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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Trailing in opinion polls, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has asked his campaign to cut back on work identifying candidates for key jobs in his would-be administration and focus instead on bolstering his chances on Election Day, according to two people familiar with the campaign’s inner workings. After months of bitter battling, Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has a commanding lead in the race to win the Electoral College and claim the U.S. presidency on Nov. 8, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project results released on Saturday, which mirror other national polls. People working on Trump’s White House transition, which is led by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, have been asked by Trump to narrow down those efforts and refocus on the race, the sources, who asked not to be identified, said Tuesday. They have, as a result, largely set aside efforts to identify candidates for key Cabinet positions, but are continuing work to fill lower-level jobs, such as Securities and Exchange Commission general counsel, that would allow Trump to begin basic work on his agenda if he won on Nov. 8, without worrying about winning political battles first. Members of the transition team are also avoiding providing Trump with updates on the transition work to allow him and the campaign to focus the core of its efforts on improving his chances of winning the election, the sources said. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The sources did not say when Trump asked his campaign to reduce its transition work. But one of the two sources said that Christie has spent twice as much time helping Trump prepare for the three presidential debates, which occurred between Sept. 26 and Oct. 19, as he had on the transition work. A spokesman for Christie declined to comment. A third source familiar with the campaign, who also asked not to be named, said a senior Trump official has been contacting Wall Street tycoons and other wealthy Republicans for recommendations on lower-level positions. That source said the Trump team has opened up its hiring search far beyond his core group of supporters and is even willing to consider people who have criticized the brash New York businessman.

Hillary Clinton just made the claim that she beat President Trump in the 2016 election. The bitter and delusional Clinton is a woman who can t let the loss go In a lengthy interview in New York Magazine, Clinton made the claim that she beat both Sanders and Trump in the 2016 election: I beat both of them, she said, evidently referencing her popular vote win over Trump.British politician Nigel Evans has message for anyone, including Hillary, who is in denial. He defends Donald Trump and his supporters in this must-watch video! The fact is, there were 61 million people who voted for Donald Trump, and when we stand up in this country and attack him, we are actually attacking the American people. Bravo! Thank you Mr. Evans!

Email During a radio interview, comic legend and political pundit Jackie Mason joked that the only time Hillary Clinton is not lying “is when her mouth is not moving.”“And even then, she is probably lying because she’s probably sitting there thinking of the next lie she is going to tell,” he added. Mason claimed that Clinton is so untrustworthy that she likely couldn’t land a job as an “attendant in the ladies’ room because they would be afraid that she would steal the towels or the napkins. Even the toilet paper wouldn’t be safe from her.” Mason was speaking during his regular segment on this reporter’s talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM in Philadelphia. He continued: Do you think that if she went for any other job besides the presidency that anyone would hire her anywhere? If you saw her resume which is a resume of accomplishing nothing and running from the police three-quarters of her life. She is always either indicted or almost indicted or about to be indicted. Her whole life spent fleeing from the Justice Departments of different countries. Now, this yenta, do you think she would be able to get any other job? … Would you think they would hire her as a chambermaid? Do you know what all those sheets and pillowcases are worth? Do you think they would trust her with it? After they found out the history of her life. Let’s be honest about it, if you went on a vacation would you let her watch your house while you went on vacation? Would you expect to come back and find anything still there?

The race is heating up as New York heads into their primary this coming Tuesday. Currently, polls have Hillary Clinton ahead by ten to seventeen points. Clinton, who is ahead nationally by more than 200 pledged delegates and hundreds more superdelegates, will need to win her home state to continue momentum after Sanders string of wins in the previous weeks.A New York win for Clinton will mean more delegates she desperately needs, and with that will come superdelegate support.But the superdelegates have continued to cause controversy within the Democratic primary. Supporters who back Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders have decried the system, feeling the individuals who make up the superdelegate system have been manifestly unfair as to how they allocate their support.Supporters within the Sanders camp have demanded that the superdelegates vote the same way as the pledged at the will of the voters for that state.But that isn t how the superdelegate system is set up (another word for superdelegates is unpledged delegates).However, that hasn t stopped the demands. And it hasn t stopped the harsh criticism, either. While these delegates have been regarded as shills, bought-and-paid-for and establishment, one superdelegate wants to remind the nay-sayers of one thing: they are still human.Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Congress first openly-lesbian senator, is also a superdelegate. And she s pretty fed up with the inquisitions. On MSNBC s Morning Joe, the progressive senator claimed if Sanders clinches the popular vote by the time the convention is held in July, she will cast her vote for him. However, as Clinton continues her popular vote lead, she s supporting the former Secretary of State. She added, nervously: I am a human being and a Superdelegate. To put it plainly, based on how the rules are set up, Baldwin is free to vote her conscience, and her conscience says Hillary Clinton for now. Those who back Senator Sanders point to the fact he beat Clinton by 13 points in Wisconsin, thus Baldwin is somehow obligated to back him.It is important to remember that these superdelegates are party leaders who, in their own right, have been elected within the Democratic Party whether it be a position within the DNC, or a senatorial, gubernatorial or representative position. It s also important to remember these delegates have nothing but the best of intentions for their party and the future of the country.Baldwin hasn t reported any harassment, but other superdelegates have (one s 12 year old child received the brunt of hrrasment when they answered the phone).Here s Baldwin s appearance on MSNBC: Featured image via Astrid Riecken/Getty Images

Presidential campaigns are always studies in contrast, but rarely have the differences between the two major party nominees — and the kind of campaigns they plan to run — been as stark and as unusual as those between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. His political instincts are as rash as hers are cautious. Her policy proposals are as detailed and numerous as his are broad and few in numbers. Her public appearances are controlled and careful. His are the political equivalent of “The Truman Show.” She says he is unqualified to be president. He says she is unfit to serve. There are certainly ideological differences between the two. But this is not an election that presents voters with the kind of choice they had in 2012. President Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney had sharply different views about social and cultural issues, the size and scope of government, the best ways to create jobs, and projecting U.S. power abroad. Some Democrats probably would take issue with the suggestion that the ideological divisions between Trump and Clinton are less clear than those between Romney and Obama. The Clinton team will appeal to her base with many of the same arguments Obama used against the GOP nominee four years ago. But Trump is not Romney. If the policy differences between Clinton and Trump were the same as those between Obama and Romney, conservative intellectuals (and many GOP elected officials) would be far more comfortable with Trump as their presumptive nominee. Ideological consistency is not part of his Trump’s political DNA. He has been on various sides of various issues — in this campaign and in past years. He will campaign to Clinton’s right on issues such as immigration, gun rights, abortion and repealing the Affordable Care Act. He will crowd her from the left on things like trade (though she has shifted on that issue), infrastructure spending and the use of military force. That’s only a small part of what makes the coming campaign so intriguing. The ways in which Clinton and Trump will run their campaigns could be as defining as where they stand on this or that issue. A walk through their campaign offices hints at these differences. Clinton’s headquarters is sprawling in its size and population, projecting a leave-nothing-to-chance philosophy. Her campaign operates out of two spacious floors in a Brooklyn office building that features spectacular views of Lower Manhattan. The quarters reflect some sensibilities of a tech start-up, but with a corporate overlay. Trump’s campaign headquarters is on a floor of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. The space is small and cramped in comparison to Clinton’s, populated by only a handful of people. The office has an industrial quality to it, having once been used for building sets for the reality TV show “The Apprentice.” There are plans to expand elsewhere in the building to meet the demands of a presumptive nominee, and Trump has set up a Washington office. But compared with Clinton and by normal standards, the Trump campaign has been a minuscule organization, operating largely from the visceral instincts of the candidate. For a long period of time, the inner circle numbered just five people. Clinton’s campaign has been built on a foundation of successful recent campaigns, particularly those of Obama in 2008 and 2012. It will have massive organizations in the battleground states — paid staff and volunteers. They will be backed by prodigious amounts of research — polling data, focus group findings, voter data, analytics and modeling — designed to draw a detailed picture of the battleground electorates. The campaign is beginning serious analysis of those electorates. In some states where the demographics are more challenging, the Clinton team will seek to persuade undecided or wavering voters to carry the day. In others, such as Florida, where the demographics are more favorable to the Democrats, the campaign probably will focus more on registering those who haven’t participated in the past and then mobilize every possible Democratic voter to turn out. Trump consumes and spouts polling data around the clock, using it as a justification for his candidacy and how he conducts himself. Yet he has just now hired a pollster, having rejected the need for one in the primaries. He shows little personal interest in the need for the kind of data and analytics now considered a requirement of modern campaigns. His expanded team is building state organizations and deepening ties with the Republican National Committee for additional muscle. But his get-out-the-vote operation may never be as comprehensive as Clinton’s, although his advisers say their primary state organizations were better and deeper than they’ve been given credit for. Where the real differences will come into play are the campaign and communication skills of the candidates. Trump has broken rules in the primaries and shows little inclination to change. He is indiscriminate in doling out interviews — he talks to everybody all the time — and is both strategic and undisciplined about the way he communicates. Clinton is far more controlled, parceling out television interviews and avoiding real interactions with the reporters who have been traveling with her for the past year. Trump will dominate the hourly news cycle conversation and will be merciless in his attacks on Clinton, as he was against his Republican opponents. Her advisers are not convinced that what worked for him in the primaries will be successful with the broader electorate. They have been studying him, culling information from those who know how he operates as a way of determining the most effective ways of responding. They aren’t sure they’ve cracked the case. Clinton will not be the main respondent to Trump. Though she has begun to attack Trump in her campaign appearances, campaign officials and surrogates will carry most of the load of answering back as needed. Whether that can break through in an environment in which Trump’s voice speaks loudly is the issue. Clinton will focus on what she would do to make people’s lives better — a message that has generated little excitement during the primaries. To the extent she talks about Trump, her message will be the obvious: that a Trump presidency is too risky in all respects. He will try to blow past all that in an effort to galvanize those voters sick of the status quo and paint her as a representative of a tired past. Her advisers think she has the discipline and an outer shell tough enough to prevent him from provoking her unnecessarily. In turn, they think she and they can get under his skin and divert his attention from the factors that will determine how people vote. Trump’s team thinks she doesn’t understand the mood of the electorate. Clinton has never met an opponent like Trump or run in such a campaign environment as the one that will unfold over the next five-plus months. That reality will animate the election and dictate the tone and pace of the campaign — though not necessarily the outcome.

Ha! PBS had a live feed on Facebook for the Democratic Woman of the Year Award but it didn t go as planned because the comments were overwhelmingly negative. PBS finally announced they were shutting down the live feed on Facebook and moving it over to YouTube where they conveniently disabled comments. LOL!Comments below the PBS announcement on Facebook were 99% against PBS airing anything to do with Hillary Clinton. To put it mildly, people were ticked off that PBS was airing this on their Facebook live feed: The comments from the Facebook newsfeed are priceless some of the best we ve ever read. Check out the screen shot below the video of Hillary yammering on and you ll see just how ticked off people were about Hillary: Brutal!PBS ANNOUNCED ON FACEBOOK: WATCH LIVE: Hillary Clinton receives Democratic Woman of the Year Award from the Women s National Democratic Club in recognition of her contributions to American politics and work as an inspiration for women.The video below is gag-worthy:(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.10'; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));WATCH LIVE: Hillary Clinton receives "Democratic Woman of the Year Award" from the Women's National Democratic Club in recognition of her contributions to American politics and work as an inspiration for women.Posted by PBS NewsHour on Thursday, November 2, 2017A screen shot from the live feed on Facebook shows how people REALLY feel about Hillary:Deborah Roberts Burt (last comment on the screen shot) gets the sheeple of the year award for her comment that any female is just fine with her .How dumb can you be? Identity politics is what got us Obama!YouTube covered the video but disabled the comments. The only thing they left was the thumbs up or thumbs down choice that was overwhelmingly thumbs down when we first saw it:

During Donald Trump s meltdown during his rally in Phoenix Tuesday evening, he threatened to shut down the government unless Congress funds his border wall. The former reality show star launched a rant which was so insane that people are starting to question whether he s fit to hold office. We re pretty sure that House Speaker Paul Ryan is wondering that, too, after Trump s screamy-ragey speech.On Wednesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) said he doesn t think a government shutdown is necessary, however, we ve noticed that when the Republican leader says something in stark contrast to Trump s rhetoric, he never says it to his face. Like, for example, when he tweeted his denouncement of the Nazis who marched in Trump s name in Charlottesville, Virginia, with one of them murdering Heather Heyer, 32, and injuring 19 others, he failed to tag @RealDonaldTrump.But anyway, Ryan said during a press conference in Hillsboro, Oregon, I don t think a government shutdown is necessary, and I don t think most people want to see a government shutdown, ourselves included. Ryan continued to say that Congress in the House has already done its work on this issue and left it up to the Senate. Given the time of year it is, and the rest of the appropriations we have to do, we re going to need more time to complete our appropriations process, particularly in the Senate, he said.Talking Points Memo reports:Trump on Tuesday night suggested he would push to tie funding for his proposed border wall to a government spending bill Congress must pass in the fall to avert a shutdown. I don t think anyone s interested in having a shutdown. I don t think it s in our interest to do so, Ryan added. I don t think you have to choose between the two. Watch:.@SpeakerRyan: "I don't think a government shut down is necessary, and I don't think most people want to see" one. https://t.co/9ZBdrCglu6 pic.twitter.com/ClqY5NAABp This Week (@ThisWeekABC) August 23, 2017Perhaps Ryan should have a sit down with Trump and explain to him what happens during a government shutdown. On the other hand, Trump doesn t seem to care about very much. Ryan is trying to distance himself from the very president he supports. He s playing it safe, knowing full well that Trump won t last much longer in office. Ryan wants to come out of the madness with his hands clean so he can say, Hey, I called Trump out without actually calling him out. That said, he s going to have a battle on his hands to keep the government open and it looks like he s ready for that. We re certain several of his Republican colleagues would back him up on that.Image via screen capture.

David Beckham s son posed with a gun in a modeling photo shoot. No big deal, right? Well, not so much to the big hypocrites on the left. He s being hammered on social media for holding a prop gun we kid you not! Does anyone out there recall the gazillion times guns have been used in photo shoots as props see below)? Lordy, these anti-gun whack jobs are losing it over THIS?!The 18-year-old son of Victoria and David Beckham was slammed on social media for posing in pictures with a gun for a shoot with Damon Baker.BROOKLYN BECKHAM HOLDING A GUN IN A PHOTO SHOOTIT S A PROP!Pop Culture reported:One Instagram user wrote, Look up Gun Violence Survivors Foundation. You should go and talk to a few of them. Maybe posing with a gun would not seem so cool. While another said, Not sure what you were thinking Brooklyn, but I suggest you make better decisions in the future. Do not promote guns as art. Despite many negative comments, the photo shoot mesmerized some of his fans. If only there were that many of @brooklynbeckham in real life, you would make every young girl so happy #clonemachine. Although the Parsons School of Design student did delete one image that featured the weapon, he still kept the collage of smaller images that show him holding and pointing a gun.THE PHOTOGRAPHER HAD TO COME OUT AND EXPLAIN HIMSELF OY VEY!Just one of so many pictures of artists holding guns as props:JayZ can do it but Brooklyn Beckham can t?

(Reuters) - A Virginia federal judge on Monday issued a preliminary injunction against President Donald Trump’s travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority nations, the latest legal setback for the administration. The ruling from U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema came in response to a request from the Commonwealth of Virginia. Brinkema said the Justice Department had responded to Virginia’s injunction request with “no evidence.”

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt s security forces killed 10 suspected militants on Sunday in a shootout during a raid on two apartments in central Cairo, the Interior Ministry said. Nine policemen, including four officers, were injured during the two raids, it said in a statement. An insurgency led by Islamic State in Egypt s rugged Sinai peninsula has killed hundreds of soldiers and policemen since the Egyptian military overthrew President Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood in mid-2013, but attacks have increasingly moved to the mainland in recent months. Authorities received information about militants fleeing North Sinai to hideouts in Cairo, where they were preparing to carry out attacks on more centrally located provinces, the ministry statement said. The police suffered their injuries after a suspected militant detonated an explosive device to block them from entering the building and during an exchange of fire that followed, security sources said. One of the security sources said authorities suspect the individuals to be members of Hasm, a group which has claimed several attacks around the Egyptian capital targeting judges and policemen since last year. Egypt accuses Hasm of being a militant wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group it outlawed in 2013. The Muslim Brotherhood denies this.

(Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced two additional nominees for his Cabinet on Wednesday, and his transition team said he is holding meetings as he prepares to make high-level appointments. Below are people mentioned as contenders for senior roles as the Trump works to form his administration before taking office on Jan. 20, according to Reuters sources and media reports. See the end of list for posts already filled. * Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican presidential nominee and former Massachusetts governor * Rudy Giuliani, Republican former mayor of New York City * David Petraeus, retired U.S. general and former CIA director who pleaded guilty to mishandling classified information he gave to his mistress * Bob Corker, Republican U.S. senator from Tennessee and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee * James Mattis, retired Marine Corps general * David Petraeus, retired U.S. general and former CIA director who pleaded guilty to mishandling classified information he gave to his mistress * Tom Cotton, Republican U.S. senator from Arkansas * Jon Kyl, former Republican U.S. senator from Arizona * Duncan Hunter, Republican U.S. representative from California and early Trump supporter, member of the House Armed Services Committee * Jim Talent, former Republican U.S. senator from Missouri who was on the Senate Armed Services Committee * Rick Perry, former Republican Texas governor * Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser under President George W. Bush * Michael McCaul, Republican U.S. representative from Texas and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee * General John Kelly, retired Marine Corps general and former commander of U.S. Southern Command * David Clarke, Milwaukee County sheriff and vocal Trump supporter * Joe Arpaio, outgoing Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff who campaigned for Trump * Kris Kobach, Kansas secretary of state * Frances Townsend, homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Republican former President George W. Bush * Jeff Holmstead, energy lawyer, former EPA official during George W. Bush administration * Robert Grady, venture capitalist, partner in private equity firm Gryphon Investors * Leslie Rutledge, Republican Arkansas attorney general * Carol Comer, commissioner of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management * Scott Pruitt, Republican Oklahoma attorney general * Harold Hamm, Oklahoma oil and gas mogul, chief executive of Continental Resources Inc * Kevin Cramer, Republican U.S. representative from North Dakota * Robert Grady, venture capitalist, partner in private equity firm Gryphon Investors * Larry Nichols, co-founder of Devon Energy Corp * James Connaughton, chief executive of Nautilus Data Technologies and a former environmental adviser to President George W. Bush * Rick Perry, former Republican Texas governor * Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor, 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee * Jan Brewer, Republican former Arizona governor * Forrest Lucas, founder of oil products company Lucas Oil * Harold Hamm, Oklahoma oil and gas mogul, chief executive of Continental Resources Inc * Robert Grady, venture capitalist, partner in private equity firm Gryphon Investors * Mary Fallin, Republican Oklahoma governor * Ray Washburne, chief executive of investment company Charter Holdings * Cathy McMorris Rodgers, U.S. representative from Washington state and House Republican Conference chair * U.S. Navy Admiral Mike Rogers, director of the National Security Agency * Ronald Burgess, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and former Defense Intelligence Agency chief * Robert Cardillo, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency * Pete Hoekstra, Republican former U.S. representative from Michigan * Rudy Giuliani, Republican former mayor of New York City * Dan DiMicco, former chief executive of steel producer Nucor Corp * Andrew Puzder, chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants * Victoria Lipnic, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission member and former Labor Department official during the George W. Bush administration * Dr. Ben Carson, former 2016 Republican presidential candidate and retired neurosurgeon * Goldman Sachs Group Inc President Gary Cohn * Sarah Palin, 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate and former Alaska governor The Trump transition team confirmed he would choose from a list of 21 names he drew up during his campaign, including Republican U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah and William Pryor, a federal judge with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. * Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus * Steve Bannon, former head of the conservative website Breitbart News * Jeff Sessions, Republican U.S. senator from Alabama and senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee (subject to Senate confirmation) * Republican U.S. Representative Mike Pompeo from Kansas (subject to Senate confirmation) * Michael Flynn, retired Army lieutenant general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency * Nikki Haley, Republican South Carolina governor (subject to Senate confirmation) * Betsy DeVos, Republican donor and former chair of the Michigan Republican Party * Tom Price, Republican U.S. representative from Georgia, orthopedic surgeon * Elaine Chao, former labor secretary and deputy transportation secretary under Republican Presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, respectively. Chao is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell * Steven Mnuchin, former Goldman Sachs Group Inc executive and Trump’s campaign finance chairman * Wilbur Ross, billionaire investor, chairman of Invesco Ltd subsidiary WL Ross & Co

Earlier today, CBS News and other outlets noticed something strange going on behind the White House. Someone had put up a giant, inflatable chicken that resembled Donald Trump. Now, the hashtag #TrumpChicken is at the top of Twitter s trending list, and for good reason.So many people find the whole thing hilarious. It s probably a good thing that Trump isn t actually in the White House to see it right now, although it s a good bet that, if he knows about it, he s fuming.And the popularity of #TrumpChicken on Twitter won t help that. Not at all.Gotta love a giant #TrumpChicken representing a guy overcompensating for a tiny cock ?Tara Dublin ? (@taradublinrocks) August 9, 2017#TrumpChicken #FollowTheMoney #Trumprussia #TREASON #Focus #TrumpLies #TrumpRussianCoverUp #TrumpTaxes #Manafort #Kushner #DonaldTrumpJr pic.twitter.com/7w4z5ZAcP5 =^.^= Kare =^.^= (@Kare_P) August 9, 2017#trumpchicken impeach then deep fry. scott7 (@scottpw7) August 9, 2017#OverHeardDownOnTheFarm? Even #TrumpChicken ? Gets Higher Ratings Than .@CNN pic.twitter.com/JV2bEzAK6K JoeKnows1972 (@Joe48430) August 9, 2017Protesters install a giant inflatable Trump chicken & it is now glaring at the White House. #TrumpChicken trending. https://t.co/ZWqnCoLAPK pic.twitter.com/aluqOUJ9VB Live News Cloud (@livenewscloud) August 9, 2017Petition to get #TrumpChicken in the @Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade this year? pic.twitter.com/35gGEEejDs Doug Burgess III (@dougiemagic) August 9, 2017Why did #TrumpChicken cross the road ? Because Vladimir Putin told him to ! Bernieforspeaker (@bernie4speaker) August 9, 2017#TrumpChicken pic.twitter.com/rclgVjPIcC CherryTheTart (@CherryTheTart) August 9, 2017Trump Seeing #TrumpChicken: The people they understand I m one of them and that I love chicken. An incredible bird, so bigly in taste. pic.twitter.com/RWOZ0EIXEj Jen Saunderson (@JenSaunderson) August 9, 2017#CNN Breaking #DonaldTrump SCREWS #GOP #TrumpCare, #TaxReform,#TrumpChicken and #Guam #AC360 #GOPinCRISIS @UniteBlue pic.twitter.com/oNWS9x9qyc Town Post.. (@ReneNow) August 9, 2017The cost of #TrumpChicken: $1,300.The cost of seeing it outside the White House: priceless. pic.twitter.com/SyARthjiCY AJ+ (@ajplus) August 9, 2017Chicken Fashion Face-Off: Who Wore it Better? This giant inflatable chicken with golden hair pops up behind the White House #TrumpChicken pic.twitter.com/r1kmfmCsq3 Latrice Butts (@latricebutts) August 9, 2017Who ordered the chicken?#TrumpChicken @realDonaldTrump #trump pic.twitter.com/0WzVhl9hPv Chooch Manicotti (@ChoochManicott1) August 9, 2017If #TrumpChicken was moved into the Oval Office would anyone even notice the difference? #ImpeachTrumpNow wazzucoug99 (@wazzucoug99) August 9, 2017#TrumpChicken won the popular vote in a landslide. pic.twitter.com/DILU03ofAH Marie Connor (@thistallawkgirl) August 9, 2017BREAKING: Approval rating for inflated #TrumpChicken now at 98%. pic.twitter.com/NmjIXmxfQA The Hummingbird (@SaysHummingbird) August 9, 2017? @realDonaldTrump, your spirit animal is doing an OUTSTANDING JOB of filling in as @POTUS for you, while you re on vacation. #TrumpChicken pic.twitter.com/JmqWgr1Lz1 Portland Beer (@Portland_Beer) August 9, 2017Is Trump going to declare war on chickens? Build a wall to keep out chickens? Unleash power like we ve never seen on chickens? #trumpchicken Miller s Forehead (@Antyinbr) August 9, 2017From this angle, it looks like the #TrumpChicken is out in the bushes with Sean Spicer ? pic.twitter.com/URA5tGjwsR Kat (@KMR31871) August 9, 2017I honestly think the #TrumpChicken has a better approval rating than @realDonaldTrump. https://t.co/GkzhDenjMU Jenn Compton (@Ryde2Win) August 10, 2017BREAKING: Two Big Cocks stare at each other near the #Whitehouse. #TrumpChicken #TrumpVsChicken https://t.co/OOX3Tm7Xra Hobo Crackerbags (@HoboCrackerbags) August 10, 2017But of course, there are also the butthurt Trump fans who think this is petty:Amazing that people using inflatables to express themselves/insult another, feel they would do a better job as #POTUS. #TrumpChicken William Whatever (@Billyw1093) August 10, 2017#TrumpChicken is just more proof #TheLeftCantMeme Bedauerlich Mek (@RebelMechaniker) August 10, 2017#TrumpChicken Progressive r so weak! Thank GOD Trump is President! I dare North Korea 2 mess with US! They become a parking lot in 15 mins CindyC Fire Fury (@Dmsrcmc12Bob) August 10, 2017#TrumpChicken you libtard Democrats are a bunch of clucking chickens nick price (@nickprice91) August 10, 2017Losers bring Inflatable Trump Chicken to the WH even though the Donald Duck Mascot did nothing to Hillary win. #TrumpChicken Shelzii (@sherman3111) August 10, 2017Read more:Featured image via Pax Ahimsa Gethen, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

WARSAW (Reuters) - President Barack Obama pledged on Saturday to seek ways to calm racial tensions and reduce divisions between police and minorities during his final months in office, but he warned that easy access to guns nationwide exacerbated the problem. Obama spoke at the end of a week in which five policemen were killed by a sniper in Dallas and two black men were killed by police in Minnesota and Louisiana. He said he would bring together civil rights and law enforcement leaders for talks at the White House next week after returning from a trip to Europe. Obama, the first black U.S. president, has spoken out on racial issues throughout his time in the White House. He has also tried but failed to reform American gun laws, stymied by Republicans in Congress who have opposed any measures that they seen as impinging on the Constitutional right to bear arms, despite a series of mass shootings in recent years. Obama said the Dallas police force reduced murder rates and community complaints by taking the issue of race and police conduct seriously, and said he hoped that would inspire “constructive actions” in the coming weeks. “That’s the spirit that we all need to embrace. That’s the spirit that I want to build on,” he said during a press conference in Poland. But the divisive issue of gun control could not be separated from the tension between police and local citizens, he said. Obama noted that Dallas police on Thursday had to protect themselves and citizens from sniper fire while deciphering who had guns among those taking part in a protest decrying police shootings of black men. The presence of a gun in the car where Philando Castile, 32, was killed by police in Minnesota on Wednesday contributed to that event, he said. “In Minneapolis, we don’t know yet what happened, but we do know that there was a gun in the car that apparently was licensed, but it caused, in some fashion, those tragic events,” Obama told reporters. “We can’t just ignore that and pretend that that’s somehow political ... it is a contributing factor – not the sole factor – but a contributing factor to the broader tensions that arise between police and the communities where they serve.” Obama is very unlikely to succeed in reviving major gun control reform before he leaves office in January. Lawmakers in Congress have fought over three rival gun measures since the June 12 mass shootings at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Democrats promised to put pressure on Republicans next week to win votes for measures to expand background checks and allow the Justice Department to block gun sales to people on government watch lists. Obama said on Saturday he hoped his legacy on the issue of race would be one of urging Americans to listen to each other and understand the country’s difficult relationship with race. “The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination didn’t suddenly vanish with the passage of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act or the election of Barack Obama,” he said. He said he hoped his words as president had conveyed “that things have gotten better, substantially better, but that we’ve still got a lot more work to do.”

