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The decision whether to allow the commercialisation of the first genetically modified (GM) food crop (mustard) in India rumbles on. As I have previously discussed here, the bottom line is government collusion over GM crop technology (that is not wanted and not needed) with transnational agribusiness, which is trying to hide in the background.
The real story behind GM mustard in India is that it presents the opportunity to make various herbicide tolerant (HT) mustard hybrids using India’s best germ plasm, which would be an irresistible money spinner for the developers and chemical manufacturers (Bayer-Monsanto). GM mustard is both a Trojan horse and based on a hoax.
Various high-level reports (listed here) have advised against introducing GM food crops to India. Allowing for not one but three GMOs (which is what the GM mustard in question constitutes, when we include its two crucial GM parental lines) is according to campaigner Aruna Rodrigues a serious case of regulatory ‘sleight-of-hand’, permissible due to diluted rules to ensure easy compliance.
If allowed to go through, India will be forced to accept a highly toxic and unsustainable technology suited to monocropping. HT GM crops would be particularly unsuitable for its agriculture given the large number of small farms growing a diverse range of crops alongside mustard that contribute towards agricultural biodiversity and, in turn, diverse, healthy diets.
The processes being used to push through GM mustard are, according to this writ by Rodrigues, based on fraud and unremitting regulatory delinquency. She argues that the whole system is in addition being protected by a subterranean process of regulation that has also broken India’s constitutional safeguards by keeping the biosafety data hidden from the nation.
Rodrigues says, “These matters require criminal prosecution.”
New development
The government has now told the Supreme Court (SC) that it won’t release GM mustard without the court’s say so. At the same time, however, it strongly opposes the writ filed by Rodrigues.
In an affidavit response to Aruna Rodrigues’ writ, however, the Union of India revealed something that merited a press release from the civil organisation Navdanya and Aruna Rodrigues (presented in full below this article).
According to the press statement, the government’s response contained an admission by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) itself that no claim had been made in any documents submitted to it that HT Mustard DMH 11 out-performs non-GMO hybrids.
So then, what is the point of GM mustard? And what were all the claims being made in media about GM mustard outperforming non-GMO hybrids by 25-30% in yield?
According to the press statement, that claim was also made by the developers (Dr Pental and his team at Delhi University) and is clearly recorded by the media. It also notes that the claim of superior yield was implied in the Supreme Court (SC) during a ‘hearing’ (24 October) on India’s import bill for edible oil.
The press statement says:
“It is now clear, by the GEAC’s own admission, that DMH 11 does not out-yield India’s best non-GMO cultivars and this includes hybrids against which this mustard was not tested.”
Navdanya and Aruna Rodrigues ask:
“Therefore, what is the Union of India’s point? Is this HT mustard being introduced because of its ability to just make hybrids? Given that it does not outperform our non-GMO hybrids, the argument collapses on its essential lack of science and reasoned thinking.”
They conclude that this HT Mustard DMH 11 is not needed – which is in fact the first step of a risk assessment protocol for GM crops!
HT mustard DMH 11 will make no impact on the domestic production of mustard oil, which was a major reason why it was being pushed in the first place. The argument was that GM mustard would increase productivity and this would help reduce imports of edible oils. Implicit in this was that India’s farmers were unproductive and GM would help overcome this.
While it is clear that India’s imports of edible oils have indeed increased, this is not as a result of an underperforming home-grown sector. India essentially became a dumping ground for palm oil. Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Then import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with.
This was a deliberate policy that effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector and served the interests of palm oil growers and US grain and agriculture commodity company Cargill, which helped write international trade rules to secure access to the Indian market on its terms. It therefore came as little surprise that in 2013 India’s then Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar accused US companies of derailing the nation’s oil seeds production programme.
Supporters of GM twisted this situation to call for the introduction of GM mustard to increase productivity.
Now their arguments on virtually each and every count have been shown to be erroneous and constitute little more than a cynical ruse to facilitate Bayer-Monsanto GM food crops and associated agropoisons entry into India.
PRESS RELEASE
UNION OF INDIA REPLY AFFIDAVIT 20/21 OCT 2016
GEAC STATES: “NO CLAIM MADE THAT DMH 11 OUTPERFORMS NON-GMO HYBRIDS”
“No such claim has been made in any of the submitted documents that DMH 11 out-performs Non-GMO hybrids. The comparison has only been made between hybrid DMH 11, NC (national Check) Varuna and the appropriate zonal checks — MSY of 2670 Kg/ha has been recorded over three years of BRL trials which is 28% and 37% more than the NC & ZC respectively”. (Ref. U of India Reply Pg 55 point 86-88)
Petitioner Comment:
With this statement, the Union of India effectively buries its own ‘raison d’être’ for its HT Mustard DMH 11. The following points may be noted:
(a) The claim of a 25-30% increase in yield may not have technically been made in the SC. This adherence to a technicality is mischievous to the extreme, but much more moot is that the Regulators by this argument cut the grass from under their own feet.
The above yield is indeed the claim by the Developers, clearly recorded by the Media and strangely in the SC by implication, by bringing in the issue of our import bill for edible oil in the ‘Hearing’ of the 24th. The claim is:
· That the superior yield of this HT mustard DMH 11, (that despite there being NO TRAIT for YIELD in the Barnase-Barstar system with the Bar gene glufosinate), through its HYBRID-MAKING capability is superior to Non-GMO cultivars in the Country.
(b) The Petitioners’ have proven without doubt based on RTI data that DMH 11 field trials were fraudulent, and specifically on the question of DELIBERATELY poor-yielding Comparators used in the field testing of HT Mustard DMH 11 in the BRL I & II field trials .
NOTE: By this statement the Government concedes the argument that DMH 11 does not out-yield India’s best NON-GMO cultivars and this includes HYBRIDS against which this mustard was not tested in BRL I &II trials (2010-11 onwards). Therefore, what is the Union-of India’s point? Is this HT mustard being introduced because of its ability to JUST make HYBRIDS? Given that it does not outperform our Non-GMO hybrids, the argument collapses on its essential lack of science and reasoned thinking.
CONCLUSION
· This HT Mustard DMH 11 is NOT NEEDED (the first step of a risk assessment protocol for GM crops )
AND
· This HT mustard DMH 11 will make no impact on DOMESTIC production of Mustard Oil leave alone the import oil bill of which mustard and Rape together are less than 2% of the total oil import (of 14.3 million Metric Tonnes in 2015-16)
Aruna Rodrigues: Petitioner GMO PIL Mo: 098263 96033
Indra Shekhar Singh, Media Spokesperson, Navdanya | 1 |
Donald Trump publicly raised questions about Hillary Clinton’s health for the first time since the former secretary of state was forced on Sunday to leave a ceremony for the victims of 9/11.
Speaking in an air-conditioned minor league basketball arena in Canton, Ohio, Trump made his most direct reference to Clinton’s recent diagnosis of pneumonia and her campaign saying she left the event in New York because she felt “overheated”.
“You think this is easy?” Trump asked. “In this beautiful room that’s 122 degrees. It is hot, and it is always hot when I perform because the crowds are so big. The rooms were not designed for this kind of crowd. I don’t know, folks. You think Hillary Clinton would be able to stand up here and do this for an hour? I don’t know.”
The Republican nominee later went on to add of his Democratic rival, “Now she’s lying in bed, getting better and we want her better, we want her back on the trail, right?”
Sounding like the classic unscripted Trump, the Republican presidential nominee often deviated from his teleprompters in a 40-minute speech that ranged from Clinton’s health to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
The issue of candidate health and medical records has come to the forefront after the Clinton campaign revealed on Sunday – eight hours after she abruptly left the ceremony at the National September 11 Memorial – that the former secretary of state had been diagnosed with pneumonia two days earlier. The Democratic nominee had to be helped into a van while leaving. Afterward, Clinton cancelled all public events for three days.
Clinton has since released more detailed medical information from her doctor describing her as “healthy and fit to serve as president”. In contrast, Trump has yet to share further medical information to the public besides a brief letter written in December that said he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”. However, in an interview with controversial TV doctor Dr Oz, set to air on Thursday, the 70-year-old Trump reportedly said that he would like to lose 15 pounds, doesn’t exercise and is fond of fast food.
Trump also addressed the water crisis in Flint, a former car manufacturing hub that has seen tens of thousands of jobs disappear in recent decades. “It used to be cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico,” the Republican nominee said. “Now the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint.” Ford said on Wednesday that it was moving all its small-car production to Mexico.
Earlier in the day, Trump had visited the city and ended up in a confrontation with a local pastor. Trump was visiting a church that serves as a water distribution center for residents when he started critiquing Clinton. The pastor, Faith Green Timmons, interrupted and made clear: “Mr Trump, I invited you here to thank us for what we’ve done in Flint, not give a political speech.”
Later in Ohio, Trump, buoyed by recent polls that showed him taking the lead in that crucial swing state, was in high spirits in front of a cheering crowd. His supporters, many of them wearing Trump-themed apparel, ate up applause lines such as when Trump asked who would pay for his famous border wall. He received loud shouts in return of “Mexico”.
The crowd also booed and hissed when Trump told them, “President Obama just announced a 30% increase to refugee admissions coming into this country.” Trump added after the loud chorus of boos subsided that “that was hard to take”. The Republican nominee added of the proposal: “It’s bringing the total to 110,000 refugees in just a single year, and we have no idea where they come from, it’s a great Trojan horse.” Looking ahead to history’s judgment, Trump noted, “I don’t want be known in 200 years for having created a Trojan horse by a different name.”
The uncharacteristic return to his unscripted rally style comes the day before the Republican nominee is scheduled to make a major economic policy speech at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. There, the Republican nominee will introduce a tax reform proposal.
Trump has previously introduced two other tax reform plans. First, in 2015, where he emphasized that half of Americans in lieu of paying taxes would simply mail a card to the IRS saying “I win”, and more recently in August where he proposed to reduce the number of tax brackets to three while drastically cutting rates. The speech on Thursday is expected to be a more expansive elaboration of the August proposal.
• This article was amended on 19 September 2016 to clarify when Hillary Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia. | 1 |
In a medium stock pot, heat the coconut oil for 30 seconds on medium heat. Step 2
Add the cumin seeds and stir until they start to sputter. Then add the onions and cook for another minute, and then, add the tomatoes, stir and cook for a few more minutes until the tomatoes soften. Step 3
Add the rest of the ingredients and stir together. Cover the pan and simmer for about 15 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes to keep from burning. Step 4
Ladle the soup into 4 serving bowls and enjoy! Leftover stew can be stored in air-tight container and saved for lunch the next day. Nutritional analysis per serving
calories 204 • fat 24 g • saturated fat 20 g • cholesterol 0 mg • fiber 6 g • protein 6 g • carbohydrate 18 g • sodium 588 mg | 1 |
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain s Electoral Commission said on Thursday it was investigating campaign group Momentum - which backed the opposition Labour Party at a June election - over whether it breached campaign finance rules. Momentum is closely associated with left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and has helped the party attract new voters, contributing to its unexpectedly strong performance at the June vote in which Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority. The Electoral Commission has today announced it has opened an investigation to establish whether Momentum, a registered non-party campaigner at the 2017 UK Parliamentary General Election, breached campaign finance rules in relation to spending, the commission said in a statement. The Electoral Commission, Britain s election watchdog, said it was looking into a range of issues, including whether the campaign group exceeded spending limits or submitted incomplete or inaccurate expenditure records. Momentum is registered as a non-party campaigner and is subject to different spending rules to Labour and other political parties. Momentum are a high profile active campaigning body. Questions over their compliance with the campaign finance rules at June s general election risks causing harm to voters confidence in elections, said Bob Posner, the Electoral Commission s Director of Political Finance and Regulation and Legal Counsel. | 1 |
VIENNA (Reuters) - Austria s co-governing Social Democrats (SPO) and conservative (OVP), who are leading in polls ahead of the Oct. 15 election, said on Friday they would sue each other in an escalating political smear scandal. A public outcry over derogatory Facebook pages targeting OVP leader Sebastian Kurz, run by campaign consultants hired by the SPO, has already led to the departure of its campaign manager and loss of popularity in a recent poll. The limit has been reached. We re suing, OVP general secretary Elisabeth Koestinger told a news conference. She said her party was preparing a libel suit against an employee of SPO campaign consultant Tal Silberstein, whom the SPO fired in August, to force him to retract comments that the OVP had offered him 100,000 euros ($116,980) to switch sides. We are also preparing to sue the SPO in relation to incitement, she said, adding the lawsuit could be broadened. SPO chairman Christoph Matznetter said the SPO was preparing a lawsuit against Kurz s spokesman seeking to clarify whether he did or did not offer money to Silberstein s employee. He said such an act could amount to bribery and industrial espionage . SPO Chancellor Christian Kern, who has governed in a tension-ridden grand coalition with the OVP, has said he knew nothing of the dirty campaigning pages and has asked Facebook to unmask the people running them. At the behest of the SPO, Vienna prosecutors are investigating unnamed persons for defamation as the pages also included derogatory content aimed at Kern. The OVP is leading pre-election polls at around 34 percent, while the SPO has slipped to third place at 22 percent below the far-right, anti-immigrant Freedom Party at 27 percent. | 0 |
SANT JULIA DE RAMIS, Spain (Reuters) - Spanish Civil Guard police in riot gear burst into a polling station minutes before Catalan regional leader Carles Puigdemont was due to vote in a referendum on Catalan independence from Spain that has been declared illegal by Madrid. Police used axes to smash a window at the sports center being used as a voting center and forced open the door in the province of Girona. Live TV pictures showed police with black berets and riot shields fanning out through the voting station, apparently searching for ballot boxes, while would-be voters, fists raised in the air, defiantly sang the Catalan anthem. Puigdemont had announced he would vote at the polling station near Girona at 0930 AM (0730 GMT), around the same time as the police entered, but there was no sign of him in the television footage. | 1 |
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The Clinton Foundation and its foreign donors have been an area of concern should Hillary Clinton become president due to accusations of pay-to-play scandals. Knowing this, Hillary gave her word that the Clinton Foundation would stop accepting foreign donations should she be elected president. However, a new leak just exposed her real plan for foreign donors, and it’s not looking good. Hillary Clinton
Once again, Hillary has landed herself in the middle of more scandalous activity. With the FBI reopening her email and private server investigation and WikiLeaks continuously exposing her corruption, she can’t seem to catch a break — and she shouldn’t. Her long list of scandals continues to grow, as should her nose, after being busted lying to the American people yet again to manipulate her way into our White House.
According to a leaked memo, Hillary’s words mean nothing. Although she promised that the Clinton Foundation would cease accepting foreign donations if she were to be elected president, a leaked memo has exposed her real plans and proven that she didn’t mean what she said. Two-faced Hillary told the public one thing, while her secret plan was for something much different.
Thanks to WikiLeaks, the truth is again being revealed after the organization published an email that was sent to John Podesta, the Clinton Campaign chair. The email contained the leaked memo, which appears to have been crafted by Cheryl Mills, a Clinton aide, who wrote, “I connected with HRC this am regarding the steps she will take with regard to the Foundation should she announce a decision to explore a run for the Presidency,” just days before Hillary announced her run for president.
Although she’s said otherwise throughout her campaign, Hillary’s personal preference, as indicated by the leaked memo dated April 7, 2015, is for the foundation to continue accepting money from foreign governments, The Daily Caller reports, and this could mean bad news for Hillary as five FBI field offices are currently investigating her “nonprofit” foundation due to pay-to-play allegations, although the Department of Justice did their best to suppress investigations into the corrupt Clinton Foundation.
The leaked memo clearly shows that Hillary indicated to staffers that her personal preference is for the foundation to continue to accept money from foreign governments, even if she is elected president . What’s worse, the corrupt Clintons were hesitant to limit the foundation’s financial operations in any way, as the memo says, Hillary “does not want to limit the Foundation’s ability to operate programs now or in the future,” adding, “ we don’t want to close the door to unexpected opportunities. ”
The memo goes on to mention a “compromise” option, where it says they could “say that the Foundation will not accept contributions from foreign governments unless that funding is part of an ongoing program or a disbursement for a completed negotiation.” However, under that option, the foundation would continue to accept money from Qatar despite Hillary’s own admission that the country is financially supporting ISIS .
The “final option” mentioned “would mirror the 2008 [Memorandum of Understanding] agreement whereby the Foundation submits new foreign government contributions and those of a substantial size increase to an independent body (e.g. White House, State Department) for review. The obvious challenge with this is that there is no independent body to make that review.” However, as The Daily Caller notes, Hillary “did not uphold her end of the 2008 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU),” and even liberal-leaning PolitiFact ruled the claim that Hillary acted in accordance with the 2008 MOU “mostly false.”
When is enough, enough? The Clinton crime family will never change their ways and their fake foundation is only a front for their shady deals. The Clintons’ greed for money and power is endless and nothing — not even our laws — will stand in the way of Hillary and Bill as they grab as much of both as they can. There’s only one place Hillary belongs while on this earth, and that’s not the Oval Office, it’s a cinderblock cell. After her time there is done, she has a one-way ticket to hell, where she probably hopes to overthrow the devil. That is how evil, corrupt, and power hungry she is. Her deceit and depravity know no bounds, and she would even give the devil a run for his money. Do you really want that kind of person to be our next president? | 1 |
Ten days removed from the shock of Donald Trump’s election, around lunchtime on a Friday, I navigated the jagged lines of steel barriers, police officers and Secret Service battalions with big dogs and big guns surrounding Trump Tower. The shopping mall, tourist trap and TV set had been transformed into the unlikely plotting ground for the nation’s immediate future. It was anybody’s guess what was taking shape inside the gilded bunkers. Clots of media people, and protesters crowded the lobby and nearby streets for the occasional clue, or at least glimpses of Marla Maples and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan. Kellyanne Conway posed for a selfie with a few lucky cops. The locus of the scene was a bank of elevators ferrying staff, cabinet candidates and the competing maestros of the Trump transition to and from various nerve centers over several floors. Every time a bell sounded, announcing the opening of an elevator door, lobby heads would bob expectantly. “Is that what Jeff Sessions looks like?” I heard a photographer ask (no, it is not, and it was not). No doubt a host of key Trump orchestrators and luminary actors were making ample use of auxiliary entrances and exits, sneaking in and out. New rumors, predictions and potential firestorms seemed to materialize every hour. The Kremlinology of the incoming White House is shaping up as knotty, to say the least. Not one of Trump’s initial hires has any experience working in a White House. How will they work with the volatile and maven in the Oval Office? With his proclivity to make decisions based on the last person he speaks to? With his children playing an uncertain role, his a possibly whisperer? How will it all work with Trump’s senior adviser Steve Bannon, former head of Breitbart News, who has a long rap sheet of racial, ethnic and sexist affronts and a war on Washington Republicans? I had gone to Trump Tower to see Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, whom Trump named as his chief of staff five days after his election, in the same release in which Bannon was named chief strategist and senior counselor. Bannon was mentioned first, for Kremlinologists scoring at home, and his appointment has consumed the bulk of the attention, given his hyperprovocative ways. But Priebus, in a sense, filled a more exotic role. He would be the chief establishment ambassador for a president whose brief and meteoric political career has been predicated on blowing that establishment up. A generous reading is that Trump is trying to foster a tension between his top deputies, who will represent his own diametrically opposed impulses (Bannon the devil on one shoulder, Priebus the peacemaking angel on the other). The simpler reading is that Trump hasn’t thought that much about this and is simply trying to reward and surround himself with people he feels served him well in the campaign. “It’s almost like a puzzle mystery,” Priebus told me last summer. I don’t recall what we were talking about, but Priebus had a knack for homespun Wisconsin logic and, particularly, throwaway lines that would stick with me. I kept thinking of the puzzle mysteries that were playing out up and down Trump Tower, even though I showed up Friday without an appointment with Priebus and was confined to the lobby watching tourists ride up and down its escalators. Priebus and I started talking last spring, as I was undertaking an article for this magazine about the seemingly fracturing state of the Republican Party. We kept in touch during the campaign, drank the occasional Miller High Life in his office and exchanged the sporadic email. Priebus was constantly going on TV saying he was certain Trump would win, even though he could read polls and precedents like everyone else. Still, he carried on as the chief carrier of Trump’s choppy water because that’s what a party chairman does: He smiles and spins and swallows his plans and audibles in the name of getting his nominee to the finish line. In a sense, Priebus, who squired his future wife to a local G. O. P. banquet on their first date, was the purest form of “political hack” that Trump would rail against as he bulldozed the G. O. P. For his efforts during the campaign, Priebus gained the respect and gratitude of Trump loyalists — especially the fiercest loyalist, Donald J. Trump himself. He also won derision and ridicule. He was the subject of multiple stories in The Onion (“Reince Priebus Smiles, Shakes Head While Flipping Through Old Briefing on G. O. P. ’s Plans for 2016”). His spirited TV defenses of Trump’s indefensible behavior drew him comparisons to “Baghdad Bob” (Muhammad Said ) Saddam Hussein’s chief propagandist during the early months of the Iraq war, whose dubious predictions of imminent victory despite growing devastation all around made him an international laughingstock. Long before Trump’s victory, back when it seemed like a long shot, I asked Priebus whether he would consider taking a job in a Trump administration — maybe a plum ambassadorship to somewhere. “Yes,” he said. “Wisconsin. ” It was a throwaway answer to a throwaway question, which was laughably hypothetical anyway. But I never had a sense he had thought that much about a Trump administration job, besides possibly staying on as R. N. C. chairman whether or not the Donald prevailed. For all his sheepishness, Priebus’s “just a kid from Kenosha, Wisc. ” shtick belies a penchant for main stages, rooms and company. No shortage of Reince Priebus photos hang on the walls of the R. N. C. ’s headquarters on Capitol Hill. He can be a little . He travels far and often to appear with candidates and party dignitaries at events where his presence is not necessarily required. Priebus was giddy when I spoke to him last spring as he prepared to attend a party for Time’s “100 most influential people” at Lincoln Center. We were on the phone, him walking through the lobby of the J. W. Marriott after a packed day of . He sounded almost out of breath, less from exhaustion than what seemed like pure excitement. He told me how stoked he was to meet the golfer Jordan Spieth and the the Rock. “Those are my top two,” Priebus said, especially the Rock. “I was a big fan back in the day,” he added, noting his childhood admiration for Hulk Hogan and Mad Dog Vachon. “Growing up in Kenosha, Wisc. being named to the Top 100 list is a pretty cool thing,” Priebus told me. At this point, I reminded him that no national party chairman would ever be named to the Top 100 except in extraordinary circumstances like these — and these were not particularly enviable ones. The White House chief of staff’s post is arguably the most grueling job in Washington. It would be a burnout caldron under even the most predictable and disciplined of presidents. The average tenure of a White House chief of staff is about two years. jobs are so synonymous with thanklessness that a whole White House mythology surrounds them. “A good chief of staff is seldom popular,” Richard Nixon wrote in his 1990 memoir. “He must see that his chief gets the credit for the administration’s successes and must take the heat for its failures, even when they are not his fault. . .. He sometimes finds he doesn’t have many friends or supporters. Some may well call him just a prat boy. ” Some may call Priebus worse than that, and maybe already have. “Eat rocks” is an expression I’ve heard Priebus use a few times. It refers to being game to do what is needed: swallowing pride and taking one (or one thousand) for the team. If serving as R. N. C. chairman in 2016 has been the definition of eating rocks, Priebus’s next gig could go down even harder. “It’s and never stops,” says Andy Card of the job he held in George W. Bush’s White House for more than five years, making him the chief of staff in history. “My only area of angst on Priebus is that he has young children,” Card added, referring to Priebus’s son and daughter. Card has a few other concerns, one of which he says presented itself as soon as Trump “jumped all over” Megyn Kelly in the first Republican primary debate last year. “I’m thinking he would be a very hard president to work for if he doesn’t accept people speaking candidly to him. ” Card, who remains close to the Bush family and supported Jeb Bush for president, said the most important part of being a chief of staff is remembering that the “staff” part is far more important than the “chief” part. The president is by far his most important client. “I know of one chief of staff who failed because he was used to being a principal,” says Beth Myers, who served as Mitt Romney’s chief of staff during his four years as governor of Massachusetts. Priebus may not have that problem he has been described with that most anodyne term for a Washington manager, the “ . ” But the White House chief of staff job is not so much about building consensus, Card told me. It’s all about serving the only principal who matters. “Chief of staff is the only job in Washington that really is defined by what the president’s idiosyncrasies are,” Card says. “Are they a morning person or an evening person? Disciplined or not? Do they suffer fools kindly or not?” Priebus and the future had their dicey stretches, but their relationship grew as the campaign wore on. “Trump told me over and over again, ‘I trust Reince, I trust him,’’u2009” Priebus felt a need to tell me one day in his office last spring. They have both proved a lot of people wrong and were both aggressively underestimated along the way, if not outright dismissed. “I don’t buy this theory that unpredictable is necessarily bad,” Priebus said back when Trump was just his ruffian nominee and not yet his future boss. You can’t appreciate the magnitude of Priebus’s changing loyalties until you consider just how much time, energy and dignity he expended before Nov. 8 trying to protect “the party” from being defiled by Trump. “Donald Trump is Donald Trump, and the party is the party,” Priebus used to tell me during the campaign. His ultimate allegiance was never in question. It was only six years ago that Priebus was happily ensconced in Kenosha as chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin. Now he is being described as the consummate “Washington insider” in the Trump White House. He certainly has a line to Republican officials, namely his close friend and fellow Wisconsinite Paul Ryan. But in the end, for Priebus, it’s now all about serving Trump, whose partisan impulses have proved flexible through the years — let alone his allegiance to the G. O. P. He ran, foremost, as a candidate of disruption. He fashioned himself a dealmaker. No doubt this could immediately run afoul of the conservative orthodoxy that has driven the Republican agenda on Capitol Hill. Trump also vowed to “drain the swamp” of the “bloodsucker” lobbyists and “blood money” “political hacks” and various other parasites and that have fattened themselves so spectacularly in City. In many ways, these are Priebus’s people. He has cavorted, and campaigned with them for years, attended their donors’ breakfasts and mediated their disputes for the good of the party. He will most likely be looked upon as a chief emissary to the Capitol Hill, K Street and donor constituencies that Trump explicitly campaigned against — the chief of swamp. For his part, Bannon has undertaken an incendiary mission over the years to upend the G. O. P. “establishment,” no one more so than Ryan (“a total and complete sellout of the American people,” Breitbart once declared, referring to Ryan’s stewardship of House appropriations). Bannon could occupy something of a mysterious Svengali role in the tradition of presumed presidential whisperers like Karl Rove (for George W. Bush) and Valerie Jarrett (for Barack Obama). Both Rove and Jarrett represented wild cards in their respective White Houses and regular thorns in the sides of the various chiefs of staffs with whom they served. But one notable difference is that neither Rove nor Jarrett made it his or her goal to obliterate the establishments that their presidents were trying to fold themselves into nor did either have close ties to fringe elements of their parties, as Bannon has to the and its main platform. Breitbart has been described as a “white propaganda mill” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The site has posted articles linking undocumented immigrants to disease, declared in a headline that “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” promoted the Confederate flag (“Hoist It High and Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage”) and referred to Gabby Giffords as “the Movement’s Human Shield. ” Bannon, who has tried to play down the most extreme elements of the in recent days, nonetheless viewed Trump as a kindred provocateur — a feeling that appears mutual. In one form or another, Priebus will try to integrate his establishment orientations with these disruptive forces operating all around him. Back during the campaign, Priebus used to refer admiringly to Trump as “an earthquake in a box. ” In a separate conversation (and metaphor) he described his challenge to me as keeping Trump inside “the funnel. ” Presumably this meant keeping him directed and contained, easier said than done, but still fascinating — and somewhat entertaining — to watch unfold in the campaign. But with the presence of Bannon and the weight of Trump leading a nervous and divided nation, the challenge in the White House is considerably less entertaining to contemplate. Washington — like the presidency, certainly — creates its own distinct funnel that will shape Trump and everyone around him in inexplicable and perhaps dark ways. As it turned out, Priebus never showed his face in the lobby of Trump’s building, at least when I was there. Like many key players inside Trump’s ragtag circle of collaborators, Priebus has gone largely dark since Election Day, holing up in Transition Tower with occasional hops down to Washington. He was not responding to my emails and was described by gatekeepers as “drinking from multiple fire hoses. ” So for now, my most recent and enduring image of Priebus is watching him beaming and and a bit stunned on TV in the early hours of Nov. 9. A triumphant Trump had just called him to the podium, declared him a “superstar” and compared him to Secretariat. “But I’ll tell you, Reince is really a star,” Trump exulted. “Reince, come up here. Where is Reince? Get over here, Reince. ” Trump offered him the mike and insisted he say something. There could be no more of a pinnacle moment for an avowed Republican Party animal who used to listen to Newt Gingrich speeches in the car as a teenager. He would soon go from being one of the most figures in American politics to one of the most insiders in a White House of insurgents. “Ladies and gentleman, the next president of the United States, Donald Trump,” was all Priebus could muster. There were worse images to dwell on before the drama intensified and puzzle mysteries inevitably presented themselves. Who knew what the night’s result would lead to or what “normal” would become for any of the Trumpians soon, or any of us? | 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Thursday that Hurricane Harvey could bring forward the deadline by which the nation’s debt ceiling needs to be raised and that he is open to the borrowing cap being dealt with as part of a wider bill. “We obviously have now the hurricane spending, which is an issue. So that’s going to have some impact on our September spending,” Mnuchin said in a interview with broadcaster CNBC, adding that it could affect the debt ceiling deadline by a couple of days. He also said projections may move around once the Treasury receives corporate tax receipts on Sept. 15. The U.S. government has a statutory limit on how much money it can borrow to cover the budget deficit that results from Washington spending more than it collects in taxes. Only Congress can raise that limit. Mnuchin told lawmakers in July they needed to raise the debt limit by Sept 29, otherwise the U.S. government might not have enough money to pay all its bills. Yields on U.S. Treasury bills maturing in the first two weeks of October shot up by between 4 and 5 basis points each following Mnuchin’s comments. The moves reflect some concern in the short-term Treasury securities market that lawmakers might not raise the limit in time. Mnuchin’s comments came as financial firms fear that the U.S. Congress may fail to reach a deal to raise the country’s debt limit. The Treasury chief appeared open to the possibility of raising the debt ceiling as part of a larger bill in Congress. Asked if he would support the debt ceiling being tied to a bill on Hurricane Harvey relief in Congress, he said while his preference was a ‘clean’ increase “at the end of the day, it’s all about raising it. If they want to raise it and attach it to something, that’s fine with me as well.” Mnuchin said he was having discussions on the debt cap with both Republican and Democrat leaders and he remained “very confident” the ceiling would be raised. Separately, Mnuchin suggested the Trump administration’s position on financial regulation reform was not overly distant from that of the nation’s central bank. Last week Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen warned against rolling back reforms introduced following the 2007 to 2009 crisis, and said any changes should be modest. “We are working on a lot of things together with the Fed and see many aspects of [regulation] the same way,” Mnuchin said. President Donald Trump has yet to decide whether to renominate Yellen when her term as chair ends in February. Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs president who is now Trump’s chief economic advisor, is also seen as a strong contender. Mnuchin, who is involved in the selection process, declined to comment on the possible frontrunners but said that he and Yellen, who meet on a weekly basis for breakfast, “have a very constructive dialog on a lot of issues, including regulation.” | 1 |
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. aviation executives will discuss the industry’s aging airports and air traffic control reform when they meet with President Donald Trump on Thursday, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The White House meeting comes at a time of heightened tension within the industry after U.S. carriers raised concerns about ongoing trade agreements with foreign carriers. Trump has vowed to renegotiate or scrap trade deals he sees as unfair between the United States and other countries. A source told Reuters the airlines expect last month’s executive order barring travel from seven Muslim-majority countries may come up and if so, the carriers in attendance would stress the need for better coordination and planning ahead of announcing such an order instead of having it sprung on them, the source said. The session will include reforming the air traffic control system, Transportation Security Administration issues, user fees and regulatory burdens, a White House official told Reuters. The expected participants include the chief executives of Delta Air Lines Inc, JetBlue Airways Corp, United Continental Holdings Inc, Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings Inc, Alaska Airlines and trade group Airlines for America, along with top officials from FedEx Corp and United Parcel Service Inc, the official said. Also expected to attend are airport directors from Los Angeles, Chicago, Tampa, Washington, Buffalo, Nashville and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. American Airlines Chief Executive Officer Doug Parker, who called Trump’s executive order on travel “divisive,” is unable to attend due to a scheduling conflict with a conference he is hosting, company spokesman Matt Miller said. Other industry executives have spoken out against the temporary travel ban saying it could hurt the industry and their employees. During the 2016 election race Trump campaigned on improving U.S. infrastructure, talking about a $1 trillion infrastructure plan over a decade. “Our airports are like from a third world country,” Trump said at a presidential debate in September. “You land at LaGuardia, you land at Kennedy, you land at LAX, you land at Newark, and you come in from Dubai and Qatar and you see these incredible — you come in from China, you see these incredible airports, and you land — we’ve become a third world country.” Heads of the three largest U.S. passenger carriers - American Airlines Group Inc, United and Delta - have sought to pressure the new administration into denouncing U.S. Open Skies agreements with the three major Middle Eastern carriers, which they accuse of having been unfairly subsidized by their governments. The three airlines, Qatar, Etihad and Emirates, have denied these claims. The Trump administration has not yet addressed the U.S. carriers’ competition concerns. Whether the issue is discussed on Thursday will be decided when the executives meet with Trump, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said. “The president wants to talk about economic growth, job creation,” Spicer said at the daily White House press briefing on Wednesday. He did not say which executives would attend the meeting. Smaller U.S. carriers JetBlue, Atlas Air Wand Hawaiian Holdings Inc, as well as the air cargo unit of FedEx have formally banded together behind the Gulf carriers, against their larger competitors. Also a point of contention is an order signed under departing former President Barack Obama granting flying rights to Norwegian Air International, which U.S. airlines and unions have said will undermine wages and working standards. Spicer, during the Wednesday press briefing, said “there is a huge economic interest that America has in that deal right now,” citing Norwegian’s use of U.S. workers and Boeing Co jets. “I don’t want to get ahead of the president on that; but just to be clear we’re talking about U.S. jobs both in terms of the people who are serving those planes, and the persons building them,” Spicer said. | 0 |
