Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Here’s how AG Barr is going to get encryption 'backdoors'
https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/31/how-ag-barr-is-going-to-get-encryption-backdoors/ #privacy #security

CNN Should Have Asked About Ranked-Choice Voting. It’s Not Too Late.

The second round of Democratic presidential debates continues tonight in Detroit. We at FairVote certainly hope that CNN’s moderators ask the 10 candidates on stage this evening about electoral reform and ranked choice voting (RCV). 

It’s an especially important topic, considering six Democratic primaries and caucuses will use RCV next year—and also because RCV would ensure that the crowded primary field ultimately produces a nominee with true majority support. 

These debates provide more than two hours of thoughtful plans on complicated issues that could well be dead on arrival in a highly polarized Congress consumed by partisanship. RCV would help provide the structural change that would incentivize politicians of all stripes to push beyond our current dysfunction, seek consensus and solve problems.

While democracy issues did not come up during Tuesday night’s discussion, just in case moderators Dana Bash, Don Lemon and Jake Tapper—or any of us—need a last-minute primer, here’s what we already know about the 2020 Democratic hopefuls and RCV. 

The candidates

By FairVote’s count, there are four Democratic candidates who actively advocate for RCV, five candidates who are supportive and two candidates who are receptive to the method. Only two candidates have expressed indifference. The other 12 major Democratic candidates have not commented publicly on RCV.  

Additionally, Republican presidential hopeful Bill Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, has backed RCV. While it's too early to know who will be the nominees of other parties like the Green Party and Libertarian Party, we can anticipate their support for RCV; in 2016, for example, both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein backed RCV.

Advocates (candidates who have a policy pushing ranked choice voting):

Andrew Yang, entrepreneur: Yang has called on the “DNC to adopt a ranked-choice voting model for all democratic primaries [and to] [w]ork with Congress to adopt ranked-choice voting for all federal elections.” He has posted this plan on Twitter and pushed it in multiple forums.
Michael Bennet, Colorado U.S. Senator: Bennet, as part of his comprehensive governmental reform plan, has called for the federal government to "support state and local governments that transition to ranked choice voting."
Seth Moulton, Massachusetts U.S. Congressman: As a congressman, Moulton publicly indicated strong support for RCV, saying, "If the Founding Fathers had understood ranked choice voting, they would have put it in the Constitution."
Mike Gravel, former Alaska U.S. Senator: Gravel has made ranked choice voting a key tenet of his policy platform, calling for the federal government to "institute a ranked-choice voting procedure for any and all elections currently functioning on the first-past-the-post system."
Bill Weld, former Massachusetts Governor: When Weld was recently asked about RCV at a forum, his response was unwavering and instant: “I love ranked choice voting.”

Supporters (candidate who have expressed positive sentiment toward RCV):

Bernie Sanders, Vermont U.S. Senator: In 2007 testimony to Vermont’s state legislature, Sanders indicated his support for a bill to establish RCV for U.S. Senate and U.S. House elections, announcing that the public should "Count me in as someone who strongly supports Instant Runoff." 
Kirsten Gillibrand, New York U.S. Senator: At a June New Hampshire forum hosted by Equal Citizens, Gillibrand said, "I support ranked choice voting. I think it's a very interesting reform that's worked in some places well."
Marianne Williamson, Author: Numerous times, Williamson has indicated support for RCV, saying "I think ranked choice voting is great," and tweeting “If only we had ranked choice voting.”
Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana: According to Equal Citizens, Buttigieg supports ranked choice voting. He has also indicated that he would sign a RCV bill if it came across his desk as president. 
Tulsi Gabbard, Hawaii U.S. Congresswoman: At a New Hampshire event, Gabbard was asked about eliminating the electoral college and utilizing a ranked voting system for president. She indicated her support for RCV, saying RCV can “make sure our voices are heard accurately and represented through our elections.” (The 30:48 mark in the video.)
Cory Booker, New Jersey U.S. Senator: Booker has indicated support for RCV for many years. He told a Voter Choice Massachusetts activist on July 12 that he supports RCV and won an RCV election in college.

