Rahm Emanuel's Moment of Fucking Truth

The Chicago mayor hopes voters will allow him to avoid an April runoff despite school closures and outbreaks of violent crime.

By David A. Graham

Larry Downing/Reuters

Too often, candidates run for office promising one thing and deliver another, alienating or simply disaffecting voters, and ultimately losing their offices. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel faces a different sort of challenge: For the most part, he's given voters what he said he would. Now, do they want to keep it?

He'll find out Tuesday, when Windy City voters go to the polls in a mayoral election. Emanuel has mounted an extremely expensive, high-powered push to get past 50 percent of the vote—the threshold he needs to win reelection outright and avoid an April 7 runoff. The X-factor in the race seems to be black voters, so Emanuel has rolled out endorsements from high-profile African American politicians, including his former boss President Obama and Representative Bobby Rush, the only man to ever beat Obama in an election.

A Chicago Tribune poll last week showed that Emanuel was within striking distance of an outright majority, with 45 percent of voters backing him, and nearly 20 percent undecided. Emanuel's top opponent is Cook County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia; other challengers include Alderman Bob Fioretti and businessman Willie Wilson.

It's been a rambunctious four years for Emanuel. After an election campaign in which he was nearly disqualified under residency requirements, the former U.S. representative and White House chief of staff cruised to victory. Since then, Emanuel has closed almost 50 schools; dealt with a strike by public-school teachers; passed an austerity budget for the city; and faced a significant murder rate.

The bruising term has turned some voters off, especially after 22 years in which the city was led by the same man, Richard Daley. But in many ways, Emanuel has done just what he said he would, bringing his brusque, no-nonsense approach to the mayorship.

Long a pragmatic moderate who reveled in muscling his preferred strategies through—often with the aid of a generous helping of profanity—that's just what he's done, on issues ranging from the budget to education. Emanuel has exercised a control over the levers of power that exceeds even his long-tenured predecessor, bending the City Council and even the state legislature to his will. But that focus seems to have come at a cost: retaining support among voters themselves, who have grown chilly on Emanuel after giving him 55 percent of the vote four years ago.

Reaching the 45 percent mark is an accomplishment in its own right. Not long ago, Emanuel's polling was in the tank, and his reelection seemed in doubt. His rebound has been helped by two big factors: good luck, and piles and piles of money. First, two of his most formidable potential opponents bowed out. Two black candidates decided not to run—Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board, passed, and Karen Lewis, a major Emanuel antagonist as head of the teachers' union, opted against running when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Meanwhile, Emanuel has raised $15 million in the race, pouring much of it into television ads. His enormous war chest has allowed him to far outspend Garcia on the airwaves, who was unable to get TV time until the final two-week stretch of the race. In moving early to get on TV and bury his opponent, Emanuel is taking a page out of Obama's playbook in the 2012 presidential election, when he and allies spent early to "define" Mitt Romney for voters.

Still, black voters—who came out in force for Emanuel four years ago, in part because of Obama's backing—remain cool. In the Tribune poll, only 42 percent backed him this time around, with a quarter still undecided. That's in large part because minority neighborhoods have borne the brunt of Chicago's recent troubles. Most of the schools that closed are in those neighborhoods. Emanuel says that was actually for the better: The schools that were shuttered were underused and under-performing, and the closures should lead to students getting better educations. He also boasts of improvements like longer school days and more extensive pre-K programs. Horrific violence is also a major factor. Even as other cities saw big drops, there were 500 murders in Chicago in 2013, many of them concentrated in minority neighborhoods. (The number was down to 407 in 2014, a 40-year record low.)

If Emanuel has ridden Obama's coattails, his challengers have tried to emulate New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's example. As a technocratic, moderate Democrat who used a top-down style and has won plaudits from neoliberal pundits on issues like education, he seems to invite just the sort of left-wing campaign de Blasio used in his come-from-behind victory in 2013. They've even co-opted de Blasio's leitmotif, accusing Emanuel of overseeing a city divided into "two Chicagos."

Emanuel essentially admitted that was true in an interview with The New York Times. “‘The city that works’ has to work for everybody,” he said, alluding to a nickname for Chicago. “Have we made progress in areas that had developed for years? Yes. Is our work done? Absolutely not.” (Skeptics might note that he's been saying the same since his term started, and apparently hasn't finished the job yet. In a profile in The Atlantic in 2012, Emanuel told Jonathan Alter almost exactly the same thing: "We are known as ‘the city that works.’ You gotta make sure it works for everybody and not just a few.”)

The irony is that even as Emanuel risks losing voters, his hold on the city has been extremely strong—stronger even than Daley, by some measures. The mayor has managed to turn the city council into a "rubber stamp" for his policies, with aldermen backing him more than they did Daley or his father, who was mayor for 21 years.

If Emanuel can win on Tuesday, it might set him up for a tenure comparable to Daley pere or fils, perhaps even with more power. But most analysts are calling the contest too close to predict at this point, and if Emanuel wins only a strong plurality matters get murkier. Emanuel would retain the advantage of incumbency, fundraising, and backing from the national Democratic establishment. Yet Dick Simpson, an oft-quoted political scientist and former alderman, thinks Emanuel would be in trouble in a runoff: He'd suddenly look far more vulnerable, and national liberals would flock in to aid Garcia. (For the record, Simpson has contributed to Garcia's campaign.)

Hence the race to the finish for the mayor, as he spent aggressively and shook as many hands as possible in the last few days before balloting. Not that glad-handing is a pleasant task right now—as of writing, it feels like -14º F in Chicago. Tuesday won't be great either, with the high barely reaching freezing and a forecast of gusty winds that should live up to Chicago's nickname. Bad weather tends to be a boon to incumbents. For a candidate who's already gotten very lucky, the forecast is one last stroke of fortune.

Final Judgment: MSNBC Moving Away From "Left-Wing TV"

Cenk Uygur host of The Young Turks addresses the recent programming shift at MSNBC. A source at MSNBC said the goal of the changes was to "move away from left wing TV". Cenk has a unique opinion as someone who was once inside the MSNBC bubble.

What Rudy Giuliani knows about love — a response to his 'doesn't love America' critique of Obama

By Wayne Barrett

Rudy Giuliani knows a lot about love.

Ask Regina Peruggi, the second cousin he grew up with and married, who was "offended" when Rudy later engineered an annulment from the priest who was his best man on the grounds, strangely enough, that she was his cousin.

Or ask Donna Hanover, the mother of his two children, who found out he wanted a separation when he left Gracie Mansion one morning and announced it at a televised press conference.

Or ask Judi Nathan, his third wife, whom he started dating while still married to Hanover and New York mayor. In two SUVs, he and an entourage of six or seven cops traveled 11 times to Judi's Hamptons getaway at a taxpayer cost of $3,000 a trip. That's love.

Rudy knows so much about love that he declared the other day that President Obama "doesn't love you" and "doesn't love me" at a private party of GOP fat cats. 

 

EDITORIAL: RUDY GIULIANI'S DISGUSTING ATTACK ON OBAMA

 

 TANNEN MAURY/EPA 

 Obama was not 'brought up the way you were and the way I was brought up through love of this country,' Giuliani went as far as to say.