Let s hope this angry leftist mayor doesn t prevent individual donors from contributing to help the people of San Juan who may not agree with her hateful attacks on our President, who is bending over backward to get the help to the victims of the hurricane.Is anyone else sick and tired of hearing this mayor whine about everything America is NOT doing for her? San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, who has refused to participate in any FEMA meetings regarding aid to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, has continually accused the Trump administration of not helping out in Puerto Rico s time of need, going so far as to claim the federal government is killing Puerto Ricans.Fox News Geraldo Rivera went down to Puerto Rico and actually confronted Cruz about her statement that people are dying because of the Trump administration s inefficiency and bureaucracy. But are people dying? I ve been traveling around, I don t see people dying, Rivera challenging Cruz said. I spoke to the doctors, they say they saw 53 patients and they had a person who was septic, but nobody dying. Dying is a continuum, Cruz said in response. If you don t get fed for seven, eight days and you re a child, you are dying. If you have 11 people like we took out of a nursing home, severely dehydrated, you are dying. Of course dying is a continuum. Everyone eventually dies. It s an unfortunate part of life. But, when it comes to Puerto Ricans dying from neglect and a lack of supplies, Rivera wasn t buying it. The death count was 16 a week ago. It remains 16 today, Rivera said. People are not dying. Here s the video of Rivera s interview with Cruz:Backing up Rivera s claims, an article released on Sunday by the Daily Mail said that a Puerto Rican woman claiming to be a police officer alleged that Cruz and Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rossello have been holding back supplies in order to make for better photo opportunities. The woman even went so far as to say that U.S. armed forces need to come in and distribute the aid. Via: MRCTV | 1 |
This is pretty hysterical and is a reaction during the Democratic debate last night:Feel free to use this in your memes, kids #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/9pEdFdGmYr Justin Fenton (@justin_fenton) January 18, 2016 | 1 |
Career criminals professional grifters the ultimate Democrat politicians Voters in Illinois and Michigan witnessed the nastiest moments thus far of the Democratic presidential campaign Sunday night when former California Gov. Jerry Brown accused Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, of unethical behavior and funneling state business to her Little Rock law firm.With former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas standing by during a one-hour TV debate in Chicago, Brown launched a harsh, personal attack on the Democratic front-runner, citing a Washington Post story published Sunday that raised questions about the relationship between the state of Arkansas and the law firm of which Hillary Clinton is a partner.Watch the exchange between Governor Jerry Brown and Bill Clinton here:Clinton ardently defended his wife`s integrity, and he charged that Brown`s attack was driven by electoral desperation and poll results.The confrontation came as the three Democrats met for the last time before Tuesday`s presidential primaries in Illinois and Michigan.Against that backdrop, Brown unleashed his barrage after he and Tsongas were asked by a debate panelist about Clinton`s electability in a possible fall campaign against President Bush. I think he`s got a big electability problem, Brown said, citing the Post story as well as other newspaper articles that addressed the governor`s environmental record in Arkansas.Calling it a scandal of major proportions, Brown said, He is funneling money to his wife`s law firm for state business. . . . It`s the kind of conflict of interest that`s incompatible with the kind of public servant we expect. The Post story did not say that either Clinton or his wife had channeled money or state business to the law firm. It did note that the Rose law firm has several state agencies and large corporations on its client list.Stabbing a finger at his rival, Clinton said: Let me tell you something, Jerry. I don`t care what you say about me, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself for jumping on my wife. You`re not worthy to be on the same platform with (her). Clinton mocked Brown`s populist campaign approach and his bulldog tactics. I don`t think you can take much of what he says seriously, Clinton said. Jerry comes here with his family wealth and his $1,500 suit, making lying accusations about my wife. I never funneled any money to my wife`s law firm. Never. Never. Clinton insisted that his wife had turned down her partnership share in any income the firm receives from state business.The candidates then began shouting over one another, Clinton alluding to Brown aide Patrick Caddell, a longtime Washington political consultant, and suggesting the former California governor was somebody else`s mouthpiece. I feel sorry for Jerry Brown, Clinton barked. He reinvents himself every year or two. Clinton, whose campaign has thus far survived supermarket tabloid allegations of infidelity and questions about his draft history, has been forced to respond to suggestions from all of his Democratic rivals that he cannot defeat Bush.Last week, Clinton had to address a New York Times report that documented the Clintons` investment in a real estate deal with a man who later became head of a savings and loan that eventually failed.Brown`s attack was the most pointed of the campaign, and may have marked a transition point in American politics, a point at which the career and conduct of a male politician`s spouse becomes fair game for attack.From her role on CBS` 60 Minutes defending her husband against charges of philandering to a less celebrated role as a campaign adviser, Hillary Clinton has played an exceedingly public role in the campaign.Via: Chicago Tribune | 1 |
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Polarized by years of civil war, Syrians were split on Friday over a U.S. strike on a government airbase, with those in rebel-held areas cautiously welcoming it but Damascus residents decrying it as Western aggression. The cruise missile strike near the city of Homs early in the day came in response to what Washington and its allies said was a chemical weapons attack this week by Syrian forces. Damascus has strongly denied using chemical weapons. Some residents of Idlib province, where the chemical attack took place killing scores of people, said they hoped the U.S. strike would weaken Assad’s government. “The American strike was good, it’s positive - we support any strike against the Syrian regime,” 29-year-old Alaa al-Zir said. “We hope there will be more strikes - and other action - to follow ... so the revolutionaries can advance further and these massacres against civilians can stop,” he said. Another man, Qadi Hajj Qadur, said the strike was likely too little, too late from the United States under new President Donald Trump, but that it was still a positive development and signaled hope for an end to the conflict. “It’s been seven years and we’ve experienced killing and they (the international community) didn’t impose a no-fly zone, they didn’t do anything. “Now America has come and wants to defend us. Is Trump a friend? I don’t know. But hopefully something good will come from him, and there will be a (peace) agreement, and this corrupt regime which slaughtered people can be gone.” Syria’s opposition has long urged the creation of a no-fly zone or provision of anti-aircraft weapons to rebel groups, and criticized what it saw as U.S. inaction under Barack Obama. Trump’s decision to launch missiles at a Syrian government target marks a dramatic departure and was welcomed by the opposition, who called for further strikes. Syria’s government controls most of the west of the country including its largest population centers, but rebels still hold Idlib province as a stronghold, with pockets of control in other areas including outside Damascus. The Damascus government said the U.S. strike was “rash” and an act of “flagrant aggression”, but did not expect a bigger escalation. In an interview with the Lebanese TV station al-Mayadeen, Assad aide Bouthaina Shaaban said any Syrian who welcomed the strike was a traitor. Damascus residents struck a defiant tone, echoing the government’s vow to escalate the pace of its attacks on insurgents and to win back the whole country. Others said the U.S. attack was no surprise and vowed to stand up to Washington. “Talk in the U.N. Security Council about (Syria using) chemical weapons is lies, and Syria knows this. They just wanted to have an excuse to strike,” said a Damascus fireman, who did not give his name. “It doesn’t make a great difference anyway. What the militants (rebels) have done to our country has more of an effect than Tomahawk missiles.” “The blood of martyrs is what waters the earth of the country. Either we die, or we win,” he said. Abu Haidara, a media student, said Syria should strike back. “The Syrian government should ... wage a war with them - with any dog who thinks he can attack Syria or the army or anyone and violate its sovereignty,” he said. | 1 |
One of our biggest concerns is that so many Americans don t realize the magnitude of just how much our nation is in deep trouble. With the election of Trump, the shadowy foes have been coming out and showing themselves to attack Trump. Glenn Greenwald does a great job of explaining what s going on:Co-founding editor of The Intercept says opponents have used the media in open warfare against the President-elect, and the CIA wanted Hillary Clinton to win the presidency:Look no further than Buzzfeed to see what he s talking about:BUZZFEED S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Attempts Lame Explanation Of Why He Published Fake News On Trump: This was absolutely the right thing to do [Video]GREENWALD:The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer:This is the faction that is now engaged in open warfare against the duly elected and already widely disliked president-elect, Donald Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty tactics and the defining ingredients of what has until recently been denounced as Fake News. Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing eager to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging those behaviors might be READ MORE: THE INTERCEPT | 0 |
The following statements were posted to the verified Twitter accounts of U.S. President Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS. The opinions expressed are his own. Reuters has not edited the statements or confirmed their accuracy. @realDonaldTrump : - Congress, get ready to do your job - DACA! [0804 EDT] -I am allowing Japan & South Korea to buy a substantially increased amount of highly sophisticated military equipment from the United States. [0836 EDT] - I look forward to working w/ D’s + R’s in Congress to address immigration reform in a way that puts hardworking citizens of our country 1st. [1645 EDT] - Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do). If they can’t, I will revisit this issue! [2038 EDT] -- Source link: (bit.ly/2jBh4LU) (bit.ly/2jpEXYR) | 0 |
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama did not mean to be critical of British Prime Minister David Cameron about Libya policy in an article published this week in The Atlantic magazine, a White House spokesman said on Friday. Obama told The Atlantic in the piece that some European allies had become passive regarding chaos in Libya and Cameron had become “distracted by a range of other things.” Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said the United States “values deeply the special relationship” with the United Kingdom and shares responsibility to deal with chaos in Libya. After Libya’s 2011 uprising, the country faces a power vacuum and is threatened by Islamic State militants. | 1 |
“What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Remember those infamous and wretched words? Of course you do. We all do. Those were the words uttered by Hillary Clinton when she was desperately trying to spin her way through a committee hearing on Benghazi.
And as anyone not named Hillary Clinton or anyone not on her corrupt payroll knows, it makes a lot of difference . This because Americans died. They died at the hands of terrorists on Hillary’s watch.
New information is now out about some of the individuals who were paid to guard/protect state department employees at the special missions compound where the terrorist attack occurred and it’s not pretty. Turns out Hillary’s state department spent $9.2 million on a contract for guards, many of whom turned out to be the very terrorists who attacked the compound, killing our ambassador and other Americans in the process.
Via Fox News .
“Many of the local Libyans who attacked the consulate on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, were the actual guards that the State Department under Hillary Clinton hired to protect the Consulate in Benghazi,” Tiegen told Fox News. “The guards were unvetted and were locals with basically no background at all in providing security. Most of them never had held a job in security in the past.
“Blue Mountain Libya, at the time of being awarded the contract by our State Department, had no employees so they quickly had to find people to work, regardless of their backgrounds,” he said.
One former guard who witnessed the attack, Weeam Mohamed, confirmed in an email sent to the Citizens Commission on Benghazi and obtained by Fox News, that at least four of the guards hired by Blue Mountain took part in the attack after opening doors to allow their confederates in.
“In the U.S. Mission, there were four people [who] belonged to the battalion February 17,” Mohamed wrote to the Commission, an independent body formed with Accuracy in Media to investigate the attack and the administration’s handling of it.
Again, it makes a lot of difference.
| 1 |
(Reuters) - Kentucky state Representative Dan Johnson, who was facing sexual assault accusations, died in a probable suicide on Wednesday, Bullitt County Coroner Dave Billings said. Johnson, 57, also the leader of the Louisville-area Heart of Fire Church, held a news conference on Tuesday at which he denied accusations contained in a report by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. The report, published earlier in the week, included accusations from a woman that Johnson molested her in 2013 when she was a teenager. Johnson, whose press conference was widely reported by local media, also defied calls by some legislators to step down. On Wednesday evening, Johnson was found dead in a probable suicide from a single gunshot wound near Louisville, the coroner said, adding that an autopsy would be performed on Thursday. Billings said law enforcement officials had been searching for Johnson after someone read a post on his Facebook page, became concerned and contacted police. The post has since been taken down, but the Courier-Journal reported that it appeared to be a farewell and read in part, “the accusations from NPR are false, GOD and only GOD knows the truth. Nothing is the way they make it out to be.” The death comes amid a national reckoning over sexual harassment and abuse that has included allegations of misconduct in a number of state legislatures, including in Kentucky. Kentucky Republican Jeff Hoover recently resigned his post as Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations. “Saddened to hear of tonight’s death of KY Representative Dan Johnson,” Kentucky Republican Gov. Matt Bevin wrote on Twitter. “My heart breaks for his family tonight...these are heavy days in Frankfort and in America...may God indeed shed His grace on us all...we sure need it.” Michael Skoler, President of Louisville Public Media, which operates the investigative reporting center, said in a statement on social media that the organization reached out to Johnson numerous times during its seven-month investigation but that he declined to discuss the group’s findings. Johnson was elected in 2016 despite becoming known for a 2016 Facebook post comparing President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama to monkeys, WDRB-TV has reported. | 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday proposed a 31 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget, as the White House seeks to eliminate climate change programs and trim initiatives to protect air and water quality. The EPA would sustain the biggest cut of any federal agency in the White House 2018 budget, as Trump seeks to clear away regulations he claims are hobbling U.S. oil drillers, coal miners and farmers. The proposed cuts are a starting point, and Congress could temper them in its budget deliberations. The proposal would slash funding for enforcing regulations, fighting water pollution, cleaning up sites contaminated by toxic waste and promoting energy-efficient appliances. It would eliminate 3,200 EPA employees, or 19 percent of the agency’s workforce. It would effectively erase former President Barack Obama’s initiatives to combat climate change by cutting funding for the agency’s signature Clean Power Plan aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions. “Consistent with the President’s America First Energy Plan, the budget reorients the EPA’s air program to protect the air we breathe without unduly burdening the American economy,” a summary of the proposed EPA budget said. Some lawmakers from Trump’s Republican party praised the proposed cuts, but some expressed concern about cuts to programs affecting their region of the country. Environmentalists blasted the plan, saying it would return America back to 1977 when smoggy skies and polluted rivers pushed lawmakers to strengthen federal clean air and clean water laws. Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, disputes the scientific consensus that human actions are the lead cause of climate change. In his former position as attorney general of oil-producing Oklahoma, he sued the EPA more than a dozen times. Pruitt believes Congress should determine whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant that needs regulation. With both chambers currently led by Republicans, and influential committees headed by lawmakers from oil-producing states, that is unlikely anytime soon. The budget would also eliminate some $100 million in spending on research and international programs on combating climate change. Trump also doubts the science of climate change and has said the country can reduce green regulations drastically without compromising air and water quality. Asked about climate change programs, Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, told reporters “we consider that to be a waste of your money.” “I think the president is fairly straightforward. We’re not spending money on that,” he said. The EPA had already faced sharp cuts under Obama. Janet McCabe, a former EPA air official, said Trump’s proposed budget would harm the EPA’s ability to respond to emergencies and also hurt day-to-day efforts on keeping air and water clean to protect human health. The proposed cuts would cut $427 million aimed at regional pollution cleanup programs, including in the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay. Funding for the Superfund program to clean up the nation’s most contaminated sites would drop by $330 million to $762 million. The summary said the budget seeks to give local and state governments responsibility for such clean-up efforts. Many states and municipalities also face severe budget constraints in the current fiscal environment. Trump’s proposal includes a 31 percent budget cut for the enforcement division, which fines companies for pollution. It would ax dozens of other programs including the popular Energy Star appliance efficiency program aimed at reducing U.S. energy consumption. “Turning back the clock to 1977 will not ‘Make America Great Again’. It will ‘Make America Gag Again,’” said Conrad Schneider, the advocacy director at Clean Air Task Force. One area that would see a small boost is for State Revolving Funds, low-interest loans for investments in water and sanitation infrastructure. The plan would add $4 million to the funds, bringing its budget up to $100 million. While employees at EPA headquarters in Washington worried about their jobs, some hoped opportunities might open up at the other side of the country. Representatives of California, where state energy commissions and a clean air agency are hiring, handed recruitment fliers to EPA employees on their way to work. The fliers said: “Fight Climate Change, Work for California.” | 0 |
(Reuters) - Republican lawmaker Devin Nunes’ investigation into whether Obama administration officials used classified intelligence reports to discredit Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign team could backfire on the congressman - and the president, sources familiar with the reports said. The reports contain no evidence that any aides to former Democratic President Barack Obama acted improperly, the sources said, but they do indicate some Trump associates may have violated an obscure 1799 law, the Logan Act, which prohibits unauthorized U.S. citizens from negotiating with a foreign government that has a dispute with the United States. The spying reports also are relevant to the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into conclusions by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia worked to tilt last November’s election in Republican Trump’s favor, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Mueller’s office declined to comment. Russia, under U.S. sanctions for rights abuses and its 2014 annexation of Crimea, has repeatedly denied allegations of election meddling. Trump has denied any possible collusion between his campaign and Moscow, an issue that has loomed over the new presidency. Nunes, chairman of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee and a Trump ally, met secretly earlier this year with a White House intelligence aide and then accused Obama officials of having requested the names of U.S. citizens seen in intercepts of communications with Russians and other foreigners. The White House did not respond to requests for comment. The names would have been routinely censored from intelligence agency intercepts, but Nunes charged that Obama’s aides had leaked the information to try to undermine Trump while he was running for president. A spokesman for then-United Nations ambassador Samantha Power, whom Nunes and other Republicans accused of digging for political dirt, said she read intelligence reports only as part of her normal duties. A spokesman for former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, whom Republicans also accused of misusing intelligence, did not respond to requests for comment. Mueller is investigating meetings and conversations between Trump associates and Russian and other foreign officials and businessmen. They include Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner; the president’s eldest son Donald Trump, Jr.; former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. “An obvious question is how all these meetings and conversations were set up,” said one of the sources. “Who set them up? What was their purpose? What were the agendas? Who approved them? Who was briefed on them afterward? Signals intelligence might shed some light on that.” Representatives for the Trump associates did not respond to requests for comment. Democratic lawmakers have said that Nunes and others have made the assertions about the leaks to distract attention from two congressional investigations and Mueller’s probe into the Russian matter. The National Security Agency masks the names of U.S. citizens in intercepts, but officials with the necessary security clearances can request them for intelligence purposes. “Unmasking Americans is extremely sensitive, and unmasking political opponents is really problematic,” said a congressional official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity. If Obama officials asked for the names or failed to justify any requests, that warranted investigation, the official said. Asked for hard evidence that Power or other aides misused intelligence for political purposes or leaked such information to the media, the official declined to comment. | 0 |
After a decade and a half of peppering nearly every political conversation with as Joe Biden famously said a noun, a verb and 9/11, the mayor who was in charge of New York City during 9/11 appeared to forget it ever happened when he said that terrorism didn t hit our country until President Obama took office.After taking a day of brutal media and Twitter mockery, Giuliani offered an explanation. He just didn t have enough time to form the couple of extra words, like since 9/11. I m not there to give a major 45-minute policy address, he said of his Trump introduction Monday in Youngstown, Ohio, where he said plainly that under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States. You speak in somewhat abbreviated language, Giuliani told The News Tuesday. All human beings speak in abbreviated language at times. Source: New York Daily NewsEven this short video clip is a minute and 20 seconds long. He had plenty of time to talk about everything but 9/11.The idea that all (terrorist attacks) started once Clinton and Obama came to office is both false and offensive. The deadliest terrorist attack happened when Giuliani was in office, and many speculate that things would not have been so bad, especially for the first responders, under a different mayor.More than that, this is a dangerous lie. As of 2014, 3,158 people have died from terrorist attacks within the United States. Over 2,900 of those people died during the attacks of 9/11. Even with the addition of the San Bernardino shooting, far fewer than 100 people have died from terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, at least since Obama took office.Whether or not Giuliani actually forgot 9/11 is irrelevant. Donald Trump is trying to create an environment in which no one is held accountable for their words, and Giuliani is no exception. The new way of campaigning, at least for Trump s team, is to spit out ridiculous accusations and assertions and then blame the media for directly quoting them. Giuliani says he will slip up again, as we all will, but since he s on the Trump team, don t look for any sort of contrition. Look for doubling down and more lies.Featured image via Jeff Swensen at Getty Images. | 0 |
(Reuters) - Highlights of the day for U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday: DODD-FRANK Trump orders reviews of major banking rules put in place after the 2008 financial crisis, drawing fire from Democrats who said his order lacked substance and squarely aligned him with Wall Street bankers. Wealth managers from Wall Street to Wisconsin have spent the last six years lobbying against the retirement advice rule that Trump began killing off with a swipe of his pen. The United States ratchets up pressure on Iran, putting sanctions on 13 individuals and 12 entities days after the White House put Tehran “on notice” over a ballistic missile test. Instead of tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, the Trump administration is exploring how to tighten its enforcement and renegotiate key terms, but it may be impossible to get other major powers and Iran to consider revisions. A federal judge in Boston declines to extend a temporary restraining order that allowed some immigrants into the United States from certain countries despite being barred by Trump’s recent executive order. Tens of thousands of visas were revoked under Trump’s travel ban, the State Department says. U.S. immigration officials have postponed interviews with asylum seekers in an Australian camp since Trump’s executive order on immigration, suggesting Washington is already blocking progress on a controversial refugee resettlement deal. Chief executives of major U.S. companies met with Trump at the White House, with some expressing concern about the ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries traveling to the United States. Congressional Republicans repeal a securities disclosure rule aimed at curbing corruption at energy and mining companies and vote to ax emissions limits on drilling operations, part of a push to remove Obama-era regulations on extractive industries. Trump’s agenda to repeal Obamacare and punish “sanctuary cities” for resisting him on immigration is making its presence felt in the $3.8 trillion municipal bond market. European Union leaders agree to stick together in dealing with Trump, but at their first summit since he took office they are at odds on how far to confront or engage with him. The Trump administration is in the midst “of a full review of all U.S. policies towards Cuba” with a focus on its human rights policies. | 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Defense and Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) are close to deal for a contract worth almost $9 billion as negotiations are poised to bring the price per F-35 below $100 million for the first time, people familiar with the talks said Wednesday. The F-35, the Pentagon’s costliest arms program, has drawn fire from U.S. President-elect Donald Trump who has made lowering prices for military equipment a pillar of his transition into office. Talks are still ongoing for the tenth batch of stealthy fighter jets with a deal for 90 planes expected to be announced by the end of the month, three people said on condition of anonymity. A Lockheed representative declined to comment and a representative for the fighter program said negotiations are ongoing. The U.S. Defense Department expects to spend $391 billion in the coming decades to develop and buy 2,443 of the supersonic warplanes. Though the F-35 program has been criticized by Trump as too expensive, the price per jet has already been declining. Lockheed, the prime contractor, and its partners have been working on building a more cost-effective supply chain to fuel the production line in Fort Worth, Texas. The overtures from the incoming administration may have had some effect, but Lockheed’s F-35 program manager Jeff Babione said last summer that the price of the F-35A conventional takeoff and landing version of the jet would drop to under $100 million per plane in this contract for the 10th low-rate production batch. The F-35 comes in three configurations, the A-model for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. allies; a F-35 B-model which can handle short takeoffs and vertical landings for the Marine Corps and the British navy; and carrier-variant F-35C jets for the U.S. Navy. Lockheed and its main partners, including Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N), United Technologies Corp’s (UTX.N) Pratt & Whitney and BAE Systems Plc (BAES.L), have been developing and building F-35s for the U.S. military and 10 allies. On Oct. 25 Lockheed, the world’s largest defense contractor, reported a quarterly profit that handily beat analysts’ expectations, as sales of its Sikorsky helicopters pushed total revenue up 14.8 percent. Lockheed is set to host its fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday. | 1 |
Banana Republic Election in the United States? 07.11.2016 Print version Font Size Nothing is more hypocritical than to hear that the US government is going to send "election observers" to other countries. For nowhere on the planet are elections more easily rigged than in the United States of America. In "Votescam: The Stealing of America" (1992) the late Collier brothers summarized the alarming state of affairs, which still prevails today. In Chapter one, "Electronic Hoodwink", they begin by quoting the first words spoken by President-elect, George Bush in his Nov. 8, 1988 victory speech in Houston, Texas. Bush said: "We can now speak the most majestic words a democracy can offer: "The people have spoken . . . " The Colliers comment in the following brilliantly written passage: "It was not "the People" of the United States who did 'the speaking' on that election day, although most of them believed it was, and still believe it. In fact, the People did not speak at all. The voices most of us really heard that day were the voices of computers strong, loud, authoritative, unquestioned in their electronic finality . . . It only makes common sense that every gear, every mechanism, every nook and cranny of every part of the voting process ought to be in the sunlight, wide open to public view. How else can the public be reasonably assured that they are participating in an unrigged election where their vote actually means something? Yet one of the most mysterious, low-profile, covert, shadowy, questionable mechanisms of American democracy is the American vote count . . . Computers in voting machines are effectively immune from checking and rechecking. If they are fixed, you cannot know it, and you cannot be sure at all of an honest tally." In fact, according to the Nation Magazine article published in August, 2005, "How They Could Steal the Election This Time," by veteran reporter Ronnie Dugger, only four mega-election vendors, ES &S (Election Systems & Software), Hart, Diebold and Sequoia processed 96% of the USA vote on election night. Circa 2013, a company named Dominion acquired Diebold and Sequoia. Privately owned computer software And the processing of the nation's ballots are done, in 1988, in 2004, and in 2016, on secret, privately owned computer software which election officials in the USA agree by contract not to inspect. In other words, the vote in America is utterly unverifiable on these machines. America processes over eighty percent of the presidential vote on secret computer programs owned by only three mega-election vendors. This is at the very least an unholy concentration of power. If the three mega-vendors are working together behind the scenes, then it is the few that own this election software that selects the President. As Joseph Stalin said, "Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." This issue of computerized election fraud simmered sub rosa from 1988 until August 1, 2016, when Donald Trump stated at a Columbus, Ohio Rally that he was afraid the "November election is going to be rigged against me." The nation's national press went into a frenzy. Jonathan Chait screeched in his headline for nymag.com, "Donald Trump, Discovering New Way to Undermine Democracy, Calls Election Rigged." In fact, it was NOT the raising of healthy questions by Trump that was undermining democracy. It was so-called reporters like Chait who didn't like anyone raising any concerns at all. On C-Span on August 21, 2016, best-selling author Roger Stone asserted that is was dangerous NOT to ask questions about how the vote was counted. After all, the Founding Fathers did encourage a healthy skepticism of government, including the part of the government that runs the elections. The situation in the United States is absurd. The fact that the public has no guarantee that the vote is actually that of the people is insane, and tears at the very fabric of democracy. Press concern is so grave about Trump's charge of a possibly rigged election, that in the last two of the three Presidential debates, NBC's Lester Holt and FOX's Chris Wallace both asked Trump if he would accept the election results. In the third debate, Trump stunned Wallace by saying he'd wait and see after he looked at the evidence, and that he was going to keep everyone in suspense. No way votes can be verified Three Supreme Court cases stated that the US voter's right to vote consisted of two parts: 1) the right to cast a ballot; and 2) the right to KNOW that one's ballot is counted accurately. With secret computer counts, there is simply no way to verify the vote. None. This is the first major election in America where the people are learning just how compromised the computer based vote has become. On October 18, 2016, computer expert Ethan Pepper appeared on the Sean Hannity radio show and noted that any election computer can be hacked; that if you get in you can switch a million votes as easy as switching one vote; and he also raised the question of WHO owns the election computer software by noting that George Soros was closely associated with those who provided 16 states with the Smartamatic voting machines. This highlights the greatest danger: that the election vendors themselves OWN the election software and that THEY are the prime suspects for rigging elections. After all, they don't have to hack in, they ARE in as the programmers of the software. And with local election officials signing contracts not to inspect the source code of the computer software, these same election vendors know that no one is looking over their shoulder. On October 26th, FOX Cable News discussed the computer voting machines in Texas that were caught by numerous voters switching their Trump vote to a Hillary vote in early election voting. This phenomenon also surfaced in Maryland. Trump has tweeted and facebooked his 21 million followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram about the computerized "vote-flipping" from Trump to Hillary in Texas. The issue of computerized election fraud was now planted in the public mind as a serious issue for the first time since election computers were introduced into the USA circa 1973. On October 31, 2016, the Drudge Report led with two links on how election computers were hacked. He linked to the new video by Bev Harris on youtube and on blackboxvoting.org entitled, "Fraction Magic." The Big TV Networks have been playing defense ever since. Rigging the election Every few hours one of the big Networks are running a story about how it would be almost "impossible" to rig a national election. But the networks had to report between airing these stories about a week ago that Ebay, Twitter, and the New York Times websites had been hacked, thus totally undermining their stories about the safety of election computers. The situation can be fixed in the USA, or prevented in other countries, by throwing the computer systems out altogether, and counting the paper ballots by hand, in public with all invited to observe, BEFORE the ballots leave the public sight. On November 5, 2016, FOX news carried commentary that whichever side wins in the Presidential race, the other will cry "computer votefraud." So the issue has finally become front and center in the Presidential campaign. Dr. David Dill of Stanford University is quoted in a 2004 Nation Magazine article, "How They Could Steal the Election This Time": "Why am I always being asked to prove these systems aren't secure? The burden of proof ought to be on the vendor. You ask about the hardware. 'Secret.' The software? 'Secret.' What's the cryptography? 'Can't tell you because that'll compromise the secrecy of the machines.'... Federal testing procedures? 'Secret'! Results of the tests? 'Secret'! Basically we are required to have blind faith." People of the USA act like citizens of Banana Republic Blind faith? That's what the subjects and slaves of Banana Republics and tin-horn dictatorships are reduced to. And that's what the people of the United States have now been reduced to since at least as far back as 1988, even though most Americans don't know it. 2016 has been a year of awakening on the election fraud issue. Will that awakening continue to grow so that the United States of America and all other nations? Will the United states and other nations replace easily-rigged election computers, and restore transparent, honest elections with hand-counted paper ballots at the neighborhood polling place once again? As it stands, there is absolutely no way to know who really won the upcoming presidential election in America. The power elite can rig their voting machines to whatever outcome they want. One of the ways the cabal in the United States can be stopped is by a verifiable vote where the America people can be assured they live in a democracy where their vote actually counts and that the will of the people is carried out in the elections. Nancy O'Brien Simpson Ms. Simpson was a radio personality in New York. She was a staff writer for The Liberty Report. A PBS documentary was done on her activism for human rights. She is a psychotherapist and political commentator. | 1 |
(INTELLIHUB) —“Everyone’s phone in the office did the same thing at the same time,” one person reported, after a “Area Emergency Test” was forced to devices by FEMA in several parts of the U.S..
