FEBRUARY 5 AND 6, 2019

NEWS AND VIEWS

GOTCHA. CAN THE NATURE AND THE TIMING OF THESE THREE EVENTS BE COINCIDENCE?

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/06/691989587/virginia-ag-says-he-dressed-as-a-rapper-and-wore-brown-makeup-at-a-1980-party
NATIONAL
Virginia AG Says He Dressed As A Rapper And Wore 'Brown Makeup' At A 1980 Party
February 6, 201912:03 PM ET
AMITA KELLY

PHOTOGRAPH -- Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring speaks at a press conference in Richmond, Va., in 2014.
Zach Gibson/Getty Images

With Virginia's top two politicians mired in their own controversies, the state's attorney general, Mark Herring, has revealed a racial incident in his own past. In a statement released Wednesday, he said he and friends attended a party in 1980 dressed as rappers they admired, including wearing wigs and "brown makeup."

"In 1980, when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate in college, some friends suggested we attend a party dressed like rappers we listened to at the time, like Kurtis Blow, and perform a song," he wrote. "It sounds ridiculous even now writing it. But because of our ignorance and glib attitudes — and because we did not have an appreciation for the experiences and perspectives of others — we dressed up and put on wigs and brown makeup."

Herring also said he's "sure we all have done things at one time or another in our lives that show poor judgment, and worse yet, have caused some level of pain to others." The 1980 party, he said, is a "glaring example" of that.

NATIONAL
Gov. Northam Is Finding Himself Increasingly Alone In Once-Supportive Virginia

The statement comes after a racist photo on Gov. Ralph Northam's 1984 medical school yearbook page surfaced last week. The photo shows one person in blackface and another wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe. After apologizing for the photo, Northam later insisted he was not one of the people in it. Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax is facing an allegation of sexual assault, which he has denied.

Herring is a progressive Democrat whose life and career reflect Virginia's evolution from capital of the Confederacy to the only Southern state that President Trump did not win in 2016.

"This was a onetime occurrence and I accept full responsibility for my conduct," Herring said.

The 57-year-old Virginia native comes from Loudoun County, a once largely rural area that now counts as one of Washington, D.C.'s outer suburbs. Herring began his political career there on the Board of Supervisors, followed by eight years in the Virginia Senate.

Read the full statement below:

"The very bright light that is shining on Virginia right now is sparking a painful but, I think we all hope, important conversation. The stakes are high, and our spirits are low.

"I am sure we all have done things at one time or another in our lives that show poor judgment, and worse yet, have caused some level of pain to others. I have a glaring example from my past that I have thought about with deep regret in the many years since, and certainly each time I took a step forward in public service, realizing that my goals and this memory could someday collide and cause pain for people I care about, those who stood with me in the many years since, or those who I hoped to serve while in office.

"In 1980, when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate in college, some friends suggested we attend a party dressed like rappers we listened to at the time, like Kurtis Blow, and perform a song. It sounds ridiculous even now writing it. But because of our ignorance and glib attitudes – and because we did not have an appreciation for the experiences and perspectives of others – we dressed up and put on wigs and brown makeup.

"This was a onetime occurrence and I accept full responsibility for my conduct.

That conduct clearly shows that, as a young man, I had a callous and inexcusable lack of awareness and insensitivity to the pain my behavior could inflict on others. It was really a minimization of both people of color, and a minimization of a horrific history I knew well even then.

"Although the shame of that moment has haunted me for decades, and though my disclosure of it now pains me immensely, what I am feeling in no way compares to the betrayal, the shock, and the deep pain that Virginians of color may be feeling. Where they have deserved to feel heard, respected, understood, and honestly represented, I fear my actions have contributed to them being forced to revisit and feel a historical pain that has never been allowed to become history.

"This conduct is in no way reflective of the man I have become in the nearly 40 years since.

"As a senator and as attorney general, I have felt an obligation to not just acknowledge but work affirmatively to address the racial inequities and systemic racism that we know exist in our criminal justice system, in our election processes, and in other institutions of power. I have long supported efforts to empower communities of color by fighting for access to healthcare, making it easier and simpler to vote, and twice defended the historic re-enfranchisement of former felons before the Supreme Court of Virginia. I have launched efforts to make our criminal justice system more just, fair, and equal by addressing implicit bias in law enforcement, establishing Virginia's first-ever program to improve re-entry programs in local jails, and pushing efforts to reform the use of cash bail. And I have tried to combat the rise in hate crimes and white supremacist violence that is plaguing our Commonwealth and our country.

"That I have contributed to the pain Virginians have felt this week is the greatest shame I have ever felt. Forgiveness in instances like these is a complicated process, one that necessarily cannot and should not be decided by anyone but those directly affected by the transgressor, should forgiveness be possible or appropriate at all. In the days ahead, honest conversations and discussions will make it clear whether I can or should continue to serve as attorney general, but no matter where we go from here, I will say that from the bottom of my heart, I am deeply, deeply sorry for the pain that I cause with this revelation."

Mark Katkov contributed to this report.


VIRGINIA ORDER OF SUCCESSION

https://news.wfu.edu/2019/02/06/expert-on-virginia-constitution-available-to-comment-on-gubernatorial-removal-succession-issues/
Expert on Virginia Constitution available to comment on gubernatorial removal, succession issues

February 6, 2019
by Cheryl Walker | walkercv@wfu.edu | 336.758.6073

John Dinan, a Wake Forest University politics and international affairs professor who specializes in the study of state constitutions and is the author of the book The Virginia State Constitution, can answer questions about the process in Virginia for removing a governor from office and what happens if a governor is removed or resigns.

Removing a governor from office: The Virginia Constitution provides two pathways for removing a governor from office. First, the Virginia Constitution allows for impeachment in cases of “malfeasance in office, corruption, neglect of duty, or other high crime or misdemeanor.” Similar to the process in place at the national level, it takes a majority vote in the house to impeach an official and a two-thirds vote in the senate for conviction and removal from office. Second, in a provision that roughly tracks the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and was intended to apply to cases of physical or mental disability, a governor can be deemed “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” as determined either by the attorney general, senate president pro tem, and house speaker acting together or by a majority vote of all members of the legislature. Such a determination triggers a process that ultimately requires a three-fourths vote in the house and senate to remove a governor on the ground of inability to discharge the powers and duties of the office.

Succession to the office of governor: When a governor leaves office before the end of the term, he is succeeded by the lieutenant governor. In case the lieutenant governor’s office is vacant, the attorney general would become governor. In case the office of attorney general is vacant, the house speaker would become governor. In any of these situations, someone assuming the office of governor mid-term would not be prohibited from running for and serving another full term in office, despite Virginia’s prohibition on a governor serving consecutive terms.

Succession to the office of lieutenant governor: In the event the lieutenant governor succeeds the governor and therefore the lieutenant governor’s office becomes vacant, the senate president pro tem would discharge the duties of the lieutenant governor, while continuing to serve in the senate. The governor is then permitted to appoint someone to fill the vacancy in the lieutenant governor’s office, with this appointee serving until the next scheduled general election (November 2019), when an election would be held to fill out the remainder of the original term.

Succession to the office of attorney general: In the event of a vacancy in the office of attorney general, the position would be filled by a person selected by a majority vote of all members of the legislature, as long as the legislature is in session, and that person would then serve the remainder of the original term. If the legislature is in recess, then the position would be filled temporarily by an appointee of the governor and that person would serve until the legislature is next in session and would select someone to fill out the term.

