WHO KILLED HIM?!

Ex-Hill Staffer Linked to Veselnitskaya Dies Suddenly After Fall Near His Home


Nico Hines
Mon, December 14, 2020, 
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty/Handout

The longtime aide to “Putin’s Congressman” Dana Rohrabacher died suddenly from a head injury over the weekend.

Paul Behrends was found by emergency responders close to his home on Friday night with severe head trauma. He was taken to a local hospital where surgeons fought to save him, but he passed away on Saturday, according to a spokesman for Rohrabacher.

Behrends was a controversial figure on Capitol Hill who lost his job as staff director for the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee after The Daily Beast reported on his links to Trump Tower lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya’s operation in the U.S.


GOP Lawmaker Got Direction From Moscow, Took It Back to D.C.

Rohrabacher’s former congressional spokesman Ken Grubbs told The Daily Beast that Behrends died at the hospital. “I did actually call Dana and he confirmed it,” he said. “What I’ve heard is that he slipped… hit his head, and died in surgery.”

Grubbs said there was no reason to think anything suspicious had happened to Behrends or that there was any link to his associations with Russia. “No, no, not at all,” he said.

Behrends’ son Josef Behrends told The Daily Beast that no one had seen his father fall at around 10 p.m. on Friday night but that his older brother, also called Paul, had rushed to the scene just four blocks from the family home when police came to the house.

“He was walking through the neighborhood and then he went to the hospital from there,” he said. “And then he passed away on Saturday. Early morning.”

Behrends made headlines for the first time in July 2017, after Veselnitskaya’s explosive June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and then Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was exposed. The meeting subsequently shone a light on Behrends’ own Russian entanglements.

Behrends had traveled to Moscow with Rohrabacher in April 2016, a few months before that meeting. In Russia, they were given a document from the Prosecutor General’s Office marked “confidential,” which included details of the Kremlin’s battle against U.S. sanctions and a pro-Kremlin propaganda movie.

When they returned to D.C., Rohrabacher cited those Kremlin’s talking points as he delayed the passage of the Global Magnitsky Act.

Behrends then worked alongside Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin—a Soviet army veteran who accompanied Veselnitskaya to the notorious Trump Tower meeting—to help deliver some of the suggestions made in Moscow. Veselnitskaya was later indicted by the U.S. for allegedly colluding with Russian officials to obstruct justice in an American court case.

They worked together to organize a subcommittee hearing that would call the director of the propaganda movie as well as other witnesses who were sympathetic to President Putin. The hearing, which was set to re-examine U.S. sanctions against Russia, was eventually quashed and replaced by a full committee hearing on Russia. Rohrabacher still succeeded in approvingly comparing President Trump to Putin and submitting testimony that claimed Russia was not behind the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent who was poisoned with a radioactive isotope in London.

After the hearing, Behrends, Rohrabacher, Akhmetshin, and Veselnitskaya had dinner at the Capitol Hill Club, a private members’ club frequented by Republicans.

It was the next day that Kevin McCarthy, who was House majority leader at the time, was recorded at a GOP meeting saying: “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” When colleagues laughed, he was heard on tape saying: “Swear to God.”

A day after these events were recounted in articles at The Daily Beast and The Atlantic, a spokesman for the House Foreign Affairs Committee said: “Paul Behrends no longer works at the committee.”

After being ousted from the subcommittee role, Behrends continued to work closely with Rohrabacher, who was later defeated in the 2018 midterms. Behrends, whose political career began as an intern for Rohrabacher in the 1990s, was most recently a partner at Rohrabacher’s lobbying firm R&B Strategies.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Iran's president says country would rejoin nuclear deal within an hour of U.S. signing on

HEY JOE WHERE ARE YOU GOING WITH THAT DEAL 

IN YOUR HAND

Catherine Garcia
Mon, December 14, 2020, 

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Monday said if the United States returns to the Iran nuclear deal, his country will follow within an hour.

