politics

So 1) These e-mails were by no means about inconsequential matters, and 2) Clinton was heavily involved in the Obama administration's war crimes. Jill Stein is right: the things we fear Trump might do, Clinton has already done.

FBI criminal investigation emails: Clinton approved CIA drone assassinations with her cellphone, report says (Salon)

An explosive new report reveals just what it is that the FBI is looking to: emails in which then-Secretary of State Clinton approved CIA drone assassinations in Pakistan with her cellphone.

And this is why so many people feel that the stench of the Clintons must be hosed off the Democratic Party -- perhaps even if the cost is four years of (ugh) President Trump.

Hillary Clinton wore a $12,495 Armani jacket during a speech about inequality (CNBC)

Hillary Clinton took a lot of flak on Monday after a report surfaced that the presidential candidate wore a Giorgio Armani jacket worth more than $12,000 during a speech in April about inequality.

Every time this happens, it strengthens the "we need to 'take our country back' from 'those people'" narrative. It plays right into an Agnew/Nixonesque appeal to the "silent majority". Young Elijah Martinez is absolutely right: this is giving Trump what he wants.

Anti-Trump protesters at Trump rally throw rocks, bottles at Albuquerque police (Washington Post)

ALBUQUERQUE — What began as an assembly of about 1,000 peaceful protesters outside a Donald Trump rally at the Albuquerque Convention Center morphed into madness Tuesday evening when mostly young, raucous rioters joined the ranks, hurling burning T-shirts, rocks and bottles toward the police and police horses trying to contain them.

Several Albuquerque police officers were injured by the projectile rocks, and at least one rioter had been arrested by the end of the night, the department tweeted....

You sometimes hear about "intersectionality", the ways in which systems of oppression like patriarchy and racism overlap, and so the interests of those working against them also intersect. You almost never hear about the intersectionality of economic class. It's as if today's "liberals" (so-called) and Democrats don't actually care whether society is built as an oppressive hierarchy, just so long as being an oppressor is an equal-opportunity position. It's no wonder that since the days of the Reagan Democrats -- indeed, going back to the 1960s -- the Republicans have been able to catch this demographic "on the rebound" as it were, after the Democrats dumped the to pursue identity politics.
(Contrast this with how the radical Black Panthers reached out to work with poor whites; and for interesting history, read Kenneth D. Durr's Behind the Backlash: White Working Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980.) The reunion that Sanders suggests would be a powerful thing -- and those in power now sure as hell don't want that.

Burying the White Working Class | Jacobin (www.jacobinmag.com)

These kinds of statements are the name of the game for today’s Democratic elite. The party has established a clear line on the white wage-earning class: they’re all either dying (demographically or literally), irrelevant in an increasingly nonwhite country, or so hopelessly racist they can go off themselves with a Miller High Life-prescription-painkiller cocktail for all they care. As liberal hero and Sanders nemesis Barney Frank put it a couple of weeks ago, “the likelihood that fifty-eight-year-old coal miners are going to become the solar engineers of the future is nil.”

The problem with this line is not just that it’s gross and elitist — it’s that it’s not even true. The working class is bigger than ever, is still really white, and is broadly supportive of a progressive populist agenda.

It just turns out that the Democratic Party outside of Sanders isn’t too interested in that agenda. And it’s even less interested in that specific chunk of the working class that forces liberals to confront head on the naked brutality of the economic system they cherish.

...

After decades of being told white workers would never support socialism because they’re racist, we’re now told that they support the socialist candidate because they are racist. Yes, this is where liberals are in the year 2016.

From the "the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" department:

In Internet age, pirate radio arises as surprising challenge (hosted.ap.org)

In the age of podcasts and streaming services, you might think pirate radio is low on the list of concerns of federal lawmakers and broadcasters. You'd be wrong.

...

Helped along by cheaper technology, the rogue stations can cover several blocks or several square miles. Most broadcast to immigrant communities that pirate radio defenders say are underserved by licensed stations.

The Olympics are one of those things that I used to think were really neat but that I learned later were fundamentally exploitive. Add in a country just emerging from a (US-backed, of course) dictatorship and you've got the makings of a horrorshow.

AP: S. Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of 'vagrants' (The Big Story)

Choi was one of thousands — the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled — rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea's arrival as a modern country. An Associated Press investigation shows that the abuse of these so-called vagrants at Brothers, the largest of dozens of such facilities, was much more vicious and widespread than previously known, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates.

One of the reasons that we haven't heard much about Americans in the Panama Papers scandal is because they don't need to go to Panama. We have Delaware. It's not illegal for the Clinton's to use a on-shore haven to dodge taxes, but it's their usual hypocrisy to do so while promising to go after other millionaire tax dodgers.

The Clintons are using 5 shell companies to save on taxes in Delaware (theweek.com)

The Clintons and their family foundation have at least five shell companies registered to the address 1209 North Orange Street in Wilmington, Delaware — which is also home to some 280,000 other companies who use the location to take advantage of the state's low taxes, limited disclosure requirements, and other business incentives.

Scalia was a horrible judge who operated under the influence of a legal theory so insane that under it women were not people under the meaning of the 14th Amendment. That had negative consequences for the whole nation. Yet I suppose we should avoid hating a person for being in the grip of bad ideas. "Equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha."

And now, fasten your seatbelts for a SCOTUS nomination during an election campaign. Gonna be interesting.

Supreme court justice Antonin Scalia dies at 79 (the Guardian)

The supreme court justice Antonin Scalia has died. He was 79.

The Republican Texas governor Greg Abbott issued a statement confirming the news and paying tribute to Scalia, a noted and staunch conservative.

At the always interesting blog "The Volokh Conspiracy", David Kopel has dug up a 1942 decree by Maryland governor Herbert O’Conor calling on armed citizens to serve in a reserve militia to defend the state against Axis "parachute troops, saboteurs, or organized raiding parties" or the actions of "enemy sympathizers within our State". It's notable for its plain statement that volunteers would be expected to provide their own weapons and would be expected to have basic competence with them -- even at this relatively recent date when the standing army was well-established as a tool of American imperialism and the foundations of the military-industrial complex had been laid.

This is what the "well-regulated militia" in Amendment II means -- a citizen body familiar with the use of arms is necessary for the security of the nation. ("Well-regulated" here does not have the meaning of "subject to extenisve regulatory law" but rather "effective and precise" -- in the same way that a mechanical timepiece is "regulated". In order to have people familiar with arms, it is necessary for the people to have them. Therefore, the Second Amendment tells us, the new nation shall not interfere with the vitally important -- not just for individual liberty but for the security of the nation -- natural right of the people to arm themselves.

Small Towns Face Rising Suicide Rates (www.nytimes.com)

Rural adolescents commit suicide at roughly twice the rate of their urban peers, according to a study published in the May issue of the journal JAMA Pediatrics. Although imbalances between city and country have long persisted, “we weren’t expecting that the disparities would be increasing over time,” said the study’s lead author, Cynthia Fontanella, a psychologist at Ohio State University.

“The rates are higher, and the gap is getting wider.”

Suicide is a threat not just to the young. Rates over all rose 7 percent in metropolitan counties from 2004 to 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In rural counties, the increase was 20 percent.

The problem reaches across demographic boundaries, encompassing such groups as older men, Native Americans and veterans. The sons and daughters of small towns are more likely to serve in the military, and nearly half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans live in rural communities.