Receptive (candidates who are open to adopting RCV):

Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts U.S. Senator: In a Voxpodcast, Warren cited the momentum behind RCV as evidence that "democracy itself is reinventing,” also saying that “"there's a lot to be said for [RCV]."
Beto O’Rourke, former Texas U.S. Congressman: O’Rourke was asked at a May town hall in New Hampshire where he stood on RCV, and he responded with an informed discussion of the ways in which RCV leads to a more civil campaign. “We’ve got all these great candidates running right now. We’ve got to do everything in our power not to demean or denigrate or weaken them, compromise them, in any way that would make them anything less than the strongest possible candidate against Trump,” he said. “Ranked choice voting provides another inducement to making sure you don’t do that to those other candidates. … It would not hurt in this very divided, highly polarized democracy to employ [RCV] as a matter of course going forward.”

Indifferent (candidates who are ambivalent about RCV):

Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota U.S. Senator: When Ellen Read, a New Hampshire activist, asked Klobuchar about RCV, Klobuchar’s response was described in this article as “noncommittal.” A Klobuchar staffer did note that Minnesota, Klobuchar’s home state, has a very strong record with RCV.
Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York City:  De Blasio was most recently quoted as saying, "The jury's still out on ranked-choice voting...I think it has strengths and I think it has weaknesses. And I’d sure like to see a lot more research on it. But there’s a lot of people who believe it might be very beneficial in New York City.” Accordingly, it should be noted that he has provided tacit support for (or at least no active opposition against) the New York City charter commission’s decision to place RCV for primary and special elections on the 2019 ballot.  

It is clear that a large slice of the Democratic primary field is open to adopting ranked choice voting. In fact, we don’t know of any candidate for president in 2020 who opposes RCV, and please let us know if you hear of candidates taking a position.

Now, let’s look at the states that adopted RCV in the candidate selection process.

The states

After the contentious 2016 primary fight, the Democratic National Committee called on its state affiliates to make the presidential candidate selection process more accessible to voters. Six states—Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Nevada, Iowa, and Wyoming— will turn to RCV to heed that call. Here’s how:

In Iowa, the state Democratic Party has proposed a ‘virtual caucus’ which would allow voters unable to participate in the Feb. 3 in-person caucus to cast their support over the phone or online via ranked choice voting. In both the online and over-the-phone plans, caucus-goers will be able to rank five preferred candidates. For the online component, voters should simply be able to state their ranked preferences by entering their rankings on an interface. For the over-the-phone component, an operator will read the candidate names in alphabetical order, giving phone-caucus-goers adequate time to respond with their preferences.

According to the plan, there would be six designated times to “virtually caucus” in the five days preceding the election—with the sixth “virtual caucus” occurring at the same time as the in-person caucus, 7:00 P.M. on February 3rd.

In Nevada, early voters and those who are voting-by-phone will have the opportunity to rank their top preferences. While the details are still being ironed out, voters will be afforded multiple opportunities to confirm their selections the in-person and over-the-phone manifestations.

In Kansas, the state Democratic Party has ditched its traditional caucus in favor of a ranked choice voting primary. According to state party secretary George Hanna, adopting ranked choice voting will not actually be much of a shock for Kansans—because RCV resembles Kansas’s typical caucus process.

“Rank[ed] choice voting essentially is caucusing by paper. You are going to pick your first choice of the candidates that are available, your next choice … and rank them.” Hanna said.

In Alaska and Hawaii, voters will show up on primary day and use ranked choice voting to cast their ballots. Wyoming Democrats, while they have not yet submitted a formal proposal, have indicated that they plan to follow a similar path.

Although the preliminary proposals indicate some states plan to implement RCV in slightly different manners, all plans adhere to the rules set by the Democratic Party: all candidates above the 15% threshold will accrue delegates. Accordingly, as FairVote Senior Fellow David Daley put it, using RCV means that “last-place candidates will be eliminated and backers of those candidates will have their vote count toward their next choice until all remaining candidates are above the 15% vote threshold to win delegates.”

While these plans are all preliminary until they are formally accepted by the DNC, it is heartening to see ranked choice voting adopted as a viable alternative to the current winner-take-all system—especially in a field this crowded.
 

Debate Protesters Push Candidates To “Make Detroit the Engine of a Green New Deal”

Tuesday afternoon, as the Democratic presidential candidates were getting ready to take the stage at the Fox Theater in Detroit, hundreds of people converged on a public park less than a mile away to rally for a Green New Deal. They put the candidates on notice that there’s no time to waste in starting a just transition from fossil fuels, and emphasized the potential role of polluted and disinvested communities in Detroit in powering a new green economy.

