As 2022 begins, the world continues to see the effects of the climate crisis — from the severe drought in East Africa to the odd snowfall in British Columbia. But since December 5, a new film has been sounding the alarm. In Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up,” an allegory about the impending climate disaster, scientists discover an approaching comet that will destroy Earth. But the media, politicians, and elite in the U.S. fail at every opportunity to prevent the impending doom. The Intercept’s senior correspondent Naomi Klein joins senior writer Jon Schwarz to discuss the film, how present-day elites are failing to address the climate crisis, and the future of the climate justice movement. Klein is a professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia and the author of many books on climate change, including her latest, “How to Change Everything: The Young Human's Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other.” join.theintercept.com/donate/now

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So I (Chris) take one week off producing for a little vacation and somehow the boys manage to accidentally record all three of themselves into just one mic track for this ep? Idk I literally can’t leave these jokers alone for one minute. Our guest editor did heroic work getting this listenable, but sorry for the “chapo classic” audio quality.

Anyway, the boys are back in town and California dreamin' on such a winter's day, they discuss whether MLK's civil rights rings are legit or Mickey Mouse, ongoing COVID hysteria, demand parents leave twitter for Facebook, how shitty it is to be a kid these days, and finally Felix debuts his idea for an adult Six Flags Great Adventure.

From time to time people tend to discuss the Org markup – some people want to extend it in one way or another, some people want to make it more Markdown-ish. I tend to agree that the selection of the tilde (~) to denote code is a bit inferior than Markdown’s choice of the backtick (`). But keep in mind this: I don’t have a problem with looking at my Org file and seeing (lots of) tildes. After all, font-lock does a good job of telling me that this is code. I have a problem with typing these tildes, since they require me pressing the shift key – and if I have a lot of small code snippets, this is not very comfortable. Add to this the fact that I happen to write in Markdown pretty often (when I use Markdown-based tools, like Slack or Jira), and I started wondering: why couldn’t I press the backtick in Org-mode to type a tilde (and vice versa so that I don’t lose the ability to type a backtick)?

Chapo Trap House’s Amber A’Lee Frost and Jacobin contributor Danny Bessner investigate whether the Democrats are losing on purpose. Ross Barkan discusses New York mayor Eric Adams’s unlikely coalition of black working-class voters and wealthy developers, and Jen Pan debunks blue-state racecraft. The Jacobin Show offers socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the podcast version of the show from January 12, 2021 with Jen Pan hosting.

Subscribe to Jacobin: https://jacobinmag.com/subscribe/?code=JACOBINYT

Music provided by Zonkey: https://linktr.ee/zonkey

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Is our existence, and that of the world, the result of pure chance?

Franco Pasut has posted on exporting variables from Org to LaTeX. The TL;DR is that you can define LaTeX macros defining a variable value in #+LATEX_HEADER: entries at the top of the Org file and then interpolate the variables in the text by including \variable_name{} in the body of the document. That’s nice because it makes it easy to change the value of those variables, if needed, in one place and have the results reflected in the whole document.

The problem with this method is that it’s not portable. It’s great if you’re only exporting to PDF but if you want to also export to HTML, say, it won’t work. The proper way of handling the general case is to define the variables at the Org level as described by Mike Hamrick in his excellent video Consistent Technical Documents Using Emacs and Org Mode that I wrote about wrote about previously.

In either case, the idea of defining variables in one place and using their values throughout the document makes a lot sense precisely because it makes it easy to change those values when needed without scanning the entire document. Take a look Hamrick’s video to see how powerful the method can be.

George Nader, an American adviser to the government of the United Arab Emirates, convicted sex offender, and frequent visitor to the White House during President Donald Trump’s first year in office, has pleaded guilty for his role in helping the UAE pump millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions into the U.S. political system during the 2016 presidential election, according to documents submitted in federal court last month.

Federal prosecutors disclosed in a December sentencing memo that Nader had agreed months earlier to plead guilty to a single count of felony conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government by funneling millions in donations to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and concealing the funds’ foreign origin. Nader’s plea has not been previously reported.

A lawyer for Nader did not respond to a request for comment.

Nader conspired to hide the funds “out of a desire to lobby on behalf and advance the interests of his client, the government of the United Arab Emirates,” according to the prosecutors’ sentencing memo. Nader received the money for the illegal donations from the UAE government, the memo said. The filing marks the first time that the U.S. government has explicitly accused the UAE, a close ally, of illegally seeking to buy access to candidates during a presidential election.

Nader’s guilty plea opens a new window into the efforts of the United Arab Emirates and its de facto ruler, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, known as MBZ, to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and shape subsequent U.S. policy in the Gulf. The government’s memo notes that Nader and Los Angeles businessperson Ahmad “Andy” Khawaja also sought to cultivate “key figures” in the Trump campaign and that Khawaja donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. It is unclear where that money came from.