In the park, there are 9, 485 of them. You sit on them. To rest. Read a book. Sip coffee. Polish off a sandwich. Feed the pigeons. Wait for a friend, maybe a spy. Or it’s a sluggish day when you have nothing to do, and this is a delicious place to accomplish absolutely nothing. Or you can drift off and muse on the plaque affixed there, representing a story behind the bench. The Central Park bench. You aren’t just sitting on wood. You are sitting on memories. There is, for instance, a bench on the Mall that reads, “Two Red Foxes and a Pup. ” What could that possibly mean? It means this. Last year, Karen May wanted to adopt a bench as a surprise gift for her husband, Tony, a retired investment banker. She inscribed it: “Tony, win, lose or break even, you always have me. Love Karen. ” When their two sons were young and he came home from his work on Wall Street, they would rush to greet him and ask, “Hey, Poppy, did you win, lose or break even?” And he would reply that he broke even, because that was what much of life was about, breaking even. While Ms. May was so inclined, she figured she would adopt an adjoining bench for her children. When her elder son, Theodore, proposed to his girlfriend, Lucinda, he wrote a brief children’s book for her called “Two Red Foxes,” because foxes were a recurring theme in her upbringing (as when a fox sped across the field when her father proposed to her mother). The foxes were for Ms. May’s son and his fiancée. And there was the fact that her younger son, Thornwell (Ms. May’s maiden name) went by the nickname Pup. So she adopted the benches and engraved them with memories. People will sit there and not know. But she knows. Caitlin LaMorte was in the park one morning, the weather obligingly balmy though rain was possible later. As development manager for the Women’s Committee of the Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park, she runs the program. It began in 1986, as a way to finance the maintenance of the benches and their immediate surroundings. (For those with different park preferences, orphan benches are up for adoption in parks elsewhere in New York and some other cities.) If you can afford it, it’s simple enough. Pay $10, 000 (it began at $5, 000) and you get to put a plaque on a bench, saying almost whatever you want (within limits of decorum: no cursing, no advertising) up to a suggested maximum of four lines of 30 characters each. And then it’s there forever. Ms. LaMorte consulted her tablet for the latest count: 4, 223 of the benches adopted. About 250 go each year, she said. While plenty of benches remain unadopted, some areas are sold out. For instance, all the benches facing the lake. The ones lining the Mall. Those near the Great Lawn. Those along Wien Walk. There are three styles of benches: the simple version the World’s Fair style, with its circular armrests, dating to 1939 and the Central Park settee, based on the benches used during the park’s creation, circa 1858. There are also several dozen handmade rustic benches. With those, you have to fund a restoration of an entire park area and the cost starts at about $500, 000, not something to rush into. Quite often, Ms. LaMorte said, benches are adopted to remember a relative or friend who has died. Or on occasion, a pet, generally a dog, though a few cats are honored as well. Something like 840 of the plaques have “memory” in their wording. There are some Sept. 11 remembrances. Three years ago, a woman chose a bench in memory of herself for when her final date comes. It hasn’t yet. The plaque, set to go, sits in one of Ms. LaMorte’s desk drawers. Increasingly, Ms. LaMorte said, “we have more plaques that are happy. ” Graduations or birthdays or birth wishes or wedding gifts. A Japanese couple, when they returned to Japan after a lengthy stretch in the city, adopted a bench that reads: “We leave our hearts in New York after 23 years of our adventure here. ” There are a lot of benches in the playground areas commemorating births. One man adopted five benches, one for each of his grandchildren, who received them on their 16th birthdays. Last year, Victor Schiller required a birthday present for his wife, Nancy. She told him, emphatically, no jewelry, thereby ruling out his category. He thought and thought, and then he had it. Give her one of the benches. They didn’t even live in New York. They lived in Charlottesville, Va. but they had bought a place in Manhattan that they inhabited roughly a week each month. They think Central Park is truly wonderful. Mr. Schiller, 59, is retired from creating technology . Ms. Schiller, 57, is retired from investment work focused on Bulgaria. He gave her the bench, and was she happy. He waited on the inscription so she could have a say. They conferred and agreed on: “We Would Make the Same Mistake All Over Again! Vic Nancy Schiller. Still Best Friends. ” They did not reveal what the mistake was. Understandably, their three mystified children asked them, but lips sealed. Each has guessed, Umm, did you mean me? Well, of course not. No! Was it waiting so long — 11 years — to have children? Wrong. How about buying the apartment in New York? Incorrect, not even close. So they don’t know. That’s what reporters are for. To crack open mysteries, shine flashlights into dusty corners. Sometimes that’s very hard. Other times, less so. In this case, the Schillers were ready to give it up. It was possible to find out in the most ordinary way — by asking them. The two met when she was 20 and he was 22. They got engaged a year later. Mr. Schiller called his mother to break the good news. His mother dropped the phone. When she calmed herself enough to pick it up, she told him, “You’re making a big mistake!” Ms. Schiller called her mother. Her mother said, “What are you thinking?” Those withering cautions, of course, are what mothers are legally required to say. And, of course, are under protocol to ignore them. Which is what the Schillers did. Went ahead and got married and never looked back. Lou Young is a rugged, affable man of 59, with a bald head and a beard. For 33 years, he has worked for the parks department, almost all of that time immersed in Central Park. He gives his title as Bench Guy. He affixes the plaques to the benches. A few at the beginning were handled by others, but since then they’ve been all his doing. In the stinging sun the other day, he was out getting it done on a bench in the Ramble. As usual, the park was bubbling with activity. Wordlessly and with focused attention, he lined up a spot in the direct center, meticulously routed out a hole, then screwed in the plaque. Four screws. In less than 10 minutes, he was done. The inscription read: “You are the image of the rose shining within me like the flame within a lamp … ” a line modified from “The Little Prince. ” Mr. Young paints the benches too, spiffs them up, fixes them when weather chews them up. He came to New York from Birmingham, Ala. after the plant he worked in, making slats for train boxcars, shut down. Not long after he got to New York, he was riding in an elevator and noticed that it passed the 12th floor and then went to 14. No 13th floor. The unlucky thing. Now wait a minute, Mr. Young thought, I was born on the 13th. On a Friday no less. To him, it’s a lucky number. So he went to a dentist and had a front tooth plated with gold and 13 engraved on it. He likes to play the numbers. Every day for 25 years, he has played 1313 at $5 a pop. Never hit, but he keeps at it. How did he like his work? “I just love the park,” he said. “Best place to be. Since I’m from the South, it reminds me of home. ” Once he put on a plaque that a man had ordered to propose to the woman he was dating. The man must have missed some important signals. Her answer was a flat no. Benches aren’t returnable. Lou Young had to remove the failed plaque and replace it with one bearing nonmatrimonial expectations. (You can always change your plaque, but that’s another $1, 000.) One day about 10 years ago the Bench Guy was out in earnest with newly arrived plaques. He had one to do at the southwest corner of the Great Lawn. He screwed it on, then took a look and saw it said Louis Young. He thought, “Interesting, this guy has the same name as me. ” Turned out, one of the recurrent donors to the park, who had adopted 18 benches and given them as gifts, had gotten to know and admire Lou Young from watching him do his bench work. So she gave him a bench. The plaque reads: “LOUIS YOUNG FOR HIS CARE AND DEDICATION TO CENTRAL PARK SINCE 1985. ” It’s not cheap to adopt a bench you could buy a decent used car for the cost. But there is . Nicole Vest battled leukemia for two and a half years before she died in February 2015. She was 34. Her family and friends debated what to do to honor her memory. She was cremated, and there was no place to go and pay respects. Someone suggested a bench, and everyone liked that idea. They set up an appeal on a website. Family and friends chipped in, as did others, people who had never met Ms. Vest but knew one of her friends or relatives. The effort kicked off on March 10 of last year. It attained its goal by April 1. About 90 people donated, some giving as little as $20. They adopted a bench just north of the sailboat pond. What to put on it? They wanted something original. “I didn’t want something that was used all the time, like beloved sister and daughter,” said Michelle Lapworth, Ms. Vest’s sister. Ms. Vest loved butterflies. She had a butterfly tattoo on her ankle, wore a butterfly necklace. Her best friend found a quotation from Hans Christian Andersen, and that met with approval. “‘Just living is not enough,’ said the butterfly. ‘One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.’ In Memory of Nicole E. Vest . ” Another story, pet included. When Chris Branca died much too young in an accident at 33 last April, his family wanted to remember him with a bench. They also wanted to remember his dog. Buddha, a bulldog, had died a year earlier. Mr. Branca delighted in going to the park with Buddha. He lived further downtown. He drove there with Buddha. He was particularly fond of the Sheep Meadow. Dogs are prohibited from the grass there. Nonetheless, that expanse beguiled Mr. Branca. Weekend after weekend, he went there with Buddha. “He would get a ticket all the time and just pay it,” said Lindsey Branca, his sister. “That was his personality. He was a little bit defiant. ” So, the family, which runs a real estate company, adopted adjoining benches, one for Mr. Branca and one for Buddha. Mr. Branca was an abiding fan of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are. ” With great frequency, he wore a Wild Things . His best friend suggested a Wild Things line that was adapted for the inscription: “For Chris Branca. In all of us there is Fear, Hope and Adventure. In all of us there is a Wild Thing. ” The adjoining bench bears the plaque: “For Buddha Branca Chris’s Bulldog forever by his side. ” A memorial service was held at the benches. Some 80 people attended. Subsequently, friends have visited the benches, taken pictures, sent them on to the family. A few weeks ago, his mother went to check on the benches and two of his childhood friends were sitting on them, chatting away. She sat down, slipped into the conversation. Another time, she looked in on the benches and a high school friend of Mr. Branca’s was resting there. It turned out that he was in town visiting. He lives in Puerto Rico. Benches. Benches. Benches. They can serve many purposes. He came to New York from Bogotá, Colombia. She arrived from St. Petersburg, Fla. They met in March 2014, at a friend’s birthday party. Chrissy Crawford made such an impression on Enrique Corredor that on the way home in a cab, he texted her to ask her out. Things went excellently from then on. As a boy he used to play in the park, dissolving into the Ramble. For years, he had had a dream that when he proposed to a woman, he would do it with one of the benches whose inscriptions he read. Right where he used to play. He just needed the woman. Now he was set. What to put on it? He trawled the internet, looking up love poems, romantic sayings. “I was surprised, but some of the best love lines were in letters written by Henry Kissinger,” he said. Yes, of course. Nonetheless, he kept going. He came across something from “Gone With the Wind,” Rhett Butler proposing to Scarlett O’Hara: “Say you’re going to marry me. Say yes. Say yes. ” Ms. Crawford was from the South. That would do it. He altered it somewhat and made the plaque: “My dearest Chrissy. Say you will marry me. With all my love and promise. Enrique. June 2015. ” He picked a day for the surprise. He had gotten the engagement ring of Ms. Crawford’s grandmother that he was going to use. But it rained. He had to push it back. He didn’t know, but the new date was the wedding anniversary of her grandmother. He suggested they run in the park. Ms. Crawford made it clear they had to leave by a certain time, for she had a business meeting. She has an online art gallery. He is an investment banker. They ran. “He kept stalling and wanting to walk around and get coffee, explore,” she remembered. “I was so angry with him by the time we got to the bench. ” He told her, “Hey, Chrissy, look at that bench. ” The anger dissipated. He dropped to his knee. She said yes. It was an expensive way to propose, considering it can be done free, but he didn’t see it that way. “Well, I didn’t have to pay for an engagement ring, so I get off on that,” he said. “But I looked on it as a creating an heirloom. Leaving our mark on the city. ” Something like 43 million people visit the park every year. Once a month or so, the couple will swing by, sit on the bench, their bench, and amid the park’s placidity, contentedly gaze at the humanity filing past, and feel good.

DUBAI (Reuters) - U.S President Donald Trump s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel s capital could provide a lifeline to militants after the setbacks they suffered this year, the de facto leader of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has warned. Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahayan also said that the UAE hopes that Washington would reconsider its decision. Trump s announcement has sparked widespread opposition across the Middle East, with many warning it could affect Washington s role as a Middle East peace broker. The U.S. move could throw a lifebuoy to terrorist and armed groups, which have begun to lose ground in the region, said Sheikh Mohammed, speaking to a delegation from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The comments were carried in a report on state news agency WAM published late on Saturday. Iraq on Saturday declared final victory over Islamic State after Iraqi forces drove its last remnants from the country, while the group is on the back foot in neighboring Syria, where an offensive backed by Russia has driven the group out of most of its strongholds. Palestinians want Arab East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, to be the capital of a state they hope would be emerge from peace talks with Israel. Israel has annexed East Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally and regards the area as part of its capital. Sheikh Mohammed said Trump s unilateral decision violates U.N. resolutions, and urged Washington to reconsider its move and work basically in an effective and neutral manner to draft true principles for peace that serve all and realize development and stability in the region , according to WAM. Turning to Yemen, Sheikh Mohammed said the Saudi-led Arab coalition, which includes the UAE, remained committed to a political solution to end the war that began in 2015 when the Iran-aligned Houthis advanced on the southern port city of Aden forcing President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to flee into exile. But he said that any solution will also not be at the expense of enabling a military militia that operates outside the state authority and posing a direct threat to the security and stability of the sisterly Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the region at large.

Report Copyright Violation Neocon Trotskyite Hannity Wants America Back On Track Hannity wants everyone to vote for Trump to get the country back on track. This is the guy who cheered on our country to wars for a bold faced lie.Folks this guy Hannity should be swinging from the gallows or better yet take him out to see and make him walk the plank. Otherwise I'll do it myself! Anonymous Coward ( OP )

Donald Trump s candidacy has been very concerning to experts and leaders on national security. His erratic and aggressive philosophies on war and security would likely get thousands of Americans and others killed, while destabilizing the world and making the entire planet less safe.To address those concerns, a new ad has been produced by the veterans group VoteVets starring Major General Paul D. Eaton highlighting why he cannot support Trump for president.Referencing his father s military service, and the men and women who served under them during his time in the military, General Eaton says, for all of them, and for our country, I cannot support Donald Trump. Eaton points out that Donald Trump does not have the temperament or judgement to be our commander-in-chief, that s why I m speaking out. Trump s agenda presents key dangers for America s military, including his expressed desire to renew the torture program that began under Bush/Cheney. Trump has said he would expand waterboarding, which is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and said he would make the military attack and kill the families of terrorists a likely war crime.The presumptive Republican nominee was widely criticized for a speech in which he praised dictator Saddam Hussein the so-called butcher of Baghdad for what he described as good policies against terrorism. Later fact checks pointed out that in addition to being an oppressive authoritarian dictator, Hussein actually provided shelter and refuge for terrorists.Eaton served as Commanding General of the military coalition section that trained soldiers in Iraq between 2003-4. He served in the military for over 36 years, then later became a critic of the Bush administration s reckless policies in Iraq. Eaton since then has served as a military adviser to Hillary Clinton s 2008 presidential campaign, and as a supporter of Obama later that year.Featured image via YouTube screen capture

Share This The FBI’s recent announcement, that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and private server has been reopened, made Huma Abedin a household name if it wasn’t already. However, many missed the chilling video released by Anonymous, exposing Abedin just days before the FBI’s announcement. It’s one that the mainstream media didn’t want you to see, but every American needs to watch it. After the laptop of Abedin’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, ended up in the hands of the FBI, Hillary’s misdeeds came under scrutiny once again. With another scandal and more controversy hitting the Clinton campaign, many have begun talking not only about Hillary Clinton but her closest aide as well. However, emails, laptops, and perverted husband Anthony Weiner are the least of our worries when it comes to Huma Abedin. In a mission to inform Americans, an informative but bone-chilling video has been released by Anonymous, exposing the real Huma Abedin. Although Mad World News previously reported on her ties to radical Islam, the recently released video that’s now begun to circulate on social media lays out her connections in an easy to follow visual that every American needs to see. “Who Is Huma?” the video asks, and the answer is chilling. The narrator of the video names four main players in exposing the truth behind Abedin and her disturbing ties to groups and people who fund terrorism. Those players are obviously Abedin herself and Hillary Clinton , but also Abdullah Omar Nasseef and Saudi Arabia, where Huma was raised from the age of two until she was 18. According to the video and verified by a lengthy piece in Vanity Fair , Huma worked for the Abedin family business, The Institute of Minority Muslim Affairs, which is a pro-Sharia Law newsletter “owned by the Muslim World League, Saudi Arabia’s global organization that promotes violent Wahhabi Islam,” BizPac Review reports. This family business was created by Abedin’s father and Nasseef, one of the four main players identified in the clip, who is also one of the founders of the Muslim World League. With Huma being Hillary’s closest aide, Huma’s close ties to terrorism extend to Hillary Clinton, which is a frightening thought considering she could be our next president. What’s worse, if Hillary is elected president, she would have Huma Abedin become Secretary of State, according to leaked emails between Hillary Clinton and her former chief of staff Cheryl Mills. While everyone is concentrating on what may or may not be in the emails discovered on the laptop of Abedin’s perverse husband, this is the information everyone should see before voting. This woman, with undeniable ties to terrorists and 9/11 funders, has been Hillary’s shadow and right-hand for decades, and that won’t change if Hillary becomes president. In fact, it could only get worse. If you want to know the true measure of someone’s character, look who they surround themselves with. The old saying, “Birds of a feather flock together,” rings true, and these are two birds that should be in a cage, not our White House.

Consortium News Exclusive: The neocon royalty Kagans are counting on Democrats and liberals to be the foot soldiers in the new neocon campaign to push Republicans and President Trump into more regime change wars Robert Perry Consortium News The Kagan family, America s neoconservative aristocracy, has reemerged having recovered from the letdown over not gaining its expected influence from the election of Hillary Clinton and from its loss of official power at the start of the Trump presidency.Back pontificating on prominent op-ed pages, the Family Kagan now is pushing for an expanded U.S. military invasion of Syria and baiting Republicans for not joining more enthusiastically in the anti-Russian witch hunt over Moscow s alleged help in electing Donald Trump.In a Washington Post op-ed on March 7, Robert Kagan (photo,left), a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a key architect of the Iraq War, jabbed at Republicans for serving as Russia s accomplices after the fact by not investigating more aggressively.Then, Frederick Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Kimberly Kagan, president of her own think tank, Institute for the Study of War, touted the idea of a bigger U.S. invasion of Syria in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on March 15.Yet, as much standing as the Kagans retain in Official Washington s world of think tanks and op-ed placements, they remain mostly outside the new Trump-era power centers looking in, although they seem to have detected a door being forced open.Still, a year ago, their prospects looked much brighter. They could pick from a large field of neocon-oriented Republican presidential contenders or like Robert Kagan they could support the establishment Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, whose liberal interventionism matched closely with neoconservatism, differing only slightly in the rationalizations used for justifying wars and more wars.There was also hope that a President Hillary Clinton would recognize how sympatico the liberal hawks and the neocons were by promoting Robert Kagan s neocon wife, Victoria Nuland (photo, left), from Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs to Secretary of State.Then, there would have been a powerful momentum for both increasing the U.S. military intervention in Syria and escalating the New Cold War with Russia, putting regime change back on the agenda for those two countries. So, early last year, the possibilities seemed endless for the Family Kagan to flex their muscles and make lots of money.A Family BusinessAs I noted two years ago in an article entitled A Family Business of Perpetual War : Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats. This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks. Not only does the broader community of neoconservatives stand to benefit but so do other members of the Kagan clan, including Robert s brother Frederick at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly, who runs her own shop called the Institute for the Study of War. But things didn t quite turn out as the Kagans had drawn them up. The neocon Republicans stumbled through the GOP primaries losing out to Donald Trump and then after Hillary Clinton muscled aside Sen. Bernie Sanders to claim the Democratic nomination she fumbled away the general election to Trump.After his surprising victory, Trump for all his many shortcomings recognized that the neocons were not his friends and mostly left them out in the cold. Nuland not only lost her politically appointed job as Assistant Secretary but resigned from the Foreign Service, too Continue this story at Consortium NewsREAD MORE NEOCON NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire NeoCon FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he thinks Republicans have the votes needed to pass a big tax cut package. In an interview with Fox Business Network set to air on Sunday, Trump said he had been thinking about tying tax legislation to an infrastructure spending bill but that it was not clear a combined package would gain more votes. “I don’t want to take any chances cause I feel we have the votes right now the way it is,” he said, according to a transcript provided by the cable news outlet.

Portland protesters were doing the usual idiotic tactic of blocking the street and not letting traffic proceed What they didn t realize is that the police aren t taking this anymore Watch the takedown of these punks Awesome!Check out the lady with the thumbs up! Haha!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top U.S. senator who oversees the United States’ UN funding threatened on Friday to pull financial support for the international body if it moves forward with a vote on a resolution over Israeli settlements, and for any nation that backs the measure. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who oversees the Senate subcommittee that controls such assistance, said in a statement: “If the United Nations moves forward with the ill-conceived resolution, I will work to form a bipartisan coalition to suspend or significantly reduce United States assistance to the United Nations.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Wednesday said Puerto Rico faces a fiscal crisis but that a solution should come from the White House or Congress. “This is really something that I’m not an expert on,” she told a meeting of the House Financial Services Committee. “What the appropriate programs are for Puerto Rico to deal with its longstanding problems - I think that’s squarely a matter for Congress and the administration to consider.”

Win or lose, Trump has left his mark, and America has changed. On the eve of the election, many Republican insiders and loyal commentators are acknowledging what has become apparent – that rise of Trump signals not just a different 2016 cycle, but an entirely new constituency – one defined by populism, by trade, by class. by the impact on jobs and economics. Charles Krauthammer stated on Fox News that Trump is the new power broker in the GOP and the de facto “king maker” – regardless of who wins the election. The demographics of the party have changed: Interestingly, Bill Clinton also gets it. The former president has been on the stump – ostensibly to differentiate his wife from President Obama – pointing out the fact that the middle class has been abandoned, and that these desperate people are turning to populist because they have lost something tangible in the last eight years. As The Daily Sheeple reported : A leaked Democratic fundraising speech Bill Clinton gave back in 2015 shows the former president telling donors that thanks to Obama, lower-income whites have lower life expectancies because they “don’t have anything to look forward to when they get up in the morning” now. Bill is tacitly acknowledging the impact that terrible trade deals have had on the American economy and jobs over the last 30 years… Not only is Bill trying to sound like a straight-talking mix of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, he is acknowledging the same new party identities that voters have assumed. While Hillary may take the electoral college votes handily enough, the popular votes will reflect a sentiment of anger and unrest in the population. As the NY Times noted : [Democrats/Hillary campaign] have effectively swapped much of their working-class white base for the so-called rising demographic of millennials, nonwhite voters and suburbanites clustered near cities such as Denver, Miami, Las Vegas and Washington. From watching these communities, it will become clear on Tuesday why Mrs. Clinton’s party enjoys a structural advantage in the Electoral College. But this election may also hasten the day when more of the heartland becomes out of reach, illustrating what Democrats lost as much as what they gained. The common thread is that a combination of trade deals and economic policies has destroyed the wealth of “everyday Americans” – shrinking the middle class and piling pressure onto the lower and working classes who must increasingly depend upon government assistance for their survival. Read more: Trump Accuses Fed of Not Raising Rates Because Obama “Doesn’t Want a Bubble Burst” Until He Leaves EPIC RANT: Fed Up American Explains Why Trump Will Win: “Somebody With Balls” Collapse Strategist: “We’re In The Terminal Phase… Economic Pain Like We’ve Never Seen Before” Trump Tuesday Means A Shift Of Power for Establishment… And They Are Freaked Davos Insider Vows Trump Defeat: “It Doesn’t Matter Who the GOP Puts Up, Hillary Will Win”

