Zuck Gets the Senatorial Spa Treatment

I have to laugh at all the "Zuckerberg Gets Grilled!" headlines today, or the equally annoying ones that insist he was raked over the coals or pounded flat on the congressional cutting board.

If you actually watched all or part of Tuesday's Senate hearing pretending to explore what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg knew about Cambridge Analytica and when he knew it, you would have realized that he was being massaged like the tiny loaf of pasty white dough he so closely resembles. You knew he was in for a luxurious kneading when Sen. Jon Tester praised his tax-evading fortune as a "charity" before he got the first question.

You knew who really was in charge of this puff pastry lesson when Zuckerberg prefaced almost every evasive answer to a softball question with a condescending, "That is a really good question, Senator."

You could almost see Zuck patting each of their empty little heads as he took frequent sips of the US Senate-brand bottled designer water. It was the only sign that he was even remotely nervous. In fact, he must have felt like the Pillsbury Doughboy after awhile, because the over-hyped Grand Inquisition consisted of one ticklish finger-jab after the other. The disingenuous queries about whether he is afraid Facebook might become a monopoly were particularly amusing.

He got so confident, in fact, that he actually pulled a Hillary Clinton and credited himself with inspiring the #MeToo movement. This is really pretty amazing, given that he originally started Facebook as a hacking tool to shame and rate the bodies and faces of his female Harvard classmates. But no matter. The way he told it to the senators, he started Facebook because he wanted to make the world a better place. His only fault, he implied, was that he was just a wee lad of 19 when he had his utopian brainstorm in his humble dorm room. Callow youth that he was and still is, he never dreamed that his apps and his algorithms could be abused by "bad actors." If the old Coke theme song selling perfect harmony and a smile on the face of an earth e-moji had started echoing through the Senate chamber during his testimony, I would not have been surprised. 

Zuck's real ace in the hole was when he coyly let out that Facebook has been subpoenaed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and that he will gladly be cooperating with the investigation of Donald Trump, and Russian meddling and other colluding things. Beyond that, though, he can't be more specific lest national security be threatened. But of course, he'll be glad to tell them everything he knows in a more secret setting so that actual people can be kept in the dark. Just as he is opaque about how exactly his apps and his algorithms suck up and misuse the information of billions of global Facebook users, he will be opaque about his own exalted role in both bringing down a president and helping the "intelligence" communities simultaneously censor users and spy upon them.

Not that he himself knows much of anything, of course. Callow idealist that he is, the details have escaped him. But he'll have "his team" get back to the Senate team. Because they're all on the same team. And we're just bystanders who are too stupid to read the fine print of the convoluted user agreements we sign as we sell our souls to the Silicon Valley devils.

As the New York Times reported in its own rehash of the "grilling,"

The technological gap between Silicon Valley and Washington was apparent when Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican of Mississippi, asked about internet regulation.

Mr. Zuckerberg explained that when thinking about regulations, government officials need to differentiate between internet companies like his and broadband providers, the companies that build and run the “pipes” that carry internet traffic, like AT&T and Comcast. 

The difference is at the heart of net neutrality, a hotly debated regulation that was overturned last year. The rules prevent internet service providers from favoring the flow of all internet content through their pipes.

“I think in general the expectations that people have of the pipes are somewhat different from the platforms,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

“When you say pipes, you mean?” Mr. Wicker asked.

Zuckerberg must have felt like Julia Child trying to teach a first-day class of culinary students who'd never boiled an egg in their lives how to prepare Beef Wellington.

Another plutocrat has hit the jackpot. It's the Luck of the Zuck, or as it's more commonly known among the ruling class racketeers: "the house always wins."

Tinfoil Hat Time

I don't know if I'll end up on Homeland Security's watch list of "hundreds of thousands" of journalists and bloggers. But since I do know that Google has drastically suppressed search results and traffic to this site, it might be just a little harder for even Big Brother himself to track me down. 

And while I don't know who-all will end up in the database, I do know that Homeland Security is contracting out this creepy new job. This means that the government can declare itself totally unaccountable for the mistakes that will be made and the damage that will be done to individual psyches, careers, and livelihoods, not to mention the violations of the First Amendment.

From The Independent:

The DHS Media Monitoring plan would allow for “24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalist, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc” to identify “any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event.”
DHS spokesman Todd Houlton tweeted to say that despite what was being reported this was nothing more than the standard practice of monitoring current events in the media.

If I do nothing, say nothing, write nothing, or think nothing wrong, then I will have nothing at all to worry about! Phew. I'm so glad that got all straightened out ahead of time, because now I can safely say that Homeland Security is nothing but an out-of-control paranoid fascist state within a fascist state, and that smarmy creep Todd Houlton can kiss my grits.
 
I don't know whether the FBI's raid on Donald Trump's lawyer's office will turn up any smoking guns on graft and corruption, or whether Michael Cohen is not as dumb as his client and therefore proactively shredded, burned, ate or otherwise destroyed any incriminating evidence. But I do know that the timing of this raid is suspicious, given that the permanent political establishment is champing at the bit for an all-out war in Syria against Russia and Iran. So maybe this raid served as a not so subtle nudge to a president who only last week had uttered the blasphemy of wanting to bring the troops back from Syria.

This is a guy who on more than one occasion has been unable to tell the difference between the country and his company. So when Trump fumed that the FBI raid was "an attack on our country" and since he has a history of poor impulse control, perhaps the Neocons will succeed in manipulating his elevated adrenaline levels at the object of their own desires, a/k/a Assad the Animal. John Bolton simpering in the background behind his foamy-white mustache as Trump foamed at the mouth for the TV cameras was not a pleasant sight.

I don't know if there really was a gas attack in Syria right before the FBI raid, or whether the "unverified" footage of children foaming at the mouth was both a nudge to Trump and a clumsy means to get a war-weary American public to believe that the perfect way to avenge a hundred deaths of innocents is to kill a thousand or a million more innocents. But I do know that it's very easy to make chlorine gas. I manufactured it once myself, totally by accident, about 30 years ago. Having run out of laundry detergent one day, I thought it would be OK to mix Dawn dish detergent with bleach in the washing machine. Luckily, the laundry area was in the basement, so I was able to shut the door and evacuate the premises at the first asphyxiating whiff. So for the pols and TV news personalities to rail that Vlad Putin lied about arranging for Assad to rid his country of chemical weapons is really kind of silly.

