A recent climbing trip up Mount Olympus in Olympic National Park brought the bittersweet experience I've become all too familiar with as someone who spends much of his free time on glaciers.

On the one hand, the experience of being on ice that is thousands of years old and often hundreds if not thousands of feet thick is humbling. The accompanying awe of this reality, coupled with the sheer beauty of these landscapes carved by and now covered with glaciers is not to be missed.

Returning from the summit, after descending to the lower Blue Glacier, one of the largest glaciers in Olympic National Park, my friends and I were struck by how much of this glacier had melted off. The stark grey lateral moraine (accumulations of dirt and rocks that have fallen onto the surface of a glacier or have been pushed along by the glacier as it moves) which we had descended to reach the climbing route that morning stood before us.

That morning, we had noted how much the glacier had melted from the high point of the moraine before we dropped down onto the glacier to rope up for the climb, but perhaps now because we had to ascend the moraine, its height really hit home. Witnessing these dramatic impacts from anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) first_hand always feels like a gut punch to me. My climbing partners and I shook our heads at the spectacle, then carried on to the edge of the glacier in order to unrope and ascend the moraine.

Olympic National Park alone has lost 82 glaciers since just 1984. The Olympic Mountains have four big valley glaciers with glaciers extending down into their lower slopes, but when the park first inventoried its glaciers back in 1958, there were twice as many. The winter of 2015 was the lowest snowpack on record for the Olympics. In the aftermath of that winter, Bill Baccus, an Olympic National Park field scientist and glacier expert, told Washington's National Park Fund blog, "What we saw on our glaciers in 2015 will probably reflect our future conditions."

Before and after photos of glaciers in Olympic National Park starkly illustrate how much ice the park is losing.

Once back atop the lateral moraine on our way back down to our camp, the shrinking Blue Glacier, now far below us, felt far smaller as the scope of its melting became all too clear with our new perspective.

The Blue Glacier from atop its lateral moraine. Alpine glaciers globally are in dramatic retreat as human_caused climate disruption continues apace.

In the Arctic, the sea ice hit a record low this year for ice older than five years, and scientists say the summers will be ice_free in the Arctic Ocean in the future - the only question is when. The last four years have been the four lowest on record for the maximum winter sea ice extend and clearly, this trend will continue.

And things are not any better in the Antarctic, where new research found that parts of the Larsen C ice shelf are actually melting during the depths of winter when temperatures stay well below freezing. This is due to the fact that "Foehn winds" are bringing warmer temperatures, and between 2015 and 2017, caused around 23 percent of the annual surface melt of the ice shelf to occur during the winter months.

Another discovery from Antarctica has shown that ACD is likely happening even faster than we know.A group of scientists found that Antarctica's Southern Ocean is most likely not absorbing as much carbon dioxide as previously believed, which means more is remaining in the atmosphere, which of course, amplifies ACD.

Equally disconcerting is the fact that the "Atlantification" and "Pacification" of the Arctic has begun as warmer waters from other oceans are streaming into the increasingly ice_free Arctic Ocean, bringing new species and signaling what is likely the upending of the incredibly sensitive polar environment.

Meanwhile, extreme weather events continue apace. The island of Kauai witnessed a shocking rain event, when one storm brought over four feet of rain in just 24 hours. Scientists warned that the event was a sign of the future, although it is now something that is a matter of history.

The second 1,000_year flood in just two years struck Ellicott City, Maryland, further underscoring the aforementioned warning from scientists.

CO2 released from dying forests is equivalent to the emissions from 11 million cars. As the 2018 hurricane season is officially underway, scientists have warned of super storms, with one of them suggesting the creation of a new Category 6 designation for extremely powerful storms as storms with higher winds and more rainfall are getting so intense, the current warning categories are soon to be outdated.

Earth

Disconcertingly, a recently published study showed that CO2 released from dying forests being decimated by tree_killing pests (which are on the increase as temperatures warm) is equivalent to the emissions from 11 million cars.

Rising temperatures bring other problems as well. One study showed that as winters continue to warm, hibernating black bears in the US aren't sleeping. This means they require more food, and often end up searching for food from humans, which causes obvious problems. The study showed that for every 1 degree Celsius minimum temperature increase, bears hibernate six fewer days. According to the study, by 2050, black bears will stay awake between 15_39 days longer each year, thus requiring that much more food.

