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Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed the State’s sanctuary city bill into law Sunday night during a Facebook Live event from his office. The new law is now the toughest city law in the United States and provides for criminal and civil penalties for police chiefs and sheriff’s that refuse to honor immigration detainers.[ “Let’s be clear about something. We all support legal immigration. It helped to build America and Texas,” the governor said before signing the bill. “Legal immigration is different from harboring people who have committed dangerous crimes. This law cracks down on policies like the Travis County sheriff who declared she would not detain known criminals accused of violent crimes. Those policies are sanctuary city policies and won’t be tolerated in Texas. ” The bill, Senate Bill 4 by Senator Charles Perry ( ) passed both chambers of the legislature before coming to Abbott’s desk for signature. The law will go into effect on September 1, 2017. This provides time for departments like the Travis County Sheriff’s Office to come into compliance. Following the bill’s passage by the legislature, Travis County Sheriff “Sanctuary Sally” Hernandez expressed her displeasure with the new law. “I am disappointed because this is not in the best interest of public safety,” the sheriff wrote in a statement obtained by Breitbart Texas. It ties the hands of our law enforcement agency and pushes victims of crime into the shadows. While I hate seeing a state law like this come to pass, I have always followed the law and that will not change. ” Earlier this year, Travis County became the poster child for sanctuary cities when the sheriff led the nation in the first Immigration and Customs Enforcement Declined Detainer Outcome Report. That report revealed more than 70 percent of criminal aliens released nationwide after detainers were issued were in Travis County, Breitbart Texas reported. Governor Abbott made the sanctuary city issue an emergency item for the Texas Legislature during his State of the State Address in January. The Texas Senate acted on the issue right away, passing SB4 in February. The bill went to the House where it sat until passage on April 27. The Senate confirmed the changes made by the House and sent the bill to Governor Abbott on May 3. Texas attempted several times under Rick Perry to pass sanctuary city legislation. The bill would pass one body of the legislature or the other but never both. This time, Governor Abbott was able to foster an environment whereby both chambers of the legislature could find their way through to final passage. Following final passage, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick said, “In the past six years, criminal aliens have been charged with more than 566, 000 crimes in Texas including kidnapping, homicide, burglary and much more. There is no excuse for endangering our communities by allowing criminal aliens who have committed a crime to go free. ” “SB 4 will ensure that no liberal local official can flaunt the law,” Patrick added. Key provisions in the bill call for criminal and civil penalties for Texas Sheriffs and chiefs of police who fail to honor immigration detainers issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, Breitbart Texas reported. It also includes a provision that allows police officers to inquire about the immigration status of a person they have detained. Abbott says this provision is vastly different than the Arizona law that requires police officers to check immigration status on people they encounter. The Texas law “allows officers to check” the immigration status but does not require it. He said this provision of the bill has been tested and upheld, even by the liberal justices on the Supreme Court. The bill also provides that an elected official who refuses to comply with the law can be removed from office, fined, and even jailed. “They could end up in the same jail with the criminals they are trying to protect,” Abbott told Breitbart Texas in an interview following the signing. Despite rumors being spread by the bill’s opponents, SB4 prohibits an officer from asking about the immigration status of any crime victim or witness to a crime. An exception is included if the person’s immigration status is germane to the crime as in a human smuggling crime, or when the victim or witness could obtain a protected immigrant status under provisions provided to a witness or crime victim. Abbott concluded his signing by saying, “There is a reason people come to American because we are a nation of laws and Texas is doing its best to keep it that way. ” Editor’s Note: This article has been updated with additional information. Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook. | 1 |
Hillary’s Bizarre Spanish Birthday Bash, Tells Illegal Aliens SECRET Message Posted on October 26, 2016 by Rebecca Diserio in Politics Share This
It’s Hillary Clinton’s birthday, and unfortunately, no one is shocked that she spent time on Univision on some ridiculous talk show, pandering to illegal aliens during a bizarre Spanish birthday bash. However, what is leaving many in disbelief is what she promised illegal aliens off the record if she gets elected. Unfortunately for her, Univision let everyone know her secret message to them, and it’s pissing Americans off. Hillary’s birthday cake (left), Hillary samples cookies (right)
Hillary is on her final leg of her ill-fated campaign, and it’s perfect that she showed her true colors on Univision’s Spanish-language talk show called “Gordo & Flaca” (Fat & Skinny) with a little person called Producer Carlitos who led Hillary around like a pet pony. It was so pathetic as they made her repeat words like “vote” and “president” in Spanish while the crowd laughed at her bad accent.
It’s cringe-worthy enough when a 69-year-old grandmother panders to a bunch of buffoons in any language, but the fact that it was an American woman running for president makes it disgusting. However, let’s look past the idiotic looking birthday cake coming from what is supposed to be an unbiased news source, albeit a Hispanic one. Instead, let’s learn what Hillary said directly to illegal aliens that have so many Americans pissed off today. It’s Hillary pandering at her best, or it’s the worst optic ever, and she should have canceled. “I want to be a really good president for you,” she said in one outtake posted by the show online. “I want to give you every opportunity to be successful in our country.” Clinton announced a free concert Saturday with latin pop stars Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony. [via Daily Mail ] Did you catch that? Hillary wants to give illegal aliens every opportunity to be successful in our country, and this was an outtake because her campaign wanted none of that talk to get posted online. Hillary is struggling badly with the heavily Cuban areas in Florida, where they routinely vote Republican, and the one thing she needs is Florida. At the end of this one minute video, you can hear Hillary say to Gordo (Fatty), “ You’ll make the difference not just here in Florida , but everywhere.” The Cuban-Americans don’t take kindly to illegal aliens of any race, so where they might watch Univision, they will not like Hillary looking ridiculous, and they will especially not like her encouraging illegal aliens in that message that was supposed to be off the record. Now for the other stupid Hillary moment, which was another bad optic for her. Producer Carlitos gave Hillary an expensive bottle of tequila as Hillary looked all bugged eyed wanting to down a shot. Producer Carlitos led Hillary like a pet pony onto the stage (left), Carlitos gave Hillary tequila (right) The path to Hillary’s White House runs through non-white voters. Think about that. Yes, America is a melting pot, but we want a legal melting pot. Wanting those in America to actually be legal Americans isn’t racist since “illegal” isn’t a race. What Donald Trump said was that it’s okay to be proud to be American. In fact, it’s vital we be proud to be Americans once again — and all races in the United States can and should feel that way. Hillary needs to pander to those minorities who, unlike Cuban-Americans, believe illegal aliens have the same rights in America as Americans . It’s crazy and proves that Hillary cares nothing about America. She is a pure globalist, who is working for those who want open borders everywhere. I truly believe that Americans are smarter than Hillary and her cabal of globalists know. Let those at Univision and those who hate America get this message loud and clear: America is not Hillary’s country to give away. It’s every Americans’ country, and we each have one vote to make sure she can never give our birthright away. | 1 |
There really could be only one appropriate home for Bruce Springsteen’s archives: the Jersey Shore. And indeed that is where they will go, through a partnership announced Tuesday with Monmouth University in West Long Branch, N. J. As part of the partnership, the university will establish the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music, which will be the repository for Mr. Springsteen’s personal collection of written works, photographs, periodicals and various artifacts from throughout his career. The university — just miles from Asbury Park, one of the towns where Mr. Springsteen started his musical career — said in a statement that the new center would promote the legacy of Mr. Springsteen and other giants of American music, like Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. Its materials would also bolster curriculums at the university, including at its music business program. “The establishment of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music celebrates and reinforces the Jersey Shore’s legacy in the history of American music, while providing a truly transformative experience for our students,” Paul R. Brown, the university’s president, said in a statement. The university offered few other details about the collection or its plans for the new center, including any financial information about the partnership. But Mr. Springsteen’s materials will join what is already a major trove of memorabilia at Monmouth, the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection. That collection includes nearly 35, 000 items — compiled in part by fans — which has been housed at Monmouth since 2011. One of the figures involved in bringing the archives to Monmouth University was Robert Santelli, the executive director of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, who is expected to take on a leadership role at the new center. Mr. Santelli, a Monmouth alumnus, also helped secure the special collection for the university in 2011. The arrangement with Monmouth comes as archives have become increasingly valuable to museums, universities and other cultural institutions, which use them for scholarly study and sometimes as tourist attractions. Last year, Bob Dylan’s archives were acquired by the George Kaiser Family Foundation for a group of institutions in Oklahoma, including the University of Tulsa, for an estimated $15 million to $20 million. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — The comparison was inflammatory, to say the least. Former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts equated Donald J. Trump’s immigration plan with Kristallnacht, the night of horror in 1938 when rampaging Nazis smashed Jewish homes and businesses in Germany and killed scores of Jews. But if it was a provocative analogy, it was not a lonely one. Mr. Trump’s campaign has engendered impassioned debate about the nature of his appeal and warnings from critics on the left and the right about the potential rise of fascism in the United States. More strident opponents have likened Mr. Trump to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. To supporters, such comparisons are deeply unfair smear tactics used to tar conservatives and scare voters. For a bipartisan establishment whose foundation has been shaken by Mr. Trump’s ascendance, these backers say, it is easier to delegitimize his support than to acknowledge widespread popular anger at the failure of both parties to confront the nation’s challenges. But the discussion comes as questions are surfacing around the globe about a revival of fascism, generally defined as a governmental system that asserts complete power and emphasizes aggressive nationalism and often racism. In places like Russia and Turkey, leaders like Vladimir V. Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan employ strongman tactics. In Austria, a nationalist candidate came within of a percentage point of becoming the first head of state elected in Europe since World War II. In Hungary, an authoritarian government has clamped down on the news media and erected razor wire fences to keep out migrants. There are worries that Poland may follow suit. Traditional parties in France, Germany, Greece and elsewhere have been challenged by nationalist movements amid an economic crisis and waves of migrants. In Israel, fascism analogies by a former prime minister and a top general have again inflamed the debate about the occupation of Palestinian territories. “The crash of 2008 showed how globalization creates losers as well as winners,” said Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “In many countries, wages are stagnant and politics has become a battle over a shrinking pie. Populists have replaced contests between left and right with a struggle between cosmopolitan elites and angry nativists. ” That dislocation may not lead to a repeat of Europe in the 1930s, but it has fueled a debate about global political trends. There is a tendency at times to try to fit current movements into understandable constructs — some refer to terrorist groups in the Middle East as Islamofascists — but scholars say there is a spectrum that includes nationalism, illiberal democracy and populist autocracy. “On a world level, the situation that affects many countries is economic stagnation and the arrival of immigrants,” said Robert O. Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University and one of the most prominent scholars of fascism. “That’s a punch that democratic governments are having enormous trouble in meeting. ” Mr. Trump dismisses the labels used by those like Mr. Weld, a longtime Republican now mounting a quixotic campaign for vice president as a Libertarian. “I don’t talk about his alcoholism,” Mr. Trump said through a spokeswoman, “so why would he talk about my foolishly perceived fascism? There is nobody less of a fascist than Donald Trump. ” (Mr. Weld, who in the 1990s reportedly appeared in public a few times having had too much to drink, declined to respond: “I’ll let that ride. ”) Americans are used to the idea that other countries may be vulnerable to such movements, but while figures like Father Charles Coughlin, the demagogic radio broadcaster, enjoyed wide followings in the 1930s, neither major party has ever nominated anyone quite like Mr. Trump. “This could be one of those moments that’s quite dangerous and we’ll look back and wonder why we treated it as at a time when we could have stopped it,” said Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Brookings Institution known for hawkish internationalism. Mr. Kagan sounded the alarm this month with a Washington Post article, “This Is How Fascism Comes to America,” that gained wide attention. “I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from conservative Republicans,” he said. “There are a lot of people who agree with this. ” Fascist comparisons are not new in American politics. A Google search of “Barack Obama and Nazi” or “George W. Bush and Nazi” produces many images of the last two presidents as fascists. But with Mr. Trump, such comparisons have gone beyond the fringe and entered mainstream conversation both in the United States and abroad. President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico criticized Mr. Trump’s plans to build a wall on the border and to bar Muslims from entering the United States. “That’s the way Mussolini arrived and the way Hitler arrived,” he said. The actor George Clooney called Mr. Trump “a xenophobic fascist. ” Louis C. K. the comic, said, “The guy is Hitler. ” Eva Schloss, the stepsister of Anne Frank, said Trump “is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism. ” It got to the point that his wife, Melania Trump, was prompted to say, “He’s not Hitler. ” Mr. Trump has provided plenty of ammunition for critics. He was slow to denounce the white supremacist David Duke and talked approvingly of beating up protesters. He has praised Mr. Putin and promised to be friends. He would not condemn supporters who launched blasts at journalists. At one point, Mr. Trump retweeted a Mussolini quote: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep. ” Asked by Chuck Todd on the NBC program “Meet the Press” about the retweet, Mr. Trump brushed off the quote’s origin. “I know who said it,” he said. “But what difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else?” “Do you want to be associated with a fascist?” Mr. Todd asked. “No,” Mr. Trump answered, “I want to be associated with interesting quotes. ” He added: “And certainly, hey, it got your attention, didn’t it?” Mr. Trump’s allies dismiss the criticism as politically motivated and historically suspect. The former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who has said he would consider being Mr. Trump’s running mate, said in an interview that he was “deeply offended” by what he called “utterly ignorant” comparisons. “Trump does not have a political structure in the sense that the fascists did,” said Mr. Gingrich, a onetime college professor who earned his doctorate in modern European history. “He doesn’t have the sort of ideology that they did. He has nobody who resembles the brownshirts. This is all just garbage. ” Beyond Hitler and Mussolini, fascism can be hard to define. Since World War II, only fringe figures have overtly identified themselves that way. In modern political discourse, the word is used as an epithet. And even Hitler and Mussolini were elastic in their political philosophies as they came to power Mussolini started out as a leftist. Mr. Paxton, the fascism scholar, said he saw similarities and differences in Mr. Trump. His message about an America in decline and his pronouncements about immigrants and outsiders echo Europe in the 1930s, Mr. Paxton said. On the other hand, he said, Mr. Trump has hardly created uniformed, violent youth groups. Moreover, fascists believe in strong state control, not individualism and deregulation. Others caution against comparisons. “I read Kagan’s piece, of course,” said Volker Perthes, the director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, in Berlin. “All the phenomena he describes are raising concerns, but I would still not call Trump or his campaign fascist. Maybe with German and European history in mind, we are a bit more cautious than others in using the label ‘fascism. ’” Mr. Perthes said real fascism requires two more elements — an outright rejection of democracy and a harsher definition of order. Jobbik, the ultraright party in Hungary, would fall into this category, he said, but Norbert Hofer, the candidate who narrowly lost the Austrian presidential vote, and Mr. Trump would not. Charles Grant, the director of the Center for European Reform, in London, distinguished between nationalist parties like Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France and actual fascism. “Historically, it means the demonization of minorities within a society to the extent that they feel insecure,” he said. “It means encouraging the use of violence against critics. It means a bellicose foreign policy that may lead to war, to excite a nationalist feeling. It takes xenophobia to extremes. And it is contemptuous of a liberal order. ” The debate about terminology may ignore the seriousness of the conditions that gave rise to Mr. Trump and his European counterparts. The New York real estate developer has tapped into a deep discontent in a country where many feel left behind while Wall Street banks get bailouts, newcomers take jobs, terrorists threaten innocents and China rises economically at America’s expense. “It seems to me in developed and semideveloped countries there is emerging a new kind of politics for which maybe the best taxonomic category would be populist nationalism,” said Stanley Payne, a professor emeritus at the University of . “We are seeing a new kind of phenomenon which is different from what you had” in the 20th century. Roger Eatwell, a professor at the University of Bath, in England, calls it “illiberal democracy,” a form of government that keeps the trappings of democracy without the reality. “Elections are seen as important to legitimizing regimes,” he said, but instead of imposing rule, as in the past, today’s authoritarians “use a variety of devices to control manipulate the media, intimidate opponents” and so on. Either way, it has found pockets of support on both sides of the Atlantic. Lilia Shevtsova, a political analyst in Moscow, said in liberal societies in the West stems from crisis or dysfunction while in illiberal countries like Russia and Turkey it reflects an attempt to fill the void left by the failure of Western notions to catch on. The problem, she added, is that “the Western political leadership at the moment is too weak to fight the tide. ” | 1 |
The anxiety began well before the Cleveland convention, where the candidate of the “Forgotten Men,” the one who declared Americans “the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth,” seemed likely to clinch his party’s presidential nomination. Doremus Jessup, the protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” sees something dark and terrible brewing in American politics — the potential for “a real fascist dictatorship” led by the populist candidate Berzelius Windrip. Friends scoff at this extravagant concern. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly!” they assure him. But Jessup, a Vermont newspaper editor and a “mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental liberal,” worries about the devastation ahead. “What can I do?” he agonizes night after night. “Oh — write another editorial I suppose!” When Election Day comes to pass, Jessup learns that his editorials have not done the trick. The reality of the new situation feels unspeakably awful, “like the passing of a friend. ” Jessup faces the presidential inauguration in a state of high distress, convinced that the nation is careering toward its doom, but that nobody — least of all his fellow liberals — can do much to stop it. “It Can’t Happen Here” is a work of dystopian fantasy, one man’s effort in the 1930s to imagine what it might look like if fascism came to America. At the time, the obvious specter was Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power in Germany provoked fears that men like the Louisiana senator Huey Long or the radio priest Charles Coughlin might accomplish a similar feat in the United States. Today, Lewis’s novel is making a comeback as an analogy for the Age of Trump. Within a week of the 2016 election, the book was reportedly sold out on Amazon. com. At a moment when instability seems to be the only constant in American politics, “It Can’t Happen Here” offers an alluring (if terrifying) certainty: It can happen here, and what comes next will be even ghastlier than you expect. Yet the graphic horrors of Lewis’s vision also limit the book’s usefulness as a guide to our own political moment. In 1935, Lewis was trying to prevent the unthinkable: the election of a candidate to the presidency of the United States. Today’s readers, by contrast, are playing scrambling to think through the implications of an electoral fait accompli. If Lewis’s postelection vision is what awaits us, there will be little cause for hope, or even civic engagement, in the months ahead. The only viable options will be to get out of the country — or to join an armed underground resistance. Lewis’s second wife, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, provided much of the inspiration for “It Can’t Happen Here. ” In 1931, she interviewed Hitler, scoffing at his “startling insignificance” when encountered . Back in the United States, Thompson interviewed Huey Long, who had vowed to challenge Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency in 1936. She noted that Long’s populist message and swaggering style reminded her of Hitler, and according to Lewis’s biographer, Richard Lingeman, Lewis took the message to heart. A recent Nobel Prize winner, known for his superhuman productivity, Lewis churned out the entire manuscript of “It Can’t Happen Here” between May and August of 1935. The novel arrived in bookstores that October. By that point, some of the immediate threat had passed. (On Sept. 8, 1935, Long was assassinated at the Louisiana State Capitol, one of the great political traumas of the 1930s.) Lewis’s book nonetheless sold 320, 000 copies, becoming his most popular work to date. Reviewers agreed that the book’s success had little to do with its literary merits though “a vigorous tract,” one critic noted, it was “not much of a novel. ” What propelled its popularity was a sense of urgency, the worry that the United States — like the nations of Western Europe — might contain dark forces yet to be unleashed. A slightly different sense of urgency seems to be fueling the book’s latest surge in popularity. We have already experienced some of what Lewis describes in the first third of the book: a blustery populist candidate rising, against all odds, to the presidency of the United States. Now the great question is whether or not we are moving into Lewis’s terrifying future. The novel’s Everyman candidate, Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip, is hardly a perfect for Trump. A creature of the Great Depression and a Democrat, Windrip sweeps into office as a promising $3, 000 to $5, 000 for every “real American family. ” His movement style evokes the of Nazi Germany rather than the anonymous jabs of the Twitter mob. Still, there are enough points of resonance to cause palpitations in the heart of any anxious liberal. Like Trump, Windrip sells himself as the champion of “Forgotten Men,” determined to bring dignity and prosperity back to America’s white working class. Windrip loves big, passionate rallies and rails against the “lies” of the mainstream press. His supporters embrace this message, lashing out against the “highbrow intellectuality” of editors and professors and policy elites. With Windrip’s encouragement, they also take out their frustrations on blacks and Jews. The architect of Windrip’s campaign is a savvy newsman named Lee Sarason, the novel’s closest approximation of Steve Bannon. It is Sarason, not Windrip, who actually writes “Zero Hour,” the candidate’s popular jeremiad on national decline. Sarason believes in propaganda, not information, openly arguing that “it is not fair to ordinary folks — it just confuses them — to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people. ” This is where the novel comes to rest by Inauguration Day: Through a combination of deception and charisma, the feared Windrip ascends to the presidency while the nation’s liberals tremble. It is only after the inauguration, though, that “It Can’t Happen Here” takes a truly dark turn. Upon moving into the White House, Windrip immediately declares Congress an “advisory” body, stripped of all real power. When members of Congress resist, he locks them up without the slightest semblance of due process, the beginning of the end for American democracy. The rest of the book describes one long, disorienting nightmare, a national descent into labor camps and torture chambers and martial law. The novel gains its energy from Jessup’s internal struggle, his regret at having done so little to stop it all while he still could. “The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work,” he realizes. “It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, Doremus Jessups, who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest. ” With this heavy hand, Lewis seeks not only to satirize American liberals, but to induce them to pay attention before it’s too late. While the book skewers Jessup’s passivity, however, it does little to suggest viable modes of engagement under the Windrip regime, short of abandoning home and family and fleeing to Canada. Every time Jessup attempts some modest act of resistance, he is met with the ruthless repression of the state. When Jessup prints a righteous editorial, Windrip’s goons arrest him and murder his . Jessup ends up as a in a concentration camp, beaten down but determined to carry on. Six months into his sentence, he escapes and joins the underground movement percolating in Canada — where, the book implies, he should have gone in the first place. The one bright spot for the forces is that things don’t work out particularly well for anyone else. Windrip never follows through on his pledge to restore prosperity and redistribute wealth, fueling conflict with his early supporters, who mostly end up dead or in jail. Even Windrip himself gets little of what he wants. As president, he insists on absolute obedience, “louder, more convincing Yeses from everybody about him. ” After two years of this treatment, his crafty aide Sarason maneuvers the president into exile, only to be deposed himself a month later in a military coup. By the book’s closing pages, Jessup has returned to the United States as a disciplined resistance fighter, organizing armed rebellions throughout the Midwest. His transformation illustrates Lewis’s most powerful message: When it happens here, everyone should be prepared to resist. But Jessup’s story also underscores how difficult it can be to sort out what to do at moments of swift political change and social confusion. In our brave imaginations, we undoubtedly do the right thing when fascism comes to America. In reality, we might not recognize it while it’s happening. | 1 |
By Claire Bernish
On Thursday, police from no less than five states sporting full riot gear and armed with heavy lethal and nonlethal weaponry, pepper spray, mace, a number of ATVs, five tanks, two helicopters, and military-equipped Humvees showed up to tear down an encampment of Standing Rock Sioux water protectors and supporters armed with … nothing.
Under orders from the now-notorious Morton County Sheriff’s Office, this ridiculously heavy-handed standing army came better prepared to do battle than some actual military units fighting overseas.
But the target of their operation — a group of slightly more than 200 Native American water protectors and supporters opposing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline — never intended to do battle with the armed, taxpayer-funded, corporate-backed, state-sponsored aggressors.
Reports vary, but no less than 141 people were arrested Thursday, and — according to witnesses — police marked numbers on arrestees’ arms and housed them in cement-floored dog kennels , without any padding, before they were transported as far away as Fargo.
“It goes back to concentration camp days,” asserted Oceti-Sakowin coordinator Mekasi Camp-Horinek, who, along with his mother, was marked and detained in a mesh kennel, reports the Los Angeles Times.
