Daily Kos

Jason Leopold and Ky Henderson have written a new piece for Vice on the close relationship higher-ups at the Central Intelligence helped twist the views Americans have of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Tequila, Painted Pearls, and Prada: How the CIA Helped Produce 'Zero Dark Thirty':

The previously undisclosed detail about [screenwriter Mark] Boal's phone call to the CIA was included in more than 100 pages of internal CIA documents obtained exclusively by VICE News in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The documents contain the most detailed information to date about the controversial role the CIA played in the production of Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT).

Included in the trove of redacted agency records is a March 2014 CIA Office of Inspector General report titled "Alleged Disclosure of Classified Information by Former D/CIA" — D/CIA refers to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta — and a separate September 2013 report from the inspector general's office titled "Potential Ethics Violations Involving Film Producers."

The ethics report contains remarkable details about how [ZDT director Kathryn] Bigelow and Boal gave CIA officers gifts and bought them meals at hotels and restaurants in Los Angeles and Washington, DC—much of which initially went unreported by the CIA officers—how they won unprecedented access to secret details about the bin Laden operation, and how they got agency officers and officials to review and critique the ZDT script. [...]

Within days of bin Laden's death, Boal secured meetings with CIA officials and counterterrorism officers. According to the inspector general's report about potential ethics violations by CIA officers, Boal also sent a letter to George Little, then the director of the CIA's Office of Public Affairs, shortly after news broke about bin Laden's death.

Boal wished to discuss his new plan: Scrapping the script for Tora Bora and instead telling the story of how the CIA managed to find and kill bin Laden. Less than three weeks after bin Laden's death, Boal and Michael Feldman, a public relations representative for Tora Bora, met with CIA officials to discuss the new project.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—The Chronicles of Mitt: Sept 13, 2012:

Hello, human diary. It is I again, Mitt Romney, your better.

My only substantive obligation today was appearing at a rally to demonstrate how much women approve of me. We acquired a decent number of women for the event, easily two dozen or so, which should be sufficient to prove the point. I then spoke to them about women things, such as the woman entrepreneur I once met. She started an upholstery business—I believe I have mentioned her before. Then I spoke at length about foreign policy again, since my foreign policy ideas seem to be especially popular of late.

I have not yet heard back from the staffer who promised to provide me a copy of Clint Eastwood's speech endorsing me. Come to think of it, I have not seen him since he agreed to fetch me the tape.

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Tweet of the Day

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Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for "Netroots Radio."

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The Week's High Impact Posts • High Impact Posts • Top Comments

Of all the countless ways to measure the health of the economy, one stands out as the most meaningful for American workers: Average real (i.e., accounting for inflation) weekly earnings. How much food can the average paycheck buy compared to a year ago? How much of the rent or mortgage can it pay? How much of the basic necessities can that paycheck cover? The answer to that question tells us how well the economy is doing for average Americans right now.

The Great Recession absolutely killed American paychecks. The National Employment Law Project found that workers' real earnings actually dropped from 2009 to 2014. More broadly, the chart below the fold tracks real weekly earnings for production and non-supervisory employees going back 50 years. After peaking in the early 1970s (Nixon was a liberal on economic policy, after all), they bottomed out under George H.W. Bush, stayed flat a few years, and then started improving sharply during Bill Clinton's presidency.

What's most important right now is that, after five bad years following 2009, real weekly earnings are now, finally, improving again, up 2.2 percent from July 2014 to July 2015. That's an impressive jump, and, amazingly, they are at a high not seen since 1980. This fact that shows how devastating high inflation has been for American workers, as seen in the huge drops in real earnings that coincided with double-digit inflation in 1974 and from 1979 to 1981. Furthermore, these recent gains are even stronger at the bottom of the wage scale according to a number of measures, thanks in part to increases in the minimum wage that progressives have won.