The deal was made during the Obama administration in 2015, lifting sanctions on Tehran in exchange for Iran reducing its uranium stockpile and dismantling its centrifuges. Rouhani said he will not discuss any changes to the accord or restrictions on Iran's ballistic missile program, The Guardian reports.

President Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, and Rouhani made his comments on the same day the Trump administration sanctioned two Iranian intelligence officials for allegedly playing a role in the 2007 disappearance and presumed death of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson. President-elect Joe Biden has said he will rejoin the deal, believing it is one way to avert a nuclear crisis in the Middle

Investigation underway into cause of hundreds of dead seals in Caspian Sea

Maria Georgieva
Mon, December 14, 2020

A dead Caspian seal in Dagestan - Musa Salgereyev /TASS

Russian authorities said they are investigating the death of nearly 300 endangered seals, including pregnant females, that have been found washed up on the shores of the Caspian Sea since December 6.

On Monday, the state fisheries agency in Dagestan, told Russian state media that 23 more seals had been discovered at the mouth of the Sulak River north of Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan.

The dead seals washed up at various places in the southern region of Dagestan, on the edge of Russia that stretches from the Caspian Sea into the Northern Caucasus, including its regional capital Makhachkala, the state fisheries agency told Russian media.


The cause of the deaths is unclear. A team from the Russian Academy of Sciences has arrived from Moscow to investigate.

The Caspian seal is the only mammal living in the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water. The seals have been endangered for years due to over-hunting in the sea, which is shared by Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkmenistan.

The states have extensive oil and gas reserves that affect the sea. Pollution and climate change have added to declining water levels, threatening many species in the area.

Since 2008, Caspian seals have been listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Experts say there are now about 70,000, down from more than one million in the early 20th century.

The Caspian seal was included in Russia’s Red Data Book of rare and endangered species this year.

The latest mass seal death is part of a recent string of ecological disasters causing marine wildlife deaths that have sparked environmental fears.

Two months ago, the sea surrounding the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia’s far east was coated in a yellowish foam and beaches littered with dead animals.

TRUMP A MASS MURDERER
Vaccine comes too late for the 300,000 US dead

ADAM GELLER and HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH
Mon, December 14, 2020, 

When Brittany Palomo was hired as a nurse in March, her parents tried to talk her out of it, fearful of the fast-spreading coronavirus. All the more reason, she told them, to start the career that had been her long-held dream.

The pandemic, though, is a nightmare -- one that has now claimed 300,000 lives in the U.S. and counting.

“Wake up, my little girl, wake up!” Palomo's mother, Maria Palomo Salinas, screamed, her grief echoing through a Harlingen, Texas, hospital, when her daughter died of COVID-19 complications around 2 a.m. on a Saturday in late November.

Palomo was 27 and, as a health care worker, was probably weeks away from getting the new vaccine that could have protected her from the virus. Instead, she became yet another victim of the relentless outbreak whose U.S. toll is accelerating as it eclipses another round-number mark.

“The numbers are staggering -- the most impactful respiratory pandemic that we have experienced in over 102 years, since the iconic 1918 Spanish flu,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said days before the U.S. reached the milestone.

The U.S. crossed the 300,000 threshold on the same it day it launched the biggest vaccination campaign in American history, with health care workers rolling up their sleeves for COVID-19 shots Monday.

The death toll was reported by Johns Hopkins University from data supplied by health authorities across the U.S. The real number of lives lost is believed to be much higher, in part because of deaths that were not accurately recorded as coronavirus-related during the early stages of the crisis.

It took four months for the virus to claim its first 100,000 American lives. But with cold weather driving people inside, where the virus spreads more easily, months of reluctance in many states to require masks, and an increase in gatherings over the holidays, some public health experts project 100,000 more could die before the end of January.

“It can certainly feel like you’re standing on the beach and sandbagging a tsunami,” said Dr. Leon Kelly, who attends to both the dead and the living as coroner for El Paso County, Colorado, and deputy medical director of its public health department.

