June 11, 2016


News and Views


https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-senator-david-perdue-pray-obamas-days-few-172000351--politics.html

GOP Sen. David Perdue: Pray that Obama's 'days be few'
MATTHEW DALY, Associated Press
June 10, 2016

Photograph -- Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga. addresses the Road to Majority Conference in Washington, Friday, June 10, 2016. Perdue told conservatives they should pray for President Barack Obama and suggested a biblical passage that says, "Let his days be few." (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)


WASHINGTON (AP) — A Republican senator told conservatives Friday they should pray for President Barack Obama and suggested a biblical passage that says, "Let his days be few."

Georgia Sen. David Perdue told a gathering of religious conservatives that "we need to be very specific about how we pray." He suggested using Psalms 109:8, which reads: "Let his days be few, and let another have his office."

As the audience at the Faith & Freedom Coalition's "Road to Majority" conference laughed and applauded, Perdue said, "In all seriousness, I believe that America is at a moment of crisis."

The next lines of the Psalm read: "Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow."

Kristen Orthman, a spokeswoman for Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, said Perdue's comments "left the impression he was praying for the death of President Obama."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., followed Perdue on stage "and did not condemn him," Orthman said. "If Republicans are still wondering why Donald Trump is their nominee, look no further than today's Faith and Freedom conference," she said.

Megan Whittemore, a spokeswoman for Perdue, said the senator told the Faith & Freedom audience that, "We are called to pray for our country, for our leaders and for our president."

Perdue "in no way wishes harm toward our president, and everyone in the room understood that," Whittemore said.

A spokesman for McConnell said the senator was not on stage when Perdue made the comment.

At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest said that "as Sen. Perdue considers whether an apology is appropriate, there are a variety of other scriptures he might consult."



“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., followed Perdue on stage "and did not condemn him," Orthman said. "If Republicans are still wondering why Donald Trump is their nominee, look no further than today's Faith and Freedom conference," she said. …. Megan Whittemore, a spokeswoman for Perdue, said the senator told the Faith & Freedom audience that, "We are called to pray for our country, for our leaders and for our president."


This is very much like one of my favorite lines from Fiddler On the Roof, in which a villager asks their leader, the Rabbi, is there a prayer for the Tsar, and he says “May God bless and keep the Tsar ‘far away from us!'” If you want to think back on that wonderful play, go to http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067093/quotes, Fiddler on the Roof (1971).



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/11/us/politics/sanders-campaign.html?_r=0

Bernie Sanders to Meet With His Inner Circle on Sunday
By YAMICHE ALCINDOR
JUNE 10, 2016

Photograph -- Senator Bernie Sanders addressed supporters at a rally in Washington on Thursday. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times


Senator Bernie Sanders plans to meet with several of his most important supporters and advisers in Burlington, Vt., on Sunday, as he faces increasing pressure to drop out of the Democratic presidential race.

The Vermont senator and his wife, Jane, will both attend the meeting that will center, in part, on the state of the race.

“He and Jane invited a couple dozen key supporters from around the country to come to Burlington,” Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Mr. Sanders, said. “It will be a broad-ranging discussion.”

While Hillary Clinton now has enough delegates to clinch the nomination, Mr. Sanders has refused to concede.

President Obama endorsed Mrs. Clinton on Thursday and called her the most qualified candidate ever to seek the White House, imploring Democrats to unite behind her. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who had carefully stayed out of the race, also endorsed Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Briggs said Mr. Sanders was committed to remaining in the race at least through Tuesday, when Washington, D.C., will hold the final contest of the primary season. He also said Mr. Sanders might be traveling back to campaign in Washington before its primary.

Mr. Sanders may be staying in the race to pressure the Democratic Party to inject more progressive ideals — like the call for a $15 federal minimum wage — into the Democratic platform at the national convention next month.

Meanwhile, he did not utter Mrs. Clinton’s name at a Thursday night rally he held in Washington, and he has not commented on Mrs. Clinton’s new endorsements.



http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/democrats-will-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-brush-with-bernie-20160609

Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie
Instead of a reality check for the party, it'll be smugness redoubled
By Matt Taibbi
June 9, 2016

Photograph -- Bernie Sanders at a campaign rally in Santa Monica, California, Tuesday. Marcus Yam/Getty
Photograph -- Bernie Sanders Speaking Harry Reid Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid speaking with Bernie Sanders in D.C. this week. Alex Brandon/AP


Years ago, over many beers in a D.C. bar, a congressional aide colorfully described the House of Representatives, where he worked.

It's "435 heads up 435 asses," he said.

I thought of that person yesterday, while reading the analyses of Hillary Clinton's victories Tuesday night. The arrival of the first female presidential nominee was undoubtedly a huge moment in American history and something even the supporters of Bernie Sanders should recognize as significant and to be celebrated. But the Washington media's assessment of how we got there was convoluted and self-deceiving.

This was no ordinary primary race, not a contest between warring factions within the party establishment, á la Obama-Clinton in '08 or even Gore-Bradley in '00. This was a barely quelled revolt that ought to have sent shock waves up and down the party, especially since the Vote of No Confidence overwhelmingly came from the next generation of voters. Yet editorialists mostly drew the opposite conclusion.

