Brett Kavanaugh’s Bush White House role emerges in new documents
The first documents from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh‘s time in George W. Bush‘s White House were released Thursday as the Senate begins to review the judge’s unusually lengthy public record for confirmation hearings this fall. The 5,700 pages from Kavanaugh’s time in the White House counsel’s office, a slim fraction of those available, were posted on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s website after being compiled by a lawyer representing the former president as part of the GOP’s expedited review process. But Democrats and others scrutinizing President Donald Trump‘s nominee quickly cried foul, saying Republicans are “cherry-picking” from the initial cache of 125,000 Bush documents and skirting traditional procedures. Kavanaugh’s five years working for Bush, as a White House counsel and the staff secretary, are the subject of a fierce dispute between Senate Republicans and Democrats about the scope of documents being made available. The battle over the paper trail has come to dominate the debate over confirming the 53-year-old appellate judge to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. The first download of thousands of papers Thursday is being pored over by activists and media organizations for insight into Kavanaugh’s legal thinking. But it’s unclear how revealing the papers will be. One of the initial pages was a discussion of lunch plans. The records cast light on Kavanaugh’s role when he served in the White House counsel’s office. Documents regarding the selection of judicial nominees show he took an interest in news and editorial coverage of Democratic resistance to some of Bush’s early nominees to appellate judgeships. “This was great,” Kavanaugh wrote in a July 8, 2001, email that included a copy of a Washington Post column by Benjamin Wittes, then a member of the editorial board, making the case that “the ideological stakes in the appointment of lower court judges should not be overstated.” Wittes has emerged as a prominent Trump critic. Another email carried the heading, “Good editorial in Chicago Tribune,” and included a piece calling on the Senate to act on Bush’s judicial nominations “without undue delay.” One topic Democrats have been particularly interested in reviewing has been the Bush-era detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects. Kavanaugh testified at his appeals court confirmation hearing in 2006 that he “was not involved and am not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants.” Among the emails released Thursday was one from November 19, 2001, in which he said he would be “happy to help” in preparing then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to respond to questions about a Justice Department policy that allowed investigators to monitor phone calls and mail between some terrorist suspects and their defense lawyers without a court order. A week later, the Justice Department provided Kavanaugh information about the monitoring in which it said that 13 inmates — none related to the investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks — were having their conversations with lawyers listened to. The email was written before the administration began detaining people at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But it is sure to fuel Democratic suspicions that he was more deeply involved in terror policy that he let on during his 2006 hearing. The records also contain fleeting, and decidedly tame, glimpses of the budding relationship between Kavanaugh and his future wife, Ashley Estes, who was serving as a secretary to the president. Kavanaugh has said their first date was on the night before the September 11 attacks. Estes asked Kavanaugh in an email on March 27, 2002, “what time do you get off today and are you up for dinner, etc. or no?” Kavanaugh replied a minute later, “yes on dinner; not sure on time off, but should be 7:30ish, maybe earlier.” Kavanaugh’s extensive time in public service means there’s a long, voluminous record of documents spanning his time at the Bush White House, his work on Kenneth Starr‘s team investigating President Bill Clinton and his judicial career. The National Archives and Records Administration is screening nearly 1 million pages related to Kavanaugh’s time in the White House to make sure none of the material is subject to executive privilege under the Presidential Records Act. It says the review will not be completed until the end of October. Once Kavanaugh became the nominee, Senate Republicans launched a separate operation to more quickly start obtaining the White House documents directly from Bush’s team. Sen. Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has promised the most transparent process yet. Already, the panel has posted thousands of other documents related to Kavanaugh, including his questionnaire and his more than 300 court cases as an appellate judge. But Democrats complain that Bush’s lawyer has been able to selectively review and release the White House documents on an expedited basis without full oversight from the Archives. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the GOP’s unusual process of tapping Bush’s lawyer, Bill Burck, to conduct an initial review and release of the documents is a conflict. Democrats complain that Republicans are only reviewing paperwork from Kavanaugh’s work in the counsel’s office, but they also want records from his three years as staff secretary, where he touched almost every paper that reached Bush’s desk. Burck worked under Kavanaugh at the Bush White House. “We are seeing layer after layer of unprecedented secrecy in what is quickly becoming the least transparent nominations process in history,” Schumer said. Republicans are eager to confirm Kavanaugh this fall, before the November midterm elections, to deliver on a top Trump priority. Because Republicans hold a majority in the Senate, confirmation is likely, But with the Senate narrowly divided 51-49, they cannot afford a defection in their ranks if all Democrats vote no. Dates have not yet been set for Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. Republished with permission from the Associated Press.