Although Thursday’s incident remained relatively peaceful for some time, with only shouts, chants, and occasional attempts by water protectors to convince this standing army to examine its motives and reconsider, clashes nonetheless broke out — solely because of gratuitous police aggression.
After facing off for a couple hours, these militant cops began closing in on the water protectors to shut down the Treaty of 1851 camp — in reference to the Fort Laramie Treaty of that year, which established a large parcel of land designated exclusively Native American territory not to be disturbed by the U.S. government. Prior to his arrest, Camp-Horinek had established the camp, stating, as cited by Indigenous Rising :
Today, the Oceti Sakowin has enacted eminent domain on DAPL lands, claiming 1851 treaty rights. This is unceded land. Highway 1806 as of this point is blockaded. We will be occupying this land and staying here until this pipeline is permanently stopped. We need bodies and we need people who are trained in non-violent direct action. We are still staying non-violent and we are still staying peaceful.
Despite the water protectors’ commitment to nonviolence, the militarized police response went as would be expected — horribly awry.
“A prayer circle of elders, including several women, was interrupted and all were arrested for standing peacefully on the public road,” stated a press release from Indigenous Environment Network . “A tipi was erected in the road and was recklessly dismantled, despite law enforcement statements that they would merely mark the tipi with a yellow ribbon and ask its owners to retrieve it. A group of water protectors was also dragged out of a sweat lodge ceremony erected in the path of the pipeline, thrown to the ground, and arrested.”
Claims to the contrary by Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier aside, Native American and Indigenous water protectors and supporters have refrained from violent acts on the whole, preferring instead peaceful prayer vigils and acts of civil disobedience.
No matter how peacefully the opposition acts, armed defenders of Big Oil interests seem determined to brutalize , disrespect, and generally incite and inflict violence against those who desire unsullied water for generations to come.
In fact, at the beginning of September, a private security firm hired by Energy Transfer Partners, the company responsible for pipeline construction, indiscriminately unleashed vicious attack dogs on water protectors, press, and supporters — for reasons as yet unknown.
During the savage attack, a pregnant woman, young girl, and many others suffered serious dog bites thanks to the ineptitude of the dogs’ handlers. Afterward, a warrant for inciting a riot was issued Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman — for doing her job, filming events as they happened — though charges were subsequently thrown out.
Although ETP and some law enforcement officers defended the barbarous actions of the private security mercenaries, the Guardian now reports that — because the guards lacked proper licensing — they could now face criminal charges. On Wednesday, the Morton County Sheriff’s Office made the determination that “dog handlers were not properly licensed to do security work in the state of North Dakota.”
Bob Frost, owner of Ohio-based Frost Kennels, told the Guardian , “All the proper protocols … were already done. I pulled my guys out the next day because we weren’t there to go to war with these protesters.”
Frost insisted he had cooperated with authorities investigating the incident — but the sheriff’s department disagrees. Seven handlers and dogs were deployed to the scene in early September, allegedly in response to reports of trespassers; but, according to the Guardian , police have only managed to identify two people.
The sheriff’s department claims Frost has not provided necessary information, and unnamed security officials cited in the report said that “there were no intentions of using the dogs or handlers for security work. However, because of the protest events, the dogs were deployed as a method of trying to keep the protesters under control.”
In a statement cited by the Guardian , Morton County Captain Jay Gruebele said, “Although lists of security employees have been provided, there is no way of confirming whether the list is accurate or if names have been purposely withheld.”
Water protectors, in the meantime, are left to deal with absurdly disproportionate state violence — and the altogether unacceptable, disrespectful, and demeaning insult of being relegated to dog kennels after being arrested for exercising their rights.
As Lakota Country Times editor, Brandon Ecoffey, wrote in an editorial Thursday,
Over the course of the last several months the abuse of detainees by Morton County Law Enforcement has overstepped every boundary guaranteed by the American constitution. Water protectors have been seen being bound and hooded by police. People are being stripped searched and abused within their jail for misdemeanor crimes. And police have employed the use of mass surveillance through drones on the protector camps. This isn’t a war zone this is North Dakota.
Claire Bernish writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com , where this article first appeared . Share: | 1 |
Swiss volunteer firefighters: It’s ok to be a bit tipsy when reporting for duty Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 23:00 Get short URL A Swiss firefighter helps a volunteer during a save and rescue drill in Zurich's Letzigrund Stadium April 19, 2008. © Arnd Wiegmann / Reuters Volunteer firefighters along with other emergency workers operating heavy vehicles in Switzerland will be able to turn up on the job slightly tipsy under new government plans that are due to take effect on January 1.
Those working voluntary in the “blue light” industry who respond to urgent situations will no longer be penalised for being a tad merry so long as their blood-alcohol level doesn’t go over 0.50 percent, which is the limit for all other drivers, Reuters reports.
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Describing the change as “necessary,” the Swiss Federal Roads Office said relief organizations are becoming more dependent on those who are not on duty or call.
“The government is addressing the need for the best possible recruitment of personnel in the event they are needed for unexpected rescue operations,” FEDRO said in a statement.
The blood-alcohol level currently stands at 0.10 percent for volunteers in the emergency service sector.
Zurich emergency services commander Peter Wullschleger said a full drinking ban still remains in force for all professional firefighters on duty or on call.
He added that the easing of restrictions was aimed at smaller communities where there is a shortage of professional firefighters who then rely on volunteers at short notice.
“With the ban, theoretically it would have been impossible for somebody enjoying even a nice glass of red wine during the Christmas holidays to fulfill their duty in the event of an emergency,” Wullschleger told Reuters. | 0 |
Amazon’s artificial home assistant Amazon Echo records every voice command you give to it. Here’s how you can listen to and delete everything your device has recorded. [“Is Amazon Echo always listening? The short answer is yes,” declared Fox News Tech. “I’m guessing most people don’t know this, but — surprise! — you can listen to every command you’ve ever given your Echo with the Alexa app on your smartphone or tablet. ” “When I did, I was surprised to learn that some of my recordings had nothing to do with commands,” Fox News’ Kim Komando reported, explaining that “There I was talking on my phone about the old studios I was selling. Alexa also recorded portions of a presidential debate. I am not sure why my real estate call was recorded, but one of the candidates almost said the word ‘Alexa. ’” So how do you find and delete Amazon Echo’s recordings? If you’d like to review your old recordings, open the Alexa app, tap on the Settings menu and then tap on History. Given the hundreds or thousands of commands most Echo users accumulate, you’ll find a huge catalog of your requests. Select the recording you’d like to review and tap the Play icon to listen to it. If it creeps you out that your requests and other things you may have said have been stored in a database, you can delete them. Here’s how: * Open the Alexa app and go into Settings. * Select History and you’ll see a list of all the entries. * Select an entry and tap the Delete button. But what if you want to delete all your recordings? Do you have to remove each one manually? That could take days! Amazon lets you remove everything with one click. Just visit the “Manage Your Content and Devices” at www. amazon. . But keep in mind Amazon’s warning that “deleting voice recordings may degrade your Alexa experience. ” Fox News Tech also explain in their article how you can stop Amazon Echo from listening to you altogether. Last month, a video of Amazon Echo turning off upon being asked about its ties to the C. I. A. went viral, prompting Breitbart Tech’s Lucas Nolan to test it himself. “We asked the same questions that the woman in the original video asked, using a similar Echo Dot device to test the original video’s validity,” reported Nolan in March, however it appeared the device had been updated, if the video was ever valid at all. “Upon being asked, ‘Alexa, are you connected to the CIA?’ the device did not shut down as seen in the original video. Instead, it responded, ‘No, I work for Amazon.’ Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 0 |
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Jon Rappoport – Arianna Stassinopoulos, aka Huffington, is a Greek bearing gifts. For Hillary Clinton.
The Huffington Post pretends it’s doing objective journalism. Nice try. No one has believed in HuffPo’s objectivity for a long time. But now we have an email that seals the deal.
Zero Hedge reports : “…the latest Podesta dump from WikiLeaks fully exposes the blatant collusion in black and white. In the following email chain, when asked whether she would like to join the board of a pro-democrat media consortium, PMUSA, Ariana graciously declines saying that she could be more useful to the Clinton campaign by pushing its agenda through the Huffington Post “without any perceived conflicts”. “She [Arianna] is enthusiastic abt the project but asks if she’s more useful to us not being on the Board and, instead, using Huffpo to echo our [pro-Hillary] message without any perceived conflicts. She has a point.” “The sender of the email is none other than Susan McCue, the former chief of staff to [Democrat Senator] Harry Reid while the recipients include John Podesta [Hillary’s campaign chairman] and the ever controversial David Brock whose Super PAC, Correct the Record, has been sued for illegally coordinating with the Clinton campaign.”
Well, isn’t that wonderful.
Arianna used to be married to Republican Congressman Michael Huffington. Then, she was a political conservative. After her divorce, from which she reportedly netted $25 million, she began to morph into a Progressive. With the financial ability to launch HuffPo, she kept on turning to the political Left. In the HuffPo merger with AOL, she came away with another $21 million.
Her opponents have pinned several labels on her: “the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus,” and “the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbing.”
So now she’s an echo chamber for the Democratic Party.
The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the root of “echo”: “…personified in classical [Greek] mythology as a mountain nymph who pined away for love of Narcissus until nothing was left of her but her voice…”
And now we’ve confirmed for whom that Arianna-voice speaks. A great American narcissist, Hillary Clinton.
Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED , EXIT FROM THE MATRIX , and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX , Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29 th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine . SF Source Jon Rappoport Nov. 2016 Share this: | 0 |
Pablo Gomez, Jr. a Berkeley student activist arrested in January for allegedly stabbing a popular French elementary school teacher to death, and severely injuring another woman, insists on being referred to as “they. ”[Gomez’s preference to be called “they” and “them” as opposed to “he” has been “sucked up into the debate over gender identity,” according to the Associated Press. The incident has reportedly talks surrounding the use of gender pronouns, particularly in a city seen as the bastion of liberalism and progressive in America. Emile Inman, 27, was reportedly found dead in her home this past January after allegedly being stabbed by Gomez, Jr. Another woman, Kiana Schmitt, 24, was rushed to the hospital after Gomez allegedly stabbed her hours earlier. However, Berkeleyside, which first reported on Gomez’s pronoun preference, began referring to the campus activists as “they” and “them” once the publication learned of that preference from one of his friends. Berkeleyside updated its January 6 article to read, “According to Gomez Jr. ’s Facebook page, they are a UC Berkeley student who lives in Berkeley. [A friend contacted Berkeleyside after publication to say that Gomez Jr. uses the pronoun “they. ” This story has been updated. ]” Popular conservative columnist Ann Coulter reacted to Berkeleyside’s decision to satisfy the murderer’s pronoun request over social media: Berkeley student arrested https: . . Article calls Gomez ”they.” Did newspapers call John Hinkley ”Jodi Foster’s boyfriend”? — Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 8, 2017, The AP reported, “After Raguso’s report, conservative commentator Ann Coulter ridiculed the pronoun change and mocked Gomez’s activist background. Breitbart. com and other conservative political websites picked up the story. ” Breitbart’s article can be found here. Frances Dinkelspiel, of Berkeleyside, told Heat Street, “We decided to use ‘they’ for Pablo Gomez Jr because that is Gomez’s preferred gender pronoun. It’s as simple as that. We have used ‘they’ in other stories about people. ” Similarly, Heat Street pointed out that Andrea Platten, managing editor of the Daily Californian, also adopted “they” as a singular pronoun at the publication last February. “We believe that any person’s preferred pronoun should be honored, regardless of whether they are accused of committing a crime,” Platten told Heat Street. Not everyone agreed that Gomez should have the right to decide which pronoun is used to describe him. “I think you give away your right to make a demand like that when you are arrested for killing somebody,” UC Berkeley junior and College Republicans member Jonothan Chow told the AP. Follow Adelle Nazarian on Facebook and Twitter. | 0 |
Actress Susan Sarandon has boldly predicted that President Donald Trump may not make it through his first term in office. [The Thelma Louise star made her prediction during an interview with People magazine that was published Friday. “I’m excited and encouraged by the idea that maybe if everything’s falling apart so obviously — I mean, I don’t think Trump’s gonna make it through his whole term,” Sarandon said. “But he’s not the first one to have Goldman Sachs in his cabinet, he’s not the one that started fracking wholeheartedly,” she said of Trump’s administration, which includes five people with ties to the Wall Street bank. “So where have we been? We’ve been asleep. ” Sarandon, of course, was a committed supporter of Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders’ White House bid. She accused what she called the “completely corrupt” Democratic National Committee of rigging the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton. The Academy eventually endorsed Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in a letter, writing that the “fear of Donald Trump is not enough for me to support Clinton, with her record of corruption. ” Now, the actress, whose cleavage is turning heads on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, says she’s optimistic since average Americans are becoming more politically aware and involved. “I’m actually optimistic because I think we’re seeing an amazing revolution happening,” the star told People. “Not by the people that claim to be political but by Americans, and I have great faith in America. You’re seeing more people running that have never run for offices. ” “If you’re acting and you’re paying attention — you have to constantly be calling your representatives,” Sarandon added. “And ultimately it could make a difference. ” Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson. | 0 |
We Are Change
Hillary Clinton’s election night fireworks have reportedly been cancelled, after reports surfaced last week that she was already planning her victory celebration for Tuesday night.
