>>5374800

Former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid has news he is eager to spread: He is feeling “very good.”

The former US Senator from Nevada was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year, and New York Times Magazine writer Mark Leibovich wrote last month after an interview with Reid that he “does not have long to live.”

At 79, and after a cancer diagnosis, Reid is in an unusually reflective place. Late last week, Reid welcomed us to an office he keeps inside the Bellagio Hotel in the heart of the Las Vegas strip, where we spoke for over an hour about his health, his party, his legacy and of course, President Donald Trump.

He says he is now in remission, lucky that doctors caught his pancreatic cancer early and noting that it is almost always a death sentence because it is usually too late to treat when finally detected. But the chemotherapy treatment was especially brutal, compromising several vertebrae to the point where he needed two back surgeries and leaving him unable to walk much without assistance.

But make no mistake: this Harry Reid is still the same former boxer and political street fighter I covered for decades in the US Senate.

Since the 2016 presidential election, Reid has been colorful in criticizing Trump. He called the now-President everything from a “con man” to a “human leech” to a “big fat guy.” He is especially proud of using the word “amoral” in his New York Times Magazine interview because he says it resulted in a boost of googling the dictionary definition of the word.

I asked him if he has anything nice to say about the President. He pondered that question hard, took time to look for an answer and after a pregnant pause, finally replied, “I just have trouble accepting him as a person, so frankly I don’t see anything he’s doing right.”

First elected to the House in 1982 and then to the Senate in 1986, Reid became Senate Democratic leader in 2005 and served one of the longest tenures as floor leader in the chamber’s history.

He retired from the Senate just a few weeks before the Trump inauguration. When I asked if he was sad to miss the chance to go head to head with this president, he demurred.

“My time has come and gone as being a Senator. I of course watch the news, read papers very closely. I miss the battle, but I understand that, that’s not for me now,” he said.

Reid: Trump makes George W. Bush look like Babe Ruth of presidents

During President George W. Bush’s administration, Reid was the Republican president’s chief antagonist in the Senate. He famously called the 43rd president a “loser,” and a “liar,” and even the worst president the country ever had.

Having covered all of that in real time, I almost fell off my chair when Reid told me that he now wishes for Bush again “every day.”

“He and I had our differences, but no one ever questioned his patriotism. Our battles were strictly political battles,” Reid said.

“There’s no question in my mind that George Bush would be Babe Ruth in this league that he’s in with Donald Trump in the league. Donald Trump wouldn’t make the team,” Reid added.

Reid dismissed calls for Trump’s impeachment as a “waste of time” because Republicans who have the majority in the Senate “are so afraid of Trump that they’re not going to get involved in this.”

But he doesn’t think Democrats need to worry about the backlash if they decide to move forward.

“I don’t think there would be a backlash,” he said. “Because the vast majority of the people know something’s wrong with Trump.”

That’s also the basis of advice for Democrats running for the White House in 2020.

“The candidates running need not talk about how bad President Trump is, they just need to talk about what’s good for the country. Everyone knows, even those people supporting knows what problems he has,” Reid said.

His wry sense of humor still very much intact, Reid proudly displays a framed letter on his office wall that Trump wrote him in 2010 congratulating the Nevada senator for winning his tough re-election bid that year.

Several months ago, Trump brought Reid back into the fold — tweeting about a speech Reid gave in 1993 criticizing birthright citizenship. Reid has long called that a mistake (one he says his Jewish born wife and daughter of immigrants lashed out at him for).

Still, he was unbothered by Trump using it as a political weapon.

“I guess everything’s fair, he found it, let him use it,” Reid said with a shoulder shrug.

More:

https://krtv.com/cnn-us-politics/2019/02/25/harry-reid-wishes-for-george-w-bush-again-every-day/

Dark to Light, bringing awareness and slowly inching the public along

While charges against New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft for soliciting prostitution brought national attention to the issue of sex trafficking on Friday, data, expert opinion and cases from around the USA show how widespread the problem is.

Sex trafficking accounted for 6,081 of the more than 8,500 reported cases of human trafficking in the United States in 2017, according to statistics from the National Human Trafficking Hotline.