For fourth year in a row, Jim Zeigler excluded from annual BCA conference
For the fourth year in a row, State Auditor Jim Zeigler has yet again been excluded from the annual“Governmental Affairs Conference hosted by the Business Council of Alabama (BCA) at the upscale Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Ala. Zeigler was the only statewide official to be left off of the invitation list this year. Zeigler, now accustomed to the annual snub is taking the news in stride. “Maybe they were going in alphabetical order and ran out of invitations before they got to the Z’s,” he joked. The annual conference includes complimentary receptions, dinners, and hotel rooms for officials. Zeigler calls it a badge of honor to be left out of the “Montgomery Insiders” event. “I wear it as a badge of honor when I am left out of things by Montgomery Insiders. I have been left out of meetings, polls, political analyses, and campaign contributions,” Zeigler opined. “I would like to pay my own way and go to the BCA conference as a speaker rather than as an attendee. I could explain to them some things that are wrong in state government and how they need to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.
Mo Brooks stands up for Trump Administration’s Space Force
The Trump administration announced plans on Thursday as to how it will stand up a Space Force as a new branch of the military, a plan that will require congressional approval. Alabama 5th District U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks expressed support for the plans following Vice President Mike Pence’s speech on Space Force at the Pentagon. “America’s military relies heavily on its space assets to secure our homeland against potential attackers. In this age of highly advanced weaponry, many of our most lethal and crucial weapons systems depend on global positioning satellites to function properly, and Chinese and Russian anti-satellite weaponry threaten those assets,” said Brooks. “For this reason, a dedicated Space Force is critical to protecting America’s national security interests and freedoms against those who would destroy them.” In June, Brooks, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, suggested that the Space Force be headquartered at Alabama’s Redstone Arsenal.
Democrats link congressman’s indictment to Donald Trump ethics
Democrats are linking a Republican congressman’s insider trading indictment to a culture of corruption they say President Donald Trump has fostered, amplifying a theme they hope will help them seize congressional control in November’s elections. “The fish rots from the head,” Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., told reporters Thursday in a conference call. He added that Trump is “the most ethically blind president we’ve ever seen.” Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., said Trump, Rep. Chris Collins and other Republicans have made the U.S. a country “of the rich, by the powerful and for the lobbyists.” Bustos and Sarbanes, the type of younger Democrats to whom party leaders are giving more exposure, spoke a day after Collins, R-N.Y., was arrested and indicted on charges of making illegal stock trades using inside information about a biotech company. Collins has denied wrongdoing. Collins was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in his 2016 presidential run and has remained a stalwart defender of the president. Their relationship — and the indictment’s assertion that Collins was on White House grounds when he used insider stock information — proved irresistible to Sarbanes. The Maryland lawmaker said there was “something poetic” that according to the indictment, Collins was attending the White House Congressional Picnic in June 2017 when he learned the company’s drug trials had failed and called his son — a fellow investor who also faces charges — to warn him about it. “It’s almost as though he walked into an ethics-free zone when he got to the White House that day,” Sarbanes said. Democrats want to taint the GOP with an aura of corruption and portray it as championing the wealthy elite as part of a campaign-season effort to offer themselves as the party of the people. Underscoring that contrast, Sarbanes and Bustos said Democrats were promising legislation aimed at protecting voters from Republican efforts to making registering and voting harder and beefing up ethics laws covering campaign contributions and financial disclosure by office holders. Democrats would retake House control if they gain 23 seats in November, which many analysts see as an achievable goal. Their chances of gaining a Senate majority are viewed as smaller. Attacking Republicans over ethics won’t be Democrats’ main line of campaign attacks. Trump himself motivates hordes of Democratic voters, as was demonstrated in this week’s still-undecided special election in an Ohio congressional district that has been safely in GOP hands for decades. In addition, Democrats view protecting people’s health care and defending the right to abortion as appealing arguments in many of the swing suburban districts that will help determine congressional control. Those issues are likely to be brought into sharper focus with the Senate’s upcoming battle over Brett Kavanaugh‘s nomination to the Supreme Court. Democrats will not have a clear field on the issue of ethics. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., is facing a harder than expected re-election race this year after the Senate Ethics Committee rebuked him for accepting gifts and using his position to advance the donor’s business interests. A criminal case against him was dismissed last year. Former Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., and long-time Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., were among several members of both parties who’ve resigned after charges of sexual harassment. As recent examples of Trump ethical issues, Bustos cited the ongoing financial fraud trial of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, and questions about the timing of stock sales by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Republished with permission from the Associated Press.
