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Ukraine, allies fear escalation after Russia exits ceasefire group | KIEV (Reuters) - Ukrainian officials, security monitors and Kiev s foreign backers warned on Wednesday that Moscow s decision to withdraw from a Ukrainian-Russian ceasefire control group could worsen the fighting in eastern Ukraine. On Monday, the Russian foreign ministry said it was recalling officers serving at the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination (JCCC) in Ukraine, accusing the Ukrainian side of obstructing their work and limiting access to the front line. Ukrainian Defence Minister Stepan Poltorak and security chief Olekshandr Turchynov said the decision, coupled with a recent surge in fighting in the eastern Donbass region, suggested Russia had switched to a more offensive strategy. We cannot rule out that they withdrew their officers in order to start stepping up not only military provocations but also military operations, Turchynov said. We will strengthen our positions at the front. The Ukrainian armed forces are currently prepared for a change in the situation, Poltorak told journalists. A Russia-backed separatist insurgency erupted in 2014 and the bloodshed has continued despite a ceasefire that was meant to end the conflict. More than 10,000 people have been killed, with casualties reported on a near-daily basis. A spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which works with the JCCC to monitor the much-violated Minsk peace agreement, said: We are concerned about any step that might lead to a further deterioration of the security situation in the region, affecting both the SMM (OSCE special monitoring mission) and the civilian population. Fighting between Ukrainian troops and separatists has climbed to the worst level in months, the OSCE said this week, after the shelling of a frontline village wounded civilians and destroyed or damaged dozens of homes. Russia denies accusations from Ukraine and NATO it supports the rebels with troops and weapons, but the U.S. envoy to peace talks, Kurt Volker, said Moscow was answerable for the violence. Russia withdrew its officers from JCCC - a ceasefire implementation tool - right before a massive escalation in ceasefire violations. Ukraine just suffered some of the worst fighting since February, 2017. Decision for peace lies with Russia, Volker tweeted on Tuesday. Germany and France, which have spearheaded international efforts to resolve the conflict, expressed concern. A Germany foreign ministry spokesman said it could have severe consequences for civilians in the conflict zones. We call on the Russian authorities to reconsider this decision and hope that the Ukrainian authorities will guarantee access to Ukrainian territory to Russian representatives of the joint center (JCCC), said Alexandre Giorgini, deputy spokesman for the French foreign ministry. Created in 2014, the JCCC is made up of Ukrainian and Russian officers, who are meant to work together to ensure the safety of OSCE monitors and help implement the Minsk ceasefire. | 0fake |
OBAMA TELLS TROOPS To Rise Up Against Trump…Protest His Authority…Feel Free To Criticize Him [VIDEO] | 43 days and counting Characterizing the military s mission as a fight against violent extremism, Obama insisted that soldiers need to rise up against Trump if they feel he is pushing policies that are ill considered.Obama told the troops, each of us has the universal right to speak your minds and to protest against authority; to live in a society that s open and free; that can criticize our president without retribution. Obama went on to insist that a proper U.S. policy against violent extremism is a long term policy. So rather than offer false promises that we can eliminate terrorism by dropping more bombs or deploying more and more troops or fencing ourselves off from the rest of the world, Obama said, we have to take a long view of the terrorist threat. And we have to pursue a smart strategy that can be sustained. In the time remaining, let me just suggest what I think should guide this approach. In addressing the war-torn Middle East, Obama insisted that global warming forms a large part of that conflict. A changing climate is increasing competition for food and water, which, he claimed, drives the conflict in Syria and other nearby nations.Obama also blamed the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution for violent extremism in the United States. Somebody who is trying to kill and willing to be killed is dangerous, particularly when we live in a country where it s very easy for that person to buy a very powerful weapon, Obama insisted. The president also defended Islam against the charge of extremism:We are fighting terrorists who claim to fight on behalf of Islam. But they do not speak for over a billion Muslims around the world, and they do not speak for American Muslims including many who wear the uniform of the United States of America s military. If we stigmatize good patriotic Muslims, that just feeds the terrorists narrative. It fuels the same false grievances they they use to motivate people to kill. If we act like this is a war between the United States and Islam, we re not gonna lose more Americans to terrorist attacks, but we ll also lose the sight of the very principles we claim to defend.As to the rise of ISIS, Obama insisted it was not given aide by his actions of pulling out of Iraq in 2011 but was instead given succor by the policies of George W. Bush. By 2011, Iraqis wanted our military presence to end, and they were unwilling to sign a new status of forces agreement to protect our troops from prosecution if they were trying to defend themselves in Iraq, Obama proclaimed. In addition, maintaining American troops in Iraq at the time could not have reversed the forces that contributed to ISIL s rise. Breitbart | 1real |
Putin is (finally) puring the Medvedev government | 259 Views November 17, 2016 1 Comment Analyses The Saker
This article was written for the Unz Review: http://www.unz.com/tsaker/putin-is-finally-purging-the-medvedev-government/
While the word was focused in rapt attention on the outcome of the US Presidential election, Vladimir Putin did something quite amazing – he arrested Alexei Uliukaev , Minister of the Economy of the Medvedev government, on charges of extortion and corruption. Uliukaev, whose telephone had been tapped by the Russian Security Services since this summer, was arrested in the middle of the night in possession of 2 million US dollars. Putin officially fired him the next morning.
Russian official sources say that Uliukaev extorted a $2 million bribe for an assessment that led to the acquisition by Rosneft (a state run Russian oil giant) of a 50% stake in Bashneft (another oil giant). Apparently, Uliukaev tried to threaten Igor Sechin , the President of Rosneft and a person considered close to Vladimir Putin and the Russian security and intelligence services.
Yes, you read that right: according to the official version, a state-owned company gave a bribe to a member of the government. Does that make sense to you? How about a senior member of the government who had his telephone tapped and who has been under close surveillance by the Federal Security Service for over a year – does that make sense to you?
This makes no sense at all and the Russian authorities fully realize that. But that is the official version. So what is going on here? Do you think that there is a message from Putin here?
Of course there is!
Remember the corrupt Minister of Defense Anatolii Serdiukov ? He was first fired from his position and only then arrested. But this time around, it is a member of the government which is arrested in the middle of the night. For a few hours, his subordinates could not even reach him – they had no idea what had happened to him. Was that a mistake? Hardly.
The way Uliukaev was detained was carefully choreographed to instill the strongest sense of fear possible in all the other 5 th columnists still in power because in so many ways Uliukaev was a symbol for all the the “Atlantic Integrationists” (those in the Kremlin who want to integrate Russia into the US controlled international security system): Uliukaev was a known liberal, just like Nikita Belykh , governor of Kirov Region, who was detained in a high-publicity arrest in June for taking a 400’000 Euros bribe. I would even say that Uliukaev could be considered the ultimate symbol of the Atlantic Integrationists and a faithful member of the Russian “liberal” (meaning the “Washington consensus” type) sect who, in the past had worked with Egor Gaidar and Alexei Kudrin and who now has been brought down by the Russian “ siloviki ”, the top officials of the so-called “power ministries” (defense, state security, intelligence). Sergei Korolev, the Head of the Economic Security service of the FSB
This was immediately recognized by everybody and the main headline of the popular website Gazeta.ru could not be clearer, it read: “ The Siloviki brought down Uliukaev ” and featured a photo of the key actors of this drama, including the tough-looking man thought to have brought Uliukaev down, Sergei Korolev, the Head of the Economic Security service of the FSB (shown on photo here).
In April, I predicted that a government purge was in the making . I have to admit that I thought that this would have happened earlier. Apparently Putin decided to take action while Uncle Sam was busy with his own, internal, problems. If that is indeed the reason for the late timing, that says a lot about the power of the USA still wields in Russia. Some observers noticed that the arrest of Uliukaev took place after the telephone conversation between Trump and Putin, hinting that Trump might have given Putin the go ahead for the arrest. That is, of course, utter nonsense, but if that can make Putin look bad – it’s good enough for the 5 th columnists.
The list of potential ‘candidates’ to be purged next is still long and includes names like the Deputy Prime Minister Arkadii Dvorkovich , the First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov , the Governor of the Russian Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina , the Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov and, of course, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. Uliukaev was only one amongst many more. Still, he was definitely a top-level target and the manner in which he was arrested must have sent a chill down the spine of all the other 5 th columnists in the Kremlin. Just the fact that his phone was tapped for so long is quite unthinkable and clearly points to the fact that nobody is safe from Putin’s purges. And that, by itself, is truly a most welcome change: every member of the Medvedev government now has been put on notice that his/her life is now spent under the close scrutiny of the FSB.
It really matters little what will happen to Uliukaev next. He has be formally arraigned, now his case will be further investigated and then Uliukaev will have his day in court (right now he has only be detained and he will be kept under house arrest for the next two months). Potentially, he faces 15 years in jail and a fine equivalent to 70 times the amount of the bribe he took. Judging by the case of Serdyukov, who is managed to escape any prison time thanks to a Presidential Amnesty for the 20 years of the Russian Constitution, Putin seem to be reluctant to inflict any form of retribution upon his enemies. But even if Uliukaev does not get to enjoy the fresh air of the Siberian taiga, he is already finished as a power broker, and that is all that really matters to Putin.
What matters here is that in the course of one night, a top level Russian Minister went from his Ministerial Offices to a holding cell and that absolutely nobody saw it coming or could prevent this. Yet again we have a case of 100% Putin style: no warnings of any kind, no hints even, just sudden dramatic action with an immediate result. His “handwriting” is clearly all over the case. Uliukaev ain’t laughing no more…
The reaction to this arrest in Russia was predictable, especially after sources in the security services told the Russian media that Arkadii Dvorkovich and Andrei Belousov were also under investigation. Anatolii Chubais, for example, declared that he was in “total shock”. Even better was the reaction of Prime Minister Medvedev who said that this development was at the “edge of his understanding”.
It will be interesting to observe the inevitable reaction from the Atlantic Integrationists: if they really feel defeated, they will pay lip-service to the need to “fight corruption on all levels” and generally keep a low profile. If they still have some fight in them, they will denounce a “Stalinist” crackdown, the return to “1930’s -like purges” and a “new campaign of terror” against democracy. The western corporate media, whose only “value” is money, will write about how the Russian “secret police” is cracking down on “business entrepreneurs” and how that will end up damaging the Russian economy. Basically, a repeat of the whining which we all heard when Putin dismantled the infamous semibankirshchina . As Elton John would say, we “have seen that movie too…”
As for the rabid Putin-hating nationalists, they will say that this is too little too late. For years they have been complaining about corruption and how top level officials were never investigated, and now that they seem to have gotten their wish, it’s “too little, too late”. But that doesn’t really matter, since they have almost as little credibility with the Russian general public as the pro-western parties like Iabloko or Parnass.
The main media outlets and political commentators are all giving Putin a standing ovation right now. That is hardly surprising since they are the ones who for many months now have been loudly and constantly complaining about the “economic bloc of the government”, meaning the pro-US 5 th columnists inside the Medvedev government. Quite literally all the main political commentators have been begging and demanding a purge of this “economic bloc” and a radical change in the economic policies of Russia. Well, they got one villain purged, which is a good start, but there are no signs that more heads will roll or that the economic course of Russia will finally break from the Washington consensus kind of policies and be replaced it with much needed policy of internal growth. But then, knowing Putin, we should not expect any signs – only action.
In Russia, just as in the USA, changing the people is far easier than changing the system while the only way to achieve real change is, precisely, to change the system, not the people. So far, Putin has only succeeded in kicking some of the worst people out and, to his credit, getting some very good people in. Now that a threat of war with the USA is very substantially reduced and that Uncle Sam will be busy with his own, internal, struggles, I hope that Putin will finally take some very strong action to liberate Russia from the Washington consensus types and replace them with real patriots who will finally make it possible for Russia to become a truly sovereign country, even in the economic sense.
The Saker The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95 | 1real |
Venezuela's Maduro seeks debt negotiations after U.S. sanctions | CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has invited bondholders to unspecified negotiations over the country s foreign debt in coming days, in response to recent U.S. financial sanctions. With Venezuela deep in recession and its currency reserves at their lowest in more than two decades, the Maduro government and state oil company PDVSA have to pay about $4 billion in debt and interest during the rest of 2017. All bondholders are invited to various rounds of negotiations over the next few weeks, the president said in a speech late on Thursday to the new Constituent Assembly. He reiterated Venezuela would keep honoring debt, but said he wanted to talk with bondholders affected by sanctions recently imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump. Maduro said Vice President Tareck El Aissami, already under U.S. financial sanctions over drug trafficking allegations, and Finance Minister Ramon Lobo would coordinate talks and some bilateral conversations with bondholders had already begun. In the same speech, Maduro said Venezuela would seek to free itself of the U.S. dollar and implement a new system of international payments using currencies such as the yuan, yen, rupee, euro and ruble. The president did not, however, specify whether paying in a different currency was an option his government wanted to discuss with bondholders. The Washington-based Institute of International Finance, which represents large banks and financial institutions, said it was advising a group of holders of Venezuelan bonds. This informal group will take note of the Venezuelan announcements and discuss how to proceed, IIF Executive Managing Director Hung Tran told Reuters. The group was made up of bondholders from the United States and elsewhere, he said. Tran said Venezuela could not change the currency of bonds without agreement by all or a large majority of holders. Last month, Trump, who brands Maduro a dictator, signed an executive order that prohibits Americans from dealing in new debt issued by the Venezuelan government or PDVSA. That could complicate any debt refinancing attempts. Washington has also sanctioned PDVSA s finance boss Simon Zerpa, meaning U.S. businesses are barred from dealing with him, and even Maduro himself in measures intended to punish the Venezuelan government for alleged corruption and rights abuses. I will be announcing Venezuela s definitive response to the financial aggression we - and the international investors - have suffered from Donald Trump and (opposition leader) Julio Borges, Maduro added in the speech on Thursday. Borges, the head of the opposition-led congress whose role has been overridden by the Constituent Assembly, has been spearheading an opposition campaign for foreign financial institutions to put the squeeze on Venezuela s government. Venezuela will take a position to defend the judicial and financial security of the republic and its investors or holders of financial instruments, Maduro added. Though Maduro gave no further details of what his government wanted to discuss with bondholders or where talks would be held, he did say 74 percent were American or Canadian. Three bondholders consulted by Reuters said they had not received any formal approach to dialogue, though two said intermediaries for the government had been communicating with some investors informally. We didn t receive an invitation or anything like that. Even if we had we don t think we would take it too seriously, said one portfolio manager at a large New York firm that owns Venezuelan debt, asking not to be named. In trading on Friday, Venezuelan government and PDVSA bonds were little changed in price. The OPEC nation of 30 million people is in the fourth year of a recession, with its population grappling with triple-digit inflation and shortages of food and medicine. Critics say a long-failing socialist economic system is to blame for Venezuela s financial troubles, while the government blames an alleged economic war by domestic foes and Washington. International reserves stood at $9.873 billion on Wednesday, compared with nearly $30 billion five years ago, central bank data shows. They are at their lowest level since 1995. Most of the country s reserves are tied up in gold that cannot be used in financial transactions without going through a certification process in another country. In another speech on Friday, Maduro said that Venezuela would begin selling its oil, gas, gold and all products in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, but gave no further details of the intended changes in export transactions. | 0fake |
Iraqi preparing to take control of crossing between Kurdistan region and Syria | BAGHDAD (Reuters) - An Iraqi military delegation is preparing to take control of the Kurdistan region border with Syria, an Iraqi military statement said on Tuesday. The delegation headed by the Iraqi army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Othman al-Ghanmi, is visiting the Fish-Khabur triangle formed by the Iraqi Turkish Syrian border, in northwestern Iraq, a statement from the Iraqi joint operation command in Baghdad said. The visit aims to control the international border it said, mentioning Iraq s two crossings with Turkey and Syria, respectively Ibrahim al-Khalil and Fish-Khabur. Iraqi officials told Reuters earlier on Tuesday Iraqi customs officials took control of the Ibrahim al-Khalil main land crossing with Turkey. | 0fake |
Comment on GOP Presidential Candidate Trump – You Need A Spanking! by para kazanmak | Subscribe
Dear GOP Presidential Candidate Donald Trump,
I just watched a portion of your interview from Sunday night and I was appalled. You seriously need to be put over someone’s knee.
You are running for the highest leadership position in this country and you are carrying on like a spoiled little toddler, stomping your feet and throwing temper tantrums and hollering all over social media. Hollering things like “Stop calling me names!”“I hate you!”“You’re being mean to me!”“I’m telling my mommy!” are not things that an adult man does – those are things that a toddler does.
Here is a prime example : “In what is now a familiar pattern, Donald Trump took to Twitter following his interview in order to trash the interviewer and whine about how the questions were supposedly stacked against him.”
Guess what? Running this country is HARD. It isn’t for whiners. Not once have I heard President Obama whine about you running him through the ringer about his birth certificate. Not once have I heard him whine when people in public office have disrespected him. Not once have I heard him whine when Congress has voted against his programs simply because he is a black man and they don’t like him. Not once in almost seven years has that man whined that Fox News has said something bad about him. Not once. Let that sink in.
I ain’t your mommy, but I am a mom. Nothing more – Just A Mom. I have a normal kid. But for a few minutes here I’m going to pretend you’re my son because you really seem to need a mom’s advice. When my kid has a temper tantrum, she gets sent to her room. When she can talk calmly to adults, she is allowed to come out and we discuss what she did wrong.
I’m thinking that maybe no one ever did that for you. No one ever said “No” to you. You never got a spanking, literally or figuratively.
You are acting like an insufferable ass. The United States is not a dictatorship. It is not a corporation that you can run into the ground and file bankruptcy on. It is a democratic government that is set up with three distinct branches of government. Those three branches of government are designed to act with a series of checks and balances to ensure that no one person has the authority or the ability to make horrid decisions, treat people in a sucky way, and waste our tax dollars on frivolities.
Here is a link to a children’s website , where they spell it out at a level that even you should be able to comprehend.
By saying “ We’ll see “ every time the interviewer reminded you of this system of checks and balances you displayed your ignorance of how our government works. My 12-year-old knows more about government than you appear to.
This is not a media circus for you to use to continue pumping hot air into the atmosphere. Global climate change is already a problem and your constant bloviating is causing more detrimental effects than the farting cows. Stop treating this campaign like your very own little playground. It isn’t. Our government is a democracy – that means that if hell freezes over and you do somehow manage to gain the presidency you work for us, the people of this country.
Here’s a thought – instead of building a wall that will cost billions, why don’t you propose an amnesty program that could be enacted for a couple million? The sheer cost of deporting millions of people, only to turn around and let them back in ‘legally’ is an astronomical burden to place on already over-burdened tax payers. It is also the DUMBEST idea I have ever heard. Does having all that money remove any shred of common sense? Do you possess any ability to think reasonably?
You would be amazed at how many cost-cutting things can be enacted if you think about them and come up with common sense solutions. The end goal is what you want to accomplish.
Since your fellow Republicans are going to be the biggest stopping block on any type of an amnesty program – sell them on what they stand to GAIN from doing this as opposed to booting everyone out and building an asinine wall.
You can’t just think about “The Donald” and how he feels about things. You have to consider each and every person in this country. You have to take our tax dollars and use them in the best way possible to make life better for us. This isn’t all about you. You’re just a potty-mouthed little boy that needs a bar of soap to wash your mouth out and a time-out to reflect on your actions lately.
You can’t act like a spoiled little toddler if you expect to be taken seriously as a GOP presidential candidate. You need to stop that silliness right now. Get your head out of your ass and look around. You have no clue how to run a government. If you want to continue acting like a toddler, no one will ever take you seriously. The voters in this country will not subject themselves to being ruled by a spoiled brat.
Grow up, Donald. | 1real |
Trump’s Own Running Mate Just Put Him To SHAME With A Simple Promise | In an appearance on NBC s Meet the Press, Mike Pence promised to do something that people have clamored for Trump to do for months. It s simple he plans to release his tax returns. Within the next week. Which is far sooner than anything we can ever expect from The Donald.Of course, despite shaming the hell out of his running mate like this, Pence still had to say that Trump will make good on his promise, too: Donald Trump and I are both going to release our tax returns. I ll release mine in the next week.Donald Trump will be releasing his tax returns at the completion of an audit. What baloney; the audit is an excuse. Trump can release his tax returns despite the audit, he just won t. Richard Nixon, arguably our most dishonest president ever, released his returns under audit. Apparently, though, Trump hiding them and being as opaque as possible is on the advice of an adviser. It s not hard, however, to believe this adviser would tell him, Don t release any information that makes you look bad in any way. Yet much of the public is wondering what he s hiding in there, including many in his own party.Both Hillary and her running mate, Tim Kaine, have already released their tax returns, further shaming the Trumpmeister. That s expected, though. One hardly expects one s own running mate to do the same thing.Hillary and Bill Clinton paid an effective tax rate of just over 43 percent. Maybe Trump is worried how much of the world will see how he evades taxes, or that he s lied about being able to get away with paying a very low tax rate. Or both. In that very vein, Trump himself has rather hypocritically said: So you know if you re running, at a minimum, probably you re going to have to show your returns. If you didn t see the tax returns you would think there s almost like something wrong, what s wrong. So what s wrong with the Donald that he won t release his tax returns? He s eating his own words. The fact that his own running mate is willing to do this, while he himself is not, is laughable at best. No doubt they think this will bring some credibility back to their campaign, but it will also make lots of people turn back to Trump and say, Show us your taxes, now that your own running mate has done it! Of course Pence tried to cover for that, but either he is lying through his teeth and has no intention of releasing his returns next week, or he s about to make Trump look really, really bad.Featured image by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images | 1real |
Trump signs order aimed at upgrading government cyber defenses | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to bolster the government’s cyber security and protect critical infrastructure from cyber attacks, marking his first significant action to address what he has called a top priority. The order seeks to improve the often-maligned network security of U.S. government agencies, from which foreign governments and other hackers have pilfered millions of personal records and other forms of sensitive data in recent years. The White House said the order also aimed to enhance protection of infrastructure such as the energy grid and financial sector from sophisticated attacks that officials have warned could pose a national security threat or cripple parts of the economy. The directive, which drew largely favorable reviews from cyber experts and industry groups, also lays out goals to develop a more robust cyber deterrence strategy, in part by forging strong cooperation with U.S. allies in cyberspace. White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert said the order sought to build on efforts undertaken by the former Obama administration. Among the notable changes, heads of federal agencies must use a framework developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to assess and manage cyber risk, and prepare a report within 90 days documenting how they will implement it. The Obama administration had encouraged the private sector to adopt the voluntary NIST framework. But it did not require government agencies to do so, which opened it up to criticism as it frequently scrambled to respond to major hacks, such as the theft of more than 20 million personnel records from the Office of Personnel Management. Government agencies would now “practice what they preach,” Bossert told reporters during a White House briefing. “A lot of progress was made in the last administration, but not nearly enough.” Michael Daniel, who served as White House cyber security coordinator under former Democratic President Barack Obama, generally praised the order but said it was largely “a plan for a plan.” Trump, a Republican, has also asked agencies to review their federal workforce’s cyber talent, an area where the government has faced a growing shortfall of qualified personnel in recent years. The order calls for an examination of the impact of moving agencies toward a shared information technology environment, such as through cloud computing services. It also urges voluntary cooperation with the private sector to develop better strategies to fend off and reduce attacks from botnets, or networks of infected devices. Trump nearly signed a cyber security measure just days into his presidency in January, but it was pulled back to allow for more input from federal agencies and consultation with experts. Before taking office, Trump said he intended to make cyber security a priority of his administration. But he has raised alarm among cyber security experts by frequently using a personal Twitter that could be hacked by an adversary. His skepticism of the conclusion by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia hacked Democratic emails during the election to help him win has drawn criticism. Russia has repeatedly denied assertions it used cyber means to meddle in the U.S. election. Bossert said Russia’s alleged hacks were not a motivation for the order, adding that “the Russians are not our only adversary on the internet.” | 0fake |
Davos elites struggle for answers as Trump era dawns | DAVOS, Switzerland - The global economy is in better shape than it’s been in years. Stock markets are booming, oil prices are on the rise again and the risks of a rapid economic slowdown in China, a major source of concern a year ago, have eased. And yet, as political leaders, CEOs and top bankers make their annual trek up the Swiss Alps to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the mood is anything but celebratory. Beneath the veneer of optimism over the economic outlook lurks acute anxiety about an increasingly toxic political climate and a deep sense of uncertainty surrounding the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated on the final day of the forum. Last year, the consensus here was that Trump had no chance of being elected. His victory, less than half a year after Britain voted to leave the European Union, was a slap at the principles that elites in Davos have long held dear, from globalization and free trade to multilateralism. Trump is the poster child for a new strain of populism that is spreading across the developed world and threatening the post-war liberal democratic order. With elections looming in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and possibly Italy, this year, the nervousness among Davos attendees is palpable. “Regardless of how you view Trump and his positions, his election has led to a deep, deep sense of uncertainty and that will cast a long shadow over Davos,” said Jean-Marie Guehenno, CEO of International Crisis Group, a conflict resolution think-tank. Moises Naim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was even more blunt: “There is a consensus that something huge is going on, global and in many respects unprecedented. But we don’t know what the causes are, nor how to deal with it.” The titles of the discussion panels at the WEF, which runs from Jan. 17-20, evoke the unsettling new landscape. Among them are “Squeezed and Angry: How to Fix the Middle Class Crisis”, “Politics of Fear or Rebellion of the Forgotten?”, “Tolerance at the Tipping Point?” and “The Post-EU Era”. The list of leaders attending this year is also telling. The star attraction will be Xi Jinping, the first Chinese president ever to attend Davos. His presence is being seen as a sign of Beijing’s growing weight in the world at a time when Trump is promising a more insular, “America first” approach and Europe is pre-occupied with its own troubles, from Brexit to terrorism. British Prime Minister Theresa May, who has the thorny task of taking her country out of the EU, will also be there. But Germany’s Angela Merkel, a Davos regular whose reputation for steady, principled leadership would have fit well with the WEF’s main theme of “Responsive and Responsible Leadership”, will not. Perhaps the central question in Davos, a four-day affair of panel discussions, lunches and cocktail parties that delve into subjects as diverse as terrorism, artificial intelligence and wellness, is whether leaders can agree on the root causes of public anger and begin to articulate a response. A WEF report on global risks released before Davos highlighted “diminishing public trust in institutions” and noted that rebuilding faith in the political process and leaders would be a “difficult task”. Guy Standing, the author of several books on the new “precariat”, a class of people who lack job security and reliable earnings, believes more people are coming around to the idea that free-market capitalism needs to be overhauled, including those that have benefited most from it. “The mainstream corporate types don’t want Trump and far-right authoritarians,” said Standing, who has been invited to Davos for the first time. “They want a sustainable global economy in which they can do business. More and more of them are sensible enough to realize that they have overreached.” But Ian Bremmer, president of U.S.-based political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, is not so sure. He recounted a recent trip to Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York where he saw bankers “rejoicing in the elevators” at the surge in stock markets and the prospect of tax cuts and deregulation under Trump. Both Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein and his JP Morgan counterpart Jamie Dimon will be in Davos. “If you want to find people who are going to rally together and say capitalism is fundamentally broken, Davos is not the place to go,” Bremmer said. Suma Chakrabarti, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), believes a “modern version of globalization” is possible but acknowledges it will take time to emerge. “It is going to be a long haul in persuading a lot of people that there is a different approach. But you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water,” he told Reuters. Still, some attendees worry that the pace of technological change and the integrated, complex nature of the global economy have made it more difficult for leaders to shape and control events, let alone reconfigure the global system. The global financial crisis of 2008/9 and the migrant crisis of 2015/16 exposed the impotence of politicians, deepening public disillusion and pushing people towards populists who offered simple explanations and solutions. The problem, says Ian Goldin, an expert on globalization and development at the University of Oxford, is that on many of the most important issues, from climate change to financial regulation, only multilateral cooperation can deliver results. And this is precisely what the populists reject. “The state of global politics is worse than it’s been in a long time,” said Goldin. “At a time when we need more coordination to tackle issues like climate change and other systemic risks, we are getting more and more insular.” | 0fake |
French privacy row over mass ID database | November 10, 2016 French privacy row over mass ID database
A French state watchdog has called for the suspension of a database that could end up holding the biometric details of 60 million people. The aim of a single “mega-database” is to fight identity fraud and improve efficiency. But, as Paul Kirby explains, there are fears the database could be abused not only by hackers but by state intelligence too, What’s the database for? The single database would not be used in judicial investigations, ministers insist. Rather, it would help tackle identity fraud by comparing one set of digital fingerprints with another. France’s interior ministry wants the Secure Electronic Documents (TES) to collect all the information on an individual held on two separate databases that have details of people’s passports and national ID cards. Only children under 12 would be exempt. It would include an individual’s name, address, marital status, eye colour, weight, photograph and fingerprints. It’s merely an administrative register, argues Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas. Its only legal use would be when data need to be requisitioned. | 1real |
For Alabama Christians, Governor Bentley’s Downfall Is a Bitter Blow - The New York Times | MONTGOMERY, Ala. — As governor, Robert Bentley would quote the Bible before the Alabama Legislature and say that God had elevated him to the State Capitol. In his dermatology practice, in the city where he was a Baptist deacon, he sometimes witnessed to patients. And when he was a candidate for statewide office, his campaign headquarters were often filled with volunteers from local churches. This is a state that knows well how mixing faith and politics can lead to disappointment. When Mr. Bentley on Monday resigned from office and pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors in the wake of the sex scandal that ended his marriage, his downfall reflected both enduring and contemporary challenges for evangelical voters. To many of the conservative Christians who unexpectedly propelled Mr. Bentley, a Republican, into power, his demise was a dispiriting setback in an age when they feel their values are under siege. “We’re sorry for him and his family, but at the same time, he made his choices and did what he did,” said the Rev. Joe Godfrey, the executive director of the Alabama Citizens Action Program, a group that holds substantial influence in the Legislature. “I don’t know that people feel had I think they feel disappointed. Here was a man who had a chance to accomplish great things, and he failed. ” But others said it had become clear that for conservative Christians, the cultural and political issues that define modern conservative politics mattered at least as much as moral piety. That was why, they suggested, Mr. Bentley was able to cling to his job for nearly 13 months after his reputation as a paragon of probity came under fire. “The idea that moral hypocrisy hurts you among evangelical voters is not true, if you’re sound on all of the fundamentals,” said Wayne Flynt, an ordained Baptist minister and one of Alabama’s historians. “Being sound on the fundamentals depends on what the evangelical community has decided the fundamentals have become. At this time, what is fundamental is hating liberals, hating Obama, hating abortion and hating marriage. ” When Mr. Bentley ran for governor in 2010, Christian voters saw extraordinary promise in the obscure lawmaker from Tuscaloosa who liked to tell people about how Bear Bryant, the revered University of Alabama football coach, had been one of his patients. He seemed oddly ordinary, the politician who was thought to be for a state increasingly frustrated by decades of corruption in Montgomery. “People were looking for something that was more grandfatherly, something that was more wise and trustworthy and less politically slick,” said Angi Stalnaker, who was Mr. Bentley’s campaign manager. “They wanted someone that they could see themselves having Sunday dinner with, and, of the candidates in 2010, Robert Bentley was the one you could see inviting over for fried chicken and cornbread. ” He won that election, and then another in 2014. But Dianne Bentley filed for divorce the next year. Months later, an ousted state official accused Mr. Bentley of having an affair with Rebekah Caldwell Mason, a top aide and former beauty pageant contestant whom he had taught in Sunday school in Tuscaloosa. Lurid audio recordings became public, and on Friday, a special counsel concluded that the governor had committed an array of misdeeds to try to cover up the “inappropriate relationship” that had led to Mr. Bentley and Ms. Mason leaving their congregation. Ms. Mason declined to comment, and the governor quit hours after impeachment hearings began. His abrupt exit — he failed to mention to reporters that his resignation was a condition of his plea agreement — spurred a new round of pain for Christians who had spent years supporting him. “I think he’s just like all of us: He’s made of flesh and bone, and he’s temptable,” said the Rev. John Killian, a former president of the Alabama Baptist State Convention. “I believe it was the devil, and I believe the devil knew he was bagging big game. ” Mr. Bentley’s public demise, Mr. Killian said, held lessons. “There is nothing Governor Bentley’s done that any of us couldn’t do if we’re not on guard,” he said. “People always saw him as a godly man. They’re disappointed, yes, but honest people need to realize we’re all susceptible. ” Some evangelical voters, who are part of one of Alabama’s most powerful voting blocs, have already begun considering whether they should change how they scrutinize candidates after a governor they regard as a bitter letdown. “I would hope they’d be more cautious,” said Roy S. Moore, who was suspended as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for his resistance to marriage. “Sometimes, politicians take advantages of that attention to morality and they will profess things they don’t actually stand for. ” Mr. Moore, who was one of Mr. Bentley’s rivals in 2010 and is considering another run for governor, said that voters were willing to look beyond indiscretions that happened before politicians took office. Once in power, though, the standards shifted, he said. “Once you get into office, they’ll judge you,” said Mr. Moore, who draws much of his popularity from evangelical Christians. In Decatur, Bob Allen, a doctor, said he would be looking for candidates to take actions effectively proving their religious convictions. “Those issues are important to me, but their record and character and integrity over time are more important than what they say,” said Dr. Allen, who twice voted for Mr. Bentley and said he hoped the former governor would repent. “Things like this are going to happen because people are imperfect,” he said. Even before Mr. Bentley’s resignation, there was a budding movement among religious conservatives here to combat malfeasance in state government that has extended well beyond the governor’s office. Mr. Bentley’s departure could strengthen that effort, Mr. Flynt said, even as he noted that he was startled by the response of evangelicals to the governor’s troubles. “Secular culture is eroding evangelicalism to the point where it takes us one full year to get rid of the governor because of all of these conflicting pressures,” he said. “He would have been out the door in an hour in the 1940s. ” | 0fake |
Fox News Editor Has His Own Really Creepy Suggestion For Trump’s VP (VIDEO) | With all the talk of Trump working on his list of potential VP picks, it s only natural that absolutely everyone under the sun would have an opinion or two about it. However, Fox News editor Chris Stirewalt s opinion should never have been uttered. He wants the King of Dunces to choose his own daughter, Ivanka, for VP.Why? Well, Stirewalt no doubt thinks this is a good enough reason: My favorite pick my absolutely favorite pick, I think is his daughter Ivanka. I think that is the best choice that he could make, he said. Everybody likes her! Has anybody ever said that they didn t like her? Everybody likes her I think he would be smart to pick his own daughter When it s a crazy election year, when weird stuff is happening, you gotta embrace the weird. Yeah, that would be weird all right. Way too weird. This is a man who is potentially a pedophile, and who has openly discussed screwing Ivanka multiple times. Recommending that he embrace the weird takes on a whole different and creepy vibe when put together with how disgusting His Royal Womanizer is.Watch Stirewalt turn horribly gross below:Of course, Charles Payne agreed that Ivanka would be a fantastic choice. She d definitely be one of the only women in His Royal Incestness inner circle, making the choice even more sickening. That an editor would actually suggest this shows how low Fox News is sinking to tout Donald Trump.Featured image via screen capture from embedded video | 1real |
Poland's new prime minister says opposes multi-speed Europe | WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland s new prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said on Tuesday in his first policy speech that he was opposed to a multi-speed Europe and that Warsaw wants to have a say in forming the future of the bloc. Deeper euro zone integration is sometimes called a multi-speed Europe because it would lead to different rates of convergence within the 28-member bloc. | 0fake |
Trump met Stanford's John Taylor in Fed chair search: official | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump met on Wednesday with Stanford University economist John Taylor in his search for a new chair of the Federal Reserve, a White House official said. Trump was joined for the meeting by Vice President Mike Pence and members of his team helping in his search for a Fed chair, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, the official told Reuters. Trump is working from a short list that includes Jerome Powell, a Fed governor, Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor, his top economic adviser Gary Cohn, and current Fed Chair Janet Yellen, whose term expires in February, sources have said. | 0fake |
Afghan officials say Mullah Omar, Taliban leader, may be dead | The reclusive leader of the Taliban hasn't been seen in public for more than a decade. The group is engaged in peace talks with the Afghan government.