Prosecutors allege that, in total, Nader transferred nearly $5 million from his UAE-based business to Khawaja, the CEO of a Los Angeles-based payment processing company. The sentencing memo details Nader and Khawaja’s efforts to disguise the money as a mundane business contract between the two. Of that amount, more than $3.5 million came from the government of the UAE and was given to Democratic political committees working to elect Clinton, according to the U.S. government, which has accused Nader, Khawaja, and six others of working together to conceal the origin of those funds. Prosecutors have not publicly accounted for what happened to the remaining $1.4 million they say Nader transferred to Khawaja.

With Nader’s guilty plea, five of the eight men charged in the alleged conspiracy have pleaded guilty; two other defendants are scheduled to stand trial this year. Khawaja fled the U.S. after the indictment. The Associated Press reported in 2020 that he was being held in Lithuania, citing police officials there and a Lithuanian lawyer representing him.

Prosecutors are seeking a five-year sentence for Nader, asking that it not begin until after he completes the 10-year sentence he is currently serving for possessing child pornography and bringing a minor to the U.S. “for the purpose of engaging in criminal sexual activity.”

Prosecutors have alleged that Nader took his instructions from the UAE crown prince and that he regularly updated MBZ on his progress as he sought to get close to Clinton. At one point, Khawaja complained that Nader and the UAE had not yet sent money to cover the costs of a Clinton fundraiser he was organizing. Nader texted that he would send note “as per HH instruction,” using an abbreviation of “his highness,” an apparent reference to MBZ.

A few days later, Nader was preparing to meet with both Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton and asked an Emirati official, almost certainly MBZ, if they could meet before he departed. “[T]raveling on Sat morning to catch up with our Big Sister and her husband: I am seeing him on Sunday and her in [sic] Tuesday Sir! Would love to see you tomorrow at your convenience…for your guidance, instruction and blessing!”

Even as Nader poured donations into the effort to elect Clinton, he worked his way into the Trump campaign on behalf of his Gulf clients.

But even as Nader poured donations into the effort to elect Clinton, he worked his way into the Trump campaign on behalf of his Gulf clients. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election described Nader as a “senior advisor” to MBZ and said that he’d made “contacts” with both campaigns. Nader would later tell the FBI that he met with Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. several times in 2016, and the New York Times reported that Nader told Trump Jr. that both MBZ and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince were eager to help his father get elected. Nader advised the Gulf monarchs to “be on good terms” with both Clinton and Trump in the runup to the 2016 vote, he told the FBI.

After Trump won the presidency but before he was inaugurated, Nader unsuccessfully sought to arrange a meeting between Trump and MBZ, according to FBI interview notes. Instead, UAE officials arranged for MBZ to speak with top Trump campaign officials including Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, and retired Lieut. Gen. Michael Flynn in New York. A few weeks later, through Nader, the Emirati leader arranged for a top Trump donor, Erik Prince, to meet with Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a state-sanctioned investment fund, at a resort in the Seychelles.

After Trump’s inauguration, Nader became a frequent visitor to the White House, according to the Times. Nader’s involvement with the Trump campaign and his role in the Seychelles meeting put him in the sights of Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Federal agents arrested Nader in June 2019 at John F. Kennedy International Airport after he got off a flight from the UAE and charged him with possessing a dozen images or videos of child pornography. Those charges were ultimately dismissed, but Nader was indicted on a separate child pornography possession charge and accused of flying a 14-year-old boy to the U.S. for sexual purposes. Nader pleaded guilty to both felony counts, which stemmed from activity that took place in 2012 and 2000, respectively, according to court documents, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison and lifetime supervision as a sex offender. Nader also spent a year in prison in the Czech Republic in 2003 for having sex with the same minor he flew to the U.S.

Nader isn’t the only American recently charged with helping the UAE influence U.S. policy. Last year, the Justice Department indicted Thomas Barrack, a wealthy businessperson and close friend and adviser of Trump, for secretly working as an agent of the UAE in an effort to help advance the country’s foreign policy aims. In a press release at the time of the indictment’s unsealing, the Justice Department described Barrack and two others as working to “provide intelligence” to the UAE government about the Trump campaign and later the administration. Barrack was also charged with obstruction of justice and lying to investigators. Also indicted in the scheme was a UAE national and associate of Barrack, Rashid Al-Malik, whose role was first reported by The Intercept in 2019.

In Barrack’s indictment, MBZ and senior UAE officials are described, though not by name, as directing and otherwise overseeing Barrack’s efforts to work with Trump to advance the UAE’s policy goals. Barrack, who pleaded not guilty to the charges, will face trial later this year.

The post UAE Adviser Illegally Funneled Foreign Cash Into Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign appeared first on The Intercept.

To mark a very special milestone, we decided to reach back to early in the podcast's history and revisit MICHAEL MOORE HATES AMERICA (2004). Mimicking Moore's own filmmaking style, this amateurish documentary sees a conservative man go on a cross-country journey to land and interview with Michael himself. We discuss why this piece of right-wing kitsch has remained so firmly lodged in our minds, and why it is such a product of its time.

Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage.

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The boys discuss a case of road rage in Florida and Thomas Friedmans highly regarded column about a Biden-Cheney unity ticket.