Let's be clear about something. Real weekly earnings should be increasing over time. Why? Because worker productivity has been going up, and so have profits. Why in the world shouldn't workers take home a commensurate share of the rewards their work produces? For the last four decades, however, they haven't. When the Federal Reserve Board meets in just a few days, they will have a chance to either nurture the positive trend of the past twelve months, or drive a stake right through it.

Please keep reading for more.

While perusing my Facebook newsfeed I found this gem from my dear friend, the Rev. Charlotte Vaughan Coyle. Her grace and eloquence were not a surprise. Charlotte read an op-ed in her local newspaper that needed some important factual feedback and pushback. Charlotte did not specify the author, title, or date of the op-ed. But it wasn't difficult to infer from Charlotte's letter to the editor of The Paris News which article she was referring to. It's titled "Cops' lives matter," by Lynda Work.

Reading Work's unfortunate hit job on Black Lives Matter illustrates the importance and necessity of the Rev. Coyle's response below. The two articles cited in her response are also very relevant and important. They help dispel myths for those who would fall for the plausible misinformation surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Rev. Coyle's letter is below.

Some things never change. With some constants in life, like the invariable force of gravity or the sun rising in the east, that persistence is good news. (Imagine your morning coffee without them.)  The bad news is that some myths, no matter how dangerous or thoroughly debunked, never seem to die.

This week, the greatest Republican zombie lie of them all—that tax cuts virtually pay for themselves—was once again exhumed for the American people. Combined with his yet-to-be revealed plans for education reform and deregulation, Jeb Bush promised his new tax cut scheme "will unleash increased investment, higher wages and sustained 4 percent economic growth, while reducing the deficit." Unfortunately, the past 35 years show that every GOP president and would-be president since Ronald Reagan—including Jeb's brother George—failed to produce either an explosion of economic growth or bulging coffers for the U.S. Treasury. Instead, like the Gipper and Dubya, Bush and his rivals will deliver a massive tax-cut windfall for the wealthy, and trillions of dollars in new debt.

Keep reading for more.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Steve Singiser Allow me to reintroduce a term that you might not have heard or thought of in quite some time: 50-state strategy.

One of the hallmark projects of Howard Dean's tenure at the DNC roughly a decade ago, the 50-state strategy was a source of vigorous debate in Democratic circles from its inception. The internal squabbling over the strategy is beautifully crystallized in this 2006 piece by Matt Bai. Largely abandoned (at least financially) for the past five years, there has been talk of resurrection, both from the DNC and the Clinton 2016 team.

A new study by the team at SmartPolitics will add some interesting fuel to that discussion. The study notes that nearly two-thirds of the states in the union are currently entrenched in long partisan streaks in terms of who they've supported in presidential elections. What's more, the majority of the states have backed the same party for the White House since Bill Clinton's initial victory in 1992.

On the surface, this would seem to play a bit of hell with the 50-state strategy. But a deeper look reveals a more complicated picture. Keep reading as we try to decipher it.

Fake news: It's all over the Internet. Sometimes it is easy to spot. Other times, it seems real, like when quotes from politicians fit our preconceived notions of what we think they would say in a given situation. If someone with good or nefarious intentions comes up with a meme or a well-written story, it can spread like wildfire on Facebook. This past week your social media feed may have been dotted with stories about Led Zeppelin getting back together to tour, the sons of the Beatles forming a band and going on tour, and Scott Walker really hating Labor Day.

Often these fake stories hide under the guise of satire. Satire is the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, ridicule, or all four to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, often within the context of politics and other topical issues. The stories about Led Zeppelin and the Beatles both are on websites that consider themselves satirical. Satire is hard to write. Many people, myself included, have tried and failed at it. That being said, it's easy to spot good satire when reading or watching it. The Simpsons, Futurama, and South Park all do—or in some cases, did—satire very well. George Orwell's Animal Farm is another example of satire. Fake news stories like the examples presented above are not satire. If the writers think they are, they've missed the mark.