Syed Zafar Hashemi, a deputy spokesman for Afghanistan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, speaks during a news conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, July 29, 2015. The Afghan government is investigating reports that Mullah Omar, leader of the Afghan Taliban, may be dead, a spokesman for the president's office said on Wednesday.
Mullah Omar of Afghanistan's Taliban regime is shown in this undated photo. Afghan officials are working to confirm reports that the Taliban leader may be dead.
Afghan officials are working to confirm reports that Taliban leader Mullah Omar is dead, just ahead of a new round of peace talks in Pakistan between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
At a last-minute press conference, Zafar Hashemi, a deputy spokesman for the president, said that they were “aware of the reports of the passing of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. We are still in the process of checking those reports,” according to the Associated Press.
The BBC says that "top sources within the Afghan administration and intelligence agency" had made the claims. The Taliban haven't yet commented on the reports.
Mullah Omar hasn’t been seen in public for years, and rumors of his death periodically crop up. An Afghan official told The Wall Street Journal that Kabul was informed of his death by Pakistan two years ago. A Pakistani official told AP that this latest report is “'speculation' designed to disrupt peace talks.”
The Taliban reportedly are divided over the talks, with some wanting to continue the insurgency they have been waging since the US came in 2001.
"Whether he is dead or alive is important because he is the collective figure for the Taliban," said a Western diplomat with connections to the Taliban leadership. "If he is dead, it would be much more difficult to get negotiations with the Taliban because there would be no collective figure to rally around and take collective responsibility for entering peace talks."
The peace talks come as the Taliban are struggling to hold on to their fighters, some of whom are attracted to the high-profile success of the so-called Islamic State. The Taliban have staged a series of “audacious attacks” to try and stave off defections, The Christian Science Monitor reported last month after a suicide attack in Kabul.
With its new activity, the Taliban is out to show restless commanders and fighters, as well as the Afghan people, that it remains a force to be reckoned with. … “ISIS is now seen as the winning horse in the race. It has imposed itself as the most powerful subversive Islamist movement – one that has been tremendously successful at accomplishing what it set out to do – and that is posing a serious challenge to other militant Islamist organizations from the Taliban to Hamas,” says Fawaz Gerges, a professor of contemporary Middle Eastern studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Last month Mullah Omar supposedly wrote a message backing the peace talks, but because the text posted on the Taliban website did not include any audio or video, it fueled rumors of his death, according to the BBC.
The assumption that he is dead helped drive several Taliban leaders to defect to IS, according to the BBC. And any confirmation of his death could spur more defections, particularly among those opposed to peace talks with the Afghan government.
Mullah Omar came to power after the Taliban emerged as the strongest force in the civil war that followed the pullout of Soviet forces. He later allied with Osama bin Laden, which put the Taliban in the crosshairs of the US after the 9/11 attacks. He has barely been heard from since then and has a $10 million bounty on his head.
The Taliban are not the only organization struggling to prove their continued relevance. The surging power and influence of IS has also sidelined Al Qaeda, which is trying to stem a wave of defections. | 0fake |
A COUGHING CLINTON Takes A Nasty Swipe At Matt Lauer…Bitterly Blames Men for Her Loss | What a bitter woman! She blames a different thing every week for her 2016 loss to President Trump. Everything she says below is a lie. She just makes it up as she goes along: She went on to describe how men who shaped the narrative of the campaign harmed her but are now under fire for sexual harassment. Hillary Clinton thinks that former NBC host Matt Lauer s demise is karma for how he questioned her about her private email server during the 2016 presidential campaign.Clinton was in Philadelphia on Thursday promoting her campaign memoir, What Happened, when she was asked about Lauer being fired this week over allegations of sexual misconduct, the Philly Voice reported. Lauer faced a storm of criticism last year when several journalists and commentators deemed his questioning of Clinton at a candidate forum unfair and even sexist. Every day I believe more in karma, Clinton said of Lauer.She went on to describe how men who shaped the narrative of the campaign harmed her but are now under fire for sexual harassment, echoing how her supporters have tied Lauer s alleged misconduct to his treatment of Clinton. She also repeated her past arguments about the election, primarily blaming a host of outside factors for her defeat. EXTENDED COUGHING FIT IS THIS KARMA TOO?At one point early in the evening, Clinton launched into an extended coughing fit, the kind of thing that tended to lead to theories during the campaign that the candidate was concealing some sort of illness. Weiner attempted to fill the time by making a self-deprecating joke about her own last name, but knowing that Clinton s history with a man of that particular surname is what led to the notorious Comey Letter, she may have not found it so funny.STILL TRYING TO SELL HER BOOK ON THE ROAD, CLINTON IS ONLY SUCCESSFUL IN MAKING HERSELF OUT TO BE THE BIGGEST WHINER AROUND The only video out there that we could find is of Hillary s response to a heckler:Philly and @HillaryClinton were having none of this asshole tonight #pizzagate #HillaryClinton #philly #whathappened pic.twitter.com/iuezuhhzKs Amy (@amyreyrn) December 1, 2017The heckler yelled out a question about Pizzagate She wasted no time in attacking the right wing . LOL!THE PHILLY NEWS COMMENTS ON THE CLINTON VISIT ARE 99.9% AGAINST CLINTON HERE S A SAMPLING:VIA: WFB | 1real |
50 Years After Apollo Disaster, Memorial for 3 Men, and for Era - The New York Times | CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Back in his days as a test pilot at Air Force Base in Ohio, Gus Grissom had a message for his wife, Betty. “If I die, have a party,” he said. Betty Grissom never did have that party. But on Friday, as for the past 25 years, there was a solemn observance at the memorial for her husband and two crewmates who were killed in the Apollo 1 disaster. Mr. Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White died in a flash fire that engulfed their capsule atop a Saturn 1B rocket during a routine training operation on Jan. 27, 1967. Mr. Grissom was 40. Ms. Grissom, 89, was at the memorial again on Friday, wearing a denim jacket with a large Apollo 1 patch in patriotic colors. She joined old friends, family members, and NASA officials and veterans, among them Charlie Duke, who took part in the Apollo 16 moon landing. With the recent deaths of the astronauts John Glenn and Eugene A. Cernan and the sea changes in Washington, the gathering felt like a memorial for an era as well as for three men. At the ceremony, candles were lit for the dead astronauts by members of their families, including Cody Grissom, 22, a pilot, who is completing his last year at his grandfather’s alma mater, Purdue University. Representatives from the Navy, the Air Force and NASA spoke, and a Navy bugler performed taps after the sun went down. “It is important that Challenger and Columbia are remembered, and that Apollo 1 is remembered,” said the Kennedy Space Center director, Robert D. Cabana. “And that we take those steps that create an environment where everyone has a voice, that we really work to ensure the success and the safety of the crew as we continue to explore and move beyond our planet. ” Ms. Grissom said this year’s ceremony was probably her last. It coincided with a NASA tribute exhibit about Apollo 1 at the Kennedy Space Center, which she, like many, thought was long overdue. “I thought this is probably a good time to call it quits with them finally getting a memorial of some kind,” she said. This year’s event drew around 150 people, one of the largest crowds ever for a memorial that few people knew of unless they were related to an astronaut or were a space fan. “We need heroes today, and these were heroes,” said one such fan, Robert Pearlman, an American space historian. People from all over the world traveled to the memorial, among them Masato Maruyama, 65, who has come for the past 10 years from Tokyo. He brought a big bottle of sake to share with the family and friends. Mr. Maruyama said Mr. Grissom reminded him of his father, who was in the Japanese Navy. He remembers just where he was when the fire occurred. “It’s not the distance — it’s in here,” he said, pointing to his heart. “I’m just one of hundreds of thousands. Apollo counted a lot not just for Americans, but human beings. ” Although the launch platform is crumbling like a concrete Greek ruin, and stenciled with an eerie “Abandon in Place,” the site was decorated with three floral wreaths brought by the Grissom family. A bagpiper stood ready and Ms. Grissom sat front and center. She was treated as the event’s grande dame as people lined up to speak with her. “I want you to know it is such an honor,” said Shirley Brown, whose shop provided the wreaths. “The first time you walked in my shop and said, ‘I’m Betty Grissom,’ I thought Queen Elizabeth had walked in. You never went down, you fought all the way. ” “I never quit,” Ms. Grissom agreed, in the kind of taciturn response her astronaut husband might have offered. Many years after the accident, two space buffs, Bob Castro and Mark Pinchell, started going out to the site of the fire, which is on Air Force property, in their own private tribute. One year, they bumped into each other, and came up with the idea of doing something bigger. “Just two space geeks who were going to Pad 34 and doing their own separate ceremonies,” said Mark Grissom, 63, who was 13 when his father died. “They met at the pad and decided to invite the families. ” The Grissoms were the first astronaut family to become involved. Early on, car headlights provided the only illumination. While other astronauts and families have been absent over the years, this year Roger Chaffee’s wife, Martha, and her daughter, Sheryl, attended, along with Ed White’s daughter Bonnie. “This is the families’ memorial,” said Sonny Witt, the 45th Space Wing director of operations for Division 1 at Patrick Air Force Base, who helps provide the access. “Not the Air Force and not NASA. They are the ones that lost the husbands and brothers and fathers. Mistakes were made, and they paid the price. ” When the three Apollo 1 astronauts were trapped in their burning capsule on Pad 34, a cry for help, believed to be from Mr. Chaffee, a rookie astronaut, came over the communications system: “Hey, we’re burning up. ” Mr. White tried opening the hatch, but caught within the highly combustible pure oxygen atmosphere, the crew suffocated. “I don’t want any of this forgotten,” Ms. Grissom said. “Gus Grissom was a human being. ” Mr. Grissom, often seen as an underdog, was a favorite astronaut of many Americans. He infamously “screwed the pooch” — as Tom Wolfe put it in “The Right Stuff” — when the hatch blew on his Mercury capsule, causing it to sink it in the Atlantic upon splashdown. Mr. Grissom was initially blamed, and the sunken capsule cost the astronaut couple a visit to the Kennedy White House. In the end, he was cleared of responsibility. Ms. Grissom, who lives in Houston by herself, and Mr. Grissom were high school sweethearts in Mitchell, Ind. Her life always revolved around him. She worked as a telephone operator for Indiana Bell, putting her husband through college at Purdue, where he studied mechanical engineering on the G. I. Bill. He was selected as an astronaut after flying an Sabre on over a hundred combat missions in Korea. Death was always on the horizon for the wives. The program lost seven astronauts on the path to the moon, largely as a result of crashes of the the supersonic jet trainer airplanes the astronauts flew back and forth from where they lived in Houston and Cape Canaveral. When the news of the Apollo 1 accident came to her, delivered by a NASA doctor when she was at a friend’s home for a weekly poker night, Ms. Grissom told her friend that she had “already died 100, 000 deaths” living with her husband. Martha Chaffee, the youngest space widow, slept with the flag that hung over her husband’s coffin at Arlington. Pat White killed herself years later, a weekend before she and some of the other wives had a reunion planned, her friends said. The space widows felt rejected after their husbands died, while still living in the closely knit community of astronaut families in the “space burbs” by the Manned Spacecraft Center (later the Johnson Space Center) in Houston, nicknamed “Togethersville” because of its exclusivity. In the late ’60s, Ms. Grissom became a black sheep among the astronaut community. She was the first of the widows to sue NASA’s largest contractor, North American Rockwell, over the construction of the capsule, and she inspired Ms. Chaffee and Ms. White to do the same. Ms. Grissom eventually settled for $350, 000. On Friday, as Ms. Grissom was helped off the old launching pad, professional and amateur stargazers pointed out the International Space Station passing in the sky above, along with Venus and a shooting star. Back in the car and about to be driven to a celebratory dinner for friends and family at a hotel in nearby Cocoa Beach, she turned to her son and said, “The stars are out tonight. ” Earlier, she spoke of how her husband’s sacrifice helped pave the way for the missions to come like the Apollo 11 moonwalk her husband never got to see. Still, she said, “I’m pretty sure he got to the moon before they did. ” She added: “Of course he didn’t make it, but in spirit I think he was already there. ” | 0fake |
PRINCIPAL OF WEALTHY NYC SCHOOL Sends Hate-Filled Email To Parents: Trump Is Worse Than 9-11 | The principal of a fancy New York City private school says the election of President Trump is worse than the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.Steve Nelson, principal of the Calhoun School, fired off a hate-filled email to parents blasting the president. He also said Trump s election would be more devastating than Vietnam, Watergate and the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. I walked the complex inner-city streets of Cleveland during the racial unrest of the 60 s, he wrote in an email obtained by the New York Post. I was in rural Georgia when Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated in Tennessee. I watched every moment of the Watergate hearings that led to the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. I watched soot-covered New Yorkers grimly trudging north on West End Avenue on September 11, 2001. I am more troubled now. The principal would have us believe that he was more disturbed by Trump s election than the sight of New Yorkers falling from the sky or the Twin Towers collapsing onto the streets of lower Manhattan.Just to put this in perspective, the principal believes President Trump is worse than the Muslim hijackers who flew jetliners into buildings and slaughtered thousands of Americans.I do not know Principal Nelson, but he sounds like a deeply disturbed educator who should not be around impressionable school children.I m rather surprised the principal did not blame Trump for sinking the Titanic or causing the Black Plague.As repulsive as his comments might have been, I believe the principal s beliefs are rather mainstream among liberals.- Todd Starnes, FOX NewsThe controversial missive roiled some parents of the elite Upper West Side school, who thought Calhoun went too far.But some members of the school community said they had the principal s back. Proud to work at Calhoun and for someone like Steve Nelson, school staffer Nahuel Fanjul-Arguijo in a Facebook post. Getting this email yesterday made me a very proud Calhoun alumni, posted Rachel Geisler. NYDNSo let s set the record straight.President Trump has never waged jihad against Americans nor has he assassinated a Civil Rights leader or napalmed a jungle in Vietnam.And to compare those horrific atrocities with the president s desire to make our nation great again is not just offensive it s downright evil. FNPeople like Steve Nelson, principal of the Calhoun School in NYC, who have so much hate in their hearts have no business anywhere near young and impressionable children. It really doesn t matter what your political leanings are. If a person tasked with educating children has so little control over their seething anger after their candidate loses an election that they feel it necessary to drag the parents into their world of pity and hate, why should any parent who have any faith in their mental capacity? Why would any parent, regardless of their political persuasion, entrust this clearly unhinged man with the safety and well-being of their most precious possessions? To have lived in New York City and witnessed the horrific tragedy of 9-11 firsthand should make his email all the more serious for these parents | 1real |
Tina Fey SKEWERS Trump For Being A ‘Chump’ Who ‘Can’t Muster The Dignity Of A Seventh Grader’ | Tina Fey put the jokes aside and took serious aim at Donald Trump.In an interview with David Letterman for The Hollywood Reporter, Fey talked about human dignity and the struggle to find dignity in Trump s America. What do you think is the No. 1 struggle of humanity now? Letterman asked. How are we going to proceed with any kind of dignity in an increasingly ugly world? Fey responded. In a world where the president makes fun of handicapped people and fat people, how do we proceed with dignity? Indeed, Donald Trump has apparently set his sights on destroying human dignity for the last year and half, reducing many groups of people to outcasts while basically telling white conservatives that they are the only ones in America who matter.Fey also talked about how women were so close to making their lives so much better, only to watch as America voted for a douchebag who will likely help Republicans reverse much of the progress women have made over the last century. It feels like we were on the precipice of things getting pretty good, and now we re in a bit of a throwback moment. I definitely came out of last month feeling misogyny is much more real than two years ago. Fey is also concerned about the Internet and how Trump and his deplorable supporters are using it. But the thing I worry about [more] than actual human interaction is the Internet. Because that s just despicable: people just being able to be awful to each other without having to be in the same room. It s metastasizing now, thanks to our glorious president-elect who can t muster the dignity of a seventh-grader. It s so easy for people to abuse each other and to abandon all civility. Elsewhere in the interview, Fey commented on Trump s Twitter tantrums over his portrayal on Saturday Night Live. It just makes me feel sick for the state of the world because it s so beneath a president, she said.Then she commented on Trump demanding an apology from the cast of Hamilton for delivering a message of unity and diversity to Mike Pence. I thought, our president-elect is a chump of a manager because don t put yourself in a position where you re asking for something and you re going to be told no You re the president. You demanded an apology that you can t get. Bad management skills. Tina Fey is right. Donald Trump should focus on the presidency instead of embarrassing himself and the office by lashing out at people on Twitter. He has created a toxic atmosphere of hate that has only hurt this country and millions of Americans who now face the daily threat of hate crimes and bullying. He should be ashamed and he definitely should not be president.Featured Image: Wikimedia | 1real |
Zakharova: The US is protecting Al-Nusra from being destroyed | November 4, 2016 - Fort Russ News - RIA Novosti - translated by J. Arnoldski -
The US should get rid of the illusion that there is the possibility of “taming” terrorists, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated.
“Terrorism is like a snake: you turn your back on it and it bites you. Don’t play with it,” she said in an interview to China Radio International.
Zakharova remarked that Western and regional countries have invested a lot of forces and means in terrorist groupings.
“But these are terrorists, and they shouldn’t be flirted with,” Zakharova added.
In the diplomat’s opinion, the actions of the American side, which is not allowing Jebat Al-Nusra to be destroyed, “are a clear manifestation of the fact that they are protecting it.”
Zakharova also noted that this is not the first time that Russia is clashing with such an approach by the US.
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Now Trump Wants to ‘Drain The Sewer’ So The Internet Let Him Know He’s A Piece Of Sh*t (TWEETS) | Donald Trump is losing it. On Monday, he kicked off his morning with perhaps his dumbest ravings yet about swamps and sewers and fake news (oh my?). Drain the Swamp should be changed to Drain the Sewer it s actually much worse than anyone ever thought, and it begins with the Fake News! our middle-schooler-in-chief tweeted.Drain the Swamp should be changed to Drain the Sewer it's actually much worse than anyone ever thought, and it begins with the Fake News! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2017If you re thinking what the f*ck is he on about? then you re not the only one. For one, a sewer is a drainage system. That s the whole point.Just like Adolf Hitler, Trump continued his attacks on the L genpresse FAKE NEWS as Trump calls the media.He also once again demanded that everyone focus on Crooked Hillarys rather than himself. It is unclear if he meant that as a possessive or a plural.So why aren't the Committees and investigators, and of course our beleaguered A.G., looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations? Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2017Basically, this tantrum was a gigantic mountain of stupidity and Americans were glad to mock him mercilessly for it.You are right. If DC was a swamp before, you made it a sewer. Next stop: toxic waste dump Dani Bostick (@danibostick) July 24, 2017How do you think sewers work, exactly? Ryan Broderick (@broderick) July 24, 2017Brilliant!Although, to be fair, DC s sewer is clogged by a MASSIVE fatberg at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Sean (@DailyChef7) July 24, 2017If by Fake News you mean My misleading tweets, statements & surrogates, agree! Screw the sewer; in 2018 & 2020 let s Flush the Toilet ! Pep Rosenfeld (@peprosenfeld) July 24, 2017Okay, have you tried calling the plumber? Let me know how it goes. nic shields (@nicshields) July 24, 2017You ARE the biggest, slimiest, diseased sewer rat so stop whining #DonnieTwoScoops! pic.twitter.com/Zx7GKfBUV4 alexandra halaby (@iskandrah) July 24, 2017You re SO right! You DID create a sewer in the @WhiteHouse! Thank you for correctly pointing that out. #drainthesewer Shaun O Banion (@shaun_obanion) July 24, 2017Ofcourse it s worse. You added half of Goldman Sachs, the foreclosure king, a racist elf, white nationalists, neo-nazis & Russian colluders Facts Do Matter (@WilDonnelly) July 24, 2017Where would sewers drain into? Surely you d have to use more sewers and that would compound the problem, no? Conor Mac (@thefella) July 24, 2017Yes, change the slogan. That should stop you from hiring a rogues gallery of the least qualified, most compromised federal officials ever. Mark Banker (@themarkbanker) July 24, 2017Is a sewer better or worse than a swamp? This is the most interesting debate topic you ve raised since becoming president. Paul Caiozzo (@PaulCaiozzo) July 24, 2017Yes, you managed to drain the swamp directly into the WH. And your constant refrain of fake news leads us to believe it isn t fake at all Susan Price (@PriceSjrw5614) July 24, 2017So you turned the swamp into a sewer ? And now it s overflowing. So much winning! Paul Cyr (@PaulCyr5) July 24, 2017We know you re much worse than we first thought. We d love to drain the sewer . How long before you can move out? Kristine Lynne (@thegoodmama) July 24, 2017It begins with you so when are you gonna resign so we can drain the sewer? Sheree Williams (@ShereeW1974) July 24, 2017Trump seems nervous about something. Could it be that his son-in-law, son, and former campaign manager are testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee about their collusion with Russia? The fact that the noose is tightening?What s he worried about?Featured image via Getty Images/screengrab | 1real |
Is It Time To Reconsider Lifetime Appointments To The Supreme Court? | Is It Time To Reconsider Lifetime Appointments To The Supreme Court?
The unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia and the looming face-off between the White House and the Senate over his replacement have revived proposals that would limit the tenure of U.S. Supreme Court justices.
Legal scholars from both political parties renewed a call Tuesday to reconsider how much time justices spend on the high court. Many of them cited, with disapproval, a bruising and protracted clash building between President Obama and the GOP-controlled Senate over when and how to fill Scalia's vacancy.
"The point of life tenure is to keep justices insulated from politics," said George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr. "That didn't quite pan out."
For years now, lawyers have been floating proposals that future high-court justices spend no more than 18 years at a time on the Supreme Court bench. The plan would space out appointments, so presidents would make appointments every two years, supporters said. That would bring regular turnover and fresh thinking to the court — and align with the longer life spans of Americans since the nation's founding, they argue.
"It just sounds undemocratic," said Gabe Roth, executive director of an advocacy group called Fix the Court, about the lifetime court appointments. "There's definitely concern about the justices being out of touch. There have been a number of cases with modern technology, whether it be smartphones or bulk data collection or different types of ways of getting TV over the airwaves or over the Internet."
Thomas Merrill, a law professor at Columbia University and a former deputy U.S. solicitor general (1987-1990), said he's been "a little bit skeptical" of the idea of term limits for Supreme Court justices. But, Merrill said, his thinking has evolved.
"My current cautious endorsement of this is based on the perception that the whole issue of appointments to the Supreme Court has become incredibly contentious, partisan, political, almost to the point where the political system freezes up, as we're witnessing right now with the Scalia death," Merrill said. "It would be a good thing not to have the type of Armageddon it looks like we're about to have."
Term-limit supporters point to a 2015 poll by Reuters/Ipsos, after high-profile rulings on Obama's health care legislation and same-sex marriage, that suggested two-thirds of respondents would support a 10-year limit on tenure on the Supreme Court.
But actually changing the system could be remarkably difficult for a political system that's already near paralysis. Some lawyers said the change could be made by lawmakers, but others have concluded it would require amending the Constitution. To do that, the House and Senate would need to vote their support, and then three-quarters of the states would have to approve. Another path would be for two-thirds of the states to call for a Constitutional Convention.
"Not likely, but possible," Kerr of George Washington University said. "We'll see how this year goes. It may become unbearable with the president and the Senate duking it out every day." | 0fake |
Delete Your Account – Episode 23: Don’t Get Sick | If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon page for as little as $5 a month. Also, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes . We can’t do this show without your support!!! On this episode, Roqayah and Kumars speak with a married father of one who has spent over ten years as a biologist and environmental protection specialist, planning large scale projects to minimize environmental impacts for several federal agencies. John (not his real name) was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in March and he’s now found himself stuck in between massive gaps in our healthcare system and an out-of-control drug war.
John tells us about his initial diagnosis, a diagnosis that came many months late because of his inability to get the care he needed in a timely fashion. This delay in care happened despite him having some of the best health insurance available as a federal employee. Once diagnosed, John tells us about how he was forced to continue working full-time so as not to lose his life insurance or health insurance policies. Without life insurance, his family would be severely impacted if he should die, and without health insurance, he could not afford the care required to keep him alive. If he were to get insurance on the private market, it would be too expensive to afford, even with his current salary, and the benefits would be severely limited compared to what he currently has.
John also tells us how he is at risk for losing his job (hence the pseudonym) because of his use of medical marijuana, the only treatment that has allowed him to deal with the horrible effects of his cancer and chemotherapy treatments. There are strict rules against federal employees using medical marijuana, even if they work in states where it is legal. Recently, it was announced that random drug-testing would be extended to all federal employees, putting John at-risk for losing his job, his healthcare, and his life insurance. We discuss the pharmaceutical industry’s role in fighting the legitimacy of medical marijuana, as well as their role in perpetuating skyrocketing healthcare costs. We also discuss the importance of writing to government officials to speak out on behalf of John and those in a similar position who are denied life-saving treatment, whether due to cost or due to our indefensible drug laws.
Look for a story from Roqayah in Shadowproof on John’s situation shortly!
The post Delete Your Account – Episode 23: Don’t Get Sick appeared first on Shadowproof . | 1real |
Israeli PM Rejects Obama’s $40 Billion Aid Offer, Demands More While America’s Children Go Hungry | The state of Israel currently receives a staggering $3 billion a year in so-called aid, much of it for its military, which is then used to brutalize the Palestinian people in the form of a military occupation and a settlement apparatus of land theft that is illegal under international law. With the current agreement set to expire in 2017, Israel wants a raise. They are now asking for an estimated $5 billion a year over the next ten years, for a total of more than $50 billion.Despite the fact that we can use this money at home to help America s 16 million children who live below the poverty level, Israel s prime minister not only is asking for more money, but he had the nerve to reject President Obama s offer of $40 billion over the next ten years. Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israelis are using their pull in Washington to get the POTUS to play by their rules. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a lobby group in Washington that works on behalf of a foreign country (Israel) often through the coercion and arm twisting of American officials, just got 83 U.S. senators to sign a letter demanding that the president send money to Israel. The letter states: In light of Israel s dramatically rising defense challenges, we stand ready to support a substantially enhanced new long-term agreement to help provide Israel the resources it requires to defend itself and preserve its qualitative military edge. Not surprisingly, Senator Bernie Sanders was not one of the signatories to the letter. The senator has recognized not only that Israel uses disproportionate force on Palestinian civilians through weapons the U.S. gives to Israel, but he also knows the alarming poverty rate that exists in our own backyard with a staggering number of children living in food insecure homes: Another element to this insane demand for money from a country supposedly in need is that Israelis enjoy free universal healthcare and education. American households incur billions in debt just so their children can be able to go to school. Moreover, many Americans continue to have no access to healthcare and Republicans are trying to kill Obamacare.It s time for America to take care of its children, its sick, and its hungry. It s time for America s politicians to worry about America first instead of an ungrateful country that doesn t require aid but rather needs to be stopped and sanctioned for its brutality against the Palestinian people.Featured image via Wikimedia Commons | 1real |
Watchdog says Gulf rift taking toll on ordinary citizens | DUBAI (Reuters) - Families are being torn apart by the rift between Qatar and three other Gulf Arab states which began six months ago, Amnesty International said on Thursday, despite measures to ease the impact of the crisis on ordinary citizens. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, along with Egypt, imposed travel, economic and diplomatic sanctions on Qatar in June over allegations of supporting terrorism. Doha denies the charge. The human rights group, citing interviews with individuals and Qatari officials, said thousands of people had been affected by the rift, which has split families, raised food prices for foreign workers and made visits to Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia more difficult. Officials from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain could not immediately be reached to comment on the report. But the three U.S.-allied countries had announced measures in June to ease the impact of the dispute on mixed families, including setting up hotlines to deal with humanitarian issues. Saudi Arabia has also said it was allowing visits to holy sites and opened its doors to Muslims in Qatar to perform the annual Muslim haj pilgrimage. Diplomatic efforts led by Kuwait to resolve the dispute have so far failed to achieve a breakthrough. The report was based on interviews with 44 affected individuals conducted in late November in Qatar as well as meetings with Qatari officials. Despite measures to allow families in mixed marriages to visit, many were finding it difficult to comply with procedures required to apply for a laissez-passer that allows residents of Qatar to travel to see loves ones in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or the UAE, the report said. It said that there was scant, or no, information about the application process on official UAE and Saudi ministry websites, while travel to Bahrain had become more difficult since Manama imposed an entry visa requirement for Qatari nationals and residents at a time when the embassy in Doha is closed. Affected families told Amnesty International that hotlines announced by the Bahrain, Saudi Arabian and UAE governments were difficult to access, the rights watchdog said. Lynn Maalouf, Director of Research for the Middle East at Amnesty International, said that by imposing travel restrictions on ordinary people, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have violated the right to family life, education and freedom of expression . Since this dispute began in June, our fears about its potential to rip families apart have been cruelly and emphatically realized, Maalouf said in a statement. | 0fake |
(Video) CNN Anchor Mocks ‘pitiful’ Hillary Campaign Watch Party | You know you re really in the tank when the CNN anchors are mocking you! A total of 6 people attended a Hillary Watch Party for here second announcement aka campaign reset today. | 1real |
Is US now a climate change leader? How Obama's new plan measures up. | The climate change plan announced by the Obama administration Monday is not as aggressive as plans by some other countries. But it suggests the US is serious about the issue and gives the country new credibility in climate talks.
As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?
President Obama speaks about his Clean Power Plan in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Monday The president is mandating even steeper greenhouse gas cuts from US power plants than previously expected, while granting states more time and broader options to comply.
The Obama administration's new rules to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from existing power plants have helped propel the United States to a leadership role in international efforts to curb global warming, some analysts suggest.
Monday's announcement of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is being seen as a significant step forward for the US and for the international process.
"This is a case of leading by example," says Elliot Diringer, executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a climate- and energy-policy think tank in Arlington, Va. "The rest of the world has been waiting a long time for the US to demonstrate the kind of leadership we're seeing now."
The plan adds to the US's diplomatic credibility on climate, adds Andrew Deutz, director of international government relations for The Nature Conservancy. And that is as significant as the emissions goals, he suggests.
But how strict are the emissions goals themselves? Is the US on the verge of becoming a world leader in cutting carbon emissions?
There’s no easy way to compare the climate efforts of different nations, specialists say, because negotiators working on a Paris treaty are taking a "pledge and review" approach. Each country chooses its own targets, based on a range of factors.
The Clean Power Plan aims to cut CO2 emissions from existing power plants to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. It is part of a broader Obama administration plan to cut carbon emissions economy-wide. The goal for that broader plan is to reduce all CO2 emissions to between 26 and 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
The European Union, by contrast, aims to cut emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels – a more-aggressive target – by 2030. Some European countries not in the EU, such as Norway and Iceland, aim to at least match the EU targets. Switzerland aims for 50 percent cuts.
Meanwhile, China, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore are using 2005 as the base year for their targets, like the US. Canada, New Zealand, and Japan have proposed emissions cuts of 25 to 30 percent by 2030. China and Singapore have pledged to significantly reduce their carbon intensity – the amount of carbon produced per unit of gross domestic product. Their goal is to see that their emissions peak by 2030.
Still others, such as Mexico, South Korea, Ethiopia, and Morocco, have set another, even softer baseline, offering to cut emissions between 32 and 64 percent, compared with what their emissions might have been in 2030 if emissions followed a "business as usual" path.
Of particular interest are India, Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa, which have yet to submit plans, notes David Waskow, who heads the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute in Washington. Along with China, these countries fall into a category of newly industrialized nations whose economic aspirations could lead to troubling emissions paths.
"People have tried to devise all sorts of formulas to suggest what an equitable distribution of effort would be," says Mr. Diringer. So far, none has stuck.
Still, Monday's announcement gives the US fresh credibility in dealing with climate change. This new credibility first emerged last November, says Mr. Deutz, when Mr. Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping jointly announced their national offerings toward a new global climate pact during a summit in Beijing. For its part, China committed to capping emissions by 2030, with renewable energy sources accounting for 20 percent of the country's generating capacity. The country also would reduce its carbon intensity by 60 to 65 percent by 2030.
"That did a couple of things," Deutz says. "It put the US out there with a significant, credible target. It demonstrated that China was prepared to commit to an international target as well. And the fact that the US and China were moving together helped to unlock the negotiating space."
That played out in interesting ways a month later at global climate talks in Lima, Peru.