The dominant story in archaeology has long been that humans came to North America around 12,000 years ago. But Indigenous archaeologist Paulette Steeves points to mounting evidence suggesting it was more like 130,000 years ago. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 13, 2022.

The western media conceals the truth of the Newsome Regime…drinking piss and cum to cure covid…Obama razes parks to build library…and two dipshits try to out-yokel each other in Ohio. Tickets for our Southern tour are on sale over at chapotraphouse.com/live

Charles Masson was a red-haired Englishman with a Cockney accent, a self-taught archaeologist who, in the 19th century, became the first westerner to explore Afghanistan’s ancient past. 

On the night of December 16, 2010, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dialed President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. The Democrats had been shellacked in the midterms a bit over a month earlier, and Republicans were set to take over the House in just two weeks. That meant two weeks to finish what they could of Obama’s legislative agenda, and Reid and the White House had conflicting priorities. Obama wanted to see the Senate approve the New START Treaty, a nuclear arms reduction pact Obama had struck with Russia. Reid, meanwhile, wanted to see how far he could get with two other issues: repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which barred gay, lesbian, and bisexual people from serving openly, and taking a run at the DREAM Act, which would confer a path to citizenship to people who’d been brought to the country illegally as children.

The DREAM Act was struggling, but Reid saw a path to “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal and told Obama that he planned to put it on the floor. Obama made a strong case against it, convinced that it would fail and derail the remainder of the lame-duck agenda. It was a familiar argument from some of his advisers — that losing on one issue was contagious and would infect the rest of the agenda, and therefore it was better to put “points on the board” with certain victories. The DREAM Act was scheduled for a vote on the same day as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and the thought of two losses was just too much to bear. Reid heard him out before delivering his response. “Well, Mr. President, sometimes you just gotta roll the dice,” Reid said, and hung up, leaving Obama with the dial tone that routinely signaled his conversations with Reid were over.

When Reid saw an opening, he took it. Reid told me he promised the president that he’d also do what he could to get the treaty approved. “I told the president, I understand how important the START Treaty is, and I’ll do everything I can to help with that. But I said, I’m going to go ahead and ‘roll the dice,’ exact words, ‘roll the dice,’ on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ I said, I think it should turn out well for both of us, but I’m rolling the dice. It turned out well for both of us,” Reid said. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal was successful and the New START Treaty was approved, though the DREAM Act died.

Still, it was necessary for the DREAM Act to die for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, to live. The lame-duck showdown illuminated the gap between Obama’s cautious, high-minded approach to politics — we must not potentially, theoretically jeopardize the ratification of a nuclear disarmament treaty extension! — and Reid’s willingness to, in his words, roll the dice. But it might not entirely explain to people who came of political age after Reid’s heyday what a consequential figure he was. The repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” removed a key obstacle to marriage equality, paving the way for the Supreme Court to bless it in 2015. Had he failed to move in that moment, it’s impossible to see the subsequent Republican Congress take action, which then makes it extraordinarily difficult for the Supreme Court to rule the way it did. But consequential as that roll of the dice was, a Reid cynic could dismiss it as getting ahead of a culture war victory that was only a matter of time.

Pointing to his two signature legislative accomplishments — the Affordable Care Act and Wall Street reform, which included the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — can be similarly unsatisfying. Reid’s true accomplishment was in what he stopped from happening — combating conventional wisdom to save Social Security and Medicare and stave off an extreme round of austerity — and the way in which his confrontational approach reshaped elements of the Democratic Party in the coming years. That all of it wasn’t enough to reshape the country is a testament to the narrow possibilities available to any party leadership figure in such a desiccated political environment. But it’s also, in some part, at the feet of Reid, as he worked hard in the Nevada 2016 Democratic presidential caucus to suppress the very energy he had organized and helped unleash. Reid died after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer on December 28, retired, at the age of 82. After a private service in Nevada on Saturday, Reid will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol.

Following Reid’s death, Obama released a letter he had recently sent to Reid demonstrating that he still had calls like that one from 2010 on his mind. “I got the news that the health situation has taken a rough turn, and that it’s hard to talk on the phone,” Obama wrote. “Which, let’s face it, is not that big of a change cause you never liked to talk on the phone anyway!” In truth, Reid spent much of his day on the phone and knew the numbers of his Democratic colleagues by heart, checking in with all of them frequently. He just wasn’t one for small talk.

“That was a courtesy call,” said Faiz Shakir, a former senior aide to Reid who went on to manage the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020, on the latest episode of Deconstructed. Once Reid had settled on a legislative strategy, he was determined to see it through.

“I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination,” Obama continued. Harry Reid was, ultimately, the man with the courage of Obama’s convictions.