Complicating things further, a recently published study showed that ACD is on track to cause a calamitous decline of insects across the world. Climate projections show that insects will lose nearly half their habitat from that alone, not even including human encroachment and other factors. Given that insects are vital to nearly every ecosystem on Earth, their widespread collapse would assuredly cause deep disruption across the planet, including humans' ability to feed ourselves. It is worth remembering that last October, scientists warned of "ecological Armageddon" when a study found that the number of flying insects in Germany (and likely elsewhere) had plummeted by three_quarters in the last 27 years alone.

A report from last month showed that honeybees may already be dying in larger numbers due to ACD, with beekeepers citing erratic weather patterns as one of the primary reasons. Beekeepers in the US reported that 40 percent of their colonies had unexpected deaths during the year that ended March 31, according to a survey released recently. Shockingly, this is an increase by one_third from the previous year. From a human_impact perspective, this obviously ties in with the collapse of insect populations, given the critical role bees play for pollination and human food production.

Finally, warmer temperatures are expected to produce more drug_resistant infections, along with genetic mutations and increased growth of the infections, according to another recent study.

Water

A recently published study of hundreds of species of fish showed that they are all migrating northwards to cooler water as global oceanic temperatures warm. The migrations due to ACD are larger than what had been expected. One alarming example of this is how Atlantic cod in New England are expected to decline by 90 percent by 2100, which would crash that centuries_old fishery. On the other side of the US, rockfish in the Pacific Northwest are moving away from the Native American communities that rely upon them and northwards into Alaskan waters.

ACD is already threatening salmon and trout species' existence in the Pacific Northwest, as their river habitat is warming up dramatically.

On the other side of the world, a marine heat wave caused a grouper from waters off the coast of Queensland, Australia, to appear all the way in New Zealand, 1,800 miles away.

Meanwhile, ocean acidification - the process by which ocean waters become more acidic due to absorbing so much CO2 from the atmosphere - is causing neurological disruption in fish, causing them to have their senses of sight, smell and sound altered.

Back on land, increasingly intense droughts are now the norm across the US Southwest. A recent report showed that even in years with normal precipitation, temperatures are increasing so much that droughts are increasingly hot, doing exceptional damage to plants and trees; whereas in the past, droughts were normally caused primarily by lack of rainfall. According to climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck, "warm temperatures tend to make the droughts more severe because they pull the moisture out of plants, they pull the moisture out of rivers and out of soil - and that moisture ends up in the atmosphere instead of where we normally like to have it."

In fact, it's already so dry across the Southwest that forests are being closed by the US Forest Service in efforts to prevent wildfires started by errant campfires. Already this year, two_thirds of New Mexico is experiencing extreme drought due to radically low snowfall/snowpack over last winter, and this is the same story throughout much of the rest of the arid region. In Arizona it is even worse: 74 percent of that state is already under extreme drought conditions.

In Australia, sheep and cattle farmers are being forced to adapt to increasingly dry conditions as rainfall across regions of that country continues to remain far below normal, with this April having been the eighth_driest on record, at 63 percent below average.

NASA warned recently that water shortages are likely to be the largest environmental challenge of this century. Places like California, Antarctica, Greenland, China, Australia and the Caspian Sea regions are already experiencing serious declines in their freshwater supplies, and these are among numerous other places around the globe where this is happening and is expected to worsen.

On that note, a recent report from New Zealand revealed a shocking decline in glaciers in that country. According to ongoing studies there, a 30 percent loss of glacial ice has occurred in just the last 40 years.

Another recently published study showed the existence of previously unknown massive canyons hidden beneath hundreds of feet of ice in the interior of Antarctica. "[If] climate conditions change in Antarctica, we might expect the ice in these troughs to flow a lot faster towards the sea," Kate Winter, a researcher at Northumbria University in the UK and lead author on the paper, told the BBC. "That makes them really important, and we simply didn't know they existed before now."

On the rising seas front, Tangier Island, a small strip of land off the coast of Virginia, which is home to about 600 year_round residents, is expected to be swallowed up by the seas as early as 25 years from now, giving rise to more climate refugees in the US.

Fire

It has been well_known for years now that ACD is increasing the frequency, duration and intensity of wildfires, so it should come as no surprise that 2018 is again off to what could be another record_setting wildfire year across the US.

