“The reason why there is going to be likely a third conservative justice in the court is because President Trump won the election, that Senate Republicans won the majority,” a reporter said to Schumer.
https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1308481498568417280
https://twitter.com/SenSchumer/status/1310928170045050880
I am not going to meet with Judge Barrett. Why would I meet with a nominee of such an illegitimate process and one who is determined to get rid of the Affordable Care Act?
>JUST ONE PING!!!
I hate parts of this timeline a lot.
https://forward.com/life/family/380923/the-original-antifa-was-a-jewish-anti-nazi-militia/
https://outline.com/SDN9hq
The Original ‘Antifa’ Was A Jewish Anti-Nazi Militia
While watching the recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia – the violence that erupted between marching neo-Nazis and Antifa protesters – I can’t help but think back to what was the original “Antifa”, a group of Jews, whom my father told me about from his childhood, growing up as a poor Jewish kid in Newark, New Jersey.
My father was born in 1904 in what was then Kishinev, Russia, and what is now Chisinau, Moldova. Before he was a year old, his family immigrated to the US. Like many Jewish families at the time, they were fleeing the murderous atmosphere created by the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. My dad grew up in the tenements of Newark, without much money but with a wealth of stories about the characters and goings on of the Jewish neighborhoods of Newark of that era.
The Antifa’s role in fighting Nazis in the streets reminded me of my dad’s story about his much beloved but “kind of crooked” first cousin, Jake “Cocky Jake” (and sometimes, “Jack”) Rothseid.
Cocky Jake was the black sheep of the family, a guy who was connected with the Jewish mob that ran Newark in the 1930’s. It wasn’t that Jake was a hit man who ran around killing people; he wasn’t exactly Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, or Dutch Schultz. He was more like the local neighborhood wise guy. He was the guy who knew a guy who knew another guy who could get things “taken care of” when legal remedies were not feasible.
My father always told me that the only time his family was ever really proud of Jake, given his line of work, was when they heard that he’d been involved with busting up pro-Nazi rallies in Newark that were taking place shortly prior to US entry into World War II.
In the late 1930’s, there was a legal pro-Nazi movement called the German-American Bund. The Bund started having large rallies in North Jersey and elsewhere, with the goal of keeping the US from entering World War II on the side of the allies. Most Americans of the time were deeply isolationist. The last thing they wanted to do was send American boys to fight and die in another European war. So the Bund’s activities were not that surprising, and found fertile ground in many quarters. But the local Jewish population was alarmed by the pro-Nazi rhetoric of the Bund, not to mention the sight of brown-shirted activists chanting and sharing Nazi salutes right here in the good old USA.
The leading lights of the Jewish community asked the local police and Sherriff’s offices to stop these gatherings, but, getting no help, decided to raise the matter to a higher authority. They appealed for protection to the Jewish mob boss of Newark, Abner “Longie” Zwillman. Zwillman agreed to help. He had his chief enforcer, ex-prize fighter Sidney Nathan Abramowitz (better known as “Nat Arno”, the name by which he is immortalized in the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame) organize a “civil rights group”, which they called “the Minutemen.”
My cousin Cocky Jake was a card-carrying member of the Minutemen, and his picture appears in newspaper accounts of the day. The Minutemen were essentially an armed group of Jewish mobsters, thugs, and wise guys like Jake. When Nat Arno gave the word that the Nazis were assembling, these denizens of the saloons, pool halls and other dens of iniquity in North Jersey would leave their usual haunts and head to the Nazi rallies. Much like today’s Antifa, the Minutemen’s preferred tools of persuasion were not logic and reason, but baseball bats, brass knuckles, rubber coated pipes and the occasional stink bomb.
The Minutemen were largely successful. Most of these pro-Nazi rallies were broken up before they got started. And the Nazis managed to get away with just a few broken bones and bruises, as Longie had decreed that no one was to be killed during these events.
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, these pro-Nazi organizations were declared illegal, and the Minutemen were able to disband and return to their usual less-than-savory activities. Years later, it was discovered that the German American Bund organizations of the time were not purely local in nature; according to an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Martin Dies, there was clear evidence that the Bund had ties to the Third Reich.
My father is long gone, as are Cocky Jake and his friends in the Minutemen, Longie Zwillman, and the rest of the characters that ran the Jewish mob in Newark back then.
Unfortunately, it seems that the Nazis are still around, but then, so are the people resisting them on the streets. I wonder if the members of today’s Antifa would be surprised to learn that they are replicating a proud lineage of Jewish gangsters who, years ago, took a brief respite from the rackets and the pool halls to do some good for a change.
I’m not sure if there’s a heaven for wise guys. Even if there is, my guess is they’d have to check their baseball bats and brass knuckles at the door. But I like to think that somewhere, Cocky Jake is looking down at all this and thinking, “Give ‘em one for me, kid.”
Mark B. Williams is the Chief Strategy Officer for the Knight Cancer Institute of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon. He is also the Honorary Consul for the Republic of Moldova for the State of Oregon. He lives in Portland with his wife and daughter.
>Mark B. Williams is the Chief Strategy Officer for the Knight Cancer Institute of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon. He is also the Honorary Consul for the Republic of Moldova for the State of Oregon. He lives in Portland with his wife and daughter.
>Honorary Consul for the Republic of Moldova for the State of Oregon
PORTLAND The Embassy of the Republic of Moldova in the United States of America announced the appointment of Mark B. Williams as Honorary Consul of the Republic of Moldova for the State of Oregon."My connection is that my father was born there," Williams said in an email. "It was Russia when he was there (in 1904), but now it is Moldova and that makes me a first generation American of Moldovan ancestry.–"
<My connection is that my father was born there, It was Russia when he was there (in 1904), but now it is Moldova and that makes me a first generation American of Moldovan ancestry.
>Chief Strategy Officer for the Knight Cancer Institute of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland
https://www.ohsu.edu/knight-cancer-institute
>why the fuck does the State of Oregon need an honorary "Consul" for the Republic of Moldova….???
It was Russia in 1904, but now it is Moldova
what was going on there/then?
>More baby humans makes God happy.
When does a Church become a playground?
When does a Church become a business?
When does a Church become political?
When does a Church become corrupt?
When does a Church become willfully blind?
When does a Church become controlled?
fuckin love poetry
>https://theintercept.com/2020/09/30/assange-extradition-cfaa-hacking/
Crumbling Case Against Assange Shows Weakness of “Hacking” Charges Related to Whistleblowing
The entire computer crime case against Assange is based on a brief discussion, between a publisher and source, about cracking a password — but the cracking never actually happened.
By 2013, the Obama administration had concluded that it could not charge WikiLeaks or Julian Assange with crimes related to publishing classified documents — documents that showed, among other things, evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan — without criminalizing investigative journalism itself. President Barack Obama’s Justice Department called this the “New York Times problem,” because if WikiLeaks and Assange were criminals for publishing classified information, the New York Times would be just as guilty.
Five years later, in 2018, the Trump administration indicted Assange anyway. But, rather than charging him with espionage for publishing classified information, they charged him with a computer crime, later adding 17 counts of espionage in a superseding May 2019 indictment.
The computer charges claimed that, in 2010, Assange conspired with his source, Chelsea Manning, to crack an account on a Windows computer in her military base, and that the “primary purpose of the conspiracy was to facilitate Manning’s acquisition and transmission of classified information.” The account enabled internet file transfers using a protocol known as FTP.
New testimony from the third week of Assange’s extradition trial makes it increasingly clear that this hacking charge is incredibly flimsy. The alleged hacking not only didn’t happen, according to expert testimony at Manning’s court martial hearing in 2013 and again at Assange’s extradition trial last week, but it also couldn’t have happened.
The new testimony, reported earlier this week by investigative news site Shadowproof, also shows that Manning already had authorized access to, and the ability to exfiltrate, all of the documents that she was accused of leaking — without receiving any technical help from WikiLeaks.
The government’s hacking case appears to be rooted entirely in a few offhand remarks in what it says are chat logs between Manning and Assange discussing password cracking — a topic that other soldiers at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, where Manning was stationed, were also actively interested in.
The indictment claims that around March 8, 2010, after Manning had already downloaded everything she leaked to WikiLeaks other than the State Department cables, the whistleblower provided Assange with part of a “password hash” for the FTP account and Assange agreed to try to help crack it. A password hash is effectively an encrypted representation of a password from which, in some cases, it’s possible to recover the original.
Manning already had authorized access to all of the documents she was planning to leak to WikiLeaks, including the State Department cables, and cracking this password would not have given her any more access or otherwise helped her with her whistleblowing activities. At most, it might have helped her hide her tracks, but even that is not very likely. I suspect she was just interested in password cracking.
Assange, however, never cracked the password.
That’s it. That’s what the government’s entire computer crime case against Assange is based on: a brief discussion about cracking a password, which never actually happened, between a publisher and his source.
Therefore, the charge is not actually about hacking — it’s about establishing legal precedent to charge publishers with conspiring with their sources, something that so far the U.S. government has failed to do because of the First Amendment.
As Shadowproof points out: In June 2013, at Manning’s court martial hearing, David Shaver, a special agent for the Army Computer Crimes Investigating Unit, testified that Manning only provided Assange with part of the password hash and that, with only that part, it’s not possible to recover the original password. It would be like trying to make a cappuccino without any espresso; Assange was missing a key ingredient.
Last week at Assange’s extradition trial, Patrick Eller, a former Command Digital Forensics Examiner at the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, further discredited the computer crime charge, according to Shadowproof.
Eller confirmed Shaver’s 2013 testimony that Manning didn’t provide Assange with enough information to crack the password. He pointed out, “The only set of documents named in the indictment that Manning sent after the alleged password cracking attempt were the State Department cables,” and that “Manning had authorized access to these documents.”
Eller also said that other soldiers at Manning’s Army base in Iraq were regularly trying to crack administrator passwords on military computers in order to install programs that they weren’t authorized to install. “While she” — Manning — “was discussing rainbow tables and password hashes in the Jabber chat” — with Assange — “she was also discussing the same topics with her colleagues. This, and the other factors previously highlighted, may indicate that the hash cracking topic was unrelated to leaking documents.”
I’m not a fan of Julian Assange, particularly since his unethical actions and lies he’s told since the 2016 U.S. election. But I am a proponent of a strong free press, and his case is critically important for the future of journalism in this country.
Journalists have relationships with their sources. These relationships are not criminal conspiracies. Even if a source ends up breaking a law by providing the journalist with classified information, the journalist did not commit a felony by receiving it and publishing it.
Whether or not you believe Assange is a journalist is beside the point. The New York Times just published groundbreaking revelations from two decades of Donald Trump’s taxes showing obscene tax avoidance, massive fraud, and hundreds of millions of dollars of debt.
Trump would like nothing more than to charge the New York Times itself, and individual journalists that reported that story, with felonies for conspiring with their source. This is why the precedent in Assange’s case is so important: If Assange loses, the Justice Department will have established new legal tactics with which to go after publishers for conspiring with their sources.