Week of November 27, 2017

Intrepid Report Newsletter
We cannot keep publishing without your help. We have no paywalls or ads. Nor do we receive corporate or foundation funding. All we have is you to keep us publishing. We rely on you to help us pay our monthly expenses. So please Donate  Monday ‘Worse than one could imagine’: Commissioner decries FCC chair’s attack on net neutrality By Jake Johnson In an effort to combat the “mountain of lies” FCC chair Ajit Pai has deployed to justify his newly released plan to kill net neutrality, Democratic FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn unveiled a fact sheet (pdf) on Wednesday aimed at helping Americans understand that Pai’s proposals are “worse than one could imagine” and highlighting their life-or-death implications for the open The fact sheet, an easily digestible two pages in length, runs through a series of commonly asked and frequently confusing questions surrounding net neutrality: what it is, why it’s important, and how Pai’s plan would affect the web. For the GOP, incompetence is a feature, not a flaw By Mike Lofgren It has been said that Newt Gingrich is “a dumb person’s idea of a smart person.” Who coined that phrase is a matter of scholarly dispute, but there is broad agreement that the sentiment is applicable. I will go further and say this characteristic of Newt’s is not just a personal foible; it establishes a model for Republican politicians and operatives since his time in Congress. Fools or knaves? By Robert Reich One of the most dangerous consequences of this awful period in American life is the denigration of the truth, and of institutions and people who tell it. A mass murderer’s love song to Trump When a guy who's compared himself to Hitler sings love ballads to the U.S. president, we've got a problem. By Jim Hightower “We’ve had a great relationship,” exulted a giddy Donald Trump, following his two-day schmoozefest in Manila with the thuggish Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte. Are billionaire noblemen the new knights in shining armor? By Ben Tanosborn We keep saying that the nation is divided: two camps, two ideologies, two political clans at the ready every minute of the day to do battle. But that’s oversimplifying the sad fact that even if our pledge of allegiance appears lofty and humanely unifying, the reality we live unveils our nation as divisible with questionable liberty and justice for all. Wednesday Kissing our a*#@s goodbye in a nuclear war By Howard Lisnoff The late novelist Kurt Vonnegut recounts the horrors of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany in both the fictional work Slaughterhouse Five and his book of nonfictional essays, Armageddon In Retrospect. Vonnegut was a World War II veteran who had his boots on the ground, so he pretty much knew his subject. He makes a point that the death toll from firebombing cities was not too much different from the two atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped over Japan in August 1945. But with the advent of the hydrogen bomb, mass annihilation is a safe bet today. In ‘blow to American consumers,’ Trump-appointed judge sides with Trump on CFPB "Who knows what deep damage Mulvaney will do until the D.C. Circuit can right this wrong." By Jake Johnson A Trump-appointed federal judge delivered a “blow to American consumers” on Tuesday by denying Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) deputy director Leandra English’s request for a temporary restraining order, which would have prevented Trump budget chief Mick Mulvaney from becoming the CFPB’s acting director. Trump wants welfare in America ended By Stephen Lendman During the Great Depression, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) provided financial help to children of low or no-income families. Once again, the right hijacks that old time religion By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship In Babylon-on-the-Potomac recently, the brand new, $500 million Museum of the Bible had its grand opening. Donald Trump did not attend, perhaps fearing a fate like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when the remnants of the Ten Commandments are unsealed, holy mayhem ensues and miscreants melt like candles. Can’t you see war is on the horizon? By Paul Craig Roberts According to news reports in the British press, Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed Russia’s industries to prepare themselves to be able to make a quick switch to war production. Friday America’s bargain with the Devil By Jacob Hornberger As many Americans know, the National Archives ended up releasing only about 5 percent of the CIA’s JFK-assassination-related records, notwithstanding the fact that the JFK Records Act, which is the law, required the release of all of them. Earthquake risk keeps heat on vulnerable nuclear reactors By Harvey Wasserman A proposal by a California administrative law judge has given safe energy advocates new hope that two Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors will be shut before an earthquake on the San Andreas fault turns them to rubble, potentially threatening millions of people. Freedom Rider: Contradictions of white supremacy By Margaret Kimberley American media have a collective crush on avowed racists. The New York Times is only the most recent perpetrator with their now maligned profile of an Ohio Nazi . The kid glove approach was too obvious and readers rose up in uproar. The back pedaling and apologizing shouldn’t let them off the hook, nor allow their colleagues at other outlets to escape scrutiny. The alt-right got a significant boost from a puff piece profile of their leader Richard Spencer in the supposedly progressive Mother Jones. Mother Jones referred to the “prom-king good looks” of the “dapper white nationalist.” Decades of US diplomacy has failed: Why the US wants to shut down PLO office By Ramzy Baroud On November 18, just days before the 50th anniversary of United Nations Resolution 242, the US State Department took its first step towards severing its ties with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Nervous about traffic stops? I am. You should be, too By John W. Whitehead We’ve all been there before.
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