By June 8, firefighters across eight US states were already hard at work on 24 different larger wildfires. Ten of these fires were in Alaska alone. By June 8, about 1,780,633 acres had burned across the country since the beginning of 2018, which already places this year well above the annual average of burned acreage for that date frame over the previous 10 years.

In a 24_hour period, one fire north of Durango, Colorado, nearly doubled in size to almost 17,000 acres, forcing new mandatory evacuation orders affecting nearly 700 homes, as the fire is expected to continue to expand and spread across conditions that the Denver Post described as "tinderbox weather conditions."

Air

This May was the warmest May ever recorded across the US, as at least 8,600 records were tied or broken across the country. In fact, the previous warmest May occurred at the height of the Dust Bowl. For the entire country, that month's temperature was a shocking 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal.

This May was also the warmest ever recorded for Norway's Arctic islands, which saw temperatures soaring as high as 6 degrees Celsius above normal.

Germany saw its hottest April and May since 1881, which the German Weather Service said was not possible without the impacts of ACD.

In Pakistan, temperatures that used to only occur in June and July are now happening in March. The country's weather service warned that the spring heat is driving up water use and demand around the country.

Meanwhile, near_surface wind speeds over planetary landmasses have dropped by as much as 25 percent since just the 1970s, according to climate scientists. Decrease in wind speed means a decrease in evaporation, which will negatively impact irrigation and farming. It also means the dispersal of wind_blown seeds will be negatively impacted, and city_dwellers reliant upon winds to clear out pollution will also suffer the consequences.

More recent research also shows that by 2100 at the latest (it is likely already happening), ACD will cause hurricanes and typhoons to be stronger, slower and far wetter than they are today. "Hurricane Ike, for example, which devastated the US Gulf Coast in 2008, would have had 13 percent stronger winds, moved 17 percent slower, and been 34 percent wetter if it had formed later this century," reported Yale 360 on the study. "With temperatures 9 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today - the warming expected if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked."

Denial and Reality

As usual, there is too much fodder from the ACD denialists to include in one dispatch, so here are just a few high/lowlights.

In early May, the Trump White House quietly cancelled funding for a NASA research program that verifies greenhouse gas cuts (agreed to in the Paris climate accord) by stitching together satellite images used to produce high_resolution models of Earth's atmospheric carbon flows.

Then, after delaying release for months in order to delete all mentions of ACD, the Trump administration finally made public a National Park Service report - of course, with no mention of ACD.

If there were a Darwin Award for most ridiculous ACD denialist, however, it would most certainly go to Alabama Republican Rep. Mo Brooks, who in May claimed that sea level rise was not due to ACD, but instead is being caused by rocks tumbling into the ocean.

Back to reality, new NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a long_time ACD denier, recently admitted that humans are the cause of climate disruption.

Furthermore, a growing number of Republican voters are acknowledging that climate disruption is human_caused, as a recent poll showed 14 percent more of them are accepting reality.

Perhaps because more of their constituents are waking up, three House Republicans recently joined a bipartisan group of lawmakers working to address ACD threats.

Thanks to a group of high school students, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert recently signed an ACD resolution the students had championed, which acknowledges the existence of ACD and calls for emissions cuts.

These reality checks are indeed refreshing, as we must have factually accurate maps to navigate this era of runaway climate disruption in order to prioritize our life decisions wisely.

This knowledge is made more urgent by the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels recently broke yet another record, when they exceeded 411 parts per million in May, a month which also had the highest monthly average ever recorded.
(c) 2018 Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

After commenting on most of the episodes on the first Israeli Prime Ministers in Raviv Drucker's TV series "The Captains," I must come back to the one whose episode I have not yet covered: Yitzhak Rabin.

Let me state right from the beginning: I liked the man.

He was a man after my own heart: honest, logical, straightforward, to the point.

No nonsense, no small talk. You entered his room, he poured you a straight whisky (seemed to me he detested water), got you seated, and asked a question that compelled you to come straight to the point.

How refreshing, compared to other politicians. But Rabin was no real politician. He was a military man through and through. He was also the man who could have changed the history of Israel.

That is why he was murdered.

The salient fact of his life was that, at the age of 70, he completely changed his basic outlook.

He was not born a man of peace. Far from it.

