Democratic Panic

The dream machine is spinning furiously as the clock ticks on #ReleaseTheMemo. On Monday the House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines to release a secret memo written by committee staffers. The memo exposes FBI use of information from the dubious "Steele Dossier" to acquire a FISA wiretap warrant against a member of the Trump campaign. Eileen Sullivan explains in "Answers About the Secret Memo on the Trump-Russia Inquiry":

What does the memo say?

The memo, according to people who have seen it, is a short summary of some of the intelligence used to support a government request to secretly surveil Carter Page, the former Trump campaign associate.

In order to obtain the warrant, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department had to show a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that they had probable cause to show that Mr. Page was acting as a Russian agent.

The memo’s main argument is that the government, in seeking the warrant, did not disclose that information in the application came from research paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Mr. Trump has said that the Democrats’ financial ties to the research support his belief that the Democrats are behind the Russia controversy.

The man behind the research is a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who compiled a dossier of explosive, unsubstantiated information about Mr. Trump and Russia. He told the F.B.I. that he was working for interests opposed to Mr. Trump, and the Republicans question whether the intelligence court judge was misled about Mr. Steele’s credibility.

Some Republican lawmakers who have seen the memo have said it reveals that the F.B.I. was biased against Mr. Trump and misused its authorities in its investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

But that argument is undercut by another piece of information said to be in the committee memo: that the top official at the Justice Department who is overseeing the Russia investigation, Rod. J. Rosenstein, approved a government application to continue the surveillance of Mr. Page, which was originally approved in mid-October 2016. Mr. Rosenstein is a Republican and was appointed by Mr. Trump.

The highlighted portion is the source of worry for Democrats, #NeverTrump Republicans (who are once again mulling third-party challenge) and the furious spinning at The New York Times. Rosenstein is tainted. Rosenstein is in charge of special counsel Mueller. So if Rosenstein goes, Mueller can't be far behind. This is the long and short of Charlie Savage's "The Real Aim of the Secret Memo Is the Mueller Investigation."

Democrats have reason to be worried. No one, not even mainlining Rachel Maddowites, can coherently explain the Mueller investigation. It has something to do with Russian interference. When you ask, "Does that mean that Russia stole the election from Hillary?" They get defensive and respond, "Hillary won the election!," before accepting that, well, okay, Russia might not have been solely responsible for electing Trump.

So even partisan Democrats are confused, in denial. As for the general public, it has stopped paying attention to the Mueller investigation months ago.

Trump is about to rack up a big win in the info wars. The general public can understand a dirty-tricks campaign (Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky). People will comprehend, as many already do, that all this Russophobia is just politics as usual, standard partisan dirty tricks, and not high crimes and misdemeanors.

At War with Pakistan

In office Trump reversed course from the campaign trail and proclaimed a renewed U.S. commitment to the war in Afghanistan. At the beginning of the month, Trump tweeted his disdain for Pakistan's role in that war, and his administration suspended aid to its ally. The response -- crippling Taliban and Islamic State attacks on Kabul -- was predictable.

What's interesting about recent coverage in "the newspaper of record," a sampling of which you will find below, is how explicitly this increase in attacks is connected to Pakistan. The U.S. is at war with our NATO ally Turkey, and it has been at war with Pakistan for quite some time, 17-plus years.

From "As Afghan Attacks Intensify, So Does Anger at Country’s Leaders" by Mujib Mashal and Fahim Abed:

Afghan officials said they had expected the urban attacks to escalate after President Trump this month ratcheted up pressure on Pakistan, long seen as supporting Taliban insurgents as proxies in Afghanistan, and intensified the air campaign against the Taliban in the countryside.

But critics say the political disarray in Kabul has exacerbated the security situation. The government is facing a growing and vocal opposition and has long been strained by a constitutional crisis. Mr. Ghani has struggled to manage, picking what critics call untimely political battles. His recent firing of a powerful provincial governor, who is refusing to leave a post he has held for 13 years, has led to a protracted showdown that is consuming the government’s energy.

In the latest wave of violence, Taliban militants laid siege to a hilltop hotel, fighting for 15 hours and killing at least 22. Then, on Saturday, the Taliban drove an ambulance packed with explosives into the heart of the city, within a earshot of the country’s intelligence agency and other government offices, and slaughtered more than 100 people.

Although the Monday attack at the military university was claimed by the Islamic State, Afghan officials saw it as connected to the Taliban violence. Afghan and Western officials have long spoken of an overlap between the networks that carry out urban attacks for the Taliban and the Islamic State.

The Trump administration announced last month that it would suspend security aid to Pakistan for harboring such terrorist groups. Mr. Ghani, his aides say, has repeatedly warned that Pakistan would push the Taliban to intensify its violence in order to weaken the government here before American pressure could change Pakistan’s long-held calculations.

The war will not end, said Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, the Afghan intelligence chief, who is facing calls to resign, “without Pakistan stopping the support for terrorists.”

“The mentality there that ‘fighting in Afghanistan is a holy war’ should be eliminated,” he added. “Without that, it is not possible to end the war here.”

Mr. Stanekzai said the international pressure on Pakistan had “translated into revenge on the Afghan people.”

Taliban commanders say they are intensifying the urban attacks as a retaliation for increased airstrikes on their areas. The United States military alone dropped more than 4,000 bombs across Afghanistan in 2017, and the Afghan air force, as it expands with aircraft provided by the United States, increasingly carries out regular bombings. New American military units are expected to arrive, adding to the approximately 14,000 troops already here, to advise and assist the Afghans.

Much of the blame for the security lapse has focused on the leadership of Mr. Ghani, whose voice has been lacking from the public conversation in the face of the bloodletting. He rarely speaks to local news media, and critics accuse him of not understanding the gravity of the situation as he remains mired in trying to fix a broken bureaucracy.

On Monday, Mr. Ghani appeared at a brief news conference along with the visiting president of Indonesia. The day had been declared a national holiday “to free resources” for victims of the earlier attacks, though many suggested that the main motive was to shut down the city for security reasons to make the Indonesian’s visit possible.

Mr. Ghani said the Taliban, who in the past had hesitated to claim responsibility for attacks with high civilian casualties, were now happy to do so because “their masters” — a reference to Pakistan — had been cornered by international pressure. “They did it at the behest of their masters, so their masters can get out of political isolation,” Mr. Ghani said.

He added: “Our blood will not go unanswered.”

From "Attacks Reveal What U.S. Won’t: Victory Remains Elusive in Afghanistan" by Helene Cooper:

In coming months, the total number of American troops in Afghanistan will grow to an estimated 15,000. Nearly a third of them — 4,000 — will have been sent under President Trump’s new war strategy, which he is expected to promote during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

“We’re going to finish what we have to finish,” Mr. Trump told reporters Monday at the start of a lunch at the White House with United Nations ambassadors on the Security Council. “What nobody else has been able to finish, we’re going to be able to do it.”

But in a war that began with airstrikes and a few hundred Special Operations forces in 2001, and which later saw as many as 100,000 troops deployed, such promises have been heard before.

[snip] 

On May 27, 2014, Mr. Obama announced that the bulk of American forces would head home. An estimated 100,000 United States troops were in Afghanistan at the peak of war operations; that number would dwindle to 10,000 under Mr. Obama’s strategy.

“It’s time to turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said.

That was before the Islamic State arrived on the scene. In 2015, the extremist group rooted in Iraq and Syria marked its arrival in Afghanistan with a suicide bomb attack in Jalalabad, killing more than 30 people and injuring more than 100.

Not to be outdone, the Taliban soon after overran Kunduz — the first time the group had managed to take over a major city since 2001. Afghan government troops, backed by the United States, eventually wrested back control.

By the end of 2016, General Nicholson, the current war commander, said the United States’ support “sends a clear message to the enemies of peace and stability in Afghanistan, and the world, frankly, that they will not win.” Four months later, he ordered the dropping of the “mother of all bombs” — the most powerful conventional bomb in the American arsenal — on an Islamic State cave complex in the Achin district of eastern Afghanistan.