A report from the New York Post claimed that law enforcement and fire department officials in New York City were being prepped for a “barge-launched pyrotechnic display off Manhattan’s Javits Center, where Clinton and running mate Tim Kaine will join their supporters for the Nov. 8 vote count.” The show was planned for 9:30 p.m. EDT, half an hour after the polls close.
While the Jacob K. Javits Center where Clinton is hosting the event has a symbolic glass ceiling , it is also important to note that the company she is reportedly using for the fireworks display is Garden State Fireworks. The same company produced the fireworks special for the grand opening of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ, in 2007.
Former Republican nominee Mitt Romney made similar plans in 2012. According to a report from the Daily Caller, the Romney campaign planned “an eight-minute, $25,000 fireworks show over Boston Harbor to celebrate a victory over Barack Obama that never happened.”
Report of Clinton’s celebration drew criticism on Twitter, with some users resurrecting calls of a rigged election:
Oh, so #HillaryClinton already booked the fireworks? https://t.co/jiRSjKmclH
— Andrew Wilkow (@WilkowMajority) November 1, 2016
"She will still try to steal the election…….that's what criminals do." — nobamunism https://t.co/KJdFJgbgpE
— Luana H. (@LuanaMacLac) November 1, 2016
Hillary must be pretty confident her cronies will snag the election for her to plan fireworks victory celebration. https://t.co/xPcUqF1RqI
— Copper Penny (@wallingfordgurl) November 1, 2016
NYPD chief of intelligence Tommy Galati, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner James O’Neill held a press conference on Election Day security on Monday morning, where they revealed that the fireworks show has been cancelled.
“They do have a permit for fireworks, but at this point we believe the fireworks is canceled,” Galati said.
When asked what the reason was behind the cancellation, Galati said, “I cannot tell you that.”
Follow Rachel Blevins on Facebook and Twitter .
The post Does Hillary Clinton Already Know The Results Of The Election? appeared first on We Are Change .
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JERUSALEM — For Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, what was intended as a gesture of respect for a man of peace has brought him anything but peace back home. His brief visit to Jerusalem to attend the funeral of Shimon Peres, the former prime minister and president of Israel, and his handshake with the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, brought a fierce backlash from many Palestinians who called it an act of betrayal by a leader who has grown out of touch. The youth movement of Mr. Abbas’s own Fatah party at one university declared that he had “committed a crime” and called on him to apologize and resign. A Palestinian military officer was so critical of Mr. Abbas on Facebook that security forces went to his home and arrested him. On Twitter, angry Palestinians used Arabic hashtags that translate to #Treason, #CondolenceForTheKiller and #AbbasDoesNotRepresentMe. “Abu Mazen’s participation in the funeral is an absolute disgrace to the Palestinian people,” Abu Samah, 52, an electrician from Ramallah, said in an interview, using Mr. Abbas’s nickname. Abu Nidal, 36, a taxi driver, complained that Mr. Abbas had joined an Israeli event even as Israelis used force against Palestinians to administer the occupation of the West Bank and continued to build settlements on land claimed by Palestinians. “Why would you honor a man responsible for the killing of your own people and then willingly shake the hands of the current enemy who is continuing to enforce the torture of his people?” Mr. Nidal asked. “Shame on you, Abu Mazen. ” The reaction to Mr. Abbas’s attendance at the funeral underscored divergent views of Mr. Peres. In Israel, the United States and much of the world, he was admired for his part in negotiating the Oslo accords, which won him a Nobel Peace Prize. But he was remembered in the West Bank, in Gaza and elsewhere in the Arab world as an Israeli security hawk who was instrumental in building Israel’s military might and promoted settlements on Palestinian territory. He also launched a military offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1996, during which Israeli artillery shelling of a United Nations base killed scores of Lebanese refugees, many of them children. The wave of criticism also reflects the weakened domestic position for Mr. Abbas and his ruling team after more than a decade in power at the Palestinian Authority. With the peace process frozen, Mr. Abbas has little to show for his cooperation with Israel on security and other matters, according to many Palestinians in the West Bank, who see their leaders as, in effect, Israeli collaborators. To his critics, Mr. Abbas seems less interested in his domestic audience than the international community, particularly in Washington. And yet his international patrons are worried that he is losing the credibility that would be necessary for a peace process to have a chance at success, should it ever be restarted. Mr. Abbas earned praise from world leaders for attending the funeral while other Arab leaders stayed away. In his eulogy, President Obama hailed him for coming. Official Palestinian news agencies published interviews praising Mr. Abbas for acting like a statesman and creating new opportunities for negotiations. Mohammed an adviser to Mr. Abbas who attended the funeral with him, said the decision to go would advance the Palestinian cause internationally. “All the world leaders who were at the funeral applauded the president’s participation, and 90 percent of the attendants shook his hands,” Mr. Madani told a radio station, according to Maan News, an Arabic news agency. “It was a political move rather than just participation in a funeral. ” Mahmoud Habbash, who served for years as religious affairs adviser for Mr. Abbas, said the Palestinian leader had acted in the best tradition of his faith. The Prophet Muhammad participated in his Jewish neighbor’s funeral, he told Arabic news outlets, “and Peres is our neighbor. ” The 1996 shelling that killed Lebanese refugees sheltered at the United Nations base made Mr. Abbas’s presence at the funeral especially controversial in Lebanon. “There is nothing worse than the death of the former Israeli president Shimon Peres, quietly, on the land of occupied Palestine, except the pilgrimage of Arab and Palestinian officialdom to participate in his funeral,” the Lebanese newspaper declared in an editorial. Another Lebanese newspaper, Assafir, described Mr. Abbas’s participation as “shaking the hands of a killer at the funeral of a killer. ” The decision gave Mr. Abbas’s foes in Hamas fresh ammunition against him. Mahmoud Zahar, a of Hamas, told an Iranian television channel that under Islamic law, Mr. Abbas now qualified as a Jew. “I pray for Allah that he will join Peres in hell,” Mr. Zahar said. The criticism extended inside Mr. Abbas’s Fatah party and across social media. Cartoons mocking him were posted and shared. One such cartoon showed Mr. Abbas placing a wreath on a boot representing Mr. Peres on Mr. Abbas’s backside was a boot print. A Facebook video posted by a critic who excoriated Mr. Abbas had more than 330, 000 views by Sunday evening. The funeral was held as violence, and the fear of it, continued. A Palestinian man stabbed an Israeli soldier on Friday at the Qalandiya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem and was then shot to death, according to the Israeli authorities. Israeli forces shut down all crossings with the West Bank for two days for Rosh Hashana, as they typically do during Jewish holidays. The Palestinian authorities have reacted sharply to some of the criticism. Besides arresting the Palestinian officer, who wrote on Facebook that Mr. Abbas had “made a mistake” by agreeing to “participate in the funeral of the killer of our people,” the authorities shut down the website of the Fatah youth movement at Birzeit University, which had condemned Mr. Abbas for his “betrayal. ” Several students were reported to have been detained. Mr. Abbas seemed to react to the criticism by taking a hard line on Israel again as soon as he returned home. At a factory groundbreaking ceremony in Bethlehem, he vowed to break the Israeli occupation. “It is true that we are a state under an occupation that persecutes, oppresses, seizes our land piece by piece, runs after our youth and destroys our homes,” he said, according to reports from the event. “Let them do what they want and build what they want, but we will build our nation and will establish our independent state. ” | 1 |
How far can USA go to take revenge on Russia for 'cybercrimes?' 07.11.2016 The United States continues an extremely aggressive campaign to accuse Russia of cyberattacks that may undermine confidence in the results of the US presidential election. US top officials have released quite a number of statements about possible responses to Russia that would at least create a stir inside the Kremlin. NBC has recently reportedб citing high-ranking sources in the US intelligence community, that US military hackers infiltrated the computer networks responsible for managing power supply and telecommunication systems of Russia. US hackers have reportedly gained access to "Kremlin's networks" and made them vulnerable to cyber attacks from the United States. Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov, commenting on the report, said that the security of Russian computer systems was ensured in accordance with current threats. The Russian Foreign Ministry demanded an official reaction from the United States in connection with the NBC report. Print version Font Size "The absence of an official response from the US administration would speak for the existence of state cyber-terrorism . Should the threats be implemented, Moscow will have a right to bring appropriate charges against Washington," official spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova said. It is worth noting that NBC plays a leading role in the campaign about the response from the USA to the attacks from hackers working for the Russian intelligence and the Kremlin." In mid-October, US Vice President Joseph Biden told NBC about the elaboration of responsive measures against Russia. NBC later reported that the Obama administration was considering unprecedented covert operations against Russia in response to what US officials see as interference in the American presidential elections ." Noteworthy, the head of NBC Universal Jeffrey Shell appears on Russia's list of sanctioned persons. However, the report said that the US administration was engaged in the process to collect certain documents to "discredit" the Russian leadership. In general, however, this is exactly what the US and Western media have been doing during the recent four years. Generally speaking, the subject of external interference in US elections is a new feature of American election campaigns. To which extent is Russia prepared to respond to Washington's threats? One may believe, of course, that all of this is simply a part of the election campaign. Yet, the subject of the "Russian threat" has become one of the central topics of Hillary Clinton's campaign. Will it continue developing if she takes offices as president? Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote, for example, that Obama allegedly personally warned Vladimir Putin about the inadmissibility of interference in the American elections. The Russians have supposedly taken the warnings. This is just an example of the implementation of political technology. This technology seems strange for Russia, but it lives very well in the USA. A lot has been done for the purpose, and it does not look like the project is going to end after November 8. InfoWatch CEO Natalya Kaspersky believes that Russia should take the threats from the USA seriously. "Technically, such attacks are possible," she told Pravda.Ru. "We have pretty good protection systems. Unfortunately, it is difficult for Russia to resist to the US technology, because basic infrastructure elements are of American origin. No matter what methods of protection we may apply to a particular system, we will not be able to go as deep as we need if the system is of American origin. It will be hard struggle," she noted. "Of course, we would need to have Russian software and preferably hardware at basic infrastructure elements," said Natalya Kaspersky. The head of Safer Internet centre Mark Tverdynin said that NBC reports were "exaggerated." "It is unlikely that someone has penetrated into our computer systems, because such attempts would be visible at once. If it had happened, our authorities would have reported about it. I think that Russia can show good resistance to such attacks. It appears to be a propaganda move," the expert told Pravda.Ru. "Switching to domestic software and hardware is a must, of course, but it would require significant resources. We need to use the scientific and technical potential. This requires a priority attention, as this is a part of Russia's national defense," the expert added. Oleg Artyukov Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru US promises to attack Russia because of made up hackers | 1 |
Be Sociable, Share! Rasmea Odeh smiles after leaving federal court in Detroit Thursday, March 12, 2015.
