching James Brown Sr to James Brown Jr and saying it’s the same voter and then the middle names don’t even match.” U.S. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. “If your name is Washington, there’s an 89 percent chance you’re African-American,” says Palast. “If your last name is Hernandez, there’s a 94 percent chance you’re Hispanic.” This inherent bias results in an astonishing one in six Hispanics, one in seven Asian-Americans and one in nine African-Americans in Crosscheck states landing on what Palast dubs “Trump’s hit list.”  Potential double registrants were sent a postcard and asked to verify their address by mailing it back. “The junk mail experts we spoke to said this postcard is meant not to be returned. It’s inscrutable small print, doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t even say you’re accused of voting twice. It just says, please confirm your voting address,” explains Palast, “and most people of colour, poor voters don’t respond to this sort of mailing and they know that.” According to the Census Bureau, white voters are 21 percent more likely than blacks or Hispanics to respond to official requests; homeowners are 32 percent more likely to respond than renters; and the young are 74 percent less likely than the old to respond. Those on the move – students and the poor, who often shift apartments while hunting for work – might not get the mail in the first place. So if a few older white people, more likely to vote Republican were caught up in the mainly ethnic hit list, they were more likely to return the card and retain their right to vote. If you do not reply to the missive, state officials have discretion over what to do next, and the process varies from state to state. What Palast’s investigation made clear is ethnic voters were disproportionately likely to be targeted and purged from voter lists. All this despite other states choosing a more reliable system to prevent double voting: the Electronic Registration Information Center, (ERIC) – adopted by 20 member states plus the District of Columbia, according to its website. A 2013 report found ERIC actually boosted voter registration and turnout and eliminated errors in voter files. Palast’s investigators calculated 1.1 million people, many spread over crucial swing states were deprived of their right to vote last Tuesday.  According to the exit polls last Tuesday, 88% of black voters voted for Hillary Clinton, as well as  65% of hispanic and asian American voters. “The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of colour and the poor,” says Palast. “Many didn’t discover that their vote was stolen until they turned up last Tuesday and found their name missing. In the US they are given something called a provisional ballot, but if your name is not on the voter roll, you can fill out all the provisional votes you like they’re not going to count your vote. – They can’t even if you’re wrongly removed. “Trump’s victory margin in Michigan was 13,107 and the Michigan Crosscheck purge list was 449,922. Trump’s victory margin in Arizona- 85,257, Arizona Crosscheck purge list- 270,824;. Trump’s victory margin in North Carolina was 177,008 and the North Carolina Crosscheck purge list had 589,393 people on it.” Crosscheck was by no means the only method that came to light to disenfranchise voters more likely to vote Democrat. Palast also cites statistics on vote spoilage – “In the UK, glitches, spoiled or empty ballots are random,  but here, the US Civil Rights Commission found in Florida you are 900% more likely to lose your vote to spoilage if you are black than if you are white.” Statistician Philip Clinker author of the study, has said that this is typical nationwide, and according to Palast, if anything, the situation has got worse since the 2000 study. In 2013, the Supreme Court overturned part of the Voting Rights Act enacted in 1965 at the heart of the Civil Right Movement to prohibit racial discrimination in voting. This allowed all kinds of shenanigans in the lead up to last week that previously could have been challenged by the Department of Justice. In North Carolina, for example, Republicans even bragged: “African American Early Voting is Down.” – This after a federal court federal court found their voting restrictions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” States, particularly those controlled by Republicans, made several changes this year, such as stricter voter ID laws and restricting polling booths, to make voting harder in a way that targeted generally Democrat-voting ethnic minority voters. There were reports of ridiculously long queues. As this is not the first election this has happened in, it appears to be a deliberate tactic. Harvard’s Stephen Pettigrew who studies polling lines found that ethnic minority voters were six times more likely to have to stand in line for over an hour. And losing out on work from disproportionately long queues costs people in ethnic minority areas proportionately more in lost income, which also puts them off voting next time. Pettigrew estimated that 200,000 people did not vote in 2014 because of queues encountered in 2012. “Election day was marred by long lines due to cuts in early voting and 868 fewer polling places,” adds Palast, “to say nothing of the untold millions who were unable to vote due to restrictive voter ID and felon disenfranchisement laws.” During the election last week, Palast also made a shocking discovery about voting machines in Ohio – one of the states in which he found many black voters were disenfranchised by a mixture of the Crosscheck and other systems, and exit polls differed markedly from the counted votes. “In the state of Ohio they have fancy new machines which can record an image of your vote and an anti-hacking function. They were turned off,” explains Palast. “I went to court with Bob Fitrakis a law professor in Ohio to have this overturned. I went into the judge’s chamber, and there the Republicans did not deny that it was turned off but they said to turn it back on would create havoc. – This after the FBI had issued a warning that they feared the machines would be hacked. “If you get such a warning, why would you turn off the anti-hacking mechanism? All this means we will never know if the machines were hacked and how many votes were lost if there was a challenge as there was no image of the vote recorded.” Greg Palast’s documentary and book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy  further details his warnings about voter suppression techniques we haven’t even mentioned in this article. “I stuck my neck out last year, saying they would steal this election, and I really hoped I would be left looking like an idiot.  “Turns out I was right though,” he adds. “The problem with the electoral college is a few thousand votes in tiny states can flip an election.” – An election President Elect Donald J Trump won despite still trailing nationwide in the popular vote. – A problem Donald Trump railed about too in the past, calling it “a disaster for democracy.” Civil rights organisation NAACP, which nine times managed to see off voter suppression of hundreds of thousands of votes in the federal courts over the past few months, is now mounting a legal battle to reinstate fully the Voter Registration Act. Palast and his team are certain that the chicanery they and others uncovered more than explains the difference between the outcome polls predicted and the result of the presidential and senate elections – especially when it comes to the exit polls taken as people had just voted. “Crosscheck does not account for all the shoplifting, but if you put it together with the other nine methods to steal votes that I identified, there’s little question that the exit polls were correct and Hillary Clinton won, or at least more voters voted for her in the swing states. Obviously she won the popular vote, but we have an electoral college system. If they counted all the votes in all the swing states the traditionally highly accurate exit polls would have been accurate,” adds Palast. Electoral Integrity blogger Theodore de Macedo Soares drew attention to the bizarre discrepancy between computer counted official vote counts and exit polls last week, writing: “According to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI, and FL) in the 2016 Presidential Election that she went on to lose in the computerized vote counts.  With these states Clinton wins the Electoral College with a count of 302 versus 205 for Trump.  Clinton also won the national exit poll by 3.2% and holds a narrow lead in the national vote count still in progress. Exit polls were conducted in 28 states. In 23 states the discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote count favored Trump. In 13 of these states the discrepancies favoring Trump exceeded the margin of error of the state.” Palast believes such discrepancies, some far greater than any acceptable margin of error are indicative of systematic electoral rigging to steal Democrat votes: “The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting.  Exit polls solve the problem. The US State Department uses exit polling to determine whether you accept the outcome of a foreign election. The Brexit exit polls were extremely accurate. Yet in the Ukraine the US does not accept the result of the 2004 election because of the exit poll mismatch with the final official count. “And here for example in North Carolina we have the exit poll raw data at 2.1% favouring victory by Clinton, yet she loses by 3.8% in the final count. In Pennsylvania 4.4% victory suddenly became a 1.2 % loss; Wisconsin: 3.9% victory becomes a 1% loss; Florida: 1.1% victory becomes a 1% loss. “In the swing States we have this massive red shift because when people come out of the votes, exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted?”” Kris Kobach did not give us a comment, but a statement from Kris Kobach’s office on the Crosscheck program said the Crosscheck program had been used for over a decade, and insisted “merely appearing as a potential match does not subject a voter to removal from a participating states’ voter registration roll/record.  Ineligible and/or unqualified persons who are registered voters are only removed from a states’ voter registration roll/record if the person is subject to removal pursuant to applicable state and federal elections provisions.”           The post Ethnic Votes Stolen in Crucial States Help Fix US Election For Trump Reveals Greg Palast appeared first on Greg Palast.15 Nov 16