The onetime presidential candidate also revealed at the party that Obama "doesn't love America," an echo of a speech he'd delivered to delirious cheers in Arizona a week earlier when he declared: "I would go anywhere, any place, anytime, and I wouldn't give a damn what the President of the United States said, to defend my country. That's a patriot. That's a man who loves his people. That's a man who fights for his people. Unlike our President."

Rudy may have forgotten the half-dozen deferments he won ducking the Vietnam War, even getting the federal judge he was clerking for to write a letter creating a special exemption for him. And remember Bernie Kerik? He's the Giulaini police commissioner, business partner and sidekick whose nomination as homeland security secretary narrowly preceded indictments. He then did his national service in prison.

 

Colter Hettich/ New York Daily News Photo Illustration 

  Giuliani's rampage against Obama questioned the President's love for America. 'I do hear him criticize America much more often than other American Presidents.'

Giuliani went so far as to rebuke the President for not being "brought up the way you were and the way I was brought up through love of this country," a bow no doubt to the parenting prowess of Harold Giuliani, who did time in Sing Sing for holding up a Harlem milkman and was the bat-wielding enforcer for the loan-sharking operation run out of a Brooklyn bar owned by Rudy's uncle.

Though Rudy cited Harold throughout his public life as his model (without revealing any of his history), he and five Rudy uncles found ways to avoid service in World War II. Harold, whose robbery conviction was in the name of an alias, made sure the draft board knew he was a felon. On the other hand, Obama's grandfather and uncle served. His uncle helped liberate Buchenwald, which apparently affected him so deeply he stayed in the family attic for six months when he returned home.

Handout A Department of Correction receiving blotter from Sing Sing prison shows the name of Harold Giuliani (aka Joseph Starrett), Rudy's father.

Rudy also said Obama is "more of a critic than he is a supporter of America," an odd admonition coming from a security salesman who told a Tijuana audience of consulting clients in October: "America needs to stop lecturing other countries and start working on how to stop drug use in its citizens," shifting the onus for the Mexican drug trade on to us. He's a consultant in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the very countries where right-wing governments, traffickers and/or gangs are driving children and teenagers across the U.S. border.

DE BLASIO, DNC CHAIR SLAM GIULIANI'S COMMENTS

 

MARK LENNIHAN/AP Actress Donna Hanover is the mother of Giuliani's two children. 

D Dipasupil/FilmMagic
Giuliani and his third wife, Judith Giuliani, attend the 'Saturday Night Live' 40th Anniversary Celebration on Sunday at Rockefeller Plaza.

He was a consultant for the government of Qatar, the country his friend and FBI director Louis Freeh accused of hiding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed before the attack. That's the ultimate triumph of money over memory, since he's still talking, as recently as a week ago, about the 10 friends and 343 firefighters he lost on 9/11.

While Giuliani finds Obama's rhetoric insufficiently pro-American, his 2012 RNC speech was filled with catchphrases like Obama's "a complete and absolute failure," and he just branded the President "a moron" in his Arizona invocation of Neville Chamberlain at Munich, all of it presumably a new form of nationalist celebration. In 2012, Rudy even blasted Obama, without a glance in the mirror, for "attempting to exploit" the killing of Osama Bin Laden, calling it "disgusting."

Rudy contends that his not-like-us Obama insights have nothing to do with race, adding in day-after doubling down that the President "was taught to be a critic of America," while pointing out that his mother and grandparents were white. There are few in New York now, after 12 years of Mike Bloomberg and a year of Bill de Blasio, who doubt that Rudy was a conscious, almost energetic, polarizer. He never acknowledged his dark side then and he's not about to now.
 
Barrett is author of "Rudy: An Investigative Biography."

Liberal Racism: 25 Things I Learned After I Wrote About ISIS and White Racism at the Daily Kos

By chaunceydevega

Racism is not an opinion. It is a fact.

White supremacy is one of the most powerful social forces and ideologies in the United States (and the West). As such, it is reflected in our political discourse, and both intentionally (through active racism) and unintentionally (implicit bias) reproduced by individuals.

Online spaces are a great lens into white supremacy because they are a type of public arena where individuals can drop the mask of social conformity and desirability, revealing their private thoughts and true selves.

Thus, comment sections are transformed into a space where “backstage racism” can be transformed into direct and public acts.

I have shared my essays here on the Daily Kos for several years. There are some good and sincere folks here who I have talked to via email and through other mediums. There are likely many “lurkers” who read, give “recs”, and share work they find valuable and useful with their friends, family, colleagues, and others in their personal networks.

By definition, those individuals who frequently comment on and read political websites are outliers relative to the general population. And while the Daily Kos is a “liberal” or “progressive” website, it still reflects the biases, habits, and beliefs of the individuals who frequent it.

For example, if a given society is racist, sexist, and homophobic, then its members and culture, to varying degrees, will be a reflection of those values. Some will resist them; others will actively reproduce and support them; most will go about their quotidian lives, a herd or mass public to be directed one way or another as their personal whims and desires pull, and cues from elites direct them.

White liberals love to point out the racism of conservatives and republicans. This is an easy task in the post civil rights era because the Tea Party GOP is the United States’ de facto White identity party.

It is far more difficult for white liberals and progressives to look in the proverbial mirror and to take a personal inventory of their own possessive investment in whiteness, and how they reproduce white supremacy as a lived ideology.

Liberal or “aversive” racism is the counterpart to the “symbolic” and “old fashioned” racism practiced by conservatives and the White Right.

My most recent posts on the Daily Kos (an essay on Dr. Martin Luther King and White memory; a new piece on ISIS’s barbarism and the lynching of black Americans by white people) have been met with many hundreds of comments. Those essays were also shared many thousands of times on Facebook and other social media.

Collectively, the comments on my essay on ISIS, as well as white historical memory and Dr. King, are a lesson in the enduring power of liberal racism. I have learned much from them.

As I have done in the past, what follows are some helpful guidelines and observations for people of color (and white folks of conscience) who dare to speak some “truth to power” about race or racism at the Daily Kos.

1.    White people are very sensitive. Many of them get very upset and angry when you tell the truth about racism, white supremacy, or white privilege. Never speak plainly and directly to liberal racists. They may wilt.

2.    Liberal racists and their allies believe that it is “unnecessary” to comment on the plain on the face fact that black Americans were burned alive in much the same as ISIS did to the captured Jordanian, Muadh al Kasasbeh.

3.    Addendum to the above. The spectacular lynchings of black Americans by white people were “a long time ago” so it should not be discussed anymore lest white people be made uncomfortable. For the White Gaze a long time ago is compressed to 50 years.

4.    Be prepared for the deflection and dismissive comment that, “everyone knows this stuff! Why are you bringing it up!”

5.    If you want to talk about racism and how black folks were subjected to horrific violence by white people—much of it worse than what ISIS visited upon Muadh al Kasasbeh—during Black History Month, one must get permission from white people first. This is especially true during Black History Month because black folks tend to get too confident and back sass white folks during those 28 days.