The classic example was James Hohmann's piece in the Washington Post, titled, "Primary wins show Hillary Clinton needs the left less than pro-Sanders liberals think."

Hohmann's thesis was that the "scope and scale" of Clinton's wins Tuesday night meant mainstream Democrats could now safely return to their traditional We won, screw you posture of "minor concessions" toward the "liberal base."

Hohmann focused on the fact that with Bernie out of the way, Hillary now had a path to victory that would involve focusing on Trump's negatives. Such a strategy won't require much if any acquiescence toward the huge masses of Democratic voters who just tried to derail her candidacy. And not only is the primary scare over, but Clinton and the centrist Democrats in general are in better shape than ever.

"Big picture," Hohmann wrote, "Clinton is running a much better and more organized campaign than she did in 2008."

Then there was Jonathan Capehart, also of the Post, whose "This is how Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the same person" piece describes Sanders as a "stubborn outsider" who "shares the same DNA" as Donald Trump. Capeheart snootily seethes that both men will ultimately pay a karmic price for not knowing their places.

"In the battle of the outsider egos storming the political establishment, Trump succeeded where Sanders failed," he wrote. "But the chaos unleashed by Trump's victory could spell doom for the GOP all over the ballot in November. Pardon me while I dab that single tear trickling down my cheek."

If they had any brains, Beltway Dems and their clucky sycophants like Capeheart would not be celebrating this week. They ought to be horrified to their marrow that the all-powerful Democratic Party ended up having to dig in for a furious rally to stave off a quirky Vermont socialist almost completely lacking big-dollar donors or institutional support.

They should be freaked out, cowed and relieved, like the Golden State Warriors would be if they needed a big fourth quarter to pull out a win against Valdosta State.

But to read the papers in the last two days is to imagine that we didn't just spend a year witnessing the growth of a massive grassroots movement fueled by loathing of the party establishment, with some correspondingly severe numerical contractions in the turnout department (though she won, for instance, Clinton received 30 percent fewer votes in California this year versus 2008, and 13 percent fewer in New Jersey).

The twin insurgencies of Trump and Sanders this year were equally a blistering referendum on Beltway politics. But the major-party leaders and the media mouthpieces they hang out with can't see this, because of what that friend of mine talked about over a decade ago: Washington culture is too far up its own backside to see much of anything at all.

In D.C., a kind of incestuous myopia very quickly becomes part of many political jobs. Congressional aides in particular work ridiculous hours for terrible pay and hang out almost exclusively with each other. About the only recreations they can afford are booze, shop-talk, and complaining about constituents, who in many offices are considered earth's lowest form of life, somewhere between lichens and nematodes.

It's somewhat understandable. In congressional offices in particular, people universally dread picking up the phone, because it's mostly only a certain kind of cable-addicted person with too much spare time who calls a politician's office.

"Have you ever called your congressman? No, because you have a job!" laughs Paul Thacker, a former Senate aide currently working on a book about life on the Hill. Thacker recounts tales of staffers rushing to turn on Fox News once the phones start ringing, because "the people" are usually only triggered to call Washington by some moronic TV news scare campaign.

In another case, Thacker remembers being in the office of the senator of a far-Northern state, watching an aide impatiently conduct half of a constituent phone call. "He was like, 'Uh huh, yes, I understand.' Then he'd pause and say, 'Yes, sir,' again. This went on for like five minutes," recounts Thacker.

Finally, the aide firmly hung up the phone, reared back and pointed accusingly at the receiver. "And you are from fucking Missouri!" he shouted. "Why are you calling me?"

These stories are funny, but they also point to a problem. Since The People is an annoying beast, young pols quickly learn to be focused entirely on each other and on their careers. They get turned on by the narrative of Beltway politics as a cool power game, and before long are way too often reaching for Game of Thrones metaphors to describe their jobs. Eventually, the only action that matters is inside the palace.

Voter concerns rapidly take a back seat to the daily grind of the job. The ideal piece of legislation in almost every case is a Frankensteinian policy concoction that allows the sponsoring pol to keep as many big-money donors in the fold as possible without offending actual human voters to the point of a ballot revolt.

This dynamic is rarely explained to the public, but voters on both sides of the aisle have lately begun guessing at the truth, and spent most of the last year letting the parties know it in the primaries. People are sick of being thought of as faraway annoyances who only get whatever policy scraps are left over after pols have finished servicing the donors they hang out with at Redskins games.

Democratic voters tried to express these frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen. Instead, they'll convince themselves that, as Hohmann's Post article put it, Hillary's latest victories mean any "pressure" they might have felt to change has now been "ameliorated."

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.

This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It's exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.

But they won't do that, because they don't see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters.

Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line.

Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power. And the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, the crisis is over. No person, no problem.

This inability to grasp that the problem is bigger than Bernie Sanders is a huge red flag. As Thacker puts it, the theme of this election year was widespread anger toward both parties, and both the Trump craziness and the near-miss with Sanders should have served as a warning. "The Democrats should be worried they're next," he says.

But they're not worried. Behind the palace walls, nobody ever is.

"Our major success so far is laying out a broad progressive agenda," says Bernie Sanders. Watch Sanders' campaign.