I don't know whether Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's media circus testimony before Congress this week will result in any punishment or government control. But I do know that the senators railing about the dangers to our privacy are cynical or disingenuous at best, and as dumb as they look at worst. The government needs Facebook as much as Facebook needs the government. How else will politicians directly target their ads at us? How else will Homeland Security keep track of all our thoughts and our wildcat strikes and our dissenting opinions and protest rallies that are not directly sanctioned by the Democratic Party/Hollywood #Resistance, Inc.?

Since many if not most congress critters receive generous campaign donations from Silicon Valley and relentless visits from its lobbyists, don't look for them to impose punitive new taxes on Big Tech any time soon, either. Since we the people are only as valuable to the oligarchs as our data, perhaps a direct tax on the data he's extracted from us will hit Zuck right where it hurts. So would a law requiring him and other tech giants, like Google and Amazon, to share their secret algorithms and data-collecting tools with the public. 

These billionaire nerds are acting just like impervious banks. They're misusing our information as wantonly as Wall Street gambles with its customers' money. As big as whole countries and with revenues and assets far exceeding those of most countries, these monstrosities consider themselves too big to fail.  Goldman Sachs and Citigroup still own the place, of course, but Amazon and Facebook and Google are literally giving them a run for their money, if not outright usurping the throne.

"Finance capitalism will be as old-fashioned as Flower Power. Some may miss it dearly, but that fondness will be little more than nostalgia," predict Oxford economists Viktor Mayer- Schonberger and Thomas Ramge in "Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data."

  "Using rich information streams is superior to relying on money alone. As the economy shifts to data-rich and thus more efficient markets, most of the information necessary for these markets to function will no longer flow through banks," they observe.

And established public companies in Silicon Valley attract more and more concentrated globs of capital, for no other reason than that they can. No wonder the media-political establishment is coming to the defense of the vampiric Amazon, which has lost billions of dollars in stock value since lesser oligarch Donald Trump decided to pick a fight with the greatest oligarch now living: Jeff Bezos. The definition of democracy is capitalism on crack, and don't let us ever forget it.

So Zuckerberg probably has as much to worry about as his fellow "thought leaders" in the East Coast division (Wall Street) did when they were hauled before Congress in 2009 and castigated for ruining the whole economy and sucking trillions of dollars from the homes and savings of ordinary people. Mistakes were made then, too, because of complex algorithms that ordinary people (including even congressional multimillionaires) couldn't possibly understand. Unaccountability is built right into their self-serving system.

The bankers lackadaisically left the hearings in their limousines and openly laughed all the way back to their banks in their Lear jets. Zuckerberg will probably be a little more circumspect. He'll probably contain his own glee behind the charming smirk and crocodile tears he's been coached to project by some of the same political operatives employed by the congressional inquisitors themselves.

It's the permanent closed feedback loop of the permanent ruling class. Money begets power begets more money begets more power.  Not only are we not in their big club, they're pounding us over the head with it at every opportunity.

Fear and Fawning In Hillaryland

"I should tell you that Hillary did try to warn me," confesses Jennifer Palmieri in the latest memoir about the ill-fated Clinton campaign. "On March 23, 2015, my first day on the campaign staff, Hillary sat me and communications director Kristina Schake down and basically vomited up what it was like to have been her for the past twenty-five years."

Even if you've grown tired of the nauseating "everybody is to blame but Hillary" literary genre, you still have to give Palmieri's "Dear Madam President" props for at least graphically feeling our pain while she goes to great gut-wrenching lengths to blame everybody but Hillary for losing: particularly, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Former FBI Director James Comey, Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange, and Donald Trump; and more generally, millions of anonymous sexist men. And of course, Palmieri also beats herself up on almost every other page. Masochism does have its rewards:

Friends, #DearMadamPresident is a NYT bestseller!!! I may faint. So grateful to all who bought the book & see their own story reflected in it. Please continue to tell your family & friends. Word of mouth & belief in your own power is how this happened. So grateful 🙏 ❤️ pic.twitter.com/bQf211J…

2 hours ago · Twitter

The money quote in the book comes early:

"We (Hillary's campaign staff) failed. It was on us to save America and we let her blow up." 

(I think Palmieri is referring to the country, and not to her candidate. I can only surmise that the publishing deadline must have gotten in the way of the editing.)

Palmieri is the campaign communications director who, just one day after the election, helped set in motion the Russiagate propaganda franchise and the beginnings of Cold War 2.0. So it's telling that she readily admits in her memoir that she was not living in a reality-based community in the days and months following the election.

 "This campaign is going to have to go all the way to December 19 and win the electoral college. Another five grueling weeks of campaigning in overtime. Then we'll look back on this bleak Wednesday when we get a glimpse of what life would be like in the dark, parallel universe where Donald Trump actually won, and we'll laugh "'Remember how unfathomably awful that Wednesday morning felt?'"

Do we ever, especially as the Cold War turns into a Warm War, threatening to blow us up. And given the unfathomable campaign that is Russiagate and the interminable sore-loser war being waged by Hillary herself, it's the booby prize that keeps on giving.

But this isn't about you, the "people", and it never was. "And now she suffers this," Palmieri laments, claiming that Hillary had this "cosmic foreboding of disaster" even before she had to be "convinced" by the Democratic Party to enter the race in the first place.

The memoir, which purports to be an extended inspirational pep talk to some mystery woman who will one day become the president of the United States, actually comes across like a discouraging dud. To be fair, Palmieri admits she hastily cobbled her slim tome together only after the "Game Change 3.0" movie she was working on with accused sexual harasser Mark Halperin fell apart. The #MeToo movement is what she says then "empowered" her to tell her own story.

"Brace yourself," she chides her hypothetical Madam President. "Nothing draws fire like a woman moving forward." 