“As you can see here this is run by FEMA,” Youtuber DAHBOO7 stated on his latest video.
This type technology may actually be pinging devices and may even be able to locate peoples whereabouts, DAHBOO told his viewers.
“[…] they are able to get a ping on your location.” Featured Image: Jhaymesisviphotography/Flickr | 0 |
The project was set to begin on March 1st and would have brought environmentally friendly high speed rail to California.But that project is in serious jeopardy after Donald Trump s Transportation minion Elaine Chao, who also happens to be Mitch McConnell s wife, ordered an audit of the $647 million grant awarded to CalTrain to help cover the costs.Despite promising to support infrastructure programs and create more jobs in America, Trump has apparently decided to break that promise in the name of petty partisan politics.Trump has threatened California in recent weeks with funding cuts because U.C. Berkeley canceled a Milo Yiannopoulos speech. Yiannopoulos is a Trump supporter and was recently exposed as an advocate of pedophilia.Trump also threatened to defund California in retaliation of the state continuing to offer sanctuary to immigrants. If we have to, we ll defund, Trump said. We give tremendous amounts of money to California. If they re going to have sanctuary cities we may have to do that certainly that would be a weapon. And Trump apparently pulled the trigger of that weapon on Friday by pulling the plug on the high speed rail project.The project would have converted the rail system running between San Jose and San San Francisco to run on electricity, which would have helped fight climate change. It also would have created nearly 10,000 new jobs. It would also have increased the number of people who use the system and would have cut operation costs.Trump made the decision after 14 California Republicans sent him a letter asking him to kill the project. That s only 14 out of a delegation of 55, 40 of whom are Democrats. That means Trump willfully sided with the minority party in California on this project.Here are the names of the Republicans the people of California can blame for losing out on this major infrastructure project. They are each up for re-election in 2018.Dana Rohrabacher Darrell Issa David G. Valadao Devin Nunes Doug LaMalfa Duncan Hunter Edward Royce Jeff Denham Ken Calvert Kevin McCarthy Mimi Walters Paul Cook Stephen Knight Tom McClintockAn audit of the project would certainly be a partisan witch hunt that would take months to complete, thus killing a project that California needs and wants.It would help fight climate change, create thousands of jobs, and start America on the path to catching up with the rest of the world when it comes to bullet train transportation. This project shouldn t be canceled, it should be demanded across the country.Featured image via Wikimedia | 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, a moderate Republican, took himself out of consideration for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday as Senate Republicans dug in on their vow not to act on any nominee by President Barack Obama. Asked if the White House was disappointed by Sandoval’s decision, Obama spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters, “He’s obviously entitled to make decisions about his own career.” Sandoval’s name surfaced as a possible nominee on Wednesday, but Senate Republicans quickly said they still would not hold hearings or vote on any Obama nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the Feb. 13 death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Obama’s appointee could pivot the court to the left for the first time in decades. Sandoval, a Mexican-American who was Nevada’s first Hispanic governor, did not offer a reason for his withdrawal. “Earlier today, I notified the White House that I do not wish to be considered at this time for possible nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States,” he said in a statement. “The notion of being considered for a seat on the highest court in the land is beyond humbling and I am incredibly grateful to have been mentioned.” Earlier on Thursday, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton expressed concern about Sandoval, urging Obama to pick a “true progressive.” But Nancy Pelosi, the top House of Representatives Democrat, called it a “good idea” for Obama to consider Republicans as well as Democrats. The Republican-led Senate must confirm any nominee. Sandoval, 52, was appointed a judge by Republican President George W. Bush before becoming governor. He took a traditional Republican stance backing gun rights but held more moderate views on social issues, supporting abortion rights. Obama will meet next Tuesday with Senate Republican and Democratic leaders regarding a court nominee, officials said. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said they will use the meeting to reiterate the Republican stance that the Senate will not act on any Supreme Court nominee until the next president takes office in January 2017, following the Nov. 8 presidential election. Republicans hope to win back the White House then. The fight over the nomination got nastier as Grassley accused Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of “childish tantrums” after Reid called Grassley the most obstructionist Judiciary Committee chairman ever. Reid responded: “A childish tantrum, when we’re asking him to do his job?” | 0 |
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Danish inventor Peter Madsen has admitted to dismembering Swedish journalist Kim Wall on board his submarine in August and dumping her body parts in the sea, but he still denies killing her, police said on Monday. The police said in a statement Madsen had told them in an Oct. 14 interrogation that Wall, 30, had died from carbon monoxide poisoning inside the submarine, while he was on the deck of the vessel. The police would now gather additional information from coroners and submarine experts from the Danish defense command. In past court hearings, Madsen said that Wall had died accidentally after being hit by a heavy hatch cover on his UC3 Nautilus submarine. The police said they would now extend the charges against Madsen - which already include murder and mutilating Wall s body - to include sexual assault without intercourse, based on 14 interior and exterior stab wounds to the journalist s genitals. Kim Wall had suffered 14 stabs in and around the genitals and it is due to these stabs that we have said that there must have been a sexual motive, police spokesman Jens Moller Jensen told journalists in Copenhagen. Madsen denies the murder and sexual assault charges. The cause of death was still unknown, said Jensen. Wall, a freelance journalist who was researching a story on Madsen, went missing after he took her out to sea in the 17-metre (56-foot) submarine in August. On Aug. 23, police identified a headless female torso that washed ashore in Copenhagen as Wall s. Wall s arms as well as her and Madsen s mobile phones are still missing and the police are currently assessing if divers should continue the search for them. Earlier this month, police said they had also recovered Wall s head and legs. They said they found no skull fracture, despite Madsen s earlier account that she had been hit on the head by the hatch cover. The submarine is one of three that Madsen built, and one of the largest of its kind privately produced in the world. It could carry eight people and weighed 40 tonnes fully equipped. The case has been scheduled to run for eight days at Copenhagen s district court from March 8 2018. | 0 |
(Reuters) - Saudi Arabia has urged its people to report subversive comments spotted on social media via a phone app, a move denounced by a human rights watchdog as Orwellian . The appeal, announced on a Twitter account run by the interior ministry late on Tuesday, coincides with an apparent crackdown on potential government critics and a call by exiled opposition figures for demonstrations. When you notice any account on social networks publishing terrorist or extremist ideas, please report it immediately via the application #We re_all_security , it said, referring to a mobile phone app launched last year to enable civilians to report traffic violations and burglaries. Hours later, the public prosecutor tweeted a section of the kingdom s terrorism law which states: Endangering national unity, obstructing the Basic Law of governance or some of its articles, and harming the state s reputation or status are terrorist crimes. Exiled Saudi critics have called for demonstrations on Friday to galvanize opposition to the royal family and prominent clerics, intellectuals and activists, including prominent Islamist cleric Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, have been detained this week, activists say. Activists circulated lists of people detained on social media showing the number had risen to around 30 on Wednesday, including some with no clear links to Islamist activity or obvious history of opposition. Protests are banned in Saudi Arabia, as are political parties. Unions are illegal, the press is controlled and criticism of the royal family can lead to prison. Riyadh says it does not have political prisoners, but senior officials have said monitoring activists is needed to maintain social stability. The detentions reported by activists follow widespread speculation, denied by officials, that King Salman intends to abdicate to his son, Crown Prince Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who dominates economic, diplomatic and domestic policy. There are also growing tensions with Qatar over its alleged support of Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood which is listed by Riyadh as a terrorist organization. Some Twitter users expressed support for the government s approach, using the We re all Security hashtag. No flattery, no silence whether for a relative or friend in securing the homeland, said one. Defend your security. Chaos starts with slogans of freedom and reform. Do not believe them. Another user called on people to photograph any low-lifes protesting on Friday and upload them to the app. Human Rights Watch, a New York-based watchdog, condemned the government dragnet, saying it called into question the authorities commitment to free speech and the rule of law. Saudi Arabia is reaching a new level of Orwellian reality when it goes beyond security services repression and outsources monitoring of citizens online comments to other citizens, said Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson, referring to English writer George Orwell s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four . Saudi Arabia s new leadership is quickly showing it has no tolerance for critical thought or speech and is marshalling Saudi society to enforce red lines by spying on itself. The government has not clearly acknowledged this week s detentions or responded to requests for comment. But state news agency SPA said on Tuesday authorities had uncovered intelligence activities for the benefit of foreign parties by a group of people it did not identify. A Saudi security source told Reuters the suspects were accused of espionage activities and having contacts with external entities including the Muslim Brotherhood , which Riyadh has classified as a terrorist organization. The government toughened its stance on dissent following the Arab Spring in 2011 after it averted unrest by offering billions of dollars in handouts and state spending. But the Brotherhood, which represents an ideological threat to Riyadh s dynastic system of rule, has gained power elsewhere in the region. Since the kingdom s founding, the ruling Al Saud family has enjoyed a close alliance with clerics of the ultra-conservative Wahhabi school of Islam. In return, the clerics have espoused a political philosophy that demands obedience to the ruler. By contrast the Muslim Brotherhood advances an active political doctrine urging revolutionary action, which flies in the face of Wahhabi teaching. The Brotherhood-inspired Sahwa movement in the 1990s agitated to bring democracy to Saudi Arabia and criticized the ruling family for corruption, social liberalization and working with the West, including allowing U.S. troops into the kingdom during the 1991 Iraq war. The Sahwa were largely undermined by a mixture of repression and co-optation but remain active. The al-Saud family has always regarded Islamist groups as the biggest internal threat to its rule over a country in which appeals to religious sentiment cannot be lightly dismissed and an al Qaeda campaign a decade ago killed hundreds. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut diplomatic and transport links with Qatar in June over its alleged support for Islamist militants, a charge that Doha denies. | 0 |
United States Reformation or Fracture?
By Thierry Meyssan Observing the US presidential electoral campaign, Thierry Meyssan analyses the resurgence of an old and weighty conflict of civilisation. Hillary Clinton has just declared that this election is not about programmes, but about the question ŤWho are the Americans?ť. It was not for reasons of his political prgramme that the Republican leaders have withdrawn their support from their candidate, Donald Trump, but because of his personal behaviour. According to Thierry Meyssan, until now, the United States was composed of migrants from different horizons who accepted to submit to the ideology of a particular community . This is the model which is in the process of breaking down, at the risk of shattering the country itself. " Voltaire " - During the year of the US electoral campaign that we have just weathered, the rhetoric has profoundly changed, and an unexpected rift has appeared between the two camps. If, in the beginning, the candidates spoke about subjects which were genuinely political (such as the sharing of wealth or national security), today they are mostly talking about sex and money. It is this dialogue, and not the political questions, which has caused the explosion of the Republican party whose main leaders have withdrawn their support from their candidate - and which is recomposing the political chess-board, awakening an ancient cleavage of civilisation. On one side, Mrs. Clinton is working to appear politically correct, while on the other, ŤThe Donaldť is blowing the hypocrisy of the ex-ŤFirst Ladyť to smithereens.
On one side, Hillary Clinton promises male / female equality - although she has never hesitated to attack and defile the women who revealed that they had slept with her husband and that she is presenting herself not for her personal qualities, but as the wife of an ex-President, and that she accuses Donald Trump of misogyny because he does not hide his appreciation of the female gender. On the other, Donald Trump denounces the privatisation of the State and the racketing of foreign personalities by the Clinton Foundation to obtain appointments with the State Department the creation of ObamaCare not in the interest of citizens, but for the profit of medical insurance companies - and goes as far as to question the honesty of the electoral system.
I am perfectly aware that the way in which Donald Trump expresses himself may encourage racism, but I do not believe for a second that this question is at the heart of the electoral debate, despite the hype from the pro-Clinton medias. It is not without interest that, during the Lewinsky affair, President Bill Clinton apologised to the Nation and convened a number of preachers to pray for his salvation. But when he was accused of similar misconduct by an audio recording, Donald Trump simply apologised to the people he had upset without making any appeal to members of the clergy. The currrent divide re-awakens the revolt of Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran values against those of the Calvinists, mainly represented in the USA by the Presbyterians, the Baptists and the Methodists.
While the two candidates were raised in the Puritan tradition (Clinton as a Methodist and Trump as a Presbyterian), Mrs. Clinton has returned to the religion of her father, and participates today in a prayer group composed of the army chiefs of staff, The Family, while Mr. Trump practises a more interior form of spirituality and rarely goes to church. Of course, no-one is locked into the systems in which they were raised, but when people act without thinking, they unconsciously reproduce these systems. The question of the religious environment of the candidates may therefore be important.
In order to understand the stakes of this game, we have to go back and look at 17th century England. Oliver Cromwell instigated a military coup detat which overthrew King Charles 1st. He wanted to install a Republic, purify the soul of the country, and ordered the decapitation of the ex-sovereign. He created a sectarian régime inspired by the ideas of Calvin, massacred thousands of Irish Papists, and imposed a Puritan way of life. He also created Zionism he invited the Jews back to England, and was the first head of state in the world to demand the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This bloody episode is known by the name of the ŤFirst British Civil Warť.
After the monarchy had been reinstated, Cromwells Puritans fled from England. They set up in Holland, from where some of them left for the Americas aboard the Mayflower (the ŤPilgrim Fathersť), while others founded the Afrikaneer community in South Africa. During the War of Independence in the 18th century United States, we saw a resurgence of the struggle of the Calvinists against the British monarchy, so that in current manuals of British History, it is known as the ŤSecond Civil Warť.
In the 19th century, the American Civil War opposed the Southern States (mainly inhabited by Catholic colonists) to the North (mostly inhabited by Protestant colonists). The History of the winning side presents this confrontation as a fight for freedom in the face of slavery, which is pure propaganda. The Southern states abolished slavery during the war when they concluded an agreement with the British monarchy). As a result, we once again saw the revolt of the Puritans against the Brititsh throne, which is why some historians speak of the ŤThird British Civil Warť.
During the 20th century, this interior confrontation of British civilisation seemed over and done with, apart from the re-appearance of the Puritans in the United Kingdom with the Ťnon-conformist Christiansť of Prime Minister David Lloyd George. It was they who divided Ireland and agreed to create the Ť Jewish national homelandť in Palestine.
In any case, one of Richard Nixons advisors, Kevin Philipps, dedicated a voluminous thesis to these civil wars, in which he noted that none of the problems had been solved, and announced a fourth confrontation [ 1 ].
I have no doubt that Mrs. Clinton will be the next President of the United States, or that if Mr. Trump were to be elected, he would be rapidly eliminated. But over the last few months, we have witnessed a large electoral redistribution within an irreversible demographic evolution. The Puritan-based churches now account for only a quarter of the population, and are swinging towards the Democrat camp. Their model looks like a historical accident. It disappeared in South Africa, and will not be able to survive much longer, either in the United States or in Israël. Beyond the Presidential election, US society will have to evolve rapidly or split once again. In a country where the youth massively rejects the influence of the Puritan preachers, it is no longer possible to displace the question of equality. The Puritans envisage a society where all men are equal, but not equivalent. Lord Cromwell wanted a Republic for the English, but only after he had massacred the Irish Papists. This is how it is at the moment in the United States all citizens are equal before the law, but in the name of the same texts, black people are systematically condemned, while attenuating circumstances are found for white people who have committed equivalent crimes. And in the majority of states, a penal condemnation, even for a speeding ticket, is enough to cancel the right to vote. Consequently, white and black people are equal, but in most states, the majority of black people has been legally deprived of its right to vote. The paradigm of this thought, in terms of foreign policy, is the Ťtwo-stateť solution in Palestine equal, but above all, not equivalent.
It is Puritan thinking that led the administrations of preacher Carter, Reagan, Bush (Sr. and Jr. are direct descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers), Clinton and Obama to support Wahhabism, in contradiction to the declared ideals of their countries, and today, to support Daesh.
A long time ago, the Founding Fathers built communities in Plymouth and Boston which were idealised in the US collective memory. And yet the historians are formal they claimed to be creating the ŤNew Israëlť, and chose the ŤLaw of Mosesť. They did not place the Cross in their temples, but the Tables of the Law. Although they are Christians, they attach more importance to the Jewish scriptures than the Gospel. They oblige their women to veil their faces and re-established corporaI punishment. Thierry Meyssan , French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. His last two books published in English : 9/11 the Big Lie and Pentagate . Translation - Pete Kimberley
[ 1 ] The Cousins Wars , Kevin Philipps, Basic Books, 1999. | 1 |
PORT LOUIS (Reuters) - The attorney general of the island nation of Mauritius stepped down on Wednesday after allegations he had helped launder gambling money. Prime Minister Pravind Kumar Jugnauth told reporters he wanted an investigation into Ravi Yerrigadoo to be conducted transparently. The Indian Ocean island markets itself as a link between Africa and Asia and is striving to move from an economy mostly based on sugar, textiles and tourism toward offshore banking, business outsourcing, luxury real estate and medical tourism. A scandal could hurt its burgeoning financial services industry. If Ravi Yerrigadoo is cleared he will be able to resume office, Jugnauth said. Mauritius-based L Express newspaper reported on Wednesday that an affidavit had been filed before the Supreme Court accusing Yerrigadoo of trying to facilitate the transfer of gambling money through a financial structure. It was not clear who had filed the affidavit. In a statement, Yerrigadoo denied the allegations and said he had quit to avoid the perception of a conflict of interest while the investigation was in progress. In March 2016, the environment minister was also forced to resign over corruption allegations. | 1 |
You are here: Home / US / Christian Pastor Jailed by Iran Reveals STUNNING Truth About Trump Christian Pastor Jailed by Iran Reveals STUNNING Truth About Trump October 29, 2016 Pinterest
Christian pastor Saeed Abedini was jailed in Iran because of his faith for three and a half years. During that extremely difficult time, Abedini said that GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump met with his family and gave them $10,000.
Abedini wrote about how Trump helped his family in a recent Facebook post and noted that he had already voted for Trump last week in early voting. “I am finally free in a free country,” he wrote. “Last year on the same day I was sick and in chains for Christ, and now I can vote to choose my next president.”
“And most amazingly, I can vote for someone that I know fought for me and called my name so many times. He met my family and gave them a $10,000 gift. I think his ideas are more biblical than the other candidates.”
In contrast, Clinton did nothing for him or his family:
As a woman who says she stands for women’s rights when she was foreign minister, she never contacted my mom, wife, sister or my daughter. She never did anything to help when I was in prison as an American pastor who was detained in Iran as a hostage.
Christian Today reported :
Abedini strongly defended Trump from attacks on his character, saying God used flawed men to lead nations in the Old Testament, likening him to King Cyrus of Persia, a figure mentioned more than 30 times in the Bible. According to Bible experts, Cyrus was a great pagan king who ruled Persia from 539 to 530 B.C. Under his rule, Jews were first allowed to return to Israel after 70 years of captivity.
Abedini wrote:
In the past few months, we have seen how media is attacking Donald Trump’s past. I have even heard so many people said he is not a Christian. Of course, only God knows this for sure, but what I see is God is using him and anointed him. It seems to me that he is the Cyrus of our modern day, but like you and me, he is a flawed man, in the process of spiritual growth.
When we hear that this candidate or that candidate is not a strong Christian or has a past that disqualifies him to be the President of the United States, my answer is that we are a nation, a people who are also sinners, saved by grace.
How often do you hear about kind things Clinton has done for others like this? I can’t think of any. Abedini’s words are extremely powerful and certainly something anyone who is on the fence about Trump should read. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama's trade agenda has cleared a key Senate hurdle to move toward a final vote.
The Senate has topped the 60 votes needed to begin substantive action on Obama's bid for "fast track" negotiating authority. The vote was 62-38.
Obama says fast track authority will improve prospects for a trade treaty with 11 other Pacific-rim nations.
Labor unions and other groups vital to Democrats strongly oppose Obama's trade agenda. They say free-trade deals cost U.S. jobs.
Obama says U.S. producers need broader access to foreign markets. | 1 |
This highly visible campaign has nothing to do with being anti-gay this is about the safety of women and children and about Target looking the other way According to a CBS Minnesota report, an anti-Target campaign is working to send Target a strong message after the corporation doubled down on its policy to continue allowing patrons to use the bathroom of their self-identified gender.Opponents of Target s bathroom policy unveiled a truck with a young girl standing at a bathroom stall in front of a man staring at her with the message What about her rights to privacy & protection? Send Target a message don t shop where women and children s emotional and physical safety and privacy are under assault, Minnesota chair of the Child League Julie Quist said.The truck is set to visit every Target store in Minnesota with the hope of reversing the policy.Claire Chretien, an organizer of the campaign, said, I don t feel safe knowing that at Target a six-foot, five-inch, 250-pound man can follow me into a bathroom and store won t do anything about it. Target CEO Brian Cornell likened the policy to when Target included African-American models in advertising in the 1960s, noting its long history of embracing diversity and inclusion. Via: Breitbart News | 1 |
BAMAKO (Reuters) - A French military strike on armed militants in northern Mali last month inadvertently killed Malian soldiers who were being held hostage by the Islamist group, the West African nation s Defence Ministry said on Monday. The French army has previously said that 15 members of the Islamist militant group Ansar Dine were taken out of action in the Oct. 23 operation in the Abeibara region, which involved Mirage jets, attack helicopters and ground forces. In the week following the raid however, Malian media reported that 11 soldiers had also been killed. French and Malian military and government officials initially declined to comment on the deaths. In a statement dated Oct. 31 but only distributed on Monday, the Defence Ministry said that Malian soldiers, detained by the terrorists, died in the attack without giving a death toll. It was not immediately clear why the distribution of the statement, which was drafted following a meeting between the defense minister, France s ambassador to Mali and a French military official, appeared to have been delayed. Paris has maintained that military intelligence had identified the site as a militant camp and French army spokesman Colonel Patrik Steiger declined to comment on the Malian statement. Work is under way with the Malian authorities to determine the identities of individuals killed. It s up to Mali, a sovereign country, to communicate on this subject, not the French forces, he said. France intervened in 2013 against Islamist militants that seized northern Mali a year earlier. Around 4,000 of its troops remain in West Africa s Sahel region as part of Operation Barkhane, a cross-border anti-terrorism operation. | 1 |
GOP Presidential candidate and religious right poster boy Mike Huckabee was confronted over his relationship with the Duggar family and decided to browbeat an Iowa voter for pointing out his dysfunctional relationship.The voter asked Huckabee why he announced support for the Duggar family, pointing out he propped up child abuse and the subsequent cover up of that abuse while attaching himself to Josh Duggar, who molested five girls. The Duggars have been influential with the religious right, a key constituency of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee s support base.In response Huckabee melted down, accusing the woman of making a scene and getting her facts about the case.Huckabee yelled at the woman and insisted that because he had known the Duggar children since they were babies she had no right to speak out about how the Duggar family patriarch, Jim Bob Duggar, had avoided reporting his son s abuse towards young children.But the voter was right. Huckabee had backed the Duggars.When the revelations about Duggar came out, Huckabee announced he was still backing the Duggar clan.Janet and I want to affirm our support for the Duggar family. Josh s actions when he was an underage teen are as he described them himself, inexcusable, but that doesn t mean unforgivable. He and his family dealt with it and were honest and open about it with the victims and the authorities. No purpose whatsoever is served by those who are now trying to discredit Josh or his family by sensationalizing the story. Good people make mistakes and do regrettable and even disgusting things.Yet as the campaign heated up and media scrutiny increased, Huckabee apparently felt the heat and scrubbed his campaign website of material showing the Duggar connection.So far Huckabee has been able to capture the magic of his 2008 campaign when he won the Iowa caucuses. He has been unable to qualify for the top-tier debates and currently polls at an average of 2% among Republicans. In all likelihood Huckabee will return to the lucrative world of being a Fox News pundit and cranking out history propaganda videos targeted at impressionable children.Featured image via YouTube | 1 |
It really is beginning to seem like some church communities are full of child molesters. Then again, those of us not brainwashed by propaganda already knew that. Here s another case of two children s lives being ruined by a devout Christian in a position of authority.Douglas J. Allison is the 55-year-old principal at a small Christian school that is an arm of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Port Angeles, Washington. He is one of two teachers, as well as the principal of Mountain View Christian School. Detectives heard the creepy old man confess to raping one of his young victims the girls were ten and eleven, respectively on a taped conversation. He also never tried to say he was not guilty of what he was being accused of when officers arrived at his house to take him away for his horrific crimes. In fact, this monster confessed to raping those little girls again to the arresting authorities.Allison is in jail on $100,000 bail, and hopefully no one pays it. He is charged with eight counts of molestation and four counts of child rape. Detectives are also working with authorities in California, as Douglas worked in a school there as well. There are likely more victims of his horrible and gross behavior.Associate Pastor Collette Pekar says of the situation: We are very, very sad. Our congregation is grieving. We love our kids, we love our families. We re praying for complete healing, for complete justice. The thing is, though, this sort of thing is all too common in religious communities. Some Christian cultures teach complete submission, and those in positions of authority, and often the churches are more concerned about their images and their collection plates than they are about the victims. It s disgusting and despicable, but true. That is why sexual predators are allowed to run rampant in those communities.Hopefully, these repeated cases of this sort of thing wakes people up, and they stop submitting to these creepy preachers and letting them abuse kids and others.Watch a video on this case below, via KOMO:Featured image via video screen capture | 0 |
Ambassador John Bolton was on Lou Dobbs tonight to comment on the Susan Rice news. It s being reported that she called for the unmasking of names for likely political reasons. if that s the case then she can be charged with fraud She should lawyer up ASAP. Reports are showing that the unmasking and spying increased as it came closer to Trump s inauguration. That could be the clue that this was stricly political. Who can forget her lies on 5 different morning shows after Benghazi. She s clearly someone who has zero credibility and who should be investigated for using intelligence for political purposes. Throw her in the slammer or give her immunity and make her talk?John Bolton This is stunning news. And you can t, even somebody as senior as the National Security Advisor, can t just decide they d like to unmask names to find out whose name is involved in a particular intercept If she said that even somebody as senior as her but her real motivation was political she was committing a kind of fraud on the intelligence gathering system and if she participated in that kind of fraud to help the political misuse of that intelligence she s got serious legal problems here. .@AmbJohnBolton says Susan Rice defrauded the intelligence system: She s got real legal problems here. #MAGA #Dobbs @POTUS pic.twitter.com/IIqdBN5AS0 Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) April 3, 2017OUR PREVIOUS REPORT ON SUSAN RICE FROM ADAM HOUSLEY:FOX NEWS ALERT: New details on @adamhousley's report; sources telling him the official who 'unmasked' Trump associates is 'very high up' pic.twitter.com/nowhUIIDSb FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) April 3, 2017 | 1 |
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The number of migrants sleeping rough on the streets of Paris has risen by at least a third since the start of the week when the “Jungle” shanty town in Calais was evacuated, officials said.