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Expert on Virginia Constitution available to comment on gubernatorial removal, succession issues

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IF YOU CAN’T KILL THE PRESS WITH A SLEDGE HAMMER, CUT OFF THEIR ACCESS TO INFORMATION, BY UNDERHANDED AND NEFARIOUS MEANS, OF COURSE.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-not-just-the-white-house-at-pentagon-and-state-dept-the-press-is-out-in-the-cold-too/2019/01/31/96f5ee02-258b-11e9-81fd-b7b05d5bed90_story.html
It’s not just the White House: At Pentagon and State Dept., the press is out in the cold, too
By Paul Farhi January 31, 2019

PHOTOGRAPH -- Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan vows to engage more frequently with the press. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

With President Trump sending more troops to the southern border, pulling some out of Syria and causing uncertainty among allies in NATO, now would seem to be a good time for the Pentagon’s brass to be getting its message out about the U.S. military.

Instead, the Pentagon’s leadership is doing less press. Top officials haven’t given an on-camera briefing to reporters since August. When acting defense secretary Patrick M. Shanahan spoke to the news media for the first time this week, it was “off camera,” meaning no one could televise or make a video recording of what he said.

Over at the State Department, the daily press briefing — once held literally daily — has become a hit-and-miss event. Before the government shutdown obliterated any briefings at all in mid-December, department officials averaged just six briefings per month during the preceding three months. The briefings got briefer, too: In previous administrations, officials spent an hour or more addressing questions about U.S. diplomatic initiatives around the world; more recently, the sessions have lasted about 25 minutes.

The White House set a record in January for the longest period in modern history without holding a press briefing, the Q&A sessions that establish a record of administration policies. But these days, it’s not just the White House that isn’t talking much to the news media. The State and Defense departments — the diplomatic and military arms of the world’s only superpower — have been curtailing their outreach with reporters, too.

For decades, the State Department had a proud tradition of briefing reporters five days a week. The sessions were widely followed inside Foggy Bottom, at embassies across Washington and ministries around the world for clues about America’s foreign policy. That changed under Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and has continued under his successor, Mike Pompeo.

The Pentagon had frequent briefings, too, as well as less formal “gaggles,” in which spokesmen discussed an array of topics. These sessions used to occur twice a week but are now held once or twice a month.

Both the Pentagon and the State Department have cut back on the number of reporters who travel with the secretaries on their trips abroad. The press retinue on the secretary of state’s frequent trips used to consist of 13 newspaper, wire service, radio and TV reporters and technicians; now it’s typically seven or eight, although the department says the number can vary depending on the size of the plane and the security arrangements. The defense secretary’s plane can take 18 in the press compartment; under former secretary of defense Jim Mattis, the press section had half or fewer than that number.

The cutback forced some reporters to book commercial flights to follow Pompeo on his recent to visit to eight countries in the Middle East. One problem: Pompeo’s schedule and commercial flight restrictions — regional rivals Qatar and Saudi Arabia do not permit reciprocal flights, for instance — meant reporters had to skip chunks of the trip.

Such limitation have forced journalists to increase their reliance on “pool” reporting to cover Pompeo’s travels, in which one reporter produces an account of events that is shared with the rest of the press corps. This arrangement, however, means there’s only one journalist, rather than multiple ones, covering the news.

It also means the public finds out less about decisions and actions on its behalf, reporters say.

“The briefing is the way an ordinary person, whether you’re sitting in St. Louis or Tennessee or the middle of Africa or Asia” learns about U.S. diplomacy, said Lesley Wroughton, a Reuters reporter who is president of the State Department Correspondents Association. “If you want to understand what the American attitude is, the briefing is the way to get at that. It’s also the way to hold the State Department and the administration accountable for their actions — by allowing reporters to ask questions, whether you like the questions or not. Without it, there are a lot of unknowns.”

In a statement, acting State Department press secretary Robert Palladino said Pompeo “has taken steps to increase media engagement at the State Department, across the United States, and around the world. No surprise that journalists want even more access — they wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they didn’t.”

His department cited statistics to bolster its record: Pompeo has appeared in eight televised briefings since his appointment in April, and given remarks or interviews 72 times while traveling abroad.

Pentagon spokesman Tom Crosson also said media relations are on the upswing. He said Mattis’s successor, Shanahan, is just getting started and has vowed to be more open with reporters. “He and other senior leaders will engage more frequently,” he said. “We’re working toward more engagement. . . . This is not a war on the media.”

Both the State and Defense departments say the travel restrictions on reporters are the result of logistical considerations, such as security arrangements, rather than an attempt to limit the press.

Nevertheless, beat reporters attribute the departments’ diminished interactions with the news media to the White House, which they say prefers to control the message.

“Everything has changed in the Pentagon since Trump,” said Kevin Baron, the executive editor of Defense One, a news site specializing in national security.

The reluctance of the Pentagon’s leadership to engage with reporters “is all a direct response to this White House and this president,” he said. “No one [at the Pentagon] wants to get crosswise with the president. They feel if they say the wrong thing, they’ll be in the crosshairs of the White House. What has happened under Trump is that it has all come to a screeching halt.”

Baron said Mattis avoided the news media because he was reluctant to air his disagreements with the president in public (Mattis’s repudiation of Trump, however, became explicit in his resignation letter in December). As a result, both Mattis and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have typically interacted with the press via off-camera “gaggles,” informal sessions that the public — and White House officials — don’t see (though Dunford has done multiple interviews and media appearances over the past year).

Reporters say their inability to get direct comment from senior officials has caused them to seek secondhand sources, whose knowledge is invariably more limited. They also say they have had more background interviews — those in which sources speak without being directly identified. Trump has railed against leaks and the practice of using anonymous sources in news stories, but the curtailed access to top officials may have led to an increase in both.

Improved access wouldn’t just make journalists’ jobs easier, it would also be good for the public, said Robert Burns, an Associated Press reporter who heads the Pentagon Press Association. The less government leaders engage, he said, “the less the public learns about what their government is doing on their behalf.”

Correction: This story originally stated that top Pentagon officials haven’t given an on-camera briefing to reporters since May. There was a briefing in August. The story has also been updated to clarify that Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. has spoken to the media outside of off-camera gaggles.

Paul Farhi
Paul Farhi is The Washington Post's media reporter. He started at The Post in 1988 and has been a financial reporter, a political reporter and a Style reporter. Follow


I NOTICE THAT HOWARD SCHULTZ IS GOING AFTER THE FEMALE PROGRESSIVES AGGRESSIVELY, BUT HE DOESN’T EVEN MENTION SANDERS. HAS HE LOOKED AT HIS TAXATION PLAN FOR THE RICH? OR DOES HE THINK BERNIE IS TOO DECREPIT TO FUNCTION IN THAT OFFICE, OR CAN’T POSSIBLY WIN? I THINK SANDERS IS TOO HARD A FIGHTER TO GIVE UP THAT EASILY, AND HIS MIND IS STILL “SHARP AS A TACK,” AS MY FATHER USED TO SAY.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/nexnjz/howard-schultz-is-blaming-aoc-and-elizabeth-warren-for-his-decision-to-run-as-independent
Howard Schultz is blaming AOC and Elizabeth Warren for his decision to run as an independent
By Rex Santus Jan 30, 2019

Former Starbucks CEO and former “lifelong Democrat” Howard Schultz blamed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren for his decision to run for president as an independent.