DETROIT — A federal hearing on Nov. 29 could determine whether the details of Israel’s torture of Palestinian prisoners will be aired in an American courtroom.
Rasmea Odeh, a 69-year-old leader of Chicago’s Palestinian-American community, is appealing her 2014 conviction on charges of unlawful procurement of naturalization.
If her conviction is upheld, she faces the loss of her U.S. citizenship and 18 months in a federal prison, followed by deportation.
Prosecutors charge that Odeh, associate director of the Arab American Action Network, failed to disclose her 1970 conviction by an Israeli military military court when applying for U.S. citizenship.
Her supporters say Odeh’s Israeli military prosecutors used a confession obtained through torture, and that her resulting post-traumatic stress disorder caused her to avoid the memory of her interrogation and omit the experience from her application form.
“When the appellate court ruled in Rasmea’s favor back in February of this year, the defense committee declared an important victory, because that decision essentially stated that Judge Gershwin Drain wrongfully barred Dr. Fabri from testifying at the trial,” Hatem Abudayyeh, a U.S. Palestinian Community Network national coordinating committee member and spokesperson for the Rasmea Defense Committee, told MintPress News.
In February, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that District Judge Gershwin Drain had erroneously excluded expert testimony by Dr. Mary Fabri, an authority on torture and former clinical psychologist at the Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture, from Odeh’s initial trial, while accepting at face value the confession used by Israeli military prosecutors in 1969.
On Nov. 29, a Daubert hearing, held to determine the admissibility of expert testimony, will consider the validity of Fabri’s diagnosis for Odeh’s defense, Abudayyeh said.
“Fabri’s testimony will be all about Rasmea’s PTSD and the torture she survived, so if the conclusion of the Daubert hearing is that her testimony is admissible, then we suspect that the torture (and the rest of Israel’s crimes against Rasmea) will make it into a new trial.”
‘So that they would leave my father alone’
In 1969, when Odeh was 21 years old, she was captured by Israeli soldiers during a nighttime raid on her Ramallah home, one of over 500 mostly young Palestinians swept up by occupying forces in the aftermath of the deadly bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket.
The following year, an Israeli military court convicted Odeh of the bombing, as well as a subsequent blast at the British consulate in Jerusalem.
In the meantime, she and her supporters say, Odeh had experienced the worst torture tactics Israeli prisons have to offer.
“They beat me with sticks, plastic sticks, and with a metal bar,” Odeh told a United Nations committee in Geneva after her release in a 1979 prisoner exchange between Israel and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command.
“They beat me on the head and I fainted as a result of these beatings. They woke me up several times by throwing cold water in my face and then started all over again.”
Her interrogators’ torture focused on sexual violence and humiliation. They “tried to introduce a stick to break my maidenhead,” Odeh said, and “tied my legs, which were spread-eagled, and they started to beat me with their hands and also with cudgels.”
At another point, she said, they “tore my clothes off me while my hands were still tied behind my back. They threw me to the ground completely naked and the room was full of a dozen or so interrogators and soldiers who looked at me and laughed sarcastically as if they were looking at a comedy or a film. Obviously they started touching my body.”
But it took the detention of her father, a U.S. citizen, to compel the confession which would lead to her conviction. After “they brought in my father and tried to force him under blows to take off his clothes and have sexual relations with me,” Odeh said, she feared he “might lose his life from one moment to the next” and decided “to make the confession that they wanted, so that they would leave my father alone.”
After 45 days, Odeh said, she told her interrogators what they wanted to hear. Taking her to the site of the supermarket bombing, they “asked me to point out where I had put the explosive. Of course, I didn’t know the place and I said ‘where exactly do you want me to show you where I put this explosive charge?’ So they showed me where the explosion had taken place and I actually pointed out that place without being able to give any details of the operation.”
‘Why we believe we will win’ Protesters rally for Rasmea Odeh outside federal court in Detroit Thursday, March 12, 2015.
Drain’s admission of Odeh’s conviction, while excluding expert testimony on its circumstances, should nullify her conviction and offer grounds for a new trial, her supporters say.
“It is patently unfair, as we have stated many times, that the judge would allow a ‘confession’ from a foreign court, especially one that was gained by vicious torture and sexual assault, into the Detroit courthouse,” Abudayyeh said.
“The fact that he allowed this into evidence without giving Rasmea the opportunity to challenge the ‘confession,’ or talk about the torture, is the essence of the case, and why we believe we will win once the truth comes out.”
Meanwhile, Odeh faces hours of intensive examination by a government psychologist, which her defense teams says could subject her to further mental harm .
“Right now the government is seeking to carry out up to 18 hours of a mental examination by a government expert whose identity they will not disclose to the defense in order to debunk her PTSD claim and accuse her of malingering,” attorney Michael Deutsch, the head of Odeh’s defense team, told MintPress.
Ultimately, he said, the process could result in a new trial which would explore the details of Odeh’s torture and its psychological effects.
“If the expert’s testimony is deemed admissible, we will have a new trial in which PTSD will be testified to as well as the specifics of the torture she endured.”
And that, Abudayyeh said, could further expose Israel’s repression of Palestinians while dealing a powerful blow to its support by the U.S. government.
“We have said repeatedly that this case is also an indictment of Israel,” he said, adding: “Our mobilizations and organizing around the case have pulled together people from all different sectors and communities to not only defend and support Rasmea, but to expose Israel’s torture, occupation, colonization, and apartheid policies. A victory in this case for Rasmea will be a huge victory for Palestine and Palestine liberation as well.” Be Sociable, Share! | 1 |
RT October 27, 2016
The number of wild animals on Earth could fall by more than two-thirds in the 50 years to 2020, according to a new report which places the blame on the destruction of habitats, hunting and pollution. The forecast could lead to major consequences for humans.
The Living Planet Report 2016 says that animal losses are on track to reach 67 percent in the 50 years to 2020. The report’s authors also took into consideration a recent trend in animal population decline, citing a 58 percent plummet between 1970 and 2012.
The researchers analyzed the changing presence of 14,152 monitored populations of the 3,706 vertebrate species – mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles among them.
According to the paper, the biggest cause of the plummeting animal populations is the destruction of wilderness areas by farming and logging. Pollution was also mentioned as a significant problem. Vaccine-laden M&M’s to be distributed via drone for endangered ferrets https://t.co/wm4DUucNxn pic.twitter.com/9a6F9x3raG
“Humanity’s misuse of natural resources is threatening habitats, pushing irreplaceable species to the brink, and threatening the stability of our climate,” said WWF’s director of science, Mike Barrett. A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Animals across the planet are expected to be affected. However, rivers and lakes are the hardest-hit areas. Barrett noted that global warming is exacerbating the pressures.
“We are no longer a small world on a big planet. We are now a big world on a small planet, where we have reached a saturation point,” the Stockholm Resilience Center’s Professor Johan Rockström said in a foreword for the report.
The decline in wildlife, along with climate change, is part of the proposed notion of Anthropocene, a term which suggests a new era in which humans have managed to have a significant global impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems.
The notion – which has yet to be officially approved as a term used to explain geological time – can lead to major consequences.
“The richness and diversity of life on Earth is fundamental to the complex life systems that underpin it. Life supports life itself and we are part of the same equation. Lose biodiversity and the natural world and the life support systems, as we know them today, will collapse,” WWF Director-General Marco Lambertini said, as quoted by the Guardian.
In fact, the report states that humans could be anything but happy if the forecast comes to fruition, noting that the predicted situation could provoke serious competition.
“Increased human pressure threatens the natural resources that humanity depends upon, increasing the risk of water and food insecurity and competition over natural resources,” the report states.
There does, however, appear to be some hope. Some species are beginning to recover, suggesting that conservation efforts could help tackle the crisis.
However, Barrett noted that in order for such efforts to take place, society must largely change how it consumes resources.
“You’d like to think that was a no-brainer in that if a business is consuming the raw materials for its products in a way that is not sustainable, then inevitably it will eventually put itself out of business,” Barrett said.
“The report is certainly a pretty shocking snapshot of where we are,” he added. “My hope though is that we don’t throw our hands up in despair – there is no time for despair, we have to crack on and act. I do remain convinced we can find our sustainable course through the Anthropocene, but the will has to be there to do it.”
The new report comes less than two months after a similar analysis found that Earth has lost one-tenth of its wilderness sites since the early 1990s. 6:41 | 0 |
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Republican Donald Trump has never been good at controlling his anger, and the same goes for his insane jealousy.
Last night, Jay Z and Beyonce shared the stage with Hillary Clinton at a concert in Cleveland, Ohio. The A-list couple showed Clinton a stunning amount of support, followed by a powerful speech by the Democratic candidate herself. It was a monumental moment, and Trump hated every second of it.
At a rally of his own, Trump couldn’t hide the fact that he was green with envy. Trump said:
“We’re going to do it, folks. We’re going to do it. Oh boy, are we going to win Pennsylvania big. Look at this. I hear we set a new record for this building. And by the way, I didn’t have to bring J Lo or Jay Z, the only way she gets anybody. I’m here all by myself. I am here all by myself. Just me. No guitar, no piano, no nothing.”
Trump didn’t even try to hide how sorry he felt for himself, and it was obvious that he was trying really hard not to completely lose it over the fact that no one likes him and almost no celebrities want to be affiliated with him. You can watch Trump give his pathetic, desperate speech below:
Trump’s bullsh*t campaign is finally coming to an end. He spent the beginning of his campaign promising America that he’d run a star-studded campaign, and he has almost nothing to show for it almost a year later. Not even his own Republican colleagues wanted to appear with him on the campaign trail, forcing Trump to go it alone.