You have to keep in mind when reading this memoir that it's the job description of a political communications pro to spit words out in quick, easily digestible, sloganeering soundbites. If you're a centrist Democrat, it's also smart to emulate Facebook COO and bestselling author Sheryl "Lean In" Sandberg, who is currently missing in action.

 You don't even have to worry about always writing the absolute truth, as in Palmieri's preposterous claim in Chapter One that Hillary was the first woman to run for the Senate. I think she probably meant she was the first First Lady ever to run for the Senate. What happened to her pal Dianne Feinstein, to name just one? The longest-serving woman, Margaret Chase Smith, must be rolling in her grave and choking on her cigar.

"Before I delve into all that happened in the campaign, I want to be clear that while misogyny and sexism were a problem on the campaign trail, I don't believe that everyone who voted against Hillary did so for sexist reasons," Palmieri allows, before glibly double-talking it with "But I do think we encountered an unconscious but pervasive gender bias that held Hillary back in many ways."

One of Hillary's biggest problems, Palmieri writes with an apparent straight face, was that she wasn't self-centered enough. She was too invested in "helping others." If only people didn't praise her all the time for "serving" as a male president's Secretary of State instead of for her actual alleged accomplishments in that and other posts! According to the author, public service as it's applied to women politicians is too uncomfortably close to the stereotype of women as caregivers.

More tidbits, all presented as concerned warnings for any future "Madam President":

-Hillary's private email server was an issue "we just couldn't put to bed." It was unfair that people demanded that Hillary apologize for something that hurt her, and only her. "The American people weren't the injured party here," Palmieri sniffs. "They didn't want her to apologize. They wanted her to confess to a crime." Harrumph.

-It is absolutely necessary to keep reliving and rehashing the Hillary Clinton campaign in order to clear the path for the next woman president, who will be inundated by haters as Proxy Hillary. The Clintonites have to keep complaining and blame-gaming to try to altruistically "sort everything out" for the sole benefit of the future female candidate.

-Jennifer Palmieri, as a self-proclaimed member of the permanent political establishment, is not ashamed to name-drop early and name-drop often. She's been in the "world's most powerful rooms" -- the Oval Office, the prime minister's inner sanctum at No. 10 Downing Street, the German Chancellor's office in Berlin, the Blue House in Seoul, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo... even The Kremlin! This memo to a future Madam President obviously doubles as her C.V. and job application. As Obama's deputy communications director, for example, she was a member of the Boys' Club and she knew when to "lean forward". This was easy, mainly because Obama was so adept at relieving the stress she chronically felt over the gossip rag stories in Politico. Obama sounds like Valium in a suit with a Zen chaser.

  -Hillary's female campaign staffers, on the other hand, were way too "zipped-up and agreeable" - and stoic. If only Palmieri had cried more, she might not have landed in the hospital in August 2016 due to an unspecified illness whose after-effects still bother her. Hillary was actually nice enough to send her a get-well OMG!! email in ALL CAPS. And then Hillary came down with pneumonia. Neither of them took care of themselves, and that is a very toxic thing that women do to themselves. "Let's nod less and cry more... crying isn't a sign of weakness, it's the ultimate female power play!" she writes. And you'll pleasantly discover that whenever the fawning media cover your meltdown, they're apt to say trite things like "she was visibly moved" or "she got all choked up." So accepting defeat graciously with a stony face is just so yesterday.

-When the Obamacare Marketplace website crashed in 2013, it was kind of a "silly crisis" and despite the media hype nowhere near as bad as the Ebola outbreak. There was no time for crying then, though, because there was too much positive spinning to be done. Palmieri stoically found a few people who had successfully signed up for health insurance, and then she put them right on TV. Zen Master Obama, though, wisely cautioned her that the story wasn't going away until they got the website working. What a stress-reliever he was! So all they had to do was sell a story that "the work was being done" and set up a few photo ops of nerds tinkering with the computers, and it all worked out so well in the end.

-After James Comey reopened the email investigation right before the election, Hillary bought a tearful Huma Abedin and Jennifer ice cream sundaes to cheer them up, and everybody acted very stoical and pretended not to care.

- Jennifer Palmieri's facial wrinkles tell a story she wants the world to see. "Embrace your battle scars," she says to her Madam President. "They will show us all what you endured in your life and in this job."

-Palmieri and other operatives thought Hillary Clinton's biography wasn't all that compelling. Hillary hadn't had enough struggles in her life. But that's our fault, too, for not appreciating her innate value "in real time." Still, Palmieri has to agree that Hillary does have a grating voice. To which criticism Hillary responded, "What would really help Hillary is if they could tell you the name of a woman on the world stage who does it exactly right."

(Oh, I don't know... Oprah?)

-Hillary's Blame Game Tour has been so worth it. "She keeps going, and eventually her story was heard. In the end, much of the press ended up applauding her candor during her book tour," Palmieri writes approvingly.

 What end? As far as Hillary is concerned, it's always the cosmic and candid and authentic beginning. Again and again and again. She might even think that Palmieri's book is an encouraging paeon to her, Hillary 3.0. And she probably wouldn't be wrong.

#MeToo For Executioners

Thank goodness for the crusading New York Times. Unfortunately, though, the Gray Lady sometimes gets her priorities mixed up, and buries the lede. 

Hypocrite that I am, I'll be burying the lede myself, but only to show you how the Paper of Record buries the lede. But here's a hint: it's a class thing, and an identity politics thing. The Times places the interests of the professional class above the rights of the downtrodden. Please bear with me for a minute and read on....

 As a result of inquiries related to the newspaper's #MeToo investigations, the lawyer in charge of the Justice Department's death penalty unit has been removed from his post and transferred on grounds of sexual harassment. This comes after he spent eight years making life and death decisions, despite never having personally prosecuted, or even sat through, a death penalty case in open court. That's the lede, and it gives only the slightest hint of the real blockbuster yet to come. Pretty compelling so far, though.