6.    The idea that white people who benefit in the present from systems of material advantage and other unearned privileges, outcomes that are the direct result of racial terrorism against non-whites, should “own” their history, is very upsetting and provocative to white folks. Never forget that White America and White Americans are a people and a country without a history.

7.    If you talk to white people about racism you should speak in the same tone and manner as Bill Moyers.

8.    Second Bill Moyers rule. White folks, especially liberal racists here on the Daily Kos and elsewhere, will only believe something is true and appropriate to discuss if a white man like Bill Moyers says it is.

9.    Third Bill Moyers rule. Well-documented events, such as horrific violence against black Americans as committed by whites, only occurred if a white person says they did. The white speaker effect is very real in America’s racial discourse.

10.    “Class issues” and “real progressive politics” trump any concern about race and racial justice.

11.    Daring to talk about the burning to death murder of Muadh al Kasasbeh by ISIS and how it resonates with the burning to death murder of thousands of black people by white Americans is a type of “black racial narcissism”.

12.    White supremacists and liberal racists have much in common with their rage at the premise that a black person would dare to talk about white on black lynchings in the United States and ISIS.

13.    White supremacists and liberal racists at the Daily Kos channel much the same animus and rage at black folks who tell them things they do not want not want to hear. The former are just more honest; the latter pretty up their racial ugliness just a bit more.

14.    Liberal racists—like their Right-wing compatriots—will derail, distract, and obfuscate your claims.

15.    Liberal racists—like their Right-wing compatriots—also use standard troll tactics such as picking on one word in a title or other questions of grammar and emphasis to avoid dealing with the facts you have presented.

16.    White supremacy’s reflection is very ugly to most white folks—especially those who have not disowned Whiteness.

17.    These people are especially upset by the premise that someone like them, in their own immediate family, neighborhood, or other relation could/would have participated in a lynching, owned slaves, or benefitted from an act of inter-personal or institutional white supremacy.

18.    Remember that being a victim of white racial terrorism is the present lived experience for non-whites in the United States and elsewhere. These are living memories. And yes, many of the victims of white racial terrorism are still alive.

19.    Whiteness is ahistorical: one of the primary advantages of being white in America is the luxury of being an individual unmoored from the past, history, and perpetually living in a bubble of white innocence.

20.    If the word “thug” is the new “nigger” then when white folks call a black person “angry”, “combative”, “bitter”, “unhinged”,  or “disrespectful” they are channeling the new “uppity”…the latter being a crime that not too long ago could be punished by the lynching tree.

21.    Right-wing racists are much more honest, and thus easier to deal with, than liberal racists.

22.    At some point in the conversation, white privilege deems that white folks who are unhappy with how a person of color dares to talk about racism will somehow be magically transformed into the real “victims”.

23.    The rules for how white supremacy and white racism should be discussed must always be set by white folks so that they can be told what they want to hear, their assumptions about their goodness and innocence validated, and their egos stroked.

24.    Racist River Dancing. At some point, a liberal racist, will call you a “nigger” in everything but name. Liberal racists are very good at calling blacks who make them upset “niggers” by using many more than just one efficient word. I grant liberal racists the permission to call me a "nigger" if they are sufficiently aroused to anger. It is much more efficient than the racial river dance--it will also keep their teeth white.

25.    Liberal racists at the Daily Kos get very upset when you write an essay that—gasp!—gets attention, goes viral, has many comments, or “hits”. Because of course, the only reason someone writes something online at the Daily Kos is to work in obscurity. Moreover, never be a black or brown person who writes something “popular” and critical about white racism at the Daily Kos.

Remember that haters are always gonna hate.

A wise person told me that “the ultimate disrespect is to look at someone and lie to them”. I have, however reluctantly, come to the conclusion that liberal racists prefer lies to the truth. Consequently, they are not worthy of any respect.

If the Daily Kos is indeed a cathedral, many of its members will condemn you, calling thee a heretic if you dare to talk critically about whiteness and white privilege. In many ways, white liberals are of the same faith as white conservatives on matters of justice and the color line—separated in belief from one another only by virtue of their membership in a different denomination.

Chris Matthews has a warning Democrats better heed for 2016

By Egberto Willies



Chris Matthews made a point about the candidates that Democrats are putting up in 2016. He made a comment that is rather prescient.

"Democrats think they can win back the US Senate in 2016. And to do that they are trying to lure back names back into the political arena for comeback bids," Chris Matthews said. "The thinking is that strong Democratic candidates who lost in the GOP wave elections of 2010 and 2014 when turnout was exceedingly low and bad for Democrats, they have a chance of winning in a Presidential year when voter turnout is usually high."

Chris Matthews then displayed a parade of Democratic election losers including Former Senators Mark Begich (D-AK), Kay Hagan (D-NC), & Russ Feingold (D-WI), Former Representative Joe Sestak (D-PA), and Former Governors Charlie Crist (D-FL) & Ted Strickland (D-OH).

The prominent list consists of one White woman and five White men. They are all over fifty. Hillary Clinton's potential candidacy has stifled the development of any real debate for a candidate to move past their past.

The Democratic Party has mostly the correct values. It has mostly the correct policies. What it is lacking is a broad bench for Americans to see.

The Republican Primary may turn out to be another exercise of free comedic entertainment. But their candidates look like America even as they articulate lunacy. They have the young and Latino in Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. They have the Black man in Ben Carson. They have the woman in Carly Fiorina. They have the establishment middle-aged White guys in Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Scott Walker. And they have the religious fanatic in Mike Huckabee. Now that is diversity, not the one America needs philosophically, but visually.

Democrats should fear two things. The first is that the predictable Presidential surge will fail to materialize when all Democrats see are retreads. Secondly, a well defined narrative for Hillary Clinton could set in, a narrative that she could have problems shaking. There are many narratives that could come back and bite her as the Republicans jump on the income inequality train. Republicans know how to do that well especially for a flawed candidate.

So here is the question. Where is the Democratic bench? Are there any fresh candidates with great ideas ready to fill it? In today's politics the optics and semblance of what one will do is much more effective than a party's articulated platform.

Joy Reid’s MSNBC Show Canceled

By Andrew Kirell

According to two internal sources, MSNBC has canceled The Reid Report. The daytime show, airing weekdays at 2 p.m. ET and hosted by Joy Reid, has long been rumored to be on the chopping block.

Our sources at the network say Reid was informed of her show’s cancellation on Thursday. It is unclear when the show will go off-air.

Media watchers have long speculated whether the “Lean Forward” network will shake up its struggling daytime lineup, especially after 1 p.m. ET host Ronan Farrow‘s eponymous show fell to a stunning 11k viewers in the ages 25-54 demo just a few weeks ago. While Farrow has been the subject of most cancellation rumors, The Reid Report has frequently been named as well.

To that end, one of our tipsters — who has worked at MSNBC for just under a decade — complained to Mediaite that the decision to cancel Reid but seemingly keep Farrow in the lineup is “a slap in the face of a woman of color,” especially because Reid’s ratings have been consistently higher than Farrow’s, and yet “she’s been given no support and no promotion.”

MSNBC declined to comment for this story.

UPDATE — 5:24 p.m. ET: It’s confirmed. Reid is out; and so is Ronan Farrow, contrary to our source’s initial complaint.