In 1840, William Henry Harrison — Ol’ Tippecanoe — made his humble upbringing in a log cabin central to his presidential campaign, just as Abraham Lincoln would 20 years later. If anything, their legendarily impoverished childhoods would have been an upgrade for a young Harry Reid, whose home had no indoor toilet or hot water. When his brother Larry broke his leg, he screamed for days, unable to get medical treatment, recalled Ari Rabin-Havt, a former aide who did research for Reid’s memoir, on the most recent episode of Deconstructed. When a mentor gave Reid a $50 bill to cover the cost of taking the bar exam, it was the first time he had held that much money in his hand. At 14, Reid and his brother Larry finally attacked their father, a miner, to defend their mother against his repeated drunken assaults. When his father killed himself, Reid was called to the home, finding his father’s dead hand still holding the gun.

Reid’s childhood produced in him a hostility toward wealthy elites that he clung to until his dying days, yet that did not prevent him from wanting to become an insider. He chose to go to law school at George Washington University, and of all the places he could have worked to pay his way through, he chose the U.S. Capitol, becoming a police officer there.

Back in Nevada, he became the town attorney for Henderson and then, still in his 20s, won election to the Nevada Legislature. By 30, he was lieutenant governor. In 1974, the Watergate wave year, he tried to parlay that into a Senate seat but lost by less than 1,000 votes.

His run for Las Vegas mayor the next year was also unsuccessful, leading to his stint instead as chair of the gaming commission. Even there, his tenure is more complicated than the Eliot Ness, crime-fighter image that has since emerged. The FBI captured audio of mobsters claiming to have Reid under their thumb, and in his famous, later cinematically portrayed public confrontation with Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, he admitted to asking Rosenthal to help bury an unfavorable story. Reid himself wore a wire to take down a mobster trying to bribe him, and later a bomb was found under the hood of his car.

By 1982, with Nevada getting a second House seat, he won the district covering Las Vegas. Four years later, he finally won his first Senate race. Burrowing even deeper inside, he rose through the ranks of Senate Democratic leadership, ultimately coming out on top in 2005.

It’s hard to contemplate the scale of the destruction the former Senate majority leader averted for the simple fact that he averted it.

After arriving in Washington, Reid’s career largely consisted of defending gains amid retreat. Following the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004, the invigorated president declared bluntly that he had collected new political capital, and he intended to spend it on privatizing Social Security.

Bush proposed allowing workers to divert their Social Security tax money to Wall Street, in a complicated scheme that would have enriched the latter and impoverished the former. In Washington, the media clamored at its highest pitch for Democrats to get serious and offer their own counterproposal. That was how Washington was supposed to work. Rahm Emanuel, then a congressional representative from Illinois, floated a plan that would create private retirement accounts but would be separate from Social Security, but that was the kind of thing progressives warned would be the camel’s nose under the tent of Social Security.

But Reid was the new minority leader of the Senate Democratic caucus, and he and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi took an unusual tack for Democrats, accustomed by the last 40 years of retreat to compromise and preserve as many of the gains made under the New Deal as possible. They simply said no. They had no counteroffer. “President Bush should forget about privatizing Social Security,” Reid told reporters on Capitol Hill. “It will not happen — and the sooner he comes to that realization, the better off we are.”

Conventional wisdom said that this was not just a losing strategy but was also deeply irresponsible — and the press didn’t let up. Wall Street titan and Nixon administration alumnus Peter Peterson had spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeding Washington with austerity propaganda, and a large chunk of the Senate Democratic caucus, stacked with far more conservative members than today, had already called for “reforms” to Social Security. If a single one publicly broke with Reid’s strategy and sat down with Republicans to negotiate, it could have created a jailbreak.

The troops deployed by Reid were the nascent Netroots, a blogosphere of activists and writers dedicated to stiffening the spines of Democrats, many of whom had risen to prominence in the midst of Howard Dean’s challenge for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. Reid didn’t understand how this community worked — he called it “The Blog,” according to his longtime lieutenant Susan McCue — but he understood its potential.

Reid brought in Rabin-Havt and later Josh Orton, who had roots in the blogosphere and liberal talk radio, to bring him closer to it, fueling one of the most consequential political evolutions in a generation. (Both Orton and Rabin-Havt went on to work for Sanders.) Reid began regular conference calls with bloggers during which the lines were open, producing a genuine give-and-take. State-based blogs had started to spring up, but the national blogosphere had yet to fully flesh itself out. The site Talking Points Memo was in its infancy and a hub of activity, tracking the fight relentlessly.

When Reid got word that a Democratic senator was going wobbly and thinking of hearing Bush out, his staff would let the bloggers know, they’d write about it, and then the senator’s office would be flooded by phone calls and they’d quickly get back in line.

“I knew the strength of that networking was just starting, and I felt I should be in in the beginning rather than try to jump in in the middle.”

In 2006, the first national blogger convention, called Yearly Kos, was held not coincidentally in Las Vegas, and Reid gave the keynote address. “I remember I was at the first Daily Kos conference. I frankly — let’s see, how to phrase this? — I didn’t fully understand the impact, but I knew the strength of that networking was just starting, and I felt I should be in in the beginning rather than try to jump in in the middle,” Reid told me. I asked Reid why he was able to evolve with the time politically while many of his colleagues remained stuck in the 1980s. “First of all, I had a wonderful staff who was very — I listened to them,” he said. “My thought process changed on many different issues.”