“This was no ordinary primary race, not a contest between warring factions within the party establishment, á la Obama-Clinton in '08 or even Gore-Bradley in '00. This was a barely quelled revolt that ought to have sent shock waves up and down the party, especially since the Vote of No Confidence overwhelmingly came from the next generation of voters. Yet editorialists mostly drew the opposite conclusion. …. Then there was Jonathan Capehart, also of the Post, whose "This is how Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the same person" piece describes Sanders as a "stubborn outsider" who "shares the same DNA" as Donald Trump. Capeheart snootily seethes that both men will ultimately pay a karmic price for not knowing their places. …. They ought to be horrified to their marrow that the all-powerful Democratic Party ended up having to dig in for a furious rally to stave off a quirky Vermont socialist almost completely lacking big-dollar donors or institutional support. …. Voter concerns rapidly take a back seat to the daily grind of the job. The ideal piece of legislation in almost every case is a Frankensteinian policy concoction that allows the sponsoring pol to keep as many big-money donors in the fold as possible without offending actual human voters to the point of a ballot revolt. This dynamic is rarely explained to the public, but voters on both sides of the aisle have lately begun guessing at the truth, and spent most of the last year letting the parties know it in the primaries. …. But they won't do that, because they don't see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters. Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line.”


“This inability to grasp that the problem is bigger than Bernie Sanders is a huge red flag. As Thacker puts it, the theme of this election year was widespread anger toward both parties, and both the Trump craziness and the near-miss with Sanders should have served as a warning. "The Democrats should be worried they're next," he says. But they're not worried. Behind the palace walls, nobody ever is.”

Thank you, Rolling Stone! This says it all. I wasn’t attracted to Sanders because he’s so handsome, (though he is a pretty cute guy), but because he is saying what needs to be said, and he really means to do something about it.



The anti-Jewish Internet

SEE Video–
ALTRIGHTMEDIA, Patrick I Buchanan, State of Emergency, the Third World Invasion and Conquest of America

Pat Buchanan- Decline and Fall of Civilizations

Patrick J. Buchanan discusses the perilous position Western Civilization finds itself in and how the same problems we face today in fact brought down Ancient Rome.

youtube.com 8:42 1 year ago



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/neo-nazis-tag-jews-on-twitter-harassment-hate-speech-politics/

Neo-Nazis tag (((Jews))) on Twitter as hate speech, politics collide
By SHANIKA GUNARATNA CBS NEWS
June 10, 2016, 7:23 PM

Photograph -- Former KKK leader David Duke, seen here in a 2004 file photo, has blamed Jewish reporters for opposing Donald Trump's campaign. Other white supremacists have found new ways to harass Jews on social media. AP PHOTO/BURT STEEL, FILE
Play VIDEO -- Trump on KKK: “Hate groups are not for me”
Play VIDEO -- President Obama: "We are all Jews"


In a stark reminder that anti-Semitism is alive and kicking in the digital realm, neo-Nazis have developed a peculiar symbol -- triple parentheses -- to label and harass Jews online. It may sound like a trivial gesture, but this one symbol speaks volumes about much larger issues: the overlap between Trump supporters and white supremacists, how Twitter polices hate speech, and the vitriol being directed at Jewish reporters who cover politics in America today.

Here's what you need to know

In recent weeks, several highly visible Jewish political reporters have reported a barrage of online harassment, much of which has come from supporters of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. The uptick is hard to measure, but through the sea of tweets one symbol has emerged: triple parentheses placed around their names.

In the white supremacist blogosphere, triple parentheses represent "echoes" -- a nod to the belief that Jewish names "echo" throughout history to punish whites for their sins.

Think of the parentheses as the digital equivalent of the yellow star, the symbol Jews were mandated to wear in Nazi Germany starting in 1939. The yellow star was one of "many psychological tactics aimed at isolating and dehumanizing the Jews of Europe, directly making them different (i.e. inferior) to everyone else," according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Center. Those who failed or refused to wear their badges risked punishment, including death. In separating Jews from the rest of the population, the symbolic stars paved the way for Jews to be segregated, ghettoized, deported and eventually murdered at a scale of 6 million.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has noticed the "echoes" symbol being used to attack Jews online and recently added it to its database of hate symbols, which is used by some law enforcement.

"It's on the radar," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in an interview with CBS News. He added that it's "the most salient and timely example" of a larger atmosphere of hate that has emerged this presidential campaign season.

Why this is a problem for Twitter

The triple parentheses symbol is not easily searchable, since most search engines omit punctuation from results. For instance, a Twitter search for it produces the result "Sorry, you entered an invalid query. Please try your search again." Thus, the slur slips under the radar, a coded language that anti-Semites can use without much fear of being easily identified and reported or having their accounts suspended. In short: anti-Semites have found a loophole in Twitter, and they're using it.

Critics note that, if Twitter specifically monitored the (((echoes))) symbol, it could potentially shut down at least this one manifestation of hate speech. Twitter could also make the term searchable.

In general, the social media platform monitors and shuts down hate speech on a tweet by tweet or account by account basis. Following Twitter's official policies, users "may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease." The platform says it will ban accounts "whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories."