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(U//FOUO) DHS Intelligence Note: Germany Christmas Market Attack Underscores Threat to Mass Gatherings and Open-Access Venues - (U) A 25-ton commercial truck transporting steel beams from Poland to Germany plowed into crowds at a Christmas market in Berlin at about 2000 local time on 19 December, killing at least 12 people and injuring 48 others, several critically, according to media reporting citing public security officials involved in the investigation. The truck was reportedly traveling at approximately 40 miles per hour when it rammed the Christmas market stands. Police estimate the vehicle traveled 80 yards into the Christmas market before coming to a halt. (U) German authorities are calling the attack a terrorist incident, with the attacker still at large. German authorities are warning that it is unclear if the attacker was a lone offender, acted as part of a cell, or if he received any sort of direction by a FTO, and expressed concern that additional attacks are possible. An individual who was initially detained on 19 December was released on 20 December, and is no longer considered a suspect, according to German police. The truck may have been stolen or hijacked with the original driver overpowered or murdered. The original driver, found dead in the truck cab, appears to have died from stabbing and shooting wounds, according to media reporting citing law enforcement officials. The truck tracking location system indicated repeated engine stalls in the time leading up to the attack, leading the owner of the vehicle to speculate this was unlikely if a veteran driver was operating the truck, unless there was some sort of mechanical trouble. In response to the incident, German authorities, as part of their heightened security posture, will place concrete barriers around access points at Christmas markets across Germany. … (U//FOUO) Vehicle Ramming Featured in Recent Terrorist Messaging (U//FOUO) I&A assesses that the 19 December likely terrorist attack at one of the largest Christmas markets in Berlin highlights terrorists’ continued use of simple tactics and is consistent with recent calls by the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) for attacks in the West using “all available means.” In an early December audio statement, ISIL spokesman Abu Hassan al-Muhajir called for attacks in “their homes, markets, street gatherings and anywhere they do not think of.” Vehicle ramming has been featured in recent violent extremist publications and messaging—including in ISIL’s al Rumiyah magazine and al-Qaʻida in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) Inspire magazine—especially since the mid-July vehicle ramming attack in Nice, France. The early-November third issue of Rumiyah highlighted applicable targets for vehicle ramming attacks such as “large outdoor conventions and celebrations, pedestrian-congested streets, outdoor markets, festivals, parades, and political rallies.” The most recent Homeland attack featuring this tactic occurred at Ohio State University in Columbus on 28 November, where Abdul Razak Ali Artan ran over pedestrians and then continued the attack with an edged weapon after the vehicle came to a stop. (U//FOUO) On 20 December, ISIL’s A’maq News Agency called the attacker “an Islamic State soldier” consistent with previous instances of quickly posting claims of credit for operations. While the attack bears the hallmarks of ISIL’s tactics and targets, we have not been able to determine a definitive link to the group at this time. … (U//FOUO) I&A has no information indicating a specific or credible threat against individuals, locations or events in the Homeland, but several recent plots and attacks in the United States and overseas involving shopping malls, mass transit, and mass gatherings, including sporting events, have shown that homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) and terrorist groups are interested in attacking these types of targets. I&A assesses that commercial facilities—such as festivals, concerts, outdoor events, and other mass gatherings—remain a potential target for terrorists or HVEs, as they often pursue simple, achievable attacks with an emphasis on economic impact and mass casualties. The most likely tactics in a hypothetical terrorist attack against such events likely would involve edged weapons, small arms, vehicular assaults, and possibly improvised explosive devices. The 19 December events underscore the difficulties the private sector and law enforcement face in securing venues that are pedestrian-friendly, particularly in light of the large number of such areas.16 Jan
National Intelligence Council Global Trends Assessment: Paradox of Progress - We are living a paradox: The achievements of the industrial and information ages are shaping a world to come that is both more dangerous and richer with opportunity than ever before. Whether promise or peril prevails will turn on the choices of humankind. The progress of the past decades is historic—connecting people, empowering individuals, groups, and states, and lifting a billion people out of poverty in the process. But this same progress also spawned shocks like the Arab Spring, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and the global rise of populist, anti-establishment politics. These shocks reveal how fragile the achievements have been, underscoring deep shifts in the global landscape that portend a dark and difficult near future. The next five years will see rising tensions within and between countries. Global growth will slow, just as increasingly complex global challenges impend. An ever-widening range of states, organizations, and empowered individuals will shape geopolitics. For better and worse, the emerging global landscape is drawing to a close an era of American dominance following the Cold War. So, too, perhaps is the rules-based international order that emerged after World War II. It will be much harder to cooperate internationally and govern in ways publics expect. Veto players will threaten to block collaboration at every turn, while information “echo chambers” will reinforce countless competing realities, undermining shared understandings of world events. Underlying this crisis in cooperation will be local, national, and international differences about the proper role of government across an array of issues ranging from the economy to the environment, religion, security, and the rights of individuals. Debates over moral boundaries—to whom is owed what—will become more pronounced, while divergence in values and interests among states will threaten international security. It will be tempting to impose order on this apparent chaos, but that ultimately would be too costly in the short run and would fail in the long. Dominating empowered, proliferating actors in multiple domains would require unacceptable resources in an era of slow growth, fiscal limits, and debt burdens. Doing so domestically would be the end of democracy, resulting in authoritarianism or instability or both. Although material strength will remain essential to geopolitical and state power, the most powerful actors of the future will draw on networks, relationships, and information to compete and cooperate. This is the lesson of great power politics in the 1900s, even if those powers had to learn and relearn it. The US and Soviet proxy wars, especially in Vietnam and Afghanistan, were a harbinger of the post-Cold War conflicts and today’s fights in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia in which less powerful adversaries deny victory through asymmetric strategies, ideology, and societal tensions. The threat from terrorism will expand in the coming decades as the growing prominence of small groups and individuals use new technologies, ideas, and relationships to their advantage. Meanwhile, states remain highly relevant. China and Russia will be emboldened, while regional aggressors and nonstate actors will see openings to pursue their interests. Uncertainty about the United States, an inward-looking West, and erosion of norms for conflict prevention and human rights will encourage China and Russia to check US influence. In doing so, their “gray zone” aggression and diverse forms of disruption will stay below the threshold of hot war but bring profound risks of miscalculation. Overconfidence that material strength can manage escalation will increase the risks of interstate conflict to levels not seen since the Cold War. Even if hot war is avoided, the current pattern of “international cooperation where we can get it”—such as on climate change—masks significant differences in values and interests among states and does little to curb assertions of dominance within regions. These trends are leading to a spheres of influence world. … Competing Views on Instability China and Russia portray global disorder as resulting from a Western plot to push what they see as self-serving American concepts and values of freedom to every corner of the planet. Western governments see instability as an underlying condition worsened by the end of the Cold War and incomplete political and economic development. Concerns over weak and fragile states rose more than a generation ago because of beliefs about the externalities they produce—whether disease, refugees, or terrorists in some instances. The growing interconnectedness of the planet, however, makes isolation from the global periphery an illusion, and the rise of human rights norms makes state violence against a governed population an unacceptable option. One consequence of post-Cold War disengagement by the United States and the then-USSR, was a loss of external support for strongmen politics, militaries, and security forces who are no longer able to bargain for patronage. Also working against coercive governments are increased demands for responsive and participatory governance by citizens no longer poor due to the unprecedented scale and speed of economic development in the nonindustrial world. Where political and economic development occurred roughly in tandem or quick succession, modernization and individual empowerment have reinforced political stability. Where economic development outpaced or occurred without political changes—such as in much of the Arab world and the rest of Africa and South Asia—instability ensued. China has been a notable exception. The provision of public goods there so far has bolstered political order but a campaign against corruption is now generating increasing uncertainty and popular protests have grown during the past 15 years. Russia is the other major exception—economic growth—largely the result of high energy and commodity prices—helped solve the disorder of the Yeltsin years. US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown that coercion and infusions of money cannot overcome state weakness. Rather, building a stable political order requires inclusiveness, cooperation among elites, and a state administration that can both control the military and provide public services. This has proved more difficult than expected to provide. … 15 Jan
DoD Cybersecurity Discipline Implementation Plan February 2016 - Inspections and incidents across the Department of Defense (DoD) reveal a need to reinforce basic cybersecurity requirements identified in policies, directives, and orders. In agreement with the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO) identified key tasks needed to ensure those requirements are achieved. The DoD Cybersecurity Campaign reinforces the need to ensure Commanders and Supervisors at all levels, including the operational level, are accountable for key tasks, including those identified in this Implementation Plan. The Campaign does not relieve a Commander’s and Supervisor’s responsibility for compliance with other cybersecurity tasks identified in policies, directives, and orders, but limits the risk assumed by one Commander or Supervisor in key areas in order to reduce the risk to all other DoD missions. As part of the Campaign, this Implementation Plan is grouped into four Lines of Effort. The requirements within each Line of Effort represent a prioritization of all existing DoD cybersecurity requirements. Each Line of Effort focuses on a different aspect of cybersecurity defense-in-depth that is being exploited by our adversaries to gain access to DoD information networks. The four Lines of Effort are: 1. Strong authentication – to degrade the adversaries’ ability to maneuver on DoD information networks; 2. Device hardening – to reduce internal and external attack vectors into DoD information networks; 3. Reduce attack surface – to reduce external attack vectors into DoD information networks; and 4. Alignment to cybersecurity / computer network defense service providers – to improve detection of and response to adversary activity In conjunction with this Implementation Plan, a DoD Cybersecurity Scorecard effort led by the DoD CIO includes prioritized requirements within these Lines of Effort. Although similar to and supportive of one another, they maintain two distinct reporting mechanisms with two distinct targets. Commanders and Supervisors at all levels will report their status with the requirements in this Implementation Plan via the Defense Readiness Reporting System (DRRS), allowing leadership to review compliance down to the tactical level. In contrast, the Cybersecurity Scorecard is a means for the Secretary of Defense to understand cybersecurity compliance at the strategic level by reporting metrics at the service tier. Securing DoD information networks to provide mission assurance requires leadership at all levels to implement cybersecurity discipline, enforce accountability, and manage the shared risk to all DoD missions. By including cybersecurity compliance in readiness reporting, this campaign forces awareness and accountability for these key tasks into the command chains and up to senior leadership, where resourcing decisions can be made to address compliance shortfalls. The Cybersecurity Discipline Implementation Plan and Cybersecurity Scorecard efforts are critical to achieving the strategic goal of Defending DoD information networks, securing DoD data, and mitigating risks to DoD missions as set forth in the 2015 DoD Cyber Strategy. The aforementioned line of efforts and associated tasks shall be linked to DoD Cyber Strategy implementation efforts whenever possible. The DoD Cybersecurity Campaign, reinforced by the USCYBERCOM Orders, will begin as soon as possible. Reporting on cybersecurity readiness in the scorecard and DRRS will begin as soon as possible.15 Jan
