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NEW YORK TIMES Publishes Trump Tax Return From 20 Years Ago…TRUMP FIRES BACK! | In a lame effort to score political points for Hillary Clinton, the New York Times published a portion of Donald Trump s 1995 tax return. They re now promoting the idea that Trump could have not paid taxes for decades. Could have doesn t mean he did! Does anyone care that a man with a huge business empire might try and pay less taxes or work the tax system to his advantage? Isn t that what most people do and it s legal to do it! I would question Trump s sanity if he begged to pay more taxes! The front pages of the tax returns themselves are essentially a non-issue, representing the 1995 gross business loss incurred by candidate Donald Trump who operates a massive conglomeration of business entities.The anti-Trump political angle is easily identifiable within the extensive article use of: could have , might be , may have , phrases used throughout the woven narrative. Journalistic narratives are rarely based on facts.The identified $916 million single year operating income loss is no different than current losses of Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and a host of other corporations and businesses.Actually, Donald Trump s 1995 loss is smaller than the operating loss the New York Times reported when it sold the Boston Globe in 2013 for a net loss of $1.03 billion.The Times purchased the Boston Globe in 93 for $1.1 billion and sold it in 2013 for $70 million, a loss of $1.03 billion. However, for some reason it s doubtful the Times will publish their own 2013 tax returns. That doesn t meet the political need.THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN RELEASED THIS STATEMENT:Read more: Conservative Treehouse | 1real |
Mexico, Chinese New Year: Your Thursday Evening Briefing - The New York Times | (Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. President Trump’s aggressive moves on security and immigration drew strong responses both domestically and internationally. Tensions with Mexico are particularly high. Its president, Enrique Peña Nieto, above, canceled a meeting with Mr. Trump, and the two feuded — largely over Twitter — as reports emerged that Mr. Trump could consider a 20 percent tax on imports to pay for a border wall. Mexico said its 50 consulates in the United States would work to protect the rights of Mexican immigrants, while America’s sanctuary cities, including New York, Boston and Los Angeles, vowed to resist immigration enforcement. _____ 2. Mr. Trump told Republican leaders at a policy retreat in Philadelphia that this Congress would be the busiest “in decades, maybe ever. ” His adviser Steve Bannon deepened tensions with the news media, saying it had been humiliated by election missteps and should “keep its mouth shut. ” He added: “I want you to quote this. The media here is the opposition party. ” This may not come as a surprise: Sales of dystopian novels, most notably George Orwell’s “1984,” are spiking. Our literary critic offers a reappraisal. The Times is tracking Mr. Trump’s full agenda, and covering many more aspects of his administration. You can also sign up for our daily politics newsletter here. _____ 3. Vice President Mike Pence will speak at the March for Life on the National Mall on Friday. Organizers have ramped up attendance efforts, not wanting to be embarrassed by a poorer turnout than the women’s marches last weekend. And health clinics across the developing world are bracing for cuts because of Mr. Trump’s revival of a policy prohibiting foreign aid to groups that discuss abortion, a rule that often curtails broader health services. Above, a woman who suffered complications from a botched abortion in the Democratic Republic of Congo. _____ 4. The Doomsday Clock has moved nearer to midnight than it’s been in more than 60 years. Devised by the nonprofit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it’s meant to convey “how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. ” It debuted in 1947. Two of the group’s scientists cited alarm over Mr. Trump’s positions on nuclear weapons and climate change. _____ 5. In China, hundreds of millions of people are traveling from industrial regions to their hometowns to celebrate the start of Lunar New Year on Saturday. Some cities have restricted the use of fireworks over pollution concerns. _____ 6. For the first time, biologists have succeeded in growing human stem cells in pig embryos. The advance brings scientists closer to developing human organs in animals for later transplant. Since the organ would be made of a patient’s own cells, there would be little risk of immune rejection. _____ 7. Tributes to Mary Tyler Moore, the iconic actress who died on Wednesday at 80, continue to pour in. The TV journalist Jane Pauley, above, said the character of the single, news producer Mary Richards was a role model and more. She even mimicked her fashion and home décor choices. The show “made a woman in the newsroom seem normal,” wrote Ms. Pauley, the anchor of “Sunday Morning” on CBS. _____ 8. Serena and a resurgent Venus Williams will face each other in the final of the Australian Open on Saturday. It’s the first time they’re playing against each other in a Grand Slam final since Wimbledon in 2009, above. If Serena wins, she would set an record with a 23rd Grand Slam singles title. And a surprisingly strong Roger Federer defeated Stan Wawrinka to advance to the men’s final. He’ll seek his first major title since Wimbledon in 2012 on Sunday. _____ 9. years after the movie “Trainspotting” gave the world a glimpse into the underbelly of Edinburgh, the characters are back. “T2 Trainspotting” — with the same director and several of the same stars, including Ewan McGregor, above center — checks in with the unmoored but compelling characters as they face middle age. It’s being released this week in Britain and reaches the U. S. in March. We rounded up the early reviews. _____ 10. Finally, whatever your politics, your fears, or your troubles, a gift: the Great National Cute Animal of 2017. Over the past two days, American zoos and aquariums have dominated the conversation on Twitter with photo after photo of adorable animals. And the world cracked a smile. Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help. Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 0fake |
State G.O.P. Leaders Move Swiftly as Party Bickers in Congress - The New York Times | When Republicans in Kentucky seized total control of the state government last year, Damon Thayer, the majority leader in the State Senate, began asking around for advice from counterparts in other capitals where the party already dominated both the legislative and executive branches. How should we handle all this power? he wanted to know. One answer impressed him, Mr. Thayer said, from a senior Republican lawmaker in Wisconsin: “Move quickly. ” Kentucky Republicans have done just that, swiftly passing laws to roll back the powers of labor unions and restrict access to abortion. But they are only getting started, Mr. Thayer said in an interview: They also plan to make sweeping changes to the education and public pension systems this year. And they have plenty of company. While Republicans in Washington appear flummoxed by the complexities of rule, struggling with issues from repealing the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, to paying for President Trump’s promised wall on the Mexican border, rising party leaders in the states seem far more at ease and assertive. Republicans have control in 25 states now, holding both the governorship and the entire legislature, and Republican lawmakers are acting with lightning speed to enact longstanding conservative priorities. In states from New England to the Midwest and across the South, conservative lawmakers have introduced or enacted legislation to erode union powers and abortion rights, loosen gun regulations, expand programs and slash taxes and spending. State Senator Scott L. Fitzgerald of Wisconsin, the Republican majority leader, said conservatives in the states had taken the party’s national victories in November as a directive to “shake up” government. “That has been amped up as a result of Donald Trump being elected president,” he said. “There’s a higher expectation now. ” If Republicans in the states have taken Mr. Trump as an inspiration, in some respects they are also largely unburdened by his personality and his political whims. Republicans in Congress are plainly struggling to overcome deep internal disagreements and to balance traditional conservative goals with Mr. Trump’s distinctive priorities. But for Republicans in state capitals, these are comparatively remote considerations. Some Democrats fear that while their own party is consumed nationally with fighting Mr. Trump, leaders and activists may be too distracted to throw up effective roadblocks to the ideological agenda that Republicans are ramming through at the state level. “Progressives cannot afford to forget about what’s happening in our backyards,” said Nick Rathod, executive director of State Innovation Exchange, a liberal group focused on state legislatures. “Some of it is even more egregious than what is currently happening in Washington, D. C. ” Republicans have gained power rapidly in the states since the 2008 presidential election, winning 33 governorships and in many instances entrenching themselves in power through legislative redistricting. Riding to office on a wave of discontent with the Obama administration, headstrong governors in states like Wisconsin and Ohio embarked on a ferocious quest to transform their states, repeatedly battling powerful unions and popular backlash. Sidelining Democratic lawmakers and grinding down liberal interest groups, these Republicans may have helped pave the way for Mr. Trump’s victories in a string of traditionally blue Midwestern states last year. Acting fastest at the moment, though, are four states where Republicans won total control of the government only in November. In addition to Kentucky, Missouri and New Hampshire became states with the election of Republican governors, and Republicans in Iowa snatched away the State Senate, where Democrats had held their last grip on power. In all four states, Republicans are racing to strip back the influence of labor unions, a key Democratic constituency. In Missouri, where union membership has waned, Gov. Eric Greitens, a telegenic former member of the Navy SEALs, signed a “right to work” bill into law on Monday, denying unions the power to require that workers at companies they represent pay dues or their equivalent as a condition of employment. In Kentucky, Gov. Matt Bevin signed a similar measure in January, along with the repeal of a law that kept wages high on public construction projects. And in New Hampshire, State Senator Jeb Bradley, the Republican majority leader, said legislation was a top priority. In Iowa, Republican leaders announced this past week that they would pursue sweeping changes to the collective bargaining rights of public employees. State Senator Bill Dix, the new Republican majority leader, said his party had campaigned on such changes — which would cut deeply into unions’ negotiating power — and intended to make good on its commitments. He said Republicans would also seek to change state laws governing health care and to enshrine in the State Constitution the right to bear arms. “Iowans expect us to take action,” Mr. Dix said. His counterpart in New Hampshire, Mr. Bradley, a former member of Congress, echoed that language, but cautioned in an interview that Republicans had to move deliberately and not just fast. “We can’t just start bonfires that we can’t put out,” he warned. “But we can certainly move forward with a conservative agenda that’s a reasonable conservative agenda. ” Democrats and labor unions, which in the past have been able to thwart conservative legislation with the help of a supportive governor or a bloc of allies in the legislature, describe the onslaught in newly Republican states as overwhelming. “They’re killing us here in the state of Missouri,” said John Stiffler, executive of the St. Louis Building Construction Trades Council. Some unions in the state, shut out of power, are attempting to put the law up for a direct vote in a 2018 referendum. For the moment, Mr. Stiffler said, union leaders are seeking to meet with Mr. Greitens in the hope of finding a compromise on other policies, like legislation. “We’re trying to find a way to get even a small audience with him,” Mr. Stiffler said of Mr. Greitens. The Republican agenda in the states goes well beyond limiting unions. Party leaders in Kentucky, New Hampshire and Missouri have signaled that they plan to expand and charter school programs and, in some instances, to pursue tort reform and to place new regulations on voting. Beleaguered Democrats see each policy as devised to undercut one of their core political constituencies: teachers, trial lawyers, minority voters or young people. In several states that the party has controlled for a longer span, Republican governors have also announced aggressive plans to overhaul the size and functions of government, including a Wisconsin proposal, backed by Gov. Scott Walker, and a large program of tax cuts in Florida, championed by Gov. Rick Scott. Both men were first elected in 2010. Republicans in a number of states are also pushing a deeply conservative social agenda. In New Hampshire, Mr. Bradley had long been pushing a bill to let people carry concealed guns without a permit repeatedly, it passed both legislative houses only to be vetoed by Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat. “We had no chance of overriding her veto,” lamented the Mr. Bradley, but Ms. Hassan was elected to the Senate in November. The gun bill cleared the legislature again on Thursday, and the new Republican governor, Chris Sununu, has “every intention of signing it,” David Abrams, a spokesman of his, said. In Kentucky last month, Mr. Bevin, 50, an activist with close ties to the Tea Party, signed a set of new restrictions on abortion, banning the procedure after 20 weeks and requiring that every woman who seeks an abortion undergo an ultrasound first. Iowa Republicans have advanced a bill to defund Planned Parenthood Missouri legislators have filed a barrage of bills, including one that would ban the procedure entirely, in defiance of the Supreme Court. In a handful of states including Missouri and Texas, lawmakers are considering legislation that would designate public restrooms and locker rooms as . And as Mr. Trump attempts to crack down on “sanctuary cities” at the national level, lawmakers in states like Texas and Tennessee have proposed measures to force municipalities to enforce federal immigration law more assertively. Democrats and their allies, including groups like Planned Parenthood, often have little recourse in these states but to rally popular outcry and organize for the next election, or to challenge policies in court. They have succeeded from time to time, including in North Carolina last year, ousting a Republican governor, Pat McCrory, who signed legislation gutting protections for gay and transgender people. In 2013, Virginia voters broke a Republican monopoly by electing a Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, who campaigned in part against abortion restrictions passed by a legislature. And in Louisiana, voters elected a Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, in 2015, to succeed the unpopular Bobby Jindal, who pursued a agenda and briefly ran for president. Mr. McAuliffe, one of a growing number of Democrats who have called on the national party to devote more attention to state elections, said Democrats should recognize the role governors play in heading off the kind of conservative legislation they find deeply offensive. Mr. McAuliffe, who has used his veto pen 71 times, said Virginia Republicans had pushed “nuttier, more socially divisive legislation than even North Carolina. ” “This isn’t scare tactics — this is actually happening,” Mr. McAuliffe said. “If you had a Republican governor, he would have had to sign them, and think where we would be today. ” In Iowa, a Democratic state senator, Janet Petersen, said the zeal of the new Republican majority had broken a mood of passivity among Democrats. On the Planned Parenthood issue alone, Ms. Petersen said her office had received about 1, 500 emails from alarmed constituents. “If there’s one positive thing to come out of this horrible legislation,” she said, “it’s that complacency is gone. ” | 0fake |
Political paralysis is the new normal: The GOP’s Scalia gamble may be suicidal, but it’s not illogical | According to numerous scholars who have weighed in since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia over the weekend, historical and constitutional precedent indicates that the president of the United States is elected for a four-year term, and does not stop being president until he or she, um, actually leaves office. That’s a hot take on a controversial topic, I know! It’s nearly as confusing as the question of who was president at the time of the 9/11 attacks, which Marco Rubio seems to think took place during some extended Bill Clinton prequel to “The Hangover,” while George W. Bush wore funny costumes and did non-alcoholic Jell-O shots and kept forgetting he had taken the oath of office.
But history’s bunk, as Henry Ford sorta, kinda said nearly a century ago. And so is reality, at least when it comes to politics in 2016, a year whose revolutionary strangeness demands a new descriptive term. “Postmodern” is way too old-fashioned, too ‘90s. Our politics are increasingly post-partisan, post-rational, post-factual and even post-political. Even the New York Times has noticed. In a story published Tuesday about the running battle over judicial appointments between the Obama administration and the Republican leadership of the Senate, reporter Charlie Savage wonderingly observed that “history is no longer a guide in a polarized Washington, where partisan warfare over judicial nominations has been escalating for more than a generation.”
That qualifies as what Friedrich Nietzsche would have called a “daybreak” moment, the dawning of a new awareness. (I agree that I quote him too much; that’s it for now.) Please notice the inherent contradiction in Savage’s sentence: “History” is no longer a guide because it is no longer history, that is, because the lessons that a mainstream commentator is supposed to draw from history no longer reflect what has actually happened. The Republican Party’s long-term strategy of paralysis, refusal and denial — of crushing all lingering vestiges of democracy under a sodden weight of nihilism and apathy — is the new normal.
That strategy stretches back at least as far as the Bill Clinton years, and has gone into Koch-funded steroid overdrive in the Citizens United era. As its zillionaire funders clearly grasp, that strategy represents the GOP’s best hope for repeated midterm victories and a stranglehold on congressional power into the indefinite future. It’s the strategy that produced the Koch brothers’ greatest single victory, to set against their more visible record of bankrolling losers like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush (and, most likely, Marco Rubio). That victory was, of course, the 37 percent turnout in the 2014 midterms, when both Democrats and moderate Republicans stayed home in droves and the GOP won its largest congressional majority since 1931.
So I don’t think it’s quite right to describe the Republican leadership’s vow to reject any possible Supreme Court nominee put forward by President Obama during his last year in office as unprecedented or particularly surprising. It’s useless to talk about precedent as if that word meant something these days, for starters. There is no relevant precedent for anything happening in American politics right now, except perhaps for some limited parallels one could identify in the severely divided nation of the 1850s, on the cusp of the Civil War.
As far as surprise goes, give me a break. Do I take a cynical view of all the expressions of amazement and righteous indignation from Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and every other leading Democrat and the entire leftward half of the commentariat? Sure I do: They sense political opportunity and the chance to shoot a flattering selfie with the Constitution behind them. Which is fair play and all, but let’s not mistake it for high-minded principle. It might be fair to give Sanders an asterisk on this one, but the Democratic Party as a whole has been a junior partner or fellow traveler in the politics of paralysis, and has done virtually nothing to resist it.
It’s no secret that the current Republican leadership in Congress is essentially held hostage by the most extreme elements of its base. We have all forgotten about John Boehner, for understandable reasons, but please remember that the duly elected speaker of the House was forced to quit for being not enough of a do-nothing obstructionist. For any elected Republican to offer a fair hearing to any Obama nominee at any level of government is tantamount to treason; half the Republican electorate apparently believes that Obama is not a United States citizen and not the lawful president in the first place. What proportion of them believes that Obama had Scalia murdered in order to ban all guns, open the borders and institute Sharia law remains unclear. (“I’m hearing it’s a big topic,” says Donald Trump, fueling a new bump in the polls.) And here we are, facing a Supreme Court vacancy after the death of the most conservative justice in recent history — or ever, quite likely — under the aforementioned lame-duck Islamo-Democratic so-called president.
Whether the Republicans can successfully run out the clock on the Obama administration without paying a devastating political price remains to be seen. It’s a massive gamble, a game of Russian roulette played with four or five bullets in a six-shooter. But their vow to do so is the logical fulfillment of their party’s long-term commitment to paralysis as politics, and it comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody in Washington. If that tactic poses unknowable hazards for the GOP in general and its presidential nominee in particular, that’s not because it is qualitatively different from what they’ve been doing for years. It’s only because it thrusts the nihilistic strategy of the right-wing conserva-trolls who have eaten the Republican Party’s soul into the public’s face in blatant and unavoidable fashion. Honestly, it was more surprising to hear Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, take half a step back from the GOP hive-mind on Tuesday and suggest he might actually fulfill his constitutional role to hold hearings on an Obama nominee. Once upon a time, Grassley came off as a right-wing zealot among Senate Republicans. Now he’s a congenial bipartisan man of reason, not to mention an 82-year-old incumbent who faces a tough reelection fight in a purple state that Obama carried twice. Let’s not waste any compassion on Grassley, because he deserves to ride the slippery slide of ignominy however that happens. But I feel sorry for the folks who are fielding all the outraged phone calls in his Capitol Hill office right now. I don’t know whether it’s too late for some Tea Party firebrand to mount a Republican primary challenge in Iowa, but I guarantee that question is being pondered right now. It’s tempting to express delight at the current GOP dilemma, where Republicans would seem to face death by fire from the pitchfork-bearing faithful if they move forward with an Obama Supreme Court nominee, and death in the frigid ocean of a national election if they don’t. It’s tempting if you’re wearing ideological blinders, that is, and if you assume that the Democratic Party, even in its divided and eviscerated state, is guaranteed to reap a glorious victory after a lemming-like wave of Republican mass suicide. I don’t think that’s a safe assumption. Our entire bipartisan political system is in dire and potentially terminal condition, and as I keep insisting there are ample reasons to believe that the virus that has destroyed one party has also infected the other, albeit in less dramatic fashion. We’re already in a year when the Republicans seem likely to nominate a lunatic demagogue who is despised by the entire party leadership — and who, whatever he is, is not a “conservative” by anyone’s definition — and when a septuagenarian Jewish socialist is one or two victories away from being the Democratic front-runner. What will come of Obama’s impending Supreme Court nomination, and who will inherit the resulting mess next January? I have no idea. But if you still think political normalcy is about to reassert itself, any minute now, I have two words for you: Hi, Jeb! | 0fake |
VIDEO: Muslim Migrant Jihad Shooting Rampage at Washington State Mall | Email
Watch this devout Muslim run wild through the Cascade mall opening fire on unsuspecting shoppers, searching for more victims as they ran for their lives — in the cause of Islam , the religion of peace . Any criticism of this savagery will result in charges of being “racist” and “islamophobic” – embrace it, we are told.
Video released of shooting rampage by Muslim migrant and Hillary Clinton illegal voter. Arcan Cetin, 20, of Oak Harbor, Washington was an immigrant from Turkey — not a citizen, but a legal permanent resident of the United States.
And Hillary wants to increase the hijrah by 550%.
Video Released From Washington State Mall Shooting
Burlington WA – Video footage from a mall in Washington state captured the fear and panic that broke out when a man carrying a rifle opened fire inside a Macy’s department store.
Some shoppers at the Cascade Mall in Burlington, Washington, ran and others hid behind clothing racks as a lone shooter with a rifle searched for his targets.
He fired at a teenage girl near some racks, shot a woman trying to hide from him behind a counter and killed two women who huddled together.
The Sept. 23 shooting left a teenage girl, three women and one man dead.
Arcan Cetin of Oak Harbor is being held on suspicion of five counts of first-degree, premeditated
murder. Bail was set at $2 million. Prosecutors have until Jan. 6, 2017 to file formal charges.
Article reposted with permission from PamelaGeller.com | 1real |
Former Ambassador Andrew Young Calls for End to Water Fluoridation, “Civil Rights Issue” | By Brandon Turbeville Anti-fluoridation activists in Georgia received a major boost of support when former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter, Andrew... | 1real |
Saudi deputy crown prince, Trump meeting a 'turning point': Saudi adviser | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia hailed a “historical turning point” in U.S.-Saudi relations after a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman highlighted the two leaders’ shared view that Iran posed a regional security threat. The meeting on Tuesday appeared to signal a meeting of the minds on many issues between Trump and Prince Mohammed, in a marked difference from Riyadh’s often fraught relationship with the Obama administration, especially in the wake of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. “This meeting is considered a historical turning point in relations between both countries and which had passed through a period of divergence of views on many issues,” a senior adviser to Prince Mohammed said in a statement. “But the meeting today restored issues to their right path and form a big change in relations between both countries in political, military, security and economic issues,” the adviser said. Saudi Arabia had viewed with unease the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, whom they felt considered Riyadh’s alliance with Washington less important than negotiating the Iran nuclear deal. Riyadh and other Gulf allies see in Trump a strong president who will shore up Washington’s role as their main strategic partner and help contain Riyadh’s adversary Iran in a region central to U.S. security and energy interests, regional analysts said. The deputy crown prince viewed the nuclear deal as “very dangerous”, the senior adviser said, adding that both leaders had identical views on “the danger of Iran’s regional expansionist activities”. The White House has said the deal was not in the best interest of the United States. Iran denies interference in Arab countries. The meeting was the first since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration with the prince, who is leading the kingdom’s efforts to revive state finances by diversifying the economy away from a reliance on falling crude oil revenues. Under the plan, which seeks to promote the private sector and make state-owned companies more efficient, Riyadh plans to sell up to 5 percent of state oil giant Saudi Aramco in what is expected to be the world’s biggest initial public offering. The two leaders, who discussed opportunities for U.S. companies to invest in Saudi Arabia, kicked off their talks in the Oval Office posing for a picture in front of journalists. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, chief of staff Reince Priebus and strategist Steve Bannon were also present at the Oval Office meeting with Prince Mohammed. The meeting also appeared to illustrate support for some of the most contentious issues that Trump has faced since taking office on Jan. 20. On a travel ban against six Muslim-majority countries, the adviser said Prince Mohammed did not regard it as one that was aimed at “Muslim countries or Islam”. Earlier this month Trump signed a revised executive order on banning citizens from Yemen, Iran, Somalia, Syria, Sudan and Libya from traveling to the United States but removed Iraq from the list, after his controversial first attempt was blocked in the court Trump’s travel ban has come under criticism for targeting citizens of several mainly Muslim countries. The senior adviser said Prince Mohammed “expressed his satisfaction after the meeting on the positive position and clarifications he heard from President Trump on his views on Islam”. The senior adviser said the leaders discussed the “successful Saudi experience of setting up a border protection system” on the Saudi-Iraq border which has prevented smuggling. Trump has vowed to start work quickly on the barrier along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border to prevent illegal immigrants and drugs from crossing to the north. Obama late last year suspended the sale of U.S.-made precision-guidance munitions to the Saudis, a reaction to thousands of civilian casualties from Saudi-led air strikes in Yemen. U.S. officials said Trump was considering ending that ban and approving the sale of guidance systems made by Raytheon Co. The State Department has approved the move, which awaits a final White House decision, the officials said. A source close to the issue, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a main topic of the meeting would be Saudi investment in the United States, which could help the U.S. president fulfill his promises of job creation. “It’s the creation of jobs through investments - President Trump wants results and statistics matter for him,” said Ingrid Naranjo, an expert in U.S.-Saudi relations. “It makes a lot of sense for the diversification strategy of Saudi to invest abroad and especially in the U.S.” Gregory Gause, a Gulf expert at Texas A&M University, said that while Saudi Arabia might find the “atmospherics” of its relations with Trump better than those with Obama, it might find less change than it hopes on key issues. For example, he said, Trump is unlikely to mount a major, costly effort to counter Iranian influence in Iraq, or to launch a full-scale campaign to oust Syrian President Bashar al Assad, as Riyadh might wish. “I think they’re going to find rhetorically that the new administration says things and uses language they like more,” said Gause. “But I think on the ground, we’re not going to see an enormous difference.” | 0fake |
Albania woos luxury hotel brands with tax breaks | TIRANA (Reuters) - Albania is planning to try to lure five-star hotel brands with tax breaks, including scrapping profit and property taxes, to increase its appeal for the higher-end of the tourist trade. With travel and tourism accounting for 8.4 percent of gross domestic product in 2016, rising demand to visit the country between Montenegro and Greece washed by the Adriatic and Ionian Seas is not being met by present facilities and infrastructure. One of Europe s poorest but also most unspoiled countries, Albania has been wooing tourists by encouraging them to Go Your Own Way , counting on the appeal of adventure tourism. Now, to lure international hotel brands, the government is to pass a law this month to exempt them from profit tax for 10 years, scrap infrastructure tax and property taxes and have them pay a VAT tax of 6 percent for any service on their hotels or resorts. International hotel chains or anyone possessing a franchise from them is welcome provided they invest no less than eight million euros for a four-star hotel and no less than 15 million euros for a five-star hotel, said Elton Orozi, an official at the tourism ministry. Albania is trying to offer more to tourists who spend more time and money so as to get acquainted with the culture, history and nature, added Orozi. The incentives will apply to developers only if they do not sell on the units since the government wants to avoid villas being built on the seashore by wealthy Albanians using them as second homes. Building luxury hotels will also depend on whether the investors steer clear of land ownership troubles, which doomed an effort to lure the French Club Med holiday company to Albania more than a decade ago. | 0fake |
U.S. congressional panels spar over 'Trump dossier' on Russia contacts | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three congressional committees are scuffling over a former British spy’s reports that are central to investigations into U.S. allegations that Russia tried to help Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, people involved in the inquiries said. The dossier assembled by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele outlined Russian financial and personal links to Trump’s campaign and associates. The Senate Intelligence Committee and special counsel Robert Mueller are looking into possible collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign and Mueller’s investigators have met with Steele. However, the Republican chairmen of the House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary committees are challenging the dossier’s credibility and one has implied that Russians may have played a role in its preparation, sources familiar with the inquiries said. The duel is not purely partisan. Senator Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Mark Warner, the committee’s ranking Democrat, are leading what other committee members from both parties called a serious effort to pursue the allegations dug up by Steele. “As I understand it, a good deal of his information remains unproven, but none of it has been disproven, and considerable amounts of it have been proven,” Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an interview with Reuters. He did not elaborate. Russia has repeatedly denied any interference in last November’s election won by businessman Trump, a Republican, against Democrat and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Trump has denied any collusion by his campaign or associates. In a report published in January four U.S. intelligence agencies said they took the dossier’s allegations seriously. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has been the harshest public critic of Steele, suggesting that Russia might have somehow had influence with Fusion GPS, the U.S. opposition research firm that hired Steele, and that they may have broken U.S. law. The dossier was first commissioned on behalf of Trump opponents in the Republican primary and then Democrats took it up when Trump became the presidential nominee. Steele met with FBI representatives before the election to discuss his findings. In a March 6 letter to then-FBI Director James Comey, Grassley wrote: “The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for president in the run-up to the election raises further questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends.” Whitehouse, however, said that a July 27 Judiciary Committee hearing called by Grassley was part of a Republican effort to discredit Steele by creating “confusion” and the false impression that Russia paid Steele for the dossier. “It could not have been clearer that there is no evidence of any Russian role behind the Steele dossier,” Whitehouse said. A Judiciary Committee aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “The American people need to be able to trust that the FBI and Justice Department are operating free from political influence. That’s what this investigation is about, and we will follow the facts wherever they lead.” Despite recusing himself in April from the House Intelligence Committee investigation, the Republican chairman, Devin Nunes, is also trying to discredit Steele’s work, sources familiar with the probe said. On Tuesday, Nunes subpoenaed the partners who run Fusion GPS, the U.S. opposition research firm that hired Steele, a source familiar with the matter said. “This is a blatant attempt to undermine the reporting of the so-called ‘dossier,’ even as its core conclusion of a broad campaign by the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election has been confirmed by the U.S. intelligence community and is now widely accepted as fact,” Joshua Levy, counsel to Fusion GPS, said in a statement. Committee Democrat Eric Swalwell also fired back, saying Nunes told Congress he had recused himself and that issuing the subpoenas would violate that recusal. “It is also a way to go it alone, not work with Democrats, and it looks like he is trying to again undermine the investigation,” Swalwell said. Nunes also used his power last month to issue subpoenas to the FBI and Justice Department, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, demanding that they surrender their files on Steele, his dossier, and their investigations into his work. So far, the Justice Department and FBI have not turned over the information Nunes requested because of the FBI investigation, which is supervised by special counsel Mueller. Mueller’s office declined to comment on the request or the investigation. | 0fake |
Merkel backs tougher U.N. sanctions against North Korea call with Putin | BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday voiced her support for tougher U.N. sanctions against North Korea in a telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a German government spokesman said. There was agreement that the conflict about North Korea s nuclear armament must be resolved peacefully, Steffen Seibert said in a statement. Merkel told Putin she supported efforts of the U.N. Security Council to rapidly adopt further sanctions against North Korea to make Pyongyang change its course, he added. Merkel also welcomed Russia s proposal of deploying U.N. peacekeepers to address the Ukraine crisis, but stressed that the proposed mandate needed to be expanded, Seibert said. Putin signaled his willingness to look into the idea of deploying U.N. peacekeepers not only on the contact line in the Donbass region, but also in other areas in eastern Ukraine to protect OSCE officials monitoring the Minsk peace deal, he added. | 0fake |
WATCH: CNN Host HUMILIATES Trump Supporter For Providing Laughable ‘Evidence’ Of Nationwide Voter Fraud | One of Trump s biggest supporters just got their ass handed to them for having zero evidence of voter fraud.Donald Trump s lies about voter fraud imploded on Monday as CNN tore apart Kris Kobach, the man Stephen Miller cited when asked if he had evidence to prove Trump s claims.Miller repeatedly claimed that millions of Americans voted illegally in November to explain how Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. Miller specifically talked about New Hampshire, claiming that thousands of people from Massachusetts bused in to vote a second time in that state. Go to New Hampshire, Miller said. Talk to anybody who s worked in politics there for a long time. Everybody s aware of the problem in New Hampshire. Except that many former and current New Hampshire politicians from both parties have criticized Trump s claim.And when ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked Miller for evidence, he merely referred the media to Kansas Secretary of State and Trump supporter Kris Kobach.On Monday, CNN host Kate Bolduan confronted Kobach about Miller s claims. Miller says, look to you, sir, for the evidence, Bolduan said. Where is it? On election day 2016, 6,000 people registered in New Hampshire using an out-of-state driver s license, Kobach claimed in response. Of those over 6,000, just under 3,000 so just under half used a Massachusetts driver s license. Now, some of those are going to be legit. They re going to be people who just moved to New Hampshire but many of those will be out-of-state residents who voted in the state. What Kobach just said is a mere prediction. In a courtroom, it would be called conjecture because Kobach is making an opinion based on incomplete information. You truly do believe that thousands of people came in from Massachusetts to vote in New Hampshire on election day? Bolduan continued in disbelief. We will have data at the end of the month [about] how many of those 6,000 people voted in both New Hampshire and in one of the other states, Kobach said, admitting that he actually doesn t have evidence. He is only promising that he will have evidence at a later time, probably when whatever right-wing organization he is associated with provides their fabricated statistics.With no real evidence to support his claims, Bolduan pounced and slammed Kobach with reality. Mr. Secretary, wait a second. Stephen Miller, over the weekend, said thousands did vote illegally. Definitively saying that this actually happened. You re saying that there s going to be more data coming at the end of the month. So, do you have the evidence? Voter registration does not equal fraudulent votes. Kobach claimed that 3 million Americans are registered to vote in two states, which isn t illegal. Of course, Trump adviser Steve Bannon is also registered to vote in two states.Kobach then offered proof of Trump s claim by whining about CNN not covering the nine cases of voter fraud Kansas is prosecuting. Bolduan easily picked that evidence apart. You have nine cases, Bolduan said. Six guilty pleas, one dismissed, two pending. That s as of January 25th. Nine cases does not rampant widespread voter fraud make. A small minority does not make millions and millions of widespread, rampant votes in this country, Bolduan continued. What Stephen Miller and the president said over the weekend is this is exactly why they lost in New Hampshire. Not saying they were prospective cases, they were illegal votes. At that point, Kobach stumbled his way through the remainder of the interview as Bolduan countered his bullshit with facts at every turn.Here s the full smack down via YouTube.Donald Trump s voter fraud claims are a pathetic attempt to stroke his own ego because he can t handle the fact that he lost to a woman and is not a legitimate president. If he is really so concerned about voter fraud, he should call for a new election immediately. But he won t because he is full of shit.Featured image via screenshot | 1real |
DELEGATES FOR DUMMIES: How They’re Awarded…And How Many Your Candidate Needs To Win [VIDEO] | Stop counting the votes! Your candidates nomination based strictly on the number of delegates they are able to obtain from each state following their elections.WATCH this great video explaining how Hillary can receive less votes, but still win with super delegates:The nominating contests that will determine the Democratic and Republican nominees for the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election are about to enter a critical phase. On March 1, known as Super Tuesday, primaries or caucuses are being held in about a dozen states, and they could be turning points in both parties.But the key to winning the nomination for each party is ultimately not about the popular vote. It is about securing the number of delegates needed to win the nomination at each party s convention July 18-21 in Cleveland for the Republicans and July 25-28 in Philadelphia for the Democrats.Like so many things in politics, there are twists and turns in how the popular vote is used to select each party s candidate.The following is a guide to the nominating process:Q: Is the delegate selection process the same for the Republican and Democratic parties?A: No. The parties set their own rules. One thing that is the same is that at each party convention, a candidate needs to reach only a simple majority of the delegate votes to win the nomination.Q: How many delegates are there?A: The Democratic convention will be attended by about 4,763 delegates, with 2,382 delegates needed to win the nomination. The Republican convention will be attended by 2,472 delegates, with 1,237 delegates needed to win.Q: I keep hearing about superdelegates. Are they different from other delegates? Do both the Republicans and Democrats have superdelegates?A: Superdelegates, officially known as unpledged delegates, are a sort of wild card in the nominating process, but only the Democrats have them.The category was created for the 1984 Democratic convention, and according to political scientists, they are a legacy of the 1980 convention when there was a fight for the nomination between President Jimmy Carter, who was seeking a second term in the White House, and Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Members of Congress were frustrated by their lack of influence, because delegates elected to support one candidate could not switch to support another. So Democratic members of the House of Representatives led an effort to win a role for themselves. That resulted in the creation of superdelegates. Unlike other delegates, superdelegates may change what candidate they are supporting right up to the convention.There is no fixed number of superdelegates because the group is defined by various categories whose members change from one election cycle to another. Here is who gets to be a superdelegate:All Democratic members of the House of Representatives and the Senate; the Democratic governors; the Democratic president and vice president of the United States; former Democratic presidents and vice presidents; former Democratic leaders of the U.S. Senate; former Democratic speakers of the House and former Democratic minority leaders. Throw in the members of the Democratic National Committee and the former chairs of the DNC and you finally have the whole pool of superdelegates.Q: What about the other delegates? Do they get to choose which candidate to support?A: Both the Democratic and Republican parties send delegates to their conventions based on the popular vote in the primary elections and caucuses held in each of the 50 states. But the parties have different rules on how delegates are allotted to a candidate.The Democratic Party applies uniform rules to all states. In each state, delegates are allocated in proportion to the percentage of the primary or caucus vote in each district. But a candidate must win at least 15 percent of the vote to be allocated any delegates.The Republican Party lets states determine their own rules, although it does dictate some things. Some states award delegates proportionate to the popular vote, although most such states have a minimum percentage that a candidate must reach to win any delegates. Some other states use the winner-take-all method, in which the candidate with the highest percentage of the popular vote is awarded all the delegates. Other states use a combination of the two methods.States that use the proportionate method may instead use the winner-take-all method if one candidate wins more than 50 percent of the popular vote.In addition, the Republican Party requires that all states with nominating contests held between March 1 and March 14 use the proportional method, meaning that all the states holding votes on Super Tuesday will have to award delegates proportionally.Q: What happens to delegates if a candidate drops out of the race?A: Another good question, because we have certainly seen that happen this year.For the Democratic Party, in every state, delegates are reallocated to the remaining candidates.Nomination About Delegates, Not VotesThe power brokers of the Democrat party are not about to let crazy uncle Bernie represent them in the presidential election this year. He is anxious to flatten the economic map in the nation and go much further than Obama has in stealing from the rich and destroying the wealth generating engine of the country. Perhaps the elite wish things to do down a bit differently than what Sanders has in mind.It turns out that the New Hampshire primary, which Bernie won in a landslide, will probably award him fewer delegates than Hillary receives.Sanders won 60 percent of the vote, but thanks to the Democratic Party s nominating system, he leaves the Granite State with at least 13 delegates while she leaves with at least 15 delegates.New Hampshire has 24 pledged delegates, which are allotted based on the popular vote. Sanders has 13, and Clinton has 9, with 2 currently allotted to neither.Under Democratic National Committee rules, New Hampshire also has 8 superdelegates, party officials who are free to commit to whomever they like, regardless of how their state votes. Their votes count the same as delegates won through the primary.New Hampshire has 8 superdelegates, 6 of which are committed to Hillary Clinton, giving her a total of 15 delegates from New Hampshire as of Wednesday at 9 a.m.The two remaining superdelegates remain uncommitted, so Hillary actually comes out ahead in overall delegate count. Clinton has 394 delegates that includes both super delegates and ones that are picked up in primary elections, while Bernie now has only 42. In other words the fix is in, and Clinton will absolutely be the Democrat nominee for president unless she is indicted for her illegal acts dealing with top secret government documents.But as with the assigning of delegates, it seems that the will of the people, along with their clearly declared votes, will be ignored and the coronation will still take place. As some of my friends like to say, Hillary for Prison, 2016! May it be so.For the Republican Party, it varies by state. In some states, delegates are required to stick with their original candidate at least through the first ballot at the Republican National Convention. In some other states, if a candidate drops out, his or her delegates may immediately pledge to another candidate. There is also a middle ground in which those delegates are reallocated to the remaining candidates. Via: NYPost | 1real |
Iraq says Kurds have brought in PKK fighters in 'declaration of war' | BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The Iraqi government accused Kurdish authorities on Sunday of bringing fighters from Turkey s separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to the disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk, and said it considered the move a declaration of war. Vahal Ali, a media assistant to Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Masoud Barzani, denied the accusation. This is false, there are no PKK in Kirkuk, only Peshmerga, he told Reuters, referring to KRG military forces. In a statement published after a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in Baghdad, and attended by top military and security commanders, the government said it would seek to impose its authority over Kirkuk and other disputed areas. Iraq s Kurdish leadership rejected on Sunday a demand by the Iraqi government to cancel the outcome of an independence referendum as a precondition for talks to resolve the dispute. Barzani and other Kurdish leaders, who met to discuss the crisis in the town of Dokan, renewed their offer to resolve peacefully the crisis with Baghdad. They rejected what they described as military threats from Iraqi forces against Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, and pledged to defend Kurdish-held territory in the event of an attack. The KRG and the Shi ite-led central government in Baghdad have been at loggerheads since the Sept. 25 referendum and its loud call for Kurdish independence. Tensions between the two parties have flared around the multi-ethnic oil city of Kirkuk, which Peshmerga forces took in 2014 when Iraqi security forces collapsed in the face of an Islamic State onslaught. The Peshmerga deployment prevented Kirkuk s oilfields from falling into jihadist hands. | 0fake |
CONGRESSMAN SOUNDS ALERT TO CYBER SNOOPING LAW SNUCK INTO BUDGET BILL | Here s one of the few true PATRIOTS in Congress! Justin Amash is always doing the right thing with the best interests of the American people in mind. We can t say that about many of our RINO Congressman! Thank goodness Amash is calling attention to The Cybersecurity Act of 2015 it s not what you think it is!Congressman Justin Amash (R-Mich.) plans to introduce legislation to undo a cybersecurity law that critics say secretly allows the federal government to spy on Americans.The Cybersecurity Act of 2015 was included in Congress year-end spending bill, a piece of must-pass legislation known as the omnibus. Many of my colleagues remain unaware that a massive surveillance bill was snuck into the omnibus, Amash said in a statement provided to the Daily Dot. And if they are aware, they may have been misled into believing this bill is about cybersecurity. On Dec. 18, the House passed the end-of-year omnibus bill, a $1.8 trillion catch-all that included everything from repeals of oil export bans to increased funding for the International Monetary Fund. Two days before its inevitable passage, lawmakers updated the bill to include language from the Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA), a bill that makes it easier for companies to share details of cyberattacks with the government but is universally loathed by privacy advocates.The Cybersecurity Act of 2015 allows companies like Facebook, Google, or Visa to share cyber threat data digital evidence of a cyberattack with the Department of Homeland Security. It also grants American firms immunity from prosecution for sharing data that may include customers personal data. Ultimately this will be fairly embarrassing for Congress. Proponents of the bill say it will help protect companies and their customers from data breaches and other cyberattacks. Critics believe the new law would allow government agencies to more easily access Americans personal information and share it with the National Security Agency. An analysis by the Open Technology Institute found citizens privacy would be more adversely affected by the final language of the omnibus bill than by CISA drafts. Just like the Patriot Act, [Congress] re-wrote the final [omnibus] bill in secret and snuck it through Congress before most people could even read it, Nathan White, Senior Legislative Manager at Access, an Internet freedom-supporting nonprofit, told the Daily Dot. And just like the Patriot Act, the bill will be used for far more than what Members of Congress think that they are authorizing. Ultimately this will be fairly embarrassing for Congress. Amash opposed CISA s language in the bill before it passed, going so far as to circulate a letter citing tech companies opposition and calling it anti-privacy legislation, but to little avail. Amash is part of the House Freedom Caucus, which, citing the omnibus s large price tag, had already vowed to oppose the bill anyway, forcing House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to find votes elsewhere.Read more: Daily Dot | 1real |
Gauis Publius: TPP Has Picked Up a Powerful Enemy — Black Lives Matter | Mark Warner, Virginia Ron Wyden, Oregon
In both houses of Congress, these were the barest of margins — 218 Yes votes in the House and 60 Yes votes in the Senate, in each case exactly the minimum required for passage. Another indication of how toxic this “trade” bill is. No Democrat dared touch it who didn’t want to or have to.