Rauf Bolden: Municipalities, ransomware and the cloud-based browser
You could almost hear people gnash their teeth, wondering about ransomware attacks on municipalities in New Mexico and Georgia. “The city of Farmington continues to recover from the ransomware attack that shut down computer systems throughout the city in early January [2018],“ according to a report by Hannah Grover in the Farmington Daily Times. “Six days after a ransomware cyberattack (March 22, 2018), Atlanta officials are [still] filling out forms by hand,” according to a report by Kimberly Hutcherson of CNN. The proliferation of online services to improve urban life, branded “Smart Cities”, as municipalities adopt interactive technologies, allowing cities to connect with their citizens has a downside, opening up the city and its residents to ransomware attacks. Governments know they have responsibilities, keeping residents’ data safe, because malware can jump from one host to another, usually through the local browser, emailing the address book when malicious code infects a city’s computer system. In spite of the dangers, local governments continue to offer online services, supporting residents, service providers, and vendors through the local browser, but City IT systems must have a minimum-security plan. Off-site backups, and cloud-based servers are a good start, limiting the damage from browser-based attacks. Today, cloud-based browsers provide an easy to use encrypted solution, protecting networks, ensuring the municipal-employee experience is fast and secure, while communicating effectively with residents. Cloud-based browsers have unique features. No web-native code like HTML, PHP or JavaScript is executed on the local machine, protecting municipal networks from ransomware, malware, spyware or other malicious scripting. Admins can disable the clipboard for copy and paste, simultaneously setting up content-access filtering, locking your network down to one browser, controlling every machine, and permission, but still giving people a fast, working experience. Acknowledging your browser is the weak link in the security plan is vital. “I’ve spent a lot of time cleaning up and preventing the influx of Ransomware and Spyware on hundreds of computers. Cleanup success was never 100%, and it was a slog to find where each flavor or variant would hide the logs or encryption keys. I had these sorts of problems everywhere I went, from home PC’s to Police equipment,” wrote Tanner Bonner, formerly with the City of Fairhope, presently IT Administrator, OWA Amusement & Entertainment Destination, Foley, Alabama. “We continually strive to keep this issue [browser security] before our employees. We have watched as several surrounding jurisdictions have suffered through ransomware attacks that were let in through browser related issues,” wrote Jeff Moon, City Manager, City of Woodstock, Georgia. ”We set up the browser [Chrome] in incognito mode and enable the setting of ‘Do Not Track’ with browsing traffic,” emailed Meagan Bing, MLIS, IT/Technical Services Librarian, Orange Beach Public Library, Orange Beach, Alabama. “I am not one to allow my browser to remember me or my password. As annoying as it might be to have to provide credentials to Sign-On over and over to the same sites, I avoid saving my credentials to avoid the possibility of someone gaining access to a site/service. I’m surprised by how many folks I encounter that don’t give this any thought, even on a shared device,” said Mark Pearson, IT Director, City of Mobile, Alabama, discussing his personal-browser strategy. “We pride ourselves on being ahead of the curve in security, and we have not been affected [by ransomware],” wrote Shana Edmond, IT Systems Supervisor, City of Gulf Shores, Gulf Shores, Alabama. The cities in Baldwin and Mobile Counties have talented IT personnel, getting buy-in from management for a migration policy is key. Cloud browsers require funding, and a small amount of configuration; having login credentials and pin codes, possibly text-to-phone confirmation, enabling 2-part authentication. “We use a turn-key tech service that includes private cloud servers. They do a really good job of protecting us and stopping intruders,” said Herb Malone, President, Gulf Shores & Orange Beach Tourism, Orange Beach, Alabama. There is a cheaper way to do things: ”85,000 employees [at Google] have managed to go more than a year without getting phished because of mandated security devices [USB authentication],” according to a report by Rhett Jones in Gizmodo, a tech web site. Cloud-based browsers provide a secure alternative to USB sticks (Whoops! I left mine at home), making the jump from the browser to the local network impossible, because there is no physical connection. New ideas will always find resistance, but there are worries. “Downtime. This may be one of the worst disadvantages of cloud computing. No cloud