John Pompano

sucks at life but great at assembling ikea crap.

[Jamie Dupree @jamiedupree]

With Trump's pardon of ex-Rep. Steve Buyer R-IN, who was convicted of insider trading, here is the updated Trump pardon list involving Congress: 11R, 2D

[Mouin Rabbani @MouinRabbani]

Claims that the Palestinians were in 1948 ordered to evacuate their homes and homeland by Arab leaders in a series of radio broadcasts has been a perennial Hasbara Symphony Orchestra favourite since the Nakba, and continues to be widely promoted to this day.

The BBC journalist and United Nations official Erskine Barton Childers (not to be confused with his father, Ireland's fourth president, Erskine Hamilton Childers) thoroughly debunked this claim more than half a century ago in his article, "The Other Exodus" published in The Spectator on 12 May 1961.

Childers reviewed the comprehensive archives of Arab radio broadcasts compiled during that period by both the BBC monitoring station in Cyprus and its US counterpart, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) run by the CIA, and found nothing.

I have posted a link to Childers's article in the comments, which is worth reading because it includes details of additional fabrications concocted by Israeli officials to further this foundational hasbara myth.

Abba Eban, then Israel's permanent representative to the UN and later foreign minister, and easily its most celebrated diplomat, for example claimed that the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Haifa, George Hakim, "fully confirmed" that Palestinians were encouraged to flee by their leaders.

Yet, according to Childers: "I wrote to His Grace [Hakim], asking for his evidence of such orders. I hold signed letters from him, with permission to publish, in which he has categorically denied ever alleging Arab evacuation orders; he states that no such orders were ever given. He says that his name has been abused for years; and that the Arabs fled through panic and forcible eviction by Jewish troops."

This is the same Abba Eban who on 6 June 1967 falsely informed the UN Security Council that Israel had launched the June War the previous day in response to a series of non-existent attacks on Israel on the morning of 5 June by the Egyptian air force and artillery units.

I was previously unaware that the Israeli archives also include records of these radio broadcasts. As the British-Israeli historian Benny Morris reports below, he went through these records and also found that such broadcasts, whether by local Palestinian or Arab leaders, simply do not exist.

While the research conducted by Childers and more recently Morris is of course useful in providing official confirmation that such broadcasts are a figment of the Zionist imagination, logic alone should suffice to debunk this myth.

In May 1948, the Arab states intervened in Palestine to put an end to the mass expulsions of Palestinians, which since November 1947 already numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and to defeat the Israeli forces responsible for this monumental crime.

Does it make any sense that prior to their intervention they would have ordered hundreds of thousands of civilians to clog every road they hoped to use to enter Palestine, for miles and days on end? Of course not.

As for the silly claim that the objective of the Arab intervention was genocide, there is no evidence for it, and the conduct of the Arab militaries during the Palestine War supports this conclusion.

Nor was it the case that the Arab intervention was a coordinated military campaign to eradicate the nascent Israeli state. Some of the participating Arab states, Syria and Iraq, did have this as an objective.

Transjordan clearly did not. Its leadership had already cut a deal with the Zionist leadership to partition Palestine between them and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. Armed conflict between Israel and Transjordan in fact ensued only after Israeli forces reneged on their agreement and initiated seizures of territory beyond the partition boundary.

Egypt's position was more ambiguous. It seemed to be primarily motivated by rivalry with Jordan, and ensuring Jordan did not become the main Arab power in Palestine. In short, no Arab state wanted to see the emergence of the Israeli state, but in most cases Arab leaders had more pressing priorities. Coordination between them was primarily notable for its absence.

Arab public opinion, by contrast, considered the failure of their leaders to successfully confront the Zionist project nothing short of treason, and it served as a catalyst for more than a decade of revolutions, coups, and uprisings throughout the region.

[Igor Bobic @igorbobic]

“My people?” Lawler asked [Rand Paul’s son].

“Yeah, you Jews,” Paul responded.

“Do you think I’m Jewish?” Lawler asked. “I’m not.”