In November, General Nicholson delivered another bright update from Kabul. “The Taliban cannot win in the face of the pressures that I outlined,” he said on Nov. 28. “Again, their choices are to reconcile, live in irrelevance or die.”

From Max Fisher's "Why Attack Afghan Civilians? Creating Chaos Rewards Taliban":

As American-led forces have escalated in response to Taliban gains, they have unintentionally pushed the Taliban toward grislier violence. Airstrikes have forced the Taliban to lie low in rural areas, where they prefer to operate, seizing territory and extorting from locals.

Instead, they have shifted toward terrifying if brief guerrilla-style attacks in Kabul and other urban districts, where American air power is of little use. Though this gains them no territory, it allows them to humiliate the government where it is most visible.

“The city is infiltrated, the city is contaminated,” said Amrullah Saleh, a former intelligence chief.

The government, Mr. Saleh said, often cannot even know whether a suicide bomber entered from outside the city “or whether he is brainwashed here; whether they build the vests here or whether they import.”

The group’s internal dynamics have aligned with its shifting incentives, elevating officers who favor large-scale attacks on civilians.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, who leads the once-semi-autonomous Haqqani Network, a terrorist group closely associated with Al Qaeda, now serves at the Taliban’s No. 2 leader and de facto military planner.

“The Taliban and the Haqqani are the same,” said Sayed Akbar Agha, a former Taliban commander. “Only the government is differentiating between them.”

[snip]

For as long as Afghanistan’s war has raged, Pakistan, which plays a double-game with the Taliban, has been at the center of its seeming intractability.

President Trump, following two presidents who tried and failed to rein in Pakistan’s meddling, publicly chastised Pakistani leaders this month, freezing security aid to Pakistan.

But Ms. Brown said that the United States seemed unready for the all-but-inevitable response to its confrontation with Pakistan. “If you start on the path of escalating pressure, you have to be ready for the other side to escalate,” she said.

The Vietnam War

I am watching The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the ten-episode documentary that PBS broadcast last year. Based on a few things I read online, I was worried that it would champion a revisionist perspective -- that the U.S. Goliath could have triumphed if not for the cowardliness of politicians and students. But so far, I just finished watching episode five, there's been no revisionism of any sort.

A month or two ago, in preparation for the Burns-Novick documentary, I watched Vietnam: A Television History, the 13-episode WGBH-produced documentary which was broadcast in the fall of 1983. No revision there either. The U.S. was beat fair and square by a much more motivated people fed up with colonial domination.

There are differences between the two documentaries. The Burns-Novick film focuses on average soldiers, where the WGBH documentary had lots of wonderful interviews with people at the top of the heap who were still alive in the late-70s/early-80s -- McGeorge Bundy, Madame Nhu.

This morning Yves Smith reposts a Tomgram by Danny Sjursen, "The War That Never Ends (for the U.S. Military High Command): And It’s Not the War on Terror."

Sjursen helpfully summarizes revision when it comes to the Vietnam War and he traces its influence on GWOT:

Historian Gary Hess identifies two main schools of revisionist thinking. There are the “Clausewitzians” (named after the nineteenth century Prussian military theorist) who insist that Washington never sufficiently attacked the enemy’s true center of gravity in North Vietnam. Beneath the academic language, they essentially agree on one key thing: the U.S. military should have bombed the North into a parking lot.

The second school, including Petraeus, Hess labeled the “hearts-and-minders.” As COINdinistas, they felt the war effort never focused clearly enough on isolating the Vietcong, protecting local villages in the South, building schools, and handing out candy — everything, in short, that might have won (in the phrase of that era) Vietnamese hearts and minds.

Both schools, however, agreed on something basic: that the U.S. military should have won in Vietnam.

[snip] 

Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, and the others entered service when military prestige had reached a nadir or was just rebounding. And those reading lists taught the young officers where to lay the blame for that — on civilians in Washington (or in the nation’s streets) or on a military high command too weak to assert its authority effectively. They would serve in Vietnam’s shadow, the shadow of defeat, and the conclusions they would draw from it would only lead to twenty-first-century disasters.

[snip] 

Today’s leaders don’t even pretend that the post-9/11 wars will ever end. In an interview last June, Petraeus — still considered a sagacious guru of the Defense establishment — disturbingly described the Afghan conflict as “generational.” Eerily enough, to cite a Vietnam-era precedent, General Creighton Abrams predicted something similar. speaking to the White House as the war in Southeast Asia was winding down. Even as President Richard Nixon slowly withdrew U.S. forces, handing over their duties to the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) — a process known then as “Vietnamization” — the general warned that, despite ARVN improvements, continued U.S. support “would be required indefinitely to maintain an effective force.” Vietnam, too, had its “generational” side (until, of course, it didn’t).

The fundamental thing to understand about the Vietnam War is that South Vietnam was never a real organic entity. Diem managed to kick the French out when he beat the mafia that controlled Saigon. Then when Diem began to lose his grip because of a Buddhist-led popular uprising, the Kennedy administration backed a coup that led to Diem's death. The show was over right there. The U.S. killed the guy who justified the fiction that there was a South Vietnam. Instead, the U.S. decided to pour more and more resources into the country in an attempt to maintain the fiction.

Erdogan Says "Operation Olive Branch" will Proceed Until Turkey Controls Manbij

The Turkish assault on the Kurdish-controlled northwest Syrian region of Afrin continues. The United States foothold in Syria is predicated on a fiction. That fiction is the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S. re-branding of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG). The YPG is a Syrian PKK militia.

There is a good story by Anne Barnard and Ben Hubbard, "Allies or Terrorists: Who Are the Kurdish Fighters in Syria?":

Y.P.G. leaders say theirs is a homegrown movement that sprang up to defend civilians in the early days of Syria’s war and against offensives by the Islamic State.

That role, and the backing of the United States, has transformed the group into the most prominent political and military force in northeastern Syria.

Formerly an impoverished and marginalized minority, Syria’s Kurds now administer substantial territory, where they are teaching Kurdish in schools and setting up local administrations. Critics have accused them of displacing Arabs.

American officials have long sought to minimize the Y.P.G.’s ties to the P.K.K., but Turkey is enraged that the United States is giving military support to a group that idealizes Mr. Ocalan, the sole inmate of an island prison in the Sea of Marmara.

Many Y.P.G. leaders speak openly of their history with the P.K.K., and Kurds from Iraq, Iran and Turkey have joined the movement in Syria.

Mr. Bonsey said there had been hope among the Americans that they could pull the Y.P.G. away from the P.K.K.

But such a prospect appears unlikely — especially with the Kurds now uncertain that they have solid support from the United States, which has sent mixed messages about how strongly it would back them against a Turkish onslaught.

The American ambivalence was clear on Wednesday in comments by Thomas P. Bossert, Mr. Trump’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“I’m not in any way critical of the Turkish decision, but I’m just praying for their longer-term strategic patience,” Mr. Bossert told reporters.

Asked if the Turks should withdraw, Mr. Bossert said, “I would prefer it if for now they would remove themselves from the capital of Afrin.”

The United States effectively gave a green light to the current Turkish offensive against Afrin, urging restraint but emphasizing that it does not work with the Y.P.G. there.

The enclave is in northwest Syria, not connected to a larger territory held by the Syrian Democratic Forces in the country’s northeast, where several small American military bases and several thousand American advisers are.

But Mr. Erdogan has threatened to attack that larger area, beginning with the town of Manbij. The Turks say the Americans promised that the Syrian Democratic Forces would withdraw from such majority-Arab areas after taking them from the Islamic State, but it has not.

The ingredients for this clash have been brewing since Syrians rose up against the authoritarian rule of President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. Within a few years, the northeastern province of Hasaka, with a large Kurdish population as well as Arabs and Assyrians, was effectively ruling itself.