Speaking at the rally, Varshini Prakash—executive director and co-founder of the youth climate organization the Sunrise Movement— made a direct appeal to the candidates. “If you want to claim the mantle of leadership in this country then you have to embrace a Green New Deal. And not just any Green New Deal—one that stops the water shutoffs, that ends the violence of prisons and poverty and pollution.”

Looking out over the crowd of youth, union members, and black, brown and indigenous activists living in communities on the front lines of environmental injustice, Prakash declared, “Right here we have the coalition that will bring America back from the greed and the hate and the division of people like Donald Trump.”

Since its founding two years ago, the Sunrise Movement’s youth activists have challenged politics as usual in Washington with such urgency, anger and moral indignation that it has rocketed the looming climate crisis into the public’s consciousness like never before, making it the number two priority among Democratic primary voters (behind healthcare). These activists have upended assumptions not only about what’s politically possible, but about the very complexion and ownership of the environmental movement.

“Learn and listen from the communities that have been fighting for generations and make Detroit the engine of the Green New Deal!” Prakash exclaimed to cheers.

Traditionally, the environmental movement has struggled to attract people of color. But yesterday’s rally and march showcased a more diverse and progressive movement. It brought together young Sunrise activists from around the country with a coalition of several Detroit union, environmental and social justice organizations called Frontline Detroit, which took the lead in hosting the event.

To organizers, Detroit is a logical place to start the brave new experiments into a Green New Deal. For one, the city is in need of relief from recent economic and environmental travails, a trait it shares with frontline communities around the country. In addition, organizers also point to Detroit’s fabled history of industrial prowess and radical labor movements.

“When we talk about the Green New Deal, we talk about union jobs because that is part of what made Detroit what it is,” Kim Hunter, social justice coordinator with Engage Michigan, said in an interview. “Radical union movements fought for racial equity on the shop floor and inside the union.”

It’s a point Theodor Spencer also pursued on stage, revving up the crowd with a round of call and response: “Detroit is?  Union Town! Detroit is? Union Town!”

Spencer also believes Detroit can lead the way. He is a member of Sunrise and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 58, who will become a journeyman next summer.

“We have truly been the engine of the world since the industrial age. We have the infrastructure. We have the people. We have the passion. We have the courage. We have the pride. Everything we build we build it with pride,” he told the crowd. “Give us an opportunity. These are our demands for a Green New Deal.”

The same emphasis was lacking on the debate stage—Sunrise lamented in a press release that climate change made up only 12 minutes of the three-hour debate, calling it “outrageous and disappointing.” Sunrise and other climate activists have demanded a presidential debate exclusively addressing climate change, but so far the Democratic National Committee has refused (although it will vote on August 22). Last week, however, CNN announced plans to host a climate crisis town hall with eight Presidential candidates and MSNBC and Georgetown University announced plans for a multi-day climate forum. Sunrise welcomes these developments, but continues to push for a climate debate.

Part of this urgency stems from the fact that climate, environmental and social justice concerns are real and immediate for many of those present at the rally. Many in the crowd live on the front lines of pollution from Detroit’s Marathon Petroleum Corps. oil refinery and 32 other polluting industries.

Nayyirah Shariff, director of Flint Rising, reminded the crowd that yesterday marked 1,923 days since the water crisis began in Flint, a city 68 miles north of Detroit. There is no end in sight, Shariff said, not only to the practical matters of replacing underground pipes and household plumbing but the chronic health problems caused by drinking contaminated water.

Others who came out were motivated by environmental awakenings of their own. For Aisha Soofi, it was the 2014 flood that deluged her grandmother’s Detroit neighborhood with raw sewage.

“It destroyed everything,” says Soofi, who remembers the piles of trash outside of every house in the neighborhood, where several other family members were also flooded out. Eventually her grandmother was able to come up with the $35,000 to make the repairs, she says, but most of her neighbors couldn’t afford a cleanup and ended up living with toxic mold and feces in their basements. The experience, she says, made her more aware of the environmental face of social injustice. Due to inadequate government response, she adds, “Community members had to drain the streets themselves. Neighbors had to push cars out of the water.”

Now 19 years old, the Ann Arbor resident is a political science major at Eastern Michigan University and runs one of Sunrise’s 200+ local hubs around the country.

“If we don’t do anything,” she says, such so-called “once in a lifetime” floods like the one that ruined her grandmother’s kitchen “are going to just keep on happening. It’s going to be a lifetime of destruction.”