In its article titillatingly headlined "At Justice Dept, Claims of Gender Bias and Groping," the paper also reports that D.O.J. lawyers immediately complained when the Obama administration appointed Kevin Carwile to the job in 2010, because as tradition dictates, only a prosecutor who has actually looked a convicted criminal right in the eye and then eloquently begged for his death in front of a jury can be qualified to later push a lot of papers around as the leader of the Capital Case Division.

This is despite D.O.J.'s own official policy statement, in which the division's lawyers merely "refer" cases to the Attorney General and don't ever prosecute them personally. That's the job of the president-appointed U.,S attorneys, who rely on the career D.O.J. lawyers to do most or all of the vetting. From the Department's website:

The Capital Case Section is primarily responsible for assisting the Attorney General's Review Committee on Capital Cases (AGRCCC) in its evaluation of capital cases submitted by United States Attorneys to the Department of Justice for review and recommendation to the Attorney General concerning the appropriateness of seeking the death penalty.  The CCS conducts a preliminary analysis of all cases in which the United States Attorney charges a defendant with a crime punishable by death and advises the AGRCCC of the factual and legal issues that are relevant to the Committee's recommendation to the Attorney General whether to seek the death penalty.
In addition to providing the expertise and analysis necessary to complete the preliminary capital review process, CCS attorneys provide legal, procedural, and technical assistance to United States Attorneys in capital investigations and prosecutions; develop policies and procedures for Federal capital prosecutions; provide training for Federal capital litigators; draft legal memoranda and pleadings; maintain a resource library on capital issues; and provide assistance in capital trials, appeals, and post-conviction litigation.

  So despite all the office kvetching back in 2010, Carwile's ultimate (transferable) offense was not that somebody higher up in the D.O.J. food chain finally got wind of his lack of prior direct death advocacy experience. His offense was that he "promoted gender bias and a sexualized environment" in the workplace. He was transferred out of the division when the Times started asking questions about the complaints against him.

Katie Benner writes in the Times:

 He fostered a culture of favoritism and sexism, according to court records, internal documents and interviews with more than a half-dozen current and former employees. In one episode, his deputy groped an administrative assistant at a bar in view of their colleagues, according to some who were present. Mr. Carwile asked the witnesses to keep it secret, one said.

 Employees of the unit, the capital case section, complained about the issues to Justice Department officials, the inspector general and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission at least 12 times. Some allegations went unaddressed for years. In cases that were investigated, the accusers were never told what investigators found. Both Mr. Carwile and his deputy, Gwynn Kinsey, remained Justice Department employees despite the inquiries.

 Six employees, including the administrative assistant, said they eventually left the section or quit government altogether in part because of the toxic climate. A defendant in Indiana has asked in court for the government to drop the death penalty recommendation in his case because of the unit’s emerging conduct issues.

It must be so hard discussing which arcane mixture of toxic chemicals can be used to kill convicts, when the decision-making environment itself is so toxic.  I am sure that 61 federal death row inmates are breathing a sigh of relief today as they learn that at least one Chief Proxy Executioner is gone, and that a more "woke" bureaucrat might soon be taking his place. Chances are that many, if not most, of them will die in prison of natural causes before their sentences are carried out anyway.

The mention of the "Indiana defendant" is, to be fair, something of a teaser for the buried lede. More about that later.

The relief must be especially poignant because, as the Times uncritically writes, President Trump now wants to make drug dealers (hear the dog-whistle: Mexicans and other foreigners) subject to the death penalty. So the capital punishment unit is therefore expected to balloon in funding, staffing, power, and stature. Whether this new improved unit will adhere to all the legal niceties decreed by Clinton administration Attorney General Janet Reno after the federal death penalty was revived in 1988 remains to be seen, however. She was very keen on avoiding any appearance of racial discrimination by lawyers recommending an execution. Trump isn't really all that into appearances.

Ironically, reports the Times, Carwile's promotion eight years ago to the Capital Case Division was done as a direct result of his carelessly misleading the government over the "Fast and Furious" gun-running scandal that got Attorney General Eric Holder hauled before Congress and wrist-slapped. At the time, it was actually considered more of a demotion for Carwile (who'd previously headed the high-profile Gangs Division) than a promotion. After all, federal capital punishment cases are relatively rare, and are usually recommended for only the most egregious crimes, such as the Timothy McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing case and more recently, for the Boston Marathon bombing case and the Dylann Roof church massacre.

The Times doesn't explicitly state that it was Eric Holder who ignored the sexual abuse complaints, at least some of which were made during his tenure. But it does report that despite his appointee's alleged bad behavior, Holder had awarded him a "management excellence" prize, ostensibly for a record increase in the division's death penalty referrals. Carwile apparently took his job very seriously.

But of course, that creepy enthusiasm for executing more and more people is not why he lost his job. 

One female attorney complained that he'd sent her all the way to California to work a death penalty case, even though she lives in Connecticut. Her male colleagues, she said, were not similarly assigned to cases far from their own homes and families.

Another employee, a male, complained that Carwile took him to a restaurant staffed by "scantily clad waitresses," which made him very uncomfortable while discussing death penalty cases.

Buried Lede Alert!

It's only after 23 paragraphs and details about the numerous sexual harassment claims that the Times finally, but only partially, relinquishes its #MeToo narrative and arrives at what should be the gist of the story. 

Admittedly, these are far less salacious incidents of legal malfeasance than the alcohol-fueled groping of women described at division happy hours in local watering holes. They include lost or destroyed boxes of evidence, lawyers who quit for greener pastures right in the middle of arguing a death penalty case, and defendants who were interviewed without the presence of "law enforcement officers" and other witnesses whose job it is to take notes and to later act as trial witnesses. But far from voicing concern for the rights of suspects and prisoners, they complain in their court papers and other documents  that the government's cases are jeopardized by all the ineptitude and sniping from people other than themselves. This carelessness, complainants say, has had the awful result of tainting death penalty prosecutions and ultimately, messing with the Division's improved capital punishment statistics down the road.

A state-sponsored death, apparently, is a terrible thing to waste. This is the lede that the New York Times buried in order to advance the #MeToo agenda and narrative.