Already, the number of dead in the U.S. rivals the population of St. Louis or Pittsburgh. The toll is equivalent to repeating a tragedy on the scale of Hurricane Katrina every day for 5 1/2 months.

“To me it represents an extraordinary failure in our response,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins, contrasting U.S. officials’ scattershot response with the massive mobilization after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“To think, now we can just absorb in our country 3,000 deaths a day as though it were just business as usual. It just represents a moral failing.”

The U.S. accounts for nearly 1 out of 5 confirmed virus deaths worldwide, far more than any other country despite its wealth and medical resources.

While the pandemic’s toll continues to soar, much has changed since the U.S. surpassed 200,000 deaths in late September.

Scientists’ furious pursuit of a vaccine is finally delivering results, beginning with the rollout of Pfizer's formula. If a second vaccine is authorized soon, as expected, 20 million people could be vaccinated by month’s end.

At the same time, the country is poised for a major shift after an election that was, in large part, a referendum on the Trump administration’s handling of the virus. President-elect Joe Biden has made clear his first priority upon taking office next month will be a comprehensive overhaul of efforts to defeat the infection.

Still, experts said, it could take well into the new year for the first wave of vaccines and other precautions to bring cases and deaths under control. Experts are warning the country must steel itself for a deadly winter.

“We are heading into probably the worst period possible because of all the things we had in the spring, which is fatigue, political resistance, maybe the loss of all the good will we had about people doing their part,” Nuzzo said.

More than 109,000 people with the virus are now in U.S. hospitals, according to the COVID Tracking Project, far eclipsing the 60,000 who filled wards during the previous peaks in April and July.

On a single day last week, the U.S. recorded more than 3,300 COVID-19 deaths, easily exceeding the heights reached in April, when the New York City area was the epicenter.

Doctors now have far more experience in treating patients, and a few drugs have been approved to speed recovery. But the toll now is far more widespread, reaching into rural areas and small and medium-size communities that don't have big-city resources.

In Waterloo, Iowa, Dr. Stacey Marlow called the wife of an 89-year-old COVID-19 patient in his final hours, not realizing until well into the conversation that the couple’s son had also died of the virus in her hospital just two days earlier.

“We see these horror stories every day so they start to run together,” said Marlow, who works in the emergency room at UnityPoint Allen Hospital.

In Los Angeles, the county’s health director, Barbara Ferrer, fought tears during a televised briefing last week as she reported a steep rise in local deaths, up to an average of 43 each day, compared with roughly a dozen in mid-November.

“Over 8,000 people who were beloved members of their families are not coming back,” Ferrer said.

In Columbia, South Carolina, the family of a third-grade teacher, Staci Blakely, asked the school district to announce her death in hopes of persuading the public to take the virus seriously.

“One of the ways we can celebrate her life is being sure that we continue to take care of each other,” schools Superintendent Greg Little said.

And then there are the families and colleagues of health care workers who are still being lost to COVID-19, even as hope draws within view.

For weeks now, Dr. James Williams has been hearing the voice of his friend Dr. Juan Fitz, an emergency room physician in Lubbock, Texas, who was hospitalized for the virus this fall after months of triaging COVID-19 patients.

“I am airborne. I am cavalry,” the 67-year-old Fitz said over the summer, describing his role in taking on the pandemic. “I go into the thick of it and, challenged by the situation, find ways to improve and sort things out.”

He died on Nov. 3.

“I’m sorry, it still gets me,” a distraught Williams said Friday, hours before the first vaccine won approval. Choking back tears, he recalled his last text message to Fitz, one the soldier-in-scrubs never answered.

Please know, he wrote, “you have an Army of friends and colleagues pulling for you.”