(U//LES) Homeland Security Investigations Presentation: Criminal Exploitation of Digital Currencies - What is a Virtual Currency? • An alternative financial value system involving the exchange of funds to purchase precious metals or other value base which can later be used in exchange for products and services. • Is not registered anywhere and it is not governed by any law other than arbitration private forums. • Personal data is not required. • The system focuses strictly on activities of the forum. • Information stored for two months and then permanently deleted. Types of Virtual Currencies E-Currency / E-Wallets Digital Gold Virtual World Virtual Games Merchants (FB, Amazon) Crypto-Currencies ** … 13 Jan
(U//FOUO) U.K. Ministry of Defence Guide: Understanding the Arab People - The Arab World is a vast area which is home to people from diverse cultures. The way in which people behave and interact with you will therefore vary greatly across the region. This guide discusses aspects of Arab culture that you might experience in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, the Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Yemen. Further reading on individual countries is recommended before you deploy. Most Arabs are Sunni Muslims who speak Arabic. However, there are many different religions, ethnic and social groups in the Arab world, among them Christians, Jews, Shi’a and Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Turks and Berbers. Some of these groups have suffered oppression in their countries, but many live happily as Arabs and as part of Arab society. While some Arab countries are very conservative and have strict rules about the role of women, others are more permissive in their approach to issues like alcohol, religion and education. The familiar stereotype of the Bedouin Arab with his camel, tent, robes and blood feuds is only a small part of Arab identity and history. In fact, this traditional way of life has died out in many parts of the Arab world, and is not significant today in areas like North Africa. With the improvement in technology and social media in recent years, people across the Arab World have been exposed to other cultures to a much greater degree than previous generations. Approximately 70% of the Arab World are under the age of 30 and so the entire region is undergoing a transformation as people try to find ways to integrate their traditional cultures into the modern world. … Religious Practice. Islam affects almost every aspect of life as a Muslim Arab. People use Islamic symbols to decorate their homes and cars, carry miniature Qur’ans with them, and go on pilgrimage to various holy shrines around the Arab world. Most Arabs follow a pattern of daily prayer, celebrate Islamic festivals and holidays, and adhere to the rules of Islam. Verses from the Qur’an are memorised. In most Arab countries, Islam also affects politics and law, influencing marriage, inheritance and divorce law, as well as many aspects of business and banking. It is common to see a copy of the qu’ran on car dashboards in Muslim countries. Sharia. Sharia is the law as revealed by God and based on the philosophy laid out in the Qur’an and Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammed). It provides the legal basis for all public rituals but also guides an individual in their personal life, such as how to wash and how to behave in relationships. Sharia is interpreted for the people by religious scholars (collectively known as an Ulema). In Saudi Arabia and Sudan, sharia is interpreted very strictly and encompasses all aspects of domestic and civil law. In other countries it is integrated with other influences. For example, Tunisia is a former French colony and during that period French civil law applied. Since gaining independence the law has developed and evolved to incorporate sharia into the existing framework, resulting in a more liberal interpretation. Christians. There are an estimated 12-16 million Christians in the Arab world, representing 5-7% of the total population. Larger communities are located in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Jordan and Iraq. The Coptic church is the most important Christian denomination in the Middle East, and suffers from discrimination in Egypt and elsewhere. A significant minority of these Christians do not consider themselves Arabs. … 8 Jan
(U//LES) ATF Chemical Analysis of Exploding Targets - Over the past few months, ATF Agents have contacted the Forensic Lab to inquire about the chemical components of various exploding targets. To assist Agents with their inquiry, exploding targets were purchased (September 2012 to October 2012) from numerous distributors and chemically analyzed. All exploding targets contain an oxidizer and a fuel (catalyst). When these two components are properly mixed, the resulting mixture becomes a shock sensitive explosive. The exploding target oxidizers and fuels were analyzed using Infrared Spectroscopy, Scanning Electron Microscope / Electron Dispersive Spectroscopy (SEM/EDS), and X-Ray Diffraction. All analysis was supervised by Forensic Chemist John Jermain. For additional questions and information, contact John at 925.280.3607. Additional studies dealing with exploding targets will be conducted by Forensic Chemist Brittany Crane and will be published at a later date. … 7 Jan
Office of the Director of National Intelligence Background Report: Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections - “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment that has been provided to the President and to recipients approved by the President. The Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the precise bases for its assessments, as the release of such information would reveal sensitive sources or methods and imperil the ability to collect critical foreign intelligence in the future. Thus, while the conclusions in the report are all reflected in the classified assessment, the declassified report does not and cannot include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence and sources and methods. The Analytic Process The mission of the Intelligence Community is to seek to reduce the uncertainty surrounding foreign activities, capabilities, or leaders’ intentions. This objective is difficult to achieve when seeking to understand complex issues on which foreign actors go to extraordinary lengths to hide or obfuscate their activities. On these issues of great importance to US national security, the goal of intelligence analysis is to provide assessments to decisionmakers that are intellectually rigorous, objective, timely, and useful, and that adhere to tradecraft standards. The tradecraft standards for analytic products have been refined over the past ten years. These standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to the information they provide), clearly expressing uncertainty, distinguishing between underlying information and analysts’ judgments and assumptions, exploring alternatives, demonstrating relevance to the customer, using strong and transparent logic, and explaining change or consistency in judgments over time. Applying these standards helps ensure that the Intelligence Community provides US policymakers, warfighters, and operators with the best and most accurate insight, warning, and context, as well as potential opportunities to advance US national security. Intelligence Community analysts integrate information from a wide range of sources, including human sources, technical collection, and open source information, and apply specialized skills and structured analytic tools to draw inferences informed by the data available, relevant past activity, and logic and reasoning to provide insight into what is happening and the prospects for the future. A critical part of the analyst’s task is to explain uncertainties associated with major judgments based on the quantity and quality of the source material, information gaps, and the complexity of the issue. When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as “we assess” or “we judge,” they are conveying an analytic assessment or judgment. Some analytic judgments are based directly on collected information; others rest on previous judgments, which serve as building blocks in rigorous analysis. In either type of judgment, the tradecraft standards outlined above ensure that analysts have an appropriate basis for the judgment. Intelligence Community judgments often include two important elements: judgments of how likely it is that something has happened or will happen (using terms such as “likely” or “unlikely”) and confidence levels in those judgments (low, moderate, and high) that refer to the evidentiary basis, logic and reasoning, and precedents that underpin the judgments. Determining Attribution in Cyber Incidents The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber operation—malicious or not—leaves a trail. US Intelligence Community analysts use this information, their constantly growing knowledge base of previous events and known malicious actors, and their knowledge of how these malicious actors work and the tools that they use, to attempt to trace these operations back to their source. In every case, they apply the same tradecraft standards described in the Analytic Process above. Analysts consider a series of questions to assess how the information compares with existing knowledge and adjust their confidence in their judgments as appropriate to account for any alternative hypotheses and ambiguities. An assessment of attribution usually is not a simple statement of who conducted an operation, but rather a series of judgments that describe whether it was an isolated incident, who was the likely perpetrator, that perpetrator’s possible motivations, and whether a foreign government had a role in ordering or leading the operation. … 6 Jan