However, Twitter has acknowledged in the past that its policies often fall short. "We suck at dealing with abuse," then-CEO Dick Costolo said in an internal memo obtained by The Verge last year.

New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman, who wrote about receiving hateful tweets from a user called @CyberTrump, said Wednesday he's abandoning Twitter entirely.

Follow
(((Jon Weisman))) ✔ @jonathanweisman
I will leave @twitter to the racists, the anti-Semites, the Bernie Bros who attacked women reporters yesterday. Maybe Twitter will rethink
9:36 AM - 8 Jun 2016 · Washington, DC, United States
268 268 Retweets 396 396 likes

CBS News reached out to Twitter for comment, but as of this posting the company has not responded.

"There's no magic wand to eradicate cyber hate or cyber incitement," Greenblatt said. His organization has worked closely with Twitter, along with companies like Facebook and Google, to architect standards for identifying hate speech. He agreed that Twitter has "room for improvement."

Some Jews are reclaiming the symbol

Earlier this month, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg decided to co-opt the parentheses and place them around his own name on Twitter. He did this out of admiration for "what LGBT activists did with the word 'queer' --seize it from haters, and make it their own," Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic.

Goldberg, a prolific voice on Jewish-American political identity, is a frequent target of online bigotry and has come to conclude that Twitter "has an enormous problem with anti-Semitism," he recently tweeted.

Follow
(((Goldberg))) ✔ @JeffreyGoldberg
Multiply this by 1000, and you'll get a sense of my day: "Your just a cucked jooish faggot that doesn't like the free exchange of ideas."
4:51 PM - 9 Jun 2016
14 14 Retweets 41 41 likes

After Goldberg's move, other Jewish voices -- including former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner -- followed suit and added the symbol to their Twitter handles. For #jewishtwitter, the move has two functions: 1) reclaim a hateful symbol in empowering, unifying terms; and 2) expose said symbol to the world, since most non-Jews would never see it in their own online experiences. In short, it's a way to pull bigotry from Twitter's backrooms (i.e. direct messages and notifications page) to center stage (i.e. one's profile).

At the same time, some Jews have expressed discomfort at the optics of their names cloaked in Neo-Nazi symbolism, regardless of the subversive intent. On Sunday, political reporter Julia Ioffe, who filed a police report after receiving threatening messages from Trump supporters for her coverage of Melania Trump, shared her concerns:

Follow
Julia Ioffe ✔ @juliaioffe
I'm really uncomfortable with people putting their own names in anti-Semitic parentheses. I get why you're doing it, but my skin crawls.
12:40 PM - 5 Jun 2016
74 74 Retweets 173 173 likes

"It's hard to figure out how to strike that balance between standing up to them and giving them too much attention, between de-fanging them and giving them more fodder," Ioffe elaborated to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Others -- like David Simon, writer and creator of the HBO series "The Wire" -- expressed their solidarity while opting not to change their Twitter handles:

Follow
David Simon ✔ @AoDespair
No parenthesis here. I'm a lefty Jew. They need a secret code to know it? Morons. But ups to righteous goyim wearing a yellow star with us.
1:20 PM - 5 Jun 2016
42 42 Retweets 160 160 likes

Several non-Jewish allies have added parentheses to their own Twitter handles, including president of the Center for American Progress Neera Tanden and NAACP CEO Cornell Brooks.

Follow
(((Cornell Brooks))) ✔ @CornellWBrooks
Founded by Jews & Blacks, the haters might as well hate mark our name 2: (((@NAACP))). @ADL_National https://mic.com/articles/145105/coincidence-detector-the-google-extension-white-supremacists-use-to-track-jews#.t4TQBkBg5 … via @MicNews
12:14 PM - 4 Jun 2016
Photo published for "Coincidence Detector": The Google Chrome Extension White Supremacists Use to Track Jews
"Coincidence Detector": The Google Chrome Extension White Supremacists Use to Track Jews
And it's currently available on the store for download.
mic.com
42 42 Retweets 65 65 likes

For the ADL's Greenblatt, this show of solidarity among non-Jews is particular moving. Greenblatt drew a parallel between these non-Jews and allies like King Christian X of Denmark during the Holocaust. After Germany mandated that its satellite states and western occupied territories force all Jews to wear identifying badges, Denmark's king is said to have threatened to wear a badge himself in protest. Ultimately, Denmark was the only place in which Germany could not enforce its mandate.

"This is similar," Greenblatt said. "It's really nice."

It's part of a bigger problem

The parentheses symbol is a small glimpse into the vast, muddy waters of anti-Semitism both on social media and in the current, hostile political climate.

Last week, Mic.com reported on the existence of a Google Chrome extension that, once installed, alters users' browsing experience so that Jewish and Jewish-sounding names are given the triple parentheses "echoes" symbol -- i.e. "(((Hershenfeld)))" -- on all the websites they visit. The plugin was uploaded by the Google Chrome user "altrightmedia," a nod to the alt-right, a loosely organized white supremacist movement that's most active on the internet.

According to Mic, which saw the plugin before it was taken down from the Google Chrome store for violating Google's hate policies, the plugin used a frequently updated list of Jewish and Jewish-sounding names generated by its users -- meaning, it was a concerted effort to keep track of Jews in the internet age.

Politically, this past week was of an uncomfortable reminder of the extent to which the worlds of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and Trumpism sometimes overlap with each other.

On Tuesday, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke told radio show listeners that "Jewish tribal nature" is to blame for the media's harsh treatment of Trump and compared Jews to "a pack of wild dogs." The white supremacist is a vocal supporter of Trump, who after initial mixed messages in interviews has explicitly distanced himself from Duke, saying "hate groups are not for me."

In the 2016 campaign, a number of journalists -- from Ioffe, Goldberg and Weisman to Jake Tapper of CNN -- have reported receiving anti-Semitic messages and threats on social media. Much of that has come from self-identified Donald J. Trump supporters, as Weisman said of his own experiences in The New York Times.

Trump has not made anti-Semitic remarks himself, and in fact has noted that his son-in-law, daughter Ivanka, and grandchildren are Jewish.

"A very large portion of these accounts associate themselves with Trump in some way, though it should be pointed out -- I find it hard to believe I'm writing this sentence -- that Donald Trump himself has expressed absolutely no interest in opening concentration camps for Jews, should he win the presidency," Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic. "The white nationalist far-right has decided, though, that Trump will advance its interests."

Earlier this month, the Anti-Defamation League announced a task force to examine recent spikes in hate-filled harassment, with a specific focus on harassment of Jewish reporters this campaign season. The aim of the task force is to examine the size and scope of the harassment, on the left as well as the right, and ultimately propose broad solutions to stymie hate speech on social media.

The group met for the first time on Wednesday. According to Greenblatt, a solid chunk of that meeting was given over to participating journalists to share their personal experiences being targeted by hate speech both online and offline.

"It's worse than I thought," Greenblatt said.


“In the white supremacist blogosphere, triple parentheses represent "echoes" -- a nod to the belief that Jewish names "echo" throughout history to punish whites for their sins. Think of the parentheses as the digital equivalent of the yellow star, the symbol Jews were mandated to wear in Nazi Germany starting in 1939. …. Those who failed or refused to wear their badges risked punishment, including death. In separating Jews from the rest of the population, the symbolic stars paved the way for Jews to be segregated, ghettoized, deported and eventually murdered at a scale of 6 million. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has noticed the "echoes" symbol being used to attack Jews online and recently added it to its database of hate symbols, which is used by some law enforcement. "It's on the radar," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in an interview with CBS News. He added that it's "the most salient and timely example" of a larger atmosphere of hate that has emerged this presidential campaign season. …. However, Twitter has acknowledged in the past that its policies often fall short. "We suck at dealing with abuse," then-CEO Dick Costolo said in an internal memo obtained by The Verge last year. New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman, who wrote about receiving hateful tweets from a user called @CyberTrump, said Wednesday he's abandoning Twitter entirely. …. According to Mic, which saw the plugin before it was taken down from the Google Chrome store for violating Google's hate policies, the plugin used a frequently updated list of Jewish and Jewish-sounding names generated by its users -- meaning, it was a concerted effort to keep track of Jews in the internet age.”


"It's worse than I thought," Greenblatt said.” It’s worse than any of us thought (except the Jewish citizens.) Our country hasn’t had this level of anti-Jewish public abuse in years, though the anti-Black statements have been up in frequency in the news. I can remember Danny Thomas sharply correcting an audience member on his ancestry when he said, “I’m Lebanese,” but that’s the only case I can come up with from my 70 something year old memory banks. There are so many CODE ways of referring to race that, as a kid, I probably missed a great deal of it. I was more attuned to codes for black people. There was very little ethnic talk in my family except for the ever present residues, such as in jokes, some of which were actually funny, but nonetheless abusive. The older I get the less approving I am of much of the humor I hear. I believe fully in a healthy amount of “political correctness,” in other words basic social fairness, in any orderly and decent society. I’m glad to see that the ADL is on the job tracking abuses and abusers. I’m sure Twitter will finally manage to stop the execrable practice -- that it is so far failing to find and eliminate -- as soon as enough users do as Jonathan Weisman has and close their TWITTER accounts. Money talks.

This code practice of “echoes” is actually more than abusive. It’s dangerous. It’s so easy to find where people live, work, etc. on the Internet now that someone can be located for possible assault or property damage by a hater and/or insane person. I do connect the scary increases in identity attack incidents with the generalized Rightwing Movement, from David Duke and Trump to the Colorado rancher Cliven Bundy’s Militias around the country. I don’t want to think that the Christian Right are doing these things, because they do still claim to be Christian. I don’t have a TWITTER account. It’s just one more weird, and relatively useless, set of technical things that I would have to learn and I don’t have any desire to do that. Besides, all those little oh so popular verbal shortcuts make me want to say WTF – yes, that’s one that I do know!



http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/11/481684318/for-the-first-time-in-decades-herring-are-spawning-in-a-hudson-river-tributary

For The First Time In Decades, Herring Are Spawning In A Hudson River Tributary
MERRIT KENNEDY
June 11, 2016 1:43 PM ET

Photograph -- Herring swim up the Wynants Kill two weeks after an old industrial dam was removed to allow ocean-going fish access to the Hudson River tributary for spawning and habitat in Troy, N.Y.
Erica Capuana/AP
YouTube -- Riverkeeper's boat captain John Lipscomb sees this as one part of a broader Hudson River recovery: “Herring Return to Wynants Kill In Troy After 85 Years.”