He was as orthodox a Zionist as they come. He fought Israel's wars, justified and unjustified, without asking questions. Some of his actions were brutal, some very brutal. During the first intifada in the Gaza Strip, he said "break their bones," and some soldiers took this literally.

So how did this man come to recognize the Palestinian people (whose very identity was denied), negotiate with the Palestinian "terrorist" leadership and sign the Oslo agreement?

I have the singular luck of being, perhaps, the only person in the world who has heard from the two main protagonists of the Oslo drama how they reached that turning point in their lives - and the lives of their two nations. They told me themselves (on different occasions, of course).

Rabin's account went more or less like this: After the 1967 war, I believed in the Jordanian Option, as did almost everybody else. Since nobody believed at the time that we would be allowed to keep the occupied territories, we wanted to return them to King Hussein, provided he let us keep East Jerusalem.

One day, the King announced that he was washing his hands of the West Bank. So the Option died. One of our experts advocated setting up "Village Leagues" in the West Bank and negotiating with them. The leagues soon collapsed.

In 1993 an Israeli_Arab peace conference was convened in Madrid. Since Israel did not recognize the Palestinians, the Palestinian representatives from the occupied territories were included in the Jordanian delegation. But when the discussion reached the Palestinian issue, the Jordanians got up and left the room, leaving the Israelis face to face with the Palestinians.

Every evening the Palestinians told the Israelis: now we must call Tunis and get instructions from Yasser Arafat. This was ridiculous. So, when I became Prime Minister again, I decided that we had better talk with Arafat himself.

(Arafat's story was similar: We started the armed struggle. It did not defeat Israel. Then we got the Arab armies to attack. At the start of the October War the Arabs indeed gained a brilliant victory, but they lost the war nevertheless. I realized that we could not defeat Israel, so I decided to make peace with Israel.)

IN HIS chapter about Rabin, Drucker paints a picture that - I believe - was not accurate.

According to him, Rabin was a weak person, who almost had to be dragged to Oslo by Shimon Peres, then the Foreign Minister. As an eyewitness, I must testify that this is quite wrong.

I met Rabin for the first time at the swimming pool. I was chatting with Ezer Weizmann, the commander of the Air Force, who had angered Ben_Gurion with his highly offensive jokes. Rabin appeared, clad like us in a bathing suit. He ignored me and turned straight to Ezer: "Don't you have enough troubles already without speaking in public with Uri Avnery?"

The next time I met him was in 1969, when he was ambassador in Washington. We had a long talk, in which I argued that the only way to safeguard the future of Israel was to make peace with the Palestinian people under the leadership of Arafat. Rabin was completely opposed to this opinion.

From then on, we met many times. A friend of mine, the sculptress Ilana Goor, was obsessed with the idea of getting us to talk with each other. So she threw frequent parties at her studio in Jaffa, the real purpose of which was to get us together. We generally met at the bar, and after everybody else had gone home we sat and talked, often with Ariel Sharon. What about? The Palestinian question, of course.

When I started my secret talks with the delegates of Arafat, first with Said Hamami and later with Issam Sartawi, I went to see Rabin in the Prime Minister's office and told him about it. Rabin's response was typical: "I don't agree with you, but I don't forbid your meetings. And if you hear something that you believe the Prime Minister of Israel should know about, my door is open."

After that I brought him several messages from Arafat, all of which he ignored. They concerned minor initiatives, but Rabin said: "If we start down this road, it will inevitably lead to a Palestinian state, which I don't want."

Arafat obviously wanted to establish contact with Rabin. I believe that this was Arafat's main purpose when he first received me in besieged West Beirut. (I was the first Israeli he ever met.)

I wish I could say that I honestly believe that it was I who convinced Rabin to change his outlook completely and make a deal with the Palestinians, but I do not believe it. Rabin was convinced by Rabin, by his own logic.

Rabin's historic mistake was that, after achieving the breakthrough in Oslo, he did not rush ahead and make peace. He was too slow and cautious. I have often compared him to a general who has broken through the enemy lines, and instead of throwing all his forces into the breach, hesitates and stops. That cost him his life.

This was a recurring fault. On the eve of the 6_day war, when he was Chief of Staff, the prolonged wait - or his compulsive smoking - caused him a breakdown. He was immobilized for 24 hours at the climax of the tension, during which time his deputy, Ezer Weizmann, took over command.

