Friday, January 10th, 2020
ALISON DURKEE, - Vanity Fair
Stephan: Well, we now have an answer to the fecal storm of criminal Trump's and the Republican Party's charges about Hillary Clinton's so-called corruption and crimes. And the verdict is: It is and always was a load of crap.
The DOJ report comes out at an interesting time. Have you noticed that everything that comes out about Trump further validates his corruption, criminality, and psychopathology while after two years, and God knows how much money, just as in the Republican Benghazi charade at the end of the day there is nothing there.
Hillary Clinton
Back in 2017, buoyed by President Donald Trump’s calls for investigations into “Crooked Hillary & the Dems,” the Justice Department launched an inquiry into Hillary Clinton and Republicans’ pet conspiracy theories about her and her career. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked U.S. Attorney John Huber to look into concerns that the FBI hadn’t fully pursued cases related to the Clinton Foundation, as well as Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, including the baseless “Uranium One” conspiracy theory championed by conservatives. Now, Huber is finally almost finished with his much-vaunted Clinton investigation—and, unsurprisingly, there isn’t really anything to show for it.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that after continuing on for more than two years, Huber’s investigation “has effectively ended with no tangible results.” After combing through documents and conferring with federal law enforcement officials looking into the Clinton Foundation in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Post reports that Huber has “found nothing worth pursuing,” let alone any criminal charges. The U.S. attorney […]
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Friday, January 10th, 2020
Julia Conley, Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan: The immigrant concentration camps created by criminal Trump and his racist minion Stephen Miller, have produced countless horror stories of family separation. It is still going on. I have tried to focus attention on the reality that ordinary Americans are committing these atrocities. How could they?
We were just following orders, that statement in several variations became one of the defining claims of the Nuremberg Trials when the Nazis testified. This report recounts the same justification invoked by a US Border Patrol Officer.
I have been looking at this issue for two decades now, and I have come to think that obedience at that level is an issue that democracies, society's seeking to foster wellbeing, need to be aware of and plan for.
Psychologist Stanley Milgrim in the 1960s carried out an historic series of experiments on obedience. Men and women who were paid a fee to be teachers in a (supposed) behavior modification experiment would shock people to the point of death, even as they screamed in agony. (The people receiving the shock were in fact actors who acted out the pain the teachers were administering. They did not actually experience it.) As Milgrimi described it:
“At 75 volts, he grunts; at 120 volts, he complains loudly; at 150, he demands to be released from the experiment. As the voltage increases, his protests become more vehement and emotional. At 285 volts, his response can be described only as an agonized scream. Soon thereafter, he makes no sound at all.”
Before he had begun the experiment Milgram sought predictions about the outcome from psychiatrists, college students, middle-class adults, and faculty in the behavioral sciences. They predicted virtually all the subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter. They expected that only 4 percent would reach 300 volts, and that only a pathological fringe of about one in a thousand would administer the highest shock on the board.
So what actually did happen? Sixty five per cent of the "teachers" went all they way to the lethal end. Not one teacher stopped before 300 volts.
Milgram S. The Perils of Obedience, Harper’s Magazine 1974. E-version to be found at: http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html.
Was this just a one-off. No, it was not. The study was replicated four decades later, in 2006, by Jerry M. Burger, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in California. Burger replicated Milgram’s findings.
We need to deal with this reality by creating a society that fosters wellbeing so no one is ever asked to do what we witnessed last summer in family separation and the child concentration camps. Because whatever the vileness people will do it as long as it is done under color of authority.
Border Patrol agent Wesley Farris told “Frontline” that separating families at the southern U.S. border was “the most horrible thing” he had ever done but that “we were all told to do this.”
Credit: screenshot/”Frontline”
In a new Frontline documentary, a Border Patrol agent describes taking part in a pilot program to separate families nearly a year before the Trump administration officially unveiled the policy—saying that while he was unhappy about separating children from their parents, he and other agents were following orders.
Journalist Martin Smith interviews agent Wesley Farris in “Targeting El Paso” about the program Farris worked on in the summer of 2017 in El Paso, Texas. Agents were instructed to separate families as the administration tested the theory that doing so would deter people from trying to enter the U.S. at the border city.
“That was the most horrible thing I’ve ever done,” Farris tells Smith in an excerpt released ahead of the documentary. “You can’t help but see your own kids.”
Farris describes one experience in particular which caused him to ask his supervisor to take him out […]
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Friday, January 10th, 2020
Greg Farrell, - Bloomberg
Stephan: The only Attorney General remotely comparable to William Barr is Nixon's AG John Mitchell, who went to prison for 19 months in 1977. But Barr is much worse in my view. He is a true christofascist, which gives everything he does a theological motivation. I think he should be disbarred, impeached by Congress and possibly criminally prosecuted and imprisoned.
William Barr listens during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington in 2019.
Credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
The New York City Bar Association has asked Congress to investigate U.S. Attorney General William Barr, saying his recent actions and statements have positioned the Justice Department and its prosecutors as “political partisans willing to use the levers of government to empower certain groups over others.”
The request, disclosed on Thursday, appears to be the first time a bar association from New York City or any comparable group has asked Congress to investigate a sitting attorney general. Last year, 450 former federal prosecutors from Republican and Democratic administrations signed a statement chastising Barr for his handling of the Mueller report on Russian election interference.
In a letter sent this week to the majority and minority leaders of the U.S. House and Senate, the leaders of the New York City group described public statements by the attorney general as troubling for an official whose job is to enforce the law without bias.
“The duties to act impartially, to avoid […]
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Friday, January 10th, 2020
Frank Rich, - New York Magazine
Stephan: I lived through Watergate, knew many of the players to varying degrees, and one of the things that has stayed with me from those years, is the time sequence, how it took time, years, to unravel everything, but unravel it did.
Frank Rich has caught this so well, and so accurately.
The Trump minions
Irony, declared dead after 9/11, is alive and kicking in Trump’s America. It’s the concepts of truth and shame that are on life support. The definition of “facts” has been so thoroughly vandalized that Americans can no longer agree on what one is, and our president has barreled through so many crimes and misdemeanors with so few consequences that it’s impossible to gainsay his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Donald Trump proves daily that there is no longer any penalty for doing wrong as long as you deny everything, never say you’re sorry, and have co-conspirators stashed in powerful places to put the fix in.
No wonder so many fear that Trump will escape his current predicament scot-free, with a foregone acquittal at his impeachment trial in the GOP-controlled Senate and a pull-from-behind victory in November, buoyed by a booming economy, fractious Democrats, and a stacked Electoral College. The enablers and apologists who […]
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Thursday, January 9th, 2020
Stephan: Let me ask you a question. How important is it that people think well of the United States, and find it trustworthy? Have the answer in your mind? Then, read this report, and click through and see the primary Pew Research report presenting the survey data.
A clear majority of people living outside the U.S. do not trust President Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, with fewer than one-third expressing confidence in him — an opinion also reflected in attitudes toward America generally, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.
However, the metrics have improved somewhat for the president since a similar survey two years ago, increasing to 29% expressing confidence from 22%.
The survey published Wednesday was conducted in 33 countries from the spring to early autumn of last year, after relations between the U.S. and North Korea had thawed somewhat but just as tensions were ratcheting up between Washington and Tehran.
The nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that the percentage of those surveyed who expressed “no confidence” in Trump (64%) was a mirror image of the 64% who expressed confidence in President Barack Obama in a survey published in June 2017.
In the earlier survey, favorable views of the United States dropped from 64% at the end of the Obama presidency to 49% when Trump became president. That “favorable” opinion of the […]
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