U.S. National Electric Grid Security and Resilience Action Plan - The Joint United States-Canada Electric Grid Security and Resilience Strategy (Strategy) is a collaborative effort between the Federal Governments of the United States and Canada and is intended to strengthen the security and resilience of the U.S. and Canadian electric grid from all adversarial, technological, and natural hazards and threats. The Strategy, released concurrently with this National Electric Grid Security and Resilience Action Plan (Action Plan), details bilateral goals to address the vulnerabilities of the respective and shared electric grid infrastructure of the United States and Canada, not only as an energy security concern, but for reasons of national security. The implementation of the Strategy requires continued action of a nationwide network of governments, departments and agencies (agencies), and private sector partners. This Action Plan details the activities, deliverables, and timelines that will be undertaken primarily by U.S. Federal agencies for the United States to make progress toward the Strategy’s goals. The security and resilience of the integrated U.S. and Canadian electric grid is dynamic. New threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities emerge even as the two countries work to prevent, protect against, and mitigate their potential consequences and to improve their ability to respond to, and recover from, disruptive incidents. Secure and reliable electricity is essential for safe and continued operation of infrastructure owned by businesses, governments, schools, hospitals, and other organizations. Structure of the Action Plan The Strategy defines three strategic goals to reduce the systemic risk to the electric grid through combined and aligned organizational, technical, and policy efforts across the public and private sectors. This Action Plan is organized around the same three strategic goals: 1. Protect Today’s Electric Grid and Enhance Preparedness 2. Manage Contingencies and Enhance Response and Recovery Efforts 3. Build a More Secure and Resilient Future Electric Grid Implementation of the Strategy and Action Plan The Secretaries of Energy and Homeland Security, in coordination with other agencies and stakeholders, will lead the implementation of the Strategy and Action Plan. The Secretaries of Energy and Homeland Security will report annually to the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology on progress made in implementing the Strategy and Action Plan in coordination with other agencies. Agencies are also expected to take steps to increase the security and resilience of the electric grid that are not explicitly included in either the Strategy or Action Plan. These efforts will also be included in the progress report to the President. This Action Plan is not intended to, nor does it, create any binding obligations under international law. The Action Plan focuses on U.S. Federal actions that may be taken within current statutory authorities and resources. Implementation of these actions will occur in consultation with State and provincial governments, regulators, and utilities, where applicable, and will require the sustained, coordinated, and complementary efforts of individuals and groups from both the United States and Canada, including many who contributed to the development of the Strategy, such as private sector partners, policy makers, and the public. Agencies will engage with private sector partners to the extent permitted by and consistent with applicable law and policy, including, but not limited to, the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), 5 U.S.C. App. 2. Iterations and future developments of this effort will be guided by each country’s Action Plan to pursue the goals of the Strategy. The Strategy sets the groundwork upon which to build future activity, just as multiple prior executive branch efforts informed the Strategy: •• Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 8, “National Preparedness” (2011), PPD 21, “Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience” (2013), and PPD 41, “United States Cyber Incident Coordination” (2016); •• Executive Order 13636, “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity,” Executive Order 13653, “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change” (2013), and Executive Order 13744, “Coordinating Efforts to Prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events” (2016); •• Presidential Memorandum, “Climate Change and National Security” (2016); •• National Space Weather Strategy and National Space Weather Action Plan (2015). 2 Jan
Joint United States-Canada Electric Grid Security and Resilience Strategy - This Joint United States-Canada Electric Grid Security and Resilience Strategy (Strategy) is a collaborative effort between the Federal Governments of the United States and Canada and is intended to strengthen the security and resilience of the U.S. and Canadian electric grid from all adversarial, technological, and natural hazards and threats. The Strategy addresses the vulnerabilities of the two countries’ respective and shared electric grid infrastructure, not only as an energy security concern, but for reasons of national security. This joint Strategy relies on the existing strong bilateral collaboration between the United States and Canada, and reflects a joint commitment to enhance a shared approach to risk management for the electric grid. It also articulates a common vision of the future electric grid that depends on effective and expanded collaboration among those who own, operate, protect, and rely on the electric grid. Because the electric grid is complex, vital to the functioning of modern society, and dependent on other infrastructure for its function, the United States and Canada developed the Strategy under the shared principle that security and resilience require increasingly collaborative efforts and shared approaches to risk management. The Strategy envisions a secure and resilient electric grid that is able to withstand hazards and recover efficiently from disruptions. In pursuit of this goal, the Strategy organizes joint approaches to protect today’s electric grid, manage contingencies by enhancing response and recovery capabilities, and cultivate a more secure and resilient future electric grid. As an expression of shared intent and approach, the Strategy organizes joint efforts to manage current and future security challenges. Three strategic goals underpin the effort to strengthen the security and resilience of the electric grid: •• Protect Today’s Electric Grid and Enhance Preparedness: A secure and resilient electric grid that protects system assets and critical functions and is able to withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions is a priority for the governments of both the United States and Canada. •• Manage Contingencies and Enhance Response and Recovery Efforts: The Strategy sets out a shared approach for enhancing continuity and response capabilities, supporting mutual aid arrangements such as cyber mutual assistance across a diverse set of stakeholders, understanding interdependencies, and expanding available tools for recovery and rebuilding. •• Build a More Secure and Resilient Future Electric Grid: The United States and Canada are working to build a more secure and resilient electric grid that is responsive to a variety of threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities. To achieve this, the electric grid will need to be more flexible and agile, with an architecture into which new technologies may be readily incorporated. The Strategy will be implemented in accordance with forthcoming U.S. and Canadian Action Plans, which will each detail specific steps and milestones for achieving the Strategy’s goals within their respective countries. These documents are intended to guide future activity within areas of Federal jurisdiction, with full respect for the different jurisdictional authorities in both countries. The Strategy is not intended to, nor does it, create any binding obligations under international law. Implementation will occur in consultation with state and provincial governments, regulators, and utilities, where applicable, and will require the sustained, coordinated, and complementary efforts of individuals and groups from both countries, including many who contributed to the development of the Strategy, such as private sector partners, policy makers, and the public. The two countries’ common effort to strengthen the security and resilience of the electric grid is imperative for both governments and all who depend on this critical asset. 2 Jan
DHS-FBI Joint Analysis Report on GRIZZLY STEPPE Russian Malicious Cyber Activity - This Joint Analysis Report (JAR) is the result of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This document provides technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by the Russian civilian and military intelligence Services (RIS) to compromise and exploit networks and endpoints associated with the U.S. election, as well as a range of U.S. Government, political, and private sector entities. The U.S. Government is referring to this malicious cyber activity by RIS as GRIZZLY STEPPE. Previous JARs have not attributed malicious cyber activity to specific countries or threat actors. However, public attribution of these activities to RIS is supported by technical indicators from the U.S. Intelligence Community, DHS, FBI, the private sector, and other entities. This determination expands upon the Joint Statement released October 7, 2016, from the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security. This activity by RIS is part of an ongoing campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the U.S. government and its citizens. These cyber operations have included spearphishing campaigns targeting government organizations, critical infrastructure entities, think tanks, universities, political organizations, and corporations leading to the theft of information. In foreign countries, RIS actors conducted damaging and/or disruptive cyber-attacks, including attacks on critical infrastructure networks. In some cases, RIS actors masqueraded as third parties, hiding behind false online personas designed to cause the victim to misattribute the source of the attack. This JAR provides technical indicators related to many of these operations, recommended mitigations, suggested actions to take in response to the indicators provided, and information on how to report such incidents to the U.S. Government. … Description The U.S. Government confirms that two different RIS actors participated in the intrusion into a U.S. political party. The first actor group, known as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) 29, entered into the party’s systems in summer 2015, while the second, known as APT28, entered in spring 2016. Both groups have historically targeted government organizations, think tanks, universities, and corporations around the world. APT29 has been observed crafting targeted spearphishing campaigns leveraging web links to a malicious dropper; once executed, the code delivers Remote Access Tools (RATs) and evades detection using a range of techniques. APT28 is known for leveraging domains that closely mimic those of targeted organizations and tricking potential victims into entering legitimate credentials. APT28 actors relied heavily on shortened URLs in their spearphishing email campaigns. Once APT28 and APT29 have access to victims, both groups exfiltrate and analyze information to gain intelligence value. These groups use this information to craft highly targeted spearphishing campaigns. These actors set up operational infrastructure to obfuscate their source infrastructure, host domains and malware for targeting organizations, establish command and control nodes, and harvest credentials and other valuable information from their targets. In summer 2015, an APT29 spearphishing campaign directed emails containing a malicious link to over 1,000 recipients, including multiple