This did not prevent Rabin from achieving the historic victory in the war, under the best General Staff the Israeli army ever had. It had been put together by Rabin patiently for the time of need.

Years later, when Rabin was chosen Prime Minister, Ezer publicly warned the public that Rabin was not up to the job. In a memorable scene, Ariel Sharon shut himself in a public phone booth, with a heap of tokens in front of him, and phoned every newspaper editor in the country to assure them that Rabin was fit for the job.

I believe that in his plodding way, Rabin would eventually have made peace with the Palestinian people and helped to set up a Palestinian state. His initial dislike of Arafat gave way to mutual respect. Arafat visited him secretly at his home.

THE MAIN subject in Drucker's film was the proverbial enmity between Rabin and Peres. They hated each other's guts, but could not get rid of each other. I likened them to Siamese twins who hated each other.

It started right from the beginning. Rabin gave up his higher studies (agriculture) in order to join the Palmach, the field force of our underground army. When the '48 war broke out, he became a field commander. Peres did not join the army at all. Ben_Gurion sent him abroad to buy arms. That was surely an important task - but it could have been accomplished by a 60_year_old. Peres was 24 - two weeks older than I.

Since then, all my generation hated him. The stigma never left him. That was one reason for the fact that Peres never won an election in all his life. But he was a master of intrigue. Rabin, who had a sharp tongue, famously called him "the untiring intriguer."

At the end, the outstanding bone of contention was the Oslo breakthrough. Peres, as Foreign Minister, claimed the credit.

0 One day I had a weird experience. I received a call that Peres wanted to see me. Since we were sworn enemies, that was strange. When I arrived, Peres gave me an hour's concentrated lecture on why it was important to make peace with the Palestinians. Since this has been the central theme of my life for many decades, while he had always adamantly opposed it, this was rather surrealistic. I listened and wondered what it was all about.

Soon after, when the Oslo agreement became public, I understood the scene: it was part of Peres' effort to claim the credit.

But it was Rabin, the Prime Minister, who made the decision and took the responsibility. Because of this he was murdered.

The final scene: the assassin stood at the foot of the stairs, the pistol in his hand, waiting for Rabin to come down. But first came Peres.

The Democrats suffered a serious setback at the U.S. Supreme Court, this week, as the Justices unanimously ruled that the party's plaintiffs had not proven they had been harmed by Wisconsin's Republican-crafted State Assembly district map. The high court also ruled unanimously against a Republican challenge of a Democrat-crafted Maryland congressional district, but on the more narrow ground that the GOP had waited too long to seek an injunction. As a result, there is still no U.S. Supreme Court standard for determining what constitutes "gerrymandering" -- unlawfully drawing legislative maps to the detriment of...whom?

The "whom" is most important. In the Wisconsin case, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, "This court is not responsible for vindicating generalized partisan preferences. The court's constitutionally prescribed role is to vindicate the individual rights of the people appearing before it." Such a narrow interpretation is designed -- like most of the court majority's legal reasoning - to frustrate challenges based on alleged harms to groups of plaintiffs. Although protections for Black people's voting rights are well established in U.S. law, the high court appears reluctant to extend protections to "generalized" groups defined by their "partisan preferences" -- like Democrats and Republicans.

There is no question that Republicans have rigged the electoral map, wherever possible, to favor whites and rural voters -- as is enshrined in historical U.S. electoral structures, most notably, the wholly undemocratic U.S. Senate, which allocates two senators for each state, regardless of population, and the Electoral College, which gives citizens in overwhelmingly white and rural Wyoming, Vermont, and North Dakota three times the presidential voting power of citizens in polyglot New York, Florida, and California. Democrats rig the game, too, when they get the chance, although it's an uphill race. Both parties, however, are intent to preserve the duopoly system that splits the U.S. polity between them, for the benefit of their corporate masters. And neither party gives a damn about Black people's right to self-determination -- which includes the ability to elect representatives and executives of their choice, unless that choice is a Democrat or Republican.