As it became the area’s dominant force, the Y.P.G. tried to implement its vision of a utopian society, inspired by Mr. Ocalan. Influenced by Murray Bookchin, an American anarchist, Mr. Ocalan has called for autonomous rule by local committees unbound by national borders. Proponents say they do not seek to break up Syria but are leading a long-term social revolution that will ensure gender and minority rights.

Reuters is reporting that in a speech today Erdogan reiterated that the goal of Turkish military campaign is to take Manbij. Problem there is that is where the U.S. Special Forces have a base:

ANKARA/BEIRUT (Reuters) - President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday Turkish forces would sweep Kurdish fighters from the Syrian border and could push all the way east to the frontier with Iraq -- a move which risks a possible confrontation with U.S. forces allied to the Kurds.

The Turkish offensive in northwest Syria's Afrin region against the Kurdish YPG militia has opened a new front in the multi-sided Syrian civil war but has strained ties with NATO ally Washington.

Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist group but the militia has played a prominent role in U.S.-led efforts to combat the hardline Islamic State in Syria.

Since the start of the incursion, dubbed "Operation Olive Branch" by Ankara, Erdogan has said Turkish forces would push east towards the town of Manbij, potentially putting them in confrontation with U.S. troops deployed there.

"Operation Olive Branch will continue until it reaches its goals. We will rid Manbij of terrorists, as it was promised to us, and our battles will continue until no terrorist is left until our border with Iraq," Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara.

Any drive by Turkish forces toward Manbij, part of Kurdish-held territory some 100 km (60 miles) east of Afrin, could threaten U.S. efforts in northern Syria.

The United States has about 2,000 troops in Syria, officially as part of the international, U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State.

U.S. forces were deployed in and around Manbij to deter Turkish and U.S.-backed rebels from attacking each other and have also carried out training missions in the area.

Washington has angered Ankara by providing arms, training and air support to the Syrian Kurdish forces. Turkey sees the YPG as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a deadly insurgency in Turkey's largely Kurdish southeast for three decades.

Bill Richardson Quits Myanmar Advisory Board on Rohingya. Who Cares?

Longtime Democrat politico Bill Richardson quit an advisory board set up by Myanmar to assess the trouble with the Rohingya in Rakhine State. Apparently it was after a spat with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. According to Hannah Beech and Rick Gladstone in "U.S. Adviser Rebukes Aung San Suu Kyi: ‘I Don’t Want to Be Part of a Whitewash’ ":

“She has developed an arrogance of power,” Mr. Richardson said by telephone during a layover in Tokyo on his way back to New Mexico from Myanmar. “I’ve known her a long time and am fond of her, but she basically is unwilling to listen to bad news, and I don’t want to be part of a whitewash.”

Nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Rakhine State in western Myanmar for Bangladesh over the past five months. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has declined to speak out forcefully against the Myanmar military’s campaign of execution, rape and arson against the Rohingya, which the United Nations and United States have labeled ethnic cleansing.

Mr. Richardson said that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi had “exploded” at him when he raised the detention of two Reuters journalists, U Wa Lone and U Kyaw Soe Oo, who are facing up to 14 years in prison under the country’s Official Secrets Act after they began investigating a mass grave of Rohingya in northern Rakhine. 

“Her face was quivering, and if she had been a little closer to me, she might have hit me, she was so furious,” Mr. Richardson said.

Richardson is grandstanding. Clearly he joined the board so he could quit, garner the headlines and discredit Myanmar.

According to the Reuters story, "Richardson quits Myanmar's 'whitewash' Rohingya crisis panel," by Bill Tarrant:

Before Richardson quit the advisory board had 10 members, including five from overseas, chaired by former Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai.

Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and energy secretary in the Clinton administration, also had harsh words for Surakiart.

The board chairman, he said, was not “genuinely committed” to implementing recommendations regarding the issues of Rohingya safety, citizenship, peace, stability and development.

“He parroted the dangerous and untrue notion that international NGOs employ radicals and that humanitarian agencies are providing material support to ARSA,” Richardson said, referring to Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army militants. [This is what Richardson is trying to put the kibosh on. This is how the U.S. conducts its secret wars. The U.S. doesn't want this publicly acknowledged.]

Surakiart was traveling with other members of the board in Rakhine and did not respond to requests for comment.

Another board member, former South African Defence Minister Roelof Meyer, told Reuters the visit to Rakhine had been “very constructive”.

“If anybody would say that we are just a rubber stamp or a voice on behalf of the government that would be completely untrue, unfair,” he said. “We haven’t done any recommendations so far.”

Other members of the board, which also includes British doctor and politician Lord Darzi of Denham and speaker of the Swedish parliament Urban Ahlin, were not immediately available for comment.

Richardson said he declined to join the advisory board’s tour of a new repatriation camp in Rakhine State on Wednesday, instead traveling to Yangon.

NAFTA

With Tillerson blaming the Russians for a recent gas attack in East Ghouta you might think that we are back in Obamatime.

What did people vote for when they voted for Trump? I doubt it was for a continuation of the Obama administration's posture towards Syria.

I always figured that a third rail for Trump was his promise to scrap NAFTA. If he can't deliver, or can't fudge it, then those Obama voters in the industrial Midwest who gave Trump his margin of victory in Michigan and Wisconsin will vanish.

Round six of NAFTA negotiations are underway this week in Montreal. There is a helpful story in CNNMoney by Patrick Gillespie, "NAFTA is close to falling apart with time running out."

There are three larges hurdles: the Mexican presidential campaign season is about to begin; Trump wants 50% of car parts sourced in the U.S.; and he wants NAFTA to sunset every five years.

There is only one more round of negotiations scheduled. Trump is threatening to abrogate the agreement if he doesn't get what he wants.

I am skeptical. Nonetheless the fear is palpable in the corporate press. My guess is that he'll fudge it and draw out talks until just prior to the launch of his reelection campaign and then try to spin whatever results as a big win for the American worker.

I think if he manages to look strong on NAFTA Trump wins in 2020.

Can't Blame Putin for This

Read "Senate Democrats’ Vote to End Shutdown Infuriates Some on the Left" by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

WASHINGTON — The decision by Senate Democrats to end the government shutdown on Monday in exchange for a promised immigration vote enraged liberals, who accused the lawmakers of betrayal and threatened to mount primaries against some of the Democrats who voted yes.

Regardless of what happens in the Senate, progressive and immigrant advocacy groups said House Republican leaders will never take up a bill that would offer legal status to young undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children without excruciating concessions on other immigration issues. They accused Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and moderate Democratic senators of capitulating to protect senators up for re-election in November in Republican-leaning states.

“They blinked because they’ll always put the party and the success of the party first,” said Representative Luis V. Gutiérrez of Illinois, one of the leading Democratic advocates for immigrants, complaining that Hispanics got short shrift. “It’s the one word they know in Spanish: mañana.”

The hasty retreat by 33 Senate Democrats was particularly humiliating in the immediate aftermath of the anniversary of the Women’s March, which saw thousands of activists reconvene in cities across the country to protest against President Trump and congressional Republicans. Liberal groups such as MoveOn.org began urging members to sign up on Monday for rallies aimed at pressuring Republicans to protect the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.

By noon, their own ostensible allies in Congress had buckled.

Trump and the GOP have convincingly won this round.  The bloodletting within the Democratic Party which should have commenced immediately after Hillary's loss but instead was put off in favor of pursuing Russophobic fantasies should begin in earnest now. The Dems can't blame throwing the Dreamers under the bus on Vladimir Putin.

February 8 will come and the weak-kneed Dems will have to shut down the government again, further splitting the party. And with Russiagate imploding, Dems have no fallback.