U.S. Government victims. APT29 used legitimate domains, to include domains associated with U.S. organizations and educational institutions, to host malware and send spearphishing emails. In the course of that campaign, APT29 successfully compromised a U.S. political party. At least one targeted individual activated links to malware hosted on operational infrastructure of opened attachments containing malware. APT29 delivered malware to the political party’s systems, established persistence, escalated privileges, enumerated active directory accounts, and exfiltrated email from several accounts through encrypted connections back through operational infrastructure. In spring 2016, APT28 compromised the same political party, again via targeted spearphishing. This time, the spearphishing email tricked recipients into changing their passwords through a fake webmail domain hosted on APT28 operational infrastructure. Using the harvested credentials, APT28 was able to gain access and steal content, likely leading to the exfiltration of information from multiple senior party members. The U.S. Government assesses that information was leaked to the press and publicly disclosed. … Reported Russian Military and Civilian Intelligence Services (RIS) Alternate Names APT28 APT29 Agent.btz BlackEnergy V3 BlackEnergy2 APT CakeDuke Carberp CHOPSTICK CloudDuke CORESHELL CosmicDuke COZYBEAR COZYCAR COZYDUKE CrouchingYeti DIONIS Dragonfly Energetic Bear EVILTOSS Fancy Bear GeminiDuke GREY CLOUD HammerDuke HAMMERTOSS Havex MiniDionis MiniDuke OLDBAIT OnionDuke Operation Pawn Storm PinchDuke Powershell backdoor Quedagh Sandworm SEADADDY Seaduke SEDKIT SEDNIT Skipper Sofacy SOURFACE SYNful Knock Tiny Baron Tsar Team twain_64.dll (64-bit X-Agent implant) VmUpgradeHelper.exe (X-Tunnel implant) Waterbug X-Agent29 Dec 16

Sunlight Foundation Blog

After MuckRock FOIA lawsuit, CIA publishes declassified documents online - When the Sunlight Foundation received an inquiry from the Central Intelligence Agency last week, we weren’t sure what to expect, given the recent pace of world events. The news turned out to be straightforward: the CIA was going to publish approximately 12 million declassified pages from its CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) on the Internet. This afternoon, the CIA carried through on its commitment from October 2016, making nearly a million individual archived documents available to the public online in its Freedom of Information Act reading room. The CREST collection goes back to the 1940s and the origins of the CIA, covering the Cold War, the Vietnam and Korean wars, the Berlin Tunnel project, aerial reconnaissance, and more. There’s even a section on a STARGATE project, which might lead to renewed speculation about what our federal government knows about extraterrestrial life. It’s important to emphasize that these documents aren’t new: they’ve been available to researchers at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. If this corpus of documents represented “the CIA’s secret history,” they haven’t done a particularly good job of keeping it that way over the past 17 years or so since the CREST tool first became available in 1999. The records in question have been declassified due to the provisions of Executive Order 13256, which used to be 12958, issued under President Clinton in 1995. The order required “the declassification of non-exempt historically valuable records 25 years or older.” If agency staff decided that records fell under an exemption of the Freedom of Information Act, in other words, you’re not going to find them online unless someone sued them out. The shift today is that the CIA has used the Internet to make the declassified files available to all of the public, wherever we go online. That’s not a minor shift: the impact of open government upon public knowledge and trust is predicated upon access. Declassifying millions of documents doesn’t inform anyone if they just sit in a dusty file cabinet. Given Sunlight’s decade of advocacy for more open government through technology, we took some time today to talk to the CIA’s director of information management, Joseph Lambert, a 32-year veteran of the civil service, about why the agency was broadening access beyond the walls of four computers in NARA. “The CIA is made up of American citizens just like you,” he told Sunlight, over the phone. “The people that I work with, we believe that we hold these records in trust for the American people. When their sensitivity attenuates over time, we feel we have a responsibility so the American people can judge them for themselves. It’s important that we put these source documents online.” When asked about which documents would be of the greatest public interest, Lambert noted that the materials from the Berlin Tunnel get a lot of attention in College Park. (The CIA knows this because they log file access and printing.) He also highlighted science and technology research and development files, reports from operations in the middle of the 20th century, and materials on secret writing and invisible ink. In the 21st century, we’ll now be able to see if public fascination with these aspects of spycraft endures, should the agency participate in the federal government’s Web analytics program. As more documents are declassified, the public should expect more of them to flow onto this reading room, along with other materials responsive to Freedom of Information Act requests. When asked how the agency was approaching declassification, Lambert said that they’ve been working on this over the past eight years. “We are focused on improving transparency and releasing what we can,” he went on. “We involve experts. The standard is damage to national security. We have classification and declassification guides that will guide if there will be damage. That is really the impetus for what makes it out the door and what does.” When asked if President Barack Obama’s Open Government Directive had an impact upon this work, Lambert said that it had, noting that he was involved in writing the CIA’s first open government plan, in 2010. (As we reported earlier this month, however, the CIA has not published a new open government plan since. When we called this to the CIA’s attention, Lambert said that they were “in the process of updating it now” and would follow up. We’ll note it if and when it happens.) “The focus on open government and transparency has had positive effects,” said Lambert. “We’ve had 9 declassification events. We’ve partnered with presidential libraries and major universities, and looked at our archives to see what compelling stories were there and if sensitivity had been attenuated. We’ve told stories that positive to CIA, told others where got wrong, like the Korean War. We’ve tried to get a body of work out there where American public can judge for themselves.” The challenges the agency has faced in its declassification efforts in the past, however, pale in comparison to what lies ahead, as the pace and scale of data and document creation increases. “When I was starting my job, about 2 million pages passed through my office every year,” said Lambert. “Now, it’s about 12 million pages. We are going to have to scale from tens of millions of pages to hundreds of millions of pages. We can’t do that with just people. I did the math: we would need 2.5 million people in one of my 3 divisions. We can’t just deputize all of Fairfax.” Lambert told us that the agency will be focusing on machine learning and natural language processing software to help them, bring technology to bear. “We have spent time with the Archivist of the United States and the White House on automating these efforts,” he said. What the agency’s public relations efforts left out, however, is that the public can also thank MuckRock, a nonprofit that helps people to file Freedom of Information Act requests, for today’s transparency watershed. (Sunlight provided a grant to help MuckRock started, years ago. Our investment has been more than returned by the public knowledge they have created since.) As Jason Leopold reported, MuckRock filed a lawsuit in December 2014 to gain access to the entire CREST database. “The CIA told MuckRock it would take at least six years to release all of the documents,” noted Leopold. “Frustrated, Michael Best, a journalist and researcher, launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to manually copy and scan all of the documents.” As it turned out, it took just over two years. (Here’s hoping the agency figures out how to accept FOIA requests over the Internet using a new FOIA.gov even faster, dumps that fax machine in the dustbin of history, and follows up on all outstanding FOIA requests.) While we’re not thrilled about the fact all of these documents have been published as PDFs, today is another step in the ultra-marathon that is open government in the United States. Progress is progress, and should be celebrated.17 Jan
OpenGov Voices: Making open data more accessible — three lessons from Boston - From left to right: Ben Green, Kayla Larkin and Renée Walsh setting up Boston Open Data’s pop-up table at the main branch of the Boston Public Library. (Photo credit: Howard Lim/City of Boston)How do you share open data in a meaningful way to help citizens convert data into knowledge about their city? Over the past few months, the City of Boston’s Open Data team has worked to explore this essential question by placing our computers aside. In our quest to bring the Open Data to Open Knowledge project (funded by the Knight Foundation) to life, the team set out to host conversations to learn from everyday Bostonians. Howard Lim is the project manager of the City of Boston’s Open Data to Open Knowledge initiative.Given the community’s ongoing trust in their local libraries and our ongoing partnership with the Boston Public Library, we decided to arrange these discussions to take place at neighborhood branch libraries. We set up Boston Open Data pop-up tables at five branch libraries and at the central branch to gauge the public’s ongoing concerns and knowledge about the city’s open-data work. We set up tables near entrances, adjacent to the children’s reading room, and wherever we could to speak with library patrons as they went about their busy lives. The team spoke to babysitting grandmothers, doting fathers, and busy teenagers across Boston and learned so much about how we can make Boston Open Data more accessible. We’ve shared our top three lessons below in the hopes that these lessons can be helpful to other municipalities as well.   Lesson 1: The term “open data” is confusing In our conversations, when we introduced the existence of Boston Open Data, many citizens expressed confusion about why such a platform existed. People even questioned the meaning of data itself. These insights suggest that open data by itself conveys little meaning about the underlying information. As a result, in our efforts to redevelop the City’s online sharing platform for data, we are working to sharpen our communications to convey what open data is and what it is not. By wrapping the platform with plain language (as suggested by 18F), we seek to broaden its reference and use by Boston’s citizens.   Lesson 2: Data rarely came up during our conversations When interacting with Bostonians, we found that most people seldom discuss their everyday concerns by requesting more access to City data. When asked if there was data about Boston that people wanted to see, they rarely had any requests. It’s evident that releasing City data without much context has few benefits, especially because people don’t seem to connect issues with data. As a result, in our ongoing efforts to publish City data, we seek to provide potential use cases to hopefully deepen this connection.   Lesson 3: Libraries are trusted institutions and librarians serve as gateways to building community knowledge Everyone we spoke with had nothing but positive things to say about their local library. Of course, people visited for a myriad of reasons — from paying a bill to studying for an exam — but all felt the library was an important pillar in their lives. Interestingly, we also learned that librarians have a great sense of the intellectual pulse of their communities due to their interactions with the public. For example, during one of our conversations with a librarian from Jamaica Plain (a Boston neighborhood), we got a great neighborhood perspective on civic life. Given these factors, we seek to work with librarians to provide greater public access to Boston Open Data. (Photo credit: Howard Lim/City of Boston)We want to incorporate these three lessons into our ongoing work to redevelop the City’s online portal for open data, which we plan to release by this spring. Additionally, by sharing our efforts on Sunlight’s blog, we hope to spark the open-government initiatives and transparency work found in other municipalities. Howard Lim is the project manager of the City of Boston’s Open Data to Open Knowledge initiative. Special thanks to the fellows and interns of the Boston Open Data team — Ben Green, Jean-Louis Rochet, Kayla Larkin, and Renée Walsh — who helped make these engagements come to life. You can reach him at howard.lim@boston.gov. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation.Interested in writing a guest blog for Sunlight? Email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.com17 Jan