Herring are spawning in a tributary to New York's Hudson River for the first time in 85 years after a dam was removed from the tributary's mouth.

The spawning in the Wynants Kill tributary is seen as an environmental success, as NPR's Nathan Rott tells our Newscast unit. He says it was previously "closed off to fish by a 6-foot dam at the side of an old mill there." Nate explains:

"With the removal of the dam earlier this month, river herring and other ocean-going fish are making their way up the tributary to spawn. Those fish spend the bulk of their life at sea, but need smaller tributaries off of rivers like the Hudson to spawn and reproduce."

There are more than 1,500 dams affecting Hudson River tributaries and "there's a wider push to remove ones that no longer serve their intended purpose," Nate adds.

"Every dam should have an existential crisis," said John Waldman, a biology professor at Queens College, tells The Associated Press. "These are artifacts of the Industrial Revolution that are persisting and doing harm."

Riverkeeper, a watchdog organization aimed at protecting the Hudson River involved in the dam removal, describes Wynant's Kill as a "historic spawning run." They explain this is an effort to improve herring stocks which fallen for decades:

"Since the 1960s, river herring populations up and down the Atlantic Coast have significantly declined due to overharvest and the loss of spawning habitat. Federal and state biologists prioritize the restoration of this habitat as one of the best ways to encourage herring stocks to recover from current historic lows."
And herring are an "integral part of the aquatic food chain," as the Associated Press explains. "In the Atlantic, many species of fish, bird and mammal rely on herring as their primary food source," according to the wire service.

"Environmental improvement efforts like the removal of the Wynants Kill dam are critically important to maintaining a healthy Hudson River ecosystem," Mayor Patrick Madden said at a recent news conference, the Troy Record reports.


"The construction of the Wynants Kill barrier almost 100 years ago cut off a tributary that was owned by the herring and other species. Now it's theirs again. That's how the Hudson River will recover. That's how the Hudson will be restored."

You can see the herring in action in this video from Riverkeeper:

Other species such as the American eel, white sucker and yellow perch have also entered the tributary after the dam was removed, according to the Troy Record.



“There are more than 1,500 dams affecting Hudson River tributaries and "there's a wider push to remove ones that no longer serve their intended purpose," Nate adds. "Every dam should have an existential crisis," said John Waldman, a biology professor at Queens College, tells The Associated Press. "These are artifacts of the Industrial Revolution that are persisting and doing harm." We humans tend to ignore signs of harm due to our increasingly technological ways of solving problems, and to continue in that vein of thought. Cooperating with nature is “old fashioned,” and seems limiting to so many of us nowadays. What we do does matter, though.

The natural waterways are important to lifeforms in lots of ways. It was salmon in the Pacific Northwest which were discovered to be instinctively drawn to the same spawning grounds that they were born to, presumably by the chemicals which are in that particular water source. Sea turtles in the Atlantic also do the same thing, so ecologists are now careful to protect sea turtle nests from human or animal scavenging because it is actually causing a reduction in the population. So many seemingly small and “unimportant” things in nature are actually vital to our living earth, or GAIA. (Did you ever read any of James Lovelock’s books about the GAIA theory?”)



GREAT ARTICLE ON THE MAN BEHIND THE SCENES


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/fashion/bernie-sanders-campaign-jeff-weaver.html?_r=0

Will This Guy Shut Off the Lights in the Sanders Campaign?
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
JUNE 11, 2016

Photograph -- Jeff Weaver with Bernie Sanders in Youngstown, Ohio, in March. Credit Mark Makela for The New York Times
Photo -- Mr. Weaver’s comic books and gaming store in Falls Church, Va. Credit Chad Bartlett for The New York Times
Photo -- Mr. Weaver, right, appearing on MSNBC with Steve Kornacki. Credit MSNBC


Twenty-eight years ago, Jeff Weaver was a lowly campaign aide driving an obscure left-wing congressional candidate around Vermont in a Yugo.

Now, Mr. Weaver is well known enough from his stinging appearances in the press and on television to be slammed by Cher. In April, the singer called #JeffWeaver “scum” on Twitter and, with the help of emojis, more scatological epithets.

Cher is a devoted Hillary Clinton supporter. Mr. Weaver, 50, is Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign manager and his closest aide and consigliere.

As the Democratic race for president winds down, some party strategists have complained that Mr. Weaver is the Vermont senator’s enabler in chief, a true believer who could encourage his boss to keep fighting on after the June 14 primary in Washington, D.C., even though Mrs. Clinton has mathematically locked up the nomination. Others think Mr. Weaver may be the one person who can coax Mr. Sanders into a conciliatory stance.

He hasn’t revealed much yet to reassure either camp. “Sure, there will be a roll call eventually,” he said in a phone interview on Friday, referring to the Democratic convention. “My plan until then is to help the senator do whatever he wants to do to further the political revolution.”