"Suddenly the US became a credible, positive force in the negotiations, getting a lot more respect than it had previously," he says. "It also meant that some countries that were hiding behind the US couldn't do that, and they were exposed."
Now, with the Clean Power Plan, which covers a sector of the economy responsible for 31 percent of the country's carbon emissions, the White House has added meat to the bones of its broader, international offering, Mr. Diringer says.
How all this plays out in Paris remains to be seen. Counting EU countries as a single entity, so far 22 countries have proposed their individual contributions to a new treaty. Taken together, these represent 56 percent of global emissions. But the commitments fall far short of what it would take to put the world on track to meet its current global-warming objective – holding global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
Many developing countries view as inadequate the emissions plans industrial countries have offered so far. Other difficult issues that don't involve emissions targets also remain to be solved.
And even with a fully operational Clean Power Plan, a new administration faces a lot of work to achieve the overall emissions reductions Obama has put forward to the Paris meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, notes Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.
Still, the Clean Power Plan represents "a very important step" in fulfilling the US's commitment, Mr. Meyer says. "Given the history at the state level with things like renewable-electricity standards and energy efficiency programs, we think it's quite likely that the US could overachieve the standard" in the Clean Power Plan. | 0fake |
The Source of our Rage: The Ruling Elite Is Protected from the Consequences of its Dominance | Charles Hugh Smith
There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness. But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance.
We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape.
If I had to pick one chart that illustrates the widening divide between the Ruling Elite and the non-elites, it is this chart of wages as a share of the nation’s output (GDP): 46 years of relentless decline, interrupted by gushing fountains of credit and asset bubbles that enriched the few while leaving the economic landscape of the many in ruins.
The Ruling Elite once had an obligation to uphold the social contract as a responsibility that came with their vast privilege, power and wealth (i.e. noblesse oblige ).
America’s Ruling Elite has transmogrified into an incestuous self-serving few unapologetically plundering the many. In their hubris-soaked arrogance, their right to rule is unquestioningly based on their moral and intellectual superiority to “the little people” they loot with abandon.
Rather than feel a responsibility to the nation, America’s Elite views the status quo as a free pass to self-aggrandizement.
Much has changed in America in the past 46 years. Not only have wages and salaries declined as a share of “economic growth,” but the wealth that has been generated has flowed to the top of the wealth/power pyramid (see chart below).
Social mobility has also declined drastically: Restoring America’s Economic Mobility , as has trust in government and key institutions.
As Frank Buckley, the author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America observed:
“In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center.”
The top .01% has seen its share of the household wealth triple from 7% to 22% in the past four decades, while the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the bottom 90% has plummeted from 36% to 23%.
As I described in America’s Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired and Now That the Presidential-Election Side Show Is Finally Ending…. , the economy is rapidly undergoing structural changes that tend to reward the top 5% class of technocrats and managers and the top .1% with millions in mobile capital, while leaving the bottom 95% in the dust.
Rather than address this rising inequality directly and honestly, the Ruling Elite has parroted propaganda and policies that protect their gains while obfuscating the reality that most American households have been losing ground for decades, a decline that has been masked by replacing real income with rising debt.
The ceaseless parroting of the Ruling Elite and the Mainstream Media that prosperity has been rising for everyone is nothing less than the destruction of truth. This propaganda has one purpose: to mask the inequality and injustice built into the American status quo.
The rapid concentration of wealth has also concentrated political power in the hands of a few who seamlessly combine public and private modes of power.
This wealth and power protects the Ruling Elite from the perverse consequences of their dominance. Their precious offspring rarely serve at the point of the American military’s spear, they never lose their jobs or income when corporations shift production (and R&D, etc.) overseas, and they are never replaced with illegal immigrants paid under the table.
Rather, the Ruling Elite is pleased to pay immigrants a pittance to care for their children, clean their luxe homes, walk their dogs, etc.
This is why we’re enraged: we bear the consequences of the Ruling Elite’s dominance. The system is rigged to benefit the few, who use their wealth and power to protect themselves from the destructive consequences of their self-serving dominance.
This rage is as yet inchoate, sensed but not yet understood as the inevitable result of a broken system and a predatory Elite that exploits the system to maximize their private gain by any means available .
ELECTION NOTE: As I write this Tuesday evening, it appears Donald Trump may win the presidency. For those who cannot understand how anyone could possibly vote for Trump, please read the above essay again and ponder what people were voting against by voting for Trump .
They may well have been voting against the corrupt, self-serving status quo rather than voting for the individual Donald Trump.
There are very few opportunities for powerless non-elites to register their disapproval of the nation’s Ruling Elite and the corrupt status quo. Voting for an outsider in a national election is one such rare opportunity.
As I noted in October, The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed (October 20, 2016).
If you still don’t understand how Trump could win, please read the above essay as many times as is necessary for you to get it: the status quo of corrupt self-serving insiders generates injustice and inequality as its only possible output. | 1real |
At least 20 hostages dead in siege of hotel in Mali, official says | Several gunmen seized a luxury hotel in Mali’s capital on Friday, killing at least 20 people in an attack that raised fresh concerns about security in a country that has battled Islamist insurgents for years.
Even after a multinational campaign to defeat them, militants have proved capable of targeting prominent locations like the city’s Radisson Blu Hotel, where the seven-hour standoff took place.
Security forces swept through the Radisson on Friday afternoon, freeing the last hostages and pursuing the gunmen, who had charged through the hotel yelling “Allahu akbar!” — or “God is great!” As the troops cleared the hotel, they found the floors littered with the bodies of Malians and foreign visitors, including a Belgian government official.
The State Department said a U.S. citizen was among the dead. A department spokesman had reported earlier that no Americans were killed or injured.
An al-Qaeda affiliate based in Africa claimed Friday’s attack. It was the latest in a year of deadly Islamist-led assaults across sub-Saharan Africa, where a patchwork of conflicts has sometimes been overshadowed by Islamic State violence in other parts of the world. From al-Shabab in Somalia to Boko Haram in Nigeria, the continent is host to a profusion of violent extremist groups, with a range of local and transnational goals, seeking to execute large-scale attacks against civilians.
[It’s not just the Islamic State. Other terror groups surge in West Africa.]
In Mali, Friday’s attack underscored how vulnerable the West African country remains, even after French forces and a small number of U.S. troops helped unseat Islamists from their northern stronghold in 2013. Before that campaign, militants appeared to be gaining ground, moving closer to the capital, seizing on the chaos caused by a 2012 military coup. The current government still has only tenuous influence in parts of the country, and the remaining French forces in particular are considered targets.
The gunmen stormed the hotel early Friday, sending some of the 170 guests and staff members fleeing in panic and prompting others to seek hiding places. One witness said the attackers freed some captives who were able to recite verses from the Koran. By late Friday afternoon, Mali’s security minister, Col. Salif Traore, said the remaining hostages were safe.
At least 20 people were killed, Traore said. The Reuters news agency, citing U.N. officials, said at least 27 bodies were seen. Authorities worked through the evening to identify the dead.
Three U.N. staff members in the hotel during the attack were safely evacuated, said Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. U.N. peacekeepers helped secure the perimeter and provided medical aid and forensics assistance, Dujarric said.
The United Nations has envoys in Bamako as part of Mali’s reconciliation efforts — what has become the deadliest peacekeeping mission of the past three years, with 53 U.N. peacekeepers killed since 2013.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said three Chinese nationals were among the dead and four were rescued.
[How U.S. troops aided at the scene of the hostage standoff]
Meanwhile, security forces tried to pin down the attackers in the heart of Bamako. Officials said that four gunmen were holed up Friday night in a hotel room but that there were no hostages with them.
A group affiliated with al-Qaeda, al-Mourabitoun, said its followers were behind the attack — similar to a smaller assault on a hotel in August that was claimed by the same group. Mali has faced repeated attacks from insurgents linked to al-Qaeda and other factions, but the Islamic State does not have major footholds in the region.
One Senegalese guest, Aissatou Gueye, was in her room when the attackers entered. Like many other guests, she was there to attend a large mining conference. “They were asking people to recite the Koran, and if they do, nothing will happen to them,” she said outside the hotel. Gueye saw one person shot dead before she ran to safety.
About a dozen Americans were rescued from the hotel, including several employees of the U.S. Embassy in Bamako, said State Department spokesman John Kirby.
The American victim was identified by her family as Anita Datar, an international development worker from Takoma Park, Md. The U.S. ambassador to Mali called the family late Friday afternoon to inform them, Datar’s mother said. Datar, the mother of a young son, worked for Palladium, an international development firm with offices in Washington.
[Anita Datar, the only known American killed in Mali, was there to help]
A member of a U.S. Special Operations unit helped to escort guests evacuated from the hotel, the Pentagon said. About 22 U.S. Defense Department personnel were in Bamako when the hotel was attacked.
President Obama, speaking to business leaders at a summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, expressed condolences to the people of Mali. “Mali security forces and our own diplomatic and security agencies rushed in to save lives,” Obama said. “This barbarity only stiffens our resolve to meet this challenge. We will stand with the people of Mali to rid the country of terrorists and strengthen their democracy.”
Authorities drew no direct links to last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris. But Mali — home to the ancient city of Timbuktu — has been at the center of a French-backed effort to drive back Islamist rebels who once controlled large portions of the country.
Security had been reinforced in Bamako — specifically around locations popular with foreigners, including the Radisson — after the Paris attacks, Traore said. He added that the attackers entered the hotel through a side entrance, “which makes us believe that they were familiar with the hotel.”
Foreigners are often targeted in Mali. Yet militants had never seized a target as prominent as the 190-room Radisson Blu, where foreign business people and diplomats are known to stay and dine.
Earlier this month — before the rampage in Paris — the leader of Ansar Dine, one of Mali’s main Islamist groups, released a statement encouraging attacks that would “push away the aggression of the French Crusader assailant” in the former French colony, which stretches from tropical West Africa to desert regions bordering Algeria.
A contingent of French troops is stationed in Mali, and President François Hollande on Thursday had praised the campaign against the Islamist insurgents.
“France is leading this war with its armed forces, its soldiers, its courage,” he said. “It must carry out this war with its allies, its partners giving us all the means available, as we did in Mali, as we are going to continue in Iraq, as we will continue in Syria.”
One of the rescued hostages, popular Guinean singer Sékouba “Bambino” Diabate, told reporters that he hid under his bed and heard two assailants speaking in English as they searched an adjacent room.
“I stayed still, hidden under the bed, not making a noise,” he said. “I heard them say in English: ‘Did you load it? Let’s go.’ ”
Extremist violence has hit Mali repeatedly. In March, attackers reportedly shouting “Allahu akbar” fired on a popular bar in Bamako. Three Malian civilians were killed, along with a Belgian security officer working for the European Union and a French national.
Two months ago, more than a dozen people — including five U.N. contractors — were killed in a 24-hour hostage siege at a hotel in Sevare in central Mali. Responsibility for that attack was claimed by al-Mourabitoun, led by Algerian Mokhtar Belmokhtar.
Belmokhtar, an infamous one-eyed militant, had also orchestrated the bloody seizure of an Algerian gas facility in 2013 in which at least 100 workers were held hostage and dozens were killed. He was targeted in a U.S. airstrike in June in Libya, and Libyan authorities said he was killed. But the Islamist group al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb rejected that claim.
Sieff reported from Nairobi. Carol Morello, Brian Murphy, William Branigin, Sarah Kaplan, Craig Whitlock and Joe Heim in Washington, David Nakamura in Kuala Lumpur and Liu Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.
It’s not just the Islamic State. Other terror groups surge in West Africa. | 0fake |
BBC Comedy Sketch "Real Housewives of ISIS" Causes Outrage | The BBC produced spoof on the “Real Housewives” TV programmes, which has a comedic Islamic State twist, has been criticised by Leftists and Muslims who claim the sketch is offensive. [The BBC released the trailer earlier this week and were immediately slammed by those on the left and Muslims who thought that making fun of the brides of members of the terror group was out of the bounds of conventional humour. The sketch is part of a new programme called “Revolting” written by Jolyon Rubinstein and Heydon Prowse which, according to the BBC, is “satirising the state of the nation. ” LOLOLOL pic. twitter. — Raheem Kassam (@RaheemKassam) January 4, 2017, The BBC2 Facebook page was inundated with criticism. One user wrote, “I’m mortified that the BBC had produced such a programme. This is simply bad taste. The fact it is a comedy makes it even more worrying that humour should be associated with the actions of ISIS. Is this really what TV licenses are funding! ?” Others took a different point of view including a Muslim saying, “As a Muslim I find this HILARIOUS! Brilliant! The satire is on point highlighting the pathetic ideals of a pathetic group like ISIS. ” Not all Muslims agreed with the sentiment and users on Twitter expressed just as much outrage for the sketch. One man, a Bangladeshi, said “The BBC really made a satirical show called ‘The Real Housewives of ISIS’ while the real housewives of ISIS are being raped and abused daily. ” The BBC really made a satirical show called ”The Real Housewives of ISIS” while the real housewives of ISIS are being raped and abused daily, — Meraj. (@UncleMeraj) January 4, 2017, Another wrote, “‘Real Housewives of ISIS’ will make Hijabis feel more isolated n targeted by Islamophobes. Thanks @BBC for adding to the negative stereotype. ” ’Real Housewives of ISIS’ will make Hijabis feel more isolated n targeted by Islamophobes. Thanks @BBC for adding to the negative stereotype, — aѕн (@AshKaneSkittles) January 4, 2017, Leftists also articulated how offended they were that the public broadcaster would dare create such a sketch mocking Islamic State. Some questioned whether the use of taxpayer money via the TV license fee should go toward the funding of the programme. As if people’s TV license in this country is going towards funding the production of a programme called ”the real housewives of ISIS”. Wow, — Cameron Edgar (@CammyyyEdgar) January 4, 2017, The video itself has already been viewed millions of times on Facebook and other social media platforms. The clip shows several women in hijabs talking to each other in a house taking selfies and showing off their suicide belts to each other. One woman even mentions that she hadn’t come from Birmingham “to do this” as she scrubbed the floor of the home. Women joining Islamic State and travelling to Syria to become brides has become a real problem in European countries as the terror group promises young girls a more glamorous lifestyle. In 2014, eight schoolgirls from Bethnal Green travelled to Syria to become brides of Islamic State fighters, all of them under the age of 18. | 0fake |
Saudi Arabia says foils Islamic State bomb, foreign spying plots | DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia said on Tuesday it foiled an Islamic State plot to bomb its defense ministry headquarters and also said it had arrested several people suspected of carrying out espionage in the kingdom on behalf of foreign powers. It was not immediately clear whether the two announcements, made separately by a security official to state news agency SPA and a security source speaking to Reuters, were related. The would-be bombers were identified as two Yemeni nationals living under aliases in the kingdom who were detained along with two Saudi citizens also suspected of involvement in the attack planned for the capital Riyadh, the official from the Presidency of State Security added. Saudi Arabia has previously been hit by deadly bombing and shooting attacks by Islamic State militants targeting security forces and Shi ite Muslims. The assailants were training in the use of explosive belts, the security source added, while authorities said they seized grenades and firearms during the operation to foil the attack. Islamic State has for years criticized the leadership of Western-allied Saudi Arabia, the world s top oil exporter, accusing it of deviating from their strict interpretation of Islam and advancing the interests of their U.S. enemies. In a separate news item, SPA quoted a security source saying authorities uncovered intelligence activities for the benefit of foreign parties by a group of people it did not name. A Saudi security source, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, told Reuters that the suspects were accused of espionage activities and having contacts with external entities including the Muslim Brotherhood , which Riyadh has classified as a terrorist organization. The group is also accused of having contacts with and receiving financial and other forms of support from two other countries to harm the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and with the aim of destabilizing the security and national unity in preparation to overthrow the Saudi regime in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, the source said. Citing an ongoing investigation, the source declined to name the countries or the members of the group. The source said one of the detainees is a member of the armed Houthi movement, which is locked in 2 1/2 years of war with a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, and is in direct contact with the group. The suspects are in custody and will be granted legal rights and due process, the source added. | 0fake |
New York girds itself for Trump's first visit as president | NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York is bracing for President Donald Trump’s first trip back to his hometown since taking office in January in a Thursday visit that is expected to draw protests and snarl traffic in the United States’ most populous city. The trip could mark a repeat of the chaotic 2-1/2 months between the real estate developer’s Nov. 8 election and Jan. 20 swearing-in, when crowds of protesters and admirers flocked outside his home in the gold-metal-clad Fifth Avenue Trump Tower. The early days of the Trump administration have brought aggressive rhetoric and moves to crack down on immigration as well as roll back environmental regulations, much of which has ruffled feathers in the liberal northeast city. Anti-Trump activists, some of whom have organized marches across the country since Trump’s stunning election victory, are planning loud protests to mark the native son’s return. “A very hot welcome is being planned for Mr. Trump,” said Alexis Danzig, a member of Rise and Resist, an informal group of activists which formed as Trump came to power. “We’ll be out in full force to voice our grievances.” Trump’s business dealings and romantic fallouts were constant city tabloid fodder in the 1980s and 1990s. His television show, “The Apprentice,” broadcast Trump to the world as the ultimate Big Apple dealmaker during the 2000s. While the Trump brand is internationally associated with New York, fewer than one in five city residents voted for him. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, both Democrats, have said his stance on immigrants has put him at odds with a city where nearly a third of residents are foreign-born. Protesters plan to gather Thursday near the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, a decommissioned aircraft carrier where Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull are to have their first in-person meeting. One of the pair’s last exchanges was an acrimonious phone call in January. New York police declined to provide details of their preparations for Trump’s tour and the protests planned around it. One lingering issue from the transition period, that of the costs of protecting the president-elect’s building was resolved earlier this week in a proposed federal budget including $61 million to reimburse New York and other local governments for providing Trump-related security. “That’s good news for our city and the hardworking police officers faced with this unprecedented security challenge,” de Blasio said in a statement. | 0fake |
Boko Haram Video Appears to Show Bodies of Kidnapped Girls - The New York Times | The militant group Boko Haram released a video on Sunday purporting to show the bodies of several kidnapped schoolgirls who fighters claim were killed by Nigerian airstrikes. A masked, camouflaged fighter who appeared in the video said many of the schoolgirls had died in the strikes, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant jihadist groups. The unidentified fighter also demanded the release of imprisoned militants in exchange for the release of the girls. The strikes are part of a broader offensive by the Nigerian military to rid the region of Boko Haram. The abduction of more than 250 schoolgirls from Chibok, a small village in northeastern Nigeria, more than two years ago set off global outrage and a social media campaign using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls that got the attention of Michelle Obama. Hundreds of other girls and boys have also been kidnapped and murdered by the group. There was no immediate comment from the government or the military about the video, although President Muhammadu Buhari said last year that he was open to negotiating with the group. A spokesman for the Bring Back Our Girls campaign said the video appeared to be legitimate, noting that families of those kidnapped had recognized eight of the girls who appeared in the clip. “We are still reaching out to some parents to see if any can recognize more,” said Jeff Okoroafor, the spokesman for the group, which regularly holds rallies in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, to demand that the government find and rescue the girls. The video is among a handful that Boko Haram has posted online in recent days, as the militant group appears to have split into two factions, apparently over the killing of other Muslims and whether fellow believers should be spared. The group has targeted mosques and markets with suicide bombers, some of whom are young girls and boys. Hundreds of Muslims have been killed. Boko Haram pledged support to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, last year, and two primary factions have emerged. One faction has been recognized by the Islamic State, which broadcast an interview with a new “governor” of the group, Abu Musab in its online publication. Abubakar Shekau had been leading Boko Haram but had not been heard from in months until the release of a voice recording on Aug. 3. Jacob Zenn, a security analyst and an African affairs specialist at the Jamestown Foundation, a research organization based in Washington, said it appeared that the girls in the video were in the custody of Mr. Shekau’s group. Logos seen in the video and a reference to Mr. Shekau as the leader indicated that it was produced by his faction, he said. Mr. Shekau’s faction “has significant logistics capabilities if it has been able to keep so many of the world’s most girls hidden and captive for more than two years now,” Mr. Zenn said. Many analysts believe the girls have been divided among Boko Haram fighters and are scattered throughout the Sambisa Forest, where the Nigerian military has stepped up its offensive against the militants in a battle that has recently included airstrikes. In the video, the camera pans across a group of girls cloaked in robes with hair coverings. At least one is holding a small child, a troubling reminder of fears that the girls have been forced to marry militants. The video cuts to a fighter in camouflage standing before them, calling on the government to release fighters. He conducts a brief interview with one of the girls, as others are grouped behind them. The last few minutes of the video show what appear to be the bodies of several dead girls. Earlier this year, members of Nigeria’s civilian militia found one of the kidnapped Chibok girls wandering in the forest. The girl, Amina Ali, was found with a baby and man claiming to be her husband, although the government said he was a member of Boko Haram. She told her family that the other girls from Chibok were still in the forest and that six of them had died. | 0fake |
Warning or threat? Hillary hints at second civil war if Trump wins | Warning or threat? Hillary hints at second civil war if Trump wins 11/02/2016
While speaking to supporters in Cincinnati on Monday, Democrat Hillary Clinton hinted at a second civil war if GOP nominee Donald Trump wins, Breitbart.com reported.
Charlie Spiering wrote:
“He has a dark and divisive vision for America that could tear our country apart,” Clinton said to supporters in Cincinnati, Ohio on Halloween.
Clinton specifically referred to the Civil War, suggesting that the country faced a similar threat of divisiveness from Donald Trump.
“Abraham Lincoln understood a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that was over the greatest of challenges – the challenge posed by slavery – and we fought a civil war,” she said.
She warned voters that it was time for the country to take the divisions in the country seriously.
“But we also have to take stock of how divided we are today, the kinds of divisions that need to be healed to bring people together,” she added, failing to admit that her side is the one that has divided America by race, class and gender.
She also claimed that Trump would start a nuclear war if a foreign leader got under his skin.
“I know there are some who will say that any discussion of this topic could be fear-mongering, but I don’t think so,” she said at a rally in Kent, Ohio, earlier in the day.
A post at Barracuda Brigade observed:
Liberals especially the Clinton are always projecting. Anything that they accuse the other side of is what they are doing. She suggests that her message is one of “hope and change” when in fact it is just more of the same.
Moreover, Trump has spent a great deal of time talking about policies and issues while Clinton & Co. have done absolutely nothing but engage in fear-mongering and fingerpointing.
Still, we have to ask — was Clinton’s “hint” a “warning” or a “threat?”
Related: | 1real |
BREAKING NEWS: “At The Direction Of The President” 22-Yr Old American Is Released From N. Korean Prison [VIDEO] | 22-yr old American Otto Warmbier was arrested and imprisoned during Barack Obama s last term in office. He was released at the direction of President Trump. Although former President Barack Obama was unable to secure her release, after being in office for less than 4 months, President Trump was also able to secure the release of Aya Hijazi, an Egyptian-American charity worker who spent three years in an Egyptian jail over what human rights groups say were bogus charges.Otto Warmbier, the college student arrested, tried and imprisoned in North Korea for more than a year for trying to swipe a souvenir from his hotel during a guided tour of the communist nation, has been released, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced Tuesday.The 22-year-old Warmbier has served just over a year of his 15-year sentence allegedly for taking down a sign of the late dictator Kim Jong Il while Warmbier was in the country with a tour group. As of Tuesday morning, Warmbier was on his way home to Cincinnati, although other details surrounding the dramatic events were not released. At the direction of the President, the Department of State has secured the release of Otto Warmbier from North Korea, Tillerson said. Mr. Warmbier is en route to the United States, where he will be reunited with his family. The Department of State continues to have discussions with the DPRK regarding three other U.S. citizens reported detained. Out of respect for the privacy of Mr. Warmbier and his family, we have no further comment on Mr. Warmbier. Warmbier s parents, who have appeared on Fox News Channel in the past to plead for their son s release, expressed gratitude. FOX News | 1real |
Exclusive: Hillary may delay campaign | “Trump's plan to repair our infrastructure is a scam," Sanders declares. | 0fake |
Devin Nunes to Step Aside From House Investigation on Russia - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — The continuing fallout from President Trump’s unsubstantiated wiretapping allegation cost him another ally on Thursday, as the embattled Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee announced he would step aside from his panel’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to disrupt last year’s election. The announcement from the committee’s chairman, Representative Devin Nunes of California, came shortly before the House Committee on Ethics said he was under investigation because of public reports that he “may have made unauthorized disclosures of classified information. ” Mr. Nunes’s recusal from the Russia inquiry was a blow to Mr. Trump, who in less than three months in office has seen the imbroglio over Russia’s disruption campaign exact political damage on some of his closest advisers and most vigorous supporters. The furor over the contacts that some of the president’s aides had with Russian officials has already led to the firing of Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, and the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions from overseeing the F. B. I. ’s inquiry into the Russian efforts. Now it has led to the recusal of Mr. Nunes from the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, and Mr. Trump faces the potential revival of that inquiry. The investigation had descended into a partisan sideshow in the two weeks since Mr. Nunes told reporters that Trump associates had been swept up in surveillance of foreign officials by American spy agencies during the transition, citing intelligence reports that were classified. He then rushed to the White House to brief Mr. Trump, prompting Democrats to argue that Mr. Nunes had proved himself far too close to the president to run an independent investigation. The criticism intensified last week when The New York Times revealed that the classified information about incidental surveillance cited by Mr. Nunes came from White House officials. White House officials had been seeking evidence to bolster a claim that Mr. Trump made March 4 on Twitter that the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump Tower during the presidential campaign. Numerous current and former American officials — including James B. Comey, the F. B. I. director — have debunked the claim. Yet Mr. Nunes resisted demands to step aside until Thursday, when he found himself under investigation by the House ethics committee. The internal House ethics investigation into whether Mr. Nunes disclosed classified information is a striking twist for a chairman who has made the unauthorized disclosure of classified information a focal point of his Russia investigation. At the same time, he has repeatedly dismissed the idea that he was wrong to disclose the existence of “dozens” of classified intelligence reports about incidental surveillance of associates of Mr. Trump. “Any talk of that is nonsense,” Mr. Nunes said in an interview with The Times last month. Mr. Nunes said in a statement that the ethics investigation was “entirely false and politically motivated” and that he would remain the intelligence committee’s chairman. But it was in the intelligence committee’s best interests for him to temporarily step aside from the Russia investigation, he said in the statement, which was issued 26 minutes before the ethics committee announced its inquiry. The statement also put the blame for the investigation on complaints against him made by multiple watchdog groups to the Office of Congressional Ethics, which is entirely separate from the ethics committee. Mr. Nunes dismissed those organizations as “ activist groups,” though it was not clear what role, if any, their complaints played in setting off the inquiry. Mr. Nunes, who served on the president’s transition team, has for weeks offered Mr. Trump fuel to keep his wiretapping claims in the news — and to make more unsubstantiated accusations. In an interview with The Times on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that the former national security adviser Susan E. Rice might have committed a crime by seeking the identities of the Trump associates who last year were swept up in surveillance of foreign officials by American spy agencies. Ms. Rice has said she did nothing wrong. Mr. Nunes’s recusal on Thursday was welcomed by Democrats, who had questioned whether White House officials had used the congressman essentially to launder the information about incidental surveillance. Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the panel’s top Democrat, praised the chairman’s decision. “It will allow us to have a fresh start moving forward,” he told reporters on Thursday. Representative K. Michael Conaway of Texas, a senior Republican on the committee, will assume control of the investigation. An accountant who formerly served as the chairman of the House ethics committee, Mr. Conaway will be assisted by two other Republicans on the committee, Mr. Nunes said: Representatives Tom Rooney of Florida and Trey Gowdy of South Carolina. Mr. Gowdy led the special investigation into the 2012 attacks on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Mr. Gowdy is also on the ethics committee. Several of the watchdog groups that had complained to the separate Office of Congressional Ethics praised the ethics committee’s decision to investigate Mr. Nunes. Jordan Libowitz, spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, described the congressman’s disclosure of classified information as “so grave that it needs to be investigated right away. ” The ethics committee comprises 10 House members: five Republicans and five Democrats. It is unclear how long the inquiry could take, but the investigations usually last months or years. The panel has the power to impose a range of penalties, from a letter admonishing a member to a recommendation that the House vote to expel a member. In more serious cases, the panel can choose to refer evidence to law enforcement officials, a move it can make confidentially. The independent Office of Congressional Ethics faced a threat in early January when House Republicans voted to gut it on the eve of the new Congress. Under pressure from Republican leaders and President Trump, they ultimately abandoned the effort. The recusal offered hope to Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, who worried that Mr. Nunes’s behavior had discredited the panel’s investigation and who had increasingly resigned themselves to the idea that they would have to conduct parallel inquiries rather than work with Republicans. “We now have a chance to reclaim our committee’s independence, credibility and ability to make progress,” Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in a statement. As the House investigation has deteriorated into partisan feuding in recent weeks, many have turned to the Senate Intelligence Committee as Congress’s last best hope for an impartial congressional investigation into Russian interference in the election. Since late July, the F. B. I. has been conducting its own counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the election, including an examination of whether Mr. Trump’s associates cooperated with Russian officials to influence the race. | 0fake |
Kremlin says no proof Russia was source of radioactive pollution | MOSCOW (Reuters) - There has to date been no confirmation from any Russian government agencies that there was an incident on Russian soil that could have caused raised levels of pollution from a radioactive isotope, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday. Russia s meteorological service said on Tuesday it had measured pollution of the ruthenium 106 isotope at nearly 1,000 times normal levels in the Ural mountains. | 0fake |
Factbox: Contenders for key jobs in Trump's administration | (Reuters) - Below are people mentioned as contenders for senior roles as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump works to form his administration before taking office on Jan. 20, according to Reuters sources and media reports. Trump has already named a number of people for other top jobs in his administration. Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican presidential nominee and former Massachusetts governor Rudy Giuliani, Republican former mayor of New York City Bob Corker, Republican U.S. senator from Tennessee and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee David Petraeus, retired general and former CIA director who pleaded guilty to mishandling classified information that he shared with his biographer, who he was having an affair with Jon Huntsman, former Republican Utah governor and ambassador to China under President Barack Obama, ran for Republican presidential nomination in 2012 James Stavridis, retired Navy admiral John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, foreign policy adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney Rex Tillerson, president and chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil Joe Manchin, Democratic U.S. senator for West Virginia Dana Rohrabacher, Republican U.S. representative of California and senior member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Alan Mulally, a former CEO at Ford and a former executive vice president at Boeing Kevin Cramer, Republican U.S. representative from North Dakota Robert Grady, venture capitalist, partner in private equity firm Gryphon Investors Heidi Heitkamp, Democratic U.S. senator from North Dakota Joe Manchin, Democratic U.S. senator from West Virginia Gary Cohn, president of Goldman Sachs Group Inc Larry Nichols, co-founder of Devon Energy Corp James Connaughton, CEO of Nautilus Data Technologies and a former environmental adviser to President George W. Bush Rick Perry, Republican former Texas governor Forrest Lucas, founder of oil products company Lucas Oil Heidi Heitkamp, Democratic U.S. senator from North Dakota Robert Grady, venture capitalist, partner in Gryphon Investors Cathy McMorris Rodgers, U.S. representative from Washington state and House Republican Conference chair Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Jan Brewer, former Republican Arizona governor Mary Fallin, Republican Oklahoma governor Ray Washburne, CEO of investment company Charter Holdings Navy Admiral Mike Rogers, director of the National Security Agency Ronald Burgess, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Robert Cardillo, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Pete Hoekstra, Republican former U.S. representative from Michigan Rudy Giuliani, Republican former mayor of New York Debra Wong Yang, former U.S. attorney for California’s Central District, appointed by former President George W. Bush Ralph Ferrara, a securities attorney at law firm Proskauer Rose LLP Paul Atkins, a Republican former SEC commissioner who is heading Trump’s transition team for independent financial regulatory agencies, including the SEC Daniel Gallagher, Republican former SEC commissioner John Allison, a former CEO of regional bank BB&T Corp and former CEO of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank Paul Atkins, Republican former SEC commissioner Thomas Hoenig, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp vice chairman Dan DiMicco, former CEO of steel producer Nucor Corp Robert Lighthizer, a Washington trade attorney and former deputy U.S. trade representative during the Republican Reagan administration Andrew Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants [APOLOT.UL] Lou Barletta, Republican U.S. representative from Pennsylvania Victoria Lipnic, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission member and former Labor Department official during the George W. Bush administration Gary Cohn, Goldman Sachs Group Inc president Mick Mulvaney, Republican U.S. representative from South Carolina David Malpass, former chief economist with investment bank Bear Stearns and a senior Trump adviser who also served in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidential administrations Scott Brown, former Republican U.S. senator from Massachusetts Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor Jeff Miller, former Republican U.S. representative from Florida who was chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee The Trump transition team confirmed the president-elect would choose from a list of 21 names he drew up during his campaign, including Republican U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah and William Pryor, a federal judge with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. | 0fake |
Trump Just Went After China In UNHINGED Rant; America’s Future In FREE FALL (DETAILS) | It wasn t too long ago that Donald Trump deeply offended China by taking a phone call from Taiwan, violating the One China policy. Since then, foreign relations under this new failing presidency have been nothing but chaotic and tense and unfortunately Trump is just making things worse.Over the weekend, Trump showed everyone that he s learning absolutely nothing about diplomacy, as he sent another f*ck you to China. In an interview with the Financial Times published Sunday, Trump warned China that if they don t get North Korea under control, America would step in. Trump said he is totally confident that the U.S. could handle North Korea s nuclear weapons program without any help. His words were: If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you. China has great influence over North Korea. And China will either decide to help us with North Korea, or they won t. And if they do that will be very good for China, and if they don t it won t be good for anyone. Then, he claimed that he could motivate China to move against the North Koreans, yet failed to clarify: I m not going to tell you. You know, I am not the United States of the past where we tell you where we are going to hit in the Middle East. This interview also had several other insane elements to it, in which Trump continued to defend his lies about former President Barack Obama wiretapping him and insisted that those false claims were turning out to be true. However, his comments about China are likely some of the most disturbing to come out of the interview.Trump s timing couldn t be more disastrous, as he is set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago club this week which will likely be another opportunity for Trump to disrespect China and put America at risk.Featured image via Joe Raedle / Getty Images | 1real |
Clinton fact-checked on 'truthful' claim in email scandal | Hillary Clinton is getting hammered for saying on “Fox News Sunday” that FBI Director James Comey confirmed her statements on her email scandal were “truthful” – with one prominent fact-checker giving the claim four “Pinocchios.”