At one time, Ann Coulter thought Donald Trump was the greatest thing to ever happen to America. But apparently, she doesn t feel that way anymore because she just freaked out all over Twitter screaming about Trump s daily melodrama and failure to follow through on any of his campaign promises.Yesterday, the Trump administration kept in place Obama s unconstitutional executive amnesty. Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 16, 2017This daily Trump melodrama is worth it ONLY if he s really going to build the wall, cut off Muslim refugees and deport illegals. Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 16, 2017Today s BORDER WALL CONSTRUCTION UPDATE: Miles completed yesterday Zero; Miles completed since Inauguration Zero. NEXT UPDATE TOMORROW. Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 16, 2017Anyone in a Southwestern state who strolls to the border & drops a brick will have done more to build the wall than @realDonaldTrump. Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 16, 2017If @VP Pence were smart, starting making noises about how he d LOVE to build a wall. He d be sworn in as president about 2 weeks. Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 16, 2017I thought w/ Trump we d finally have a president helping OUR country. So far: Syria, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Italy, China, N Kor. Today: Cuba! Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 16, 2017At least Cuba s in our hemisphere. How long can it be before Trump gets to America? https://t.co/vTf5osrr15 Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 16, 2017Well gee, it seems like there is trouble in paradise. Mediaite reached out to Coulter for a comment and her response made it crystal clear where she stands with Trump at this particular moment. It was a whole series today! This jackass is really ticking me off. And today Cuba? F*cking Cuba? If he d run a campaign promising to do everything he s done in the last 6 months, he d never have been elected. Even Trump s most loyal supporters are fed up with his bullsh*t. His approval ratings are dwindling by the day and no one with any sense at all wants to be associated with him or his administration. And now, even Ann Coulter has had it with him. Things sure don t look good for Trump right now.Featured image via Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The shooting in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday was the 353rd mass shooting of 2015, according to the crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker that Vox uses for our maps documenting mass shootings. Or it was the 29th, if you use data from USA Today. Or it was the fourth, if you use a database maintained by Mother Jones. How are three news outlets coming up with such different answers? It all comes down to definitions: There are other differences too — for example, Mother Jones says it generally only includes single gunman incidents, though it includes San Bernardino and the Columbine massacre in its database. But those are the main ones. What's happening here a dispute not about the facts, but over what the appropriate definition is. The Mass Shooting Tracker definition is fairly new, but the dispute between Mother Jones and USA Today is older and more ideologically fraught. That's because the Mother Jones definition suggests that mass shootings are rising in number, and the USA Today definition doesn't. If you look at all killings in which four or more people died, there doesn't appear to be a strong upward trend, according to estimates by Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox, who uses a similar definition to USA Today: But other researchers, like Amy P. Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller of the Harvard School of Public Health, argue that Mother Jones's more restrictive definition is appropriate. Cohen et al. analyzed Mother Jones's data and concluded that mass shootings were becoming more frequent. They measure the average period of time between mass shooting incidents, rather than the number of incidents themselves; mass shootings of the kind they're studying are rare enough to make the latter untenable. They find that the period of time separating mass shootings (by their definition) has been shrinking: So who's right? Well, Fox is right about the phenomenon he's studying, Cohen et al. are right about the phenomenon they're studying, and the Mass Shooting Tracker is right for the phenomenon it's studying. Declaring one or the other definition the "right" one is too pat; each is right for the thing it tracks. Fox's data tells us that shootings of four or more people didn't decline in the 1990s the way shootings as a whole did; that's concerning. Cohen et al.'s data tells us that high-profile public mass shootings like Aurora or Newtown have not only failed to decline the way normal shootings have but have increased in recent years; that's also concerning. And the Mass Shooting tracker tells us that mass shootings, deadly or not, are a daily occurrence in the US; that is, obviously, concerning. But people still care about determining the "right" definition in cases like this for the purpose of ideological proxy warfare. Declaring Fox or Cohen et al. right, in particular, has a certain political valence in the wider gun control debate. You see something similar in discussions around school shootings, wherein gun control skeptics are as eager to declare that gang-related shootings in school are not real school shootings as they are to embrace Fox's definition in which gang-related mass shootings are real mass shootings — and vice versa for gun control supporters. The best case for gun control has little to do with mass shootings, and isn't necessarily focused on homicides at all What's frustrating about this is that whether mass shootings are increasing or decreasing in frequency has very little to do with the generalized case for gun control. Mother Jones's Mark Follman — who has done extraordinary work on gun violence in America, including compiling the data set used by Cohen et al. — is not wrong when he writes that the Mother Jones–defined mass shootings are "a unique phenomenon that must be understood on its own." And it's worth studying both the phenomena identified by Fox and those identified by Mother Jones to find specialized ways to prevent them. But mass shootings are very rare. By Fox's definition, there are between 50 and 125 victims a year (compared with 11,068 total gun homicides in 2011); by the Mother Jones definition, there are substantially fewer than that. Mass shootings can and should be prevented, and their comparative rarity makes them no less monstrous or tragic. But the best case for gun control has little to do with mass shootings, and isn't necessarily focused on homicides at all. Of the 33,636 firearm deaths in 2013, 63 percent, or 21,175, were suicides. The evidence that the presence of additional guns contributes to more firearm homicides is persuasive, but research from the Means Matter Project at the Harvard School of Public Health (much of it done by Azrael and Miller themselves, along with Cathy Barber) shows that the evidence that guns contribute to higher levels of suicide is considerably stronger. Suicide, contrary to popular belief, isn't typically planned and thought through extensively in advance. It's impulsive; one survey found that 90 percent of respondents deliberated for less than a day before attempting suicide. And 90 percent of people who survive suicide attempts end up dying by other means. They didn't make a considered choice and then seek to follow through by whatever means; they made an impulsive decision and got lucky. Ken Baldwin, who survived a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, once told the New Yorker's Tad Friend that as he was falling, he "instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped." America's gun homicide problem is real, frightening, and must be addressed. But its gun suicide problem is considerably worse. Guns make it likelier that these impulsive decisions end in death rather than in survival and recovery. Studies suggest that suicide attempts using guns are fatal in the vast majority of cases, while attempts using cuts or poisoning are only fatal 6 or 7 percent of the time. So it's perhaps unsurprising that areas with more guns tend to have higher suicide rates, or that a number of gun control measures have been successful in preventing suicides. In one particularly dramatic case, the Israeli Defense Forces stopped letting soldiers bring their guns home over the weekend, and suicides fell 40 percent, primarily due to a drop in firearm suicides committed on weekends. The dominant focus of gun control efforts, then, should be on keeping guns (and particularly handguns) out of the hands of suicidal people. America's gun homicide problem is real, frightening, and must be addressed. But its gun suicide problem is considerably worse. My concern is that disputes over whether this or that incident counts as a mass shooting reaffirms the myth that Jared Loughner and Adam Lanza are the face of America's gun violence problem. They're not. The tens of thousands who die every year because of depression and a nearby gun are. They are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the gun debate, and they deserve better.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When Donald Trump started thinking during his campaign for the presidency last year about filling a Supreme Court vacancy, he turned to a group of Washington insiders at the controls of a well-oiled machine that puts conservative judges on the bench. That disciplined network of operatives, shepherded by judicial activist Leonard Leo, on Friday delivered for Trump his first major accomplishment as U.S. president: the confirmation of conservative Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice. Unlike the chaotic rollouts of other Trump policy initiatives, the Gorsuch nomination went relatively smoothly. Democrats put up a fight in the Senate, but they lacked the votes to block the Republican majority and they lost. Other key players included experienced Washington hands such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, former Senator Kelly Ayotte and White House Counsel Don McGahn. “It worked because it was all planned out before the nomination. We know what works, what doesn’t work, what resources we need. We know the other side’s arguments and how to answer them. It’s like war,” Leo told Reuters on Friday. The only surprise stumble in the effort came when Trump attacked judges who blocked his order banning U.S. entry by people from certain Muslim-majority countries. Gorsuch distanced himself from the president’s Twitter messages. Other than that, discipline was maintained from the first of five meetings that Leo, a veteran of Bush-era judicial confirmation battles, attended with Trump. The two met twice before the election. Leo helped compile a list of potential nominees for Trump. That helped win over conservative activists unsure of Trump’s ideological compass at a time when he was still fighting for the Republican presidential nomination. A second, longer list came in September. It included Gorsuch, a federal judge. The campaign for Gorsuch’s confirmation would not have happened without McConnell, who stopped former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, from filling the high court vacancy created when conservative icon Antonin Scalia died in February 2016. After Trump won the election, he named McGahn, a Washington-based campaign finance lawyer at Jones Day, as White House counsel. Known by his colleagues as “The Quiet Man,” McGahn managed the nomination from inside the administration. Leo, who reported to McGahn, pushed back against Democrats’ claims that Trump basically out-sourced the nomination process to outside groups. Leo said McGahn carefully scrutinized the lists of nominees and was not simply a rubber stamp. The Gorsuch campaign got heavy marketing and promotion backing from the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), a coordinating body for conservative and grassroots groups. It launched $10 million in pro-Gorsuch advertising, targeting in particular Senate Democrats facing re-election contests in 2018. The JCN was born during the administration of former President George W. Bush, when Republicans realized a strong outside campaign was critical to getting conservatives on the court. Carrie Severino, the group’s chief counsel, said the fact Trump agreed to stick to the nominees list made her job easier. “We were prepared for several possibilities, and we had ads, websites, research packets, and much more ready to launch the moment a name was confirmed,” she said. Leo said conservatives have borrowed techniques from the liberal coalitions that worked to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork by Republican then-President Ronald Reagan in 1987. The JCN also tapped social media and communications professionals. Washington public relations heavyweight Ron Bonjean played a role, reporting to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. At the White House, McGahn and a team in his office held “murder boards” where Gorsuch was bombarded with questions senators might ask. Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short and his team organized visits with senators and worked with Ayotte. Asked to accompany Gorsuch around Capitol Hill, Ayotte accepted, she said in an interview. Ayotte had lost her re-election bid in November and had criticized Trump. But she helped arrange meetings for Gorsuch with almost 80 senators. In the end, said sources close to the Gorsuch effort, it worked because it was highly regimented. Leo said the machine that got Gorsuch on the bench is here to stay although he will return to his job as executive vice president of the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers’ group. Leo hopes Trump will tap that machine for a possible second nomination during his presidency. “Supreme Court confirmations have become full-blown political campaigns,” he said.

President Trump spoke at the first ever Celebrate Freedom Rally last night delivering a barn burner of a speech to veterans and wounded warriors from Walter Reid Hospital. It was one of the best red meat speeches our President has ever delivered. We think you ll enjoy it Go to the 21:45 point for the amazing story of Harry F. Miller:Harry lied about his age to join the American forces. He was just 15 when he joined the US military during World War II. Harry was a US hero at The Battle of the Bulge!Harry s story:During the battle, the 1st Army Headquarters instructed the tank crews to go down to an ordnance depot and take whatever they needed for the tanks. We had to take good parts off of one tank and put it on another. We finally got three tanks and a tank destroyer that would operate and run, and had a gun, he said in an interview with VA. They took the three working tanks and sent them to their C Company. Those three tanks ended up taking out three German tanks, which ended up being members of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitlerbeing, Hitler s old body guards.

MANILA (Reuters) - The Philippine Congress approved a bill that removes a proposed 900 million pesos ($17.87 million) for the police war on drugs, now that police are no longer leading the operation, but which provides them with body cameras to record arrests. Senator Loren Legarda, the head of senate s finance committee, said on Monday that Congress re-allotted the police-requested budget because the Drug Enforcement Agency was now leading the controversial war on drugs in which thousand of suspected dealers and users have been killed. The bill, approved by Congress last week, is expected to be endorsed by President Rodrigo Duterte, who launched the crackdown, on Tuesday. Duterte this month ordered the police to return to the drugs war, following a near eight-week layoff, but in a supporting role only. Most of the money steered away from the war on drugs would go towards military and police housing, and the balance would be used to buy body cameras for police engaged in anti-drug operations. Maybe they would be fearful if they are monitored, to lessen if not totally eliminate untoward incidents, Legarda told the ANC news channel. The anti-narcotics crackdown has drawn international criticism, with rights groups pointing out lapses in police operations and alleged executions of drug suspects. Police say they have shot dead more than 3,900 drug suspects in self-defence during the 17-month campaign, but surveys have showed doubts among Filipinos about the validity of police accounts.

Like all other presidents since George H.W. Bush President Obama has worked to build a closer relationship with Israel while still pushing them publicly to stop the development of their Jews only settlements that have all but made a 2 state solution impossible. The progressives in the Democratic party have pushed for accountability with Israel due to its horrific human rights violations against the Palestinians, which rules over them and denies them the most basic of human rights in the West Bank and Gaza. Yet, despite the billions of dollars of tax payer money we give but can t afford to give to Israel, politicians are tripping over each other to grovel to the American Israel Public Affairs committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel lobby group that can make or break a political career.That s why all the political candidates lined up to speak at the AIPAC conference yesterday (minus the only Jewish candidate Bernie Sanders) to see who can kiss Israel s a** the best; each of the Republican presidential candidates using Israel as a cudgel to hammer President Obama for not sufficiently bowing to the needs of the Israel first AIPAC conference.It was quite embarrassing to watch American leaders grovel to a group whose sole reason for being is to push the interests of a foreign country. Out of all of the pandering and ass kissing that happened at AIPAC there was one moment that brought a long ovation from the crowd. And this one moment really encapsulates the sense of entitlement for Israel.Trump s best line: with President Obama in his final year, yay! And the crowd erupts. One would think there was a Rosh Hashanah celebration with the kind of applause heard in the crowd, but alas it was a group of right wing Americans applauding President Obama being in his final year in office.Because from their vantage point President Obama is secretly trying to destroy Israel. Despite the billions of dollars sent each year, the diplomatic cover the president has provided Israel at the United Nations for its war crimes and apartheid state they hate him. Despite the years of partisanship by Prime Minister Netanyahu where he inserted himself into the 2012 Presidential election to help Mitt Romney or the multiple years of public defiance over international agreements on the Iran peace deal having brokered a deal with the Republican party to speak to Congress behind President Obama s back they blame him.AIPAC is upset because of the president s deal with Iran over its nuclear weapons and would rather see America s kids go to war on Israel s behalf than have the diplomatic solution the president was able to broker, which the great majority of US military leaders have called a good deal. They are also upset because the president has refused to raise Israel s welfare check to $5 billion a year from the current $3 billion we give them, despite the fact that we can t afford clean water in Flint, Michigan.One good word to to describe AIPAC s reaction to Trump s condemnation of the president is: ungrateful.Watch video here: With Pres. Obama in his final year yay, @realDonaldTrump says to cheers at #AIPAC2016: https://t.co/ivrbx3iG0B https://t.co/8iTFpuMZt9 CBSN (@CBSNLive) March 21, 2016Featured image via video screenshot.

Only supporters of Donald Trump could say something so stupid that a news anchor smacks their own head in frustration.When CNN host Alisyn Camerota organized a discussion with a bunch of Trump supporters, she apparently didn t expect the monumental stupidity she was about to receive.The group of Trump supporters, which included Susan DeLemus, Paula Johnson, and others whom Camerota has spoken to before throughout the 2016 Election, were totally ignorant of Trump s picks for his administration and repeatedly spouted falsehoods in order to defend him.DeLemus claimed that Trump only picked top people to fill his cabinet. People that I m looking at that Trump has appointed or nominated have all been top of the class, number one in their field, extremely talented, great leaders on their own, she said.Of course, any reasonable person with a functioning brain understands that Trump has been scraping the bottom of the conservative barrel to fill government positions. After all, no one can say with a straight face that Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is the best attorney in the country.And no one can say that Sarah Palin is even remotely qualified to be Secretary of anything, much less Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Trump s pick to run the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos, is staunchly anti-public schools and funds a group that wants to dismantle child labor laws because mining would be exciting for kids. In other words, she is definitely unqualified to shape the future of education in this country.But when the subject of protests against Trump came up, Camerota was flooded with idiocy spearheaded by Johnson. Voting is a privilege in this country and you need to be legal, not like California where three million illegals voted, she claimed. Where are you getting your information? a confused Camerota asked.Johnson claimed she got the information from the media, including CNN, which means Johnson probably took reports on Trump s tweet about 3 million people voting illegally for Hillary Clinton as the truth because the media reported on it.Johnson repeatedly insisted that California let 3 million undocumented immigrants vote and claimed that President Obama encouraged them to vote. All of the panelists agreed, with one even daring Camerota to Google it because it s on Facebook. Well, Camerota did and found that Fox Business deceptively edited a clip of President Obama to make it sound like he encouraged undocumented immigrants to vote when, in fact, he did not.But that didn t sway Johnson from continuing to insist that California allows undocumented immigrants to vote, which caused Camerota to smack her own head in frustration because the stupid was clearly strong in this one.Here s the video via YouTube.Seriously, Donald Trump claim about 3 million illegal voters has been thoroughly debunked and has been trashed by members of his own party because it is so absurd. This segment proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump supporters are completely ignorant and have been brainwashed to believe anything that Trump says. And yet they wonder why they are constantly mocked.Featured image via screenshot

In yet another bombshell report, Newsweek just revealed that Vladamir Putin and the Russian government are actively trying to help Donald Trump win the election because they believe he will help them weaken our NATO allies.The Republican nominee s connections to Russia have been a huge topic in the news for many months due to his compliments about Putin and the fact that some of his closest campaign allies have connections to Russia.In addition, Trump has declared that he will consider pulling United States support from NATO and even strong-armed the Republican Party to ditch a platform plank condemning Russia s aggression toward Ukraine.And Putin has rewarded Trump by directing Russian media to blare out support for him and Russian hackers have been busy hacking American computer systems in an effort to hurt the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton.Of course, Trump has defended Russia despite the cyber-attacks being confirmed by Western intelligence agencies in the United States and Europe. Trump was even briefed about this and yet he still denies that Russia is the perpetrator.And that is leading many of our closest allies to worry about what could happen if Trump becomes president.According to Newsweek,Officials from two European countries told Newsweek that Trump s comments about Russia s hacking have alarmed several NATO partners because it suggests he either does not believe the information he receives in intelligence briefings, does not pay attention to it, does not understand it or is misleading the American public for unknown reasons. One British official said members of that government who are aware of the scope of Russia s cyberattacks both in Western Europe and America found Trump s comments quite disturbing because they fear that, if elected, the Republican presidential nominee would continue to ignore information gathered by intelligence services in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy.And we know Russia is backing Trump because they ended their hacking campaign when it seemed like he would be replaced as the nominee by a sane Republican, only to resume hacking on Trump s behalf when he wasn t replaced.When Trump launched into an inexplicable attack on the parents of a Muslim-American soldier who died in combat, the Kremlin assumed the Republican nominee was showing himself psychologically unfit to be president and would be forced by his party to withdraw from the race. As a result, Moscow put its hacking campaign temporarily on hold, ending the distribution of documents until Trump stabilized, both personally and in the polls, according to reports provided to Western intelligence.And the United States election is not the only one Russia has interfered with. The Kremlin also spread misinformation that helped right-wingers take control in Germany and caused the United Kingdom to vote in favor of Brexit, both of which help Russia weaken alliances.But their true target is NATO, which is what stands in the way of Russia overpowering Europe, and our allies fear that a Trump victory on November 8th would embolden Russia to do just that.Officials in Western Europe say they are dismayed that they now feel compelled to gather intelligence on a man who could be the next president of the United States, but believe they have no choice. Moscow is seen as a direct threat to their interests both in its aggressive efforts to reshape global alliances and for its power to damage Western Europe, which obtains almost 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia. Should the United States, the last remaining superpower, tilt its policies away from NATO to the benefit of Russia, the alliance between America and Western Europe could be transformed in unprecedented ways. And so, for perhaps the first time since World War II, countries in Western Europe fear that the American election, should Trump win, could trigger events that imperil their national security and do potentially irreparable harm to the alliances that have kept the continent safe for decades.Here s video of Rachel Maddow explaining how big this news is via YouTube.Oh, and one more thing. While Donald Trump and Republicans continue to whine about how Hillary Clinton used a private server, it turns out Hillary was smart to do so because the Russians hacked into the State Department email system, which means if she had used that system her emails would have been obtained by the Russian government.So Russia literally wants Trump to win so they can use him as their puppet to gain more influence in the world, which means more war, less democracy, and a United States that is weaker.That cannot be allowed to happen. Clearly, the Russians like Trump, and that should make all Americans cast their votes for Hillary Clinton.Featured Image: YouTube

The shocking truth about how close we are to becoming a one-party fascist stateThis is the most brilliant and scary analysis of where we, as a nation are today Last year a retired Border Patrol Officer by the name of Zach Taylor went on camera to explain the driving force behind the unprecedented surge in illegal immigration happening on our southern border. Taylor went on to note that what was happening at our border was not due to a spur of the moment event, or a humanitarian crisis , but asymmetrical warfare. The surge we saw at the border was apart of a larger more chilling event that served one purpose and one purpose only, to show our enemies that our southern border had been compromised and the government wouldn t do a damn thing about it.The border was destroyed because of the actions taken by President Barack Obama under the guise of his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) plan. Simply put, DACA rewrote our immigration laws and created the incentive for illegal aliens to break our laws as Obama deliberately undermined our nation s sovereignty by simply creating his own. The culmination of Obama s DACA has resulted in over 790,000 illegal aliens entering the country from the middle of 2013 to May of 2015, for a total of 2.5 million new illegal immigrants since Obama took office in January of 2009.While the threat comes from without, in this case millions of illegal immigrants, it could not have been possible without the enemy already being inside of the United States. As Mr. Taylor states, If asymmetrical warfare is going to be successful, the first thing that has to be done is to compromise America s defense against invasion because they have to have their personnel inside the United States to affect the infrastructure our hospitals, our schools, our electric grid, our power supplies, our water supply basically what we call infrastructure [which] effects the degeneration from inside the United States. By drawing away the resources that are intended to protect the United States border in order to care for the illegal immigrants, the border is now wide open and our infrastructure is overloaded. Yet, the crisis on the border is only a small part of the larger warfare that s being waged against our country at the hands of our own president. Today the Obama juggernaut is systematically bankrupting our country, and undoing the constitutional arrangements our Founders left to us , writes David Horowitz in his book Fight Fire With Fire. The contempt of the Obama party for consultative and representative government is relentlessly on display. Horowitz goes on to give the example of what our enemy represents with the following statement uttered by then Senate Majority leader Harry Reid as he defended his refusal to negotiate with Republicans over Obamacare and the debt crisis. Reid stated in these words: We are here to support the federal government. That s our job. End quote. You ll notice that representing the people for whom our Constitution makes sovereign is not included in Reid s statement.Horowitz then writes the following: My years as a radical prepared me to see much of this coming. But even I never thought we would be looking so soon at the prospect of a one-party system and a fascist state. Those words may sound hyperbolic, but take a moment to think about it. If you have transformed the taxing agency of the state into a political weapon and Obama has; if you are setting up a massive government program to collect and file the financial and health information of every citizen, and also to control their access to care; and if you have a spy agency that can read the mail and listen to the communications of every individual in the country, you don t really need a secret police to destroy political opponents. You already have the means to do it. This is all the more troubling when you look at the sheer amount of data the Obama administration, or shall I say the Obama government, is collecting on each and every individual living in the United States. To effect the degeneration of the country from within the Obama administration has weaponized the IRS, DOJ, and FBI to target Americans who oppose their agenda. Now, the White House has added a key tool in their arsenal by prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of racial and economic justice. On Saturday, Paul Sperry of the New York Post, uncovered the latest Obama plan that is aimed at collecting personal data for a secret race database. Sperry writes, Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school all to document inequalities between minorities and whites. It may sound conspiratorial but under this government the only conspiracy is that being committed against Americans who are too distracted by today s latest ginned up political crisis.Sperry continues by noting that, this Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make disparate impact cases against: banks that don t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds. Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online. This means that so called civil-rights attorneys like those working for the ACLU and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of racial disparities and segregation, even if no other evidence of discrimination exists. Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society , concludes Sperry. If you were to add all the databases created under this administration, including the Obamacare database, known as MIDAS, which retains tens of millions of Obamacare enrollees information, you could quiet literally make the claim that the federal government has data on every single American citizen. In the hands of someone like Obama this becomes of grave concern given his willingness to use such information against his opponents. Now that this information will be made public in order to extort communities deemed too segregated . Whether it be through the withholding of federal funds for a local community showing a pattern of racial disparity or lawsuits against a school that disciplines minorities more than whites, it doesn t much matter. The government will be able to force you to act in a way that it deems socially acceptable as Obama drastically changes the racial makeup of America by enshrining an infrastructure that will continue long after he s gone.All the while this is happening below the surface and under the radar from most Americans, we remain and for good reason, distracted by the latest crisis of the day. A Christian owned Oregon bakery is forced by the state to pay a fine for not baking a cake for a lesbian couple, a woman is killed by an illegal immigrant and 7-time convicted felon in San Francisco, four Marines and one Navy Officer are executed by an Islamic jihadist; none of this would be happening but for Obama s actions. He knew that ISIS had put out a hit list specifically targeting our military, and he did nothing. He cheered on the Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage knowing that it would be used in a way to exploit and destroy businesses specifically owned by Christians. He created the sanctuary city policy that has served to protect illegal immigrants while they rape, murder, and assault American citizens like Kate Steinle in San Francisco.All of this is happening because of the enemy we have in the White House. The country is being brought to its knees by overt acts such as the jihadist attack that was met with no response, to covert acts such as the Obama race database. Yet, no resistance is met to counter the agenda of the Obama adminstration. Even the capacity of the American people to determine their own national interests are being torn asunder without any fight, without even so much as a whimper from Congress. Without a pushback, the adminstration goes about acting without repercussion held to no degree of accountability. With impeachment and the power of the purse both taken off the table by Congress, America is literally at the whim of Obama as the only checks that exist today on what the president can do is what he personally thinks he can get away with and what his political incentives are.So the adminstration pushes full steam ahead without any concern for the American people themselves. Nowhere is this more apparent, on a foreign policy scale, than with the adminstration s nuclear deal with Iran. As Andrew McCarthy of National Review writes, At the U.N. today, the Obama administration is colluding with our enemies and other foreign sovereigns to deprive the American people through their elected representatives of the power to determine what obligations they will accept under international law. The Obama administration has taken the position that Russia, China, and, yes, Iran, have a vote on our national security, but we do not. And in this betrayal, Congress has, at best, been a witless aider and abettor. At worst, they ve gone along with the adminstration in committing treason against the United States of America.I believe in the latter.Via: Politically Short

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Nearly 20 percent of high school and university students in Indonesia support the establishment of a caliphate in the world s largest Muslim-majority country over the current secular government, a new survey showed this week. Indonesia has in recent years seen its long-standing reputation for religious tolerance come under scrutiny as hardline Islamic groups muscle their way into public and political life in the young democracy. The vast majority of Indonesians practice a moderate form of Islam and the country has sizeable minorities of Hindus, Christians, and people who adhere to traditional beliefs. Religious diversity is enshrined in its constitution. The survey by a Jakarta-based organization polled over 4,200 Muslim students, mostly in top schools and universities on Java island, home to over half the country s population. Nearly one in four students said they were, to varying degrees, ready to wage jihad to achieve a caliphate. This indicates that intolerant teachings have already entered top universities and high schools, pollster Alvara, which carried out the survey, said in its report released Tuesday. The government and moderate Islamic organizations must start taking tangible steps to anticipate this and be present in student circles with language that is easy for them to understand, the report added. A presidential spokesman declined to comment on the findings. Hardline Islamic groups late last year led mass street rallies against Jakarta s former governor, a Christian, whom they believed had insulted Islam. They eventually succeeded in derailing Basuki Tjahaja Purnama s re-election bid in April this year, and he was subsequently jailed for blasphemy. The ruling was criticized globally as unjust. Groups like the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) call for sharia law to be imposed on the country and believe its leaders should only be Muslim. The survey showed that the vast majority of students disagree with the establishment of an Islamic caliphate and violence. But authorities have repeatedly warned against the creeping influence of radical Islamic thought among student organizations and in campus activities. President Joko Widodo and his government are trying to contain the rising influence of hairline groups, especially in universities and Islamic boarding schools. A presidential decree banning any civil organizations deemed to go against the country s secular state ideology was approved by parliament last month. Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a largely peaceful organization that calls for the establishment of a caliphate in Indonesia, was the first group to be disbanded under the decree. President Widodo has made several speeches at Islamic boarding schools around the country emphasizing Indonesia s diversity and the importance of national unity. In September, Widodo called at a conference of around 3,000 university rectors for the promotion of the country s secular ideology, Pancasila , in education.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq s Supreme Justice Council ordered on Thursday the arrest of Kurdistan Regional Government Vice President Kosrat Rasul for allegedly saying Iraqi troops which took over the city of Kirkuk were occupying forces.

Tapper, the host of the network's "State of the Union" Sunday show and "The Lead" on weekdays, was picked to lead the event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library on Sept. 16. The prime-time debate will actually be split into two parts: One with the candidates that national polls rank as the top 10 GOP contenders, and one with the candidates who didn't make that cut. The broad GOP field has presented a challenge for both Fox News and CNN as debate hosts. Fox News announced a plan for an August 6 debate that would only include the 10 candidates that were at the top of the heap, as determined by an average of national polls. Fox's proposed criteria created the most consternation, partly because it is hosting the first debate, partly because it is a favorite of conservatives, and partly because its rules are more restrictive than CNN's. Some Republican Party leaders in Iowa and New Hampshire have said they feel the use of national polls stomps on their roles as the first in the nation caucus and primary states, respectively. Tapper announced that he'll moderate the debate on Sunday, at the end of his first show as CNN's new "State of the Union" host.