On this issue, the Democrats' principled stance is worse than the Republicans. The Democrats consistently oppose Black "super-majority" voting districts that empower African Americans to elect candidates of their choice without significant non-Black support, while the GOP favors such districts. The Democratic Party abhors deep concentrations of Black voters, preferring to spread the Black vote over a number of districts to enhance Democratic legislative prospects, statewide. Republicans want as many Black votes as possible locked up in a few super-majority districts, rendering the rest of the legislative map an electoral battleground among whites, where Republicans can expect to fare well.

"Choice" vs "Influence"

The Democratic Party is determined to deny Blacks decisive electoral power. The Party fights tooth and nail to limit the number of voting districts in which Blacks have sufficient numbers to elect candidates of their "choice." Instead, the Party preaches that Blacks are better off spread out in districts where they make up 20 or 30 percent of the vote, but can "influence" more elections. The Democrats' preference is to dilute the Black electorate so that no "choice" remains but to vote for whatever

candidate is put forward by the fat cats that control the reins of the Party. Democratic districting schemes are designed to reduce Blacks to captive vote-fodder, dependable ciphers to shore up Democratic weakness among whites.

The very concept of Black self-determination is anathema to the Democratic Party -- just as it is on the Republican side of the duopoly. However, the GOP can live with -- and gain some legislative advantages from -- the creation of Black majority districts, since they are the stronger party among whites in most states. Democrats demand that Blacks surrender the power to conduct their own political battles in majority Black environments and choose officeholders that reflect Black people's evolving political will. Instead, Blacks are relegated to the status of yes-men to the Party -- a political captivity dressed up as "diversity."

And "yes-men" and women is what we've gotten from this deal with the Democrats. The Black Misleadership Class is steeped in subservience to the Democratic Party, which has been its connection to the ruling classes of U.S. society. In that sense, the Party is the root of corruption in the Black polity. The other main conduit of corruption, the GOP, is effectively off-limits, since its organizing principle is white supremacy. The duopoly system locks Blacks in the Democrats' foul and abusive embrace.

But, the Democrats don't just corrupt Black officeholders; they distort and deform the Black political conversation, through unrelenting suppression and cooptation of the Black Radical Tradition. Blacks are the most left-leaning, socialist-friendly, pro-peace ethnic constituency in the country, by far -- but that is not reflected in Black electoral politics. The Democratic Party is the duopoly system's mechanism to snuff out Black radicalism. Black Democratic officials and operatives have, for the past four decades, overseen the day-to-day maintenance of the Black Mass Incarceration State in the inner cities, on behalf of the Lords of Capital. The Democratic Party is, in truth, the long arm of the ruling class, reaching into every political nook and cranny of Black America and strangling every radical Black political tendency in its crib.

Black majorities, unrestrained, tend to hatch radical approaches to capitalist and white supremacist-inflicted problems. Is it any wonder that the self-proclaimed "most radical city on the planet" is 80 percent Black Jackson, Mississippi? Or that Amiri Baraka's son is the hugely popular mayor of Newark, New Jersey, the state's largest city, where whites make up only 13 percent of the population? Or that the Bay Area Center For Voting Research found, back in 2005, that:

"The list of America's most liberal [sic] cities reads like a who's who of prominent African American communities. Gary, Washington D.C., Newark, Flint, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Birmingham have long had prominent black populations. While most black voters have consistently supported Democrats since the 1960s, it is the white liberals that have slowly withered away over the decades, leaving African Americans as the sole standard bearers for the left...." -- (See The Black Commentator, "Where the Left Lives," by Bruce Dixon.)

It is the Democratic Party's job -- its division of labor under the duopoly electoral arrangement -- to subvert and suppress those radical tendencies, and to dilute the power of Black majorities wherever they exist. The Party has blunted the radicalism of the leftist city halls in Jackson and Newark, and seeks to bleach out "too-Black" legislative districts wherever possible.

Monday's Supreme Court decision blessing Ohio's removal of half a million voters was ultimately decided on the issue of a postcard.

Now that little postcard threatens the voting rights of millions_but it can be reversed.

The instant_news media, working from press releases, not the Supreme Court's decision itself, said that Husted, Ohio Secretary of State v. A. Philip Randolph Institute was about whether Ohio has the right to remove voters who failed to cast ballots in two federal election cycles.

Nope.

Even the Court's right_wing majority concedes that federal law strictly forbids removing voters because they skipped some elections. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 states that a voter purge program "shall not result in the removal of the name of any person ... by reason of the person's failure to vote."