___

Associated Press writers Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, and Christopher Weber in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

Philippine journalist Maria Ressa says new libel case 'ludicrous'

Rappler CEO Maria Ressa speaks to the media outside a regional trial court before the arraignment in her second cyber libel case, in Makati City

Tue, December 15, 2020

MANILA (Reuters) - Maria Ressa, who heads a Philippine news website known for its tough scrutiny of President Rodrigo Duterte, refused to enter a plea on Tuesday in a second cyber libel case she faces, saying the charges against her were ludicrous.

Ressa, a Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2018, has faced a series of lawsuits that she says amount to intimidation against her and other journalists in a country previously known for upholding press freedom.

"I will take this all the way to the end, and we will win it, because it's ludicrous," Ressa, CEO of news site Rappler www.rappler.com, told reporters outside the court in Manila.

Ressa's counsel, Theodore Te, said they had agreed to a conditional arraignment while waiting for a decision on a motion to quash the charges.

Businessman Wilfredo Keng had filed a new cyber libel case against Ressa, accusing her of sharing screenshots of a 2002 article linking him to a criminal report. Keng's lawyers did not talk to reporters after the hearing.

In June, Ressa was convicted of libel over a 2012 article that linked Keng to illegal activities. She faces up to six year in jail but is appealing the ruling.

Ressa is also facing several other cases, including tax offences and violation of foreign-ownership rules in media.

She has said the cases are a form of harassment due to her news site's critical reports on Duterte's bloody war on drugs, during which more than 5,900 suspected drug dealers and users have been killed in anti-narcotics operations.

Duterte has lambasted media agencies for critical reporting on alleged rights abuses in the campaign.

In July, lawmakers allied with the president blocked the application of media conglomerate ABS-CBN Corp, which has also angered Duterte, for a congressional franchise renewal.

As a result, the country's biggest broadcaster closed radio stations, shut down provincial offices and laid off thousands of workers.

(Reporting by Jay Ereno; Writing by Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Ed Davies, Robert Birsel)

Italians return French Legion awards after el-Sissi gets one



PAOLO SANTALUCIA and NICOLE WINFIELD
Mon, December 14, 2020


ROME (AP) — Two prominent Italian intellectuals announced Monday they were returning their Legion of Honor awards to France to protest that Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi was given the prize despite his government's human rights abuses.

Corrado Augias, a longtime journalist for La Repubblica daily and onetime European Parliamentarian for Italy’s center-left, returned his prize to the French Embassy on Monday. Giovanna Melandri, a former Italian culture minister and the president of Rome's Maxxi contemporary art museum, announced she would follow suit.

Both cited Egypt’s role in the 2016 kidnapping, torture and killing of an Italian doctoral research student in Cairo, as well as the regime's other human rights violations.

French President Emmanuel Macron rolled out the red carpet for el-Sissi's two-day visit last week and awarded him the highest French honor during a closed-door ceremony Sept. 7 that only became public after the Egyptian presidency published photos of it.

Also last week, Rome prosecutors formally placed four high-ranking members of Egypt’s security forces under investigation over the death of Giulio Regeni, whose 2016 killing strained relations between Rome and Cairo and galvanized Italy's human rights community.

Speaking outside the French Embassy, Augias said he returned his 2007 prize out of “a sense of indignation,” given that the award was bestowed on el-Sissi at the same time that Rome prosecutors were detailing the torture that Regeni suffered to a parliamentary committee.

“The two things together were too strong,” he told reporters. “I couldn't refrain from reacting."

Melandri said in a Facebook post Monday that she too would return the honor she received in 2003, saying it was sad but necessary to make clear that “honor" should mean something.

“I hope that this gesture can help open a frank and friendly confrontation in our two countries on which values ​​should be that we want to defend, strengthen and continue to ‘honor' in a democratic Europe and a globalized world," she wrote.

El-Sissi’s state visit had sparked protests by human rights activists incensed that France was welcoming el-Sissi despite the heaviest crackdown on dissent in Egypt’s modern history. At the time, it wasn’t known that Macron had awarded el-Sissi the highest distinction of the Legion of Honor order of merit, the Grand-Croix, or Grand-Cross.