Former Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has been forced to deny a claim that he ordered the outlandish dirty dossier on President-elect Donald Trump.The BBC initially named Bush, one of Trump s opponent in the 2016 Republican primary, as having enlisted the services of Washington-based political research firm FusionGPS to look into Trump s business dealings.FusionGPS later hired ex-MI6 spy Christopher Steele to dig further into Trump s connections with Russia. He (Steele) was compiling this report on behalf of initially Trump s opponent Jeb Bush, the BBC said on Wednesday. The BBC subsequently said on Thursday its Washington correspondent Paul Wood misspoke.Bush s spokeswoman, Kristy Campbell, categorically denied any involvement between Bush and Steele. It is absolutely not true that Governor Bush had any knowledge or involvement with this gentleman and his allegations, Campbell told Reuters by phone It s nothing we ve ever seen before. However, Bush s camp have not specifically ruled out any contact with FusionGPS.On Thursday, the former Florida state governor said it s unlikely he ll run for office again.Bush said that life goes on and that he s focused on building up his business again and working with the foundation he created to push for changes in education policy. He s also ruling out running again for governor in his home state.It seems what started in September 2015 as a fairly standard political research mission to scrutinize the business dealings of a presidential candidate unexpectedly spiralled into a series of increasingly bizarre and lurid claims, none of which are verified. The company that was hired to dig into Trump, FusionGPS, is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, and advertises itself as providing premium research, strategic intelligence, and due diligence services .On Thursday, the former Florida state governor said it s unlikely he ll run for office again.Bush said that life goes on and that he s focused on building up his business again and working with the foundation he created to push for changes in education policy. He s also ruling out running again for governor in his home state.It seems what started in September 2015 as a fairly standard political research mission to scrutinize the business dealings of a presidential candidate unexpectedly spiralled into a series of increasingly bizarre and lurid claims, none of which are verified.The company that was hired to dig into Trump, FusionGPS, is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, and advertises itself as providing premium research, strategic intelligence, and due diligence services .Simpson left the Wall Street Journal in 2009 to launch an investigations company with fellow reporter Sue Schmidt.The company was called SNS Global LLC and the pair were also affiliated with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, a nonprofit foundation focused on security issues.Here s Trump s response:Via: Daily Mail

adobochron 10 Comments San Francisco, California – It was an agreement four years in the making, oftentimes marred by shouting matches among city hall officials, representatives of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, merchants and homeowners. But the Halloween party in San Francisco’s gay Castro district finally returns in 2014. It will be recalled that the Halloween bash attracted as many as 500,000 each year and has become a major tourist attraction, second and third only to the Pride parade and Folsom Street Fair. Stabbing and shooting incidents, believed to be perpetrated by straight revelers, prompted city officials to permanently ban the event beginning in 2010. As part of the agreement, the “new” Castro Halloween will be open only to members of the LGBTQ community who will have to register with city hall and be included in a “gay registry.” Registrants, who will take an oath admitting that they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or questioning, will be issued special identification cards linked to the official registry. The IDs will be the only accepted pass to gain entry to the Halloween event. ID’s will be scanned at entrances to the event to confirm that individuals are listed in the official registry. Get ready to say “Boo!” Again. Rate this:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - High-income Wall Street financiers could be unintended winners from a section of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tax-cut plan that is meant to help mostly small, “mom-and-pop” businesses. Trump called on Wednesday for a new “pass-through” tax rate of 25 percent that could mean big savings for owners of sole proprietorships and partnerships who now pay 39.6 percent. But it could also mean a windfall for partners in private-equity, venture-capital and hedge funds, unless Congress can figure out a way to block them from taking advantage of the new rate. Ron Wyden, top Democrat on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, said Democrats supported a pass-through rate for small businesses, such as “a cleaner, a garage, a restaurant.” He said Trump’s plan, however, would create “a whole new set of wealthy individuals being able to dodge their taxes through this new provision.” At issue is the taxation of the roughly 95 percent of American businesses that are not public corporations. Non-public pass-through businesses, such as sole proprietorships, limited liability companies and partnerships, pay no income tax themselves. Instead their profits “pass through” directly to their owners, who pay tax on them at the individual tax rates. A small fraction of those business owners pay the top individual tax rate of 39.6 percent, higher than the current top corporate income tax rate of 35 percent. Those business owners have long complained that the disparity is unfair, especially in view of the fact that many multinationals pay much less than the 35 percent statutory corporate tax rate by exploiting abundant loopholes and tax breaks available to large, global corporations. Republicans have been eager to address the issue. Trump’s plan proposes a new tax rate of 25 percent for the pass-through income of “small and family-owned businesses.” The problem, according to the plan’s critics, is that financial entities such as private-equity, venture-capital and hedge funds are all partnerships whose wealthy partners would see substantial tax savings on large portions of their income unless congressional tax writers find a way to exclude them. ‘GOOD’ VERSUS ‘BAD’ PASS-THROUGH INCOME The White House document that spelled out Trump’s plan signaled that the administration was aware of the potential problem but would leave addressing it up to Congress. The document said: “The framework contemplates that the (congressional tax) committees will adopt measures to prevent the recharacterization of personal income into business income to prevent wealthy individuals from avoiding the top personal tax rate.” Trump’s plan also proposes cutting the top corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent and cutting the top individual tax rate to 35 percent from 39.6 percent. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said two weeks ago that the administration would ensure partners at services firms such as accounting, law and financial firms would not benefit from a new, lower pass-through rate. A Treasury Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the pass-through rate or plans to exempt certain categories of firms. Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, a liberal advocacy group, said the idea that a new pass-through rate would help small business was “simply a hoax.” Tax experts said it would be difficult for congressional tax writers to exempt partners at services firms from using the new pass-through rate. “There has always been talk of how to carve out ‘good’ pass-through income from ‘bad’ pass-through income. The problem is it’s exceedingly hard to do and there is no way to draw clear lines that won’t be manipulated,” said Seth Hanlon with the Center for American Progress, a liberal group. Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego, agreed it would be “challenging.” “Still, I think it can probably be done,” Fleischer said.

As debate rages on over whether to ban assault rifles, pass stricter background checks, and ban potential terrorists from buying guns, the American Medical Association is demanding one thing: research into American s gun obsession.Calling the epidemic a very public health crisis, the AMA s President, Dr. Steven Stack, told reporters at an annual meeting in Chicago that the time is now to fund research, which has been stonewalled for years by Congress and the powerful lobbying efforts of the NRA. But now, the AMA is fighting back, pledging to actively lobby Congress: With approximately 30,000 men, women and children dying each year at the barrel of a gun in elementary schools, movie theaters, workplaces, houses of worship and on live television, the United States faces a public health crisis of gun violence. Even as America faces a crisis unrivaled in any other developed country, the Congress prohibits the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting the very research that would help us understand the problems associated with gun violence and determine how to reduce the high rate of firearm-related deaths and injuries. Thanks to GOP obstructionism, a lift on the CDC s investigation into gun violence was stalled when Senate Republicans blocked funding for the research. Stack stressed the importance of allowing such research, saying that figuring out why the epidemic continues is vital so physicians and other health providers, law enforcement and society at large may be able to prevent injury, death and other harms to society resulting from firearms. And before the NRA nuts accuse the AMA of unconstitutional activism, it should be noted that the only stake the AMA has in this research is the safety of firearms and their use, and reducing and preventing firearm violence. That s all there is to it. Doctors wanting to save lives? Wow, what a concept! These people aren t politicians, they re health advisors. And America s violent obsession with guns is a threat to the safety and health of everyone.This is the first time the American Medical Association has taken such a firm stance on a political issue on this magnitude. Perhaps Republicans (who go on and on about doctors and Obamacare) should listen to what the doctors are saying.Featured image via Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

(Reuters) - Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton will undergo surgery early next month for prostate cancer, he said in a statement Tuesday. Staff for Dayton, 70, said last week he was weighing treatment options after saying he had cancer in late January. A day before he announced the diagnosis, Dayton collapsed while delivering his state-of-the-state address in St. Paul, but later said he did not think the fainting episode was related to his illness. Dayton will have surgery to remove his prostate on March 2, he said in the statement. The operation will be done at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Dayton said he will need to spend one night in the hospital. The cancer has not spread beyond his prostate, Dayton said. Dayton, a Democrat, served six years as a U.S. senator from Minnesota before he was elected to his first term as governor in 2010. His current term runs until early 2018.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican U.S. Congressman Jason Chaffetz said on Thursday he plans to withdraw a bill that would have sold off more than 3 million acres of federal land to private interests after it drew a barrage of negative comments from hunters and outdoor enthusiasts. Chaffetz said in a post on the Instagram social media site that he would scrap the so-called Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act of 2017, which he introduced last week, saying he feared it sent “the wrong message.” “I’m a proud gun owner, hunter and love our public lands,” the Utah representative said in a comment, beneath a photo he posted of himself outdoors wearing hunting gear and holding a dog. “I hear you and HR 621 dies tomorrow,” added Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. HR 621 is the abbreviated name of the bill, which would have directed the Interior Department to sell off 3.3 million acres of federal land including “to non-federal entities” across 10 western states, which Chaffetz had said were “small parcels of land” that former President Bill Clinton previously identified as “serving no public purpose.” Sportsmen and women, hunting groups, and outdoor gear retailers had flooded Chaffetz’s Instagram account with thousands of posts, urging him to “say no to HR 621” and to “#keepitpublic.”. Conservation and hunting and gaming advocacy groups have been raising concerns over the past month about what they see an aggressive strategy by Congress to make it easier to transfer public lands to state control or sell it off. Last month, on the first day of the new Congress, the House passed a rules package that contained a measure that would facilitate a public lands sell-off by directing the Congressional Budget Office, which provides lawmakers data for budget decisions, to assign no monetary value to the lands. Outdoors groups say public lands hold value for the outdoor recreation economy. The Wilderness Society values that industry at over $646 billion.   “I don’t think anybody had expected the backlash that has happened as a result of these bills. People are upset out here in the west and it is one of the hottest political issues in western states,” said Brad Brooks, Idaho Deputy Regional Director for the Wilderness Society. President Donald Trump has advocated for opening up public land for more drilling and mining, although he has said that public land should stay under federal control.

HA HA! Look At Arkansas Today Trump +28 If the election were held in Hillary's home state today, Trump would be winning by a landslide. 02/08/16 5 08/14/15 11 Mail with questions or comments about this site. "Godlike Productions" & "GLP" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.008s (8 queries)

MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine lawmakers rejected President Rodrigo Duterte s choice of health secretary on Tuesday, making her the fifth cabinet member to have been turned down since Duterte came to power. No reason was given for the rejection of Paulyn Ubial, who has been in public office for 27 years. In the Philippines, all cabinet ministers must be approved by the Commission on Appointments and hearings can take place long after they start work. Senator Gregorio Honasan, chairman of the commission s health committee, said it had decided to withhold its consent to the appointment of Ubial. He did not elaborate. Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella expressed regret, saying the government was grateful for her service. Duterte has enjoyed strong opinion poll numbers since winning the presidency in last year s elections but heavy scrutiny of his war on drugs, which has killed thousands of Filipinos, appears to have impacted his ratings. Trust and satisfaction in Duterte fell to the lowest of his presidency in the third quarter of this year, a survey showed on Sunday, although sentiment about his leadership remained positive overall. Lawmakers have also rejected the appointments of Duterte s foreign, environment, agrarian reform and social welfare ministers. Two of the ministers were recommended by Maoist rebel leaders who were still talking peace with the government. Duterte has stopped the negotiations because of continuing violence. Duterte s picks for foreign and environment ministers, Alan Peter Cayetano and Roy Cimatu, have been confirmed.

In response to the establishment media s contrived fake news crisis designed to marginalise independent and alternative media sources of news and analysis, 21WIRE is running its own #FakeNewsWeek campaign, where each day our editorial team at 21st Century Wire will feature media critiques and analysis of mainstream corporate media coverage of current events exposing the government and the mainstream media as the real purveyors of fake news throughout modern history The Centre for Research on GlobalizationNever before has it been so important to have independent, honest voices and sources of information. We are as a society inundated and overwhelmed with a flood of information from a wide array of sources, but these sources of information, by and large, serve the powerful interests and individuals that own them. The main sources of information, for both public and official consumption, include the mainstream media, alternative media, academia and think tanks.The mainstream media is the most obvious in its inherent bias and manipulation. The mainstream media is owned directly by large multinational corporations, and through their boards of directors are connected with a plethora of other major global corporations and elite interests. An example of these connections can be seen through the board of Time Warner.Time Warner owns Time Magazine, HBO, Warner Bros., and CNN, among many others. The board of directors includes individuals past or presently affiliated with: the Council on Foreign Relations, the IMF, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Warburg Pincus, Phillip Morris, and AMR Corporation, among many others.Two of the most esteemed sources of news in the U.S. are the New York Times (referred to as the paper of record ) and the Washington Post. The New York Times has on its board people who are past or presently affiliated with: Schering-Plough International (pharmaceuticals), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chevron Corporation, Wesco Financial Corporation, Kohlberg & Company, The Charles Schwab Corporation, eBay Inc., Xerox, IBM, Ford Motor Company, Eli Lilly & Company, among others. Hardly a bastion of impartiality.And the same could be said for The Washington Post, which has on its board: Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and individuals associated with (past or presently): the Coca-Cola Company, New York University, Conservation International, the Council on Foreign Relations, Xerox, Catalyst, Johnson & Johnson, Target Corporation, RAND Corporation, General Motors, and the Business Council, among others.It is also important to address how the mainstream media is intertwined, often covertly and secretly, with the government. Carl Bernstein, one of the two Washington Post reporters who covered the Watergate scandal, revealed that there were over 400 American journalists who had secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency. Interestingly, the use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence-gathering employed by the CIA. Among organizations which cooperated with the CIA were the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc. The CIA even ran a training program to teach its agents to be journalists, who were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. These types of relationships have continued in the decades since, although perhaps more covertly and quietly than before. For example, it was revealed in 2000 that during the NATO bombing of Kosovo, several officers from the US Army s 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg worked in the news division at CNN s Atlanta headquarters. This same Army Psyop outfit had planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration s Central America policies, which was described by the Miami Herald as a vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory. These Army PSYOP officers also worked at National Public Radio (NPR) at the same time. The US military has, in fact, had a strong relationship with CNN.In 2008, it was reported that the Pentagon ran a major propaganda campaign by using retired Generals and former Pentagon officials to present a good picture of the administration s war-time policies. The program started in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003 and continued into 2009. These officials, presented as military analysts , regurgitate government talking points and often sit on the boards of military contractors, thus having a vested interest in the subjects they are brought on to analyze. In 2013, Public Accountability reported:During the public debate around the question of whether to attack Syria, Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to George W. Bush, made a series of high-profile media appearances. Hadley argued strenuously for military intervention in appearances on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Bloomberg TV, and authored a Washington Post op-ed headlined To stop Iran, Obama must enforce red lines with Assad. In each case, Hadley s audience was not informed that he serves as a director of Raytheon, the weapons manufacturer that makes the Tomahawk cruise missiles that were widely cited as a weapon of choice in a potential strike against Syria. Hadley earns $128,500 in annual cash compensation from the company and chairs its public affairs committee. He also owns 11,477 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate ($77.65 on August 23, making Hadley s share s worth $891,189). Despite this financial stake, Hadley was presented to his audience as an experienced, independent national security expert.The major philanthropic foundations in the United States have often used their enormous wealth to co-opt voices of dissent and movements of resistance into channels that are safe for the powers that be. As McGeorge Bundy, former President of the Ford Foundation once said, Everything the Foundation does is to make the world safe for Capitalism. Examples of this include philanthropies like the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation providing immense financial and organizational support to Non-Governmental Organizations. Furthermore, the alternative media are often funded by these same foundations, which has the effect of influencing the direction of coverage as well as the stifling of critical analysis Learn more about the Centre for Research on Globalization and the work of its founder and editor, Professor Michel Chossudovsky, as well how to donate to them at Global Research.ca. The original version of this article was published at Global Research in March 2011. READ MORE ABOUT MSM FAKE NEWS AT: FAKE NEWS WEEKSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @ 21WIRE.TV

Dr. Gina Loudon went on CNN today to discuss the fallacious groping accusations against Donald Trump. Per Wikileaks we know that CNN is working with the Clinton Campaign to destroy Donald Trump. Numerous leaked emails by Wikileaks prove that they have combined efforts to bring down the Republican candidate.This isn t the first time Brooke Baldwin has been embarrassed by a conservative who destroys her argument and makes her look like an uneducated leftist. She famously interrupted a Republican who brought up Hillary s destruction of 13 mobile devices with hammers. You can watch her FREAK AFTER On-Air Fact-Check HERE.Dr. Gina was supposed to discuss alleged groping incidents with Donald Trump. Gina Dropped a bomb! .Via: Gateway Pundit

NTEB Ads Privacy Policy More Electoral College Members Receiving Death Threats From Hillary Supporters Ahead Of December Voting Hillary voters around the country are bombarding Electoral College with emails, some of them threatening, in an effort to force them to vote against the outcome of the presidential election. by Geoffrey Grider November 21, 2016 A member of the electoral commission in Texas says his colleagues are getting death threats as angry Hillary supporters ramp up the pressure before electors cast their vote on December 19th. Hillary voters around the country are bombarding Electoral College with emails, some of them threatening, in an effort to force them to vote against the outcome of the presidential election. “At first everyone was kinda enchanted by it. Now all the electors are starting to get beaten down. There are some electors who have been threatened with harm or with death,” Texas elector Alex Kim told NBC 5. “When people ask me to vote for Hillary Clinton, there’s no way,” he said. “I reject the Democratic Party principles and I reject Hillary Clinton .” Kim said he had a message for all the people who are trying to pressure him into changing his vote; “Go to hell”. Hillary Supporters Send Death Threats to Electors: As we previously reported , another elector in Michigan said he has also received a number of death threats, including a promise that he would be shot in the head if he voted for Trump. “I’ve had people talk about shoving a gun in my mouth and blowing my brains out. And I’ve received dozens and dozens of those emails. Even the non-threatening-my-life emails are very aggressive,” Michael Banerian told the Detroit News, adding that he has been labeled a “hateful bigot” by the same people who are violently threatening him. A petition to demand electors change their vote to Clinton has also surpassed 4.5 million signatures. Meanwhile on Twitter , Hillary supporters are organizing on how to pressure electors under the hashtag #HamiltonElectors , a reference to Mike Pence being lectured by a cast member of the musical show. Unfortunately for them, conservatives found the hashtag and have now largely taken it over to decry leftists attempting to overturn the results of a democratic election. source SHARE THIS ARTICLE

Joel Pollack has been with Breitbart News through the years of Obama and beyond so he knows this is a war. It s so much more that STATUES He gets it and it s great to know Steve Bannon will be back in the trenches with Pollack.Interesting @MSNBC segment with @AliVelshi and @joelpollak https://t.co/cd011s0Wvn Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) August 18, 2017Joel Pollack: Hashtag War has been our motto since the days of Andrew Breitbart. And we use it whenever we go to war against our three main targets which are, in order- Hollywood and the mainstream media, number one the Democratic party and institutional left, number two and the Republican establishment in Washington, number three Our mission remains the same as it has been before Trump, as it was after he was elected and as it will continue to be. Great debate that we wish would happen more often Many of the comments from both sides said that this was fantastic because both sides were given a chance to speak.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany took a first decisive step on Wednesday toward forming a new government when its veteran finance minister, conservative Wolfgang Schaeuble, agreed to become president of the parliament, clearing the way for another party to take his job. Chancellor Angela Merkel will hope that Schaeuble, deeply respected in Germany for helping to steer the euro zone through its debt crisis, can stamp his authority on a fractious Bundestag lower house that will include two more parties after Sunday s federal election. Merkel must assemble Germany s first three-way coalition since the 1950s after her conservatives lost support and a far-right party, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), entered parliament for the first time in half a century. In a sign of the challenges ahead, Andrea Nahles, the Social Democrats newly elected parliamentary leader, told reporters her party would hit conservatives squarely in the jaw after four years as junior partner in a Merkel-led grand coalition . Merkel s most realistic coalition option now is a deal with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), returning to parliament after a four-year hiatus, and the Greens. But the parties disagree on issues such as energy, Europe and migration, complicating the path to a so-called Jamaica coalition - a reference to the parties colors: black, yellow and green, which are also those of the Jamaican flag. Schaeuble, 75, who emerged as one of Europe s most influential politicians during the euro zone crisis, will bring unprecedented weight to the role of Bundestag president, normally a low-profile position. His willingness to quit as finance minister after eight years in the post makes it easier for the FDP to join a Merkel-led coalition. The FDP, who are as fiscally hawkish as Schaeuble, have said they want his old job. As an outstanding personality Wolfgang Schaeuble possesses a natural authority that is of particular importance in these times, said FDP leader Christian Lindner, himself seen as a likely successor at the finance ministry. Lindner s deputy, Wolfgang Kubicki, another possible candidate for the post, told the RND newspaper chain that Schaeuble s move showed Merkel s openness to a Jamaica coalition. He also underscored his party s call for a shift in fiscal policy. Schaeuble was criticized in southern Europe, especially Greece, for his insistence on tax hikes and spending cuts at a time of deep recession, but is popular at home for balancing the books and presiding over high growth and low unemployment. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, speaking in Munich, said he did not think Schaeuble s departure would soften the EU s approach to heavily indebted Greece. The austerity measures will be continued by those who carried them out together with Wolfgang Schaeuble, he said. The Free Democrats, with a voter support base among Germany s small and medium-sized businesses, are as committed to budgetary discipline as Schaeuble but less pro-European, meaning Wednesday s news drew a mixed reception from the euro zone. I don t think there will be radical changes in German economic policy if the FDP replaces him, said one official close to euro zone policy-making. The FDP are also hardliners on deficits. But another euro zone official said the euro zone was losing one of the most pro-European politicians I know and instead getting a party markedly cooler on political integration. Italian Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan told the Handelsblatt newspaper he would miss Schaeuble s steady hand. Wolfgang Schaeuble was a loyal discussion partner, serious, competent and also a good friend, he said. Merkel emerged from Sunday s election a weakened figure after her conservatives, still the largest bloc in the Bundestag, bled support to the AfD. But the exit of Schaeuble, the most powerful counterweight to the long-serving chancellor, could paradoxically strengthen her position. As Bundestag president, Schaeuble will not be involved in coalition negotiations, removing one strong-minded negotiator from the table and potentially giving Merkel a freer hand. Coalition negotiations will only begin in earnest after Oct. 15, when the conservatives hope to wrest power from the Social Democrats in a state election in Lower Saxony. By law, the new parliament must convene for its first session 30 days after the election, so by Oct. 24 at the latest.

VIRGINIA governor Terry McAuliffe decided to get political today when he spoke out during the presser for the Virginia shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise. Leave it to a political hack like McAuliffe to bring gun control into the discussion: There are too many guns on the street. We lose 93 million Americans a day to gun violence. CONFUSION: VA Gov. Terry McAuliffe: There are too many guns on the street. We lose 93 million Americans a day to gun violence. pic.twitter.com/36EUPl4Jsb Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) June 14, 2017Leave it to this uneducated political snake to make this all about politics and gun control. He eventually corrected himself to say that it s just 93 people a day who are victims of gun violence. How many are saved BECAUSE they are armed with a gun? Lives were saved today because the Capitol Police were armed. That s all thanks to Steve Scalise who is a leader in Congress and gets protection. It they hadn t been there, who know how many would have been killed!McAuliffe is a Clinton crony who has always been a snake in the grass. He will do anything to get ahead politically. He s been involved in a questionable redistricting in his state and prior to the 2016 election he made it possible for thousands of felons to vote.

They pulled every trick in the book. From manufactured polls designed to discourage Trump supporters from going to vote on election day, to an all-out assassination attempt on his character, you ve gotta hand it to these propagandists, there wasn t a dirty trick they didn t try. Trump took abuse by the media like no other Presidential candidate before him. Even after our dishonest media was caught working behind the scenes with Crooked Hillary, her campaign and the DNC, they still came at Trump with a shameless vengeance like we ve never seen. What the media didn t understand however, was that every time we saw Trump alone in the ring against a mob of unruly leftist journalists fighting back with everything he had, it only strengthened our resolve.In Trump, Americans saw something that s been missing from our politicians for decades, we saw someone who was actually willing o fight for our nation on our behalf. We saw someone who wasn t going to concede to political correctness, or to give our lying media respect they didn t deserve. Every time he called them out for their dishonesty, Americans cheered. Every time they hit Trump with another lie, or worked in unison to impugn his character, he always managed to come back even stronger than before.Trump wasn t interested in playing by the media s rules, and they did everything in their power to punish him for not playing along. Along the way, he brilliantly exposed them as nothing more than an extension of Hillary Clinton s campaign. And so it is, with great pleasure we share with you some of the best liberal media meltdowns post-Trumpocalypse MSNBC s Rachel Maddow typically has a very arrogant way about her. Funny, the attitude seems to have disappeared:Yes, this is real life . https://t.co/NEU67a7U1o Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) October 8, 2016NBC s Chuck Todd and Lester Holt were two of Hilary s biggest cheerleaders. They just can t seem to figure out how they failed to convince America we needed Hillary as our next President:.@chucktodd on Trump: "He blew all of our predictions, and models, and you name it out of the water." #ElectionNight https://t.co/kt1fOMHXWu MSNBC (@MSNBC) November 9, 2016It s bad enough that MSNBC s Chris Matthews has to deal with a Republican President, but how will he EVER be able to deal with a xenophobic Republican majority House and Senate?What will a Trump presidency mean for the future of our immigration laws? https://t.co/KqtMftSfwU Hardball (@hardball) November 10, 2016Debate hack Martha Raddatz was in full meltdown mode:CNN s Dana Bash explains to Brooke Baldwin how people who voted for Trump really don t like him.

On Sunday, during an appearance on Fox and Friends , Trump surrogate Brunell Donald-Kyei went into full-blown Mad Hatter mode as she “argued” the significance of the FBI’s recent announcement concerning Hillary Clinton’s emails. During the segment, after proclaiming that she’s an “attorney,” the Vice-Chair of Trump’s National Diversity Coalition declared that the FBI doesn’t just “reopen cases.” However, panelist Brian Benjamin observed that the FBI had not officially reopened the case against Clinton (most likely due to the fact that they have not actually found anything). This unauthorized use of logic on the Fox News channel prompted Donald-Kyei to quickly dive down a rabbit hole of far-right-wing conspiracy theories, first citing the Wikileaks Podesta emails as proof of Clinton’s corruption and then implying something much darker about the presidential candidate. “We’ve got Huma Abedin with 10,000 emails under “life insurance” because she doesn’t want an accidental death,” declared the Trump surrogate. Um. What? She then went on to rail against Clinton and Obama, accusing both of making race relations worse over the past eight years. “Hillary Clinton is running around saying [that], when she and the president have worked so hard over the last eight years to divide the country.” Without citing any concrete evidence, the attorney claimed that both Clinton and Obama worked to pit “whites against blacks, blacks against Hispanics,” and “Hispanics against Asians.” She further argued that unlike Obama and Clinton, Trump would bring Americans together. Donald-Kyei concluded her rant with a prediction as bulletproof as her logic. “Believe me, believe me, they are convening a grand jury,” Donald-Kyei exclaimed . “Trust me!” Donald Trump must have the greatest collection of mentally unbalanced, intellectually dishonest, and morally dubious surrogates of any presidential candidate in U.S. history. Featured image via YouTube .

OSLO (Reuters) - The leader of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Beatrice Fihn, was delighted with the news that the grassroots organization had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the awards committee s head, Berit Reiss-Andersen, told a news conference.