Trump Thinks He Has a Winner with the Government Shutdown

In "Government Shutdown Goes Into Monday as Senate Inches Toward Deal" by Nicholas Fandos and Thomas Kaplan the deal being inched towards is this:

[T]he government would stay open through early February, to be coupled with a promise that the Senate would tackle the issue of immigration in the coming weeks.

In other words, another short-term continuing resolution, this one to expire February 8, followed by another government shutdown if immigration is not dealt with.

To me, this seems worse than letting the current shutdown continue. As Fandos and Kaplan mention, the problem with kicking the can down the road a couple of weeks, there is no guarantee that a stand-alone vote in the Senate on DACA  accomplishes anything:

The talk of promised action on immigration also raised other questions, including whether a pledge from Mr. McConnell like the one he offered on Sunday could be a significant enough assurance for Senate Democrats who are worried about the fate of the Dreamers. For instance, a promise of a Senate vote on a stand-alone immigration bill would still leave the possibility that the measure would die in the House, potentially leaving the DACA issue unresolved.

The bombshell of the story -- and proof that this shutdown is owned by the GOP -- is Schumer's statement that during his Friday night one-on-one with Trump at the White House he gave the president what he asked for -- funding for the wall -- only for Trump to say no to Schumer's yes:

Mr. Schumer’s 11th-hour negotiations with Mr. Trump on Friday have proved to be a focal point for both parties as they have cast blame. On Sunday, Mr. Schumer said that during their meeting at the White House, Mr. Trump had “picked a number” that he wanted to fund a border wall and that Mr. Schumer had accepted in exchange for protections for Dreamers. Hours later, he said, Mr. Trump walked away from a tentative agreement.

“I essentially agreed to give the president something he has said he wants, in exchange for something we both want,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor. “The president must take yes for an answer. Until he does, it’s the Trump shutdown.”

Clearly Trump and the Republicans feel as if they can't lose. If the shutdown continues, they will be able to tar the Democrats with closing the government on behalf of illegal immigrants. If the Democrats fold, the GOP will have effectively split the Democratic Party.

NFL Championship Round Predictions

Last weekend during the divisional round I went 2-2 on my predictions, and I was lucky to get that given the last second circus-like victory of Vikings over the Saints. I am now 4-4 for the NFL playoffs heading into today's championship round.

Television ratings were down again in the divisional round, something that can't in good faith be placed at the doorstep of player anthem protests since they have disappeared. But the NFL championship games are purported to be immune to ratings drops. The league can bank on between 45-50 million viewers. If ratings fall below this number commissioner Roger Goodell likely will not be able to collect his full $200 million salary; his recent contract extension was filled with language pegging his compensation to a variety of financial targets.

The line out of Las Vegas is Patriots by a touchdown; Minnesota by a field goal.

New England at New England is a tough draw for the young Jaguars. My analysis of this game boils down to this: If Ben Roethlisberger can put up 42 points on the vaunted Jacksonville defense, what do you think Tom Brady is going to do?

There is a chance that Sacksonville will have a better day against New England's O-line than they had in Pittsburgh, knocking Brady around. That's how you beat the Patriots. Hit Brady. Bring pressure up the middle.

I would love to see Jacksonville win this game. But I think it is an unreasonable expectation. Take the Patriots.

Minnesota at Philadelphia is a toss-up. Who could have foreseen that two Rams castoffs would be facing off at QB in the NFC Championship? I'm going with the Eagles because the Vikings defense was completely shredded in the second half of the game against the Saints. Michael Thomas was always open. Drew Brees connected at will. The Saints should have won that game. Philadelphia's defense never broke down against the Falcons.

Now you will say that Nick Foles is no Drew Brees. You are right; he isn't. But Foles beat Atlanta with a blistering second half running the RPO (run-pass option). Philadelphia has a deeper bench of running backs and receivers. Plus, the Eagles looked really loose at home, easily shrugging off first-half turnovers. Pick the Eagles.

Senate Whip Count Shows Shutdown is Coming

The New York Times is pretty much predicting a government shutdown. The header for its "Live Briefing" page is "Senate Democrats Appear Set to Block Bill to Avert Government Shutdown."

I was dismissive of the possibility earlier in the week based on exigencies of reelection for Democratic senators from ten states that Trump won in 2016. Tally those ten votes with 50 from the GOP and you have the 60 votes you need for cloture.

The problem is that there are Republican "No" votes. Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul have both announced their opposition, which means that Mitch McConnell needs 12 Democrat defectors, if not more.

The whip count shows at this point Schumer has the votes to block the spending bill, which means the government is shutting down at midnight.

I say good. It's time for the Democrats to show some backbone. Shutting down the government never hurt the Republicans come election day. Plus, November is a long way off. Given the amnesiac quality of our collective consciousness, hardly anyone is going to remember January ten months from now.

It's also good because it is going to put Trump's hard bargaining skills on full display. Trump is relishing this shutdown. He is certain he can roll his good friends Nancy and Chuck.

Regardless of who wins, these shutdowns are good because they reengage the citizenry in the business of government. The shutdown invites discussion, debate, involvement. Elected officials have to take the heat.

Look at thus standoff as a tune-up match for the midterms. Who comes out on top will tell us a lot about who has game going into November.

Trump sans Populism

Trump's polls are ticking back up, which probably has to do with all the adulatory corporate press on the recent changes to the tax code. Trump's ceiling appears to be an approval rating of 44%; his disapproval rating never goes south of 50%. Not solid footing for another presidential run.

And while I am inclined to believe that it is good enough to deal with a feckless, flipflopping Democratic contender -- say, a Cory Booker, a Kirsten Gillibrand or a Kamala Harris -- what makes me think twice is how Trump continues to smash the rungs of the ladder that he used to climb to the White House.

The Border Wall: Trump's chief of staff John Kelly told members of the Hispanic Caucus yesterday that the wall is kaput; that the president has undergone an evolution since he has been in office. Trump is denying it this morning, but Kelly is telling the truth. One year on where's the wall?

NAFTA: Trump has been promising to tear up NAFTA for over a year, yet negotiations continue. Trump can't walk away from the agreement because the tariffs on U.S. agriculture that would result would deal a blow to the foundation of Trump's support, which is rural.

Foreign Wars: As Gardiner Harris reminds us in a story ("Tillerson Says U.S. Troops to Stay in Syria Beyond Battle With ISIS") devoted to Tillerson's proclamation of a U.S. protectorate where part of the caliphate once stood, Trump promised less foreign entanglements:

Mr. Tillerson’s comments were the first time a senior Trump administration official pledged to keep American troops in Syria well after the current battle ends. They also marked another step in President Trump’s gradual evolution from a populist firebrand who promised to extricate the United States from foreign military entanglements to one who is grudgingly accepting many of the national security strategies he once derided.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump said that “at some point, we cannot be the policeman of the world.”

Combine this with stories about administration chagrin over reconciliation flowering on the Korean Peninsula, and the inevitable confrontation with Iran, not to mention the arming of Ukraine, and it is obvious for all to see that Trump is even more bellicose than Obama.

At this point my guess is that even a feckless Democrat can beat a Trump who has reneged on just about every single populist promise.

I Don't See This Society Capable of Healing Itself

Failure is everywhere, but apparently we have no ability to correct our mistakes. When Trump and the Republicans swept the elections of 2016, change -- even of a "worst-case scenario" type -- seemed certain. Paradigm shift was right around the corner. But it has not been the case. Trumptime is merely a continuation of Obamatime, which was merely a continuation of Bushtime, which was merely a continuation of Clintontime, and so on.

As Caitlin Johnstone wonderfully summarized on Sunday in "The One Fact Which Disproves Russiagate, But Nobody Wants To Talk About":

Nobody wants to think about this because it doesn’t fit in with America’s stale partisan models; Democrats would have to admit that their best shot at getting a rival president impeached is pure gibberish, and Trump supporters would have to acknowledge that their swamp-draining populist hero is actually just one more corrupt globalist neocon like his predecessors. But when it comes to actual facts in evidence, that’s exactly what we’re looking at.