When people tell her the Green New Deal is a pipedream that will never happen, she asks: “Why is aspirational such a bad thing?” Besides, she adds, “We don’t have time. … If we don’t do anything within these next 11 years, there will be irreversible damage to our world.”

That was the general sentiment as the crowd picked up their handmade signs and union placards, hoisting banners and a series of giant cardboard upraised fists bearing climate justice demands, and set off down the road to the Fox Theatre to the pulsing of drums and the resounding sound of a thousand voices chanting, “I believe that we will win!”

Organizers estimated the crowd at more than 1,000 people. A group of black and brown activists, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), took the lead.  

Once the march reached the general vicinity of the theater, they were stopped by police within about a block of the theater, where other activists clustered in small groups—including Trump supporters, many hoisting blatantly racist and sexist signs, who were being serenaded by a rock-and-roll cover band comprised of a group of gangly young white guys.

Despite taunts from these and other Trump supporters—including a small band of black T-shirted men who arrived later, marching up the street in a military-style procession and waving American flags and Trump banners—the Frontline Detroit group maintained the joyful vibe, eventually making it past a set of police barriers and walking on past the Fox Theatre. Tensions flared with police when they tried to turn around to walk back down the other side of the street, directly in front of the theater. Eventually, organizers directed marchers to return to Cass Park, where the march had begun.

Someone Is Suing Companies for Using SMS Messages in 2019

Anuwave’s Suit Against Coinbase Demonstrates a Longstanding Flaw in the Patent System

This month’s Stupid Patent of the Month deals with SMS (short messaging service), a technology that goes back to the mid-1980s. Modern-day SMS messages, typically bundled with mobile phone services, have been around since 1992, but one company believes that you should have to pay a licensing fee simply to incorporate them into your app or service.

That company is Anuwave, which recently sued cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (PDF) for infringement of US Patent 8,295,862. That’s only the most recent suit: Anuwave has sued dozens of companies since 2015 for alleged infringement of the patent—Symantec, Avast, and Bitdefender, just to name a few that have faced lawsuits.

Anuwave’s patent is on a software application using SMS to check for information—for example, for use on a device that can send and receive SMS messages, but doesn’t have an Internet connection. Anuwave alleges that Coinbase infringed the patent by letting users perform tasks like checking their balance via SMS.

Here’s the first claim of the patent:

A method of enabling communication through SMS communication channel, comprising:

listing all services at a terminal station that are available with an SMS gateway according to meta information available at the terminal station;

upon selecting a service, a network aware application displaying associated parameters that a user needs to select or enter;

upon user selection, submitting a request to the SMS gateway; and

the SMS gateway responding back with a response,

wherein the associated parameters include the parameters listed at the terminal station and the parameters desired by the user and not listed at the terminal station.

Coinbase is not the first company to use SMS messages to perform basic software commands. Unified Patents filed a complaint in 2017 with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board to invalidate Anuwave’s patent (PDF), and Unified’s complaint identifies three different provisional patent applications as prior art. (Unfortunately, the PTAB never made a decision: Unified reached a settlement with Anuwave and dropped the complaint.)

In the world of software, combining existing technologies or processes happens every day as a matter of course.

According to the law, a person isn’t entitled to a patent if the claimed invention already existed when the application was filed or would have been obvious to someone skilled in the relevant technology area. The Supreme Court has held that a combination of existing inventions can be ruled obvious even if that particular combination didn’t previously exist before the patent was issued.

In the world of software, combining existing technologies or processes happens every day as a matter of course. As patent expert Charles Duan wrote, “Non-proprietary software developers and other innovation communities value interoperability and combinability of software. Thus, the legal assumption that new combinations are uncommon and often worthy of patents conflicts with the experiences of those software developers, for whom new combinations are routine and expected.”

But let’s put aside the question of whether combining SMS with other services would have been obvious before Anuwave’s patent was granted. It really shouldn’t have been issued for a much more basic reason: it’s not an invention.

The landmark Supreme Court opinion Alice v. CLS Bank says that an abstract idea does not become a patentable invention simply by being implemented on a computer. At its core, Anuwave’s patent is on the idea of using SMS messages to provide information to a device. It’s clearly vulnerable to a challenge under Alice.

