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America's Toxic and Dangerous Alliance with Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has long used its oil wealth to buy American loyalty and to guaranty American politicians' indifference to the evils of the regime.  Indeed, after the 9-11 terror attacks which were committed mostly by Saudi extremists, George W. Bush allowed special flights for Saudis to flee America even as all other flights were grounded.  What was already a toxic and unprincipled alliance has turned truly grotesque under the Trump/Pence regime lead by a man who worships money as his only god notwithstanding the ridiculous lip service given to Christofascist leaders whose only real goal was stacking the U.S. Supreme with far right ideologues.  A column in the New York Times looks at this immoral alliance and the increasing shredding of principle required to  maintain relations with a truly murderous regime.  Here are column excerpts:

The Saudis are experts on emoluments. If you don’t take their favors one way, they find another way to try to co-opt you. 

Hollywood, Silicon Valley, presidential libraries and foundations, politically connected private equity groups, P.R. firms, think tanks, universities and Trump family enterprises are awash in Arab money. The Saudis satisfy American greed, deftly playing their role as dollar signs in robes.

Donald Trump, who may be the only person more fond of lavish displays of arriviste gilt than the Saudis, is bedazzled by a Saudi pledge to buy billions worth of American weapons, just as he was flattered by the Saudi sword dance and weird luminescent orb séance on his visit to the kingdom.

Even before the bloodcurdling execution of Jamal Khashoggi for his just criticism of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, it was clear that the chump Trump and jejune Jared had bet their entire Middle East strategy on a chillingly autocratic and reckless person.

The prince was easing up on the draconian restrictions on women to get a gloss as a liberal visionary. But he was simultaneously jailing women activists, imprisoning and torturing royals and top businessmen and making America an accomplice in a grotesque war in Yemen, dropping bombs supplied by the U.S. with little care about whether civilians died, including in an attack on a school bus, killing dozens of children. This, as the self-styled children’s advocate Ivanka was out on the town, talking about the fabulous “deliverables” she and Jared were bringing to their BFFs in Riyadh.

The Saudis blithely assume abhorrence at their inhumane behavior — from beheadings to forcing teenage girls without head scarves back into a burning school to die, as the religious police did in Mecca in 2002, to the brazen murder of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist — can be lubricated away with oil and money.

And why shouldn’t they? Our alliance with the Saudis has always been poisoned by cynical bargains.

After the oil boom of the late ’70s, Islamic clerics were enraged at the hedonistic behavior of the royals. In order to continue with their hypocritical lifestyle, the royals offered cultural freedom and women’s rights as a sop to the fundamentalists, allowing anti-Western clerics and madrasas to flourish and giving a free pass to those who bankrolled terrorism.

Even as we hailed the Saudis as our partners in fighting terrorism, they were nurturing the monsters who would come for us. Seventeen years before the psychotic Saudi hit squad traveled to Istanbul to dismember Khashoggi while he was still alive, another psychotic Saudi hit squad traveled to America to turn planes packed with passengers into bombs.

Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. The Saudi royals repeatedly stymied American efforts to crack down on Al Qaeda in the years before 9/11.
But they remained our dear friends. W.’s White House allowed Prince Bandar — the dean of the Washington diplomatic corps was so close to the Bush family that his nickname was “Bandar Bush” — to spirit Bin Laden’s family members and other wealthy Saudis out of America on jets after the twin towers fell.

Even Barack Obama, who had no love lost for the Saudis, refused for eight years to release a classified document from 2002 detailing contacts between Saudi officials and some of the 9/11 hijackers, including checks from Saudi royals to operatives in contact with the hijackers and a connection between a Bandar employee and a Qaeda militant. (Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa, wrote charitable checks that ended up in the hands of two hijackers.) Our Faustian deal was this: As long as the Saudis kept our oil prices low, bought our fighter jets, housed our fleets and drones and gave us cover in the region, they could keep their country proudly medieval. The Saudis need us more than we need them. We now produce more oil than they do. And yet we continue to coddle them and shield them from responsibility for their barbaric ways.

Because, after all, the press is the Enemy of the People, deserving a body slam. And the Saudis are our dear friends, deserving bows, hugs and kisses.

The Courts Are Being Stacked to Strip Away LGBT Rights

German judges during the Nazi era in Germany. These judges  - all the while purporting to support
the rule of  law - handed down rulings that deprived people of basic human rights.