There is no official estimate of the total number of human trafficking victims in the U.S. Polaris, a non-profit that operates the hotline on human trafficking, estimates that the total number of victims nationally reaches into the hundreds of thousands when estimates of both adults and minors and sex trafficking and labor trafficking are aggregated.

Illicit massage or spa businesses, similar to the ones in the Florida case, were the top location or industry where sex trafficking occurred in 2017, with 714 reported cases, according to the hotline's data.

More than 9,000 illicit massage businesses operate in every state around the country, bringing in a stunning $2.5 billion each year, according to estimates in a 2018 report by Polaris on trafficking in these businesses.

"It's not accurate to understand these cases as local," Bradley Myles, CEO of Polaris, told USA TODAY on Friday. "The places are being overlooked and underestimated."

Characteristics of the average illegal spa that Polaris details fit with how prosecutors described ones in Florida.

Ten spas were shut down in Orlando, Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast after a several months of investigation revealed women there were in "sexual servitude," according to arrest records.

At Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida, where Kraft allegedly paid for sexual services, women – many of them from China – lived in the spa and were not permitted to leave, according to Martin County Sheriff Will Snyder.

Kraft, who has been charged but not arrested, denied the allegation. He is one of hundreds of alleged clients facing charges in the recent Florida stings.

Like some of the spas that allegedly engaged in sex trafficking in Florida, the average illicit massage business is connected to at least one other, according to Polaris.

Myles said most are tied to larger criminal networks that have links to the countries where many of the women at the spas are from. Many of the women are coerced to work in the businesses and often earn no wages and have no autonomy, Myles said.

"These girls are there all day long, into the evening. They can’t leave and they are performing sex acts," Vero Beach police Chief David Currey said of the investigation. "Some of them may tell us they’re OK, but they’re not."

Beyond sex-trafficking at just massage spas, the United States prosecutes hundreds of cases each year and wins scores of convictions on charges of trafficking with respect to slavery and sex trafficking of children by force, fraud or coercion, according to an analysis of federal records by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

In fiscal year 2018, 189 cases resulted in convictions, according to TRAC’s data.

Here's a look at how sex trafficking has affected areas across the country:

'Mecca of sex trafficking'

In March last year, a report estimated 340 young adults and children have been victims of sex trafficking in Milwaukee in a four-year period.

"We've heard from different sources that we're the mecca of sex trafficking, but we need to be able to measure that," Mallory O'Brien, director of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission, which participated in the report, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at the time.

"This was our opportunity to do that," she said.

Research found 340 people ages 25 and younger who were confirmed or believed to have been victims of sex trafficking in Milwaukee between Jan. 1, 2013, and Dec. 31, 2016.

Overall in Wisconsin, child welfare workers confirmed 99 incidents of children and youth sex trafficking statewide from June 2017 through August, 2018, the state Department of Children and Families said in January.

Backpage and effects of its shutdown

More Here:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/not-just-robert-kraft-spa-161627605.html

>>5375262

Yep

Nearly two dozen former GOP lawmakers are urging Republicans to oppose President Trump’s national emergency declaration.

The former lawmakers in a letter published in Politico Playbook on Monday remind Republican lawmakers of an oath to “put the country and its Constitution above everything, including party politics or loyalty to a president.”

Five former Republican senators and 19 former GOP members of Congress, who all served between 1967 and 2013, signed the letter. They ask current Republicans to “pass a joint resolution terminating” the national emergency.

“We who have signed this letter are no longer Members of Congress but that oath still burns within us,” they write. “That is why we are coming together to urge those of you who are now charged with upholding the authority of the first branch of government to resist efforts to surrender those powers to a president.”

Trump declared a national emergency earlier this month after congressional rejected funding for his proposed wall along the southern border.

The House is expected to vote this week on a resolution to block the declaration. The resolution was backed by one Republican lawmaker, Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.)

Trump's emergency declaration has already drawn at least five legal challenges, and has been widely condemned, including from a group of nearly 60 former national security officials.

The ex-lawmakers argue that the declaration hurts constituents by allowing the president to circumvent Congress’s power of the purse and undermining “true representative government.”