MANILA (Reuters) - Across Asia, more and more countries are being pulled into Beijing’s orbit, with the timid stance adopted by Southeast Asian nations on the South China Sea at a weekend summit a clear sign this fundamental geostrategic shift is gathering momentum. U.S. President Donald Trump’s flurry of calls at the weekend to the leaders of the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore might cheer those who fear his predecessor Barack Obama’s “pivot” to Asia has been abandoned in favor of an “America First” agenda. But White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said the conversations were aimed at lining up Asian partners in case tensions over North Korea lead to “nuclear and massive destruction in Asia”, and mentioned no broader strategic goal. Southeast Asian nations will need more than that to convince them the United States still has their backs. In the meantime, some are leaning closer to China, soft-pedalling quarrels over the disputed South China Sea and angling for a slice of Beijing’s “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure investment program to compensate for the U.S. abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. The unexpected bonhomie that has emerged between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping could give Asian countries further confidence to continue their swing toward Beijing. “Before, most Southeast Asian states wanted to benefit from Chinese regional economic initiatives and from American pushback against China,” said Malcolm Cook, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. “The second part of this balance is now in question. Hence, the pressure to acquiesce to China diplomatically and on security issues is stronger.” Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, piqued by the Obama administration’s criticism of his human rights record, last year announced his “separation” from longtime ally the United States while on a visit to Beijing. The White House described Trump’s conversation with the firebrand Philippines leader as “very friendly” and - prompting criticism from Human Rights Watch for “effectively endorsing Duterte’s murderous war on drugs” - invited him to Washington. But, underlining his new-found friendship with Beijing, Duterte on Monday inspected a Chinese naval ships docked at his hometown, the first visit of its kind to the Philippines in years. Duterte, who last year put aside a legal challenge to Beijing’s sweeping territorial claims in the South China Sea to start negotiating billions of dollars worth of loans and infrastructure investments, chaired the latest summit of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Manila. Several ASEAN diplomats said China sent officials to lobby the Philippines ahead of the summit, and before the leaders had even gathered Duterte said it was pointless pressuring Beijing over its maritime activities. An early draft of the summit statement seen by Reuters made references to land reclamation and militarization in the disputed waterway, but they were subsequently dropped, as were references to “tensions” and “escalation of activities”. Cook said it was clear that, with the Philippines steering the summit to this conclusion, “it is no longer just Cambodia that is acting as an agent of Chinese influence in ASEAN over the South China Sea dispute”. Thailand and Malaysia have also moved closer to China. Thailand’s relations with Washington came under strain during the Obama administration because of concerns about freedoms under its military-dominated government. Trump invited Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha to visit Washington during their call on Sunday, but the former general’s government has its eyes elsewhere: last week it approved the first of three submarine purchases from China worth more than $1 billion. Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong says Washington’s new posture has shifted Asia’s political and economic balance. Lee, whose country, like Vietnam, has shown no signs of moving closer to Beijing, stressed to his ASEAN counterparts on Saturday that, despite Trump’s “radically different approach”, they should balance their ties between the United States and China. Trump has said he will attend two summits in the region in November. But Southeast Asian nations are trying to gauge how far they can still rely on Washington as a shield against Chinese assertiveness. ASEAN foreign ministers will be seeking answers at a meeting with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Washington this Thursday. Uncertainty over Washington’s commitment, analysts say, will only draw ASEAN countries further toward China, which can lure them with cheap loans, infrastructure investments and tariff cuts, but with a risk of diminished bargaining power. Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, said it was imperative for ASEAN to regain leverage by bringing Washington back into the equation and expanding the influence of Japan. “ASEAN is in a precarious position now with the concessions, accommodation and even appeasement with China,” Thitinan said. “If China continues to be shrewd and takes ASEAN on another ride, then ASEAN will be much worse off.”

As the House moves closer to actually representing the will of We The People with this vote, what does it really mean in terms of stopping the bleed of Muslim men (Syrian refugees) into our country?The American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act that was approved by the US House this afternoon will not prohibit Syrian Refugees (Muslim males) from entering our country. It just ensures they are being more carefully screened. Congress needs to act NOW to stop the flow of potential terrorists and mostly military age Muslim men who have been conditioned to hating America for their entire lives into our country.The House of Representatives has approved legislation that would make it even more difficult for refugees from Syria and Iraq to enter the United States.Our Imperial President, Barack Hussein Obama has already said he ll veto the bill With almost unanimous support from Republicans and 47 Democrats supporting, the House approved by 289 votes to 137 the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, which would require the secretary of homeland security, the FBI director and the director of national intelligence to each certify that a refugee was not a threat to national security before they were admitted to the United States.This certification would come on top of the preexisting extensive screening process for refugees seeking admittance to the United States, which currently takes over 18 months.The White House has already said the president will veto the legislation and both chief of staff Denis McDonough and secretary of homeland security Jeh Johnson were on Capitol Hill lobbying against the bill on Thursday. However, those efforts did not sway some Democratic skeptics.New York Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney told reporters that he thought the bill represented a simple improvement to the process. The administration is required to certify many things under federal law, and I don t understand why the president couldn t direct the heads of these agencies within 24 hours of the completion of existing process to make this certification or not. It adds no new time. The New York congressman said it is offensive to me that we would stigmatize refugees and make victims of people who have suffered so much already and said he did not think the bill did that, unlike the reactions of many governors and Republican president candidates to the refugee issue. Instead, he insisted it represented a simple step to provide certification to the preexisting screening process.Democratic opponents of the bill such as representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri dismissed the legislation something simply designed to make people feel better. However, he noted that there had been a failure among politicians of both parties to acknowledge the very legitimate and very real fear that s out there . In doing so, Cleaver echoed remarks made to reporters yesterday by Democratic senator Tim Kaine who complained that the Obama administration had not properly explained [the vetting system for refugees] to the American public .Republicans were realistic about the bill s dim prospects of becoming law but saw it as an important step in raising public awareness of the refugee issue. Iowa congressman Steve King told the Guardian said that, while there was very little that Congress could pass that would avoid a veto, the bill brings the public s attention to this .King said he thought the increased public attention would make it harder for Obama to veto the bill, which would also need to pass the Senate to become law, and might even make it possible for an Obama veto to be overridden by Congress. However, King thought that the focus on the refugee issue missed the point and there instead we need to destroy the caliphates and defeat the ideology of Islamic jihad .King said: It s the equivalent of going into emergency room with patients bleeding off of gurneys and going and getting a bucket and mop to mop it up instead of stopping the bleeding. His thoughts were echoed in part by Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, who noted that many of his constituents had been worried about whether Syrian refugees had been properly vetted since before the Paris attacks.The Kansas Republican saw this bill as prelude to a fight in December over the budget, seeing the possibility of attaching a rider on refugee policy to an appropriations (spending) bill. I don t think the president is gonna shut government down to bring Syrian refugees into this country and that s the only way to get attention, he said. Via: The Guardian

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a newspaper she was looking forward to meeting U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington on Friday. “It’s always better to talk with each other than about each other,” Merkel told regional newspaper Saarbruecker Zeitung. Asked if both sides were curious, Merkel said: “There’s definitely curiosity. And also pleasure at meeting each other. At least from my side.” Merkel was on her way to the airport on Monday to fly to Washington for her first meeting with Trump when he rang her to postpone the trip due to the approach of a winter storm. Merkel said she wanted to speak with Trump, who was elected in November, about security and economic issues as well as about future international cooperation. Regarding concerns about a trade war between the United States and Germany or Europe, Merkel said: “Our countries benefit when we work together well and fairly.” The United States has repeatedly criticized Germany’s large current account surplus, but Merkel said there was also a lot of direct German investment in the United States. Carmaker BMW’s U.S. plant exports “more cars than GM and Ford together” from the United States, Merkel said. “I’ll make that clear,” she added.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa s ruling ANC decided to downgrade its embassy in Tel Aviv to a liaison office over a U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel s capital, ahead of a U.N. vote on Thursday on a resolution urging Washington to drop the move. The decision was taken at the end of a five-day African National Congress conference, in which Cyril Ramaphosa was elected as its new leader and South Africa s likely next president after 2019 elections, following Jacob Zuma. Delegates endorsed the proposal that we must give practical support to the oppressed people of Palestine and resolved on an immediate and unconditional downgrade of the SA (South Africa) Embassy in Israel to a Liaison Office, new ANC Secretary General Ace Magashule said on Thursday. There was no immediate comment from Israel s Foreign Ministry. South Africa s ministry for international relations and cooperation said on its website that it was deeply concerned about Trump s move as it would undermine Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, which has been frozen since 2014. The South African Board of Jewish Deputies and the South African Zionist Federation jointly condemned the ANC s decision. The 193-member U.N. General Assembly will hold a rare special session on Thursday at the request of Arab and Muslim states to vote on the draft resolution, which Washington vetoed on Monday in the 15-member U.N. Security Council. Most countries regard the status of Jerusalem as a matter to be settled in an eventual Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, although that process has been frozen for over three years. Israel deems Jerusalem its eternal and indivisible capital and wants all embassies based there. Palestinians want the capital of an independent Palestinian state to be in the city s eastern sector, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War and annexed in a move never recognized internationally. The ANC s move comes at a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pursuing closer ties with other African countries. Last month, on a visit to Kenya, Netanyahu announced that Israel was opening a new embassy in nearby Rwanda as part of the expanding Israeli presence in Africa and the deepening of cooperation between Israel and African countries . Israel is seeking to expel thousands of African migrants to Rwanda. On Thursday, Netanyahu described the United Nations as a house of lies on Thursday and said Israel totally rejects this vote, even before approval . Trump upended decades of U.S. policy on Dec. 6 when he recognized Jerusalem as Israel s capital, generating outrage from Palestinians and the Arab and Muslim world, and concern among Washington s Western allies. When under white-minority rule, South Africa was one of Israel s few allies on the continent. But after the 1994 demise of apartheid, relations cooled as the black-majority ANC took over. The ANC has condemned Israeli occupation of territories where Palestinians seek statehood, while maintaining full diplomatic and trade relations with Israel.

When it comes to interpreting current events, no one does official conspiracy theories like the Unite States.For years, Washington has tried to promulgate a propaganda campaign which tries to somehow link al Qaeda to Iran, or ISIS to Iran. For the mentally-challenged members of the right-wing media in the US, this isn t a massive feat, as a large segment of that audience cannot even locate Iran on a global map. There is also the issue of US warhawks like Lindsey Graham and John McCain being proven pathological liars who will say anything regardless of whether it s based in actual fact. All of this contributes to a number of shallow, creative narratives which continuously circulate between FOX News, The Atlantic Magazine, Tel Aviv, Riyadh and the US Senate.And just like the US and UK mainstream media s coverage of Syria, the deep throat source in this dossier is al Qaeda.This latest chapter in the US fantasy world of Iranian intrigue attempts to further the Israeli-favoured mythology, blaming Iran for all of the region s woes. Make no mistake: the American neoconservative wing and their Israeli benefactors are determined to invent new conditions for war with Iran IMAGE: Bush s al Qaeda No.2 Guy Abu Musab al ZarqawiGareth Porter The American Conservative For many years, major U.S. institutions ranging from the Pentagon to the 9/11 Commission have been pushing the line that Iran secretly cooperated with Al Qaeda both before and after the 9/11 terror attacks. But the evidence for those claims remained either secret or sketchy, and always highly questionable.In early November, however, the mainstream media claimed to have its smoking gun a CIA document written by an unidentified Al Qaeda official and released in conjunction with 47,000 never-before-seen documents seized from Osama bin Laden s house in Abbottabad, Pakistan.The Associated Press reported that the Al Qaeda document appears to bolster U.S. claims that Iran supported the extremist network leading up to the September 11 terror attacks. The Wall Street Journal said the document provides new insights into Al Qaeda s relationship with Iran, suggesting a pragmatic alliance that emerged out of shared hatred of the United States and Saudi Arabia. NBC News wrote that the document reveals that, at various points in the relationship Iran offered Al Qaeda help in the form of money, arms and training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon in exchange for striking American interests in the Gulf, implying that Al Qaeda had declined the offer.Former Obama National Security Council spokesman Ned Price, writing for The Atlantic, went even further, asserting that the document includes an account of a deal with Iranian authorities to host and train Saudi-Al Qaeda members as long as they have agreed to plot against their common enemy, American interests in the Gulf region. But none of those media reports were based on any careful reading of the document s contents. The 19-page Arabic-language document, which was translated in full for The American Conservative, doesn t support the media narrative of new evidence of Iran-Al Qaeda cooperation, either before or after 9/11, at all.It provides no evidence whatsoever of tangible Iranian assistance to Al Qaeda. On the contrary, it confirms previous evidence that Iranian authorities quickly rounded up those Al Qaeda operatives living in the country when they were able to track them down, and held them in isolation to prevent any further contact with Al Qaeda units outside Iran.Taken by SurpriseWhat it shows is that the Al Qaeda operatives were led to believe Iran was friendly to their cause and were quite taken by surprise when their people were arrested in two waves in late 2002. It suggests that Iran had played them, gaining the fighters trust while maximizing intelligence regarding Al Qaeda s presence in Iran.Nevertheless, this account, which appears to have been written by a mid-level Al Qaeda cadre in 2007, appears to bolster an internal Al Qaeda narrative that the terror group rejected Iranian blandishments and were wary of what they saw as untrustworthiness on the part of the Iranians. The author asserts the Iranians offered Saudi Al Qaeda members who had entered the country money and arms, anything they need, and training with Hezbollah in exchange for hitting American interests in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. But there is no word about whether any Iranian arms or money were ever actually given to Al Qaeda fighters. And the author acknowledges that the Saudis in question were among those who had been deported during sweeping arrests, casting doubt over whether there was ever any deal in the offing.The author suggests Al Qaeda rejected Iranian assistance on principle. We don t need them, he insisted. Thanks to God, we can do without them, and nothing can come from them but evil. That theme is obviously important to maintaining organizational identity and morale. But later in the document, the author expresses deep bitterness about what they obviously felt was Iranian double-dealing in 2002 to 2003. They are ready to play-act, he writes of the Iranians. Their religion is lies and keeping quiet. And usually they show what is contrary to what is in their mind . It is hereditary with them, deep in their character. The author recalls that Al Qaeda operatives were ordered to move to Iran in March 2002, three months after they had left Afghanistan for Waziristan or elsewhere in Pakistan (the document, by the way, says nothing of any activity in Iran before 9/11). He acknowledges that most of his cadres entered Iran illegally, although some of them obtained visas from the Iranian consulate in Karachi.Among the latter was Abu Hafs al Mauritani, an Islamic scholar who was ordered by the leadership shura in Pakistan to seek Iranian permission for Al Qaeda fighters and families to pass through Iran or to stay there for an extended period. He was accompanied by middle- and lower-ranking cadres, including some who worked for Abu Musab al Zarqawi. The account clearly suggests that Zarqawi himself had remained in hiding after entering Iran illegally.Strict ConditionsAbu Hafs al Mauratani did reach an understanding with Iran, according to the Al Qaeda account, but it had nothing to do with providing arms or money. It was a deal that allowed them to remain for some period or to pass through the country, but only on the condition that they observe very strict security conditions: no meetings, no use of cell phones, no movements that would attract attention. The account attributes those restrictions to Iranian fears of U.S. retribution which was undoubtedly part of the motivation. But it is clear Iran viewed Al Qaeda as an extremist Salafist security threat to itself as well.Most of the Al Qaeda visitors, according to the Al Qaeda document, settled in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan and Baluchistan Province where the majority of the population are Sunnis and speak Baluchi. They generally violated the security restrictions imposed by the Iranians. They established links with the Baluchis who he notes were also Salafists and began holding meetings. Some of them even made direct contact by phone with Salafist militants in Chechnya, where a conflict was rapidly spiraling out of control. Saif al-Adel, one of the leading Al Qaeda figures in Iran at the time, later revealed that the Al Qaeda fighting contingent under Abu Musab al Zarqawi s command immediately began reorganizing to return to Afghanistan.Waves of ArrestsThe first Iranian campaign to round up Al Qaeda personnel, which the author of the documents says was focused on Zahedan, came in May or June 2002 no more than three months after they have had entered Iran. Those arrested were either jailed or deported to their home countries. The Saudi Foreign Minister praised Iran in August for having transferred 16 Al Qaeda suspects to the Saudi government in June.In February 2003, Iranian security launched a new wave of arrests. This time they captured three major groups of Al Qaeda operatives in Tehran and Mashad, including Zarqawi and other top leaders in the country, according to the document. Saif al Adel later revealed in a post on a pro-Al Qaeda website in 2005 (reported in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat), that the Iranians had succeeded in capturing 80 percent of the group associated with Zarqawi, and that it had caused the failure of 75 percent of our plan. The anonymous author writes that the initial Iran policy was to deport those arrested and that Zarqawi was allowed to go to Iraq (where he plotted attacks on Shia and coalition forces until his death in 2006). But then, he says, the policy suddenly changed and the Iranians stopped deportations, instead opting to keep the Al Qaeda senior leadership in custody presumably as bargaining chips. Yes, Iran deported 225 Al Qaeda suspects to other countries, including Saudi Arabia, in 2003. But the Al Qaeda leaders were held in Iran, not as bargaining chips, but under tight security to prevent them from communicating with the Al Qaeda networks elsewhere in the region, which Bush administration officials eventually acknowledged.After the arrests and imprisonment of senior al Qaeda figures, the Al Qaeda leadership became increasingly angry at Iran. In November 2008, unknown gunmen abducted an Iran consular official in Peshawar, Pakistan, and in July 2013, al Qaeda operatives in Yemen kidnapped an Iranian diplomat. In March 2015, Iran reportedly released five of the senior al Qaeda in prison, including Said al-Adel, in return for the release of the diplomat in Yemen.In a document taken from the Abbottabad compound and published by West Point s Counter-Terrorism Center in 2012, a senior Al Qaeda official wrote, We believe that our efforts, which included escalating a political and media campaign, the threats we made, the kidnapping of their friend the commercial counselor in the Iranian Consulate in Peshawar, and other reasons that scared them based on what they saw (we are capable of), to be among the reasons that led them to expedite (the release of these prisoners). There was a time when Iran did view Al Qaeda as an ally. It was during and immediately after the war of the mujahedin against Soviet troops in Afghanistan. That, of course, was the period when the CIA was backing bin Laden s efforts as well. But after the Taliban seized power in Kabul in 1996 and especially after Taliban troops killed 11 Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998 the Iranian view of Al Qaeda changed fundamentally. Since then, Iran has clearly regarded it as an extreme sectarian terrorist organization and its sworn enemy. What has not changed is the determination of the U.S. national security state and the supporters of Israel to maintain the myth of an enduring Iranian support for Al Qaeda.Gareth Porter is an independent journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. This article originally appeared at The American Conservative.READ MORE IRAN NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Iran NewsSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE NOW & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

MUNICH (Reuters) - A spokesman for Bavaria s Christian Social Union (CSU) denied a German media report on Thursday that Horst Seehofer is to stand down as state premier and hand over to rival Markus Soeder, but stay on as head of the Christian Social Union (CSU). Broadcaster Bayerische Rundfunk, citing no sources, had reported the move. A shakeup has been widely expected as senior CSU members meet on Thursday. But a spokesman for the CSU said the media report was absolutely wrong . Any changes, which would come as Germany struggles to find a way out of a political crisis caused by the collapse of coalition talks on Sunday night, could end a longstanding power struggle within the CSU, sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel s Christian Democrats (CDU).

Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia were born in the same year, chosen by the same president, live on the same Northern Virginia street and, in serving together on the Supreme Court longer than any other current pair of justices, have many times voted the same conservative way. But one issue — how the Constitution protects gay citizens — divides and defines the two like no other. This week’s historic hearing on same-sex marriage is both the logical extension and ultimate showdown in a decades-long argument that so far Kennedy has always won. [Here’s what the fallout of a ruling could be in the various states] Each of Kennedy’s bold and lyrical rulings on behalf of gays — “times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress,” he wrote in Lawrence v. Texas — has been just as reliably followed by a meticulous and fiery denunciation from Scalia. “The court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed,” Scalia answered in the Lawrence case. Kennedy has written all of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions on gay rights: protecting the civil rights of homosexuals in Romer v. Evans (1996), abolishing anti-gay sodomy laws in Lawrence (2003) and ruling in United States v. Windsor two years ago that the federal government must recognize same-sex marriages. Each was a steppingstone to the Supreme Court’s consideration on Tuesday of whether the Constitution forbids states from prohibiting gay couples to marry. If the pattern continues and the court renders a landmark ruling favoring gay marriage, it will likely once again be Kennedy whose words memorialize that decision and Scalia who will articulate the dissent. It is not a conflict everyone would have predicted for two of Ronald Reagan’s choices for the court. Scalia ascended to the bench in 1986, and Kennedy followed 17 months later. The two, born on opposite coasts in 1936, are consistent comrades on issues important to corporate America and in dismantling campaign finance laws they see restricting political speech. After Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sided with liberals to declare the Affordable Care Act constitutional, Scalia and Kennedy united with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in a jointly written, 65-page dissent mocking the majority opinion and saying the entire act should be found invalid. Kennedy is often the deciding vote when the ideologically divided court splits 5 to 4, but in two-thirds of those cases he sides with the conservatives. But if they often arrive at the same conclusion — one obstacle for same-sex marriage proponents in the current case is Kennedy’s allegiance to states’ rights — Kennedy and Scalia could not be more different in how they view a judge’s role. “Their different approach to gay rights reflects their more fundamental disagreement about how to think about the liberties protected by the Constitution,” said Paul M. Smith, a Washington lawyer who was on the winning side in the Lawrence case. Scalia believes the only freedoms that should be viewed as protected by the Constitution “are those that have been protected under American law throughout our history, defined at the most specific level,” Smith said. Otherwise, the people decide. Kennedy, Smith said, “believes that each generation has the right to conceive of newer and broader forms of liberty that merit constitutional protection. He sees history as a guide but not a straitjacket.” Their battle is compelling, said Allison Orr Larsen, a William and Mary law professor, because it “brings to the forefront the theoretical question in constitutional law: How should courts respond to change when interpreting the Constitution?” Michael Dorf, a professor at Cornell Law School and a former Kennedy clerk, said his former boss’s decisions on gay rights were not constructed to lead ultimately to a decision on same-sex marriage. But they provided a foundation for how to view new constitutional rights “if that’s where the country moves.” Scalia, on the other hand, champions the cause of originalism, and Edward Whelan, a former Scalia clerk and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said his former boss learned quickly that “Kennedy’s judicial approach was not anything close to what Scalia’s is.” “A basic tenet of originalism is that it’s not the role of judges to impose their own moral philosophies,” Whelan said. “Scalia understands the Constitution to leave the vast bulk of policy issues to the democratic processes and rejects the notion that it’s his role to read his own views into the Constitution.” It’s worth remembering the differences among President Reagan’s choices for the Supreme Court. He fulfilled his campaign pledge to name a woman to the bench with Sandra Day O’Connor, the pragmatic Arizona politician and judge who quickly became the court’s center. Scalia’s selection was celebrated by conservatives eager to see a new method of constitutional interpretation forcefully advocated on the court. Kennedy was a compromise, Reagan’s third choice for the seat he once hoped would be filled by conservative Robert Bork, whose nomination was defeated in the Senate. “This was the Bork seat,” said Smith. “Things could have been much different.” Kennedy’s views, Dorf said, were those of a “moderate California Republican.” Although he never ruled for gay rights as a lower court judge, Kennedy expressed concern about the policy even as he upheld the military’s right to dismiss gay servicemen. And Frank J. Colucci, a political science professor at Purdue University who has written a book about Kennedy’s jurisprudence, recalled that Kennedy in a speech criticized the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that upheld a Georgia statute criminalizing sodomy. “He came about as close as you can as a lower court judge to saying it was wrongly decided,” Colucci said. Once on the court, Kennedy was able to say just that. In the first gay rights case, Romer, Kennedy wrote for the majority in striking down a Colorado constitutional amendment. After some cities in the state began passing laws protecting gays from discrimination in housing, employment and other areas, voters through a referendum approved the amendment precluding such government protections. Colorado’s amendment, Kennedy wrote, “classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else. This Colorado cannot do. A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.” That began something of a call-and-response on the issue: Kennedy delivering the majority’s opinion, Scalia replying with a scalding dissent, read from the bench for emphasis. “This court has no business imposing upon all Americans the resolution favored by the elite class from which the members of this institution are selected, pronouncing that ‘animosity’ toward homosexuality is evil,” Scalia wrote in Romer. “I vigorously dissent.” In Lawrence, Kennedy got the chance to reverse the court’s decision on sodomy, and did: “Bowers was not correct when it was decided and it is not correct today.” Private, homosexual conduct between consenting adults, he wrote, “involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.” O’Connor wrote a concurring opinion to say the ruling did not touch on the matter of whether gays would be able to marry. Scalia wrote that homosexuals should be free to promote their cause through democratic means, but “many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home.” “They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive,” he wrote. “The court views it as ‘discrimination.’ ” Two years ago, in Windsor, Kennedy wrote that the federal government’s refusal to offer the same government benefits available to heterosexual couples to legally married gay couples tells “all the world that their otherwise valid marriages are unworthy” and “humiliates” their children. Again, Scalia blasted the decision, saying the majority was merely being coy in saying the decision did not address whether states are required to give licenses for same-sex marriage. “By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition,” he wrote. Most federal courts have taken Scalia literally. “The court agrees with Justice Scalia’s interpretation of Windsor,” wrote U.S. District Judge Robert J. Shelby of Salt Lake City. Shelby’s decision to strike a marriage ban in Utah was the first such ruling following Windsor and began the path that continues to Tuesday’s oral arguments, and will end with the court’s decision in June. 40 years later: “I’ve got the license and the faggot letter” The right finds a voice on same-sex marriage Gay rights, religious rights and a compromise in an unlikely place: Utah

As he was standing next to podium, Donald Trump must have been throwing a silent temper tantrum as Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny humiliated him and his anti-immigrant policy.St. Patrick s Day may have been a complete bummer this year because of Trump, but during an event at the White House honoring the holiday, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny gave the world something to smile about as he delivered remarks about immigration that made Trump fume on the sidelines.Unable to rudely stop the Irish leader, Trump had to listen as Kenny talked about immigration and how immigrants came to America and made our country stronger despite bigots who looked down upon them. It s fitting that we gather here each year to celebrate St. Patrick and his legacy, Kenny began. He, too, of course, was an immigrant. And even though he is, of course, the patron saint of Ireland, for many people around the globe, he is also the symbol of indeed, the patron of immigrants. Here in America, in your great country, 35 million people claim Irish heritage, Kenny continued as Trump scowled and squirmed. And the Irish have contributed to the economic, social, political and cultural life of this great country over the last 200 years. Kenny then pointed out that Irish immigrants were also unwelcome in America as people blamed them for crime and lack of jobs just as Donald Trump and Republicans are blaming Latinos today. Ireland came to America because, deprived of liberty, deprived of opportunity, of safety, and even food itself, the Irish believed, and four decades before Lady Liberty lifted her lamp we were the retched refuse on the teeming shore. We believed in the shelter of America, in the compassion of America, in the opportunity of America. Here s the video via Twitter. We were the wretched refuse on the teeming shore, Irish prime minister says with Donald Trump in the room. pic.twitter.com/7jEfTVvIzE Barry Malone (@malonebarry) March 17, 2017Indeed, millions of immigrants came to this country with nothing in order to pursue better lives for themselves and their families just as immigrants continue to do so today. But Trump has made the American Dream a nightmare for millions of immigrants as he continues to persecute Latinos and Muslims.And the Irish Prime Minister just cleverly shamed Donald Trump in the most epic and stealthy way for it.Featured image via screenshot

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations said on Thursday that it was extending a round of Syria talks in Geneva until Dec. 15 aimed at shaping a political solution to end the war, but that the presidency had not yet been discussed. U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura said that the talks would focus in particular on a new constitution and U.N.-supervised parliamentary and presidential elections, as well as on 12 core principles that he declined to enumerate. We have not discussed the issue of the presidency. We have been discussing the 12 principles. You will see they are of a broad nature but they have an impact on everything in the future constitution, he told a news conference. These are essential because they do refer to what could be a shared vision of the kind of Syria that the Syrians want to live in, he said. Syria s opposition has always said that President Bashar al-Assad must step down, but his negotiators have refused to discuss the issue, and his recent successes on the battlefield have strengthened his hand. I want to believe that that issue should come up from the Syrians through U.N.-supervised elections, de Mistura said. With more than two weeks ahead, the round was effectively just beginning, he said, noting that the government negotiators had arrived late and might take a few days out to consult and refresh in Damascus before returning to Geneva around Tuesday. On Thursday he began shuttling between the two sides, installed in separate rooms off the same corridor, but he said having contact in person was less important than meeting on the substance, and the atmosphere was professional and serious on both sides. He said the talks had solid diplomatic backing, with recent support from Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Assad, as well as a telephone call from U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at the start of the round. The defeat of Islamic State in its main strongholds in Syria had also produced a moment of truth . All this takes place against quite a backdrop. It s just not a normal round of talks, de Mistura said. Have you seen how people are talking to each other, how those who were involved in the conflict for the first time are taking positions that are in the direction of a political dialogue? And for the first time in eight rounds of Syria talks presided over by de Mistura, the opposition is represented by a unified negotiating team, raising the possibility of direct talks between the two sides.