The former secretary of state cited Comey when asked to account for her repeated claims that she never sent or received material marked classified on her personal email account. When host Chris Wallace noted that Comey said those things were not true, Clinton disagreed.
“That's not what I heard Director Comey say … Director Comey said that my answers were truthful and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails,” she said.
The Washington Post Fact Checker picked apart that statement, ultimately giving it four “Pinocchios,” its worst rating for truthfulness.
“Clinton is cherry-picking statements by Comey to preserve her narrative about the unusual setup of a private email server. This allows her to skate past the more disturbing findings of the FBI investigation,” the Post wrote, noting that she was relying on Comey’s statement to Congress: “We have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI.”
However, the FBI director did not say the same about her statements to the American public. And during testimony before a House committee, Comey said it was “not true” that nothing Clinton sent or received was marked classified. To the contrary, he said, “there was classified material emailed.”
The Post concluded: “While Comey did say there was no evidence she lied to the FBI, that is not the same as saying she told the truth to the American public — which was the point of Wallace’s question. Comey has repeatedly not taken a stand on her public statements.
“And although Comey did say many emails were retroactively classified, he also said that there were some emails that were already classified that should not have been sent on an unclassified, private server. That’s the uncomfortable truth that Clinton has trouble admitting.”
Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., also called out Clinton on Twitter for the claims.
The campaign has stressed, with regard to the emails apparently marked classified, that Comey acknowledged during the hearing in question the markings themselves were not properly marked. The State Department also has suggested those markings shouldn’t have been there.
Comey, though, also challenged other statements by Clinton during his testimony. On her claim that she used one device, Comey said, “She used multiple devices.” And on her claim that she turned over all work-related emails, he said, “No, we found work-related emails, thousands that were not returned."
Clinton, meanwhile, acknowledged again on “Fox News Sunday” that she made a “mistake,” while appearing to spread the blame around.
“I take classification seriously. I relied on and had every reason to rely on the judgments of the professionals with whom I worked. And so, in retrospect, maybe some people are saying, ‘Well, … among those 300 people, they made the wrong call,’” Clinton said. “At the time, there was no reason, in my view, to doubt the professionalism and the determination by the people who work every single day on behalf of our country.” | 0fake |
Inside Bernie Sanders’s quest to win over Nevada’s Latinos | EAST LAS VEGAS — "Nevada is especially important because we're a swing state. Who here knows what a swing state is?" a Bernie Sanders campaign organizer had asked the room of 15 volunteers — overwhelmingly Latino and largely in their teens and 20s — during an introductory spiel that was part training and part pep rally.
Silence. The question hung in the air just long enough to become awkward.
"No one?" the organizer asked. Clearly surprised but only slightly deterred, he barreled on with the rest of his pitch.
Many of Sanders's enthusiastic supporters are people who are interested in the presidential race because they're interested in Bernie Sanders, not the other way around. That's a big asset for a campaign that's relying on motivated volunteers: The Sanders campaign needs these young Latinos to spread Sanders's message of economic populism, and his extremely progressive immigration platform, to the rest of the Latino community.
But it's also an illustration of just how much work Sanders's people have cut out for them in a very short amount of time.
The campaign hopes that this work will cause Latinos to caucus for Sanders on Saturday in high enough numbers to win a state in what's become an unexpectedly close race — and, in the process, prove to observers that Sanders can win with nonwhites.
The campaign's office in East Las Vegas is strategically located in a neighborhood the Sanders organizer referred to as "Little Mexico." It is also a few blocks from Rancho High School, a school of nearly 3,000 students, more than two-thirds of whom identify as Latino. This isn't symbolic — it's an important way to make sure Sanders's most devoted supporters can come to the office to call voters and canvass neighborhoods.
The Sanders campaign's "Latino outreach strategy" is a matter of who is speaking on the candidate's behalf — but it doesn't involve changing what those people are saying. Forty-one percent of America's Latino voters, and 44 percent of Nevada's, are millennials. And as far as the Sanders campaign is concerned, they're just like any other millennials: They care about a $15 minimum wage and free college tuition, and they want to get money out of politics.
In other words, the Sanders campaign's "pitch" to Latinos is strikingly similar to its pitch to everyone else: In the words of Nevada state director Joan Kato, Sanders is "someone who's always fought for equality and making sure the average person is not taken advantage of."
In Nevada, at least, this message appeals to many young Latinos who are excited about Sanders's ability to transform a political system they don't fully buy into. It's not just that they agree with the positions Sanders is espousing; it's that they believe he will be a reliable champion for them if he's elected.
"Bernie is the only candidate that really believes in the Fight for $15 movement," a young organizer told the group of volunteers in East Las Vegas, referring to the fact that Sanders's opponent in the primary, Hillary Clinton, has embraced a $12-an-hour minimum wage but won't go as high as $15. "We have to show that support just the way he's supporting us."
Even though Sanders's economic message has won enthusiasm from many young Latinos, the candidate's position on immigration is still a key part of his Latino outreach strategy.
For many Latino voters, immigration is a "threshold issue"; issues like health care, jobs, and education might be more important to them, but they won't even start evaluating a candidate — or party — on those issues if he or she doesn't support immigration reform.
Early in Sanders's campaign, during an interview with Vox, he expressed skepticism about large-scale low-skilled immigration into the US — and it looked like he was setting himself up for attacks from the very vocal immigrant rights movement. But instead, the Sanders campaign turned his relative underemphasis on immigration prior to his candidacy into an asset for his campaign by bringing immigration activists in to craft an immigration platform that put him substantially to the left of Hillary Clinton.
DREAMer activists Cesar Vargas and Erika Andiola joined the Sanders campaign last fall, with the task of designing the senator's immigration platform. Along with other Sanders staffers, and the candidate himself, they essentially crowdsourced the platform, asking immigrant activists and legal organizations for suggestions and input.
"We were the people who presented the senator with this whole policy platform. They knew it was bold, and they accepted it," Vargas said.
Vargas and Andiola had some good material to start with: Sanders's opposition to big business makes him a natural critic of private, for-profit prisons, and he'd already promised to abolish them. That wouldn't have as much of an impact on the overall prison population as most people think, but it would absolutely transform the immigration detention system — which is dominated by for-profit facilities. And for many grassroots immigration activists, curbing immigration detention and enforcement is a key goal.
Many of the activists Vargas and Andiola talked to had personal experience with the detention system. One of them was Liz Hernandez, an activist with the United Coalition for Immigrant and Migrant Rights in Las Vegas. Hernandez was detained by immigration agents at the age of 10, along with her mother, 7-year-old sister, and 2-month-old brother. Her mother, who made and sold homemade cheeses to support the family, had to ask the agents for food and water for her children.
Sixteen years later — and after having told her story countless times in her advocacy work — Hernandez crying as she recounts all of this for me: "It's disgusting to know that there are kids being criminalized at such a young age." Hernandez received protection from deportation and work permission under Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012; her mother is still at risk of deportation.
Hernandez and other local activists met with Sanders himself while Vargas and Andiola were working on the platform. She told him about her family's experiences. And, she says, "He was like, 'We're going to make something happen.'"
His platform follows through on that commitment. While both Sanders and Clinton promise to go even further than President Obama in using executive action to protect unauthorized immigrants from deportations, Sanders puts a number on it: He'd protect up to 9 million unauthorized immigrants. And he'd even allow some parents who'd already been deported to return to the US and their families. It sounds like an immigration advocate's wish list — because it is.
"I've never been asked to endorse a politician before," says Hernandez. "It's really hard for me to talk about a candidate, to say, 'You have to support this person.'" But Sanders won her over: The afternoon I meet her, she's the most diligent volunteer in the East Las Vegas office, calling voter after voter to urge them to caucus.
As far as the Sanders campaign is concerned, their biggest problem is name recognition. Talk to some of their supporters, and you might think it's the only problem.
Adriana Arévalo, an outreach strategist with the Sanders campaign, had a recent encounter with a woman at a soccer tournament who said she supported Hillary "'because she's the wife of Bill Clinton.' I said, 'Okay, but do you know what she's offering for you, for your family?'" Arévalo says the woman left the tournament as a Sanders supporter.
But Sanders' campaign is making progress. One person I spoke to in Las Vegas (who asked not to be named because they're affiliated with a nonpartisan organization) said they're hearing from, "like, Latina housekeepers: 'El viejito, he has some good ideas.'" Viejito is an affectionate, even nicknamey way to say "the old man." "That they already have a nickname for him, wow."
"There's barely any people who reject Bernie for his ideas," says Cynthia, a 17-year-old Rancho High School student and Sanders volunteer. Her confidence is brimming. "If people were more politically aware, they'd already know who Bernie was."
This is an appealing narrative for the Sanders campaign in Nevada, because it presents their only problem as something they have the resources to solve: All they need is word of mouth, and they have an enthusiastic young volunteer core to accomplish that.
Sometimes it can be hard to tell how big the groundswell of Latino support for Sanders really is. The campaign presents its Nevada operation as a response to popular demand: There are 12 offices in Nevada, multiple staffers took pains to mention, more than any other presidential campaign. But political journalist Jon Ralston (considered the "dean" of the local press corps) thinks that's mostly hype: "Yeah, you have 12 offices, but if the lights aren't on in 11 of them..." he says airily.
Ralston is also skeptical of the campaign's claim that it's been endorsed by five Spanish-language publications in Nevada; when the campaign announced the first three endorsements, he called them "three Spanish-language newspapers nobody has heard of, including an ad mag and an online news aggregator."
And in other cases, the campaign's aggressive enthusiasm can look like straight-up aggression. A student government leader at the College of Southern Nevada, who was initially listed among the Sanders campaign's "steering committee," later said that she hadn't known signing up for the committee implied an endorsement of Sanders and that she would actually be supporting Hillary Clinton.
The most powerful union in southern Nevada, the Culinary Union Local 226, also harshly criticized the Sanders campaign for sneaking into employee dining rooms and canvassing for Sanders while wearing union pins — a move that, several advocates in Nevada stressed to me, could have gotten the union in serious trouble.
The Sanders campaign has a mixed record when it comes to conventional campaign tactics, which makes it all the more important that its word-of-mouth, passion-driven campaign succeed. The passionate Sanders supporters are the ones who are expected to spread the word to less politically engaged members of the community: that there is in fact a second Democrat running for president, and that he's the one who really wants to help them afford college and help their parents avoid deportation.
The Clinton campaign urges its staff and volunteers to focus on maximizing "voter contacts" — "the goal is that canvassers have knocked on your door four to five times in the last two months," Clinton communications staffer Jorge Silva tells me — and to develop spreadsheets of who needs a ride to the polls.
The Sanders campaign also wants to reach as many voters as frequently as possible, of course — but it urges its volunteers not to use their scripts when calling potential caucus-goers, and instead to share their personal stories of why they support the senator.
"We are the face of the political revolution," one staffer told the East Las Vegas volunteers, "and that's why we gotta call everybody and their moms, like, 10 times."
Spreading the word is obviously important as a force multiplier. But there's a more basic reason for the focus on evangelism: Many of Sanders's most passionate supporters can't themselves vote.
Some of the young volunteers can caucus — Cynthia, for example — will be 18 by Election Day in November, so Nevada law allows her to caucus in February. Furthermore, Nevada allows same-day voter registration for Democratic caucus-goers, something that was a major factor in helping Obama take more of the state's delegates than Clinton in 2008 (though he lost the popular vote).
But even with early eligibility and same-day registration, many of Sanders's most fervent Latino supporters aren't eligible to caucus. That doesn't stop them from organizing for the candidate, as staffers stress time and time again. But it could still set a ceiling for the candidate.
Sanders's best asset in the caucuses is the fact that his supporters are likely to be more informed about when the caucuses are and more passionate about showing up to them. Some of the most passionate of those supporters are young Latinos, of two very different types.
The first are the kind who have been involved in politics long enough that they don't tend to fall in love with politicians but feel they've finally found someone to trust: the Cesar Vargases and Liz Hernandezes of the world. They're noncitizens (like many of their peers in the immigrant rights movement), and they can't vote. The second are the kind who aren't otherwise interested in politics — who don't know what a swing state is — but who see Sanders as a politician worth paying attention to. Some of them are eligible to vote like Cynthia; others are simply too young.
At the East Las Vegas office, a campaign organizer tried to prepare a few young volunteers to call potential caucus-goers. When he turned to ask another staffer for clarification about something, one of the volunteers shyly raised his hand and gestured at the young woman next to him: "We actually kind of have to leave right now." Their ride had arrived. | 0fake |
Pakistan Home of London Terrorist Who Came to UK as Child Refugee Raided, Had Access to Tunnels Under Parliament | As London Bridge terrorist Khuram Shazad Butt’s home in Pakistan is raided, authorities reveal the Islamist had access to tunnels under Parliament. [Sky News reports that Butt, who they say came to Britain with his parents from Pakistan as asylum seekers, worked for Transport for London. Further reports indicate Butt’s work gave him access to tunnels under the Houses of Parliament from the Westminster Underground Station — despite the fact he had been investigated for terror links by MI5 and even been featured on a Channel 4 documentary about Islamists titled ‘The Jihadis Next Door‘. Pakistani security officials told The Telegraph newspaper that raids on homes and businesses connected to the Butt family were being carried out as a precaution, but that the terrorist was likely radicalised in Britain and trained in Syria. “Our British counterparts told us they don’t think he was radicalised here, and we think it is probably more likely that he was trained in Syria,” one said. “But we are searching the homes of any relatives connected to him and we are tracing all telephone calls made by family members. ” The news comes as Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley declared Britain was now facing a “completely different” level of threat and indicated that current policing and security methods are not equal to the task of containing it. “In nine weeks, we’ve had five plots foiled and three successful attacks. That is completely different to anything we have seen for a long time,” he said. “As the Prime Minister has indicated, we’re going to need to do some things differently. We’re going to have to think again about the next iteration of our police and security service model, which has constantly had to innovate over many decades. ” Regarding Butt, the Assistant Commissioner defended the decision to drop an inquiry into his activities by saying there was “no intelligence to suggest that this attack was being planned”. He added that he expected the authorities “will probably discover information on covert communications that were [not in] our knowledge that if we had access to those communications it may have changed our judgment” suggesting he wants new powers to monitor encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp. | 0fake |
Hillary admits creation of Mujahedin plague | Share This: PATRICE GREANVILLE T he problem is that, while helpful to have the empire’s managers show their true sociopathic face, her narrative is a distorted simplification bearing all the vices of her political prejudices and ignorance, the script favored by the US ruling class.
Consider just one of her major lies, tossed about casually and sure to be swallowed whole by the perennially clueless audience: That The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan… The USSR did not invade Afghanistan . The besieged, progressive and modernising Kabul government—a leftwing government that promptly moved to advance literacy, gave women full and unrestricted civil rights, and in general was trying to bring the nation out of the middle ages (program which Washington could care less), invited the Soviets to come in, as it was meeting stiff resistance to its reforms by the entrenched landlords and reactionary clerics in the countryside. Moscow accepted the invitation because it also suited its valid objective of not allowing the Americans to plant another huge military base on the Central Asia underbelly, part of the encirclement of Russia the US has been carrying out for many decades. The invitation is similar and as genuine as the invitation by the Government of Syria, today, to come in and fight against the Western-sponsored terrorists, an authority to set foot on Syrian soil which the Americans and their multiple sordid accomplices in mayhem in the Middle East, totally lack. Contrast this with Washington’s actions in Vietnam, where it first refused to recognize the right of the newly independent Vietnamese to a free election (since they knew the communists led by Ho Chi Minh would win by a huge margin), and then simply invaded that nation under trumped up pretexts (Gulf of Tonkin, etc.).The closer you inspect the US government narrative, the clearer it becomes it is a tissue of cynical big lies, word-twistings, professional pr.r. spin, and self-serving myths and simplifications—all in the service of sordid and criminal goals the elites can never admit to the American public.
PHOTOS: Above—Afghan women college students, a total novelty in Kabul, sporting Western dress, etc. (1978). Afghan women studying, as equals, in Kabul, 1979. The communist government in power then (PDPA, the People’s Democratic party of Afghanistan) actually liberated Afghan women from centuries old customs that effectively enslaved them to husband and society. As usual, Western bourgeois feminists have said virtually nothing about the tremendous losses suffered by women and children as a result of Washington’s intervention in Afghanistan on the side of the most reactionary sectors of society. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS | 1real |
U.S. Government Jailing People For Not Paying Back Student Loans (VIDEO) | The enormous debt students incur for college is already a huge burden for millions of Americans and the stress of financial debt can be daunting. Well now it can get even worse. The U.S. government is arresting borrowers who fail to pay back their student loans.This happened to Paul Aker, who was arrested for failing to pay back a $1,500 loan he took out in 1987. He says that seven U.S. marshals showed up to his home with guns and combat gear and dragged him to jail. From there, he was taken to court where he was forced to sign a repayment plan in front of a judge. Aker said: It was mind boggling, I couldn t believe it. I was standing before the court with no rights read to me, no legal representation, and I d been told that I owe $1,500, just couldn t believe it. The private sector is now able to use the government to force citizens to pay back loans. In this case, US marshals were used on behalf of debt collectors. US congressman Gene Green of Texas said: Our federal resources, our US marshals and federal court system are being used by the private sector. A few years ago, Congress allowed the private sector to contract for student loan collections and so you have these private companies who are doing this. Private loan companies often charge enormous interest rates that plunge young Americans into perpetual debt slavery for a lifetime. It s crazy to think that they re now able to use the resources of the federal government to come after Americans who often don t have the financial resources to pay back loans.Thanks to the U.S. Congress, this has all been made possible.Watch Video Here: Featured image From YouTube Screen Capture. | 1real |
Nicholas Clinch, Who Took On Unclimbed Mountains, Dies at 85 - The New York Times | Nicholas Clinch, an audacious and intrepid mountaineer who led expeditions of skyscraping peaks in the Himalayas and in Antarctica, died on June 15 in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 85. The cause was cancer, a nephew, Richard Kylberg, said. An unusual figure in the world of elite mountaineering, Mr. Clinch was a tall, somewhat gangly man whose slight build was not in the hardy athletic mold of a climber. He was, in addition, asthmatic. But he found his niche in the field by applying his intelligence, technical skill, practical knowledge and perseverance. In October 1955, Mr. Clinch, then in his was relaxing after a spaghetti dinner with some fellow climbers in a Northern California living room when he issued an almost casual challenge. “Who wants to climb Hidden Peak in 1958?” he asked. The reference was to the mountain on earth, located in the Karakoram range in northeast Pakistan. Known also as Gasherbrum I, at about 26, 500 feet it is one of the 14 mountains higher than 8, 000 meters and was, at the time, the unclimbed peak in the world. (Dhaulagiri, in Nepal, at nearly 26, 800 feet, was not climbed until 1960.) His companions laughed — justifiably, Mr. Clinch would later write — but he assembled a small team of climbers (including two men who were there for the first inquiry) secured permission for the trek from the Pakistani government, shipped 7, 000 pounds of food and equipment halfway around the world, and met his original deadline. In the spring of 1958, Mr. Clinch led a support army of more than 100 people from the town of Skardu to Hidden Peak, 150 miles away, and in early July two members of the climbing party, Pete Schoening and Andy Kauffman, achieved the summit. An assault on the peak from a final temporary camp by a second group of climbers, including Mr. Clinch, was canceled because of threatening weather. That others got the glory for the first ascent was no bother to Mr. Clinch, a lawyer by profession who scaled mountains on several continents and was known among mountaineers as a consummate team player and a leader and organizer of infinite patience, diligence and humor. “He would say to me, ‘The mountains don’t care who you are,’ ” Mr. Kylberg, his nephew, said, meaning that great athletes could founder in the wild at high altitudes as easily as anyone else. “He saw the mountains as a great human equalizer. ” Mr. Clinch’s physical achievements in enduring what he described, in The Saturday Evening Post in 1961, as “the special agonies of climbing, when the combination of blazing sun and snow makes it feel as if your head were in an oven and your feet in a freezer while you carry heavy loads,” were nonetheless impressive. In 1960, he had organized another first ascent in the Karakoram, leading a team of American and Pakistani mountaineers to the top of Masherbrum — sometimes known as Doomsday Mountain — at upward of 25, 600 feet. “Nick had the capacity to fantasize and to translate fantasy into reality,” Tom Hornbein, who was part of the Masherbrum team, said in a telephone interview. Asked how a less than robust physical specimen could conquer such mammoth peaks, Mr. Hornbein (who in 1963, with another climber, forged a new route up Mount Everest) said that Mr. Clinch was a highly proficient climber technically, and that his ability to apply his climbing experience to the problems in front of him was peerless. “Nick,” he added, “was not lacking in drive. ” Nicholas Bayard Clinch III was born in Evanston, Ill. on Nov. 9, 1930, and grew up in Dallas and in Roswell, N. M. where he attended the New Mexico Military Institute. His father was a military flyer who became a colonel in the Air Force. Nicholas III graduated from Stanford and went on to earn a law degree there. Like his father, he served in the Air Force. In the 1970s, he was a lawyer for the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, the financial institution in Irvine, Calif. that went bankrupt in 1989 during a scandal that sent Charles H. Keating Jr. the chief executive of its parent corporation, to prison for fraud. Mr. Clinch was a longtime member of the American Alpine Club and its president from 1968 to 1970. He was the executive director of the Sierra Club Foundation from 1975 to 1981, and he worked as an environmental consultant for the Fluor Corporation, a engineering and construction firm. His attraction to the mountains began when he was a teenager. He spent summers at an adventure camp in Estes Park, Colo. and met many friends, including Mr. Hornbein, who would become climbing colleagues. Mr. Clinch married Elizabeth Wallace Campbell, known as Betsy, in 1964. Together they wrote “Through a Land of Extremes: The Littledales of Central Asia” (2011) about the British explorers and adventurers St. George Littledale and his wife, Teresa. Mr. Clinch was also the author of “A Walk in the Sky” (1982) an account of the Hidden Peak expedition. Mr. Clinch is survived by his wife a sister, Lee Everding and two daughters, Alison Clinch and Lee Bridges. One more of Mr. Clinch’s remarkable climbing ventures, perhaps the most remarkable: In December 1966, with the sponsorship of the American Alpine Club and the National Geographic Society, he led a team of American climbers in the first ascent of Mount Vinson, at just over 16, 000 feet the highest peak in Antarctica. In temperatures well below zero (and in sunlight) all 10 climbers in the group reached the summit. In 2006, according to the United States Geological Survey, a nearly mountaintop, 1. 4 miles southeast of Mount Vinson, was named in his honor: Clinch Peak. | 0fake |
Dannenfelser: Trump’s SCOTUS Finalists Would Defend Life - Breitbart | I’m proud to have made the case for Donald Trump during the presidential campaign. Now that he’s been sworn in, I’m eager to help him build a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade and wipe out the “abortion distortion” that has plagued judicial rulings for decades. So when it comes to filling Justice Scalia’s vacancy, it’s essential to assess how the various candidates on President Trump’s Supreme Court list measure up on that score. [That’s why I must respectfully disagree with Andy Schlafly, son of the late and great Phyllis Schlafly, whose vocal opposition to almost all of the candidates on President Trump’s list has caused confusion and consternation among activists. Schlafly claims there is only one candidate among the 21 on the President’s list worthy of his endorsement. Even candidates like 11th Circuit Judge William Pryor, who has decried Roe v. Wade as the “worst abomination in the history of constitutional law” and as having “led to the slaughter of millions of innocent unborn children,” do not satisfy Schlafly’s qualifications. Pryor has won my approval, and has strong backing from Federalist Society, Alliance Defending Freedom and others whose opinion I highly value. Phyllis Schlafly herself helped put several candidates on President Trump’s list. She praised them as “ . ” Former Scalia clerk Ed Whelan (who has long argued for Roe to be overruled) has thoroughly argued against Schlafly’s criticisms. Last week Whelan wrote a response to Schlafly’s condemnation of 10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch pointing out that Gorsuch, in a powerful opinion, argued for allowing the state of Utah to defund Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion business. Gorsuch has written a doctoral dissertation and a book arguing against assisted suicide and euthanasia and has also declared that “human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable, and that the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong. ” Further, Gorsuch strongly supported the rights of Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor against the HHS mandate on abortifacient drugs and devices. Schlafly claims that Gorsuch “thinks courts should not correct their own mistaken precedents. ” But the sentence written by Gorsuch quoted by Schlafly, from the panel ruling in a case United States v. goes on to call for his court to overturn its wrong precedent. Schlafly also criticizes the Federalist Society for not being, and never being, . The Federalist Society doesn’t take institutional positions on any issues. But Justice Scalia helped to found the Federalist Society and remained a good friend of it until his death, precisely because of the sound legal principles that the Federalist Society helps to promote. I have every confidence that the Federalist Society is helping President Trump fulfill his pledge to appoint justices. Truth is the movement’s strongest ally in our fight to change hearts and minds in the culture while also building protections for the unborn into our nation’s law. The names being surfaced as finalists for President Trump’s Supreme Court pick provide an historic opportunity to fill the Supreme Court with strong Constitutionalists who would defend the right to life of Americans born and unborn. Marjorie Dannenfelser is the president of the Susan B. Anthony List. | 0fake |
Sarah Palin Humiliates Herself By Picking A Fight With Bill Nye: He’s ‘As Much A Scientist As I Am’ | After learning that Bill Nye had been very publicly demolishing her new climate change denial movie, Sarah Palin lashed out at the beloved science communicator with the ultimate insult saying he s as dumb as she is.In what might be the most mismatched battle of intellect in history, Palin and Nye have recently gone toe-to-toe over an upcoming documentary meant to prove climate change is a lie called Climate Hustle. The film is produced by infamous right-wing climate denier Marc Morano and is billed as the long-awaited response to Al Gore s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth. Palin, a woman whose catchphrase is Drill, baby, drill is the film s chief promoter.For a brief moment it appeared that Nye would actually get a chance to debate Palin over climate science face-to-face, however the deal quickly fell through. The two sides have been trading barbs online ever since. Nye seemingly put the matter to rest with a final Facebook post in which he explained: Marc Morano did not invite me to his movie but he said I refused to come after he did invite me he was making that up, Nye said in a video posted on his Facebook page. It s disingenuous, at best. Morano did interview Nye and a clip in which he humiliates himself by refusing to put his money where his mouth is with a simple $20,000 bet quickly went viral.Never one to know when to keep her mouth shut, Palin has now jumped into the fray and hilariously tried to attack Nye s credibility by comparing it to her own.As The Hill caught at an event on Capitol Hill:Palin, the former governor of Alaska and the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, said the man known for his show Bill Nye the Science Guy, is using his position of authority to harm children by teaching them that climate change is real and man-made.Palin said behind the alarmism that the climate is changing is a predetermined and political agenda of those, I think, who are controlling the narrative right now on changes in the weather. The irony of a half-term governor and now reality television star criticizing Bill Nye for his science credentials is rich. And while Nye doesn t currently work as a research scientist, he received a Bachelors of Science from Cornell in mechanical engineering and spent his early career teaching astronomy and ecology courses at the college level. Furthermore, he s been honored with dozens of prestigious awards for his work at being an effective communicator of science (a job that is sorely needed). He s dedicated his life to passing along oftentimes complex scientific ideas in a way that is digestible and fun.In terms of climate science, Nye isn t a leading authority doing the cutting edge research but he listens to the people who are. Palin, of course, hasn t bothered to listen to a scientist once in her career. Instead, she s latched onto Morano, a man who viciously smeared respected climatologists to push his climate denial agenda. Before being humiliated by Nye during his own interview, Morano s last claim to fame was appearing on Fox News to complain that Google was unfairly discriminating against his articles by fact-checking them.Who would you trust?Featured image via Getty | 1real |
Jodie Foster at Anti-Trump Rally: ’This Is Our Time to Resist’ | Actress Jodie Foster condemned President Donald Trump’s policies Friday during United Talent Agency’s “United Voices” rally outside the company’s Beverly Hills headquarters. [Foster, famous for avoiding the spotlight and politics, took the stage in front of hundreds of protesters and delivered a blistering critique of Trump’s immigration and national security agenda. “We know that the first attack on democracy is an assault on free expression, civil liberties, and this relentless war on the truth, ” Foster said. “And sadly, it’s too familiar because history repeats itself. ” “So you’re going to remember where you were today and what you did,” the aded. “It doesn’t matter where you were born, who you voted for. All the colors in the identity rainbow — this is our time to resist. It is the time to show up and demand answers. It’s all of us trying to tell our elected officials to do their job. ” “We will not tolerate chaos, ineptitude, and warmongering,” Foster told the crowd. “This is our time to resist”: Jodie Foster has led a Hollywood protest against Donald Trump pic. twitter. — The Telegraph (@Telegraph) February 25, 2017, United Talent Agency canceled its usual bash and organized the rally after the president signed an executive order that temporarily halted the admission into the United States of refugees from seven countries. Actor Michael J. Fox also addressed the crowd, calling Trump’s immigration and national security policies an “assault on human dignity. ” Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson. | 0fake |
Former A.I.G. Executives Reach Settlement in Accounting Fraud Case - The New York Times | Maurice R. Greenberg, the former chief executive of American International Group, reached an unexpected settlement ending a tumultuous, battle over civil accounting fraud charges first brought in 2005 by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Mr. Greenberg, 91, and his Howard Smith, A. I. G. ’s former chief financial officer, reached the agreement with the current New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, who announced it on Friday. In the settlement, the two men acknowledged that they had participated in and approved two transactions that inaccurately portrayed A. I. G. ’s financial results over four years. They agreed to give up more than $9. 9 million that they received as performance bonuses from 2001 through 2004, with Mr. Greenberg paying most of that amount. But it is a fraction of the more than $50 million the state had sought. The former executives also released statements acknowledging their roles in the transactions, but not admitting to fraud. After negotiations spanning about two months, the settlement was a quiet conclusion to a case that began during an era when Mr. Spitzer extracted large fines after accusing Wall Street research analysts of publishing biased research, mutual fund managers of shady trading and insurance brokers of rigging bids and receiving kickbacks. The Enron and WorldCom accounting frauds had shaken corporate boards. But Mr. Greenberg was determined to fight his case, and both sides dug in for a long battle. Neither Mr. Greenberg nor Mr. Spitzer have the same jobs they had in 2005, having receded from those prominent roles. The trial began in September before New York State Supreme Court Justice Charles E. Ramos after 11 years of delays and legal maneuvering, much of it as Mr. Greenberg appealed rulings by the judge. After his testimony and in the trial, Mr. Greenberg and the lawyers arguing for the state began mediation in December. The trial had been set to resume last month, but was postponed pending the talks. The former executives were accused of overseeing two sham reinsurance deals aimed at duping A. I. G. investors. One deal turned auto warranty insurance losses into investment losses the other inflated A. I. G. reserves by $500 million. The charges led to Mr. Greenberg’s ouster in 2005 as chief of A. I. G. which he had built into a global insurance leader. In a statement on Friday, Mr. Schneiderman said, “Today’s agreement settles the indisputable fact that Mr. Greenberg has denied for 12 years: that Mr. Greenberg orchestrated two transactions that fundamentally misrepresented A. I. G. ’s finances. ” In his statement, Mr. Greenberg said he “initiated, participated in and approved these two transactions” as a result, A. I. G. ’s public filings “inaccurately portrayed the accounting, and thus the financial condition and performance for A. I. G. ’s loss reserves and underwriting income. ” In an interview, David Boies, Mr. Greenberg’s lawyer, called the agreement a “nuisance settlement,” noting that Mr. Greenberg had avoided two penalties sought by the state that would have barred him from working in the securities industry or as an officer of a public company. The settlement’s outline was framed by the mediator, Kenneth R. Feinberg. The transactions were featured when A. I. G. settled accounting fraud charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2006. One, a reinsurance deal between A. I. G. and General Reinsurance Corporation, a company owned by Berkshire Hathaway, prompted federal criminal charges in Connecticut against several former executives of the companies two former Gen Re executives pleaded guilty. A 2008 jury verdict against five others was overturned on appeal. What began as a battle was nasty from the start. Before he brought the charges in May 2005, Mr. Spitzer had forced the ouster of Mr. Greenberg’s son Jeffrey as chief executive of the insurance brokerage Marsh McLennan after charging it with and receiving kickbacks. And Mr. Greenberg complained that Mr. Spitzer was treating minor infractions, like “foot faults” in tennis, as capital crimes. Mr. Spitzer shot back, “too many foot faults, and you can lose the match. ” Early in the trial, Mr. Greenberg admitted to a sometimes active role in formulating the transactions at issue but insisted he had intended for them to comply with accounting rules. He said he had left most details to subordinates. On the stand, he lunged and parried with state trial lawyer David E. Nachman, avoiding simple answers so often that the judge chided him. “If we don’t want this trial to last a year, you’re going to have to give direct answers,” Judge Ramos said. In his opening statement, Mr. Boies said, “this case is devoid of any admissible evidence that ties Mr. Greenberg to anything that was improper about these two transactions. ” Saule Omarova, who specializes in the regulation of financial institutions as a professor at Cornell Law School, said the case was about the legacies of Mr. Greenberg as A. I. G. ’s longtime leader and Mr. Spitzer as a onetime prominent Wall Street regulator. Stepping back, she said, the case is a prominent example of regulators’ efforts to untangle the blame for “ activities at large financial conglomerates” that later loomed large in the financial crisis of 2008. Three years after the charges led to Mr. Greenberg’s ouster, A. I. G. nearly collapsed and needed an $185 billion federal rescue. Mr. Spitzer resigned as New York governor in 2008 in a prostitution scandal. The state and the two defendants had reached an agreement to settle the case just before A. I. G. ’s . However, a steep drop in A. I. G. ’s stock price at that time reduced the value of a planned charitable donation of A. I. G. shares that would have been part of the settlement, and the agreement was called off. Before the trial, Judge Ramos ruled in favor of the state on one of the charges, but that was overturned on appeal, and the defense unsuccessfully sought to remove him from the case. In the Gen Re deal struck in 2000, the company was supposedly paying $10 million to get reinsurance from A. I. G. according to testimony by Christian M. Milton, a former A. I. G. executive. But A. I. G. arranged to repay the $10 million to Gen Re with a $5 million deal fee, he testified. The state charged that the “secret” fee repayment was a sign the reinsurance was bogus, intended mainly to allow A. I. G. to increase reserves by $500 million. But Mr. Greenberg, who initiated the deal by phoning the Gen Re chief executive, testified that he was not aware of the repayment plan. In a 2008 deposition admitted into evidence early in the trial, Alice Schroeder, a former Morgan Stanley insurance analyst, said that if she had known about the Gen Re transaction and its impact in raising A. I. G. ’s reserve levels, she “almost certainly” would not have upgraded the stock in early 2001. She also described Mr. Greenberg as “a very manager. ” One cloud over the state’s case was whether a deposition of Richard Napier, a former Gen Re executive, could come into evidence. Mr. Napier was an important prosecution witness in the Connecticut trial who in 2005 pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit securities fraud in the A. I. G. deal. While the defense objected to parts of Mr. Napier’s deposition as inadmissible “hearsay,” New York State lawyers argued that a “ exception” to hearsay rules should apply. Judge Ramos received briefs on the issue but had not ruled before the mediation effort began. | 0fake |
U.S. attorney general says people should just 'say no' to opioids | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions equated the opioid epidemic to a personal failing by many Americans who cannot “say no” to drugs on Thursday, and he said that marijuana could be serving as a gateway to the problem. “People should say no to drug use. They have got to protect themselves first,” he said during a question-and-answer session at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington. Sessions made his comments ahead of President Donald Trump’s declaration that the opioid crisis a public health emergency, a move that will redirect federal resources to help combat the problem. Sessions said he was extremely troubled by the epidemic, saying it has led to more overdose deaths than the height of the AIDS public health crisis in the 1980s. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioids were responsible for more than 33,000 U.S. deaths in 2015. The Justice Department has stepped up enforcement efforts to combat the problem. Earlier on Thursday, the Justice Department announced it had secured an indictment against a Pittsburgh-based doctor for unlawfully distributing opioids, in the first case of its kind to be brought since Sessions launched an Opioid Abuse and Detection unit. But in response to a question about how best to combat the epidemic, Sessions cast the problem in a moral light. “I do think that this whole country needs to not be so lackadaisical about drugs,” he said. In urging people to say no to drugs, his comments channeled former First Lady Nancy Reagan, who famously launched a “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign when the crack cocaine epidemic was ravaging communities in the 1980s. Her husband, President Ronald Reagan, during his tenure signed into law a sweeping criminal justice bill that established mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, including marijuana. Sessions said on Thursday that “fentanyl people are really killers,” but did not clarify to whom he was specifically referring. He also said that he has heard from many police chiefs that drug addiction “starts with marijuana.” Fentanyl is a synthetic opiate that is up to 50 times more lethal than heroin. Michael Correia, the government relations director for the National Cannabis Industry Association, said Sessions is ill-informed and pointed to data showing many of the overdoses involve prescription painkillers. According to the CDC, nearly half of all the opioid overdose deaths in the United States in 2015 involved prescription medications. Correia said Sessions “is still repeating the old, tired argument that marijuana is a gateway when there is a lot of evidence that proves otherwise.” | 0fake |
Donald Trump Will Throw A Hissy Fit After Reading George Will’s Review Of His Inaugural Address | Donald Trump thinks his inaugural address was the best ever. George Will emphatically disagrees.As it became clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee last year, the longtime conservative columnist left the Republican Party in disgust.Trump, of course, lashed out by calling Will overrated. But Will fired back by nailing Trump s lack of intelligence.And after Will s review of Trump s speech, it looks like it s only a matter of time before Trump lashes out again.Trump delivered his inaugural address on Friday as a pathetic crowd watched and cheered after every word he uttered.Trump lied repeatedly and made promises he won t keep while portraying America as an apocalyptic wasteland where poverty and crime reign and the military is crippled. It was a divisive and negative speech that ignores all the progress America made over the last eight years after a devastating recession nearly flattened our economy.But Trump thinks his speech was great and Fox News stroked his fragile ego by agreeing with him.George Will, however, was not impressed. Twenty minutes into his presidency, Donald Trump, who is always claiming to have made, or to be about to make, astonishing history, had done so, Will began in his column for the Washington Post. Living down to expectations, he had delivered the most dreadful inaugural address in history. Will took on Kellyanne Conway s promise that Trump s speech would be elegant. This is not the adjective that came to mind as he described American carnage, Will wrote. That was a phrase the likes of which has never hitherto been spoken at an inauguration. Oblivious to the moment and the setting, the always remarkable Trump proved that something dystopian can be strangely exhilarating: In what should have been a civic liturgy serving national unity and confidence, he vindicated his severest critics by serving up reheated campaign rhetoric about rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape and an education system producing students deprived of all knowledge. Yes, all. But cheer up, Will continued. Because the carnage will vanish if we follow two simple rules: Buy American and hire American. Simple is the right word. Indeed, Trump literally said this and tweeted it on Friday even though he doesn t obey those two rules himself.Will went on to reference Ronald Reagan s first inauguration and responded directly to Trump s declaration that What truly matters is not which party controls our government but whether our government is controlled by the people by cleverly quoting words James Madison would use today to comment on Trump s rise to the presidency. A dependence on the people, James Madison wrote, is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. He meant the checks and balances of our constitutional architecture. They are necessary because, as Madison anticipated and as the nation was reminded on Friday, Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Mic. Dropped. And now we wait for Donald Trump s temper tantrum.Featured image via screenshot | 1real |
Supreme Court rejects union appeal over Trump casino bankruptcy | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a union’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that allowed Atlantic City’s Trump Taj Mahal casino, founded by Donald Trump but now owned by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, to break its contract with union workers to secure a bankruptcy rescue deal. The high court’s decision not to hear the appeal by Unite Here Local 54 leaves in place a January decision by the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that cleared the way for the casino to exit Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The struggling casino has since emerged from bankruptcy and is now owned by Icahn Enterprises LP. It was the New Jersey city’s largest casino when Trump opened it in 1990 but it later fell on hard times along with other Atlantic City casinos. Trump, the billionaire real estate developer and presumptive Republican U.S. presidential nominee, founded the casino and it bears his name, but he has said he no longer has a stake in it. In 2014, the casino’s owner, Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc, filed for bankruptcy. Last year, it convinced a U.S. bankruptcy judge that it had to impose a new lower-cost contract on unionized workers in order to secure Icahn’s rescue deal. The union appealed, arguing that because the collective bargaining agreement expired before the bankruptcy, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court lacked jurisdiction. The appeals court sided with Trump Entertainment, saying a bankruptcy judge must be free to evaluate a labor contract that may determine the fate of a business. | 0fake |
Israel says it has destroyed Hamas attack tunnel from Gaza | JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli forces on Sunday destroyed a significant cross-border attack tunnel from the Gaza Strip, which the military said was being dug by the enclave s dominant Islamist group, Hamas. The announcement, cleared by Israeli censors who had previously barred reports of detection work around the central Gaza frontier, followed a surge of Palestinian unrest in response to last week s U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel s capital. It also came as Palestinian factions tried to meet Sunday s deadline for an Egyptian-mediated handover of Gaza by Hamas to Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas after a decade s schism. A network of Gaza tunnels allowed Hamas gunmen to blindside Israel s superior forces during the 2014 war and the Israelis, with U.S. help, have since stepped up work on counter-measures. The tunnel destroyed on Sunday ran hundreds of meters into Israeli territory and, though unfinished, was a new project that showed a significant effort by Hamas , military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Conricus told reporters. He did not elaborate on how Israel knew Hamas was responsible for the tunnel, which he said reached to within 1km (0.6 miles) of the nearest Israeli civilian community. Hamas did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The previous such announcement was on Oct. 30, when Israel blew up a tunnel dug by Islamic Jihad. In the process of that demolition, 10 gunmen from the group and another two from Hamas were killed - deaths that Israeli sources described as an unintended result of the passage s collapse within Gazan turf. Conricus said that to the best of our knowledge there were no such casualties on Sunday, though he added that the tunnels could be death traps for Gaza gunmen. The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) will continue to discover, expose and demolish these terror tunnels, he said. | 0fake |
Assad: US waging proxy war in Syria against Russia & Iran | Assad: US waging proxy war in Syria against Russia & Iran 11/03/2016
BLACKLISTEDNEWS.COM Despite claiming humanitarian motives, US actions in Syria are meant to undermine the power of Russia and Iran, with Washington trying to achieve this goal by directly supporting terrorists, Syrian President Bashar Assad has said. The US’ secret collaboration with terrorists is the reason why all attempts at a ceasefire and political transition in Syria have so far failed, the Syrian leader told Serbian newspaper Politika. The interview was also published by the Syria’s SANA news agency.