Along the bustling boulevards and a canal in a northeastern corner of Paris, hundreds of tents have been pitched by migrants – mostly Africans who say they are from Sudan – with cardboard on the ground to try and insulate them from the cold.
While the presence of migrants there is not new, it has grown substantially this week, Colombe Brossel, Paris deputy mayor in charge of security issues, told Reuters. …
Between the Stalingrad and Jaures Paris metro stations, migrants who spent the night camped out on the median strip of a major road, with traffic passing on either side, had scattered on Friday morning, many carrying their tents while police patrolled the center of the boulevard.
Migrants and officials said police checked ID papers and asylum requests and later let the migrants return to the central reservation of the avenue where they put their tents back up.
“There’s a lot of new people here,” said Mustafa, 21, from Darfur, as he waited on the side of the road. | 1 |
Republicans have put forward a plan to stop Obama administration s last minute regulations Tuesday. These midnight regulations published after the 2016 presidential election could cost the American taxpayer over $44 billion.California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa re-introduced legislation Tuesday that would allow Congress to overturn executive branch regulations finalized in the last 60 legislative days of an outgoing presidential administration.The bill amends the Congressional Review Act, which would allow Congress to recoup the ability to essentially curb numerous regulations rushed through the regulatory process in the last days of an outgoing administration at one time.Issa s office claims the bill is designed to stem a growing trend by Presidents, of both parties, to use their last few months in office to rush in costly, expensive or controversial new regulations. The legislation, expected to be approved by the House Wednesday, was already introduced with support from the Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Tom Marino. Regulations impacting the economy, the environment, families, and our community should be done with great caution and transparency, not get rushed in last-minute on a President s way out of office. This is a good piece of legislation that will help keep this and future Presidents in check. The Midnight Rules Relief Act is a reasonable plan to strengthen executive branch oversight, giving Congress a better tool to ensure regulations are limited and, when necessary, approved in an open and transparent manner, Issa said in a statement. Daily Caller | 1 |
Minnesota humorist Garrison Keillor just nailed Donald Trump in one of the best take-downs yet.Donald Trump is an insecure little man who thinks the presidency will finally make people respect him, and nobody made that clearer than Keillor, who wrote a column published on Wednesday that puts the Republican nominee in his place.Keillor begins by focusing on Trump s hat. The brim shadows your face, which gives a sinister look, as if you d come to town to announce the closing of the pulp factory, he wrote. Your eyes look dead and your scowl does not suggest American greatness so much as American indigestion. Keillor continued by pointing out that Trump has apparently been trying for his entire life to be liked and respected by the Manhattan elite. The New York Times treats you like the village idiot, Keillor wrote. This is painful for a Queens boy trying to win respect in Manhattan When you came to Manhattan 40 years ago, you discovered that in entertainment, the press, politics, finance, everywhere you went, you ran into Jews, and they are not like you: Jews didn t go in for big yachts and a fleet of aircraft they showed off by way of philanthropy or by raising brilliant offspring. They sympathized with the civil rights movement. In Queens, blacks were a threat to property values they belonged in the Bronx, not down the street. To the Times, Queens is Cleveland. Bush league. You are Queens. The casinos were totally Queens, the gold faucets in your triplex, the bragging, the insults, but you wanted to be liked by Those People. This explains why Trump would throw his hat into the presidential ring. He is desperate for respect from his wealthy peers. Running for president is your last bid for the respect of Manhattan, Keillor continued. If you were to win election, they couldn t ridicule you anymore. They could be horrified, but there is nothing ridiculous about being Leader of the Free World. You have B-52 bombers at your command. When you go places, a battalion of security guys comb the environs. You attract really really good speechwriters who give you Churchillian cadences and toss in quotes from Emerson and Aeschylus and Ecclesiastes. Keillor then went on to mock Trump over the bad month he had in August. The teleprompter is not your friend. You are in the old tradition of locker room ranting and big honkers in the steam room, sitting naked, talking man talk, griping about the goons and ginks and lousy workmanship and the uppity broads and the great lays and how you vanquished your enemies at the bank. Keillor concludes by pointing out that running for president is the hardest work Trump has ever done in his life and breaks the news to Donald that in the end he is going to lose and he won t get a damn thing he wanted. It s the hardest work you ve ever done. You walk out in the white cap and you rant for an hour about stuff that means nothing and the fans scream and wave their signs and you wish you could level with them for once and say one true thing: I love you to death and when this is over I will have nothing that I want. Donald Trump is currently imploding in the polls and his campaign continues fly off the rails even as he insists that he is winning and that everybody loves him.This is a man in serious denial and Keillor just hit him with the reality that he has always been a loser and will always be a loser.Featured image via Getty | 0 |
WARSAW (Reuters) - Several hundred people walked in silence on Monday night in Warsaw in memory of a 54-year-old man who died late last month after setting himself on fire in protest against the ruling conservatives policies. Piotr Szczesny, a married father of two from the small town of Niepolomice in Poland s south, died on Oct. 29, after setting himself on fire on Oct. 19 in front of the Palace of Culture, a Warsaw landmark. The Polish government, led by the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) which came to power two years ago, has been criticized by the European Commission for policies Brussels says jeopardize the freedom of the media and independence of courts. I love freedom above all, Szczesny, wrote in a leaflet, copies of which he scattered around himself. That s why I decided to commit the act of self-immolation and I hope that my death will shake the conscience of many people.... One of the protesters on Monday, Jacek Rabinski, a 38-year-old training to be a paramedic, said that he mourned Szczesny s life and was full of respect for his decision. We are here because we are worried about the situation in our country, the political situation, Rabinski said. Many people live in the conviction that politics doesn t concern them. Politics is us, we ordinary people create politics. | 1 |
So a woman straps an apparatus to her person, claims she s a man and expects airport security to treat her with kit gloves because she s entitled to special privileges? If you come through airport security with something foreign strapped to your body, why should you be entitled to special treatment? Sorry, but most of the world is not going to side with you on this one dude In a submission to an Australian senate inquiry into airport and aviation security, the National LGBTI Health Alliance reported a climate of pervasive discrimination for LGBTI people.The submission includes a lengthy complaint from an anonymous transgender person sent to one of Australia s major domestic airlines about an incident early last year.The person was passing through airport security and was selected to go through a body scanner, which picked up a prosthetic worn in their underwear. I explained to the officer at the scanner that I am trans and that I was wearing a prosthetic, to which he responded that he would need to get his supervisor, the complaint reads. In full view of other travellers, the supervisor approached me putting rubber gloves on, the passenger wrote. When I asked him what the gloves were for, he told me that he was going to do a private search . After entering a small room with the two men, the passenger pulled out the prosthetic for the men to see, and the supervisor put on a second glove.When again asked what the gloves were for, the supervisor responded, You want me to touch that thing with my bare hands? After placing the prosthetic in a tray and undergoing a pat-down, the supervisor opened the door for the passenger to leave. My prosthetic [was] still sitting in the tray. I asked him to close the door so that I could have some privacy, the complaint reads. He closed the door and both men stood watching me as I put it back in place. The passenger wrote that the experience left them feeling degraded and anxious about traveling.For entire story: Buzzfeed | 0 |
(CNN) Thousands gathered in Riyadh on Friday to say farewell to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud, a cautious reformer who succeeded in securing broader freedoms in the conservative kingdom, but fell short in gaining greater independence for women.
Abdullah died early Friday, several weeks after the state-run Saudi Press Agency said he was suffering from pneumonia and had been admitted to a hospital . The royal court didn't release an exact cause of death. He was 90.
To ensure a smooth transition, the kingdom quickly appointed his 79-year-old half-brother, Salman bin Abdulaziz, to the throne. His half-brother Prince Muqrin, a decade younger, is the new crown prince.
After Friday afternoon prayers at Riyadh's Imam Turki Bin Abdullah Grand Mosque, the body of Abdullah, wrapped in a pale shroud, was carried from the mosque toward a cemetery, followed by a solemn procession of Saudi men in traditional dress.
He was later laid to rest after a simple, swift ceremony. Those present at the graveside -- the royals closest to the late king -- were then to move on to a royal palace, where they were to pay their respects to the new monarch.
The ceremony of "al Bayaah," or pledging of allegiance to the new king, followed the funeral.
Condolences and remembrances poured in from all corners of the globe.
"To God we belong and indeed to him we shall return," said the homepage of the English-language Saudi newspaper Arab News.
Bahrain, Jordan and the Palestinian territories, among others, declared days of mourning. The U.N. secretary-general praised Abdullah for his Arab Peace Initiative to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said he would lead a delegation "in the coming days" to pay respects.
"King Abdullah's life spanned from before the birth of modern Saudi Arabia through its emergence as a critical force within the global economy and a leader among Arab and Islamic nations," U.S. President Barack Obama said in a statement.
Speaking to CNN's Richard Quest in Davos, Switzerland, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he expects no changes in his government's relations with Saudi Arabia.
"I don't anticipate anything based on the conversation we have had, no," he said.
In an address to the nation -- his first televised appearance since becoming king -- Salman offered his condolences to the Saudi people.
"We will, with God's will and power, adhere to the straight path this country followed since its establishment by King Abdulaziz and his sons after him, and will not deviate at all from it, since our constitution is the book of Allah (Quran) and the teachings of Prophet Mohammed," he said.
He also spoke of the "desperate need" for unity and solidarity among the followers of Islam, saying Saudi Arabia would continue to promote that.
He had already issued six royal decrees Friday, the Saudi Press Agency reported, including appointing Prince Mohammed bin Naif bin Abdulaziz as the deputy crown prince.
Salman, who has 1.33 million followers on Twitter but follows no one, changed his Twitter handle to @KingSalman.
In the context of the kingdom's conservative circles, Abdullah was seen as a reformer and often came up against more hardline clerics.
After ascending to the throne, Abdullah took steps toward broader freedoms and invested some of the country's vast oil wealth in large-scale education and infrastructure projects.
"He was really quite (an) extraordinary figure. He was probably the most progressive and liberal-minded king of Saudi Arabia since King Faisal, which is a long time ago, in the early 1970s," CNN's Fareed Zakaria said about Abdullah, whom he described as "much loved."
"I had the opportunity to meet with him once, and what you got a sense of was somebody who really was determined to move his country forward," Zakaria said. "It's a conservative country and a conservative society -- and he kept emphasizing that to me -- but he was very clear in the direction he wanted to go."
However, resistance from conservative factions hindered some of his efforts, leaving many women, in particular, disappointed by a lack of progress toward greater independence.
Under Abdullah's leadership, the country slowly squashed al Qaeda, capturing or killing its leaders in the kingdom, forcing the remnants underground and sidelining radical preachers.
It also took a more prominent role in international affairs.
"Remember, the last time the price of oil fell like this, the Soviet Union collapsed," said Zakaria. "That said, the successor is a very competent man."
He added: "I don't expect any major shift, but it marks a big change, and we'll have to see what the new king is like." | 0 |
Donald Trump s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, conveniently forgot to mention a slew of foreign contacts, including several meetings with high-profile Russian operatives, when he applied for his security clearance. Now, Democrats are demanding that Kushner s security clearance be revoked in light of his failure to disclose the meetings.Five House Democrats penned a letter to FBI Director James Comey and National Background Investigations Director Charles Phalen on Thursday, calling for Kushner to lose his security clearance. Mr. Kushner s lack of candor about meetings with Russian officials appears to be part of a larger pattern of dissembling and deception on Russian contacts from the Trump team, and we believe the public deserves the truth about what connection, if any, exists between these incidents, they wrote.The letter was signed by Don Beyer of Virginia, Ted Lieu of California, Jerrold Nadler of New York, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Peter Welch of Vermont. The Democrats said they were particularly concerned about an article in the New York Times that reported Kushner had omitted dozens of contacts with foreign leaders. They noted that this story did not receive the scrutiny it deserved. The lawmakers added a reminder that falsifying or concealing information on a SF-86 questionnaire is a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. Given the severity of the allegations and still unanswered questions about this administration s recently uncovered covert dealings with Russian government and intelligence officials, we are requesting that Mr. Kushner s interim top-secret security clearance be suspended pending a review of Mr. Kushner s compliance with the laws and regulation governing security clearance. The Democrats are also calling on Kushner to make public all of the meetings he had during the time of Trump s transition.According to Kushner s aides, he has been under an interim security clearance so far while the FBI has been gathering information on him. Kushner is also set to face an interview with Senate Intelligence Committee regarding his contacts with Russia.Via screen shotFeatured image via Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images | 1 |
Claire Bernish
Censorship by Facebook has become a thorn in the side of nearly anyone with an opinion differing from the narrative touted by the corporate press — for instance, sentiments not praising Hillary Clinton — and now, through both a new report from Reuters and emails published by Wikileaks, we have insight into why certain posts are targeted.
Facebook relies on a combination of artificial intelligence and human judgment to remove posts deemed offensive, violent, or otherwise unacceptable to its community standards — but precisely how the ultimate call to take down posts, pages, and groups are made remains unknown.
And Facebook takedowns, no matter the improvements to the process the social media behemoth claims to make, have been no less controversial or questionable — and those whose posts are censored have little if any recourse to argue their case.
Recent examples of head-scratchers which led to an international uproar, include Facebook’s removal of the iconic Vietnam War photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc — who, at just 9-years-old, was captured on film by an Associated Press photographer fleeing the aftermath of an errant napalm attack near a Buddhist pagoda in the village of Trang Bang.
That photograph helped cement in the collective American mind the horrors of the war, and ultimately fueled the success of the anti-war effort — but Facebook arbitrarily pulled the image for nudity — and proceeded even to ban the page of the Conservative prime minister of Norway for also posting the image.
Ultimately, the social media company reversed course in that case — but not before also taking down the equally iconic image of civil rights leader Rosa Park’s arrest.
But taking down of the image of Kim Phúc might not have been simply an error of AI, since it had been used as a specific example in training the teams responsible for content removal, two unnamed former Facebook employees told Reuters .
“Trainers told content-monitoring staffers that the photo violated Facebook policy, despite its historical significance, because it depicted a naked child, in distress, photographed without her consent, the employees told Reuters.”
In the final decision to reverse that censorship, Facebook head of the community operations division, Justin Osofsky, admitted it had been a “mistake.”
According to Reuters , to whom many current and former Facebook employees spoke on condition of anonymity, the process of judging which posts deserve to be remove and which should be allowed will, in certain instances, be left to the discretion of a small cadre of the company’s elite executives.
In addition to Osofsky, Global Policy Chief Monika Bickert; government relations chief, Joel Kaplan; vice president for public policy and communications, Elliot Schrage; and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg make the final call on censorship and appeals.
“All five studied at Harvard, and four of them have both undergraduate and graduate degrees from the elite institution. All but Sandberg hold law degrees. Three of the executives have longstanding personal ties to Sandberg,” the outlet notes. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg also occasionally offers guidance in difficult decisions. But there are others.
Company spokeswoman Christine Chen explained, “Facebook has a broad, diverse and global network involved in content policy and enforcement, with different managers and senior executives being pulled in depending on the region and the issue at hand.”
For those on the receiving end of what could only be described as lopsided and inexplicable censorship, recourse is generally limited and can be nearly impossible to come by. Often, the nature of posts and pages removed insinuates political motivations on the part of the censors.
Indeed, and once again flaring international controversy, Facebook disabled , among others, the accounts of editors of Quds and Shehab New Agency — prominent Palestinian media organizations — without explanation or even a specific example given for justification.
Although three of four Palestinian-focused accounts were restored, Facebook refused to comment to either Reuters or the accounts’ owners why the decision was reversed, except to say it had been an ‘error.’
In fact, although Chen and other Facebook insiders spoke with Reuters directly about contentious content removal policies and procedures, many details of the processes remain covert and sorely intransparent to the public who is so often forced to cope with the consequences.
Earlier this year, an exposé by Gizmodo showing Facebook’s suppression of conservative outlets via its “Trending Topics” section appeared to evidence extreme bias in favor of liberal and corporate media mainstays. Alternative media, too, which provides reports counter to the mainstream political and foreign policy paradigm, has often been the subject of controversial take-downs, censorship, and suppressive tactics — either directly by Facebook, or through convoluted algorithms and artificial intelligence bots.
However, considering Sheryl Sandberg and her loyalists populate the top-level group deciding the fate for content removal complaints, it would appear Wikileaks could provide answers for both post censorship and suppression of outlets not vowing complete fealty to the preferred, left-leaning narrative.
In a June 4, 2015, email to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta — an enormous cache of whose emails are still being published on a daily basis by Wikileaks — penned by Sandberg in response to condolences on the death of her husband, states , in part,
“And I still want HRC to win badly. I am still here to help as I can. She came over and was magical with my kids.”
After a wave of post removals and temporary page bans, it appears Facebook has begun to come to its senses for what actually violates community standards — and what might have political worth contrary to the views of its executives.
Senior members of Facebook’s policy team recently posted about the laxing of rules governing community standards, which — though welcome — might only provide temporary relief. Quoted by the Wall Street Journal , they wrote :
“In the weeks ahead, we’re going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest—even if they might otherwise violate our standards.”
While the social media giant deems itself a technology, and not news, platform, Facebook is still the bouncing off point for issues of interest for an overwhelming percentage of its users. Although it perhaps has some responsibility in regard to the removal of certain content, putting censorship in the hands of only a few individuals in certain instances is a chilling reminder of the fragility — and grave importance — of free speech. | 1 |
Patrick Henningsen 21st Century WireSo far as world peace and prosperity goes, most of the names currently being kicked around for America s top diplomatic position do not inspire a great deal of confidence. It s easy to feel uneasy when you see recycled neoconservative hawks like John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani, or old hands like Mitt Romney who previously stated that Russia is America s greatest threat. As far as potential picks go for Secretary of State, none is more interesting than the potential that Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard brings to the table. President-Elect Donald Trump invited Hawaii s Gabbard to New York City this week for a meeting regarding possible involvement in the new Presidential Administration. She s got a lot going for her as an Iraq War veteran with deep understanding of the perils of US interventions overseas, she also brings with her some common sense geopolitical context a refreshing change from the off-the-shelf, neoliberal interventionist juggernaut previously driven by the hawkish Hillary Clinton, or the flippant public tirades and baseless insults leveled at Russia by the likes of Samantha Power.With an apparently more experienced Romney ahead of her in the queue, Gabbard is certainly a long shot, but considering the mess left behind by eight years of clandestine free for-all and the chronic absent-minded Obama era interventionist policy blunders, not to mention (but we will) the hysterical public meltdowns by US State Dept spokespersons like John Kirby, Jen Psaki and Marie Harf you can t help but consider the fresh approach that someone like Gabbard might offer.Gabbard (photo, left) also understands the dangers posed by salafist and Wahabi extremists like ISIS, and most certainly would push back against the Obama Administration and the CIA s dubious (and technically illegal, by way of US and international law) policy of arming and supporting various and sundry moderate rebel extremists (terrorists) in Syria like Al Nusra Front, Arar al Sham, Nour al-din al-Zenki and many others all favored by western covert subterfuge teams as instruments of regime change in Syria.In terms of independence, Gabbard has already made it clear that her stint would not involve capitulating to her GOP cabinet cohorts, adding that if she was to disagree with President Trump, I will not hesitate to express that disagreement. Previously, Gabbard was Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), but suddenly resigned earlier this year in protest after pointing out her party s unfair favoring of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders during their party s primaries. Following the Wikileaks disclosures, it turns out that Gabbard was on the right side of history, while her detractors in the DNC leadership hierarchy like Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (forced to resign over the Sanders affair was exposed) and Donna Brazile (caught cheating with CNN by passing questions to the Clinton campaign) ended up on the wrong side of history. Here we can see a positive pattern emerging for Gabbard, and it gets better.SEE ALSO: Trump s Foreign Policy: Russia, Syria, Iran and Cabinet NeoconsRegarding foreign policy, Gabbard s stance on Syria is remarkable, and holds great potential for a resolution to the 5 year conflict (not a civil war), as well as a chance to make positive inroads with Russia and other countries who have been perennial foes of both the Obama and Bush Administrations. Because of this, Gabbard has many enemies from on both the Republicans and Democratic chambers alike. Washington, with all of its untoward influence from the cartel of military defense contractor giants, and foreign lobbies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, will not go quietly overnight.In a major departure from the abject failure of the Obama-Clinton-Kerry proxy war debacle in Syria, Gabbard said this about her alignment with Trump policy objectives and diffusing a tense situation in Syria: However, I believe we can disagree, even strongly, but still come together on issues that matter to the American people and affect their daily lives. We cannot allow continued divisiveness to destroy our country I shared with him my grave concerns that escalating the war in Syria by implementing a so-called no fly/safe zone would be disastrous for the Syrian people, our country and the world, she said. It would lead to more death and suffering, exacerbate the refugee crisis, strengthen ISIS and al-Qaeda and bring us into a direct conflict with Russia, which could result in a nuclear war. We discussed my bill to end our country s illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government and the need to focus our precious resources on rebuilding our own country and on defeating al-Qaeda, ISIS and other terrorist groups who pose a threat to the American people. Critics have remarked about her young age (35 years old) and lack of political experience. However, consider how much experience both of the previous Secretary of States had in John Kerry and Hillary Clinton and yet, they have presided over one unmitigated foreign policy disaster after another, whether in Libya, Syria, Yemen or the Ukraine. Quite possibly, history will look back on these two Obama appointees as the worst ever Secretary of States to hold that position. This is no exaggeration when you pause and take a sober look around the Middle East today.Aside from the novelty of her relative youth in relation to typically older diplomats, Gabbard s authenticity and character comes across in her public speaking, and thus she could be very effective, and no doubt very popular internationally. She s also gone against the party line on Syria. Once again, there she is on the right side of history, while her more experienced party leaders are on stuck on the wrong side. While boldly challenging the party line won t win you any favors in the partisan cesspool of the DC swamp, it shows the sort of character required to lead a team for successful bilateral consensus-building at the international negotiations table. In terms of the US public relations image internationally, this is an intangible benefit that you simply cannot put a price on, because right now, Washington s chief priority should be mending some of the serious rifts left behind by a previously derelict State Dept. Gabbard has the potential to paint US diplomacy in an entirely new light, and a positive one at that. The biggest mistake a Trump White House could make is to place a neoconservative, or hawkish Secretary in place who might help to reboot talking up a war with Iran, or use NATO to press against Russia at its doorstep.So the real question should not be about Gabbard s relative experience, but rather can she be what the previous Secretaries could not a diplomat.It s a long shot, but she has the potential to mend a fractured Middle East and also revamp relations with Russia which means a more peaceful and stable world. Not a bad a thought.More from the Trump Transition Team . Shushannah Walshe ABCDemocratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a high-profile Bernie Sanders supporter during the Democratic primaries, is under serious consideration for various Cabinet positions in President-elect Donald Trump s administration, according to a senior official on the transition team.According to the official, the 35-year-old Hawaii congresswoman is being looked as a candidate for secretary of state, secretary of defense or United Nations ambassador. If selected, Gabbard will be the first woman as well as the youngest pick for Trump s Cabinet.She met with him this morning in his New York City offices at Trump Tower. The Trump transition source said that their sit-down was a terrific meeting and that the Trump team sees her as very impressive.Gabbard, a progressive Democrat, has bucked her party in Congress and during the contentious Democratic primaries. In February she left her position as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee to support Sanders. In the House she has broken with Democrats on the Syrian civil war (she supports keeping President Bashar al-Assad in power) and Syrian refugees (she voted for a GOP bill last year to conduct stricter background checks on refugees).This afternoon she released a long statement on her meeting with Trump, saying he asked to meet with her about our current policies regarding Syria, our fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as other foreign policy challenges we face. She said they had a frank and positive conversation in which we discussed a variety of foreign policy issues in depth. Continue this story at ABCREAD MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 FilesSUPPORT OUR WORK BY SUBSCRIBING & BECOMING A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 0 |
But O Donnell told Joy Reid on MSNBC s AM Joy on Sunday that if they sue Walsh, they should sue him as well: I believe that Bill O Reilly sexually harassed Wendy Walsh. I believe Bill O Reilly is a sexual harasser. Now, according to O Reilly s thug lawyer, I m sue-able right now. Go ahead. Go ahead. Come and sue me, Bill O Reilly, I dare you. He predicted that O Reilly won t sue because he s actually guilty of these things and also because he wouldn t want to be under oath answering questions about the case.O Donnell also blasted Fox News as a cesspool of sexual harassment and abuse of women. Attention-starved O Donnell wants to jump in on the action It s all about ratings | 1 |
On Tuesday, Lewis Black appeared on Comedy Central s The Nightly Show to hype his ABC special, Madoff, but made sure to take the time to be his lovable, crotchety self. Black says that the most surprising news that arose out of the Iowa caucuses was that Ben Carson seemingly left all of his clothes in Florida and had to fly home to get them. What s surprising is that Ben Carson flew from Iowa to Florida to get a change of clothes, Black said. That kind of leads into the other thing that someone really that batsh*t crazy could score 10 percent in Iowa. Though Black agreed with the rest of the panel that Marco Rubio poses the most severe threat to Hillary Clinton, but Black questioned his ability to actually be President, noting that much of his time in office would be on the job training as with Barack Obama But host Larry Wilmore disagreed, noting that Republicans racist opposition to every single one of the President s initiatives played a bigger role in stifling any progress Obama may have attempted to make. It was absolutely that, but also it was dealing with it s the same position of a guy who s in the Senate who hasn t been in the Senate long enough, But when Wilmore pointed out that Ted Cruz, whose daughter recently snubbed him as he attempted to orchestrate a warm family moment for the cameras, had a similar background to Rubio, it was on. Black pointed out that both Trump and Cruz are bullies, but Cruz is far too creepy to be recognized as just as big a bully as Donald Trump: Here s what Rubio s problem is right now both Trump and Cruz are both bullies. So I think that they re going to kind of punch him. What I really find interesting about Cruz, after everything else, is that people don t seem to have noticed that he is a bully. Trump is an obvious bully. Cruz is the bully who acts weird, and he s acting weird all the time, and so you end up doing what the weird guy wants you to do so he ll stop acting weird. Trump is such an amazing overbearing asshole that we can t see how creepy Cruz is, Wilmore added, with Black noting that there s a touch of ferret in Cruz s family.Cruz is remembered as the creepy guy in school. His former college roommate, Craig Mazin, is almost addicted to telling people about it on Twitter, noting that the presidential hopeful leaves behind a greasy film on whatever he touches. They even had a nickname for it Cruhz. He was also fond of hanging out near the women s restroom in a bathrobe for reasons we would rather not imagine.Of course, it could be said that Trump is creepy, as well, with his numerous remarks about how he wants to sleep with his daughter and the insanely unsettling ways they pose for photographs, so Cruz does have some competition in that department. At least Cruz can say, completely honestly, that he doesn t want to sleep with his little girl.Watch Black lay the smack down, below:The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore Get More: The Nightly Show Full Episodes,The Nightly Show on Facebook,The Nightly Show Video ArchiveFeatured image via screengrab | 0 |
Civil political discourse took a beating in West Virginia this weekend when a Democratic senator profanely proclaimed that he was going to vote the way he wanted and didn t give a s t if it cost him his seat. I don t give a s t, you understand? I just don t give a s t, Sen. Joe Manchin told the Charleston Gazette-Mail on Sunday, saying he wasn t going to toe his party s line on every issue. Don t care if I get elected, don t care if I get defeated, how about that. If they think because I m up for election, that I can be wrangled into voting for s t that I don t like and can t explain, they re all crazy, he continued. I m not scared of an election, let s put it that way. Elections do not bother me or scare me, he said. I m going to continue to do the same thing I ve always done, extremely independent. President Trump won West Virginia by a mile, and Democratic Gov. Jim Justice pointedly switched teams and joined the GOP at a Trump campaign rally in the state last week.Watch Governor Justice announce that he s switching parties at the Trump rally last week:West Virginia Democratic Governor Jim Justice announces that he is switching parties to GOP https://t.co/io13ugk6KD https://t.co/GZkqWBJ6z3 NBC News (@NBCNews) August 3, 2017Manchin s angry comments followed a slam from GOP senatorial candidate Patrick Morrisey, who called for the incumbent to resign from the Democratic leadership.Morrisey cited Manchin s refusal to sign onto a letter establishing Democrats three main policy points on tax reform, The Hill reported.Manchin was one of three Democrats in the Senate who didn t sign the letter.He explained that he agreed with the party platform but wanted party leaders to get Republicans on board. NYP | 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives were in discussions on Tuesday about how long to fund the federal government in a short-term spending measure expected to come to a vote as early as Wednesday. “I feel like we’re going to have a majority... for passing the CR (spending measure) we have this week,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters after a closed-door meeting with fellow House Republican members. “We’re having a good conversation with our members about timing and date ... and all the rest,” he added. The conservative House Freedom Caucus, which has enough members to block legislation, has pressed Republican leaders to consider a spending measure that expires on Dec. 30, eight days later than the Dec. 22 deadline that House and Senate Republicans have been discussing up to now. Ryan said the end date of the measure, known officially as a continuing resolution, or CR, would become known when it reaches the House floor. But House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions told reporters his panel would consider a continuing resolution that expires on Dec. 22. The committee later rescheduled its hearing on the legislation for 3 p.m. (2000 GMT) on Wednesday. Several other House Republicans, however, said members were still debating whether the funding would expire on Dec. 22 or on Dec. 30, after the Dec. 25 Christmas holiday. “It’s still being negotiated,” said Representative Greg Walden. A Senate Republican leadership aide sidestepped a question on what Senate leaders thought about the CR date. “If the House makes any changes to their bill, I’m sure they will let everyone know,” the aide said. | 1 |