Sending the wrong message to investors: Donald Trump and the rule of law - Every year, the consulting firm AT Kearney surveys executives for their opinions on where to invest. In mid- 2016, the United States topped the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Confidence Index for the fourth year in a row. AT Kearney found that global business executives are more optimistic about the economic outlook for the United States than for any other country. A significant percentage of business executives said, however, that they would reduce investment into the United States “if Americans elect a populist (far-left or far-right) president in the November election.” In November 2016, Americans elected a self-proclaimed populist president, Donald J. Trump, but the markets did not respond with fear. In the month since the election, global markets have generally risen. Analysts claim investors see opportunities in the President-elect’s plan to build infrastructure. Market actors, however, crave predictability, transparent regulatory processes, evenhandedness, and norms underpinning the rule of law. Some of the President- elect’s recent actions signal a decline in the rule of law. As a result of this signaling, foreign and domestic investment in the US is likely to decline. In countries with strong rule of law, government officials and agents, as well as individuals and private entities, are held to account. Laws and regulations are clear, publicized, stable, just, applied evenly, and protect fundamental rights. Policymakers enact, administer, and enforce the laws and regulations in an accessible, fair, and efficient manner. The court system provides a timely and even-handed approach to justice. Market actors know that although policies may change, these norms of good governance will persist. Thus, in the US, corporate investors presume that they will not be discriminated against because they hire Muslims, favor climate change accommodation, or choose to move their operations overseas. President Trump has used his words and actions in ways that undermine confidence that companies and individuals will be treated in a transparent, equitable, and accountable manner. Trump’s approach to trade policy illuminates how little he values evenhandedness and transparency, which are key norms underpinning the rule of law. In early December, Trump stressed that rather than applying the same tariffs to all companies, he would use punitive tariffs to punish companies that source overseas. First, under the Constitution, trade policymaking is a shared responsibility between the Executive and legislative branches. Congress has not indicated that it wants to single out specific companies for their production and employment decision. Hence, this approach is undemocratic, undermines longstanding US mores of evenhandedness, and violates trade commitments under the WTO, the international trade organization created by the US to discipline such practices. While it is laudable that the President elect wants to preserve jobs, executives may read into his action that the Trump Administration will act in an arbitrary or discriminatory manner. Secondly, Trump-affiliated companies are not modeling positive behavior. Trump subsidiaries and licensees make eye­glasses, perfume, cuff links and suits in Bangladesh, China, Honduras and other lower-wage countries, not in the USA. Executives may read into his actions that he is above the law and not fully committed to his own policies. In a similar manner, Trump’s refusal to put his family’s assets in a blind trust or to be fully transparent about his taxes or investments signals the wrong message about the rule of law. Without a blind trust, he risks conflicts of interest and raises questions about whether Executive Branch decisions are made in the public interest or the interest of his firm or cronies. Executives may read into this behavior that it is ok to have such conflicts of interest. Moreover, the United States may find it hard to promote good governance overseas when our new president’s approach to governance is opaque, unpredictable, and less accountable. Trump signals that his interests take precedence over the public’s right to know or the interests of other investors, who will not have the same access he and his family have to make good market decisions. Here again, his actions convey that the US will not adhere to the same levels of transparency, accountability and evenhandedness investors have long expected. Governance is not only about policy choices. It is also about signaling. President-elect Trump has indicated that he (and hence the US) are less committed to longstanding mores of good governance such as transparency, accountability and evenhandedness. Investors may send a signal in return by reducing their investments in US markets. Susan Ariel Aaronson is Research Professor and Cross Disciplinary Fellow at the George Washington University, where she teaches corruption and good governance. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation.16 Jan
The appearance of corruption will be ubiquitous in a Trump presidency - John Wonderlich, Sunlight’s executive director, went on Democracy Now yesterday to discuss President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to ignore ethics experts urging him to divest from his businesses. Sunlight has been tracking Trump’s conflicts of interest for months, calling on him to disclose, divest and place the assets in a blind trust, as American presidents have done for decades. The plan Trump announced this week utterly fails to address these issues, which means the President-elect will enter the White House with unprecedented conflicts of interest. Why does it matter? As John told Democracy now, one of the concerns is self-enrichment: So the president is involved in every decision that gets made about how the country functions, involved at every level of government. And so, his knowledge of his vast business empire and of his debt means that any decision that gets made about taxes or about healthcare or about finance, about bank regulation—all the issues facing the country—have a direct and material impact on businesses that he owns. So that’s one concern, is that he’s going to make decisions not on behalf of what’s best for the country, but with an eye to his business interests. There are other concerns, too. It undermines the presidency to have even the appearance of corruption. And we now can be confident that everything that happens to President-elect Trump is going to be tinged with an appearance of corruption, because we don’t even know the full extent of his business connections, because he refuses to release his tax returns. So the appearance of corruption is going to be ubiquitous within a Trump presidency. And then a third level of concern is that by maintaining his business ties, Trump has levers that are not typically available to the presidency, so whether that is paying a private security force, like we know Trump is doing that is displacing the Secret Service’s role, which allows him to do things like eject protesters in a way that maybe the Secret Service wouldn’t do, or who knows what else? Trump is availing himself of levers to power that other presidents don’t have. You can watch the entire appearance on Democracy Now in the video embedded below: 13 Jan
House Oversight should do oversight, not threaten the Office of Government Ethics - [“Code of Ethics for Government Service,” 1958]This week, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Chairman of the U.S. House Oversight Committee, sent the Director of Office of Government Ethics (OGE) a critical letter about his public comments and tweets. In the letter, Chaffetz criticized OGE for offering ethics guidance to President-Elect Donald J. Trump in public, to the public, using Twitter, instead of in private. In his remarks this week at the Brookings Institute, embedded below, Director of OGE Walter Shaub said what ethics expects from both political parties and nonpartisan watchdogs all agree on, including Sunlight: Trump’s plan fails to address his conflicts of interest because he does not completely divest from his businesses and place his assets in a blind trust. OGE Director Walter Shaub’s statements and tweets reflect a consensus shared by former officials, Congressional intent, and common sense. As he said, “ethics has no party. Congress established OGE in 1978 in the Ethics in Government Act to provide “leadership & oversight” of ethics in the executive branch. The OGE is and has been, in other words, doing its job. Informing the public when a plan does not meet an ethical standard accepted for decades by past presidents and their nominees is appropriate. In response to those actions, the letter states that House Oversight Committee has jurisdiction for reauthorizing OGE, which could be viewed as a veiled threat. Chairman Chaffetz and his colleagues have stood up for transparency and accountability repeatedly the past three years in moving Freedom of Information Act reform forward to eventual passage, holding hearings that put much-needed Sunlight on agency compliance. It’s critical for House Oversight to hold the executive branch accountable in 2017, including White House ethics. President-Elect Trump’s conflicts of interest merit scrutiny today and in the years to come. The public needs OGE and Congress to work together in public to hold the Trump administration accountable, not convene closed door hearings about how a federal ethics is informing the public. Sunlight joined a bipartisan group of 20 organizations and ethics experts on a letter to Chairman Chaffetz requesting that he “defer any inquiry into OGE until such time as it is bipartisan, held in public, addresses the Trump administration’s potential conflicts-of-interest, and is calibrated to interfere as little as possible with OGE’s ongoing activities of reviewing the incoming administration’s compliance with ethical requirements.” If you agree with this assessment, please call the House Oversight Committee using the contact information on this spreadsheet and urge them to hold the Trump administration accountable — and to support the impartial role of the ethics office that is seeking to prevent corruption in our federal government.13 Jan