Black Lives Matter and the TPP
And now the TPP has become even more toxic, since the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social-justice movement has endorsed the anti-TPP position. Politico Pro has this (sub. required; my emphasis):
Obama’s latest TPP foe: Black Lives Matter By Andrew Hanna Monday, Oct. 31, 2016
The Obama administration will face an unexpected adversary as it gears up for what could be a blockbuster lame-duck fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership: the Black Lives Matter movement.
The group — best known best for its protests of police shootings of African-Americans — has joined the fray over the Asian Pacific trade deal as part of its growing focus on economic issues, contending the pact would lead to greater racial injustice . It ties past trade deals to the closures of factories that have hurt black workers disproportionately and increased black poverty .
Its involvement could influence the votes of a handful of wavering Democrats, should Congress tackle TPP during the lame duck.
“There are groups that are going to pay a lot of close attention to what they say, especially the Congressional Black Caucus,” said Bill Reinsch, a fellow at the Stimson Center and close trade-vote watcher.
Only a small band of 28 House Democrats voted to give the president fast track authority to complete TPP, including three members of the Congressional Black Caucus: Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) and Terri Sewell (D-Ala.). A fourth black caucus member, Republican Mia Love of Utah, also voted for fast-track authority.
With anti-trade fervor whipped into a fever pitch by the presidential election campaign, their votes are considered key to passage of the pact — and all are under increasing pressure to abandon the president should the pact come to a ratification vote.
The pretend reason, of course, for TPP support is support for a major legacy “want” by the first black president. The pro-Clinton members of the Democratic Platform Committee, for example, resisted to the end any explicit language about TPP on the grounds that the Party must support its president.
Democrats Prioritize Party Unity Over Including Stand Against TPP In Platform
Members of the Democratic National Convention Platform Committee shot down an attempt to include specific opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal in the platform, despite the fact that both Democratic presidential candidates have taken positions against the TPP.
The attempt failed because members appointed by Hillary Clinton and DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed it was improper to oppose the TPP when President Barack Obama fervently believes in the agreement. However, by putting party unity before taking a firm stand against the trade agreement, the door was left open for Clinton to go back to supporting the TPP , which was the case when she was secretary of state.
“It is hard for me to understand why Secretary Clinton’s delegates won’t stand behind Secretary Clinton’s positions in the party’s platform,” Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said….
Even platform committee chair, Representative E.J. Cummings [normally progressive on trade issues], chose to vote against the resolution. He, too, bragged about not voting for trade agreements.
“I don’t want to do anything as he ends his term to undercut the president of the United States. I’m just not going to do it. And that’s where I stand,” Cummings proclaimed.
That’s the pretend reason — supporting the first black president — for most of them anyway. The real reason is different and not unexpected — money and everything money can buy. The Democratic Party as it’s currently configured exists to enable the fire hose flow of corporate and big-wealth dollars into its coffers. Opposing that flow gets you the “Sanders treatment,” but I’m not spilling any new beans in saying that.
This move by Black Lives Matter takes away the pretend reason and thus puts some careers at risk. BLM has high visibility at the moment. It will be worth watching the result, the actual TPP vote, as this plays out later.
What to Watch For in the Lame Duck
Once the Democrats figure out how many Republicans will defect from their leadership in each house of Congress (there were 50 House Republican defections last time plus six not voting, and five Senate defections plus two not voting), they’ll know how many Democrats will have to “take one for the team” — vote Yes on TPP so others with reputations to protect (like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi ) don’t have to.
The numbers needed to pass TPP in the Senate have changed this time. Only 51 votes are needed there now (that’s part of what “fast track” means). Finding 50 No votes in the Senate is not an impossible task, but it’s a very high bar — depending on the way Republicans vote, as few as four “Democrats” like Ron Wyden could guarantee passage.
So the greatest vulnerability for TPP is in the House . Can Democrats again muster something like 28 pro-corporate votes? Which Democrats will chose to take the fall a second time? Corporatists like Ron Kind will eagerly comply. But will Earl Blumenauer ( bow-tie bicycle guy )? Will CBC members Sewell and Johnson, with BLM lobbying hard against them? Or will other House Democrats be needed (and willing) to take the fall so Pelosi can move TPP across the line?
Again, Fast Track passed the House with zero votes to spare. What if the Republican opposition — including the opposition to Speaker Ryan in the wake of the Trump debacle — swells to more than 50? This could be a very close vote.
TPP, Obama’s Legacy and “A Glide Path to His Life as an Ex-President”
The Politico article quoted above helpfully notes this about Obama’s legacy:
If successfully pushed through Congress, ratification of the trade accord would be the last major piece of legislation of the Obama presidency. The prospect that black lawmakers and activists could help to hand him a defeat is complicated by Obama’s position as the first black president.
“ This is part of President Obama’s legacy ,” said [CBC member Gregory] Meeks.
Will Barack Obama get his legacy wish, along with his legacy library and foundation? The New York Times a few weeks ago told us this about Obama’s future plans and needs:
Publicly, Mr. Obama betrays little urgency about his future. Privately, he is preparing for his postpresidency with the same fierce discipline and fund-raising ambition that characterized the 2008 campaign that got him to the White House.
The long-running dinner this past February is part of a methodical effort taking place inside and outside the White House as the president, first lady and a cadre of top aides map out a postpresidential infrastructure and endowment they estimate could cost as much as $1 billion . The president’s aides did not ask any of the guests for library contributions after the dinner, but a number of those at the table could be donors in the future….
So far, Mr. Obama has raised just over $5.4 million from 12 donors, with gifts ranging from $100,000 to $1 million. Michael J. Sacks, a Chicago businessman, gave $666,666. Fred Eychaner, the founder of Chicago-based Newsweb Corp., which owns community newspapers and radio stations, donated $1 million. Mark T. Gallogly, a private equity executive, and James H. Simons, a technology entrepreneur, each contributed $340,000 to a foundation set up to oversee development of the library.
The real push for donations, foundation officials said, will come after Mr. Obama leaves the White House .
Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser, oversees an effort inside the White House to keep attention on Mr. Obama’s future and to ensure that his final 17 months in office, barring crises, serve as a glide path to his life as an ex-president .
“A glide path to his life as an ex-president.” I guess you could call him, after his 2008 trademark, “ever hopeful and looking for change” Interesting times indeed. 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 1real |
Terror Through the Eyes of Innocents: The Children in Nice - The New York Times | NICE, France — It was the first and last fireworks show in this seaside city that Yanis Coviaux ever saw. He died in the carnage Thursday night. So did Brodie Copeland, 11, who was visiting from the United States. Haroun El Kamel, 12, survived but might never look at fireworks the same way. Then there was Laura Borla, 14, who came to see the fireworks with her twin sister and their mother but was separated from them in the chaos. After days of searching frantically for her, Laura’s family learned on Sunday morning that she was dead. “We miss you already we will love you always,” her sister, Lucie, said in a Facebook post. The driver who plowed his truck into crowds at the conclusion of the Bastille Day fireworks in Nice killed at least 84 people and injured hundreds more. The trauma was exacerbated by the presence of a large number of children, whose deaths, injuries and psychological scars gave this attack — like the one in March that killed many children at a park in Pakistan, or the recent slaughter of families celebrating the end of Ramadan in Baghdad — an especially brutal feel and underscored its indiscriminate cruelty. At least 10 children were killed Thursday night, and at least 35 were treated for injuries at hospitals in Nice. Others were separated from their parents in the chaos, and some no doubt saw and heard things they might carry with them for a long time. No one who was visiting the waterfront that night could have imagined such a horrific ending. Going to the fireworks on July 14 is an annual family ritual in Nice, a time for picnics on the beach — and, when the beach is too full, for spreading tablecloths on the meridian of the waterfront road known for more than 150 years as the Promenade des Anglais. From there, people have a fine view of the sea and the extravagant fireworks display. “You have to bring your children because if you don’t, you will pay for it all year — all their friends are there,” said Raja El Kamel, 43, Haroun’s mother, who was with him and a close friend from Sweden and her two children to watch the festivities. In a city that enjoys a party, the July 14 fireworks are especially beloved because the entire community joins in: Christian and Muslim, religious and secular, but French above all. The presence of large numbers of tourists gives the evening even more of a festive feel. For Yanis and his parents, Mickael and Samira Coviaux, the evening was a first. The parents, both truck drivers, live in Grenoble, and this was their first time seeing the July 14 fireworks on the Mediterranean as a family, said Yanis’s aunt Anaïs Coviaux, a law student in Paris, who came to support her brother and after Yanis was killed. “The children were playing among themselves, and they had their back to the road,” she said. “They did not hear the truck until just one second before it hit. It went up on the sidewalk it struck Yanis and the mother of one of the other children with them. ” The mother also died. There was no first aid nearby. Finally, Mr. Coviaux picked up his little boy and began walking with him until they found a person with a car who agreed to take them to the hospital. When they passed some firefighters, they stopped and asked them to try to revive him. But the child was dead. “He was my parents’ only grandson, the only grandson in the family,” Anaïs Coviaux said softly. She explained that her brother and his wife were too distraught to speak. “Yanis loved people,” she said. “He especially liked Sundays when all the family was gathered, and he would say, ‘Mamie and Papi, we are going to have a party. ’” Later, Mr. Coviaux said in an email that “every single person that Yanis met in his short life fell in love with him. ” The entire family gathered on the promenade Saturday to view the last sights he had seen. “It was important for us to come to the place he died to pay him a tribute,” Anaïs Coviaux said, “because we could not bear to say goodbye to him. We left a picture of him and flowers. ” Identifying children and examining them has been difficult because of the level of trauma and because some were brought to the hospital without relatives, said Sylvie Serret, a child psychiatrist at the Lenval Foundation hospital, which treated at least 30 injured children on Thursday night. “A lot of the children coming in were in a state of shock they were not speaking, for instance,” she said. An emergency room nurse at Pasteur Hospital, Mejdi Chemakhi, cared for several children, including a boy and a girl who had been brought in without their parents. The boy was 4, Mr. Chemakhi said, and the girl was 6. The boy, Mr. Chemakhi recounted, spoke in a flat tone, apparently in shock. “My mummy is dead, but my daddy is still alive,” he recalled the boy saying over and over. The boy, expressionless, finally said, “I am tired, I need to sleep, I have no clothes,” Mr. Chemakhi recalled. “So I took him in my arms and tried to console him,” he said. “You don’t really know what else to do in those situations. It is really important to make them feel safe. ” Later that night, a wounded man was brought to the hospital and told Mr. Chemakhi that he had lost his wife and could not find his children, a boy and a girl. Mr. Chemakhi realized the three belonged together and helped reunite them. On the Promenade des Anglais on Saturday, there were memorials of flowers and notes, sometimes every few feet, to mark where people had lost their lives. Nathalie Russo, 30, a Muslim who wears a hijab, came with her mother to retrace the steps she and her children, Mayssa and Emine, took on Thursday night. “My daughter is telling me that she does not want to see fireworks again,” Ms. Russo said, adding, “She kept asking me, ‘How did the bad people get from Paris to Nice? ’” “She thought the man who did this was one of those who attacked the Bataclan,” she said, “and he had come here to do the same thing. ” The Bataclan is the Paris concert hall where 90 people were shot dead by three Islamic State operatives on Nov. 13, when a total of 130 people were killed in and around Paris by terrorists. Some mothers and fathers who had not been near the fireworks brought their children to see the memorials on Saturday as a way of expressing unity with the community and defiance toward the terrorists. Nour Hamila, a Nice native who has converted to Islam, made a point of bringing her three children, who are 8, 5 and 3. “I told them not to be afraid because that’s what the terrorists want we have to support each other,” she said as her son, Mohamed, placed flowers on one of the memorials. It is harder for those children who witnessed the killings. For Ms. Kamel’s son, Haroun, the moment is etched in his mind. “We saw it from far away, a white truck in this black night,” she said. She recalled thinking that the truck did not belong there because the street was closed to traffic. Her son and her friend’s son and daughter were playing and laughing. Then the driver accelerated and began to veer from one side of the road to the other, “plowing into people,” she said. Somehow she pushed herself and her son onto the sidewalk as the truck neared. Then it passed, and all she remembers was her son saying, “Mama, Mama, you must come to help the people. ” She looked at the road and recognized a neighbor who was kneeling next to her husband, wailing his name. Ms. Kamel told her son to go with her friend and the other children. Everything was silent. “There was just this terrible wind,” she said. “To the left you saw bodies you looked right and saw bodies there were strollers, and people trying to save other people. ” After trying to comfort her neighbor, she looked for her son, but by then the crowds were running, and it was chaos. Hours later, when she found him and her friend, her son said, “Mama, did you manage to save the man?” Ms. Kamel responded that the emergency services had come for him. “You know, children don’t have a global vision,” she said. “He saw all those corpses, but for him, the one at his feet was supposed to be saved. ” | 0fake |
null | It just goes to show you that you can't rely on a fire extinguisher if you let it go beyond its recharge date. You have to check the tag. | 1real |
New U.S. travel ban to spare green card holders: Trump official | MUNICH (Reuters) - A new version of a Trump administration travel ban will not stop green card residency holders or travelers already on planes from entering the United States, U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security John Kelly said on Saturday. U.S. President Donald Trump’s initial attempt to clamp down for security reasons on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and on refugees snarled to a halt amid a judicial backlash and chaos at airports. “The president is contemplating releasing a tighter, more streamlined version of the first (order). And I will have opportunity to work (on) a rollout plan, in particular to make sure that there’s no one in a sense caught in the system of moving from overseas to our airports,” Kelly said at the Munich Security Conference. Asked whether green card residency permit holders would be allowed in, Kelly said: “It’s a good assumption and, as far as the visas go, ... if they’re in motion from some distant land to the United States, when they arrive they will be allowed in.” He promised “a short phase-in period to make sure that people on the other end don’t get on airplanes. But if they’re on an airplane and inbound, they’ll be allowed to enter the country.” A draft of the replacement executive order shows that the administration aims to put restrictions on citizens of the same seven Muslim-majority countries covered by the initial order, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cites an internal State Department memo. The replacement order could be issued as early as Tuesday, the Journal reported, citing a U.S. government official. The administration would seek to implement the new order a week to two weeks after it is signed, and covers citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, the Journal said. Trump’s original order, which he said was meant to head off attacks by Islamist militants, barred people from those same countries from entering for 90 days and excluded all refugees for 120 days, except those from Syria, who were banned indefinitely. The abrupt implementation of the order last month plunged the immigration system into chaos, sparking a wave of criticism from the countries affected, and from Western allies and some of America’s leading corporations, especially technology firms. | 0fake |
The N-Word Flies As Racists Attack 49er’s Quarterback For Protesting Police Treatment Of Blacks | Just remember, Donald Trump s campaign is supported by racists, and this is how they treat people of color.Police have been unjustly killing black people at an alarming rate, and that has caused a movement to rise in protest against it. Black Lives Matter is making an effort to change the way police treat African-Americans across the nation, and that is making racists explode in rage because they cheer whenever a black person is killed in this country and they want the violence to continue.So when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick chose to sit during the national anthem on Friday night versus the Green Bay Packers to protest police shootings of black people, the racists quickly attacked him by questioning his patriotism and calling him the N-word. I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color, Kaepernick told the press after the game. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder. And he is right. Police officers who unjustly kill black people often go unpunished and are usually sent right back out into the streets to do it again. Police departments are reluctant to do anything other than to put the offending officer on paid leave. Prosecutors are reluctant to bring charges. And even if they do, grand juries usually let what most normal people call murder slide.And let s make this clear, we are talking about officers who kill black people who are unarmed and don t resist. We are talking about officers who kill black people who run for their lives. We are talking about officers who kill black people even though suspects are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Cops are NOT supposed to be executioners.But racists believe that keeping police officers from shooting and killing black people is somehow a violation of their rights, so they viciously attacked Kaepernick.Blatant disrespect doesn t work well for impacting change. Feel free to find a country that supports you better. #Colin Kaepernick Paul Hoffman (@papac00772) August 27, 2016 Welp, I guess my Kaepernick jersey is going out with the next thrift store donations.https://t.co/31DHUM8TMg Holly Nicholas (@ilikerox) August 27, 2016This nigger Colin Kaepernick has a $114M contract to throw a fucking ball. Yeah, blacks are so oppressed in America. AdolfJoeBiden (@Bidenshairplugz) August 27, 2016 Colin Kaepernick is keepin it real and gets the prestigious nigger of the day award overtaking Will Smith in hardcore nigger status. nate (@bloodandsoil5) August 27, 2016Organizers should try the Saudi national anthem. I bet Colin @Kaepernick7 & boycotting U.S. Muslims will stand erect https://t.co/R9aiLSNuzH (((Tarek Fatah))) (@TarekFatah) August 27, 2016 All of you faggot cucks worshiping nigger athletes like Colin Kaepernick are getting what you want. You want to be shit on. Kill yourselves. MOBI-WAN (@28thVerse) August 27, 2016Of course, Americans have the freedom to not stand during the national anthem just like school children do not have to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. That is their right as citizens of this country. Many conservatives are claiming that Kaepernick is disrespecting our veterans and their sacrifice, but that is not the case at all. Our soldiers fight for ALL of our rights, which includes choosing not to stand during the national anthem. Just because Kaepernick is making a political statement using the platform he has been given doesn t mean he hates our troops.If anything, Kaepernick is walking in the footsteps of Muhammad Ali, whom conservatives were praising not too long ago when he passed away. The boxing legend also took a stand against rampant racism and oppression when he changed his name and refused to enter the service after being drafted for the Vietnam War. White racists howled with rage then, too.And Kaepernick was taking a stand for others, not himself. So claiming that his multimillion dollar salary means people of color like him are not oppressed is bullshit. But the fact that racists attacked him in these ways prove that racism and oppression still exist in this country and that these racists are desperate to regain the white dominated racist America of the past.And they are trying to do that by supporting Donald Trump s racist campaign for the presidency.Yet Republicans still wonder why black people won t vote for them.Featured image via Wikimedia | 1real |
Opposition wants Russian pressure for Syria deal within six months | GENEVA (Reuters) - Syria s opposition wants Russia and other states to put pressure on President Bashar al-Assad to engage in peace talks in Geneva to produce a political solution within six months, the chief of its delegation said at the start of negotiations on Wednesday. We want more pressure on the regime to engage in the negotiation and continue in the negotiation to reach a political solution in six months, as (U.N. Security Council Resolution) 2254 says, Nasr Hariri told Reuters. Just speaking about a political transition without any advancement, we will lose our trust in the process and our people will lose their trust in us and in the process itself. Hariri said Syria and its ally Iran wanted the fighting to continue until they could declare a military victory, and they were not abiding by agreements to de-escalate the fighting in areas such as Eastern Ghouta, a besieged rebel-held enclave. If the situation continues as it is now I think there is great danger in these agreements. Russia had arranged a pause in the fighting for Eastern Ghouta for two or three days, which showed Moscow had the power to ensure de-escalation agreements were respected, he said. A war monitor and a witness said on Wednesday that heavy shelling hit Eastern Ghouta in spite of the start of the Russian-backed truce there. Syria s civil war is now in its seventh year and previous rounds of negotiations made virtually no progress, with no direct contact between the opposing delegations, who took turns to meet U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura. The Syrian government delegation has always rejected the opposition s demand that Assad leave power, calling them terrorists who lacked the legitimacy to negotiate. The government s position on the battlefield has strengthened dramatically since Russia joined the war on Assad s behalf two years ago, raising speculation that the opposition could soften its negotiating stance. However, opposition delegates meeting last week issued a statement repeating their demand that Assad be excluded from any transitional government, a position which Damascus and its allies say is divorced from reality on the ground. De Mistura originally planned a round of 4-5 days but was now planning to continue until Dec. 15, Hariri said, adding that his team had come hoping for direct talks with the government delegation for the first time. Hariri said his opening words to government negotiator Bashar al-Ja afari would be: I hope despite all of the crimes which have been done in Syria, I hope that the regime can come ready to put the people of Syria first. De Mistura has asked both sides to come without preconditions. Hariri said the opposition had no preconditions, but planned to talk about Assad s future as part of the negotiations. The talks are meant to cover four major issues: elections, governance, the constitution and fighting terrorism. All four would be discussed, Hariri said, but it would not be possible to go straight into the core elements straightaway. If we will speak about constitution or election under the current circumstances inside Syria with this kind of regime, I think it will be impossible, he said. Among issues the opposition wanted to discuss at the outset were humanitarian aid and people detained by forces loyal to Assad. Hariri said detainees number more than 200,000. Syrian government negotiator Ja afari also met de Mistura on Wednesday but declined to speak to reporters afterwards. | 0fake |
5 Must-See Shows if You’re in New York This Month - The New York Times | Broadway shows often fold their tents at the end of the year, fearing the winter blues at the box office. But this year a few shows of note are holding on, at least for a week or two. You’ve got a few more days to catch Stephen Karam’s gorgeous “The Humans,” last season’s Tony winner for best play (ending on Jan. 15) and even fewer to jump on the exhilarating emotional roller coaster that is the sublime revival of the musical “Falsettos” (ending on Sunday). Looking further ahead, here are other notable shows and events I’d put at the top of my list. The first of the majestic cycle of plays written by the great August Wilson, this drama set in the 1970s (and written in 1979) was, until now, the only piece of the cycle not to be produced on Broadway. A classic Wilson ensemble drama, about a group of gypsy cab drivers in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the new Manhattan Theater Club production is directed by Ruben who has both appeared in and directed Wilson’s plays — notably the superb recent revival of “The Piano Lesson” from the Signature Theater. (In previews for a Jan. 19 opening at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.) Normally I frown on theater as a rarefied form of stargazing. But with a star as luminous as Cate Blanchett, I will grant an exception. And, of course, Ms. Blanchett, who graces this new adaptation of “Platonov,” an early Chekhov play, is not merely a movie star burnishing her reputation with a Broadway debut. During the past decade she has made regular, acclaimed appearances on the New York stage, in productions imported from the Sydney Theater Company (as is this one). An unwieldy drama about the familiar Chekhovian concerns — lives full of regret, stomachs bloated with vodka — the play has been moved from Russia in the 19th century to Russia in the late 20th century for this version by Andrew Upton, Ms. Blanchett’s husband. The esteemed Australian actor Richard Roxburgh is Platonov. (In previews for a Sunday opening at the Barrymore Theater.) I have been saving this lovable classic as a cure for the blues. The small but enterprising Irish Rep first produced this delicious musical whimsy, with a glorious, multihued score by Burton Lane and E. Y. Harburg, a dozen years ago, with Melissa Errico as the ingénue, Sharon (she who wonders “How Are Things in Glocca Morra? ”). The seemingly ageless Ms. Errico, I am delighted to report, is unfurling her silvery soprano once again in this revival, directed by the company’s artistic director, Charlotte Moore. (Through Jan. 29 at the Irish Repertory Theater.) [Read the review] This is not a single show (as downtown theatergoers will, of course, know) but a whole feast of international theater, presented by the Public Theater at its home base and elsewhere. Along with P. S. 122’s Coil and other festivals, it has come to make January a dizzying smorgasbord of experimental theater. Highlights this year include a new production from one of my favorite companies, the imaginative 600 Highwaymen, presenting “The Fever,” which is said to be “performed in complete collaboration with the audience. ” Bring your tap shoes — or at least a willingness to blast your way through the fourth wall on a regular basis. (Various locations, .) Martin McDonagh’s was the first of his trilogy of plays set in the impoverished Irish village of the title. It returns in a production from the Druid Theater, the company that first made a splash internationally with a pungent production that ultimately moved to Broadway. Once again the company’s longtime chief, Garry Hynes, directs. And Marie Mullen, who won a Tony Award as the embittered daughter of a manipulative terror of a mother, with the aptly monstrous name Mag, now takes on that formidable role. (Begins performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Jan. 11.) | 0fake |
Anniversary of Great Reporter’s Death | Anniversary of Great Reporter’s Death By Daily Bell Staff - November 23, 2016
We got the very sad news today, Nov. 22, 2015, that Dave McGowan passed away from cancer at 12:47 p.m. – Truth and Shadows
We missed the anniversary of McGowan’s death, which was yesterday, but he was one helluva a writer, exposing in brief books the“directed history” of the modern era. So, we’ll remember him today. We’ve written about him before, here.
He died of an extremely aggressive form of lung cancer, which made some of his fans speculate that he’d actually been assassinated. Unfortunately, much of Dave’s work is no long freely available on the ‘Net, though some is available here .
The following is Dave’s last post here from his Blog Center for an Informed America (June 14, 2015).
Just nine weeks ago, on April 14, I presented a lengthy video deconstruction of the 2013 Boston Marathon incident through the Caravan to Midnight radio show/podcast. About a week later (on April 20, of all days), the nearly four-hour video presentation was uploaded to YouTube.
Not long after that, someone using the username Phoenix Archangel posted an interesting comment: “John [Wells, the host of the show] always signs off with some of the best advice ever. Speaking of advice: this David McGowan fella really ought to quit smoking. With all the elitist feathers he’s ruffling, he’s likely to come down with a spontaneous case of hitherto undiagnosed stage 4 inoperable Pancreatic cancer.”
… Mr./Ms Archangel … wasn’t too far off, though I’ve been told that it’s actually incurable small-cell lung cancer that has already spread to my liver and bones. And no, that’s unfortunately not a joke. It’s my new reality as of just a few short weeks ago, when my entire world was turned upside-down and I suddenly found myself being admitted to the oncology ward at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. Four days later, I was beginning my first round of chemotherapy infusions. The second round begins tomorrow, on Monday, June 15.
More from Truth and Shadows:
The first thing I read from McGowan was his series on the Apollo Moon missions called “Wagging the Moondoggie.” This amazing 14-part series is what finally convinced me that the Moon landings never took place. What struck me was not only his insight but his wit. Very dry, which is the best kind.
In addition to what became a whole series on 9/11, I was also blown away by series on the Boston Marathon “bombing” and dark side of the music scene in Laurel Canyon in the 1960s (which became a book). Other books he has written include Programmed to Kill, Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion, and Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don’t Want You to See.
We ran into McGowan’s work very early in the 2000s when we were researching an article on the Peak Oil hoax. At the time, libertarian analysis was mostly theoretical, but we were trying to focus on a synthesis between free-market theory and “directed” history.