provider, even the very best, would claim immunity to service outages. Cloud computing systems are Internet based, which means your access is fully dependent on your Internet connection,” according to a report by Andrew Larkin in Cloud Academy’s Blog. Weighing a technology’s upside potential versus its downside risk is what managers do. Given the operational downside, possibly opting for network-integrated hardware with several competent staff over the cloud. “We do port based security on our firewalls in order to control the flow of traffic [on local browsers]. The most important piece to this security would be the staff that we have to manage the day to day business of the county infrastructure,” wrote Brian Peacock, IT Director, Baldwin County Commission, Baldwin County, Alabama. Local governments get it, desperately needing to leave malware defeats in the rear-view mirror, keeping residents’ data safe, reducing the pressure on IT personnel, letting technology take the place of employee vigilance. Privacy and security are not in conflict; they are bound together by the same thread, ultimately realizing the era of government-enforced regulation is over. On March 23, 2018 Congress passed a law dismantling Internet Privacy Rules (Senate Joint Resolution 34 (S.J.Res.34)). On April 3, 2018 President Donald Trump quietly signed the bill into law, arguing privacy regulations are burdensome. ISPs (Internet-Service Providers) are no longer required to get explicit permission before collecting any customer’s data and re-selling it, being something a City or County Administrator will have to explain to his or her Elected Officials, possibly amending the
Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange proposes $250 budget for FY19
During Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange asked for a budget increase in the upcoming fiscal year. Strange proposed a $250 million budget — an $8 million increase from FY18 — that would fund public safety, merit-based raises as well as a one-time payment for retirees. The mayor’s proposed budget includes: $3 million for health care for those active and retirees called an “internal service fund” $1.7 million increases to the Montgomery Police Department and $1.3 million for the Montgomery Fire Department, including a merit increase for “deserving employees.” $1.2 million for public safety $500k for a one-time payment to retirees $1.5 million in additional neighborhood paving, intersection upgrades and striping (nearly $225k per district) Strange proffered several ways the city will pay for the increase: The city would raise $3 million with a 2-cent gas tax: from $0.04 to $0.06 $3 million from a general increase in sales and lodging taxes $2 million of those dollars by reducing city sanitation costs by limiting the trash pick up days from three days a week down to two.
Decatur City Schools bans cellphones from classrooms
Classrooms in Decatur, Ala. are now phone free learning zones. Effective aug. 15, when the 2018-2019 school year begins, cellphones in the classroom will be banned. Decatur City Schools Superintendent Michael Douglas took to Facebook on Monday to explain the change in policy in a video. The changes comes in the wake of the move to provide all high school students with individual Chromebooks to use. “We’re taking the cell phones out of the classroom,” Douglas said. “Because we’re providing a device we’re really gonna protect the classroom and make sure it’s for instructional purposes.” The schools will still allow students to use phones on campus outside of the classrooms, such as in the hallways and during lunchtime. Watch Douglas’ video below:
History shared but unreconciled in city’s Confederate statue
In 1906, when aging, white Confederate veterans of the Civil War and black ex-slaves still lived on the old plantations of the Deep South, two very different celebrations were afoot in this city known even then as a beacon of black empowerment. Tuskegee Institute, founded to educate Southern blacks whose families had lived in bondage for generations, was saluting its 25th anniversary. Meanwhile, area whites were preparing to dedicate a monument to rebel soldiers in a downtown park set aside exclusively for white people. Flash forward to today and that same Confederate monument still stands in the same park, both of them owned by a Confederate heritage group. They sit in the heart of a poor, black-controlled town of 9,800 people that’s less than 3 percent white. Students from what’s now Tuskegee University once tried and failed to tear down the old gray statue, which has since become a target for vandals. But critics who want it gone aren’t optimistic about removing it, even as similar monuments come down nationwide. “I think it would probably take a bomb to get it down,” said Dyann Robinson, president of the Tuskegee Historic Preservation Commission. The story of how such a monument