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday said that Hungary sees a strong Poland as a vital component of a central European caucus within the European Union, and so will block any action to suspend Poland s voting rights in the EU. Orban said Poland, under fire from Brussels for its transformation of the judiciary, was being criticized unfairly and unjustly. He spelled out that Hungary would not subscribe to an attempt to invoke the EU s Article 7 sanction process. We need to make it clear to the EU that it is pointless even to start proceedings against Poland as there is no chance of seeing it through - because Hungary will be there and form an insurmountable road block, Orban said. | 1 |
As polls show Clinton beating Donald Trump in Kansas and catching up in Georgia, another solid red state is showing the presumptive Democratic nominee beating the Republican nominee.A recent poll conducted by OH Predictive Insight shows Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump in Arizona by 5 points, 47-42 (with approximately 6 percent backing a third party candidate and less than approximately 6 percent unsure).The poll surveyed a whopping 1,060 likely Democratic, Republican, Independent and Non-Declared voters across the Grand Canyon state, and found that Trump s trailing comes from his serious deficit with women and urban voters. The last time a Democrat carried Arizona was in 1996, when Bill Clinton was elected to his second term.The pollsters responded with shock at Arizona s competitiveness. Mike Noble, managing partner of the polling company, said of the findings: It s very surprising to think that Hillary Clinton may carry Arizona, a state that holds the narratives of SB1070, two nationally known anti-illegal immigration sheriffs, liberal gun laws and consistently conservative constituents. Wes Gullet, another partner in the company and a former Phoenix mayoral candidate, echoed Noble s shock at the results: It s shocking to think that a Democratic presidential candidate would carry Arizona if the election were held today, considering that every statewide office in Arizona is held by a Republican as well as significant majorities in the Arizona House and Senate. Arizona should be a reliable red state. The poll also showed 10 percent of Democrats backing Trump while 13 percent of Republicans are backing Clinton. Clinton also led Trump among Independents 45-38, a seven point advantage.In 2012, Mitt Romney won Arizona by 9 percent. The fact that Clinton nabs Independent voters and more Republicans than Trump does with Democrats could turn Arizona blue.The state that has given us SB 1070, Jan Brewer, Sheriff Joe Arpaio and a cranky John McCain may be turning blue after all. Maybe putting a racist, sexist xenophobe as the Republican Party s nominee wasn t such a good idea.Featured image via Sara D. Davis/Getty Images | 1 |
President Barack Obama hasn t exactly kept his disgust and disdain for Republican nominee Donald Trump a secret, but he made it hilariously obvious when he appeared on Monday night s Late Show With Stephen Colbert, as the two men brutally mocked the GOP s sorry excuse for a presidential candidate.On the show, Obama sat down with host Stephen Colbert, who tries to disguise himself so he can subtly ask the President how he feels about this election s presidential candidates. Because he couldn t flat-out ask Obama how he really felt, Colbert found an interesting way to get the information out of our commander-in-chief: by asking him to choose between two snacks.Colbert asked Obama to make a decision between an extra fiber nutrient bar which has traveled to more than 100 countries, or this shriveled tangerine covered in golden retriever hair, filled with bile, that I wouldn t leave alone with the woman I love. By the description alone, we all know just which snack represented what candidate but the visual made the whole thing even more hilarious. In all honesty, the tangerine wasn t too far off from being an exact replica of Trump anyway.You can watch the clip below to see Colbert and Obama both poke fun of America s worse presidential candidate to date:Wherein @POTUS makes an important snack decision. (Watch the rest tonight on #LSSC!) pic.twitter.com/Wkeqs6tMU8 The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) October 17, 2016Judging by Trump s Twitter activity over the last few hours, the business mogul may have already seen this clip because he was caught dissing Obama shortly after Colbert tweeted the clip (and Obama s decision):TwitterBitter, much? Trump s emotions are running high right now, and he must be terrified to face off with Clinton again during Wednesday night s debate. He s unraveling fast, and I m sure having the President of the United States insult you only adds insult to injury.Featured image via screenshots | 1 |
Once again, Republicans are throwing a hissy fit because President Obama did not cut his vacation short to go immediately to Louisiana, but Governor John Bel Edwards put them in their place.As Louisiana deals with historic flooding that has broken records while killing 13 people and destroying tens of thousands of home, Republicans have been complaining about President Obama not dropping everything to visit the state.But during an appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show on Thursday night, Governor Bel Edwards set the record straight.As it turns out, Bel Edwards thinks President Obama s presence would be a distraction that would force the state to shift people and resources to prepare for the visit instead of remaining where they belong.First responders and emergency personnel are still involved in the rescue and recovery phase of the disaster, so pulling them away from that effort would be unwise. Therefore, Bel Edwards appreciates that President Obama did not jump on the first plane to Baton Rouge. The president is welcome anytime he wants to come, Bel Edwards said. I do want you to know, and your viewers to know, that within hours of me making a request for a federal declaration I got it from the president. He called me. I want you to know that I ve been speaking to Valerie Jarrett just about every day. He dispatched the FEMA administrator to meet with me for an entire day. Today I had the Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. We ve also had the four-star general who runs all of the guard for the country here today. Bel Edwards said he would prefer if President Obama waited a week or two before coming to tour the flood damage and gave an example of what has to done to prepare for such a visit by pointing out how the state prepared for Vice-President Joe Biden s visit when he attended a memorial service three weeks ago for slain police officers. It is a major ordeal, they free up the interstate for him. We have to take hundreds of local first responders, police officers, sheriffs, deputies and state troopers to provide security for that type of visit. I would just as soon have those people engaged in the response rather than trying to secure the president. So I d ask him to wait, if he would, another couple weeks. Bel Edwards also noted that FEMA has been embedded in Baton Rouge since last Thursday, so President Obama and the federal government were well prepared to respond to the flooding unlike President Bush was for Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,836 people.Rachel Maddow also pointed out that the state would have had emergency funding for this disaster had former Governor Bobby Jindal and Republican lawmakers not crippled state revenue by giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy.Here s the video via MSNBC:In short, President Obama has not ignored Louisiana s struggle. He has done everything short of visiting the state. And if he did visit, it would only do more harm then good.Donald Trump, on the other hand, visited the state and he couldn t even be bothered to cut a check to help those in need. The only help he provided was to assist in unloading play-doh from a truck instead of food or water or any other useful supply that people actually need.Meanwhile, President Obama has given Louisiana all the assistance they could possibly ask for in order to help people affected by the flooding. That s what real leadership is all about. Republicans would be well-advised to follow his example.Featured Image: Screenshot | 1 |
Thu, 27 Oct 2016 15:33 UTC Danney Williams and Bill Clinton YouTube on Wednesday terminated the account of Danney Williams, the 30-year-old man who has claimed since the 1990s to be the black son of former President Bill Clinton. But YouTube suddenly reversed its decision on Thursday amid public outcry and reinstated the account in the early morning hours, posting a notice that said only: "After a review of your account, we have confirmed that your YouTube account is not in violation of our Terms of Service. As such, we have unsuspended your account." When it terminated the account on Wednesday, YouTube cited unspecified "repeated or severe violations of our Terms of Use and/or Community Guidelines" and declared the account "cannot be restored." The YouTube decision to terminate Williams' account blocked the nine-minute feature "BANISHED - The Untold Story of Danney Williams," which had received 1.2 million views since Williams posted it last week. Produced by filmmaker Joel Gilbert, it drew nearly 100,000 views per day and more than 1,000 viewer comments , with the overwhelming majority expressing support for Williams and outrage at the Clintons for not being willing to allow a DNA test to determine paternity. "My YouTube account has been deleted, but the same video appears in 50 other places on YouTube alone," Williams said on his Facebook page after being notified of YouTube's decision to suspend the account. "[YouTube] can't handle the truth! Please share #BillClintonSon." Twitter also continued to allow Williams to post the "Banished" video on Danney Williams' page , but the Twitter link to YouTube displayed the message : "This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated. Sorry about that." The video is still running on Danney Williams-Clinton's Facebook page , as well as on the YouTube channel operated by Gilbert. Attempt to silence Danney Williams? Gilbert told WND on Wednesday he helped Williams file an online appeal form on YouTube asking why the account was suspended and demanding it be immediately reinstated. "The behavior of YouTube/Google in suspending Danney's account is outrageous! There have been absolutely zero violations of any kind let alone a severe one of any YouTube terms or guidelines," Gilbert said. Gilbert was outspoken in charging YouTube with partisan political motives. "The only possible explanation is that the Clinton campaign requested YouTube/Google to silence Danney, 'to run him off the plantation' as Danney said Hillary Clinton did to him and his aunt when he was a small child and they were chased off the grounds of the Arkansas governor's mansion in 1990," Gilbert said. "Danney cannot be silenced any longer," he continued. "Hillary may try to sweep Danney Williams under the rug, but it's not going to work this time. His story is out there, and every day more and more people understand Bill and Hillary Clinton banished this young man from their family because of the color of his skin." See the Danney Williams video feature: WND reported Oct. 19 that in the hours before the third and final presidential debate, attorneys for Williams were in Las Vegas to announce their intention to file a paternity suit demanding DNA evidence from the former president. Accompanying the dramatic announcement was a rap music video celebrating Williams that went viral on the Internet. No definitive DNA test WND reported that no DNA test was conducted in 1999, despite media reports to the contrary when Williams' claim first surfaced. Clinton defenders since 1999 have contended the tabloid Star Magazine conducted a "DNA showdown" proving Bill Clinton was not Williams' father, citing Star Magazine editor Phil Bunton saying at the time, "There was no match, nothing even close." But in an interview, Bunton told WND that no blood sample was obtained from Clinton and Star Magazine never published a story documenting a laboratory test. "I don't remember ever seeing any laboratory test that was done on Clinton's DNA," Bunton told WND. Bunton is now the owner of the Rivertown Magazine in Haverstraw, New York. He affirmed to WND that the tabloid relied on the DNA evidence for Clinton published by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, extracted from the infamous Monica Lewinsky blue dress. "We got a lot of phone calls from several people in the media, including the New York Times, wanting to know when we were going to get the DNA back," Bunton recalled to WND. "We thought it was going to turn out to be his son, but when the DNA came back there was no story there even to write." The DNA test released by Kenneth Starr was the second of two DNA laboratory tests the FBI had run on Clinton, but the public record leaves no doubt that Starr withheld the more robust test conducted by the FBI. 'Twitter rules' Many other figures who have challenged the Democratic Party or the left-leaning media narrative also have run into trouble with social media outlets, including James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas, which has exposed Clinton campaign voter fraud and agitation in a series of hidden-camera videos. Just as O'Keefe was preparing to release new revelations of voter fraud Oct. 13, Twitter shut down his account , claiming violations of "Twitter Rules." The notice said he "must delete the tweets that are in violation of our rules, which prohibit: harassing other users, threatening other users, disclosing other users' private information" or violating "other rules." In a statement, O'Keefe said he relies on social media to "bypass the media and directly reach the public." On Monday, O'Keefe wrote in a tweet Project Veritas was unable to upload its third video in the series to YouTube, calling the apparent block "bizarre." Earlier this month, O'Keefe was forced to delete a tweet critical of a Hillary Clinton staffer to regain use of his account after it was suspended for a day. His account was suspended in the hours before a release of a new hidden-camera video that exposed a Clinton ally saying she could use executive action on guns, the Daily Caller reported . Project Veritas posted an undercover video Oct. 17 proving Hillary Clinton supporters were inciting violence at Donald Trump rallies to gain negative media coverage. Millions of viewers watched the video in just a few hours, but it didn't show up on Google's "trending" list on YouTube, which Google owns, noted SilenceisConsent.net . It did, however, trend on Twitter, which Google does not own. Breitbart blogger Milo Yiannopoulos was suspended permanently by Twitter minutes before his "Gays for Trump" party at the Republican National Convention. For some 11 months, the makers of the new movie "I'm Not Ashamed," about the first victim of the Columbine killers in Colorado in 1999, were unable to promote their movie through YouTube. The trailer was taken down late in 2015, and the movie's entire channel was suspended . Among the conservatives censored by Facebook : Conservative activist and Trump supporter Lauren Southern received a 30-day ban from Facebook because she complained about a friend's account being censored. Facebook locked a 12-year-old black middle schooler's account for posting a video supporting Rudy Giuliani's comment that Obama "doesn't love America." The admin of a pro-Trump group was banned for saying Trump is not anti-Muslim, but anti-ISIS. | 1 |
Disney is refusing, thus far, to buckle to hackers’ ransomware demands to return the new edition of Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. [Deadline Hollywood reported that Disney CEO Bob Iger has gone to the FBI, rather than pay a huge amount of Bitcoins to the ransomware hackers to recover the latest Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. The first several episodes generated $3. 75 billion at the box office. The WannaCrypt virus, better known as “WannaCry,” over the weekend at the rate of about 5, 000 computers an hour. It exploited known vulnerabilities of servers running Microsoft software that had not been updated with the existing Windows Defender’s security patch, or are so old they are no longer supported. The WannaCry ransomware also exploits a Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) vulnerability developed by the U. S. National Security Agency and disclosed on Twitter last month by the infamous ShadowBrokers hacker auction site. Cybersecurity Ventures estimated financial losses at about $4 billion, before Disney late last night confirmed to ABC employees that the movie was being held hostage. Hollywood’s other big media property caught up in the WannaCry ransomware hack is Netflix’s Orange is the New Black. Huge corporations like Disney and Netflix employ very sophisticated security professionals and spend big bucks to license software. But the thousands of financially struggling creative individuals, and hundreds of small specialized vendors, who service the media giants lack appropriate security tools, which is providing criminals with an open door to steal intellectual property treasures. Despite estimated global corporate investment plans to spend $1 trillion on computer security over the next four years, annual cybercrime losses are expected to grow from $3 trillion in 2015 to a $6 trillion a year in 2021. Global damage from the WannaCry virus was limited after a researcher at Malware Tech accidentally discovered a “kill switch” over the weekend. | 0 |
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The NRA’s magazine acknowledged that President Obama “really hasn’t had the opportunity to” confiscate firearms, undercutting years of fearmongering about the supposed existence of a “ massive Obama conspiracy ” to dismantle the Second Amendment and take guns away.
The NRA’s admission that a president can’t confiscate guns because “Congress writes the laws, not the president” also demonstrates the implausibility of repeated recent claims from the NRA that link Hillary Clinton to gun confiscation.
The admission was included in a June 9 article for NRA magazine America’s 1st Freedom which took issue with how Obama “rudely” responded to a question from a gun store owner at a recent town hall event.
The article quoted Obama as telling the questioner, “I’m about to leave office. There have been more guns sold since I’ve been president than just about any time in U.S. history. There are enough guns for every man, woman and child in this country. And at no point have I ever proposed confiscating guns from responsible gun owners. So it is just not true.”
Responding to Obama’s statement, the article acknowledged, “Now, [the gun store owner]could have interrupted the president to mention that Obama really hasn’t had the opportunity to do that. Congress writes the laws, not the president”:
Rhude didn’t sit down after asking his question. Rather, he stood silently as President Obama didn’t even try to answer his question, but instead went off on a defensive tirade: “First of all, the notion that I or Hillary or Democrats or whoever you want to choose are hell-bent on taking away folks’ guns is just not true. And I don’t care how many times the NRA says it.”
Obama then said, “I’m about to leave office. There have been more guns sold since I’ve been president than just about any time in U.S. history. There are enough guns for every man, woman and child in this country. And at no point have I ever proposed confiscating guns from responsible gun owners. So it is just not true.”
Now, Rhude could have interrupted the president to mention that Obama really hasn’t had the opportunity to do that. Congress writes the laws, not the president. He could then have listed the many attacks on the right to bear arms — from Operation Fast and Furious to Operation Choke Point to Obama’s attempted ban on common ammunition for AR-15-type rifles to his using a “pen and phone” to push anti-gun executive actions. But Rhude respectfully stayed silent.
Claims about gun confiscation and Obama have been the NRA’s bread and butter for the past eight years . More recently, the NRA has suggested that the election of Clinton could lead to gun confiscation for law-abiding Americans.
Read in full on Media Matters for America: NRA Admits It: “Obama Really Hasn’t Had The Opportunity To” Confiscate Guns
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CNN has been heavily criticized for its coverage of Donald Trump s rise and rightfully so. For months, one of the most watched news networks in America deferred to the both sides model of false equivalency that had been standard practice for years. Recently, as Trump clinched the Republican nomination and it became clear that he has no intention of being more presidential, something in the minds of the network s reporters and hosts clicked. They finally seem to get it. Donald Trump is a despicable person and no amount of he said, she said is going to blunt that fact.So they ve changed. And in doing so have absolutely upped their game.On a recent episode of At This Hour, hosts John Berman and Kate Bolduan put on a masterclass on how to press a Trump supporter to get right down to the uncomfortable truth at the very root of Trump s campaign. They invited on freshman congressman Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) and slowly demolished his talking points. Watching a human being get so thoroughly decimated is never easy, but given Zeldin s baffling support for Trump it s hard to say he didn t have it coming. He knows Trump is a racist just ask him.After Zeldin tried to dismiss Trump s comments about his Hispanic judge as a regrettable mistake, the pair of hosts didn t let him off the hook. If Donald Trump is engaging in racism, are you still comfortable supporting him? Zeldin tried to change the subject, as he no doubt was trained to do. But Bolduan and Berman weren t buying it. After trying to use the opportunity to pivot to bashing Hillary Clinton, Bolduan interrupts. I m not saying Are you now voting for Hillary Clinton? , but are you still endorsing Donald Trump if you think he s engaging in racism? Well, yes, it s Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton and it s a no brainer between the two of them Are you essentially saying Yes he s a racist, but he s our racist ? Boom!Zeldin has to admit that while Trump s comments are indeed racist, he thinks in Trump s heart that he isn t a white supremacist. (A tip for any aspiring politicians: If you have to go on national television to tepidly argue that deep inside your candidate isn t as racist as he looks, you ve already lost.)Again Berman holds his feet to the fire: Sorry but what would you call someone who makes racist statements? Everyone calls them a racist. So if Donald Trump is making racist statements, you re saying he s a racist! Hahaha.The exchange ends with Zeldin throwing up the last, most desperate argument he and his party has in their playbook: Trump may be a racist, but Obama is a bigger racist. The look on the hosts faces is absolutely priceless.Watch the full, cringeworthy exchange below:Featured image via CNN | 1 |
Donald Trump was right again! This is yet another example of the media distorting or just not telling the truth. Several news sources have slammed Trump and said he s lying about what happened on 9/11. Not only is this disturbing, but it brings into question so much more about 9/11.American Thinker s Ed Straker gets to the heart of the media s refusal to report on Muslim support for 9/11:Why does any of this matter? The media continue to try to paint Trump as a bigot. This all ties into the refugee question. If we admit more refugees, will some be sympathetic to terrorists? It s easy to get to yes if you know, as I do, that some here already support terrorism.Since our refugees come from other countries, not New Jersey, you would think the media would want to examine foreign Muslim support for radical Islam. You would think they would want to see these polls showing alarming percentages of foreign Muslims who support attacks on America. And have a look at this poll, which shows that 5% of Muslim Americans support radical Islam and 14% of American Muslims claim to have no opinion of radical Islam. Admitting more Muslims to America during this time of war exposes Americans to large and unwarranted risks.But this is not the question the media want to look at. They are only interested in Muslims in Jersey City, New Jersey. Perhaps they should look into the arrest of this Islamic bomber who lived in Jersey City, or how the Islamic Center of Jersey City promotes jihad, or the arrest of this West New Yorker (that s right next to Jersey City) who was providing support for ISIS.The Washington Post reported on September 18, 2001 one week after the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks, that the law enforcement officers were investigating people in Muslim enclaves of Jersey City, New Jersey who were seen the day of the attacks celebrating and holding rooftop parties to watch the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers unfold across the Hudson River in New York City. One of the Post s reporters later stated his sources were eyewitnesses and Jersey City police officers.The issue of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the attacks was raised recently by leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.Excerpt from the Washington Post: The FBI investigation into the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon has led agents back to a familiar area: northern New Jersey. It was there, in Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, that a Muslim cell plotted the 1993 bombing of the twin towers and sought to destroy other New York landmarks as part of an urban guerrilla war against the United States. It is believed that 13 of those detained by federal authorities for questioning in its probe into the worst terrorist act in U.S. history are from northeastern New Jersey, some from the same Journal Square area where suspects in the 1993 bombing lived. In October 1995, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian cleric who delivered fiery sermons at a run-down mosque in Jersey City, was convicted of directing the conspiracy to blow up the United Nations, an FBI building, and three bridges and tunnels linking New York and New Jersey. He was also convicted of being part of a plot to kill Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Sayyid Nosair of Jersey City and Cliffside Park was also charged in the 1990 killing of Rabbi Meir Kahane in Manhattan. The Kahane murder was the beginning of a series of militant acts by the Muslim cell that was encouraged by Abdel-Rahman, the group s spiritual leader. Jersey City, an urban enclave of 240,055 people that is home to one of the largest Arab populations among U.S. cities In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river. H/t PowerlineJohn Hindraker at Powerline reported the Post article earlier Sunday and added that one of the reporters on the story, Serge F. Kovaleski, had informed a researcher, Irfan Khawaja, who was looking into whether Muslims in northern New Jersey had celebrated the 9/11 attacks that his sources for the report on Jersey City were Jersey City police officers.Then there is this follow-up from Irfan Khawaja in July 2004:In an email to me on Dec. 16, 2003, Kovaleski indicated that his information had come from the Jersey City Police Department, and that he had confirmed the JCPD s information via interviews of eyewitnesses of the celebration.I don t think Trump saw anyone celebrating in Jersey City on television, but I could be wrong about that. In any event, NPR, the New York Times and the Associated Press are simply wrong when they tell their audiences that there is no evidence of Muslims in America celebrating on September 11, and no contemporaneous news stories to that effect.Why does this happen? Are NPR, the Times and the AP incapable of using Google? Perhaps. But here is another possibility: note that the Times and the AP coyly limited their denials to news accounts of mass cheering or mass celebrations in Jersey City. I think they found the Washington Post story but preferred not to mention it. Instead, they deceived their readers by silently making the implicit judgment that a number of people are not a mass. I think that these news outlets are so hysterically eager to discredit any concerns about Islam that they won t let something as minor as the facts get in their way. There is dishonesty here, but it is on the part of NPR, the New York Times and the Associated Press, not Donald Trump.Jersey City Longshot From The West: NO HATE HERE MOVE ALONG: | 1 |
With mainstream media and establishment politicians stacked against him from the moment he announced his run for the presidency, Donald J. Trump has been in an ongoing pitched battle to communicate his plans and his eventual successes to Americans. Through public rallies and social media, he has managed to bypass the traditional information gatekeepers and has spoken directly to the people.Yet, Americans are subjected to a relentless drumbeat from the Democratic Party, amplified by virtually the entire establishment press, that Trump is not only undisciplined, unfit for office and possibly racist, but that embarrassingly little has been accomplished by the Trump administration.But we Deplorables know better When Dana Kamide made this pro-Trump video last year, it was an instant hit. The hilarious video reminded Americans of why we re so blessed to have President Trump as our President. To date, the It s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year viral video has been seen over 5.6 million times. This Christmas, let s all count our blessings and remember to be thankful for the bullet we dodged in 2016. Enjoy WND And while he has befuddled and disappointed some with major promises such as Obamacare repeal and a border wall unfulfilled or put on the backburner the stunning reality is this: Donald Trump has amassed a long and remarkable list of actions and accomplishments that will surprise average Americans, even those who support the president and consider themselves well-informed politically.Below, is an accounting of the truly significant achievements of the first eight months of the Trump presidency. The accomplishments are all the more noteworthy as they have been carried out in an environment of unrelenting negativity on the part of not only the Democrats and almost the entire news media, but the Beltway establishment itself, the entire donor class, the Deep State, and even many Republicans wedded to the D.C. swamp. DECEMBERRegulatory reform: President Trump announced Dec. 14 his administration has far exceeded its promise to eliminate regulations at a 2:1 ratio and impose no lifetime net regulatory costs. In total, agencies issued 67 deregulatory actions while imposing only three new regulatory actions, a ratio of 22:1. Federal agencies also achieved $8.1 billion in lifetime net regulatory cost savings, the equivalent of $570 million per year. Jobs: Some 228,000 new jobs were created in November, highlighting the strongest U.S. labor market since the turn of the century. The government also reported Dec. 8 that unemployment was unchanged at 4.1 percent, but that s still nearly a 17-year low. Military: The Trump administration asked a federal court Dec. 7 for an emergency stay to delay a court order to begin opening the military to transgender recruits by Jan. 1. Israel: While the previous three U.S. presidents promised during their election campaigns to recognize Jerusalem as Israel s capital, President Trump on Dec. 6 became the first to follow through. In his official order, Trump also ordered the U.S. Embassy to be moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded: President Donald Trump, thank you for today s historic decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel s capital. The Jewish people and the Jewish state will be forever grateful. Immigration: The Department of Homeland Security released figures Dec. 4 showing Trump is delivering on his pledge to more strictly control immigration and deter would-be border-crossers. Border Patrol arrests dropped to a 45-year low in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, down 25 percent from a year earlier. ICE said the number of people apprehended away from the border jumped 25 percent this fiscal year. The increase is 37 percent after Trump s inauguration compared to the same period the year before. States rights: President Trump signed two executive orders Dec. 4 that gave back about 2 million acres of land to the state of Utah by modifying executive orders by President Obama. Arguing the Antiquities Act requires that any reservation of land as part of a monument be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects of historic or scientific interest to be protected, Trump reduced the federal government s control of the Bear s Ear National Monument to just 201,876 acres, pointing out that the important objects of scientific or historic interest described described in Obama s proclamation are protected under existing laws and agency management designations. He also reduced the Grand Staircase National Monument in Utah from nearly 1.9 million acres to about 1 million. Immigration: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced Dec. 3 the Trump administration is withdrawing from the Global Compact on Migration, arguing the pact would undermine the sovereign right of the United States to enforce our immigration laws and secure our borders. Tillerson made the announcement just before the opening of a global conference on migration in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Tax reform: Propelled by the engagement of President Trump, the Senate on Dec. 1 passed the biggest rewrite of the nation s tax system since 1986, reducing rates for businesses and individuals. The Republican-led House passed a similar bill in November. The two chambers of Congress will negotiate a reconciliation of the two bills that they expect to put on the president s desk before the end of the year. Health care: The Senate tax-reform bill passed Dec. 1 eliminates Obamacare s individual mandate, the linchpin of Obama s government-controlled health-care system, which penalizes taxpayers for choosing not to buy health insurance.NOVEMBERStocks: The Dow Jones industrial average surged more than 331 points Nov. 30 to close above 24,000 for the first time in history. Stocks were buoyed by the possibility of the Senate passing the Republican tax-reform bill championed by President Trump. Mining: Mining increased 28.6 percent in the second quarter and was the leading contributor to growth for the nation and in the three fastest-growing states of North Dakota, Wyoming, and Texas, according to the Commerce Department s Bureau of Economic Analysis. North Korea: In response to North Korea s buildup of nuclear weapons and missiles, the communist nation was officially designated a state sponsor of terror by the Trump administration on Nov. 20. The Treasury Department followed up with sanctions on organizations and companies doing business with North Korea. Regulation reform: Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Nov. 17 the Department of Justice will cease the practice initiated by President Obama of issuing guidance memos to enact new regulations that sometimes have had the effect of changing federal laws. Iran: Trump issued a memorandum Nov. 16 determining that the U.S. has enough petroleum coming from countries other than Iran to permit a significant reduction in the volume of petroleum and petroleum products purchased from the mullah-led nation. China trade: During President Trump s visit to China in November, trade and investment deals worth more than $250 billion were announced that are expected to create jobs for American workers, farmers and ranchers by increasing U.S. exports to China and stimulating investment in American communities. Government transparency: The federal government on Nov. 9 made public more than 13,000 additional documents from its files on President John F. Kennedy s assassination, under orders from President Trump. It was the fourth released since October, when the president allowed the immediate release of 2,800 records by the National Archives. International liberty: President Trump proclaimed Nov. 7, the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, as the National Day for the Victims of Communism Religious liberty: The Department of Agriculture issued a guidance Nov. 6 that ensures Christians who opposed same-sex marriage would not be discriminated against for their beliefs. Job growth: President Trump announced in the Oval Office Nov. 2 that the semiconductor manufacturing company Broadcom Limited is moving its headquarters from Singapore to the United States. Broadcom is a Fortune 100 company that already employs more than 7,500 workers in the United States, and that number is expected to grow exponentially, with an estimated $20 billion to be spent on employees annually. Broadcom CEO Hock E. Tan said the decision to relocate Broadcom was driven by his desire to give back to this country that has given me so much. Government reform: EPA Director Scott Pruitt placed 66 new experts on three different EPA scientific committees who espouse more conservative views than their predecessors. To prevent conflicts of interest, Pruitt signed a directive Oct. 31 banning scientists who receive EPA grants from serving on the agency s independent advisory boards.OCTOBERJob growth: The White House announced Oct. 25 a new drone Integration Pilot Program that will accelerate drone integration into the national airspace system. Under the program, the Department of Transportation will enter into agreements with state, local, and tribal governments to establish innovation zones for testing complex UAS operations and to attempt different models for integrating drones into local airspace. Calling drones a critical, fast-growing part of American aviation, increasing efficiency, productivity, and jobs, the White House said they present opportunities to enhance the safety of the American public, increase the efficiency and productivity of American industry, and create tens of thousands of new American jobs. Government reform: Melania Trump, while embracing a more active and public schedule as first lady, is running one of the leanest East Wing operations in recent history, according to a Fox News analysis of White House personnel reports that found she has significantly reduced the number of aides on the first lady s office payroll in comparison to her predecessor, Michelle Obama. During President Obama s first year in office, 16 people were listed working for Michelle Obama, earning a combined $1.24 million a year. This year, just four people were listed working for Melania Trump as of June, with salaries totaling $486,700. Obamacare: Trump signed an executive order Oct. 12 that directs three federal agencies to rewrite regulations to encourage the establishment of cheaper health plans that can be purchased across state lines and are not bound by certain Obamacare rules and regulations. The directive would allow small-business owners, trade groups and others to join together to purchase health insurance. The plans would not be required to include benefits such as prescription drugs. Trump also wants to expand the sale of stopgap policies that don t cover pre-existing conditions, mental health services and other costly benefits. Consumer optimism: U.S. consumer sentiment unexpectedly surged to a 13-year high as Americans perceptions of the economy and their own finances rebounded following several major hurricanes, a University of Michigan survey showed Oct. 13. Iran nuclear agreement: President Trump announced Oct. 13 he will not certify the Iran nuclear deal and vowed that the U.S. would pull out unless changes are made. He also unveiled a new strategy, the culmination of nine months of deliberation with Congress and allies, on how to best protect American security from the rogue mullah-led regime. The plan includes denying the regime funding and any paths to a nuclear weapon and ballistic missiles. The Department of the Treasury sanctioned more than 25 entities and individuals involved in Iran s ballistic missile program. The U.S. also sanctioned 16 entities and individuals that have supported Iran s military and Revolutionary Guard Corps in the development of drones, fast attack boats and other military equipment. United Nations: The United States is quitting the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Heather Nauert, a State Department spokeswoman, announced the move will be made before the end of the year This decision was not taken lightly, and reflects U.S. concerns with mounting arrears at UNESCO, the need for fundamental reform in the organization, and continuing anti-Israel bias at UNESCO. Homeland security: The Supreme Court dismissed a major challenge to President Trump s travel ban on majority-Muslim countries Oct. 10 because it has been replaced by a new version, sending the controversy back to the starting block. The ruling is a victory for the Trump administration, which had asked the court to drop the case after Trump signed a proclamation Sept. 24 that replaced the temporary travel ban on six nations with a new, indefinite ban affecting eight countries. That action made the court challenge moot, the justices ruled. EPA reform: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt announced Oct. 9 a new set of rules that will override the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama s drive to curb global climate change. The agency is moving to undo, delay or block more than 30 environmental rules, the largest regulatory rollback in the agency s 47-year history. Immigration: The Trump administration submitted to Congress Oct. 8 a 70-point proposal that calls for increased border security, interior enforcement of immigration laws and a merit-based immigration system. It includes funding and completing construction of a southern border wall, improving expedited removal of illegal aliens, protecting innocent people in sanctuary cities, ending extended-family chain migration and establishing a point-based system for green cards to protect U.S. workers and taxpayers. Religious liberty: Attorney General Sessions on Oct. 6 issued guidance to all administrative agencies and executive departments regarding religious liberty protections in federal law in keeping with Trump s May 4 executive order. The guidance interprets existing protections for religious liberty in federal law, identifying 20 high-level principles that administrative agencies and executive departments can put to practical use to ensure the religious freedoms of Americans are lawfully protected. Attorney General Sessions also issued a second memorandum to the Department of Justice, directing implementation of the religious liberty guidance within the department. Among the principles are the freedom of religion extends to persons and organizations, Americans do not give up their freedom of religion by participating in the marketplace, partaking of the public square, or interacting with government and government may not restrict acts or abstentions because of the beliefs they display. Missile defense: The Department of Defense reprogrammed approximately $400 million for U.S. missile defense systems. Religious liberty: The Trump administration expanded religious and moral exemptions for mandated contraceptive coverage under Obamacare. Obama s signature legislation required that nearly all insurance plans cover abortion-inducing drugs and contraception, forcing citizens to violate sincerely held religious or moral beliefs, pay steep fines, or forgo offering or obtaining health insurance entirely. The interim final rules note that the United States has a long history of providing conscience protections in the regulation of health care entities and individuals with objections based on religious beliefs and moral convictions. The rule aligns with the U.S. Supreme Court s unanimous ruling protecting the Little Sisters of the Poor, which says the government cannot fine religious groups for following their faith. Immigration: Amid strong Democratic opposition, the House Homeland Security Committee gave first approval to the broad scope of President Trump s border wall Oct. 4, clearing a bill that would authorize $10 billion in new infrastructure spending, new waivers to speed up construction, and 10,000 more border agents and officers to patrol the U.S.