Of course Trump is jealous and bitter. While Clinton doesn’t need the support of the massive amount of celebrities who have endorsed her, their support is a clear sign that she is doing something right and her campaign is something worth standing by. You can watch Beyonce and Jay Z stand with Clinton below:
Featured image via Alex Wong / Getty Images Patti Colli My passion is bringing attention to human rights and equality issues. In addition to writing for New Century Times and other political platforms, I also run a website and digital magazine dedicated to social issues and promoting equality in all forms. Post navigation | 0 |
The marching band of Talladega College, Alabama’s oldest private historically black college, is set to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration, causing outrage and backlash from some of the school’s former students. [“We were a bit horrified to hear of the invitation,” Talladega alumni Shirley Ferrill told the Associated Press. “I don’t want my alma mater to give the appearance of supporting him. Ignore, decline or whatever, but please don’t send our band out in our name to do that. ” The Presidential Inaugural Committee announced the news Friday that some 40 groups, including high school bands and military organizations, were accepted to perform in the inaugural parade. Talladega College Marching Tornadoes’ decision to perform at the prestigious event quickly consumed the college’s social media sites. “The news that Talladega College has forgotten its steady and proud 150 years of history, by making the decision to not stand in solidarity with other and courageous people, academic institutions, and organizations, protesting the inauguration of one of the most antagonistic, unrepentant racists, has simply and unequivocally broken my heart today,” wrote Nikky Finney, a 1979 graduate of Talladega, who’s now chair of creative writing and southern studies at the University of South Carolina. “This should have been a teachable moment for the President of Talladega College instead it has become a moment of divisiveness and shame,” Finney wrote. There were some who applauded Talladega’s decision. “It’s a Presidential Inauguration, a high profile event. It’s a great experience for the band,” one user wrote on the popular marching band online message board bandhead. org. “Some of you have got this all wrong,” another user wrote. “You all were wrong about the Presidential Election and you are wrong about Talladega. This is great news for Talladega College and the Marching Tornadoes. This will open up the door for the band and College to make a remarkable rise. ” Talladega College, which was founded by descendants of slaves in 1867, is set to make the trip to the nation’s capital for the January 20 event. Talladega’s acceptance is also noteworthy considering . C. Howard University, another historically black college, declined to sign up to participate in the inaugural parade. Howard’s band director, John Newson, cited budgetary concerns among the reasons the band declined to perform. Trump’s inauguration has been a lighting rod in recent weeks with threats of boycott being leveled against opera singer Andrea Bocelli and a petition calling for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to back out of the inauguration gathering several thousand signatures. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Radio City Rockettes will perform at the inauguration, while teenage opera singer Jackie Evancho will sing the National Anthem. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson | 0 |
The ailing media mogul Sumner M. Redstone will no longer draw a salary from Viacom, one of the big media companies he controls, two people briefed on the development said Wednesday. The move follows a legal battle in California that highlighted Mr. Redstone’s failing health while challenging his mental capacity. The case was dismissed last week, but the details that emerged prompted Viacom’s board to evaluate his compensation and status. Eliminating his pay is a gesture toward acknowledging that he is no longer involved in operations and deserving pay as a company executive. Mr. Redstone, 92, remains chairman emeritus and controlling shareholder of Viacom and CBS, a $40 billion media empire. He controls about 80 percent of the voting shares in the companies through National Amusements, the private theater chain company started by his father. Control of the two companies will be passed to a trust only after he dies or is declared not competent. Filed in November by a former companion and romantic partner, the lawsuit included embarrassing and salacious claims about Mr. Redstone, who has had minor strokes and has a speech impediment. Those included details about his sexual appetite, incontinence and demands to eat steak while on a feeding tube. Those details prompted investors to raise questions about Mr. Redstone’s pay, his role at his companies and other corporate governance issues. In February, he stepped down as chairman at both companies. In dismissing the case after only one day, the judge relied heavily on videotaped testimony from Mr. Redstone, saying the media mogul had convincingly asserted that he did not want the former companion, Manuela Herzer, to supervise his health care, as she was seeking. “I think he said what he wanted to say,” the judge said. But the same testimony, a transcript of which was released to news organizations, also included halting answers, profanity, forgetfulness and nonresponsiveness — putting renewed focus on the media mogul’s mental capacity. There was also an evaluation by a geriatric psychiatrist. The judge, in his evaluation of the testimony, said, “It is also not in dispute that Redstone suffers from either mild or moderate dementia. ” Mr. Redstone’s total compensation was $2 million in the 2015 fiscal year, down from $13 million in 2014. Viacom’s board met on Wednesday. It is not clear whether the board of CBS was making the same considerations. CBS declined to comment. The Viacom development was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. | 0 |
Maureen Dowd: You have gorgeous stuff in your house in White Plains, but you don’t entertain. André Leon Talley: Confirm. You don’t like it when Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski dress like twins. Confirm. You once advised me to get shoes the color of the skin of a Vidalia onion. Confirm. You worked for Andy Warhol at Interview magazine. He was the weirdest person you ever met. Deny. He was normal to me. Anna Wintour has never worn a ponytail. Confirm. You’ve never been romantically involved with a designer. Oh, confirm. You own a thousand caftans. Deny. I have more than 10 and less than 50. Listen, I’m not Marie Antoinette. You don’t believe couples should sleep in the same bed. Confirm. They really should be in different apartments in the same city. If you could have any friend in the world, you’d pick Judge Judy. Confirm. You watch seven hours a day of MSNBC. Confirm. You touched Vivien Leigh’s green velvet dress from “Gone With the Wind. ” And did I! Confirm. Was Queen Elizabeth hot? Confirm. She was very stylish in the ’60s. She had a fabulous figure, fabulous waist and big bosoms, and she looked good in her clothes. Was Princess Margaret sexy? Deny. Except the actress who plays her in “The Crown,” when she’s galloping on her horse to Peter Townsend with her trench coat flying behind. Except for kilts, skirts for men, like Marc Jacobs made, are never coming back. Confirm. Your biggest regret is not writing the definitive biography about Yves Saint Laurent. Confirm. You’ve never been in love with a man, only a woman. Confirm. Your ideal of a hot guy is Bruce Springsteen. Deny. It’s Will Smith. When you ran the Russian magazine Numéro Russia, you thought you could change Russian politics. Deny. Michelle Obama is the best dressed first lady of all time. Confirm. Anna Wintour will love the fashion of the Trump presidency. Deny. You thought it was a brilliant move when Trump the back of his tie to keep it in place. Confirm. You can also have an instant by your temples. Amal Clooney snubbed you at the Met Gala. Confirm. Trump is going to bring back boxy suits and long ties. Deny. Ivanka is a fashion icon. Deny. Oscar de la Renta designed your bed. Confirm. You brushed Valentino’s pug’s teeth. That is so not true! Deny. You were blurred out of the Kim and Kanye wedding episode on the Kardashian show. Confirm. It was an oversight. They did put me back in. You have Truman Capote’s sofa in your house that you bought at an auction. Confirm. It’s O. K. to wear a bandeau maillot to the office. Confirm. You crave a pair of sable boxer shorts to go with your sable coat. Confirm. Sable underwear would go great with my sable coat by Karl Lagerfeld for Fendi and would express a kind of sexuality that I would aspire to that does not exist. | 0 |
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Wednesday during the NBA playoffs coverage on “NBA on TNT,” Charles Barkley took a moment to offer his sentiments on ESPN’s layoffs. Barkley wished everyone well, saying all sports media are “in this thing together. ” “[A] lot of people at ESPN got laid off today,” Barkley said. “I just want to wish all the guys and girls nothing but the best. This is a tough business at times. And you see these people all the time on television. And then you see them during events. I just wanted to let them know I was thinking about them. I know a lot of them are household names. ESPN is not our competition. We’re in this thing together. ” Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 0 |
Under fire for suggesting that a federal judge, Gonzalo P. Curiel, was biased because he is Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday that the judge’s heritage does not make him “incapable of being impartial. ” Here’s the statement his campaign released: It is unfortunate that my comments have been misconstrued as a categorical attack against people of Mexican heritage. I am friends with and employ thousands of people of Mexican and Hispanic descent. The American justice system relies on fair and impartial judges. All judges should be held to that standard. I do not feel that one’s heritage makes them incapable of being impartial, but based on the rulings that I have received in the Trump University civil case, I feel justified in questioning whether I am receiving a fair trial. Over the past few weeks, I have watched as the media has reported one inaccuracy after another concerning the ongoing litigation involving Trump University. There are several important facts the public should know and that the media has failed to report. Throughout the litigation my attorneys have continually demonstrated that students who participated in Trump University were provided a substantive, valuable education based upon a curriculum developed by professors from Northwestern University, Columbia Business School, Stanford University and other respected institutions. And the response from students was overwhelming. Over a period, more than 10, 000 paying students filled out surveys giving the courses high marks and expressing their overwhelming satisfaction with Trump University’s programs. For example: Former student Tarla Makaeff, the original plaintiff in the litigation, not only completed multiple surveys rating Trump University’s seminar “excellent” in every category, but also praised Trump University’s mentorship program in a glowing minute video testimonial. When asked “how could Trump University help to meet [her] goals,” she simply stated “[c]ontinue to offer great classes. ” Once the plaintiffs’ lawyers realized how disastrous a witness she was, they asked to have her removed from the case. Over my lawyers’ objections, the judge granted the plaintiffs’ motion, but allowed the case to continue. Art Cohen, a lead plaintiffs in the litigation, completed a survey in which he not only rated Trump University’s seminar “excellent” in virtually every category, but went so far as to indicate that he would “attend another Trump University seminar” and even “recommend Trump University seminars to a friend. ” When asked how Trump University could improve the seminar, Mr. Cohen’s only suggestion was to “[h]ave lunch sandwiches brought in” and make the lunch break 45 minutes. Former student Bob Giullo, who has been critical of Trump University in numerous interviews and negative advertisements from my political opponents, also expressed his satisfaction, rating Trump University’s programs “excellent” in every category. When asked how Trump University could improve its programs, Mr. Giullo simply asked that students be provided “more comfortable chairs. ” Indeed, these are just a few of literally thousands of positive surveys, all of which can be viewed online at www. 98percentapproval. com. For those students who decided that Trump University’s programs were not for them, the company had a generous refund policy, offering a full refund to any student who asked for their money back within three days of signing up for a program or by the end of the first day of any multiday program, whichever came later. Normally, legal issues in a civil case would be heard in a neutral environment. However, given my unique circumstances as nominee of the Republican Party and the core issues of my campaign that focus on illegal immigration, jobs and unfair trade, I have concerns as to my ability to receive a fair trial. I am fighting hard to bring jobs back to the United States. Many companies — like Ford, General Motors, Nabisco, Carrier — are moving production to Mexico. Drugs and illegal immigrants are also pouring across our border. This is bad for all Americans, regardless of their heritage. Due to what I believe are unfair and mistaken rulings in this case and the judge’s reported associations with certain professional organizations, questions were raised regarding the judge’s impartiality. It is a fair question. I hope it is not the case. While this lawsuit should have been dismissed, it is now scheduled for trial in November. I do not intend to comment on this matter any further. With all of the thousands of people who have given the courses such high marks and accolades, we will win this case! Donald J. Trump | 1 |
The pathway forward for ATT’s pending $85 billion merger with Time Warner goes through President Donald Trump’s apprehensions about the deal, concerns that don’t appear to be going away any time soon. [The real estate magnate chided the deal on the campaign trail, saying, “It’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few. ” Critics argue that the increased concentration of media and telecom companies hurts competition and consumers. Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, also opposes the deal. Trump’s apprehensions with the merger stem partly from CNN, a subsidiary of Time Warner, which he argues covers him unfairly. Trump has called the network a “fake news” network as the outlet’s personalities have repeatedly criticized him as he’s taken the highest office in the land. Fox Business’ Charlie Gasparino claims that Time Warner might need to spin off CNN as a separate entity to make the deal work. But it’s not just CNN’s biased coverage against him that has led to President Trump’s opposition to the merger. During the campaign, his economic adviser Peter Navarro — now the director of the newly created National Trade Council in the Trump White House — said Trump is generally opposed to the consolidation of media power in a handful of companies: The very corporations that have gained from shipping America’s factories and jobs offshore are the very same media conglomerates now pushing Hillary Clinton’s agenda. She is the official candidate of the multinational ruling elite. NBC, and its Clinton megaphone MSNBC, were once owned by General Electric, a leader in offshoring factories to China. Now NBC has been bought by Comcast, which is specifically targeting the Chinese market — even as Comcast’s anchors and reporters at MSNBC engage in their Never Trump tactics. ATT, the original and abusive “Ma Bell” telephone monopoly, is now trying to buy Time Warner and thus the wildly CNN. Donald Trump would never approve such a deal because it concentrates too much power in the hands of the too and powerful few. Senator Jeff Sessions ( ) once confirmed as attorney general, would the merger. When asked by Senator Mike Lee ( ) about whether there would be side deals requiring CNN to be spun off for the merger to be approved, Sessions said, “The law is not crystal clear about what’s lawful and what’s not lawful and what the antitrust division is required to do and it leave dangers, if not politicization of it, it remains dangers of policy agendas getting embroiled in it. ” The law’s ambiguity allows for flexibility when it comes to Trump’s decision on the merger because he has not made up his mind yet on the matter. President Trump says that he has “not seen all the facts. ” He told Axios, “I have been on the record in the past of saying it’s too big and we have to keep competition. So, but other than that, I haven’t, you know, I haven’t seen any of the facts, yet. I’m sure that will be presented to me and to the people within government. ” | 0 |