But here's the trick: In 2002, the George W. Bush administration ginned up the Help America Vote Act. When a Bush tells you he's going to "help" you vote, look out. Yet, naïve Democrats passed the act into law. The Help America Vote Act is filled with buried land mines that are still exploding.

Monday's decision is one of those land mines. The Help America Vote Act, the Court concluded, blew open a giant loophole in the National Voter Registration Act's protections. The trick is that Ohio does not remove voters simply because they missed a few elections. According to the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito:

Ohio uses a registrant's failure to vote [only] to identify that registrant as a person whose address has likely changed.

The Court takes note that Ohio claims it had evidence that, in 2012, a whopping 1.5 million voters - an astronomical 20 percent of its total voter base - had moved their residence out of Ohio or moved from their county voting area. The 1.5 million voters were sent postcards asking them to confirm their mailing address.

It was a voter's failure to return the postcard that cost them their right to vote. The Court majority said that the Help America Vote Act trumps the National Voter Registration Act, arguing that the act passed under George W. Bush "specifies that 'nothing in [the National Voter Registration Act prohibition] may be construed to prohibit a State from using the procedures' - [such as] sending a return card."

The Justices ruled that a voter's failure to return a postcard (which asks the voter to confirm their address) constitutes solid proof that the voter had left Ohio or moved to another voting district.

The plaintiffs, a coalition of voting rights groups, were gob_smacked. Plaintiffs argued that there are many reasons folks did not return the postcard, most likely that they threw it away as junk mail or never received it in the first place. But the Court majority found that, without specific evidence, the plaintiffs' claim that voters just threw away the cards was speculative and "dubious."

Jim Crow Is in the Cards

Writing for the four dissenters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the effect of the Court's decision was to disproportionately wipe out the rights of "minority, low-income, disabled, homeless, and veteran voters." Sotomayor went on to cite an investigation revealing that Ohio's purge operation had knocked out the registrations of 10 percent of African American_majority neighborhoods in downtown Cincinnati compared to only 4 percent of voters in a nearby suburban, majority_white neighborhood.

But that's the point, Madame Justice.

But how? The Jim Crow result is in the cards.

I first discovered "purge-by-postcard" in 2014 while investigating mass attacks on voter rolls by GOP officials in a dozen states for Al Jazeera. I turned to direct mail experts, including Michael Wychocki, a Chicago_based adviser on mailing for Amazon and other companies that live or die by mail.

He directed me to the US Census Bureau's massive study of mail return rates. Dig this:

​While 90 percent of those 65 years of age and older return the Census form, only 55.4 percent of those 18 to 24 reply.

Homeowners are 32 percent more likely than renters to return forms.

Only 65 percent of Latino voters mailed back an initial Census form, as did 70 percent of Black voters_versus over 80 percent of "non-Hispanic whites."

And crucially, according to the Census study, 12 percent of mailings simply go astray_especially, says Wychocki, in poor, urban communities, where the tenants hop between apartments in the same neighborhood. And let's not even discuss students and the homeless.

Designed to Be Thrown Away?

And that's the Census Bureau, which designs mailings to get the highest response possible. Not so for the purge_by_postcard programs used by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted.

I showed Ohio voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis a postcard on which one's voting rights hang, and he gave, word for word, the same response I got from another direct mail expert, Mark Swedlund (whose clientele include eBay and AT&T): "Looks like junk mail, you'd throw it in the garbage."

Indeed, Wychocki inspected the cards, which are filled with blocks of small print with no images. He explained that the design violates every cardinal rule of direct mail solicitation. While Wychocki would not speculate on the designer's motives, he said it looked as if the postcard was by someone who did not want the voter to respond.

And one such someone is Kris Kobach. According to documents obtained by the ACLU, Kobach provided Husted (and other GOP voting officials) a sample postcard to send to voters targeted for purge.

Why? There are two groups of voters in the 500,000 that Ohio purged based on "evidence" the voter has moved. Hundreds of thousands were purged who landed on the suspect list because they missed elections. Second, there were those who supposedly have registered in another state. Names of those identified as moving to another state were taken from the infamous Interstate Crosscheck list given Husted by Kobach, according to documents from Kobach's office.