Congress makes the role of U.S. chief technology officer permanent - On January 6, 2017, President Barack Obama quietly signed a bill that codified the role of the chief technology officer (CTO) of the United States into law. Congress made the US CTO permanent in the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which passed the Senate on December 10 and the House on December 16. In doing so, our legislators recognized a reality that’s clear around the globe: technology is now part of every facet of society, including government itself. In the 21st century, it’s critical that the President of the United States have a technologist advising him or her on policy decisions. Congress codifying the role of the CTO in U.S. government is an important, unheralded action that institutionalizes one of the promises that President Obama made before entering office. Notably, the US CTO is now a Senate-confirmed position, however, which will place appropriate scrutiny on the background and qualifications of the person nominated to serve. Unfortunately, the legislation that President Obama signed into law does not put the US CTO at the cabinet table. In Section 604 of the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, Congress designates the US CTO as an associate director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), reporting to the Director. To put it another way, the US CTO is now officially the “T” in OSTP. What this means in practice is that there is a layer between the nation’s top technologist and the president. President-elect Trump can and should address this by designating his US CTO as an assistant to the president, as President Obama has done for the three people who served in the position in his administration. We hope that he does so, given the importance of the president receiving the best possible advice about technology at the earliest possible time in decision-making processes. President Obama’s choices for US CTO offer three different models for Trump to consider. Aneesh Chopra had a technology policy background prior to the White House, rising out of Virginia state government, and focused on “government as a convener,” working within the constraints of a position that had no statutory authority and little budget. His focus on healthcare technology, standards, and open data laid the groundwork for the progress that is followed. Todd Park, the nation’s second CTO, was a successful serial entrepreneur in the private sector, bringing a relentless energy to government as the Department of Health and Human Services first chief technology officer before ascending to the White House. Park played a crucial role in turning around healthcare.gov after its disastrous launch in the fall of 2013, working himself to exhaustion to fix the ailing online marketplace for health insurance. He champion open data as well, expanding the successful model that he had pioneered at HHS. The third US CTO, Megan Smith, built upon the legacy of her predecessors and made the role her own as the first US CTO with a technical background. Smith, a MIT-trained mechanical engineer who worked at Google for nearly a decade before entering government, has focused upon hey host of policy and technical initiatives, for open government to increasing the diversity of the nation’s technologists. Her relentless optimism and inspiring vision for the use of technology to improve how government works, from open source to open data, leaves big shoes to fill. In thinking through this decision and finding the right candidate, President-elect Trump may will turn to Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has deep connections in Silicon Valley. Whether Thiel himself would be willing to answer public service is anyone’s guess, but his networks are likely to be tapped to find someone with both the expertise required for the role and the gravitas to influence President-elect Trump’s decisions. Whomever is tapped to serve will inherit and extraordinary legacy of policy achievements, programs, and initiatives from the current White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the largest in the nation’s history. We hope that the President-elect chooses wisely, given how high the stakes are for delivering digital services and implementing new laws and regulations, and select a US CTO who will uphold and expand the legacy of opening government through technology from the past decade. Our wishlist for the US CTO today, however, starts with the same qualifications as it did in 2009: “A small-d democratic visionary: The CTO should be someone who has a vision of how the Internet and related technological advances can involve Americans in their government again, improve the effectiveness of government, and make the democratic process more engaging and participatory.” Sunlight called for the rapid appointment a US CTO eight years ago and hopes to see one soon in 2017.12 Jan
Trump to enter White House with unprecedented conflicts of interest - Today’s announcement by President-elect Donald J. Trump failed to address the unprecedented conflicts of interest he brings to Presidency. Trump is putting his business interests ahead of the interests of the country by failing to live up to well-established practices for addressing financial conflicts. Trump’s plan leaves the Presidency vulnerable to self-dealing, constitutional crisis, the appearance of corruption, and other abuses of power. Trump’s approach to governance and ethics repudiates decades of accepted norms for modern democratic accountability. Trump’s trust is not blind. His brand will conflict with his Presidency. His taxes remain secret, despite decades of precedent. The Trump Presidency will be mired in litigation, doubt, scandal, and crisis. Congress needs to act. The press corps needs public support as we all prepare for an unprecedented conflict between private interests and the office of the American President.11 Jan
Open Contracting: What Works for American Cities - (Photo credit: Jen Gallardo/Flickr)Through the What Works Cities Initiative, Sunlight Foundation is working with mid-sized cities to support the development of open-data reforms. Connecting a citywide commitment to open data to the challenges faced by city departments is essential to the success of this work. Few challenges present a greater opportunity than opening contracting data. In 2013, we launched a procurement-focused initiative that resulted in our Open Procurement Data Guidelines and uncovered trends in local procurement specifically. Several months ago, we announced that we were picking this research back up with the help of our friends at the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP), to improve the open data support that we provide to cities and to better support our What Works Cities partners at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Government Performance Lab in their work on results-driven contracting. This guest post by OCP’s Sierra Ramirez explains the results of this work. Have you ever wondered how much your city spends on school lunches? What about services for the homeless? Cities spend billions of dollars every year on goods and services that residents care about, and yet sometimes they are left in the dark when it comes to important questions about who is being paid, what is being procured, and how much is being spent. Together with the Sunlight Foundation, we’ve looked at  best practices in making this contract data more open and transparent to help reduce corruption in the procurement process, improve government effectiveness, and allow for more accountability and oversight in the process. Nowhere is this more important than in municipal procurement. Cities opening and sharing information about their acquisition needs, contract process, and the performance of their vendors will help to improve their communities by building greater trust in government spending. It will also increase opportunities for potential vendors by lowering barriers to identify relevant bids and understanding the government’s decision-making in contract awards. Finally, it makes the internal planning and preparation process more effective as well by having access to timely information across government agencies. Based on this research and other previous work, we have produced a set of simple, practical guidelines for city procurement officials and a comprehensive research report to consider as they develop their own contracting data release programs. Real world cases highlight best practices from the 22 North American cities included in the research, drawing on interviews conducted with municipal staff, by phone and in person, across the U.S., Mexico City and Montreal. Here are 5 innovations we have identified: Planning data in New York CityThe earlier a municipality gives vendors a sense of its future needs, the more preliminary planning they can do. In 2011 the New York City Council passed a law that requires the mayor to coordinate all executive departments to share upcoming contracting opportunities for the coming year, at least five months in advance. By 31 July, each agency’s plan for the year ahead must be published online and include detailed information on when the contract opportunity will be released, the contract vehicle, and the number of staff needed and their qualifications. This level of specificity gives vendors time to identify key personnel and research the best method to provide the goods and services. Solicitation data in Montgomery County, MDInformation about new contract offers should be shared about with potential vendors, including information about the good/service to be purchased, the value of the procurement, and any accompanying documents that justify or explain exemptions from regular procedures and requirements (such as sole source contracts). Montgomery County, MD releases a wide variety of procurement datasets as part of its comprehensive OpenMontgomery initiative. MoCo publishes a variety of solicitations, including potential contracts small enough that they are not subject to its “formal” procurement process, and even calls attention to existing contracts whose terms will be expiring soon. By doing so, it provides other vendors opportunities to compete, and ensures for itself a better deal. Award data in Miami-Dade, FLDetails about the government’s decisions should be published, stipulating the winner, price, and reasons for contracting with a particular vendor. Before selecting a vendor, Miami-Dade publishes interim recommendations online and provides a period of time for challenges to be filed. This ensures competitors who have been ruled out can examine the proposed decision before it becomes irrevocable. Miami-Dade is also unique in highlighting contracts being issued on a sole-source basis to give other potential vendors a chance to offer equivalent services at competitive rates. Contract data in Cincinnati, OHThe full text of signed contracts including all amendments should be published including structured data about key details such as awardee, amount, date etc. Cincinnati’s open data portal includes procurement datasets. The primary contracts dataset contains links to a variety of contract-related documents, including the signed contract itself. The records are updated to reflect any amendments to a contract. Implementation data in Austin, TXInformation on the implementation of contracts should be disclosed, including information such as implementation milestones, actual completion date, and information on funding extensions outside the scope of the original agreement. Austin, like many cities, publishes a list of currently active