SAY WHAT?

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.

INTEL REPORT--A wrongful death civil rights lawsuit has been filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court against Ed Buck, L.A. County District Attorney Jackie Lacey and Craig Hum, assistant head deputy district attorney, in the 2017 death of 26-year-old Gemmel Moore at Buck’s Laurel Avenue apartment. The suit has been filed on behalf of Moore’s estate and his mother, LaTisha Nixon. (Photo above: Gemmel “Juelz” Moore (left) and Ed Buck (Facebook)

Moore, an African-American man who was a sex worker, was found dead of a crystal meth overdose in Buck’s apartment on July 27, 2017.  Buck, who is 65, is a white man known for luring young black men to his apartment through posts on gay sex sites such as Adam4Adam.com. (Read the rest.) 

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LA Councilman Floats Idea of Ballot Measure to Fund Child Care

Emily Alpert Reyes 

INTEL REPORT--Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Krekorian said Wednesday that he wants the city to pursue a ballot measure to fund programs for young children — and could put the issue before voters as soon as next year. 

In a newly released proposal, the councilman is asking city staffers to report back on ways to expand licensed child care programs at the Department of Recreation and Parks. Krekorian said that before the last recession, the department offered licensed child care programs at 26 facilities. Now, he said, that number has plummeted to just two. (Read the rest.)  

-cw

INTEL REPORT--Bestowing vital hope on beleaguered journalists everywhere, Hilde Lysiak, 12-year-old reporter, editor and publisher of the Orange Street News, last week faced down an Arizona cop who threatened to "have you arrested and thrown in juvey" for chasing down a tip on her bike, aka doing her job - or as Lysiak conscientiously reported, "The OSN was working on a story in Patagonia, Arizona when a law enforcement officer threatened the reporter with arrest unless she stopped reporting the news." 

WELL REGULATED MILITIA, UNREGULATED PRESIDENT--A young friend is seriously considering joining her state’s National Guard. She’s a world-class athlete, but also a working-class woman from a rural background competing in a rich person’s sport. Between seasons, she works for a local farm and auctioneer to put together the money for equipment and travel.

Each season, raising the necessary money to compete is a touch-and-go proposition, so she’s now talking to the National Guard. If, after basic training, she joins the Army’s World Class Athletes Program as a reservist, her service will essentially consist of competing in her sport. She’ll get an annual salary, health care, college tuition -- all to do what she loves and wants to do anyway. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, she could end up fighting in one of this country’s forever wars.

INTEL REPORT: During his excruciating State of the Union address, Donald Trump tried to use the plight of women, real and imagined, to promote his rightwing agenda. It was an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak.

As part of his racist attacks on Central American immigrants, Trump erroneously claimed that one in three female caravanista refugees has been sexually assaulted en route to the U.S. border. This notorious sexual harasser intoned about sex traffickers who “smuggle thousands of young girls and women into the United States and to sell them into prostitution and modern-day slavery.”

Did Trump raise the humane response of opening the borders to survivors of domestic abuse, assault or harassment? Did he call for assistance and care for vulnerable immigrants? Hell, no! His only solutions are to mobilize soldiers and build a border wall. So much for assisting women in need. How cynical to use real-life trauma to sell a solution that will only add to women’s problems. 

INTEL REPORT--The Great Pretender's ongoing hysteria about a wall to keep out his fictional “tremendous onslaught” of brown people is happily, increasingly running into its own wall - knowledgeable people in border areas pushing back and arguing #WallsDontWork.” 

The resistance ranges from officials in the border town of Nogales, Arizona taking down his newly installed, flesh-slicing, maximum-security-prison-flavored coils of razor wire on an existing border fence - WTF on the U.S. side yet - that was universally blasted as “inhuman” to both California's and New Mexico's governors withdrawing most  National Guard troops from the border, condemning Trump's  "fear-mongering." 

New Mexico's new governor even made a wild video in which she hurls herself through multiple flimsy but dusty walls to show what she thinks of the whole ignoring-real-problems-to-build-a-stupid-racist-wall thing. 

INTEL REPORT--In a little-noticed side impact of California’s 2018 law granting drivers the option of listing their gender as nonbinary, California’s Department of Insurance has decreed that auto insurance companies can no longer grant breaks in insurance rates to teen drivers who are female or charge young men more.

Outgoing Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, in one of his final acts in office, issued a regulation last month prohibiting the use of gender in automobile insurance rating, similar to regulations in six other states.

Jones’ replacement, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, supports that policy, saying in a statement: “Gender, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation are beyond your control, and it is not a fair or even an effective way to predict risk.”

INTEL REPORT--According to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll, 76 percent of registered voters believe that the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes. (Photo: Michael Fleshman/Flickr/cc)

Likely 2020 contenders and progressive members of Congress have proposed a variety of plans in recent days to make the rich pay more in taxes and begin reversing soaring inequality—from a wealth tax to a 70 percent top marginal rate to a higher estate tax on the richest families—and a survey published on Monday found that such ideas are extremely popular among the American public.

According to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll, 76 percent of registered voters believe that the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes, and 61 percent back Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) new proposal for an annual tax of two percent on assets over $50 million—which she dubbed the "Ultra-Millionaire Tax." The poll found that even 50 percent of Republican voters support Warren's plan.