For example, in 2015, leading up to the presidential election, Kobach, secretary of state in Kansas, gave Husted the Crosscheck list of 423,484 names of Ohio citizens who supposedly had registered in another state, according to Kansas records obtained by an investigative team I was working with at Rolling Stone magazine. Kobach and Husted had originally sold the Crosscheck program to the public as a method of finding criminal "double voters" - those actually voting in two states.

But Kobach himself told me in 2016_when I confronted him at a GOP fundraiser in Wichita while working for Rolling Stone_that the primary use of his Crosscheck lists is to identify voters who have moved and registered in another state. Kobach's office directs the national program to remove voters who fail to respond to a postcard, taking advantage of the nifty Help America Vote Act-shaped hole in the National Voter Registration Act.

That Kris Kobach led the way with the purge_by_postcard scheme is not surprising, given his long history of scams to disenfranchise voters of color, closely reported on by Truthout.

History of Vote Suppression

Which brings us to Sotomayor's outrage that the majority "entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the [National Voter Registration Act] was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low_income voters that Congress set out to eradicate."

We don't need to look at all of US history. Husted's own long record of purging, blocking and not counting voters of color is a history lesson in disenfranchisement all by itself.

In 2012 and 2016, I filmed the single early voting station in Dayton, Ohio, where Black voters lined up for five hours to vote. I also filmed the lines in a white Toledo suburb. Well, actually, there were no lines: white voters had a gigantic field of machines to choose from_plus cookies and coffee served.

The long lines for Black voters resulted from Husted's order closing all but one single early voting station in each county. That meant one polling station for the 13,000 residents and cows in Vinton County and one polling station for 1.3 million residents of Franklin County (Columbus).

Ohio attorney Robert Fitrakis says, bluntly, that Husted is purging voters of color to "make Ohio winnable [for Republicans] in the only way he knows how - by stealing American citizens' votes. And he's counting on bigotry to get away with it."

What Can Be Done?

The implications of the Supreme Court decision are unimaginably horrid, as states come up with spurious "evidence" that a voter has moved - "proven" by a failure to respond to a piece of junk mail.

The purge could be massive: A half_million in Ohio will undoubtedly lead to millions nationwide.

Normally, a Supreme Court verdict is the final word, the last rodeo.

But there is hope. On Wednesday, I spoke by phone with renowned class_action attorney Jeanne Mirer of New York. She explained that the civil rights groups lost on a matter of law: States may assume a voter has moved residence if they don't return a postcard.

But what if the facts say otherwise?

Just the Facts, Ma'am

It's really simple to find out if failure to return a postcard is evidence you've moved: ask the voter. Call them up, knock on their door: Mr. Webster, have you moved to Virginia?

If Mr. Webster and others say, "No, here I am, I haven't moved" ... well, then, the Court's factual assumption goes poof! Because the National Voter Registration Act says that removal methods must be "reasonable."

So, the way to challenge the Court's decision is to prove that purge_by_postcard is unreasonable and bogus.

To get to these purged voters, we need their names. But Husted has steadfastly refused to give up his list of the damned. He knows that the release of the names of those purged will blow his case to smithereens.

So, this week, this reporter is filing a demand on Husted for the list of the purged. And I thank Mirer's firm for taking on this enormous task, because in all, we are filing in 25 states where mass purges are conducted. (And her firm is working pro bono.)

Husted has so far stonewalled our polite requests for the information, but this new demand comes with a 90_day notice of a lawsuit.

And in Kansas, where these methods, postcards and Crosscheck lists are conceived, I am joined in my demand on Kris Kobach for his purge lists by the Kansas ACLU.

Strategically, we're beginning by demanding that segment of the purge list that Kobach gave to Ohio and other states.

Through investigation, we have already obtained small parts of these purge lists - including the one targeting Donald Alexander Webster Sr., a 70_year_old Black voter in Dayton, Ohio. He is listed as allegedly moving from Ohio to Virginia because there's a Virginia voter registered as Donald Eugene Webster Jr.

Webster has not moved from Ohio. I met with him in his Dayton home. And he swears he's never been a "Eugene" or a "Junior." He insists, "I vote every election and every primary, every one."

Channeling Justice Sotomayor, he told me, "I remember the Civil Rights Act, I remember all of those things. Almost all gone." He added, with a deep sadness in his voice, "Somebody dropped the ball. Maybe it was us, our age group, that we thought we didn't have to fight anymore."