“Supporting the terrorists is a war of attrition against Syria, against Iran, against Russia, that’s how they look at it. That’s why not only this ceasefire – every attempt regarding ceasefire or political moving or political initiative, every failure of these things, the United States was to blame,” the Syrian president said.
Assad was referring to the deal negotiated by the US and Russia in September, which it was hoped would pave the way for a lasting truce in Syria. In practice, the agreement was derailed by armed groups, which had rejected it from the very beginning. The US pledged to convince the so-called moderate opposition to stick to the bargain and separate from terrorists, who would then be legitimate targets for a joint Russian-American air campaign. Washington didn’t deliver on this promise, however.
According to the Syrian president, a lasting ceasefire was not what Washington sought from the deal in the first place.
“They always ask for ceasefire only when the terrorists are in a bad situation, not for the civilians. And they try to use those ceasefires in order to support the terrorists, bring them logistic support, armament, money, everything, in order to re-attack and to become stronger again,” he said.
Sometimes the US support for terrorist groups goes through its allies such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Assad believes, while occasionally they provide direct support even to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), a group that the Washington-led coalition was supposedly formed to defeat. An example of this came during an American attack on Syrian Army troops near Deir Ez-Zor, which happened while the US-Russian truce was in force, and which the US claimed was the result of a mistake.
“They attacked a very big area. They didn’t attack a building to say, ‘we made a mistake.’ They attacked three big hills, not other groups neighboring these hills,” he said. “In less than one hour, ISIS attacked those hills. It means that ISIS gathered their forces to attack those hills. How did ISIS know that the Americans would attack that Syrian position? It means they were ready, they were prepared.”
Humanitarian mask, like in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan or Iraq Western media are currently focusing on civilian suffering in Syria and alleged atrocities committed by the Syrian government and its allies to justify deeper involvement in the war by whatever means the White House chooses, Assad said in the interview.
“You have a black-and-white picture; very, very bad guy against very, very good guy. It’s like the narrative of George W. Bush during the war on Iraq and on Afghanistan,” he described.
“The war in your country has been portrayed in the same way; as a humanitarian war where the West wanted to intervene in order to protect a certain community against the aggressors from the other community,” Assad said, referring to the Balkan Wars and the partitioning of Yugoslavia. “So, many people in the world believe that story, the same in Syria; they use the same mask, the humanitarian mask.”
While stressing any wrongdoing on the part of the government forces, the West ignores whatever atrocities the opposition commits, the president said.
“The terrorists killed during the last three days more than 80 innocent civilians in Aleppo, and wounded more than 300. You don’t read anything about them in the Western mainstream media,” he said. “They only single out some pictures and some incidents in the area under the control of the terrorists just to use them for their political agenda in order to condemn and to blame the Syrian government, not because they are worried about the Syrians.”
“They don’t care about our children, or about innocents, and about civilization, about infrastructure,” he added. “But actually, they only care about using everything that would serve their vested interests.”
The Syrian president doesn’t expect the US approach to Syria to change, regardless of who wins the presidential election next week, he told the newspaper. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would be bad for his country, he said.
“We don’t see any good signs that the United States is going to change dramatically its policy toward what’s happening in the world… or to obey the international law, or to care about the United Nation’s Charter,” he said.
“It’s not about who’s going to be president; the difference will be very minimal, each one of them is going to be allowed to leave his own fingerprint, just personal fingerprint, but doesn’t mean change of policies. That’s why we don’t pin our hopes, we don’t waste our time with it.”
A year without interference to stop war Assad reiterated his assessment that if Syria were left to settle its problems without foreign interference, it would take it no more than a year to end the conflict, saying that “it is not very complicated internally.”
“Of course, that looks not realistic, because everybody knows that the United States wanted to undermine the position of Russia as a great power in the world, including in Syria. Saudi Arabia has been looking how to destroy Iran for years now, and Syria could be one of the places where they can achieve that, according to their way of thinking,” he said.
“But if we say that we could achieve that situation where all those foreign powers leave Syria alone, we don’t have a problem in solving our problem.”
The president said Syria has existed as a multiethnic multiconfessional entity for centuries and has significant experience in overcoming differences.
“Without all different colors of the society – Christians, Muslims, and the different sects and ethnicities – you won’t have Syria. So, every Syrian citizen should feel fully free in practicing his rituals, his traditions, his beliefs. He should be free in order to have a stable country. Otherwise you won’t have Syria as a stable country,” Assad said.
The war has been a huge ordeal for Syrian society, but it has made Syrians as a nation more united, not less, he added.
“Many Syrians before the war didn’t tell the difference between being fanatic and being extremist, between being extremist and being terrorist. Those borders weren’t clear for many,” the president said. “Because of the war, because of the destruction, because of the heavy price that affected every Syrian, many Syrians learned the lesson and now they know that the only way to protect the country and to preserve the country is to be homogenous, to live with each other, to integrate, to accept, to love each other.”
“That’s why I think the effect of the war, in spite of all the bad aspects of any war like this war, but this aspect was positive for the Syrian society. So, I’m not worried about the structure of Syrian society after the war. I think it’s going to be healthier,” Assad added. | 1real |
With Koch Brothers Academy, Conservatives Settle In for Long War - The New York Times | ARLINGTON, Va. — The rise of Donald J. Trump, with his hostility toward free trade and vow to protect entitlements, is a sharp rebuke to the principles long championed by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch. But if the Koch brothers have lost the battle for conservative values in 2016, they are also quietly preparing for a long war. Their secret weapon is the Grassroots Leadership Academy: a training program dreamed up by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the political education arm of the Koch network, and intended to groom the next generation of conservative activists to shape the future of the Republican Party. Taking inspiration from icons of the left like Saul Alinsky, the Frankfurt School, and even President Obama’s Organizing for Action, the academy offers classes like “Messaging to the Middle” (about reaching not just the conservative base but also persuadable voters) community organizing and how to wage a successful public protest, complete with costumes. The goal is not just to equip activists to compete with the left, but also to help rebuild the conservative movement in the wake of a Trump loss — or even a Trump victory. The Kochs will be key figures in any discussion about what direction the party takes after 2016, and they are determined to steer it toward their vision. A band of trained volunteers focused on elections farther down the ballot could help raise their standing for 2018 and beyond. The network hopes that these activists will learn how to make a compelling, personal pitch to win over new converts to the cause, and that if volunteers are grounded in a strong philosophical understanding of principles, they will be better prepared not only to explain their beliefs but also to ward off candidates, like Mr. Trump, who do not espouse their vision. “We want a cultural shift of people being able to know what they want and how to talk to the people in their communities, so that in the future, when there are political leaders that want to demagogue issues, they do hit resistance,” said Levi Russell, the director of public affairs for Americans for Prosperity. After Americans for Prosperity spent more than $100 million during the 2012 election, yet failed to take back the White House or the Senate, the Koch network undertook a major and overhaul. It is spending $3 million on the training initiative, which officially began in February 2015, and plans to expand it next year. The effort has taken on newfound urgency because Mr. Trump has shown that Republican voters will support a candidate who denounces trade agreements and rejects the doctrine the Kochs have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to push. “This Republican nomination battle for president has demonstrated that no issue is ever fully won,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity. “You must keep competing and explaining. For example, why free trade is better, why entitlement reform is necessary. ” The group has held training sessions in roughly three dozen states, and about 10, 000 people have attended an academy program. The academy offers three tiers: two courses and, for those who have completed the first two levels, a final, intensive training at Americans for Prosperity’s headquarters here, with hotel and travel expenses underwritten by the group. The first level introduces trainees to the principles of economic freedom and prepares them, for example, to lobby their representatives about a particular issue. The second level of training seeks to turn the attendees into community activists, the sorts of people who could recruit and mobilize others. The curriculum is likely to intensify criticism of the Kochs, whose fortune is based largely on oil and petroleum, from liberals who view the brothers’ political work as stemming largely from their financial interests. One of the sessions, called the “Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” teaches attendees to argue that “a turn away from fossil fuel use would ultimately be disastrous to humanity — especially the poorest of the poor. ” Slade O’Brien, vice president of the Grassroots Leadership Academy, said he had learned two big lessons from studying Democratic tactics. “It was incredibly it was truly at the level,” he said. “And they didn’t have to agree on everything to agree to work on something — that incremental victories matter, and they would work on those rather than swing for the fences and try to hit a home run. ” In Bethlehem, Pa. the second session of the training program was held in a conference room over the beer and liquor section of a Wegmans grocery. Fifteen people munched on turkey wraps and miniature cannoli as they listened to Mary Conway, a Republican organizer who worked for Senator John McCain’s and Sarah Palin’s 2008 campaign, run briskly through a series of slides with labels like “The Left Is Highly Organized” and quotations from Mr. Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals. ” With the intonation of a motivational speaker, Ms. Conway urged her students to focus on what makes a successful movement. “Successful or Unsuccessful,” read slides listing various movements, one of which was the civil rights fight of the 1950s and 1960s. “One thing the civil rights movement was very good at was capturing the new media,” Ms. Conway said. Several attendees were activists from local Tea Party groups. One was a political blogger. They offered their views on successful political movements — and, during a break, on the presidential race. It was a reminder that the network cannot always control who shows up. Charlie Knight, 70, a electrician who supports Mr. Trump, said he had come to the training because he wanted to be around “ people. ” “There’s only one person that I could possibly support, because the other one’s nothing but a liar,” Mr. Knight said. Mr. O’Brien, the Grassroots vice president, said he hoped the program would pay dividends over the long term. “You can’t just show up at somebody’s door six weeks before an election and build a relationship with them,” he said. He added that Mr. Obama’s wing was “magnificent at building up their volunteers and relationships over a period of time, and you have to give them credit. ” The leadership academy program still has some work to do. Though the Kochs have tried to make the conservative base more diverse, in a recent training session near Washington, the class of roughly two dozen was mostly older and white. While some of the budding activists seemed equipped to return home and wage a successful campaign, others seemed generally befuddled and uncomfortable with even the basics of social media, like Twitter and digital video. At one point, a man briefly dozed off during a session on the legislative process. “The big question going forward is what are the programs that these people get plugged into once they’re ready to get involved in politics,” said Sasha Issenberg, the author of “Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns,” a book the program’s leaders have consulted. “What the left has been very good about doing is taking enthusiastic activists, giving them training, but then plugging them into systems where their energy is well directed. ” Near the end of a Friday session in Arlington, the trainees divided into several teams. Each team had a designated “builder” whose goal was to recreate a small widget out of building blocks using only descriptions from teammates, relayed from one person to the next in what was, basically, a giant game of telephone. Some teams did better than others, but the description became increasingly garbled as it passed from person to person. The real point of the exercise, a moderator explained, was that “you constantly have to be working on communication skills if you want to be a leader. ” But when he asked the group what the lesson was, someone shouted out a message perhaps even more aligned with the project’s stated aim: “Cut out the bureaucracy!” the attendee said, to laughter. “Yeah, cut out the middle man and just say it right to the builder,” the moderator conceded. | 0fake |
Yahoo scanning order unlikely to be made public: sources | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Obama administration officials briefed key congressional staffers last week about a secret court order to Yahoo Inc YHOO.O that prompted it to search all users’ incoming emails for a still undisclosed digital signature, but they remain reluctant to discuss the unusual case with a broader audience. Executive branch officials spoke to staff for members of the Senate and House of Representatives committees overseeing intelligence operations and the judiciary, according to people briefed on the events, which followed Reuters’ disclosure of the massive search.[nL2N1C601L] But attempts by other members of Congress and civil society groups to learn more about the Yahoo order are unlikely to meet with success anytime soon, because its details remain a sensitive national security matter, U.S. officials told Reuters. Release of any declassified version of the order is unlikely in the foreseeable future, the officials said. The decision to keep details of the order secret comes amid mounting pressure on the U.S. government to be more transparent about its data-collection activities ahead of a congressional deadline next year to reauthorize some foreign intelligence authorities. On Tuesday, more than 30 advocacy groups will send a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asking for declassification of the Yahoo order that led to the search of emails last year in pursuit of data matching a specific digital symbol. “We believe such a massive scan of the emails of millions of people, particularly if it involves the scanning of email content, could violate (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), the Fourth Amendment, and international human rights law,” the coalition wrote in an advance draft of the letter that was shared with Reuters. The Center for Democracy & Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Brennan Center, Human Rights Watch and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers are among the signatories. The groups say that Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which sources said the order was issued, requires a finding that the target of such a wiretap is probably an agent of a foreign power and that the facility to be tapped is probably going to be used for a transmission. An entire service, such as Yahoo, has never publicly been considered to be a “facility” in such a case: instead, the word usually refers to a phone number or an email account. The groups also pressed Clapper, who has pledged to be more transparent in the wake of controversial spying revelations, to explain how much authority the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has to order technical assistance from technology companies. Reuters reported that Yahoo had installed a special program that was hidden inside a Linux kernel module on its mail servers, where security staffers found it. Representative Justin Amash, who does not sit on one of the relevant committees, recently asked that all of Congress be briefed, given the significance of any change in interpreting foreign intelligence laws. “The briefing should involve all members, because all members will within about a year have to vote on a significant part of FISA,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, which circulated Tuesday’s letter among free speech and privacy advocates. “They should know what occurred so that they can decide whether to outlaw it.” Also last week, Yahoo itself asked Clapper to declassify the secret order or at least describe it, so that the company could respond to news reports and criticism that it did not do more to protect its users’ communications. The American Civil Liberties Union meanwhile filed a motion in the surveillance court asking that the Yahoo order and other significant ruling going back a decade be unsealed. | 0fake |
News: Incredibly Selfish: The City Of Chicago Wants Its Baseball Team To Win The World Series Even Though It Already Has A Bunch Of Movie Theaters And A Zoo | Email
If you want to see the full depths of human greed, look no further than the city of Chicago. This week, the residents of this selfish city are marching through the streets rooting for their hometown baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, to win the World Series. Yep, you heard that right. The citizens of Chicago want their baseball team to win the World Series even though their city already has a bunch of movie theaters and a zoo.
Some people just want more and more and more.
The endless selfishness on display here is just sickening. Apparently having dozens of movie theaters and a whole zoo to enjoy isn’t enough for the pleasure gluttons of Chicago. They need a big honking World Series victory, too.
We’ll give you a minute to try to wrap your head around the sheer unbridled avarice of these people. All you have to do is Google “Movie Theaters Chicago,” and you’ll be flooded with the names and addresses of cinemas all over the city playing both mainstream blockbusters and art house gems, which the people of Chicago can go to whenever they want. And when they aren’t in the mood for a movie, these spoiled brats can go see exotic creatures from all over the world at the Lincoln Park Zoo. But apparently that’s not enough to satisfy these unhinged hedonists. No, they need a gigantic parade for the Chicago Cubs cutting right through the middle of their city. They need fountains of champagne and a picture of Anthony Rizzo celebrating on the front page of every major newspaper in the country.
Hey, Chicago! Maybe if the Cubs win the World Series someone will make a movie about it, and you can go watch it in whichever one of the goddamn dozens of fucking movie theaters in your charmed little city is closest to your house. And then when the movie about your world champion baseball team is over, you can go talk about it while you look at the majestic lowland gorillas that live at your fully functioning goddamn zoo. If you aren’t sickened by what you see in the mirror, Chicago, it’s because greed has warped your minds.
Some people are just never content, no matter how many blessings life serves to them on a silver platter. Apparently the people in Chicago will not be satisfied unless their brains are gushing dopamine in all directions at all times. They have so many movie theaters. They have a zoo. And yet they won’t be happy until the fucking president of the United States is personally congratulating them for having the best baseball team in the world. Where do they get the gall to desire a World Series victory amid their cornucopia of movie theaters and their zoo? It’s disgusting. Nothing is ever enough for Chicago.
Fucking ingrates. | 1real |
null | Sounds good, Pedro. | 1real |
Old rivals Obama and McCain tussle over Iran | Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama had some blunt words for Sen. John McCain for questioning the honesty of Secretary of State John Kerry -- telling his former campaign rival to, in essence, back off.
"When I hear some, like Sen. McCain recently, suggest that our secretary of state, John Kerry, who served in the United States Senate, a Vietnam veteran, who's provided exemplary service to this nation, is somehow less trustworthy in the interpretation of what's in a political agreement than the Supreme Leader of Iran -- that's an indication of the degree to which partisanship has crossed all boundaries," Obama said Saturday evening at a press conference in Panama City, Panama.
The President's critique of the Arizona Republican, who is also a Vietnam War veteran, came after McCain suggested Kerry is purposely misinterpreting the framework of the nuclear deal in order to gain domestic support as negotiators work towards a final agreement.
"John Kerry is delusional," McCain said Thursday on the radio program "The Hugh Hewitt Show." "I think you're going to find out that they had never agreed to the things that John Kerry claimed that they had."
The sniping between the two stems out of the two competing interpretations of what's actually in the framework nuclear agreement struck in Switzerland between the United States, its allies and Iran.
The Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamanei, has suggested that Iran will not agree to inspections of their military facilities and demanding that sanctions will need to be lifted on Day 1, the day the deal is signed. U.S. officials have indicated the deal agreed to says otherwise, that it includes intense inspections and calls for sanctions to be lifted gradually.
McCain's remarks seemed to touch a nerve with Obama, who went after the senator without being specifically asked about his comments suggesting that seemed McCain was almost backwards in giving the Supreme Leader of the Iran the benefit of the doubt over a U.S. secretary of state.
"When you start getting to the point where you are actively communicating that the United States government and our secretary of state is somehow spinning presentations in a negotiation with a foreign power, particularly one that you say is your enemy, that's a problem," the President said. "It needs to stop."
McCain wasted no time responding directly to the President on Saturday evening.
"These widely divergent explanations of the nuclear deal must be fully explained and reconciled if we are to give serious consideration to this agreement," he said in a statement.
McCain followed up more pointedly in a tweet, writing, "So Pres Obama goes to #Panama, meets with Castro and attacks me - I'm sure Raúl is pleased."
Kerry, appearing on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday morning, defended his sales job of the deal, saying he stands by "every fact" of the agreement that he has laid out.
This tees up what had already promised to be a testy week ahead between Obama and Congress.
On Monday, lawmakers will return from a two-week spring recess for its first session since the announcement of the framework agreement. On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will start moving on a bill which would attempt to give Congress a vote to kill the deal.
The White House has repeatedly called for the legislation, spearheaded by Republican Sen. Bob Corker, to be changed so that it would not be binding. It has warned that it could undercut the administration's hand at the negotiating table with Iran -- a sentiment the president echoed from Panama on Saturday before returning to Washington.
"What I'm concerned about is making sure that we don't prejudge it, or those who are opposed to any deal whatsoever try to use a procedural argument essentially to screw up the possibility of a deal," Obama said. "I don't understand why it is that everybody is working so hard to anticipate failure. "
This is not the first battle between the 2008 rivals for the presidency. McCain has harshly criticized the Obama administration over its handling of several foreign policy issues, such as the American role in Iraq. | 0fake |
Charles Hugh Smith: “Don’t Diss the Dark Ages” | Posted on October 26, 2016 by Charles Hugh Smith
Once dissed as The Dark Ages, the Medieval Era is more properly viewed as a successful adaptation to the challenges of the post-Western Roman Empire era. The decline of the Western Roman Empire was the result of a constellation of challenges, including (but not limited to) massive new incursions of powerful Germanic tribes, a widening chasm between the Western and the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), plague, an onerous tax burden on the non-elite classes, weak leadership, the dominance of a self-serving elite (sound familiar?) and last but not least, the expansion of an unproductive rabble in Rome that had to be bribed with increasingly costly Bread and Circuses .
In effect, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire ran out of time and money. The Grand Strategy, successful for hundreds of years, relied heavily on persuading “barbarian” tribes to join the Roman system for the commercial and security benefits. This process of integration worked because it was backed by the threat of destruction by military force.
The Empire maintained relatively modest military forces given its vast territory, but its road system and fleet enabled relatively rapid concentration of force to counter an invasion. It also maintained extensive fortifications along active borders.
All of this required substantial tax revenues, manpower and effective leadership, not just for fortifications, the army, roads and the fleet, but to maintain the commercial and political benefits offered to “barbarians” who chose integration in the Empire.
Once the military threats proliferated and the benefits of Imperial membership eroded, the Grand Strategy was unable to maintain the integrity of the Imperial borders.
As tax revenues and the bureaucracy they supported imploded, security declined, reducing trade and communications. This unvirtuous cycle fed on itself: reduced trade led to reduced tax revenues which led to phantom legions that were still listed on the bureaucratic ledgers but which no longer had any troops.
The collapse of the Western Empire was a process, not an event. Key organizational infrastructures that endured through the Medieval era–for example, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches–gained traction in the waning centuries of the Western Empire.
Monasteries offered islands of scholarship and literacy and in many cases offered security via fortifications.
As trade diminished along with secure trade routes, self-reliance became the order of the day outside the borders of the Byzantine and Persian empires.
Though political leadership shifted with the latest invasion from the steppes of Eurasia, the two branches of Christendom slowly converted many invading groups or consolidated existing Christian powers into alliances that bound together diverse groups and proto-states.
These alliances were typically contingent and temporary, as today’s ally became tomorrow’s enemy, or vice versa. Despite the shifting loyalties of constant invasion and warfare, the Byzantine Empire endured and Charlemagne (and others) in Western Europe established the fractured but still effective Holy Roman Empire.
Much was lost when the Western Roman Empire collapsed, but islands of literacy, learning and security arose despite the constant conflicts and threats of invasion. Venice offers one example of a small city securing trade routes with commercial centers that then funded a regional empire.
The tidiness of the old Empire could not be reinstated. The adaptations were as messy and untidy as the challenges that swept in from the steppes and forests.
So please don’t diss the Dark Ages. Yes, the Roman baths, coliseums and political /social order fell into disrepair, but new ways of coping emerged that were as contingent and untidy as the era’s multiple challenges.
New modes of production and new social /political orders do not arise fully formed. They are pieced together by trial and error and numerous cycles of adaptation, innovation and failure. Share: | 1real |
Kaspersky says it obtained suspected NSA hacking code from U.S. computer | SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Moscow-based antivirus software maker Kaspersky Lab said on Wednesday that its security software had taken source code for a secret American hacking tool from a personal computer in the United States. In September, U.S. officials ordered Kaspersky’s products removed from government computers, saying the firm was vulnerable to Kremlin influence and that using the software could jeopardize national security. After that announcement, the Wall Street Journal reported on Oct. 5 that hackers working for the Russian government appeared to have targeted a National Security Agency (NSA) worker by using Kaspersky software to identify classified files in 2015. The New York Times reported on Oct. 10 that Israeli officials reported the operation to the United States after they hacked into Kaspersky's network. The Russian government has denied any involvement. Kaspersky began an internal inquiry in a bid to restore trust. On Wednesday, it said it had stumbled on the code in 2014 when the consumer version of its popular software flagged a zip file as malicious on a U.S. computer. While reviewing the file’s contents, a Kaspersky analyst discovered it contained the source code for a hacking tool later attributed to what Kaspersky calls the Equation Group. The software removed the file and the analyst reported the matter to Chief Executive Eugene Kaspersky, who ordered that the copy of the code be destroyed, the company said. Kaspersky said it assumed the 2014 source code episode was connected to the NSA’s loss of files described in media reports. “We deleted the archive because we don’t need the source code to improve our protection technologies and because of concerns regarding the handling of classified materials,” said Kaspersky spokeswoman Sarah Kitsos. Source code, which is normally hidden and gives instructions to computers, would have posed no danger to the Kaspersky customer. Former employees told Reuters in July that the company had on rare occasions removed uninfected files. Kaspersky spokeswoman Yuliya Shlychkova on Wednesday said removals of such uninfected material happen “extremely rarely.” Kaspersky said no third parties saw the code, though the media reports said the spy tool had ended up in the hands of the Russian government. Kaspersky denied the Journal’s report that its programs searched for keywords including “top secret.” The company said it found no evidence that it had been hacked by Russian spies or anyone except the Israelis, though it suggested others could have obtained the tools by hacking into the American’s computer through a back door it later spotted there. The NSA declined to comment on Kaspersky’s review. The new 2014 date of the incident is of interest because Kaspersky only announced its discovery of an espionage campaign by the Equation Group in February 2015. At that time, Reuters cited former NSA employees who said that Equation Group was an NSA project. Kaspersky’s Equation Group report was one of its most celebrated findings, since it indicated that the group could infect firmware on most computers. That gave the NSA almost undetectable presence. Shlychkova said the American machine’s files were found before the big Equation Group announcement but after Kaspersky had discovered Equation software on a machine in the Middle East. She said that occurred in March 2014. Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who led calls in the U.S. Congress to purge Kaspersky products from federal government networks, on Wednesday sent a letter to DHS acting Secretary Elaine Duke and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, urging the U.S. government to declassify information about Kaspersky products. The step was necessary, Shaheen wrote, “to allow the American people to make informed decisions about risks to their privacy and security.” Also on Tuesday, Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill sent a separate letter to DHS asking what was being done to ensure federal agencies were complying with the ban on Kaspersky products. Kaspersky’s consumer anti-virus software has won high marks from reviewers. The company said Monday it would submit the source code of its software and future updates for inspection by independent parties. | 0fake |
JUST IN: TRUMP HITS BACK At ‘Nancy and Chuck’ with Stunning Visual…Pelosi Has A Twitter Meltdown [Video] | We reported earlier today that Chuck and Nancy decided to be no-shows to a budget meeting after POTUS tweeted a scorchingly honest assessment of the two Democrat leaders (see below)WELL, IN TRUE TRUMP STYLE, THE PRESIDENT SET UP A GREAT VISUAL FOR A PRESSER:MOMENTS AGO: @POTUS, @SenateMajLdr, @SpeakerRyan, & Secretary Mattis delivered remarks on tax reform votes and North Korea's ICBM launch. pic.twitter.com/dA9jmoIiJk Fox News (@FoxNews) November 28, 2017NANCY GOES BONKERS WITH DELUSIONAL CLAIMS ABOUT POTUS:.@realDonaldTrump now knows that his verbal abuse will no longer be tolerated. His empty chair photo opp showed he s more interested in stunts than in addressing the needs of the American people. Poor Ryan and McConnell relegated to props. Sad! Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) November 28, 2017@realDonaldTrump now knows that his verbal abuse will no longer be tolerated. His empty chair photo opp showed he s more interested in stunts than in addressing the needs of the American people. Poor Ryan and McConnell relegated to props. Sad!, Pelosi tweeted.ONCE AGAIN, TRUMP OUTWITS THE WASHINGTON SWAMP DWELLERS MAGA! HERE S WHAT HAPPENED EARLIER TODAY:Senate Minority Leader Schumer and House Minority Leader Pelosi are having a temper tantrum after President Trump exposed them for who they really are in a scorching tweet:PRESIDENT TRUMP S TWEET: Meeting with Chuck and Nancy today about keeping government open and working. Problem is they want illegal immigrants flooding into our Country unchecked, are weak on Crime and want to substantially RAISE Taxes. I don t see a deal!Meeting with Chuck and Nancy today about keeping government open and working. Problem is they want illegal immigrants flooding into our Country unchecked, are weak on Crime and want to substantially RAISE Taxes. I don t see a deal! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2017BURN! CHUCK AND NANCY CAN T HANDLE THE TRUTH!They released a joint statement on Tuesday saying they were not playing They were taking their ball and going home like a couple of toddlers. Were they EVER in the budget game to make any reasonable compromise? We think they asked for unreasonable things that Trump just couldn t pull the trigger on. Amnesty for Dreamers could be one of those things. We don t have details but we re thinking it s why Trump tweeted about one borders.A portion of the statement reads: Given that the President doesn t see a deal between Democrats and the White House, we believe the best path forward is to continue negotiating with our Republican counterparts in Congress instead. Rather than going to the White House for a show meeting that won t result in an agreement, we ve asked Leader McConnell and Speaker Ryan to meet this afternoon, THE TWEET IS THE TRUTH It s about time someone called these two out for putting Americans last! | 1real |
Topless Protesters Arrested At Trump’s Polling Station | Topless Protesters Arrested At Trump’s Polling Station 11/08/2016
DAILY CALLER
The polling station where Republican candidate Donald Trump plans to vote Tuesday morning in New York was crashed by angry, shirtless protesters.