The more the public learned about Bush’s scheme to privatize Social Security, the less popular it became, and he ultimately admitted defeat and shelved it. It was the beginning of his political collapse. Followed by scandals related to his mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, corruption, and chaos in Iraq, it led to a Democratic sweep of Congress, making Reid majority leader — a position he held until 2015, when chaos in Iraq would again flip control of the Senate.

Reid did not fall backward into the leadership of a Senate supermajority with Obama in the White House; he had methodically put into place each piece, beginning with the president. In the fall of 2006, Reid and his longtime friend Judy Hill, who did upkeep on his home in Searchlight, Nevada, were in Reid’s living room when Hill spotted a Time magazine graced with then-Sen. Obama’s image. That man, said Hill, should be our next president. “Good choice,” Reid told her, Hill says, clearly indicating with his smile that Obama was his pick too. Hill nearly fainted when Obama called her on her cellphone from the White House to thank her for her early lobbying of Reid. Reid’s payoff for his endorsement of Obama was a promise that Yucca Mountain in Nevada would never be used as a nuclear waste storage dump, and Obama followed through, naming a Reid aide to run the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Yet during the fight over the Affordable Care Act, Reid was often battling the White House as much as his conservative flank. After the election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts cost Senate Democrats their 60-vote supermajority, Reid turned toward the budget reconciliation process to get Obama’s health care law done. That way, it only needed 50 votes to pass, which meant a public health insurance option was also back on the table, despite the White House hostility to it.

In the House, Reps. Jared Polis and Chellie Pingree began circulating a letter calling for the Senate to add a public option through reconciliation. The blogosphere hounded House members until more than 100 signed on. Polis enlisted the support of Sen. Michael Bennet, a first-term Democrat from Polis’s home state of Colorado facing pressure from a progressive primary challenger and in need of some cred. New York’s first-term Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand also signed on, her first big break in the Senate with her Blue Dog roots in the House. With first-term Sen. Jeff Merkley and sophomore Sen. Sherrod Brown, the four put out a Senate version of the Pingree-Polis letter.

The effort caught fire in the Senate, where more than 40 senators eventually made the commitment and more than 50 said they would vote for it if it were on the floor.

The letter gave despondent grassroots Democrats something to organize around, and they began calling their senators and members of Congress and demanding that they sign the letter. As names piled up, the new endorsements created new stories, articles that then fed the outside activism.

As the number of senators joining the effort expanded, it generated leadership support, with Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez getting behind it. With genuine momentum behind the public option, Harry Reid was the next to jump on board.

“Senator Reid has always and continues to support the public option as a way to drive down costs and create competition,” read a statement his office put out Friday, February 19, 2010. “That is why he included the measure in his original health care proposal. If a decision is made to use reconciliation to advance health care, Senator Reid will work with the White House, the House, and members of his caucus in an effort to craft a public option that can overcome procedural obstacles and secure enough votes.”

The White House didn’t appreciate the new energy. A few hours after Reid’s office put out its statement in support of the public option, Obama’s chief of staff, former Rep. Emanuel, met senior Reid aide Jim Manley and a few reporters from the Washington Post and the New York Times for dinner and drinks at Lola’s, a Capitol Hill bar and grill. Seeing Manley, Emanuel offered a response to Reid’s gesture with one of his own: a double-bird, an eerie sight given his severed right finger.

As the final details of the bill were being worked out, a national public option was still alive; Reid and his aides were trying to work through the details of what type of public expansion would be agreeable to the caucus, and the two senators they needed to go through were Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman. Both would take the offers back to representatives of the insurance industry for feedback, Reid aides said.

Connecticut’s political economy has long been dominated by insurers, which were major supporters of Lieberman. Nelson, meanwhile, simply was the insurance industry. He had been an executive at Central National Insurance Group of Omaha, before becoming the state’s insurance commissioner. After his stint in public service, he went back to the insurance company, eventually becoming the firm’s president.

Privately, efforts by Reid staffers to persuade the White House to include the public option were rebuffed. “The word kept coming back, too many promises have been made. It’s over,” said one senior Reid aide. The public option was not included.

“We had the votes, it just didn’t last very long,” Reid told me years later. “We had the votes on public option for 24 hours, and a number of votes changed. Where the pressure came from, I don’t know, but it came, and we were unable to get it done.”

Reid’s major legislative push in 2009 and 2010 coincided with his own reelection campaign in Nevada. In 1998, Reid had survived by fewer than 500 votes and determined after that election to reshape Nevada’s politics to give himself bigger margins. He spent years building up the state party machine and poking holes in the opposition.

To survive, he had worked over the Republican field for years. Kristen Orthman, who worked on his 2010 campaign and served as an aide until Reid’s eventual retirement, said that Reid had identified then-state Sen. Joe Heck as a potential Republican opponent. Seeing the Obama wave coming, he recruited a serious challenger and knocked Heck out of the Nevada Senate in 2008, hobbling his rise through the ranks and taking him off the table for a 2010 Senate run. He relentlessly targeted the GOP front-runner, Sue Lowden, in the primary, making national news out of her infamous suggestion that health care reform was unnecessary because people could simply barter chickens for care. Sharron Angle, a tea party favorite, ended up winning the primary.