We could hardly believe McGowan’s comments on Peak Oil. Without, apparently, a deep background in Austrian free-market economics, he nonetheless fully grasped the idiocy of asserting that the modern world was running out of oil, and that since alternatives were not going to be developed in a timely manner, the only solution was drastic, government action. He even mentioned abiotic oil, see here, as we recall.
When we read his short books, we were further impressed. McGowan moved far beyond simplistic assertions of “conspiracy” to show you clearly how modern history seemed to work.
For us, the book on the mid-1960s Laurel Canyon music scene here was perhaps the most brilliant. Who knew that Jimi Hendrix was in the military, here, prior to becoming a rock star? Who knew that many of the musical stars of the early- to the mid-1960s were somehow gathered together in Laurel Canyon prior to their fame, here – and that many or most had military ties or came from military families.
McGowan didn’t state everything. Some things he left up to you. But it was hard to come away from his books without understanding his main point, that society was directed purposefully from above and that before the Internet (and people like McGowan), you would live your entire life unknowingly according to someone else’s plan.
His short book about Laurel Canyon not only shows how directed history operates, it makes the point, resonantly, that society and even culture can be shifted according to elite strategies. In other words, in not very many pages it SHOWS (not tells) how Western social manipulation actually works. Likely it has worked this way for thousands of years.
Before McGowan, it was easy to believe that social manipulation must inevitably be a clumsy affair, imposed brutally as it was in the USSR. McGowan presents ways cultural reconfiguration can take place secretly and powerfully, without anyone but a handful knowing it is happening.
For instance, the standard story of the 1960s is that young people got upset over the war and in the process of protesting, quickly created an entire counterculture that opposed much of what “corporate America” stood for. The trouble with the 1960s counterculture was that it never adequately defined the real problem, nor did it fully explain the solution.
The hippie ethos blamed much of what was wrong with America on corporate greed and the like. This led to the conclusion that government itself could rectify what was wrong. But both modern corporations and today’s massive governments are the result of monopoly force wielded behind the scenes.
In reality, as McGowan showed, the 1960s movement was likely painstakingly created to generate certain results, mostly by reinforcing social chaos. Thus, blaming problems on corporations and looking to government for solutions was only to be expected, though it was wrongheaded on numerous levels.
As we know today from Internet information, government is seemingly supported by a handful of unfathomably rich individuals – those who likely control central banking – to provide “solutions” that inevitably generate more problems not less.
We know from Austrian economics that almost every law and regulation is surely a price fix that must drain prosperity from society. We know, via “marginal utility” here that valid prices can only be generated via market competition itself.
The 1960s hippie revolution explored little of this because – as McGowan suggested – it was created and sustained by the CIA. So many 1960s figures were apparently working with the CIA.
These may have included singer Jim Morrison, whose father helped initiate the fake military incidents that Lyndon Johnson used to generate the full-on Vietnam war here – and many other musicians, promoters and business opportunists. And also those individuals who initially dispersed CIA-created LSD, here.
In fact, one can speculate that the Vietnam War itself was created as part of a Hegelian dialectic that included the creation of a manipulated 1960s alternative “hippie” culture. Each Hegelian thesis demands an antithesis that leads to a synthesis. The war was the thesis, and the counterculture was the antithesis leading to the synthesis we have today.
The goal is always globalism, apparently. And social chaos must be regularly induced in order to reinforce additional government actions. If one has the patience and the desire, it is relatively easy to discern the evolution of these modern manipulations and even to predict their future.
It’s one reason, we continue to distrust narratives present in the mainstream media and even those being offered, sometimes, in the alternative media. We’re not sure that this presidential election, for instance, is what it seems. And we have written numerous articles suggesting that a good deal of purposeful propaganda surrounds nuclear weapons, to name one additional promotion, here .
Conclusion: McGowan helped show the way, however, and we simply need to follow his lead to better our own comprehension. It’s not pleasant to pursue such information, nor come to additional conclusions, but the alternative is living in ignorance of the true influences on our life and times. Some people are content to live without embarking on such explorations. Others are not. | 1real |
15 SURPRISING FACTS About The White House Easter Egg Roll | The big question this year for the White House Easter Egg roll is whether White House Press Scretary will show up as the Easter Bunny. A little known fact and tradition has been that Spicer is the Easter Bunny! What a guy! Who knew that the guy who dressed in the bunny costume would one day be the 45th President s Press Secretary 15 SURPRISING FACTS ABOUT THE WHITE HOUSE EASTER EGG ROLL:While the long-established custom of rolling eggs on the historic grounds has practically become a rite of passage for those who observe Easter, this time-honored tradition has come a long way since it was officially established by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878. In fact, the fun in Washington on Capitol Hill almost didn t become the grandstanding institution as we now know it today.Here, we look back at the White House Easter Egg Roll s 138-year history to highlight 15 of the most surprising and memorable moments associated with the most sought-after ticket in D.C.1. According to the White House Historical Association, some historians note that it was first lady Dolley Madison who originally proposed the idea of a public egg roll around 1810. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson s young children held their own informal egg roll for their own amusement in the 1860s.2. Taking advantage of a day off from school, more than 10,000 children were said to have gathered near the cast-iron dome of the U.S. capitol in 1876. Baskets in tow, filled with dyed Easter eggs, they set about to carry on the holiday tradition of rolling eggs down the hills to see how far they d go without breaking.3. Uh oh, here comes the fun police. The unusual sport of rolling and racing after hard-cooked eggs apparently did a lot of damage to the grounds of the Capitol. So in 1876, members of Congress approved the Turf Protection Act, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, which prevented the Capitol s grounds from being used as a playground. The law was supposed to take effect in 1877, but inclement weather prevented any Easter activities from occurring that year anyway. However, the egg rollers who showed up in 1878 were turned away and forced to play elsewhere.4. President Hayes and his wife, Lucy, brought the holiday tradition back later in 1878 for the first official White House Easter Egg Roll. Every year thereafter, with a few notable exceptions, presidents have hosted the celebration on the South Lawn.5. By the late 1800s, games such as egg picking, egg ball, toss and catch, and egg croquet were added to the Easter festivities.6. The treasured tradition was cancelled due to World War I and suspended during the Second World War in 1942. When the White House underwent renovations in that same year, it was hosted by Congress and held at other locations.7. After a 12-year hiatus, President Dwight D. Eisenhower brought the egg-stravaganza back in 1953.8. In 1969, the White House Easter Bunny went hoppin down the government trail for the first time. The bunny was actually a staffer for first lady Pat Nixon. While we know that the Easter bunny is always part of the current administration s staff, the rules forbid the bunny from revealing his or her identity, until now that is.9. Ursula Meese, wife of President Reagan s Attorney General Edwin Meese III, was quite the Peter Rabbit of her time, as she performed as the White House Bunny for six seasons. It earned her the nickname The Meester Bunny. And thanks to this unofficial Twitter account, we know just who was under the fleece costume during the George W. Bush Administration as well. Today, he s traded in the long bunny ears for a suit and a podium, but there s no word yet if current Press Secretary Sean Spicer will be making a furry-tailed appearance again for this year s celebration.10. Enter the sacred spoon in 1974. Organizers were tasked with finding silverware for the first egg-rolling races, where children used spoons to push their eggs through the grass, down marked-off lanes.11. Step right up: The circus came to town in 1977. President Jimmy Carter introduced a three-ring circus and menagerie, including a 1,200-pound steer named Big Red. 12. President Ronald Reagan, a superstar in his own right, brought a little Hollywood to the White House event in 1981. Not only did he and wife, Nancy, present Broadway show performances and the Egg Hunt Pits, but they also had balloons from the Macy s Thanksgiving Day Parade floating in mid-air.13. The Reagans were also the first to use wooden eggs at the Easter egg hunt, which were signed by Hollywood s elite, widely-recognized athletes, and notable politicians. Ever since, wooden eggs imprinted with the president and first lady s signatures are handed out as a small memento to children under 13 years old.14. By 2009, the Easter Egg Roll had become the hottest ticket in D.C. So much so, an online lottery for tickets was established to give children from all around the country the opportunity to attend. The lottery is held in March each year for three days only.15. Sean Spicer is the Easter Bunny!WHAT A GUY!Via: Southern Living | 1real |
Irak verbietet den Alkohol | Irak verbietet den Alkohol Voltaire Netzwerk | 26. Oktober 2016 français Español italiano عربي Das irakische Parlament hat in aller Heimlichkeit am 22. Oktober 2016 eine Änderung zu seinem Gemeindegesetz verabschiedet, die den Verkauf, die Einfuhr und die Herstellung von Alkohol untersagt.
Das Alkoholverbot wurde angenommen, um am Vorabend der Befreiung des von Daesch besetzten Mossul die Islamisten zufrieden zu stellen.
Das Gesetz führt Bußgelder von 8.000 bis 20.000 Dollar für den festgestellten Verstoß ein.
Da die Christen des Irak (die den Wein benutzen, um ihre Messe zu feiern) das Gesetz als diskriminierend betrachten, haben sie beschlossen, vor einem Bundesgericht gegen den Gesetzestext zu klagen.
Übersetzung
Sabine | 1real |
DUP leader says Brexit transition should be kept to 'absolute minimum' | BELFAST (Reuters) - The head of Northern Ireland s Democratic Unionist party, which is propping up British Prime Minister Theresa May s government, on Friday called for any Brexit transition period to be kept to a minimum and accused the EU of trying to damage Britain. In some of her most anti-EU comments since she agreed her 10 members of parliament would support May, Arlene Foster said in a statement that she believed aggressive EU negotiators ... seem determined to do as much damage as they can to the UK. The DUP campaigned to leave the European Union during last year s referendum. But 56 percent of Northern Ireland voters supported remain, and Foster has tended to shy away from hard Brexit positions. Northern Ireland is widely seen as the region with the most to lose if customs barriers are introduced between Britain and the EU. Foster described May s Friday speech in Florence, in which she called for Britain to stay in the single market under its current terms for around two years, as a positive vision. Any transition period should be for the absolute minimum period, she said. The wishes expressed in the referendum should be delivered without undue delay. | 0fake |
HOW OBAMA’S BROKEN U.S. Deportation Process and Canada’s Open-Door Immigration Policy Are Responsible For Horrifying Act of Terror By Somali Immigrant | U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Tuesday that a Somali refugee charged with ramming his car into a Canadian policeman, stabbing him and then injuring four people while leading officers on a high-speed chase over the weekend was ordered deported from the U.S. in 2011.Jennifer Elzea, an ICE spokeswoman, said Hasan Sharif Abdulahi was taken into ICE s custody in San Diego in July of that year and in September an immigration judge ordered him sent back to Somalia.Elzea said Sharif was released from custody two months later then failed to report as ordered for his removal on Jan. 24, 2012. She said efforts to locate him were unsuccessful.Sharif faces 11 charges, including five of attempted murder in the Saturday night attack in Edmonton, Alberta. Police have raised the possibility of filing terrorism charges against Sharif because there was an Islamic State flag in his car and he was investigated in 2015 for espousing extremist views.Canadian Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said Sharif, 30, entered Canada legally in 2012 and obtained refugee status.A preliminary hearing for Sharif opened Tuesday but was recessed so he can find a lawyer. He appeared on closed-circuit television and followed proceedings with the help of an interpreter. The suspect spoke briefly with a lawyer who stepped forward to help.Edmonton police say they believe Sharif acted alone during the series of attacks, which began around 8:15 p.m. Saturday as police Constable Mike Chernyk was handling crowd control outside a Canadian Football League game at a stadium just northeast of downtown. AP | 1real |
White House proposes to privatize air traffic control | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump is proposing to shift oversight of the U.S. air traffic control from the federal government to an independent group, according to budget documents released on Thursday. Trump, who called the U.S. air traffic control system “obsolete” in a meeting with airline executives last month, is proposing $16.2 billion for the Department of Transportation’s discretionary budget for fiscal year 2018, a reduction of 13 percent. Some Transportation Department budget items are paid through the highway gas tax fund. The document says Trump’s plan “initiates a multi-year reauthorization proposal to shift the air traffic control function of the Federal Aviation Administration to an independent, non-governmental organization.” Privatization advocates argue that spinning off air traffic control into a non-government entity would allow for a more efficient system and rapid, cost-effective improvements of technology, in part by avoiding the government procurement process. Opponents, including some airlines, say the U.S. system is so large that privatization would not save money, and would drive up ticket costs and could create a national security risk. There also are concerns that airlines would dominate the private-company board and limit access to airports by business jets. The budget would eliminate $175 million in annual funding for the Essential Air Service, a program to support commercial air service to rural airports and end subsidies for Amtrak to operate long-distance train service. Amtrak would then “focus on better managing” state-supported lines and service in the busy Northeast corridor, the budget document said. The Trump budget would also eliminate the Obama administration’s “TIGER” grant program, saving $499 million. That program has been used to fund a variety of transportation projects, including high-speed and intracity rail, highway construction and transit bus systems. The budget calls for cutting the budget of U.S. space agency NASA by 0.8 percent to $19.1 billion. The budget proposes cancelling the multi-billion-dollar Asteroid Redirect Mission, but funds development of the Orion crew vehicle and Space Launch System. The budget calls for expanding public private partnerships. NASA has partnerships with Space Exploration Technologies and other companies. The budget funds a mission to fly by Jupiter moon Europa, but cancels a multi-billion mission to land on the moon. It would also fund a Mars rover mission in 2020. The FAA is spending billions to implement “NextGen,” a system that would utilize satellites to monitor aircraft instead of radar and make other changes and has faced implementation challenges. The FAA said it has spent $7.5 billion on NextGen over the past seven years, which “has resulted in $2.7 billion in benefits to passengers and the airlines to date, and is expected to yield more than $160 billion in benefits through 2030.” Last month, Trump criticized spending on NextGen, saying the system was “totally out of whack,” over budget and behind schedule. The FAA handles more than 50,000 flights a day and more than 700 million passengers each year. It spends nearly $10 billion a year on air traffic control funded largely through passenger user fees, and has about 28,000 air traffic control personnel. Since 1987, several countries have moved responsibility for air traffic control from national civil aviation authorities to independent self-financed providers. The Government Accountability Office said in a 2016 report that the United States “is generally considered to have the busiest, most complex and safest ATC system in the world.” | 0fake |
The Republican Party ruined conservatism long before Trump: Why they still don’t get it | This is true at both the national and state levels. Modern conservative mythology begins with Reagan, a man who tripled the federal budget deficit (which shot up to $3 trillion during his tenure) and raised taxes 11 times during the course of his presidency. Reagan didn’t shrink the size of government or grow the middle class. On the contrary, he made government more bloated, more defense-oriented, more corporatist. George W. Bush’s 8 years in office were similarly disastrous: more corporate welfare, more debt, more Utopian military campaigns, more disorder.
Today Republican governors are plunging – or have plunged – their states into one abyss after another, all under the banner of conservatism. There are almost too many examples to cite: Sam Brownback in Kansas; Bobby Jindal in Louisiana; Rick Snyder in Michigan; Phil Bryant in Mississippi; Scott Walker in Wisconsin; Chris Christie in New Jersey; Paul LePage in Maine; Rick Scott in Florida. The list goes on and on and on.
The point is obvious enough: The conservative brand is tainted.
Now that Donald Trump has hijacked the Republican Party, the conservative intelligentsia is apoplectic. Trump isn’t a real conservative, they say. He’s ideologically incoherent, they say. The assumption is that Trump is an aberration, a chimera born of anti-establishment rage. Or that he’s a threat to the “conservative movement” rather than its natural outgrowth.
Consider the latest Wall Street Journal op-ed by conservative columnist Bret Stephens. Stephens writes:
There are two problems with this. First, there’s a disconnect between establishment Republicans and conservative voters. If you watch Fox News or listen to right-wing radio, it’s clear that the base isn’t animated by a coherent worldview. Many self-identify as conservative, but their conservatism is a vague stew of cultural resentment, religious certainty, and half-baked talking points. There is no consistent “conservative cause” to preserve. And if there is a genuine conservative coalition, the Know Nothings and the John Birchers are now central to it. Indeed, the GOP has cultivated these wings since its adoption of the “Southern Strategy” roughly 50 years ago.
Second, to the extent that conservative ideas have been implemented in recent years, they haven’t worked. The “conservative cause” is already crippled. Neoliberal economics, which is what conservative elites support, has gutted the country and the working class. The trade deals, the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the privatization schemes – have redistributed wealth upwards at the expense of everyone else. “Conservatives,” Stephens writes, are “supposed to believe that it’s folly to put hope before experience,” but they’ve put ideological dogma over empirical reality for decades. “Trickle-down” economics didn’t work for Reagan (revenue decreased and unemployment spiked to 10.8 percent after his initial 1981 tax cuts, for example) and it didn’t work for the Bush administrations. And yet GOP presidential candidates speak as though the contrary were true, as though history doesn’t exist. One can argue that this isn’t classical conservatism; that real conservatism involves prudence, a pragmatic respect for existing institutions, and careful responsiveness to change. But that’s not what passes as conservatism. Today’s “conservatives” are hopelessly wedded to discredited abstractions. When elected, their ideas have failed. Now voters are revolting against the establishment and choosing instead to embrace the ethno-nationalism of Trump. Stephens writes that “A Trump presidency means losing the Republican Party.” I disagree. Trump’s nomination means the Republican Party is already lost. Or perhaps it was never found. The GOP has been ideologically fractured since at least the early ’80s, when it morphed into a quasi-religious movement. The Wall Street Journal editorial board cares about tax policy and capital gains, but the Republican base doesn’t. The people voting for Trump are losers in the new economy to be sure, but they’re animated by cultural angst and identity-based fears as much as anything else. Republicans have exploited their base in similar ways for years; Trump has just taken it to another level. I’m not sure what a Trump presidency really means. But it’s not the death knell for conservatism. The GOP ruined conservatism long before Trump. If people like Stephens want to save conservatism, they need a new party, not a new candidate. | 0fake |
Clinton tells Wells Fargo customers CEO owes them an explanation | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took on the Wells Fargo & Co bogus-accounts case in a letter to the bank’s customers to be released on Tuesday, when Wells Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf will testify before a Senate committee. Clinton, who faced accusations during her party’s primary elections of representing Wall Street’s interests, said in the letter that Stumpf “owes all of you a clear explanation as to how this happened under his watch.” Earlier this month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other regulators announced a $185 million settlement with the bank for creating 2 million phantom accounts under actual customers’ names in a bid to meet internal sales goals. In the letter sent to customers, Clinton laid out a three-prong plan to address what she called “the culture of misconduct and recklessness” in the banking system. It included “clawing back” the compensation of individual executives involved in wrongdoing and breaking up big banks that are not managed effectively. She also called for maintaining the CFPB, an agency created in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law that Republican lawmakers would like to reorganize. | 0fake |
Exclusive: Grand jury subpoenas issued in relation to Russian lawyer, Trump Jr. meeting - sources | NEW YORK (Reuters) - Grand jury subpoenas have been issued in connection with the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr., a Russian lawyer and others, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday. The sources also said special counsel Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury in Washington to investigate allegations of Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections. | 0fake |
Watch These Students SHUT DOWN Fox Host For Mocking ‘Rape Hysteria’ And ‘Repeated Consent’ (VIDEO) | It s no secret that conservatives believe with all of their hearts that serious, life-threatening issues that plague women every day of their lives aren t very important. So when Fox Business host John Stossel made a mockery of policies that have been put in place prevent rapes on college campuses over the weekend, he was shocked to find out that many people don t agree with his misogynistic jokes.The weekend segment was called Campus Rape Hysteria, and Stossel repeatedly argued throughout the program that there wasn t an epidemic and that any evidence related to sexual assault on campuses was debatable. Stossel also laughed at campus initiatives that require men to have consent from a woman before and throughout a sexual experience. Stossel said: Colleges passed rules and some states passed laws that are supposed to protect women by defining the consent that s needed before a couple can have sex. California s law says consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity. That means, I guess, a woman must repeatedly say, Yes, please proceed. I doubt many college students do that but it is the law! To get his point across and show just how crazy this could get, Stossel and his friends at Fox created a check-list-type form that mocked the consent process except it wasn t received as well as he thought it would be.Fox News screenshotWhen Stossel showed his form to college students, most of them actually took the subject seriously leaving the Fox host visibly disappointed that America s youth actually had morals and respect for women. He said: The kids must laugh at it. I can t believe anybody having sex gets repeated consent. Yet many students voiced the exact opposite. One male student said on the show, Something needs to be done. I m not sure this is the right way, but I think women need more protection. You can watch the segment below:Featured image is a screenshot | 1real |
VIDEO : Meet the Sailor in PRISON for a MINOR CLASSIFIED INFRACTION While Hillary Runs for President – TruthFeed | VIDEO : Meet the Sailor in PRISON for a MINOR CLASSIFIED INFRACTION While Hillary Runs for President VIDEO : Meet the Sailor in PRISON for a MINOR CLASSIFIED INFRACTION While Hillary Runs for President Videos By TruthFeedNews November 4, 2016
This is a heartbreaking story because it reveals we live in two Americas. One America if you are a Clinton and have friends like Loretta Lynch in “important places” and another America if you are a regular citizen that serves your country.
Kathleen Saucier, mother of Kristian Saucier, shares her son’s story.
Watch the video:
Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. | 1real |
Starbucks Brand Crashes After Announcement of Plan to Hire 10,000 Muslim ’Refugees’ - Breitbart | The Starbucks Coffee brand has taken a major hit since the company’s announcement that it would hire 10, 000 Muslim “refugees” in response to President Donald Trump’s temporary travel moratorium in January. [Starbucks was one of those early to criticize President Trump for putting a temporary hold on immigration from a list of seven countries flagged by the Obama administration. In response, the coffee house giant pledged to hire 10, 000 Muslim refugees over five years in protest against Trump’s order. But since the company issued its statement its brand name has lost its luster with customers. Perception levels of the Starbucks brand name fell by an incredible since its January announcement, according to a YouGov survey, as reported by Yahoo Finance. The survey measures how potential customers feel about a company’s brand and asks if they have “heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word of mouth, was it positive or negative. ” In the week before the company’s January refugees announcement, 30% of respondents said they would consider spending money at Starbucks. But after the statement that number fell to 24 percent, the survey discovered. The company’s announcement immediately sparked a #BoycottStarbucks movement on Twitter and brought condemnation from coast to coast. Not long after Starbucks issued its refugee statement, many Americans began to wonder why Starbucks is slighting the hiring of Americans — especially U. S. military veterans — in favor of refugees. Ultimately, on the heels of its refugees announcement, the company felt enough pressure to issue a second statement to explain to America’s military veterans that the company doesn’t actually hate them. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 0fake |
BMW will open Mexican factory in 2019 despite Trump: executive | MUNICH (Reuters) - BMW (BMWG.DE) will stick to plans to open a Mexican plant in 2019 despite warnings by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to slap a border tax on the German brand’s vehicles made in Mexico and destined for the United States, an executive said. In an interview with German newspaper Bild published on Sunday, Trump said BMW should build its new car factory in the United States because this would be “much better” for the firm. But BMW will stick to its plans and open the factory in San Luis Potosi in 2019, executive Peter Schwarzenbauer told reporters at a conference in Munich on Monday. The new Mexican plant would build the BMW 3 Series starting from 2019, with the output intended for the world market. The factory would be an addition to existing 3 Series production facilities in Germany and China. | 0fake |
Hollywood Lefty Leo DiCaprio Goes Off The Rails On Climate Change Claims [Video] | Leo must be drinking the climate change Kool-Aid: It is the most existential human crisis that the world has ever known, in my opinion. Fresh from filming The Revenant, DiCaprio and the film s director Alejandro I rritu recounted how they experienced the devastating affects of climate change on location in Argentina in the nine months that it took to make the movie. Yep, he really believes all this bs. This would all be funny except for the fact that DiCaprio is head of a multimillion-dollar environmental lobby group, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, and a producer of documentaries on climate change.DiCaprio just gave $15 million to environmental causes last year.Here he s pictured with the commie head of the UN: | 1real |
Trump says hopes to avoid use of military action on North Korea | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would prefer to avoid military action to deal with North Korea s nuclear threat, but said previous diplomatic efforts have failed to pressure Pyongyang from developing its missiles. Military action would certainly be an option. Is it inevitable? Nothing is inevitable, Trump said during a news conference. I would prefer not going the route of the military, Trump said. If we do use it on North Korea, it will be a very sad day for North Korea. | 0fake |
Brooks: Trump ’Siding With a Foreign Leader Against the US President’ on Israel and Russia - Breitbart | On Friday’s broadcast of “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that especially with Israel and Russia Donald Trump is “siding with a foreign leader against the US president. ” Brooks said, “What’s sort of remarkable is that, especially in the Israel and the Russia cases, you’ve got a US citizen, Donald Trump, siding with a foreign leader against the US president. There is a reason why have tried to remain mute during their transitional periods, relatively, because you just don’t want to be for somebody — some other country against your own government, and especially when you’re about to take the helm of that government. And there will be a lot of permanent people who are just going to be stuck there, who’s — who are now in a war between the and the guy they’re currently serving. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 0fake |
Senator Slimeball Is At It Again: Cruz Sends Fake ‘Checks’ To Trick Voters Into Giving Him Money | It might just be time to say Sen. Ted Cruz, in his desperation to win, is running the most disgusting, deceitful political campaign in U.S. history. He seems eager to keep using these underhanded tactics. He clearly enjoys it.After unapolegetically pissing off the entire state of Iowa with fraudulent mailers, Cruz immediately traveled to New Hampshire and beyond where he s doing the exact same thing. In New Jersey, for example, residents woke up this week to find that Cruz had sent them a check in the mail.For a struggling family, a bit of free money coming in the mail out of the blue could mean everything. Tearing it open, what did they find? A shameless campaign tactic designed to get them to give money to Cruz s floundering campaign. Rather than a check made out to them, Cruz s campaign took it upon themselves to write out a check paid to the order of Cruz for President for $45.00.It was all part of Cruz s (possibly illegal) money-making scheme that he s used in recent weeks. Cruz has suggested that he has secret wealthy backers that have promised to match donations with regular voters. He begs supporters to give him as much money as they can so that these anonymous, super-secret definitely real rich friends of his will double the money.While these underhanded tactics probably do work to get Cruz the money he needs to pay people to like him, it s hard to imagine they are doing wonders for his electability. At this rate, there won t be a state in the country that Cruz hasn t personally disgusted with his slimeball campaign. Iowa s state government is already floating the idea that they will be looking into legal action against Cruz s campaign for the numerous election laws that Cruz skated the line of.For Cruz, all of this backlash might be worth it. He s long been considered one of the most reviled people in politics. People who know him, people who work with him, people who once lived with him in college, all say he s a creep. He s not going to win votes by popularity or policy. Instead, his campaign has always been about raising a ton of money from a select group of millionaires and billionaires and then desperately clinging onto fringe right voters who find his homophobia and poor-shaming rhetoric a turn on.If Cruz s campaign continues to drag for the duration of the primaries, expect to see all the stops pulled out. His team is clearly looking for any possible way to win ethics and lawfulness need not apply.Featured image from Gage Skidmore/Flickr | 1real |
Some toast Comey testimony, others shrug at U.S. bar 'watch parties' | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Crowds packed U.S. bars on Thursday to watch former FBI chief James Comey testify to Congress, with some patrons dismissing the hearing as hype and others cheering his comments as they downed mixed drinks with names like “impeachmint” and “bad hombre.” From Capitol Hill to San Francisco’s Castro district, television “watch parties” beckoned politics buffs to taverns, restaurants and living rooms to view an event some likened to the “Super Bowl of Washington.” The drama around Comey’s first public appearance since he was fired by President Donald Trump last month drew the kind of communal public interest more often associated with major sporting events and awards shows. Every seat was taken at the Union Pub in Washington, located in the shadow of the building where Comey testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee for about three hours from 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT). Comey accused Trump of dismissing him to try to undercut the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between his 2016 presidential campaign team and Russia’s alleged efforts to influence the election. The pub had promised to buy patrons a round of drinks every time Trump, a prolific Twitter user, tweeted during Comey’s testimony - but drinkers were out of luck. The president did not launch a single public retort during the hearing, although his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., sent several tweets attacking Comey. “(Comey) did in no uncertain terms call Trump a dishonest person,” said Jared Sorhaindo, 30, who works as a researcher. “That was one of the things that I thought would make Trump fly off the handle.” Mark Johnson, 69, self-employed from Rockville, Maryland, was one of the few Republicans in the packed bar and defended the Republican president. “It is kind of selective outrage on the part of Democrats, and I don’t think that what Trump did rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors,” Johnson said, referring to one of the standards that can trigger congressional impeachment proceedings against a president. At Houston’s Axelrad Beer Garden, a crowd of 200 people applauded when Comey called Trump’s rationale for firing him “lies, plain and simple.” Texas leans Republican but Houston, the largest city in the state, voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in November. “So far, no smoking gun,” said Cesar Robles, 35, watching the hearing at the bar. “Not much is going to be done” as a result of the testimony, he said. Back at the Union Pub in the nation’s capital, Joseph Cortese, a 22-year-old intern working for a Republican congressman, said the hearing was overblown and would not affect Trump or his agenda. Some Democrats have suggested Trump could be impeached and removed from office if he was found to have sought to hinder the Russia probe in a way that obstructed justice. That is seen as very unlikely given Republicans control both chambers of Congress. “I think the media and liberals are going to have to move on and accept the fact that Donald Trump is going to be president for the next four years,” Cortese said. | 0fake |
THE “OBAMA BOUNCE”: UKIP Leader Claims Obama’s Insulting Threat To UK Voters BACKFIRED…Actually Drove Voters To Support “Leave EU” Movement | Barack Hussein Obama has been in over his head since he first stepped foot in the White House. Our Community Organizer In Chief just found out how unwelcome his Chicago style politics are in the UK UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage told Breitbart that the visit by President Obama, where he threatened to send Britain to the back of the queue if the public voted to leave the European Union (EU), backfired and caused a Brexit Bounce , swaying Britons to vote for Brexit.Comparing the outcome to the American Independence Day, Mr. Farage said: You [Americans] have your Independence Day where in July you celebrate being your own country, governing yourself, having your own courts, controlling your own borders and that s what happened to us yesterday. We have broken away from a political union where our power was being overruled, our courts were being overruled, and we had a complete open border for anybody from southern and eastern Europe, so this is a major historic step. On the EU post-Brexit, he said: We ve not just changed British history. I m sure that the EU project itself will now come tumbling down. I would like to think and hope that right across the globe what we ve done is to prove that people power can beat the establishment. The European Union project has failed. It is dying before your very eyes. It is unwanted, it is unloved, and people across the country are saying what UKIP has been saying for years: We want our country back, we want our democracy back, we want the closest possible relationship with our neighbours. We re happy to have a NAFTA kind of agreement with free trade, but we don t want political union . Asked of any lessons drawn from his own experiences that could be applied during the American presidential elections, Mr. Farage advised: Threatening people insults their intelligence. Don t threaten people repeatedly because if you do in the end they think you re crying wolf and they won t believe you. It s Project Fear, or in the end when Obama came it was Project Threat.Citing Mr. Obama s visit to the UK at the request of Prime Minister David Cameron:The lessons learnt from the Obama visit are fascinating. Here is the most powerful man in the world coming from a country that we have always had huge regard for. And people in Britain listening to Obama said: how dare the American president come here and tell us what to do and it backfired.And I think we got an Obama Brexit Bounce, because people do not want to be told how to think and how to vote. BreitbartWatch here to see how citizens reacted to Obama s threat:https://youtu.be/w-DSGtfWgegRepublican lawmakers warned US President Barack Obama his controversial intervention into the British EU referendum debate threatens to harm the special relationship. During a visit timed to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II s 90th birthday earlier this year, Obama warned that the United States would be in no hurry to agree a bilateral trade deal with a Britain outside the EU. I think it s fair to say that maybe at some point down the line there might be a UK-US trade agreement, but it s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc, the European Union, to get a trade agreement done. And the UK is going to be at the back of the queue, he said.Obama s comments caused furore among Leave campaigners, with UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage accusing Obama of talking Britain down. Former Defense Minister Liam Fox dismissed the president s intervention, calling his views largely irrelevant, as he will soon be leaving the White House. Via: RT | 1real |
The Panama Papers: How The 1%’s Greed Has Literally Been Killing Millions Of People (VIDEO) | One of the immediate benefits of The Panama Papers is that we now have a clear picture of how corrupt corporations have been both actively causing the death of millions of people all around the world.In a video created by the International Coalition of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), they explain how the law firm Mossack Fonseca has been enabling corporations to sell fuel and weapons being used to kill tens of thousands of Syrian civilians to continue doing business despite an international ban imposed by the United States, the UK and several other countries.ICIJ also highlights how the law firm decided it wasn t their business to report one of their clients to the police for being a child rapist that later sold his victims into sex slavery:One of the ringleaders was a client of Mossack Fonseca. When the firm discovered their client was a pedophile, they decided that they were not legally obliged to report his off shore business activities to the authorities.Another galling example shown in the video is how one company, with the help of Mossack Fonseca, deprived the nation of Uganda of over $400 million in taxes. In a country as poor as Uganda, this lack of money leads directly to the death of women and children who cannot receive proper healthcare. Remember that when you hear a Republican refuse to investigate the law firm in the coming weeks.Mossack Fonseca is also involved with laundering money for the international drug trade, which is where the millions of dead people mentioned in the title come from.Watch the video below and try to imagine what kind of people can be so callous towards their fellow man: Featured image via screen capture | 1real |
Peru's prime minister skeptical about bill to expand anti-graft rules | LIMA (Reuters) - The government of Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski will likely object to a bill passed by Congress that aims to expand new anti-graft restrictions to Grana y Montero and other local partners of Brazilian builder Odebrecht [ODBES.UL], the prime minister said Thursday. Odebrecht has admitted to paying millions of dollars in bribes to officials in Peru over a decade-long period, and lawmakers want the financial constraints written to keep Odebrecht from evading payment of fines for bribery to apply to the companies it partnered with. But Prime Minister Mercedes Araoz said a new bill that sailed through the opposition-ruled Congress two weeks ago threatens to paralyze construction projects and likely violates due process. I m not a lawyer but I do think that you always have to respect the presumption of innocence, Araoz told foreign media in the capital Lima. There are parts of it that we would have to take issue with. Araoz said Congress has not yet sent the bill to the executive branch for passage and that the justice and economy ministries would study it thoroughly before taking any action. The legislation would restrict international asset transfers and the right to seize ill gotten gains of Grana and other Odebrecht partners. However, none of Odebrecht s local partners have been convicted of any crimes and deny taking part in Odebrecht s bribes. Grana, Peru s biggest construction group and Odebrecht s most important local partner, saw its shares drop nearly 23 percent to 2.4 soles ( 0.5573) after passage of the legislation. Grana did not immediately respond to requests for comment but has criticized the bill as unconstitutional and promised to take legal action if it becomes law. Lawmakers who back the legislation have said Odebrecht s partners likely had a hand in Odebrecht s kickback schemes and that prosecutors were working too slowly in finding other guilty parties. Grana is under investigation in the attorney general s office but has not been charged with any crime and has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. Araoz added that the government is planning to ask Congress for special legislative powers to make tax collection more efficient. However, she said the changes would be minor and ruled out any changes to tax rates. | 0fake |
Trump Wants To Appoint Alt-Right Propagandist Steve Bannon As His Chief Of Staff |
Now that the election is over, Donald Trump is deciding who he will appoint to fill his cabinet. Although most the names on his list are fairly horrifying, none more so than who he is considering for White House Chief of Staff. Trump’s top pick is reportedly former Breitbart bigwig, Steve Bannon.