A year ago Facebook started adding a satire tag to some of these hoax news stories. Unfortunately, this has not stopped the hoaxes from filling our news feeds.

Keep reading below as we hash out these hoaxes.

While O.J. Simpson was standing trial for the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman 21 years ago, it was revealed that he had repeatedly beaten his wife. One incident that landed her in a hospital occurred on January 1, 1989. Confronting the LAPD officers who were responding to his wife's frantic 911 call, he berated them for attempting to arrest him:

"The police have been out here eight times before, and now you're going to arrest me for this?" Simpson is quoted in one report as yelling to two police officers who were responding to a 911 call. "This is a family matter. Why do you want to make a big deal out of it when we can handle it?"

In January 1989, domestic violence was still being treated as a family matter, of little concern to the police or to society at large. A major result of the murder trial that followed within five years was an increased public awareness of domestic violence as a serious crime. Shortly after the trial, the Violence Against Women Act was passed through Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton.

Two years later, in 1996, Congress passed a law preventing domestic batterers from purchasing guns, and by 2008 domestic homicide rates had plummeted 53%, according to the Department of Justice.

In Nicole Brown Simpson's case, knowledge of the abuse she suffered made Americans aware of the fact that sometimes, some men who beat up women end up killing them. Domestic violence was no longer a family matter, but a crime. Please keep reading for a look at how the beating of Janay Palmer by former Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice has impacted our view of domestic violence in the year since it occurred.

The images were searing. The body of a drowned 3-year-old washing up on a Turkish beach. At least 200 more drowned when their boat sank off the coast of Libya. An abandoned truck in eastern Austria wherein 71 people suffocated, their bodies so badly decomposed in the heat that authorities at first couldn't tell how many there were. There have been similar images all year. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, an estimated 300,000 people have fled across the Mediterranean this year, with at least 2,500 dying. Calais long has been a center of migrant camps, and this summer it became the source of nightly disruptions to the international Eurostar train service. In 12 months, 15 people from the camps died trying to sneak onto trains or lorries passing through the Channel Tunnel.

The political leadership has been sharply mixed. Hungary's openly bigoted Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is, not unexpectedly, inflammatory and cruel. Slovakia's government is little better. Britain's despicable Prime Minister David Cameron, who cut funds for Mediterranean search and rescue missions, first took a stand against admitting more refugees before relenting a little, agreeing to allow a relatively pathetic few. The big surprise has been Germany's Angela Merkel. Fresh off squeezing the life out of the Greek economy, she has been surprisingly compassionate and brave.

The European people also have shown great nobility. From Vienna came one of the most beautiful images, when the riot police called out to monitor a 20,000 strong protest in support of the refugees respectfully removed their helmets as the procession passed. Munich greeted refugees with applause, sweets and toys. Its mayor acknowledged the difficulty of accepting 10,000 people in one weekend alone, but said his top priority wasn't to worry about the numbers, but to try to accommodate them and make them feel safe. The German media have been supportive of what they see as a transformative moment akin to reunification, and the German business community welcomes the economic opportunity. Sweden began granting residency to refugees from Syria two years ago, and Denmark this week temporarily closed both roads and train services, overwhelmed by the number of people trying to pass through to its welcoming neighbor.

No one can ignore the crisis anymore. Europe is scrambling to find answers, with refugee quotas to be distributed according to various nations' capacities. The world is watching. But the cause of the horror is largely being ignored. It's a classic case of treating the symptoms. People are fleeing wars and droughts in the Middle East and Africa, and even amidst the best of the best intentions, the source of the crisis is rarely part of the conversation. It will get worse. What's happening now in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa is only the beginning. It is a portent. And if the world's political and economic leaders don't awaken to that fact, they will remain unprepared as the crisis morphs into crises, and the entire world is overwhelmed.

Keep reading for more.