As noted before, besides being a political junkie, I was a history major in college and have continued to read historical works in the decades since.  One of the periods in history I find most disturbing and horrifying is the period when Hitler rose to power in Germany which then progressed into World War II and the Holocaust.  Hitler used several tools to rise to power some of which included (i) fanning hatred against racial and religious minorities (e.g., Gypsies and Jews) and depicting them as dangerous and less than human, (ii) attacking the press and calling legitimate news that sought exposed Nazi tactics as the German equivalent of "fake news" and (iii) used the courts and legislation to strip away the rights of targeted minorities. In his effort, he was aided by "good Germans" who either looked the other way at wrong doing or supported Hitler's efforts because he played to their prejudices and bigotry.  Many of these "good Germans" were  - or at least pretended to be - good Christians.  

Fast forward to today and we see a number of the same tactics being employed.  Watch a Trump rally and then watch a clip of from a Hitler rally.  The similarities are disturbing and certain groups are being targeted for hate and mistreatment today just as in the 1930's.  Then, of course, we hear the constant lie that main stream media is disseminating "fake news."  And we are seeing the third element, as well, as Trump is packing the federal courts with right wing extremists.  Voting rights are being stripped from minorities and others seem destined to see a right wing controlled U.S. Supreme Court declare them as open game for discrimination. Just as disturbing, I see far too many - including "friends" - cheering all of this on as they remain seemingly oblivious to the very real harm that many will suffer. Among these cheerleaders are the Christofascists to whom Trump promised the moon in exchange for their political support.  They, however, know full well the harm they are doing and find it perfectly fine.  Like the Auschwitz staff in the image below, they see others who do not subscribe to their beliefs as less than human and worthy of mistreatment.  In the case of gays, they even use the same sorts of lies merely swapping the word "Jew" for "gay" or "homosexual."  They are now seemingly poised with the help of Trump judicial appointments, including that of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, to begin stripping away the rights of LGBT citizens with the help of the five "conservatives: on the high Court.  A column in Huffington Post looks at this frightening prospect: 

While much of the country was in an uproar over the nomination (and confirmation) of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, anti-LGBTQ religious extremists in Texas filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Austin targeting its anti-discrimination ordinance protecting LGBTQ people, claiming it infringes on their religious liberty. Two days later, another anti-LGBTQ group in Texas filed a second, separate and even broader lawsuit attacking the Austin ordinance in state court.

[I]f the U.S. Supreme Court ― or individuals’ state Supreme Courts ― were to rule such laws in violation of “religious liberty,” hundreds of such laws protecting LGBTQ people across the United States could be wiped out.

The Supreme Court did, in fact, have a chance to do that earlier this year ― or to do the opposite and make it clear that LGBTQ people are constitutionally protected ― in its Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission decision. But it punted on either outcome.

And while Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that Colorado and ostensibly any other state or locality “can” protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, he and the court didn’t emphatically state that those protections are constitutionally guaranteed, leaving it for another case to decide the issue.

The optics of the case, however, were terrible ― seen as a victory for anti-LGBTQ extremists, no matter how narrow, and emboldening them moving forward.

With Kennedy gone, the Supreme Court could indeed clarify the issue when another case reaches it; and it could quite possibly be a very dark decision.

So on Oct. 6, as the Senate narrowly confirmed the hard-right Kavanaugh to replace Kennedy, the Houston-based U.S. Pastor’s Council, representing 25 churches, filed its lawsuit in federal court in Austin seeking to overturn the city’s employment protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity, claiming they violate the U.S. Constitution, the Texas Constitution and the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

“I firmly believe they waited to file until [Kavanaugh] was confirmed,” Meghan Stabler, a noted Austin LGBTQ activist and former board member of the Human Rights Campaign, told me. She thinks the groups had been working on their respective filings for some time and coordinated their efforts. It’s “a clear indication of what is to come with regards to the religious liberty issue” and the high court, Stabler said. “If this effort succeeds in the courts, it would be open season for discrimination against LGBT people not just in Texas, but across the country,” said Dan Quinn, communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, which has long battled both groups that filed the lawsuits. . . . . the lawsuits are not about “religious freedom,” but rather an attempt at “sweeping away anti-discrimination protections that have been on the books for decades.” As with abortion rights issues, the larger goal of anti-LGBTQ groups is to keep filing these kinds of lawsuits until they hit judges or justices who will help them score a win, overturning any precedent or narrowing previous Supreme Court rulings.

The road through Texas seems like a strategic decision. The lawsuits are two-pronged: One is challenging the law in state court, the other in federal court. If the very conservative and anti-LGBTQ Texas Supreme Court were to rule in favor of the religious extremists ― which doesn’t seem like a stretch ― Texas Freedom Network’s Dan Quinn speculated other states hostile to LGBTQ rights would move in the same direction. 