In a series of recent interviews, Schultz said that Democrats are embracing “un-American” policies that target billionaires, which he happens to be. At a Monday night event for his book launch, he specifically called out Ocasio-Cortez’s informal proposal to tax America’s hyper-rich at a 70 percent marginal rate.

“I respect the Democratic Party. I no longer feel affiliated because I don't know their views represent the majority of Americans. I don't think we want a 70 percent income tax in America,” Schultz said, although he mischaracterized Ocasio-Cortez’s idea. She’s proposing a marginal tax on income over $10 million, which would affect only a tiny fraction of America’s most wealthy.

Schultz, who endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and previously described himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” attempted to dismiss Ocasio-Cortez as a “bit misinformed.” Recent polls indicate a majority of Americans support Ocasio-Cortez’s idea, which was U.S. tax law until Ronald Reagan became president and cut taxes. Ocasio-Cortez said last week that a “system that allows billionaires to exist” is immoral.

Ocasio-Cortez responded to Schultz’s critiques of her by pondering why nobody ever tells billionaires seeking high office to work their way up or “start with City Council first.” A few anonymous Democrats told the Hill this week that they were seeking candidates to primary Ocasio-Cortez because she ascended too quickly.


Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
✔
@AOC
Why don’t people ever tell billionaires who want to run for President that they need to “work their way up” or that “maybe they should start with city council first”?

The Daily Beast
✔
@thedailybeast
Howard Schultz blames Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for his decision to run as Independent and it has to do with her plan to tax the rich https://trib.al/vxHYHyd

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He also singled out Elizabeth Warren’s proposed “ultra-millionaire” tax that economists say would generate trillions in revenue over a decade by taxing the wealth of America’s richest. He said Warren’s plan was “ridiculous” and would never get passed.

Warren fired back and implied that Schultz wanted to buy the presidency to keep the system rigged” for himself and other billionaires.


Schultz also attacked Medicare for All, a policy idea that’s been widely embraced by 2020 Democratic candidates that would guarantee health coverage to all Americans but could abolish the private insurance industry.

“That’s not correct. That’s not American,” Schultz said Tuesday on CBS. “What’s next? What industry are we going to abolish next? The coffee industry?”

Last week, Schultz announced he is “seriously considering” running for president as a “centrist independent,” sparking a backlash among Democrats fearing he’d take votes from them and contribute to a Trump re-election. Many have also attacked his billionaire status: During his press tour, Schultz revealed that he has no idea how much a box of cereal costs.

Cover: Howard Schultz seen on day one of Summit LA18 in Downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, Nov. 2, 2018, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)


THIS STORY DOESN’T DESCRIBE HOW THE RUNNER MANAGED TO STRANGLE/SUFFOCATE A YOUNG 80 POUND MOUNTAIN LION, OR COUGAR. THAT ISN’T A VERY LARGE LION BUT THEY ARE INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS. IT WAS PROBABLY INEXPERIENCED AT HUNTING, MAYBE STARVING, AND THE ARTICLE SAID THAT AN AUTOPSY WILL BE PERFORMED ON THE ANIMAL. MOUNTAIN LIONS DON’T USUALLY ATTACK PEOPLE. I ASSUME THEY WILL CHECK FOR RABIES. PERSONALLY, I WOULDN’T EVER GO ON A LONG MOUNTAIN HIKE ON MY OWN, AND I DON’T THINK A MAN SHOULD EITHER. HOPEFULLY AN UPDATE WILL BE ISSUED ON THE FACTS HERE. LOOK AT THESE WAYS GIVEN THAT A HUMAN CAN DEFEND HIMSELF AGAINST A CAT. THE INSTRUCTION GIVEN IS ABOUT THE SAME AS WITH DOGS AND BEARS. IN ALL CASES, WE HAVE TO AVOID LOOKING OR ACTING LIKE PREY, AND REMEMBER THAT THEY CAN OUTRUN US. FOUR LEGS ARE BETTER THAN TWO.

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/05/691528804/colorado-runner-kills-mountain-lion-in-self-defense
Colorado Runner Kills Mountain Lion In Self-Defense
February 5, 20198:02 AM ET
MATTHEW S. SCHWARTZ

PHOTOGRAPH -- A mountain lion leaps from a rock in this file photo. A man in Colorado successfully defended himself from a mountain lion attack while he was jogging on a trail Monday.
Avalon/UIG via Getty Images

Updated at 11 a.m. ET

A trail jogger in Colorado successfully defended himself Monday against a mountain lion that attacked him from behind. The cat is dead, and the man is recovering in a local hospital.

The jogger, whose identity has not been released, was running alone in the foothills of the Horsetooth Mountain Park in northern Colorado when, he said, he heard something behind him on the trail. As he turned to investigate, the juvenile mountain lion lunged.

The jogger said he was bitten on the face and wrist, according to a statement from Colorado Parks and Wildlife. But he was able to fight back, killing the young mountain lion. The man's injuries were serious, but not life-threatening, and he was able to get himself to a local hospital.

The man killed the animal by suffocating it, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife's Northeast Region. Exactly how he did so wasn't immediately clear.


CPW NE Region
@CPW_NE
· 13h
More on today's mountain lion attack at Horsetooth Reservoir Open Space: the trail runner is recovering from his injuries, and the lion was killed as the victim defended himself on the trail. A necropsy* will be performed by @COParksWildlife. More details: https://cpw.state.co.us/aboutus/Pages/News-Release-Details.aspx?NewsID=6832 …


CPW NE Region
@CPW_NE
After additional investigation, including examination of the lion, we have confirmed the victim's account that he was able to suffocate the animal while defending himself from the attack.

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Colorado state park officials later found the body of the juvenile mountain lion near several possessions that the jogger asked officers to recover for him. The body of the big cat was taken to a state health lab for examination. It possibly weighed at least 80 pounds, CPW said.

"In the event of a lion attack you need to do anything in your power to fight back just as this gentleman did," Mark Leslie, Colorado Parks and Wildlife Northeast Region manager, said in the statement.

The park closed after the attack for an investigation, but reopened Monday evening, according to the Coloradoan.

The parks service said mountain lion attacks on people are rare, with fewer than 20 fatalities in more than a century. Lions are "elusive animals" that "tend to avoid humans," CPW said. Nonetheless, if people encounter a mountain lion, they should try not to run. "Running may stimulate a lion's instinct to chase and attack," the parks service said.

The parks service offered several tips for such an encounter: Face the mountain lion, stand tall, and make yourself appear larger by raising your arms and opening your jacket if you are wearing one. Never turn your back.

"What you want to do is convince the lion you are not prey and that you may in fact be a danger to the lion," the parks service said.

If the cat attacks, all is not lost, CPW said. "People have fought back with rocks, sticks, caps or jackets, garden tools and their bare hands successfully."

If you have to fight, the parks service recommends targeting the animal's eyes and nose.


ABORTION IS A SAD THING, BUT NOT AS SAD AS A CHILD BEING RAISED BY A WOMAN WHO, BECAUSE OF HER OWN EMOTIONAL PAIN, CANNOT GIVE IT THE INNER NURTURING THAT WE ALL NEED. A CHILD CAN’T THRIVE ON INTELLECTUALIZED “LOVE.” IF THERE ARE NO HUGS AND GENTLENESS, THERE IS NO USABLE LOVE. A WOMAN WHO FEELS THAT WAY SHOULD CONSIDER TAKING PSYCHOTHERAPY, AND IN THE FUTURE, USING BIRTH CONTROL; AND IF THE WOMAN FEELS THAT SHE CAN’T DO WHAT A MOTHER MUST DO, THERE SHOULD ALWAYS CONSIDER ADOPTION.