One of the most powerful speakers I've ever had the opportunity to hear over my more than five decades in the civil rights movement is the Rev. Dr. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, and chief architect of the Moral Mondays Movement. On Friday, September 25, I will have the opportunity to hear him once again at a Daily Kos event in Asheville, North Carolina. It's free and open to the public. Hopefully many readers will join me there, and if you cannot, then pass the word on.

What is key in the grassroots organizing being spearheaded by Moral Mondays and other activist groups across the nation like #BlackLivesMatter, The Dream Defenders, United We Dream, Overpass Light Brigade, and Gathering for Justice, is that their movements are inextricably linked to past civil and political abuses, but are alive and well now. The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles has a list with links to many groups continuing the fight for change.

Too many people speak about the struggle for civil rights as if it is something only to be dragged out as part of Black/Women's/Latino History Month and relegated to a poster on the wall, a spot in a museum, or a memorial tribute when an elder passes on. But the movement is alive, growing, linked to a long history, and moving forward into the future. At a time when the drumbeat of dissonant, destructive, racist, and sexist voices are standard fare in the media and given legitimacy by bigots running for elective office, we must cast aside the burial cloak and embrace the immediacy of direct action—now!

Rev. Barber discusses this eloquently on video in The Third Reconstruction, which is also the title of his soon-to-be released book.  

Join me below for the video, and more.

The graphic this morning comes from the site Compound Interest where UK chemistry teacher, Andy Brunning, has assembled a truly wonderful stack of infographics. If you like it, I'll use more.

Charles Blow looks at Bernie and the black vote.

Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders spoke Saturday to a half empty gymnasium at Benedict College in South Carolina. The school is historically black, but the crowd appeared to be largely white.

This underscores the severe challenge facing the Sanders campaign: African-American voters have yet to fully connect to the man and the message.

An August Gallup Poll found that Hillary Clinton’s favorability among African-Americans was 80 percent while Sanders’ was only 23 percent. A full two-thirds of blacks were unfamiliar with Sanders.

This may sound a bit dismissive, but Blow really wants to like this guy.

There is an earnest, if snappy, aura to Sanders that is laudable and refreshing. One doesn’t sense the stench of ambition or the revolting unctuousness of incessant calculation.

There is an idealistic crusader in the man, possibly to the point of being quixotic, but at least it doesn’t come off as having been corrupted by money or power or the God complex that so often attends those in pursuit of the seat behind the Resolute Desk.

The rest of the article reviews a discussion with Sanders on the issue of his attempt to reach out to African-American voters. Go read it.

Now, grab your coffee and come on in. There are a lot of pundits to cover today...

This week, the Kenyan usurper, B. Hussein Obama—arguably the lamest duck ever—beat the odds and secured the biggest foreign policy victory of his (illegitimate) presidency.

But it wasn't supposed to be like this.

Hypothetically speaking, these were going to be heady times for Republicans.

Upon returning to Washington after a well-deserved vacation, the GOP-controlled Congress was all set to tell Obama and his Iran-loving P5+1 partners to go fuck themselves.

The House even set aside a special date on which to deliver that message, and numerous Republican VIPs came to town to take part in the festivities.

Dick Cheney was there, preaching about the joy of war; and Sarah Palin was serving up her trademark word salad to the faithful.

But a funny thing happened on the way to 9/11—the game was over before it even began, and the GOP had lost ... big time.

Bottom line: It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).

What's coming up on Sunday Kos ...

• Fake news is a plague on social media, by Mark E Andersen
• The refugee crisis is a portent, by Laurence Lewis
• The civil rights movement hasn't ended. We are in a third reconstruction, by Denise Oliver Velez
• Only certainties for GOP are debt and tax cuts, by Jon Perr
• When a football player hits a woman we notice, by Susan Grigsby
• Statewide polarization, a 50-state strategy, and why it all matters, by Steve Singiser
• An example of how white allies can dispel Black Lives Matter misinformation, by Egberto Willies
• Real wages are finally (finally) growing. Can the Fed stop itself from ruining everything, by Ian Reifowitz