The federal lawsuit, meanwhile, could find its way to the Supreme Court via the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which turned away a challenge by LGBTQ advocates to Mississippi’s broad and discriminatory Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 2017, . . . . That law, viewed by many legal advocates as among the most discriminatory anti-LGBTQ laws ever passed, allows businesses that offer wedding-related services to refuse them to LGBTQ people and allows religious groups to discriminate in employment and housing. It allows adoption and foster agencies to discriminate against gay and lesbian couples. And it even allows doctors and mental health counselors to turn away LGBTQ people simply based on the practitioners’ religious beliefs.

LGBTQ advocates then appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which, in January of 2018 ― with Kennedy still on the court ― jarred advocates when it refused to hear the case, letting the horrendous Mississippi law stand.

Neil Gorsuch is a religious liberty crusader who is chomping at the bit, waiting for such a case. His past writings and a dissenting opinion on the court last year have made that clear. And Kavanaugh’s own record and his responses to questions about marriage equality during his confirmation hearings ― not to mention the partisanship and anger at “the left” he displayed during the hearing on the sexual assault allegations against him ― show that he can’t be relied upon to be a swing vote to protect LGBTQ rights.

[W]ith Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, the timing of the suits ― filed as he was confirmed and sworn in as a justice ― should also be a blaring siren for everyone who cares about civil rights for LGBTQ people. 

Some of the staff from Auschwitz - none looked like monsters despite the horrors
they perpetrated. Do not be fooled by appearances or false claims of morality and decency.

 If you are LGBT, you have good reason to be very afraid.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

Nov. 6, 2018 May Determine the Survival of Coastal Louisiana and Virginia

Virginia's Cedar Island that is disappearing.

Red depicts areas of Louisiana being lost to sea level rise.

A column in the New Orleans Times-Picayune dove tails with my earlier post about the declining or stagnating values of waterfront homes in Tidewater Virginia.  While focused on the Mississippi delta in Louisiana the same concerns apply to portions of the Atlantic coast of Virginia's Eastern Shore that are literally disappearing as well as the coastline all around the Chesapeake Bay.  After New Orleans, Norfolk is the second most threatened major US city at risk from rising sea levels.  As the column notes, elections do indeed have consequences and if a climate change denying Republican majority remains in Congress after the 2018 midterm elections, many property owners will see increasing threats to the property and rising flood insurance rates as the Trump/Pence regime continues to dismantle environmental regulations, allows increasingly polluted water and air, and does nothing to address climate change and the threat it poses to millions of Americans living in coastal regions. The thrust of the column is that it is utter crucial that individuals be elected to Congress who are living in objective reality and who not only recognize the threat but will push for legislation to address it.  One can readily substitute names like Scott Taylor, Rob Witman, David Brat and other Republican members of Virginia's Congressional delegation for those in the column because they all are supportive of the same climate change denying GOP agenda.  Here are column excerpts:

The truism that elections have consequences will never be more accurate than this Nov. 6 when residents living in the congressional districts of U.S. Reps. Steve Scalise, Clay Higgins and Garret Graves go to the polls.

This includes all or parts of Jefferson, St. Bernard, Orleans, St. Tammany, Plaquemines, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. James, Vermillion, St. Mary’s, Cameron and Calcasieu parishes. In other words, the entire sinking, crumbling, drowning Louisiana coastal zone.

A vote for any of these congressmen by anyone living in those parishes is a vote virtually guaranteeing your flood risk and insurance will be rapidly climbing, your home values will be dropping, local businesses will be relocating, new businesses will not be coming, the state’s ambitious coastal master plan will be dramatically scaled back – and your grandchildren will have to find someplace else to live.

Here’s why.

Last week the world’s authority on climate change issued a new report saying greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 40 percent in the next 10 years or the planet will be locked into some of the worst impacts of warming before the end of the century – and that includes a dramatic acceleration in sea level rise that will swamp our coast.

The state’s own map of this disaster (page 74 of the 2017 plan), shows most of everything below Interstate 10 from Lake Charles to Slidell under water by 2067 – about the time the next generation hopes to retire. And this happens even if the $92 billion coastal plan is funded and finished.

But Scalise, Graves and Higgins have consistently opposed climate regulations, and pledge to continue to do so.  In what amounts to a case of criminal arrogance, these politicians — none of whom has a science degree — are asking you to believe they know more about climate science than the experts.

Indeed, Scalise recently co-authored a House resolution pledging to oppose any form of carbon pricing — which even emission emitters like Exxon Mobil now support. Scalise said such regulations "would be detrimental to American families and businesses.”