They also warn current Republicans that a future Democratic president could use the same national emergency powers to advance their own legislation.

“What will you do when a president of another party uses the precedent you are establishing to impose policies to which you are unalterably opposed?” they ask. “There is no way around this difficulty: what powers are ceded to a president whose policies you support may also be used by presidents whose policies you abhor.”

The former lawmakers end the letter by urging current Republicans to “honor your oath of office” and pass a joint resolution against the emergency declaration.

“You were sent to Congress to be the voice of the people,” they write. “That is an awesome burden and it may require you to exercise restraint to protect the constitutional model—that which is the root of American exceptionalism—and to keep it from being sacrificed on the altar of expediency.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/431374-ex-gop-lawmakers-pen-letter-urging-current-republicans-to-block-trumps

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-25/trump-kim-may-declare-end-to-korean-war-in-vietnam-summit?utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_content=business&utm_source=twitter&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_medium=social

Germany's Alternative For Germany (AfD) party (previously) are an insurgent neofascist movement with ties to senior mainstream politicians and the country's super-wealthy would-be oligarchs; the party put on a hard push in the the 2018 Bavarian elections and their meme warfare was full of familiar voter-suppression tactics, from garden-variety disinformation to exhortations to stay home on election day.

Also prominent in the group's messaging: hashtags and tropes from the US far-right conspiracy theory Qanon (previously), an incoherent toxic stew of antisemitism, murder accusations, numerology, Islamophobia, and other pathologies of the moment.

The connection between Qanon and AfD comes from an unreleased report from the London School of Economics-affiliated Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which bills itself as an "anti-extremist think tank"; some details of the study have been reported in the German and US press.

The researchers traced the inclusion of Qanon-affiliated hashtags in AfD social media, including German translations and adaptations of popular Qanon tags (e.g. #linksliegenlassen, #MerkelMussWeg); as with the US-based Qanon activists, the German Qanon phenomenon was driven by small numbers of incredibly prolific social media users – not bots (Erin Gallagher's research found that Qanon tweeters posting 500+ messages/day were often "older retired people with a lot of free time").

There's evidence that US-based Qanon activists forged alliances with German neofascists; some popular fascist hashtags ("#ChemnitzIstDerAnfang") originated with US Qanon accounts.

Qanon is becoming a kind of ideological signifier among far-right groups: members of the far-right who have adopted the yellow vest for street demonstrations in Canada and the UK have been spotted decorating the vests with Qanon memes and carrying Qanon-boosting signs. Qanon networks have also been used to boost the virality of racist videos.

I think far-right extremism is the intersection of garden-variety bigotry/xenophobia with economic precarity and a breakdown of the epistemological consensus about what constitutes a reliable indicator that something is true.

Xenophobia and bigotry are always around, but they surge when people feel afraid for their overall economic circumstances, and that surge has been supercharged by decades of both scientific denialism (well-funded campaigns to sow doubt about the motives of climate scientists, doctors who warn of the link between smoking and cancer, etc) and corruption – for example, anti-vax builds on the assertion that experts have corrupt motives and that regulators are so captured that they let them get away with murder. The thing is, regulators really are that captured.

I can't say for sure that a more equitable economic system – which would cut off the resources used by corporate influences to distort policy, and by ideological entrepreneurs to push expensive, profitable scientific denial – would neutralize the far-right, but I think it's worth a try.

The crossover between QAnon and far-right German movements like the Chemnitz riots makes sense. Both movements are aggressively anti-Muslim and anti-refugee. And both make vague gestures toward a right-wing revolution.

“At the time I got the impression that some people thought Chemnitz was going to be ‘Germany's great awakening,’” Gallagher said, referencing QAnon’s promise of a “great awakening” in America.

It’s a trend she’s previously observed, as America’s alt-right moved on to trolling on behalf of their counterparts in Europe after Trump’s victory in 2016.

“I've noticed crossover of US alt-right networks with European alt-right for a long time,” she said. “How QAnon fits into all that is a great question, but the international alt-right coordinated swarms—QAnon related or not—do not surprise me.”

https://boingboing.net/2019/02/24/afd-and-qanon.html