U.S. District Judge orders the CIA and the NSA to reveal whether they were conducting surveillance on Occupy Philly. They'll also have to justify keeping those records from the public, and since Occupy Philly were not terrorists, I'm having a hard time seeing how they'll justify that. (Clever, clever little CIA, refusing to answer at first because their mission is monitoring foreign subjects! A mission I'm sure they never expand!)
In a possibly related note, Capitol police arrest 17 (out of 40) protestors who staged a sit-in at the office of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Until Tuesday evening, Mr. Schumer was picking out drapes for the Senate Majority leader's office; now he's hoping his reputation as the senior Senator from Wall Street won't kill his chances at becoming Minority Leader. I'd prefer Sen. Sanders or Sen. Warren, too, but these are Democrats we're talking about, who are as we speak planning to find the weakest possible centrist to run against Mr. Trump in 2020, the lessons of 2004 and 2016 remaining unlearned.
Radley Balko at the Washington Post writes at length about "The Terrifying Prospect of an Attorney General Giuliani." The sheer amount of pettiness, vindictiveness, and power-madness described therein is exhaustive and exhausting, but let's highlight two things: one, his actual incitement of New York police officers to riot in 1993, and two, his hard work expanding asset forfeiture, where you get your property taken before you're even found guilty of a damn thing. It's not too outlandish to imagine Mr. Trump sending in the Army to massacre to the Standing Rock protestors with nary a nod from Mr. Giuliani.
William D. Cohan at Politico wonders "Why Wall Street is Suddenly in Love with Donald Trump." Suddenly? The banksters have been getting, and will continue to get, "flagellation" from "mainstream America" (of course, we might also call them the people), but any flagellation they got from the Obama Administration was only for the cameras. The idea that Donald Trump knows how to "build things" is, of course, laugh-out-loud funny, and exactly the kind of "analysis" you'd expect from a bankster who doesn't build anything but fake wealth. Kudos to the author, at least, for mentioning that Steve "I'm 'Alt-Right,' Not Racist" Bannon was a Goldman-Sachs bankster not too long ago.
Finally, the Seattle City Council votes unanimously to ban "conversion therapy" purportedly aiming to turn gay youth into straight youth. "Conversion therapy" uses "practices" like forcible re-enactment of past sexual abuses and certain "exercises" involving intimate touching and nudity. That's some "tough love" right there! Of course, your freedom to practice bad "science" doesn't extend to pushing that "science" onto children.
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