So what does a chief of staff do ? Well, the person holding this position is often called “the most powerful man in Washington.”
“The duties of the White House chief of staff vary, yet traditionally encompass the following, such as: select and supervise key White House staff, control access to the Oval Office and the president, manage communications and information flow, and negotiate with Congress, executive branch agencies, and external political groups to implement the president’s agenda.”
“In fulfilling these duties, the chief of Staff oversees and coordinates the efforts of the following offices within the EOP and White House Office: the Council of Economic Advisers, National Security staff, Office of Management and Budget, Office of Legislative Affairs, and Office of Management and Administration, to name a few.”
Okay, so that’s an important job. So who the hell is Steve Bannon? Not surprisingly, he is the worst of the worst.
David Badash over at The New Civil Rights Movement summed it up quite nicely: Bannon “stepped down at Breitbart to run the final few months of Trump’s campaign, but for years he has run one of the most popular far, far right wing websites, Breitbart. It masquerades as a news site but it’s home to the alt-right, as Bannon has bragged. In other words, the white supremacists and white nationalists, the anti-Semites, the anti-LGBT crowd, the anti-Black crowd, the anti-diversity, anti-feminism, anti-Obama movement. Racists, homophobes, bigots of every stripe get their ‘news’ at Breitbart. And it got Trump elected.”
According to court filings from his divorce proceedings, Bannon is not only a sadistic wife beater , but he is also every bit as anti-Semitic as Breitbart itself. His wife testified that he fought against allowing his daughters to attend an upscale school because of the number of Jewish children that attended.
“He said that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.”
This man , this is who Trump wants to have serving as the White House Chief of Staff. His advisors are encouraging him to choose RNC Chair Reince Priebus, but we all know how Trump is with taking advice from people who might actually know what they’re talking about. Who cares if Bannon actually knows anything about how to run the damn country, Trump just wants the biggest bigot he can find.
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PETER THIEL’S CIA-BACKED DATA MINING COMPANY WINS COURT BATTLE AGAINST THE U.S. ARMY | Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › PETER THIEL’S CIA-BACKED DATA MINING COMPANY WINS COURT BATTLE AGAINST THE U.S. ARMY PETER THIEL’S CIA-BACKED DATA MINING COMPANY WINS COURT BATTLE AGAINST THE U.S. ARMY 0 SHARES
[10/31/16] PALANTIR, A DATA mining behemoth that received startup funding from the CIA, just got its foot in the door to a lucrative U.S. military contract following a months-long legal battle with the Army.
On Monday the software company won the chance to pitch its data services, the Gotham Platform, to help build out an upgrade to the Distributed Common Ground System — an Army program “that gathers intelligence spanning all echelons from space to mud,” according to the service’s website.
The contracts for the project could eventually total in the billions of dollars.
The Army has had a strained relationship with the Silicon Valley startup, despite the company’s coziness with the intelligence community, according to press reports. This summer, Palantir sued the Army , alleging it failed to abide by solicitation rules when it excluded the company from the bid to help design the intelligence system.
The Army asserted Palantir couldn’t sue before the contract was awarded, and didn’t have standing to do so.
U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Marian Blank Horn agreed with Palantir during an open hearing on Monday, according to Bloomberg News. Her written opinion was filed under seal, giving both parties a chance to request redactions.
Once called “the war on terror’s secret weapon,” Palantir’s software helps users, whether law enforcement officials or businesspeople, understand and track relationships in data. The company’s proprietary algorithms are designed to sift through massive troves of data — whether bank transactions, social media interactions, weather calculations, or crime reports — and spit out conclusions about everything from terrorist cells to car thieves. Post navigation | 1real |
Rocker Neil Young, a Canadian, talks U.S. presidential politics | (Reprise Records corrects release date of next album to June 24 from June 17, last paragraph) By Jane Ross (Reuters) - Neil Young, a Canadian citizen, can’t vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election - but the 70-year-old rocker has plenty to say about it. In a video interview with Reuters ahead of the release of his new album “Earth,” the Grammy-award-winning singer-songwriter excused Donald Trump for using his music without asking his permission. Trump’s use of “Rockin’ in the Free World” during the Republican nominee’s campaign launch raised heckles last June. Young’s management company released a statement at the time saying that Trump was not authorized to use the song in the announcement of his presidential candidacy. Young now says he has nothing against Trump using his song. He just would have liked to have been asked. “The fact that I said I was for Bernie Sanders and then he didn’t ask me to use ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ doesn’t mean that he can’t use it,” said Young, who has long lived on a ranch in California. Young confirmed the Trump’s campaign statement that the campaign had a license agreement with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for the right to play the recording. “He actually got a license to use it,” Young said. “I mean, he said he did and I believe him. So I got nothing against him. You know, once the music goes out, everybody can use it for anything. “But if the artist who made it is saying you never spoke to them, if that means something to you, you probably will stop playing it. And it meant something to Donald and he stopped.” Young says his support for Sanders in the election race was still strong, despite Hillary Clinton’s lead in the contest for the Democratic nomination. “He’s the only one talking about the issues, about issues that matter to me, the issues on my mind - problems of corporate control of democracy and everything slipping away and not being able to have six major companies owning all the media in the United States,” Young said. Young has retained his Canadian citizenship. Although becoming a U.S. citizen would allow him to vote in the country’s November presidential election, he dismisses the notion. “Oh, that would be a big ruse. I’m a Canadian. There’s nothing I can do about that,” he said. But, he says, he will keep on talking politics, in his music and in public. “I vote in my own way, by making a lot of noise. If you don’t want to listen to me, fine. If you don’t want to vote like I would, don’t. But I still have a voice.” Young’s latest album, featuring live recordings of songs from throughout his career, will be released on June 24 on Reprise Records. | 0fake |
7 things to watch for on election night | Washington (CNN) Donald Trump is attempting to crack Hillary Clinton's blue wall. And Clinton is hoping for a surge in Latino turnout fueled by opposition to Trump.
The two candidates are making a last-minute dash across swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina as the 2016 presidential race enters its final hours. They've also gone north to Michigan and New Hampshire to states Democrats have won in recent cycles but could flip this year.
Here are the key states and signs to study as the night unfolds:
Most plausible paths to victory for Trump start with holding onto two battlegrounds that Mitt Romney won four years ago -- North Carolina and Arizona -- and flipping three states President Barack Obama carried: Florida, Ohio and Iowa.
A loss in any of the states would severely complicate Trump's already precarious path to 270 electoral votes. Though if Trump clawed back Pennsylvania or Michigan from the Democrats, who have won both electoral-rich states six times in a row, North Carolina would be more expendable. A win in a state like Pennsylvania or Michigan would allow Trump to offset a loss in North Carolina and still have a shot at reaching 270.
If that doesn't happen, holding North Carolina and Arizona, while reclaiming Florida, Ohio and Iowa from the Democrats -- plus Maine's 2nd District -- would only get him to 260.
Trump would need to tack on 10 more electoral votes somehow. New Hampshire's four and Nevada's six would get him there. Colorado, with nine electoral votes, Michigan with 15 and Pennsylvania with 20 are also possibilities.
In his last 48 hours before Election Day, Trump has been pretty much everywhere, including Colorado, Michigan -- even Minnesota -- searching for the extra votes he needs.
The key question for Clinton is whether her "blue wall" of Democratic-leaning states on the Great Lakes -- Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin -- will hold.
Trump has targeted all three, but Clinton has consistently led polls in all three states. However, most voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania cast their ballots on Election Day -- which means her campaign hasn't built the early voting advantage already in place elsewhere.
If Clinton can do that and pick up just one of North Carolina, Florida or Ohio, she's all but guaranteed to win.
If she can't win one of those three states, she'll need to hold Virginia, vote-by-mail Colorado, New Hampshire and Nevada -- where Democrats have already built a hefty early voting edge.
If Clinton wins, her coalition will consist of women, college-educated voters and a swell of new Latino voters.
In early voting in states like Nevada, and Florida, there's already evidence of burgeoning Latino turnout. This is best witnessed by the over 57,000 people who voted in Nevada Friday, with pictures of long lines and extended hours at a Latino grocery store in Clark County.
Many first-time voters, polls show, are turning out to oppose Trump. And Democrats are bullish that Latinos have been under-polled through the entire 2016 election cycle.
For Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, this is a ghost of elections past. After the 2012 race, the RNC warned that the party needed to do more to court Latino voters. A nominee who roundly rejected that advice could be the reason the party loses a third consecutive presidential race.
Just as Trump's attacks on Mexican immigrants have alienated Latino voters, his attacks on women and allegations of sexual assault have helped Clinton to a large lead among female voters. Clinton's campaign has highlighted Trump's most derogatory remarks in TV ads aimed at moderate, suburban women -- a constituency that has helped Republican nominees in years past. If she succeeds, it would limit Trump's strengths to rural areas.
Trump's biggest strength is his overwhelming support from disaffected white voters -- particularly men, and especially those without college degrees.
His campaign has long argued that those voters -- many of them independent or Democrats who buy into Trump's protectionist stance on trade -- will carry him on Election Day.
For this to happen, Trump will also need core Democratic voters to stay at home, as well.
Already, Trump appears poised to win Iowa, and has polled ahead of Clinton in Ohio. He's hoping to win enough blue-collar Democrats in Pennsylvania or Michigan to win at least one of those states.
Michigan, in particular, emerged as a tempting target in the campaign's closing days -- a state hard-hit by the trade deals Trump bemoans. Clinton's campaign raced to play defense, dispatching the former secretary of state there, as well as President Barack Obama, for last-minute rallies.
Among Democrats' biggest concerns has been whether African-American voters -- a reliably left-leaning constituency -- will turn out in numbers anywhere close to their support for Obama in 2008 and 2012.
If the answer is no, it could hobble Clinton in key states -- particularly Florida and North Carolina.
Obama is helping carry Clinton's load with black voters. In a call to Tom Joyner's radio show, he argued that participating in this election is just as much about him as it is about Clinton.
"And I know that there are a lot of people in barbershops and beauty salons, you know, in the neighborhoods who are saying to themselves 'We love Barack, we love -- we especially love Michelle -- and so, you know, it was exciting and now we're not excited as much,'" he said. "You know what? I need everybody to understand that everything we've done is dependent on me being able to pass the baton to somebody who believes in the same things I believe in."
Since Trump clinched the GOP nomination in May, Republican Senate and House candidates have been forced to answer for everything he has said -- from his attacks on a Gold Star family and an Indiana-born judge's heritage to his rejection of conservative orthodoxy.
As soon as the election ends, Capitol Hill Republicans -- especially if they retain control of both the House and Senate -- will regain power.
The party will have to decide just what to do with Trump's rejection of free trade, his calls for a decreased US role overseas and his criticism of GOP congressional leaders -- whether he wins or loses.
But adopting some of Trump's policy planks while rejecting his political style might not help much after an election driven by the candidates' personalities.
For a nation divided by a long, bitter contest, this could be the most important question of all: Will the loser concede -- and how will he or she do it?
Trump and Clinton are both historically unpopular presidential nominees. Half the country thinks Clinton is a crook, and the other half thinks Trump is a racist and misogynist.
And Trump, in particular, has cast the election as rigged -- calling into question whether ballots that are mailed in will be counted, playing up inaccurate reports of voter irregularities and claiming that voter fraud is pervasive.
The loser will play a crucial role in legitimizing the victor -- or delegitimizing the winner from the outset. | 0fake |
Set to Lift Interest Rate, Fed Embraces Investors’ Optimism - The New York Times | The Federal Reserve is poised to raise its benchmark interest rate in significantly sooner than investors had expected, as it moves to keep pace with a wave of economic optimism that started with the election of President Trump. In an unusually clear statement about a pending decision, the Fed chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, said on Friday in Chicago that the central bank was likely to act at its next meeting — barring any unpleasant economic surprises. Ms. Yellen added that the Fed still expected to raise rates twice more later in the year, which she said would bring the benchmark rate close to a level that the Fed regards as neutral, with low rates no longer providing an inducement for borrowing and . That outlook signals that an end is finally in sight for the Fed’s economic stimulus campaign, devised during the depths of the financial crisis more than eight years ago. Stanley Fischer, the Fed’s vice chairman, delivered the same message at the same time at a conference in New York. “We’ve seen a lot of substantial change in a relatively short time,” Mr. Fischer said of the postelection shift in economic conditions. “There is almost no economic indicator that has come in badly in the last three months. ” Asked whether Fed officials were delivering a coordinated message, Mr. Fischer responded wryly, “If there has been a conscious effort, I’m about to join it. ” The impending rate increase could heighten tensions with the White House, which wants to stimulate growth by cutting taxes, reducing regulation and increasing defense and infrastructure spending. Fed officials have concluded the economy is already growing at something close to the maximum sustainable pace, meaning faster growth should be offset by faster rate increases. Financial markets, however, are taking the prospect of higher rates in stride. The Standard Poor’s index, which is up more than 11 percent since Election Day, ended trading on Friday mostly flat. The prospective Fed move has modest implications for consumers. Interest rates on car loans and some kinds of credit card debt will tick upward, but remain at low levels by historical standards. Rates on mortgages are up by about half a percentage point over the past year. The broader consequences depend on the Fed’s ability to raise interest rates without slowing economic growth. The Fed’s goal is to return rates to a level that neither encourages nor impedes economic activity. Over the past century, however, most of the central bank’s attempts to strike that balance have ended in economic recessions. The American economy is in the midst of one of the longest expansions in the nation’s history, but it is also one of the weakest. The economy expanded by 1. 6 percent in 2016, compared with 2. 6 percent in 2015, according to the government’s most recent estimate. Fed officials have concluded, however, that monetary policy cannot deliver faster growth. The Fed’s job is to minimize unemployment and moderate inflation. The unemployment rate, at 4. 8 percent in January, is in a range Fed officials regard as healthy, and prices rose 1. 9 percent in the 12 months ending in January, the closest the Fed has come since 2012 to hitting its target of 2 percent annual inflation. In December, the Fed raised its benchmark rate for just the second time since the financial crisis, to a range of 0. 5 percent to 0. 75 percent, and predicted three increases in 2017. At the beginning of the week, however, Wall Street analysts and investors did not expect the Fed to raise rates again any earlier than June. The Fed issued a measured statement after its policy meeting in early February, and the meeting minutes, published three weeks later, conveyed little sense of urgency. Now, after a week of discussions, analysts regard a March increase as highly likely. Michael Feroli, the chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase, described the shift in Fed language as “remarkably swift and decisive. ” Investors put the chances at almost 80 percent in trading on Friday, according to an analysis of asset prices by CME Group. Some Fed officials appear particularly focused on the rise of the stock market. William C. Dudley, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who described markets as “very buoyant” on Tuesday, has said in the past that if markets did not respond to rate increases, the Fed might need to act more forcefully to tighten financial conditions. It is also getting harder to dismiss the market’s reaction to Mr. Trump’s victory as a bout of temporary euphoria. Mr. Fischer noted on Friday that the stock market boom was creating wealth that people would begin to spend. Ms. Yellen pointed to an improvement in the global context. “The prospects for further moderate economic growth look encouraging, particularly as risks emanating from abroad appear to have receded somewhat,” she said. The shift in the Fed’s language over the last week also may reflect a recognition that market expectations were not keeping pace with the Fed’s evolving view of the economy. Ms. Yellen, in a February appearance before Congress, hinted that the Fed might be providing a little too much stimulus, describing the Fed’s policy as “accommodative. ” But at the start of this week, investors still put a low probability on a March increase. Markets are wary of the Fed’s flirtations with interest rate increases, as the central bank in recent years has often found reasons for postponements. This time, the Fed chose to overwhelm any lingering doubts. On Tuesday, Mr. Dudley told CNBC that the case for a rate increase “has become a lot more compelling. ” On Wednesday, Lael Brainard, a Fed governor who has been one of the most consistent supporters of raising interest rates slowly, suggested that she too was ready to act. “We are closing in on full employment, inflation is moving gradually toward our target, foreign growth is on more solid footing, and risks to the outlook are as close to balanced as they have been in some time,” Ms. Brainard said at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Assuming continued progress, it will likely be appropriate soon to remove additional accommodation, continuing on a gradual path. ” Fed officials often bury their latest views on monetary policy at the end of their speeches. Ms. Brainard’s remarks came at the beginning, so that no one missed the point. On Thursday, another Fed governor, Jerome H. Powell, issued a similarly blunt notice of intent in an interview with CNBC. “I think the case for a rate increase for March has come together, and I think it’s on the table for discussion,” he said. Then came Friday, the last day on which Fed rules allowed officials to comment on monetary policy before the March meeting, and Ms. Yellen delivered the last word. “At our meeting later this month,” she said, “the committee will evaluate whether employment and inflation are continuing to evolve in line with our expectations, in which case a further adjustment of the federal funds rate would likely be appropriate. ” The committee is scheduled to meet in Washington on March 14 and 15. | 0fake |
Transgender Texas Boy Gets New Birth Certificate | Born Mary Grace, a North Texas child is now officially named Max. His parents petitioned a court to change all of his legal documents, including his name, birth certificate, and Social Security card to reflect his male name and identity. [Max Briggle’s mother Amber told WFAA: “He’s always going to be transgender, but having that piece of paper, my hope is that it’s going to make it a little easier for him. ” She called these changes, “another milestone,” and believed the new paperwork was essential for her child while the state legislature debates the proposed “bathroom bill,” SB 6. If passed into law, this legislation would mandate people use bathrooms based on the gender shown on their birth certificates. Amber and husband Adam, who reside outside of Dallas in Denton, became visible advocates for transgender children as the “bathroom bill” debate heated up nationally and in Texas. Max, then MG, became the face of Texas trans kids when his parents invited Attorney General Ken Paxton to dinner at their home. The family wanted to show Paxton they were a “ normal, remarkably unremarkable family,” according to The Dallas Morning News. Paxton and his wife accepted the invitation. The AG lead a lawsuit against the former Obama administration over a transgender directive that advised public school students could use the bathroom and other facilities based on “gender identity. ” Ultimately, a federal judge blocked the Obama transgender guidelines. “As long as we’re going to pass laws saying which facilities you can and can’t use, it’s awfully nice to have a document saying he can use it,” said Amber Briggle. “At the same time, I just feel like it’s so unnecessary. Why do I have to change my son’s birth certificate so he can be treated like the boy that he is?” A changed birth certificate impacts more than bathrooms. In 2016, Texas public school superintendents resoundingly approved the University Interscholastic League’s (UIL) amendment requiring that school districts use a ’s birth certificate to determine gender identification if questioned, as reported by Breitbart Texas. The UIL is the state’s governing body for competitive public school athletics, music, and academic events. Recently, North Texas transgender teen athlete Mack Beggs, transitioning from female to male, competed on the girl’s wrestling team because of UIL rules, Breitbart Texas reported. Altering Max’s name required a letter from a physician meeting specific requirements and a court order. According to WFAA, Texas Health Human Services said only 34 people in the entire state met these requirements and could change their vital documents last year. In this case, the Briggle family went through the U. S. State Department to amend their trans child’s birth certificate since he was born in The Netherlands. The State Department issues a Consular Report of Birth Abroad (CRBA) when American children are born in a foreign country. That document now states Max’s sex as male. A CRBA functions as a birth certificate for all official purposes. Amber Briggle believes going through the State Department simplified the lengthy process. “The fact that he was born abroad made it significantly easier for us than had he been born here in Texas,” she said. “In which case, I’m not sure it would have happened at all. At least not at this age. ” The family now plans to have a “ ” baby shower to commemorate the revised paperwork. “I want to have a baby shower for my baby boy,” said Amber Briggle. “He’s always been my son. But it’s been this very long, gradual process over nine years for us to get to this point, and I feel like that needs to be recognized. ” Follow Merrill Hope, a member of the original Breitbart Texas team, on Twitter. | 0fake |
Trump Supporters Form Militia To Beat Up Protesters At Rallies Just Like Hitler’s Brownshirts (IMAGE) | Sounds like they should call themselves the Brownshirts, because that s what this group basically is.At Donald Trump rallies across the nation, his supporters have committed violence against protesters with little or no restraint or consequences for that matter.One rally in North Carolina last week alone saw two black men get physically assaulted by racist white guys who clearly didn t care if they were being filmed or not, but they attacked their victims anyway despite not being provoked to do so. They didn t do it in self defense, but out of hatred and entitlement.Rallies in St. Louis and Chicago have nearly sparked race wars between white racists and protesters, and Trump has even led his supporters in a pledge that included the Nazi salute.Trump claims that his rallies are not violent and that no one has ever been injured at one of his events.So, it really comes as no surprise at all that a group of Trump supporters are actually forming a militia to beat up protesters who they claim are Far-left agitators and the real culprits committing violent acts.A group on Twitter called Lion s Guard, described themselves as An informal civilian organization dedicated to protecting the safety and security of innocent, peaceful Trump supporters from violent Far-Left agitators. The group then tweeted out an invitation to other Trump supporters who would like to forcefully protect rallies and referred to themselves as the real victims of beatings and violence. Do you want to provide security protection to innocent people who are subject to harassment and assault by Far-left agitators? If so, you are welcome to join. That s the mission to protect innocents who can t hire their own security guards. We are unarmed but willing to forcefully protect people if need be. We are *defensive*, *protective* of innocents who are being beaten and harassed for their political views. And then the page was taken down after the page owner received a threat, but they promised to create a website to coordinate actions the group takes.Here s a screenshot of the Twitter page via RT.Image via RTAgain, this group sounds like wannabe members of the Brownshirts who served Adolf Hitler during his rise to power in Germany, whose primary purpose was to provide protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies from those they deemed socialists and communists. At one such assembly in November 1919, Hitler s Brownshirt friends ejected hecklers by force by throwing them down the stairs. At another meeting in February 1920, dissenters who tried to shout Hitler down were violently removed. And in November 1921, a melee broke out when the Brownshirts attacked protesters during a Hitler speech.This is same kind of violence that is already occurring at Trump rallies across the country and now a group of his supporters are taking it a step further by creating a group dedicated to forcefully taking down protesters if a Trump supporter merely feels threatened.Trump has already been repeatedly labeled a fascist this month, and this new group only makes that label stick. Featured image via Imgur | 1real |
One Hero Made Donald Trump Panic And Made Twitter Celebrate (DETAILS) | If you were bored on Thursday night at around 7pm ET and felt the need to peruse President Trump s Twitter feed, you might ve instead encountered a blue page bearing the message, Sorry, that page doesn t exist! , eventually just replaced with an even more generic-looking response:Yes, for a whole 11 minutes Donald Trump s Twitter account was down.Twitter is sometimes seen as that one avenue where voyeurs and sociopaths can coexist so it comes as no surprise that the medium is a favorite of President Trump s, as well as his supporters and critics alike. It is where we get to see the truly uncensored leader, not following a script, just posting exactly what comes to mind and digging his hole deeper with every tweet. A normal day for Trump generally begins by taking to Twitter to attack Democrats, North Korea and, of course, kneeling NFL players before he starts his presidential duties.However, some have grown tired of Trump s early morning poop-tweets and one person decided to take action. That s right, this wasn t the result of some glitch of sorts, but was actually an inside job. To be more specific, it was the work of a heroic Twitter employee on their last day on the job. Twitter initially released a statement saying the President s feed was inadvertently deactivated due to a human error, but it didn t take long for the truth to come out.Earlier today @realdonaldtrump s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored. We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again. Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee s last day. We are conducting a full internal review. https://t.co/mlarOgiaRF Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017Naturally, the Twittersphere initially went into conspiracy mode when they couldn t access Trump s account, with the common assumption being that the President had finally been booted from the platform. Many have requested that President Trump be banned from Twitter under the belief that his tweets about North Korea could be bringing the United States closer to the brink of nuclear war, something Twitter has declined to do, claiming they must weigh the newsworthiness of Trump s tweets with its violent rhetoric.Instead, on this occasion, it was just a Twitter employee having the intestinal fortitude to do what many have probably fantasized about doing on their last day of work.Featured image via screenshot | 1real |
‘My First Gay Bar’: Rachel Maddow, Andy Cohen and Others Share Their Coming-Out Stories - The New York Times | For generations of gays and lesbians, especially those for whom walking into the sometime secret and darkened doorway of one was often the first step in the process, gay bars have long held a significant place in their personal histories. That was never more apparent than in the days following the mass shootings at Pulse, the gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. in which 49 patrons lost their lives, and which prompted many to recall the nights they had spent in similar settings, and the sense of community they found there. “I can’t tell you how many bars and clubs I’ve been to over the years,” the CNN newsman Anderson Cooper told The New York Times last week. “Every gay man in America remembers the first time they went to a gay bar and how they felt. ” “I don’t want to sound like I’m speaking for the gay community,” said Mr. Cooper, who publicly acknowledged his sexual orientation in 2012. “But it certainly resonates very deeply for me. ” Below, some other prominent gays and lesbians recall what gay bars meant to them as they began to embrace their sexuality, some eagerly and some nervously. Television host and producer I used to sneak away from my straight friends at Boston University and go to Chaps (gay bars often have hypermasculine names) in Boston’s Back Bay. It was quite literally like stepping into another world. When I moved to New York in 1990, the Works on Columbus Avenue and Uncle Charlie’s on Greenwich Avenue were where I built a community of friends. gay bars were integral in our social development. They were an escape from the (often unfriendly) outside world, packed every night of the week, and everyone inside was a friend. Playwright, author and activist In 1953, gay bars were scary. I was a freshman at Yale. I thought I was the only gay man there. I overheard some guys making snide and sneering references to a place called Pirelli’s where “the fairies” went. I was lonely, very. So I went. It was a kind of place only a few blocks from campus. Surely I’d meet a guy from Yale here. When the smoke cleared, I saw 30 or so men, all much older and definitely not collegiate. Eventually a spoke to me. Would I like to go for a ride? We drove for miles looking for a place to “do it. ” We did it parked in some wilderness, a distance from New Haven. He drove me back to Yale and then he drove home. He’d come all the way from Hartford to find his gay bar. This was my coming out at Yale. Except nobody knew it but me. And I was still lonely, very. It would still be a bunch of years before gay bars would start being less scary, and a lot of fun. Actress The first gay bar I ever went to was the Cubbyhole when it was on Hudson Street in the West Village. It would have been around 1984, which made me and I was fresh out of graduate school. I looked very straight and very Midwestern cornfed. I walked around the block before I got the nerve to go in because the lady bouncers looked so fearsome and eyed me suspiciously. When I finally tried to walk in, the door lady stopped me and asked: “Do you know where you are? This is a lesbian bar. ” “Yeah, I know,” I said nonchalantly, as if I’d been walking into dyke bars since the beginning of time. Host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” The first time I went to a gay bar was in 1990, thanks to a fairly terrible fake ID that I bought for $25. I was 17 years old, and equally scared of being caught for being underage, and of being recognized by anyone I knew. I don’t even think I ordered a beer. I just remember frantically playing pinball and not speaking to anyone the whole time I was there. That fake ID was my lifeline for years because it got me into the only places where I could find the gay community that I so wanted to be part of. Gay bars and clubs were the alpha and the omega for me then. I wish I still had that terrible fake Arizona drivers’ license — I think my alter ego from that ID (her name was Ann) would be 48 years old by now. I still have her same haircut. Actor and comedian My first gay bar in New York was the Duplex, because it was kind of a soft launch into the gay world. My good friend Diane Davis and I used to get up onstage after a few drinks and sing “Sun and Moon” from “Miss Saigon. ” That may have been my first gay bar over all. I went to school at Northwestern and lived with a bunch of gay guys, and we would go out to Boystown, the big strip of gay bars in Chicago. There was one called Charlie’s Chicago, which was a gay bar. I was, like, I’m gay, but I’m not into this. That’s where I started to draw some lines. Actress Between my junior and senior year of high school, I drove an ice cream truck in my hometown Belleville, Ill. My truck broke down near this little bar called Lil’s Tavern. I had heard rumblings about this tavern. I had an aunt and uncle who lived near there, so we would barbecue with them, and I heard words bandied about like “bulldyke” and “ . ” I knew they would have a phone where I could call the boss, so I went in and in the corner was a table with six big ol’ butch dykes. Like, monster butch dykes. I had never seen one before. It was noon or so, and it was completely empty except for these six huge dykes playing poker. And one of them looked up at me and yelled, “Hey, baby butch!” I’ll never forget it. I did one of those takes, like, “Oh, she’s talking to me. ” Performer Rialto Tap in Chicago was the first black gay bar I went to, and what I really remember was the cracked tile dance floor. This was when everyone was playing raw house music and bands like Heaven 17 and Yazoo. After that, I went to C. O. D. As in Cash on Delivery. That’s where I first heard Frankie Knuckles. I was there underage with a fake ID. I was a trans person so I was an outsider, but it was where people went to dance and get away from the everyday. It was acceptance. It was no fear. I told my parents I was staying at a friend’s house. Novelist (“We the Animals”) When I was 20, 21, and I liked to go out in a red skirt with a duck patch on it, which I paired with a hoodie and Chuck Taylors. I remember one night on the walk to the Stud in San Francisco, a man took me in with disgust — my hairy legs, my painted lips — and called me a “faggot,” in that quiet, direct way that always seems particularly menacing, looking straight into my eyes. I remember dancing particularly hard that night. I remember needing to feel beautiful, and catching glimpses in the mirrored wall of my hairy legs coming out under that skirt, catching glimpses of my desperate twirling. I remember my boyfriend was there, smiling at me, lovingly bemused. And then another man, who sidled up to me at the bar when I paused for beer, said to me, “Girl, you are figuring it out tonight on that dance floor,” and I was, and I still am. Actress and comedian It was 1980, maybe 1981. I was — 19, living at my dad’s home in Commack, Long Island. My neighbor was housing a relative from England for the summer. We were both gay newbies. There was only one gay club that we knew of. I think it was called Thunders. In French the word for lightning is éclair. How I remembered that from ninth grade French? No idea. I asked my dad if I could use the car to go out. “Where to?” he asked (at 10 p. m. on a Friday night). “The bakery,” I said, “to get éclairs. ” Silence, and then, he said “O. K. ” Peter and I drove the dented white Volare to the strip mall in Commack. We danced the night away — drinking Bud Light. I felt happy and free. On the way home we made sure to stop at the Candlelight diner — around 2 a. m. — to pick up éclairs. Dad was clueless. From that day on, “bakery” was our code word for gay bar. Broadcaster and author On a Sunday night in July 1991, at a sprawling complex called Tracks in the District of Columbia, I found thousands of young black gay men and lesbians. At times, as I walked around the three dance floors, it seemed as though everyone in Washington was gay. The men at the gym, the parishioners at my church, the salespeople at the department stores, even the guards at the White House were there. But here, unlike the white gay clubs, the patrons appreciated, and in fact reveled in, black beauty. For the first time in my life, I felt not only desirous of others but desirable to them as well. Cartoonist, author of the graphic memoir “Fun Home” My first gay bar was Satan’s, in Akron, Ohio. I was in college, and a bunch of us drove an hour and a half to get there. I was used to feeling like a total alien when I was in any kind of social group. But that night, in the large mixed crowd (there weren’t enough gay people to support a separate club for women) I experienced the profound existential relief, for once, of not being the only queer. A year later, in 1981, I moved to New York. There was a lot of routine hostility on the street. Even in Sheridan Square on a weekend night you’d get hassled for holding hands. But then you’d step past the bouncer at the Duchess, and you were home free. The bar had its own perils — no one ever paid the slightest attention to me there — but it afforded me the space to just be, with my guard down, and that was salvational. President, the Ford Foundation In 1978, my freshman year at the University of Texas, my sophisticated friend Kenneth would drive us in his new Cutlass to a bar called Austin Country. It was a giant converted warehouse, with bars encircling the dance floor and the biggest disco ball in Austin. I still can hear Karen Young belting out “Hot Shot. ” I remember the closeted fraternity boys, who had just dropped their dates at the sorority house — and the girls who loved to spin and gyrate on the dance floor, earning the attention of adoring gay boys. By my senior year, the mood was changing. We were focused on getting into law school, or business school, or landing a job. Tragically, AIDS was beginning its deadly, devastating advance. The frivolity of those fast, fulsome, fleeting days has long since given way. But in that infectious music, to borrow a phrase from Sylvester, we were “made to feel mighty real. ” Author and playwright When I was a teenage apprentice in summer stock, I went to my first gay bar in suburban Connecticut. I don’t remember the bar’s name, but the parking lot was packed with station wagons. The atmosphere was friendly and the outfits were from Sears and Brooks Brothers. I remember thinking that if I said “Dad?” lots of guys would turn around. Author, “The Noonday Demon,” “Far Away” There were two gay bars in the neighborhood where I grew up. One was Uncle Charlie’s Uptown, the other had a punning name I didn’t understand at the time: Camp David. I haunted them, promenading back and forth with our family dog, whom I had to walk after dinner, and trying to see past the darkened windows and curtained doors, simultaneously hoping and fearing that one of those men in tight jeans would want to strike up an intimacy as he exited. By the time I was old enough to enter such an establishment, I had my own tight jeans and inchoate prospects. But contrary to so many narratives of relief at finding a gay context, my initial experience was primarily of anxiety, because to be where the least acceptable aspect of myself was the explicit topic made me feel more naked than the boys. It was Boy Bar on St. Marks Place, and I clung to someone I knew named Debbie who was temporarily lesbian. Sex was already easy to find, though it unnerved me. Love was not unimaginable, though I didn’t yet have the hang of it. Ease and dignity, however, had seemed incompatible with my gayness until my sweaty June bar visit set me on a new path, one that much later led me to marrying my husband, having our children, and becoming an activist for L. G. B. T. Q. rights. Potter and designer Providence, R. I. 1989. I’m at my local gay watering hole, the No Name (a. k. a. No Shame) frivolously dancing to Bronski Beat. In walks a dude from New York who was a member of ACT UP, wearing a leather jacket that said “Don’t Tread on Me. ” It was a defining moment for me. It was about gay empowerment, it was about not getting messed with and it was about the importance of addressing an existential crisis head on. I moved to New York the next year. Opening Ceremony, and director, Kenzo Wonder B — r was one of my favorite New York haunts. I remember, it was on a really random night, and it was pretty quiet — maybe 10 people in the bar. Of the 10 people, in the back, was Madonna and her little crew, just going out on a Tuesday night. My friend girl Robin used to D. J. there, so we would go, and this time it was me and my six friends — trying to play it cool as much as we could. Playwright and producer It was the Roosterfish, a dingy nautical gay bar in Venice Beach in Los Angeles. I went to stupidly try and find a gay surfer who loved Didion, Ed Ruscha and Tecate. I ended up with a Republican boy with red hair, a economics fanatic from Pepperdine up the coast in Malibu. We made out in the back. I found his politics repulsively erotic. There was a jukebox, and I think it had Dennis Wilson’s ultra cool “Pacific Ocean Blue” on it, which I loved. We went back to my place, and I explored the dichotomy between lust and politics. Fashion and costume designer My first early experience that I remember was my trips to Provincetown, Mass. and it was fun and liberating. It occupied a couple of years of my life during my early 20s. Provincetown was a gay destination, a mecca where gay people at that time could feel comfortable and celebratory. It was particularly attractive because the gay society in the early ’60s was much more underground in the big cities. I would describe it as an escape from gay reality. Provincetown was a free and open space, lots of great performers, people out to have fun, and this is exactly what it was to me. Creative director, Altuzarra The first gay club I went to was Le Queen in Paris when I was in high school. It still exists — it’s on the — but it was an institution at the time. I was probably 16, and I remember being very about going. I was really new to that sort of scene. I remember it being very dark and no one talking to me. I think I stayed about an hour, an hour and a half — not dancing, not drinking, though I’m sure I was bopping around in my dark corner. I think at the time, I thought I was going to find a boyfriend if I went out, or become friends with people, which clearly doesn’t happen in a techno club in Paris. But it felt very exhilarating. It was my first time interacting with other gay people, even though I wasn’t really interacting with them — at least I was in their presence. That was a very powerful thing. Psychologist and former National Basketball Association player I’m from Manchester, England, so we have a very vibrant gay community that is very well integrated. There was an area called the Village. I used to go there with my sister with my friends routinely. In the U. S. I felt differently about it. I lived in Arizona, in Scottsdale, while I played in the league. I went to a little bar there called BS West. I remember walking in that first time quite tentatively with a group of my friends. Immediately, I get a drink, I turn around and I see someone at the bar and say, “Damn it, I know that guy. ” It was Bill Kennedy, the N. B. A. ref, who came out recently. What are the chances that you walk into a bar and there’s a ref? I didn’t talk to him the first time. Later, I did talk to him, and it was amazingly reassuring. In Scottsdale, in that bar, we met other players and other officials from other sports. Not just pro athletes but college athletes as well. It was fascinating to feel my world expanded. The feeling that you have that there are no other gay people in sports evaporated quickly. Fashion consultant Uncle Charlie’s in 1983 was the original social network. I moved to New York in January of 1983, fresh off the boat from Salina, Kan. the first place I went was the gay bar. It gave me permission to be me. There was such a culture of going out after work then. Everybody went to Uncle Charlie’s. Fashion designer The first gay club I went to was probably when I was 16. It was called City Nights in San Francisco. I remember I would have to get a fake ID as it was an club. But all my friends were older at that point because I lived by myself in S. F. and made friends from just going out. Night life was my escape from the day to day. I would go every Thursday: night. I was very lucky to have the community I grew up in be so supportive. Singer and songwriter I came out when I was pretty young. I might have even been 13, but let’s just say 14, to be somewhat respectable. Montreal had a pretty decadent gay scene. There was a lot of cruising and tons of bathhouses. My first gay bar was this place called Alcatraz. I was alone — I kind of snuck out of my house wearing spandex. I was from Westmount, which was a more area, and Alcatraz was in a poor French neighborhood. So I was like this lost little rich boy wearing a cravat. I didn’t actually have that much sex, per se, but it was fun and exciting. But it was also scary. I was just trying to figure my way out. I knew instinctively that the path that my life would take was through that barroom door. CNN anchor I was deeply closeted in college. Everybody was. It was the 1980s, it was the South, and people didn’t come out then as quickly as they do now. With my friends, mostly straight frat guys, I would frequent a popular college bar at L. S. U. called the Bengal on Highland Road in Baton Rouge, La. But inevitably I would sneak off, very carefully, to the bars down the road, just past the straight bar. One was named Xanthus, an “alternative” bar where the bouncer was a girl named Big Hair. (By the way, Hair and I are still friends to this day.) The dance floor there was filled with punk rockers, bow heads (sorority girls) gay boys, lesbians and every kind of person under the sun, and I loved it. But the gay bar was a bit harder to navigate because it was across the street and one could easily be spotted entering and leaving. After I finally built up the liquid courage to do it, I never turned back. The eclectic music, the light show, the cute guys milling about, the club kids dancing on speakers: It was gay heaven! I didn’t have to pretend anymore. I was finally at home. Actress and musician My first gay bar was a lesbian dive called the Egyptian (“E”) Room in Portland, Ore. It had a terrible layout: a series of cramped, dank rooms, all seemingly accidental like a human habitrail. There were baby dyke couples twinned out with matching tongue rings and spiky hair, uniformed post office ladies, construction workers, power lezzies in Paula Poundstone blazers, and butches taking up space at the bar or around the pool table, manspreading because they could. I think I went to the E Room as much to witness another woman’s freedom as I did to get a sense of my own. A gay bar is ours. It’s ours like putty, it’s ours like clay. The environment is both ridiculous and profound, but we get to decide when it’s one or both, or neither. Only away from the glare of homophobia could we experience malleability, a flexing of the self, a full rotation. Who knew there were 360 degrees? | 0fake |
A Scaredy-Cat’s Investigation Into Why People Enjoy Fear - The New York Times | Halloween is here again. That means your have planted surprise spiders around the office. You’ve been invited to a haunted hayride. Your neighbor’s yard has a full cemetery, rigged with motion detectors and zombies. from the start, I have always dreaded this time of year. Haunted houses, ghost tours and horror film fests are not my thing, and why people love having the daylights scared out of them completely escapes me. I decided to try to understand my friends who are on the lookout for thrills this time of year. As it turns out, there are many possible reasons some people like to be scared stiff. Each person’s threshold for experiences that provoke fear is made up of a unique recipe that blends nature and nurture. “The ingredients vary from person to person,” said Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University and a former president of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Farley is interested in what draws certain people to extreme behaviors, like driving racecars, climbing Mount Everest and flying hot air balloons across oceans. In the 1980s, he coined the term “Type T” personality to refer to the behavioral profile of . What makes someone he said, comes down to a mix of genes, environment and early development. David Zald, a neuropsychologist at Vanderbilt University, studies one piece of the equation. His research partly focuses on dopamine, a chemical involved in our brain’s response to reward. In the past, he has found that people who lack what he calls “brakes” on dopamine release tend to pursue thrilling activities. When you go to a haunted house, you’re grappling with a conflict, Dr. Zald said: The experience could either be fun or terrifying, and how you weigh that balance could depend in part on dopamine levels. “Having a greater amount of dopamine pushes someone to pursue the goal of excitement,” he said, “whereas someone who basically has less dopamine is more likely to hold back and say, ‘No, this isn’t worth it to me. ’” Socially, we get cues about how to respond to fear from those around us, said Margee Kerr, a sociologist and author of the book “Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear. ” Early on, that’s taking notes from our parents about how to deal with distress. Later, experiencing stressful situations with others can cultivate social bonds. Part of that has to do with emotional contagion, or a communal response to shared experiences, Dr. Kerr said. If your friend is captivated by the horror movie you are watching together, you process that by recreating the same feeling in your own mind, and that can bring you closer together. People also tend to hold onto memories of fear more intensely, she said, so if you have positive associations with a scary situation, like going to a haunted house, you’ll likely want to do it again. can also be a way of testing oneself. Josh Randall and Kristjan Thor, creators of Blackout, a haunted house experience that consistently tops rankings of “Most Extreme Haunted Houses,” said they see many people coming to their events with a goal of . “It’s almost like a dare to themselves,” Mr. Thor said. “People want to be able to conquer something. ” For many, being scared is a jolting escape from daily life. When immersed in a scary situation, you can suspend your disbelief and live in the moment — and that loss of control can feel really good. This is key for Blackout, Mr. Randall said: “For a finite period of time, that audience member can turn off the real world, and live in a fantasy world. ” After talking with the experts, I was starting to see why some friends love getting spooked. But why do I hate being scared so much? It could be because I was never exposed to horror movies or haunted houses growing up, so by the time I did experience these things, I was . It could be that the regions in my brain involved in coding fear and anxiety are more sensitive. Most likely, it is a mix of many different factors. Regardless of the reason though, “it’s perfectly O. K. not to like scary things,” Dr. Kerr said. For people who cannot fathom sitting out a haunted house, it’s important not to coerce your more cautious friends into doing something they do not want to, Dr. Kerr said. “That can compound the fear, and make it even worse. ” So, for any friends who were thinking of inviting me to the haunted house this weekend, save your breath — I have a doctor’s note. | 0fake |
ISIS Chainsaw Massacre: Nine Christian Youths Literally Sawed In Half, Accused Of Being Part Of Resistance Faction | Ads ISIS Chainsaw Massacre: Nine Christian Youths Literally Sawed In Half, Accused Of Being Part Of Resistance Faction Oct 27, 2016 Previous post
Just when you thought ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) could not possibly develop more heinous ways of executing captives and prisoners, news out of the besieged city of Mosul, Iraq, reveals that a group of youths have been put to death in what amounts to nothing short of a chainsaw massacre. According to a source, nine Mosul youths were killed, all accused of belonging to an anti-ISIS resistance faction.