Reid’s hostility to the tea party bordered on the obsessive. An early convert to clean energy, he was building a wind turbine outside his Nevada home in early 2010. As it was being constructed, Sarah Palin, the late Sen. John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, announced that a tea party rally would be held in Searchlight, a town of about 500 people at the time. When Reid heard, he found his handyman, Richard Hill, and delivered marching orders. “He wanted it up before the Tea Party Express came through,” Hill told me. Reid made clear how important it was to have that wind turbine erected before Palin’s arrival, so that it could stand as a middle finger in the face of the rows of flag-waving RVs.

“We got it up the day before,” Hill said. He almost never bothered Reid while he was in Washington, where the senator stayed at a suite in the Ritz-Carlton, but decided that it was worth it and texted Reid that the deed was done. Reid instantly sent back his gratitude.

But it was by deploying his Senate power on behalf of a private development project that got him reelected. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest urban development project in Las Vegas, CityCenter, was at risk of failure and could have brought the entire state economy down with it. Reid browbeat banks into refinancing the project and keeping it alive, then ran on the jobs it saved. Orthman, meanwhile, called a local radio station while Angle was on air and asked if she’d have made the same decision. “No,” Angle said, likely costing her the race.

Reid won by a convincing 6-point margin.

But after Democrats lost the House in the 2010 tea party wave, Obama vowed to “tighten our belts,” sitting down for major negotiations over what Washington called a “grand bargain,” a deal that would comprehensively slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while also raising taxes — ostensibly in the name of deficit reduction but effectively aimed at driving the final dagger of the Reagan Revolution into the heart of a functioning government. It was in many ways a rehash of the Social Security battle, and Reid fought it from the beginning.

Because it was a high priority for Obama, Reid worked delicately to undermine it, though the contest often burst into public. One weekend in 2013, during government shutdown negotiations, I published a story sourced to multiple Senate Democratic leadership aides critical of White House efforts to capitulate to a recent Republican demand. Obama picked up the phone and called Reid to complain and accuse his chief of staff, David Krone, of leaking. Krone himself was listening in on the call and surprised Obama by piping up and taking offense at the accusation. That year, Reid finally made it clear: “There is not going to be a grand bargain,” he declared. On another occasion, Reid famously showed his contempt for a list of White House concessions by crumpling it up and throwing it into his office fire — a gesture that quickly appeared in the press.

Reid famously showed his contempt for a list of White House concessions by crumpling it up and throwing it into his office fire.

Having beaten back the grand bargain, Reid joined with Sen. Elizabeth Warren in going on the offense, calling for Social Security not to be cut but to be expanded. The ground was finally changing, and though Reid had shown a willingness to betray the establishment, that willingness only went so far.

Reid had stiffened Democrats’ spines against Bush and later against Obama’s willingness to capitulate to the politics of austerity, but ultimately he was boxed in — or had no interest in breaking out of the box — by the politics of his era. In 2016, when the Clinton machine was challenged a second time, this time by Sanders, Reid stood by the Clintons. Obama versus Hillary Clinton was an intra-insider contest, the kind in which Reid felt comfortable bucking a faction of power. But Sanders versus Clinton was outsider versus insider, and Reid stayed true to his fellow insiders, deploying his Nevada machine against Sanders in the caucus.

Reid never revealed his role in forcing the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” onto the Senate floor while Obama was still in office. I learned about it through former Reid aides and confirmed it in an interview with Reid. After I reached out to Obama’s post-presidential office for comment in 2019, Obama called Reid to discuss the issue, and Reid said that he would talk with me again to clarify any potential misunderstanding. When we spoke again, he stuck by his original story.

“There is no doubt that — let me say this the right way — the issue was over the [START] treaty and ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ Now, Obama was always in favor of [repealing] ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Reid said. “I had to make sure that I could pass both of them, and I wasn’t sure I could. So I decided what I was going to do is get what I thought was going to be the hardest out of the way first, and that was ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ I got that done, knew I had the votes for that, then I did the [START] thing, that’s how it worked. But please, I don’t want anyone to think that Obama did not favor ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ [repeal].”

I asked Reid: “So Obama’s concern was that it might not have the votes and it and the DREAM Act failing might then take down the START treaty, is that right?”

“Yes, and my job was to get both of them done, and when I got the votes to do it, I said, ‘Here I go, I’m gonna do it,’” Reid said, “and so that’s how it worked out.”

The post Harry Reid Had the Courage of Obama’s Convictions appeared first on The Intercept.

There has been a global boom in high-rise construction and people living vertically. But can we live in them happily and build them sustainably? 