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canadian police said they were investigating the mysterious deaths of Barry Sherman, founder of Canadian pharmaceutical firm Apotex Inc, and his wife, Honey, one of the nation s wealthiest couples whose bodies were found in their mansion on Friday. Police said they learned of the deaths after responding to a midday (1700 GMT) medical call at the Sherman s home in an affluent section of northeast Toronto. Two bodies covered in blankets were removed from the home and loaded into an unmarked van on Friday evening. The circumstances of their death appear suspicious and we are treating it that way, said Constable David Hopkinson. Homicide detectives later told reporters gathered outside the home that there were no signs of forced entry. Their neighbors, business associates and some of Canada s most powerful politicians said they were saddened by the deaths. Our condolences to their family & friends, and to everyone touched by their vision & spirit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote on Twitter. Toronto Mayor John Tory said in statement he was shocked and heartbroken to learn of the deaths, noting that the couple had made extensive contributions to the city. Toronto Police are investigating, and I hope that investigation will be able to provide answers for all of us who are mourning this tremendous loss, Tory said. The Shermans recently listed their home for sale for nearly C$7 million ($5.4 million). A real estate agent discovered the bodies in the basement while preparing for an open house, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported, citing a relative. Sherman, 75, founded privately held Apotex in 1974, growing it by introducing large numbers of low-cost generic drugs that took market share from branded pharmaceuticals. He stepped down as chief executive in 2012 but remained executive chairman. Forbes has estimated Sherman s fortune at $3.2 billion. Apotex is the world s No. 7 generic drugmaker with 11,000 employees and annual sales of more than C$2 billion in more than 45 countries, according to its website. The couple was known for their philanthropy, giving tens of millions of dollars to hospitals, universities and Jewish organizations, CBC reported. They were extremely successful in business, but also very, very giving people, former Ontario Premier Bob Rae told CBC. It s going to be a very, very big loss. The Globe and Mail reported in February that Lobbying Commissioner Karen Shepherd was investigating a complaint about a 2015 political fundraiser that Trudeau had attended.

Since Obama was sworn in as President hundreds of thousands of refugees have come to America most of them Muslim. We re also seeing thousands of people from all over the world cross our Southern border illegally. With the virtual invasion via illegals and refugees, is Obama trying to give America to ISIS? It is a question worth asking if you look at the facts: DHS has just announced that ISIS is infiltrating the Refugee Resettlement Program. No shocker there. And yet, not only does Obama refuse to shut it down, he s bringing more and more in. Treasonous much? He s also going after our guns and constitutional rights in an attempt to strip them from us just when we need them the most. ISIS PLANS GLOBAL DOMINATION: A document has just surfaced which outlines how ISIS organizes its territory and controls it. I am not surprised. I would have expected nothing less from the Caliphate. They are a conquering force after all, so it makes sense that they would be the ultimate, brutal community organizers.Before we get into that, the latest on ISIS is that Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour is dead in Afghanistan. He was mortally wounded in a shootout last Tuesday and succumbed to his wounds sometime within the next 48 hours. If true, this is a death blow to the Taliban in Afghanistan by ISIS and is very bad news. As horrific as the Taliban is, ISIS makes them look like amateurs.Experts say they can t figure out where ISIS is getting their funding. Are you kidding me? They are big business: drugs, oil and they are backed by various countries behind the scenes and other players in geopolitical manipulations. ISIS will spread through Afghanistan like a malignant cancer. Slaughter and terror will be widespread. ISIS is very organized in their conquest for the Caliphate and they will rule the country with an iron fist and a Quran.I don t believe the Taliban when they say Mansour is still alive. If he were alive, we would have seen him by now. Already, slick propaganda is surfacing from ISIS of their executions of their enemies. It is brutal and gory. I have heard reports of them making the Taliban kneel on explosives and then blowing them up. They also put mortars as necklaces around their necks and then detonate them. The training camps they are setting up all over the place are terrifying and many are flocking to ISIS to join in the fight for the Caliphate. They are the strong horse in the race for the Middle East. ISIS is going from town to town, province to province and slaughtering people and conquering in their wake. They rape women and children, execute infidels and crucify offenders. They take slaves and wealth as they go. It is very reminiscent of Genghis Kahn. People flee in abject terror when they hear that ISIS is approaching.Neither Russia or the United States could take the Taliban out. They live like goats in the mountains of Afghanistan. But ISIS is making short order of them and fast. The trick is to be more brutal and aggressive than your enemy and ISIS has that down to an art. ISIS settled in among the population in Afghanistan and then activated. That is exactly what they are doing in Europe. Things are about to get very, very dicey out there.Now, with this unearthed document, we see how they have global plans. ISIS is already throughout the Middle East and with the Hijrah migration, they are now planted in Europe. Just as they did in Afghanistan, they initially plant themselves within a population before rising up in cells and sweeping the country. They are beginning to do this in America too, thanks to Barack Obama s open borders and Refugee Resettlement Program.Read more: Noisy Room

Forget Wikileaks...this is the real October Surprise that is going to stop Hillary page: 1 link People have a hard time wading through all of the twists and turns, and convoluted political intrigue, that are the devastating stream of revelations about just how corrupt the Democratic Party...and its supreme leader Hillary Clinton...is. Most people don't have the time, or the attention span, to pour over the tens of thousands of documents being released by Wikileaks - and the MSM is trying their hardest to ignore the subject. Having said that, my father once told me that, "There are two things you don't mess with. A man's wife, or a man's paycheque...and not necessarily in that order." Substitute "woman" and "husband" if you like, but the message is very clear. And now...even CNN cannot ignore it...we have the issue that directly affects people's pocketbooks. Plain and simple. The pain and the impacts are very real and very personal. Obamacare Premiums... Just watch the Polls swing on this issue leading up to November 8...and watch as State after State goes from Blue to Red - just like the American peoples' bank accounts, due to the astonishing increases in Obamacare Premiums! edit on 27-10-2016 by mobiusmale because: link not working edit on 27-10-2016 by mobiusmale because: typo link a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. link a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. People will vote with their wallets. Looks like the people least likely to afford it get hit the hardest. time.com... Yet it’s also true that for Americans who don’t get insurance through work, and who make too much money to qualify for federal subsidies, the cost of health coverage is about to soar dramatically, with premiums sometimes rising $1,000, even over $2,000 for the year. If one were making 45k per year and the cost of a service increased 1k-2k for THAT year one would find other service providers or not use the service at all. But if you did not pay for health insurance you would owe the irs a penalty of 2k. Damned if you do Damned if you do not. 5% of someones income is alot, enough to make them think about who to vote for. a reply to: kruphix I am 27, never get ill, have low blood pressure, and am in good shape. My premiums doubled since this mess. So I ditched it. This was a redistribution of health care. link I don't understand why Trump hasn't been all over this opportunity. He should stop with the nonsense shooting himself in the foot crap and focus on this news to sway more voters to his side. Instead he has been babbling about his awesome golf course. It is times like these that make me think he must be taking a dive on purpose. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because "OBAMACARE," so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. link a reply to: kruphix The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. Yeah the people in the "basket of deplorables" are a small minority as well. Perhaps in your opinion they are all in the same basket. Nice to be told "you're a amall minority" your fate won't effect an election. originally posted by: kruphix a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. cool, then abolishing the abortion that is "Obamacare" should be quick and easy. Then we can get insurance companies back to competing for our business and maybe get insurance back to where most people can afford it and not just those making less than $23k a year. You do realize that Obamacare is the single biggest failure in the history of the US last 8 years right? Much like a monkey #ing a football. link a reply to: mobiusmale It's going to cost Hilary some votes but is NOT going turn a blue state red. Might sway a poorer purple one toward red, but I'm unsure of what state fits that bill exactly. Fl maybe? a reply to: Greggers Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because "OBAMACARE," so who knows. "Work with her"? really kind of like the dems worked with the gop to pass the ACA to begin with? Pass it before you read it? Like your plan keep your plan? That kind of cooperation? originally posted by: kruphix a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. Considering you're talking about small and medium business owners who the current administration (and HRC) says they want to support, I am fairly certain the OP is accurate. The price hikes are a direct slap in the face to those of us that own our own small businesses and pay for insurance on our own. Shows how out of touch the top is with the middle. Employer sponsored rates are high too. It's cutting into employees' pay. Wake up voters !!! originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because "OBAMACARE," so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. yes, the young ones who are also making minimum wage or close. If they make any money at all, they will miss the subsidies and be paying the $500 to $800 a month the rest of us have to pay. The way it was before Obamacare was much much better for everyone except the one's with pre-existing conditions. It's a shame we couldn't have someone who was smart enough to grasp that. Then they could have just tried to fix that tiny slice of the population instead of jamming a broomstick up the rest of us. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because "OBAMACARE," so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. "More Federal Funding" is just code for, "we are going to increase taxes"...so Hillary's solution for high Health insurance Premiums, is to move the taxpayer drain a little farther to left and call it something else. I mean what choice would she have, if she wants to keep some semblance of this disaster intact? The Obama/Clinton regime doubled the National Debt to over $20 trillion dollars in 8 yearts...how much deeper can that go before the whole bubble bursts? a reply to: Vasa Croe The price hikes are a direct slap in the face to those of us that own our own small businesses and pay for insurance on our own. That's right they forgot if you have less than 50 people employed you do not have to provide insurance to your employees. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because "OBAMACARE," so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. And where exactly does federal funding come from? *looks at wallet* No such thing as a free lunch. My healthcare costs have gone up almost 50% while benefits have gone down, and I'm on an employer provided plan. I'm 33yo and healthy as a horse. Healthcare is not a right, quit treating it as such. Get some actual competition in the system as well as some tort reform and maybe you'll see some improvement. Start jailing cronies and letting unprofitable companies fail you'll see some improvement. I feel sorry for anyone who believes that Democrats/Republicans are one dimes worth of different from each other... edit on 10-27-2016 by cynicalheathen because: (no reason given)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic Senator Patty Murray said Tuesday she thought a bipartisan deal to repair Obamacare was still possible, despite the announcement by her negotiating partner, Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, that they had failed to reach an agreement. Murray, in a statement, said she had made some “tough concessions” in the talks, when it came to giving states more flexibility under Obamacare. She was disappointed that Republican leaders had decided to “freeze” the bipartisan approach “but I am confident that we can reach a deal if we keep working together — and I am committed to getting that done.” Alexander and Murray had been working to protect the government payments made to insurers to help reduce medical expenses for low-income Americans enrolled in Obamacare. Alexander also wanted states to have more flexibility to design insurance plans under the program.

Police in this country had a great run. Let s face it if you remember the 1970s, 1980s anytime before 600 million cameras went online nationwide, a policeman s word was gold. Now, with an increasing number of people filming nonstop and the introduction of mandatory body cams for more conscientious departments, police can t simply corroborate with each other, sign a report and move on with their day. They re beginning to be held accountable for their actions. Ironically it all began with the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, which wasn t recorded. Multiple witnesses said they saw Brown shot while he was standing a safe distance away and unarmed. A grand jury failed to indict Officer Darren Wilson for Brown s death.Thus sparked the #BlackLivesMatter movement, as more and more it became evident that the narrative, pretty much nationwide, plays out differently for black men than for anyone else in society. They are killed more often. Murdered in cold blood in many cases, black men are routinely beaten after they submit if they aren t shot for looking scary and black first. Conservatives fired back with #BlueLivesMatter and started talking about all of the cops killed by black people ever.And so here we are. Politics has managed to take yet another issue all Americans should be behind and turned into a political circus. Conservatives, who are the political ideology that inspires standoffs with federal agents and wildlife refuge occupations, suddenly believe that if you don t conform with the law and do whatever a police officer tells you, you should be executed on the street. Why? Because the issue is black people. Make it about white people and all of a sudden they re holed up in their bunker with 24,000 rounds of ammunition and a pallet of canned peaches.Conservatives have been awfully quiet this year about cop killings, however, even though they are up substantially. At this time last year there were ten police officers killed in the line of duty, this year there have been 17. Certainly we should hearing about the thugs who murdered these public servants? No? 71 percent of the cops killed this year were killed by white men. Not scary black guys wearing bandanas, shooting at them with Uzis from the blacked out windows of an Escalade on 24-inch rims. White guys. Nutjobs, psychopaths, career criminals; come to find out white men are pretty darned dangerous and they don t need Uzis.So where s the news coverage of the major increase in cop killings? Where s the outrage? Where is #BlueLivesMatter? Do blue lives only matter when they re killed by black men or do they matter all the time? The double standard is so easy to see it s ridiculous. #BlackLivesMatter isn t about cops or all lives. It s not about being an equal part of something when you re not treated as equal. Black men are routinely treated as dangerous, often at the end of a young, hair-trigger finger.Featured image by WP/Getty Images

The Houston Police Department and Texas Rangers are investigating after a gun nut opened fire on the office of Democratic state Senator John Whitmire a day before President Obama is scheduled to speak in Austin.Early Thursday morning around 12:30am, a shooter fired several rounds into the two-story office. There are bullet slugs everywhere, Whitmire said. One lodged in a framed picture. It s pretty amazing. Whitemire, a gun control advocate, surmised that the weapon used in the attack was an AR-15 because the bullets were .223 caliber. No one was harmed in the shooting but Whitmire and his staff along with law enforcement officials are taking the incident seriously. We ll take precautions. But it s part of the job, unfortunately, in this day and time, Whitmire said. They are checking in this general area to see if anyone else received any gunfire. We don t know yet. I don t know yet. The targeting of Whitmire s office occurred the day before President Obama is scheduled to appear at the South by Southwest tech and music festival on Friday where he is delivered a keynote address.Upon hearing of Obama s schedule, Texas open carry gun nuts stated their desire to attend the event with their guns to hand out pro-law literature. But one of the gun nuts had a different idea for what his buddies should do. If you get a clear shot, please fire for effect! conservative gun nut Kriss Elliot wrote on Facebook.So not only has the Texas open carry obsession resulted in violence against a Democratic office, it has resulted in gun nuts actually wanting to assassinate President Obama, and now it s much easier for them to do this because they are legally allowed to carry deadly firearms in public view.Make no mistake, these people belong in jail or at the very least an FBI watch list, but as long as Republicans control the state it will remain an exaggerated and embarrassing version of the Wild West.Featured Image: OnlyInYourState.com

WASHINGTON — James E. Cartwright, a retired Marine Corps general who as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff served as a key member of President Obama’s national security team, agreed to plead guilty on Monday to lying to the F. B. I. about his discussions with reporters about Iran’s nuclear program. General Cartwright entered the guilty plea before Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. As part of the deal, prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed that under sentencing guidelines, the punishment could range from a $500 fine to six months in prison. However, the government reserved the right to argue for a higher sentence, and the judge is not bound by the guidelines. Judge Leon set a sentencing hearing for Jan. 17. During the hearing, General Cartwright spoke stoically and in a calm voice, answering “Yes, sir” to a series of questions posed by the judge to make sure he understood what he was doing. He did not speak to reporters afterward, but in a statement said that he was not the original source of the information. “It was wrong for me to mislead the F. B. I. on Nov. 2, 2012, and I accept full responsibility for this,” General Cartwright said. “I knew I was not the source of the story and I didn’t want to be blamed for the leak. My only goal in talking to the reporters was to protect American interests and lives I love my country and continue to this day to do everything I can to defend it. ” His lawyer, Gregory B. Craig, said in a statement that his client had spoken to journalists after they had already reported their stories and that his motive was to prevent publication of information that might have harmed national security. The investigation focused on leaks to reporters for The New York Times and Newsweek. For General Cartwright, who was known as “Obama’s favorite general” before his retirement in 2011, the plea amounts to a stunning fall. It also adds a new twist to a surge of criminal cases in the Obama era. The case grew out of a period of political furor over leaks in the summer of 2012, when numerous books and articles appeared about Mr. Obama’s national security record during his first term. Republicans in Congress accused the White House of deliberately leaking government secrets, endangering national security to make Mr. Obama look tough in an election year. The administration denied that charge, and the attorney general at the time, Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed two United States attorneys to look into two specific disclosures, one of which was the cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program. NBC News reported in 2013 that the Iran cyberattack investigation was focused on General Cartwright. The cyberattack was Operation Olympic Games, a joint United effort to sabotage Iranian nuclear centrifuges with a computer virus sometimes called Stuxnet. A description of it was contained in “Confront and Conceal,” a book by David E. Sanger, a New York Times reporter, that was also adapted as an article published by The Times. “In researching his book ‘Confront and Conceal’ and his stories for The New York Times, David E. Sanger relied on multiple sources in Washington, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity,” The Times said in a statement on Monday. “As in the past, neither The Times nor Mr. Sanger will discuss whether a particular person was a source or the sourcing of particular information that was published, beyond what has been disclosed in our stories and in the book,” the statement continued. “Reporting like this serves a vital public interest: explaining how the United States is using a powerful new technology against its adversaries and the concern that it raises about how similar weapons can be used against the U. S. We will continue to pursue that reporting vigorously. “We are disappointed that the Justice Department has gone forward with the leak investigation that led to today’s guilty plea by General Cartwright,” it added. “These investigations send a chilling message to all government employees that they should not speak to reporters. The inevitable result is that the American public is deprived of information that it needs to know. ” Prosecutors also accused General Cartwright of lying about his conversations with another reporter, Daniel Klaidman, then of Newsweek. They said that the general had falsely told investigators that he had never discussed an unnamed country with Mr. Klaidman, but that he had sent an email to that reporter that “confirmed certain classified information relating” to that country in February 2012. Mr. Klaidman wrote an article in February 2012 about the Obama administration’s policy toward disrupting the Iranian nuclear program, including a section about a conversation between General Cartwright and Mr. Obama in early 2009 about various covert sabotage efforts. The list included cyberwarfare programs to damage centrifuges. He declined to comment on Monday. It was reported by Foreign Policy in the fall of 2013 that General Cartwright had been stripped of his security clearance. But with no official word from the Justice Department since then, it had seemed that the case was being handled administratively rather than criminally. On Monday morning, however, federal prosecutors filed criminal information against General Cartwright stating that on Nov. 2, 2012, investigators showed him “a list of quotes and quotations from David Sanger’s book, a number of which contained classified information,” but that he falsely told investigators that “he was not the source of any of the quotes and statements” and that “he did not provide or confirm classified information to David Sanger. ” General Cartwright’s guilty plea — not for leaking, but for lying to agents pursuing an investigation into an apparent leak — was reminiscent of the case prosecutors brought during the George W. Bush administration against I. Lewis Libby, a former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby was charged with lying about his conversations with journalists to investigators looking into the disclosure of a C. I. A. official’s identity, but was not charged over the leak itself. Before General Cartwright’s plea, the Obama administration had already brought criminal charges in more than twice as many cases involving leaks of government secrets to the news media as were brought under all previous presidents combined. They included eight officials it charged under the Espionage Act, although in some cases that charge was dropped. In a ninth case in the Obama era, the government struck a deal with David H. Petraeus, a prominent retired general who served as director of the C. I. A. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information related to accusations that he let his biographer read notebooks containing national security secrets, although she did not publish any of them. Mr. Petraeus also admitted to lying to the F. B. I. but he was not charged with that offense under his plea deal. He paid a fine and was sentenced to two years of probation.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia s Defence Ministry said on Friday six TU-22M3 long-range bombers had carried out air strikes on Islamic State targets on the western bank of the Euphrates river in Syria, the RIA news agency reported. Militants strongholds and groups were among the targets hit by the bombers, the ministry said.

In a complete 180 degree turn, a church that was the site of numerous mind boggling anti-gay rants will now be home to a shelter designed specifically to help at-risk LGBT youth. How s that for karma?Reverend James David Manning has become notorious for the awful sermons he delivers from his Harlem-based Atlah Worldwide Church. Outside, he frequently puts up massive signs denouncing homosexuality and anyone who supports gay rights. One sign claimed supporting same-sex marriage would give a person cancer or syphilis. Another declared Obama had released homo demons to attack black men.Thankfully, Manning s time being able to spew insane garbage from the pulpit appears to be over. Manning, busy as he was spreading hate, seems to have massively mismanaged his finances. His church is reportedly over $1 million in debt and the property it sits on will now be auctioned off.Enter the Ali Forney Center, an organization dedicated to providing help to homeless and at-risk LGBTQ youth. Since hearing about the recent vacancy they have been fundraising to buy Manning s old church. In just 12 days they raised over $200,000. It s likely they will soon be able to acquire it. We re confident we ll be able to go into the auction with a partner that will allow us to have not just an entry-level bid, said Carl Siciliano, the Center s founder and executive director. Because the building is historic, it is subject to zoning laws that make it almost impossible for the lot to be used to erect something like luxury housing or office buildings. If the building still manages to fall into the hands of a developer, Siciliano and his colleagues have a back-up plan: they will try to rent space there for $30,000 a month.Hilariously, Manning seems to be in pure denial that his church is being sold. He insists he s not leaving. In a disturbing video, Manning took aim at his enemies that want to take him down just because he hasn t paid over a million dollars in taxes. He does, however, appear to be dimly aware that his church will soon be a homeless shelter for LGBTQ youths. All kinds of stuff is being spread around [about how] they re going to turn this church into a bathhouse. How they re going to turn it into a homeless building for the sodomites. It s mainly the sodomites. The soulful minded people aren t doing anything. It s not soulful people or sodomites doing this to Manning it s the government. In December, a judge ordered the foreclosure after over a decade of Manning s church deliberately not paying his taxes. Records show that he has a whopping nine separate tax liens against him. Some going as far back as 2002.Manning is always quick to point out parts of the bible that speak against homosexuality, but he seems to have overlooked the parts that condemn greed. Maybe he should have paid more attention.Feature image from YouTube

President Obama visited Jakarta, where the normally staid and reasoned statesman gave a blistering assessment of the Trump administration and unleashed the birthers all over again.Obama is clearly angry at the fact that Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate agreement and told an audience in Indonesia that the U.S. temporarily has no leadership.Touting one of his cornerstone achievements while in office, he said: In Paris, we came together around the most ambitious agreement in history about climate change. An agreement that even with the temporary absence of American leadership, can still give our children a fighting chance .Source: IndependentIf you recall, Obama spent some of his childhood in the largely Muslim Indonesia, a fact that was central to the birther movement, which was spearheaded by none other than Donald Trump. You can be sure that Obama knew exactly what the birthers would do with his visit to Indonesia and especially with his criticism of Trump and it s hard to imagine it s not completely intentional anything to bring more attention to climate change.There s a certain irony to Obama pulling this crap in Indonesia He needs to just retire while we glory in destroying his legacy. #MAGA https://t.co/DDMKrEDqrE Linda Suhler, Ph.D. (@LindaSuhler) July 1, 2017Obama in Indonesia, the world s most populous Muslim-majority country gives speech criticizing POTUS Trump. Obama is a #traitor to the USA! pic.twitter.com/x90SVJ7eJK Glenn Quagmire (@marklar1969) July 1, 2017Actually, a traitor would be if the sitting president is actively colluding with Russia.He s a Muslim full of hate. He never even liked this Country. I knew it when he wouldn t put his hand on the Bible to be sworn in. Connie Cryan (@ccryan41) July 3, 2017I was so POed by this creep attacking USA forgot he was in his childhood home talking to family & friends. Thanks for reminding me, Thomas P Kennedy III (@ThomasPKennedy3) July 3, 2017Obama Spreading Racism & intolerance in Indonesia ! America s future does involve Strong People ,who learned from Obama s misguiding s ! ?? pic.twitter.com/4ZvUgTIoNR Joey D (@Bahamajoe0) July 2, 2017Obama is trying to spark a coup from Indonesia just before Independence Day. Vladimir Lenin would be very proud of him. The Daily POTUS (@redalertnow) July 3, 2017Not really sure any of those words belong together.Obama in Indonesia, majority Muslim, for 4th weekend, just being himself & blasting Americans for being TOO Patriotic ??while praising Islam pic.twitter.com/x6984u5rIW Piper Covfefe (@PiperSul) July 3, 2017Oh, there he is! On that side of the world now. Obama s back home again in Indonesia https://t.co/gyXNceW4xz Andrew Malcolm (@AHMalcolm) June 28, 2017Obama also argued against nationalism, which World Net Daily called patriotism. With his friends in Jakarta IndonesiaNot surprised #Traitor #Obama is putting down #Patriotism on #IndependenceDayhttps://t.co/tQrLzCnCWx Thomas P Kennedy III (@ThomasPKennedy3) July 3, 2017While Trump voters are giddy at once again being able to pull out the birther card, the real joke is on them and on Trump. Trump is unraveling through his Twitter feed. Obama knows that Trump will respond in the least presidential way possible leaving the administration a bit more hobbled after each tweet.

Here s what the election map for Crooked Hillary vs. Trump in Oregon looked:Due to extensive criminal and dangerous behavior, protest is now considered a riot. Crowd has been advised. Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) November 11, 2016Those not wanting to be associated w/anarchists should leave the area immediately. Peaceful protesters encouraged to go to Pioneer Square Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) November 11, 2016Finally .police are not saying the woman who was hit by a car and killed was part of the anti-Trump protests, but the accident did happen near area of protests according to Twitter users.