YES, I’M NOT A CHRISTIAN, BUT AN ETHICAL HUMANIST. I WANT LIFE ALWAYS TO BE BEARABLE AND WHEN POSSIBLE, HAPPY FOR EVERYBODY. THERE ARE KIDS BORN AND RAISED EVERY DAY IN A SITUATION THAT STIFLES THEIR DESIRE TO BE ALIVE AND THEIR ABILITY TO SUCCEED. NOW THAT REALLY IS A TRAGEDY. OH, YES, AND THEN WE INCARCERATE THEM.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/01/apprehension-on-all-sides-before-launch-of-irish-abortion-services
Apprehension on all sides before launch of Irish abortion services
Legislation and logistics have been fast-tracked to turn last May’s vote into reality

IMAGE -- People celebrate the result of the Irish abortion referendum in May 2018. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

Ireland is poised to roll out its first regular abortion services in the coming weeks in the wake of the referendum vote to lift the country’s near-total ban on abortion.

Politicians and officials fast-tracked legislation and logistical preparations to turn last year’s landslide vote in favour of liberalisation into reality for women who wish to terminate pregnancies.

About nine of the state’s 19 maternity units, plus clinics run by other organisations, have indicated they will be ready to start abortion services in January.

Only 162 of Ireland’s 4,000 GPs have signed up to provide the service, but the government says that will suffice. The government plans to establish “exclusion zones” to move any protests away from clinics.

The rollout will mark another milestone in the Republic of Ireland’s transformation from a conservative society in thrall to the Roman Catholic church to a liberal, secular country, and will increase the pressure to lift Northern Ireland’s abortion ban, an anomaly in the UK.

“The fact it has been turned around so quickly is brilliant,” said Clare Murphy, a spokesperson for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which catered to many of the approximately 3,000 women who travelled from Ireland to Britain last year to obtain abortions. “That number will definitely drop, without a doubt.”

The referendum last May delivered a mandate for change: 66.4% of voters chose to repeal the eighth amendment to the constitution, which gave “the unborn” equal rights to pregnant women and made abortion illegal even in cases of rape, incest or severe danger to the mother.

Since then, Ireland’s health minister, Simon Harris, has driven a tight timetable, steering legislation through contentious, marathon debates in parliament and negotiating with medical service providers.

The Irish president, Michael Higgins, signed the regulation of termination of pregnancy bill into law on 20 December, paving the way for services to open in January. Campaigners have hailed it as an overdue breakthrough for women’s rights and equality.

Under the new system, GPs will provide abortions to women up to nine weeks pregnant and hospitals will perform terminations at between nine and 12 weeks. After 12 weeks, abortions will be allowed only in exceptional circumstances. The service will be largely free, with the state paying GPs approximately €400 per patient.

As the rollout nears, all sides are apprehensive. Pro-choice groups criticised a mandatory three-day “cooling off” period for women who request abortions, calling it a sop to anti-abortion activists that lacked any medical basis. They also worry about uncertainty over those seeking abortions after 12 weeks, estimated in about 17% of cases.

“We expect there will be a significant cohort of women who won’t be catered for,” said Murphy. She expected hundreds of such cases to end up in British clinics this year.

Anti-abortion advocates have been dismayed, saying the referendum was not a mandate for abortion on demand. Brendan Leahy, the bishop of Limerick, said Ireland was experiencing an “inglorious watermark”.

Doctors, nurses, counsellors and administrators worry about bottlenecks and confusion in a health service already creaking from dysfunction and long waiting lists.

A 24-hour, seven-day helpline will direct women to local GPs who provide abortions. Concern about teething problems has deterred many GPs from signing up to abortion services.

An online consultation by the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) found that 43% were unwilling because of concerns about the rollout, especially “referral pathways” to secondary care involving ultrasound and hospital services.

Tony Cox, the ICGP’s medical director, said: “A small but significant group, particularly younger GPs, see the introduction of abortion services as a significant milestone for women’s health services in Ireland.

“We believe the majority of members are concerned that the introduction has been rushed, that the referral pathways won’t be in place for a while, but are optimistic that it will settle down and that the media interest will subside, and the 24-hour helpline will work smoothly.”


“AND THE BEAT GOES ON, AND THE BEAT GOES ON.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/04/activists-protest-against-irelands-new-abortion-services
Activists protest against Ireland's new abortion services
Pro-choice groups condemn picket of clinic as health service warns of fake websites
Rory Carroll Ireland correspondent
@rorycarroll72
Fri 4 Jan 2019 13.18 EST

Anti-abortion activists have struck back against Ireland’s introduction of abortion services by picketing a clinic and by launching potentially misleading websites that mimic the state’s support service for unplanned pregnancies.

A group holding placards protested outside a doctor’s office in Galway on Thursday in an effort to deter women from seeking abortion pills just three days after abortion services became legal.

About half a dozen people stood outside the Galvia West medical centre in Galway city with signs bearing slogans including “Say no to abortion in Galway” and “Real doctors don’t terminate their patients.”

Organisers said it was a peaceful demonstration that received positive feedback from the public.

However, pro-choice groups condemned the picket as intimidation and urged the government to establish exclusion zones to prevent protests outside abortion service providers.

“I do find that this is public harassment, effectively, of people who are trying to access abortion services here,” Ailbhe Smyth from the Together for Yes campaign told Newstalk radio station on Friday.

“It’s despicable behaviour because they are deliberately seeking to deter women from accessing an entirely lawful health service in this country.”

She called on the health minister, Simon Harris, to deliver on a promise to introduce legislation for exclusion zones around medical practices offering abortion services, a call backed by Colm O’Gorman, the head of Amnesty Ireland.

“Exclusion zones don’t mean people cannot protest,” he tweeted. “But they must do so in a way that doesn’t interfere with another person’s right to access a lawful health service.”

Pro-choice activists hope Ireland’s success can be replicated in North

Meanwhile, other anti-abortion activists are believed to be behind several websites that mimic myoptions.ie, a support site for women affected by unplanned pregnancies run by the Health Service Executive (HSE), a state agency.

The site, which launched on Tuesday, directs women who seek abortions to advice and information about how to access the service, which is set to roll out across Ireland in the coming weeks and months.

The HSE warned this week of websites with possible hidden agendas using similar names to its helpline.

The mimic sites try to steer women away from abortions by warning of health dangers and offering ultrasounds to show an image of the foetus.

“Call us now and book a free ultrasound if you are thinking about termination and need to know how far pregnant you are and all you need to know to be fully informed,” says one such site, myoptions.website.

It links to research which claims to link abortions to breast cancer, an association which has been widely discredited by physicians and scientists.

When the Guardian called its helpline, it was answered by Eamon Murphy, a veteran anti-abortion activist based in Dublin. “We’re flooded with phone calls and demands,” he said.

He cited research purportedly connecting abortions to cancer. “We’re probably the only people telling women of the link.”

Asked about misleading callers by mimicking the state’s helpline, Murphy said his site was set up last year, predating the official site. Asked for more details, he ended the call.

Ireland started rolling out abortion services on 1 January in the wake of the referendum vote last year to lift a near-total ban on abortion, a landmark in the country’s social liberalisation.