Rather than accentuating the rampant legal malpractice by federal prosecutors that harms the defendants facing the death penalty, (or any draconian sentence, for that matter) the Times also seems more concerned about the harmful sexist treatment of career death penalty attorneys. One female lawyer in the division actually filed papers claiming that Carwile took more seriously a male colleague's "gluten intolerance" than he did her recent surgery, and required her to travel. It is "insensitive," she said, to force ailing female legal execution advocates to make long trips, while male death penalty advocates are allowed to malinger behind their desks. 

The Times concludes:

Current and former employees said the public understandably expects death penalty cases to be handled with integrity. As Mr. Sessions and Mr. Trump push for more capital punishments, the section’s history, they say, could work against the Justice Department.

In other words, the bureaucracy is more important than the justice it claims to mete out, especially the justice meted out in the death chamber. No mention is made of the due process rights of the accused or convicted people moldering in their prison cells or on death row as they await their trials and appeals. The implication about the aforementioned Indiana defendant is that his lawyer is taking advantage of an unfortunate personnel situation, and nothing more. The implication is that Capital Punishment is spread way too thin, that it's being spoiled by sexism, that the solution is simply a change in qualified personnel, and that the damage done to high-powered careers always trumps the physical deaths of defendants who may or may not be guilty of what the government accuses them of doing. And naturally, more money will be needed to help root out the overwork and the toxicity, and attract more qualified legal personnel who will not be inconvenienced or exhausted by long-distance travel.

Sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace are terrible things, to be sure. But that a newspaper gives these wrongs more import than the scandal of federal prosecutors manufacturing, and often bungling, an ever-increasing number of death penalty referrals is downright grotesque. This enthusiasm for ever more capital punishment is only mentioned in the Times article as it pertains to the sexual harassment cases, and then almost as a side issue.

Just as more people are refusing to tolerate misogyny, more people are refusing to tolerate the cruel and unusual punishment that is the death penalty, whether lawyers advocate for it with "integrity" or not. According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans now oppose capital punishment, and this opposition is at its highest among young people.

Most of it stems from the publicity on several recent botched lethal injections, as well as more death row inmates being exonerated as a result of DNA testing. And despite the Department of Justice actually rewarding its recently demoted death penalty expert for referring more such cases for prosecution, the actual total number of executions in this country has gone down, as have convicts sentenced to death.

Capital punishment in the United States might finally be reaching its own #Time's Up moment. Somebody ought to alert the editors at the Times, not to mention the legislators being prodded to inflate the Capital Cases Division with more proxy executioners, support personnel and of course, scads more money.

Should our congressional appropriators divert from type and experience a smidgen of doubt over the funding of America's myriad death squads, they will no doubt turn to conservative role model Joseph de Maistre and a book that might as well be re-titled "Executions For Dummies." 

"Just as it is possible that we are in error when we accuse human justice of sparing a guilty man, because the one we regard as such is not really guilty, on the other side it is equally possible that a man tortured for a crime he did not commit really merited punishment for an absolutely unknown crime."

This is exactly how the pathocrats sleep at night.

McCarthyite Cavalcade of Cartoons

My adolescent niece recently received the following email from the microblogging site Tumblr:

Dear (name redacted by me):

As part of our commitment to transparency, we want you to know that we uncovered and terminated 84 accounts linked to Internet Research Agency or IRA (a group closely tied to the the Russian government) posing as members of the Tumblr community.

The IRA engages in electronic disinformation and propaganda campaigns around the world using phony social media accounts. When we uncovered these accounts, we notified law enforcement, terminated the accounts, and deleted their original posts.

While investigating their activity on Tumblr, we discovered that you either followed one of these accounts linked to the IRA, or liked or reblogged one of their posts:

• coldfirefan

You aren’t in trouble, and don’t need to take any action if you don’t want to. We deleted the accounts but decided to leave up any reblog chains so that you can curate your own Tumblr to reflect your own personal views and perspectives.

My nieces's first thought was, "Oh my god, I've been hacked and I have to change all 500 of my damned passwords again."

Her second thought was, "Oh my god, somebody hacked my account and stole my identity and filled my page with porn images and all my friends will think I'm a horrible person."

Her third thought: "What if maybe I really am in trouble, and Tumblr is bullshitting me by telling me I have nothing to worry about because I did something wrong even if I didn't do anything wrong! All I ever did on that site was post pictures of My Little Pony!"

But then the light bulb went off. My niece's final encouraging thought was, "Hey - wait a minute. Is this just another extension of people's paranoia about Russia that Aunt Karen was talking about at the dinner table?"

Bingo.  My niece, after several panic-stricken minutes, had finally used her rational brain and decided to ignore the propaganda and fear-mongering. She didn't even waste her time clicking on Tumblr. She will probably never click on Tumblr again. She's still dying to know just who "coldfirefan" really is, though, because she'd never heard that name and hadn't even realized she was stalking him, her or it, especially since she hadn't logged on to Tumblr in months. And she thinks it's pretty rotten that people are so biased against "Russians." After all, some of her (and my) ancestors and relatives are of Russian extraction.

But doesn't she worry, I asked, that Tumblr itself was and still is following her, seemingly aware of her every click and move in cyberspace?. She shrugged. Privacy is not her most pressing concern. She grew up on the Facebook ethos and the "sharing economy," after all. The stealing of her information and data by corporations interested only in making a profit doesn't seem to faze her in the least.

But hey, at least she cares about propaganda as much as she cares about her My Little Pony collection. All is not lost.

Looking over the email that Tumblr sent to her, and to who knows how many other (mainly very youthful) subscribers, I am not so sanguine. This media company's cloying implicit message, that "since you did nothing wrong yourself, you have nothing to worry about" is a chilling one, barely removed from "if you do nothing wrong, then you'll have nothing to worry about - because we're keeping an eye on you."

Meanwhile, the corporate media are praising Tumblr's belated "transparency" initiative. Wired, a part of the Clinton-friendly Conde Nast empire, applauds the platform for "finally breaking its long silence".

After months of silence, Tumblr Friday released a list of 84 usernames and their aliases that it says were connected to "state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda campaigns." It's the first time the company has publicly acknowledged what journalists and researchers have known now for months: Russian trolls also used Tumblr to spread their divisive memes and gifs, reportedly to the tune of hundreds of thousands of interactions.