MSNBC Gets One Right By Canceling Ronan Farrow

By Jason Easley

It is a day of change at MSNBC as the network has canceled the extremely low rated Ronan Farrow show. The cancellation of Farrow comes on the same day that the network also canceled Joy Reid.

Via The Wrap:

MSNBC’s daytime changes continued Thursday with the cancellation of “Ronan Farrow Daily,” an MSNBC spokesperson confirmed to TheWrap.
….
The network will move “Way Too Early” host Thomas Roberts to the 1 p.m . to 3 p.m. timeslot, where he’ll host a news show.

It’s about time.

Farrow’s program was the lowest rated show on any of the three cable networks. As I wrote, when the news of Reid’s cancelation was announced, “Ronan Farrow’s ratings are so bad that he is finishing behind a newscast on Al-Jazeera America. On February 4, 2014, Farrow had 22,000 total viewers compared to 44,000 for Al Jazeera America (AJAM). The former Current TV is available in fewer homes than MSNBC, so a smaller network is doubling Farrow’s viewership. Joy Reid was also struggling in the ratings, but her show was not performing as badly as Farrow’s. Plus, any chance that she had to be successful was destroyed by the fact that Farrow was her lead in.”

Joy Reid didn’t deserve to get the axe. Ronan Farrow’s cancellation was long overdue. Farrow’s show never worked. He was almost painful at times to watch. Farrow wasn’t a television person, and it showed. It got to the point where putting Farrow’s show out of its misery was the humane thing to do.

Thomas Roberts is MSNBC’s utility player, and he will almost certainly generate higher ratings than Farrow. Moving Roberts to 5 AM ahead of the slumping Morning Joe always felt like a waste of talent. MSNBC might have been better served to have Roberts take Farrow’s spot and leave Joy Reid at 2 PM, but apparently Reid has to pay for Phil Griffin’s terrible decision to hire the untested Farrow.

The good news for viewers is that it looks like Phil Griffin’s wonk obsession might be coming to an end. The other long-rumored move to be coming is that Chris Hayes will be moved out of 8 PM. Once Hayes is moved to a timeslot that better fits his talents, MSNBC will finally be on a path towards righting the ship.

Update: An MSNBC spokesperson tells PoliticusUSA that MSNBC is moving towards a more news driven lineup between 11 AM-3PM ET. It looks like the wonk experiment is over at MSNBC.

HEAVY METAL

Posted by the man of twists and turns

The Science of Cast Iron Cooking. The Truth About Cast Iron. How To Season A Cast Iron Skillet:

The skillet you want is at least fifty years old, and right now it is probably sitting on a thrift store shelf or a yard sale table. Your first task is to locate it. Until the 1960's, the final stage in manufacturing cast iron was to machine-polish each pan until the cooking surface was as smooth as glass. New cast iron is sold unpolished, that is, fresh out of the mold, with a texture like pitted Formica. The cast iron companies claim that the new, unpolished skillets are as easy to season and as non-stick as the old, polished ones—but then they would say that. You can polish new cast iron yourself with an orbital sander and some 80 grit, followed by hand sanding with 220 grit wet-dry, then 320, then 400, then 600 for good measure, but let’s face it, you’d rather have those five hours of your life and the ridges on your fingernails intact. The skillet you want is polished already.

How To Season A Cast Iron Pan. 5 Myths Of Cast Iron Cookware.

Cast Iron: A Love Story leads to
The Cast Iron Chronicles {1} - "As you can guess from pretty much every post on this blog, I am deeply devoted to cast iron. "
The Cast Iron Chronicles {2} - " My plan is to continue with the steel wool and then transition to the coarse sand paper as needed."
The Cast Iron Chronicles {3} - "I trust that it’s an important step but the science is a mystery to me!"
The Cast Iron Chronicles {4} - " I promise that when we did this portion of the restoration we had a fire extinguisher on hand and that the pan was not close to anything that could catch on fire."
The Cast Iron Chronicles {5} - "It took me a few minutes to accept it, seeing as how I’ve been cracking at this beast for weeks I didn’t think I’d ever get to the point where I’d be ready to fry an egg in it."
The Cast Iron Chronicles {6} - "I’ve always been taught that to season a pan you coat it in animal or vegetable fat (or a combination), and put it in a warm oven for an hour. Then you let it cool, rinse, and repeat."

The Best Cast Iron Recipies
Iron-clad goodness
What We Can Learn From A Cast Iron Pan.
How to season, use and love cast iron skillets (with recipes)
The Cast-Iron Secret to Serious Pizza: Recipe: Vaughn's Perfect Skillet Pizza

The Pizza Lab: Foolproof Pan Pizza

The way I see it, there are three basic difficulties most folks have with pizza:

Problem 1: Kneading. How long is enough? What motion do I use? And is it really worth the doggone effort?
Problem 2: Stretching. Once I've got that disk of dough, how do I get it into the shape of an actual pizza, ready to be topped?
Problem 3: Transferring. Ok, let's say I've got my dough made and perfectly stretched onto my pizza peel. How do I get it onto that stone in the oven without disturbing the toppings or having it turn into a misshapen blob?
This recipe avoids all three of those common pitfalls, making it pretty much foolproof. To be perfectly honest, every single one of these steps has been done before, and none of it is rocket science. All I'm doing is combining them all into a single recipe.

You can jump straight into a full step-by-step slideshow of the process or find the exact measurements and instructions in the recipe here, or read on for a few more details on what to expect and how we got there.

Jane Lazarre, On the Problems of Breathing in America

By Jane Lazarre

It will come as no surprise to you that we’re top-notch when it comes to denouncing barbarism -- as long as it’s theirs.  So the responses here to the horrific burning to death of a Jordanian pilot by the Islamic State -- the definition of an act of barbarism -- were suitably indignant and horrified. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to our own barbarism, we turn out to be a tad weaker, whether you’re talking about torture, horrific abuses, the killing of prisoners and of innocents, or the deaths of children by drone (“collateral damage”) across the Greater Middle East.

So I have to admit with some embarrassment that, when I heard of the fate of that Jordanian pilot, my mind ran first to Medieval Europe, to the burning of Joan of Arc, as our president’s thoughts evidently ran to barbaric acts involved in the Crusades.  He made mention of this at a recent National Prayer Breakfast, for which he was savaged by his critics.  As Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal put it, “We will be happy to keep an eye out for runaway Christians, but it would be nice if he would face the reality of the situation today. The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the radical Islamic threat today.”

Let’s admit that Jindal has a point about such ancient history.  When it comes to a commitment to death-by-fire, the Islamic State is hardly alone and you don’t have to reach back to medieval Europe for examples.  After all, we live in the country that, in World War II, developed and first used napalm, an incendiary whose special “anti-personnel” advantage is that it sticks to human skin while burning. 
But that, too, is ancient history.  (So Korea, so Vietnam!)  In Iraq, the U.S. military used far more powerful bombs that were meant to burn up enemy troops en masse, not to speak of the incendiary capabilities of white phosphorus shells sent into urban areas where civilians were still living.  In Pakistan and Yemen, we might well be discussing the inflammatory properties of the aptly named Hellfire missile that the CIA’s drones often use in their assassination campaigns.