On April 29, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Halim Dhanidina overturned the conviction of Rory Moroney, a gay man arrested by an undercover Long Beach police officer in October 2014.In overturning Moroney s conviction, the judge confirmed what LGBTQ advocates have been saying for years: that gay men are routinely targeted by members of the Long Beach vice squad.The judge agreed with Moroney s attorneys, who sought to have their client s conviction on charges of lewd conduct and indecent exposure thrown out, citing the discriminatory nature of Long Beach lewd conduct stings. During the stings, male officers are sent out into the community to specifically target gay men.In Moroney s case an undercover officer made gestures toward him in a public restroom. Moroney was arrested after responding to what he presumed to be sexual advances on the part of the officer by exposing himself.Dhanidina found that the presence and tactics of the decoy officers actually caused the crimes to occur. The judge also found that Long Beach s vice tactics are discriminatory because the squad uses only male officers as undercover decoys in lewd conduct stings. He went on to say that the police department intentionally targeted men who engaged in homosexual sex, during the stings.While the police department claimed that the stings were only done in response to citizen lewd conduct complaints, the judge shut down that argument after they failed to show evidence of citizens complaining.LGBTQ activists and civil rights attorneys have long criticized the tactics used by police to arrest gay men.Jim Key, a spokesman for the Los Angeles LGBT Center, told the Los Angeles Times that police who use these tactics aren t saving lives, they re destroying them by branding innocent men as sex offenders. John Duran, West Hollywood councilman and expert witness, said the lewd conduct stings came out of the era when homosexuality was criminal, calling them a leftover from the last century. While the judge s decision is a step forward, both for Moroney and others who have been entrapped by Long Beach police, these same tactics are unfortunately used to persecute gay men all across the country.Last year police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana finally apologized for destroying hundreds of lives after they entrapped and arrested gay men using a ban on sodomy struck down by the Supreme Court almost 15 years ago.Watch video from The Young Turks, which talks about how police targeted and trapped the victims of these false arrests:Just as we have a long way to go in the US to eliminate institutional racism, we still have a long way to go to eliminate institutional homophobia, which includes a multitude of tactics used by police and lawmakers to profile, target, entrap, criminalize and imprison members of LGBTQ community.Photo by Ulrich Baumgarten via Getty Images

Appearing on the The View Thursday morning was none other than former Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson. He, of course, spoke of his time running for office and even joked that his first choice for president went out the window the day he dropped out. Carson was then asked by the women of the show about his endorsement of Donald Trump. Which, in all honesty, doesn t make any sense, and it was discovered last week that Trump may have illegally offered him an advisory role in exchange for an endorsement.Whoopi Goldberg didn t hold back at all and laid it all out on the table for Carson: This guy he s a racist and he s not good for the country You re Ben Carson! You re so much better than this. Carson then explained that because he is better than this he s capable of looking past the racism to the broader picture. Which is the biggest load of BS I ve ever heard.Carson also said that we have to get away from the ruling class, and unfortunately it had to be explained to the sleepy doctor that Trump is very much a part of the ruling class.All in all, the ladies of The View, in particular, Whoopi Goldberg, tore Trump a new one, and laid into Carson for backing him.Watch here: And as per usual, Trump proves that he cannot handle criticism, especially if it comes from women. He quickly took to his Twitter account while the show was still airing to show everyone, once again, that he has the maturity level of a seven-year-old..@TheView T.V. show, which is failing so badly that it will soon be taken off thr air, is constantly asking me to go on. I TELL THEM "NO" Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2016Explain how the women on The View, which is a total disaster since the great Barbara Walters left, ever got their jobs. @abc is wasting time Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2016Well, the women of The View, while still on air, called him out on these tweets, and told him that they d love to have him on, but he s terrified they ll be mean to him and ask him tough questions. You see, Trump only wants to be part of interviews where he can control the conversation and be adored by the media. Being surrounded by strong, successful women interrogating him is pretty much his worst nightmare.Oh, and The View has been on for 20 years now and is doing just fine with or without Trump as a guest. He s the last person to talk about a failing television show.Good on Whoopi for calling both Carson and Trump out. Carson on his hypocrisy and aversion to reality, and Trump on his utter horseshit. Well done.Featured image via video screen capture/Twitter

Does anyone actually believe it s possible that Barack Hussein Obama is the only person in America (with maybe the exception of Valerie Jarrett) who doesn t see this is a horrible, lopsided and dangerous deal for America?Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Times Square Wednesday evening in protest over the recent landmark nuclear deal with Iran.As CBS2 s Jessica Schneider reported, some 10 thousand are rallying in solidarity with signs and voices raised against the nuclear deal.Protest organizers proclaim: Washington is prepared to give Iran virtually all that it needs to get to the bomb. To release $150 billion to Iran will result in the expansion of worldwide terror. Former New York Governor, and Presidential contender, George Pataki joined the chorus of voices urging lawmakers to block the deal. Reject this deal. Protect America. Protect Israel and protect the world from freedom, Pataki said.The Stop Iran Rally Coalition which claims to be a bi-partisan group is also calling out Sen. Charles Schumer, saying he has the votes as presumptive leader to override this deal .If this deal is not stopped, New York voters will know whom to blame. Sen. Schumer said in a statement Wednesday that he wasn t ready to make a decision on the deal yet. I ve read the agreement and I m seeking answers to the many questions I have. Before I make a decision, I m going to speak at length with experts on both sides, the lawmaker said.In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry led back-to-back, closed-door briefings, trying to sway lawmakers to approve the deal to curb Iran s nuclear program. We are convinced that the agreement that we have arrived at with world powers is an agreement that will prevent Iran from the potential of securing a nuclear weapon. It will make the region, our friends and allies safer, it will make the world safer, Kerry said. And we are convinced that the absence of any viable alternative absolutely underscores that fact. Meanwhile, Israel s ambassador to the U.S. is fiercely lobbying lawmakers to reject the deal. And Republicans are pledging to do just that. Because a bad deal threatens the security of the American people, and we re going to do everything possible to stop it, said Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner. And many at the rally said more people in the country need to start listening and speaking out as well. I m very concerned about what our situation is here. Nobody wants this deal to go through and we re hoping that Obama will hear the voice of the American people and we re hoping that Congress will listen to what we have say. And hopefully we can do something about that, said one protester. I feel people really don t understand the main issue. To me the main issue is not what happens 10 years from now, but what happens as soon as the sanctions are removed from Iran, another protester told Schneider. Which is the main terrorist regime in the world, which spreads terrorism all around the world, which is responsible for the deaths of Americans as well as Israelis. Several academic, military, and political leaders will speak to the crowd Wednesday night. All of them urge that this is an issue that transcends politics and they re urging Congress to keep sanctions against Iran, even if it means overriding President Barack Obama s likely veto on any legislation against the deal, Schneider reported. Congress has 60 days to approve or reject the deal. The Senate will hold a hearing on the deal Thursday.Via: New York CBS Local

Donald Trump is not ruling out a run for president as an independent if things go south for the front-runner in the Republican race. "I'm going to have to see what happens," he told George Stephanopoulos in an interview that aired Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "I will see what happens. I have to be treated fairly." Trump was responding to a Wall Street Journal report that Republican operatives are considering banding together donors from the other GOP campaigns in a bid to knock Trump off the top spot. Their efforts are taking on increased urgency as the first-in-the-nation Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses near and Trump leads the crowded GOP field for the fourth consecutive month, according to a new national Washington Post-ABC News poll. Some candidates, including Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Florida governor Jeb Bush, also are showing more willingness lately to directly attack Trump. On Sunday, Trump said his measure of whether he would support the eventual GOP nominee is whether he is treated "fairly" in the campaign, a line he often uses when talking about a third-party run. "When I did this, I said I have to be treated fairly," Trump told Stephanopoulos. "If I’m treated fairly, I’m fine. All I want to do is [have] a level playing field." Trump has given competing signals throughout the campaign about whether he would run as a third-party candidate. He didn't raise his hand in the Republican Party's first presidential debate, in August, when moderators asked the candidates whether they would pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee. But in September, Trump signed a pledge saying he would support the eventual nominee — instead of opposing him or her in a third-party run. If Republican operatives succeed in knocking Trump off his perch, their plan could backfire if he then runs as an independent. A July Washington Post-ABC News poll found that in a hypothetical general election matchup between Bush and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, Clinton led 50 percent to 44 percent. But throw a third-party Trump run into the mix, and the poll found that he would tear support away Bush and give Clinton a 16-point lead.

SOCHI, Russia/RIYADH (Reuters) - Russia s Vladimir Putin won the backing of Turkey and Iran on Wednesday to host a Syrian peace congress, taking the central role in a major diplomatic push to finally end a civil war all but won by Moscow s ally, President Bashar al-Assad. Syrian opposition groups, meeting in Saudi Arabia to seek a unified position ahead of peace talks, decided to stick to their demand that Assad leave power, Al Arabiya television reported, following speculation they might soften their stance after their hardline leader quit. Two days after being visited by Assad in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, President Putin hosted his counterparts Tayyip Erdogan and Hassan Rouhani there. In a joint statement, the three leaders called on the Syrian government and moderate opposition to participate constructively in the planned congress, to be held in the same city on a date they did not specify. The congress will look at the key questions on Syria s national agenda, Putin told reporters at the summit, sitting alongside Rouhani and Erdogan. First of all that is the drawing-up of a framework for the future structure of the state, the adoption of a new constitution, and, on the basis of that, the holding of elections under United Nations supervision. There was no word from the leaders on who would be invited. The list of invitees has been a sticking point, with Turkey objecting to some Syrian Kurdish groups attending. Syria s civil war, in its seventh year, has killed hundreds of thousands of people and created the world s worst refugee crisis, driving more than 11 million people from their homes. All previous efforts to achieve a diplomatic solution have swiftly collapsed, with the opposition demanding Assad leave power, the government insisting he stay on, and neither side able to force the issue by achieving a military victory. But since Russia joined the war on behalf of Assad in 2015, the balance of power has turned decisively in his government s favor. A year ago, the army forced rebels out of their last urban stronghold, the eastern half of Aleppo. In recent weeks, the self-proclaimed caliphate of jihadist group Islamic State has collapsed. Government forces now effectively control all of Syria apart from a few shrinking rebel pockets and a swathe in the north held by mainly Kurdish forces backed by the United States. Opposition groups held their meeting on Wednesday at a luxury hotel in Riyadh, two days after the leader of the High Negotiations Committee (HNC) that has represented them at previous peace talks quit abruptly. HNC chief Riyad Hijab had been known as an uncompromising defender of the position that Assad must have no role in any political transition for Syria, and his resignation had led to speculation the opposition could soften its stance. However, a draft of the meeting s final statement still included the demand Assad leave office at the start of any transition, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television reported. Having helped Assad s government reach the cusp of victory, Putin now appears to be playing the leading role in international efforts to end the war on Assad s terms. In addition to hosting Assad, Rouhani and Erdogan, the Russian leader has also phoned U.S. President Donald Trump and Saudi King Salman in the past 24 hours. Iran has long supported Assad. Saudi Arabia, Iran s arch rival in the Middle East and long a backer of rebel groups in Syria and advocate of the position that Assad must leave, has been the main supporter of the HNC. But after King Salman made an historic visit to Moscow a few months ago, Riyadh appears to have come around to Russia s dominant role in Syria. Similarly Turkey, traditionally one of the Syrian leader s implacable foes, has increasingly shown willingness to work with Russia to resolve the crisis. This summit is aimed at results. I believe critical decisions will be reached, Turkey s Erdogan said in Sochi before his meeting with Putin and Rouhani. The Syrian government welcomed the final statement from the three-way Iran summit, Syrian state media said on Wednesday, quoting an official source in the Foreign Ministry. It described it as the culmination of Assad s summit with Putin. The other major power with troops in Syria, the United States, has so far kept its distance. Washington has been arming, training and sending special forces to assist a Kurdish group fighting against Islamic State, angering Turkey which is fighting its own Kurdish insurgency. Still, any final settlement that keeps Assad in power will probably require the participation of some kind of opposition delegation willing to negotiate over the demand that he go. U.N. peace talks mediator Staffan de Mistura, host of the formal peace process in Geneva, told the opposition groups at the Riyadh meeting they needed to have the hard discussions necessary to reach a common line . A strong, unified team is a creative partner in Geneva and we need that, one who can actually explore more than one way to arrive to the goals that we need to have, he said. De Mistura will meet Russia s defense and foreign ministers on Thursday to discuss preparations for a new round of Geneva talks, Russian news agency RIA reported. Russia said on Tuesday that the resignation of such radically minded Syrian opposition figures as HNC chief Hijab would help unite the disparate opposition factions around a more realistic platform. [L8N1NR296]

Of late, Bernie Sanders has been under assault from the technocratic wing of the Democratic Party. The charge? His campaign has circulated economic projections that show stunning — and rather implausible — benefits from Sanders's agenda. Sanders's "promises runs against our party's best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic," wrote four Democratic ex-chairs of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers. "These are numbers we would describe as deep voodoo if they came from a tax-cutting Republican," agreed Paul Krugman. Amidst this onslaught, Steve Randy Waldman has penned what is, I think, the best defense of Sanders. He admits that the campaign's policy proposals are sketchy and the economic projections it's circulating are fantastical. But he argues that none of that really matters. The president's "role is to define priorities that must later be translated into well-crafted policy details," he says. "In a democratic polity, wonks are the help." Waldman has a point. If elected president, Sanders could certainly get some top economists to tighten his policies. He would have the vast machinery of the federal government available to sweat the details. The best experts in academia would be honored to advise him. Every think tank in town would produce reams of research on how to implement his ideas. And, hell, let's just be honest: All this policy talk is just a way to pass the time between now and the election. It doesn't matter how strong Bernie Sanders's single-payer health care plan is — it's not going to pass, just like Donald Trump isn't going to get Mexico to pay for a wall and Hillary Clinton isn't going to get universal pre-K past a Republican Congress and Ted Cruz isn't going to set up a value-added tax. It's obvious that debating the details of campaign proposals is, on some level, fantasy football for wonks. Events will intercede, bureaucracies will weigh in, Congress will balk, promises will be broken. Remember when Barack Obama ran for president opposing an individual mandate and then flip-flopped and supported one? So what's the point of paying attention to any of this at all? As someone who pays quite a lot of attention to campaign policy processes, here's my answer: Watching a candidate run his campaign's policy processes is one of our best ways of predicting how he would run his White House. The key word there, by the way, is run. Some of the most important decisions the president makes are about how to run the processes that translate vision into policy. Those decisions include whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas make sense, which strategies are likely to work. The presidency is one damn decision like that after another. Obama, famously, is so exhausted by the decision fatigue of the job that he wears the same color suit every day so he has one less thing to decide in the morning. This is one way in which campaigns give us insight into presidencies. Presidential candidates also have to decide whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas are truly good ones, which strategies are likely to work. To make those decisions well, they need a sound philosophy, yes, but they also need to want to hear good advice, they need to want advisers who will tell them when they're wrong, they need to have good instincts for when something they want to believe is true simply isn't, and they need to be realistic about the strategies that are likely to work and the ones that aren't. My worry about Sanders, watching him in this campaign, is that he isn't very interested in learning the weak points in his ideas, that he hasn't surrounded himself with people who police the limits between what they wish were true and what the best evidence says is true, that he doesn't seek out counterarguments to his instincts, that he's attracted to strategies that align with his hopes for American politics rather than what we know about American politics. And these tendencies, if they persist, can turn good values into bad policies and an inspiring candidate into a bad president. The reason I care about the puppies-and-rainbows promises of his single-payer proposal is that I think Sanders believes them — I don't think he's a cynical politician simply eliding the weaknesses of his plan. The reason I care about his campaign's circulation of fairly outlandish economic projections is that it makes me worry there's no one around Sanders with the sense to say that those results don't pass the smell test. The reason I'm frustrated by Sanders's promise that a political revolution will overcome all opposition to his plans is I think he believes it, and so I'm not sure he has a real plan B for when the political revolution doesn't happen. The reason Sanders's persistently superficial answers on foreign policy matter to me is that they're a test of his ability to learn on the fly about topics he's not terribly interested in. In a democratic polity, wonks are the help. But that only underscores the importance of electing someone good at hiring and managing them. A President Sanders could hire excellent technocrats to help him make policy, but would he want to? A President Sanders could surround himself with experts who know the shortcomings of his ideas, but would he listen to them? A President Sanders could become deeply engaged on foreign policy, but would he decide to? Management isn't the sexiest or most inspiring of topics. But, as Jimmy Carter can tell you, it matters. A good vision can be destroyed by a bad strategy; high ideals can be muddied by weak staffing; a pure heart can be led astray by bad advice. There are plenty of criticisms to be made of Obama's presidency, but I think the baseline competence of his administration has begun to dim memories of how important presidential management really is. The Bush administration was, from this perspective, a genuine disaster — a festival of tax cuts that didn't make sense and wars that were ill-planned, and all of it run by a man who clearly couldn't separate experts from hacks ("Heckuva job, Brownie!") and good advice from ideological fantasies. I have always thought this story, reported by Megan McArdle, showed the mundane ways in which Bush's deficiencies diminished his presidency: A senior economic adviser for George W. Bush once told me a rather haunting story about the administration’s decision to sign the 2002 farm bill ... Like virtually all sound economists, Bush’s advisers disliked the bill, a subsidy-laden monstrosity that was considerably worse than the farm bill that had preceded it in 1996—but they reluctantly allowed it to go forward, because they thought passing the farm bill would buy legislative support for something they considered even more important: the authority the president needed to advance the next round of treaty negotiations at the World Trade Organization. As compromises go, this one didn’t seem too bad, so Bush’s advisers put on their game faces as the president signed it into law on May 13, 2002, with a touching speech about providing a safety net for farmers. All went well until later, when someone cracked a joke about how "we don’t need another farm bill." The president, shocked, demanded an explanation. "What’s wrong with the farm bill? No one told me to veto the farm bill." The adviser wasn’t trying to hide the football, but had just assumed that Bush knew. So had everyone else. It was so obvious to economists, no one thought to tell the president. On the other hand, George W. Bush's father wasn't the most brilliant policy mind to ever occupy the Oval Office, but he was an excellent manager who chose good staff, made decisions he didn't like but knew were necessary, and ran a competent and mostly scandal-free bureaucracy. There's a reason esteem for his presidency has grown greatly since he left office. Voters are hiring managers, and the presidential campaign is a long, strangely constructed job interview. Among the qualities people are looking for are inspiration and decency, and Sanders has shown he has both in spades. But the presidency demands more than that, and Sanders's success means he needs to show he's up to the more mundane rigors of the job, too.

We have very few favorites when it comes to reporting for obvious reasons: They lie all the time! Who hasn t read or heard something totally false about Trump and Russia? This past week was a banner week of lies from the main stream media so it s our pleasure to straighten things out for everyone We ve discovered a star news reporting organization that stands above most others in their reporting on the Trump/Russia investigation. CIRCA NEWS with Sara Carter and John Solomon are setting the record straight!Here s the skinny on the latest media lies and the truth via Circa:Aggressive news reporting can be a public service, like when courageous journalists exposed Richard Nixon s Watergate, the Catholic church s cover up of the sexual abuse and the U.S. intelligence failures that preceded 9-11.But breathless, half-baked reporting in times of tumult can also misserve the public, like when The Wall Street Journal retracted a false story that Bill Clinton had been seen in a compromising position with an intern in the White House or when NBC wrongly identified Richard Jewell as the Olympic Park bombing suspect.This past week, professional journalism offered us several new examples of breathless reporting during the brouhaha over Donald Trump, James Comey and Russia intelligence. At their least, some stories misled the public, and at their worst they outright misinformed.Here are some examples this week that should cause the media to search whether its current standards are doing enough to ensure the public gets the whole truth. You can review the facts and decide for yourself whether the media shamed itself.The Rosenstein Quitting Episode The Washington Post reported Wednesday night that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had threatened to resign after the narrative emerging from the White House on Tuesday evening cast him as a prime mover of the decision to fire Comey. The story cited an unnamed source close to the White House. But it did not have any comment or confirmation from the man who was alleged to have made the threat.When Sinclair Broadcast Group s Michelle Macaluso finally caught up to Rosenstein, a funny thing happened. He debunked the story. No, I m not quitting, he said.The reporter pressed on: Did you threaten to quit? No, Rosenstein said.The Post did not return a call for comment Friday on whether it stood by its story.The Comey resources requestThe New York Times and several other outlets reported Wednesday that Comey, just before he was fired, had asked the Justice Department s Rosenstein for more funding and personnel for the Russia intelligence probe. But when Comey s deputy got to Capitol Hill the next day, he denied there was any need for more resources. I believe we have the adequate resources to do it and I know that we have resourced that investigation adequately, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told lawmakers.McCabe said the FBI, if it needed more resources, wouldn t even go to the Justice Department but instead to Congress. We don t typically request resources for an individual case, he explained.CNN s claim that Trump is under investigation During the breaking story on Comey Tuesday night, respected CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin declared the FBI director s firing was a grotesque abuse of power and that it was a political act when the President is under investigation. Toobin is entitled to his opinion but he should have the right facts. Numerous sources confirm to Circa that Comey told Congress just last week that Trump is NOT a target of the Russia probe.CNN s connection of grand jury subpoenas to Comey s firingCNN went live with an exclusive the night Comey was fired, reporting that grand jury subpoenas were issued to associates of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn seeking business records in the Russia case.But with one slight turn of hand, CNN s legitimate scoop was crafted to suggest there had been some correlation to Comey s firing. CNN learned of the subpoenas hours before President Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey, the network reported.The multitude of media comparisons to WatergateCountless media outlets from Politico and The New York Times to Mother Jones have suggested the whole Russia scandal is akin to Watergate, right down to Comey s firing mirroring Nixon s efforts to axe the special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox.There s just one problem with that. Nixon was the target of the Watergate probe and he was accused of specific crimes.Via: Circa New/John Solomon

WASHINGTON, D. C. — The big business lobby, which profits from hiring foreign labor over American workers, is pushing for an expansion of the foreign guest worker visa. Americans would be laid off from those seasonal jobs in the process. [A push by the Workforce Coalition, an organization made up of the open borders lobby and big business associations, demands a expansion of the visa where returning foreign workers would be exempt from the annual cap of 66, 000, quadrupling the number of foreign workers entering the U. S. and taking jobs from American workers. When the same action was done in 2015, with bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats, big business concerns applied for some 264, 000 foreign guest workers, according to POLITICO. At the time, House Speaker Paul Ryan supported the expansion, claiming outrage over the move was “hyperbole. ” The visa brings foreign nationals to the U. S. for nonagricultural jobs. The visa impacts and poor Americans most, as labor jobs in the hotel industry, water parks, retail stores and restaurants can all outsource jobs to foreign workers under the program. More than half a million jobs in the U. S. have been taken by visa workers in the last five years. Center for Immigration Studies Fellow David Seminara wrote in 2010 how the visa had become a tool for the big business lobby to save money by hiring cheap, foreign labor over Americans. “Use of the program has morphed from its original intent to help employers that need seasonal temporary workers,” Seminara wrote. “The majority of the program’s current users are neither small nor seasonal employers, but rather to companies and recruiters that petition for to work for ten months out of the year, year after year. ” Big business and the open borders lobby are not alone, though, in their demand for more foreign labor, Sen. Thom Tillis ( ) and Sen. Mark Warner ( ) are leading the call to replace more American workers with cheaper, foreign workers. In a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary (DHS) Tillis, Warner and some 32 GOP and Democratic Senators called on more foreign workers to enter the U. S. in the upcoming Fiscal Year. Those Senators include: Senators Bill Cassidy ( ) Ron Wyden ( ) John Cornyn ( ) Roy Blunt ( ) Chris Coons ( ) John Barrasso ( ) Michael Bennet ( ) Susan Collins ( ) Tom Carper ( ) Lindsey Graham ( ) Patty Murray ( ) Mike Enzi ( ) Amy Klobuchar ( ) Jerry Moran ( ) Angus King ( ) Tim Scott ( ) Roger Wicker ( ) Orrin Hatch ( ) Ben Cardin ( ) Richard Burr ( ) Lisa Murkowski ( ) James Lankford ( ) Johnny Isakson ( ) Cory Gardner ( ) Pat Roberts ( ) Mike Rounds ( ) Thad Cochran ( ) Dan Sullivan ( ) Maria Cantwell ( ) and Bob Casey ( ). Additionally, Tillis and Sen. Angus King ( ) are pushing legislation to permanently exempt returning foreign workers from the 66, 000 visa cap, which would be at the expense of hundreds of thousands of laid off American workers over time. Tillis is also responsible for pushing an amnesty bill that would give legal residency to the more than 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U. S. as Breitbart Texas reported. John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

On Wednesday night, stories started pouring in from women accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault — groping them or kissing them against their will much like Trump bragged about doing in a leaked audio recording. But almost immediately, Trump surrogates and others started calling their stories into question because of the timing. “These allegations are decades old,” senior Trump adviser A.J. Delgado told Chris Hayes on MSNBC. “If somebody actually did that, Chris, any reasonable woman would have come forward and said something at the time.” Delgado added that she didn’t find the women who talked to the New York Times “credible” because they reportedly support Hillary Clinton. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said he was “skeptical” about the “timing” of the allegations, even though he also insisted that he had “no reason to doubt” the stories. “Talk about an October surprise," Scarborough said. "There have been a thousand triggering events that would've made sense. If I had been sexually harassed by this man, the Megyn Kelly story would've given me an opportunity." But the timing of these reports really isn't suspicious at all. In fact, it's totally expected and even “reasonable,” to use Delgado’s words, when you understand how victims of sexual abuse respond to trauma and social stigma. The three women who spoke to journalists at the New York Times or the Palm Beach Post all said they were inspired to come forward after hearing Trump deny on national television that he had done the things he described on the leaked tapes. Natasha Stoynoff of People magazine also led off her story with the exchange from the second presidential debate, when Anderson Cooper asked Trump: “Just for the record, are you saying … that you did not actually kiss women without consent?” This wasn’t just a “triggering” event, as Scarborough put it (although the harassment of Megyn Kelly was indeed triggering for survivors of abuse). This was Trump explicitly denying that he had done exactly the kinds of things these women say he did to them. The New York Times reported that it was after the debate that one of the accusers, Rachel Crooks, emailed a reporter at the Times about her experience. The other accuser who talked to the Times, Jessica Leeds, said that she started telling her story to people she knew about a year and a half ago, when it became apparent that Trump was “actually running for president.” But as Leeds explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, watching the debate inspired her to write a letter to the editor to the New York Times to tell her story. That led staffers to contact her and reporters to interview her, which led to her story being vetted and published. And Crooks had reportedly been talking to Times staffers about her experience before the debate — but it wasn’t until afterward that she actually agreed to go on the record. There’s a tendency in our culture to automatically disbelieve victims of sexual abuse when they come forward. That’s especially true in high-profile cases against famous or powerful men, as we’ve seen just this year with Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes. When an accuser’s story is called into question, the typical narrative is that she’s just seeking attention or a big payout, or that she has some other ulterior motive. But if you’ve ever talked to actual victims of assault, or been one yourself, you know that coming forward is terrifying and intimidating on all kinds of levels, and that the costs often drastically outweigh the benefits. As a purely practical matter, pressing charges can mean putting your life on hold for an investigation or a trial, and losing a lot of time and money as a result. “It’s almost impossible for most women to respond effectively to sexual harassment,” said Patricia Barnes, an attorney and an expert on workplace discrimination, in an earlier interview with Vox. “Because to do so means they have to hire an attorney, they have to go through a complex legal proceeding that takes years, and it has an uncertain outcome at best and often fails.” The potential payout is rarely worth it. If you go the civil route, the median settlement for a sexual harassment suit is $30,000. If you’re pursuing a criminal case, most accused rapists never see jail time. Accusing a powerful man also means risking your career if he’s your boss, or even if he works in your industry. We heard stories along these lines from Roger Ailes’s alleged victims, one of whom said there was a “conspiracy of silence” around Ailes’s behavior because nobody wanted to “be personally and professionally destroyed” by Ailes. Then there are the personal and emotional costs. Victims risk being shunned by their community if they accuse someone who is well-liked. They risk having their personal life, and especially their sex life, ruthlessly scrutinized by people who want to find reasons not to believe them. Finally, sexual abuse causes trauma that may be too painful to relive in court, much less in public. It may take victims a long time to even admit to themselves that they were abused or victimized. Victims may simply want to “suppress” the experience, as Trump accuser Leeds put it, and move on with their lives. And victims often feel shame after their attack, even if they’ve done nothing wrong. So it’s no surprise that many victims never report the crimes against them in the first place. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that they may only decide to come forward years later — because it takes that long to process the trauma, or to muster up the courage to put yourself through the reporting process, or to find the time to put the rest of your life on hold to pursue justice. Leeds, who is 74 years old and says Trump assaulted her in the early 1980s on an airplane, explained that society’s attitudes at the time heavily discouraged victims from speaking out. “The culture had instilled in us that somehow it was our fault, the attention that we received from men,” Leeds said. “That we were responsible for their behavior. You didn’t complain to the authorities, you didn’t complain to your boss. If something happened to you, you just bucked up and you went on.” But despite the feminist advances of the intervening decades, this is still often true today. Crooks, who said Trump forcibly kissed her outside an elevator in 2005, told the Times that the incident made her “so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.” But as Crooks’s then-boyfriend also told the Times: “I think that what was more upsetting than him kissing her was that she felt like she couldn’t do anything to him because of his position. ... I remember her saying, ‘I can’t do anything to this guy, because he’s Donald Trump.’” Power imbalances, shame and trauma, the fear of social stigma — all of these are reasons why it often takes something big to encourage women to come forward. It might take hearing someone else break her silence publicly first, which can make it feel safer and less lonely for you to do the same. It might take hearing that your attacker had other victims, which could make you feel morally obligated to help make sure he can’t do it again. Or it might take seeing the question of whether your attacker committed sexual assault suddenly become a presidential campaign issue.