Wired, which "outed" whistleblower Chelsea Manning by publishing email exchanges between her and the late Adrian Lamo, itself maintained a long year of silence over its role in exposing her. It seems that in Wired's world, transparency is the top priority only so long as it doesn't endanger the security of the US military establishment. And now we learn that Wired and other "researchers" had been monitoring Tumblr for months, and knew what Tumblr warned my niece about long before Tumblr was finally pressured into warning her and other spied-upon users. 

The Daily Beast, where Chelsea Clinton just happens to sit on the board, had also been complaining about Tumblr's tight lips, even after its journalists had taken screen shots of the site and collated the names of known Russian bots. Even so, Tumblr shockingly had rejected requests for comment not only from the Beast, but from the powerful Borg mind of CNN. And when Tumblr did comment, it was too frightfully generic.

Meanwhile, I wonder whether "coldfirefan" possibly used Pinkie Pie Pony to spread divisive messages about Morning Glory Pony, thereby convincing the snowy-white Bride Pony to listen to her husband and vote for Trump instead of for Hillary. Also too, could the male fans of My Little Pony, called "Bronies," really be nothing but a Trojan horse for hordes of Hillary-hating Bernie Bro straw-stallions? I guess we'll never know. But, as Wired continues,

Not surprisingly, the accounts often promoted each others' posts, in an apparently successful effort to expand their reach. They also mostly appear to have continued posting long after the election, a reminder that, as intelligence officials have repeatedly warned, Russia's efforts to subvert US democracy have continued unabated.

My niece is supposed to be all upset at the possibility that her My Little Pony pics may have been subverted, or even had their identities stolen. For all we know, there might be whole herds of little plastic Anna Karenina equines out there in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And that is a very scary thought, especially if they happen to live in the same playroom as Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends.

Seriously, though, the Russian movie version of My Little Pony is supposed to be every bit as cheesy as the hundred or so political Facebook ads planted by those 13 grossly underpaid Russian trolls from the IRA. The film is so subversively bad, in fact, that it's not even available on YouTube any more. It's impossible to find out if coldfirefan is listed on the credits.

Those irksome trolls not only interfered in our free and fixed oligarchic elections, their countrymen even meddled in our beloved cheesy all-American Little Ponies TV franchise, having the gall to dub the dialogue of the animated cartoons into Russian.

 No leaked dossier or Congressional witch-hunt is necessary. Senate Troll Hunter-in-Chief Mark Warner can just relax, because here's all the shocking proof he'll ever need:

Where Late the Sweet Obamas Sang

When the Obamas appear at one of their many lucrative speaking gigs and tell other rich people that their new goal in life is to fill the whole world with "hundreds or thousands or millions" of Baracks and Michelles, please don't worry. They're not going for a kinder, gentler, neoliberal version of The Boys From Brazil. They don't actually want to replicate themselves as robotic pod people.

They don't want to literally clone themselves, for heaven's sake -- even though this method would probably be a lot cheaper than training vast new generations of wannabe Baracks and Michelles at their planned $500 million library in Chicago, and burning hundreds or thousands or millions of gallons of polluting jet fuel as they travel the world to inspire paying customers to murmur the right platitudes. Better for the rich to talk optimistically and nicely about the downtrodden than to insult them. It sure beats sharing the actual wealth with them. The very thought of redistribution makes offshore tax havens cringe.

  If Barack Obama knows how to train people in anything, it's in the properly mellifluous use of platitudes. He crooned to a Tokyo audience that he wants to teach young people how to "run in the relay race that is human progress." That's a nice way of saying that it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and competition - not empathy - is the key to success and happiness. On the other hand, the cult of the individual must always be tempered by "civil discourse" so as to give proper cover to predatory capitalists. Nice guy that he is, Obama even euphemized these predators and their unprosecuted crimes against humanity as "problems caused by old men."

As the glowing corporate media coverage of his post-presidency always interprets it, isn't Obama just so wonderfully discreet and even-tempered whenever he takes a jab at Donald J. Trump?

Now, to be fair, Obama also told the audience that if it turns out he's unable to create new legions of virtual Baracks and Michelles to save the world, he will at least inspire imitations: "or, the next group of people who could take that baton in that relay race that is human progress.”

(It's the Think System of the 21st century, as originally devised by that lovable old scammer himself, Professor Harold Hill the Music Man.)

But forget the feel-good musical comedy. We've got big trouble here in River City  The late Kate Wilhelm warned in her classic work of post-apocalyptic fiction, "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang," that while the rich might think they're special, keeping their dynasties alive and thriving while the rest of the world starves and burns might have a few drawbacks. From Wikipedia's plot summary:

The collapse of civilization around the worlds resulted from massive environmental changes and global disease, which was attributed to large-scale pollution. With a range of members privileged by virtue of education and monetary resources, one large family founds an isolated community in an attempt to survive the still developing global disasters. As the death toll rises, mainly to disease and nuclear warfare, they discover that the human population left on earth is universally infertile. From cloning experiments conducted through the study of mice, the scientists in the small community theorize that the infertility might be reversed after multiple generations of cloning, and the family begins cloning themselves in an effort to survive.

If you think that scenario is far-fetched, you can always turn to nonfiction. Naomi Klein writes in The Intercept of a small group of Ayn Randian plutocrats - Puertopians - aiming to re-colonize the storm-ravaged Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and turn it into a jumbo gated community and multi-trillion dollar closed market economy:  

As a breed, the Puertopians, in their flip-flops and surfer shorts, are a sort of slacker cousin to the Seasteaders, a movement of wealthy libertarians who have been plotting for years to escape the government’s grip by starting their own city-states on artificial islands. Anybody who doesn’t like being taxed or regulated will simply be able to, as the Seasteading manifesto states, “vote with your boat.

”For those harboring these Randian secessionist fantasies, Puerto Rico is a much lighter lift. When it comes to taxing and regulating the wealthy, its current government has surrendered with unmatched enthusiasm. And there’s no need to go to the trouble of building your own islands on elaborate floating platforms — as one Puerto Crypto session put it, Puerto Rico is poised to be transformed into a “crypto-island.”