For the moment, at least, Mr. Weaver holds the political world in suspense: Is he going to broker a peace agreement or will he be the last man standing on the Bernie barricades?

It’s a delicate moment in the Sanders campaign. Like the time’s-up music that shoos Oscar winners off the stage at the Academy Awards show, the cascade of Clinton endorsements this last week — President Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Vice President Joe Biden — are drowning out Mr. Sanders’s un-acceptance speech.

On television, Clinton supporters continue to gingerly humor the senator, insisting he should take his time.

In private, those same strategists drum their fingers, roll their eyes and look pointedly at their watches as they circle Mr. Weaver.

Mr. Weaver, who is bald, bearded and wears glasses, looks like many other Washington political operatives who roundelay on cable news shows. Since the Sanders campaign started, he has become adept at talk-show sparring, but he isn’t typical. Instead he is a rather glaring reminder of what has made the Sanders campaign so different — and unpredictable.

Mr. Weaver had left politics and was running a comic book and gaming store in Falls Church, Va., when Mr. Sanders tapped him for the job; he had never managed a presidential campaign before. (The recorded message on his personal cellphone still takes messages for Victory Comics.)

He was an unlikely choice, but possibly the best one for the willful and demanding self-described democratic socialist who, after meeting with President Obama on Thursday, assured supporters at a rally in Washington, D.C., that “we are still standing.” Mr. Sanders relies on longtime loyalists to work round the clock.

Mr. Weaver calls himself Mr. Sanders’s lieutenant. (He didn’t say Robin, though when pressed he said his favorite superhero is Batman.)

“I’ve worked for Bernie since I was 20 years old, so I am still inspired by what he has to say, but you know I’ve been with him so long,” Mr. Weaver said in a deserted hotel cafeteria on June 7, the day of the California primary.

“I think one of the reasons why he asked me is that he knows I know how he thinks,” Mr. Weaver said. “I’m here to do what Bernie wants to get done. By and large I understand what that is before he … ” Mr. Weaver paused and changed tack. “Without having to ask him about it.”

Those who have worked with him on Capitol Hill say he is more influential than he lets on.

“He is the one staff person who is both loyal to Bernie Sanders and clearly not intimidated by him in the least,” said Luke Albee, a former chief of staff to the Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Mark Warner of Virginia. Mr. Albee met Mr. Weaver in the 1980s, when Mr. Weaver was a Boston University student lobbying Senator Leahy on behalf of Soviet Jewry.

“He didn’t look like a typical student,” Mr. Albee said. “He was smart, a fast speaker and he looked 40.” (Mr. Weaver later left B.U. after being suspended for, among other things, student protests against apartheid.)

Mr. Albee said he didn’t know in which direction Mr. Weaver would prod Mr. Sanders, if any. “If I were to guess, I would think he wants to come up with a plan to land the plane smoothly,” Mr. Albee said. “At least I hope so.”

Carol Davis, the treasurer for Mr. Sanders’s first senate campaign, said she was astounded when Mr. Weaver was appointed campaign manager, but later decided it made sense. “With Bernie and Jeff, it’s sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins,” she said.

And perhaps accordingly, Mr. Weaver has been cast as the heavy in news reports that the dwindling Sanders campaign is riven between die-hards and professional consultants who prefer to get back on the good side of the Democratic establishment. Mr. Weaver disagreed.

“The senator, he drives this train,” Mr. Weaver said. “It’s not a staff-driven or consultant-driven campaign.”

Mr. Weaver has made enemies on Capitol Hill and inside the Democratic National Committee, but he appears to get along quite well with his opposite number in the Clinton campaign, Robby Mook. In fact, Mr. Mook and Mr. Weaver seem to have the kind of back-channel entente — and camaraderie — that the Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze and Secretary of State Jim Baker shared during the Cold War.

“I get along with Jeff extraordinarily well,” Mr. Mook said, noting that he speaks to Mr. Weaver by phone often. “He is obviously a tough opponent who did a masterful job, but I consider him a good and close colleague.”

Tad Devine, Mr. Sanders’s chief strategist, is described by some political analysts as the insider most eager to make peace with the Clinton forces. Mr. Devine said he thinks of Mr. Weaver as a friend and ally, not a rival. “Jeff looks tough and aggressive on television,” Mr. Devine said. “He’s smart and he’s not afraid to stay stuff. But off camera, he’s steady, really smart and good company. We laugh a lot.”

It was not so jolly inside the Sanders war room on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles on the night of the California primary. The two top aides sat near each other as the returns began coming in, not so much together as in parallel play. Mr. Devine watched CNN on a laptop and made droll comments about the commentators. Mr. Weaver was crouched over a different computer with the campaign’s pollster Ben Tulchin, staring at early returns.

Those results showed Mrs. Clinton with a much stronger lead than the Sanders team had hoped for, and the room grew quieter. Younger campaign aides studied their screens with the strained intensity of gamblers watching a roulette ball circle closer and closer to zero. Mr. Weaver maintained good humor — albeit gallows humor — and made phone calls.