Two topless female protesters entered the New York City polling station, disturbing voters and chanting. The women were reportedly saying “Trump, grab your balls!” in reference to the leaked audio of his lewd conversation with Billy Bush from 2005.
The protesters had “Femen USA” painted on their backs. Femen is a mostly-European, extreme feminist activist group, increasingly spreading in the United States.
“I can assure you sure that once American women are trained and ready to act as Femen, every place of gender injustice, every representative of patriarchal culture, will be a target of Femen USA,” one activist told The Daily Beast . | 1real |
Trump Budget: ‘A New Foundation for American Greatness’ - Breitbart | WASHINGTON, D. C. — The Trump Administration released it’s fiscal year 2018 budget entitled “A New Foundation for American Greatness” on Tuesday morning which prioritizes money for defense, border security, law enforcement, veterans and school choice. [Documents previewed on Monday included a summary of the plan. One document entitled “A New Foundation for a Balanced Budget” stated that this budget “will reverse the damaging trends from previous administrations and restore the American Dream. ” It asserts that under this budget, by 2027 “publicly held debt will be reduced to less than 60 percent of GDP, the lowest level since 2010, when the economic policies of the last Administration took effect. ” Mulvaney reinforced this in a Monday budget preview briefing. He said that the budget will balance in 10 years under this plan, “the concept we put in place is a general, what we call the plan, which is that every single year we see those reduced by two cents on the dollar, every single year. ” The document emphasizes that there are no cuts to core Social Security benefits and no cuts to Medicare. Another document entitled “A New Foundation for American Jobs” laid out a vision for regulatory, welfare, and tax reform. The summary states that fiscal year 2018 budget projections include the Congressional Review Act resolutions that roll back certain Obama Administration regulations. This, the summary states, will generate “annual cost savings of approximately $600 million to $1. 2 billion per year. ” The budget reforms the federal SNAP program for an estimated combined savings of $193 billion over 10 years. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) reforms are estimated to save $21 billion over ten years. The OMB document states that total welfare reforms in the budget proposal will save $274 billion over 10 years. The tax reform element of the budget assumes several reforms laid out in the Trump Administration’s recently released tax reform outline. This includes paring down tax brackets from 7 categories to three, cutting the business tax rate to 15 percent and making many small businesses eligible for the 15 percent rate. A third document “A New Foundation for a Secure Nation” laid out an increase in defense spending and spending on border security immigration enforcement. Defense spending would be increased by $54 billion or 10 percent more than the 2017 CR President Barack Obama signed into law and the 2018 budget cap. Border security and immigration enforcement is allocated $2. 6 billion for “new infrastructure and technology investments in 2018 to give CBP frontline law enforcement officers the tools and technologies they need to deter, deny, identify, track and resolve illegal activity along the border. ” The President’s budget assumes passage of the American Health Care Act AHCA as well as tax reform, though a tax reform plan is still being formulated. The full plan was posted to the Office of Management and Budget website at 11 a. m. eastern at the same time Director Mick Mulvaney began a briefing on the details. This is a developing story. Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana | 0fake |
Israeli minister says Trump speech may start war with Iran | JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel’s intelligence minister said U.S. President Donald Trump’s speech against the 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran on Friday was “very significant” and could lead to war given threats that preceded it from Tehran. Israel’s Channel 2 TV asked Intelligence Minister Israel Katz whether he saw a risk of war after Trump’s speech. “Absolutely, yes. I think that the speech was very significant,” Katz responded. “Iran is the new North Korea. We see where things are goings.” | 0fake |
An Iraqi Family Split by the Vicissitudes of Asylum - The New York Times | Maha ’s family is divided. She immigrated to New York City in 2014, reuniting with her three sons who had arrived earlier. She expected that her husband, Husham and her two other sons would soon join her from Amman, Jordan, finally bringing the family together after a tumultuous decade of surviving the Iraq war, fleeing to Jordan and then searching for a permanent home. But on Friday, the family was dealt another blow, after President Trump approved a sweeping executive order on immigration that, among other things, blocked entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries including Iraq, where members of the family are citizens. Her husband and two sons in Jordan are for now locked out of the United States, and Ms. Obaidi cannot travel away, or risk being denied . “Now our family in the U. S. can’t even come to visit us, nor can we visit them,” Mr. Qadhi said on Saturday in Amman. “We just sit and watch like the rest of the world what is happening, and our fate is being decided for us, in front of our eyes. ” The family lived in Baghdad as American tanks, troops and missiles tore into the Iraqi capital in 2003. It stayed for several years, despite gunfire and bomb blasts outside its house and the kidnapping of several family members. The family helped American soldiers even though other Iraqis targeted it for doing so. One of the sons in Amman, Thabit said he and his father had run a snack bar on an American base in Baghdad, serving candy and soft drinks to troops, and operated a internet cafe, which required them to be vetted and approved to begin work. After Thabit was kidnapped in 2006 by Qaeda terrorists and eventually released, he said, he reported details about the episode to American officials in the hope that they would be caught. And on his way home from the Baghdad base one day, he came upon four American troops injured along the road, and he said he had loaded them into his car and driven them to the Green Zone. “America has abandoned its responsibility to protect those who protected and cooperated with the Americans,” he said. “It’s a decision solely based on my religious faith. It’s discrimination solely on religious grounds. ” He added: “This is the wrong decision. Is it even constitutional?” The family’s home was along one of Baghdad’s major highways, an entry point for American troops during the invasion. The family huddled in a windowless section of the home for 10 days, as bullets shattered windows and rockets blazed through the sky, until the United States took control of Baghdad. In the years after the invasion, the family remained in Iraq, even as unrest spread, militants took up arms and tensions between Sunnis and Shiites flared up. In addition to Thabit Ms. Obaidi’s husband was also kidnapped, on two separate occasions. The family members recalled the lengths to which they went to get them freed, how they stuffed $60, 000 in Iraqi dinars into garbage bags and were instructed by cellphone to travel to a series of locations before dropping off the ransom. “It was like in the movies,” Ms. Obaidi said in an interview this month. Fearing more attacks, the family left Iraq for Jordan. It joined many other Iraqi refugees, including extended family members. Ms. Obaidi and her husband used their savings to buy a home in Amman. Employment opportunities were scarce for Iraqis, leading three of her sons, starting in 2010, to venture to the United States to find work. When Ms. Obaidi later followed them, she hoped that her entire family could apply for asylum and unite in America. She made the trip despite a number of concerns. “At first, I felt afraid,” she said. “How can I live in this country? It is a foreign country. It is very far from my culture. How will I be compatible with the community?” To her surprise, Ms. Obaidi found New York to be unlike its gruff stereotypes. People smiled as she walked down the street. Men helped her haul heavy bags up stairs. Others offered her seats on the subway. “Everybody in America is very nice,” she said. “They are very polite, helpful people, nice people, always with a smile on their face. That is my experience. ” She has found additional support from the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian aid, relief and development nongovernmental organization based in New York. Founded in 1933, the organization is the newest organization supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, and the only one of the eight groups whose work extends beyond the New York area. It operates in 29 cities in the United States and in more than 40 countries. The organization was instrumental in helping Ms. Obaidi adjust to her new life and connecting her with a number of social services, including health insurance and food stamps. It helped her obtain a Social Security card, navigate New York’s streets and understand its transportation system. The group also helped her study for her driver’s license permit exam, among other services. “I feel I am not lonely,” she said. “I have somebody. I have somebody to support me. ” She shares a home in the Astoria neighborhood in Queens with two of her sons, Saif and Qaed . Her third son, Tameem and his wife, Melissa Forstrom, also live in the neighborhood. “I have a nice life,” Ms. Obaidi said. “Even though my apartment is small, I feel happy in it. I like it. ” But it is a home with some notable, painful absences. “I’ve divided myself,” Ms. Obaidi said. “Some part is there in Jordan, and some parts … ” She trailed off, overcome with emotion. In Amman, Thabit her oldest son, lives with his wife and son across the street from Ms. Obaidi’s husband, Husham, and their youngest son, Omar . They have been denied asylum in the United States. In October 2015, Husham was sent a conditional acceptance letter for asylum in the United States. About a year later, he received a second letter, denying him resettlement. Omar who works at Unicef to help provide water, sanitation and hygiene to Syrian refugees in Jordan, was also denied resettlement. “We have lived here as if we were waiting for something, as if everything was temporary, but now we no longer know what we are waiting for,” Omar said in his apartment in Amman. Thabit who has traveled to New York several times to visit his family, has not received the same denial letters for resettlement in the United States. His tourist visa was renewed, but a week later, an officer at the American Embassy in Amman told him that his visa had been canceled, and his case for resettlement was denied. Whether they will ever get approval to move to the United States is even more uncertain now. Thabit said that Mr. Trump’s order was particularly painful and that he felt America was turning its back on Iraqis who had risked their lives to help soldiers during the war. “At the end we realized we were no longer welcome, neither from the Iraqis because we worked with the Americans, nor from the Americans because we were Iraqi,” he said. Like many Iraqis, Thabit is living in Jordan on a conditional basis. He must renew his permission every year, and it is dependent on the family’s financial means. “Nothing is guaranteed in business,” he said. “Today, my trade company here is successful, but if one day the business fails, then what will happen? Where do I go?” In the United States, his siblings, even with employment and legal immigration status, live in a similar state of unsteadiness and concern. For three years, Tameem ’s only proof of his legal status was an record known as an form, a document without a photo of him and only his name and identification numbers. It has hindered his attempts to travel even within the United States. Visas for Saif ’s wife and children were approved recently after a wait of more than two years. They were booked on a plane expected to arrive Feb. 7, but Friday’s executive order by Mr. Trump has dashed those plans. “The kids, they grow up far from their father,” Saif said. “All of a sudden, I told them ‘I’m sorry, something changed. I may not be able to see you soon. ’” He and his wife are distraught by the development, which leaves them in a precarious position. In anticipation of the move, their children were taken out of their private school and the lease on their apartment in Amman is to expire on Feb. 1. “I’m watching the news every second,” Mr. Qadhi said. Ms. Obaidi’s children have been able to acclimate to their new surroundings and establish a rhythm in their lives. Tameem owns a cellphone store in the East Village in Manhattan, Qaed works as an information technology manager, and Saif is an Uber driver. Ms. Obaidi stays busy by volunteering at the Masjid Dar mosque. The family gathers as often as work schedules and other responsibilities allow, most often on Sundays, when Ms. Obaidi prepares a large meal. They all await the day when more chairs can be placed around the table. Halfway across the world, the other half of the family shares that sentiment. Omar said he missed his brothers, but especially his mother. “It just feels weird that we are now split, and the future looks grim,” he said. “We are travelers on a journey with no destination, and my family is so far away. ” | 0fake |
Russia says still likely to back Paris climate deal despite U.S. withdrawal | MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Friday it was still likely to back the landmark 2015 global agreement to fight climate change despite the U.S. withdrawal from the pact, but a Kremlin aide said Washington’s pull-out left a gaping hole in the deal. Russia has signed the Paris climate pact but is the biggest emitter of global greenhouse gases not to have yet ratified it. Russian officials have said they need more time to assess its potential impact on their economy and have spoken of drafting a strategy for low-carbon development, fuelling fears among green campaigners Moscow may not ratify the agreement. Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said on Friday he did not think that U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull his country out of the agreement would prompt Russia to rethink its own stance however. “We made the decision to join, and I don’t think we will (change) it,” the RIA news agency cited Dvorkovich as telling reporters at an economic forum in St Petersburg. “The deal simply amounts to a signal about the unity of countries around a certain theme. I don’t think anyone doubts that the Americans will make environmental policy. We will definitely do this (make environmental policy) regardless of whether we are part of the agreement or not,” he added. Separately, Kremlin aide Andrei Belousov told reporters at the same event that the U.S. withdrawal punched a gaping hole in the pact, rendering it unworkable. Belousov said Russia was analyzing the U.S. move, but said Russia’s own plans did not depend on the decision of others, including the United States. “I think it’s a great shame because decisions that have been taken should not be changed,” he said of the U.S. withdrawal. “It’s obvious that without the participation of the United States the Paris agreement will be unworkable because the United States is one of the biggest generators of emissions.” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said on Thursday that Moscow attached “great significance” to the deal despite anything the United States might do. | 0fake |
Trump’s Campaign Is Damaging His Brand | If Donald Trump is nothing else, he’s an American brand. The Trump name adorns luxury condominiums, hotels and golf courses around the world; it has sold a TV show, millions of books, a line of cologne and even, briefly, an airline.
And that brand, according to new data published here in Politico Magazine for the first time, is taking a major hit in the wake of his presidential campaign.
Trump has built his distinctive trademark over the course of decades in public life, turning his own wealth, glamorous lifestyle and personality into emblems of his multi-billion dollar company through endless self-promotion. Trump considers this reputation alone a hugely significant part of his business: Financial documents the candidate released earlier this year set the value of his company’s “deals, brand and branded developments” at $3 billion, which makes his name the single most significant item in his portfolio. Trump’s brand was also his first great advantage as a presidential candidate, giving him name recognition and the gloss of success that even a Bush might envy.
But as Trump the candidate has ascended, hitting the top of the polls and staying there thanks to a series of controversial statements and a groundswell of Republican populist support, the opposite has happened to Trump the brand: Among the people Trump’s business depends on—the consumer making over $100,000 a year—the value of the Trump name is collapsing.
A December survey of American consumer opinion, fielded by the BAV Consulting division of advertising and marketing giant Young & Rubicam (and the largest and longest running study of brands in the world), found that since Donald Trump’s run for president, the Trump brand has lost the confidence of the people who can afford to stay at one of his hotels, play at one of his country clubs or purchase a home in one of his developments. It is also rapidly losing its association with the gilded traits Trump has long promoted as the essence of his business.
In categories such as “prestigious,” “upper class” and “glamorous” the Trump name has plummeted among high-income consumers. Within the same group, it is also losing its connection with the terms “leader,” “dynamic” and “innovative”—quite a blow for a man who criticizes others for being “low energy” and considers himself an industry trailblazer. The brand has been a survey subject for BAV Consulting’s regular surveys for over a decade and has never before experienced such a precipitous drop in reputation. It’s the kind of change that usually follows a big corporate scandal, like a product recall or financial misconduct. But in Trump’s case it’s a man’s personality that is in play.
The billionaire Trump might brush off complaints about his politics; he might even shrug off short-term commercial losses. But this plunge in brand status would be seen as a crisis in the offices of any major consumer-oriented company. Public companies often claim losses in net worth when customers turn against them because of a public relations disaster; they call it a decline in “goodwill.” As a private corporation, the Trump Organization is not obligated to report any such a decline—or to report it accurately—but any CEO will tell you that a brand deterioration like this is likely to have a significant financial impact, affecting sales, borrowing and even efforts to attract high quality employees.
The first visible signs of the commercial cost associated with Trump’s extreme politics came after his inflammatory comments about undocumented Mexican immigrants, which he made as he announced his candidacy last June. NBC quickly dumped him as host of Celebrity Apprentice, a gig that netted him millions of dollars per year. Univision, Macy’s, Serta and others began unwinding marketing relationships with him. More recently, real estate partners have talked of taking his name off developments, and a home furnishings retailer in the Middle East took Trump products off display. In Vancouver, 50,000 people have petitioned to prevent the brand name from decorating a skyscraper under construction.
Less visible, but no less important, are hits Trump has taken among his target consumer base: the luxury, or “aspirational” market of those making over $100,000 a year. The wealthiest respondents in the BAV survey—those with incomes over $150,000—judge Trump the harshest of any income bracket. In this group, as measured by BAV’s consumer opinion index, Trump’s reputation for being “obliging” and “upper class” has declined by more than 50 percent since the outset of the campaign, followed by “leader” (with a 41 percent decline) and “prestigious” (down by 39 percent). The next lower income level—households making between $100,000 and $150,000—wasn’t much kinder, with a 56 percent decline for “obliging,” a 45 percent decline in “prestigious” and a 38 percent drop for “upper class.”
Even the one notable upward spike in Trump traits—the wealthiest view the Trump brand as 65 percent more “traditional” than they did when the trait was measured before the campaign—points to commercial trouble. Although Trump’s political loyalists might cheer his standing as a traditional figure, this quality is not a good thing for a business seeking to sell glamour and luxury. In commercial terms, other products that are deemed “traditional” are the canned meat product Spam and Idaho potatoes.
In interviews we conducted before the campaign, Trump’s children, who work in his companies, acknowledged that their father is the brand and that he will dominate its marketing for the rest of his days. “He became synonymous with success and aspiration,” noted daughter Ivanka. “That is still at the core of what the brand is today.”
But the challenge of a brand future clouded by his father’s polarizing views was on Donald Trump. Jr.’s mind in 2014, long before his father declared his run for president. “If you’re asking, ‘Do I think that he knows he’s a polarizing guy?’ Yes. The answer is 100-percent,” Donald Jr. said. “He will be out there, and he will question these things in a way that you don’t see anyone doing today—or certainly not anyone that has a brand. … There could be potentially ramifications to his business for taking these stances.”
How serious will these ramifications be? We might never know: As head of a privately held company, free of financial obligations to shareholders, Donald Trump has no reason to disclose the financial hit he takes due to his controversial campaign. Still, it’s worth noting that these kinds of blows can be massive: During the dot-com crash, firms that fell from grace took multi-billion dollar “goodwill” write-offs. AOL noted a $99 billion loss in goodwill. Worldcom’s was $45 billion.
Donald Trump, as a 69-year-old whose fortune is counted in the billions, will very likely remain wealthy and comfortable—a success as he defines it—for the rest of his days. But those like his children who may have counted on the brand to sustain them further into the future cannot be so certain.
Then again, they could move into the part of the consumer market where no real damage has been done. Perhaps a Trump brand of smokes, or maybe canned meat? | 0fake |
Comment on FBI Makes Stunning Reversal, Reopens Clinton Investigation After Discovery of New Documents by Terry | Claire Bernish
In a thoroughly stunning development, the FBI has announced the relaunch of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and personal server , after learning of “ the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation ,” as Rep. Jason Chaffetz tweeted Friday afternoon. FBI Dir just informed me, "The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation." Case reopened
— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016
With just ten days to go before the presidential election, this development could knock the Clinton campaign for quite the loop — particularly amid growing controversy in revelations from campaign chair John Podesta’s emails , which continue to be published by Wikileaks on a daily basis.
FBI Director James Comey penned a letter to Congress Friday, noting the bureau had learned additional documents had become apparent that could have bearing in the investigation of Clinton, stating , in part, via NBC News :
“Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.”
Although Comey did not initially make it apparent the content nor source of the documents, Federal Law Enforcement officials did acknowledge that the content originated from devices owned by one of Mrs. Clinton’s top aides, Huma Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner . After consulting with the team of investigators, Comey “agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to asses their importance to our investigation.”
Comey made no suggestion whether or not the documents could be “significant,” but the fact the investigation has now been reopened certainly piques additional questions about both the new items as well as how they might have originally escaped the FBI’s attention.
“There are outstanding questions . . . regarding a possible conflict of interest into this case,” stated House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz in a letter to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, as cited by the Washington Post . Chaffetz requested McCabe provide documentation concerning his wife’s 2015 bid for the Senate, which, as the Post notes, received financial support from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is close to Hillary Clinton.
Chaffetz requested documents from McCabe concerning “when you first became aware the State Department was pressuring the FBI to reverse its decision regarding the classification of one of Secretary Clinton’s emails,” and, “when you first became aware the FBI had opened an investigation into Secretary Clinton’s email server.”
Indeed, Chaffetz notes several discrepancies in interdepartmental interactions during the course of the prior investigation, such as:
“In the spring and summer of 2015, the FBI interacted with multiple agencies regarding Secretary Clinton’s emails. In April or May of 2015, Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy began contacting officials in the FBI’s National Security Branch, which you headed prior to serving as the head of the Washington Field Office. Under Secretary Kennedy pressured FBI officials to reverse a decision regarding an email deemed by the FBI to contain classified information. …”
Considering the increasingly embattled campaign of Hillary Clinton, and the late date for initiating further investigation, one wonders whether the abrupt discovery could be related to the putatively missing 30,000 emails which have been the subject of both consternation and ridicule for months.
Although Comey did not reveal, well, much of anything about the decision to relaunch the investigation, it’s clear this will have a direct and resounding impact on Hillary Clinton’s contentious bid for the White House. Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this: | 1real |
Three vehicles torched in long-running South African taxi war | JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - One Uber vehicle and two other taxis were torched in South Africa s main business district on Thursday night in a feud over fares, but no one was injured, Uber and police said on Friday. The vehicles were set alight in the wealthy Sandton district near the Gautrain station, a popular pick-up point for taxis where previous attacks on Uber vehicles have taken place. It was not clear who torched the vehicles. Uber [UBER.UL] drivers around the world have faced threats and protests from regular taxi operators, who say cheap fares from Uber drivers are forcing them out of business. All the drivers of the cars escaped unharmed. It is suspected that the incident is related to the ongoing fight between the metered taxis and the Ubers, police spokesman Captain Mavela Masondo said. A fourth car had its back window smashed in, he said. On Friday, police officers patrolled the street outside the Gautrain station, which is opposite the Reuters offices. Samantha Allenberg, Uber s communications head for Africa, said only one of the torched vehicles belonged to Uber. One of the torched vehicles was likely from a different ride-hailing service, Allenberg said. We really need the government to do more here. The violence and intimidation is simply unacceptable, she said. Uber has met the minister of transport and law enforcement agencies several times over similar incidents, she said. Footage of the burning vehicles circulated on social media. Transport Minister Joe Maswanganyi said those behind the violence and intimidation would face the law. More than 6,000 vehicles use the e-hailing Uber application to find customers in South Africa, where the service has grown swiftly as public transport has not kept up with the rising population in sprawling cities. Uber operates in more than 600 cities and has faced protests in France, Brazil and Hungary, and Uber drivers have been threatened or attacked in Kenya, Costa Rica, and Australia. | 0fake |
Mitt Romney Refuses to Support Trump: “I Keep Hoping That Somehow Things Will Get Better” | The Republican Party’s identity crisis keeps getting worse. Hours after House Speaker Paul Ryan said he was not ready to support Donald Trump, the presumptive G.O.P. nominee, 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney also refused to endorse his successor, saying that he was “dismayed” by the state of American politics and that he wished for “better choices” for candidates who, unfortunately, do not exist anymore.
While Romney ruled out the possibility of a third-party candidacy during a Q&A at a fundraising gala Thursday night in Washington, he said he was so fundamentally disappointed with the G.O.P. that he could not support Trump in good conscience, nor would he switch allegiances and support Hillary Clinton.
“I see way too much demagoguery and populism on both sides of the aisle and I only hope and aspire that we'll see more greatness,” he said, according to the Washington Examiner.
Earlier this year, Romney championed the Never Trump movement, attempting to block his nomination by proposing the remaining Republican candidates unite to force a contested convention in which an alternative would win the nomination despite winning fewer primaries. That dream ended earlier this week when Ted Cruz dropped out of the race (and John Kasich soon after), but that didn’t stop Romney from sticking to his convictions.
“I happen to think that the person who is leading the nation has an enormous and disproportionate impact on the course of the world, so I am dismayed at where we are now,” he said. “I wish we had better choices, and I keep hoping that somehow things will get better, and I just don't see an easy answer from where we are.”
Romney also praised Ryan, his former running mate, who recently took on Trump. “He is where he needs to be,” he explained, saying that he was impressed that Ryan could somehow get the wildly fractious House G.O.P. to work together. “I’d love to see him run for president, but having a Speaker of the House, at this stage, where we don’t know what’s going to happen on the presidential race, having a Speaker of the House with that kind of leadership capacity is very encouraging. I have hopes that he’ll remain Speaker.”
Romney may not be the first Republican leader to publicly disavow Trump since he became the party’s nominee—that honor goes to Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, who quickly argued that an “adult” step in and run for president on a third-party ticket—but he is by far the most prominent. So far, there have been rumblings within an embarrassed G.O.P. that they could never support Trump: both George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush refused to endorse or comment on the nomination, and do not plan on attending the Republican National Convention. Senator John McCain was recorded saying that Trump would severely hurt his re-election chances in Arizona, a Latino-heavy state that borders Mexico. And, as Hillary Clinton highlighted in an e-mail blast, that sentiment isn’t limited to high-profile Republicans, either: dozens of other G.O.P. congressional representatives, governors, and major political figures are all quickly boarding the anti-Trump train—or, at the very least, refusing to comment. | 0fake |
Multinationals grapple with Republican excise tax surprise | WASHINGTON/LONDON (Reuters) - The Republican tax bill unveiled last week in the U.S. Congress could disrupt the global supply chains of large, multinational companies by slapping a 20-percent tax on cross-border transactions they routinely make between related business units. European multinationals, some of which currently pay little U.S. tax on U.S. profits thanks to tax treaties and diversion of U.S. earnings to their home countries or other low-tax jurisdictions, could be especially hard hit if the proposed tax becomes law, according to some tax experts. Others said the proposal could run afoul of international tax treaties, the World Trade Organization and other global standards that forbid the double taxation of profits if the new tax did not account for income taxes paid in other countries. The proposed tax, tucked deep in the 429-page bill backed by President Donald Trump, caught corporate tax strategists by surprise and sent them scrambling to understand its dynamics and goals, as well as whether Congress is likely ever to vote on it. Reuters contacted seven multinational companies and four industry groups. None would comment directly on the proposal, with most saying they were still studying the entire tax package. The proposal is part of a broad tax reform bill unveiled by House of Representatives Republicans on Thursday, which promises to lower overall tax burdens and simplify the tax code. Whether the proposed reforms ever become law is uncertain, with weeks and possibly months of debate and intense lobbying still ahead. The House package overall has drawn criticism for adding too much to the federal budget deficit and too heavily favoring the rich and big business. However, the corporate tax part, experts said, included some ambitious proposals worthy of further discussion. They said the 20 percent excise tax is one such proposal targeting the abuses of so-called transfer-pricing where multinationals themselves set prices of goods, services and intellectual property rights that constantly move between their national business units. Under global standards, those prices should resemble those available on the open market. However, if a foreign parent charges U.S. affiliates inflated price, it can reduce its U.S. tax bill and effectively shift profits to a lower-tax country, reducing the entire corporation’s overall tax costs. “Clearly there’s a transfer-pricing issue and something should be done,” said Steven Rosenthal, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “I would view this 20-percent excise tax as a blunt instrument to address the problem. And the problem with blunt instruments is sometimes they hit what you want to hit, and sometimes they hit what you don’t want to hit,” said Rosenthal, former legislation counsel at Congress’s Joint Tax Committee. Under the proposal, U.S. business units that import products, pay royalties or other tax-deductible, non-interest fees to foreign parents or affiliates in the course of doing business would either pay a 20-percent tax on these or agree to treat the amounts as income connected to their U.S. business and subject to U.S. taxes. As proposed, the new tax rule would apply only to businesses with payments from U.S. units to foreign affiliates exceeding $100 million. The rule would not take effect until after 2018. European companies that sell foreign-made products into the U.S. market through local distribution units could be among those most affected, said Michael Mundaca, co-director of the national tax department at the accounting firm Ernst & Young. Such companies could end up paying tax on the transfers twice - first if they paid the excise tax in the United States and then at home where they are taxed now and where the new U.S. tax would not be accounted for without changes to bilateral tax treaties. “That would be a structure that would at least initially be hit by the full force” of the excise tax, said Mundaca, a former U.S. Treasury Department assistant secretary for tax policy. He said European officials would be registering concern. “I am sure they are making calls right now to their counterparts in the U.S. Treasury looking for some explanation ... and making the point that this might be contrary to treaty obligations.” Gavin Ekins, an economist at the Tax Foundation, a conservative think tank, predicted that most multinationals would opt to avoid the excise tax by electing to pay U.S. corporate tax on all the profits related to products sold in the United States. Those include profits on activities conducted overseas, like manufacturing or research, which are also subject to foreign income taxes. The U.S. corporate tax rate on those profits would drop to 20 percent from 35 percent if the House bill becomes law. The promise of additional revenue and hopes that the new tax may entice multinationals to locate more production and jobs in the United States, may well outweigh international concerns. The entire Republican tax package is projected to add $1.5 trillion over 10 years to the $20 trillion federal debt and the planned excise tax is among sources of new revenue needed to avoid an even bigger shortfall. It is expected to bring about $155 billion over 10 years, according to a summary of the Republican proposal distributed last week. Still, as the tax debate heats up, foreign multinationals are likely to lobby hard against it, with domestic corporations linked to foreign affiliates possibly concerned as well. There is also uncertainty how the new rules would work in practice. It was unclear, for example, from the bill’s language how companies should calculate income “effectively connected” to their U.S. business, Tax Foundation’s Ekins said. “You don’t know what profit is included when you choose ‘effectively connected income’ and don’t know the formula,” he said. “Is it just for that product line? All the income that comes in from every other company or from every other source?” The House tax committee was scheduled to begin considering amendments to the Republican tax bill on Monday. | 0fake |
Chelsea For President? | Go to Article
There’s a scene at the end of the remarkably terrible film, “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” in which Sean Connery’s Allan Quartermain has died, and is buried. The audience breathes a sigh of relief. This wretched film dragged itself across the finish line, and that’s the end of it. | 1real |
Sanctuary Cities Surround Area Where Illegal Aliens Allegedly Killed Woman | The region of Washington State where a woman was allegedly shot 13 and killed by a gang of illegal immigrants is surrounded by sanctuary jurisdictions. [Jill Sundberg was allegedly murdered in the Grant County area by five illegal immigrants, as Breitbart Texas reported, a region which neighbors multiple sanctuary cities. A look at the Center for Immigration Studies sanctuary map reveals that there are over 25 sanctuary cities in Washington alone, almost more than any other state in the country. South of George, sanctuary jurisdictions like Yakima County, the town of Sunnyside, Benton County, and Franklin County harbor illegal aliens from federal immigration enforcement officers. To the east of George sits Spokane County, which has specific policies in place for the sheriff’s department to protect illegal immigrants. On the northwest side of George sits Chelan County, which has a local jail policy that refuses to hold illegal immigrants on the basis of their immigration status for federal authorities. Sundberg was allegedly arguing with Rodriguez on the evening of December 21. Shortly after the argument, Sundberg was kidnapped and taken to the location where her body was eventually discovered. Police have arrested the five illegal immigrants who they say are responsible for shooting Sundberg 13 times in the head and stabbing her body with a message written in Spanish on a piece of cardboard. John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 0fake |
Trump taps climate change skeptic as energy adviser, pushes back on taxes | WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Donald Trump on Friday picked a prominent climate change skeptic to help him craft his energy policy and pushed back against renewed calls that he release his income tax returns - saying his tax rate is “none of your business.” The presumptive Republican presidential nominee is seeking to build out his policy proposals as he pivots from campaigning for his party’s nomination to a likely general election matchup with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Among those he has asked for help is U.S. Republican Representative Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, one of the country’s most ardent oil and gas drilling advocates and climate change skeptics. North Dakota has been at the forefront of the U.S. shale oil and gas boom. Trump’s team asked Cramer, who has endorsed Trump, to write a white paper, or detailed report, on his energy policy ideas, according to Cramer and sources familiar with the matter. Cramer said in an interview that his white paper would emphasize the dangers of foreign ownership of U.S. energy assets, as well as what he characterized as burdensome taxes and over-regulation. Trump will have an opportunity to float some of the ideas at an energy summit in Bismarck, North Dakota on May 26, Cramer said. The senator was also among a group of Trump advisers who recently met with lawmakers from Western energy states, who hope Trump will open more federal land for drilling, a lawmaker who took part in the meeting said. A spokeswoman for Trump’s campaign did not comment. Environmental groups, and Clinton’s campaign, quickly attacked Trump for tapping Cramer. “Kevin Cramer has consistently backed reckless and dangerous schemes to put the profits of fossil fuel executives before the health of the public, so he and Trump are a match made in polluter heaven,” Sierra Club Legislative Director Melinda Pierce said in an emailed statement. The Clinton campaign also criticized the move. “Donald Trump’s choice of outspoken climate (change) denier Kevin Cramer to advise him on energy policy is just the latest piece of evidence that letting him get near the White House would put our children’s health and futures at risk,” said campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson. Trump has been light on the details of his energy policy, though he recently told supporters in West Virginia that the coal industry would thrive if he were president. He has also claimed global warming is a concept “created by and for the Chinese” to hurt U.S. business. Clinton, meanwhile, has advocated shifting the country to 50 percent clean energy by 2030, promised heavy regulation of fracking, and said her prospective administration would put coal companies “out of business.” Trump also took heat on Friday for not releasing his tax returns, something that American presidential candidates have done for decades. Clinton and her rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have both released their returns. Trump has said the Internal Revenue Service was auditing his returns and he wanted to wait until the review was over before making them public. “It should be, and I hope it’s before the election,” Trump told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Pressed on what tax rate he pays, Trump refused to say. “It’s none of your business,” he said. The candidate has said there is nothing voters can learn from his tax filings. Tax filings show sources of income, both from within the United States and other countries, as well as charitable giving, investments, deductions and other financial information. The IRS declined to comment on whether Trump or any other presidential candidates were being audited. However, the Trump campaign earlier this year released a letter from his attorneys saying his personal tax returns have been under “continuous examination” from the IRS. This week, Clinton began calling on her probable Republican rival to release his returns. Last August, the former U.S. secretary of state posted the past eight years of tax returns for her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, on her website. Sanders released his 2014 return in April. Presidential candidates have a long history in the modern era of releasing their tax returns. “In 1976, Gerald Ford did not release his returns, but he did release some information about his taxes,” said Joseph Thorndike, director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that provides tax news and analysis. “That was the last time that a major party nominee hasn’t done it,” he said. (Refiling to change dateline, previous WASHINGTON.) | 0fake |
UP IN ARMS: Trump Nation Absolutely Rejects Mitt Romney For Secretary Of State Pick | UP IN ARMS: Trump Nation Absolutely Rejects Mitt Romney For Secretary Of State Pick Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, was highly critical of Trump during the campaign and called him a "phony," and a "fraud" and dedicated an entire speech in March to denouncing his candidacy. 24, 2016 Top Donald Trump aide Kellyanne Conway said she is receiving a deluge of comments about the possibility of Mitt Romney being selected as secretary of State.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Donald Trump made promises that a majority of the American people clearly identified with, one of which was his promise to #DrainTheSwamp . But draining the swamp involves removing the inhabitants of that swamp. Globalist Mitt Romney, keeper of the Bush Crime Family legacy, is one of the big frogs in that elitist swamp. So it stands to reason that Donald Trump could – under NO circumstances – choose Romney for any position in his cabinet. What do you think? Please comment below.
“Receiving deluge of social media & private comms re: Romney,” Conway said, linking to a story about Trump loyalists who are unhappy with the possibility. Receiving deluge of social media & private comms re: Romney Some Trump loyalists warn against Romney as sec of state https://t.co/HDtpjeJTc3
— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) November 24, 2016
She also stressed loyalty as a key trait for a secretary of State in a follow-up tweet. Conway told CNN that her tweets reflect the private discussions she’s had with Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence . Kissinger & Schultz as Secs of State flew around the world less, counseled POTUS close to home more. And were loyal. Good checklist.
— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) November 24, 2016
“I am struck by the intensity and volume of resistance [to Romney] from the grassroots; words like ‘betrayal,’” Conway said. “I communicate with PEOTUS and VPEOTUS privately and regularly so this is not an attempt to do so publicly as some (who missed the election completely) are suggesting.”
She said she respects “completely” that these “weighty decisions” rest with Trump, “a man whose political instincts and unconventional campaign defied the critics and made history.”
Some Trump supporters and allies have tried to steer the President-elect from nominating Romney as the U.S.’s chief diplomat. Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, was highly critical of Trump during the campaign and called him a “phony,” and a “fraud” and dedicated an entire speech in March to denouncing his candidacy.
“He attacked [Trump] on a personal level about his character, his integrity, his honor,” Trump supporter Mike Huckabee said on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday. The former Arkansas governor added that it would be a “real insult” to Trump voters if Romney was nominated to be secretary of State.
Other Trump supporters, like former Speaker Newt Gingrich , have said they favor former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the job.
“I think that, if you want someone who is going to go out and be a very tough negotiator for America and represent American interest in the way that Trump campaigned, I think that probably Rudy is the better pick and has the right temperament.” source SHARE THIS ARTICLE Geoffrey Grider NTEB is run by end times author and editor-in-chief Geoffrey Grider. Geoffrey runs a successful web design company, and is a full-time minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to running NOW THE END BEGINS, he has a dynamic street preaching outreach and tract ministry team in Saint Augustine, FL. NTEB #TRENDING | 1real |
Voting Machines Stolen Before Georgia Special Election | Several voting machines were stolen in Georgia as the state gears up for a hotly contested special election to replace a Republican who left Congress to take a job in the Trump administration, reports say. [The devices were taken on Monday from a Cobb County precinct manager’s vehicle, according to Channel 2 Acton News. In a public statement, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp said, “It is unacceptable that the Cobb County Elections Office waited two days to notify my office of this theft. ” “We have opened an investigation, and we are taking steps to ensure that it has no effect on the election tomorrow. I am confident that the results will not be compromised,” Kemp added. Cobb County’s elections director, Janine Eveler, insisted that the information on the machines is “hard to access” and says she does not think the thieves will be able to interfere in the election. The election has been called to fill the House seat vacated by Rep. Tom Price, who left Congress to become President Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services. In 2016, Price won his seat by a lopsided 20 points in the conservative Sixth District. The GOP side of the election features a crowded field of 11 candidates, but there are five Democrat candidates, as well. Democrat candidate Jon Ossoff, a former congressional staffer, seems to be the favorite on the left, with actors and activists aligning behind him and raising funds for him. The election pits all candidates against one other, but to win outright, the top must garner 50 percent or more. If no candidate gets that 50 percent, a runoff election will determine the winner. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 0fake |
Mexico’s Richest Oligarch Loses Billions on News of Trump Victory | 21st Century Wire says Mexico s billionaire tycoon Carlos Slim saw a large chuck of his wealth evaporate literally overnight, after news of a Donald Trump election victory hit the currency and stock markets on Wednesday morning. According to Bloomberg financial analysts, Slim, Mexico s wealthiest person and rated fifth on the global rich list, took a stinging $5.1 billion haircut after the Mexican Peso went into a 12% free fall after Trump s stunning upset over Democratic Hillary Clinton.Slim s loss amounted to a staggering 9.2 percent of his total fortune.In the week before, polls showed Hillary Clinton as the odds on favorite, netting the billionaires a staggering $57 billion in total wealth increase across world markets. However, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, oligarchs lost a total of $41 billion during Wednesday s epic slide with Slim being the biggest loser.READ MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 1real |
Repudiating the Media | Q. If Trump wins can it be considered a repudiation of the national news mediocrity? A. I certainly hope so!
The performance of the major news outlets this election cycle has been something to behold. It’s been the worst, most shallow undertaking I can remember. And I remember the treatment Goldwater got.
I wrote here on Lew’s blog last week about the hysterical reaction Gloria Borger and others had to Trump’s unwillingness to promise to respect the election results in advance.
They acted like panicked teenage girls in a horror movie.
Pat Buchanan explains the media’s panic. “The establishment is terrified that it has lost the country,” he says. “The country no longer believes in its leadership.”
About time!
Now with the Comey development it won’t be long before Dems start talking about a rigged system.
Another moment of equal media idiocracy: When the Clintonistas blamed Russia for spilling DNC emails that showed its secret collaboration with Hillary and against Bernie Sanders.
Trump said “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing!”
The line wasn’t well-delivered. But it was still funny.
Even so, the joke was lost on the usual suspects. I watched CNN’s Jake Tapper’s visage grow dark as he expressed grave concern that Trump was inviting the Russians to interfere in our election.
The whole thing brings to mind an old vaudeville comedy routine with, let’s say, Joe and Moe: Joe: I’m offended by the media’s alarmist reaction to Trump’s email joke. Moe: Are you offended as a Trump supporter? Joe: No, I’m offended as a person with a sense of humor! 11:09 am on October 29, 2016 | 1real |
Huma’s Weiner Dogs Hillary | 1real | |
HERE IT IS: List Of Democrat Hypocrites Who Voted To Filibuster GW Bush’s Final Supreme Court Pick | If you look closely, you might find a few familiar hypocrites who were calling for the nomination of a new Supreme Court Justice before Scalia s body was removed from the hotel where he died h/t Weasel Zippers | 1real |
Scotland's Sturgeon demands changes in EU exit bill after meeting May | LONDON (Reuters) - Scotland s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said on Tuesday the UK government had to make changes to its European Union withdrawal bill before her devolved government in Edinburgh would agree to back it, but said she was hopeful progress could be made. The devolved governments in Scotland and Wales are worried that the withdrawal bill will sap their powers. They cannot veto the EU bill, but failure to win their consent would be an embarrassing setback for British Prime Minister Theresa May s government and could reignite Scottish demands for independence. There s a long way still to go and I m very clear that bill has to change, Sturgeon told reporters after talks with May in London that she described as constructive and cordial . Hopefully having had the opportunity to air the concerns we have in more details we will be able to make progress in weeks to come, Sturgeon said. The EU withdrawal bill seeks to convert all existing EU laws into British law to provide legal clarity after Britain leaves the bloc and lawmakers started to debate it on Tuesday in Britain s parliament. Scotland and Wales, which currently control policy areas such as health, education, transport and agriculture, say the legislation does not guarantee the status of their devolved powers after Brexit. A spokeswoman for May said that devolved powers would be enhanced after Brexit. The prime minister reiterated that as powers are repatriated from Brussels back to Britain there will be a significant increase in the decision-making powers for the Scottish Government and other devolved administrations. Brexit is a source of tension for the four constituent nations of the United Kingdom because Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU, while Wales and England - by far the most populous of the four - voted to leave. | 0fake |
Jesus Comes Out of the Closet … Or Does He? | Wednesday, 16 November 2016
What a week it has been for the Son of the Almighty.
Tuesday, Jesus himself was seen at the Tampa's infamous The Honey Pot night club, a night spot known for its super-hot drag show. A copy of Jesus's bar tab reveals he and his "posse" of Lucifer ( a.k.a "Lu"), Peter and Paul who were in town visiting from Miami's South Beach and his PR-man-cum-handler, John from the New testament, ran up a 2,400-dollar bar tab consisting of bottles of Crystal champagne and bottles of Ciroc vodka.
Since coming out of retirement to handle the End Times (signaled by the candidacy of Donald Trump and the emergence of the second Biblical Beast of Revelation, Mike Pence), Jesus has been quite a man around town, being seen at the hottest, newest and trendiest clubs and some of the seediest backwater bars, often extremely drunk and occasionally abrasive. "The stress is getting to him, sure," his handler, John, confessed. "I mean, his Old Man calls him out of retirement, ends his vacation and tells him he has to restore peace on Earth, and meanwhile he's got Trump and Pence claiming they're actually Christians - yeah, it irritates him. He'll be okay, though. He's got a good resume."
The revelry escalated to the point of Jesus ushering several transvestite dancers behind the silken ropes of his VIP section, where things got admittedly sloppy. "Yeah," The Prince of Darkness, Lucifer, admitted. "Things did spiral out of control, got a little crazy. I'm kind of feeling it today." Lucifer was referring to Jesus's bumping and grinding with his new cross-gendered "friends" and taking body shots off of their surgically implanted breasts.
"Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing on that place, man," The Prince of Peace admitted. "I thought Dad was going to send down the old fire and brimstone by the time Peter and Paul were swinging on the stripper pole."
Though The Almighty didn't set the club ablaze for their transgressions, the pictures of Jesus carousing with his ambiguously gendered friends did set social media on fire. The rumor mill kicked into full gear and people began to question Jesus's "orientation." He seemed to be enjoying his new "friends" from the club a little bit too much.
"I've known Jesus for a very long time," the Apostle Paul said candidly when asked about Jesus's sexual preference. "I know for a fact he's not. I mean you can ask Mary Magdalene, and a whole bunch of other females in the Old World. I mean, he put the 'fertile' in the Fertile Crescent, you know what I mean? And trust me, I know fabulous when I see it."
Long-time lawyer friend, Pontius Pilate, commented: "Absolutely not. Not a chance. That's nothing but slander and libel - and maybe a little wishful thinking on some people's parts. You know everyone wants a piece of a celebrity. But no, he's as straight as the Path of the Righteous. It's this social media. He's not too savvy with, you know? Didn't grow up with it. I've discussed it with him a hundred times. He really needs to be more careful in this day and age."
Jesus himself showed up to a press conference late the next day looking all the worse for the wear. In the press room, he kept his sunglasses on, complaining about the flashing of the cameras and how "damned loud everyone was talking." With a Bloody Mary conspicuously perched in his right hand, Jesus stepped toward the microphone and addressed the crowd about the true intention of his booze-fueled antics, which it turns out was a subtle message to Gay-rights adversary Mike Pence. "I know what we're all here for. I've seen the pictures circulating on social media and, admittedly, they don't look too good. I admit that. Things have been really tense around here lately and I guess I lashed out a bit at the other team, Trump and Pence. You know Pence with his whole Christian thing: 'I'm a Christian, a conservative and a Republican in that order.' What a clown! I admit my disgust got the better of me and I just wanted to piss Pence off. Unfortunately, it got a little crazy. But, hey, what if I was gay? I'm Jesus. I can be gay if I want, and here Pence is screwing with gays in my name. Jerk! Who's this Hoosier from Indiana anyway? I mean, he's not Jesus Christ, I am damn it. He better remember that when it comes to Judgment Day because the Old Man Upstairs isn't too happy about these Christians giving us a bad rep. You know how much PR work that takes to fix up? We're still reeling from Bush and his whole Family Values thing. And Reagan, don't even get me started."
A reporter finally asked the unthinkable: "So you're not gay?"
"I've been around a long time, like a couple millennia, man," Jesus started. "I've seen a lot of things. I'm no prude. I've been to college. We're all adults here. We've all tried things. And I don't judge. That's my dad's job. Me? My philosophy is like what Bill Clinton said: 'Don't ask, don't tell.' At the end of the day, though, Mary and I are going on almost two-thousand years together. I have my kids, good friends like Lu, Peter and Paul, and I have my health, mostly because I'm immortal. To answer your question, no. Not gay. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go lay hands on myself and fix this hangover." Make Chris Dahl's | 1real |
Unthinkable Politics and the Dead Bodies of Children | [Hands Up installation by Basil Kincaid in Ferguson. heartacheandpaint.com] Henry A. Giroux Cultural Critic and Public Intellectual Editor's Note The institutions that drive and reinforce capitalism at its most direct and base level are not even considered by politicians – Hillary Clinton included – as needing dismantling in order to save children. Those institutions are (domestically) the so called “criminal justice” and “juvenile justice” systems, and (internationally) the military, mercenaries, and paid international forces that are hired to carry out US international policy where children are often collateral damage, and sometimes direct targets. The U.S. also uses poor children of all races, but disproportionately children of color, as front line expendable military troops. A s the distinction between the truth and lies fades in public life, politics appears to be increasingly emptied of any substance. As Lucy Marcus has observed , “Nowadays, facts and truth are becoming [more] difficult to uphold in politics (and in business and even sports).” Certainly, in the age of Trump there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the appeal to reason, informed judgment and facts is at odds with the current political culture. That is, truth and evidence have gone the way of the electric typewriter, or so it seems.
Americans seem to have a growing fondness for ignorance, an attitude that reinforces the downsizing of the civic function of language. Falsehoods and deceptions no longer appear marginal to political debate but now seem to shape much of what is said by the presidential candidates. This is shockingly true for Trump, who has organized much of his campaign around endless fabrications, sending fact checkers into a frenzy of activity. When Trump is caught in a falsehood, he simply ignores the facts and just keeps on lying. His followers could care less about whether he deceives them or not.
On the other hand, Hillary Clinton has earned a reputation as a chameleon, willing to say almost anything to promote her political career, regardless of whether she sacrifices the truth in order to do so. Her email scandal is largely read as symptomatic of a more pronounced and deeper level of dishonesty. Consequently, she is viewed mostly by the general public as untrustworthy. In response, she has managed her truth deficit by invoking her lifelong defense of families and children. For instance, during the second debate she claimed she wanted “America to be for our children” and attempted to bolster her concern for the welfare of children by pointing to her early work with the Children’s Defense Fund. In the third presidential debate, she argued against Trump’s call for exporting 11 million immigrants by stating that she was against his deportation policies because she “didn’t want to rip families apart [and was against] sending parents away from children.” In her political television ads, she points to supporting policies that “will invest in schools and colleges [and will work to] develop an economy where every young American can find a job and start a family of their own.”
Unfortunately, Clinton only focuses on managing some of the problems that young people face, rather than doing anything to change the conditions that produce them. For instance, she says nothing about what education should accomplish in a democracy when educational policies are driven by a neoliberal economy that she supports. And while she talks about providing jobs for young people, she has little to say about transforming rather than adjusting an economy marked by wide gaps in inequality, wealth and power.
Matters of power, state violence, extreme poverty, institutional racism, a broken criminal justice system, the school to prison pipeline and the existence of the mass incarceration state, among other important matters, rarely if ever enter her discourse and yet these are major issues negatively affecting the lives of millions of children in the United States. And her alleged regard for children falls apart in light of her hawkish policies on global regime change, drone attacks and cyber-warfare, and her unqualified support for the warfare state. Her alleged support for children abroad does not capture the larger reality they face from when their countries are invaded, attacked by drones and subject to contemporary forms of indiscriminate violence. Rather than critique the US as a powerful engine of violence, Clinton expands its imperialist role around the globe. This is a key point in light of her defense of the rights of children, because her warmongering ideology puts children in the path of lethal violence.
At the same time, Clinton’s promise to address the problems many children face in the United States reeks of a disingenuousness made visible by her history of siding with and supporting policies that were injurious to children. Not only did she once disparagingly call young people super-predators, but as the First Lady she strongly backed her husband’s campaign to “end welfare as we know it.” President Clinton’s welfare policies did great harm to poor children. They eliminated the Aid to Families with Dependent Children federal assistance program and infuriated Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, to the degree that she ended her working relationship with Hillary Clinton. According to Edelman , the bill represented a frontal assault on the well-being of poor children and families. Yet as late as 2008, Hillary was still touting this pernicious welfare bill as a success. She also supported Bill Clinton’s “tough on crime” policies, which, according to Michelle Alexander , “resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history”— which has a devastating effect on the families and children of color. Finally, Clinton supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.
Occupying the right wing of the Democratic Party, Clinton has aligned herself with a war culture that supports drone warfare and continues to support military policies that result in the needless deaths of millions of children in the Middle East, Yemen, Somalia, and other places that bear the brunt of America’s foreign policy. It is difficult to imagine, given Clinton’s coziness with the financial elite, big corporations, the military-industrial complex and the reigning war culture, that she will do anything that will lessen the violence to which children, both at home and around the globe, will face under her potential reign as President of the United States. Clinton has nothing to say about the need for a collective struggle for economic and political justice. Given her past history, Clinton’s disingenuousness becomes even starker next to the images of war and violence that mark the bodies of youth both in the United States and abroad. Her commitments to war and security have been built on the misery, mutilation and deaths of young people and her recent alleged support for the welfare of children does little to cover up the many ways capitalism, militarism, state violence and racism are killing poor Black and Brown youth. Rethinking the Horrors of War
The horrors of war became painfully visible when the image circulated of the lifeless body of Aylan (Alan) Kurdi, a three-year-old who washed up on a beach face-downin the coastal town of Bodrum, Turkey, on September 2, 2015, while traveling with other refugees toward the Greek island of Kos. A second haunting image appeared on August 17, 2016, showing five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, bloodied and covered with dust, sitting silently in an ambulance after an airstrike on Aleppo, a city in northern Syria.
Ordinarily, such images of children dead, injured and suffering motivate public outrage and also incite people to act. Omran’s image was widely circulated by mainstream news organizations and in the social media. The image provoked so much international outrage that the governments of Syria, China and Russia claimed it was pure propaganda and was staged.
One of the most powerful images in history to provoke moral outrage and public anger was the image that circulated in 1955 of the grossly mutilated body of Emmett Till. That depiction of the effects of brutal racist violence helped to galvanize the civil rights movement. Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl” via E-rea .
Another image that changed the course of history was on display in 1972 when an anguished and terrified young girl was photographed running naked after a Napalm bomb burned and disfigured her body. The iconic picture played a significant role in mobilizing protests that helped stop the Vietnam War.
Reactions to such horrible images still exist, but the brutal and unthinkable acts of violence they portray now seem to produce short-lived outrage and blend into the all-encompassing spectacle of violence and the fog of war. What is crucial to acknowledge is that the war has come home and has trapped many young people in its spiral of accelerated violence, which has become a new form of domestic terrorism and the primary force promoting a machinery of literal and social death for many youths. Domestic terrorism is now exemplified every day in media stories focusing on the killing of unarmed young people by the police and in the gun violence that is turning poor urban cities into war zones. Violence has become a habitual response by the state to every social problem. This has become more and more evident as the application of militarized police power produces on a daily basis a growing number of images of dead bodies which increasingly find their way onto the screen cultures of the social media. In the US, according to Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund column , “Seventy-eight children under 5 died by guns in 2015 — 30 more than the 48 law enforcement officers killed by guns in the line of duty.” In other words, Edelman writes, “guns killed more preschoolers in one year than they did law-enforcement officers.” In Chicago alone, in the first eight months of 2016, 12 people were shot daily. According to a Carnegie-Knight News21 investigation :
For every U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan during 11 years of war, at least 13 children were shot and killed in America. More than 450 kids didn’t make it to kindergarten. Another 2,700 or more were killed by a firearm before they could sit behind the wheel of a car. Every day, on average, seven children were shot dead. A News21 investigation of child and youth deaths in America between 2002 and 2012 found that at least 28,000 children and teens 19-years-old and younger were killed with guns. Teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 made up over two-thirds of all youth gun deaths in America.
Gary Younge observes that every day in the United States “seven kids and teens are shot dead” which adds up to 2,500 dead children a year. What is clear is that neither mainstream political party nor their respective political leaders, including Hillary Clinton, “has a thoroughgoing plan for dealing with America’s gun culture, [one] that goes well beyond background checks,” he adds. This level of violence has deep roots in systemic structures of racism, inequality and poverty that make visible a broken democracy. Rather than being viewed as a social investment, poor youth of color are now seen as excess, threatening, suspect and undeserving of either a society in which they are protected or a future in which they are treated with respect. Instead of educating them, America spends large sums of money to imprison them; instead of building schools, we invest more and more in prisons; instead of providing quality health care, jobs and housing for them, we consign them to dilapidated schools, push them into the underground economy, and criminalize their behaviors. There are few safe spaces left for poor youth of color — rather our society offers them the promise of immiseration and a jail cell. This suggests not only a politics that has turned into a pathology, but also a dystopian logic that is as cruel as it is morally indifferent.
Children and the Politics of Disappearance
The killing of children in America and by US forces abroad has become part of a politics of willful disappearance in which a culture of cruelty, immediacy and forgetting works in tandem to eliminate any trace of the factors behind the production of violence in the service of the unthinkable — a society willing to sacrifice its own children to the industries that trade and profit in the massive production and distribution of guns. Such extreme violence no longer appears to have a threshold that would make it intolerable. In part, this is because the business of violence has become standardized as part of the culture of business. Or, as Phil Wolfson puts it , “the business of violence has become a far too accepted part of the fabric of contemporary life in the United States.” Tamir Rice remembrance / protest march.
War culture becomes visible in the extreme violence captured in videos of the police killing of children, such as 12-year-old Tamir Rice and adults, such as Walter Scott, who was shot in the back as he was running away from his car by Michael Slager, a white North Charleston, South Carolina policeman.
The scope and visibility of such actions often promote policies further wedded to military solutions, such as suspending civil liberties, accelerating the militarization of society and employing counter-terrorism tactics that rely heavily on military force. As violence becomes both normalized and spectacularized in the media, a war machine and culture becomes so deeply embedded in American society that, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write in their book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire , “war has become … a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life.”
Yet, war machines do more than produce extreme forms of violence; they also fix whole categories of people as disposable enemies and force them into conditions of extreme precarity, if not danger. This is especially true of undocumented immigrants, poor Black youth, Muslims and those young people who now inhabit a neoliberal social order that has substituted precariousness for social and economic protections. Young people today are told they are on their own and not to expect much from a society that offers them poor health care, a terrain of uncertainty and insecurity, a crushing burden of debt, no hope for the future, and a market-based value system that tells them that their security and survival is no longer a social responsibility but personal responsibility. If the future looks bleak for many young people, it is not because of their own doing. Yet, the ruling elite and mainstream media journalists continually label them as losers, suggesting that their failure is a character flaw rather than the outcome of wider structural and systemic forces over which they have no control. In this instance, intolerable violence is masked by a state that has been taken over by the financial elite and that has abandoned its social functions while emptying out politics for an entire generation of youth. Indifferent to their own criminal acts, financial elites unapologetically “give precedence to private financial gain and market determinism over human lives and broad public values,” in the words of William Greider , and in doing so, inhabit the dark side of politics. Youth in a Suspect Society
Young people, especially those considered the most suspect, provide a startling and eye-opening referent for analyzing not only how violence is represented and experienced, but also how it is distributed across a variety of interrelated sites. The daily violence experienced by youths, especially the most defenseless, does not often make news, because it exposes the harsh brutalizing reality that many youth face in a racist, homophobic, carceral and market-driven society. Such indifference is all the more tragic since one of the most unspoken acts of collective violence in the United States resides in its treatment of its children.
What I call the war on youth is alarming given that the fate of a society’s democracy is tied to the condition of its children. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant theologian, once argued that the ultimate test of morality, if not democracy, is how a society treats its children. If we take this principle seriously, the US has failed its children, particularly those who are already underserved. Many face a bleak future filled with low-paying jobs, the effects of the collapse of the welfare state, the threat of a lifetime of unemployment, the paralyzing burden of high levels of debt and a political landscape that prioritized exchange relations over relationships built on trust, dignity and compassion. All of these factors make the future look bleak for young people, but there are also other more brutalizing forces at work that now bear down on many young people — forces that suggest that a distinctive type of hardness and culture of cruelty is now shaping American society and its view of young people.
In this instance, young people marginalized by class, race and ethnicity are treated as disposable in a society in which the American dream has been turned into an American nightmare. Young people now inhabit a landscape of permanent uncertainty and crisis: one in which they are spied on, incarcerated, criminalized and written out of the discourse of democracy. No longer seen as a social investment, the most vulnerable youth have become a liability, subject to the harsh dictates of the neoliberal state and a symbolic reminder of a social order that offers youth no promise of an alternative and democratic future. The dictates of precarity and austerity have become repackaged and weaponized under neoliberalism and the ongoing morphology of violence normalized as the only possible mode of life. Under the reign of a war culture, America has arrived at a historical moment in which the war on children suggests that, as Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin have argued , “the very notion of a future seems to have been cancelled.” But the war on youth does more: it also reveals the raw reality of power politics and its willingness to crush early on all forms of resistance among young people. The Challenge Ahead for Progressives
The current presidential race and the debates it has provided make clear that the Republican Party wants to eliminate whatever social provisions and public goods are available for young people while the allegedly more progressive Democratic Party puts forward reforms that do little to address the underlying economic, social and ethical conditions that produce them. Trump goes further and wants to accelerate the war on young people through a law and order campaign that expands the punishing state. Clinton points to some of the problems youth face, but in doing so fails to address a number of important issues, such as the high incarceration rates of poor Black youth, the neoliberal logic of financialization, the rise of the warfare state, massive poverty, systemic racism, the surveillance state, segregation, the militarization of the police, the destruction of the planet and a culture of institutional and symbolic violence that surges through society like an electric current.
If children matter, as Clinton has argued, then it is crucial to recognize that her concerns are highly disingenuous because she refuses to dismantle capitalism as it exists and fight for a social order that is no longer ruled by the commanding institutions that serve the financial elite and the dictates of global neoliberalism. If young people are to be viewed as a crucial measure of a substantive democracy, it is important to take seriously what it means to create a society that addresses their needs and opens up a better future than the one the established political and financial elites have created for them. This is not a matter of reform; it is a matter of radical economic and political justice. Such a challenge must address the current struggles faced by young people by going to the roots of the problem. This will not happen by adopting the language of reform, which has no way of addressing why the plight of young people has dissolved into a domestication of the unimaginable.