contracts. What is unusual is that Austin releases details for each contract about the maximum expenditure for the contract, the amount currently ordered, and the amount actually spent up to this point. These details provide some insight into the progress of each contract over time. It also displays a list of current contracts for each vendor. While that information can be assembled from the published data of other cities, doing so automatically makes the data more accessible to less technically savvy stakeholders. How does open contracting help? Open contracting transforms public spending by making documents and data ‘open by default’ across the entire chain of public contracting and using this information to engage business and citizens to shape better outcomes. One resource, the Open Contracting Data Standard, describes what to publish and how to make this information useful and practical. This technical schema provides for structured, machine-readable information on all relevant documents in municipal procurement such as budgets, bid proposals, bidder information, contracts, and invoices. Using the guidelines, research and resources, procurement professionals can work with stakeholders to identify objectives, develop policies, and implement changes. We find that engagement with relevant stakeholders from the policy development stage, all the way through day-to-day disclosure is critical to ensuring results. In fact, each step in the contracting phase represents a unique opportunity for publishing open data. At a minimum, there should be timely, accessible, affirmative disclosure of open data about procurement plans, solicitation notices and bidding documents, award notices, full contracts, and implementation details. Final thoughts Open contracting is one of the few policies available to municipal governments that can simultaneously save cities money and save staff time, increase the public’s trust, and improve public services. While real effort needs to be invested to solidly implement and engage with stakeholders, once done this reform touches on virtually every program a government may undertake. In cities that open up public contracting, you can take look at that contract for school lunches — worth almost 200 million dollars in New York City last year. You can understand how your city’s homeless services vendor spending adds up (over 30 million dollars in Los Angeles in 2016, up 10 million from the previous year). Imagine this data being accessible for cities far beyond LA or New York, and the possible benefits that could result. That’s what we at Sunlight and the Open Contracting Partnership are working on, and we hope you’ll join us. Sierra Ramirez is a Program Analyst at the Open Contracting Partnership. She is an monitoring, evaluation and learning specialist with Latin America and Middle East field experience in organizational learning and development. In her work, she emphasizes reflective and collaborative strategies to integrate meaningful Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL) across all our program interventions, as well as providing general program support. Email Sierra at sramirez@open-contracting.org. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation. Interested in writing a guest blog for Sunlight? Email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.com11 Jan
Cabinet nominees should be held to historical ethics and transparency standards - [Senator Jeff Sessions testifies at the confirmation hearing for his nomination as U.S. Attorney General]Last week, Sunlight joined a coalition of open government advocates in a letter to Senate leadership calling on the U.S. Senate to establish disclosure standards for the Committees before which presidential appointees appear. We have been disappointed to see no action since. Historically low trust in US government remains an important issue in the USA. Rushing confirmations would erode it. As the New York Times reported, billionaires pose a significant challenge to the Office of Government Ethics, particularly given evidence that the Presidential Transition fell out of contact with the agency after the election. The quality of vetting and background checks may come back to haunt the new administration, as hidden conflicts of interest become clear in office. Until the Office of Government Ethics certifies the financial disclosures of a nominee, the FBI completes background checks and the relevant committee informs the public using its website, the U.S. Senate should delay holding hearings for President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations. We are not alone in this view. Writing in the Guardian, former Bush and Obama White House ethics lawyers Richard Painter and Norm Eisen argue that President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations must be delayed. “Completion of the ethics review process prior to Senate confirmation hearings ensures that all parties have a detailed understanding of the nominee’s commitments prior to taking office, offers full transparency to the Senate, and mitigates the opportunity for undue influence on the independent ethics review process.” There is recent precedent to call for this standard. The 7 Obama nominees confirmed on January 20, 2009 had all obtained certified Office of Government Ethics ethics agreements 6 days to 3 weeks in advance of that hearing. By not leading on disclosure and divestment from conflicts of interest, the President-elect has set a dangerous ethical bar. We hope to see meaningful action from him to resolve them in the press conference has promised tomorrow, his first since July 27, 2016. We have been heartened to see that the Senate leadership has delayed some nomination hearings on one day, but the standards for disclosure that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for in 2009 remain important to uphold today. As of noon on Tuesday, the Office of Government Ethics has published ethics agreements and financial disclosures for six nominees up for Senate confirmation hearings this week: Elaine Chao, Rep. Mike Pompeo, Senator Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Mike Kelly and General James Mattis. OGE has not published papers for Wilbur Ross, Dr. Ben Carson or Betsy DeVos. Notably, DeVos’s hearing has now been delayed until next week. That’s the right move: rushing nominees through without full vetting increases the risk of hidden conflicts of interest and other problems coming to light that will hinder the ability of the Trump administration to serve the public in crucial areas, from national security to criminal justice. No presidential nominee should receive a hearing in the U.S. Senate until he or she has finished review with Office of Government Ethics. If you agree, we encourage you to contact your Senators and tell them that ethics and disclosure matter to you as a citizen. It’s in no one’s interest to confirm presidential nominees and then see them resign because they violated the law.10 Jan
Federal agencies subject to CFO Act near full compliance with Open Government Directive - Almost 8 years ago, President Obama’s commitment to transparent and open government on first day in office led to the Open Government Directive (OGD) of December 2009, directing agencies to publish plans about improving transparency, accountability and participation. The same model was expanded to the Open Government Partnership, where nations publish action plans. Examining its progress, success and failures is an important part of understanding President Obama’s legacy – and the prognosis for similar efforts around the world. Last September, Sunlight found that half of U.S. Cabinet agencies had not complied with President Barack Obama’s Open Government Directive by publishing a 2016 Open Government plan, as directed by the White House. By the end of 2016, 13 of the 15 cabinet agencies had published plans, with the Department of Veterans Affairs promising to publish one and Interior referring our inquiry onwards without outcome to date. At the beginning of 2017, Sunlight completed a second audit of federal agencies, starting with the 44 on the White House’s list of senior accountable officials for the Open Government Directive and adding the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission. We’ve asked agencies when they will comply with the president’s executive orders using the opengov emails they’ve published and will update this spreadsheet and post if and when that occurs. Our audit, which is a living document that we update over time, is embedded below. What we found on January 4, 2017 was relatively good news: along with the 13 cabinet agencies that we’d previously audited, all 9 of the CFO Act agencies had 2016 open government plans. That’s a 92% compliance rate. Of the 23 non-CFO Act agencies we audited, however, 17 did not have a 2016 plan. As we said in July 2016, “if the result of the self-evaluation are weak or incomplete plans that highlight how agencies have fallen short in achieving their goals, that will be a useful outcome for building upon those lessons. If the results show meaningful progress, it will be a useful indicator of whether this approach to making government more transparent and accountable is worth preserving, extending and strengthening. If agencies do not provide any plan at all, that will serve as its own answer for the priority the Open Government Directive has occupied in their governance.” Our most recent findings, however, must be contextualized: according to White House counsels that briefed Sunlight in 2009, federal agencies subject to the Chief Financial Officers Act are mandated to comply with the executive order. Federal agencies that are not subject to the Act were encouraged but not required to comply. While the public can and should question the quality and frequency of open government commitments or achievements, the basic requirements of the OGD were for agencies to set up a /open webpage, put three “high value data sets” online, and publish a plan. Where agencies were not required to comply with the OGD, those requirements were often not met. Other agencies published a plan in 2010 and never returned. Other asked for feedback promised a plan but never published one. A few don’t even have a /open page. The National Archives and Records Administration, however, produced an impressive open government plan that reflects commitments to transparency, accountability, participation and collaboration that the public can and should expect of federal agencies in the United States of America. By way of contrast, unfortunately, the White House’s own Office of National Drug Control Policy has failed to publish a new plan since 2010, during the expansion of the opioid epidemic in the USA. Despite the importance of their roles as regulators and disclosure agencies, the Federal Communications Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Election Commission never published an Open Government Plan during the Obama administration at all. It’s not that the FCC or FEC haven’t made progress using technology to govern better — just look at Open.FEC.gov — or honored sunshine laws, but the absence of a plan at these agencies means there is no progress report, self-assessment nor activities to use as a baselines the next administration comes into power. That’s a poor foundation for open government in a Trump administration and another data point for President Obama’s mixed record. We hope that the transition team will use all of the 2016 plans as a baseline for open government in the Trump administration, extending and improving the progress that has been made since 2009 towards making our agencies more transparent, accountable, and responsive to the public. 4 Jan
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