The award ceremony was held without the press before dinner at the Elysee presidential palace in Paris. The event was not listed on Macron’s official agenda.

The French presidency said such a ceremony is usually part of the protocol during state visits.

The French ambassador to Italy, Christian Masset, said he respected Augias and defended the government's human rights record.

“France is on the front lines for human rights and makes no compromises,” he tweeted after Augias returned his prize. “Many cases were discussed during President el-Sissi’s visit to Paris, in the most appropriate and efficient way.”

The Legion of Honor has been given to French war heroes, writers, artists and businessmen. But it has also been given to leaders with questionable human rights records, including Syrian President Bashar Assad (though he returned it in 2018) and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

France has on occasion also stripped people of the honor, including Harvey Weinstein in 2017, in the wake of the #MeToo sexual misconduct accusations against him.

During the visit, France and Egypt signed contracts for French development aid and hospital and transport cooperation.

At his news conference with el-Sissi, Macron justified such cooperation and ruled out making it conditional on human rights issues, saying Egypt is France’s key partner in the fight against extremism.

“It would be ineffective in terms of human rights and counterproductive in the fight against terrorism — that’s why I won’t do that,” he said.

___

Sylvie Corbet contributed from Paris.

Dag Hammarskjold Mystery

Q&A with Ravi Somaiya, author of ‘The Golden Thread’





Randy Dotinga
Mon, December 14, 2020

Journalist Ravi Somaiya suggests in his new book that the United Nations secretary-general in the 1960s, Dag Hammarskjöld, paid a terrible price for his efforts to broker a cease-fire in the bloody civil war in Congo. Mr. Somaiya spoke with Monitor correspondent Randy Dotinga.

Q: What drew you to this story?

I came across this in an archive, and I just was just blown away. It’s a ripping mystery, and I love stories where people aren’t entirely good or entirely bad. It becomes so much more interesting when the characters are ambiguous.


Q: How did Congo become such a global hot spot?

It had the world’s most desirable uranium for purposes that both the Soviets and the West had in mind, and there were other vital minerals there. Then, it came to be strategically vital as the Cold War developed. It borders nine other nations and is really the heart of Africa.

Q: Hammarskjöld tried to bring peace to the region. What was his vision?

He felt that the Black majority deserved to rule after many decades of [colonial] oppression and brutality. It’s amazing to me just how incendiary a position that was in 1961 and how much it drove everyone absolutely crazy. He managed to annoy an enormous number of very powerful people.

What I love about him is that he’s one of the purest idealists I’ve come across in any position of power. It’s very rare. He genuinely tried to do good and was also quite effective. You’ve really cracked something if you can manage to apply idealistic principles in a meaningful way when surrounded by segments who oppose you.

Q: How did this Swedish economist become the head of the United Nations in the first place?

He didn’t seem like any sort of threat, and U.N. leaders just said, “Great, shove that guy in, he’s not going to cause us any trouble.” But in the end, he was both principled and willing to fight for his beliefs. Now, many diplomats say he represents the best of the U.N.

Q: What do you think would have happened in Congo if Hammarskjöld had lived?

I like to hope that we might have had a more peaceful resolution. To me, it’s about the original sin of colonialism. You can’t have that much murder and brutality and oppression without having some rage and division to overcome afterward. There’s still a lot of healing left to be done in the Congo.

Q: What is his legacy?

Moral leadership is principled leadership and idealistic leadership. Sometimes it’s OK to do the right thing. But I look around the world, and everyone seems to be trying to do what’s expedient. Our leaders seem to check the polls before making a decision.

Q: How close to the truth is your book in answering whether Hammarskjöld was murdered or died in an accident?

You can’t really know for sure until everything’s been revealed. Governments are still holding onto documents, and I can’t imagine why. I’m sure it’s for some silly reason like petty embarrassment.