A total of 66.4% of voters delivered a stinging rebuke to the Roman Catholic church by voting to repeal the eighth amendment to the constitution, which gave “the unborn” equal rights to pregnant women and made abortion illegal even in cases of rape, incest or severe danger to the mother.

Fast-track legislation led to the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act being signed into law on 20 December 2018, paving the way for service rollout this month.

Most of the state’s 19 maternity units, plus clinics run by other organisations, are expected to start offering abortion services within weeks.

About 20 women reportedly sought terminations on the first working day of the service on Wednesday.

Under the new system, GPs will provide abortions to women up to nine weeks pregnant and hospitals will perform terminations at between nine and 12 weeks.

After 12 weeks, abortions will be allowed only in exceptional circumstances. The service will be largely free, with the state paying GPs approximately €400 (£358) per patient.


https://www.thenation.com/article/socialism-sotu-donald-trump-bernie-sanders/
Socialism Is More Popular Than You Think, Mr. President
Most surveys show Trump would lose in a matchup against a democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders.
By John Nichols TODAY FEBRUARY 6, 2019 5:16 PM

PHOTOGRAPH – SANDERS AND THE CROWD (Reuters / Lucy Nicholson)

Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address did not feature a musical soundtrack. But, if it had, surely the orchestral accompaniment would have soared when he got to the line: “We are born free, and we will stay safe. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

But, just as surely, the music would have quieted down as the camera shifted to the assured countenance of newly elected US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat who was elected last fall after campaigning as “an educator, organizer, Democratic Socialist, and born-and-raised New Yorker running to champion working families in Congress; or that of US Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who won her 2018 primary and general election races as a member of Democratic Socialists of America and was endorsed by DSA’s muscular chapter in the Detroit area. And the music would have stopped when it got to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who is often referred to as “America’s best-known socialist,” and whom a lot of people would like to see challenge Trump in the 2020 presidential race.

The president might have wanted the joint session of Congress, and the American people who bothered to listen in, to believe that “Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination and control.”

But every recent national poll of prospective 2020 voters has Sanders, the democratic socialist, beating Trump, the socialism basher.

A PPP survey released January 22 had it Sanders 51 to Trump 41. That was an improvement on the nine-point lead a PPP survey gave the senator last June.

When CNN polled prospective 2020 voters last year, it was Sanders 55 to Trump 42.

In the battleground state of Michigan, which Trump narrowly won in 2016, a new Detroit News/WDIV-TV poll has Sanders leading by 11 points.

A PPP survey of North Carolina voters, which was conducted last month, put Sanders ahead 48-45 in another state that the Republicans won in 2016.

Sanders has not announced that he will challenge the president. But the senator, who won 23 primaries and caucuses as a contender for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, generally polls near the top of the Democrats and independents who will judge the wide field of 2020 Democratic prospects. (He’s behind former vice president Joe Biden but ahead of all or most of the other announced and prospective candidates.)

Biden often polls a point or so better against Trump than does Sanders in hypothetical matchups for a 2020 general election contest. But Sanders tends to run better than other Democratic prospects.

So it doesn’t seem like the “s” word is dragging the senator down.

Perhaps that is because, while Trump may think “socialism” is a scare word, and while many prominent Democrats may get scared when it is referenced, Sanders is comfortable discussing the ideology. “Do they think I’m afraid of the word? I’m not afraid of the word,” says Sanders.

On Tuesday night, the senator trumped Trump’s “born free… stay safe” rhetoric with a simple observation: “People are not truly free when they can’t afford health care, prescription drugs, or a place to live. People are not free when they cannot retire with dignity or feed their families.”

That’s how Sanders does it. He’s not defensive. He’s aggressive. While Trump equates the humane democratic socialism that millions of Americans embrace with “government coercion, domination and control”—in a desperate attempt to narrow the discourse—Sanders makes honest comparisons that expand and enhance the dialogue.

“I happen to believe that, if the American people understood the significant accomplishments that have taken place under social-democratic governments, democratic-socialist governments, labor governments throughout Europe, they would be shocked to know about those accomplishments,” the senator told me several years ago. “How many Americans know that in virtually every European country, when you have a baby, you get guaranteed time off and, depending on the country, significant financial benefits as well. Do the American people know that? I doubt it. Do the American people even know that we’re the only major Western industrialized country that doesn’t guarantee healthcare for all? Most people don’t know that. Do the American people know that in many countries throughout Europe, public colleges and universities are either tuition-free or very inexpensive?”

The numbers don’t tell us that America is a socialist country. But they do suggest that Americans are intrigued by socialism as an alternative to capitalism. Thirty-seven percent of Americans now view socialism positively, according to a Gallup survey from last year. And among the rising generation of voters, the numbers are substantially higher. “Americans aged 18 to 29 are as positive about socialism (51 percent) as they are about capitalism (45 percent),” explains the Gallup analysis. “This represents a 12-point decline in young adults’ positive views of capitalism in just the past two years and a marked shift since 2010, when 68 percent viewed it positively.”

Another set of numbers may be even more telling. Membership in Democratic Socialists of America has spiked from 7,000 members in 2016 to over 55,000 today. And dozens of democratic socialists now serve in elected posts, from the US Senate to the US House to state legislatures and municipal governments and school boards across the country.

Take note, Mr. President, the “s” word isn’t as scary as you think. Indeed, says Ocasio-Cortez, “I think he’s scared.”

“He sees that everything is closing in on him,” says the democratic socialist, who is advancing a Green New Deal plan and proposing tax hikes for the rich. “And he knows he’s losing the battle of public opinion when it comes to the actual substantive proposals that we’re advancing.”


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STACEY ABRAMS SHOWS TRUMP WHAT A POLITICIAN WHO CARES ABOUT THIS COUNTRY SOUNDS LIKE

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THE UNITED STATES IS A PROGRESSIVE NATION WITH A DEMOCRACY PROBLEM

John NicholsTWITTERJohn Nichols is The Nation’s national-affairs correspondent. He is the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America, from Nation Books, and co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.


ABOUT SANDERS' ADVISER MATT DUSS:

https://www.thenation.com/article/matt-duss-bernie-sanders-foreign-policy-blob/
Who Is Matt Duss, and Can He Take On Washington’s ‘Blob’?
Bernie Sanders’s foreign-policy adviser is part of a new generation of progressives fighting an entrenched status quo.
By David KlionTwitter TODAY FEBRUARY 6, 2019 2:00 PM

ART – WASHINGTON ENGULFED IN A HUGE PINK “BLOB”

Forty-five years after Congress passed the War Powers Resolution over Richard Nixon’s veto, the Senate finally invoked its power to end a war. This past December, 56 senators voted to cut off all US support for Saudi Arabia’s horrific military campaign in Yemen, which began in the final years of the Obama administration, sharply escalated under Donald Trump, and has led to the deaths of an estimated 85,000 children due to starvation.

The morning of the vote, Bernie Sanders addressed his Senate colleagues next to a photo of an emaciated Yemeni child and urged them to pass the resolution, which he’d introduced along with co-sponsors Mike Lee, a Republican, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat. “We have been providing the bombs the Saudi-led coalition is using, refueling their planes before they drop those bombs, and assisting with intelligence,” Sanders said. “In too many cases, our weapons are being used to kill civilians.”

As the Vermont senator spoke, a 6-foot-5, bespectacled bear of a man sat quietly beside him. Matt Duss, 46, has recently become one of the most significant figures reshaping progressive foreign policy in the Trump era. Since February 2017, when Sanders hired him as his foreign-policy adviser, Duss has played a key role in advancing the Yemen resolution and has deeply informed Sanders’s growing emphasis on international affairs.