Mr. Weaver, while respected by his peers, isn’t a clubbable Washingtonian. When Vermonters refer to him as a “St. Albans boy,” they don’t mean he is an alumnus of the elite private school in Washington, D.C., that Al Gore and Secretary of State John Kerry attended. Mr. Weaver was raised in St. Albans, Vt., a small rural town near the Canadian border.

He has French-Canadian roots; his grandmother was named Violet Champagne. He was educated by nuns and considers himself as social justice Catholic; his three children attended Catholic schools. From 1985 to 1989, he was in the United States Marine Corps Reserves.

While working for Mr. Sanders, he went to Georgetown law school, where he met his wife, Barbara Butterworth, 49, who shares his progressive politics and is a criminal defense lawyer for indigent clients.

“Jeff enjoys taking on the powers that be,” Ms. Butterworth said.

Mr. Weaver said he doesn’t know what he will do after the campaign. He said he wasn’t sure if he would return to the comics store. And he doesn’t seem likely to become a hired gun on the Democratic circuit.

When asked what other politicians he could work for, Mr. Weaver gave the name of Paul Wellstone, the progressive Minnesota senator who died in a plane crash in 2002. The other name that came to mind was the California representative Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote in 2001 against the authorization of use of force after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Post-convention, Mr. Weaver could certainly pursue a career as a left-of-center political commentator. He could also, he joked, make weight-loss infomercials, since he has lost 30 pounds during the campaign.

He seems to be tickled by his sudden fame, and chuckled about a recent encounter on the MSNBC program “Hardball” with Chris Matthews. When Mr. Matthews scolded Mr. Weaver for not having yet released Mr. Sanders’s tax returns, Mr. Weaver pointed out that Mr. Matthews’s wife, Kathleen, didn’t release their tax returns when she ran for a Congressional seat last year. (Ms. Matthews lost the primary.)

Mr. Matthews, clearly taken aback, suggested the analogy was unfair. “This is ‘Hardball,’ Chris,” Mr. Weaver replied evenly.

Mr. Weaver, too, has campaigned for office. In 1990, he ran as an independent against the incumbent mayor of St. Albans. His concession words back then could turn out to be prophetic: “People haven’t seen the last of Jeff Weaver.”



“Now, Mr. Weaver is well known enough from his stinging appearances in the press and on television to be slammed by Cher. In April, the singer called #JeffWeaver “scum” on Twitter and, with the help of emojis, more scatological epithets. Cher is a devoted Hillary Clinton supporter. Mr. Weaver, 50, is Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign manager and his closest aide and consigliere. As the Democratic race for president winds down, some party strategists have complained that Mr. Weaver is the Vermont senator’s enabler in chief, a true believer who could encourage his boss to keep fighting on after the June 14 primary in Washington, D.C. …. “He is the one staff person who is both loyal to Bernie Sanders and clearly not intimidated by him in the least,” said Luke Albee, a former chief of staff to the Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Mark Warner of Virginia. Mr. Albee met Mr. Weaver in the 1980s, when Mr. Weaver was a Boston University student lobbying Senator Leahy on behalf of Soviet Jewry. “He didn’t look like a typical student,” Mr. Albee said. “He was smart, a fast speaker and he looked 40.” (Mr. Weaver later left B.U. after being suspended for, among other things, student protests against apartheid.) …. And perhaps accordingly, Mr. Weaver has been cast as the heavy in news reports that the dwindling Sanders campaign is riven between die-hards and professional consultants who prefer to get back on the good side of the Democratic establishment. Mr. Weaver disagreed. “The senator, he drives this train,” Mr. Weaver said. “It’s not a staff-driven or consultant-driven campaign.” …. While working for Mr. Sanders, he went to Georgetown law school, where he met his wife, Barbara Butterworth, 49, who shares his progressive politics and is a criminal defense lawyer for indigent clients. “Jeff enjoys taking on the powers that be,” Ms. Butterworth said. …. He seems to be tickled by his sudden fame, and chuckled about a recent encounter on the MSNBC program “Hardball” with Chris Matthews. When Mr. Matthews scolded Mr. Weaver for not having yet released Mr. Sanders’s tax returns, Mr. Weaver pointed out that Mr. Matthews’s wife, Kathleen, didn’t release their tax returns when she ran for a Congressional seat last year. (Ms. Matthews lost the primary.) Mr. Matthews, clearly taken aback, suggested the analogy was unfair. “This is ‘Hardball,’ Chris,” Mr. Weaver replied evenly.


I have been attracted to the Sanders campaign since I first began to see his “Bernie Photos,” usually showing a real photo but also a salty, pungent comment on politics that catches my attention immediately. His cleverness, seriousness about his chosen issues, and boldness astounded me. Then I began to hope strongly that he was not afraid to take on the DNC, and that he would be popular enough to win. It now appears that the Sanders effect on the party as a whole and on the public may be the most important thing that can happen. The possibility of an actual fissure that weakens the Progressive cause rather than strengthening it is one of my concerns, but if in order to keep Progressive views and issues on the front burner we could actually have to create a new party, I’m seriously looking at that. The Clinton “politics as usual,” is not something that will get us ahead as a society. A firmer push against the Radical Right is needed. I’m collecting information about other Progressives who may be interested in forming their own party. From time to time I will post information under the heading PROGRESSIVES, 2016 as I collect it.