In 1939, Billie Holiday stood up on stage in a Manhattan hotel and performed Strange Fruit, a haunting protest song about the lynching of Black Americans.  That night, the young jazz singer received a warning from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics never to sing the song again. Holiday’s lifelong defiance of that warning led to her being relentlessly pursued by Harry Anslinger, the racist director of the FBN.  Author Johann Hari talks to Phillip about the new Billie Holiday biopic based on his book Chasing The Scream.  

Some Novel Python Packaging/Distribution/Inspection/Installation Projects

Naval historian Kate Jamieson tackles listener questions on the Age of Sail, when sailing ships dominated global trade and warfare

In the latest episode in our series on history’s biggest topics, naval historian Kate Jamieson tackles listener questions on the Age of Sail. Speaking to Kev Lochun, she covers subjects ranging from ghost ships and sea monsters to the rigours of life at sea.

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Contributor(s): Dr Noura Erakat | The report built on decades of the intellectual work and political advocacy of Palestinians scholars and organizations. Notably, the HRW report diverges from those legacies in significant ways.

Some time ago I wrote about my (very simple) tmux script. Since then I started to like tmux even more, and in fact I tend to create a similar script for every major project I work on. Last time, however, I noted how the sleep part is very fragile (and less than elegant). Since then I realized that I do not need any advanced scripting to run command Y in tmux window B when command X in window A finishes its job. In fact, this is very simple, and I’m ashamed I didn’t think about it earlier.

Krystal and Saagar discuss the December jobs report numbers, liberal cringe on January 6th, Ted Cruz's heated appearance on Tucker Carlson, SCOTUS misinformation during vaccine mandate hearings, POLITICO's major reporting screwup, CDC lies on covid & kids, the frauds on the anti-vax right, intergenerational warfare between millennials & boomers, and more!

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Philip Pilkington’s Substack: https://macrocosm.substack.com/ 

Philip Pilkington’s Article: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/12/generation-against-generation 

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For anyone who follows this podcast, it’s never a surprise when you hear the words “I don’t know.”  Not due to a gap in knowledge of any kind or the question being one of an odd variety, but because it simply lives behind this giant wall of silence called the U.S. classification system.  The Korean War has been over since 1953 and yet, we still don’t know the full extent of U.S. culpability in using biological warfare against North Korean / Chinese forces.  Censorship is a different matter.  For a country ostensibly on the side of “free speech”, the United States often uses censorship to shore up their narratives among the American people.     Dr. Jeffrey Kaye joins the podcast to discuss his most recent CounterPunch piece, “CIA, MKULTRA and the Cover-up of U.S. Germ Warfare in the Korean War.”   “In this article, CIA mind-control programs are linked to experiments on returning Korean War POWs. Also revealed is the extent to which CIA officials from Projects Bluebird, Artichoke and MKULTRA collaborated with U.S. biological warfare efforts, including the top secret “processing” of high-ranking POWs who confessed to U.S. use of biological weapons.” Jeff Kaye is a highly respected psychologist in San Francisco and an expert on current torture and rendition techniques and developments. He writes on torture and other subjects for Firedoglake, Truthout, and most recently at CounterPunch. Main website: https://www.fortressonahill.com Let me guess.  You're enjoying the show so much, you'd like to leave us a review?!  https://lovethepodcast.com/fortressonahill Email us at fortressonahill@gmail.com Check out our t-shirt store on Spreadshirt.com: https://bit.ly/3qD63MW Not a contributor on Patreon? You're missing out on amazing bonus content! Sign up to be one of our patrons today! - https://www.patreon.com/fortressonahill A special thanks to our Patreon honorary producers - Will Ahrens, Fahim Shirazee, James O'Barr, Adam Bellows, Eric Phillips, Paul Appell, Julie Dupris, Thomas Benson,  Janet Hanson, Tristan Oliver, Daniel Fleming, Michael Caron, Zach H, Ren Jacob, Howard Reynolds, Why I am Antiwar Podcast, Korgoth, Alejandro, and the Statist Quo Podcast.  You all are the engine that helps us power the podcast.  Thank you so much!!! Not up for something recurring like Patreon, but want to give a couple bucks?!  Visit https://paypal.me/fortressonahill to contribute!! Fortress On A Hill is hosted, written, and produced by Chris 'Henri' Henrikson, Danny Sjursen, and Keagan Miller. https://bit.ly/3yeBaB9 Intro / outro music "Fortress on a hill" written and performed by Clifton Hicks.  Click here for Clifton's Patreon page: https://bit.ly/3h7Ni0Z Cover and website art designed by Brian K. Wyatt Jr. of B-EZ Graphix Multimedia Marketing Agency in Tallehassee, FL: https://bit.ly/2U8qMfn Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts alone, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Found our discussion with Rania about the two year anniversary of the killing of Qassam Suleimani here plus getting censored by Instagram here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/60843466) Beirut-based journalist Rania Khalek reports back from being on the ground in Ethiopia and shares what she learned and what the media is getting wrong about it.

The infinitely funny and smart David Cross stopped by for a chat and we couldn’t contain our excitement. You know him from Mr. Show, Arrested Development, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (tip from Wilson: the best hidden gem show you’ll find), and his hilarious standup specials.