“I give Matt an extraordinary amount of credit on Yemen,” says Representative Ro Khanna, who introduced the joint resolution in the House. “He’s the principal reason that Sanders took this huge risk in introducing the War Powers Resolution in the Senate and agreeing to [support] what we had introduced in the House.”

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Sanders is reportedly about to announce a second presidential run, and attention is already turning to his foreign-policy views. In his 2016 campaign, Sanders’s primary focus was on domestic economic issues, and many critics regarded him as a lightweight on foreign policy. This time around, Sanders has won over skeptics in the foreign-policy establishment with substantive speeches in 2017 and 2018, laying out a comprehensive vision for America’s role in the world. Beyond wanting to end or prevent wars in the Middle East, Sanders has also linked the global rise of authoritarian populism to wealth inequality, and has called for an international progressive movement to combat authoritarian leaders and kleptocrats from Russia to Brazil. And while Duss doesn’t want to take credit for what he says are his boss’s deeply held views, he has had a hand in all of this.

To the extent that Sanders is raising new ideas and challenging the interventionist consensus that has long dominated Washington, it makes sense that he’s relying on the advice of a relative outsider. The nation’s capital is infamously a town of straight-A students who hustled their way through the most elite schools and prestigious internships in pursuit of power. Duss took a more meandering path, playing in bands and working odd jobs for years before finishing college in his early 30s. He then spent the next decade influencing the public debate, mainly as a blogger, before finally emerging as a Senate staffer.

Duss is now gaining prominence at a pivotal moment for progressive foreign policy. Since the end of the Cold War, leading Democrats have broadly subscribed to the liberal-internationalist doctrine, with its emphasis on free-trade pacts, military coalitions to overthrow dictators and prevent atrocities, and, since 9/11, ruthless prosecution of the War on Terror; any differences with their Republican colleagues have often been more of degree than kind. Foreign-policy critics on the left, meanwhile, have generally been relegated to academia and the alternative media, and have focused mainly on challenging the excesses of empire, not on articulating a more positive and ambitious global vision.

More than most policy-makers, Duss is a product of that left-leaning tradition. His ascension was in many ways made possible by the political earthquake of 2016—not just Trump’s election, but the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the enduring influence of Sanders, and the emergence of a new generation of progressives who have grown up amid endless wars. The open question is whether Duss and others like him are capable of taking on the foreign-policy world’s entrenched status quo.

Duss was born in 1972 in the Hudson Valley town of Nyack, an hour north of Manhattan. His mother, a nurse, came from a family of truck drivers in rural western Pennsylvania; his father, a journalist and aid worker, was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany after his family, some of whom had been kulak* in Ukraine, survived famine under Stalin and some of the worst carnage of World War II. When Duss’s father was 2, his family emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn. Despite their very different origins, Duss’s father and mother shared an evangelical faith; they met while attending a missionary-training college in Nyack, where they eventually settled.

“We’re a family of refugees,” Duss tells me over brunch near his home in northern Virginia. “That’s always been part of my understanding of where we came from.” Because of his family history, Duss says, he never had any illusions about Soviet communism, but he does identify as a man of the left, a strong social democrat perfectly at home with Sanders’s political program.

Duss himself grew up in a tight-knit community of evangelical Christians. While he wrestled with his faith throughout his teens and early adulthood—he describes himself as pro-choice, pro–LGBTQ rights, and very liberal—the communitarian and humanitarian aspects of Christianity remain central to his life.

In 1983, his family relocated for a year to a refugee-processing center in the Philippines to work with a Christian NGO there. From age 10 to 11, Duss attended a Christian boarding school while helping refugees from Southeast Asia prepare for life in North America. He was in Manila at the time of the assassination of opposition politician Benigno Aquino, a critic of the US-aligned dictator Ferdinand Marcos. “It was an interesting vantage point for how the US was perceived elsewhere,” he says. “Obviously, I couldn’t fully understand or engage with the political conversation there—but still, it made an impression.”

Exposure to the wider world left Duss feeling more isolated from his peers back home. Once a promising student, in junior high he became disengaged from school, grappling with his religious upbringing and preferring music to homework. At 15, he took up guitar, his influences ranging from Van Halen to indie groups like the Replacements, the Pixies, and Dinosaur Jr. It was through playing in bands that he found his peer group, which included an Iraqi-American singer who helped personalize the first Gulf War for him. “I just was uncomfortable with America sending troops around the world,” Duss says.

After two and a half years at a small Christian college in Massachusetts, Duss found himself unmotivated and returned home to Nyack, where he worked in a variety of menial jobs while pursuing his true passions: playing guitar and writing fiction. In 1994, he moved to Seattle, where he met his wife, and where he first became involved in politics via anti-globalization activism and Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign.

Duss became fascinated with the Muslim world on a trip to Istanbul for a friend’s wedding in 2000. He found the experience of being awakened by the morning call to prayer transformative, and began reading obsessively about Islamic history and politics. The 9/11 attacks the following year left him frustrated and concerned about the way the US media portrayed Muslims and the Middle East, and for the first time in his life he felt a sense of political mission. At a time when many US policy-makers were encouraging open-ended war across the Muslim world, Duss dedicated himself to understanding the societies that would bear the brunt of such a policy.

In 2002, Duss transferred from community college to the University of Washington, where he finally earned his bachelor’s degree at 31 and his master’s at 34 while studying Arabic and raising a newborn. He wrote his thesis on Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who had become the political and spiritual leader of the insurgency against the US-led coalition occupying Iraq.

After finishing his academic work, Duss and his family moved back east and settled in Alexandria, Virginia. Duss quickly took to the Beltway blogosphere and started several websites, including one dedicated to monitoring the Islamophobic writings of Marty Peretz, then publisher of The New Republic. He began receiving wider recognition writing about the Middle East for The American Prospect. That eventually earned him a staff job at the Center for American Progress, where in early 2008 he became editor of the national-security team for the liberal think tank’s affiliated blog, ThinkProgress. “If TAP was like getting signed to Sub Pop,” says Duss, referring to the indie label that signed bands like Nirvana and Sleater-Kinney, “going to CAP was like a major label.”

“His success is an argument for all kinds of diversity in the foreign-policy community,” says Heather Hurlburt, a former State Department official during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “Perhaps ironically, it’s also a vindication of [CAP founder] John Podesta, of all people, whose early vision for the Center for American Progress was that it would hire and pay talented young people who didn’t come from super-privileged traditional backgrounds.”

At the same time that Duss was starting at CAP, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were engaged in a heated presidential primary. During a January 2008 debate, Obama contrasted his opposition to the Iraq War with Clinton’s initial support for it. “I don’t want to just end the war,” Obama said. “I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place.” For Duss, this line “was like hearing [Jimi Hendrix’s] ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’ for the first time. It’s like, ‘That is rock and roll.’”

“Matt has always been willing to challenge underlying assumptions about the conduct of American foreign policy,” says Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s closest national-security advisers. “He rightly seized on President Obama’s statement…and he held us to that standard for eight years.”

The Obama administration often struggled to hold itself to that same standard. The idealism that appealed to Duss and many others produced some significant achievements, notably the Iran nuclear deal, the reestablishment of relations with Cuba, and the Paris climate accord. But Obama didn’t end US military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, and he launched new, undeclared wars in several other countries in the Muslim world. He authorized record sums of military aid to Israel and Saudi Arabia despite the atrocities they committed in the Gaza Strip and Yemen. He championed the Arab Spring, then stood by the Gulf monarchies and the Egyptian military junta as they snuffed it out.