Nor historically is there any need to reach back to Medieval Europe when it comes to the celebratory burning to death of prisoners.  Such events -- sometimes at fairgrounds, often made into postcards (the videos of their day) to spread the news (“This is the barbeque we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe”), and with onlookers gathering bits of ash and bone to keep as souvenirs -- are an integral part of far more recent American history.  From the nineteenth century well into the twentieth, black Americans were regularly publicly burned to death in this fashion.  Not that I can claim this came instantly to my mind either, but it did to Bill Moyers’s -- in the middle of the night after the Jordanian news arrived -- and he wrote an eloquent piece about one such case in Texas in 1916.

It’s important to remember that if there is a world of Middle Eastern barbarism, there is an American one, too, which, as we know from recent events, has by no means ended, even if trial and death by fire is no longer part of it in this country. Today, in a distinct change of pace at TomDispatch, novelist and memoirist Jane Lazarre offers an intimate, lyrical, post-Ferguson look at what it’s meant to her to raise her two black sons in the afterlife of such a world. Tom

Once White in America
Raising Black Sons in a White Country
By Jane Lazarre
For Adam and Khary

Black bodiesswingin' inthe summerbreezestrange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees

It was 1969 and 1973, both times in early fall, when I first saw your small bodies, rose and tan, and fell in love for the second and third time with a black body, as it is named, for my first love was for your father. Always a word lover, I loved his words, trustworthy, often not expansive, sometimes even sparse, but always reliable and clear.

How I -- a first-generation Russian-Jewish girl -- loved clarity! Reliable words -- true words, measured words, filled with fascinating new life stories, drawing me down and in. The second and third times I fell in love with black bodies I became a black body, not Black, but black in a way I’d say without shame and some humor, for mine is dark tan called white. But I am the carrier, I am the body who carried them, released on a river of blood.

Am I black in a cop’s hands when he is pushing, pressing hard for dope or a gun or a rope or a knife or a fist?  I am not a black body, yet my body is somehow, somewhere, theirs -- Trayvon’s, Emmett’s, thousands more at the end of a rope’s tight murderous swing, black as a night stick splits my head, shatters my chest, black as a boy not yet a man walking toward a man with a gun, suddenly shot dead, a just-become man walking down the stairs toward a gun, black as a tall man, a big man, looking strong but pleading for his breath, killed by choking arms and bodies piled on top of his head.

Walking the sidewalks of my city in the morning, I dodge white dads’ bikes daily, their little toddlers strapped into a back seat, and I don’t mind as riding in the street or wide, traffic-filled avenues does seem a dangerous way to get to nursery school. Later in the morning, when I am still walking, the white fathers or mothers bike by me again, now with the back seats empty. I look around for police, wondering if there will be a ticketing for riding on the sidewalk, since no child’s safety is at stake.  No cops in sight. My great-nephew, young and black and not fully grown, was stopped and handcuffed by police a month ago for riding his bike on the sidewalk,  his often glazed eyes glazing more deeply now.

On Writing/Being White

Once I wrote a story -- a black man named Samuel, enslaved in Maryland’s western shore, 1863 -- I drew him in words.  His death was terrible and vicious, his body dismembered by the man who called him property, the crime -- impregnating the man’s daughter --  a woman I called Louisa. I named her in part for a strong friend I wanted to conjure by my side as I wrote, but she was based on a real-life young woman who lived in actual history, a woman named Jane, the same name as my own.

Samuel’s death was so brutal I had trouble reading my own words out loud, or even to myself at times, though I had written them: a slow dismemberment, piece by precious human piece, this nearly unspeakable violence also taken from reality, a horrific reality I had read about in books on torture during slavery, an image that refused to leave my mind, especially in the dark or when I closed my eyes.

I watched him die with Louisa, and with Ruth, Samuel’s mother, a character based in part on my mother-in-law, granddaughter of an enslaved American, and my close friend for more than 40 years now, and I tried not to hide my eyes from the brutal human dismemberment -- the belief that they could erase his memory, his life as a man, yet thinking in this way to preserve the memory of his crime: a black man, enslaved, fathering the child of a young white woman who loved him. I called the novel Inheritance. I wanted to claim the terrible history of my country, to honor the necessity of collective memory. I want to assert the power and capacity, the necessity, for human empathy and the deeper-than-skin-deep identification that comes with love.

My words telling Samuel’s story in 1861 are almost as close to myself as my body-carrying boys, my sons, whose keys, in 1985, or in 1991, finally in the door at night assuaged my panic, waiting, waiting, trying to contain the fears, not only of muggers but, yes, of police, fears I had learned about most specifically as I listened, as they did, to their father talking what is now known as The Talk: never run on the street, not even on your own block to catch the bus. Always show your hands. Never fail to be respectful even if police are insulting and disrespecting you. They have sticks, and guns, and your job is to come home safe.

My son’s best friend in college, proud of his new car stopped in front of our building in Manhattan, was thrown up against a car and searched or frisked, years before this assault had become a legitimized method with a frightening name. Once white in America, I watched and listened as I had learned to do in more creative, soul-expanding ways -- learning from my new family about African American history and culture -- witnessing my older son, always a lover of music, his face filled with mixed emotions as he listened in a high school classroom to Louis Armstrong singing the searing lyrics and haunting melody of “Black and Blue.”
My younger son loved poetry and has almost the same name as one of the falsely convicted boys in the Central Park Jogger case, so he wrote poems about them -- the animal names they were called, the possibility, later proven, of their innocence. Searching for healing, I introduced him to African American poetry, a centuries-long tradition of various and elegant forms, poems of lamentation, and of the grace of memory and of love.

Once white in America, I searched for space within myself to absorb new meanings; now, years later, meanings so deeply absorbed they are entwined inseparably with my sense of the world as it is, the self that I am. I watch the television film again, and again, of Trayvon’s sweet face, of Michael Brown gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri, of Eric Garner, a man in my own city screaming, “I can’t breathe.” I hear my husband’s voice, after nearly 50 years of living in New York City, his tones and even some pronunciations returning to the Southern sounds of his youth and childhood: "I remember Emmett Till. When he was killed, he was the same age as I was. I still remember it, how it felt to me then."

Strange Fruit

I want to reverse the meanings of the song I heard sung last month, after hundreds of listenings to old records, then CD's, this time by Audra McDonald who sounded so like Billie whose songs she was singing, whose gardenia she played with, on and off, on and off her thick black hair, whose drink she drank, put down, sipped again, whose graceful walk she walked, but sometimes wobbled, nearly falling, whose pain and anger she spoke in shouts and whispers about nightclubs and shameful insults, haunting memories and whites-only bathrooms when you very badly need to pee, of desertions and abandonments of many kinds, Audra singing such perfect Billie you could swear you were in the club hearing Billie Holiday’s tones, soft and low to contrast with the terrible words echoing through time, from mind to body to mind.

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth...
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Their newborn silken flesh, the deep sea eyes, the graceful mouth; the first time I saw their faces, rose and tan, wide-staring eyes, one, then a few years later the other, hearing their father’s sigh of relief and cry of joy, the long, hard labors over, once, then twice, and me smiling and alive.