Over and over and over again this alleged Russian asset has been choosing to undermine Moscow instead of advancing its interests. He approved the sale of arms to Ukraine, a move loudly encouraged by DC neocons which Obama refused to do because of the dangerous tensions it would inflame with Russia. His administration forced first RT and now Sputnik to register as foreign agents, expanded NATO with the addition of Montenegro, assigning established Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine, shutting down a Russian consulate in San Francisco and throwing out Russian diplomats as part of continued back-and-forth hostile diplomatic exchanges, and signing the Russian sanctions bill despite loud protests from Moscow. If he is indeed an expensive Russian asset, then Russia got ripped off.

What of #Resistance, the outpouring of political engagement and civic renewal in the wake of Trump's election, as the one-year anniversary of the Women's March approaches? According to Farah Stockman in "One Year After Women’s March, More Activism but Less Unity" a branding-based split -- I kid you not -- is underway:

Now, on the eve of the anniversary, a rift is emerging between two groups: Women’s March Inc., which organized the march on Washington and spent much of the year creating more social justice protests, and another organization of activists who planned sister marches last year and believe that winning elections, particularly in red states, should be the primary goal. The split has raised questions about who can claim the mantle of the Women’s March — and the funding and press attention that goes with it.

The newer group, named March On, formed after some female activists in red states felt the protests being encouraged by Women’s March Inc., which is based in New York, were not resonating in their communities.

“We can march and take to the streets and yell about all the stuff we want to change, but unless we’re getting people elected to office who are going to make those changes, we’re not really doing anything,” said Lindsey Kanaly, who organized the women’s march in Oklahoma City and is now a March On board member.

[snip] 

Bob Bland, also a co-president, said the new group was “welcome in the resistance.” But she noted that its creation had led to “a lot of confusion” among activists on the ground who did not realize that it was a separate entity.

“That’s why it is so important for new groups coming into this movement, like March On, to make sure they have distinct branding and messaging that is specific to them and their group that doesn’t appear as if it is directly Women’s March related,” Ms. Bland said.

The best that can be said of #Resistance and groups like March On and Indivisible is that they are training people in how to actually do politics: knocking on doors, calling legislative hotlines, raising money. The problem is that at its best #Resistance is operating in a completely rigged system, helping to elect more Democrats, who will then turn around and vote to gut their own reform legislation. (See "Democrats Add Momentum to G.O.P. Push to Loosen Banking Rules" by Alan Rappeport.)

Ask yourself, "What could change this system?" Let's assume that Democrats win an amazing wave election this fall and take back both the U.S. House and Senate. What does that do? Nothing really. Trump might be impeached, but the drama would drag on for the remainder of his term.

Let's assume that there's another global financial crisis. Do the "too big to fail" banks get nationalized this time? Almost certainly not. It would be back to QE 4.0 or whatever iteration we are on now.

Let's assume a nuclear war with North Korea. In the aftermath of the Armageddon, do we ban nuclear weapons and roll back the Pentagon? Chances are the opposite. Our already militarist society (post-9/11) would become even more so.

I think it is going to take something huge, some cataclysm of the natural world, a continental drought or the death of an ocean, to bring about the kind of political and societal renewal we need. I hope it is not the case, but I don't see this society healing itself.

It's "Shithole" vs. "Shithouse": Don't Bet on a Government Shutdown this Week

The basis for Trump's claims that Senator Dick Durbin lied about the profanity the president used in a White House meeting last week on DACA apparently -- and unbelievably -- boils down to "shithole" versus "shithouse." According to a fine story, "As Shutdown Talk Rises, Trump’s Immigration Words Pose Risks for Both Parties," by Jonathan Martin, Michael Shear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg:

. . . Mr. Durbin, who told local reporters in Illinois on Monday that he stood by his account of Thursday’s meeting with the president.

“I know what happened. I stand behind every word I said,” he said, adding that he is focused on the immigration legislation “full time.”

A White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity suggested on Monday that Mr. Trump had said “shithouse countries,” not “shithole countries.” Mr. Durbin expressed disbelief that anyone would see a substantive difference between the terms.

“I stick with my original interpretation. I am stunned that this is their defense,” he said.

Two Republican officials independently said on Monday that Mr. Trump had said the original phrase.

 A government shutdown looms by the end of the week if a deal can't be reached on the Dreamers:

Mr. Short [Marc Short, White House legislative director] said the current proposal devised by Mr. Graham and Mr. Durbin did not do enough to satisfy the president’s demands for enhanced border security. And, he said, it failed to broadly end what Republicans call “chain migration,” a process by which American citizens can eventually bring their extended families into the United States over a period of many years.

Mr. Short argued that the current proposal would actually increase the ability of DACA recipients to bring some family members into the country since, under their current legal status, they are barred from sponsoring entry for anyone else.

“Their proposal only expands chain migration for that group,” he said.

Under pressure from immigrant rights activists, Democrats are likely to resist broader efforts to limit immigrants from sponsoring their family members, an idea that Democrats view favorably as “family reunification” — a part of American immigration law for decades.

Mr. Short also urged Democrats to put off efforts to address immigrants from Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador and other countries who have been in the United States under a program called Temporary Protected Status. The Graham-Durbin plan called for issuing new visas for those immigrants after the Trump administration said they would end T.P.S. status for people from those countries.

“I don’t think we envision it as part of this deal,” Mr. Short said of the T.P.S. program. “That expands it into comprehensive immigration reform.”

And then there is the wall. Trump wants any deal on DACA to include funds for his beautiful wall along the southern border.

DACA negotiations are splitting both parties, but the Democrats more so. It's 2016 all over again, the social democrats versus the neoliberals:

For Democratic lawmakers, the pressure from their left flank to demand relief for the Dreamers is only rising.

“We are going to be telling Democrats the following: If you vote for a spending bill that does not include relief for Dreamers, you are voting for funds that will be used to deport Dreamers,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrants rights group.

But the wisdom of eventually forcing a shutdown to shield the migrants is dividing the party.

Some Democratic strategists, such as former Representative Steve Israel of New York, said Democrats should seize their leverage now that Republicans already have enough political headaches, namely the president’s historic unpopularity.

“They absolutely have the upper hand as a matter of policy and as also as a matter of politics,” said Mr. Israel. “Republicans cannot afford to shut down the government in one of the roughest midterm environments they’ve ever had. Democrats have the upper hand and they should play the upper hand.”

Yet to other Democrats, forcing a government shutdown in the same fashion that congressional Republicans did in President Barack Obama’s second term would be to take a considerable political risk, the legislative equivalent of the nuclear option.

“It looks like a big Washington mess to people,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s former top strategist. “Dealing with Trump is obviously a very, very difficult issue not just for Democrats but for Republicans because he is so mercurial and unreliable. The question is: Have you reached that point now where you want to employ what is the most explosive tool in your toolbox?”

Or as Ms. McCaskill put it: “I am not interested in drawing a line in sand as negotiations continue because I think that’s how negotiations get blown up.”

The Axelrod quote makes it clear that a government shutdown is unlikely. As Martin et al. write earlier in the story:

Ten Democratic senators are on the ballot this November in states that are heavily white, have little sympathy for undocumented immigrants and that Mr. Trump won. Many of these lawmakers have no desire to force a government shutdown over an immigration issue. Some of the party’s most at-risk seats are in Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia and North Dakota.

If they side with Senate Republicans, Congress could pass yet another short-term spending bill by Friday that would end the shutdown threat for now as negotiations continue.

 At this point it is all about those midterms. Democrats, with the exception of potential presidential candidates angling for 2020, are hugging the center line in the belief that 2018 is going to be a wave election when the mythical white suburban moderate -- the one who didn't vote for Hillary -- will come to the polls to cast a ballot for the Democrat. So don't expect a government shutdown this week.