KABUL, Afghanistan — As cafes, restaurants, and performance centers in Kabul came under attack one after another in recent years, the campus of the American University of Afghanistan remained a rare oasis for some of the country’s brightest young men and women. Beyond providing a quality education, the school offered a glimpse of a carefree life away from the unpredictable violence that afflicted the rest of the capital. Behind layers of security, students could play basketball at the gym, compete in debate tournaments or just have an uninterrupted conversation over coffee. That sense of freedom, too, was violated Wednesday night. Men with Kalashnikov rifles and grenades first gunned down a guard at the adjoining school for the blind. One drove a car packed with explosives into the American University’s wall, blowing a gap through it. Two more militants dashed onto campus, where hundreds of students were taking evening classes. The attackers methodically stalked the men and women trapped inside, fighting off the Afghan security forces for nearly 10 hours in a terrifying overnight siege. On Thursday morning, at least 13 lay dead: seven students, three police officers, two university guards and the night guard at the neighboring school for the blind. Abdul Baseer Mujahid, a spokesman for the Kabul police, said that more than 30 others were hurt in the attack another estimate, from the Health Ministry, said 16 had been killed and 53 wounded. The attack was unmistakably a blow to young Afghans who had chosen to defy the migrant exodus away from the country’s war and instead pursue their dreams in the difficult circumstances at home. Among the dead was Naqib Ahmad Khpulwak, a young lecturer in the university’s law department, who had recently completed a master’s degree in the United States through the Fulbright program and had returned to Afghanistan to teach. He expected soon to start a doctorate program in Britain. “Your master’s degree is still lying in my pile of papers — you told me to get it stamped and approved,” one of his friends in the United States, Ayub Khawreen, wrote in a Facebook post. “My mouth be broken that I encouraged you to return home. But you wouldn’t listen to me anyway — you were boiling in your love for the country, and at the end you burned in that. ” From its start in 2006, the American University drew the sons and daughters of prominent Afghan families. But many students of more humble backgrounds won scholarships, and they were among the school’s most promising. Sami Sarwari had been a student of the successful Afghan National Institute of Music, where his skills with the dilruba, a folk instrument, had made him part of an orchestra that traveled the United States and performed at the Kennedy Center. After a 2014 attack at a performance center in Kabul where they were giving a concert, he quit music, according to his friend Shabeer Kabuli. This fall, Mr. Sarwari won a scholarship to the American University. He was killed on his second day of classes. His last Facebook post, on Tuesday, had the American University tagged as its location. “I’m in,” he wrote. “Looking forward to a beautiful and bright future. ” “He had wished to support his family and be with them like a mountain,” said Ahmad Sarmast, the founder and director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, who taught Mr. Sarwari for six years and was among the wounded in the 2014 concert attack. “His family is so poor, and his mother tried to support her children to achieve their goals. ” On Thursday, President Ashraf Ghani condemned the attack as a barbaric act of enmity against progress. Out of safety concerns, the university remained closed. All three of the attackers were killed, their affiliation still unannounced by Thursday evening. But another statement from Mr. Ghani’s office suggested that suspicion had fallen on the Haqqani wing of the Taliban, or some other faction. Mr. Ghani called the Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, and “asked for serious and practical measures against the terrorists organizing the attack,” the statement said. Through the night, family members of the people trapped on campus gathered outside a security cordon, hoping for news. Some students inside took to social media to ask for help, but they later fell silent — many of them desperate to avoid alerting the gunmen to their hiding places. Members of the Afghan Special Forces cut off the area’s electricity and began evacuating hundreds of students, moving slowly to try to avoid civilian casualties, said Sediq Sediqqi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. Security officials said both of the infiltrating gunmen entered the Bayat classroom building just after 7 p. m. when about 160 students were in class in the building. One of the militants had stationed himself near the stairs on the first floor, while the second had moved up to target the classrooms on the second floor. Most of the student casualties were caused by the first militant, who shot those trying to flee. The militant on the first floor was killed around 1:30 a. m. officials said. The gunman on the second floor lobbed grenades at Special Forces troops for two more hours. The siege was declared over shortly before 5 a. m. on Thursday. Some of the people who had been trapped inside the university described a ordeal, much of it spent waiting for death in complete darkness. They hid in gym lockers, or under classroom desks. Some jumped from upper floors, breaking their legs, while others managed to scale the walls of the compound. Abdullah Frotan, a student who was trapped until the very end of the siege, said he had been in a classroom when the initial explosion occurred. About 10 students in his class tried to make it to the first floor to escape, but the gunmen were already inside the building, so they rushed back to the third floor and tried to hide in a classroom. “We were lying like dead bodies on the ground in the rear of the class, and we put all the chairs in front of us, and we hid behind the chairs,” Mr. Frotan said. Two of his classmates were wounded, one in the back and one in the leg, Mr. Frotan said. They held their hands over their mouths to stifle cries of pain that could alert the attackers. “One of our classmates did not come back with us to the third floor. He was killed we learned this later,” Mr. Frotan said. Muhammad Daud, 26, an economics student, said he had recited his final prayers hiding under the tables on a classroom. The attacker fired a few rounds in the dark, and then moved on to the next room. Mr. Daud agonized over whether to try to jump out a window. The gunman’s sudden return to the classroom made the decision easier. “When he started firing, I jumped and didn’t think what would happen,” he said. Alnaz Jamal, an scholarship student who was starting her first week of college after years of displacement in Pakistan, did not make it. Ms. Jamal, whom her family called Alina, had been attending a lecture on the second floor, and she was among those who jumped, said Omaid Sharifi, a cousin. When the family finally found her body at a morgue this morning, they saw she had also sustained bullet wounds. Her father, a street vendor, was in Pakistan to get Ms. Jamal’s high school transcript and new clothes for her university journey. “Her mother faints every 15 minutes,” Mr. Sharifi said. | 1 |
During the opening day of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, Sen. Dianne Feinstein ( ) called the NRA an “extreme organization” that stands in the way of getting “ assault weapons off our streets. ”[Feinstein’s NRA comment came after she voiced her expectations that the Supreme Court will have final say on air and water pollution and just before she addressed employers who “[discriminate] against workers. ” CSPAN 2 aired Feinstein’s comments: “It is the Supreme Court that will have final word … [on] whether the NRA and other extreme organizations will be able to block common sense gun regulations, including those that keep assault weapons off our streets. ” Many things are at play in Feinstein’s statement, including the ongoing Democrat animosity toward the fact that the Supreme Court rulings in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010) pose a great hindrance to the future of gun control in this country. Moreover, Feinstein’s statement betrays her continued support of an “assault weapons” ban, such as the one that Democrats enacted during the Clinton administration or the one Feinstein herself unsuccessfully pushed after the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School. On September 14, 2014, Breitbart News reported a New York Times (NYT) column that described “assault weapons” as a “myth” Democrats created in the 1990s. NYT pointed out, “In the early 1990s … Democrats created and then banned a category of guns they called ‘assault weapons.’ America was then suffering from a spike in gun crime and it seemed like a problem threatening everyone. Gun murders each year had been climbing: 11, 000, then 13, 000, then 17, 000. ” It then showed that the creation of the “assault weapons” moniker was a political contrivance: “This category of guns — a selection of rifles, shotguns, and handguns with ‘military features’ — only figured in about 2 percent of gun crime before the ban. Handguns were used in more than 80 percent of gun murders each year. ” In the 1990s, the Democrats created a category of guns called “assault weapons,” demonized them, then set out to ban them as a way to keep Americans safe. However, the whole time, such weapons were only used in “about 2 percent of gun crime. ” The truth then and now is that concealable weapons are far preferable for criminals than bulky, weapons of any type. Moreover, FBI crime stats for 2015 show nearly three times more people were stabbed or hacked to death than were killed with rifles and shotguns combined, and those are rifles and shotguns of any type. If we were to specify a certain type of rifle — an or — the ratio of stabbing deaths versus shooting deaths would be even more lopsided. AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 0 |
Pravda.Ru signs agreement with largest news agency of Azerbaijan Inna Novikova, Araz Zeynalov On November 4, at a meeting between General Director of Pravda.Ru Internet media holding, Inna Novikova, and CEO of News Agency Vesti.Az, Araz Zeynalov, a document about media partnerships was signed. The CEOs of the two companies discussed current problems in the field of modern journalism, the influence of Russian and Azerbaijani media on the formation of political agenda and peculiarities of covering international conflicts. During the talks, special attention was paid to the importance of the Russian-Azerbaijani cooperation in media landscape of both countries. Inna Novikova and Araz Zeynalov decided to document the partnership status and signed an agreement on media cooperation. The agreement provides for the exchange of journalistic materials, including news, articles, videos and contact base. Vesti.Az is a part of APA Holding. The agency started working on March 16, 2009. During seven years of work, the agency has been able to create an effective website and earn a good reputation rating among Internet media. From the very first days of operation, Vesti.Az agency won extensive attention of audiences. Exclusive materials, reports and interviews have turned Vesti.Az into one of the most popular online publications. Pravda.Ru is Russia's first independent daily socio-political online newspaper that has developed into Russia's largest and modern electronic media outlet. Pravda.Ru has been online since January 27, 1999. Keeping pace with the times, Pravda.Ru has always kept in touch with traditions of the chronicler of the century - the Pravda newspaper. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru | 0 |
Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” former communications chief for President George W. Bush Nicolle Wallace said Donald Trump “bullies female reporters at his rally as an applause line. ” Wallace said, “We have just elected a man who bullies female reporters at his rally as an applause line. We have just elected a man who started a hot war with a female anchor instead of attending a debate she moderated. We are in a new place. And I don’t think it’s good. And I don’t think it has any parallels to the past. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 0 |
Earthquake hits Italy shaking Rome's ancient ruins 'including Colosseum and Pantheon' The tremor, which is believed to be 5.5 magnitude struck near Perugia but has reportedly caused some minor damage in the capital city Anonymous Coward Report Copyright Violation Re: Earthquake hits Italy shaking Rome's ancient ruins 'including Colosseum and Pantheon' When the antipope is installed, Rome will be destroyed by an Earthquake within 7 months. This is the beginning. Anonymous Coward ( OP ) | 0 |
The Islamic State ( ) in its annual call for violence during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, has urged jihadists and sympathizers to wage an “ war” in the West, stressing the targeting of noncombatants. [Through encrypted Telegram messaging app channels and YouTube, ISIS has disseminated its Ramadan propaganda in the form of an slideshow. The group’s 2017 Ramadan call for violence is titled “Where Are the Lions of War?” Specifically, the message urges jihadists to carry out attacks in the United States, Russia, and across Europe. “Your targeting of the innocents and civilians is beloved by us and the most effective, so go forth and may you get a great reward or martyrdom in Ramadan,” declares ISIS in the message. “Attack them in their homes, their markets, their roads and their forums,” the group adds. ISIS urges suicide bombers to carry out attacks now. The message states: O ye righteous believers in America, Russia and Europe. O supporters of the caliphate, o you who can’t reach the Islamic state lands and you are now among the idolaters, roll up clothes of your grandfather arm and believe in your quest, and know that our war with our enemy is war and an of easy conciliation easy to reach so make them busy with themselves away from muslims and Islamic state lands and remember the words of your Prophet peace be upon him: (the disbeliever and his killer never meet in hell). While most Muslims follow the tradition of abstaining from eating, drinking, smoking, having sex, and other physical needs each day, starting from before the break of dawn until sunset during the month of Ramadan, others adhere to the belief that perceives Ramadan as a month of jihad and martyrdom. Islamist and jihadi organizations, such as ISIS, encourage their followers to carry out violent attacks during the holiest month for Muslims, which begins Friday night. There is usually a spike in terrorist attacks during Ramadan. Last year alone, Islamic terrorists killed at least 420 people and wounded nearly 730 others across the world during the holy month, described last year as one of the bloodiest in modern history. “Prepare yourselves and be ready, and make sure that you spend all the time in the invading for the say of Allah, and ask God what you request, to make it a month and a curse on the infidels everywhere,” states the ISIS 2017 Ramadan message. The terrorist group encourages jihadists to carry out attacks in their home countries as nations across the world have tightened up security, making it difficult for jihadists to travel to ISIS’s Caliphate. Addressing “soldiers of the caliphate and its supporters in Europe and America,” ISIS advises, “If the tyrants have closed the door of emigration open in their faces the door of Jihad … the smallest work you do in their homes is better and more beloved to us than our greatest work,” reports The Foreign Desk. | 0 |
on November 21, 2016 7:58 pm ·
Donald Trump has had a rocky relationship with the press ever since his presidential campaign, and he’s only punished them further for trying to report the truth since becoming the President-elect.