“Oh wow, I’m so sorry for calling you a Jew,” Paul said.

Wild story from @reesejgorman https://t.co/mLPkS5iH5m

[Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp]

I've seen a lot of takes that Orbán's defeat means that he was never an authoritarian in the first place.

This is completely wrong — and, in fact, betrays a complete misunderstanding of both Hungarian politics and modern authoritarianism.

Here's why.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump went from making insane genocidal threats this morning to hyping the “golden age” of Iran hours later, and he received no concessions in between. He’s an absolute basket case who needs to be removed from power before he follows through on one of his mass murder fantasies.

[Ayo-Elesho @Ayoelesho]

I just saw that Mr George Galloway quoted my tweet, and it reminds me of when, as a political science undergrad at Nigeria’s premier university, I was researching the brutality of the apartheid regime in South Africa and came across his debate at the Oxford Union for the first time.

In the debate, Mr Galloway spoke of a time he joined in the fight against apartheid in South Africa and asserted that he would never debate a supporter of apartheid because it is one of the worst forms of racism and fascism there are.

It is a delight to see that he has remained steadfast in speaking out against apartheid, racism, and genocide, and that he has been consistent in upholding democracy, respect for international law, and the sovereignty of nations, especially those vulnerable to the whims of imperial predators.

Attached is a video clip of his debate at the Oxford Union.

Video credit: Oxford Union

@georgegalloway

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

George Lucas traded $350,000 in directing salary for something Fox executives thought was worthless: the right to sell Star Wars toys.

It was 1976. Over 40 studios had already passed on his script, including Disney. Fox only greenlit the project because they wanted Lucas for other films. Nobody at the studio expected to make money on a space opera with no stars, so when Lucas offered to cut his directing fee from $500,000 to $150,000 in exchange for merchandising and sequel rights, Fox said yes on the spot. Movie merchandise was a dead business. Fox had lost money on Doctor Dolittle lunchboxes a decade earlier. They thought they were getting the better deal.

Lucas couldn’t even find a toy company that wanted in. Kenner, a division of cereal company General Foods, finally bought the licensing for a flat $100,000. Then Star Wars opened. Between 1977 and 1978, Kenner sold $100 million worth of toys off that $100,000 investment. They couldn’t make enough for Christmas ’77, so they sold empty boxes with IOUs inside, promising to mail the action figures later. Parents paid real money for cardboard and a promise.

Nobody around the production saw any of this coming. Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan, privately called the script “fairy-tale rubbish.” But he was shrewd enough to negotiate 2.25% of royalties instead of a flat fee. About 20 minutes of total screen time earned his estate somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Lucas himself was so convinced the film would flop that he offered Spielberg a bet while visiting the Close Encounters set: swap 2.5% of each other’s profits. Spielberg took it. That handshake has paid him around $40 million.

And then the money started compounding. Lucas poured his Star Wars profits into ILM, the effects house he’d built for the film. When its computer graphics division got too expensive to maintain, he sold it to Steve Jobs in 1986 for $10 million. Jobs renamed it Pixar. Disney bought Pixar twenty years later for $7.4 billion. Then in 2012, Disney came back for the rest, buying Lucasfilm itself for $4.05 billion.

Total franchise revenue today sits around $46.7 billion, over $20 billion from merchandise alone. The filmmaker 40 studios passed on is now worth $5.3 billion according to Forbes. Fifty years ago today, cameras rolled on a desert in Tunisia.

The $350,000 pay cut that made it all possible might be the best trade in business history.

[Robert A. Pape @ProfessorPape]

Three historical lessons about bombing campaigns and regime change:

[Danny Deraney @DannyDeraney]

Pouring one out for The Reverend Jesse Jackson. A giant and a champion for civil rights and equality.

But can anyone read Green Eggs and Ham better? No.

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

Jesse Jackson was a champion for civil rights, economic justice, and world peace.

I have always remembered his moving call for moral clarity at the 1988 DNC.