Q: But we are getting closer, correct?

Reports from the U.N. coming out later this year are going to reveal more, and I’m also going to keep pushing. We’ve gotten nearly all the way there. I don’t know if one can ever discover the truth in capital letters, but we can have the most honest, accurate accounting of what happened

Dag Hammarskjöld - Wikipedi
 29 July 1905 – 18 September 1961) was a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations. As of 2020, Hammarskjöld remains the youngest person to have held the Secretary-General post, having been only 47 years old when he was appointed in 1953.

Race's Role in the Cold Case of Dag
Oct 11, 2019 — Dag Hammarskjold, the late United Nations secretary-general killed in a 1961 plane crash, may have been murdered, his aircraft shot out of the ...

UN Leader Dag Hammarskjold Died in Mysterious ...
www.history.com › dag-hammarskjold-death-plane-crash
Aug 16, 2019 — Shortly after midnight on September 18, 1961, a chartered DC-6 airplane carrying United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold on a ...
Place of death: Ndola
Board member of: United Nations
Country of nationality: Sweden
Nationality: Sweden

Biden, Harris Call for Gun Reforms to ‘Honor’ Sandy Hook Victims


Brittany Bernstein  NATIONAL REVIEW
Mon, December 14, 2020,


President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on Monday called for “common sense” gun reforms in honor of the eight-year anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary that killed 20 children and six adults.

Biden, who was vice president when the shooting occurred in 2012, called it the “saddest day we had in the White House.”

The president-elect said in a statement that he remains in awe of the “grandparents, parents, siblings, children, spouses, and fellow broken and healing hearts of Sandy Hook.”


“I have heard from and watched as so many of you turned pain into purpose, working to change our laws and our culture around gun violence and how we protect and nurture our children,” he said.

He praised those who became activists in the wake of the shooting, saying they “helped us forge a consensus that gun violence is a national health crisis and we need to address its total cost to fully heal families, communities, and our nation.”

“Eight years later, there have been plenty of thoughts and prayers, but we know that is not enough,” Biden said. “Together with you and millions of our fellow Americans of every background all across our nation, we will fight to end this scourge on our society and enact common sense reforms that are supported by a majority of Americans and that will save countless lives.”

In a tweet Vice President-elect Kamala Harris called for gun reform to “honor” the victims of the shooting.

Today marks 8 years since 20 first-graders and 6 educators were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

To honor the lives lost in this terrible tragedy, it’s past time we implement common-sense gun safety reforms to keep our children safe. pic.twitter.com/YmsIWM6dDG

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) December 14, 2020

“To honor the lives lost in this terrible tragedy, it’s past time we implement common-sense gun safety reforms to keep our children safe,” she said.

Since the Sandy Hook shooting — which was the second-deadliest school shooting and the fourth-deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — more than 20 state legislatures have expanded background check requirements on some types of firearms, according to The Hill.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.,) said in a tweet that the victims should be honored with “positive action” and to “redouble efforts against gun violence under a new administration.”

We mark this painful 8th anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook with renewed resolve—to honor the beautiful lives lost with positive action, & redouble efforts against gun violence under a new administration.

— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) December 14, 2020

“We mark this painful 8th anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook with renewed resolve—to honor the beautiful lives lost with positive action & redouble efforts against gun violence under a new administration,” he wrote.

RIGHT WING CONVERVATIVE NATIONAL REVIEW OBVIOUSLY EXPECTS ITS READERS TO UNDERSTAND THIS AS THE COMING WAR ON GUNS BY THE BIDEN HARRIS ADMIN AND THE PENDING ABOLISMENT OF THE SECOND AMEDMENT 

USA
How we get to civil war

Damon Linker
Mon, December 14, 2020

It's a tense moment in American politics.

Democrat Joe Biden won the presidential election, and it wasn't especially close. Yet President Trump has not only refused to concede the election. He has repeatedly insisted, without evidence, that he won in a landslide that was denied to him and his supporters by systematic voter fraud. It would be one thing if these were the delusional rantings of a lone sociopath. When the village idiot proclaims himself to be Napoleon Bonaparte and no one recognizes him as such, he's just a lunatic. But when a large faction of the village affirms that he is in fact a Corsican general, things get more complicated.

That's where we are now, with 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives insisting, in an amicus brief filed in support of a lawsuit dismissed by the Supreme Court last week, that the election in four crucial swing states was stolen by the Democrats.

This combination of events — the courts rejecting legally frivolous efforts to overturn election results while significant numbers of Republican officeholders (and voters) continue to cheer on the conspiracy — shows that the primary danger of this moment isn't and never was that Trump would succeed in his hapless coup attempt. The primary danger was and is that Trump would shape public opinion in an explicitly anti-democratic direction, creating a large constituency in the country for rejecting election results that don't deliver partisan victories. Trump is cultivating an appetite for one-party rule, and setting the country on a path that could produce constitutional breakdown and civil war.

How far are we from such a catastrophic turn of events? There was some street violence in Washington, D.C., on Saturday evening after an hours-long deranged rally by Trump supporters. But it didn't escalate. And the fact is that, so far at least, members of the Trumpian right have accepted court decisions that have disappointed their hopes. Which means they still recognize the authority of the judicial branch. As long as that persists, the chance of widespread civil unrest will remain remote.

But will it last? That isn't a question that can be answered by looking only to the right.

It takes two sides (at least) to fight a civil war. For significant violence to break out, Democrats would have to play a role, responding to Republican provocations in a way that shreds our remaining deference to institutional authority and norms of restraint, moving the country well beyond the bounds of normal politics into the twilight realm of extra-constitutional action.

Unfortunately, there are signs that some on the left are eager to make precisely such a move.

Last week, in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) proposed that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment empowers her to block the 126 House Republicans who signed on to the failed lawsuit from taking their seats in the 117th Congress, on the grounds that they are traitors to the country and the Constitution, much like the Confederates who waged war against the Union in the 1860s. A handful of political commentators have echoed these and related arguments.

Leave aside for the moment the near certainty that Pelosi will reject such advice. It's important to think through precisely why this is such a terrible idea.

The language to which Pascrell is appealing was adopted and imposed after the Confederacy had been decisively defeated in the Civil War. That gave the North considerable leverage to impose its will on the vanquished traitors of the seditious South. And yet even so, Reconstruction failed. The South ultimately refused to accept the North's terms and wore it down, first through terrorism, then through the imposition of state-sponsored apartheid. Is an analogous approach really supposed to be considered a viable plan today, when Democrats have only a razor-thin majority in the House for leverage?

Even if Reconstruction had been a smashing success a century and a half ago, it couldn't possibly be useful for anything today besides throwing off a spark that ignites a civil conflagration. By calling the 126 recalcitrant Republicans traitors and refusing to seat them, Pelosi would be unilaterally setting up the Democratic Party in the House as a regime-level authority empowered to render summary judgment of fundamental political disputes.

The almost certain result of such a move would be to split the legislative branch, with the excluded Republicans setting up an alternative Congress independent of the Democrats and the remaining Republicans in the House and Senate forced to choose which side to join. The same process of choosing would take place across the country, with individuals, legislatures, governors, civil servants, courts, and ultimately, state and federal troops lining up on opposing sides, ready to accept or reject legislation passed by one or the other Congress.

It is in trying, and failing, to adjudicate the rapidly multiplying conflicts among competing sources of authority that an actual civil war would likely begin.

How likely is any of this to happen?

At the moment, not very. Pascrell is just one member of Congress, and Pelosi is much too politically prudent to follow his lead.