The real challenge for progressives is to build a broad-based movement and create a set of alternate educational public spheres to take on the task of transforming (rather than reforming) the existing capitalist social order and its poisonous relations of power and injustice. Children matter because they remind us of the need not only to create a more democratic future, but also to take seriously the collective struggle and modes of resistance that can make it happen. Henry A. Giroux, Contributing Editor C urrently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His books include: American at War with Itself , Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Land 2011), On Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011), Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm 2012), Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (Routledge 2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013). Giroux’s most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights) and Higher Education After Neoliberalism (Haymarket) will be published in 2014). He is also a Contributing Editor of Cyrano’s Journal Today / The Greanville Post , and member of Truthout’s Board of Directors and has his own page The Public Intellectual . His web site is www.henryagiroux.com . =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. [email-subscribers namefield=”YES” desc=”” group=”Public”] | 1real |
Schandalen stapelen zich al generaties lang op voor Huis van Oranje | 01 UTC Verraad op hoog niveau: Bernhard, de Bilderberger had contacten met de CIA en Gladio Heel Nederland mocht zien dat koningin Juliana onhandig was. Het paste bij een staatshoofd dat vooral gewoon wilde zijn, terwijl dat helemaal niet kon. Haar hofhouding werd getypeerd als ,een lieflijke chaos." Commentaar: Onlangs werd bekend dat de Oranjes al decennialang compensatie krijgen voor de belasting die zij moeten betalen. Het heeft lang geduurd, maar nu is dr. Jolande Withuis' biografie van koningin Juliana er dan toch. Na zes jaar noeste vlijt presenteren uitgeverij Bezige Bij en Withuis' vroegere werkgever, het Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (NIOD), woensdag het resultaat, 863 pagina's dik. Met veel nieuwe verhalen, die toch vooral het beeld bevestigen dat zich in de loop der jaren van Juliana heeft gevormd. Dat die 863 pagina's geen ogenblik vervelen, is een compliment voor Withuis' schrijfstijl. Met vaart beschrijft ze Juliana's levensgang, waar het predikaat "chaos" vaak beter bij paste dan de typering "lieflijk". Toegang tot het Koninklijk Huisarchief kreeg de onderzoekster niet , maar ook daarbuiten was er genoeg materiaal. Commentaar: Wat hebben ze te verbergen? Huwelijk Zoals Wilhelmina de koningin van de oorlog was, zo was haar enige dochter de koningin van de wederopbouw, de vernieuwing en de democratisering. De sociale Juliana, monarch van 1948 tot 1980, gedijde goed in de decennia van groeiende welvaart. Koningin tegen wil en dank? Het is een van de vele fabels die de ronde deden. De werkelijkheid was volgens Withuis anders. Juliana ,koesterde na haar aantreden geruime tijd de ambitie een der grootste vorstinnen op aarde te worden." Dat werd ze niet. Privé was het soms bijzonder weinig rozengeur en maneschijn. Veel details over haar ongelukkige huwelijk kwamen pas later naar buiten, toen 'oorlogsheld' - dat was hij allerminst - Bernhard steeds meer werd ontmaskerd als schuinsmarcheerder. Zelfs minderjarige jongedames die in het paleis op bezoek kwamen, waren voor hem niet veilig . In plaats van Juliana's steunpilaar werd hij haar achilleshiel, die haar soms diep vernederde , schrijft Withuis. Het was Juliana's ,man van haar dromen" vooral om een goede positie te doen . Dit boek verbloemt de misère niet, zoals dat vroeger wel gebeurde. Commentaar: Macht werkt als een magneet op psychopaten. Vliegende schotels Koningin Juliana had veel belangstelling voor religie. ,Dat is een van de weinige constanten in haar overigens tamelijk grillige leven", stelt Withuis vast. ,Haar geloof behelsde geen traditioneel christendom, maar een diffuse religiositeit, waarin hel en verdoemenis ontbraken en 'alternatieve' en oosterse invloeden alle ruimte kregen. Juliana hechtte eraan onconventioneel te zijn, ook in geloofszaken." Dat bleek toen ze zich aan gebedsgenezeres Greet Hofmans vastklampte en later toen ze - reeds dementerend - in de huwelijksdienst van prins Maurits ter communie ging. Van Hofmans moest ze afstand nemen, en dat ging allerminst van harte. ,Ze poogde, hoewel ze niet meer meedeed, toch contact te houden. Haar vroegere vrienden behandelden haar echter zoals elke sekte uittreders behandelt: als een minne deserteur, tevens verdoemde." Met Hofmans was de zweverigheid overigens niet weggejaagd. De koningin ging zich nu bezighouden met vliegende schotels en buitenaardse wezens, en hield decennialang aan die denkbeelden vast. Commentaar: Wat wist Juliana werkelijk? Moederlijk Nieuwe crises volgden rond de partnerkeuze van de prinsessen Irene en Beatrix. Juliana vond de ophef over Irenes overgang naar de Rooms-Katholieke Kerk maar moeilijk: ,Wij mogen ons toch allen Gods kinderen weten en dat is de onverbrekelijke band onder de mensen", sprak ze voor de radio. Prinses Juliana werd na haar overlijden in 2004 vooral herdacht als een sociaal betrokken, moederlijke vrouw. Ze werd een geliefd vorstin, en daaraan deed het Lockheedschandaal - haar man had steekpenningen aangenomen van een vliegtuigfabrikant - geen afbreuk. Niet zonder reden koos dochter Beatrix voor een totaal andere regeerstijl. Commentaar: Ook was hij betrokken bij illegale wapenleveranties aan Indonesië . Citaten van biografe Withuis over koningin Juliana - Juliana riep veeleer mededogen op dan woede: die onbetrouwbare man, die dominante moeder, die zelfbewuste dochter en dan zelf zo verlegen... Dat aan dit beeld een flinke dosis theater te pas kwam, werd niet beseft. - Juliana was warrig en chaotisch. Er is overigens geen reden die verwardheid al toe te schrijven aan haar latere dementie. Het was veeleer haar manier van werken. Voor veel Haagse politici en ambtenaren was de komst van de nieuwe vorstin (Beatrix) een verademing. - Beatrix had uit het jarenlang aanzien van wat zij zag als het disfunctioneren van haar moeder de conclusie getrokken dat 'gewoon' en 'koningin' niet samengaan. - (Over de inhuldiging van koningin Beatrix in 1980:) Toen zijn hoofdcommissaris hem telefonisch toestemming vroeg om te schieten, omdat de horden dreigden de Dam te bereiken, antwoordde de Amsterdamse burgemeester W. Polak vanuit de Nieuwe Kerk met een vastberaden: Nee. - (Personeelsleden op Soestdijk:) Als je een foutje maakte, zag ze dat zogenaamd niet. Ze zou dan niet naar de intendant gaan om te klagen. Bernhard wel. Bij hem moest alles perfect tot in de puntjes zijn. Was het zwembad 30 graden in plaats van 31, dan belde hij de huismeester. - Haar steun ten tijde van de Lockheed-ontmaskering had de liefde van haar echtgenoot niet doen groeien. (...) Het is niet waar dat Juliana en Bernhard gescheiden van elkaar in een Baarnse en een Soestervleugel van het paleis leefden. Wel was het personeel verdeeld: men was óf op haar óf op zijn hand. (...) De verhouding met Bernhard was en bleef kil. Ze zat vaak tot diep in de nacht alleen tv te kijken in de bibliotheek. Samen eten deden ze zelden. (...) Bezoekers van Bernhard maakten regelmatig mee dat Juliana gesprekken van haar man trachtte te verstoren. (...) Toch bleef Bernhard Juliana's grote liefde. Haar liefste wens was dat het tussen hen nog goed zou komen. Haar slaapkamer stond vol met zijn foto's. Soms viel ze in slaap met zijn foto tegen haar borst gedrukt. - Geestelijk was en bleef Juliana een alleseter. Ze ging bijna wekelijks naar de kerk, maar wel steeds naar een andere. Vanaf ongeveer 1996 keek ze, in plaats van een kerk te bezoeken, naar Hour of Power met een populaire tv-dominee van de Amerikaanse megakerk Crystal Cathedral of naar Nederland Zingt van de EO. (...) Juliana bleef haar inspiratie opdoen bij hele en halve kwakzalvers, auteurs die zich vooral manifesteerden buiten de wetenschap en de gangbare theologie. - Tussen 1987 en 1997 ging Juliana's geheugen achteruit. Bernhard kon daar niet tegen. Als ze hem iets voor een tweede keer vroeg, reageerde hij grof en ongeduldig, waarna zij tranen met tuiten huilde. Amnestie of slagroomtaart Sommigen geloven nog steeds in de sprookjes van het koningshuis, maar achter het masker ziet men de beerput Voor Van Agt was het die eerste vrijdag van het jaar ( 1980 ) een verrassing geweest dat de koningin wilde aftreden; het onderwerp was in hun gesprekken nooit eerder aan de orde geweest. Naar hij vermoedt had ze dit moment mede gekozen, omdat het kabinet net voor het kerstreces een debat in de Tweede Kamer had doorstaan over de heftigste controverse uit die jaren: de kruisraket, en dus ondanks de economische crisis en de onrustbarend stijgende werkloosheid , stevig in het zadel leek te zitten. Dat bleek niet helemaal het geval: drie weken na Juliana's aankondiging van haar troonsafstand trad minister van Financiën mr. F. H. J. J. Andriessen (CDA) af, omdat er zijns inziens te weinig werd bezuinigd. Niettemin vond Van Agt het verstandig dat de koningin haar functie neerlegde. Haar laatste jaren waren, zoals hij het uitdrukt, ,niet haar meest glorieuze." Juliana was vaak ,verward." Zo ook de dag dat ze via de televisie haar abdicatie aankondigde. Op de ochtend van 31 januari gaf de minister-president persoonlijk de voorzitter van de NOS, mr. E. Jurgens, opdracht alles in gereedheid te brengen voor een opname die namiddag en een uitzending diezelfde avond. Toen hij in de vroege avond zelf op Soestdijk arriveerde, bleek het daar een chaos. De koningin had het, haar traditie getrouw, aan de stok met de televisiemensen. Zij wilde dat haar hondje Zara terwijl zij sprak bij haar op schoot zou liggen en dat haar papegaaienkooi op de achtergrond stond, zodat ze haar 'landgenoten' vanuit een huiselijke sfeer zou toespreken. De geluids- en cameramensen daarentegen, die haar lastige gedrag toeschreven aan het feit dat er vanaf de ochtend sherry was geschonken, leek gekrijs en geblaf tijdens zo'n officieel gebeuren geen goed idee. Maar het was haar huis, dus zij ,deed nou eens waar ze zin in had", verklaarde ze. Ze vond dat de technici te weinig opschoten en te veel rommel maakten. Het door haarzelf bepaalde tijdstip van haar proclamatie kwam bij nader inzien slecht uit. Personeel en apparatuur moesten voor achten weg zijn, liet ze NOS-directeur Enkelaar weten, want dan begon in diezelfde kamer het verjaardagsfeestje van haar dochter. Zara, waarvoor hij toch al weinig warme gevoelens koesterde, moest op gezag van de minister-president weg. Lorre bleef; de cameraman koos voor zijn opname een hoek vanwaaruit hij niet in beeld kwam. Mocht de vogel vreemde geluiden gaan voortbrengen, dan zou hij de lens alsnog op hem richten, opdat het publiek geen ongewenste conclusies zou trekken over de gezondheidstoestand van de vorstin. (...) In haar laatste maanden als vorstin probeerde Juliana nog haar zin te krijgen in een oude kwestie. Een van de categorieën 'zielige mensen' voor wie zij zich graag inzette waren gedetineerden. Al was het vanuit verschillende motieven, inzake de Drie van Breda hadden Juliana en Van Agt, toen nog minister van Justitie, in 1972 op één lijn gezeten. Dat had haar hoop gegeven toen ze hem een jaar later had voorgesteld om ter gelegenheid van haar vijfentwintigjarig ambtsjubileum gratie te verlenen aan gedetineerden. Als archaïsch prerogatief uit de tijd dat vorsten als dragers van de absolute macht ook rechtspraken , staat amnestie haaks op de constitutionele monarchie. Van Agt had dan ook getracht Juliana van het idee af te brengen. Het concept "jubileumgratie", had hij haar uitgelegd, paste vanwege de willekeur niet in het moderne strafrecht; voorts zou haar voorstel waarschijnlijk leiden tot hernieuwde discussies over de Drie. Commentaar: Aangezien leden van deze familie met regelmaat Bilderbergconferenties bezoeken moeten we hun macht niet onderschatten. Zeven jaar na dato trachtte Juliana haar oude wens buiten Van Agt om alsnog te verwezenlijken. Een internationale verplichting van de minister-president kwam daarbij goed van pas. In overleg met de koningin besloot Van Agt een reis naar Indonesië en Japan, die al gepland stond voor hij wist van de aanstaande troonswisseling, goeddeels te handhaven. Juliana maakte van zijn afwezigheid prompt gebruik om de amnestie opnieuw aan te kaarten, maar ook zonder premier willigde het kabinet dit verlangen natuurlijk niet in. Vicepremier en minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Wiegel en raadadviseur Van der Voet moesten haar daarvan overtuigen, wat nog niet meeviel. Na veel heen-en-weergepraat stelde de koningin als compromis voor om dan maar alle gedetineerden op Koninginnedag op slagroomtaart te trakteren. Naar het verhaal wil (se non è vero...), antwoordde Wiegel: ,Een uitstekend idee, majesteit, en dan spuiten we op elk van die taarten: ,Nog vele jaren!"" Juliana had voldoende humor om mét beide heren in lachen uit te barsten. De amnestie was van de baan." Uit: " Juliana, vorstin in een mannenwereld", door Jolande Withuis. Uitg. De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam/Antwerpen 2016; ISBN 978 90 234 3523 5; 863 pag.; € 39,99. Lees ook in Digibron Juliana's oorlog : Voorpublicatie van een nog te verschijnen biografie van Jolande Withuis (Protestants Nederland, 01-04-2015 ) Juliana als ambassadrice (Reformatorisch Dagblad, 03-03-2014 ) De eeuw van vorstin Juliana : Hervormd, maar vooral oecumenisch en spiritueel (Protestants Nederland, 01-04-2009 ) Juliana, vrouw met warm en sociaal hart : Koningschap staat vooral in het teken van de wederopbouw van Nederland (Reformatorisch Dagblad, 20-03-2004 ) Commentaar: Bernhard was ook betrokken bij de Gladio/Stay Behind Networks en waarschijnlijk zeer chantabel vanwege zijn misbruik van 'minderjarige jongedames'. | 1real |
U.N. chief says no alternative to two state solution in Middle East | UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday that there was no alternative to a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians and that Jerusalem was a final-status issue that should be resolved through direct talks. I have consistently spoken out against any unilateral measures that would jeopardize the prospect of peace for Israelis and Palestinians, Guterres said after U.S. President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. In this moment of great anxiety, I want to make it clear: There is no alternative to the two-state solution. There is no Plan B, he told reporters. I will do everything in my power to support the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to return to meaningful negotiations. | 0fake |
DEM REP, WIFE OF FELON CAUGHT On Tape Bragging About Inciting Violence At Trump Rallies, Makes Hilarious Claim About Number Of Seats Democrats Will Take In 2018 [VIDEO] | Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky (Ill.) is married to Robert Creamer, one of the key figures in O Keefe s undercover video that showed him organizing Democrat operatives to incite Trump supporters, hoping to get them to commit acts of violence that could be caught on film, thereby helping Hillary to win the election.Creamer was a convicted felon who oversaw a check-kiting scheme so elaborate that his employees followed a written manual complete with detailed instructions on when and where to float checks totaling millions of dollars.Go to the 3:35 mark to see Robert Creamer in action:It s only natural that the wife of a disgraced Democrat operative and convicted felon would be asked by CNN to offer hope about the future of the floundering Democrat Party.Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky (Ill.) said Monday that she believes Democrats can win the 25 seats they need to retake the House of Representatives in 2018.Schakowsky s comments on CNN came days after the Democratic Party lost its fourth straight special congressional election, with Jon Ossoff losing to Republican Karen Handel in last Tuesday s House race in Georgia s sixth district.CNN host Poppy Harlow asked Schakowsky about the loss in Georgia, as well as others in Montana, Kansas, and South Carolina. Schakowsky dismissed the losses, arguing they are not indicative of Democrats electoral chances in 2018. The reason that those Republicans were appointed to the [Trump] administration is because they were considered safe Republican districts. The Ossoff district, the sixth district in Georgia, is the 71st most likely district that Democrats can win, she said. In other words, there are 70 districts that will be easier than that. Schakowsky was referring to the fact that the Georgia race and special elections in other states were replacing seats vacated by lawmakers who were nominated to serve in President Donald Trump s administration. WFB | 1real |
BREAKING: FEDERAL COURT RULES ON NSA’S WARRANTLESS COLLECTION OF DATA… | Another positive step towards restoring our freedoms A federal court has decided that the National Security Agency s (NSA) bulk, warrantless collection of millions of Americans phone records is illegal.The decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday represents the second major court victory for opponents of the NSA, after a lower court decision called the program nearly unconstitutional six months ago.The phone records program exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized, Judge Gerard Lynch wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel. The court did not examine the constitutionality of the surveillance program.Via: The Hill | 1real |
President and First Lady Arrive in Texas: Serve Food, Hand Out Coloring Books: ‘We are with you’ [Video] | Check out what s happening in Texas! President Trump and the First Lady arrived and got to work helping out. FLOTUS AND POTUS ARRIVE IN TEXAS:TEXAS: We are with you today, we are with you tomorrow, and we will be with you EVERY SINGLE DAY AFTER, to restore, recover, and REBUILD! pic.twitter.com/p1Fh8jmmFA Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 2, 2017Melania Trump exited Air Force One ready to get to work:OUR FIRST LADY LOOKING GREAT ROCKING A TEXAS HAT AND CONVERSE TENNIS SHOES:HUGS FROM OUR PRESIDENT!President Trump Serves Food at NRG Stadium: This is awesome! President Trump puts on gloves to serve food. He turns to the press and says My hands are too big! PresidentAs he puts on plastic gloves to serve food at NRG Stadium President Trump turns to press and says: My hands are too big! pic.twitter.com/WIUTLOS4XD Pat Ward (@WardDPatrick) September 2, 2017President Trump hands out food boxes and meets with Harvey victims: We will get through this and rebuild President Trump is handing out food boxes & meeting with #Harvey victims in Houston. We will get through this and rebuild.#TexasStrong pic.twitter.com/4DAKfnBRIk Alex (@SoCal4Trump) September 2, 2017 | 1real |
Ex-Illinois congressman pleads not guilty to spending scandal | (Reuters) - A former U.S. representative whose lavish Washington office raised questions about use of taxpayer money pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges of defrauding the federal government and campaign committees, then trying to cover it up. Aaron Schock, a 35-year-old former Republican congressman from Illinois, was indicted in November by the U.S. Department of Justice on 24 counts, including wire fraud, theft of government funds and filing false federal income tax returns. He entered his plea in a federal court in Springfield, Illinois. “I look forward to the truth and all the facts coming out in this case. I have complete faith in my legal team, the good people of this community, and that justice will ultimately prevail,” Schock said in an emailed statement. Schock, elected to the, U.S. House of Representatives in 2008 at the age of 27, gained a following by posting flashy photos on social media of himself traveling around the world. But he was hounded with questions after The Washington Post reported last year about lavish decorations in his Capitol Hill office based on the PBS period melodrama “Downton Abbey.” Although staff told the Post that the interior design work had been done for free, the story prompted more investigations into Schock’s spending habits, with several media outlets reporting he failed to disclose some expenditures and had to repay others after improperly using taxpayer funds. | 0fake |
David Brooks: Whites are “voting their gene pool” after being “ruined” by globalization, immigration, and feminism | David Brooks: Whites are “voting their gene pool” after being “ruined” by globalization, immigration, and feminism November 7, 2016 at 1:09 am By Dr. Patrick Slattery
On the PBS News Hour on Friday, David Brooks said white people are “voting their gene pool.” Wow. Just wow. This is the same David Brooks who wrote in his New York Times column about a Jewish woman who came up to him after a speech, and knowing that he was Jewish too told him that his speech was a description of how Jews had taken over America, which he acknowledged in the column was indeed the case.One of my Jewish professors once boasted that “Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans.” In other words, they voted their gene pool. Of course, they eventually bought out the Republican party as well, which gave their gene pool’s vote a choice.
Blacks famously vote their gene pool. Hispanics are expected to vote their gene pool. But when whites and whites alone consider their ethnic interests in voting, it is something that Brooks and the rest of the Zio elite and their Goyish lackey find “deplorable.”
Basically, less educated or high school-educated whites are going to Trump. It doesn’t matter what the guy does. And college-educated going to Clinton.
Sometimes, you get the sense that the campaign barely matters. People are just going with their gene pool and whatever it is. And that is one of the more depressing aspects of this race for me.
But what Brooks said about the reasons for whites (besides the college-indoctrinated whites) voting their gene pool was even more interesting.
We had a lot of good things over the years that were really good for America. I think globalization has been really good for America. I think the influx of immigrants has been really good for America. Feminism has been really good for America.”
But there are a lot of people who used to be up in society, because of those three good things, are now down, a lot of high school-educated white guys. And they have been displaced.
When David Brooks was growing up, whites make up close to 90% of the American population. So it doesn’t really make sense to say that the displacement of the bulk of the American population is good for America.
Of course, he did specify “high school-educated white guys.” Well, were blacks helped by globalization, immigration, and feminism? What did that do for their employment rates, crime rates, illegitimacy rates, etc.?
And white women? Well, maybe all they ever wanted in the first place was to have blue hair, nose rings, tattoos, and raise cats instead of babies. I guess we never asked them.
And college educated white guys? Well, they used to go to Harvard and Yale. Now, with affirmative action for blacks and Hispanics, competition from Asians, and massive Jewish nepotism, a white guy is lucky to get into a second-tier state school.
Brooks conclusion was even more breath taking:
And shame on us for not paying attention to that and helping them out. And, therefore, as a result, what happened was, they were alienated, they got super cynical, because they really were being shafted. And so they react in an angry way.
Well, that’s not a shock, given the last 30 or 50 years of American history. And so, for us going forward, it’s to not reverse the dynamism of American society and the diversity. It’s to pay attention to the people who are being ruined by it, and so this doesn’t happen again.
Here he admits that whites got shafted. That we are being ruined by diversity. But the weird thing is that line about “so this doesn’t happen again.” What? Is he concerned that Hispanics might be Jewed out of the America they inherit from whites?
The rest of his appearance was just a poetic rant against Donald Trump. With any luck, on Tuesday Trump will be elected president, and we can make begin the process of making America America again. | 1real |
US charges 61 over India-based scam involving 15,000 victims | Society The US is charging dozens of people with participation in a major Indian-based fraud.
The US Justice Department has charged 61 people and entities with involvement in a major India-based scam that targeted thousands of Americans.
The scheme involved Indian call centers, where some workers called American citizens and convinced them to pay their non-existent debts by impersonating Internal Revenue Service (IRS), immigration and other federal officials, the Justice Department said in a statement on Thursday.
Some victims were even offered short-term loans or grants on condition of providing good-faith deposits or payment of a processing fee.
The scammers had stolen more than $300 million from at least 15,000 unsuspecting citizens, the department noted.
The victims’ money was laundered by an American network of criminals who used debit cards or wire transfers under fake identities, the indictment said.
Federal officials arrested 20 people across America on Thursday. Additionally, 32 individuals and five call centers in India were charged with connection to the case.
US Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said in a press briefing that Washington was looking forward extraditing the suspects from India to face jail terms.
“It's really important for the scammers in India to know that the United States is looking at this, is watching them and they could, if they engage in that activity, be extradited to the United Sates and could sit in jail ... for several years,” she said.
In a bill of indictment for the scammers, the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas had pointed to scare tactics employed by the operators of call centers in Ahmedabad, in the Indian state of Gujarat.
They “threatened potential victims with arrest, imprisonment, fines or deportation if they did not pay taxes or penalties to the government,” it read.
The extent of the scam was so vast that major federal organizations such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Treasury, Homeland Security, US Secret Service and police had to help with the investigation, according to the Justice Department. Loading ... | 1real |
Kenya police use teargas, shoot in air during opposition march | NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenyan police fired teargas and shots in the air on Monday as hundreds of demonstrators marched through the capital Nairobi to protest against proposed legal changes that would make it harder for the Supreme Court to annul an election. Reuters television footage showed a sport utility vehicle ploughing into some of the protesters, severely injuring three, but it was not immediately clear who was responsible and the police made no immediate comment on the incident. Kenya is due on Oct. 26 to repeat a presidential election after the Supreme Court nullified an Aug. 8 vote due to procedural irregularities. President Uhuru Kenyatta, who won the August election, will face opposition leader Raila Odinga. Uncertainty over the coming election has created turmoil in the East African nation, which is a regional trade hub and staunch Western ally. As the demonstrators marched toward the election board in Nairobi, a Reuters journalist saw men in plain clothes near security forces fire shots in the air. Police on horseback set up blockades to prevent protesters from accessing some roads. Police also used teargas in the western city of Kisumu, Odinga s stronghold, to disperse protesters, though another demonstration in the coastal city of Mombasa passed peacefully. Odinga s opposition alliance is threatening to boycott the October vote unless the electoral board changes some personnel - a stance he declined on Monday to clarify, in comments that suggested he was keeping his options open for now. This is a democratic society we live in. If I choose not to participate in the pre-rigged election process, it is my democratic right. No court can order me to do so, Odinga said in comments broadcast on Kenyan TV stations, without elaborating further. The protesters want to warn ruling party lawmakers not to pass an amendment to the election law that would limit the circumstances in which the Supreme Court could void an election on procedural grounds, opposition lawmaker James Orengo said. If parliament passes the law tomorrow, it will be like declaring war on the Kenyan people, he said. Justin Muturi, speaker of the National Assembly, said the amendment could be debated when parliament reconvenes on Tuesday if lawmakers were keen to push it forward. He said the key part of the proposed law stipulates that if a candidate boycotts an election whose date has already been set, the remaining candidate would win the contest without formal polls being held. The government is keen to avoid a constitutional crisis if Odinga pulls out at the last minute, frustrating the court s order to hold elections within 60 days, Muturi said. We are trying to prevent a crisis should there be no elections, he told Reuters by phone. The government-backed Kenya National Commission on Human Rights said on Monday in a report that at least 37 people had been killed in a police crackdown on protests that immediately followed the August vote - the highest death toll given so far. The report attributed some deaths to police using live bullets and a few from police bludgeoning using clubs . It named a 6-month-old baby girl, a 7-year-old boy, and an 8-year-old girl as being among the victims. | 0fake |
‘Monster Vote’ Is Happening, Early Voting Poll Numbers You Can’t Know | ‘Monster Vote’ Is Happening, Early Voting Poll Numbers You Can’t Know Posted on October 30, 2016 by Rebecca Diserio in Politics Share This Hillary Clinton (left), Trump rally (middle), Donald Trump (right)
For weeks, the mainstream media has pushed a false narrative that Hillary Clinton is so far ahead and this election is over. Luckily, there are some who realized this move is straight out of the leftist playbook and called out the press for what they were up to — lying. No longer can they report Hillary being ahead by double digits. In what’s been dubbed “the monster vote,” here are the poll numbers they do not want you to see.
What’s the monster vote? That’s the silent majority in this country who are going to overwhelm all of the liberal talking heads’ expectations. We started to see the monster vote for Donald Trump in the primaries, where he attracted voters to register as Republicans to vote in the primaries.
Now, we have early voting taking place in some states, and those numbers are proving, here comes the monster vote . Gateway Pundit reported:
DONALD TRUMP Senior Communications Advisor Jason Miller shared some very positive news on FOX News on Sunday morning.
Jason Miller told Melissa Francis the Trump Campaign is up 100,000 votes in Florida and 35,000 votes in North Carolina compared to four years ago . Trump rally (left), “We’re gonna need a bigger basket” meme (right)
Let’s break that down further to see what it means. Based on all the early voting in Florida, which is a must win for Trump, right now, it’s Trump = 51.5%, HRC = 48.5%, which is incredible. Democrats typically rule early voting, and in 2012, at this point, Barack Obama was up by 5% in Florida. Now, for the monster vote news for Florida, as broken down by The Conservative Treehouse (CTH):
This is YUGE because Obama won early voting in FL by 5 points in 2012 and after election night he won the state by less than 1 point. ( LINK ) Actual in person voting on the traditional election day, November 8th, will heavily favor Donald Trump.
Folks, based on what we have data wise so far and the fact that the 16 counties didn’t start early voting until the 29th of October (which favors Trump based on data above), I can now soundly say that we will win FL by 8 to 10 points (54.5 – 46.5). The monster vote is coming.
The mainstream media will continue to slant the early voting numbers for Hillary, so don’t listen to them. I guarantee you, they are taking a sample and then skewing it. Remember, Democrats almost always vote early, but Republicans don’t usually vote until election day. Based on what these smart guys at CTH are saying, North Carolina, Ohio, and Nevada will go Trump and even Minnesota and Wisconsin are slanting towards Trump, which would be just icing on the cake since those states usually go Democrat.
Tune out the mainstream media on the polls and get ready for the monster vote. It seems to be the best-kept secret in this election. The monster voters are the forgotten men and women across this country who haven’t voted in years and are now sick and tired of Washington’s corruption invading their life.
They’re back with a vengeance, and they have hope that we can turn this country around. We all agree it will be pure joy on election night as we watch Hillary and her minions break down in disbelief that We the People took our power back and we will never give it away again. | 1real |
Trump’s White Supremacist Fans Say ‘Rational’ Approach Will Help Achieve Ethnic Cleansing Of U.S. | Everyone thinks of people like the KKK when they think of white supremacists. Indeed, it s no secret that the KKK s former Grand Wizard, David Duke, loves Donald Trump. However, there are other white supremacists here who are far less obvious, and therefore, more insidious, than anything groups like the KKK could do. They appeared at the Republican National Convention in droves to cheer on their hero, Donald Trump.This group is well-heeled, well-dressed, clean-cut, and they want to remove everyone who isn t white and Christian from this country. Literally. They think Trump will help them further their rational arguments in support of an actual ethnic cleansing of the U.S. Following Trump s disaster of a speech at the Republican National Convention, Richard Spencer, a very prominent white supremacist, said: We ll help [blacks, Jews, Hispanics, etc.] go somewhere else. I m not a maniac.I know in order to achieve what I want to achieve, you have to deal with people rationally. Because expelling most of the U.S. population is a completely rational position to have.He is a maniac he just can t see it.After Trump s Thursday speech, Spencer and others spoke to a member of the Republican Jewish Coalition as well as an executive from another major Jewish group, and these two were shocked at how cavalier he and his group were in totally dismissing their concerns out of hand, like they re second-class citizens.To these people, though, they are second-class citizens. And these are the kinds of people Donald Trump draws to him, and only rejects them when the press pushes him on it. His campaign slogan is a magnet for white supremacists. In fact, Spencer actually said: Trust me. Trump thinks like me. Do you think it s a coincidence that everybody like me loves Trump and supports him? He s not wrong. His Royal Whiteness has called for deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, barring Muslims from entering the country, and says he s the law and order candidate who will stop the terrorists that are Black Lives Matter. It s actually not a surprise that white supremacists love him.But don t call them white supremacists! They like Europeanists, alt-right, and white nationalists. In other words, they use terms that couch their white supremacy in something that they think sounds less bigoted, so they can turn more people into bigots.Spencer is actually on the Southern Poverty Law Center s radar because he pushes Aryan Nation ideals so hard. He believes that the ethnic cleansing required to return dispossessed white people to their rightful place on high should be peaceful, but should definitely happen post haste. He s called Martin Luther King, Jr. a fraud and degenerate, and he s said that immigration is a proxy war against white people whose grandchildren would find themselves in a country alien and hostile if action isn t taken.The sickest part of this is that Spencer not only thinks he and his positions are rational, but that Trump will cleanse this country in a calm and rational manner, because if ethnic cleansing is just done right, it won t in unrest or violence and will put white people back into their ivory towers. These people are one of the primary reasons Trump is so dangerous.Featured image via William Thomas Cain/Getty Images | 1real |
NEW YORK BASED MUSLIM ACTIVIST PRAISES ISIS CHURCH BOMBERS ON FACEBOOK: “The Crescent Must Always Be on Top of the Cross”…So Much For Coexist [Video] | The comments on her Facebook page are praising the attacks. It s a plethora of Alahu Akbars. Unbelievable!This woman has over 1 million followers on Facebook!TRANSLATED FROM ARABIC SHE PRAISES THE TACTICS OF THE SUICIDE BOMBERS: Video bombing from another angle.. doesn t show the officer embrace (suicide)The detonation centre mainly inside away from the gate of the metal detector and explosives!! (halfway through the second 17)Suicide s alleged decided to blow himself up in the 2 security officials veiled and undo blast inside the church.. in addition to high morals to go through the gate of explosive explosive detection.. Obviously, there are increasingly sophisticated in ethics ( Bombers) Her Facebook Page: Ayat OrabyThe second video she posted from the bombing in Egypt is a different angle. She claims in her Facebook post that this is all fake and made up by the Christians. Wow!Kick her a** out of the U.S.! | 1real |
JUST IN: “Pit Bull” Attorney For Special Counsel Robert Mueller Attended Hillary’s Election Night Party | Is there a single person left on Robert Mueller s Trump-Russian collusion team who isn t in bed with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?An attorney for special counsel Robert Mueller attended Hillary Clinton s election night party in New York City, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.Andrew Weissmann s attendance at the party is one of many signs pointing to a troubling bias from the attorney. Weissmann has been described by The New York Times as Mueller s lieutenant and pit bull. Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch obtained an email Tuesday that revealed Weissmann praised former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates defiance of Trump. I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much. All my deepest respects, Weissmann wrote to Yates on Jan. 30. The email followed Yates instruction to the DOJ not to defend an executive order banning immigration from seven nations, an act that led to her dismissal by President Trump.Weissmann is one of several Democratic donors that have been hired by Mueller, a registered Republican. The special counsel s pit bull donated a combined $6,600 to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.The special counsel s probe has been criticized by Trump s allies, but the White House maintains Trump has no intention to fire Mueller. Daily Caller | 1real |
RATINGS FOR NBC’S Backstabbing Megyn Kelly Are In…The Anti-Trump Left May Love Her…But Do Viewers? | Last week, Alex Jones scooped NBC and Megyn Kelly with a secretly recorded conversation he had with Kelly, where she begged him to agree to allow her interview him. Kelly can be heard offering her assurances that she would never disparage him.The controversial Infowars host released the contents of their conversation which he claims to have recorded on his website Thursday night. Jones even released a teaser of what appears to be a secretly recorded conversation with Kelly (below).NBC s Megyn Kelly may be getting kudos for the hit job she did on Father s Day for InfoWars host Alex Jones. But the ratings are weak. Even America s Funniest Home Videos and a CBS 60 Minutes rerun beat her out Sunday night. Lefty Think Progress called it a ratings catastrophe. Her number: 3.5 million viewers. It s her lowest since her new show Megyn Kelly Tonight began three weeks ago.CNN s Brian Stelter called Jones a virus. What s different about this, about this hate-monger, this conspiracy theorist? Stelter asked on Sunday s Reliable Sources. I wonder if what is different, Charlie, is that the country feels very anxious right now, obviously very divided, as we have been talking about, and Alex Jones is a virus. There s maybe a fear of spreading that virus more fully on a big network like the National Broadcasting Company. What Kelly shouldn t be praised for are the lies she told Jones in her persuasive ass-kissy story pitch.Before Sunday s program, Jones called her Medusa and venomously ranwhat Kelly had to think were private phone calls in which she repeatedly claimed her story would not be a gotcha piece. I don t double-cross, she insisted. She wanted to get to know HIM. She told him in the end he d be fine with what she did. She wanted people to come away thinking how interesting he is, just another father and not the boogeyman they d imagined him to be. Daily CallerWatch Megyn Kelly s hatchet job on Alex Jones here: | 1real |
Merkel call to stop Turkey's EU bid draws mixed response | TALLINN/PARIS (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel s call to stop Turkey s European Union accession talks drew a mixed response from the bloc s foreign ministers on Thursday, while French President Emmanuel Macron said Ankara remained a vital partner of the EU. NATO allies Germany and Turkey have traded increasingly bitter words over the last two years, contributing to an overall souring of Ankara s relations with the EU. President Tayyip Erdogan s crackdown on dissent following a failed 2016 coup attempt has drawn broad condemnation in the bloc. Merkel announced her toughened stance on Turkey s long-stalled EU bid in a TV debate last Sunday as she faced off with her main rival in national elections due on Sept. 24. Her Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, arriving for talks with his EU colleagues in the Estonian capital Tallinn, said it was Turkey itself that was moving away from the EU. Austria s Sebastian Kurz reiterated his line that the talks should end. But Finland and Lithuania spoke out against breaking off the talks, which opened formally in 2005 but stalled over Erdogan s track record on human rights and the unresolved issue of Cyprus - a Mediterranean island that belongs to the EU but of which part falls under an unrecognized protectorate of Turkey. No, we should continue the process and engagement. It s not easy but we have to value contacts, Lithuania s Linas Linkevicius told reporters. By stopping, by cutting, we will ...encourage them even more to go away. I think the effect would be the opposite than what we d wish. EU entry talks, no matter how protracted, had long been seen in themselves as a stimulus to Turkish democratic reform; but EU officials see a slide back in recent years with judicial independence and freedom of speech in peril. Turkey s EU ties minister, Omer Celik, is due to join the bloc s 28 officials for talks in Tallinn later on Thursday. The EU is wary of upsetting Erdogan, eager to preserve a deal that stemmed the mass migration via Turkey of people from conflict zones in the tumultuous Middle East. We have to tread very carefully and, while discussing Turkey s status as a candidate country, we should also discuss the future relationship in all its aspects, Estonia s Sven Mikser said in Tallinn. He said he did not expect the EU to make any formal decision this year, adding that the bloc needed to cooperate with Ankara on migration and security in particular. The French president told Greece s Kathimerini newspaper that ties with Turkey should be maintained. Turkey has indeed strayed away from the European Union in recent months and worryingly overstepped the mark in ways that cannot be ignored, he said. But I want to avoid a split because it s a vital partner in many crises we all face, notably the immigration challenge and the terrorist threat. With other countries in the EU also advocating more strategic patience , the unanimity of 28 member states required to kill off Turkey s bid seems absent. But suspending accession talks, which the European Parliament has already called for repeatedly, would only require the backing of majority of EU states. Merkel wants to discuss that with fellow EU leaders at their summit planned in October 19-20, more than three weeks after Germany s election. A senior Turkish official said EU states must decide whether they wanted Turkey as a member, but there was a sense they no longer want the marriage...(but) want cohabitation . Kati Piri, a European Parliament speaker on Turkey, advised suspending the membership track but pushing ahead with customs union talks as the most realistic leverage the EU can now have to try negotiate some standards with Turkey . Turkey under this government does not even uphold the minimum human rights standards now. But we should not take away the EU perspective from the Turkish people, and in suspending talks we would have to name conditions for reviving them. But this German twist is triggered by German elections, not by some change on the side of Turkey. So what does Merkel really mean? I think it s likely she will return to her usual pragmatism after the elections, Piri told Reuters. | 0fake |
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