Iraqi News reported August 31 that nine youths were convicted in an Islamic State sharia court of being members of a resistance faction in the city. They were summarily sentenced to a public execution. The nine were then tied to a pole Wednesday and cut in two with a chainsaw by ISIS militants.
A source, who wished to remain anonymous, told Iraqi News , “The death sentence pronounced by ISIS sharia court stated that the men should be tied to an iron pole in the center of Tal Afar Square in Mosul and then sliced into two with an electric chainsaw.”
The news outlet went on to note that ISIS has executed thousands of the city’s citizens since taking over Mosul in June 2014. Although allegations and charges have varied, most of those killed by the extremists were convicted of collaborating with enemy forces.
The ISIS chainsaw killings come just a week after Islamic State extremists, after convicting six individuals of collaborating with the enemy in sharia court, killed the group by lowering the then still living men into boiling vats of tar . According to Inquisitr , the killings were also a public execution in Mosul, the carrying out of the sentence said to have been done to instill fear in the citizenry.
It is doubtful that, given ISIS’ barbaric and often horrendous killing methods (not to mention the regularity with which killings are carried out), there was a need to instill fear in the local population. At best, the most that could have been accomplished was to reinforce the Islamic State’s willingness to kill any and all who oppose its authority.
As Iraqi defense forces, supported by U.S. air power, and Peshmerga troops, with assistance from various militias and paramilitary factions, tighten | 1real |
Trump Supporter Pulls Gun On Black Man At Polling Station For Refusing To Vote Trump, Gets Arrested | November 8, 2016 Trump Supporter Pulls Gun On Black Man At Polling Station For Refusing To Vote Trump, Gets Arrested Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr
We knew it was going to happen, and honestly, it could have been a lot worse. Still, it’s shocking that this is what our elections have come to.
A Trump supporter picked a fight with a voter at a Palm Beach polling place over his choice of candidate. The crazed right-winger ended up pulling a gun on the African American man who was simply trying to cast his vote.
According to the victim , Tobian Norris, he was on his way to vote when he ran into a Trump supporter intent on causing trouble.
“I saw this guy, he was basically soliciting votes for Donald Trump and he decided he wanted to solicit me,” Norris said.
He says he made it clear that there was no way he would ever consider voting for Trump. After a brief discussion about Trump and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, Norris finally asked the Trump supporter if he had graduated high school and all hell broke loose. The man lunged at Norris, attacking him and knocking the phone he had been using to film the incident to the ground.
“He grabbed my hand and knocked the phone out of my hand and called me the n-word, and I just blacked out and hit him in the ribs, and he pulled a gun on me,” Norris recalled.
When Norris defended himself, punching the assailant in the ribs, the crazed man did what any good Trump supporter would do: He pulled out a gun.
The victim ran and was thankfully unharmed. This could have ended so much worse. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputies arrived and arrested the gun toting Trump follower.
Norris recorded the entire exchange and posted it live on Facebook. You can watch the video below:
Featured image via video screen capture Share this Article! | 1real |
Iran Revokes Russia’s Use of Air Base, Saying Moscow ‘Betrayed Trust’ - The New York Times | BEIRUT, Lebanon — Iran on Monday annulled permission for Russian planes to fly bombing runs into Syria from an Iranian base, only a week after having granted such extraordinary access, saying that the Kremlin had been unacceptably public and arrogant about the privilege. The and the explanation for it from Iran’s foreign and defense ministries appeared to reflect and longstanding suspicions of Russia despite their tactical alliance in the Syria war. The abruptness of the termination, even if temporary, also suggested that the Russians, eager to show widening influence in the Middle East, had seriously misread how a public announcement of their use of the Hamadan base in western Iran would reverberate among Iranians. Russia state news media had been trumpeting the deal as a sign that its partnership with Iran was deepening. No foreign power has based forces in Iran since World War II. In response to the annulment, the Russian military issued a statement saying its planes had already completed their missions. “The Russian military aircraft involved in launching airstrikes from the Iranian Hamadan base against terrorist sites in Syria successfully accomplished the tasks they had set out to complete,” Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said in a statement. “All aircraft involved in this operation are now on Russian territory. ” The agreement had seemingly marked a milestone for Russian foreign policy and a strengthening alliance with the region’s Shiite powers of Iran, Iraq and the government side in Syria’s civil war. And it would have allowed Russia to use greater firepower more easily in Syria, a new threat to opposition fighters. It was not clear why the agreement appeared to unravel so soon, and experts and American officials cautioned that it remains to be verified via satellite images that Russia’s operations from Iran have stopped. But Iran’s minister of defense, Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, accused Russia of having publicized the deal excessively, calling the Kremlin’s behavior a “betrayal of trust” and “ungentlemanly. ” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Bahram Ghasemi, told reporters in Tehran that the permission had been temporary and “it is finished, for now. ” Maziar Behrooz, a history professor at San Francisco State University and an expert on relations, said Iran’s withdrawal of permission, at the very least, signaled “a lack of coordination between the Iranians and Russians” over how — or even whether — the deal would remain secret. “The Russians went public with this without assuring adequate sensitivities to Iran’s internal dynamics, in order to perhaps score a point and boost their prestige,” Mr. Behrooz said. “If the Russians hadn’t exposed this, no problem would have arisen. ” It was only the latest in a series of ups and downs in the important but often uncomfortable relationship between Iran and Russia regarding the Syria war. Both sides have signaled they do not expect to agree on every issue. Their strategic collaboration is not considered under threat. But the perceived Russian arrogance may have been a step too far for Iranian sensitivities since the Russian takeover, nearly a year ago, of Iran’s role as the Syrian government’s leading ally. The Russians have deployed formidable air power since September to help the forces of President Bashar of Syria, who had been ceding ground. Iran and its militia allies still bear the brunt of the casualties as Russia has few troops on the ground. Iran and Russia share major goals, chiefly preventing the ouster of President Assad by force. And they each have a stake in battling Islamist extremists they see as threats to their own security. But they have very different approaches, roles, and visions. Russia’s priority is to block what it sees as regime change, part of its policy of opposing interference in any country’s internal affairs, and to preserve Syrian state institutions. It has signaled that it is not wedded to Mr. Assad’s rule. Iran appears more focused on preserving and expanding its projection of power into the Middle East through relationships with the Lebanese group Hezbollah, other Shiite militias and with Mr. Assad, who has long guaranteed Hezbollah an arms supply route from Iran and belongs to the Alawite sect, a branch of Shiite Islam, the dominant faith in Iran. At the same time, Iran fueled the growth of Syrian militias, preferring to work with them. Since jumping into the conflict at a point where Iran seemed unable to keep Mr. Assad from faltering, Russia has tried to integrate these militias into the army. Iran and Russia face challenges collaborating in the field. Hezbollah fighters and supporters openly disdain the Syrian Army, and grumble that Russia has not given air support to its fighters. And Russian officials feel more comfortable dealing with Syrian Army commanders — many of them educated in Russia — than with the Shiite religious trappings of the militias. Russia and Iran also differ sharply on Israel. Iran and Israel see each other as irreconcilable enemies, while Russia maintains close relations with Israel, home to a million Russian emigrants. Then there is Iran’s long memory of the Russian empire battling the Persian Empire and gobbling up its periphery. To Iran, with its national identity, it was not that long ago that the Russians were the enemy, fighting for control of Central Asia and the Caucasus “Russia is not trusted. They just don’t trust each other,” said Cliff Kupchan, the chairman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. Russia’s flaunting of its Iran base privilege, he said, “was just too much for Iranian domestic politics to bear. ” With a history of meddling by Western powers, notably Britain, Iran guards its sovereignty closely. After Russia’s Tupolev and Sukhoi bombers started flying last week, Iranian members of Parliament said the agreement might be in violation of the Constitution. “We have not given any military base to the Russians and they are not here to stay,” General Dehghan said. The two countries had “no written agreement” for use of the base, he said, adding that it was only a temporary agreement on refueling. Russia announced what it described as a deal to use the Iranian base on Aug. 16, saying it would shorten the distance flown by bombers, which had been flying from southern Russia. A Russian analyst of the Middle East, Yuri Barmin, posted on Twitter that it was clear the base was “a temporary arrangement due to logistical difficulties” but added that the termination “was too quick. ” Victor Mizin, a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Russia’s university for diplomats, said the symbolism of the air base deal had been important in Moscow. “The message was a continuation of what Russia started in Syria,” Mr. Mizin said, “which is saying that Russia has returned to the status of a great power, like the Soviet Union, only without the ideology. ” | 0fake |
Noam Chomsky: Why It’s a Big Danger to Dismiss the Anger of Trump Voters | by Lambert Strether
Lambert here: Howard Dean, back in 2003 and before he lost his mind, said : “I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks. We can’t beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats.” Of course, such a gross violation of liberal class and cultural markers could not be permitted, and Dean was forced to grovel and apologize by the dominant identitarian wing of the Democrat Party and then, when his fifty-state strategy won Democrats control of Congress in 2006, instantly defenestrated by Rahm Emanuel, among others, and his organization gutted by Tim Kaine . When Chomsky asks “Why are we failing to organize these people?” he’s asking a question to which Dean already gave the answer.
Clinton, of course, thinks that organizing “these people” is a bad idea, which is why she called them “deplorable” and “irredeemable” (and if you’re a Christian, as Clinton purports to be, “irredeemable” means irredeemable). So do many of her supporters, who seem to labor under the twin delusions that (a) “these people” will go away on the morning of November 9, and that (b) calling them, in various ways, stupid is, as a strategy, full of #win. If Clinton wishes to fail during a legitimacy crisis, she and her supporters should go on exactly as they have begun. Personally, I’m not a “worse is better” guy (too much suffering), but I confess I see little prospect of the dominant faction in the Democrat Party changing its ways, Dean, Chomsky, or no.
By Alexandra Rosenmann, AlterNet associate editor. Originally published in Alternet .
In the past 15 months, Noam Chomsky has weighed in on the U.S. presidential race often.
“There are differences in the parties,” he said in February, when asked if he’d even consider a Republican over Hillary Clinton. “Small differences [coupled with] great power can have enormous consequences.”
Chomsky initally favored Sanders over Clinton, but insisted Democrats must win at all costs. Because according to Chomsky , if Trump wins “the human species is in very deep trouble.
But as for Trump’s supporters, Chomsky’s not counting them out just yet.
“I’m basically judging by what I see and read about them listening to talk radio and so on,” Chomsky admitted of the protests on the right. “But my strong impression is that these [right-wing protesters] are people with very real grievances.”
“They give the impression of being a hard-working serious people who think they’ve been doing everything right. They’ve been doing what they’re ‘supposed’ to do [as] god-fearing hard-working, gun-carrying, you know patriotic, Americans,” Chomsky continued.
“What are they doing wrong and how come their lives are so crummy?” Chomsky asked.
It’s a question that has plagued the election.
“They’re not getting answers,” Chomsky insisted. “The answers they are getting are not only crazy, but extremely dangerous, so the right response is to ask ourselves, why are we failing to organize these people?”
There’s nothing partisan about losing money to Wall Street or lacking health insurance; issues at the forefront of protests from both sides for nearly a decade.
“We have not succeeded in unifying people,” Chomsky noted. “It’s our fault.”
Watch: | 1real |
The Reason This Republican Thinks His Opponent Is Unqualified Is The Most Disgusting Thing You’ll Hear Today | Ohio State Senate Majority Leader Tom Patton is a term-limited Senator who has decided to run for the State House of Representatives to keep his political career alive. His opponent is a young woman named Jennifer Herold, who is the mother of 2 toddlers. Patton, proving that he has more than enough misogyny to be a card-carrying member of the Republican party, has decided Herold is unqualified to run against him.You see, Jennifer Herold isn t a 62-year-old man like Patton is. As a woman under 30 with two children, she has no business in politics. Patton said in a radio interview recently: The gal that s running against me is a 30-year-old, you know, mom, mother of two infants. And I don t know if anybody explained to her we ve got to spend three nights a week in Columbus. So, how does that work out for you? I waited until I was 48 and my kids were raised and at least adults before we took the opportunity to try. Well then. There are so many things wrong with that statement it s hard to choose where to begin. First, don t call her gal. It s insulting and cheapens your attack even more, if that s possible. Newt, Columbus isn t all that far; Mrs. Herold could easily make the commute if she wanted to. It s difficult to imagine a fragile little gal having the ability to oh, say drive a car, we know. Last, have you considered, Senator, that she may have a husband at home who doesn t believe it s the woman s job to take care of the kids 24/7?How old you are and your warped sense of how a modern family works is irrelevant, you insufferable douchebag.It gets worse. While talking polling numbers, Patton said: I want to tell her, Hey Sweetie, I just got 27 percent of the pie in just my district, which is nine times what should have been done. Seriously? Hey, Sweetie? What is unfortunate is that his message will resonate with the sexists who populate his party. They don t like people who don t have penises representing them, because what could a woman possibly know about anything other than child-rearing and pleasing her husband? Patton is the perfect poster boy for the GOP.Herold responded with pure class and dignity in a statement: We realize the sacrifice that is involved in holding such a position. However, Tom Patton has crossed a line by trying to turn the fact that I am a mother of two children into a negative campaign issue. It s insulting for my opponent to suggest that motherhood is a liability. In fact, my experience as a mom is perhaps my greatest strength. Tom, only one man in my life is allowed to call me sweetie. From now on, I respectfully ask you to refer to me as Jen, Jennifer, Ms. Herold, or your opponent. Well said, Ms. Herold. Patton has since apologized, calling his words poorly chosen. What he doesn t seem to understand is that it isn t the words he chose that are disturbing, it s the way he thinks. It s the sexism and utter disrespect for Herold as a woman and a human being that make him so despicable.Too little too late, Senator. Hopefully you get your ass handed to you so you ll have no choice but to stumble off into the sunset and obscurity. Featured image via screen capture | 1real |
BREAKING: #CrookedHillary Told FBI She Only Deleted Personal Emails…FBI Just Recovered 30 DELETED BENGHAZI Emails | She s the most crooked criminal to ever seek the office of President of the United States. The State Department says about 30 emails that may be related to the 2012 attack on U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya, are among the thousands of Hillary Clinton emails recovered during the FBI s recently closed investigation into her use of a private server.WATCH Hillary lie here:Government lawyers told U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta Tuesday that an undetermined number of the emails among the 30 were not included in the 55,000 pages previously provided by Clinton. The State Department s lawyer said it would need until the end of September to review the emails and redact potentially classified information before they are released.The State Department says about 30 emails that may be related to the 2012 attack on U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya, are among the thousands of Hillary Clinton emails recovered during the FBI s recently closed investigation into her use of a private server.Clinton has previously maintained that the only server emails that were not handed over to the State Department were related to personal matters not having to do with her professional duties.Following the Benghazi email discovery, Jason Miller, Senior Communications Advisor for Donald Trump s presidential campaign said in a statement: Today s disclosure that 30 additional emails about Benghazi were discovered on Hillary Clinton s private server raises additional questions about the more than 30,000 emails she deleted. Hillary Clinton swore before a federal court and told the American people she handed over all of her work-related emails. If Clinton did not consider emails about something as important as Benghazi to be work-related, one has to wonder what is contained in the other emails she attempted to wipe from her server. Government lawyers told U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta Tuesday that an undetermined number of the emails among the 30 were not included in the 55,000 pages previously provided by Clinton. The State Department s lawyer said it would need until the end of September to review the emails and redact potentially classified information before they are released.A law enforcement official also told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the FBI is expected to release documents soon related to its investigation, which focused on whether Clinton and her aides mishandled government secrets.The official, who wasn t authorized to discuss the matter by name and spoke on condition of anonymity, said documents in the case would be made public as the FBI responds to Freedom of Information Act requests. It wasn t immediately clear when the documents would be released or exactly what they would include.For entire story: TIME | 1real |
Tax Plan Sows Confusion as Tensions With Mexico Soar - The New York Times | PHILADELPHIA — President Trump’s decision to build a wall along the length of the United States’ southern border with Mexico erupted into a diplomatic standoff on Thursday, leading to the cancellation of a White House visit by Mexico’s president and sharply rising tensions over who would pay for the wall. With the conflict escalating, Mr. Trump appeared to embrace a proposal by House Republicans that would impose a 20 percent tax on all imported goods. The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, told reporters that the proceeds would be used to pay for the border wall, estimated to cost as much as $20 billion. But a furious uproar prompted Mr. Spicer to temper his earlier remarks, saying the plan was simply “one idea” that might work to finance the wall. Mr. Spicer said it was not the job of the White House to “roll something out” on tax policy, while Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said the administration was considering “a buffet of options. ” If Mr. Trump does eventually announce his support for the tax plan, it could have a broad impact on the American economy, and its consumers and workers, by sharply increasing the prices of imported goods or reducing profits for the companies that produce them. Other nations could retaliate, prompting a trade war that could hit consumers around the globe. Retail businesses could see their tax bills surge, said David French of the National Retail Federation, who predicted that those costs would be passed on to consumers. He called the idea “very counter to the way consumers are feeling at the moment. ” If nothing else, the developments showed Mr. Trump that international diplomacy and a overhaul of the tax code would not be as easy as an announcement before a campaign microphone. The events unfolded after Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday to strengthen the nation’s deportation force and start construction on a new wall along the border. Adding to Mexico’s perception of an insult was the timing of the order: It came on the first day of talks between top Mexican officials and their counterparts in Washington, and just days before a scheduled meeting between Mr. Trump and the Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto. The sense of chaos and confusion about the tax issue added to the fallout from Mr. Trump’s conflict with Mr. Peña Nieto, his first direct clash with a world leader since becoming president a week ago. The Mexican peso bounced sharply with each new development. Tensions between the two have been simmering for months, despite comments by both men that they were trying to work together. Mr. Trump’s immigration and decisions on Wednesday appeared to shatter the remaining good will between them. In a video message delivered on Twitter on Wednesday night, Mr. Peña Nieto reiterated his commitment to protect the interests of Mexico and the Mexican people, and pledged to devote the resources of Mexico’s consulates in the United States to protecting its citizens. “I regret and condemn the United States’ decision to continue with the construction of a wall that, for years now, far from uniting us, divides us,” Mr. Peña Nieto said. Mr. Trump responded on Twitter, “If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting. ” Within hours, that is just what happened. Blasting Mr. Trump for sowing division between the countries, Mr. Peña Nieto angrily backed out of the White House meeting, which had been scheduled for next week. In remarks at congressional Republicans’ retreat in Philadelphia, Mr. Trump portrayed the decision to cancel the meeting as his own and issued a stern warning to Mr. Peña Nieto about the consequences of refusing to cooperate with him on financing the wall. “Unless Mexico is going to treat the United States fairly, with respect, such a meeting would be fruitless, and I want to go a different route,” Mr. Trump said. “We have no choice. ” In the same remarks, Mr. Trump alluded to the idea of a border tax, saying, “We’re working on a tax reform bill that will reduce our trade deficits, increase American exports, and will generate revenue from Mexico that will pay for the wall if we decide to go that route. ” After the speech, in a brief, impromptu news conference as Mr. Trump flew back to Washington, Mr. Spicer told reporters that the president now favored the plan to impose a 20 percent border tax as part of a sweeping overhaul of corporate taxation. Only last week, Mr. Trump had dismissed the tax as too complicated, favoring his own plan to impose a 35 percent tariff on manufactured goods made by American corporations in overseas factories. Mr. Spicer said that the plan for the tax was “taking shape” and that it was “really going to provide the funding” for the wall. Mr. Spicer said that was a direct reference to the centerpiece of House Republicans’ proposal to overhaul the tax code. They have been pushing the idea for months, but with little evidence, until Thursday, that Mr. Trump was interested in it. But by the time Mr. Spicer returned to the White House two hours later, he had already recanted. In another hastily arranged conversation with reporters, he called the proposal “one idea” that might work and said it was not the job of the White House to “roll something out” on tax policy. “We’ve been asked over and over again: ‘How could you possibly do this? There’s no way that Mexico will pay for it,’ ” Mr. Spicer said. “Here’s one way. Boom. Done. We could go in another direction. We could talk about tariffs. We could talk about other custom user fees. There are a hundred other things. ” The White House and House Republicans have been hashing out their respective tax proposals as they press forward with Mr. Trump’s agenda to revive American manufacturing and increase exports. The House proposal would replace the current system of corporate taxation with one that more closely resembles the approach taken by many other developed nations. The government would impose a 20 percent tax on corporate income earned in the United States, which would have the effect of taxing imports while exempting exports. The approach, known as border adjustment, creates the appearance of taxing trade deficits. The goods that the United States imported from Mexico in 2015 were worth about $60 billion more than the goods it exported to Mexico, so federal revenue in the short term would increase by roughly $12 billion. But the House plan would offset that revenue by reducing the 35 percent corporate income tax rate, and would thus generate no new federal revenue over all. It was unclear how that fit with Mr. Spicer’s repeated contention Thursday afternoon that revenue from the tax adjustment would help finance construction of the border wall. By siphoning off that revenue, Mr. Trump would make it impossible to reduce the tax rate as far as Republicans wish. He is pressing for a 15 percent corporate tax rate. Moreover, the tax would not be paid by Mexico. It would be paid by companies selling Mexican goods in the United States. Some might raise prices, imposing the cost on consumers, while others might be forced by competitive pressures to absorb the tax, reducing their profits. Many economists also doubt that the change would end up penalizing imports or encouraging exports. They predict that the value of the dollar would rise, offsetting those effects. Nonetheless, many businesses in industries such as retail and energy, which rely heavily on imports, were in a panic. Representative Kevin Brady, the Texas Republican who wrote the plan, told Fox News on Thursday afternoon that he was pleased that Mr. Trump appeared to be on board with it after his appearance in Philadelphia. “What I heard today from this president was that in tax reform, that they would level the playing field for imports around the world and level it with the U. S. products here in America at the exact same rate,” Mr. Brady said. | 0fake |
LOL! LEFTIST RAG PUBLISHES Story About How President Trump Will Use Racist #HurricaneHarvey To Harm Blacks | You just can t make this stuff up The leftist rag, Daily Kos actually wrote a story about how President Trump will disproportionately harm blacks after Hurricane Harvey attacks them in Texas.Here is the actual tweet pushing their insane story about a racist Hurricane Harvey:Hurricane Harvey poised to disproportionately impact blacks in Texas, but no one is talking about it https://t.co/A6JrT6CYUp Daily Kos (@dailykos) August 25, 2017Here s an excerpt from the article:As Texas braces itself for Hurricane Harvey, the Trump administration remains woefully ignorant and unprepared. The current FEMA director is working to rewrite the Federal Flood Insurance Program so that the federal government bears less of the cost when disasters strike and flooding occurs. On the surface, that might sound like a fiscally responsible move. But it s loaded with inconsistencies and will most certainly not work out well for local cities, states or residents. Additionally, since Trump seems to be firing people weekly but taking his sweet time in hiring them, no one has been appointed to lead both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS oversees FEMA and the Coast Guard so it s almost guaranteed that the response to this storm will be chaos. This is shaping up to be another Hurricane Katrina complete with a devastating impact on black and brown communities.Southeast Texas and the coastal bend regions of the state are expected to be the hardest hit. While Hispanics make up about 40 percent of the state s population, Texas has one of the largest black populations in the country. And they live concentrated in the areas that are predicted to be hardest hit. For example, several counties have already been declared a state of disaster by Republican Gov. Greg AbbottNoteworthy also is the high percentage of people in poverty [in Texas] who are African American women, especially single parents. Of the 24% of African Americans below poverty level, single mothers make up 65%. Daily Kos | 1real |
Trump's Washington hotel a conflict of interest: Democratic lawmakers | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump must divest his luxury Washington hotel in a building leased from the federal government because the arrangement violates conflict-of-interest rules, congressional Democrats said on Wednesday. The General Services Administration, which manages property owned by the federal government, including the Old Post Office housing the Trump International Hotel, has said the lease would violate federal conflict-of-interest rules once the Republican businessman is sworn in on Jan. 20, according to a letter to the agency from lawmakers. The letter referred to a Dec. 8 briefing to congressional staffers by a GSA official whom the letter did not name. “The Deputy Commissioner made clear that Mr. Trump must divest himself not only of managerial control, but of all ownership interest as well,” Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland and three other Democrats said in the letter, which was made public on Wednesday. The hotel is a few blocks from the White House and has become a rallying point for anti-Trump protesters since it opened in September. It is among businesses that could create unprecedented conflicts of interest for Trump, a New York real estate developer and former reality TV star. Trump’s company has not responded to the GSA’s concerns about the potential conflict, the Democratic lawmakers said. They asked the agency for documents about the lease, profit and expense projections and legal memos about the conflict of interest. The hotel lease includes a standard GSA provision barring members of Congress or other elected federal officials - such as the president - from having any part of it. Trump has said he will draw up documents that will remove him from day-to-day business operations. He had planned a Thursday news conference to disclose details, but put that announcement off until next month. Trump will address the hotel issue in January, spokesman Jason Miller told reporters. In response to the Democrats’ letter, the GSA said in a statement it could not speak definitively about divestment until Trump’s financial arrangements were completed and he had become president. The agency added, “To do so now would be premature.” Later on Wednesday, Cummings said Democrats still stood “100 percent behind” the letter, saying GSA informed their staff of the lease issue. Federal law does not prohibit the president’s involvement in private business while in office, even though lawmakers and executive branch officials are subject to conflict-of-interest rules. But most presidents in recent decades have placed their personal assets in blind trusts so they do not know how their decisions influence their personal fortunes. Trump has said he plans to avoid the conflict issue by transferring control of his businesses to his oldest three children. But the U.S. Office of Government Ethics said in a letter to Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware on Monday that such a transfer would not qualify legally as a blind trust nor eliminate conflicts of interest. | 0fake |
BREAKING! NYPD Ready To Make Arrests In Weiner Case…Hillary Visited Pedophile Island At Least 6 Times…Money Laundering, Underage Sex, Pay-for-Play,Proof of Inappropriate Handling Classified Information » 100percentfedUp.com | BREAKING! NYPD Ready To Make Arrests In Weiner Case…Hillary Visited Pedophile Island At Least 6 Times…Money Laundering, Underage Sex, Pay-for-Play,Proof of Inappropriate Handling Classified Information Blackwater USA Founder, Retired Navy Seal Erik Prince
Prince claimed he had insider knowledge of the investigation that could help explain why FBI Director James Comey had to announce he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server last week.