Anuwave v. Coinbase is one of the first patent lawsuits ever in the blockchain world, so we expect that the cryptocurrency community will be watching it closely. But it tells an all-too-common story about how low-quality software patents all too often undermine innovation: a company that does not produce anything wields an overly broad software patent against an entire field of actual, practicing companies. This is only the most recent example.

Today, some members of Congress are bent on undermining the Alice decision, destroying the most valuable tool that innovators can use against these stupid software patents. Please take a moment to write your members of Congress and urge them to reject the Tillis-Coons proposal.

Take Action

Tell Congress not to open the floodgates to stupid patents

Corporate Democrats Have Been in the Driver’s Seat for 30 Years. Not Anymore.

For the past three decades, the Democratic Party has been living with a debilitating trauma that’s left it a shell of what it once was. But if Tuesday night’s debate is any indication, the Democrats may finally be moving into the home stretch of a long, painful recovery.

Rather than sticking to the longtime script of Democrats pandering to the center, the two highest polling candidates on the stage—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—articulated a clear-eyed left-wing vision of the direction the party should take. Sanders railed against the “ruling class” while advocating enshrining universal economic rights, as Warren warned that “we’re not going to solve the urgent problems we face with small ideas and spinelessness.” Sanders agreed, claiming: “I get a little bit tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas.”

Ever since the Clinton years of the 1990s, the party’s officials and apparatchiks have internalized the belief that being too bold or too far left is a ticket to political oblivion. After enjoying a near-unbroken hold on the White House from 1932 to 1968, the following 24 years saw Democratic presidential nominee after nominee go down in landslides against ever more right-wing Republican opponents. Peace candidate George McGovern, who called for pulling troops out of Vietnam within 90 days in 1972, had been too far left to win, went the conventional wisdom. So had Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis in 1984 and 1988, respectively, conveniently ignoring the reality that both had campaigned as centrists pledging to cut the deficit and reform welfare.

This set of lessons, combined with Bill Clinton’s two presidential victories, led the party to an increasingly ruinous set of choices. Clinton’s “triangulation”—collaborating with Republicans to deregulate banks, cut social programs and empower large financial institutions—helped hollow out unions and working-class support for the party, while setting the stage for the 2008 financial crisis. The Democrats’ choice of safe “moderate” candidate John Kerry in 2004 saw a vulnerable George W. Bush return to the White House for another four years. And Barack Obama finished the job Clinton had begun, with his fear of appearing too radical or—heaven forbid—a “socialist,” leading to a less-than-aggressive response to the financial crisis, creating, in turn, a wipeout of black working-class wealth and a sluggish economic recovery that helped President Trump ride a wave of rage and apathy to the White House in 2016.

Paralyzed by caution, and its worst instincts justified through a gradual takeover by corporate interests, the Democratic Party has in many ways been its own worst enemy. Rather than proposing far-reaching redistributive policies, national Democrats have by and large moved to the right while pushing means-tested, tepid proposals meant not to offend corporate backers or scare off mythical “Reagan Democrats.” The result has been a party that’s failed to inspire its core constituency—working-class voters—to show up at the polls. Just look at the Obama years, during which the party lost over 1,000 seats nationwide.   

Yet Tuesday night’s battle between, on the side, Sanders and Warren—the two most progressive candidates in the field—and, on the other, the conservative Democrats misleadingly labeled “moderates” by much of the media suggest things may be finally changing.

The debate saw a conservative onslaught on the ideas and vision of the party’s surging left wing. Sanders and Warren—both tribunes for progressive energy during the Obama years—faced right-wing attacks and skepticism from not just their conservative opponents, but CNN’s panel of moderators as well.

Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney opened the debate by derisively referring to Sanders and Warren’s “bad policies” and “impossible promises” of Medicare for All and “free everything,” questioning why the Democrats were being “the party of taking something away from people,” in this case, private health insurance. Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan suggested that Sanders’ Medicare for All bill would make things worse for union members. Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper stressed that incremental reform (“evolution, not revolution”) and giving Americans “choice” promised a better way forward. Moderator Jake Tapper demanded to know if Warren and Sanders planned on raising taxes for the middle class.

The two senators responded combatively, batting away the attacks in an often fiery fashion. “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” an exasperated Warren told Delaney. “You’re wrong,” Sanders said, responding to Delaney’s charge that Medicare for All was “political suicide.”