NFL Divisional Round Predictions

I went 2-2 last weekend in my predictions for the wild card round. No better than tossing a coin.

All the wild card games were good -- really good, I think; competitive, enjoyable to watch; a far cry from the average soporific regular season game -- which makes the poor television ratings for the wild card round very troubling news for the National Football League (see "After lousy regular season, NFL's TV ratings worsen in wild-card playoffs" by Michael McCarthy).

Ratings for 2017 NFL regular season games were down ten percent from the prior year, which were down eight percent from the year before. Viewership of the wild card games declined 11% from last year. The Saturday night Falcons-Rams match-up at the L.A. Coliseum was the lowest rated wild card game in that time slot in history, which is a shame because it was an excellent game.

As I've said before, the National Football League is in real trouble, facing a crisis, which mirrors American society in general. The only teams remaining in the playoffs said to have a national following (and hence good for strong television viewership) are the Patriots and the Steelers. If ratings continue to decline after this weekend when both New England and Pittsburgh play, multiple alarms will trigger in the league's Park Avenue corporate suites.

Scapegoating Colin Kaepernick -- journalists continue to dutifully list the Kaepernick-inspired anti-racist protests during the national anthem as cause number one for the ratings drop -- will no longer cut the mustard.

The bottom line is NFL games basically have been lousy for the last two seasons. Simultaneous with the collapse in the quality of play has been the league's concussion settlement. Ken Belson has a must-read story in today's paper, "He Helped Ex-Players Get Benefits. His Family Is Still Waiting.," about the efforts of Mike Webster's family to collect some settlement money. What I didn't know is that the settlement doesn't apply to any player who died before 2006. Hall-of-Famer Webster died in 2002. He was the first NFL player to be diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). (Accomplished character actor David Morse portrayed Webster in the 2015 film Concussion).

“Mike opened up Pandora’s box,” Pam Webster, 66, the football player’s ex-wife, said of his C.T.E. diagnosis, which has become an existential crisis for the N.F.L. because it has led to the barrage of lawsuits and to parents rethinking their children’s participation in football. “There’s no reason Mike shouldn’t be included.”

Read Belson's story and you come away with the twisted, tortured nature of the sport, which, make no mistake, is a blood sport, and it is bleeding out.

I happened to have a vivid dream last night of a professional playoff football game of the future. There were no pads or helmets worn. The field was brilliant green, but much more narrow, like half as wide, or even one-third the width of a regulation football field, and the number of players was no more than six to a side. The game was fast and played full-on, but there weren't jarring hits, and the action was more continuous, like a team handball game. The reaction of my dream mind was curious: I was intrigued but disappointed; I longed for the grinding, smash-mouth strategy of the power running game. Men, I guess, are violent creatures who unknowingly yearn for destruction.

Anyway, on to the picks for the divisional round.

In the first game much is being made of the top-seeded Eagles being an underdog at home. Carson Wentz, the sophomore QB who went down with a knee injury, was the X factor for the Philadelphia. I was of the opinion that it was his scrambling out of the pocket, particularly on third down, which made the offense go. Philadelphia's offensive anemia since Wentz's injury proves that my opinion was on the money. Nick Foles is okay. He had a great 2013 season for the Eagles (it didn't hurt that he had LeSean McCoy in the backfield). But then after one more season Philadelphia peddled him to the Rams for Sam Bradford, and he has never been the same player since. (I always wondered why the Rams benched him in favor of Case Keenum, but then look at the season Keenum has put together for the Vikings.)

Foles strikes me as another Jared Goff type quarterback -- tall and willowy in the pocket -- and the Falcons seemed to handle Goff just fine. The Falcons also shut down Todd Gurley, a far better running back than anyone the Eagles can field. So that leaves the Eagles defense. Matt Ryan makes mistakes, and Philadelphia could capitalize quickly on those mistakes. But Ryan is playing focused football; he wants back into the Super Bowl to atone for Atlanta's collapse last year against the Patriots. I'm a bit concerned that if Philly goes all in with their power backs Jay Ajayi and LeGarrette Blount the Eagles could wear down the smaller, fast Falcon linebackers. But in the end I am a Dan Quinn man. I'm taking the Falcons.

Game number two on Saturday features Tennessee against New England in Foxborough. Smart money is all on the Patriots at home. Tom Brady at 40 is hip again. I must say I have more respect for New England now than at any time in my adult life. Brady is a winner, an excellent passer, a leader. I loathe Bob Kraft and Bill Belichik. I loathe the franchise because it represents the triumph of the corporate machine over the heroic individual. But I respect the Patriots.

I was very wrong when I called the Titans false idols. In the past I had put my faith in Marcus Mariota several times in marquee match-ups, only to see the Oregon Duck choke badly. He seemed unable to perform with courage and discipline on the national stage. His second-half comeback against Kansas City proved that I had given up my faith too soon.

Mariota's touchdown pass to himself at the goal line was akin to the Rapture. For Tennessee to triumph in Foxborough would require the Second Coming. Is this it? Are we at End Times? Are we on the doorstep of Christ's thousand-year millennial kingdom? I hope so, and I'll be rooting for the Titans. But I am predicting a Patriots win.

Tomorrow's first game is Jacksonville at Pittsburgh. Jacksonville shellacked the Steelers at home during the regular season. Roethlisberger had an unusually bad game, throwing a large number of interceptions. That won't happen twice. The only reason the Jaguars beat Buffalo 10-3 was because Blake Bortles was allowed to repeatedly scramble out the pocket for large gains. That has about as much chance happening against a Mike Tomlin defense as a repeat of a QB throwing a touchdown pass to himself. Steelers win.

The final game of the divisional round is New Orleans at Minnesota. Drew Brees saved the Saints bacon by returning to superstar form. His passing accuracy was beautiful to behold. Still, the Panthers, despite Cam Newton's lethargic showing, could very well have won the game in the fourth quarter. The Vikings will put more pressure on Brees than Carolina did. Most importantly, the Vikings defensive secondary is far superior to the Panthers. Vikings win.

Does Voting Matter?

This morning Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism re-posts Michael Olenick's "Voting Matters," a useful if partisan (pro-Democrat) sketch of the undemocratic (because of gerrymandering) voting system in the United States. Olenick makes a good point about California and New York:

If California and New York acted like red states they could theoretically flip 22 seats, enough to leave Republicans in the minority. Sure, they received more votes in 2016 but, at this point, that under Republican orthodoxy that’s a meaningless detail. Nancy Pelosi should not be winning her seat by 80.9 percent, which she did. She should win by 52 percent to ensure that California Republican Jeff Denham, who won by 51.7 percent, loses. Since the districts are nowhere near each other is that unethical? Ethics in gerrymandering? Yawn.

The national government is basically Dixiecrat 70 years after Strom Thurmond bolted from the Democratic Party and ran as a champion of segregation. How can this be if not for the complete failure of the two-party system?

One way out of the morass is through a proliferation of political parties, through a vibrant multi-party democracy. The parties don't even need to regularly field candidates for political office. So voting isn't a necessity.

Look at the Black Panther Party. They catapulted to national renown because of a press stunt at the California state capital and a great issue -- the 2nd Amendment for black people -- and then parlayed their popularity into a hot breakfast program, which further established the party in local communities. That's when the FBI declared war with COINTELPRO. Interestingly, it's only when the Panthers took a stab at mainstream politics, running Bobby Seale for the mayor of Oakland in 1972, that the party's terminal illness was manifest. (Watch Stanley Nelson's The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution -- the best thing I've seen on the Black Panther Party.)

A political party doesn't have to be explicitly electoral. Occupy Wall Street's error, if you ask me, was conflating the electoral with the political. Occupy was clearly a political movement, but the movement bent over backwards to eschew politics. What OWS was rejecting was electoral politics as practiced in our pay-to-play system. OWS should have embraced party politics, with the distinction that it would not have been concerned initially with elections. This would have allowed it to continue to organize after it lost its main squat in Zuccotti Park.