Skin darkened slowly as they grew into men. Are you half-black? someone asked when one of them was a child. He looked down. Which half?

What color am I, Daddy?

I captured and preserved these words in another story:

I mean, you know, what color am I? Really? Am I black like you?
Yes, son, you are Black, like me.

Black men, body and mind, in this white, white country I write and rewrite.
It is 1863 and 1965 and 2008 and still we wait
for the bodies
to stop
falling, for our minds
to slow like rivers
after a storm,
waters
darkened to rich
olive brown by moist soil
lifted,
surfacing, warm.
It was Mississippi, he was just my age and I was scared, and angry...
It is Staten Island, New York...
It is Ferguson, Missouri...
No one indicted, no one held to blame.
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14

We chanted loud, Women in Black, United Nations Plaza, 1999, calling out slowly the times Amadou Diallo was shot for pulling out his wallet. His mother’s voice in the vestibule where he was murdered, crying out his name -- Amadou, Amadou -- again and again and again.

Emmett Till’s mother insisting on an open coffin. Mothers and fathers of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, calling for justice but also for peace.

It is 2015 and I could list so many names. I would pray, but I am not a believer, as people call us now, but I do believe in action, in what has always been called struggle, in what I insist on calling faith in the human capacity and responsibility to know and feel another human story. I witness my son, now a man of 40, marching from Washington Square Park up Fifth Avenue, across 34th Street, downtown on Sixth, long renamed Avenue of the Americas, to One Police Plaza. He marches and shouts with colleagues and friends: I can’t breathe! Black lives matter!

I believe in words. I am a mother/grandmother/writer/teacher/wife of a black man for 46 years/friend/Jewish-American woman who loves color and still knows words can sometimes, might somehow be, could be a part of the way, to everything. I am the tan woman whose sons are tawny amber autumn leaf and almond brown cedar umber spring earth brown, whose sons are black men now, the woman whose young nephew walks dangerous streets and rides on dangerous sidewalks, whose young granddaughter is “mixed,” but clearly not white, slowly discovering and naming her inheritance.

And right now, as I write in the early winter days of 2015, I want courage here, a collective call, a shared claim -- I am the mothers and fathers of black sons shot down on Northern streets and stairwells and highways. Whiteness is a social and political category created to embed in the mind a false description of the body, its purpose to confirm privilege and superiority, to deny solidarity. It is not me. I reject it. It is not you.

We can’t breathe.

Jane Lazarre is a prize-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction. Her most recent novel is Inheritance. Other novels include Some Place Quite Unknown, The Powers of Charlotte, and Worlds Beyond My Control. Her memoirs include The Mother Knot, On Loving Men, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, Wet Earth, and Dreams: A Narrative of Grief and Recovery. She is currently working on a memoir about her father, The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter. For more, go to JaneLazarre.com.

[Note: This essay will appear in the forthcoming book, Mothers Of Black Sons: Fears, Sorrows, and Hopes, edited by George Yancy and Maria Davidson.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Jane Lazarre

NSA hiding Equation spy program on hard drives

By JOSEPH MENN

Equation infection: Kaspersky Labs says the highest number of machines infected with Equation programs were in Iran, Russia and Pakistan.

The US National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.

That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyber-espionage operations.

Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said.

Kaspersky Labs - The areas of government Equation has been able to infect by nation.

The firm declined to publicly name the country behind the spying campaign, but said it was closely linked to Stuxnet, the NSA-led cyberweapon that was used to attack Iran's uranium enrichment facility. The NSA is the agency responsible for gathering electronic intelligence on behalf of the United States.

A former NSA employee told Reuters that Kaspersky's analysis was correct, and that people still in the intelligence agency valued these spying programs as highly as Stuxnet. Another former intelligence operative confirmed that the NSA had developed the prized technique of concealing spyware in hard drives, but said he did not know which spy efforts relied on it.

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines declined to comment.

Kaspersky published the technical details of its research on Monday, which should help infected institutions detect the spying programs, some of which trace back as far as 2001.

The disclosure could further hurt the NSA's surveillance abilities, already damaged by massive leaks by former contractor Edward Snowden. Snowden's revelations have hurt the United States' relations with some allies and slowed the sales of US technology products abroad.

The exposure of these new spying tools could lead to greater backlash against Western technology, particularly in countries such as China, which is already drafting regulations that would require most bank technology suppliers to proffer copies of their software code for inspection.

TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGH

According to Kaspersky, the spies made a technological breakthrough by figuring out how to lodge malicious software in the obscure code called firmware that launches every time a computer is turned on.

Disk drive firmware is viewed by spies and cybersecurity experts as the second-most valuable real estate on a PC for a hacker, second only to the BIOS code invoked automatically as a computer boots up.

"The hardware will be able to infect the computer over and over," lead Kaspersky researcher Costin Raiu said in an interview.

Though the leaders of the still-active espionage campaign could have taken control of thousands of PC's, giving them the ability to steal files or eavesdrop on anything they wanted, the spies were selective and only established full remote control over machines belonging to the most desirable foreign targets, according to Raiu. He said Kaspersky found only a few especially high-value computers with the hard-drive infections.

Kaspersky's reconstructions of the spying programs show that they could work in disk drives sold by more than a dozen companies, comprising essentially the entire market. They include Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, IBM, Micron Technology and Samsung.

Western Digital, Seagate and Micron said they had no knowledge of these spying programs. Toshiba and Samsung declined to comment. IBM did not respond to requests for comment.

GETTING THE SOURCE CODE

Raiu said the authors of the spying programs must have had access to the proprietary source code that directs the actions of the hard drives. That code can serve as a road map to vulnerabilities, allowing those who study it to launch attacks much more easily.

"There is zero chance that someone could rewrite the [hard drive] operating system using public information," Raiu said.

Concerns about access to source code flared after a series of high-profile cyber attacks on Google Inc and other US companies in 2009 that were blamed on China. Investigators have said they found evidence that the hackers gained access to source code from several big US tech and defense companies.

It is not clear how the NSA may have obtained the hard drives' source code. Western Digital spokesman Steve Shattuck said the company "has not provided its source code to government agencies." The other hard drive makers would not say if they had shared their source code with the NSA.

Seagate spokesman Clive Over said it has "secure measures to prevent tampering or reverse engineering of its firmware and other technologies." Micron spokesman Daniel Francisco said the company took the security of its products seriously and "we are not aware of any instances of foreign code."

According to former intelligence operatives, the NSA has multiple ways of obtaining source code from tech companies, including asking directly and posing as a software developer. If a company wants to sell products to the Pentagon or another sensitive US agency, the government can request a security audit to make sure the source code is safe.

"They don't admit it, but they do say, 'We're going to do an evaluation, we need the source code,'" said Vincent Liu, a partner at security consulting firm Bishop Fox and former NSA analyst. "It's usually the NSA doing the evaluation, and it's a pretty small leap to say they're going to keep that source code."

Kaspersky called the authors of the spying program "the Equation group," named after their embrace of complex encryption formulas.