[Cameron Hudson @_hudsonc]

This story is still hard to believe. https://t.co/tr9MPDq2bp

[Acyn @Acyn]

Rahman: On January 13th, on the way to my 39th appointment at the traumatic brain injury center, I encountered a traffic jam caused by ICE vehicles and no signs indicating how to get around it. I had not wanted to pull into a block to chaotic intersection but verbally agreed to do so and rolled down my window after an agent yelled, "Move, I will break your f'ing window." 
There were conflicting threats and instructions that I could not process while watching for pedestrians. Then the glass of the passenger side window flew across my face. I yelled, "I am disabled!," at the hands grabbing at me and the agent said, "Too late."

An agent pulled a large combat knife in front of my face. Which I thought was for cutting me. And later learned was used to cut off my seatbelt. Shooting pain went through my head, neck and wrists when I hit the ground face first and people leaned on my back. 

I was carried facedown through the street by my cuffed arms and legs while yelling that I had a brain injury and was disabled.

[alex bronzini-vender @alexbronzini]

I actually shrieked at “look how bro glazed it”

[Kevin MacFarland @GOPChairperson]

The most complete glimpse yet into the life and radicalization of Anthony Kazmierczak, the man who rushed Ilhan Omar.

From rarely posting anything political to physically attacking members of Congress in just a few years. Another victim of the algorithm.

[Alec MacGillis @AlecMacGillis]

This is quite an exchange with @DavidAFrench about whether we are witnessing the emergence of a "dual state."

[Matt Bruenig @MattBruenig]

competing paramilitary forces is some real failed state shit

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

Trump might actually release the Epstein files now to distract from what ICE and Border Patrol is doing.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Lathan: It's 9/11, never forget. It's Pearl Harbor, never forget—lives in infamy. Slavery, the treatment of black people in this country, it’s let's try hard not to remember.

[Charlotte Clymer 🇺🇦 @cmclymer]

It annoys me so much when this dorkass loser does his whole Foghorn Leghorn "I'm just a good ole boy from the South who don't understand these elites" schtick with that syrupy drawl he puts on.

John Kennedy is NOT from the sticks, and he ain't stupid. He comes from a long line of southern elites.

His great-great-great-grandfather Sanders Neely once enslaved 120 people on the Eutaw Planation in east Mississippi.

His other great-great-great-grandfather Oswell Neely enslaved 55 people on the LaVacca Plantation in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana.

And his other great-great-great-grand-grandfather Nathan Calhoun enslaved 65 people on his farm in South Carolina.

Nathan's son, Dabney Calhoun (Kennedy's great-great-grandfather) was a physician who enslaved 22 people.

Dabney's son, Leonidas Calhoun (Kennedy's great-grandfather), was also a physician and inherited all that land after the Civil War and worked it with the cheap labor of Black farmers.

Leonidas' son, William Calhoun (Kennedy's grandpappy on his mama's side), was a state lawmaker whose birth brought these various enslaving family branches together and it was he who inherited the LaVacca Plantation.

Kennedy's mama was born and raised on the LaVacca Plantation and Kennedy, himself, was named an inheritor of that land passed down all the way back from his slaveholder great(x3)-granddaddy.

John Kennedy was born into an elite family. He was born into wealth.

He graduated as a co-valedictorian of his high school class.

Then he graduated magna cum laude from Vanderbilt.

Then he graduated at the top of his class at University of Virginia School of Law, where he was executive editor of the Virginia Law Review.

Then he took his happy ass over to England and graduated from Oxford with a first class honours degree in civil law.

Folks... this performance he puts on, all of it, the whole thing, is a political brand.

It's a costume. He is committed to the bit.

Go back and look at old videos of his interviews early in his political career.

There's a slight accent there, but it ain't the heavy, drippy, molasses-in-my-mouth, aw shucks, "all I need in this cruel world is a watering hole and muh fishin' pole" patter he does these days.

It's all a performance, and it's utterly shameless.

So, for this elitist prick to pretend he's not overeducated and not elitist and just one of the good ole boys--while he's pushing policies that completely fuck over working class families in Louisiana--is pretty goddamn pathetic.