He clearly wasn’t thinking about the American families and businesses in the parishes of his district, which includes all or parts of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Lafourche and Terrebonne. If you superimpose a map of Scalise’s 1st Congressional District over what Louisiana says will be left in that area without emissions, Scalise could be out of a job.

These are the parishes that are already witnessing forced migrations and plummeting real estate values, whose highways now flood not just during storms but on stiff southerly winds. These are the parishes desperately seeking funding for levees, floodwalls and elevated highways to help them cope with the disaster they know is already underway.

But Scalise, Graves and Higgins don’t want to vote for the only sure way the world knows to reduce those impacts. These politicians — heavily supported by emitters of these emissions — say it would cost some industries too much money and cost some people their jobs. But how many jobs will be left when the area is under water?

Perhaps Scalise, Higgins and Graves are just parroting the leader of their party, President Donald Trump — another politician without any science credits. He threw cold water on the report, saying he doubted the science because he believes some scientists have political agendas (unlike politicians like him.)

This is the president man who takes the word of murdering autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and China’s Xi Jinping — but calls into question the ethics of Louisiana’s coastal scientists.

So, yes, if you live on Louisiana’s coast and vote for any of these three on Nov. 6, you’re likely to have consequences — some very wet ones.

Ditto for Virginians living on the coast who vote for any Republicans on November 6, 2018. 

More Sunday Male Beauty

Waterfront Home Values Fall Because of Sea Level Rise, Flooding

November 6, 2018, is fast approaching and voters have the choice between (i) candidates of a political party that denies that climate change is occurring and that is tearing down environmental regulations that seek to slow the climate change process, and (ii) candidates of the opposing party that see climate change among the most pressing problem facing the federal government.  While sadly a number of local "friends" are falling for the racist, xenophobic message of the climate change deniers, those with waterfront properties might want to rethink who they will vote for on election day.  In Hampton Roads the value of waterfront properties is falling or, at best appreciating far more slowly than the values of properties on high ground away from the water.  The phenomenon not only hits homeowners in the pocket books as their typically biggest investment is harmed, but it also erodes city tax bases.  In short, everyone loses in one form or another -  all so Republicans can pander to an ignorance embracing party base.  A piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at the problem which is not confined to Southside cities.   Here are excerpts:

Waterfront homes used to be the safest investment in real estate, but rising tides have turned a sure thing into a potential liability.

After a review of property value data and a litany of studies, The Virginian-Pilot has found mounting evidence that real estate values across Hampton Roads are being driven down as a result of recurrent flooding and sea level rise.

One couple in Norfolk has had their waterfront house, once valued at more than a million dollars, on the market for two years. They’ve dropped the price to less than $800,000 and are still waiting for a buyer.

And it’s not just seven-figure waterfront homes in Norfolk and Virginia Beach taking the hit. Values of seemingly safe houses several blocks from the water are hurting as well.

Several recent studies have shown that impacts from flooding – from water in the basement to inundated streets – already have hamstrung property prices and cost Hampton Roads homeowners hundreds of millions of dollars in lost or unrealized values.  Homeowners might be surprised by these staggering numbers – in many places where research shows flooding is hurting home prices, city assessments show those values rising. They’re just not rising as fast as they could be.

“Part of the idea of getting these numbers out there is that people may not know they’ve lost value, because the actual value may still be going up,” said Jeremy Porter, a Columbia University professor who worked on the recent study with the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that pushes for solutions to sea level rise by presenting data.

[R]eal estate agents to academics to homeowners agree that recurring flooding and rising seas are driving down the value of what were once considered desirable investments.

A group from First Street and academics from Columbia University developed Flood iQ, a website that allows people to see how the values of waterfront homes have fared since 2006 when compared to similarly valued homes that don’t deal with flooding.

The Washington Post recently highlighted Flood iQ and two other academic studies that came to the same conclusion: Coastal property values aren’t keeping pace. The First Street group studied the values of homes from Virginia to Florida dating back to 2006 and found they’re worth $7.4 billion less than they would be otherwise.

Three-quarters of that loss was due not to flooding homes, but flooding streets, said Steven McAlpine of First Street Foundation.