“Because of Weinergate and the sexting scandal, the NYPD started investigating it. Through a subpoena, through a warrant, they searched his laptop, and sure enough, found those 650,000 emails. They found way more stuff than just more information pertaining to the inappropriate sexting the guy was doing,” Prince claimed.
“They found State Department emails. They found a lot of other really damning criminal information, including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than 20 times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times,” he said.
“The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI, and they said, ‘We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments,’” Prince explained.
“I believe – I know, and this is from a very well-placed source of mine at 1PP, One Police Plaza in New York – the NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making in this investigation, and they’ve gotten huge pushback, to the point of coercion, from the Justice Department, with the Justice Department threatening to charge someone that had been unrelated in the accidental heart attack death of Eric Garner almost two years ago. That’s the level of pushback the Obama Justice Department is doing against actually seeking justice in the email and other related criminal matters,” Prince said.
“There’s five different parts of the FBI conducting investigations into these things, with constant downdrafts from the Obama Justice Department. So in the, I hope, unlikely and very unfortunate event that Hillary Clinton is elected president, we will have a constitutional crisis that we have not seen since, I believe, 1860,” Prince declared.
Marlow asked Prince to clarify these revelations.
“NYPD was the first one to look at that laptop,” Prince elaborated. “Weiner and Huma Abedin, his wife – the closest adviser of Hillary Clinton for 20 years – have both flipped. They are cooperating with the government. They both have – they see potential jail time of many years for their crimes, for Huma Abedin sending and receiving and even storing hundreds of thousands of messages from the State Department server and from Hillary Clinton’s own homebrew server, which contained classified information. Weiner faces all kinds of exposure for the inappropriate sexting that was going on and for other information that they found.”
“So NYPD first gets that computer. They see how disgusting it is. They keep a copy of everything, and they pass a copy on to the FBI, which finally pushes the FBI off their chairs, making Comey reopen that investigation, which was indicated in the letter last week. The point being, NYPD has all the information, and they will pursue justice within their rights if the FBI doesn’t,” Prince contended.
“There is all kinds of criminal culpability through all the emails they’ve seen of that 650,000, including money laundering, underage sex, pay-for-play, and, of course, plenty of proof of inappropriate handling, sending/receiving of classified information, up to SAP level Special Access Programs,” he stated.
“So the plot thickens. NYPD was pushing because, as an article quoted one of the chiefs – that’s the level just below commissioner – he said as a parent, as a father with daughters, he could not let that level of evil continue,” Prince said.
He noted that the FBI can investigate these matters, “but they can’t convene a grand jury. They can’t file charges.”
“The prosecutors, the Justice Department has to do that,” he explained. “Now, as I understand it, Preet Bharara, the Manhattan prosecutor, has gotten ahold of some of this. From what I hear, he’s a stand-up guy, and hopefully he does the right thing.”
Marlow agreed that Bharara’s “sterling reputation” as a determined prosecutor was “bad news for the Clintons.”
Prince agreed, but said, “If people are willing to bend or break the law and don’t really care about the Constitution or due process – if you’re willing to use Stalinist tactics against someone – who knows what level of pressure” could be brought to bear against even the most tenacious law enforcement officials?
Listen to interview here:
“The point being, fortunately, it’s not just the FBI; [there are] five different offices that are in the hunt for justice, but the NYPD has it as well,” Prince said, citing the Wall Street Journal reporting that has “exposed downdraft, back pressure from the Justice Department” against both the FBI and NYPD, in an effort to “keep the sunlight and the disinfecting effects of the truth and transparency from shining on this great evil that has gone on, and is slowly being exposed.”
“The Justice Department is trying to run out the clock, to elect Hillary Clinton, to prevent any real justice from being done,” he warned.
As for the mayor of New York City, Prince said he has heard that “de Blasio wants to stay away from this.”
“The evidence is so bad, the email content is so bad, that I think even he wants to stay away from it, which is really telling,” he said.
For entire story: Breitbart News 14.7K shares | 1real |
Twitter Rips The Huffington Post To Shreds Over This Photo Of Their Staff (TWEETS) | Liz Heron, executive editor at The Huffington Post, tweeted out a photo from their editorial meeting on May 20, and it has Twitter in an absolute uproar. Can you see why?Notice anything about this @HuffingtonPost editors meeting? ?????? pic.twitter.com/7sg4SyraPa Liz Heron (@lheron) May 20, 2016The emoji she s got on there clearly show that she s touting girl power with this photo, but there is, in fact, a major problem with it that brought Twitter s wrath down upon her, and The Huffington Post itself. It s diversity, or a lack thereof. Where s the racial diversity?The editorial staff is primarily white, like most executive staffs at most companies, and Twitter was kind enough to point that out, along with a couple of other problems: An Ed table full of white women, and @HuffingtonPost s 2016 readership is in the toilet. Shocker https://t.co/mJ830qbtmG Joe Knight (@MoneyJKnight) May 22, 2016.@lheron it seems that the @HuffingtonPost has a few kinks left in the cloning process? MennoKnight (@Menn0knight) May 22, 2016 .@lheron @HuffingtonPost I m a suburban Harvard-educated white guy named White and that room makes me look like Shaft Popehat (@Popehat) May 21, 2016Even Adam Baldwin weighed in on the diversity problem: @seanmdav @lheron @jtLOL pic.twitter.com/p4dAX9gz5u Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) May 21, 2016@bunkerwsmith @Cernovich @lheron @Soylentopia @HuffingtonPost found the token asian minorities pic.twitter.com/o16XQ9HiuX peppercats (@_peppercats) May 22, 2016 @lheron @HuffingtonPost White Power! Soz I meant girl power! pic.twitter.com/F8uuriczSq O.E.P. (@PyramidPorts) May 22, 2016@lheron @HuffingtonPost The fact that you don t notice what apparently half of the people in the world do says a lot about your POV. All Bass, No Treble (@tiffmc1013) May 22, 2016This next one is needling HuffPo over the fact that it loves painting itself as the liberal answer to conservative media. However, it behaves like a typical, profit-mongering corporation that would support conservative business policies to enhance its bottom line, and engages in questionable practices to that same end, like having thousands of writers work for free.@lheron@HuffingtonPost What I notice is that nobody there is more than 3 years out of college. Ignorant, but cheap as dirt to hire. Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) May 20, 2016In going through these tweets, one will see some predictably sexist tweets about how it s just as sexist for a company to have an entirely female leadership staff as it is for them to have an entirely male leadership staff. That s male privilege talking, though we still live in a man s world here. Women have it much harder in the workplace, including climbing that vaunted corporate ladder, than men do.An all-female editorial team in a man s world is great. However, for a supposedly liberal outlet, whatever attempts they re making at racial diversity suck. We have to wonder whether their HR department screens out resumes of people with black sounding names like many other HR departments do. We also have to wonder whether they consider black people to automatically be less qualified, like many other companies seem to.Perhaps they re afraid they ll lose readers if their readers know they have black people on their editorial staff.Yes, companies should absolutely put the people they believe to be the best qualified in open positions. Oftentimes, however, black candidates are judged more harshly than other candidates, especially white candidates, due to racial biases in a variety of areas. HuffPo, this is extremely disappointing.Image via screen capture from embedded tweet by Liz Heron | 1real |
Are you taking your iodine? | Wed, 26 Oct 2016 08:04 UTC © periodictable.com Are you taking your iodine? Everyone should be supplementing with iodine but if you live on the west coast of the United States, Canada or Mexico you better be taking your iodine and your children should be taking their iodine because: Thanks to the environmental disaster that was Fukushima and the incredibly long half-life of iodine-129, the Pacific coast may never be the same again. It will take about 16 million years for the contamination from the tremendous nuclear accident to dissipate . While a vast array of radioactive isotopes were released into the environment during the Fukushima meltdown, iodine-129 is a particularly concerning material, due to its incredibly long half-life. This means that basically any food that comes from the North American western coast will likely be contaminated with radiation for innumerable generations to come. Radiation in the oceans will inevitably enter our water supply, and consequently our food supply as well. According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), iodine from the ocean enters the air as sea spray or iodine gas. Once in the air, iodine can then combine with water particles and enter surface water and soil once the particles fall to ground. Iodine can remain in the soil for extremely long periods of time, because it can combine with organic material easily. Plants and vegetation that grow in this soil also have the potential to absorb the iodine. Iodine could potentially improve your health People who have low iodine levels are more likely to get thyroid cancer than those who do not. Low iodine levels also cause goiter (an enlarged thyroid) and this increases the chance of developing thyroid cancer. When faced with a radioactive cloud, as is everyone in the northern hemisphere thanks to Fukushima, it is absolutely imperative that we take iodine, whatever iodine you can get your hands on. If the only iodine available is topical iodine that is not suitable for oral use then you should paint your body and your children's bodies with it. Dr. Brownstein writes, "If there is enough inorganic, non-radioactive iodine in our bodies, the radioactive fallout has nowhere to bind in our bodies. It will pass through us, leaving our bodies unharmed. It is important to ensure that we have adequate iodine levels before this fallout hits." Dr. Michael B. Schachter says, "The treatment dose when a person is iodine insufficient is generally between 12.5 mg and 50 mg daily. Preliminary research indicates that if a person is iodine insufficient, it takes about three months to become iodine sufficient while ingesting a dosage of 50 mg of iodine daily and a year to achieve that while ingesting a dosage of 12.5 mg of iodine daily. Women with a history of low iodine levels (hypothyroidism) face a significantly higher risk of developing liver cancer. Researchers led by Manal Hassan of Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas concluded that this finding suggested a clinical association between hypothyroidism and hepatitis C, which is contributing to the country's rising rate of liver cancer. "At 6 grams daily (which is 6 million micrograms/day or 6,000 milligrams/day!), a much higher dose, iodine has been used to cure syphilis, skin lesions, and chronic lung disease ," says Dr. Gabriel Cousens . "From a larger physiological perspective, it is important to realize that the thyroid is only one gland of many glands and tissues that needs iodine. Other glands/organs/systems with high iodine uptake are the breasts, ovaries, cervix, blood, lymph, bones, gastric mucosal, salivary, adrenal, prostate, colon, thymus, lungs, bladder, kidney, and skin. Iodine is found and used in every hormonal receptor in the body," he states. No one recommends that much iodine today but it is good to understand iodine so one is not afraid to take as much as one needs. Iodine prevents cancer especially in the breasts, ovaries and prostate gland. It is also extremely important in the age of antibiotic resistant infections for it kills viruses, bacteria and fungi. Breast tissue contains the body's third highest concentrations of this essential mineral, so shortfalls in iodine needs have a highly negative impact on breast tissue. Iodine shortfalls coupled with bromine and other toxic halogens cause fibrocystic breast disease and breast cancer . It is unbelievable that doctors nor the government recommends enough iodine to protect people from the harm that comes from not taking iodine. Makes me believe that most doctors have no idea how to practice medicine—not real medicine that helps more than it hurts. The iodine in salt is enough only to prevent goiter but nothing else. Comment: For more information on the benefits of iodine and how to take it, read: | 1real |
Is Trump Mentally Fit? ‘Sure,’ Gingrich Says - The New York Times | Does Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker and hopeful, think Donald J. Trump has the mental fitness to be president of the United States? His answer in an interview on Monday was not very convincing. “Yeah, and my answer would be, sure,” Mr. Gingrich said, after a sigh and a pause, in an interview for the first episode of “The ” a new politics podcast from The New York Times that was published on Tuesday. The former speaker declined to give a more emphatic endorsement of Mr. Trump’s psychological sturdiness when the interviewer, Michael Barbaro, asked if he could “be more forceful than ‘sure.’ ” Instead, Mr. Gingrich said he believed Mr. Trump was “at least as reliable as Andrew Jackson” and praised him for possessing “a personality which will by definition not be normal. ” Here is a transcript of the exchange: (Andrew Jackson was last in the news when the Treasury Department decided in April that the former president, a slaveholder known today for both his persecution of Native Americans and advocacy for poor whites, would share the $20 bill with the former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman.) Questions have mounted among both Democrats and Republicans about whether Mr. Trump possesses the mental fitness and strength of character to serve as president, and his poll numbers have fallen as a result. Mr. Gingrich acknowledged Mr. Trump’s trouble in his interview with “The . ” “The last two weeks have been peculiarly bad for Trump,” he said. Mr. Trump has appeared to inflict much of that damage upon himself, including by engaging in a feud with the parents of a fallen United States soldier who criticized him at the Democratic National Convention, confounding many of his supporters. As his numbers have fallen and his troubles have grown, some Republican officials have begun to publicly reject his candidacy. On Monday Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said she would not vote for Mr. Trump, citing his “constant stream of cruel comments and his inability to admit error or apologize” to those he has attacked. Earlier that day, 50 national security officials who served in Republican administrations signed an open letter warning that he “would put at risk our country’s national security and ” if he won the election. | 0fake |
European politicians wary on Republican convention over Trump | BERLIN (Reuters) - Britain’s Nigel Farage will be at the Republican convention in Cleveland next week to dole out lessons from his Brexit campaign. So will Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, who sees Donald Trump as an ally in his crusade to prevent an “Islamization” of the West. But some mainstream European conservatives who have traveled to previous Republican gatherings admit in private to being horrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency and are boycotting this year’s spectacle, which runs from July 18-21. Many of the center-right politicians making the trip from Europe admit to secretly rooting for Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. They are going not to support Trump, they say, but to witness “the Donald” in the flesh and experience what is shaping up to be one of the rowdiest, most unpredictable Republican conventions in decades. “We will see whether Trump can reinvent himself at the convention,” Guenter Krings, a senior lawmaker from German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives who will make the trip with just one other Bundestag colleague, told Reuters. “One can only hope so, but I have my doubts.” Politicians from around the world are invited every four years to attend the Republican and Democratic conventions as part of a formal visitors program that includes briefings with campaign managers, pollsters and foreign policy experts. They also spend time in the main convention hall. This year, nearly 120 politicians from center-right parties outside the United States are expected, roughly half of them from Europe. Trump’s candidacy has presented European parties with traditional links to U.S. Republicans with a dilemma. Many view his positions — on issues like immigration, security, trade and the divisive Brexit question — as closer to those of upstart far-right parties whose rise they are struggling to contain. Four years ago, when Mitt Romney was the Republican candidate, the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), the largest grouping in the European Parliament, sent a delegation of eight members to Tampa. This year there will be no EPP delegation because no-one from the group expressed an interest in attending. Despite the wariness, there is a reluctance to criticize the famously thin-skinned Trump too openly, in part out of fear he could win the election in November and punish his foreign critics, as he threatened to do when David Cameron, the recently departed British prime minister, slammed Trump’s proposal for a temporary U.S. ban on Muslims as “divisive, stupid and wrong”. While the conservative mainstream is leery, Europe’s array of nationalist, anti-immigration parties seem fascinated by Trump, even if some are uneasy about embracing the New York real estate businessman, who has vowed to “make America great again”. A spokesman for Britain’s UKIP party in Brussels confirmed that Farage would attend to “give them some lessons” on Brexit. And Wilders told Reuters that he would be in Cleveland and wanted to meet Trump there. “I hope Donald Trump becomes America’s next president,” Wilders said. “Such a victory would be good for Europe. America and Europe are threatened by the same danger of cultural relativism and Islam.” Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, France’s National Front and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) are not planning to send anyone to Cleveland, the parties said. “We are neutral,” Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache told Reuters when asked if he supported Trump. “He defends American interests. He is saying some things that need to be said.”Also absent will be Italy’s Northern League, whose leader Matteo Salvini describes himself as an enthusiastic Trump fan but learned earlier this year that the admiration was not necessarily mutual. Salvini traveled to Pennsylvania in April to attend a Trump rally. He was photographed shaking hands with the Republican candidate and his party said Trump had endorsed Salvini to become Italian prime minister. But a month later, Trump denied in an interview ever having met Salvini and said he had no interest in doing so. Eirik Moen of the International Democrat Union, which coordinates trips to the convention by center-right politicians across the world, said that numbers could be dented this year because countries like Britain, Spain and Australia are in the midst of political transitions, making it difficult for some to travel. Still, eight British Conservatives who sit in the European Parliament are expected to be in Cleveland. On the continent, France’s main center-right party, les Republicains, is not sending a delegation. And the contingent from Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) is unusually small. In Germany, political debate is conducted in a sober, reserved manner and personal attacks are rare, even during election campaigns. Hence the mix of shock and horror at the tone of the U.S. race. Trump has dismissed Merkel as “insane” for letting hundreds of thousands of refugees into the country. And his idea to build a wall along the Mexican border elicits shudders in Berlin, a city that was divided by its own wall for nearly three decades and will celebrate the 27th anniversary of its fall a day after U.S. voters cast their ballots on Nov. 8. “Many of Donald Trump’s positions — for example his stance toward Muslims, toward immigration from Mexico and gun ownership — are simply not compatible with the positions of the conservatives and other parties in Germany,” said Juergen Hardt, a CDU lawmaker who also acts as the government’s coordinator for transatlantic relations. Hardt said he is planning to go on vacation with his family next week and won’t be able to attend the convention. | 0fake |
Suicide attack on Kabul Shi'ite mosque kills at least 30 | KABUL (Reuters) - A suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to a Shi ite Muslim mosque in Kabul as other attackers stormed the building, killing at least 30 people including worshippers gathering for Friday prayers, officials said. Islamic State, which has launched several attacks against minority Shi ite targets in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility, the jihadist group s news agency said. The assault sparked chaos as worshippers fled and others frantically searched for missing family members. The attackers are slaughtering people like sheep but there s no one to go and rescue them, said Murtaza, a young boy whose parents were trapped inside as the attack unfolded. A lot of people are on the ground and no one is trying to rescue them. By Friday evening police said they had secured the mosque in the Khair Khana area of the capital, and all three attackers were dead. Witnesses said they had thrown grenades, and police officials said a suicide bomber detonated himself at the gate. A second suicide bomber detonated among a group of women in the mosque, an official said. Security sources put the overall toll at 30 people killed and dozens wounded. At least 10 civilians were killed, including women and children, while another 30 were wounded, Ministry of Interior spokesman Najib Danish said earlier in the day. At least three policemen were also killed and eight wounded, he said. Police said they rescued more than 100 worshippers. At least 15 of the wounded were taken to city hospitals, said Ismail Kawosi, a spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health. One witness, Sayed Pacha, said four attackers had entered the mosque. At first a suicide bomber opened fire and martyred two security guards at the entrance of the mosque and then they entered inside, he told Reuters. Human rights activists condemned the attack, the latest in a campaign of sectarian violence. Insurgents who carry out atrocities against a specific ethnic or religious community are committing war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity, Patricia Gossman, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. | 0fake |
Gardasil is a Decision We Will Always Regret | . Gardasil is a Decision We Will Always Regret Reading about the young lives that have effectively been destroyed by Gardasil tears my soul; not on... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/gardasil-is-decision-we-will-always.html Reading about the young lives that have effectively been destroyed by Gardasil tears my soul; not only for these young women, but for their parents, their friends and for the millions of families around the globe that may yet be hoodwinked into thinking they are protecting their daughter — or son. Sharyl Attkisson, the former CBS reporter who became an independent truth investigator and author, filed this report back in 2008. In 2006, the National Vaccine Information Center railed against Merck’s insistence that Gardasil was just fine to inject into preteens. President Barbara Loe Fisher was livid when she wrote: "Merck’s pre and post-licensure marketing strategy has positioned mass use of this vaccine by pre-teens as a morality play in order to avoid talking about the flawed science they used to get it licensed." But nothing stopped the train. And the shots, and the serious injuries, including death, kept mounting. Natural News reported the tremendous grief of Katy Robinson’s parents, after this vibrant child took the Gardasil shot in 2010 at the tender age of 11. “Katie’s list of symptoms included the following: 24/7 headaches and migraines, 24/7 stabbing ear pain, hyperacusis, fatigue, abdominal pain, nausea, all over joint pain, constant sore throat, visual disturbances, light sensitivity, cognitive issues such as memory and severe comprehension problems, random numbness and tingling, weird “bug crawling” skin sensations, generalized weakness throughout her body (it was difficult for Katie to just sit in the shower to bathe), dizziness, fainting and heart palpitations. “She slept long hours and stayed in her bedroom shielding herself from the noise of everyday living... She was also highly positive for Mycoplasma Pneumonia... Katie even had the classic Bartonella rash (looks like purple and red stretch marks) surrounding her breasts and hips which is confirmation of an active Bartonella infection... [a] diagnostic center diagnosed Katie with the beginning stages of Dysautonomia (a malfunctioning automatic nervous system). We were told that there was no cure and that symptoms were managed with medications...” Thousands of dollars and hours later, the parents discovered that the Gardasil Vaccine can “activate a latent Bartonella infection that was otherwise being suppressed by a properly functioning immune system.” They finally knew that it was Gardasil injections that nearly destroyed their daughter and still do not know if she will ever return to normal. They live with regret. Finally, a little too late, the American College of Pediatricians is now warning parents about Gardasil. But what they are warning about is an entirely new subset of difficulties. The Holistic Works reports: “Gardasil vaccines could be ‘associated with the very rare but serious condition of premature ovarian failure (POF),’ says the America College of Pediatricians (ACP)... “[L]ong-term ovarian function was not assessed in either the original rat safety studies or in the human vaccine trials,” explains the ACP. “Even more, because doctors are so aggressively propagandized by the cash-rich vaccine industry, they don’t even realize that HPV vaccines can cause ovarian failure.” Toxic ingredients in Gardasil and all vaccines are already known to cause harm. From The Holistic Works also stated: “The ACP explained that ‘potential mechanisms of action have been postulated based on autoimmune associations with the aluminum adjuvant used and previously documented ovarian toxicity in rats from another component, polysorbate 80.’ “In other words, the science already knows about the mechanisms of potential harm caused by these ingredients. “It’s not a mystery, and it’s not even debatable that injecting children with aluminum, mercury, MSG, formaldehyde and polysorbate 80 will inevitably cause severe damage in some of those children.” By D. Samuelson | 1real |
Chris Christie Says Only Stupid Judges Will Work For Low Wages; Teachers Can Still Suck It (VIDEO) | On New Jersey 101.5, Chris Christie made the argument for raising wages for judges and government employees, but he still presumably thinks minimum wage workers and teachers are the exceptions.Christie lost a bid to get a raise for judges, who currently make $140,000 a year in New Jersey. According to Christie, $140k makes for stupid judges. The idea somehow that judges are overpaid is ridiculous, Christie said.Christie said starting salaries for lawyers in the New Jersey area is $195,000 for a first-year associate. You don t want judges out there, lawyers becomes judges who think that getting $140,000 a year is a raise, Christie said. If you can t make $140,000 as a lawyer with the experience to actually be on the bench, you re not that good a lawyer. You want to appear before stupid judges? Then don t raise their pay anymore. Because the people you will get in the main applying for these jobs will be people who see it as a step up in pay for them, said Christie.Here s the video:Christie was referring to a defeated bill that would have allowed him and other government officials, including judges, to make money off of book deals. The bill would have also given a big raise to Christie s cabinet members, state and local judges and legislative aides.The bill would also have done some real damage to newspapers in New Jersey, which is currently the only place to find official legal notices. Christie s bill would have made the notices available online, and in a time when journalism is under assault, newspapers can t afford the hit that would cause in readership.But, let s just for a moment assume that Christie is right, and that it takes money to attract the best and the brightest. Well, he certainly doesn t seem to have that attitude when it comes to teachers or to the people who serve his copious amounts of food.Christie has long been engaged in a war against teachers. He even once threatened to punch teachers in the face. In New Jersey, teachers average less than half what Christie s judges make, and Christie fights tooth and nail to keep their pay low. Shouldn t we aim for smart teachers, as well?Christie has long been against raising the minimum wage in New Jersey, which has the fourth most expensive cost of living in the nation. It s even ahead of California. Still, the minimum wage for New Jersey is just $8.25. Christie vetoed a bill that would have raised the minimum wage.Featured image via Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images. | 1real |
Bob Dylan Secretly Longs For Teen Choice Award | Dylan Might Have Gone Electric, But That Doesn't Cut It With Today's Teens.
New York, NY - After being announced as the winner of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize for groovy songs, sources close to legendary songwriter, Bob Dylan, say that all he really wants is a surfboard trophy from the Teen Choice Awards.
"Mr. Dylan couldn't care less about the Nobel Peace Prize," told a music industry rep, who is close with the singer. "That's why he hasn't said anything about it. He'll probably just use the million dollars that comes with the medal to wipe his ass with. What he really wants, is to join the elite ranks of musicology, and take his place along side band's like New Kids and Wrong Direction."
But the teens we talked to on the streets of New York say that it's very unlikely that one of America's most beloved icons will ever achieve his lofty goals. His music, somehow, just doesn't resonate with them, the way it did for their great-grandparents. "The answer isn't blowing in the wind anymore, Bob," snorted fourteen-year-old, Jackson Drake, while repeatedly trying to land an annoying skateboard flip. "You can just Google any answer you want now. Somebody should tell him that. Oh, and a man playing the tambourine... that's totally gay. Nobody wants to hear a song about that, either. Write a song about exploding hover-boards, or getting zonked on bath-salts, then you've got something!" explained our youth, who surmised that a man would have to walk down about 30 roads... before you can call him a man.
Editor's Note: After Jackson skated away, we did Google the answer, and found out that the actual number was 43. So there you go Bob Dylan. Make Paul Blake's | 1real |
Congress: Hillary Will Be Impeached If She Becomes President | Members of Congress have said that if Hillary Clinton is elected President next week they will start proceedings to have her impeached.
Via YourNewsWire
As Hillary Clinton’s campaign implodes amid the FBI actively pursuing five separate probes, including one into claims that the Clinton Foundation is connected to a Washington pedophile ring, there is still a possibility that Democrats will stubbornly vote her in on Tuesday.
Yesterday during an interview on Fox News, Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul explained the process. “If the investigation goes forward and it looks like an indictment is pending, at that point in time under the Constitution, the House of Representatives would engage in an impeachment trial.
It would go to the Senate and impeachment proceedings and removal would take place,” McCaul told Fox News’ Bill Hemmer. “I would hate to see this country thrown into a constitutional crisis because of Hillary Clinton’s behavior.”
This again brings up the prospect of whether President Obama will pardon Clinton before she takes her oath of office. Meanwhile, the Oversight Committee is already bracing for years of investigationsshould Clinton move into the Oval Office.
| 1real |
Cowardly Paul Ryan Locks Constituents Out Of Their Own Capitol Instead Of Listening To Them (DETAILS) | House Speaker Paul Ryan is a snake, a hypocrite, and a weasel. He is also an incredible coward. Part of being a public servant is listening to the people. However, that is definitely not a value that Speaker Ryan shares. On Friday, Planned Parenthood advocates showed up at his Capitol Hill offices, only to be greeted with guards at every turn. It seemed that Ryan and his cronies were expecting the people to show up, sporting their pink I Stand With Planned Parenthood shirts, with boxes and boxes of petitions in tow, signed by tens of thousands of Americans who are demanding answers to Ryan s plans to take away healthcare from millions of American women.When the advocates were blocked by Capitol Hill police, finally a staffer had to escort them to Ryan s office. When they got there, the door was locked and heavily guarded. There was a sign that read, Please knock, only scheduled appointments will be admitted. Since this was Ryan s regular office and not the one reserved for the Speaker of the House whomever that may be at any given time there is no way to know if Ryan himself was there. However, it is reasonable to assume that people were in there, oh, you know working, during the day on a Friday.Finally, after being turned away from Ryan s office, the advocates were allowed into the office of Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), who fully backs what they were doing. People in that office listened to what they had to say, and they were able to leave their petitions there, and Speaker Ryan will be getting a large delivery later. Here are the photos of the advocates waiting patiently outside Ryan s office:.@SpeakerRyan's office sent 6 security guards to block delivery of 87K #IStandWithPP petitions telling Ryan not to defund Planned Parenthood pic.twitter.com/56QHwhjR2q Planned Parenthood (@PPact) January 6, 2017.@SpeakerRyan's office is appointments-only & conveniently closed now right when we came by to drop off thousands of #IStandWithPP petitions pic.twitter.com/wCqOjzZION Planned Parenthood (@PPact) January 6, 2017.@SpeakerRyan wouldn't listen to the thousands of people who say #IStandWithPP but #reprohealth champ @RepGwenMoore opened her doors to us! pic.twitter.com/seHrZJoxZw Planned Parenthood (@PPact) January 6, 2017Eric Carthart, who works with Planned Parenthood Action Fund, says of what Ryan did: Paul Ryan may have locked his doors, but he can t drown out our voices, said Eric Carhart of Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Millions of women, men and young people, nearly half of whom are people of color, rely on Planned Parenthood for reproductive health care, including nearly 60,000 in Wisconsin. If Paul Ryan is going to take away our health care and the care of millions of people the least he can do is meet us face to face. Paul Ryan should be ashamed of himself. It s his JOB to listen to the taxpaying citizens who pay his salary. He works for us, not the other way around. We will keep fighting. We are not going away. His extreme, draconian, anti-woman agenda will not be tolerated in the United States of America in the year 2017.Featured image via Mark Wilson/Getty Images | 1real |
US support emboldens Israel to defy intl. law: Author | Interviews A Palestinian woman searches through her belongings after her family home was demolished by Israelis in the mostly Arab East Jerusalem al-Quds neighborhood of Beit Hanina on October 26, 2016. (AFP photo)
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has passed a second resolution to endorse the fact that Jerusalem al-Quds is a Muslim city and the so-called Temple Mount is an Islamic site called Haram al-Sharif. The UNESCO adopted the first resolution to reaffirm the right of the Palestinians to the al-Aqsa Mosque compound on October 18.
John Steppling, author and commentator, told Press TV that the Israeli authorities “have been getting away with the violations of international law for 50 years,” as a result of the US’ all-out support for their crimes.
“They (the Israeli authorities) pretty much do what they want because the United States protects them,” he added.
According to the author, “Israel doesn’t care what the UN says, what do they care [about is] that the United States gives them three billion dollars a year in military aid regardless of anything.”
The analyst also expressed concern about “what will happen once Hillary Clinton becomes president, as she has a very close relationship with Israel, [and] very close relationship with Netanyahu, and Israel may very well feel empowered to take even bolder steps in what has been frankly incremental genocide against Palestinians.”
The occupied territories have been the scene of increased tensions ever since Israeli forces imposed restrictions on the entry of Palestinian worshipers into the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in August 2015.