-Mexico line. Space exploration: President Trump revived the National Space Council for the first time in 25 years to assist him in developing and implementing long-range strategic goals for the nation s space policy. The pace program will refocus on human exploration and discovery. Vice President Mike Pence, who chaired the National Space Council s Oct. 5 meeting, said the administration aims to establish a renewed American presence on the moon and from that foundation become the first nation to bring mankind to Mars. The administration also will renew America s commitment to creating the space technology needed to protect national security. And Pence pointed out the intelligence community reports that Russia and China are pursuing a full range of anti-satellite technology designed to threaten our U.S. military effectiveness. Abortion: The Office of Management and Budget on Oct. 2 issued a Statement of Administration Policy (SAP) to strongly support the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (H.R. 36), which would generally make it unlawful for any person to perform, or attempt to perform, an abortion of an unborn child after 20 weeks post-fertilization. Protecting life: The president issued a statement Oct. 1 renewing the nation s strong commitment to promoting the health, well-being, and inherent dignity of all children and adults with Down syndrome. The president observed there remain too many people both in the United States and throughout the world that still see Down syndrome as an excuse to ignore or discard human life. He said Americans and their government must always be vigilant in defending and promoting the unique and special gifts of all citizens in need and should not tolerate any discrimination against them, as all people have inherent dignity. Protecting life: The Department of Health and Human Services has published a draft of a new strategic plan that states in its introduction that life begins at conception. The personhood of the unborn child is central to the abortion debate as even the justice who wrote the landmark Roe v. Wade opinion has acknowledged because, if established in law, it would nullify a right to abortion. The largely overlooked HHS strategic plan for 2018-22 states the agency accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, beginning at conception. Tax reform: Trump is working with Congress to lower taxes by seven points for the middle class and lower business taxes to a 15 percent rate.SEPTEMBERLower courts: Trump is filling up lower courts with lifetime appointees. In the estimation of Democratic official Ron Klain, a massive transformation is underway in how our fundamental rights are defined by the federal judiciary. Klain, lamenting Trump s moves, said the president is proving wildly successful in one respect: naming youthful conservative nominees to the federal bench in record-setting numbers. On Sept. 28, Trump announced an eighth wave of judicial candidates, with nine more names. Canada trade: In September, the Commerce Department, siding with Boeing, slapped a 219 percent tariff on the import of Canadian-made Bombardier jets, arguing they are supported by subsidies from the governments of Canada and the U.K., creating an unfair market. Korea trade: Trump began the process of renegotiating the United States-South Korea Free Trade Agreement in September. Climate: In September, Trump shut down a climate-change advisory panel under the direction of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that critics have contended was formed largely to promote President Obama s climate policies, arguing it lacked representation from those who think the empirical evidence points to human actions contributing little to global warming and that attempting to reduce it would slow the conquest of poverty around the world. The EPA also has decided not to renew the appointments of dozens of scientists on various scientific advisory panels. Economy: Household wealth reached a record high of $1.7 trillion in the second quarter due to rising property values and gains in financial assets, according to a Federal Reserve report. Homeland security: In September, Trump signed an executive order to enhance vetting capabilities and processes for detecting attempted entry into the United States by terrorists or other public-security threats. North Korea: After some 25 years of failed negotiations to contain Pyongyang s nuclear program, the communist regime s latest threatening actions were met by President Trump with a warning that military action, including a preemptive nuclear attack, would be considered. After Trump s warnings, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un backed off on his threat to attack the U.S. territory of Guam. North Korea: On Sept. 7, the U.S. fully deployed the THAAD missile defense system to South Korea despite objections from Pyongyang s chief ally, China. North Korea: In September, Trump signed an executive order significantly expanding U.S. authority to target individuals, companies and financial institutions that finance and facilitate trade with North Korea, most of which are Chinese. Meanwhile, China s central bank has ordered banks in its massive banking system to immediately stop doing business with North Korea. United Nations: In his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Trump told the global body in September, I put America first and you should do the same with your nations. In the speech, he also explicitly denounced socialism and communism, pointing to Venezuela as an example of what happens when socialism is successfully implemented. Immigration: President Trump, in September, rescinded Obama s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order, which gave de facto amnesty to some 800,000 people who came to the country as children with their illegal-alien parents. Trump delayed implementing his order for six months to give Congress time to come up with a legislative solution. Stock markets: Through the first week of September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had 34 record highs. From Election Day to the Inauguration, the Dow rose more than 1,500 points. It climbed another 2,500 points from Inauguration Day, reaching more than 22,400 in mid-September, a gain of more than $4 trillion in wealth since Trump was elected. The Dow s spike from 19,000 to above 21,000 in just 66 days was the fastest 2,000-point rise ever. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ also have set all-time highs. On Aug. 7, the Dow closed with an all-time high for the ninth day in a row, the first time the market has had a run of that length twice under one presidency.For the entire list, go to WND | 0 |
The conversation regarding super delegates has been very divisive in the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton supporters cite her overwhelming super delegate support as evidence Hillary Clinton is the best candidate, while Bernie Sanders supporters cite it as evidence of corruption and an out-of-touch party, as many of those super delegates pledged allegiance to Secretary Clinton before the primaries even began.Super delegates don t cast their votes until the convention, so counting their votes before then when they can change until then is pointless, but it is noteworthy that Bernie Sanders finally received his first endorsement in the U.S. Senate. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon wrote an op-ed in the New York Times outlining why he supports Bernie Sanders for president. In the op-ed, Senator Merkley said how he thinks both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are great candidates, but only Bernie Sanders will help us rethink how our economy and our politics work. Under President Obama s leadership, our country is fairer and more prosperous for all than it was seven years ago. But as we look toward the next administration, there is far more work to do. We need urgency. We need big ideas. We need to rethink the status quo, wrote Senator Merkley. It has been noted that Bernie has an uphill battle ahead of him to win the Democratic nomination. But his leadership on these issues and his willingness to fearlessly stand up to the powers that be have galvanized a grass-roots movement. People know that we don t just need better policies, we need a wholesale rethinking of how our economy and our politics work, and for whom they work. Oregon holds a closed primary on May 17th.Featured image courtesy of Flickr | 1 |
GENEVA (Reuters) - U.N. Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said Syria talks in the Kazakh capital Astana on Friday had agreed on a working group for the release of detainees, which he said was a commendable first step towards an arrangement between the warring sides. He also said that Russia s plan to convene a Syrian congress of national dialogue in Sochi next month should be assessed by its ability to contribute to and support the U.N.-led Geneva talks on ending the war in Syria. | 1 |
Other nations are stepping up to play larger roles in the world because of Donald Trump, proving that he is destroying American respect and power abroad.One of Trump s first acts after taking over the White House was to issue a global gag rule on abortion.The executive order bans groups that receive funding from the United States from giving women information on abortion, reversal of President Obama s policy that had been in effect for the last eight years.Apparently, conservatives believe they not only have the right to tell American women what to do with their bodies, they believe they have the right to tell all women around the world what to do with their bodies as well.Trump s policy is an embarrassing shift. Women around the world will now see America as a hostile enemy of women s rights and bodily autonomy.And as a result of of the United States abandoning women around the world, other nations are sticking it to Trump by filling the gaps.According to Reuters,Norway has joined an international initiative to raise millions of dollars to replace shortfalls left by U.S. President Donald Trump s ban on U.S.-funded groups worldwide providing information on abortion.In January, the Netherlands started a global fund to help women access abortion services, saying Trump s global gag rule meant a funding gap of $600 million over the next four years, and has pledged $10 million to the initiative to replace that.Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Finland, Canada and Cape Verde have all also lent their support.Norway is also chipping in $10 million. The government is increasing its support for family planning and safe abortion, Prime Minister Erna Solberg said in a statement. At a time when this agenda has come under pressure, a joint effort is particularly important. So Donald Trump just hurt American prestige by doing something that will hurt women around the globe. But other nations are boosting their own prestige by filling the funding gap.Abortion is a medically necessary procedure that women should have access to no matter where they live. By trying to deny women that access, Donald Trump is putting lives at risk and taking rights away from women after our country has fought for years to lift up women around the world.Trump and Republicans should realize that as they continue to shrink America s role in the world, other nations will take advantage of it and increase their own prestige and power. As long as Trump and Republicans continue down this path, respect for us will plummet and our influence will wane.Featured image via Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images | 0 |
President Obama, who as a candidate once urged supporters to bring a gun to the knife fight of his campaign, on Tuesday decried vicious rhetoric from Republican presidential candidates.Here is a great compilation of Obama s top 5 hits on his opponent (50% of America). Can you imagine the comments that haven t been recorded, like at the recent meeting with Black Lives Matter terrorists who were invited guests of Barack Obama s, coincidentally just prior to the organized Chicago Trump rally riots?During the annual Friends of Ireland luncheon at the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Obama told a bipartisan group of lawmakers that he is more than a little dismayed about what s happening on the campaign trail lately. Never one to miss out on the opportunity to bash his enemies our very un-statesman like Community Organizer In Chief took the opportunity when speaking in front of the Prime Minister of Ireland to not talk about relations with Ireland, but instead, to bash Donald Trump. He made it clear to this group who has absolutely nothing to do with our elections, that he is watching his every move Trump makes and will use every opportunity, no matter how inappropriate, to damage his reputation. Probably the most sickening and dishonest part of this video is when Obama begrudgingly tells Speaker Of The House, Paul Ryan (R) that, I know you are a great father and a great husband and that, We can have political debates without turning on each other at the 7:45 mark: We have heard vulgar and divisive rhetoric aimed at women and minorities at Americans who don t look like us, or pray like us or vote like we do, Mr. Obama said in an obvious reference to Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. We ve seen misguided attempts to shut down that speech, however offensive it may be. In response to those attempts, we ve seen actual violence, and we ve heard silence from too many of our leaders. As he has increasingly in recent days, Mr. Obama lamented any effort to spread fear or encourage violence, or to shut people down when they re trying to speak, or turn Americans against one another. As a citizen who will still be leading this office, I will not support somebody who practices that kind of politics, the president said.But as a candidate for the White House in 2008, Mr. Obama was no stranger to violent rhetoric. He encouraged the notion that he was a product of Chicago s particularly tough brand of politics.At a campaign event in Philadelphia in June 2008, Mr. Obama told supporters, If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl. I ve seen Eagles fans. Later that year, as polls showed a close race between Mr. Obama and Republican nominee John McCain, Mr. Obama urged a crowd of about 1,500 at a campaign rally in Elko, Nevada, to get confrontational in their community for him. I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors, Mr. Obama said. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face. The president on Tuesday seemed to be referring to such comments of his own when he remarked, All of us can recall some intemperate words that we regret. Certainly, I can. And while some may be more to blame than others for the current climate, all of us are responsible for reversing it. Via: Washington Times | 1 |
Chris Christie knows how to create awkward political moments that s for sure! (*SEE PHOTO GAFFE GALLERY BELOW) Remember the game hug? The VERY awkward moment behind candidate Trump where he just stood there with a blank stare? His latest and most awkward political moment has to be Beachgate where he was captured lounging with his family on a NJ beach after closing it to the public. Ouch! We re just happy he wasn t hired by President Trump but was let go by Jared Kushner. Wheeew!In previous reports, we ve also discussed the election night gaffe of a bold Chris Christie shoving his way into photos with newly elected President Trump (see photo above). The word was that the president wasn t too happy about this and that this behavior cost Christie a position with the new Trump administration. The Christie Bridgegate scandal was another factor that s been reported. The newest revelation exposes the ultimate mistake from Christie:Chris Christie made his ultimate mistake with Donald Trump when he bragged about talking to President Obama on election night and offered to let Trump an infamous germaphobe use Christie s cellphone to talk to Obama. If you win, he s going to call my phone, and I ll pass it over to you, Christie said, according to excerpts of a new book obtained by the Daily Mail.A visibly angry Trump snapped at his top campaign aide: Hey Chris, you know my f king phone number. Just give it to the president. I don t want your f king phone, Trump fumed.Christie, who never received a role in the White House despite his steadfast support for the president, wouldn t recover from the phone debacle, the report said.Christie made yet another critical mistake when he pushed himself into photos with Trump on election night.Trump s son-in-law Jared Kushner whose father was prosecuted by Christie, then a US attorney in New Jersey gave the Garden State governor the ax right after Trump s victory.We have to say that after the latest Chris Christie gaffe of Beachgate where he closed the NJ beach to the public BUT opened it to only his family has us convinced that Trump and Kushner did the right thing! MAN HUG AWKWARD!STANDING BY TRUMP WITH BLANK STARE:CAUGHT ON THE BEACH WITH FAMILY AFTER CLOSING BEACH:Via: NYP | 0 |
An employee of the Columbus City School system made a post to Facebook on Thursday, where they called for a Boston Marathon like attack at a local Columbus City LGBTQ pride festival. The poster wrote on the event s official page: I hope this event turns out like the Boston Marathon a few year s (sic) back. All [LGBTQ people] should be killed or at least relocated. Both the local police and Homeland have been made aware of the threat and are looking into the matter.A local NBC affiliate contacted the individual who made the post and questioned his motivations. The individual refused to say why he posted the hateful message and responded that they did not have anything to say about the matter. The school district quickly responded to the news by issuing a statement where they called the comments inappropriate. The school district released a statement the next day where they announced that the poster was being terminated from his position. I can share that the District is working toward his termination. More importantly, we are gearing up for an even larger contingent of teachers, staff, students, families[,] and allies planning to march together at tomorrow s Pride Parade. We are expecting well over 400 people upward of 500 now as people positively respond to the immediate actions we took as a District following this employee s unacceptable actions, the statement reads. Despite recent legal gains such as the SCOTUS decision that made marriage equality the law of the land, hate crimes that target LGBTQ individuals have been on the rise. In fact, 2016 was declared the deadliest year on record for LGBTQ people according to data that was compiled by analysts. The report also cited the recent political climate as a major contributing factor in the rise. When Republicans are in charge, the queer community also suffers heavily. You can watch a video report on the story, below, in full.Featured Image: Photo by Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty Images with NBC 4 Video screenshot added | 0 |
Donald Trump s hateful, divisive rhetoric brought out the worst in Americans during his presidential campaign and now that the reality television star and scammy business mogul has been elected as President of the Unites States, his supporters are letting their true colors shine freely.America s future leader spent over a year normalizing bigotry, discrimination, and violence, and now we re seeing a massive increase in hate crimes and attacks across America. And it turns out, not even the country s most well-known and respected individuals are safe. Recently, Golden Globe-nominated actress Emmy Rossum spoke out about the recent anti-Semitic attacks she s been getting from Trump supporters since the election, and it s enough to make your stomach turn. If anyone is still trying to convince you that Trump isn t the modern-day Adolf Hitler, you need to show them what Rossum endured at the hands of these monsters.On Sunday, Rossum fought back and called out Trump and his supporters for their hate speech:TwitterTwitterTwitterTwitter No matter WHO you voted for, I don t care, THIS is not okay. You will be seeing a train shortly pic.twitter.com/cvQP6Fegz4 Emmy Rossum (@emmyrossum) November 14, 2016The particular person who was harassing Rossum has since been suspended by Twitter, but there are several more Americans who echo his opinions. It is hard to believe that this is the country that was once considered progressive and accepting of all individuals. It s clear that Trump is making good on his promise to return our country to earlier times in history, where white people ruled everyone else.Rossum pointed out this sad phenomenon perfectly when she remarked that perhaps America was naive about how far we d come, and maybe this brand of hatred had been there all along, just waiting to be awakened by the right kind of dictator. It is terrifying and upsetting to come to terms with the fact that the America we ve been living in is such a divisive, unwelcoming place now.TwitterFeatured image via Alberto E. Rodriguez and Zach Gibson/Getty Images | 1 |
In case you missed this earlier today A woman was hit by an anarchist and then dragged by her American flag. She ran to find the attacker and came upon a group of Black Lives Matter girls who taunted her. It s sickening to watch but shows just hoe hateful these people are. She explains in the second video down FOX NEWS: Woman waving American flag hit, dragged by Antifa at #BostonFreeSpeechRally. pic.twitter.com/0c7htSrgqA Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) August 19, 2017 This Boston Patriot is clearly heartbroken UPDATE: Patriotic elderly woman tearfully recounts being physically assaulted by Antifa at #BostonFreeSpeechRally. pic.twitter.com/U615iiSDmG Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) August 20, 2017 They don t care heartbroken Boston womanGuess who else doesn t care? The main stream media! They were absent from the area but you can bet if this was a left leaning person the media would have been all over this woman. Shame on them! | 1 |
The ultimate nanny state move in this liberal state shows us where we re heading. Should we be doing more and more of the things parents should do? This trend is nothing but disturbing Four public schools in the Madison, Wis. school district will soon begin providing a plethora of parenting services to students including breakfasts, dinners, doctor s visits and homework help.Funding for the full-service neighborhood schools will come from a $300,000 grant from the Madison Community Foundation, reports the Wisconsin State Journal.Actual school hours won t change. However, the school buildings will open earlier and close much later. The four schools will also start opening on the weekends.School districts in six U.S. states have been taking up the community school model. The schools are most common in poor urban area where children may not be eating right or have access to healthcare.The U.S. Department of Education doles out millions of dollars to nine organizations which then fund such schools after funding their own staffs, of course.Read more: Daily Caller | 1 |
It happened so fast: One moment I was running trails, the next I was staring a sow in the face, so close I could smell it, wild and pungent and alarming, and I knew it could smell me, too, my fear. I was in the middle of a rainy run in Far North Bicentennial Park on the outskirts of Anchorage, where I live. It was late July, a time when grizzlies sweep down from the mountains to feast on the salmon swimming up Campbell Creek. But I was miles from the water. I had planned my route away from the creek, and I hadn’t seen bear scat in more than an hour. As I crested a hill, a crash sounded from my right, and I instinctively moved to the left, expecting a moose. But it was the sow with three cubs. The cubs fled up a tree. The sow paused in front of me, as if waiting. I backed into the brush, fortifying myself behind a skinny grove of alder trees, moving slowly, carefully, never taking my eyes off the bear. When it veered as if to leave I felt such relief that my throat loosened and small gasps escaped my lips. Then it abruptly turned and charged directly at me. It’s impossible to run the trails around Alaska without thinking about bears. There are piles of scat everywhere, dotted with blueberry and cranberry seeds that glint in the sun, reminders that you have to be careful. You have to be versed in bear awareness, bear etiquette and bear protocol. Headphones are a and going alone is discouraged. Making noise and carrying bear spray is recommended. Still, I often ran alone. I preferred it that way. I liked the serenity and the loneliness, liked the hours of nothing but me and the mountains and the trees. That day, I wore a bear bell attached to my hydration pack, and I sang, too, whenever I came to dense areas. I sang old rock ’n’ roll songs, loudly and badly. I was cautious but not afraid. I ran these trails all summer and the summer before, and while I saw bears on many other trails, I only twice saw them on these sections. Maybe I let down my guard. Maybe I felt invincible, the way you feel when you repeat risky behavior without negative results. Maybe the bear was having a bad day. When the bear charged, time stood still. I felt every millisecond. I stood in the drizzle, rain coating my face like tears, and I did what they tell you to do if a black bear charges: I waved my arms and yelled. “I’m human!” I cried, my voice rising through the birch trees, through that silent and moment. “I’m a person!” The bear paused and ran back toward the brush. A minute later, it charged a second time. And again I waved my arms and yelled and again it stopped, this time so close I could almost reach out and touch its snout. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow. I wondered, briefly and almost idly, if this was how I would die. Suddenly, I wanted to talk to my son, who was grown and off living his own life. I wanted to hear his voice. A lifetime later, the bear turned and ran off, its backside swaying into the trees. I had to get back to the trail, to the possibility of safety, yet I couldn’t step away from the alders. It was my only protection. That’s when the bear began circling around me in a wide arc. That’s when I knew I was in trouble, became really afraid. When my son was young and nothing would comfort him, I would talk. It didn’t matter what I said, he needed my voice, the steady flow of words. As I stepped from the shelter of the alders, I talked out loud, my voice surprisingly calm. I talked to the bear to show that I meant no harm, but mostly I talked to reassure myself. As the bear circled for a second time, I stumbled through devil’s club, snagging my shorts and scratching my legs, and I talked about the day my son was born, how I recognized his face immediately. When I reached the trail, I kept talking. The bear followed, but I didn’t look back. A half a mile later, I glanced over my shoulder, and the bear was gone. I started running and didn’t stop until I encountered two hikers, and I collapsed at their feet. For weeks I saw that bear’s face in my dreams, and I woke up, heart pounding. I swore I would never run trails again, but I missed it too much, and soon I was out with the trees and that big, big sky. Some things are worth the risk, though I made sure to carry a canister of bear spray, just in case. And sometimes even now when I’m running, I think of that bear charging and how I stood there, so still and yet so alive. It opened something inside of me that can never be closed. It offered a taste of the unknown: At any time I might find myself crouched in the brush, face to face with my own fragile existence. So much of life is chance. There are no guarantees. But there are vast landscapes and dangers and wild moments of good luck. | 0 |
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave the go-ahead on Friday for a massive copper and gold mining operation to seek permits to mine the headwaters of an Obama-era protected world-class fishery in southwest Alaska.After an agreement through a court settlement, the EPA will start withdrawing restrictions on mining development in the Bristol Bay region, a pristine Alaskan fishery that provides the world with half of its sockeye salmon.This unfortunate agreement comes only four months after Trump came into office, which the Pebble mine supporters hoped would be their ticket to big money through Trump s promises of environmental deregulation.Environmental rights groups are worried this agreement will act as a dangerous precedent for industry to challenge the EPA in court on environmental issues they previously wouldn t have gone after during the Obama Administration. It obviously sends a psychological message to big mining companies that if they were nervous about getting permits in the past that this is their golden opportunity to get their mine through the process. said Brett Harti, the government affairs director for the center for biological Diversity environment group.It s being called a backdoor deal by critics and a slap in the face to the citizens of the Bristol Bay region who petitioned to keep the region protected.The Pebble company sued the EPA in federal court claiming the agency colluded with environmental groups to block the mining project. The suit followed an EPA study that concluded the proposed large-scale mining posed a siginificant risk to the region s salmon and cause adverse effects to Alaskan Natives who based their culture around the salmon resources in the area. The EPA inspector general found no evidence that the EPA predetermined the outcome of the study in any way. Protecting Bristol Bay from the Pebble Mine has been a priority issue for the hook-and-bullet community for 10 years. This was a real test for President Trump, who said all the right things to sportsmen during the election, said Scott Hed, the director of the Sportsman s Alliance for Alaska. This is a direct assault on our values. America s hunters and anglers are extremely disappointed but we will not let up in the fight to protect Bristol Bay. Photo by: Sergi Reboredo/VW Pics/UIG via Getty Images | 0 |
Fewer than 1 percent of papers published in scientific journals follow the scientific method, according to research by Wharton School professor and forecasting expert J. Scott Armstrong. [Professor Armstrong, who the Journal of Forecasting in 1982 and the International Journal of Forecasting in 1985, made the claim in a presentation about what he considers to be “alarmism” from forecasters over climate change. “We also go through journals and rate how well they conform to the scientific method. I used to think that maybe 10 percent of papers in my field … were maybe useful. Now it looks like maybe, one tenth of one percent follow the scientific method” said Armstrong in his presentation, which can be watched in full below. “People just don’t do it. ” Armstrong defined eight criteria for compliance with the scientific method, including full disclosure of methods, data, and other reliable information, conclusions that are consistent with the evidence, valid and simple methods, and valid and reliable data. According to Armstrong, very little of the forecasting in climate change debate adheres to these criteria. “For example, for disclosure, we were working on polar bear [population] forecasts, and we were asked to review the government’s polar bear forecast. We asked, ‘could you send us the data’ and they said ‘No’ … So we had to do it without knowing what the data were. ” According to Armstrong, forecasts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) violate all eight criteria. “Why is this all happening? Nobody asks them!” said Armstrong, who says that people who submit papers to journals are not required to follow the scientific method. “You send something to a journal and they don’t tell you what you have to do. They don’t say ‘here’s what science is, here’s how to do it. ’” Digging deeper into their motivations, Armstrong pointed to the wealth of incentives for publishing papers with politically convenient rather than scientific conclusions. “They’re rewarded for doing research. One of my favourite examples is testing statistical significance — that’s invalid. It’s been over 100 years we’ve been fighting the fight against that. Even its inventor thought it wasn’t going to amount to anything. You can be rewarded then, for following an invalid [method]. ” “They cheat. If you don’t get statistically significant results, then you throw out variables, add variables, [and] eventually you get what you want. ” “My big thing is advocacy. People are asked to come up with certain answers, and in our whole field that’s been a general movement ever since I’ve been here, and it just gets worse every year. And the reason is funded research. ” “I’ve [gone through] my whole career, with lots of publications, and I’ve never gotten a research grant. And I’m proud of that now. ” Armstrong concluded his talk by arguing that scientific evidence should be required for all climate regulations. You can follow Allum Bokhari on Twitter and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to abokhari@breitbart. com. | 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s commission to investigate possible election fraud will convene this month, a government notice said on Friday, as more U.S. states have refused to hand over at least some voter data. Trump created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May, after claiming without evidence that millions of people voted illegally for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 election. U.S. civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers have called the panel a voter suppression tactic by Trump, a Republican who won the presidential election by securing a majority in the Electoral College tally of delegates even as he lost the popular vote to Clinton by some 3 million votes. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a watchdog group, has filed a lawsuit to block the commission’s data request until its privacy impact can be weighed. A hearing in the case was scheduled for Friday afternoon. There is a wide consensus among state officials from both parties and election experts that voter fraud is rare. States rejecting the commission’s attempts to gather voter information have called it unnecessary and a violation of privacy. Most U.S. states have rejected full compliance with the commission’s requests. Republican Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the commission’s vice chairman, said in a statement sent by the White House that 14 states and Washington, D.C., had rejected the request outright. The commission will meet on July 19 to swear in members, formulate objectives and discuss next steps after asking the 50 states to turn over potentially sensitive voter information, according to a General Services Administration (GSA) notice published in the Federal Register. A June 28 letter from the election panel sought names, the last four digits of Social Security numbers, addresses, birth dates, political affiliations, felony convictions and voting histories. Matthew Dunlap, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state and a commission member, on Friday dismissed Trump’s claim that millions of voters illegally cast ballots. “We just don’t see that,” he told CNN. “People are incredibly law abiding.” Although Maine is one state that has pushed back at the commission’s request, Dunlap said he hopes the panel can tackle voting issues including ballot access and hacking. A Republican commission member, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, defended the panel, telling CNN on Thursday that fraud with even “one vote per precinct ... can change the course of history.” A court filing in the Electronic Privacy Information Center case also showed the panel plans to house data on White House computers rather than at the GSA. The Washington Post, which earlier reported the filing, noted GSA would be required to follow specific privacy requirements. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Moscow tried to tilt the election in Trump’s favor. Moscow has dismissed the accusations. Trump has denied any collusion and has questioned the agencies’ conclusion as well as any Russian role. | 1 |