The group used a variety of means to spread other spying programs, such as by compromising jihadist websites, infecting USB sticks and CDs, and developing a self-spreading computer worm called Fanny, Kasperky said.

Fanny was like Stuxnet in that it exploited two of the same undisclosed software flaws, known as "zero days," which strongly suggested collaboration by the authors, Raiu said. He added that it was "quite possible" that the Equation group used Fanny to scout out targets for Stuxnet in Iran and spread the virus.

 - Reuters

4 Things You Should Know About Presidential Candidate Scott Walker Before It’s Too Late

This guy is a menace to the public good.

By wcmcoop

So … Scott Walker is all but officially running for president, and the country is getting a look at a man whom we residents of Wisconsin have been living with since before he became governor. While the national press has focused on the policies and conservative ideology that Walker has imposed on our state, these don’t define the man or explain the mayhem he has caused here.

The massive protests against Walker in 2011 began with “Act 10,” which stripped public employee unions of almost all of their rights and power. Walker loves to leave the story there and depicts ongoing opposition to him as a fight between him and the unions. It’s a narrative that sells well to his donors and to a national press eager for narrative simplicity.

But Act 10 was only a triggering event, not the sole or even primary motivation of Walker’s opponents. While much of the opposition to Walker centers around his policies, there is more to it than that. It is the way he implements these policies, the way he deals with opposition, and the way he rewards his allies that make Walker not just divisive, but frightening. Even conservatives who share Walker’s ideology should distrust him, and dread the prospect of him becoming president.

Why? Here is a brief primer on Scott Walker, drawn from what we have learned about him first-hand here in Wisconsin. These are things that the rest of the country should know in order to avoid learning the same lessons the hard way—on a national and international platform of the presidency.

1. Scott Walker is a liar.

“So what?” you say, “aren’t all politicians liars?” True, but Walker is in a league apart. He lies about so much, even inconsequential things, that it seems almost compulsive.

His recent lies explaining how “searching for truth” and other aspects of the “Wisconsin Idea” came to be stricken from his rewrite of the University of Wisconsin mission statement were astounding enough to draw rebuke from the New York Times editorial board, but such lies compose a large part of almost all of Walker’s public statements.

Like most politicians, Walker lies when it is politically convenient to do so; unlike most politicians, Walker lies when the truth is already firmly established, such as when he claims that Wisconsin has a budget surplus (it doesn’t), or that he never considered planting agents provocateurs among the demonstrators (he did). For Walker, deceit is not only a tool; it is an end in itself, his default mode.

Walker even lies about things that have no obvious political angle, like the date of the births of his sons and how he got his bald spot.

Walker’s lies often take the form of self-aggrandizing fantasy, a large helping of which he served up in his ironically titled [for someone who almost never appears in public] ghost-written political autobiography, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge. In it, for example, Walker recounts how during the peak of the 2011 protests, a mob surrounded his car and tried to tip it over. This incident never happened, at least not to Walker, though Walker’s story bears a remarkable similarity to a 1958 attack on Richard Nixon’s car in Venezuela.

2. Scott Walker is astoundingly corrupt, even by current political standards.

He is so corrupt the corruption itself gives him cover, because an objective description of it sounds like a hyperbolic screed, leading to an “Oh, come on, he can’t be as bad as all that” from people who don’t know his history.

He IS that bad. Here’s his tea party brag that shows he’s more extreme than conservative. During the past few years, the fact that he has not yet actually been indicted for a crime is the strongest defense of his character that his supporters have been able to mount.

Walker’s reputation for political cunning, reflected in the oft-repeated warnings to not underestimate him, derives from his lack of moral restraint and his willingness to do anything to get what he wants, rather than from any tactical brilliance or deep understanding of people. It’s “the ends justify the means” on steroids. This, combined with the ineptitude of the Wisconsin Democrats and the Wisconsin press, answers an obvious question about Walker: How could someone of such mediocre abilities be so successful?

Walker’s known political career began in 1988, when he ran for president of the Associated Students of Marquette University. He didn’t win, but he was found guilty of violating campaign rules. After trying to lie his way out of it, he was forced to admit the truth of the charges. The Marquette Tribune ran an editorial before the election declaring that Walker was “unfit for presidency.” Like much of Walker’s past, the details of why he left Marquette before graduating are secrets.

It may seem petty to bring up an incident from so long ago, but Walker has continued to show the pattern he revealed at Marquette in every job he has held since about which there is any public information. His lies about the “Wisconsin Idea” and getting caught in them prove he has not changed. In fact, past and ongoing criminal investigations into Walker’s administrations, both as Milwaukee County executive and as governor, have resulted in multiple felony convictions of close Walker associates, and charges ranging from misuse of county resources for political purposes, to embezzling funds raised to help wives and children of veterans, to child enticement.

Among the felons is Tim Russell, Walker’s political mentor from shortly after he left Marquette, and one of the very few people who can be identified as a personal friend of Walker. Walker himself so far has escaped indictment, but public records of the investigation, some accidentally released, leave little doubt that Walker knew about and used (and perhaps continues to use) an illegal in-house email system to illegally coordinate his public offices with his political campaigns, and to evade open records laws. The latest criminal probe has identified Walker as part of a “criminal scheme” to evade campaign finance laws by arranging to have donations to his recall election laundered through Koch-funded super PAC's.

But lies and corruption are not the end of the story. They merely set the stage for what is truly frightening about a possible Walker presidency.

3. Walker does not tolerate opposition.

This applies not only to opposition from other politicians (although it certainly applies to them, too—see the fate of Mike Ellis) but to everyone. Suppression of dissent through intimidation is one of the chief features of the Walker governorship, and a main source of the fear and discord Walker has inflicted on his state.

Walker uses the power of his office to punish opponents. His administration ordered unconstitutional mass arrests of peaceful political dissidents in the Wisconsin State Capitol. In the state legislature, which Walker controls, laws have been introduced to eliminate the ability of local governments to block industrial projects of Walker’s donors, to eliminate independent government oversight panels, to eliminate the office of Secretary of State (currently held by Douglas La Follette, a staunch opponent), to remove the Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court, who has sided against Walker in several cases.

But much of the dirty work of intimidation is carried out by a network of right-wing groups that operate with a wink and nod from the administration, allied with unscrupulous legislators, Koch-funded lobbyists, and new right-wing media outlets set up by out-of-state billionaires. The most obvious of these intimidation efforts is a digitized, searchable online database of the one million people who signed a petition demanding Walker’s recall. The barely unstated purpose of this list is to keep petition signers from being hired by pro-Walker businesses. Walker himself withdrew the student representative nominee for the Board of Regents because his name appeared on the list.

People who do not limit their dissent to petition signing can expect harsher treatment. Opponents of Walker’s mine deregulation legislation, crafted specifically to allow Florida billionaire Chris Cline to open an iron mine in northern Wisconsin (and Walker’s one and only “jobs initiative”) have been attacked openly in right-wing outlets like the Bradley-funded “Media Trackers,” and behind the scenes by state legislators. Mine opponents have had their jobs threatened, sometimes with success. Many have received death threats.