Over 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of last October. Loading ... | 1real |
SC Man Uses ‘Stand Your Ground’ Law As Reason For Bail After He ‘Slow Cooked’ Murder Victims | Stand your ground laws are reasons for legalized murder, literally, and here South Carolina has given you proof. This is no murky case a la Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin (though, to sane people, those weren t murky, either). But no one 39-year-old James Edward Loftis of Goose Creek, South Carolina, is using the state s Stand Your Ground law to literally get away with cold blooded, pre-meditated murder. It looks like it could work, too.Reports say that Loftis had called a cab to take him home from a strip club, but failed to pay the fare. That s when all hell broke loose. The cab driver, 46-year-old Guma Oz Dubar, along with his friend who was present at the time, 32-year-old Cody Newland, insisted that Loftis make good on the money they owed him for the cab ride. Loftis has provided many different details regarding what transpired next, but his story is the only ones the police have, as Newland and Dubar are dead, by Loftis hand. The only thing the defendant will confess to is shooting both victims before burning their bodies in graves he dug in his own yard to hide his crimes.Deputy Solicitor Bryan Alfaro said of Loftis s actions: They were essentially just slow-cooked inside the grave site. After that, Loftis s attorney decided to use the state s so-called stand your ground law to try to get the defendant off. The law says you can kill people invading your property. However, these people were not invading. They had picked this dude s drunk ass up from a strip club, and he didn t want to pay for the ride home. Doesn t sound like much of an invasion to me. This defense, however, got the judge to decide that Loftis is not a flight risk, and, despite his cold-blooded commission of a double murder, Loftis is now out on $250,ooo bail.Loftis s lawyer, Stephen Harris, continues his ludicrous defense, saying: He s a human being. He freaked out and thought he was going to prison, so he tried to hide the bodies. Nobody knows how you re going to react when you kill two people.Well, Mr. Harris, most folks would just pay the cab fare and go in, instead of stiffing the driver and then killing him and his friend. But I suppose that is irrelevant to you and your client, right? Two innocent people are dead over this insanity, and you re going to use South Carolina s insane gun laws to get your client off when he should clearly rot in prison for the rest of his life.I wish there were a Hell so you and Mr. Loftis could burn there. Condolences to the families of the victims your client murdered.Featured image via mugshot/screen capture via Raw Story | 1real |
Israel Says It Will Rein In ‘Footprint’ of West Bank Settlements - The New York Times | JERUSALEM — A day after approving the construction of a new settlement in the West Bank for the first time in more than 20 years, Israel announced a new, if ambiguous, settlement policy on Friday “out of consideration for the positions of President Trump” and, it said, to enable progress in the peace process with Palestinians. Israel said it was taking steps to “significantly rein in the footprint” of the settlements, allowing construction within all its existing settlements in the occupied West Bank but limiting, “wherever possible,” their expansion into new territory. How the new policy might translate on the ground was largely left open to interpretation. The Palestinians, like most of the rest of the world, oppose any Israeli construction in the occupied territories. Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinians’ chief negotiator, furiously rejected the Israeli settlement policy. “All Israeli settlements are illegal,’’ he said, “and we are not going to accept any formula that aims at legitimizing the presence of Israeli colonies on occupied Palestinian land. ” Mr. Trump has called for curbs in settlement construction as part of an ambitious push to revive talks to end the conflict. In an interview published in February in the Hebrew edition of Israel Hayom, a newspaper considered supportive of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Mr. Trump said he wanted Israel “to act reasonably,” after a series of Israeli moves to approve thousands of housing units for new settlers. “There is limited remaining territory,” Mr. Trump added. “Every time you take land for a settlement, less territory remains. ” Days later, during a meeting between the two leaders at the White House, Mr. Trump made a public request to hold off on settlements. But on Friday, the White House gave no signal that it was troubled by Israel’s latest settlement move. At a White House briefing on Friday, officials said they did not want to discuss the settlement question and did not anticipate that it would be a focal point of discussions over the next week. That was despite the fact that on Friday the administration was preparing for separate visits by President Abdel Fattah of Egypt and King Abdullah II of Jordan to the White House next week — both leaders of countries often affected by tensions between Palestinians and Israelis. While Mr. Sisi has not yet made Israeli policy toward the Palestinians a major concern, King Abdullah faces a more delicate domestic situation where assertive Israeli actions often generate protests. Worried about a public backlash, King Abdullah raced to Washington shortly after Mr. Trump took office to buttonhole the new president at a prayer breakfast and implore him not to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, as he had promised on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump has obliged and delayed any embassy move while he reconsiders the matter. Since then, Jerusalem and Washington have negotiated to try to reach an understanding on slowing or curbing settlement construction. During the Obama administration, Israel’s settlement activity was the source of constant friction. Secretary of State John Kerry harshly rebuked Israel in December while vigorously defending a United States decision to abstain from a United Nations vote condemning Israel on the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But Israel’s latest policy announcement was likely to have been coordinated with the White House. Since the February meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, American and Israeli officials have been working to reach a more formal understanding on slowing or curbing settlement construction. And there appears to be some understanding that Mr. Netanyahu would be allowed to fulfill his earlier promise to compensate 40 families evicted from the illegal hilltop outpost of Amona by building them a new community. Mr. Netanyahu has been walking a fine line between the new Trump administration, with which he wants to remain on good terms, and the right wing of his governing coalition, which has been pressuring him to increase construction and, in particular, to reject any freeze on building in certain areas. The ministers were silent on Friday. The Yesha Council, the umbrella body representing the roughly 400, 000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, expressed cautious optimism but, reflecting the ambiguity of the new policy, said it would be monitoring the Israeli government closely to see if new building plans came to fruition. Most of the world considers Israeli settlement activity in the territories captured from Jordan in 1967 to be a violation of international law. Israel considers the territories disputed and says the fate of the settlements must be decided in peace talks. Most informal peace plans have envisaged border adjustments that would allow Israel to retain some of the major settlement blocs, especially those close to the 1967 boundaries, under any permanent agreement with the Palestinians, in return for land swaps. The new policy announced on Friday made no explicit distinction between the blocs and the outlying settlements, in deference to the settlement advocates. It said that Israel would continue construction, where possible, within already developed areas of the settlements, and where that was not possible, would build adjacent to the last line of construction. In cases where legal, security or topographical constraints made those scenarios impossible, new construction would be kept as close as possible to the existing areas. The boundaries of jurisdiction of some of the settlements are expansive, extending well beyond the areas. The new policy seems aimed at preventing the construction of new neighborhoods far away from existing buildings, long a settler tactic aimed at controlling larger swaths of West Bank land. But the new Israeli formula left the government much room for maneuver. While it might limit the territorial expansion of the settlements, it could also encourage an increase in the settler population by, for example, filling in available spaces with construction and by building more homes closer to existing amenities. “When you build neighborhoods adjacent to the area it encourages people to come,” said Shaul Arieli, an Israeli expert on political geography who prepared maps for past negotiations with the Palestinians and supports a solution. “They become part of the settlement and have access to its services. ” More settlers outside the settlement blocs would clearly make any eventual Israeli evacuation more difficult. But Mr. Arieli said that for supporters of the solution there were also advantages in the new policy, especially if new construction was mostly concentrated within the blocs, making them denser rather than spreading over a larger geographical area. “The question,” he said, “is where they will build. ” Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that opposes and monitors settlement construction, said the definition of “inside a settlement” could be quite flexible in the eyes of the settlers and the Israeli government, with “settlers looking to exploit the loopholes” in order to expand. “It is this argument over lines,” the group said in a statement, “that has led past U. S. administrations into the trap of seemingly endless and irresolvable negotiations over how to decide what it means to build ‘inside’ settlements. ” Under the pretense of restraint, and while trying to fool the international community, it said, the “Israeli government has drafted a policy that will allow it to continue and expand settlements without any limitations. ” | 0fake |
Ted Cruz Gets OWNED By His Own Harvard Law Professor: Calls Cruz Clueless On Constitution (VIDEO) | Laurence Tribe, who was Ted Cruz s own Constitutional Law professor at Harvard, visited MSNBC s The Last Word, to discuss Cruz s total lack of understanding on, and general contempt for, the Constitution of the United States.Professor Tribe said point blank that Ted Cruz only cares about the Constitution when it benefits Ted Cruz, or if he can use it as a weapon to hurt other Americans. Otherwise, he could not care less if the Constitution says you have a right he doesn t want you to have.You really can t argue with Professor Tribe s assessment of Cruz on that. He couldn t be more correct.Professor Tribe spoke briefly to the recent birther attacks put forth against Cruz by fellow Republicans and Donald Trump. He said that these attacks brought into light the glaringly obvious example of how Ted Cruz simply chooses to interpret the Constitution in any way that is convenient for him at the time, with no regard to the actual law.What this does is give us a window into the character of Ted Cruz. The sort of person he is, with respect to the American Constitution. Whats intriguing it was true even when he was my student years ago he used to believe in originalism, that is the Constitution always means what it meant when it was adopted- Except when it s not convenient for him to mean that. This is a perfect example.If the Constitution always meant what he claims, namely that if you got an American mother it doesn t matter where in the world you re born, you become a natura born citizen at birth. Well then, why in the world did congress need to pass a law dealing with naturalization and immigration in 1934, saying from now on, although it wasn t true before, if you have a mother who s an American citizen, thats good enough? Source: MSNBCTribe s example seems innocent enough, but it speaks to a larger issue where Cruz simply doesn t care about constitutional law. Remember we were still torturing people as recently as 7 years ago, regardless of what the Constitution said. Professor Tribe continued on even further in criticizing him even further, saying the Cruz he taught constitutional law to at Harvard is nothing like the Cruz of today. He implied that it was like the Cruz of today never studied constitutional law at all. Tribe also touched on some of Cruz s other comments, where he said that the Supreme Court s word has no impact on the law of the land. Professor Tribe could only describe it as Scary. Watch Ted Cruz s former constitutional law professor completely destroy his presidential qualifications below:Featured image via video screen capture | 1real |
Iran’s Zarif to hold talks with Russia’s Lavrov on Syria in Moscow | Politics Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (Photo by AP)
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will pay an official one-day visit to Russia for talks on the Syrian crisis.
Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said on Wednesday that the top diplomat is due in Moscow on Friday.
He said that Zarif is scheduled to attend a trilateral meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem on regional developments, including the conflict in Syria.
According to Qassemi, Zarif will also hold a separate meeting with Lavrov to discuss Tehran-Moscow relations.
Meanwhile, Russia's RIA news agency, citing the Russian Foreign Ministry, reported that Zarif and Lavrov will also discuss the situation in Iraq.
Muallem's scheduled visit on Friday had earlier been announced by the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Iran and Russia have similar stances on the ongoing deadly crisis in Syria. Moscow and Tehran reject any foreign interference in the affairs of the war-hit country, stressing that only the Syrians are entitled to decide their own fate.
Iran has been providing military advisory assistance to the Syrian government in its campaign against terrorism.
Russia has also been carrying out airstrikes against terrorists' positions in Syria since September last year at the official request of the Damascus government.
Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. Over 400,000 people have so far been killed in the conflict, according to estimates by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura .
In neighboring Iraq, the Arab country’s army is also pressing ahead with a massive operation aimed at recapturing Mosul from Daesh Takfiri terrorists, who captured the strategic city in June 2014.
The army has been liberating more areas aroundMosul, with the Iraqi Joint Operations Command announcing that counter-terrorism units were only two kilometers away from the city. Loading ... | 1real |
WATCH: Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson Makes Debut On FOX News With Hilarious Commentary On Hillary And Bernie | You gotta love the socialist duck analogy | 1real |
Russia Looks to Exploit White House ‘Turbulence,’ Analysts Say - The New York Times | MOSCOW — The Kremlin, increasingly convinced that President Trump will not fundamentally change relations with Russia, is instead seeking to bolster its global influence by exploiting what it considers weakness in Washington, according to political advisers, diplomats, journalists and other analysts. Russia has continued to test the United States on the military front, with fighter jets flying close to an American warship in the Black Sea this month and a Russian naval vessel steaming conspicuously in the Atlantic off the coast of Delaware. “They think he is unstable, that he can be manipulated, that he is authoritarian and a person without a team,” Alexei A. Venediktov, the editor in chief of Echo of Moscow, a liberal radio station, said of President Trump. The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, has long sought to crack the liberal Western order, both as a competitor and as a champion of an alternative, illiberal model. To that end, he did what he could to buttress the electoral chances of Mr. Trump, who seemed like a kindred spirit with his harsh denunciations of NATO and the European Union, his endorsement of the British withdrawal from the European Union and his repeated shrugs over Russia’s destabilizing Ukraine. In this context, Mr. Trump’s election was an unexpected bonus, but the original giddiness has worn off, and Moscow has returned to its formula of creating turmoil and exploiting the resulting opportunities. “They are all telling each other that this is great, he created this turbulence inside, as we wanted, and now he is focused on his domestic problems and we have more freedom to maneuver,” Mr. Venediktov said. “Let them deal with their own problems. There, not in Ukraine. There, not in the Middle East. There, not in NATO. This is the state of mind right now. ” Sergei A. Markov, a leading analyst friendly to the Kremlin, made much the same point. “Right now the Kremlin is looking for ways that Russia can use the chaos in Washington to pursue its own interests,” said Mr. Markov, a member of the Civic Chamber, a Kremlin advisory group. “The main hope is that the U. S. will be preoccupied with itself and will stop pressuring Russia. ” Any turbulence that Russia foments also gives the Kremlin leverage that it can try to trade in the global arena at a time when it does not have much that others want. Mr. Venediktov compared the Russian position to an intrusive neighbor who promises to be helpful by avoiding noisy restoration activity at night even though it breaks the apartment building rules in the first place. Analysts say the Kremlin is aware that the tactic of creating and exploiting disarray can become in that prolonged instability could allow threats like the extremist group Islamic State to flourish. “It is important for Russia that America does its job in foreign policy,” said Alexey Chesnakov, a periodic Kremlin political adviser and the director of the Center for Current Politics, a trend analysis group in Moscow. “If there is nobody to do that job, it might not be good for us, either. ” The Middle East provides examples of both vectors, analysts say, a moment of chaos to exploit and concerns about achieving stability for the future. Moscow has begun courting Libya, where Mr. Putin seems to want to prove that the Obama administration and other Western powers made a mistake by working to force Col. Muammar from power in 2011. Russia invited various powerful figures to Moscow and sent the country’s lone aircraft carrier, the somewhat dilapidated Admiral Kuznetsov, on a port call to Libya on its way back from Syria last month. Khalifa Haftar, the military commander in eastern Libya, got a tour. The government invited veteran officials and analysts from around the Arab world this week to discuss the future of Libya and Yemen, among other topics. Syria, on the other hand, underscores the limits to Russian power. In the two months since government forces took back the city of Aleppo, there has been little movement in forging peace. Not least, Russia can ill afford the billions of dollars needed to rebuild the country. For that it needs Washington to help persuade its allies like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who all seek a political transition away from Syrian President Bashar . Like much of the world, nobody in Moscow can figure out who makes Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, never mind what it will be. Since the inauguration, it has become clear that Mr. Trump’s rosy view of Mr. Putin is not shared by the president’s top foreign policy advisers, with the possible exception of Stephen K. Bannon, his chief White House strategist. “We cannot understand how they will work in concert,” said Igor Yurgens, a Russian economist who is prominent in business and development. The Kremlin has adopted a attitude toward Mr. Trump, analysts said, expecting the first meeting with Mr. Putin in Europe sometime this summer to set the course for relations. Dmitry K. Kiselyov, the anchor of the main state propaganda program “News of the Week,” recently pronounced what seemed to be the new party line on the air. “Let’s not judge too harshly, things are still unsettled in the White House,” he said. “Still not a word from there. Only little words, and that doesn’t amount to a policy. ” Just how unsettled was underscored on Monday, when the White House announced plans to increase military spending by $54 billion, an amount just about equal to what Russia spends in total on its military annually. While the appearance of such turmoil in the White House has probably been surprising, even gratifying, to the Kremlin, analysts say Russia’s government is worried about having too much of a good thing. “It would be better for us to have a predictable partner,” Mr. Markov said. “An unpredictable one is dangerous. ” The perception of weakness calls into question here in Moscow whether Mr. Trump can ever live up to the many statements he made during the campaign about forging closer ties with Mr. Putin and Russia. “The overwhelming view of the Kremlin is that Trump is not very strong,” said Valeriy Solovey, a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. “He might have sympathy toward Russia, but he is contained within the political establishment. ” Russia’s far right regularly predicts Mr. Trump’s assassination at the hands of the American establishment, a view occasionally echoed on state television. Alexander Dugin, a nationalist Russian philosopher, called Mr. Trump’s inauguration the happiest day of his life because it signified the demise of the liberal international order. Mr. Dugin seemed most eager for Mr. Trump to get on with his promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington, although he worried about the consequences. “It can kill,” Mr. Dugin said in an interview. “It is not so easy to drain the swamp. ” Since the inauguration, however, enthusiasm for Mr. Trump in official Russia lurched from cool to uncool seemingly overnight. Dmitri S. Peskov, the presidential spokesman, denied that the new skepticism had been ordered from the top. The speed of the change was striking, however. Russia’s political class marvels at how much time it now spends chewing over the minutiae of the American political system. Some attribute that to the fact that domestic politics are comatose, with Mr. Putin assured of winning another term in 2018. “Nobody is talking about the Putin election,” said Mr. Chesnakov, the political consultant. “We are discussing relations between Congress and Trump. ” | 0fake |
Jane Pauley to Become Anchor of CBS Show ‘Sunday Morning’ - The New York Times | The veteran television personality Jane Pauley will replace Charles Osgood as the anchor of the highly rated CBS show “Sunday Morning. ” Mr. Osgood, who is retiring, announced the news on his last show on Sunday. Ms. Pauley’s first day in the role will be Oct. 9, and she will become only the third anchor of the show, which started in 1979. For Ms. Pauley, 65, a return to the anchor role for a morning television show represents an unexpected comeback. And by selecting her instead of a younger CBS is clearly trying to ease the transition from Mr. Osgood, 83, whose folksy delivery has been a mainstay on the show for more than two decades. In a statement, the president of CBS News, David Rhodes, said, “Charles Osgood is a television news legend — and so is Jane Pauley. ” Ms. Pauley first catapulted to fame at age 25 when she replaced Barbara Walters as an anchor of the “Today” show 40 years ago. She remained with “Today” through the late 1980s until the notoriously messy handoff in 1989, when Ms. Pauley left the show and was replaced by Deborah Norville. Ms. Pauley later was a host of NBC’s newsmagazine “Dateline” from 1992 to 2003. But for much of the next decade, television opportunities dwindled for Ms. Pauley, though she had a daytime talk show that lasted a season and she made appearances on “Today. ” She became a CBS contributor two years ago and has filled in for Mr. Osgood on “Sunday Morning” and for Scott Pelley on the “CBS Evening News. ” She has reported stories for the Sunday morning show, including the only television interview with David Letterman in the to his retirement last year. The transition is an important one for the network. “Sunday Morning” is a powerful ratings machine: It attracts nearly six million viewers and is by far the Sunday morning news show. Its big viewership has helped the show that follows it, “Face the Nation,” remain the Sunday morning public affairs show. (“Meet the Press” on NBC attracts the most viewers in the to bracket coveted by advertisers.) And this is the second consecutive year that CBS has had a peaceful Sunday morning handoff, something that can be rare for morning shows. (Recall the departures of Ms. Pauley or Ann Curry from “Today,” or David Gregory’s firing from “Meet the Press. ”) Last year, Bob Schieffer introduced John Dickerson on the air as the new anchor of “Face the Nation,” just as Mr. Osgood did with Ms. Pauley on Sunday. “Charles Osgood set the standard for ‘CBS Sunday Morning,’” Ms. Pauley said in a statement. “And it’s a great honor to be given the chance to further our show’s legacy of excellence. I look forward to bringing loyal viewers the kind of engaging, original reporting that has made the broadcast so irresistible for so long. ” | 0fake |
'Joe the Plumber' praises Trump, cites his 'beautiful women' | HOLLAND, Ohio (Reuters) - “Joe the Plumber,” the Ohio workingman who came to symbolize U.S. taxpayer frustration in the 2008 presidential election, is still angry. And like many angry voters, he likes insurgent Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — in part because the New York billionaire dated attractive women. “He’s a winner. He’s made billions. He’s dated beautiful women. His wife is a model. That’s not to sniff at. And a lot of people believe he can bring that kind of success to the White House,” said Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, 42, who shot to prominence during the 2008 campaign after then-Republican nominee John McCain seized on a confrontation Wurzelbacher had with then-Democratic candidate Barack Obama. Sitting in his Ohio house, a Ruger handgun on a table next to him, Wurzelbacher told Reuters he has yet to decide who to support but says he understands why so many people are drawn to the caustic Trump, a real-estate developer and former reality TV show host, and is unhappy with the Republican Party establishment lining up against him. He said Trump’s position as an insurgent candidate who is willing to defy party leaders was a more important reason to vote for him than his wealth and the model-looks of his wife Melania. But he said he believed other voters were drawn to his larger-than-life image and glamorous lifestyle. He also likes Ted Cruz, the conservative U.S. senator from Texas. He is scathing about Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida and the favorite of the Republican establishment to challenge Trump. And he dislikes John Kasich, the Ohio governor who narrowly trails Trump in his home state with less than two weeks until Ohio’s primary on March 15. Trump, 69, is the front-runner in the race for the Republican nomination for the Nov. 8 election, but party leaders worry policies that include building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and temporarily banning Muslims from entering the United States will turn off voters and upset U.S. allies. As a conservative, Wurzelbacher says he is willing to overlook Trump’s previous heresies on issues such as gun control, abortion, gay marriage and even his past donations to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner. The Obama administration, he says, is a miserable failure. In the 2008 campaign, Wurzelbacher made headlines when he asked Obama about his small business tax policy. During a videotaped exchange, Obama answered in part by saying, “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Wurzelbacher had told Obama he was interested in buying a plumbing business. Two days later McCain, Obama’s opponent, cited “Joe the Plumber” as the quintessential American everyman who had exposed Obama as having what McCain called a socialist, wealth-distributing economic world view. It mattered little that “Joe” wasn’t his first name. He never ultimately got a plumbing license in Ohio. But he says he was honorably discharged from the U.S. Air Force as a journeyman plumber. Soon after, Wurzelbacher appeared at rallies with McCain and his running mate, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. He seemed enraged at Obama’s economic policies. Today, he is highly critical of Senator McCain, deriding his opposition to Trump as corrupt. “They are not opposing Trump for the American people. They are doing it for their party, and I don’t like that. It’s control, power, greed. Trump scares them.” Wurzelbacher, who had assailed unions along with Obama’s decision to use taxpayer money to rescue the car manufacturers Chrysler and General Motors from bankruptcy in 2009, drew much criticism when it emerged that he took a job at a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio, in 2014 - and joined a local union to get it. “That was an experiment,” Wurzelbacher said. He said he never intended to work at Chrysler full-time. He wanted to see inside a union factory so he could write about it, he said. He worked on the paint line for three months, and then left. He ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012, winning the Republican primary for Ohio’s 9th congressional district but lost to Democratic Marcy Kaptur by a landslide. Wurzelbacher says his life has settled down since the madness of 2008. He got married five years ago. He has a three-year-old daughter and one-year-old son, and a 20-year-old son living in Kentucky. He now spends his time running two websites, JoeforAmerica.com, and one his wife inspired, livingloving.com. But he is disgusted by much of the debate in America. “Political correctness is a huge issue. People are afraid to speak their minds. They are afraid of being labeled a racist or a homophobe.” On guns, Wurzelbacher says the more people who have guns, the safer they will be. Asked how many guns he has, Wurzelbacher replied, “not enough.” (Editing by Jason Szep and Howard Goller) This article was funded in part by SAP. It was independently created by the Reuters editorial staff. SAP had no editorial involvement in its creation or production. | 0fake |
Hillary and the Ghosts of Watergate | Posted on November 1, 2016 by Charles Hugh Smith
The parallels between Hillary Clinton and Richard Nixon are not legal–they are political: specifically, how can a leader crippled by scandal and cover-ups govern?
In even blunter terms: how can a crippled politico deliver the goods to the special interests who bet their cash and political capital on the politico’s ability to deliver favors?
Among the many ghosts of Watergate, one specter especially haunts Hillary: once the special interests and party stalwarts who defended you through every scandal and every cover-up–month after month and year after year, on the promise that you would deliver the goods upon ascending to the presidency–realize you are too damaged to deliver anything of value to anyone, why would they continue supporting you?
Once a politico has to declare “I am not a crook” based on legalese rather than a moral foundation, that politico’s ability to lead has vanished. Hillary and her supporters rely entirely on legalese parsing of wrong-doing rather than on a self-explanatory, basic moral foundation of right and wrong.
Declaring “I am not a crook” because the wrongdoing escapes prosecution is the same as declaring “I am above the law.” If the foundation of one’s ability to lead is a reliance on legal parsing and allies in the Department of Justice squashing investigations while handing out immunity like candy on Halloween, the political capital required to lead no longer exists.
Ultimately, the President leads by moral suasion. Even the political act of delivering the goods to the special interests that funded your campaign and your wealth must be backed by the moral authority of personal integrity and a morally grounded appeal to the common good.
A politician who has effectively zero personal integrity is only as viable as his/her ability to deliver favors to the few (i.e. special interests) over the objections of the many. A reliance on cold-blooded horse-trading only works if the leader has enough political capital to arm-twist everyone into granting favors to allies and special interests.
But this political capital rests on moral suasion and support earned not by issuing promises but by leading the nation through thorny thickets to solutions that work for the many, not just the few.
Once the ability to lead has been lost, special interests can forget about getting favors. And once they realize their politico is a liability rather than an asset, self-preservation requires abandoning the liability as quickly as possible.
It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. Anyone who thinks Hillary has the personal integrity to build sufficient political capital to lead is delusional. Anyone who believes Hillary has the moral foundation to deliver the goods to the myriad special interests that have funded her campaign and her personal wealth is equally delusional.
Are Goldman Sachs et al. delusional? If there is any lesson to be learned from the ghosts of Watergate, it is that the big-money support of a leader who has lost the ability to deliver the goods crumbles very quickly as the endgame unfolds. | 1real |
Study: Phytochemical Found In Broccoli And Cauliflower Attacks Prostate Cancer Cells | in: Natural Medicine We all know that it’s important to eat our vegetables. At least, that’s what most of us have heard since we were kids. What our mother’s told us as when we were young, our doctors tell us as we get older. Sometimes though, it helps to have a more specific reason than high cholesterol, or even a motherly “because I said so.” Especially for people who aren’t big fans of eating organic greens. According to a study conducted at Oregon State University’s Linus Pauling Micronutrient Research Institute confirms that sulforaphane, a phytochemical found in broccoli and related cruciferous vegetables, such as cauliflower and cabbage , have a natural ability to target and attack prostate cancer cells without harming neighboring cells [ 1 ] . Unconnected studies suggest it may have similar promise for breast cancer. The active chemicals found in everyday foods – such as broccoli – are often much more potent than people would imagine. If fact, determining how to safely adapt these chemical ingredients for medical use is one of the biggest hurdles researchers face. Even edible plants that are considered “rich” in a given nutritional substance, contain relatively low amounts of it by volume. The vast majority of these compounds may also become toxic to humans if taken in large enough concentrations. While a number of previous investigations have proven that sulforaphane is able to attack both benign and malignant cancer cells, the Oregon State study is one of the first to prove that it is effective without disrupting otherwise healthy tissue. This gives researchers a tremendous tool for developing new, low-risk treatment options, and is likely to encourage additional research into the healing potential of other seemingly mundane edible plants. Realistically, it could be some time before these findings are applied to any sort of drug development or cancer treatment in a traditional hospital setting. Meanwhile though, the researchers behind the study recommend that we all eat more organic cruciferous vegetables. Besides broccoli, a number of readily available cruciferous vegetables contain naturally large amounts of sulforaphane. Some good examples of foods high in this important phytochemical include mild and spicy radishes, turnips, watercress, cabbage, arugula, kale, chard, and most other leafy greens. Unrelated studies also suggest a variety of other cancer-fighting compounds may be present in other herbs and garden vegetables. Celery and parsley , for instance, are especially rich in apigenin – a substance that has shown remarkable promise for fighting breast cancer. Trace amounts of apigenin are also found in oranges, apples, and some tree nuts. The problem is, it’s very difficult for the body to effectively extract it from any of these foods on its own. References: Oregon State University. Study confirms safety, cancer-targeting ability of nutrient in broccoli . News & Research Communications. 2011 June 9. Submit your review | 1real |
Donald Trump: Obamacare ‘One of the Biggest Broken Promises in History of Politics’ - Breitbart | President Donald Trump thundered against Obamacare in Ohio on Wednesday, calling it “one of the biggest broken promises in the history of politics. ”[The president met with families who had their lives upended by Obamacare, addressing reporters at the Ohio airport before his infrastructure speech. “Obamacare is dead, I’ve been saying it for a long time, everybody knows it, everybody that wants to report fairly about it does,” Trump said. He delivered a speech after Anthem announced that they were pulling out of the health care exchanges in Ohio, due to prohibitive costs to the company. “That’s it, . Wave ” Trump said. “What a mess. ” Trump commented during his speech that Democrats suffered immensely politically for their actions, as they were voted out of office. “That’s why they lost the House. They lost the Senate. They lost the White House,” he said. Trump warned both parties in Congress to pass an Obamacare replacement quickly, and commented that Senate Majority Mitch McConnell was working to get a proposal finished as soon as possible. He specifically called out Democrats for trying to stop Republican efforts to fix the problem. “We’re having no help, it’s only obstruction from the Democrats,” Trump said. “The Democrats are destroying health care in this country. ” He added that the eventual bill would be a strictly Republican effort. “Republicans or bust,” he said. | 0fake |
Nazis Whine Over Impending Release Of An Anti-Nazi Video Game (VIDEO/TWEETS) | With the rise of Donald Trump has also come the rise of literal Nazism in America. When the streets of an American street look more like 1930s Germany as they did in Charlottesville, Virginia just weeks ago with murder as the end result, it is time for people to use whatever platforms they have to speak out against Nazism. That is just what is being done by the makers of the video game Wolfenstein II. The company will be releasing a new game on October 27, and it is all about killing Nazis. In a tweet, including a short video, the company made it clear: No Nazis in America. Here is that tweet:Make America Nazi-Free Again. #NoMoreNazis #Wolf2 pic.twitter.com/52OESypw4P Wolfenstein (@wolfenstein) October 5, 2017Of course, being the idiots that they are, the actual Nazis on Twitter just could not contain themselves, and they lashed out in a rage against the makers of Wolfenstein. Here are just a few of their whiny, insane tweets:imagine seeing the words "no more nazis" and reacting like this pic.twitter.com/5L9b8CPm3s Vylash #TeamKICK (@MiraVylash) October 6, 2017The amount of people legitimately upset by the new Wolfenstein trailer is equal parts sad and hilarious pic.twitter.com/icrl0CfiyO 88 Fingers (@YungShaxx) October 6, 2017Yeah well I wasn't about to play a game about endlessly killing white people anyway. GTA San Andreas is more my speed. G tz (@Gotz_Iron_Hand) October 6, 2017So, there you have it. Apparently, it is now debatable in America as to whether a video game going after Nazis should be played, because we have literal Nazis right in the middle of our mainstream political culture. This is what happens when you elect a literal fascist as president folks. Thank all of the people who were stupid enough to fall for this con man when we descend further into something so unimaginably dire at the hands of Donald Trump and his white supremacist government and mouthbreathing followers.One would like to believe that good will triumph in the end, but who really knows at this point?Featured image via screen capture from Twitter | 1real |
Syria's Eastern Ghouta faces 'complete catastrophe': U.N. | GENEVA (Reuters) - The 400,000 civilians besieged in the Syrian enclave of Eastern Ghouta face complete catastrophe because aid deliveries are blocked and hundreds of people need urgent medical evacuation, U.N. humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland said on Thursday. Seven people have died because they were not evacuated and 29 more were at imminent risk including 18 children, he told reporters in Geneva after a regular meeting of the U.N. humanitarian taskforce on Syria. I feel as if we are now returning to some of the bleakest days of this conflict again, Egeland said. Nowhere is it as bad as in Eastern Ghouta, he said of the area, which is surrounded by the army. The area east of Damascus had been completely sealed off since September, leaving U.N. aid convoys and evacuations as a potential lifeline facing a bureaucratic wall of inaction . We cannot continue like that. If we only get a fraction of what is needed it will be a complete catastrophe, he said. What about a ceasefire now in this area and a green light to all medical evacuations? As well as people wounded in the fighting, there were a growing number of acutely malnourished children, which meant they were very close to dying, he said. Why men in their 50s and 60s like me stop women and children from getting the medical service that would save their lives is beyond my imagination. It can change tomorrow. Russian, Syrian and U.N. officials had met in Damascus to try to break the deadlock, both for Eastern Ghouta and for about 55,000 civilians stranded on the Jordanian border in a desolate area known as the Berm. The first meeting still hasn t produced at all the concrete results that were needed but it is our strong feeling that the Russian Federation wants us to get the access and wants to help us so we are hopeful that this trilateral mechanism will yield results. The Berm had not received an aid distribution since June, but the United States, Russia and others had worked out a detailed plan to supply aid from Damascus. Despite diplomatic efforts to set up de-escalation zones there was still fighting in many areas, including Aleppo, Idlib, Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Hama, and civilians were being caught in the crossfire. He said the war had lasted longer than the Second World War, and supplies were depleted, so that the coming winter could be the toughest of the war even if it is the last. This is a man-made disaster, it can end, Egeland said. | 0fake |
Poll: Trump, Carson top GOP race; Clinton leads Dems but support drops | Two non-politicians, businessman Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, dominate the contest for the Republican nomination, together accounting for more than half of the potential vote as support for traditional politicians continues to decline, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
In the contest for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton has lost significant ground over the past two months, as she has struggled to manage the controversy over her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state. She still leads the field of Democrats, but for the first time her support has dropped below 50 percent in Post-ABC surveys, with the biggest decline coming among white women.
Overall, the survey underscored the degree of dissatisfaction toward government and politics that is shaping the campaign. More than 7 in 10 Americans say people in politics cannot be trusted. More than 6 in 10 say the political system is dysfunctional. Sizable majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents agree with those assessments.
But Democrats and Republicans part ways over the kind of experience they are looking for in the next president. Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans say they prefer the next president to have experience that comes from outside the political establishment. Only about a quarter of Democrats say the same.
Two-thirds of the Republicans who say they are looking for non-political experience currently support either Trump or Carson — the foundation of the wide division between the two outsiders and the rest of a field made up almost exclusively of traditional politicians. Several of these current or former elected officials registered new lows in the survey.
Their next big chance to reverse their fortunes comes at a debate Wednesday evening at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., that will feature the top 11 candidates. The debate, hosted by CNN, will begin at 8 p.m. Eastern time. There will be an earlier forum, beginning at 6 p.m., for the candidates who did not qualify for the main debate.
The new poll found Trump to be the favorite of 33 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. That is a jump of nine percentage points since mid-July and a 29-point increase since late May, just before Trump announced his candidacy. He does well with most groups of GOP voters, but his strongest support comes from those who do not have a college degree and those with incomes below $50,000.
Carson runs second at 20 percent, 14 points higher than in July. His surge is consistent with several other national polls that show him moving up the ranks since the first Republican debate in Cleveland last month. Carson’s base is more strongly rooted in the conservative wing of the party.
After Trump and Carson, there is a significant falloff in support for the other candidates. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who began the year as the nominal GOP front-runner, stands at 8 percent, his lowest ever in Post-ABC surveys of the 2016 field. Next, at 7 percent each, are Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. No one else registered above 5 percent.
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie either tied or registered their lowest levels of support in Post-ABC polls of the 2016 race dating to the beginning of 2014.
Walker suffered the steepest decline since the July survey, falling from 13 percent to 2 percent. Recent polls in Iowa, where Walker had been leading, also have shown a loss of support.
Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, Clinton is the choice of 42 percent of registered voters. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is second with 24 percent and Vice President Biden, who is deciding whether to run, is third with 21 percent. Sanders’s support has risen by 10 points since July, while Biden has gained nine points.
Biden advisers have said he is likely to make a decision this month. The vice president has said recently that he is still dealing with the death of his son Beau a few months ago and cannot yet say he has the emotional commitment needed to seek the presidency. But his advisers are preparing for a possible campaign as Biden and his family weigh the personal costs of running.
The survey indicates that if Biden decides not to run, Clinton would benefit far more than Sanders, at least initially. Without Biden on the list, Clinton jumps 14 points, to 56 percent, among Democratic-leaning voters, while Sanders rises four points, to 28 percent.
While Clinton maintains the lead, her support has dropped 21 points among Democrats since July. She has lost ground with most demographic groups, but the sharpest drop has come among women and particularly white women. In July, 64 percent of white women said they supported Clinton; today, it is 31 percent, the same level of backing as Sanders, whose support has doubled among this group.
A majority of Americans (55 percent) say they disapprove of the way Clinton has handled questions about her use of a private e-mail account while serving as secretary of state. An almost identical percentage (54 percent) say that she has tried to cover up facts. Asked whether Clinton stayed within government guidelines or broke the rules by using a private server, 51 percent say she broke the rules, while 32 percent say she did not, with the remainder offering no opinion.
The public is divided on the question of whether the e-mail issue is a legitimate one in the coming election, although today, unlike four months ago, slightly more say it is not legitimate.