could be erected and still remain in place a century later offers lessons in just how hard it can be to confront a shared history that still divides a nation. ___ In 1860, before the Civil War began, Census records show 1,020 white people owned 18,176 black people in Macon County, where Tuskegee sits. The enslaved were mostly kept uneducated. Schooling became nearly as big a need as food and shelter once the fighting stopped in 1865. Established by the Alabama Legislature through the joint work of a freed slave and a former slave owner, the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute was founded in 1881, according to the school’s official history. Booker T. Washington built it into a leading institution for educating blacks. To this day, it remains a leading historically black university. By the time of Tuskegee’s 25th anniversary, Washington was widely acclaimed for advocating practical education, character building and hard work to lift blacks from the poverty of the postwar South. William Howard Taft, who would become U.S. president a few years later, attended the celebration; so did industrialist and donor Andrew Carnegie. Coverage of the anniversary festivities in The Tuskegee News, a white-owned newspaper, emphasized that blacks needed to get along with the whites who had near total control in the old Confederate states. “Every address from northerner, or southerner, and black gave forth the unmistakable tribute to the value, yea, the absolute necessity of the southern negro doing all in his power to merit the confidence and friendly cooperation of the southern white man …,” the paper reported on its front page. ___ Meanwhile, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, composed of female descendants of Confederate veterans, was erecting monuments glorifying the “lost cause” of the South all over the region in the early 1900s. The women of the Tuskegee chapter planned one for their town. They staged a musical performance and a chrysanthemum show to raise money for a Confederate statue, according to Tuskegee News accounts. Then, two months after the Tuskegee Institute anniversary, leaders of the white-controlled county government gave the United Daughters the main downtown square to serve as a “park for white people” around a memorial to Macon County’s Confederate veterans, city records show. The monument, which included the inscribed admonition to “honor the brave,” finally was dedicated on Oct. 6, 1909. The Montgomery Advertiser called the ceremony “one of the largest masses of white people ever before witnessed in Tuskegee.” Confederate flags waved and 13 young women were dressed in crimson and white to represent the Confederate states. Newspaper stories from the time don’t say whether any blacks attended the event, which included a parade through town, but they most certainly were around. Macon County was around 82 percent black at the time, Census records show, although Jim Crow laws kept whites in firm political control. The nation’s first black combat pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen, trained in the town in the 1940s, but not until the 1960s did the civil rights movement start changing political dynamics. ___ Blacks were first elected to office in Tuskegee in 1964, but whites still controlled most of Alabama. Frustrated after an all-white jury in another county acquitted a white man accused of murder in the shooting death of a civil rights worker, blacks took out their anger on the Confederate monument in 1966. A crowd described in news reports as Tuskegee students converged downtown after jurors acquitted white gas station attendant Marvin Segrest in the killing of black Navy veteran and civil rights worker Samuel L. Younge Jr., who was gunned down after asking to use a whites-only bathroom. It took only 70 minutes or so for jurors to side with Segrest. On a night when rocks flew through windows around the town square, demonstrators went after the Confederate monument. Simuel Schutz Jr., a friend of Younge who participated in the demonstration, said protesters attached a chain or rope to the monument in a bid to pull it down, but failed. “We didn’t have a vehicle to topple it that night and that’s why it’s still there,” said Schutz, 72, now a contractor in Trenton, New Jersey. But protesters did have spray paint. The next morning, the soldier atop the monument had a yellow stripe down its back with the words “black power” scrawled on the base in black paint. First elected mayor in 1972, Johnny Ford said he tried to have the monument relocated after taking office and again in 2015. Both efforts failed, as did a few similar attempts during the intervening years. “Whites oppose moving it and older blacks didn’t want to for fear of upsetting race relations,” said Ford, now out of office after serving more than three decades both as mayor and a state representative from the area. For some,
