SAY WHAT?

INTEL REPORT--Facing the possibility of being imprisoned yet again in the coming days for refusing to testify before a secretive grand jury, U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning on Sunday warned of the grave threat the Trump administration poses to press freedoms.

"I think that ultimately what they really want is, they want to go after journalists," Manning said during an interview on CNN when asked whether the Trump administration's effort to extradite WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange to the U.S. is a danger to the free press.

INTEL REPORT--American Christian extremist Steven Anderson (photo above), best known for his hateful diatribes and calls for violence against LGBTQ people, has been denied entry into 26 European countries this week. The Arizona pastor has already been banned from Jamaica, South Africa, the UK, and Canada; he was arrested and deported while in Botswana in 2016. 

Anderson planned a trip to the Netherlands to do some “soul winning” according to the Netherlands Times. After activists pointed out Anderson’s history, State Secretary Mark Harbers of Justice and Security responded by not only banning Anderson from entering Dutch boundaries, he made sure that Anderson wasn’t allowed entry into the entire Schengen Area.

Photo: Shutterstock

INTEL REPORT--First it was the word “gay.” For decades, conservatives objected to people using the word to describe homosexuality on the grounds that it corrupted a perfectly good word and prevented it from being used to mean cheerful. No less an institution than The New York Times refused to use the word until well after its meaning was widely accepted. 

Now the right has conceded that battle, even using “LGBT” to show that it’s entered the 21st century. But what the right isn’t about to do is abandon its desperate battle to de-gay the rainbow.

INTEL REPORT--“Socialism,” snarled Donald Trump at a recent pep rally of far-right Republicans. The obedient crowd of Trumpistas snarled back in unison: So-sh’ll-izz-ummm! 

There you have the entire intellectual content of the GOP’s 2020 re-election strategy under Generalissimo Trump: Slap Democrats with a scurrilous campaign branding them as Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin re-incarnate. 

INTEL REPORT--A person who said they were going to donate $7600 to a GoFundMe for a baby with cancer changed their mind when they found out that the baby had two mothers, blaming the baby’s cancer on “God’s way” of saying that lesbians shouldn’t raise kids.

Callie June, 18 months, has stage 4 nueroblastoma, a type of nerve cancer, and her moms Tiffany and Albree Shaffer have been by her side ever since the diagnosis.

Her moms have incurred a lot of debt to pay for her care and one of them quit her jobs to take care of Callie. So someone in her extended family set up a GoFundMe to help with expenses.

INTEL REPORT--Two of the gay men who posed for a photo at Coachella with closeted former Congressman Aaron Schock have apologized, saying they had no idea who he was. They assert they had just met when he asked to be included in the picture that has outraged the LGBTQ community.

Schock, a Republican, actively opposed LGBTQ rights while he was in office. He was caught on video later that night making out with another man while shoving his hand down the man’s pants.

 “Rob [Masi] and I have been out since we were 14 and 15, respectively; and living as proud gay men in a loving relationship, who hope to get married one day. We are entirely against Aaron Schock’s values, views and actions,” Will Rossi wrote in a post on Instragram.

INTEL REPORT--Amazon is a company that’s drunk on profits and market share.

Last year, the online retail giant netted $11 billion in profits while paying $0 in taxes. The company controls nearly half of all online sales in the United States, and its Amazon Web Services division is the leader in providing cloud-based computing services, counting Netflix and the U.S. government among its major clients.

You’d think that with all this money, Amazon would be a leader in tackling climate change, since it’s the biggest threat to our planet — and since Amazon uses massive amounts of energy. However, after taking some steps in the right direction on clean energy, Amazon has since made it clear that profits are the only thing that matters.

INTEL REPORT--The GOP ex-congressman whose sexuality was DC’s worst-kept secret has been spotted making out with another man at Coachella. Former Representative Aaron Schock who made a splash in the nation’s capital with his clothing choices, Instagram photos, and interior decorating choices, resigned after being accused of illegally using campaign funds to finance his over-the-top lifestyle. 