On all those questions, there is a big difference in the responses of Democrats vs. Republicans and independents. A majority of Democrats (55 percent) approve of how she has handled the controversy, while a third do not. More than 7 in 10 say the e-mails are not a legitimate issue in the coming campaign.
In a hypothetical general election, Clinton runs about evenly with Trump, leading 46 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. Clinton holds a much bigger lead, 51 percent to 39 percent, among all adults.
Clinton and Trump share one vulnerability: Almost 6 in 10 Americans say Trump is not honest and trustworthy, while 56 percent say that about Clinton. But in other measures, Clinton is seen as far readier to be president than the GOP front-runner.
At this point, 6 in 10 say Trump is not qualified to be president, though more than 6 in 10 Republicans say he is. Two-thirds say he does not understand the problems of “people like you.” More than 6 in 10 say he does not have the kind of personality and temperament it takes to serve effectively as president.
Just over half of all Americans say Clinton does not understand their problems, but 56 percent say she has the personality and temperament to serve as president.
Among all Americans, 57 percent oppose Trump’s tough positions on immigration. Among Republicans, 56 percent support them — with 39 percent saying they strongly support them.
The Post-ABC News poll was conducted Sept. 7-10 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults, including landline and cellphone respondents. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Full results of the poll and detailed methodology are available at wapo.st/pollarchive. | 0fake |
ISIS Uses 600 Suicide Dogs to Restrain Iraqi Army’s Advance in Mosul | Erbil- While Iraqi forces are advancing in Mosul to free the city, some Iraqi officers were informed about new plan of terrorists of ISIS to use 600 suicide dogs to restrain Iraqi Army’s advance. 20 Shares
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Fahmi Abbas, an officer in Iraqi Armored Units had an interview with IRNA and said: “ISIS terrorists have equipped 600 dogs with bombs and want to send them among Iraqi Army forces and explode them by remote control.”
As stated by this military official, ISIS’s intention is to hinder advance of Iraqi Army to the city center of Mosul.
This new plan was brought up when most of terrorists’ suicide attacks were neutralized by Iraqi heat-seeking missiles before reaching their aim.
According to the statistics announced by Iraqi Army, during the 19 days since Mosul liberation operation began, terrorists of ISIS have performed 100 suicide attacks in different regions, although they didn’t succeed in delaying the advance of Iraqi forces.
Fahmi Abbas stressed that all Corps have been informed about terrorists’ new tactics and they won’t be taken off-guard.
This Iraqi military official also mentioned the possibility of using other animals for suicide attacks by the terrorists. He said that ISIS is under siege and terrorists have nowhere to escape, unless they surrender or get killed.
On Saturday (5th Nov), Iraqi Army entered “Hammam al-Alili” in south of Mosul and managed to free this part of city in the western bank of Dijlah (Tigris river).
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Iran Deal Tests Trump’s Independence | Iran Deal Tests Trump’s Independence November 18, 2016
An early test of whether President Trump will bow to Israel’s political clout may come over the Iran nuclear agreement which Prime Minister Netanyahu wants killed, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes.
By Paul R. Pillar
Among the foreign policy issues on which Donald Trump took a simple anti-Obama, or anti-Clinton, stance during the campaign but about which he had not seemed to have devoted much thought, one of the most prominent and important is the agreement that restricts Iran’s nuclear program, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA.
When the new president does get a chance to give the subject more attention, he will see that opposition to the agreement is primarily a matter of old political baggage. If he does not want to be burdened with such baggage and desires instead to set his own course, he will build on the agreement rather than succumb to the pressures of those who would like to kill it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations in 2012, drawing his own “red line” on how far he will let Iran go in refining nuclear fuel.
The baggage has had two parts. One has been the effort by President Obama’s political opposition to deny him any major achievements — applicable to the JCPOA in that it has been one of the President’s most significant foreign policy achievements. Even viewed through a crass partisan political lens, this motivation will get more out of date with each day that goes by after Mr. Obama leaves office.
The other part has been opposition of the Netanyahu government in Israel, with all the usual implications of how that government’s postures affect U.S. politics and how the Iran issue has thus been treated as if it were an Israel issue. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition has been motivated by the objectives of keeping a regional rival to Israel isolated forever, portraying Iran as the root of all problems in the Middle East, distracting attention from problems that involve Israel and its policies, and keeping U.S. diplomacy and cooperative measures in the Middle East confined to Israel or channels approved by Israel.
This opposition was maintained even though the agreement that has precluded an Iranian nuclear weapon is very much in the interests of Israel’s security, as testified to by the large majority of senior Israeli security officials and former officials who have been free to discuss the topic.
A Success
The JCPOA is a success. It has been fully working for well over a year. It has blocked all possible avenues to an Iranian nuclear weapon. Iran has been complying with its extensive obligations under the agreement, as certified by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Those opponents who have stretched to accuse Iran of violations have been doing exactly that: stretching. Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani celebrates the completion of an interim deal on Iran’s nuclear program on Nov. 24, 2013, by kissing the head of the daughter of an assassinated Iranian nuclear engineer. (Iranian government photo)
Regarding recent accusations regarding Iranian production of heavy water, for example, the agreement does not prohibit Iran from ever exceeding a specified limit of 130 metric tons. Instead, the JCPOA requires Iran to make any excess available for export — which is exactly what Iran has done.
For the new U.S. administration to withdraw from the JCPOA — either explicitly by declaring so, or through sanctions policies that would violate the agreement — would clearly be a big mistake. To begin with, any such unilateral move by the United States would run up against the fact that this agreement involves not only Iran and the United States but also five other parties, including major Western allies as well as Russia and China.
The European allies have made quite clear that they are committed to the agreement. U.S. abrogation would not only involve problems with them but also would upset any early efforts by President Trump to develop more cooperative relations with Russia.
A U.S. withdrawal could lead Iran to react in either of two ways, each of which would be disadvantageous to U.S. interests. If the Iranians judged the U.S. part of the economic and sanctions provisions of the JCPOA to be too large to overlook, they would declare — as they would be entitled to — that the entire agreement was null and void. This would mean Iran would be freed from all the nuclear limitations in the agreement.
The Iranians could spin as many centrifuges, stockpile as much highly enriched uranium, and build as many plutonium-producing reactors as they want. (And forget the notion of negotiating a “better deal” — that was never a possibility with an agreement that was laboriously negotiated and that was barely politically acceptable in Iran.)
A Boon for U.S. Rivals
Alternatively, the Iranians might say that it considered the agreement still to be in force with all the parties other than the United States. This would mean the Europeans getting business deals such as large sales of commercial airliners rather than American companies like Boeing getting the business, and it would mean Russia and China getting both commercial deals and diplomatic influence that the United States would not be getting. This would be a situation that Donald Trump himself said during the campaign was unacceptable. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaking to the AIPAC conference in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2016. (Photo credit: AIPAC)
Withdrawal from the JCPOA would have additional, farther-reaching negative implications for President Trump. It would re-open an old issue that had been resolved through diplomacy, create a new crisis, and consume much high-level time and attention that otherwise could be devoted to countless other foreign policy problems, including ones centered in the Middle East.
Withdrawal also would weaken the credibility of anything else the new U.S. president wants to do that involves, like the JCPOA, executive action rather than a treaty. Much of what Mr. Trump has talked about regarding trade and other matters falls into this category.
Not least important, backing away from the JCPOA would kill opportunities to build on the agreement by doing diplomatic business with Iran on many important issues where Iran is unavoidably a major player. An excellent guide to those opportunities is a just-released report titled Maximizing the Opening with Iran: How President Trump Can Secure American Interests in the Middle East , prepared by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and signed by 76 national security experts and scholars (including myself). The report states, “If diplomacy could be successful in resolving the most volatile and complex point of tension between the U.S. and Iran – the nuclear dispute – President Trump should also employ diplomacy to peacefully resolve or manage the remaining differences between Washington and Tehran.”
It’s not just bilateral issues and remaining differences in the U.S.-Iranian relationship that are at stake. It is the ability of the United States to address effectively many other problems important to it. In the words of the NIAC report, “Iran has substantial latent power – population size and potential for wealth generation – and thus it is bound to be a leading power in the greater Middle East. Washington cannot change this. Nor can Washington stabilize the Middle East without Iran’s involvement. Iran will be part of the regional solution – or there won’t be a solution.”
The report includes many specific recommendations regarding problems ranging from warfare in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan to energy and security in the Persian Gulf.
The JCPOA is important not just because of the technical details of what goes on inside Iranian nuclear facilities, although the nuclear nonproliferation objectives that the accord has advanced are indeed very important. It is important also as a step away from the self-hamstringing American habit of not fully using available diplomatic tools to pursue U.S. interests, because of a distaste for dealing with regimes we don’t happen to like. Making America great on the world stage requires getting rid of that habit.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is author most recently of Why America Misunderstands the World . (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.) | 1real |
Study: Fracking Does Not Contaminate Groundwater - Breitbart | A new study conducted by Duke University found that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has not contaminated the groundwater in West Virginia. [Duke’s study found that the claim by many environmentalists that fracking contaminates the groundwater does not hold up, because the groundwater was already contaminated from methane and salts before the fracking occurred. “Based on consistent evidence from comprehensive testing, we found no indication of groundwater contamination over the course of our study,” Avner Vengosh, the professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said. Vengosh and other scientists concluded that, while fracking did not contaminate the groundwater, accidental spills of fracking wastewater could pose a threat to surface water in the area. ”However, we did find that spill water associated with fracked wells and their wastewater has an impact on the quality of streams in areas of intense shale gas development,” Vengosh added. “The assessment,” he continued, “is that groundwater is so far not being impacted, but surface water is more readily contaminated because of the frequency of spills. ” Researchers collected water samples from 112 drinking wells in northwestern West Virginia and studied them over a three year period. They sampled 20 of the water wells before drilling or fracking started in the area in order to obtain a baseline for later comparisons. Duke’s study draws similar conclusions to the scientific studies from regulatory bodies, academics, and the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) that determined that fracking has not contaminated groundwater or drinking water. | 0fake |
Donald Trump in Brussels: ‘We Will Win This Fight’ Against Terrorism - Breitbart | President Donald Trump vowed to keep fighting terrorism, calling the attack in Manchester a reminder of the importance of the battle. [“[T]he top problem right now is terrorism,” Trump said after landing in Brussels, during a meeting with Prime Minister Charles Michel of Belgium. The president added that under his Generals, the fight was “doing very well,” but described the terrorist attack in Manchester as a “horrible” and “unthinkable” situation. “When you see something like what happened a few days ago, you realize how important it is to win this fight,” he said. “And we will win this fight. ” Trump will meet with NATO allies in Brussels to discuss the future of the alliance and the ongoing struggle against terrorism. Speaking with reporters on Air Force One, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that NATO should join the coalition against ISIS. “They’ve been an observer. But they’ve become more and more engaged in the actual fight to defeat ISIS,” he said. | 0fake |
Russia, Jordan agree to speed de-escalation zone in south Syria | AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordan said on Monday it was working with Russia to roll out a plan to end fighting in southwestern Syria in the fastest possible time - part of a peace pact for the border area brokered by Amman, Moscow and Washington. Jordan and Russia s foreign ministers met in Amman to discuss progress in setting up a de-escalation zone in the particularly sensitive region that includes Syrian territory neighboring Israel. Neither side gave details on any sticking points, but diplomats told Reuters they have included the final positions of fighting forces, U.S. unease about Russian involvement in policing the deal, and when to reopen a key border crossing. Russia, which backs Syria s government in the civil war, and the United States, which backs rebel forces seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad, met secretly in Jordan in June and announced a ceasefire in Syria s southwest a month later. The truce - the first peacemaking effort in the war by the U.S. government under President Donald Trump - has reduced fighting there and is meant to lead to a longer-lasting de-escalation, a step toward a full settlement more than six years into the complex war. We expressed our support to resolve all issues relating to the de-escalation zones performance, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Amman. The goal is to set up a de-escalation zone in the fastest possible time, his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Safadi said. Our priority is that our borders are secure and that means that there should be no Daesh nor Nusra nor sectarian militias, Safadi added, referring to Islamic State and a rebel force once linked to Al Qaeda, both operating in Syria. An official and two senior diplomats told Reuters the powers have made progress in drawing up a map of the de-escalation zone, including Quneitra province bordering Israel, alongside the southern Deraa province adjoining Jordan. The official and diplomats said Washington had also secured an understanding with Moscow that militias backed by the Syrian government s ally Iran must be pushed 40 km (25 miles) from the border. That might help allay Israeli and Jordanian concerns about the presence of Lebanon s Iran-backed Hezbollah group in the area. Diplomats said Lavrov also pressed Jordan to re-open its Nasib border crossing with Syria, something Amman has so far resisted, saying it needs more security. But it has strongly backed the broader de-escalation deal, seeing it as paving the way for an eventual return of tens of thousands of refugees in its territory. Rebels say the ceasefire remains fragile and fear Syria s army will return to attack them once it has consolidated gains in the north and other areas. Insurgents say the de-escalation zones merely free up Syria s army to make territorial gains elsewhere. Syria s army, supported by Russian air power and Iranian-backed militias, has in recent weeks gained a string of post along the border with Jordan in southeastern Syria, a zone that is outside the ceasefire area. | 0fake |
The Leaker-In-Chief Just Tweeted Classified Info To His 35 Million Followers | We sure Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be all up in this after his promise to stop the leaks coming from the White House. The perpetrator in this instance (and several other instances) is none other the current occupant of the White House. Donald Trump s 17-day vacation at his luxury golf course in Bedminster, N.J. is going swimmingly. Yesterday, as rain poured down, President Bone Spurs began rage-tweeting, seemingly taking out the weather on the media, and attacking a Democratic Senator s military record. On Tuesday morning, the man who said he would have very little time to watch TV when elected started retweeting segments from Fox & Friends.One segment the Vacationer-in-Chief retweeted to his 35 million followers reports on U.S. spy agencies detecting two anti-ship missiles being loaded onto a boat by North Korea in recent days.The report attributes US officials with knowledge of the latest intelligence in the region and quotes one official who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive information. Trump routinely bashes anonymous sources, but only when the information is critical of him. When the president disseminates classified info about US spy satellite capabilities based on anonymous sources Peter Alexander from NBC News tweeted. Old enough to remember when US sent a man to prison for leaking a story like this. Now it gets an RT from POTUS, wrote Josh Gernstein, a Politico reporter covering the White House, according to BuzzFeed.When the president disseminates classified info about US spy satellite capabilities based on anonymous sources. ? pic.twitter.com/rmJitYRUBR Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) August 8, 2017When Nikki Haley was asked on Fox about the spy satellite report on North Korea, she said she can t discuss classified information. I can t talk about anything that s classified. And if that s in the newspaper that s a shame, she said. Well, it s all over the news NOW, isn t it?Watch:Nikki Haley says she can't talk about the story Donald Trump retweeted this morning: "I can't talk about anything that's classified" pic.twitter.com/7kWjJGs3tQ Amber Jamieson (@ambiej) August 8, 2017 I have no reason to comment on it, she said just before bashing leakers who put lives in danger. It s interesting that the panel of Fox & Friends seemed unnerved by leakers after they just leaked sensitive information which the amateur president happily tweeted this his millions of followers. We suggest she give Donald Trump a stern talking to.We suggest UN Ambassador Nikki Haley give Donald Trump a stern talking to.Read more:Photo by Isaac Brekken/Getty Images. | 1real |
The Mirage of a Return to Manufacturing Greatness - The New York Times | Half a century ago, harvesting California’s 2. 2 million tons of tomatoes for ketchup required as many as 45, 000 workers. In the 1960s, though, scientists and engineers at the University of California, Davis, developed an oblong tomato that lent itself to being and an efficient mechanical harvester to do the job in one pass through a field. The battle to save jobs was on. How could a publicly funded university invest in research that cut farmworker jobs only to help growers? That was the question raised in a lawsuit filed by a farmworker advocacy group against U. C. Davis in 1979. César Chavez’s United Farm Workers union made stopping mechanization its No. 1 legislative priority. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter’s agriculture secretary, Robert Bergland, declared that the federal government would no longer finance research that could lead to the “replacing of an adequate and willing work force with machines. ” These days, the battle to save American jobs has a different flavor. It echoes in Hillary Clinton’s promise “to win the global competition for manufacturing jobs and production. ” It lives in Donald Trump’s call to break Nafta and impose a 45 percent tariff against Chinese imports, and in Bernie Sanders’s rallying cry against trade agreements. Its outcome, however, will probably be similar. The freeze on research may have slowed the mechanization of California’s harvests, but by the year 2000, only 5, 000 harvest workers were employed in California to pick and sort what was by then a crop of tomatoes. In America’s factories, jobs are inevitably disappearing, too. But despite the political rhetoric, the problem is not mainly globalization. Manufacturing jobs are on the decline in factories around the world. “The observation is uncontroversial,” said Joseph Stiglitz, the economist at Columbia University. “Global employment in manufacturing is going down because productivity increases are exceeding increases in demand for manufactured products by a significant amount. ” The consequences of this dynamic are often misunderstood, not least by politicians offering slogans to fix them. No matter how high the tariffs Mr. Trump wants to raise to encircle the American economy, he will not be able to produce a manufacturing renaissance at home. Neither would changing tax rules to limit corporate flight from the United States, as Mrs. Clinton proposes. “The likelihood that we will get a manufacturing recovery is close to nil,” Professor Stiglitz said. “We are more likely to have a smaller share of a shrinking pie. ” Look at it this way: Over the course of the 20th century, farm employment in the United States dropped to 2 percent of the work force from 41 percent, even as output soared. Since 1950, manufacturing’s share has shrunk to 8. 5 percent of nonfarm jobs, from 24 percent. It still has a ways to go. The shrinking of manufacturing employment is global. In other words, strategies to restore manufacturing jobs in one country will amount to destroying them in another, in a worldwide game. The loss of such jobs has created plenty of problems in the United States. For the countless workers living in less developed reaches of the world, though, it adds up to a potential disaster. Japan’s long stagnation can be read as a consequence of a development strategy that left the nation overly dependent on manufacturing. “They are focused on a business,” said Bruce Greenwald, an expert on investment strategy at Columbia Business School. “They are not eliminating hours of work in manufacturing fast enough to keep pace with the reduction in work needed. ” The richest countries today started deindustrializing when they were already well off and benefited from fairly skilled and productive work forces that could make the transition into service jobs, as increasingly affluent consumers devoted less of their incomes to physical goods and more to leisure, advanced health care and other services. Poorer countries have more limited options. If the demise of manufacturing jobs in the United States forced many workers into retail jobs and the like, imagine the challenge in a country like India, where factory employment has already topped out, yet income per person is only one of what it was in the United States at its peak. “Developing countries are suffering premature deindustrialization,” said Dani Rodrik, a leading expert on the international economy who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “Both employment and output deindustrialization is setting in at much lower levels of income. ” This is even happening in a manufacturing behemoth like China — which appears to have maxed out the industrial export strategy at a much lower income level than its successful Asian predecessors, like Japan and Taiwan. For poorer countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the decline of manufacturing as a bountiful source of jobs puts an end to the prime path to riches that the modern world has followed. Manufacturing, Professor Rodrik points out, has unique advantages. For one thing, it can quickly employ lots of unskilled workers. “Setting up a factory to make toys puts you on a productivity escalator in a way that traditional agriculture and services didn’t do,” he said. Moreover, production isn’t constrained by a small domestic market: Exports of goods can easily flow around the world, allowing industry room to grow and giving developing countries time to ride up the ladder of income, skills and sophistication. The natural resources that dominate the exports of many poor countries don’t have these features. They employ few workers and offer little added value. They do not encourage acquiring skills, and they expose countries to violent swings in commodity prices. services such as finance and programming do pay well. But these aren’t the service sectors most poor countries build. A majority of service jobs in most poor countries are generally limited to housework, mom and pop retail and the like. Since these sectors offer little productivity growth and are generally isolated from foreign competition, they cannot pull a nation out of poverty. The first large transition from agriculture to industry in the early 20th century — well lubricated by public spending on world wars — liberated workers from their chains far more effectively than Karl Marx’s revolution ever did. The current transition, from manufacturing to services, is more problematic. In poor countries, Mr. Rodrik says, workers may have to pare back their aspirations of development. Who knows “how will political systems manage?” he asks. In the United States, the political challenge is no less daunting. Low pay married to high profits in much of the service economy are contributing to a widening income chasm that is rending society in all sorts of ways. Used to the prosperity once delivered by manufacturing, American workers are rebelling against the changing tide. Note to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump: A grab at the world’s manufacturing jobs is the wrong answer. Walls will damage prosperity, not enhance it. Promises to recapture greatness ring hollow. The United States, though, does have options: health care, education and clean energy, just to name a few. They present big economic and political challenges, of course — not least the enormous inefficiency of private American medicine and Republicans’ blanket opposition to more public spending. Yet just as the federal government once provided a critical push to move the economy from its agricultural past into its industrial future, so, too, could it help build a postindustrial tomorrow. | 0fake |
Tillerson: Russia Must Choose Between Assad and the U.S. - Breitbart | LUCCA, Italy (AP) — U. S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson issued an ultimatum to Russia on Tuesday: Side with the U. S. and likeminded countries on Syria, or embrace Iran, militant group Hezbollah and embattled Syrian leader Bashar Assad. [As he embarked on a trip to Moscow following urgent meetings in Italy with top diplomats, Tillerson said it was unclear whether Russia had failed to take seriously its obligation to rid Syria of chemical weapons, or had merely been incompetent. But he said the distinction “doesn’t much matter to the dead. ” “We cannot let this happen again,” the secretary of state said. “We want to relieve the suffering of the Syrian people. Russia can be a part of that future and play an important role,” Tillerson added in remarks to reporters. “Or Russia can maintain its alliance with this group, which we believe is not going to serve Russia’s interests longer term. ” Since the U. S. launched airstrikes against Assad’s forces in retaliation for a chemical attack on civilians last week, Trump administration officials have offered mixed messages about whether Washington believes Assad definitely must surrender power — and when. Tillerson said it was clear the U. S. saw no role for Assad in Syria’s future, given that he had lost legitimacy. “It is clear to all of us that the reign of the Assad family is coming to an end,” he said. “But the question of how that ends and the transition itself could be very important in our view to the durability, the stability inside of a unified Syria. ” “That’s why we are not presupposing how that occurs,” Tillerson added. He said the talks that Russia and Iran have helped broker in the Kazakh capital, Astana, could generate momentum toward broader talks about a political transition — if the Astana talks succeed in creating a durable . The resulting political talks would take place under the auspices of the United Nations process in Geneva. “To date, Astana has not achieved much progress,” Tillerson said. Tillerson spoke after a meeting of the “likeminded” countries was hastily arranged on the sidelines of the summit of the Group of Seven industrialized economies in Italy, days after the U. S. for the first time launched airstrikes against Assad’s forces. A key focus since the chemical attack has been on increasing pressure on Russia, Assad’s strongest ally, which has used its own military to keep Assad in power. The U. S. and others have said that Russia bears responsibility for the deaths of civilians at the hands of Assad given Moscow’s role in guaranteeing the 2013 deal in which Assad was supposed to have given up his chemical weapons arsenal. The U. S. raised the stakes significantly on Monday when a senior U. S. official said Washington has made a preliminary conclusion that Russia knew in advance of Syria’s chemical weapons attack. Yet the U. S. has no proof of Moscow’s involvement, said the official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on intelligence matters and demanded anonymity. That accusation will hang over Tillerson’s visit to Moscow, where he plans with meet with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and possibly with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin declined to say whether Putin would meet with Tillerson, in line with its usual practice of not announcing such meetings ahead of time. The United States has sought to minimize expectations for the trip or the likelihood that the U. S. will leave with any concessions from Russia regarding its support for Assad. Instead, the U. S. is hoping to use the visit — the first by a Trump Cabinet official to Russia — to convey its expectations to Moscow and then allow the Russians a period of time to respond. Though intended to punish Assad for a chemical weapons attack, the U. S. strikes last week served to refocus the world’s attention on the bloody war in Syria, now in its seventh year. Diplomats gathered in Italy as U. S. officials in Washington floated the possibility of new sanctions on the Syrian and Russian military, plus the threat of additional U. S. military action if Assad’s government continues attacking civilians. At Tuesday’s meeting in the walled Tuscan city of Lucca, the countries were joined by diplomats from nations including Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. The inclusion of those countries is important because the U. S. strategy for Syria involves enlisting help from Mideast nations to ensure security and stability in Syria after the Islamic State group is vanquished. | 0fake |
Abbas says Jerusalem is eternal Palestinian capital, dismisses U.S. peace role | RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Wednesday that Jerusalem was the eternal capital of the State of Palestine in response to U.S. President Donald Trump s announcement that he was recognizing the city as Israel s capital. In a pre-recorded speech played on Palestine TV, Abbas rejected Trump s announcement which included a decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, a move he said was tantamount to the United States abdicating its role as a peace mediator. | 0fake |
In a Defiant, Angry Speech, Donald Trump Defends Image Seen as Anti-Semitic - The New York Times | Donald J. Trump on Wednesday offered a defiant defense of his campaign’s decision to publish an image widely viewed as — saying he regretted deleting it — and vigorously reaffirmed his praise of Saddam Hussein, the murderous Iraqi dictator. In the span of 30 minutes, an Mr. Trump breathed new life into a controversy that was sparked on Saturday by his posting of an image on his Twitter account of a star next to a picture of Hillary Clinton, with money seeming to rain down in the background. The image was quickly, and broadly, criticized for invoking stereotypes of Jews. Mr. Trump deleted it two hours later, and replaced the star image with a circle. “ ‘You shouldn’t have taken it down,’ ” Mr. Trump recalled telling one of his campaign workers. “I said, ‘Too bad, you should have left it up.’ I would have rather defended it. ” “That’s just a star,” Mr. Trump said repeatedly. It was a striking display of from a presumptive presidential nominee and underscored the limitations of Mr. Trump’s scattershot approach during the Republican primaries — not to mention how difficult he often makes it for his campaign team to control him. The rally in Cincinnati had been promoted by Mr. Trump’s team for two days as a chance for him to give a tryout to a potential running mate, former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Periodically, beginning midway through Mr. Trump’s speech, the crowd chanted Mr. Gingrich’s name, but Mr. Trump did not heed its wishes. Mr. Trump had not discussed the Twitter message at length until Wednesday night, at his rally in Cincinnati, and his remarks seemed to clash with those of his Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, who earlier in the day had defended Mr. Trump in an unusual and candid article, suggesting that the Twitter post was “careless. ” The attention paid to the controversy had begun to die down by the time Mr. Trump took the stage, and he began to read from notes about the criticism leveled against Mrs. Clinton on Tuesday by the F. B. I. director, James B. Comey. But within 20 minutes, Mr. Trump tossed his notes aside and moved on to topics closer to home — the criticism he had received for his praise of Saddam Hussein at a rally Tuesday night in Raleigh, N. C. Mr. Trump reiterated his belief that Hussein was “bad,” but effective at killing terrorists, despite Hussein’s classification by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism. But the bulk of Mr. Trump’s energy was spent on the Twitter post. “They’re racially profiling, they’re profiling, not us,” he said of the news media. Mr. Trump called the news media “dishonest” in the rambling and sometimes address, in which he hopscotched from one topic to another. He angrily lamented his treatment at the hands of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, which he called a “crooked, crooked, disgusting group. ” Raising his voice to a hoarse shout, he complained that the Clinton campaign had released an ad showing Mr. Trump playing golf, though he said he did not play golf on his recent trip to Scotland. “The picture was from two years before,” Mr. Trump said. “At a different course!” He also noted, in a calmer tone, that the clip used by the Clinton campaign made him look thin. “The swing,” he added, “actually looked good. ” At one point, Mr. Trump lamented that his youngest child, Barron, “draws stars all over the place. ” He continued, “I never said, ‘That’s the Star of David, Barron, don’t!’ ” At another, he swatted at a mosquito that landed on his lectern and said he never liked the insects, before adding, “Speaking of mosquitoes, hello, Hillary. How are you doing?” Hours earlier, the deeply private Mr. Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, wrote the article in which he described the “Donald Trump I know. ” Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner wrote, is not an . He also described his family’s experiences during the Holocaust, adding: “I go into these details, which I have never discussed, because it’s important to me that people understand where I’m coming from when I report that I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points. ” Mr. Kushner obliquely acknowledged that the Star of David post was a mistake, but cited it as evidence of the refreshing originality of Mr. Trump’s campaign. “If my father in law’s team was careless in choosing an image to retweet, well part of the reason it’s so shocking is that it’s the actual candidate communicating with the American public rather than the armies of handlers who ordinary candidates’ every move,” he wrote. But Mr. Trump said several times on Wednesday that he saw nothing wrong with the image. In an interview shortly before the rally, Mr. Trump said, “I didn’t want to delete it — I would have never deleted it. My people deleted it before they told me about it, they did it because of the sensibilities and sensitivities. But when I looked at it, I thought that’s a star. I never thought, that’s the Star of David. ” | 0fake |
Les Américains ne sont plus qu’à quelques heures d’être enfin tranquilles pour quatre ans >> Le Gorafi | null | 1real |
WATCH TUCKER CARLSON Face Off With New York Times Editor Who Claims “High Journalistic Standards” At The Liberal Rag [Video] | 1real | |
US Will Never Separate its Fighters from Islamists Because it Depends on Them : | US Will Never Separate its Fighters from Islamists Because it Depends on Them By Dan Glazebrook
November 08, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " RT " - It was the big idea that was supposed to herald a new era of US-Russian co-operation in Syria: the separation of Western-backed moderate rebels from groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda, in order that the former could be brought into political negotiations whilst the latter were targeted by combined US and Russian military operations. Russia and Syria managed to get the UN Security Council to agree to a ban on the funding, training and arming of foreign fighters joining such groups back in September 2014, whilst the US-Russia ceasefire agreement this September reiterated that separating moderate opposition forces from Nusra [Al Qaedas Syria affiliate, now rebranded as Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham] was a key priority. As Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov recalled at a press conference last week, our agreements with the Americans linked this separation to a seven-day period of quiet. At the end of the period, the Americans undertook to show us on the map exactly where they believed there were terrorists and where there were none. On this basis, we should have jointly coordinated targets for effective engagement. To reiterate, they requested seven days for that, insisting that a seven-day pause should be a precondition. We announced this pause but it was violated with a strike against Syrian Army detachments three days later when, lest we forget, British and US bomber jets carried out a sustained attack on Syrian army troops fighting ISIS in Deir al-Zour, killing 62 and wounding over 100, effectively burying the ceasefire. Nevertheless, in response to Western demands, Syrian and Russian planes again suspended airstrikes on Aleppo two weeks ago, giving the US another chance to make good on its promises to separate its favoured rebel factions from the Al Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front. A fortnight later, however and fully ten months after his initial public call (at an International Syria Support Group meeting in February) for so-called moderates to separate themselves from Al Qaeda and co Kerry was still pleading for them to have more time to do so.
Events on the ground, meanwhile, have been moving entirely in the other direction. More and more of the groups supposedly fighting under the Wests Free Syrian Army banner (never much more than a fiction to which militias could pledge mythical allegiance in exchange for Western finance and weaponry) have been fighting with the Al Nusra-led Jaysh Al-Fateh (Army of Conquest) alliance since it was launched in March last year. Indeed, so successful has this formation been both in terms of capturing territory, mainly in Idlib province, and in establishing Nusras hegemony over the various insurgent factions that its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Julani, apparently believes the grand merger of rebel groups he has long dreamed of, fully integrated under a Nusra chain of command, is now a realistic possibility.
It is no surprise, then, that it is precisely this Nusra-led formation that has been leading the rebel onslaught against government-held Western Aleppo launched last Friday, complete with car bombs, rockets and mortars directed against residential areas. These are thought to have killed at least 41 civilians, including 16 children, in relentless and indiscriminate raids that have shocked and appalled the UN Special Envoy to Syria Steffan de Mistura. The Independents Robert Fisk, reporting from the area following a rebel rocket attack, described a younger boy [lying] on a hospital trolley, a doctor picking metal out of his face, all his limbs heavily bandaged. He was writhing in agony, moving his legs wildly, comforted by the director of the school.
Will attacks like these, then, increase the urgency with which the US pursues its supposed desire to separate the groups in receipt of its largesse from their Al Qaeda lite allies?
This is highly unlikely: Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem was probably correct when he stated last week that the US is unwilling to separate the factions its backs from Al Nusra, despite its repeated commitments to do so, for two main reasons.
Firstly, rebel groups have openly targeted civilians since 2011, often on the basis of ethnicity, religion or political beliefs, and this has never bothered their Western backers before. Indeed, the rebels then operating under the banner of the pro-Western Free Syrian Army heralded their entry in Aleppo in 2012 with two massive car bombs in the city centre and the burning down of the citys centuries-old souks. This was followed up with a bomb attack on Aleppo University on January 15 th 2013, killing 80, as part of the rebels morale bombing campaign against those supporters of the government. Two months later, one Syrian soldier and 19 civilians were killed in the village of Khan Al-Assal near Aleppo in a gas attack suspected by the UN Mission investigating it to have been carried out by the opposition. And as early as December 2012, Channel 4 News were reporting on suspected massacres of Alawite civilians by Free Syrian Army fighters, massacres which have been a mainstay of rebel activities. Far from dampening Western enthusiasm for the rebel cause, this particular report was followed up with calls by David Cameron to step up its assistance to the insurgency, who promised a doubling of British aid to the rebels within months. The targeting of civilians has never damaged Western support in the past, and is unlikely to do so now.
Secondly, aside from ISIS and the Syrian army, Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham and Ahrar Al Sham are clearly the most effective fighting groups on the ground, and the other rebel factions and its Western backers clearly understand this. And again, this is nothing new; sectarian Salafist groups have been the leading force in the insurgency since the start, as the West has always been fully aware. The now notorious US Defence Intelligence Agency memo of 12 th August 2012, for example which was circulated to, amongst others, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI and Central Command noted thatthe Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria. And to prevent any ambiguity, DIA chief at the time, Michael Flynn, then confirmed in an interview with Al Jazeeras Mehdi Hassan, that the US governments backing of such forces was not based on ignorance, nor a mistake, but was rather a willful decision. Such groups have always been the driving force of the Wests anti-Syria operation, and the US government understands well that its insurgency would soon fizzle out without them. As the USs primary aim remains regime change rather than the defeat of terrorism, therefore, they are unlikely to make any serious attempt to divide their proxies from the fighting forces of Al Qaeda. We can, instead, expect more pleas for time from the likes of John Kerry, and more spurious rhetoric about the US commitment to fighting terrorism, combined with continued material support for the very groups now openly allied to Al Qaeda. In other words: more of the sordid same. | 1real |
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