We Need an Anti-Plastic Party

Britain has joined a growing list of countries to ban plastic microbeads from personal care products. The immediate problem is that microbeads, as Des Shoe explains in "The U.K. Has Banned Microbeads. Why?," are overwhelming waste water treatment facilities. The long-term problem is that plastic -- not just microplastics -- is destroying our oceans, which are already in rough shape because of climate change. What Shoe doesn't say is that all that non-microscopic plastic in the ocean eventually breaks down into microplastic and becomes bite-sized collection points for toxins before being consumed by sea life.

Last year I saw a documentary, A Plastic Ocean: We Need s Wave of Change (2016), that compellingly framed the issue of plastic pollution. Here is a review I wrote of the film for my public library:

This documentary will make you think twice the next time you go to the grocery store and you put your produce in a plastic bag. The oceans are choking with plastic. Most plastic is not recycled and it ends up in landfill. From there it finds its way into the ocean. Stories of a Texas-sized island of floating plastic in the north Pacific are not literally true. But the reality is worse. Plastic, because of sunlight, salt water and the action of waves, breaks down into little bits. The bits act as collection points for toxins. The bits are then consumed by sea life. The hardest scenes of the film to watch are when they cut open the bellies of birds and fish and inside is a hefty load of plastic debris. But sea creatures aren't the only ones getting zapped by plastic. We are too. Overwhelmingly plastic bottles and containers release chemicals that mirror the sex hormone estrogen. So we're all getting doused with estrogenic chemicals. I often wonder why it is that there seems to be more young men, who as far as I can tell don't appear to be transgender, walking around with large breasts. Now I have an idea.

To go along with our vegan party we need an anti-plastic party. The Anti-Masonic Party of the early 19th century was key to party formation in the United States. The Anti-Masonic Party held the first presidential nominating convention; it was the starting point for politicians such as Thurlow Weed, Thaddeus Stevens and William Seward; it was populist and anti-elitist, sort of an Occupy of its day, before being swallowed up by the Whigs. Too bad we don't live in a truly open society.

There Should Be a U.S. Vegan Party

Among the general public there is a certain kind of disdain for the vegan. I think deep down it has to do with guilt. Most people know that if confronted with butchering an animal in order to eat they would take a pass and choose instead to forage for nuts and greens; so to continue to eat meat is morally lazy.

I went vegan several years back after seeing Noah (2014) by Darren Aronofsky. The main selling point for veganism -- at least what I tell people -- is that I never get sick. After I relate this, I'm usually given the stink eye. People don't want to be told that there is a relatively simple, easy path to personal empowerment that they are ignoring out of sloth.

Now there is scientific proof that a plant-based diet improves one's immune system. Read Carl Zimmer's "Fiber Is Good for You. Now Scientists May Know Why."

There should be an American Vegan Party (there was a Vegetarian Party) to organize around the politics of food and champion a plant-based diet. If only we lived in a free society where party formation and ballot access weren't so restricted.

Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army

There was a rare story yesterday -- see Richard Paddock's "Rohingya Militants in Myanmar Claim Responsibility for Attack" -- about the Rohingya insurgent group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), whose attacks on police stations in Rakhine State, Myanmar, last August elicited the Burmese crackdown that sent hundreds of thousands fleeing across the border to Bangladesh.

The plight of the Rohingya has been humanitarian crisis #1 for the mainstream Western press. One would think the war in Yemen would merit the kind of consistent front-page coverage garnered by the Rohingya refugees, but such has not been the case. Yemen receives a fraction of the attention paid to the Rohingya.

Paddock's story, which reports on an ambush by ARSA against Burmese government security forces, is rare in that it actually refers to the armed insurgency. Overwhelmingly, mainstream Western press focuses on the suffering of uprooted Rohingya villagers, their rape and murder, presenting a situation familiar to readers who for years have been exposed to the reporting on Syria; there, it is evil dictator Bashar al-Assad who apparently lives only to gas, murder and torture his own people.

To quote Paddock's story in full:

BANGKOK — A resistance group in Myanmar claimed responsibility on Sunday for an ambush of government forces in Rakhine State that left three people wounded, saying it had no choice but to defend the Rohingya from “state-sponsored terrorism.”

In a statement posted on Twitter, Atta Ullah, who identifies himself as commander of the rebel group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, said the attack on Friday morning in Maungdaw had been staged in response to efforts by Myanmar’s security forces to drive the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in a Buddhist-majority country, from the area.

Mr. Atta Ullah accused government forces of continuing to kill civilians, rape women and destroy villages in a campaign of genocide.

More than 650,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since the Myanmar military began its campaign in late August, joining roughly 87,000 who had fled earlier. Survivors have given consistent, harrowing accounts of gang rapes, torture, random killings and the destruction of villages.

The campaign against the Rohingya has been called “ethnic cleansing” by the United States and the United Nations.

“Thousands of Rohingya are still fleeing to escape from endless inhumane persecutions of the Burmese terrorist army,” Mr. Atta Ullah said.

Two security officers and a driver were injured in the ambush on Friday, according to a post on the Facebook page of Senior Gnl. Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s military chief. Ten members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, took part in the attack, the post said.

The rebel group, which is known locally as Harakah al-Yaqin, or the Faith Movement, is a small, underequipped group that has struggled to mount significant military operations. But it has claimed responsibility for a few deadly attacks on Myanmar’s security forces, including in August.

Richard Horsey, an independent analyst in Yangon, the economic capital Myanmar, said that while the group is small and poorly armed, its actions provoke major responses from the government.

“It’s uncertain whether they have the capacity to sustain an insurgency, but even occasional small attacks like this will have a big political impact in Myanmar,” he said.

Small operations by the group against security forces in August prompted brutal retaliation from government forces, which in turn contributed to the mass exodus of Rohingya from Rakhine.

The international aid group Doctors Without Borders estimated last month that at least 6,700 Rohingya, including 730 young children, had met with violent deaths in the month after the military campaign began in August.

General Min Aung Hlaing, the country’s most powerful figure, has denied that the army committed atrocities against the Rohingya. In November, the military released the results of an internal inquiry that cleared all soldiers in Rakhine of any misconduct. Not a single innocent civilian had been raped or killed by the security forces, the report said.

The government has refused to grant access to the region to independent observers including United Nations officials, aid groups, representatives of foreign governments and journalists.

The government of Myanmar, also known as Burma, has denied most Rohingya citizenship and considers them to be “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh, factors that complicate their status and their ability to be recognized as refugees or to apply for asylum.

U Zaw Htay, a former army major who serves as a spokesman for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s top civilian leader, said the ambush on Friday had been intended to derail the repatriation of Rohingya under an agreement between Myanmar and Bangladesh.

“We will start the repatriation process on Jan. 23,” he said. “That’s why ARSA carried out a terrorist attack on Jan. 5, just to delay the repatriation process.”

U Win Myat Aye, the minister of social welfare and resettlement, said that refugees would have the choice of living at a temporary center while their homes are being rebuilt, or of returning to their villages to help rebuild the housing themselves, with the government bearing the construction costs.

The relocation center is expected to accommodate up to 30,000 people in tents from Belgium and China, he said.

“After the construction of their original place is done, they can live in their own place and they can work freely as before,” he said.

Despite such assurances, it is unclear how many Rohingya will want to return home given the violent campaign of the past few months.

In his statement, Mr. Atta Ullah said ARSA had “no other option but to combat ‘Burmese state-sponsored terrorism’ against the Rohingya population for the purpose of defending, salvaging and protecting the Rohingya community.”

Mr. Horsey, who has closely followed the group, said the rare statement from the rebel leader was a bid to position the organization as a political representative of the Rohingya.