Obama’s foreign-policy record disappointed many activists and writers on the left. But inside the Beltway and among key Democratic institutions, it had plenty of defenders, including some who would clash directly with Duss once he’d entered the think-tank world.

Duss worked at CAP until 2014 and blogged prolifically for ThinkProgress, where he was an outspoken voice against military interventionism, a critic of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, and an advocate of diplomacy with Iran. He co-authored a report on Islamophobia in the world of conservative donor networks and think tanks, making his share of enemies in the process. He also helped identify and recruit like-minded writers to the site, including Ali Gharib (now an editor at The Intercept) and Eli Clifton (now a fellow at Type Media Center).

Initially, Duss had a significant degree of freedom to express his opinions at ThinkProgress, which he attributes to Podesta’s hands-off approach. Asked whether that approach continued for the entirety of his time at CAP, Duss says simply, “No, it didn’t.”

In 2011, the year that CAP’s current president, Neera Tanden, took over from Podesta, Duss’s team drew the ire of pro-Israel organizations and media outlets in Washington. Following an article in Politico by Ben Smith (now editor in chief of BuzzFeed News) spotlighting ThinkProgress’s critical coverage of Israel, Duss and several other CAP writers felt targeted. “The goal of that piece was definitely to start a campaign against us,” says Duss, who adds that he has no personal resentment toward Smith and respects much of his work. “It was clear he was working off of an opposition document that had been shopped to him that was later leaked.” Duss specifically calls out the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The Washington Free Beacon, and some members of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies for coordinating a campaign against him and his colleagues.

“Reporters get information from all sorts of places, and from people with all sorts of motives,” Ben Smith says in response. “That was an accurate story about the differences on Israel inside a Democratic institution—a story that is obviously still playing out in the party.” In any case, Gharib and Clifton would voluntarily leave CAP after what Duss says was significant internal pressure that interfered with their work. Duss remained at the organization for three more years, essentially daring the higher-ups to fire him.

Faiz Shakir, who ran ThinkProgress at the time and hired all of the writers targeted by AIPAC, still speaks warmly of Duss. “Matt was advocating for the Iranian deal long before it was mainstreamed; he was also warning of the consequences of [Israel’s] settlement expansion long before the Obama administration tried to take a hard line on the issue,” says Shakir, now the ACLU’s national political director. “For his work, he obviously engendered opposition from powerful groups who didn’t want to see ideological movement on those issues.”

Tanden’s only comment for this profile was delivered via her communications director: “While at CAP, Matt Duss made important contributions to our national-security team, and he has done critical work since.”

While it’s clearly a sensitive subject for all parties involved, the tensions from the CAP incident presaged deeper divides within progressive policy circles. Tanden was an outspoken critic of Duss’s future boss Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primaries and remains so today. CAP’s acceptance of funds from the United Arab Emirates, which started during her tenure, was recently a source of significant internal turmoil, as was Tanden’s 2015 event with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whereas Duss has vociferously criticized both the UAE and Israeli governments for years. His experience at CAP speaks to the limits of trying to challenge donors and policy-makers within powerful Democratic Party–aligned organizations—limits that Sanders will likely run into again if he seeks to reform foreign policy in a progressive direction.

In 2014, Duss left CAP to become president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a small nonprofit that provides grants to Israeli, Palestinian, and American civil-society groups. While at FMEP, Duss participated in working groups in coordination with Ben Rhodes to support the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, which faced significant opposition from hawks and pro-Israel groups in Congress.

Several times during Duss’s tenure at both CAP and FMEP, some neoconservative and pro-Israel critics accused him of anti-Semitism, a charge that he finds hurtful and absurd. A 2013 article in The Washington Free Beacon insinuated that Duss, his brother, and his father are all hostile to Jews, largely relying on their persistent criticism of the Israeli occupation as evidence. In 2015, a Republican congressman issued a press release accusing Duss and his family of “anti-Sematic [sic] ties,” again citing as evidence their criticism of the Israeli government. “Any fair reading of my work—and, frankly, my life—refutes that plainly,” Duss says.

Duss’s deep interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict is rooted in both his Christian upbringing and his humanitarian instincts. The first of his many visits to Israel and the occupied territories was in 2003, in the middle of the second intifada, while his brother was doing relief work there. “A bus had blown up in Jerusalem a week before, so the reality of terrorism is there; you have to recognize it,” Duss says. “But at the same time, watching the daily indignity and humiliation and violence that is visited on Palestinian civilians in multiple ways… there’s no justification for that.”

The public conversation about Israel has shifted in the past few years. Younger Jews on college campuses and elsewhere have become disenchanted with Israel and more critical of the occupation, and this has created more space in the media and in politics for views like Duss’s. The new Congress includes several Democrats who have endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, a position that many other Democrats not only oppose but are trying to make illegal. Neither Duss nor Sanders has endorsed boycotting Israel, but both have defended the right to engage in such boycotts, and in 2015 Duss testified before Congress that “it is a mistake to focus on the BDS movement while ignoring the main reason for its continued growth, which is the failure to end the occupation.” While some BDS activists may consider that a moderate position, no one has ever voiced it in the context of a presidential campaign.

During the 2016 Democratic primary contest between Clinton and Sanders, Duss bemoaned the absence of a real foreign-policy debate. At the time, many progressives were frustrated with Clinton’s reflexive hawkishness, on the one hand, and Sanders’s perceived lack of a serious interest in international affairs, on the other.

Had Clinton defeated Trump that fall, Duss expected to remain at FMEP and attempt to push the new administration toward a more progressive approach to the Middle East. Instead, mere weeks after Trump’s shocking victory, Duss met with Sanders in person and soon found himself working for the Vermont senator, taking a pay cut in order to directly shape policy on Capitol Hill. “He’s very much like he is in public, except funnier,” Duss says of Sanders, “and that’s how I immediately knew we could work together.”

While they come from very different backgrounds, Sanders and Duss share something important in common: At least by Washington standards, they both spent their 20s adrift. After graduating from the University of Chicago, where he was more interested in activism than in grades, Sanders moved to Vermont and worked as a carpenter while making radical film strips and writing for alternative publications. He didn’t win an election until he was 39, didn’t go to Washington for another decade after that, and has only emerged as a leading national figure in the past few years. Like Duss, Sanders has stubbornly held onto a set of core ideals and waited, at whatever cost to his career, for the national debate to shift his way. As Duss puts it, both men’s identities were fully formed outside the Beltway.

“People with Matt’s views don’t always work within the US government, so I was glad he took on his current role as an adviser for Bernie,” Ben Rhodes says. “It’s good for the Senate to have a progressive activist in that role, and it’s good for someone like Matt to learn how to navigate the complexity of being a Senate staffer.” Rhodes, who rocketed to international influence at 29 on the basis of his “mind meld” with Obama, is the most obvious example of the kind of role that Duss might be expected to play in a Sanders administration. Rhodes was also a critic of the US foreign-policy establishment, which he dubbed “the Blob,” and its interventionist consensus—and during his time in the White House, he made many of the same enemies that Duss has.