Donald Trump is known for his controversial and often racist comments and he continues to be unrelenting. During his latest feud with Fox News and specifically Megyn Kelly, Trump tweeted an image of Kelly meeting with a Saudi prince and a woman dressed in niqab.@Drudge_Report_ @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/yjQSzw2GaR Brad (@BradCross4) January 28, 2016As you can probably guess, the image is a fake and was retweeted by Trump from an unapologetic racist who has also tweeted images of Michelle Obama as a monkey and having sex with an ape.Not that Trump seems to care where he gets his information from.In the past, he has retweeted white supremacists, including fans of Adolf Hitler, and has promoted fake crime statistics fabricated by neo-Nazis, which he later defended as very credible. In his latest racist tweet, Trump does what he does best which is to play on the fears of individuals. This time, just like many times before, Islam was used as a vehicle in which to do so. He has called for banning Muslims from entering the United States, stood by and did nothing while a Muslim woman was kicked out of one of his rallies for simply being a Muslim, and has attacked the religion and its followers to the point where there has been a surge in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the country because of his comments. Thus, the fake image of Megyn Kelly is designed to associate Kelly with Islam and Muslims, which in Trump s as well as his racist associates warped minds means something terrible and something un-American.Trump is a disturbing and a disgusting individual who appeals to folks just like him. Let s hope that when all is said and done in terms of the elections, we can all look back and reminisce at the big bad joke that was Donald Trump running to be president of the United States.Featured Image Via Wikimedia Commons | 0 |
The Daily Show, be it under the hosting of Jon Stewart or Trevor Noah, has never been subtle about its disdain for the GOP s idiocy. However, Tuesday night s episode was more chilling than almost any we ve ever seen, since it addressed a terrifying bill that is being proposed by House Republicans in Iowa a bill that would let children have guns. Host Trevor Noah was understandably incredulous at the fact that this is even a thing. First, Noah addressed the fact that kids can already use hunting rifles, but not handguns, with adult supervision. He began by comparing this lunacy to the notorious hatred between Justin Beiber fans ( Beliebers ) and New Direction fans ( Directioners ): Beliebers vs. Directoners just got a whole lot more interesting. Noah then turned his attentions to kids who like to hunt: Some kids do like hunting. It s those kids who only like the first five minutes of Bambi. But then, things got downright scary, when Noah played a clip from a news station that detailed the intentions of Nathan Gibson, a gun nut who has been letting his kids use handguns since they were 5, even though it is illegal. He s now trying to make his illegal and dangerous actions with his own children the law of the land in the state of Iowa. Just to get this straight: Some guy picked up the phone and called a lawmaker and said Hey, uh, my kids need guns. And they were like, Done! And every day in America there s parents calling lawmakers saying, Hey, my kids died because of guns. And they re like, Uhh, can you hold? Noah went on to described the absurdity of all of this in terms even a fool could understand (though I doubt the fools falling in line behind this dangerous nonsense will care). He began by asking, Do you know what children are? and showed clips of crying, tantrum-throwing kids. Who watches that and says, Uh, I like that, but it s missing something. After that, the clip was repeated, this time with gunfire. He ended on a chilling note: Oh, and by the way, that was under adult supervision. You do realize that. That kid was doing that under adult supervision. I love that the adult was like, I m just gonna video this. Watch the video below:And this is why we should not allow gun nuts to make laws. They truly are insane. Thank you, Trevor Noah, for telling it like it is. Featured image via video screen capture from Raw Story | 0 |
A Detroit judge threw the mother of a drunk driver being sentenced for killing a man out of her courtroom and into jail after she laughed at the victim’s family during a statement from the victim’s sister. [VIDEO: Drunk Driver’s Mom Jailed for Laughing at Victim’s Family, Amanda Kosal, 25, was awaiting sentencing when Judge Qiana Lillard threw Donna Kosal and her boyfriend out of the courtroom, calling them “clowns” after the victim’s sister gave a statement to the court, the Daily Mail reported. The video showed the judge losing patience with Donna and her boyfriend after she caught them smirking. The judge later brought the mother back in and sentenced her to 93 days in jail for contempt of court. Amanda Kosal pleaded guilty to killing Jerome Zirker and severely injuring his fiancee Brittany Johnson. She was sentenced to three to 15 years in prison. Judge Lillard said Donna Kosal and an unidentified boyfriend were acting disrespectfully in the courtroom. “It’s time for him to go,” Judge Lillard said, looking out into the gallery. “And I don’t know who he is, but whoever can sit here at a tragic moment like this and laugh and smile when somebody has lost a family member … in the entire time that Mr. Zirker’s sister was speaking that clown, and that’s what I am going to call him, a clown, was sitting there smiling and laughing. ” A guard escorted the man from the room, and Judge Lillard addressed Donna. “You can go too because if you don’t know how to act, you can go to jail, so leave,” she said. When Judge Lillard brought Donna back in, they exchanged a few words and the judge motioned to the bailiffs to take Donna to jail. “Take her, she’s going in the back,” the judge said to the bailiffs. “Anybody else wanna go? You can go, too. ” Donna said something about the judge’s mouth, to which the judge replied, “Oh, my mouth? Well, thank you, your mouth got you 93 days,” the New York Post reported. The next day, Donna appeared before the judge, and apologized for what she did. “I deeply apologize for what I did. I was under a lot of stress,” Donna said to the judge. The judge took pity on her and reduced her sentence by 92 days, setting her free. Amanda’s vehicle slammed into Johnson and Zirker head on, crossing the center line. Zirker was picking up his fiancee from a as a care worker at a group home when the accident happened, WDIV reported. | 0 |
Admitting Somalis who d been settled for years in Pakistan like the Ohio State jihadi and his family is only one of them. Another refugee absurdity was revealed recently the Obama administration has agreed to admit illegal aliens intercepted at sea by Australia and held in camps outside that country, on two Pacific islands.The number of people said to be affected is reported to range from 1,600 to nearly 2,500; my colleague Nayla Rush has an overview here. These are people Australia has decided do not warrant refugee status (or what our law would consider asylum). Therefore they have no right to move to Australia. But for a variety of reasons, Australia cannot, or does not want to, send them back, and the refugees won t accept offers of resettlement in New Guinea or Cambodia because they re holding out for a First World country. What s more, their presence in those Australian-run camps on the islands of Nauru and Manus (the latter owned by Papua New Guinea) has become a political headache. Most are from Iran, with smaller numbers from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere.I can see why Australia would want this deal; it costs Oz taxpayers $2 billion to run the two island detention facilities and closing them down would rid the government of the headache. But if Australia doesn t consider them refugees, why should we take them?It appears we re doing this as a favor to Australia; some speculate it s a quid pro quo for Australia s taking some U.S.-bound illegals in camps in Costa Rica, though how that s comparable isn t clear, and Australia has denied any such bargain. The chairman of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, Bob Goodlatte and Chuck Grassley, also want to know why we re doing this, and they wrote to the secretaries of State and Homeland Security asking for details on the secret agreement to bring the illegal aliens here. When Capitol Hill staffers asked the State Department how many such refugees would be resettled here under the secret deal, they were told the number was classified. Read more at: NRO | 1 |
One thing you don t ever want to do is tell a woman to smile more. It s become this thing where people feel they are entitled to tell a woman how she should or should not behave or appear. As if a woman does this one thing, she ll appear more likable or more genuine or more pretty. Here s the thing no one is telling men to smile more, because when men don t smile they re being serious and responsible and down to business. God forbid it be the same thing for a woman.Pointing out this hypocrisy perfectly was none other than Ellen DeGeneres on her show. She said: She gave a very passioninate speech, and then someone, I don t want to say it was a man, because it was a bunch of men they said that Hillary needs to smile more Here s something you should never tell a woman smile, relax, calm down, or drink less. It s then brought up that no one is telling the male candidates to smile. Ellen then shows photos of all the men still running for office (sans Kasich). She also points out that it s lose-lose for women, because at the same time they re being told to smile more, they re told to wipe the smile off their face because they may look crazy. Meanwhile, the men can pretty much do as they please.Ellen said: I know Hillary, and I know there are plenty of things that make her smile like her daughter, her granddaughter, when there s a sale on pantsuits I m not against smiling. I think we should all do it more women, men, cats, Clint Eastwood But we should do it on our own terms. Which is exactly right. Telling a woman that they should smile is telling a woman what they should be doing with their body and image, and that s pretty much the epitome of misogyny. If you don t think it s sexist that likely says more about you than it does about anything else.Featured image via video screen capture | 0 |
By Nathaniel Mauka
Congress overwhelmingly voted for the Patriot Act nearly 16 years ago, and our civil liberties have never been the same since. As if this singular bill, passed by George W. Bush, wasn’t invasive enough, allowing big banks to demand our internet data, and more — the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act ( CISA ) makes cyber-spying by the shadow government and the financial entities controlling it, a forgone conclusion.
As with most shadow government legislation, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is packed with hidden surveillance allowances. CISA was quietly passed to allow government to demand that private companies hand over personal information to them at will. It also allows companies to mine data, under the auspices of government-created urgency.
The mere fact that this act passed in late 2015 is monumental, since it has been before Congress in different forms for over a decade . The election seems to have offered the perfect cover, as Americans and activists were too busy arguing over Trump vs. Hillary.
Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government relations at the Electronic Transactions Association believes the value of sharing our personal data as a means to be alerted of ‘cyber threats’ outweighs any hazard to our civil liberties. Talbott states ,
“The value is that everyone can be alerted to cyber threats and take precautionary countermeasures before they materialize and spread,” he said. “Before CISA, corrective measures could be taken only after the cyber threat had done its damage. CISA allows each company to serve as an early warning system to the entire economy.”
Who exactly would be determining if someone is a ‘threat’ is the meat of the sandwich, though. CISA is ripe for abuse, just as the Patriot Act has been.
The Patriot Act has made it legal for law enforcement to spy on people, without probable cause – to enter their homes, or even to strip search them before they’ve been to court, had the opportunity to argue a case, or given ‘authorities’ a motive for this type of interrogation.
The stated purpose of the Patriot Act was to deter terrorist acts in the United States, but what do you do when the terrorists have already taken over your country? CISA simply expands the reach of a shadow government which has already been proven to reach beyond the boundaries of constitutional law.
More importantly, who specifically is CISA targeting? After multiple hackers have infiltrated computer systems at the White House , the State Department , the Pentagon , and the Office of Personnel Management, along with the Democratic National Committee , and numerous multinational banks run by the cabal, is the shadow government simply trying to create a stop-gap before their most elusive, yet damning information is made public?
CISA certainly will expand the reach of government surveillance on citizens as it has been conducted by the the National Security Agency (NSA) before former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed it.
“I think this bill was meant to be a surveillance bill from the start,” said Justin Harvey, CSO of Fidelis Cybersecurity, adding that he is dubious that the stated intent of the bill – to use collective intelligence to warn of potential cyber attacks and possibly stop them before they occur – will result.
Under the guise of ‘sharing cyber threats’ CISA allows companies to wholesale-collect information that may not even be a threat – and then pass it along for government bodies to determine if it is, indeed a threat. If this sounds like circular logic – it is just the beginning of the odd verbiage within the bill. It’s justifications for entering every possible orifice for data-gathering are more confounded than an octopus in a straight jacket.
The government can already enter your personal property including your home, your body , your cell, and your computer , but now they will have a legal in-roads to declare you a cyber-threat, simply for sending an email . This begs the question – who is the real cyber-bully? CISA seems to be nothing more than a prevarication, covering the acts of an elite few who don’t want their secrets exposed.
Nathaniel Mauka is a researcher of the dark side of government and exopolitics, and a staff writer for Waking Times .
Source: Waking Times
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Cosmetics brand Lush, popular among young girls and hipsters for their bath bombs, is launching a new anti-President Trump hair care product.According to Cosmopolitan, Lush announced plans to release a hair treatment called Yuge, a play on the way Trump pronounces the word huge, alongside an orange faced, tiny-handed man at their 2017 Lush Summit.The Yuge product is reportedly a hot oil treatment that will add volume and softness to your hair. Cosmopolitan notes the product is not currently available as it is being tested on humans in the U.K. (Lush opposes animal testing).Here is an excerpt from the article that appears on Lush s homepage:The United States is in the midst of a trying political and social time that is being felt throughout North America and the world. Intolerance, hostility, racism and fear have been pushed to the forefront and emotions are running high. Because of this divisiveness, it s now more important than ever to stand up for inclusivity, compassion and respect for all people.Lush has always been, and will always be, a safe space for everyone regardless of immigration status, gender, race, age, sexual orientation, religion or political affiliation. We love and encourage individuality, and our employees and customers are as diverse as the products we create. That s what makes the Lush community so special.Lush s Welcome Refugees statement encourages people to share the hashtags #refugeeswelcome and #nobannowall and to visit the website for the International Rescue Committee to take action. Lush s political stances haven t always been explicit through statements on their website. This Valentine s Day, Lush featured photos of same-sex couples in baths throughout their website.-MRCTV | 0 |
On Wednesday, Donald Trump warned the special counsel investigating the Russia scandal not to look into his business or personal finances and that s exactly like saying, Hey, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, look into my finances! Well, that s just what happened. It s like after robbing a bank and the police stop you for running a red light, so you say, Don t look in the trunk! So, as part of the probe into possible ties between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 presidential election, the Special Counsel is now is examining a broad range of transactions involving Trump s businesses as well as those of his associates, according to what a person familiar with the probe told Bloomberg.FBI investigators and others are looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump s involvement in a controversial SoHo development in New York with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008, the person said.The Trump Crime Family and Associates look like they re in deep sh*t:The investigation also has absorbed a money-laundering probe begun by federal prosecutors in New York into Trump s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.Trump s lawyer, John Dowd, said on Thursday that the inquiry into Trump s businesses is unrelated to last year s election. Those transactions are in my view well beyond the mandate of the Special counsel; are unrelated to the election of 2016 or any alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and most importantly, are well beyond any Statute of Limitation imposed by the United States Code, he stated in an email.We disagree! There s a saying which goes like this: Follow the money and apparently, Mueller has heard that wise quote before. There s a way that Trump could clear this all up. It would require the sitting president to release his tax returns, you know, like all of his predecessors have done.By the way, if Trump s resort in Florida mysteriously catches fire and he says, Don t look in the garage for propellant then I m pretty sure they will look into the garage. Nevertheless, Trump didn t see this coming. Somehow.Photo by Ann Heisenfelt/Getty Images | 1 |
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday the main part of the battle with Islamic State in Syria was over, according to the state-run RIA news agency. RIA also quoted Lavrov as saying the key task in Syria now was to destroy Jabhat al-Nusra, referring to the al Qaeda-linked group known in English as Nusra Front. | 0 |
Trump and his allies expect us to dismiss the 35-page dossier that details Donald Trump and his team s ties to the Russian government, but a lot of crazy stuff keeps happening that makes it impossible.When it was just former MI6 agent and author of the report Christopher Steele, who is in hiding to protect himself from both Trump and Putin s goons, saying that President Asterisk s closet is overflowing with skeletons (and Russian hooker urine) it was one thing, but the existence of audio and even video of Trump engaging in incriminating acts was confirmed by at least four sources, including one in the American intelligence community. Israeli intelligence officials have also been warned about sharing intel with Trump s administration for fear that it will be leaked to Vladimir Putin. And then there s the little matter of what happened to a gentleman who helped Steele compile his incriminating yet not entirely verified report Oleg Erovinkin was a former general in the KGB and the FSB. He is suspected of feeding information to Steele, and he was found dead in his car on Boxing Day. Russian state-run media initially reported that foul play was involved when Erovinkin s body was found in a black Lexus [and] a large-scale investigation has been commenced in the area. Erovinkin s body was sent to the FSB morgue. Since then, the cause of death has been downgraded to heart attack. The Telegraph reports:Erovinkin was a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and now head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, who is repeatedly named in the dossier.Erovinkin has been described as a key liaison between Sechin and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Mr Steele writes in an intelligence report dated July 19, 2016, he has a source close to Sechin, who had disclosed alleged links between Mr Trump s supporters and Moscow.The death of Erovinkin has prompted speculation it is linked to Mr Steele s explosive dossier, which was made public earlier this month. Mr Trump has dismissed the dossier as fake news and no evidence has emerged to support its lurid claims.The Russian state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported Erovinkin s body was found in a black Lexus [and] a large-scale investigation has been commenced in the area. Erovinkin s body was sent to the FSB morgue .No cause of death has been confirmed and the FSB continues to investigate. Media reports suggested his death was a result of foul play.It was later claimed he died of a heart attack. Christo Grozev, an expert on Russia-related security threats, believes Erovinkin is the key source to whom Mr Steele refers in his dossier. Insiders have described Erovinkin to me alternately as Sechin s treasurer and the go-between between Putin and Sechin . One thing that everyone seems to agree both in public and private sources is that Erovinkin was Sechin s closest associate, Grozev says. I have no doubt that at the time Erovinkin died, Mr Putin had Mr Steele s Trump dossier on his desk. He would arguably have known whether the alleged story is based on fact or fiction. Whichever is true, he would have had a motive to seek and find the mole, he adds. He would have had to conclude that Erovinkin was at least a person of interest. At this point, it will be difficult for our own intelligence agencies to get to the bottom of this situation. Recently, for example, Trump decided to retain James Comey yes, the guy who interfered in the election on his behalf as the head of the FBI. The Donald also has the power to fire Comey if the ongoing investigation is not positive for Trump. At around the same time as the announcement, the Bureau cleared Michael Flynn of any wrongdoing in his numerous, suspicious calls to the Russian ambassador.Our country is in a bad place and we need more information to correctly determine what is going on with any of this information the current administration and his despotic allies will go to any lengths to hide.Was Erovinkin murdered because of his knowledge of information that could greatly hurt Trump and his BFF Putin? Maybe, maybe not. Putin is exactly the sort of person who has been known to leave a trail of dead journalists in his wake for reporting too much. It s not outside the realm of possibility that he had a former KGB agent murdered for knowing too much.Featured image via Getty Images (Drew Angerer)/Twitter | 0 |
Tune in to the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR) for another LIVE broadcast of The Boiler Room starting at 6 PM PST | 9 PM EST for this special broadcast. Join us for uncensored, uninterruptible talk radio, custom-made for barfly philosophers, misguided moralists, masochists, street corner evangelists, media-maniacs, savants, political animals and otherwise lovable rascals.Join ACR hosts Hesher, & Spore along with Andy Nowicki of Alt Right Blogspot, Jay Dyer from jaysanalysis.com, Jamie Hanshaw author of Weird Stuff, Branko Mali of Kali Tribune, Randy J of 21Wire and Daniel Spaulding of Soul of the East for the 70th episode of BOILER ROOM. Dim the lights, dawn the headphones and indulge in some Boiler Room with the crew. .Please like and share the program and visit our donate page to get involved!BOILER ROOM IS NOT A POLICTALLY CORRECT ZONE! LISTEN TO THE SHOW IN THE PLAYER BELOW ENJOY! Reference Links: | 0 |
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Major parties running in Sunday s mid-term congressional election in Argentina suspended their campaigns on Wednesday after a body, thought to be that a young protester who went missing more than two months ago, was found in a river. A government spokeswoman said President Mauricio Macri s Cambiemos, or Let s Change , coalition would halt campaigning for the rest of the day after investigators on Tuesday discovered the body in the Chubut River in the country s southern Patagonia region. The remains were found near the site where indigenous rights activist Santiago Maldonado was last seen at a tribal rights protest on Aug. 1. Former president and now Senate candidate Cristina Fernandez also suspended campaigning, along with other major figures vying for Congress, their campaigns said. We have halted all events until there is word from either the judge in charge of the case or Santiago s family, a spokesman for Fernandez s Unidad Ciudadana, or Citizens Unity party told Reuters. In the final week of campaigning the Maldonado case has overshadowed the congressional election, which is expected to give Macri s coalition additional seats but not a majority in either chamber. Some opposition and rights groups believe state security forces took Maldonado, a 28-year-old craftsman, and allege Macri s government covered up information on his whereabouts. Macri s government has said that there is no evidence that shows security forces detained Maldonado. Potential cases of abuse by security forces are sensitive in Argentina, where the 1976-1983 military dictatorship secretly detained, tortured and killed people in clandestine prisons. Rights groups say up to 30,000 people disappeared. The markets will watch Sunday s election to see if business-friendly Cambiemos emerges as the main vote-getter in the bellwether province of Buenos Aires. Investors say they prefer Macri s orthodox economic policies to those of Fernandez, a free-spending populist who led the country from 2008 to 2016. While it has dominated headlines, political analysts have said they do not expect the case to change votes. | 0 |
If this is really true our leaders are sicker than I thought. Its madness and and the people need to rise up in protest | 1 |
By Paul Craig Roberts on November 9, 2016 If only Trump could exile the lot of them. They are anti-American to the core.
by Paul Craig Roberts
The American electorate’s preference for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders has established two facts. One is that the majority of the American people do not believe the media presstitutes. The other is that only the “progressives” and “liberals” who inhabit the Atlantic Northeast and Pacific West coasts believe the presstitutes.
Trump’s election to the presidency has confirmed these holier-than-thou souls in their strongly held belief that America is a white trash racist country. They have told us this all day long today.
From these people and from the presstitutes we hear that white supremacy elected Trump. This is their propaganda, the intention of which is to discredit a Trump administration before it is inaugurated. Funny how white supremacy elected black Obama twice previously.
Truthout has lost it completely. John Knefel declares “The David Dukes of the World Prevail.”
Kelly Hayes declares “White Supremacy Elected Donald Trump.”
William Rivers Pitt declares “We have elected a fascist that Mussolini would have recognized on sight.”
Hillary carried only a handful of states, the states that comprise the One Percent’s stomping grounds. Yet Amy Goodman of Democracy Now sees meaning in political writer John Nichols claim that as Hillary carried New York and California, she won the popular vote and should be in the White House.
I remember a few days ago George Soros saying that Trump would win the popular vote, but that the electoral vote would go to Hillary, thus ridding the oligarchs of Trump.
Earth Justice promises to hold Trump accountable. Trump who promises to end the threat of nuclear war with Russia and China, thereby doing more to save animal and human life than the entirety of the Democratic Party and environmental organizations, is going to be held accountable by an organization that allegedly is beyond politics and is dedicated to preserving animals from destruction.
The ACLU, of which I am a member, has also put “on notice” the president-elect who has said he will save us from nuclear war. Faced with this idiocy from the ACLU, I will not renew my membership.
Feminists tell us that we are “grieving, scared, and in shock,” and that “it is critical that we stand together and support each other.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami of the J Street Jewish Community tells us that it is “an incredibly sad and difficult day. For tens of millions of Americans who share a core belief in tolerance, decency and social justice, the election results are a severe shock. In this challenging moment, we turn to one another for comfort and community. During this election, J Street made unequivocally clear our conviction that Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States.”
Van Jones, a CNN commentator, said that Trump’s election is a nightmare, “a deeply painful moment,” a “whitelash” against minorities. While he bemoaned the pain inflicted upon poor little presstitute Van Jones, he didn’t mind insulting the American electorate and the President-elect of the United States. After all, Van Jones sees that as his racist prerogative. Architects of Endless “Regime Change” wars
And so, the holier-than-thou crowd prefers Hillary, despite her unambigious position that she would maximize conflict with Russia and China, provoke direct military conflict between the US and Russia by imposing a no-fly zone in Syria, attack Iran and other of Israel’s targets, further enrich her Wall Street handlers by privatizing Social Security, and prevent any dissent from the lowly people class of her high-handed ways. If William Rivers Pitt sees Trump as a Mussolini fascist, Trump is too mild for Pitt. He prefers Hillary, a Hitler to the third power.
The progressives have totally discredited themselves just as the presstitutes have done. Their need for a bogyman to nourish their hysteria indicates serious psychological disturbance.
They actually prefer the risk of Armageddon to peace among nuclear powers. As their 501(c)3s live off corporate contributions, they prefer globalist corporate profits to jobs for ordinary Americans.
These are the people who think of themselves as our instructors and our betters.
If only Trump could exile the lot of them. They are anti-American to the core. Related Posts: | 1 |
Sean Penn is not exactly one to mince words, and he didn t mince words when he was asked about the time he worked with Steve Bannon on a film project. Bannon has a heavy history of bankrolling and doing other work on films, even as recently as 2012. He was an executive producer for The Indian Runner, which was Penn s first time directing.Penn was not nice when talking about Bannon, and that s putting it mildly. He actually said: Bannon was then, as he is now, simply another bitter Hollywood wannabe who went rogue by way of toxic narcissistic iconoclasm. But, deep in his heart, he s just a conniving hateful bloated punk who despises mankind. And then there are also the bad things about him And then there are also the bad things about him Wow. Just wow. We ve known since Bannon came into the spotlight a year ago that he was a complete dick who loves bullying people. Earlier this year, film critic Ann Hornaday wrote a piece for the Washington Post that talks about what we can learn about Bannon from watching the films he made.Many of his films are directly tied to his worldview in fact, he s an extreme right-wing version of Michael Moore in that respect. He s spent a lot of time attacking the permanent political class, in his films, along with hippies and community organizers who allegedly hate this country and hate the Constitution. He s gone after Hillary Clinton and President Obama, but also Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. In short, he hates the whole world and everyone in it who doesn t see it exactly the way he does.Which seems to be exactly what Penn was describing in his mini-diatribe.Bannon is also someone who issues threats and ultimatums and strong-arms people into doing things his way. His narcissistic ego likely suffered a massive blow when he tried to bully Republicans on their farce of a healthcare bill by saying, This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill. Even before that sorry excuse of a bill failed, just the idea of Republicans not following his orders was enough for him to urge Trump to create a shit list. When Republicans scoffed in his general direction over his orders, it was very likely a humiliating defeat for him.So he s just a conniving hateful bloated punk who despises mankind, is a damned accurate description of him.Image of Sean Penn by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for The Hollywood Reporter. Image of Steve Bannon by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images | 1 |
The violence and hate we witnessed at Trump rallies is now spilling over into the rest of society. Since the billionaire racist misogynist internet troll was elected to lead the free world, there have been literally hundreds of hate crimes (many of which in his name) and his supporters have proved completely unwilling to behave themselves even in their victory.At an anti-Trump protest in Ohio on Monday, we received a reminder of the violent nature of the animals known as Trump voters. As Tim Joseph was delivering his message into a bullhorn at the Ohio Union at OSU in Columbus, one Trump voter voiced his displeasure with the current direction of the country (or whatever bullsh*t the media is saying to explain away these alleged people s behavior today) by shoving the protester down some stairs from behind like a coward, of course. You idiot, the disenfranchised white man screeched as he went all WWE on Joseph.One man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask began to beat the living hell out of the attacker, whose identity has not yet been released. Instead of joining in like we saw at Trump rallies throughout the election year, other protesters calmed the man down and the crowd detained him peacefully until police arrived. According to Undergraduate Student Government president Gerard Basalla the attacker, a student, was arrested and placed under indefinite suspension. The assault that occurred that s what it was in the Union tonight is completely unacceptable, Basalla told The Lantern. Every person on this campus has the right to feel safe and voice their opinion without fearing harm. We can t be having this. We protect First Amendment rights actively, but we do not under any circumstances tolerate intimidation or threats to students, faculty, staff or visitors to our campus, University President Michael Drake said in an email to students following the attack.Watch the assault below: | 1 |
by Jerri-Lynn Scofield
Jerri-Lynn here: There are many reasons to despair at the choice US voters face in tomorrow’s election. The danger that either candidate will goad Russia or China, without respect to consequences, is perhaps the most immediate and frightening. While many media hounds chase the false scent of alleged Russian manipulation of Trump, the election, and Wikileaks, to name just a few of the crazy allegations being discussed, this more serious threat has not been pursued nearly as vigorously.