4. Under Walker, Wisconsin literally has become a lawless state.

The state has become a playground for the Walker regime and its supporters, and a dangerous place for the rest of us. State agencies, most notably the Departments of Justice, Administration, and Natural Resources are fully under the control of Walker and his minions. Scientists and professionals have been replaced by political cronies who know nothing about the jobs they are supposed to do.

Ultimately, corruption and intimidation are unchecked in Wisconsin for two reasons: the State Supreme Court and the Wisconsin press. The State Supreme Court is controlled by four ethically challenged Walker allies who barely even pretend to be honest, and who Walker and his friends can count on to make problems go away.

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin press has mostly been asleep. A few articles describe each new revelation of Walker’s deceit or corruption, with follow-up articles giving Walker’s explanation, and there the matter is left. Walker is almost never asked difficult questions or pressed to explain his often incoherent answers. Thus Walker’s friends can openly violate the law with little fear of either prosecution or sustained scrutiny. When Chris Cline, in clear violation of state law, sent heavily armed and unlicensed mercenaries to his proposed mining site in the Penokee Mountains, a publicity stunt designed to raise the specter of “eco-terrorism,” no charges were ever filed and press coverage of the story quickly vanished.

The mysterious late “discovery” of 14,000 votes in Waukesha County, which swung a State Supreme Court election to Walker ally David Prosser and thereby maintained Walker’s control over the court, has never been adequately investigated, despite hundreds of suspicious irregularities and serious evidence of ballot tampering discovered during the state-mandated recount. The Government Accountability Board, the state agency that should have investigated this evidence, did not even look at it before certifying the election results.

The press accepted the results without question and never reported on the evidence of fraud. Illegal campaign donations, physical attacks on Walker opponents circulating recall petitions, online threats by pro-Walker groups such as “Knot my Wisconsin” and “Operation Burn Notice” have all gone unpunished and largely unreported.

Scott Walker has damaged the legal and political system of Wisconsin so badly that it may never recover. His house of cards is collapsing and even the state GOP knows it. It is only because Wisconsin is just a state within a larger country, and not an independent country on its own, that it has not descended into totalitarian dictatorship. Scott Walker does not scorn moral constraints on his actions. Rather, he seems to not comprehend such constraints. Walker’s only limit is the limit of his power, and it is this limit that Walker wants to eliminate by becoming president.

wcmcoop stands for the Wisconsin Citizens Media Cooperative.

Black Mississippi judge opens a can of whoop ass on white murderers

By Scott Kaufman

Judge Carlton Reeves (CLEO)

The United States District judge tasked with sentencing the men responsible for murdering James Craig Anderson in Mississippi in 2011 asked them to sit down while he read a lengthy statement about the history of race relations in Mississippi, NPR’s Code Switch blog reports.

On June 26, 2011, Deryl Dedmon, Jr., John Aaron Rice, and Dylan Wade Butler drove into Jackson, Mississippi — which they referred to as “Jafrica” — to “go fuck with some niggers.” They came across Anderson, a 49-year-old auto plant worker, and assaulted him while yelling “white power.”

While Anderson was on the ground, Dedmon ran him over with his truck.

Two women who were involved in the altercation and who encouraged the trio to kill Anderson pleaded guilty to hate crimes charges in December for their role in the criminal conspiracy.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, one of only two African-Americans to serve as a federal judge in Mississippi, spoke to Dedmon, Rice, and Butler before sentencing them for the hate crime charges related to Anderson’s death.

“Mississippi has expressed its savagery in a number of ways throughout its history — slavery being the cruelest example, but a close second being Mississippi’s infatuation with lynchings,” he said.

Reeves compared the number of blacks who died via lynchings to other statistics commonly associated with tragedy in American culture. The 4,742 African-Americans who were killed by lynch mobs “contrasts with the 1,401 prisoners who have been executed legally in the United States since 1976.

In modern terms, that number represents more than those killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom and more than twice the number of American casualties in Operation Enduring Freedom — the Afghanistan conflict. Turning to home, this number also represents 1,700 more than who were killed on Sept. 11.”

Quoting one Mississippi historian, Reeves noted that of “‘the 40 martyrs whose names are inscribed in the national Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL, 19 were killed in Mississippi.’”

“‘How was it,’ Walton asks, ‘that half who died did so in one state?’ My Mississippi, your Mississippi and our Mississippi.”

“Mississippi soil has been stained with the blood of folk whose names have become synonymous with the civil rights movement like Emmett Till, Willie McGee, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Vernon Dahmer, George W. Lee, Medgar Evers and Mack Charles Parker,” he said.

“On June 26, 2011, four days short of his 49th birthday, the blood of James Anderson was added to Mississippi’s soil.”

“The common denominator of the deaths of these individuals was not their race,” Reeves continued.

“It was not that they all were engaged in freedom fighting. It was not that they had been engaged in criminal activity, trumped up or otherwise.

“No, the common denominator was that the last thing that each of these individuals saw was the inhumanity of racism. The last thing that each felt was the audacity and agony of hate, senseless hate: crippling, maiming them and finally taking away their lives.”

“Like the marauders of ages past,” he said, addressing the defendants, “these young folk conspired, planned, and coordinated a plan of attack on certain neighborhoods in the city of Jackson for the sole purpose of harassing, terrorizing, physically assaulting and causing bodily injury to black folk. They punched and kicked them about their bodies — their heads, their faces. They prowled. They came ready to hurt. They used dangerous weapons; they targeted the weak; they recruited and encouraged others to join in the coordinated chaos; and they boasted about their shameful activity.”

“This was a 2011 version of the nigger hunts.”

“What is so disturbing … so shocking … so numbing … is that these nigger hunts were perpetrated by our children … students who live among us … educated in our public schools … in our private academies … students who played football lined up on the same side of scrimmage line with black teammates … average students and honor students. Kids who worked during school and in the summers; kids who now had full-time jobs and some of whom were even unemployed.”

“I asked the question earlier,” Reeves said, “but what could transform these young adults into the violent creatures their victims saw?”

“It was nothing the victims did … they were not championing any cause … political … social … economic … nothing they did … not a wolf whistle … not a supposed crime … nothing they did.

There is absolutely no doubt that in the view of the court the victims were targeted because of their race.”

“The simple fact,” Reeves said, “is that what turned these children into criminal defendants was their joint decision to act on racial hatred.”

“Today we take another step away from Mississippi’s tortured past,” Reeves concluded. “We move farther away from the abyss. Indeed, Mississippi is a place and a state of mind. And those who think they know about her people and her past will also understand that her story has not been completely written.”

“Mississippi has a present and a future. That present and future has promise. As demonstrated by the work of the officers within these state and federal agencies — black and white, male and female, in this Mississippi they work together to advance the rule of law. Having learned from Mississippi’s inglorious past, these officials know that in advancing the rule of law, the criminal justice system must operate without regard to race, creed or color.”

“This is the strongest way Mississippi can reject those notions,” he said, before sentencing Dedmon to 50 years, Rice to 18 years, and Butler to 7 years — all without the possibility of parole — for their roles in the commission of a hate crime. Dedmon already faces 2 life sentences after pleading guilty to capital murder in 2012.