And now you know him as a Useful Idiot.

We talk comedy: creating a standup special, using audience feedback to perfect his set, and how he felt when Netflix took down an episode of w/ Bob and David for having a character in blackface.

We talk politics: why Bernie would’ve won, why (some) Hillary Clinton supporters were blinded by tribalism, and why Andrew Yang should “fuck all the way off.”

And for good measure we geek out about our favorite David Cross roles and bits.

Come back Monday for the extended interview where we take a deep dive into his new special “I’m From the Future,” politics, and more.

Plus, Joe Manchin and the crackhead daughters, military-grade snow removal, and naked but masked.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.

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Andy Zaltzman and the News Quiz return to satirise the weeks news from the UK and beyond.

This week Andy is joined by Alice Fraser, Chris McCausland, Katie Perrior and Ahir Shah. They look at the smallprint on Keir Starmer's 'contract with Britain', rate Boris Johnson's new look, and discuss Novak Djokovic's double fault.

Chair's Script: Written by Andy Zaltzman Additional Material: Written by Simon Alcock, Nathan D'Arcy Roberts, Alice Fraser, Rajiv Karia and Hannah Platt Production Coordinator: Katie Baum Sound Editor: Marc Willcox Producer: Gwyn Rhys Davies

A BBC Studios Production

Part 2 of our fantasy adventure series in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. After the tragic death of Mikaeus Lynndal, the boys venture into the Cheshire Woods and the Catacomb lair of the Rat King.

Guided by DM Patches (@senator_gun)

Written by DM Patches & Jack Walden (@meanunclejack)

Additional voices by Branson Reese (@bransonreese)

Series art by Artyom Trakhanov (@vor_bokor)

This month, I talk to Bryan Caplan (George Mason University) about what a world without immigration restrictions could look like.

The work discussed in this episode comes out of Bryan’s incredible non-fiction graphic novel, Open Borders, which I highly recommend checking out. Don’t let the comic-book-iness of it fool you; it is 100% accessible and entertaining, but it is also written at the level of detail you’d normally expect to see in a peer-reviewed research paper.

One basic fact about the world today is that it’s kind of a pain to move from country to country. You can maybe pull it off if you’ve already landed a fancy job where you want to move and if you’re coming from a first-world country, but even then, there are more complications than you might think: work visas, sponsorships, visa renewal, permanent residency, possible eventual citizenship. Basically just a ton of red tape. And if you’re coming from a third-world country, forget it: you typically either have to be a political refugee or enter a lottery that leaves you with a vanishingly small chance of getting in. So although it is technically possible to immigrate, assuming that planets are aligned, the fact remains that in most situations, there are strong legal pressures locking us into whatever country we live in right now. Bryan Caplan thinks that we should essentially just eliminate the bureaucratic machine that makes it so difficult to live wherever you please. Sure, there can still be customs, and nation states, and basic security checks—but other than that, make it as easy as possible for everyone to move around.

Let’s take the US as an example. One obvious benefit of opening up our borders is humanitarian: anyone living in poverty would be able to come here and with no difficulty whatsoever be able to start earning ten times as much money as they could back home. But far beyond that, there is a growing body of research within economics which suggests that having a large influx of formerly poor, newly productive people will lead to a boost in our economy. So everybody wins. And it isn’t just any old boost; it’s a massive boost. If these models are correct, everybody wins big time.

Tune in to hear our guest run through some of the empirical evidence for this prediction and find out why, according to him, the supposed dangers of an open boders policy are greatly exaggerated!

Further Reading

If you’re curious to learn more about the arguments discussed in this episode, you can do no better than to turn to the book:

Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith

You might also enjoy Bryan’s blog post at Econlib running through the many topics the book covers.

Finally, our distinguished guest recommends the following paper by Michael Clemens, which was part of the inspiration for his work on open borders:

‘Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?', Michael A. Clemens

Happy reading!

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Support Pushback at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate Douglas Macgregor, a retired US Army Colonel and former Pentagon senior advisor, analyzes the US-Russia standoff in Ukraine; the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan; Trump's failure to act on 2016 campaign anti-interventionist rhetoric, only to surround himself with neocons; and the ongoing, overlooked US military occupation of Syria after the decade-long CIA dirty war. "The Military Industrial Congressional Complex," Macgregor says, "seems to be more powerful than anyone who occupies the office of the presidency." Guest: Douglas Macgregor, retired US Army Colonel and former Pentagon senior advisor.

Economist Michael Hudson discusses the global inflation crisis and how the US Federal Reserve has given trillions of dollars to large banks.

VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=m7eAbbVMr_4

EI editors discuss some of the most impactful stories of the year.

Democracy Now! 2022-01-05 Wednesday

• Headlines for January 05, 2022
• "American Insurrection": How Far-Right Extremists Moved from Fringe to Mainstream After Jan. 6 Attack
• Columnist Will Bunch: Trump Came Much Closer to Pulling Off a January 6 Coup Than People Realize

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