In this Real News Network interview , journalist John Pilger and TRNN’s Paul Jay discuss why the very real prospect of another World War is not taken seriously by the US media. Pilger argues that whoever is elected, tensions with China and Russia will escalate. I tidied up the rush transcript as best I could. Please excuse any remaining errors.
PAUL JAY, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay.
In a few days, Americans are going to decide who the next President of the United States is going to be. Of course, this is an issue of global concern, given that the United States considers itself hegemon of the world and acts that way. What will be the difference perhaps is the foreign policy of the next President, whatever it is, Clinton or Trump. Based on what we’ve seen the last few years and how does one assess all of this? I think we’re assessing the degree of danger to the world. There doesn’t seem to be any other measurement here.
Now joining us to discuss all of this is John Pilger. John joins us from London. John is an award- winning very celebrated filmmaker and journalist. His films have been broadcast on major broadcast platforms and channels around the world. His latest film is The Coming War on China , which will be released in December. Thanks very much for joining us John.
JOHN PILGER: You’re welcome.
JAY: So as I said in the opening, it’s a kind of a question of who is more dangerous. There doesn’t seem to be any question. I think in most thinking peoples minds that one way or the other, US foreign policy is going to be dangerous for people of the world, particularly in the Middle East but not only. What is your assessment in this moment?
PILGER: Well it’s always dangerous. I sometimes think that it’s extraordinary I’ve gotten to this stage in life and I haven’t been blown up by US foreign policy. But so we all of us outside the US quake before a US election. That said, the US isn’t run by presidents, it’s run by a vast national security machine and that hasn’t changed in the last 15 years or so. I think the other 2 candidates. One is clearly a rogue candidate and that’s Donald Trump and the other, Hillary Clinton, is the candidate of this vast national security machine.
I think what’s been a pity for all of us outside the United States and indeed for all Americans, is that the hysteria over Donald Trump has obscured the fact that Hillary Clinton may well turn out to be one of the more dangerous presidents, assuming she does win as the polls suggest, though she may not of course. Because she is the president. She is almost the embodiment of a status quo that since 9/11 has left us all in a very precarious state. It’s left the Middle East in a precarious state. But above all, it’s brought us to the brink of some kind of very serious confrontation with Russia and the taunting of Russia, the intimidation of Russia is now unabated and just over the horizon there is a similar baiting of the other great nuclear power, China.
Now this issue which of course amounts to the prospect of another world war, even another nuclear war, have not been touched on.
Well they have been touched on. Ironically in the first debate, Donald Trump was asked about this and he said words to the effect, words that I would not go nuclear. I would not do a first strike. This wasn’t used. It wasn’t published. Now I would’ve thought for whatever it’s worth, he might not have meant it. Trump says a lot of things he doesn’t mean. Contradicts himself. But I would’ve thought that difference between Trump and Clinton on the issue of nuclear war, of war and peace was pretty critical. At least an issue to be debated. But it wasn’t.
JAY: Yeah, the American media is totally involved in this salacious part of Trump’s history and as usual, not very interested in any issues of polices of substance. You can find things on both of these candidates that would give one the chills. Starting with Trump, the great danger of Trump is that it won’t be President Trump, it will be President Pence. Pence has been asked who he’s going to model his Vice Presidency after and he says Cheney and in terms of foreign policy outlook, there seems to be no difference between him and Cheney.
PILGER: Well, what’s the difference between any of them frankly? I mean neocon is a terrible word but it describes them all. Trump is perhaps more interesting because he seems to have upset all the establishment. The CIA wants him beaten, the Pentagon wants him beaten, the State Department wants him beaten, even his own party wants him beaten. I mean something recommends him and just his enemies do. So, whether there is a difference I think there’s a difference of that much. I do emphasize this, that as you mentioned all these salacious stories about Trump but you know what do people want? Do they want to hear salacious stories or do they want to hear about the prospects of war and peace? Do they want to hear about whether we’re entering an extremely dangerous period in relation to Russia or not?
These issues have not been addressed and I don’t think theres any doubt that Clinton who has very unusually named a cabinet already in a sense and a very good article by one of the independent journalists in Washington, Gareth Porter, listed these people and they’re all war hawks. And she said it in the last debate. Im going to have a no-fly zone in Syria. That means attacking Russian planes.
JAY: I think there’s no doubt whichever of these people get elected president, in spite of Trump’s rhetoric and if you look at what Pence says, I think both Clinton and I will say a Pence Trump, and I put Pence first because I think that’s the more likely scenario, are going to be looking for provocations with Russia. Both Clinton and Pence are using Russian rhetoric to try and engage but using more than rhetoric. There’s this very interesting WikiLeaks that I don’t think has received nearly enough attention which shows something about the State Department under Clinton’s mentality.
It said in the WikiLeaks that it’s not said who it’s to or from but when I asked some of the people we know who have some expertise in this, they say it sounds like a State Department briefing. It says to get the Israelis in support or not in active opposition to the Iran deal we need to get rid of Assad. And essentially– and one assumes the reason for getting that will please Israel is to undermine Hezbollah– but it kind of shows what drives a lot of State Department thinking and I don’t think it’s a big stretch to think it drives Clinton thinking.
PILGER: Yeah, well, she hasn’t hidden it. She’s had an obsequious relationship with Israel– it’s well known. Her tough talking, her militarist talking, is all out there in the open. She’s made it clear that she’s going to face off Vladimir Putin. She’s going to talk tough to the Chinese. As a kind of insanity about all this. I mean US foreign policy is actually run in a straight line since 1945. But it’s become more extreme in the last 10-15 years. That’s what worries most of us outside the United States and ought to worry those of you in the United States that it’s become so extreme now. So extreme that the prospect of an accidental war at the very least. Here we are at centenaries of the first world war where all the lessons of there are glaring out at us of not quite accidental war. Intended war that lit up and became a slaughter partly by accident. I don’t for a moment think that this verbose provocateur who is currently the Defense Secretary, Mr. Carter, who is forever shouting his militarist slogans around the world. I don’t for a moment think that he actually wants nuclear war. But he sure is trying to bring it on. I’ve never known anything quite like his constant aggression. And this campaign of sending out these admirals and generals. Like Admiral Harry Harris in the Pacific speaking like Lord Palmerston in the 19th century. You know how much he runs from the world. You know what you say from Bollywood to Hollywood. You know these rather absurd people but with very great power.
JAY: The overall agenda of American dominance I don’t think changes much between the various administrations or parties. But do you not think sometimes individual and specific agendas within the complexity of the America elites plays a role? I’ll give you a couple examples. First of all, Cheney clearly drove the Iraq war. John Kiriakou, the former CIA agent said there was a morning meeting with the heads of all the major agencies and top Pentagon officials in the year leading up to the Iraq War and that that completely quite out of the ordinary, that morning phone call was chaired by Dick Cheney. And that in that phone call, and Kiriakou was apparently on it sometimes with some of the CIA people, most of the heads of agencies, most of the officialdom of the military complex were against invading Iraq. Cheney actually threatened these people saying resign or do what you’re ordered to.
There are times when specific agendas can take hold. Like for example the people I guess that what the Real News, they heard us talk about Project for New American Century often enough. The very far right type of agenda. The other one where I think it did make a difference is if you look at the Obama-McCain election. This is not to say Obama has not been aggressive and has not committed war crimes because he has. On the other hand, this is John Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran McCain and Obama does make a deal with Iran. I mean there are differences within these corridors of power which are sometimes important are there not?
PILGER: Obama decided not to attack Iran. I don’t know about making a deal with Iran. They decided not to attack Iran. Attacking Iran would’ve been a disaster of course for the people of Iran and in the Middle East. But it would’ve also been a disaster for the United States.
JAY: As the Iraq War was.
PILGER: He decided not to attack them. So yes, but Obama has run probably more wars simultaneously than any other president. He’s run probably the most comprehensive terror campaign in his drone warfare of assassination. You know we can sit here and say that one is slightly better.
JAY: I wouldn’t even use the word better. I would say in specific circumstances.
PILGER: I was searching. I was going to say less insane than the other. Sure. But in the end, here we are in 2016 in a presidential campaign and I’ve covered 4 US presidential campaigns and I thought no you couldn’t have Nixon as president. Well looking back on Nixon compared with some of the others who have come since, maybe a little less insane there. I don’t know. But here we are in 2016 with this political freak show in the United States that spells great danger for all of us.
JAY: John talk a little bit about the film you’re working on and why you think there’s such a looming confrontation with China, what’s driving it?
PILGER: Well it’s not what I think. The evidence is very clear. I mean Obama, the one who’s done the deals, hes announced that he went to Australia in 2011 and announced what was known as the pivot to Asia and that was the deployment, the transfer of almost two-thirds of US naval forces into the Asia Pacific region by the year 2020. And at the moment there are 400 US bases ringing China. They start in Australia and they go all the way through Asia, up through the Pacific, Korea, Japan, across Eurasia, Afghanistan, India. If you look at them on a map, you can understand why the Chinese have apparently changed their nuclear policy to a first strike policy. They never had that. They used to keep the missiles and warheads separate. They don’t anymore.
In the informed literature, the Journal of Concerned Scientists and there have been a number of articles that have described in some detail how the Chinese have changed their nuclear profile. They’re worried. I was there not long ago and I spoke to a number of strategists and people are worried– rather confused actually– but worried and some of them are quite angry. The whole building of air strips on the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea was a defensive move. Last year the United States conducted possibly the biggest naval exercise in history. Talisman Saber in which it rehearsed a blockade across the Malacca Straits through which comes 80% of China’s oil and its raw materials.
The Chinese understand all of this. They know all of this. If it’s not explained to us through our media, they certainly know about it. This kind of provocation against China has been almost, I wouldn’t say a sideshow but it’s another chapter. The first chapter of course is the provocation of Russia. And that is probably the most dangerous. Does anyone in the United States know what the Russians are thinking? What people in Russia are thinking? That they’re having civil drill exercises. What the Russian press is saying? What people think about this?
There is a sense in much of Russia that the United States is about to attack them. This is very, very dangerous because it puts a country in a defensive position, and that’s when accidents can happen. There is no debate about this in what is it? Constitutionally the free-est place in the world, in the United States? Nothing. Read the New York Times for the last couple of days. It’s become a sort of Cold War propaganda sheet. Stories that are clearly nonsense.
JAY: The objective seems to be one would think to weaken Putin but if anything’s going to strengthen Putin it’s this kind of threat that creates an increased amount of nationalism and such.
PILGER: Well I don’t know if it will strengthen Putin at all. I don’t know enough about Russia. But the little I do know suggests that Putin is one of those who is always talking about being a partner of the United States. He does want to be a partner. He sees Russia’s future in Europe. There are others in Russia who have had enough of the talk of partnership and who drink in a deep well of Russian nationalism and Russian memory of all their great invasions of their country. So, I don’t know whether it strengthens Putin or not. Perhaps it doesn’t. Whatever it is, it’s dangerous.
JAY: You mean in other ways it could be strengthening far more nationalists and fascistic forces that could actually-
PILGER: Well not fascistic. In fact, there are plenty of fascists in Ukraine. You wouldn’t know that reading the US press. There was a coup in 2014. Fascist led. Paid for by the United States. The truth of that is inverted and it has Russia invading Ukraine. I mean couldn’t make it up but that’s the received wisdom. Now I’m not sure about the fascistic elements in Russia but there could be militarist elements and there could be those in the very powerful national security sector in Russia that say we have to prepare and they are preparing of course. Their weapons industry has been developing in a very sophisticated way in the last few years. Their air defenses and so on. But this is all war preparation. You know whether it’s Clinton or Trump it’s deeply worrying and deeply disturbing when reckless politicians like Hillary Clinton can stand up and beat every war drum that is put in front of them. That’s reckless.
JAY: Alright thanks very much for joining us, John.
PILGER: You’re welcome.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on the Real News Network. 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 1 |
Paul Ryan nervously giggled during the Republican announcement of the budget and Obamacare replacement this morning. It s interesting to watch all of the Republicans in the video below skip over the elephant in the room by redirecting everyone to other items THEY consider to be positive. Ryan emphasized the funding for border patrol but skipped right over the border wall funding.Why does the left bother with Resistance theatrics when the Republican Congress funds their entire wish list anyway?Is funding the NIH (National Institutes for Health) with 2 BILLION dollars a good thing? That bloated and very wasteful item needs to be looked at more closely. Remember shrimp on a treadmill? Drunk monkeys? Yes, this is the organization that gives out YOUR tax dollars to people to do crazy experiments that are honestly wasteful.The other things like funding Sanctuary Cities? Is anyone else puzzled by this?Why are the Republicans constantly trying to appease the Democrats?Please skip to the 5:15 mark in the video:This is a loser spending bill for the American people! | 1 |
It turns out the words affordable and care were both horrendous lies pushed by the Left in order to prop up the most dangerous man to every occupy our Oval Office.If you like your insurance carrier, you can keep your insurance carrier. The nation s largest provider of health insurance announced this morning that it may choose to stop offering individual coverage after 2016, and will pull back on its marketing efforts immediately in this market. If the losses continue and United pulls out of next year s exchanges, it will set up a very bad moment for ObamaCare and for Democrats just weeks before the election:UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) today reported revised expectations for 2015, reflecting a continuing deterioration in individual exchange-compliant product performance, and provided an initial outlook for 2016. In recent weeks, growth expectations for individual exchange participation have tempered industrywide, co-operatives have failed, and market data has signaled higher risks and more difficulties while our own claims experience has deteriorated, so we are taking this proactive step, said Stephen J. Hemsley, chief executive officer of UnitedHealth Group. We continue to be pleased with the growth and overall performance of our Company outside of the individual exchange products and look forward to strong, positive and broad based earnings growth across our enterprise in 2016. UnitedHealthcare has pulled back on its marketing efforts for individual exchange products in 2016. The Company is evaluating the viability of the insurance exchange product segment and will determine during the first half of 2016 to what extent it can continue to serve the public exchange markets in 2017.Don t kid yourselves. If United is going to pull back on marketing efforts for 2016, it s because they don t see themselves being in the market in 2017. Just by announcing it, United has set up the expectation of withdrawal for investors, who do not want to have good money chasing after bad.Assuming nothing changes in the fiscal model and after three years, it s not likely to suddenly improve that would create a huge gap in choice for many Americans in the next open enrollment period. That would normally begin in October 2016, unless HHS decides to delay it, as they did ahead of the 2014 elections. Many voters will suddenly find their coverage expired, forced to choose another plan from a smaller list of options, all of which will no doubt become even more expensive for everyone thanks to the decline in competition. It s going to act like a bombshell on the election, especially for Democrats running to hold seats in Congress, and perhaps even in the presidential election.Philip Klein explains why prices will move even higher than usual:The year 2017 is significant for insurers, because that s the year when several programs designed to mitigate risk for insurers through federal backstops go away. The hope was that those programs would act as training wheels for Obamacare in its first few years of implementation, but after that, the insurers were supposed to be able to thrive on their own. UnitedHealth s statement suggests otherwise.If UnitedHealth and other insurers decide to exit, remaining insurers will be forced to take on even more high-risk enrollees, prompting them to either raise rates further or exit themselves. That in turn would deprive individuals of choices and remove competition, a key purpose of the exchanges. Klein sat in on a United conference call this morning, and got the scope of the losses:UnitedHealth expects to lose over $200 million on Obamacare in 2016 alone Philip Klein (@philipaklein) November 19, 2015So don t expect United to suddenly see a reason to get back into the 2017 market, not without hefty risk-corridor subsidies which under any other circumstances would be called corporate welfare. Given that Congress isn t likely to reverse course and underwrite ObamaCare losses, the path to the exit remains the likely course for United, and perhaps some of its competitors, too.United says it will remain committed to its Medicaid and Medicare businesses, and of course it will stick with its employer-based group coverage, where the issues of ObamaCare regulation have less impact. But this is a reversal for United on the individual markets, as Forbes Bruce Japsen points out. Just last month, United s CEO declared that they still considered this a growth market.United has discovered that the trade-offs in mandates and forced coverage don t pay off. It s a bait-and-switch for insurers by the Obama administration, but it s even worse of a bait-and-switch for consumers. In my column today for The Fiscal Times, I argue that the financial model of ObamaCare has left consumers with a fistful of broken promises, and the worst of both worlds.Via:Hot Air | 1 |
Being called out for his utter incompetence as a leader by the press is not something Obama is used to CBS News s Major Garrett asked President Obama at a press conference Wednesday if he was content with four Americans held in Iranian jails while his administration celebrated the nuclear deal. Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content with all the fanfare around this deal to leave the conscious of this nation, the strength of this nation unaccounted for in relation to these four Americans? Garrett asked. That s nonsense and you should know better, Obama bit back. Nobody s content and our diplomats and our teams are working diligently to try to get them out. Garrett later brushed off the scolding on CBS s news streaming network, saying, Clearly, it struck a nerve. That was my intention Was it provocative? Yes. Was it intended to be as such? Absolutely. The Daily Beast s Shane Harris reported yesterday that the Americans came up during negotiations over Iran s nuclear program. We believe very strongly that this is an opportunity for Iran to let the Americans come home, an administration official said.Via: The Daily Beast | 1 |
SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin, a dog lover, received a top breed puppy as a belated birthday gift on Wednesday from Turkmenistan s president who is keen to recover lost Russian markets for Turkmen gas. We have a common friend - this is the world s unique alabai dog. And today I brought this little alabai with me, President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov said before talks with Putin, pulling the pup out from a portable cage and holding it up by the scruff of its neck. Putin, who marked his 65th birthday on Oct. 7, took the puppy, called Verny which means faithful in Russian, and kissed it in its forehead. The alabai is a home-bred Turkmen variety of the Central Asian shepherd dog. Along with the handmade carpets and the ancient Akhal Teke breed of race horses, it is officially listed as part of Turkmenistan s national heritage. Plush and cuddly when they are young, alabai dogs grow into fierce shepherd dogs, fearless in warding off wolves but also in dealing with human strangers. Berdymukhamedov, a flamboyant former dentist whose interests range from sport cars to noble horses, enjoys a personality cult and autocratic powers in his desert nation which sits on the world s fourth-largest natural gas reserves. The two men held talks at the Black Sea resort of Sochi, on the sidelines of a summit of ex-Soviet states, with the Turkmen side keen to see a possible resumption of natural gas exports to Russia. Russia, once the main buyer of Turkmen gas, stopped buying the fuel last year due to a price dispute. China, with its growing appetite for energy, is now the main market for Turkmen gas. Some other foreign leaders including those of Japan and Bulgaria have also given Putin puppies of rare breeds as gifts. | 0 |
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There are many jobs that are commonly understood to be dangerous to your health. Many people know the risk of these positions and continue to do their jobs diligently nonetheless. After all, we all have to make a living, and many people love what they do.
However, a recent study may cause us to rethink some of the things we thought we knew about which jobs are safe and which are not. It could also cause some to rethink their career goals. These researchers did their due diligence, and through a very scientific process, put together a list of the most unhealthy jobs in America.
While many on the list would surprise no one– nuclear medicine technologist, for example– there are some that may surprise even the people in the positions. Possibly the most shocking on the list was their number one most unhealthy career in America: dentists, dental surgeons and dental assistants.
Other surprises on the list include flight attendant, veterinarian and podiatrist. While many of these may not seem to make sense at first, after a closer look, one begins to understand the thinking and the process behind the rankings. For some, it includes the unusual amount of time spent sitting down. For others, factors like possible exposure to infectious disease explain their place on the list. Unfortunately for dentists, they hit a double-whammy on those factors plus several other aspects of the job that are viewed as unhealthy.
The list also includes several of the old hits like chemical plant and systems operator, radiologist and derrick operators. However, even the order of some of these and the dangerous attributes attributed to them can be surprising.
Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but there were even some on the list that were surprising simply because of their existence. One of those was histotechnologist; I didn’t even know that was a thing. In case you are more or equally uneducated as I, a histotechnologist is part of a medical laboratory team that prepares tissue for analysis and diagnosis of disease. If you did know that, you probably are a histotechnologist.
The information used in determining this list comes from the Occupational Informational Network, or O*Net. O*Net is a U.S. Department of Labor database that contains detailed information about hundreds of careers and occupations. It provides a host of useful facts for job seekers, human resources professionals, students and researchers.
In order to analyze occupations by the possible impact they could have on workers’ health, the researchers used O*Net measures of six different health risks and averaged them together. The types of risk include: Exposure to contaminants Exposure to disease and infection Exposure to hazardous conditions Risk of minor burns, cuts, bites and stings Time spent sitting | 1 |
NEWARK, N.J. (Reuters) - Two former allies of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie deliberately closed access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in a “vicious” and unlawful political revenge scheme, a federal prosecutor said on Friday at the close of their criminal trial. Bridget Kelly, the governor’s former deputy chief of staff, and Bill Baroni, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, abused their power to create a massive traffic jam in order to punish a local mayor for failing to back Christie’s re-election campaign, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Cortes told jurors in Newark, New Jersey. “As cruel and callous as that scheme was, what makes it unlawful was that they misused government resources to carry it out,” Cortes said in closing arguments at federal court in Newark, New Jersey. Baroni’s lawyer is expected to deliver his closing argument later on Friday. The Port Authority operates the George Washington Bridge, said by the agency to be the world’s busiest. Kelly and Baroni are charged with fraud, conspiracy and depriving residents of Fort Lee, New Jersey, of their civil rights. Former Port Authority executive David Wildstein has pleaded guilty and appeared as the government’s star witness. Christie has not been charged and has steadfastly denied any advance knowledge of the plan. But Wildstein, Baroni and Kelly all testified that they told the governor some details about the lane closures either beforehand or while they were occurring. The so-called “Bridgegate” scandal tarnished Christie’s national reputation, damaging his unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination. The trial has cast an unflattering light on Christie as a temperamental bully whose administration used the Port Authority to hand out favors, and penalties, to local officials. Kelly and Baroni, both of whom testified in their own defense, said they were duped by Wildstein and his claim that the lane closures were part of a legitimate traffic study. But Cortes warned jurors not to be fooled by that “preposterous” assertion, pointing to Kelly’s now-infamous email to Wildstein in which she wrote, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” as evidence of her guilt. During his closing argument, Cortes showed jurors numerous messages sent among Kelly, Wildstein and Baroni suggesting they deliberately ignored Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich’s desperate pleas for help as the gridlock became untenable, delaying first responders and stranding school buses for hours. At one point, Wildstein told Baroni that his response to Sokolich should be “radio silence.” | 0 |
Palestinian factions and terrorist groups hailed an attack carried out by three terrorists that killed a female Israeli police officer in Jerusalem on Friday and wounded others nearby. [The attack took place near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City and saw three Palestinian terrorists armed with knives and guns open fire and start stabbing those nearby, critically wounding Hadas Malka, 23, a policewomen who died of her wounds. Others were wounded in the assault, and all three terrorists were shot dead by Israeli security forces at the scene. The Islamic State used its Amaq news agency to claim that “soldiers of the caliphate” attacked a “gathering of Jews. ” Hamas rejected the IS claim of responsibility while Israeli officials expressed skepticism over the IS statement. The Islamic Palestinian factions praised the combined attack, with an Islamic Jihad spokesman Dahoud Shihab saying in a statement released immediately after the terrorist event that “The martyr’s blood that was spilled at the gates of the Mosque is a clear message that the intifada continues and that the Palestinian people will not give up. ” Shihab praised “the pure martyrs who were killed while fasting,” and noted that the attack in Jerusalem “is proof that Jerusalem is the land of the jihad. Praise be to the pure martyrs who rose up to defend the purity and sanctity of the blessed land while screaming in the faces of all those who seek normalization. ” Hamas also praised the attack in Jerusalem. Hazem Qassem, one of Hamas’ spokesmen, said in a special statement that the attack was additional proof “that our Palestinian nation continues its revolution against the criminal occupation and that the intifada will continue until we achieve full freedom. ” According to him, the death of the three terrorists “is proof that the occupation is the true face of terror, terror against which the Palestinian nation is exercising its right to defend itself and its holy places. ” The Abou Ali Mustafa Brigades, the military arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, also praised the attack and called the carnage “a natural response to the crimes of the continuing occupation against our people. ” “The act sends a clear message to the leaders of the occupation that the opposition and the intifada continue and are revitalized and we haven’t been broken despite all the steps and tools of criminal oppression,” the statement added. The terrorist organization called for the Palestinian people “to continue the heroic attacks that spill the blood of the occupation and to continue supporting the resistance. ” Israeli “occupation” refers to Israel’s presence in the West Bank, home to historic Jewish communities like Hebron and Beit El, as well as Israel’s control over eastern Jerusalem, which contains the Temple Mount and Western Wall. Instead of condemning the terrorist attack, the Fatah movement, led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, slammed what it called “the killing of three young Palestinians by the forces of the Israel occupation in East Jerusalem. ” Fatah was referring to the three terrorists who were eliminated in the middle of carrying out their murderous assault against Israelis. The statement, published by the movement in the official WAFA Palestinian news agency, added that the deaths of the three attackers represents “the continuation of Israeli policies of escalation and is proof that the Israeli occupation government is continuing its policies. ” Abbas’s Fatah movement called “for the Israeli occupation government to immediately cease the escalation that does not serve the security or stability of the region. ” The movement further called on the international community “to seriously consider the possibility of security international protection for the innocent Palestinian people. ” | 0 |
Yesterday, social media was buzzing after The Huffington Post actually posted a story that not only backed up Trump s assertion about Sweden being a hot mess, but it called out journalists for lying about how the invasion of immigrants are destroying European nations. The title of the article in and of itself, is bad enough: Trump is absolutely right about Sweden but the honesty with which the writer approaches the subject is even more stunning. Not surprisingly, after getting a lot of negative reaction from the left who felt the Huffington Post let them down by actually telling the truth, the Huffington Post deleted the story. Our friend @TEN_GOP was kind enough to archive the story before they deleted it.https://twitter.com/TEN_GOP/status/834822902495145985President Trump tweeted clarification of the comments he made about Sweden that the Huffington Post author Ren Zografos referenced in his article:My statement as to what's happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants & Sweden. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 19, 2017After The Huffington Post deleted his article, Ren Zografos came out in defense of his words and of Trump comments about Sweden on Twitter:Trump is absolutely right about Sweden https://t.co/jyFM3bjIE8 Ren Zografos (@zokrates) February 22, 2017Here he Zografos defends his article as nothing but the truth. :Thank you for all supports so far, kind people. The story is nothing but the truth.. #truth #media #Trump Ren Zografos (@zokrates) February 23, 2017Sweden has huge problems because of liberal immigration policy Many journalists around the world are eager to condemn Donald Trump no matter what. When he tweeted about immigration in Sweden few days ago, the social media exploded. Most of the opponent said that Trump has made up the immigration problem Sweden have. They are wrong.Only hours later there was a riot of violence and destructions by immigrants in the capitol of Sweden, Stockholm. The police was forced to shoot with ammunition to put and end to it. In Malm , another city south in Sweden they have struggle with gang violence and lawlessness for years. So when Trump talk about that Sweden have an immigration problem he is actually spot on.It s well known for Scandinavians and other Europeans that liberal immigration comes with drugs, rapes, gang wars, robbery and violence. Additional to that we see the respective nations cultures fading away, for good and for bad.But the immigration problem is not only a Swedish predicament. The truth is, that several European cities have huge immigration problems where even the police force is afraid to interfere in some locations in these cities. UK, France and several other European countries are changing rapidly with extreme quantity of immigration. I m not saying immigration is only bad, but a lot of problems come with poor immigration policy, as consequences we get violence, terror and gangs. The fact is that the press here in Europe hasn t doing their job properly. There is this fear for journalists to not report the basic truth which is that Europe has enormous problems that comes from liberal immigration politics, and as we also now can see in Sweden, but also here in Norway. But it s not political correct for journalists to say or write that immigration in Europe is unsuccessful. When that said, most of the people that come from other countries are behaving flawless and are a gift to our society, but then again to report that everything is all good is simply wrong and these journalists should find another job, because they do not have enough integrity that requires to be decent journalist.Go here to see the actual archived article. | 1 |
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