Schock was a reliably anti-gay vote for Republicans, despite the parade of young men who visited his DC apartment, and his outing by journalist Itay Hod in 2014. Hod claimed he had walked in on his male roommate and Schock showering together. 

INTEL REPORT--As we continue to follow along with the soap operatic saga known as Jussie Smollett’s Chicago case, many have expressed a desire for it all to be over. The rollercoaster of plot twists — including the biggest of them all, when all charges were dropped, abruptly — sent everyone in a tailspin, and frankly, it was exhausting.

Though current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was basically blowing smoke out of his ears like a character straight out of a Looney Tunes scene featuring a villain with foiled plans, newly-elected Mayor Lori Lightfoot believes the city has other priorities. Earlier this month, Emanuel demanded the 36-year-old actor-singer fork over $130,000 to recoup costs to the Chicago Police Department for allegedly wasting the force’s resources and to take care of billable “overtime hours.” 

INTEL REPORT--American Media Inc. is actively seeking to sell off the National Enquirer, according to three people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The decision to sell came after the hedge fund manager whose firm controls American Media became “disgusted” with the Enquirer’s reporting tactics, according to one of these people.

INTEL REPORT--There is no question that racial resentment was a major driver of support for Donald Trump during his presidential campaign in 2016. At the height of the race, a lot of Republican candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate tried to distance themselves from his highly charged rhetoric.

New research suggests these efforts were in vain—which was good news for the Republicans in question. It seems that Trump's ethnic hostility ultimately worked to their advantage.

"We find that racial animus among voters helped Republicans at multiple ballot levels," write political scientists Carlos Algara and Isaac Hale of the University of California–Davis.

INTEL REPORT--According to The New York Times (NYT), Facebook is creating its own cryptocurrency. It would be used on WhatsApp, which Facebook owns, to facilitate transactions between users. 

Facebook’s move is clearly to counter the threat from up and coming messenging rivals Telegram and Signal. NYT said that the Facebook secret effort to build its own cryptocurrency “started last year after Telegram raised an eye-popping $1.7 billion to fund its cryptocurrency project”. 

Between Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, which Facebook owns, there are a collective 2.7 billion users. If Facebook decides to back the value of its own digital coin with a basket of foreign currencies, then it could potentially become the largest central bank in the world — because that’s what central banks do; print money backed by their country’s economy and foreign currency reserves.

INTEL REPORT--Syria’s envoy to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari, lambasted the Trump administration for recognizing the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights. 

He said that if Trump wanted to give somebody else’s territory to Israel, it should be North and South Carolina.

The United Nations Charter forbids the acquisition of territory by military force and insists on preserving the territorial integrity of the world’s states.

Israel conquered Syria’s Golan Heights in 1967, which, whatever Pm Binyamin Netanyahu might allege, was not a defensive war for Israel, since it launched the first attacks. It is not illegal for Israel to occupy the Heights until a peace treaty can be achieved between Israel and Syria, but it is illegal for Israel to simply permanently steal its neighbor’s land.

INTEL REPORT--Collusion — or a lack of it — turns out to have been the rhetorical trap that ensnared President Trump’s pursuers. There was no need for detailed electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy because they had an overarching deal: the quid of help in the campaign against Hillary Clinton for the quo of a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from the Obama administration’s burdensome economic sanctions. The Trumpites knew about the quid and held out the prospect of the quo.

Run down the known facts about the communications between Russians and the Trump campaign and their deal reveals itself. Perhaps, somewhere along the line, Russians also reminded the Trump family of their helpful cooperation with his past financial ventures. Perhaps, also, they articulated their resentment of Mrs. Clinton for her challenge as secretary of state to the legitimacy of Mr. Putin’s own election. But no such speculation is needed to perceive the obvious bargain reached during the campaign of 2016.