Donald Trump is a lot of things, but presidential is not one of them. Kellyanne Conway is Trump s campaign manager, so it s her job to polish the turd that the Republican party nominated and make him something palatable to the majority of American voters. Unfortunately for both Trump and Conway, even she doesn t believe that Trump is presidential, at least that s what a video dug up by CNN s Jake Tapper says.The subject was Trump s latest obsession, which is that the election is somehow rigged against him. Tapper noted, on Sunday s State of the Union, that there s no evidence whatsoever of election rigging. As proof, he pulled out a not-so-old video of Conway basically saying the same thing. Back in April when you were working against Donald Trump, when you were working for Ted Cruz and advising his super PAC, you had some tough words for Mr. Trump when he was lashing out at the time against the system being rigged, Tapper told Conway before refreshing her memory with a video clip. We hear from the Trump campaign, the rules change, it s not fair, Conway had said in April. He can whine and complain all he wants that he didn t know the rules. Conway, to her credit, didn t skip a beat and said, we love watching that clip together. That was about what was happening on the weekends. When Donald Trump would win the vote, he would basically win all the electoral votes in a state, and on the weekends, the Cruz campaign would go back and follow the rules and get back some of those delegates. So no, it s not a pattern for him. Source: Raw StoryThen, she once again tried deflecting from Trump s accusations that the election is rigged against him personally and said that the election is about the system being rigged against the little guy. Here s the video:Of course, Trump s rigged election claims have never been about the little guy, unless Trump is trying to claim that as an alleged billionaire, born on 3rd base, he s a little guy. The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary but also at many polling places SAD Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016Featured image via video screen capture.

WASHINGTON/PALM BEACH (Reuters) - Hours after a poison gas attack in Syria killed dozens of civilians on Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s intelligence advisers provided evidence Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad was behind the atrocity, officials said. Trump, who had long said the top U.S. priority in Syria should be to fight Islamic State, immediately ordered a list of options to punish Assad, according to senior officials who took part in the flurry of closed-door meetings that played out over two days. Confronting his first foreign policy crisis, Trump relied on seasoned military experts rather than the political operatives who had dominated policy in the first weeks of his presidency and showed a willingness to move quickly, officials involved in the deliberations said. On Thursday afternoon, Trump ordered the launch of a barrage of cruise missiles against the Shayrat air field north of Damascus, which the Pentagon says was used to store the chemical weapons used in the attack. “I think it does demonstrate that President Trump is willing to act when governments and actors cross the line ... It is clear that President Trump made that statement to the world,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters. Senior administration officials said they met with Trump as early as Tuesday evening and presented options including sanctions, diplomatic pressure and a military plan to strike Syria drawn up well before he took office. “He had a lot of questions and said he wanted to think about it but he also had some points he wanted to make. He wanted the options refined,” one official said. On Wednesday morning, Trump’s military advisers said they knew which Syrian air base was used to launch the chemical attack and that they had tracked the Sukhoi-22 jet that carried it out. Trump told them to focus on the military plans. “It was a matter of dusting those off and adapting them for the current target set and timing,” said another official. That same afternoon, Trump appeared in the White House Rose Garden and said the “unspeakable” attack against “even beautiful little babies” had changed his attitude toward Assad. Asked then whether he was formulating a new policy on Syria, Trump replied: “You’ll see.” By late afternoon on Thursday, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff met at the Pentagon to finalize the plan for the military strikes as Trump headed to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for a summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. At another meeting there, Trump signed off on the missile attacks and went to dinner with Xi. Two U.S. warships – the USS Ross and the USS Porter – fired 59 cruise missiles from the eastern Mediterranean Sea at the targeted air base at around 8:40 p.m. ET (00:40 GMT), just as the two presidents were finishing their meals. Throughout the three days of meetings, Trump’s key military advisers were national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, officials said. In a White House marked by palace intrigue, McMaster has jostled for influence with Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, who lost his seat on the National Security Council on Wednesday just as the military preparations were developing. Tillerson’s State Department told allies on Thursday that a strike against Syria was imminent, without providing details, one official said. But the move angered Russia, a major ally of Assad, and appeared to diminish chances of closer cooperation with Moscow that Trump has said is possible, especially in fighting the Islamic State militant group. Tillerson played down suggestions that Trump was dropping his “America First” approach to foreign policy. And one of the other officials involved in the planning said the cruise missile launch was a “one-off” strike rather than the start of an escalating campaign.

Donald Trump Jr gets more from his dad than just his name, of all the Trump kids, Don seems to be most obsessed with appearing macho. Unfortunately, it never works out for him. And even worse, when he faces the inevitable mockery for his hamfisted attempts to appear tough, his first response is to hide.Twitter got to see a perfect example of this on Saturday, after Don Jr. thought he d take a dig at the mainstream media and walked right into a pretty hilarious self-own. Donald Trump Jr., hot off of tweeting that his critics were triggered, got triggered himself after posting this tweet onto his social media account:I'm going to have to buy 5-10,000 of these to pass around to our buddies in the #MSM. In the meantime I'll model it for them?. #yourewelcome pic.twitter.com/Hnn3Z5Pspm Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 15, 2017Any normal person would look at this picture and go please delete this and never show it to another human being. Everything about it was sad. The weird thumbs up. The pained expression on his face that was presumably supposed to signal toughness. The shirt oh god, the shirt. Instead of deleting the photo in shame, Don tweeted it with an equally embarrassing caption.Playing into his father s rabid base of right-wing fanatics, Don promised to send 10,000 shirts reading Very Fake News to his friends in the mainstream media. Like the rest of the Trump family, Don hates the media because they have repeatedly debunked Trump s lies. Don has retreated into his own conservative bubble, recently praising a pro-rape white nationalist blogger named Mike Cernovich, suggesting the conspiracy theorist deserves a Pulitzer.But Don couldn t take it after he dished it. Soon after tweeting, he started facing relentless mockery.@DonaldJTrumpJr HAHAHA LOL !!! LMAO #gotem ? christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) April 15, 2017pic.twitter.com/ZSVbu5GXT6 Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) April 15, 2017@DonaldJTrumpJr it is a very nice shirt pic.twitter.com/1DmgXGVYzx Matt Binder (@MattBinder) April 15, 2017What a monumental embarrassment. https://t.co/QVh8Kv71k2 Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke) April 15, 2017@ditzkoff God he is such a tool!!!!!!!!! Omg Can you imagine being so oblivious to what an idiot you are. andy lassner (@andylassner) April 15, 2017Donald Trump Jr doesn t handle getting made fun of well. The last message in particular must have stung, because he blocked Andy Lassner, which Lassner discovered when he tried to go to Don s Twitter page.Oh for fuck's sake pic.twitter.com/TjA6YLlmAn andy lassner (@andylassner) April 15, 2017Donald Trump Jr is obsessed with blocking people who make fun of him, while still pretending he s a tough guy.Apparently, Donald J Trump Jr has me blocked! ? #lifegoals TRUMP DRINKS PISS! (@JamesJJacksonJr) April 14, 2017Donald Trump Jr. blocked me! I must have said the right thing. Good Witch of Emma (@joan_moon) April 1, 2017@AltUSPressSec @DonaldJTrumpJr Oh, Junior blocked me. Tsk tsk. (Ab)Cynthia (@Ab_Synthia) April 15, 2017Unfortunately he may have inadvertently started a movement. People are now actively trying to burn Don so bad that he blocks them, too.@andylassner I clearly have some work to do. Danny Zuker (@DannyZuker) April 15, 2017Goals @DonaldJTrumpJr block me https://t.co/wIiyqYNCSh Mycol Wever (@Mycolw12) April 15, 2017I think it s safe to say that Donald Trump Jr spent this Easter weekend, to use his phrase, extremely triggered.Featured image via Twitter

Megyn: What about Tim Allen? You re one of the few conservatives in Hollywood. You re out of the closet as a conservative. Who do you like for President? Megyn: What about Hillary Clinton? Tim Allen: All my staff, we asked the girl writers, the females, the women they said It s about time . So one of us said, If it was Sarah Palin would it still be about time ? Tim Allen: Did she [Hillary] actually bark like a dog? Did I actually see that? She doesn t have a skill set for jokes. She s just not her husband, who I ve met, and is actually kind of a neat guy. Although, he was eyeballing my wife the entire time we were talking. I think this guy he really was. And he kept looking at me, but he kept looking at her Heh, heh, how you doing, it s nice talking to ya, I really love your show.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Venezuela s government has not officially notified the United Nations of any changes to its representation at the organization, a U.N. spokesman said on Wednesday. Four sources told Reuters on Wednesday that Rafael Ramirez, a former oil czar turned U.N. diplomat, had been sacked from his post amid a broad oil industry anti-corruption campaign.

COLOMBO (Reuters) - A Sri Lankan court on Thursday jailed and fined two top officials in former president Mahinda Rajapaksa s government for misappropriation of funds, a lawyer said, the first convictions in a series of investigations into official corruption. The government of President Maithripala Sirisena unseated Rajapaksa in 2015 on promises to expose corruption and is under pressure to follow through. Sirisena s administration has been probing money laundering and misappropriation of state property in more than 50 cases, but no one had been convicted until Thursday. Colombo High Court sentenced Lalith Weeratunga, former secretary to Rajapaksa, and Anusha Palpita, ex-head of the state-run Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, to three years of rigorous imprisonment , or jail with hard labor, and fined them 52 million rupees ($340,760) each. Election monitors had complained that the state fund was used to influence voters ahead of 2015 presidential polls. Kalinga Indratissa, the lawyer who appeared on behalf of Weeratunga and Palpita, told Reuters the two would appeal. Two of Rajapaksa s sons, Namal and Yoshitha, have been arrested and released on bail over money laundering allegations. His brother, Basil, who headed the economic development ministry, has also been arrested at least three times - twice over suspicion of misuse of anti-poverty funds and a once over suspicion of laundering money and released on bail. Rajapaksa and his family deny any wrongdoing. Rajapaksa was president for a decade until January 2015 and is popular among ethnic majority Sinhala Buddhists who credit him with ending the 26-year-war against minority Tamil separatist rebels in 2009.

Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Iraqis who say their lives are in danger because they worked with the U.S. government in Iraq fear their chances of finding refuge in the United States may vanish under a new order signed on Friday by President Donald Trump. The order temporarily suspends the United States’ main refugee program and halts visas being issued to citizens of several predominantly Muslim countries, including Iraq. It is expected to affect two programs U.S. lawmakers created a few years after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to help the tens of thousands of Iraqis who risked their lives helping Americans. Trump says the order is necessary to prevent Islamist militants from coming to the United States posing as refugees, but refugee advocacy groups say the lengthy screening of applicants by multiple U.S. agencies makes this fear unfounded. Iraqis coming to the United States under the Special Immigrant Visa program for Iraqis, which stopped accepting new applications in 2014, or the ongoing Direct Access Program for U.S.-Affiliated Iraqis are losing hope of ever getting out. “Mr. Trump, the new president, killed our dreams,” said one Baghdad man whose wife worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as a bookkeeper. “I don’t have any hope to go to the United States,” he said in a telephone interview, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by Iraq’s Sunni and Shia militant groups and also of unfavorable treatment by the Trump administration. More than 7,000 Iraqis, many of them interpreters for the U.S. military, have resettled in the United States under the Special Immigrant Visa program since 2008, while another 500 or so are still being processed, according to State Department figures. Another 58,000 Iraqis were awaiting interviews under the Direct Access program, according to the International Refugee Assistance Project. Tens of thousands have already arrived under the second program, but no recent total was available. “A lot of translators were trying to get the hell out of there because they had a mark on their head for working with U.S. forces,” Allen Vaught, a former U.S. Army captain who went to Fallujah in western Iraq in 2003, said in a telephone interview. “They’re viewed as collaborators.” He fears the order would endanger American troops by making it harder to recruit local support in war zones, a belief echoed by several advocacy groups working on behalf of America’s Iraqi employees. While in Iraq, Vaught employed five local interpreters who initially earned $5 a week traveling with troops, sometimes without weapons or armor. He helped two of the interpreters come to the United States as refugees with their families, putting them up initially in his home in Dallas, Texas. Another two were executed by militia groups, he said. The fifth was still mired in the refugee screening process, which can last months or years even after the initial interview. Vaught had expected to also welcome him into his home this year before he had seen a draft of Trump’s order. “This executive order is based on ignorance and fear,” he said. “And you do not lead a country with ignorance and fear.” In Baghdad, the Iraqi man waiting for a visa recalled U.S, soldiers had laughed at his concerns, telling him the United States is too big a democracy to be changed on “the decision of one person like Trump,” he said. But he now wonders if the soldiers were right. In 2013, a USAID official encouraged his family to apply as refugees under the Direct Access program. He checked in every week or so, but is still waiting word on an appointment at the U.S. consulate for the necessary interview. The same year he filed his application, he was shot in the head while driving to work, hospitalizing him for a month and leaving him deaf in one ear. He connected that to the threats that had often flashed as text messages on his cellphone, sent by Islamist militants angered by his wife’s work for USAID. Others in Iraq remained hopeful they would eventually get out. An Iraqi man who worked for a U.S. defense contractor and later alongside U.S. troops as a mid-ranking Iraqi Army officer, recalled his excitement at getting the phone call a few weeks ago telling him that his family had an interview appointment at the U.S. consulate after two years and four applications. He was hopeful it would still take place in mid-February, believing that American officials would be concerned about the threats to his family. He was unaware that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday temporarily halted trips by staff to interview applicants. “I believe this is politics, things you hear on the news,” he told Reuters by phone from Baghad on condition of anonymity. “I don’t think they would prevent Iraqis coming to America.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s doubts about the war in Afghanistan has led to a delay in completing a new U.S. strategy in South Asia, skepticism that included a suggestion that the U.S. military commander in the region be fired, U.S. officials said on Wednesday. During a July 19 meeting in the White House Situation Room, Trump demanded that his top national security aides provide more information on what one official called “the end-state” in a country where the United States has spent 16 years fighting against the Taliban with no end in sight. The meeting grew stormy when Trump said Defense Secretary James Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford, a Marine general, should consider firing Army General John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, for not winning the war. “We aren’t winning,” he told them, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. RELATED COVERAGE Commentary: Steve Bannon is right on Afghanistan Commentary: The road to Afghanistan peace does not lie in Kabul In addition, once the meeting concluded, Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, got into what one official called “a shouting match” with White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster over the direction of U.S. policy. Some officials left the meeting “stunned” by the president’s vehement complaints that the military was allowing the United States to lose the war. Mattis, McMaster and other top aides are putting together answers to Trump’s questions in a way to try to get him to approve the strategy, the officials said. The White House had no comment on the accounts of the meeting. Another meeting of top aides is scheduled on Thursday. Although Trump earlier this year gave Mattis the authority to deploy U.S. military forces as he sees fit, in fact the defense secretary’s plans to add around 4,000 more U.S. troops to the 8,400 currently deployed in Afghanistan are being caught up in the delay surrounding the strategy, the officials said. “It’s been contingent all along informally on the strategy being approved,” a senior administration official said of the troop deployment. Trump has long been a skeptic of lingering U.S. involvement in foreign wars and has expressed little interest in deploying military forces without a specific plan on what they will do and for how long. Officials said Trump argued that the United States should demand a share of Afghanistan’s estimated $1 trillion in mineral wealth in exchange for its assistance to the Afghan government. But other officials noted that without securing the entire country, which could take many years, there is no way to get the country’s mineral riches to market, except to Iran. Trump complained that the Chinese are profiting from their mining operations, the officials said.

Field is correct about the 8a companies and Trump is correct about China . http://planet.infowars.com/politics/whats-the-truth-about-american-vote-fraud-anything-to-suspect As Curtis testifies they were downloading a lot of secret stuff from Nasa as well . Chinese controlling the vote in USA you couldnt make that up , no wonder they have all your industry . No one can deny this didnt happen they are all there at the testimony on video .

SOFIA (Reuters) - Bulgaria has frozen assets and property and bank accounts belonging to businessman and media owner Ivo Prokopiev, who said the state was trying to silence the country s independent media. The Commission for Illegal Assets Forfeiture is preparing to file a claim against Prokopiev and his businesses to seize assets and property worth 199 million levs ($119 million), which it believed were derived from a rogue privatization of a plant 17 years ago, said the commission s chairman, Plamen Georgiev. Bulgaria, one of the European Union s poorest and, according to Transparency International, its most corrupt country, set up the commission in the 2000s to confiscate the illegally obtained assets of corrupt businessmen and officials and organized crime bosses. Prokopiev, 46, denied any wrongdoing. He said the commission has been used to intimidate the journalists at the influential financial newspaper Capital and the news website Dnevnik. He is the majority owner of both. He also said a Bulgarian court had ruled in 2004 that nothing was wrong with the privatization of mineral maker Kaolin, the basis of the accusations against him. We are witnessing how a state institution with very wide powers is being used as a bat and an instrument for repression, Prokopiev told a news conference. We do not have any doubt about the ultimate goal of this .... to subdue the editorial position of two of the few independent media in Bulgaria. Georgiev told a news conference a regional court in Bulgaria had frozen shares and stakes of Prokopiev in over 40 companies on commission s request, but said the actions would not impede the work of the news organizations. Five right-wing political parties that are not represented in the parliament protested against the commission s move. Some political analysts also saw it as an attempt to silence the independent newspapers in the country. This act really seems to be directed against people who are representatives of free media in Bulgaria, said Daniel Smilov, an analyst with Sofia-based Center for Liberal Strategies. Bulgaria ranked 109th out of 180 countries, lower than any EU member, in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index compiled by the Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders. Bulgaria ranked 51st in 2007, when it joined the EU.

The sex secrets of the young Barack Obama have been revealed in an authoritative new biography of the ex-president.The new book by Pulitzer Prize winning author David J. Garrow titled, Rising claims that Barack Obama proposed to Sheila Miyoshi Jager before he met MichelleGarrows book is full of bombshells about Barack Obama and the sacrifices he made early onIn a probing new biography, Rising Star, David J. Garrow attempts to do all that, but also something more: He tells us how Obama lived, and explores the calculations he made in the decades leading up to his winning the presidency. Garrow portrays Obama as a man who ruthlessly compartmentalized his existence; who believed early on that he was fated for greatness; and who made emotional sacrifices in the pursuit of a goal that must have seemed unlikely to everyone but him. Every step whether his foray into community organizing, Harvard Law School, even the choice of whom to love was not just about living a life but about fulfilling a destiny.It is in the personal realm that Garrow s account is particularly revealing. He shares for the first time the story of a woman Obama lived with and loved in Chicago, in the years before he met Michelle, and whom he asked to marry him. Sheila Miyoshi Jager, now a professor at Oberlin College, is a recurring presence in Rising Star, and her pained, drawn-out relationship with Obama informs both his will to rise in politics and the trade-offs he deems necessary to do so. Narrow, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Martin Luther King Jr., concludes this massive new work with a damning verdict on Obama s determination: While the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core. -The Washington PostObama slept with his girlfriend Genevieve Cook on their first date, before she wrote him a poem about their f***ing and called their sex passionate , the book about the former president reveals.They also took cocaine together and after they split she slept with his best friend.Obama also considered a gay relationship while at college, twice proposed to another white girlfriend, and cheated on Michelle with his ex during the first year of their relationship. Obama, a new Columbia graduate who was working for a firm that prepared financial reports at the time, made dinner for Cook at his apartment in Manhattan two weeks after meeting her at a New Year s Eve party and handing her his phone number.It was the start of a relationship which is one of a series revealed in Rising Star.It was written after exhaustive research by Pulitzer-prize winning biographer David Garrow, and also reveals how he asked another woman to marry him and continued a relationship with her while dating Michelle, before she became his wife.Cook was 25 when she met 22-year-old Obama on New Year s Eve in 1983.Australian-born Cook was living in her mother and stepfather s Park Avenue apartment at the time, but had been brought up around the world, including like Obama, Indonesia as her father was an Australian spy and diplomat.But the couple also used drugs and Cook reveals that Obama was still a cocaine user when they were together.He would spend time with other friends Hasan Chandoo, Imad Hussain and Sohale Siddiqi, who he had been friends with at Occidental College, in Los Angeles and Cook said the trio was taking lots of cocaine .They were far more prolific users than Obama, who she said probably preferred staying home to read than taking the drug. Chandoo who was later to become a fundraiser for Obama was the leader, the book claims. For every five lines that somebody did, he would have done half, Cook said.The book also notes that Cook and Obama would smoke pot but only at parties and records one time when during tension in their relationship she wrote in her diary that they went to a party and got high on cocaine.That Obama was still using cocaine in his early 20s is a significant revelation.He had previously only disclosed that he used it as a teenage student.The couple split in June 1985, after a year and a half together, the book says.But she was hardly out of his life because she became involved with his friend Sohale in September of that year.She and Sohale did ecstasy together, and then had sex. When she wrote to Obama and told him he replied: The news of Sohale and you did hurt. He also used possibly inadvertently a racial slur to refer to Sohale and the other two Pakistani-born friends, calling them the Pakis in the same letter.

21st Century Wire says Regarding the latest Trump outrage , it s taken a while for the media to catch-up and analyze what s happened in recent days and why.Watch this segment that aired live over the weekend this past Saturday, where 21WIRE editor Patrick Henningsen spoke with RT International about the may lay at GOP front runner Donald Trump s rally in Chicago on Friday night.There s plenty of fervor to go around

Irish rock band U2 has delayed the release of its next studio album after the surprise election of Donald Trump. [Songs of Experience, the band’s to its 2014 album Songs of Innocence, was “pretty much complete,” U2 founding guitarist The Edge told Rolling Stone. Then Trump won the election and “suddenly the world changed. ” “We just went, ‘Hold on a second — we’ve got to give ourselves a moment to think about this record and about how it relates to what’s going on in the world,’” the guitarist said about the upcoming project. Trump’s election, he noted, was “like a pendulum has suddenly just taken a huge swing in the other direction. ” He noted that most of the album’s lyrics were “written in the early part of 2016,” and now need to be revised because “the world is a different place. ” U2, seeing its next record as an opportunity to make a political statement, knew it needed to put the album “on ice for a minute, just to really think about it one more time before putting it out, just to make sure that it really was what we wanted to say. ” “We may even write a couple of new songs because that’s the very position we’re in,” the guitarist said. “We’ve given ourselves a little bit of breathing space for creativity. ” “So we said look, ‘Look, let’s do both. We can really celebrate this album, which is really born again in this context, and we can also really get a chance to think about these songs and make sure they’re really what we want to put out,’” he added. U2 has remained relatively quiet during the presidential election, though the band’s frontman Bono called Trump “dangerous,” and said he’s “potentially the worst idea that ever happened to America. ” “Look, America is like the best idea the world ever came up with, but Donald Trump is potentially the worst idea that ever happened to America,” Bono said in September on CBS This Morning. “Potentially,” he added, Trump “could destroy” America. A month later, Bono bashed Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the U. S. border during a concert in San Francisco. Bono could be seen screaming “You’re fired!” at an onstage projection of Trump. “Good people are not going to stay silent while you run off with the American dream!” Bono shouted during the elaborate, virtual . On Monday, U2 announced a tour of North America and Europe to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its first album, The Joshua Tree. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama hosted a reception for Black History Month in the East Room of the White House on Thursday .

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese envoy exchanged views on the Korean peninsula issue with North Korean officials during a visit to North Korea, China s state news agency Xinhua said on Monday. It did not immediately give details, but Song Tao, head of the international department of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, has been in Pyongyang to discuss the outcome of the recently concluded Communist Party Congress in Beijing.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani court issued an arrest warrant for ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif after he failed to appear before the court over anti-corruption allegations, local media said on Thursday, but he can avoid arrest by paying bail. In Pakistan, bailable arrest warrants often act as a warning to deter absences from court, but a judge can later issue non-bailable warrants that are more serious and could see Sharif arrested when he returns to Pakistan. Sharif missed the hearing as he is undertaking a religious pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, Dawn and other English-language newspapers reported. Sharif had spent previous weeks tending to his wife in London, where she is receiving cancer treatment. Sharif faces three separate corruption charges from the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), an anti-corruption body which has its own courts. Sharif s two sons and his daughter Maryam, who is viewed as Sharif s heir-apparent, are also facing NAB trials. Sharif, 67, resigned in July after the Supreme Court disqualified him from holding office over an undeclared source of income, but the veteran leader maintains his grip on the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party. The Sharifs have called the corruption proceedings against them a conspiracy, hinting at intervention by the powerful military, but opponents have hailed it as a rare example of the rich and powerful being held accountable. The army denies playing a role. We are going through a time in Pakistan where speaking up against injustice is called contempt of court and speaking up for the nation is called treason, but I still believe that we will be victorious, Maryam said outside the court, according to Dawn newspaper. Sharif had a representative in court. Sharif s disqualification stemmed from the Panama Papers leaks in 2016 that appeared to show that his daughter and two sons owned offshore holding companies registered in the British Virgin Islands and used them to buy flats in London. The NAB court charges against Sharif relate to the ownership of London apartments, as well as establishment of two large-scale factory businesses in Saudi Arabia. Sharifs deny any wrongdoing on all charges.

On April 29, Los Angeles marks the 25th anniversary of the riots that engulfed the city in 1992 following the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers who were videotaped beating motorist Rodney King. [Three of the four officers were white King, who died in 2012, was black. (Two officers were later convicted in a federal civil rights trial.) As Bay Area public radio station KQED recalls: Fury over the acquittal — stoked by years of racial and economic inequality in the city — spilled over into the streets, resulting in five days of rioting in Los Angeles. It ignited a national conversation about racial and economic disparity and police use of force that continues today. … The acquittals were announced around 3 p. m. less than three hours later, the unrest began. Residents set fires, looted and destroyed liquor stores, grocery stores, retail shops and fast food restaurants. motorists — both white and Latino — were targeted some were pulled out of their cars and beaten. The reaction to the acquittal in South Central Los Angeles — now known just as South Los Angeles — was particularly violent. At the time, more than half of the population there was black. Tension had already been mounting in the neighborhood in the years leading up to the riots: the unemployment rate was about 50 percent, a drug epidemic was ravaging the area, and gang activity and violent crime were high. During the riots, a white trucker, Reginald Denny, was nearly beaten to death by gang members, and footage of the beating was captured overhead. Four black bystanders intervened and saved Denny by driving him to the hospital. In the years since then, there has been significant improvement in the relationship between the LAPD and minority communities in the city. For that reason, the marches of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 caught many observers by surprise. During the riots, King pleaded for calm: “I just want to say — you know — can we all get along?” Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak