At MAGA Rally in Green Bay Trump Reveals He is Vulnerable on Saudi Arabia

At a MAGA rally in Green Bay on Saturday Trump attacked one of his two closest foreign allies, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Trump knows he's vulnerable with his base due to his administration's obvious kowtowing to the Kingdom. So he's lying through his teeth, telling his hayseed supporters that he read King Salman the riot act over the phone.

After Khashoggi, after vetoing the War Powers Act on Yemen, after scrapping the JCPOA, after backtracking on a complete troop withdrawal from Syria, Trump has lost all credibility as an opponent of permanent warfare. He won a razor-thin victory in 2016 by running to Hillary's left. He won't be able to do it again.

Can Trump win a national election with the votes of rubes only? 

No.

Spain's General Election Results Bad News for Neoliberals

Spain's general election took place yesterday. Turnout, at over 75%, was almost 10% higher than the last general election in 2016.

There are several takeaways, chief of which is that prime minister Pedro Sanchez's Socialists have figured out a way to staunch the bleeding on the center-left. And they did it by advocating greater social spending. Sanchez called the April 28 election after his anti-austerity budget was blocked by conservatives.

Now the Socialists are by far the largest party in the Congress of Deputies. It's nearest rival, the People's Party, suffered a catastrophic set back yesterday, losing 69 seats. The People's Party is at risk of being replaced by the center-right Ciudadanos as the second-largest political party in Spain. Ciudadanos picked up 25 seats and came within 220,000 votes of the People's Party.

Another takeaway is that Vox, the far-right, ultra-nationalist, anti-immigrant party, enters Congress for the first time with a little over 10% of the vote. Vox will hold 24 seats, about the number of seats (29) that Podemos lost, but hardly the juggernaut that the media made it out to be. Podemos still has nearly double the number of seats (42) as the far-right Vox.

Raphael Minder's "Socialists Strengthen Hold in Spain Election" is a good write-up, but he makes no mention of why Sanchez won.

I think it's pretty obvious. The Socialists won in Spain because they called for more social spending. It's a winning formula. And it points the way to victory for non-centrist, non-neoliberal Democrats in the United States.

Macron is a Bellwether for Neoliberal Politicians Everywhere

French president Emmanuel Macron held his first press conference on Thursday (see "Macron, Chastened by Yellow Vest Protests, Says ‘I Can Do Better’" by Adam Nossiter) after two years in office. He played the penitent and admitted to coming up short in his efforts to address the grievances of the Yellow Vests.

He promised to lower taxes by about $5.5 billion, put a stop to the vastly unpopular closing of rural schools and hospitals, peg pensions of less than $2,200 per month to inflation, and abolish one of the dominating institutions in French public life, ENA, or the National School for Administration, from which he and much of the government hierarchy have graduated.

Not insignificant but not in proportion to the mass uprising roiling France. How Macron proceeds is important because he is the one spectacular electoral achievement for peak neoliberalism post-Brexit and post-Trump. In other words, Macron is a bellwether for neoliberal politicians everywhere. If he's on the ropes and tossing gumdrops into the crowd, that's a bad sign for the global neoliberal consensus of the ruling elite and a good sign for the rest of us.

Enter Biden

Joe Biden's campaign announcement video is, believe it or not, quite good. He defines the 2020 presidential election in terms of the white supremacist Tiki-torch parade in Charlottesville, August 2017, a low point for Trump. Armageddon is coming and Biden promises to be our champion against the forces of evil.

It's effective, but it's doubtful that Biden can maintain that narrative throughout the primary, a narrative, which, as Alexander Burns notes in his professional write-up, "Joe Biden Announces 2020 Run for President," assumes a return to a pre-Trump steady state.

Rather than describe his political record or embrace left-wing policies that some Democrats and liberal activists are hungry for, Mr. Biden made a thematic attempt to define the Democratic primary in terms of a question: which candidate can beat Mr. Trump and restore normalcy.

But no such steady state existed. Trump was a reaction to a political system that embraces massive inequality and perpetual warfare.

Make no mistake. Biden will be formidable. I imagine he'll have support of most of the unions. The bonus offered by his entry into the presidential contest is that it will stress the contenders for the mantle of centrism. Hopefully Klobuchar, Harris and Buttigieg will take an immediate hit. Sanders, Gabbard and Warren will be unaffected at the outset because they don't draw their support from the same well.

Democrats Contra Sanders

If you want a sample of the attack that the Democratic Party will use against Bernie Sanders the closer we get to 2020 read Thomas Edsall's "Bernie Sanders Scares a Lot of People, and Quite a Few of Them Are Democrats."

Edsall interviewed professional Democrats -- pollsters, consultants, political scientists and economists -- allowing them to speak on background (why is that necessary?), and his findings reveal a party completely out of touch with reality.

The principal attack will be that Sanders can't win a general election because he is a "socialist." "Socialism" will scare off the mythical suburban moderate whose allegiance a presidential candidate must secure in order to win the White House.

Then Edsall tills the soil of Sanders' free-wheelin' '60s/early-'70s lifestyle, a lifestyle from a bygone era which will somehow disqualify Sanders with an electorate accustomed to presidential tales of balling Playboy bunnies and porn stars.

Then, in the last one-third of the article, Edsall explores Sanders' strengths, and a little reality is allowed to shine in:

Two large surveys — one by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the other by the Voter Study Group — showed that in 2016 12 percent of Sanders’ primary voters cast ballots for Trump in November. If Sanders could return a substantial share of that 12 percent, which translates roughly to 1.58 million voters, to the Democratic fold, it would significantly enhance the party’s prospects up and down the ticket.

On Monday, the Sanders campaign released internal campaign polling by Tulchin Research that shows that at the moment Sanders is running ahead of Trump in the three key industrial states that gave Trump his 2016 Electoral College victory.

When voters were asked, “If the election were held today, who would you vote for, Bernie Sanders, the Democrat, or Donald Trump, the Republican,” Sanders led 52-41 in Michigan, 52-42 in Wisconsin and 51-43 in Pennsylvania.

A double-digit lead in two out of the three states that Trump won by a narrow margin in 2016, handing him the White House -- that's the only argument you need about Bernie's chances in a genral election.

Extinction Rebellion Continues

There is a decent write-up by Robert Stevens of the ongoing Extinction Rebellion (XR) in London (see "Police arrest over 1,000 climate change protesters in London"):

More than 1,000 people have been arrested in London over the last seven days of climate change protests organised by the Extinction Rebellion (XR) group.

Protesters continued to peacefully occupy public spaces in the capital, including Parliament Square, Piccadilly Circus, Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus and Marble Arch, despite mounting and provocative police arrests.

[snip]

On Sunday, those gathered at Marble Arch were addressed by 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, whose protests outside Sweden’s parliament last year sparked the current wave of global strikes and demonstrations by school youth and students.

Thunberg, who will meet politicians, including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn over the next week, said to a standing ovation, “Despite all the beautiful words and promises. … For way too long the politicians and people in power have got away with not doing anything at all to fight the climate crisis and ecological crisis …”

She added, “We are now facing an existential crisis, the climate crisis and ecological crisis which have never been treated as crises before, they have been ignored for decades.”

The New York Times has generally ignored XR, though it did publish one story by Ceylan Yeginsu, one of the newspaper's better reporters, last week. Yeginsu made note of the demands of the Extinction Rebellion:

The group has three core demands of the British government: to “tell the truth” by declaring a climate and ecological emergency; to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025; and to create a citizens’ assembly to lead on climate issues.

[snip]

Whether intentional or not, their cause received a lift on Wednesday from Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, who warned the financial sector that it faced an existential threat from climate change and urged international banks to take immediate steps to prepare.

“As financial policymakers and prudential supervisors we cannot ignore the obvious physical risks before our eyes,” Mr. Carney wrote in a joint article with Francois Villeroy, the governor of the Banque De France, that was published in The Guardian newspaper.

Citing the threats to insurance companies and banks from the recent spate of storms, floods, fires and other natural disasters, he said, “Climate Change is a global problem, which requires global solutions, in which the whole financial sector has a central role to play.”

Good News: Ukrainians Reject U.S. Puppet Poroshenko

One can infer from the lack of coverage in "the newspaper of record" that yesterday's outcome of the presidential election in Ukraine (see "Ukraine Election: Volodymyr Zelensky, TV Comedian, Trounces President" by Andrew Higgins and Iuliia Mendel) is unwelcome in Washington, D.C.

Why? Lev Golinkin explains in The Nation (see "Ukraine’s Upcoming Election Pits a Deeply Unpopular President Against a TV Comedian"):

Thus far, Western media have focused on the “Isn’t this quirky?” aspect of an untested comedian about to become the leader of Ukraine. But there’s nothing quirky about it.

For millions of Ukrainian citizens mired in economic corruption, this election is anything but funny. Millions of rational people would rather take their chances with an untested comedian than the US-backed Poroshenko. That staggering decision behooves us to pay attention.

For the past five years, Ukraine played a central role in US foreign policy. Washington vigorously supported the 2013–14 Maidan uprising that ousted Viktor Yanukovych and brought Poroshenko to power. A bipartisan Who’s Who of Washington powerbrokers, including Senator John McCainand Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, hustled into Kiev to cheer on the uprising.

Five years later, the majority of Ukrainians are overwhelmingly rejecting that choice.

Indeed, it’s hard to consider this election as anything other than a referendum on not only Poroshenko’s presidency, but the entire US-backed Maidan project.

Higgins and Mendel report the extent of Poroshenko's overwhelming rejection:

KIEV, Ukraine — The comedian Volodymyr Zelensky won a landslide victory in Ukraine’s presidential election, according to official results with nearly all of the votes counted, making a comic actor with no experience in government or the military the commander in chief of a country that has been at war with Russian proxies for over five years.

With more than 95 percent of ballots cast on Sunday counted, Mr. Zelensky had won 73.17 percent of the vote, compared with just 24.5 percent for Petro O. Poroshenko, Ukraine’s incumbent president. Mr. Zelensky triumphed in every region, except for the area around the city of Lviv, a center of Ukrainian culture and nationalism in the west of the country.

Ukraine’s central election commission said that final official results might not be ready until April 30 because of the upcoming Orthodox Easter holidays.

Mr. Zelensky’s victory will give Ukraine its first Jewish leader and deliver a stinging rebuke to a political and business establishment represented by Mr. Poroshenko, a billionaire candy tycoon who campaigned on the nationalist slogan “Army, language, faith.”

Besides the issue of the systemic corruption of the oligarchy the presidential election was also a referendum on language. Zelensky speaks Russian not Ukrainian. A reader of The Times would be completely unaware of this because the few stories and opinion pieces devoted to the election made no mention of it.

A good story published by Politico at the end of March explains:

The usage of Ukrainian has boomed since the revolution, with a new law dictating that all schooling after the fifth grade onward must be in Ukrainian. Russian, meanwhile, has been demonized by some on the right as the “language of the enemy.”

Last year, overzealous city councilors from Ukraine’s western city of Lviv went as far as to ban Russian-language culture and media altogether — a move that occasioned a sharp rebuke from the country’s Western diplomatic community. “The Lviv [region] ban as formulated is narrow-minded, discriminatory and just plain dumb,” the Canadian ambassador to Ukraine, Roman Waschuk, tweeted at the time.

The ban was an outlier, but it struck the wrong tone in the country’s east and south, where Russian is still the predominant language. (The anti-government protests that preceded the war in the Donbas were set off by news that Ukraine’s parliament was considering repealing the status of Russian as a regional language).

A recent media law mandating Russian-language outlets to translate their content into Ukrainian has also ruffled feathers — and driven some sites out of business.

The coup in Kiev five years ago kicked off a great deal of turbulence in international affairs. Maybe the rejection of Poroshenko, Washington's man, is a favorable omen for our politics ahead.

The Mueller Report: When Things Fall Apart

The problem presented by the release of the redacted Mueller report for the massive disinformation campaign which is Russiagate, a.k.a., "Putin Stole my Election!" -- well, there are several problems -- is that Mueller clearly places the burden on Congress to act: No proof of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government (see Glenn Greenwald's "Robert Mueller Did Not Merely Reject the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theories. He Obliterated Them.," as well as his debate with David Cay Johnston). Obstruction of justice charges, if they are to be pursued, should be taken up by a co-equal branch of government.

But the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives will not begin impeachment proceedings because then there would have to be hearings, testimony given, witnesses cross-examined. All the fluff and gossip contained in the Steele dossier would go up in smoke.

So what are the Democrats to do? Their precious status as victims of Putin's evil machinations is fast disappearing.

The New York Times is busy re-conjuring the genie from his bottle. Yesterday's unsigned editorial -- "The Mueller Report and the Danger Facing American Democracy: A perceived victory for Russian interference poses a serious risk for the United States." -- restates that case against Russia:

The report of the special counsel Robert Mueller leaves considerable space for partisan warfare over the role of President Trump and his political campaign in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. But one conclusion is categorical: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”

What are we really talking about here? The Times itself acknowledges that "there is no way to gauge with any certainty how much impact the Russian activities actually had on voters."

We appear to be talking about a modest effort by the reputedly Kremlin controlled Internet Research Agency (IRA) to influence voters. We are supposed to believe that digital ads "purchased in rubles using 470 fake accounts and pages" could have had any impact at all in an election campaign where $6.5 billion was spent.

(My reply to cries of "Putin is dividing us!" is "That's the whole point of the two-party system," which usually generates a stunned silence.)

We are also talking about the DNC hack and Podesta hack, both of which, absent proof, are ascribed to Russian military intelligence. That's just baldly accepted; to question it, to request the evidence for the assertion, is to invite ridicule.

The reality is that all nations fiddle about with influence campaigns on the internet. For instance, close U.S. ally Saudi Arabia was caught red-handed running a botnet in the wake of Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance; Israel has waged cyber-warfare against the BDS movement; and let's not forget the fake Russian botnet created by Jonathon Morgan, a Russiagate conspiracy theorist and author of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia's use of social media during the 2016 election.

The Times editorial seems to acknowledge this by saying that it is the influence campaigns of "hostile" nations that are a threat to U.S. democracy:

A perceived victory for Russian interference poses a serious danger to the United States. Already, several American agencies are working, in partnership with the tech industry, to prevent election interference going forward. But the Kremlin is not the only hostile government mucking around in America’s cyberspace — China and North Korea are two others honing their cyber-arsenals, and they, too, could be tempted to manipulate partisan strife for their ends.

I'm surprised Iran wasn't mentioned, or Venezuela.

And that is what we're really talking about here: The establishment of a censorship regime for the new media environment.

In 2016 things got out of hand because voters no longer get their information from a trusted daily newspaper or the nightly television news. They get their information from the internet. The internet is too wild and woolly an environment to keep a nation of hundreds of millions pacified. Thus, the internet must be regulated.

And that's been happening under the cover of the Russian bogeyman. The tech companies are being brought to heel, to hunt and fetch for the master.

The problem is that the elite political consensus being protected is indefensible. People are miserable. The planet is undergoing a massive die-off. And all the rich want to do is get richer.

In the end, this counterintelligence campaign, this Russiagate, which is really a massive domestic pacification program like COINTELPRO, is going to have to resort to violence, and that's when things fall apart.

Democratic Panic

From "‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats Are Agonizing Over His Momentum" by Jonathan Martin:

WASHINGTON — When Leah Daughtry, a former Democratic Party official, addressed a closed-door gathering of about 100 wealthy liberal donors in San Francisco last month, all it took was a review of the 2020 primary rules to throw a scare in them.

Democrats are likely to go into their convention next summer without having settled on a presidential nominee, said Ms. Daughtry, who ran her party’s conventions in 2008 and 2016, the last two times the nomination was contested. And Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is well positioned to be one of the last candidates standing, she noted.

“I think I freaked them out,” Ms. Daughtry recalled with a chuckle, an assessment that was confirmed by three other attendees. They are hardly alone.

From canapé-filled fund-raisers on the coasts to the cloakrooms of Washington, mainstream Democrats are increasingly worried that their effort to defeat President Trump in 2020 could be complicated by Mr. Sanders, in a political scenario all too reminiscent of how Mr. Trump himself seized the Republican nomination in 2016.

It’s truly remarkable. Elite Democratic donors and apparatchiks are shitting in their pants over the possibility of Bernie’s nomination.

It appears they are taking a brokered convention for granted because of the massive frontloading of the primary season. Then, after the first ballot, the superdelegates can vote. So it looks to be a mess in the making.

But not nearly as much of a mess if Bernie wins the primary in a rout. Then I think it’s a pretty safe bet some of these billionaire Dem donors will back a third-party run by Bloomberg or someone else.

Whatever the cost they will block a socialist from winning the presidency.

Trump Vetoes Yemen War Powers Resolution; Sledgehammers his Base

Take a look at the reader comments accompanying the Breitbart story on Trump's veto of the War Powers Resolution ending U.S. involvement in the Yemen civil war. They are almost 100% opposed to the veto.

Much is made about Trump's canniness in keeping his base tightly bound to him. And it's true. Trump has been good at shoveling red meat to his supporters. But working class white reactionaries do not approve of the Saudi royal family; they loathe them.

Attacking little Ilhan Omar comes off as all the more unseemly and perverse when Trump time and again is pictured in flagrante licking Saudi boots.

Trump's veto takes a sledgehammer to his conservative base. As Mark Landler and Peter Baker remind us in "Trump Vetoes Measure to Force End to U.S. Involvement in Yemen War," the Yemen War Powers resolution was co-sponsored by arch-Trump Republicans:

“This is deeply disappointing,” said Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who was one of the original sponsors of the measure in the House and had sought a meeting with Mr. Trump to try to persuade him to sign it.

“The president had the opportunity to sign a historic War Powers Resolution and stand with a bipartisan coalition, including his allies Rand Paul, Mark Meadows and Matt Gaetz, to stop endless wars,” Mr. Khanna said. “He failed to uphold the principles of the Constitution that give Congress power over matters of war and peace.”

Mr. Khanna was referring to the Republican senator from Kentucky, Mr. Paul, and two Republican representatives, from North Carolina and Florida, Mr. Meadows and Mr. Gaetz, who are closely aligned with Mr. Trump, but split with fellow Republicans to vote with Democrats in favor of the resolution. Members of the group had asked to meet with Mr. Trump to make their case against a veto, but the White House brushed them off.

Trump is gambling that Yemen disappears as a campaign issue a year from now. His veto guarantees that it won't, particularly if the Sanders runaway train continues to gain speed.

The American Independent Party is Still Around After Half a Century

There was this interesting blurb from yesterday's Water Cooler by Lambert Strether:

CA: “California Voters Keep Accidentally Joining George Wallace’s Zombie Political Party” [New York Magazine]. “An April 2016 Los Angeles Times report showing that a vast number of indies who should have been registering as ‘No Party Preference’ voters were instead signing up for the [American Independent Party, a hold-over from the Wallace campaign in 1968]…. it certainly did not help the Sanders campaign, which was counting on indie votes…. If there’s a 20-candidate presidential field and Sanders or somebody else is counting on indies to get them across the line in California, they’d better start getting the word on about the AIP pretty soon.”

Who would have imagined that the American Independent Party exists more than 50 years after the 1968 presidential election. It seems to be limited to California; headquartered in Vacaville.

Last night, thinking about the 2020 presidential campaign, I wondered, If Wallace had somehow managed to get elected in 1968, could he have won a second term in 1972?

Because in many ways Trump's presidency is as if George Wallace had been elected, the main difference being that, as Michael Moore does a good job reminding us in his film Fahrenheit 11/9, Trump won in 2016 by running to Hillary's left on a host of issues, particularly war and peace. George Wallace, with General Curtis LeMay on his ticket in '68, ran as an unrepentant war-pig.

But all of Trump's left-progressive packaging has been ripped off after two-plus years in the White House.

As I drifted off to sleep I thought the only chance that Trump has is if the Democratic Party comes to the rescue. This is not out of the realm of possibility. If Sanders win's the primary, Democratic Party leaders might see their best hope of survival the sabotage of his candidacy.

The Conflict at the Core of Mainstream Assange Coverage

The jubilation found last week in the mainstream media upon Julian Assange's arrest has given way to a more ominous assessment. A good example is Michelle Goldberg's opinion piece "Is Assange’s Arrest a Threat to the Free Press?" While Goldberg relishes the jailing of a principal Russiagate conspirator, most of her column is spent arguing that the U.S. indictment of the Assange is very bad news for press freedom:

“It was part of the conspiracy that Assange and Manning took measures to conceal Manning as the source of the disclosure of classified records to WikiLeaks,” says the indictment. Most if not all investigative journalists take such measures to protect their sources. The indictment says, “It was part of the conspiracy that Assange encouraged Manning to provide information and records from departments and agencies of the United States.” Journalists often do this when they urge whistle-blowers to come forward. “It was part of the conspiracy that Assange and Manning used a special folder on a cloud drop box of WikiLeaks” to transmit classified information, the indictment continues. Like many news organizations, The New York Times does something similar, soliciting tips through an encrypted submission system called SecureDrop.

There is a conflict at the core of how the mainstream media is covering Assange's arrest. On the one hand, there is a recognition that the U.S. indictment of the WikiLeaks co-founder paves the way for arrests of reporters who work for legacy media outlets; on the other, Assange continues to be demonized, a good example of which is "As Ecuador Harbored Assange, It Was Subjected to Threats and Leaks," by Nicholas Casey and Jo Becker. The reader is supposed to feel pity for poor Lenin Moreno who had photos leaked of his eating lobster in bed. All I came away feeling was that it was likely the CIA or an allied intelligence service hacked Moreno so that WikiLeaks would take the blame and Assange would be ousted from his refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy.

It will be interesting to see how this conflict plays out. The mainstream media exists primarily to paint villains for the government; but in the case of Assange, to continue to do so will further destabilize an already shaky newspaper industry.

Nicholas Kristof should be in Prison, Not Julian Assange

For a good example of the absolutely decrepit state of mainstream opinion writing read Nicholas Kristof's embarrassing "Hungry and Desperate, but Away From a Country in Chaos."

The template remains unchanged: A nation's people are being brutalized by its leadership. So the enlightened, benign United States must intervene in that country to replace its leaders with ones of its own choosing.

What always goes unmentioned is that a majority of the citizens of the targeted country doesn't want its leaders evicted by the United States. What also goes unmentioned is that the leaders selected by the U.S. favor privatizing their country's assets.

As Kristof proudly proclaimed in the aftermath of Muammar Gaddafi's ouster in 2011:

I’m a believer in humanitarian intervention to avert genocide or mass atrocities — when the stars align, as I believe they did in Libya — so maybe I’m deluding myself to justify our bombing campaign. Yet it seems to me that the NATO military intervention prevented a massacre in Benghazi, saved countless Libyan lives and has put the country on a track of hope.

Countries like the United States, France, Britain and Qatar did something historic in supporting a military operation that was largely about preserving lives, not national interests. While plenty can still go wrong, my sense is that Libya is muddling along toward a future far better than its oppressive past.

In the years that followed, when Libya descended into civil war and chaos, Kristof changed his tune and became critical of the "humanitarian intervention," not only there but in Syria as well.

The important thing to note here is that Kristof's change of tune on Libya and Syria never translates into an aversion to making another call for a new regimen change operation.

This is also the case with Kristof's fellow columnist Thomas Friedman, who supported the invasion of Iraq, only to acknowledge later that he was wrong, but then ended up arguing for the removal of Assad in Syria.

People like Kristof and Friedman are not really independent thinkers. They are Borgs. They will always advocate for whatever war is being boosted at the moment, to fall back later, in order to maintain any credibility at all, and criticize the intervention, as Kristof does persuasively now with the war in Yemen.

New York Times Attempts to Link Assange to Russiagate

What's odd about the main dispatch on Julian Assange's arrest published by The New York Times  (see "Julian Assange Arrested on U.S. Extradition Warrant, London Police Say" by Richard Pérez-Peña) is that the center of the story is all about Russiagate, capped by this paragraph:

“The big questions that it seems like he should be able to answer are about the relationships between WikiLeaks and the Russian government and between Roger Stone and the Trump campaign,” said Scott R. Anderson, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an editor of the online publication Lawfare, who has tracked the investigation. “There are certainly a lot of factual gaps that it seems like Assange could help fill.”

Then you have to read 14 more paragraphs until arriving at the final two paragraphs:

During the 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks released thousands of emailsstolen from the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee, leading to a series of revelations that embarrassed the party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. United States investigators have said that the systems were hacked by Russian agents.

Mr. Assange made no secret of his intent to damage Mrs. Clinton, but he has insisted that he did not get the emails from Russia.

The whole "Stone worked with Assange, and therefore the Russians, to sabotage the Clinton campaign" line is a complete canard. Mueller could have interviewed Assange and elected not to. What does that tell you?

It tells you that the excessive focus on Russiagate and the allegations of Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno are meant to disparage the character of Assange and bias readers against him.

There is no mention of the UN's finding that Assange was being arbitrarily detained and that the UK must allow him to leave the Ecuadorian embassy freely.

There is no mention of the absurd Luke Harding story published by The Guardian alleging a meeting between Assange and Paul Manafort at the Ecuadorian embassy.

There is precious little mention -- a couple paragraphs -- of the trove of U.S. Government filth Assange published in 2010.

Trump Might Have Helped Reelect Netanyahu but He Harmed His Own Chances for a Second Term

In the endless media discussion of Trump's alleged collusion with Russia what is almost never noted because it is wholly taken for granted is Trump's collusion with another foreign power, Israel.

It appears that Trump was successful in getting Benjamin Netanyahu reelected prime minister. Though it unclear at this point if Likud has won more seats than the upstart Blue and White alliance, and many twists and turns remain before Netanyahu can announce the formation of a new government, nonetheless the consensus -- from The New York Times to the World Socialist Web Site -- is that the right and far-right parties won more seats than the center and left parties.

Trump was critical in boosting right-wing turnout in the weeks running up to yesterday's election because 1) he recognized Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights; 2) he declared Iran's IRGC a terrorist organization; and 3) he remained silent when Netanyahu promised to annex large chunks of the West Bank. Short of invading Iran, there is not much more Trump could have done for his patron Sheldon Adelson.

The U.S. political system is completely in the thrall of Israel. Yes, the Trump administration is upending the two-state solution, but you don't see much of a reaction from Democrats in Congress. The only notable reaction was when one of their own, Ilhan Omar, a freshman Democrat from Minneapolis, had the temerity to refuse to pledge allegiance to Israel.

The good news here? Though Netanyahu benefited from Trump's moves, Trump will not. Trump believes that Israel is popular with American voters. It is not. Trump is confusing hard-shell evangelicals and Sheldon Adelson for the U.S. electorate as a whole.

Unless Trump's labeling of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is merely cosmetic, the fallout from this decision alone will prevent his reelection. Voters absolutely do not want another Middle East war.

Peace Agreement with Taliban Needs to be Concluded by End of Summer

With the blessing of proconsul Zalmay Khalilzad, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has created a "big tent" council to oversee negotiations with the Taliban. As Mujib Mashal and Fahim Abed point out in "Afghans Name Council to Ease Logjam on Talks With Taliban" heretofore the Taliban have refused to speak with official from Ghani's government:

The Taliban have refused to meet directly with representatives of the Afghan government, calling it a puppet of the United States. The Afghan government has insisted on nothing less than direct negotiations, criticizing any move by political groups to engage with the Taliban as giving the insurgents unwarranted legitimacy.

[snip] 

Mohammed Umer Daudzai, a member of the council, said an informal meeting with the Taliban in Qatar, seen as an icebreaker, would go ahead. That meeting, set for mid-April and expected to be attended by more than a hundred Afghans from various parts of society, is intended as a trust-building measure.

“It was decided in today’s meeting that we will participate in the meeting in Qatar as a joint delegation,” Mr. Daudzai said. “A big delegation will go to Qatar to exchange views with the other side, which are the Taliban, but they will not negotiate. Negotiation is the next step.”

Easing Mr. Ghani’s concerns is the fact that since he leads the council overseeing the talks, his officials will be on the negotiating team when direct talks with the Taliban do begin. Government representatives are also likely to attend the large Qatar meeting.

The Taliban will get around their prohibition of negotiating with the puppet government by saying that they are dealing not with official representatives but people acting in an individual capacity.

The criticism of this "icebreaker" in Qatar is that it is merely a repeat of the February meeting in Moscow between "Afghan political elites" and the Taliban that was repudiated by Ghani. The only difference now is that Ghani is a major participant in the charade.

It is hard to see how Ghani survives. The presidential election has already been delayed twice this year; it is now set for September 28.

I am of the opinion that whatever ruse is hatched between the Taliban and the U.S. to hand over power it has to be completed before the end of summer because there is a very limited capacity to stage a viable presidential election.

"Rectal Feeding" Back in the News

A story published in the national print edition of the Saturday New York Times describes the ongoing U.S. military commission trials of Al Qaeda detainees apprehended post-9/11. As Carol Rosenberg reports in "Guantánamo Trials Grapple With How Much Evidence to Allow About Torture," admission of torture by the United States Government at the black sites it operated overseas remains a sticking point:

Seventeen-and-a-half years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and a decade after President Barack Obama ordered the C.I.A. to dismantle any remnants of its global prison network, the military commission system is still wrestling with how to handle evidence of what the United States did to the Qaeda suspects it held at C.I.A. black sites. While the topic of torture can now be discussed in open court, there is still a dispute about how evidence of it can be gathered and used in the proceedings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

By law, prosecutors cannot use evidence gained through torture — or any other involuntary statements — at the war court, where eight of Guantánamo’s 40 prisoners are accused of being complicit in terrorist attacks. Prosecutors have made clear that nothing the defendants said at the black sites will be used as evidence.

But defense lawyers have continued to press for details of what happened to their clients and to be able to use the information either to fight the charges or to win more lenient sentencing. And they have been aided by changing circumstances, not least the government’s declassification of some details of how the prisoners were interrogated by the C.I.A.

Rosenberg describes the torture of one Qaeda foot soldier, Majid Khan:

The topic of his torture was strictly taboo on Feb. 29, 2012, when he made his first court appearance since disappearing from his native Pakistan in 2003 at age 23. At that first hearing, Mr. Khan, who lived in suburban Baltimore for seven years and graduated from high school there in 1999, admitted to volunteering to work for Al Qaeda after Sept. 11 and plotting with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused architect of the attacks.

But in the intervening years, the Obama administration declassified details of what Mr. Khan said the C.I.A. did to him. By his account, he was beaten, hung naked from a wooden beam for three days with no food, kept for months in darkness, and submerged, shackled and hooded, into a tub of ice and water.

Additional details of his treatment were revealed in the partly declassified introduction to a Senate study of the George W. Bush administration’s black site program. In his second year of C.I.A. detention, according to a cable cited in the study, the agency “infused” a purée of pasta, sauce, nuts, raisins and hummus up Mr. Khan’s rectum, because he went on a hunger strike.

The C.I.A. calls this “rectal feeding.” Defense lawyers call it rape.

Mr. Khan’s lawyers now want to call witnesses and gather evidence to show his sentencing jury what happened to him.

Prosecutors are resisting divulging any information on how the black sites were operated, probably because they are still in existence, just not at the same locations.

Trump Guarantees Himself a One-Term Presidency if He Vetoes the War Powers Act Resolution on Yemen

AP has an extensive story (see Ahmed al-Haj's "Cholera is surging once again in war-ravaged Yemen") about a doubling of reported cholera cases in Yemen.