Warren pointed out to Hickenlooper that incremental reforms had already been tried to no avail, and admonished the other candidates for “using Republican talking points.” Sanders leveled the same accusation at Tapper before charging that “the health care industry will be advertising tonight on this program … with that talking point,” a prediction that came at least partially true: PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying arm, was one of a number of pharmaceutical entities to air ads during subsequent commercial breaks.

And this was all during just the first half-hour. Healthcare reared its head again later in the debate once the conversation turned to immigration, with the moderators suggesting that Sanders’ plan to allow undocumented immigrants to access care under Medicare for All would encourage a deluge of migrants. A number of other questions implied that Sanders was too radical to beat Trump, or, as one put it, that he was indistinguishable from the far-right president because they both said they wanted to end wars. At one point, the moderators pushed the candidates to affirm they would maintain the United States’ first-use of nuclear weapons, a stance Warren bravely rejected, paralleling UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s own stance on the matter.

Perhaps most significantly, both Sanders and Warren tied signature policies like Medicare for All, a wealth tax, free tertiary education and student debt cancellation to their broader vision of political change, rebuking Democrats’ three-decade-long strategy of scurrying in fear at the sight of their own shadow. Warren thundered that the Democrats need to be the party “of big, structural change.” Sanders argued that "to win this election and to defeat Donald Trump … we need to have a campaign of energy and excitement and of vision. We need to bring millions of young people into the political process in a way that we have never seen.” For his part, Delaney fell back on the Democratic establishment’s classic warning that McGovern’s 1972 loss showed moving to the left was the electoral equivalent of drinking rat poison.

Meanwhile, Warren and Sanders’ criticisms of their conservative challengers were rooted in more than a kernel of truth. Sanders’ charge that Delaney, while opposing Medicare for All, “made money off of healthcare” wasn’t wrong. Besides being a conservative “New Democrat” who, while in the House, supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership and backed Obama’s entitlement-cutting Bowles-Simpson commission, Delaney was one of the richest members of Congress thanks to his career at the head of a company that lent money to the healthcare sector. As Sludge has reported, his latest financial disclosure, filed in 2019, shows Delaney has $3.2 million invested in the healthcare sector and funds with holdings in the industry.

The same goes for Warren’s suggestion that the candidates assailing Medicare for All lacked the “political will” to fight for it, which Hickenlooper emphatically denied. Yet in 2016, as governor of Colorado, he—along with fellow 2020 candidate, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet—opposed Amendment 69, a ballot measure that would have instituted a single-payer system in the state. At the time, Hickenlooper claimed that it was “premature” to reform the healthcare system. Behind closed doors, he told the Colorado Forum, an assembly of business leaders and political operatives that comprised one of Colorado’s most powerful lobbies, that a “couple large healthcare-related companies that are looking at moving their headquarters to Colorado” had “paused” when they learned about the measure.

While post-debate polling is still to come, it’s been clear that the unambitious, conservative approach championed by figures like Delaney and Hickenlooper is no longer welcome among the Democratic grassroots. Both candidates were booed at the California Democratic Convention this year for rebuking single-payer healthcare and socialism. In most polls, both candidates are ranking somewhere between 0 and 1 percent. Hickenlooper, whose campaign began hemorrhaging staff in early July, recently celebrated triumphantly when he hit a mere 2 percent, in one of this election’s most unintentionally hilarious tweets so far: “You did this. This campaign is gaining serious momentum and we’re just getting started.”

The Democratic Party’s recovery from their 30-year trauma isn’t over yet. After all, Joe Biden, one of the original neoliberal Democrats who abandoned the New Deal in the 1980s and is currently running a campaign based on attacking Medicare for All while being lavished with corporate money, is still the frontrunner.

But Warren and Sanders’ performance in Tuesday night’s debate, coupled with the crowd’s raucous cheers for their defiant retorts to the party’s withering conservative wing, hints that the healing process is well underway.

Dozens of press freedom groups denounce the threats against journalist Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept Brazil

In the past week, journalist Glenn Greenwald has been repeatedly threatened with jail time by right-wing Bralizian president Jair Bolsonaro. Multiple members of Brazil’s Congress have called for him to be arrested or his articles censored. Justice Minister Sergio Moro implied on Twitter Greenwald should be deported. Greenwald, his family, and his colleagues at The Intercept Brazil have also received countless death threats over the past six weeks.

