Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
AP’s Today in History for November 27th
San Francisco Mayor shot to death; Gerald Ford named as Richard Nixon’s Vice President; Doctors perform world’s first partial face transplant; Playwright Eugene O’Neill dies.
Breakfast Tune Carolina Chocolate Drops – Day Of Liberty
Something to Think about, Breakfast News & Blogs Below
Standing Rock protesters will not follow official directive to leave camps
Associated Press in Cannon Ball, North Dakota
Dakota Access oil pipeline protesters will not follow a government directive to leave the federal land where hundreds have camped for months, organizers said on Saturday, despite state officials encouraging them to do so.
At a press conference, Standing Rock Sioux tribal leader Dave Archambault and other protest organizers confidently explained that they would stay at the Oceti Sakowin camp and continue with nonviolent protests, a day after Archambault received a letter from the US army corps of engineers that said all federal lands north of the Cannonball river would be closed to public access 5 December over “safety concerns”.
The corps cited the coming winter and increasingly contentious clashes between protesters – who believe the pipeline could harm drinking water and Native American cultural sites – and police. …
Newly-Released Documents Confirm Bureau of Prisons Visit to CIA Torture Site in Afghanistan
Alex Emmons, The Intercept
ONE OF THE MANY alarming facts that came to light with the release of the executive summary of the Senate Torture Report in 2014 was that the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons had sent a “delegation of several officers” to Afghanistan to conduct an assessment an infamous CIA detention site and concluded the CIA “did not mistreat the detainees.”
Senate investigators found that the bureau officers visited a detention site codenamed Cobalt north of Kabul in November 2002. That site — also known as the Salt Pit — has become infamous for the brutal torture inflicted on detainees there, including rectal exams conducted with “excessive force.” According to Senate investigators, the CIA’s own employees described the facility as “a dungeon,” where detainees “cowered” as interrogators opened the door and “looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”
In April, the ACLU filed suit to obtain documents related to the visit, which the Bureau of Prisons initially claimed did not exist.
The bureau has now turned over several emails mentioning the visit — along with a written declaration by a senior Bureau of Prisons lawyer explaining the attempted cover-up. That declaration states that the officers were tasked orally, so that there was no record of their travel, and that the CIA forbade the two officers from producing records of or about the visit. …
Libya won’t take part in any OPEC cuts for ‘foreseeable future’
Aidan Lewis, Reuters
Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) said on Sunday it would not take part in any OPEC production cuts for the “foreseeable future” as the North African country tries to bring crude output back towards pre-conflict levels.
“Libya is in such a dangerous economic situation, there is no way it can participate in OPEC production cuts for the foreseeable future,” NOC Chairman Mustafa Sanalla told delegates at the Arab-Austrian Economic Forum in Vienna on Friday, according to an NOC statement.
Libya has more than doubled its national crude production to around 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) since several previously blockaded oil ports were reopened in September.
But output remains far below the 1.6 million bpd the country was producing before its 2011 uprising, and Libya has been rapidly depleting its foreign exchanged reserves.
Libya had already indicated its reluctance to curtail production, and this week OPEC will debate a proposal to cut production that would exempt Libya and Nigeria, another country where output has been hit by conflict. …
Here’s How We Can Really Protect America
A progressive argument for an American Brexit.
Thom Hartmann, AlterNet
From Thomas Friedman to Barack Obama, from Mitt Romney to John McCain, it’s fashionable among the “intelligentsia” and elites of both parties to ridicule “protectionism” as a way to rebuild America.
Yet during his campaign, Donald Trump openly embraced the idea of slapping tariffs on imported goods.
After visiting where I grew up in Michigan for the holidays, I’d argue this was more than half of why he won the Electoral College part of the election of 2016. Protectionism built America, and people here in the industrial Midwest know it. The people, while often mal- and mis-informed by our corporate media, aren’t stupid, and many are old enough to remember how good things were for workers when we operated under a nakedly protectionist system of trade. …
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Coin toss for a council seat: Tied race determined by chance
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Officials settled a deadlocked race for a spot on a city council in suburban Salt Lake City by drawing names from a pilgrim hat and flipping a coin — a decision-by-chance that Utah and a number of other states allow to break ties in elections or appointments.
Utah law lets tied votes be settled “by lot” but does not specify what method of chance to use, Elections Director Mark Thomas said Wednesday. A coin toss and drawing names are common methods and they have been used two or three times over the past decade in Utah, generally in small elections, he said.
In the Kentucky city of Grayson, a tied election for a city council seat was settled Thursday with a coin flip. …
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