Sure, unlike the empty city-states Seasteaders fantasize about, real-world Puerto Rico is densely habited with living, breathing Puerto Ricans. But FEMA and the governor’s office have been doing their best to take care of that too. Though there has been no reliable effort to track migration flows since Hurricane Maria, some 200,000 people have reportedly left the island, many of them with federal help.

Of course, this makes Barack and Michelle's million-clone neoliberal army seem downright beneficent. They sure beat a bunch of creepy wrinkled old Ayn Rand pod people.

Forget about Michelle Obama running against Trump in 2020, though. Unlike her hubby's rather narcissistic goal of millions of Obamas, she herself modestly aims for only "thousands of Mes" to do the hard work of market-based identity politics. As reported by Business Insider,

The former first lady has been meeting many younger leaders through her work with the Obama Foundation. She says it has given her a lot of optimism about their approach to leading the country.
"They're tired of watching us do the same old thing and expect different results," Obama, 54, said at Klick Health's Muse event in New York on Tuesday. "So I'm optimistic about the future. There are some bright young people out there doing some amazing things."
Those interactions have helped to solidify her plans, which aren't likely to involve running for office. "This is why I'm not going to run for president," she said. "Because I think it's a better investment to invest in creating thousands of mes."

The article doesn't state whether The Real Michelle was paid her reported customary fee of $200,000 for inspiring Klick Health, a consulting and marketing agency whose stated task is to help the world's top medical and pharmaceutical industries burnish their images and increase their profits through the use of Big Data, as well as to inspire patients to manage their own health care needs more "efficiently."

Something just klicked in my brain, and not in a pleasant way. But never mind all that. Back to Mrs. Obama.

While she apparently allows media coverage of certain carefully selected muse-ical corporate events such as Klick Fest, this was apparently not the case in Miami Beach last week, when a Pulitzer-winning Washington Post reporter was booted from an exclusive BET event headlining Michelle Obama. It seems that the "intimate" conference for wealthy African-American women was implicitly off the record, yet panelist Robin Givhan still had the nerve to write a rather fawning blog-post about Obama's appearance for her newspaper. 

A BET rep insisted Givhan was “invited as a guest (not working press) to moderate a fashion panel,” and her travel and hotel were paid for by BET.

“She was made aware that it was an intimate conversation in a sacred space of sisterhood and fellowship.”

After a prolonged ethics kerfuffle largely played out over Twitter, the National Association of Black Journalists has come out in support of Givhan:

The rules of journalism are clear: any decision to make an event off-the-record must be stated clearly upfront, and not after-the-fact. If an individual or entity desires to have a conversation that is off-the-record, that has to be made public. It can’t be assumed or hinted. BET’s statement of the event being ‘an intimate conversation in a sacred space of sisterhood and fellowship’ does not hold water in any newsroom. If the off-the-record declaration is not made, that means everything is on-the-record and available to be reported.

Here's my take on the controversy. Michelle Obama's scripted BET conversation with BFF Valerie Jarrett probably derives from a chapter in her upcoming memoir, Becoming Michelle Obama. It was also probably a dress rehearsal for the world-wide book tour. The publisher's hype is that this volume will be so thrillingly "intimate" and mesmerizing that its sales are expected to skyrocket into even more millions of copies than there will be Obama clones.  Since intimacy "as told by" the rich and famous is such a valuable commodity, Robin Givhan probably leaked a whole hunk of the book without even realizing it. 

But at least the sour note ended on a very sweet note. Journalism in the public, rather than the private, interest really does prevail sometimes. Not every reporter is a stenographer and celebrity-worshiper. It's enough to make you sing for joy.

Commentariat Central: Hawks & Mawks Edition

 Welcome to another semi-regular New York Times comment dump.

If the media aren't salivating over porn star Stormy Daniels, they're salivating and/or retching over war porn addict John Bolton joining the Trump administration.  Bolton did constitute at least a quarter-lobe of Bush's-dry drunk brain, after all. So the fact that erstwhile Iraq War critic Trump is embracing the "hawkish" Bolton - on the 15th anniversary of the illegal invasion, no less - is making even some Neocon-embracing, Saudi-groveling Democrats' hair curl. 

It's bad enough that Trump is a hypocrite, Bolton is a hypocrite for talking tough about Russia at the same time he's enriched himself by, among other things, canoodling with Russian oligarchs on behalf of the National Rifle Association.

 We are supposed to be selectively outraged by some, but by no means all, of the corruption going on this establishment. Thanks to the dearth of media coverage, most people are not too shocked that the US has sold billions of dollars' worth of weapons to the Saudi royals for their war on poor Yemenis, and the humanitarian crisis of starvation and cholera it has wrought.

So this week's designated bad guy is John Bolton. Not that he doesn't eminently deserve the title, of course; it's just so hard to keep straight so many names of so many miscreants vying for attention in our overloaded brains at any given moment.

In her Sunday column comparing the two boy kings - George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump - and their mutual Neocon addiction, Maureen Dowd writes:

Because the Dr. Strangeloves treated W. like a host body, we ended up in two tragically unending wars.

In the bitter contest between the Rumsfeld Defense Department and the Colin Powell State Department, John Bolton was a Rummy person who was a fifth column at State, along with Liz Cheney. Like a walrus version of Wile E. Coyote, he lived to dynamite treaties, alliances and anything with “global” or “multilateral” in the title.

He was known as the most undiplomatic diplomat ever, with a rip-their-eyeballs-out, foaming-at-the-mouth style.

My published comment:

 Calling Bolton a hawk is an insult to hawks, who are sharp-eyed, who kill only what they can eat at one sitting, and who are actually tameable if paired with a properly trained handler. A better moniker is "war criminal." However, since in 2002 Bolton pre-absolved himself of culpability for war crimes when he advised Bush not to ratify the Rome Statute/ International Criminal Court Treaty, he continues to roam free.