All of these intimidation tactics stem from a series of important investigative articles published by The Intercept Brazil and other prominent Brazilian publications over the past month and a half. The stories have detailed confidential conversations then-judge Moro had with federal prosecutors that raise serious ethical and legal issues surrounding prominent corruption cases and the 2018 Brazilian election.

The only “crime” Greenwald and The Intercept Brazil have been accused of is the same type of action that countless news outlets around the world engage in every day: publishing news stories in the public interest, based on information from a confidential source.

Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and dozens of other international press freedom and human rights organizations have released an open letter forcefully condemning these threats and intimidation tactics, and are calling on the Brazilian government to protect the press freedom rights of all the reporters involved.

The letter states “the attempts to undermine and attack the credibility of The Intercept Brazil and its partners are viewed by the signatories of this appeal as a grave threat to the freedom to inform. Not only are they designed to deflect the public’s attention from the content of the revelations but above all, they reinforce an increasingly hostile work environment for the media and especially for investigative journalism.”

The letter goes on to state: “Freedom of the press and information are pillars of democracy. They transcend political divisions and must be protected and guaranteed at all costs.”

Greenwald is a founding board member of Freedom of the Press Foundation. We stand fully behind our friend and colleague and demand that the Brazilian government and its officials cease their dangerous threats to core press freedom rights that should be guaranteed to every journalist.

The full letter can be read below.

[embedded content] [embedded content]

Climate change alters tree demography in northern forests

The rise in temperature and precipitation levels in summer in northern Japan has negatively affected the growth of conifers and resulted in their gradual decline, according to a 38-year-long study in which mixed forests of conifers and broad-leaved trees were monitored.

Encapsulated Indian medicinal herb shows anti-diabetic properties in mice

Extracts of the herb Withania coagulans, or Paneer dodi, are used in traditional Indian medicine. Although some healers claim that W. coagulans can help treat diabetes, the bitter-tasting plant hasn't been studied extensively by scientists. Now, researchers have found that herbal extracts packaged in polymers derived from natural substances can reduce blood glucose levels in diabetic mice.

Trump Health Care Strategy: Pretend to Have a Plan

Apparently Donald Trump plans to take his usual sober and considered approach to health care policy during campaign season: White House advisers, scrambling to create a health-care agenda for President Trump to promote on the campaign trail, are meeting at least daily with the aim of rolling out a measure every two to three weeks […]

#UKMetOffice: #UK's 10 hottest years on record occurred since 2002 | UK news | The Guardian

The trend is becoming ever clearer.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/31/uks-10-hottest-years-on-record-have-occurred-since-2002-met-office

#GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #Environment

The Ghost of Racism Past

New tape reveals Ronald Reagan calling black people “those monkeys from those African countries”

Welcome Back to Matt’s Gardening Corner

This week: we are NOT talking about the state of digital media.

Keep Hustling: Four Cartoonists on Their Gig Economy Experiences

Is YOUR Democracy in Trouble?

Some warning signs.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders Dominate Democratic Debate Set Up to Ambush Them

The most progressive candidates on stage at the Democratic debate in Detroit, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, dominated an event framed like an ambush.

The post Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders Dominate Democratic Debate Set Up to Ambush Them appeared first on The Intercept.

Do the Rich Need Yet Another Tax Cut? I Say No.

Here is a letter sent to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. It is signed by 21 Republican senators: Sometimes the old songs are the best. Conservatives have been trying to enact a stealth cut in the capital gains via inflation indexing for as long as I can remember, but they’ve never been able to get it […]

Antioxidant compound from soybeans may prevent marijuana-induced blood vessel damage

Marijuana exposure damages cells of the inner lining of blood vessels throughout the heart and vascular system. In studies with human cells and arteries from mice, a compound found in soybeans blocked the damage and may have potential in preventing cardiovascular side effects of marijuana use.

Rural Hospitals Are Shutting Down in States That Didn’t Expand Medicaid

Hospitals in rural areas are losing money and sometimes closing down, taking away jobs and limiting health care options for some of the nation’s poorest citizens, according to a study published earlier this week by the Pittsburg Morning Sun and GateHouse Media. And the decision to reject a key part of Obamacare by Republican politicians in […]

Kamala Harris Receives Donations From Big Pharma Executives Despite Claim She Rejects Them

Campaign finance records show Harris has received thousands of dollars from executives at drug companies and distributors this year; most were not returned.

The post Kamala Harris Receives Donations From Big Pharma Executives Despite Claim She Rejects Them appeared first on The Intercept.