 18 December 19 Surviving Christmas - Any Way We Can
Big shortfall for December. Flurry of campaigns going on, madness prevails. The hope that December would provide additional funding has given way to the realization that making it out of December in one piece is the real challenge.
Please remember RSN is always there. We need precious few of you to help out, but we need that help now.
In earnest.
Marc Ash
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17 December 19
Megan Garber, The Atlantic
Garber writes: "On Sunday, the New York Post published an interview with Harvey Weinstein - the first he has given in a year."
The women who have made allegations against Weinstein have often talked about the power he had over them—to make careers and to destroy them, very definitely, but also, in an even more literal sense, his height and his heft. More than 80 women have accused him of sexual misconduct (Weinstein has repeatedly denied engaging in nonconsensual sex). And many of those women mention, in particular, the way he used his body against theirs, pinning them, weighing them down—making an accomplice, they have suggested, of gravity itself.
So it is striking—and jarring—to see the latest images of Weinstein that have been made public: images of his body being uncooperative. The tubes; the walker; the tennis balls. The Post’s images may well be journalistic recordings of the convalescence of the mogul, who was in a car accident in August. (Driving his Jeep, he reportedly told authorities, he swerved to avoid a deer, crashing into a tree.) The photos may well capture the aftermath of the back surgery he received this month to alleviate the resulting pain.
Former Trump campaign official Rick Gates. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Greg Walters, VICE
Walters writes: "Rick Gates is going to jail. But only on the weekends."
Gates pleaded guilty in February 2018 to charges of lying to investigators and conspiring with his former boss, former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, to hide millions the pair earned while engaged in illegal lobbying for the government of Ukraine years ago.
Gates’ light sentence shows how much it pays to cooperate with the feds: He’d otherwise face some four or five years, even with his guilty plea.
Gates provided what prosecutors described as “extensive” cooperation with investigators, which helped take down his own former friends and business associates Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. All three were once top political advisers to Trump.
Manafort, 70, has already been in jail for 18 months while serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence for bank and tax fraud and illegal foreign lobbying, after first fighting the charges.
Stone was found guilty of lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice in November.
Manafort and Gates were indicted together in October 2017 as early targets of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who pursued them over their decade of work for the Russia-friendly former President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych.
That illegal lobbying campaign, which included efforts to recruit high-profile European politicians to try to influence American decision-makers in Ukraine’s favor, earned both men millions, which they hid from American tax officials in a network of offshore bank accounts.
American soldiers during the Moro campaign. (photo: Library of Congress)
Danny Sjursen | Remembering America's First (and Longest) Forgotten War on Tribal Islamists: It Was "Progress" All the Way Then, Too
Danny Sjursen, TomDispatch
Sjursen writes: "For a decade and a half, the U.S. Army waged war on fierce tribal Muslims in a remote land. Sound familiar?"
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Woman heads to a polling station. (photo: George Frey/Getty)
Danny Sjursen, TomDispatch
Sjursen writes: "For a decade and a half, the U.S. Army waged war on fierce tribal Muslims in a remote land. Sound familiar?"
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Woman heads to a polling station. (photo: George Frey/Getty)
Judge Allows Georgia to Purge 309K Voter Registrations Overnight
Mark Niesse, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Niesse writes: "About 309,000 names were set to be erased from Georgia's list of registered voters Monday night, a mass cancellation that a federal judge allowed to move forward."
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Several agencies are involved in carrying out President Trump's immigration policies, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees detention centers across the country, has come under the most criticism. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Mark Niesse, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Niesse writes: "About 309,000 names were set to be erased from Georgia's list of registered voters Monday night, a mass cancellation that a federal judge allowed to move forward."
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Several agencies are involved in carrying out President Trump's immigration policies, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees detention centers across the country, has come under the most criticism. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Ian MacDougall, ProPublica
MacDougall writes: "This month, we wrote an article revealing how the consulting giant McKinsey & Company helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement implement the Trump administration's immigration policies."
The article described how McKinsey “proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees,” noting that some of McKinsey’s recommendations made ICE staffers uncomfortable. The story explained that it was based on “interviews with people who worked on the project for both ICE and McKinsey and 1,500 pages of documents obtained from the agency after ProPublica filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.” It incorporated several statements and responses from McKinsey and ICE.
After the article was published, McKinsey posted an 800-word statement on its website criticizing the article. McKinsey paid to have the statement treated as an advertisement on Google, so it appears above the original article in an online search for “McKinsey ICE.”
McKinsey alleges that the article “ignores many of the factual points that we presented” and “misleads readers” about the firm’s work for ICE. It asserts that “while we offered extensive on-the-record comments in response to more than a dozen questions, the story contains only the barest of statements from McKinsey and ignores many of the factual points that we presented.”
Aung San Suu Kyi. (photo: Reuters)
"A Spectacular Fall From Grace": Aung San Suu Kyi Denies Burmese Genocide of Rohingya at the Hague
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Burma's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi has asked the U.N. International Court of Justice to drop the genocide case against Myanmar, formerly Burma."
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Burma's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi has asked the U.N. International Court of Justice to drop the genocide case against Myanmar, formerly Burma."
Rainwater. (photo: Tim Graham/Alamy)
Rainwater in Parts of US Contain High Levels of Toxic Chemical, Says Study
Daniel Ross, Guardian UK
Ross writes: "New data shows that rainwater in some parts of the US contains high enough levels of potentially toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to possibly affect human health and may, if found in drinking water, in some cases be high enough to trigger regulatory action."
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Daniel Ross, Guardian UK
Ross writes: "New data shows that rainwater in some parts of the US contains high enough levels of potentially toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to possibly affect human health and may, if found in drinking water, in some cases be high enough to trigger regulatory action."
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