Our home is on what was once the premier street in Hampton.  After seeing the value drop during the real estate meltdown of a decade ago, the value has stabilized but has not appreciated as one might expect.  Why?  We are located on a tidal creek with 4.6 acres of creek and marsh - the setting is gorgeous but the threat of flooding only too real.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Houston Chronicle: For U.S. Senate: Beto O'Rourke

It's always an embarrassment for a state wide political candidate to have their hometown newspaper endorse and out of town opponent.  Yet that's what has happened to Ted Cruz who the same paper had endorsed when he last ran for the U.S. Senate.  Having seen the real Ted Cruz in action, the Houston Chronicle - which has a history of endorsing Republicans - endorsed Beto O'Rourke for the Senate race, trashing Cruz in the process.  Houston is part of the growing "blue" urban base for Democrats in Texas which to date, unlike what has happened in Virginia, still lacks enough votes to out vote the reactionary, racist rural areas of Texas. The Chronicle's main complaint: Cruz has not been representing the interests of Texas or average Texans.  Instead he has been on a quest of running for president and ignoring his duties.  Here are editorial highlights:

With eyes clear but certainly not starry, we enthusiastically endorse Beto O'Rourke for U.S. Senate. The West Texas congressman's command of issues that matter to this state, his unaffected eloquence and his eagerness to reach out to all Texans make him one of the most impressive candidates this editorial board has encountered in many years. Despite the long odds he faces – pollster nonpareil Nate Silver gives O'Rourke a 20 percent chance of winning – a "Beto" victory would be good for Texas, not only because of his skills, both personal and political, but also because of the manifest inadequacies of the man he would replace.

Ted Cruz — a candidate the Chronicle endorsed in 2012, by the way — is the junior senator from Texas in name only.  Exhibiting little interest in addressing the needs of his fellow Texans during his six years in office, he has kept his eyes on a higher prize. He's been running for president since he took the oath of office — more likely since he picked up his class schedule as a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Houston's Second Baptist High School more than three decades ago. For Cruz, public office is a private quest; the needs of his constituents are secondary.

It was the rookie Cruz, riding high after a double-digit win in 2012, who brazenly took the lead in a 2013 federal government shutdown, an exercise in self-aggrandizement that he hoped would lead to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Cruz, instead, undercut the economy, cost taxpayers an estimated $2 billion (and inflicted his reading of Dr. Seuss's "Green Eggs and Ham" on an unamused nation). Maybe the senator succeeded in cementing in his obstructionist tea party bona fides, but we don't recall Texans clamoring for such an ill-considered, self-serving stunt.

Cruz's very first vote as senator was a "nay" on the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act, a bill authorizing $60 billion for relief agencies working to address the needs of Hurricane Sandy victims. More than a few of Cruz's congressional colleagues reminded him of that vote when he came seeking support for Hurricane Harvey relief efforts.

Voters don't send representatives to Washington to win popularity contests, and yet the bipartisan disdain the Republican incumbent elicits from his colleagues, remarkable in its intensity, deserves noting. His repellent personality hamstrings his ability to do the job.

"Lucifer in the flesh," is how Republican former House Speaker John Boehner described Cruz, adding: "I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life."

Former U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican who was adept at tending to Texan needs and who worked tirelessly on the state's behalf, once reminded the Chronicle editorial board that Cruz would have to decide where his loyalties lay when he got to Washington: with fellow Texans or fellow obstructionist ideologues. Six years later, it's obvious he's decided.

Cruz's challenger is running as an unapologetic progressive. He supports comprehensive immigration reform, including a solution to the Dreamer dilemma; health care for all; an end to the war on drugs (including legalizing marijuana); sensible (and constitutional) gun control, and other issues that place him in the Democratic mainstream this political season.

What sets O'Rourke apart, aside from the remarkable campaign he's running, are policy positions in keeping with a candidate duly aware of the traditionally conservative Texas voter he would be representing in the U.S. Senate. Representing a congressional district that includes Fort Bliss and numerous military retirees, he has focused on improving the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, with special attention to mental health. He's a strong believer in free trade and global markets, an economic position that should appeal to pragmatic Houston business interests.

As a lifelong border resident, O'Rourke supports our trade ties with Mexico and our need to sustain and encourage those ties (despite the anti-Mexican malice that emanates from the White House).

"While he may look like the second coming of Bobby Kennedy to D.C. pundits," political scientist Jay Aiyer of Texas Southern University has written, "Texans can see that O'Rourke has more in common with the politics and approach of former Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby, who advocated for modernizing Texas through bipartisan cooperation during his time leading the Texas Senate."

There's one more reason O'Rourke should represent Texas in the U.S. Senate: He would help to serve as a check on a president who is a danger to the republic. Cruz is unwilling to take on that responsibility.

[I]magine how refreshing it would be to have a U.S. senator who not only knows the issues but respects the opposition, who takes firm positions but reaches out to those who disagree, who expects to make government work for Texas and the nation. Beto O'Rourke, we believe, is that senator.

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