INTEL REPORT--Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been held in solitary confinement for 17 days as of Monday, after being held in contempt of court for refusing to answer a grand jury's questions about her disclosures of U.S. military documents to Wikileaks. (Photo: @xychelsea/Instagram)

Supporters of U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning are demanding she be released from solitary confinement, in which she has been held for 17 days since refusing to answer a grand jury's questions.

Chelsea Resists!, Manning's support committee, released a statement over the weekend denouncing her treatment and invoking the United Nations' own statements about the dangers and injustice of isolation in prisons.

INTEL REPORT--The current administration has bent over backwards to force-feed its anti-immigrant agenda to the American public. That agenda remains broadly unpopular, but they’ve tried every trick in the con artist book to impose it anyway.

Despite years of hysterical anti-immigrant propaganda, most Americans continually report positive views of immigrants and immigration in opinion surveys. Yet we’ve been faced with constant threats of government shutdowns or made-up “national emergencies” if we don’t give the administration money for a wall most of us oppose.

While politicians debate these things, real people die.

INTEL REPORT--A coalition of activist groups is protesting in front of Fox News Headquarters in New York City today to bring attention to the network's recent controversies—as the cable channel tries to woo companies in the wake of a number of high profile advertising defections. 

"The message to companies and their media buyers is clear," said Angelo Carusone, the president of watchdog group Media Matters for America, one of the organizers of the action, in a statement. "No matter what time of day you advertise on Fox News, you support the network's extremism and bigotry."

Fox will host advertisers Wednesday morning in an attempt to deflect recent defections from companies wary of comments by the network's hosts and the increasingly bad reputation of the channel. Fox "Tucker Carlson Tonight" host Tucker Carlson is currently weathering a storm over his appearances on "The Bubba the Love Sponge Show" radio show, where Carlson made misogynistic, homophobic, and racist comments and appeared to excuse child rape. 

420 FILE--Usually I don’t look to sitcoms for wisdom, but the new season of One Day at a Time has a real gem (or many, actually, but here is one). The family lives in California, where marijuana is legal, both recreationally and medicinally. The mother catches the teenage son vaping, and he complains that she’s being too harsh on him because it’s legal now.

INTEL REPORT--Sometimes we forget that the progressive movement’s political goal is not just to elect good officials, but to enact good public policy.

From my eight-year experience as Texas agriculture commissioner years ago, I can attest that the second goal doesn’t necessarily follow the first.

One major pledge of my campaign, for example, was to reduce pesticide poisonings of people and the environment. On taking office, though, I was swarmed by chemical lobbyists, governors, legislators, and other intimidating forces of the ag-poison complex, demanding that I “move to the middle of the road.”

INTEL REPORT--Donald Trump, the president whose petulance reaches further than the ties he seemingly purchased from the estate of Andre the Giant, took to Twitter to vent his frustration after the Democratic National Committee refused to let Fox News host a primary debate, a move first reported by the Washington Post.

“Recent reporting in the New Yorker on the inappropriate relationship between President Trump, his administration and Fox News has led me to conclude that the network is not in a position to host a fair and neutral debate for our candidates,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement Wednesday. “Fox News will not serve as a media partner for the 2020 Democratic primary debates.”

INTEL REPORT--A few months after the King of Pop faced his first public sexual abuse allegations, Vanity Fair reporter Maureen Orth wrote in January 1994 that “even by Hollywood standards, Michael Jackson’s weirdness is legendary, but he has always been protected by the armor of his celebrity.”

“Almost no one, especially those C.E.O.’s and moguls who make millions off him, has ever really questioned his motives: why this reclusive man-child with no known history of romantic relationships prefers to live a fantasy life in the company of children,” Orth wrote of Jackson, who later privately settled with accuser Jordan Chandler.

At its core, HBO’s “Leaving Neverland” is a devastating and searing excavation of how sexual abuse can tear apart the lives of accusers and their families. But particularly in its second half, airing Monday night, the documentary hints at how Jackson’s otherworldly superstardom enabled his alleged abuse to evade major scrutiny from the media during much of his career.