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In the lead-up to the 2020 Democratic primaries, a number of the expected major contenders have tacked left on the domestic-policy issues that Sanders staked out in 2016. But no one has indicated as clearly as Sanders that there needs to be a break with the foreign-policy consensus that Clinton embodied and would have reinforced. No one besides Sanders has hired an adviser with such a clear track record of defying the Blob. But while foreign policy could be an issue that attracts activists to Sanders, it will also likely inspire attacks, especially with regard to Israel. In fact, Ann Lewis, a pro-Israel Democratic operative who pressured CAP over Duss and his cohort in 2012, now co-chairs a well-funded new organization, the Democratic Majority for Israel, dedicated to countering the growing criticism of Israel among progressives.

Then again, the world has changed a lot in the past decade, and some Democrats are optimistic about ending the status quo. “Matt represents a real break from interventionist thinking,” says Ro Khanna, “and it’s why foreign policy is going to be an advantage for Bernie Sanders if he runs. Last time, they said he was naive on foreign policy. This time, he’s responsible for the biggest foreign-policy success of the past few years, with the Yemen vote. And I would give a lot of credit to Matt Duss.”

Duss himself is insistently modest, refusing to claim any special credit for Sanders’s perceived new outspokenness. He compares his boss to the legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. “One of Miles’s real geniuses was as a band leader, assembling the best players of the moment and getting them to play better than they ever had before—and in many cases than they ever would again,” Duss says. “This is the best band I’ve ever played in.”

David KlionTWITTERDavid Klion is a writer and editor in Brooklyn whose work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Guardian, Jewish Currents, and other publications.


[Stolypin reform -- http://www.economywatch.com/agrarian/stolypin.html
Stolypin Reform
APRIL 21, 2010• AGRARIAN REFORM• BY ECONOMYWATCH

The Stolypin Reform (1906-17) is one of the well-known agrarian land reform programs, which brought immense, revolutionary changes in the agricultural sector of Imperial Russia, affecting both the agricultural productivities and the lives of the native farmers. The Stolypin Reform was the brain-child of the Chairman of the Russian Council of Ministers, Pyotr Stolypin. Implemented during the tenure of Pyotr Stolypin, the Stolypin Reform was born out of the recommendations of the "The Needs of Agricultural Industry Special Conference", held in Russia during 1901-1903. However, most of the benefits offered by the Stolypin Reform were implemented by the 1920 Soviet agrarian reform programs.

Objectives of the Stolypin Reform:
Stolypin Reform was introduced, for bringing about differences in the agricultural activities of Russia. It was therefore, guided by the following goals:

The Stolypin Reform initiated a metamorphosis of the "Archaic Obshchina" form of agriculture in Russia. This enabled the Russian imperialism to trap the Russian farmers and scrap them out of their independence they enjoyed as a result of various emancipation reform programs in 1861. The reasons why "Archaic Obshchina" required transformation was that it emphasized more on aggregate land ownerships, repressing control on the lands by the elder members of a family and dispersed allotment of lands depending on size of the families involved.

Being a firm believer of conservative ides and views, Pyotr Stolypin's aim in initiating the Stolypin Reform was the complete eradication of the existing commune system known as the Mir. The reform also attempted to banish the emancipation enjoyed by the Russian peasants so far, to prevent the emergence of further causes of peasant revolution, like the one in 1905. The primary aim of all these imposed restrictions was to tie the farmers to their own private pieces of land. It also tried to make the farmer class loyal to the then Russian Tsar rulers.

Implementation of the Stolypin Reform:
Implementation of the Stolypin Agrarian Reforms started with the introduction of Ukase or the unconditional right of individual landownership on 9th November 1906, The immediate aim of this reform was to get rid of the "Archaic Obshchina" agricultural system, replacing it with a more capitalist-oriented, advanced form of agriculture, with special emphasis on modern and strengthened farm places and private land ownership.”]


[KULAKS* --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak --
The kulaks (/ˈkuːlæk/; Russian: кула́к, tr. kulak, IPA: [kʊˈlak] (About this soundlisten), plural кулаки́, "fist", by extension "tight-fisted"; kurkuli in Ukraine, but also used in Russian texts in Ukrainian contexts) were a category of affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia and the early Soviet Union. The word kulak originally referred to independent farmers in the Russian Empire who emerged from the peasantry and became wealthy following the Stolypin reform, which began in 1906. The label of kulak was broadened in 1918 to include any peasant who resisted handing over their grain to detachments from Moscow.[1] During 1929–1933, Joseph Stalin's leadership of the total campaign to collectivize the peasantry meant that "peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbors" were labeled "kulaks".[2]

According to the political theory of Marxism–Leninism of the early 20th century, the kulaks were class enemies of the poorer peasants.[3] Vladimir Lenin described them as "bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine".[4][5] Marxism–Leninism had intended a revolution to liberate poor peasants and farm laborers alongside the proletariat (urban and industrial workers). In addition, the command economy of Soviet Bolshevism required the collectivization of farms and land to allow industrialization or conversion to large-scale agricultural production. In practice, government officials violently seized kulak farms and killed resisters[3][6] while others were deported to labor camps. Another result of dekulakization was the mass migration of these "class enemies" from the countryside to the cities[7] following the loss of their property as it was turned over to the collective as part of the collectivization campaign.]


PROTECTIONS FOR THE QUEEN – THIS LOOKS AS THOUGH TIMES ARE GETTING MORE DANGEROUS NOW. I HOPE THE TURMOIL OF THIS PERIOD WILL JUST PASS THROUGH THE DIFFICULTIES INTO A BETTER WORLD. THIS MOVE ON BRITAIN'S PART, OF COURSE, IS PROBABLY JUST PRECAUTIONARY THINKING, LIKE THE US CONGRESS TAKING BACK ITS’ RIGHT AND ABILITY TO STOP WAR BY REFUSING TO FINANCE IT, EVEN IF PRESIDENT TRUMP DOES START ONE.
[SEE: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/12/13/donald-trump-senate-votes-end-u-s-support-yemen-war-jamal-khashoggi/2296155002/.]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/03/queen-to-be-evacuated-if-brexit-turns-ugly-reports
Queen to be evacuated if Brexit turns ugly – reports
Cold war plans revived to move royals to safe locations away from London if unrest follows no deal
PHOTOGRAPH -- Queen Elizabeth and members of the royal family could be evacuated from London in the event of unrest following a no-deal Brexit. Photograph: Alastair Grant/AP Reuters
Sat 2 Feb 2019 21.07 EST

British officials have revived cold war emergency plans to relocate the royal family should there be riots in London if Britain suffers a disruptive departure from the European Union, two Sunday newspapers have reported.

“These emergency evacuation plans have been in existence since the cold war but have now been repurposed in the event of civil disorder following a no-deal Brexit,” the Sunday Times said, quoting an unnamed source from the government’s Cabinet Office, which handles sensitive administrative issues.

The Mail on Sunday also said it had learnt of plans to move the royal family, including Queen Elizabeth, to safe locations away from London.

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In January an annual speech by the Queen, 92, to a women’s group was widely interpreted in Britain as a call for politicians to reach agreement over Brexit.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Conservative MP and keen supporter of Brexit, told the Mail on Sunday he believed the plans showed unnecessary panic by officials over a no-deal Brexit as senior royals had remained in London during bombing in the second world war.

But the Sunday Times said an ex-police officer formerly in charge of royal protection, Dai Davies, expected Queen Elizabeth would be moved out of London if there was unrest. “If there were problems in London, clearly you would remove the royal family away from those key sites,” Davies was quoted as saying.