But what happens if Republicans act out on Jan. 6? That's when both houses of Congress convene for a ceremony during which the sitting vice president is supposed to tally the Electoral College votes and declare Joe Biden the official winner of the election. Will Mike Pence turn on Trump to do this? Even if he does, things could get messy if even one member of the House and one from the Senate raise objections about a state's vote totals. In that case, the two houses of Congress would return to their chambers for a two-hour debate and then votes on whether to disqualify the results of any state about which an objection was raised.

None of this is at all likely to change the ultimate outcome. Too many Republican senators have made clear their intention to stand behind the certified vote tallies and Electoral College results. Putting them together with Democrats will ensure that Biden's win will stand in the Senate.

But how will Democrats in the House respond to a two-hour circus potentially involving dozens of their Republican colleagues making outrageous accusations of voter fraud? And how will that anger and bitterness affect the outcome of the race for House speaker, which will be heating up at roughly the same time? Might Pelosi find herself facing a formidable challenge from her left — from members of her caucus eager to lash out with more than words at the Republican side of the aisle, perhaps by locking out members of the GOP who actively tried to overturn the election?

As I said, it's a tense moment. But that doesn't release officeholders and analysts from the burden of acting responsibly. On the contrary, the stakes increase that burden. It may feel good to contemplate lashing out at one's enemies. But actions have consequences, and they can be truly awful. Instead of bringing an easy and satisfying victory, rash moves in the pressure-cooker of the present could easily send us down a path of outright constitutional breakdown and an outbreak of violence the likes of which this country hasn't seen in over 150 years.

Those who advocate for such actions had better do so with eyes wide open.

#ISRAEL #APARTHEID  

After 60 years, East Jerusalem Palestinians face eviction under Israeli settler rulings




Palestinian Nabil Al-Kurd stands outside his home in east Jerusalem

By Suheir Sheikh and Rami Ayyub
Tue, December 15, 2020, 

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - For Nabil al-Kurd, being forced out of the East Jerusalem home he has lived in since the 1950s would be a fate worse than death.

But the 76-year-old and his wife and children are among dozens of Palestinians under threat of eviction from two districts of the disputed city, after an Israeli court ruled their properties are built on land belonging to Jewish settlers.

"This is my motherland. All my memories are in this house," Kurd told Reuters. "I won't leave unless it is to the cemetery."

The ownership claims against him and others in Sheikh Jarrah and a second neighbourhood, Batan al-Hawa, are a focal point of settler development plans in East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in a war in 1967.

Kurd was ordered evicted in October, within 30 days.

He has appealed to the Jerusalem District court, though Hagit Ofran, project coordinator for Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now, says he has little chance of overturning the ruling.

That same court has this year upheld several settler claims, based on 19th- and early 20th-century documents, drawing censure from the European Union, whose representative in Jerusalem says 77 Palestinians are at risk of forced transfer.

CITY AT THE HEART OF CONFLICT

The status of Jerusalem, a city holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians, is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Palestinians want the capital of their would-be state to be East Jerusalem, and most countries regard settlements that Israel has built there as illegal.

Israel disputes this, citing biblical and historical links to the territory, as well as security needs and legal arguments.

Many of the Palestinians facing eviction were refugees like Kurd or their descendants, who came to the area more than half a century ago, Peace Now said.

The settlers in Kurd's case bought the land from two Jewish associations that claimed to have purchased it at the end of the 19th century, the group said.

A lawyer who represented the settlers claiming Kurd's property declined to speak with Reuters.

Peace Now says some 14 families have been evicted from Batan al-Hawa since 2015 and 16 from Sheikh Jarrah since the late 1990s in such cases.

Evictions are typically stayed while appeals are heard, and some of the residents have appealed their cases to Israel's Supreme Court, but Kurd's family is taking no chances.

"My family has prepared luggage of the important things we need so that if they come in any second, we will be ready," said daughter Muna al-Kurd.

"...We have a camera at the house, four cameras that show the street, and dad stays up until two to three in the morning just watching if they are coming to evacuate us."

(Writing by Rami Ayyub; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and John Stonestreet)