“We declare, loud and clear, that we will continue our legitimate struggles in hand-in-hand cooperation with the civilized international community until all our demands are fulfilled,” Mr. Atta Ullah said. “Rohingya people must be consulted in all decision-making that affects their humanitarian needs and political future.”

Attah Ullah was raised and educated in Saudi Arabia, which is where funding for ARSA is said to originate. ARSA fighters are said to have received training in Libya. ARSA is the only Rohingya insurgent group to issue communiques in fluent English. ARSA is the only Islamist Rohingya insurgent group. It certainly points to a U.S. intelligence operation.

Paddock never lists ARSA demands (which don't seem to be explicitly separatist and can be found on the Rohingya Blogger website), but at least he mentions the repatriation agreement between Bangladesh and Myanmar; that hardly ever receives any press in the West.

The Absurdity of Russiagate

It was easy to miss, which I am sure was the newspaper's intention, tucked as it was in the interior of last Tuesday's science section, but Benedict Carey's story about the first serious academic study on fake news -- "‘Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests" -- pretty much demolishes "the Russians stole my election" narrative pushed in the mainstream media, the Democratic Party and by U.S. intelligence agencies:

[N]ow the first hard data on fake-news consumption has arrived. Researchers last week posted an analysis of the browsing histories of thousands of adults during the run-up to the 2016 election — a real-time picture of who viewed which fake stories, and what real news those people were seeing at the same time.

[snip] 

In the new study, a trio of political scientists — Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College (a regular contributor to The Times’s Upshot), Andrew Guess of Princeton University and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter — analyzed web traffic data gathered from a representative sample of 2,525 Americans who consented to have their online activity monitored anonymously by the survey and analytic firm YouGov.

The data included website visits made in the weeks before and after the 2016 election, and a measure of political partisanship based on overall browsing habits. (The vast majority of participants favored Mr. Trump or Hillary Clinton.)

[snip]

“For all the hype about fake news, it’s important to recognize that it reached only a subset of Americans, and most of the ones it was reaching already were intense partisans,” Dr. Nyhan said.

“They were also voracious consumers of hard news,” he added. “These are people intensely engaged in politics who follow it closely.”

Given the ratio of truth to fiction, Dr. Watts said, fake news paled in influence beside mainstream news coverage, particularly stories about Mrs. Clinton and her use of a private email server as secretary of state. Coverage of that topic appeared repeatedly and prominently in venues like The New York Times and the Washington Post.

In other words, the alleged victims of fake news are cagey news junkies and political partisans who consume a lot of product overwhelmingly from corporate chains.

Can you say "There is no there there" any louder?

Many times over the last year I thought "The Russians Did It" campaign would collapse under the weight of its own absurdity -- was there any serious mainstream engagement with the assertion that the compromising information from the Democratic National Committee came from a leak (via thumb drive) and not a hack (because of online download speeds)? -- but it has chugged along all the same. It is even accepted in toto in the hipster weekly paper of my hometown.

Each week The New York Times publishes a "bombshell" front-pager purporting to document that Trump should be indicted any day now. My guess is that most people have given up reading these stories. The headlines get read, and I'm sure elite partisans continue to read everything, but for the most part Russiagate has become just noise.

And for good reason because that is what it is -- a deep state disinformation campaign targeting its domestic population. If you read Friday's "Obstruction Inquiry Shows Trump’s Struggle to Keep Grip on Russia Investigation" by Michael Schmidt you know that the Mueller investigation is boiling down to next to nothing. There is no evidence of collusion with Russia, and chicken shit when it comes to obstruction:

Mr. Mueller has also been examining a false statement that the president reportedly dictated on Air Force One in July in response to an article in The Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials had with Russians in 2016. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice.

Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer dealing with the special counsel’s investigation, declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have said the president has fully cooperated with the investigation, and they have expressed confidence that the inquiry will soon be coming to a close. They said that they believed the president would be exonerated, and that they hoped to have that conclusion made public.

Legal experts said that of the two primary issues Mr. Mueller appears to be investigating — whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice while in office and whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — there is currently a larger body of public evidence tying the president to a possible crime of obstruction.

But the experts are divided about whether the accumulated evidence is enough for Mr. Mueller to bring an obstruction case. They said it could be difficult to prove that the president, who has broad authority over the executive branch, including the hiring and firing of officials, had corrupt intentions when he took actions like ousting the F.B.I. director. Some experts said the case would be stronger if there was evidence that the president had told witnesses to lie under oath.

Once again, can you say "There is no there there" any louder?

An interesting development is the GOP's decision to go on the offensive with a criminal referral to the DOJ on Christopher Steele, and the FBI's re-opening the Clinton Foundation corruption case. Trump delivered the tax cut and with midterms looming, Republicans are circling the wagons.

I  hope that things get interesting. The problem is that Democrats have very little game.

Are We Supposed to Believe that Ahmadinejad is a CIA Agent?

On Thursday Iran blamed the CIA for the recent protests roiling the country. Yesterday Caitlin Johnstone wrote "Reminder: The Lying, Coup-Staging CIA Recently Escalated Operations In Iran":

The CIA recently escalated its involvement in Iran, and they ain’t there for the baba ghanoush.

Back in June the Wall Street Journal published a report saying that America’s Central Intelligence Agency had set up a new organization whose sole task would be to focus on Iran under the direction of “Ayatollah Mike” D’andrea, an aggressive Iran hawk.

“The Iran Mission Center will bring together analysts, operations personnel and specialists from across the CIA to bring to bear the range of the agency’s capabilities, including covert action,” says the report.

This alone is reason enough to be intensely skeptical of every single thing you hear about Iran. The CIA has been a consistent utilizer and developer of the science of psyops — psychological operations in which large groups of people are deceived and manipulated into thinking and feeling a certain way to advance a prefered agenda during war and during peacetime. Relatedly, the CIA also has an extensive and well-documented history of staging regime change coups to topple rival governments all around the world, including Iran. These are not conspiracy theories. These are conspiracy facts.

I agree with Johnstone. We have to be skeptical. At the same time we can't look at every uprising as a CIA maneuver. The U.S. spook machine will definitely start spinning once protests spread, attempting to maximize mayhem for official enemies. But we should not confuse this with an army of agents on the ground manning the barricades and leading the protests.

The staple for the CIA is a capital-based coup, what has been dubbed a "color revolution." The protests in Iran are the opposite of the CoRev model; they're not centered in a capital but are taking place in the hinterlands where it is hard for Western journalists to report what is actually going on. As Thomas Erdbrink noted on Wednesday (see "As Iran Erupts in Protest, Tehran Is Notably Quiet"):

The protests that broke out a week ago in other parts of Iran — but never gained traction in the capital — have shown some signs of abating, though demonstrators are still taking to the streets after dark in many outlying provinces. Elite forces with the Revolutionary Guards Corps were deployed to three of them on Wednesday — Hamadan, Isfahan and Lorestan — to help quell uprisings there.

Rural Iranian provinces are more conservative than the cosmopolitan urban centers. (The same is true of the United States of course. Trump won because of a tsunami of rural support.) The rural areas have been bedrock for the Islamic Republic of Iran. For the CIA to stage a coup built out of this bedrock would be the same as toppling Viktor Yanukovich in 2014 with Russian-speaking patriots from Donetsk instead of the neo-Nazis from Lviv who showed up in Kiev with guns. In other words, nonsense.

We have to grant agency to ordinary people; to do otherwise would be to subscribe to a type of Gnosticism where various intelligence agencies stand in for the demiurge.

My sense is that the mainstream reporting is generally correct. This is about rural vs. urban inequality, about Ahmadinejad vs. Rouhani, about domestic politics, a perspective bolstered by reports of former president Ahmadinejad's arrest.

Intelligence agencies are good at disinformation, sowing discord and dissension, co-opting already existing movements; creating campaigns from whole cloth . . . well, look at Timber Sycamore, an epic failure that might eventually be blamed for the dissolution of the European Union.