It took a while but yesterday the U.S. House of Representatives voted to end military involvement in Yemen (see Catie Edmondson's "U.S. Role in Yemen War Will End Unless Trump Issues Second Veto"),

What was particularly encouraging about the vote is that the GOP's ultimate nullifier, crying wolf over anti-Semitism in form of an anti-BDS amendment, failed to work this go-round. There was Democratic unity. The War Powers Act resolution passed 247-to-176, "with 16 Republicans joining all House Democrats."

Now it is on to the White House for a promised Trump veto, which will amount to a new presidential power to declare war unilaterally with a mere one-third support in either chamber of congress.

The silver lining of a veto is that it will be political suicide for Trump; it will box him in with his hard-shell minority, a base from which he cannot win a national election.

A veto will also create a legitimate, non-Mueller-oriented movement to impeach Trump for waging an illegal war.

Biden's #MeToo Problem

Joe Biden released a video yesterday (see "Joe Biden, in Video, Says He Will Be ‘More Mindful’ of Personal Space" by Sydney Ember and Jonathan Martin) where he says, by way of summing up the nearly one-week's-worth of stories of women coming forward saying that the former vice president touched or kissed them inappropriately, that “Social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted, and the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset and I get it. I get it. I hear what they’re saying.”

Having read most of Sydney Ember's reporting on Biden's #MeToo dust-up, I'm inclined to accept Uncle Joe's assessment. We gone from revelations of predatory, quid-pro-quo sexual behavior, not to mention allegations of rape, by Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein, which kicked off #MeToo less than two-years ago, to complaints, in Joe Biden's case, about hands on shoulders and kisses on the top of the head.

The #MeToo goalposts have moved and moved quickly.

Women have yet to come forward and accuse Biden of sexual assault. Trump has faced numerous credible accusations of sexual assault; he even gloated about it on camera.

The manhandling politician probably goes back to the founding of the republic. What's changed, and changed in the last two years, is that women -- not all women, but a lot -- don't want intimate physical contact as part of the price of being in public.

My sense is that this will blow over, as did the Bernie Sanders #MeToo specter that Sydney Ember attempted to conjure up, and Joe Biden will enter the race in a formidable manner.

What's interesting is that there is so much institutional opposition to Biden's candidacy. Biden seems to me the only candidate who can take on Bernie at this point. And if we accept as fact that the Democratic Party wants to block a Sanders nomination at all costs, I don't know why there is so much boosterism in the mainstream media for Beto, Buttigieg and Harris.

Ted Rall Defines Russiagate

Craig Murray posted this Ted Rall cartoon the other day in "Muellergate and the Discreet Lies of the Bourgeoisie."

Elizabeth Warren's Presidential Campaign Already in Trouble

The New York Times reported the other day (see "Elizabeth Warren Loses Finance Director as She Struggles in Early Fund-Raising" by Astead Herndon and Jonathan Martin) that Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign is already in trouble. Though her first-quarter fundraising totals have not been announced, Warren's finance director, Michael Pratt, quit after Warren made the decision to forego big-ticket fundraisers which cater to the wealthy and rely instead on small donations:

Ms. Warren’s most immediate challenge, though, may be money. She raised only $299,000 in the first day of her candidacy, far below the $5.9 million and $6.1 million Mr. Sanders and Mr. O’Rourke brought in for the same period and also less than Ms. Harris. In emails to supporters, asking for as little as $3, her campaign flatly says her rivals will post “fund-raising figures we won’t be able to match.”

And after demonstrating little capacity to raise cash online, Ms. Warren effectively doubled down on small-dollar contributions, announcing last month that she would no longer hold big-money fund-raisers or seek wealthy donors to bundle hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks.

She cast it as a decision long in the making that will offer her more time with voters. In truth, she made the choice only after a robust debate inside her campaign that led to the resignation of her finance director, Michael Pratt, who strenuously objected to the idea.

At a Valentine’s Day meeting at Ms. Warren’s Washington condominium that began with a heart-shaped cake but soon grew heated, Mr. Pratt noted that campaigns often collapse when they run out of money and pleaded with her not to cut off a significant cash stream, according to Democrats briefed on the conversation. He pointed out that winning over wealthy fund-raisers across the country helped build networks that could translate into political support, not just checks.

But Mr. Pratt lost the argument to two of Ms. Warren’s closest advisers, Dan Geldon and Joe Rospars, who made the case about standing apart from the field and freeing up her schedule.

I admit to being intrigued by Warren's candidacy. She has led in terms of progressive policy ideas. Unfortunately, after reading her article in Foreign Affairs, "A Foreign Policy for All," I can only conclude that she is a fraud. She says she wants something different and then she embraces confrontation of Russia and China.

We'll have to wait and see what she reports for the first quarter, but early indications are that once she burns though the $10 million she transferred from her senate campaign, she'll basically be kaput.