Not only was the Bush cohort never prosecuted, Bush himself is being rehabbed in the propaganda court of oligarchic opinion. Trump is so magical that way; he makes some of the worst scoundrels and killers in US history look like choirboys compared to himself.

Bolton is far too depraved to be called a mere hawk. But I do think it's fair to call him a mawk, given the way he slimily burrowed into Bush's soft yielding brain while whispering all those lies about the non-existent WMDs. Bolton is both a predator and a parasite.

The one black lining on the dark cloud is that Trump is neither a proper handler, nor as malleable as Bush. Trump's dwindling supply of sycophants can't hold a candle to, for example, the malevolence of the still-ticking Dick Cheney (who is likely too crafty to accept a temporary invite into the current chaotic inner sanctum.)

Odds are that Trump will grow as tired of Bolton as he has with the rest of them. We can only hope that both these criminals will be forced out before they ever get the chance to bomb any more innocent people.

***

For more run-of-the-mill mawkishness, we can always count on Times resident scold Charles Blow to supply it in overwrought dollops. In his latest effort, he bemoans the tragic damage that our most recent boy king is doing to America's benevolent "brand." All because of Trump, you see, people all over the world who used to love United States diplomatic product are now wrinkling their noses in disgust. The merchandise's value is being threatened. And as the title to his latest column asserts, this makes Trump absolutely "un-American." Attempting to analyze Trump's recent lying to Justin Trudeau of Canada about a non-existent trade deficit, Blow writes:

It bears repeating that Donald Trump is a pathological, unrepentant liar. We must state this truth for as long as he revels in untruth.

But there is something about the nakedness of this confession, the brazenness of it, the cavalier-ness, that still has the ability to shock....

Our relationship with our allies around the world depends on some degree of mutual trust and respect. What must they think when they watch Trump demolish those diplomatic tenets? How are international agreements supposed to be negotiated when one party is a proven, prolific liar?

We have no idea just how damaged the American brand has become under Trump.

My published response:

 Trump is as American as rotten apple pie. He isn't the disease, he's just the most glaring symptom of the disease which has been deliberately crafted in the laboratories of the money-soaked Congress.

Trump uses racism as a weapon to divide and conquer just as the US has from its very inception.:From the slave trade, to the colonization and extermination of natives, to the international plunder by the World Bank and the IMF, to the forever wars waged from nearly 1,000 military bases. 

Trump destroying the American "brand?" To the permanent ruling class and to the media whose job it is to sell a "narrative" of democracy and equality, yes. But to many of us, the "brand" was exposed as a fraud long ago. Ask the refugees from the Middle East, for example, how they feel about Trump's sullying of the "brand." Ask the unemployed factory workers in the US Midwest. Ask the millions of families evicted from their homes after the 2008 collapse, while the bankers got bailouts and bonuses and the top 1% pocketed 94% of all that lost household wealth. Ask them about "brand damage" and they'll either weep bitter tears or laugh right in your face.

 Trump's lies are his essential currency. List them to your heart's content and he won't care a whit. The Trump brand is the American brand boiled right down to its very essence: capitalism on crack.

The country not only needs a high colonic to purge itself of the Trump offal, it needs the therapeutic nourishment of a new New Deal.

***

Times op-ed contributor Susan Jacoby, meanwhile, sets up a nifty little neoliberal straw man in her recent piece, entitled "Stop Apologizing for Being Elite." It seems that hordes of Fox News Deplorables hate you because you happen to possess a college degree and hold a job and earn a decent salary. But don't let them get you down. Above all, stop feeling so ashamed just because you earned yourself a seat at the table, and they didn't. Stop feeling sorry for them! The ignorant should take a tip from her own dear departed grandmother and learn to love learning for learning's sake. And liberal intellectuals should take more pride in their own accomplishments as they mawkishly preach a bootstrapping, ladders-of-opportunity agenda to their less-educated brethren:

Gran has been in my thoughts even more than usual this year, because I know that she would have scoffed at one of the unanticipated consequences of the Trump presidency. I am referring to the endless self-flagellation among well-educated liberals — “the elites,” in pejorative parlance — about their failure to “get” the concerns of white working-class voters. Gran never expected anyone to “get” her. She was determined to educate herself for what she considered the privilege of citizenship.Our current political discourse is corrupted by two equally flawed narratives about the relationship between social class and politics.

 The first is a fable accepted by many intellectuals, who have found themselves guilty because just enough white working-class voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin handed Mr. Trump his Electoral College win in 2016. Many fear that this year’s midterm elections will once again result in a rejection of “elitism” by the same voters.

In a second, equally flawed narrative — adopted by a segment of both blue-collar workers and intellectuals — the American working class is so victimized that almost none of its members are capable of accepting the responsibility of civic self-education.

 And the third flawed narrative is Jacoby's own, given that she conflates the allegedly maligned educated elite ( for example, doctors who won't accept Medicaid patients) with the noxious Power Elite. Jacoby does not discuss the latter group in her article at all.

So I responded:

The resented "elites" aren't intellectuals like doctors and teachers. They are the permanent ruling class of career politicians and operatives, corporate media propagandists and personalities, and the handful of very wealthy families and CEOs who actually run this show.

If doctors refuse to treat Medicare and Medicaid patients, it's because the aristocracy refuses to adequately subsidize health care for the poor, disabled and elderly. Regular people aren't blaming underpaid teachers (bravely beginning to strike for a living wage) and adjunct college professors with advanced degrees who, along with other members of our growing economic underclass, often qualify for meager Medicaid and food assistance. If these professionals feel "guilty" about Trump, then it's probably news to them.

Education may have been a ticket to the good life back in Grandma's day, but since the US devolved into an oligarchy, this is no longer true. Our money-soaked, privatized government ensures that the culture of corruption, of which Trump is only the most glaring symptom, will continue to fester.

While the far-right GOP openly disdains humanity, the centrist Dems go the insipid concern-trolling route, touting incrementalism and bragging about "diversity" - as the oligarchs permit a token few black, brown and female persons to rise within the ranks in order to give the ultra-rich some much-needed identity-politics cover.

But guess what? The empire has no clothes, and people are noticing.