On Monday, Trump was set to have an off the record meeting with television networks to try and hash out presidential press access. This meeting was particularly important because Trump has previously limited press access, and has ditched two protocol press pools since getting elected.
Some reporters in attendance were NBC’s Deborah Turness, Lester Holt and Chuck Todd; ABC’s James Goldston, George Stephanopoulos, David Muir and Martha Raddatz; CBS’ Norah O’Donnell and Charlie Rose; Fox News’ Bill Shine, Jack Abernethy, Jay Wallace, Suzanne Scott; MSNBC’s Phil Griffin; and CNN’s Jeff Zucker and Erin Burnett. It was a good group, and it could have been a very effective meeting if only things had gone according to plan.
Unfortunately, instead of having a respectful conversation and coming up with an amicable way to move forward, what the press got was a baby Trump temper tantrum of epic proportions. Or, as one person put it , “It was like a f*cking firing squad.”
Trump made zero attempt to hide his disrespect for the media. According to The New York Post , one anonymous source said:
“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down.”
This claim was backed up by another person, who said:
“The meeting took place in a big board room and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks.
“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong. He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was network of liars.”
This attack left reporters stunned, and even as they tried to keep bringing up press access to stay on topic, Trump barely let them speak. While this is certainly shocking, this behavior is completely typical of Trump. He has always hated the free press because it has held him accountable and reported on his mistakes and shortcomings.
Americans on social media are already coming to terms with how terrifying this is: Twitter Twitter Twitter
Interestingly enough, Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway had the nerve to say the meeting went well. She said:
“Excellent meetings with the top executives of the major networks. Pretty unprecedented meeting we put together in two days.”
Disgraceful.
Featured image by Christopher Furlong via Getty Images Share this Article! Author: Vera My passion is bringing attention to human rights and equality issues. In addition to writing for Addicting Info, I also run a website and digital magazine dedicated to social issues and promoting equality in all forms. Search | 0 |
Comedian Sarah Silverman got an earful from her social media followers on Sunday after appearing to mistake a pair of bright orange construction markings for swastikas painted by . [The comedian wrote that she was on her way to get coffee when she noticed the markings on the sidewalk. Walking to get coffee saw these all over a sidewalk in the town I’m in. Is this an attempt at swastikas? Do neo nazis not have google? pic. twitter. — Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) February 12, 2017, “Walking to get coffee saw these all over a sidewalk in the town I’m in. Is this an attempt at swastikas? Do neo nazis not have google?” she wrote. Of course, Silverman’s followers were quick to point out that the markings were, in fact, innocuous markings used in construction, often to designate a spot for which there is a pipe or a wire underneath. Others simply ridiculed the comedian for her post, attributing other innocent, everyday situations to the work of nefarious extremists. . @SarahKSilverman Check it out. I even spotted a couple of Nazis in broad daylight testing some sort of abortion prevention laser device pic. twitter. — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) February 13, 2017, . @SarahKSilverman just saw this mysterious Nazi sign on the street. There’s even a ”15MPH” under it — must be some secret Nazi code. pic. twitter. — Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) February 13, 2017, @SarahKSilverman The KKK guys left their hats down the street too. pic. twitter. — Eric Larson (@larsoneric50) February 13, 2017, After realizing her mistake, Silverman posted a series of tweets in which she explained that she has begun to see swastikas “in everything” due to the country’s current political climate. It’s a construction marker. Innocent mistake for a Jew that gets ”burn in an oven!” at least weekly on twitter. Still pretty close though.. pic. twitter. — Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) February 13, 2017, To the smelly condescending cunts who say ima dummy 4 seeing swastikas in street markers: — Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) February 13, 2017, I’m seeing swastikas in everything fratboys. It started w Bannon’s rise festered when trump decided not 2 mention Jews re the Holocaust. https: . — Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) February 13, 2017, The comedian — who was one of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s earliest and most vocal celebrity supporters before rallying behind eventual Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the general election — has continued to speak out in opposition to President Donald Trump. Earlier this month, Silverman suggested that the U. S. military could help Americans overthrow the Trump administration. WAKE UP JOIN THE RESISTANCE. ONCE THE MILITARY IS W US FASCISTS GET OVERTHROWN. MAD KING HIS HANDLERS GO BYE BYE❤❤❤❤ https: . — Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) February 2, 2017, Shortly after the election, the comedian wrote on Twitter that for many of Clinton’s supporters, the outcome of the race felt like the Great Depression of the 1930s, only worse. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 0 |
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz revved up hundreds of Tea Party activists at Wednesday’s “Storm Congress” rally against the American Health Care Act crafted by Speaker Paul Ryan (R. .) to stabilize health insurance markets, rather than repeal the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. [“Thank you for braving the cold and thank you for standing up and fighting for freedom,” said Cruz, who was on a roster of speakers that included Sen. Rand Paul (R. .) Jenny Beth Martin — the leader of the Tea Party Patriots — and members of the House Freedom Caucus. The rally was organized by FreedomWorks, the policy and logistics hub for Tea Party and conservative activists. The master of ceremonies was Andrew Wilkow, the host of the XMSirius radio show The Wilkow Majority. “In November Democrats were shocked, the media was shocked — although I repeat myself, and millions of Americans across this country rose up and said: ‘Enough is enough and we have a mandate for change. ’” Cruz said Republicans promised for more than six years that if the voters gave them control of the House, Senate, and White House, the GOP would repeal Obamacare. Now, the GOP controls Congress and the White House, he said. “Well, you know what? We’re out of excuses. The time for talk is over. Now, is the time for action. ” After the rally, FreedomWorks staffers escorted teams of activists to meetings with congressmen and senators, where they advocated for a clean repeal of Obamacare, instead of the bill Speaker Paul Ryan (R. .) crafted — the American Health Care Act, or RyanCare. The RyanCare bill does not repeal and replace the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Rather it keeps its structure and programs in place. Central to the bill is the support it provides to the insurance companies by preserving the Individual Mandate as a program administered by the insurance companies and the cutbacks to Medicaid. The expansion of Medicaid pulled millions of lower income insurance customers out of the private market, which drastically changed business conditions for the insurance companies. Now that the American Health Care Act passed the House Budget Committee, the bill is in front of the House Rules Committee, which is tasked with providing the conditions for the bill’s debate on the House floor. As RyanCare moved through the Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Budget committees, it remained unchanged from the exact text the speaker’s office posted March 6 at 6 p. m. Whether or not the Rules committee allows amendments on the House floor will signal if the speaker has the votes to muscle through his text unaltered. | 0 |
Report Copyright Violation Trump and Hillary work for the same organization The Queen of Queens Foundation. The both would like to implement the Alpha Omega World Marshall Programme and install the United Nation Pentagon-H World Military Government. Would anyone like to make a wager against?How about the new Marshall Law anyone? Page 1 | 0 |
RIO DE JANEIRO — Elaine Thompson of Jamaica won the 200 meters to complete a sprint double at the Rio Games. Dafne Schippers of the Netherlands won the silver medal. She leaned at the line in a desperate bid to catch Thompson and tumbled hard to the track. Tori Bowie of the United States won the bronze. Thompson’s winning time was 21. 78. In the 100 meters, Thompson had dethroned her countrywoman, the winner . Bowie was the silver medalist in that race. Schippers is the reigning world champion in the 200. A former long jumper and heptathlete, she has taken the sprinting world by storm since converting to the dashes full time. Schippers had sealed the favorite’s status with a 21. 96, the fastest time in the semifinals on Tuesday. The race was missing Allyson Felix, who has been a dominant athlete at the distance since as far back as 2004 and who won the gold medal in London in 2012. She was only fourth in the U. S. Trials at 200, though she did qualify for the 400, in which she won the silver medal. | 0 |
Paul Manafort, a professional Republican political operative since the 1970s, was supposed to impose order on Donald J. Trump’s chaotic presidential campaign. On Friday, the chaos devoured him. Weeks of sliding poll numbers and false starts had sapped Mr. Manafort’s credibility inside the campaign. A cooling relationship with Mr. Trump — who had taken to calling Mr. Manafort “low energy,” the epithet he once used to mock a former rival, Jeb Bush — turned hot last weekend when the candidate erupted, blaming Mr. Manafort for a damaging newspaper article detailing the campaign’s internal travails, according to three people briefed on the episode. Then a wave of reports about Mr. Manafort’s own business dealings with leaders in Ukraine, involving allegations of millions of dollars in cash payments and secret lobbying efforts in the United States, threw a spotlight on a glaring vulnerability for Mr. Trump: his admiration for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. By Friday morning, Mr. Manafort’s predictions to confidants that he might not be able to survive in his post had come true. “This morning Paul Manafort offered, and I accepted, his resignation from the campaign,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “I am very appreciative for his great work in helping to get us where we are today. ” In fact, Mr. Manafort did not go voluntarily. “My father just didn’t want to have the distraction looming over the campaign,” Eric Trump, the candidate’s second son, explained in a Fox News interview. In a twist, Mr. Manafort’s ouster came after a week in which Mr. Trump had taken several steps toward the kind of normalized candidacy that Mr. Manafort had been striving for: The Republican nominee gave three speeches in which he generally stuck to a script he mostly attacked Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, while refraining from berating other Republicans and, on Friday, he began running his first television advertisements. The timing of Mr. Manafort’s departure largely overshadowed the news Thursday night when the candidate, who has long spurned apologies, announced at a rally that he actually regretted some of the more offensive things he has said — though without specifying which. And on Friday, Mr. Trump toured areas of Baton Rouge, La. even as his aides were confirming Mr. Manafort’s exit. Mr. Manafort, 67, who had managed national Republican conventions in the past, was hired in late March, as Mr. Trump was facing a pitched battle to amass the number of delegates needed to capture the party’s nomination. He was seen as a peer to Mr. Trump, 70, and as someone whose advice Mr. Trump might heed. He ended up taking the helm of the campaign when Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s previous campaign manager, was fired after repeatedly clashing with the candidate’s children. Mr. Manafort helped defeat the “never Trump” movement within the Republican Party, opened lines of communication with party leaders in Washington and crushed a brief but noisy delegate uprising on the floor of the Republican convention in Cleveland on its first day. He also successfully pushed for the selection of Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as Mr. Trump’s running mate. But Mr. Trump never developed the sort of chemistry or comfort level with Mr. Manafort that he had with Mr. Lewandowski, campaign aides said. Mr. Trump has continued to seek out the advice of Mr. Lewandowski, who remains a fierce rival of Mr. Manafort. Nor did Mr. Trump ever quite buy into what Mr. Manafort was selling. Just as Mr. Trump has resisted behaving like a traditional presidential candidate, he has also felt little need to construct the sort of hierarchical organization typical of a campaign for the White House. This is in part, Mr. Trump’s advisers say, because he relies on his instincts and the counsel of his family. But it is also because he simply prefers to improvise, unconstrained by convention or by a chain of command. A change in the leadership of his campaign may not stop Mr. Trump from making abrupt decisions based on news coverage, playing advisers off one another and following the guidance of whoever may be traveling with him or has just spoken to him on the phone. But what Mr. Trump loses in Mr. Manafort is somebody who has had decades of experience in campaigns and relationships in the party that made him a useful ambassador for a candidate who lacks both, and is given to angering fellow Republicans. Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, wrote on Twitter on Friday that Rick Gates, Mr. Manafort’s deputy, would leave New York for Washington, where he would serve as “the campaign’s liaison to the R. N. C. ” But it remains to be seen who will step into Mr. Manafort’s role of chief strategist for the final 11 weeks until Election Day. Mr. Manafort’s exit came as Mr. Trump had been trying to reboot his campaign after a disastrous stretch in which he committed a series of wounds — belittling the mother of a Muslim soldier who was killed in Iraq and threatening to withhold an endorsement from House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, a fellow Republican. Aides have tried a range of efforts to rein in Mr. Trump’s impulses. But they have been unsuccessful in taming his propensity to respond sharply to media coverage of his campaign. It was an article in The New York Times last weekend — about frequent but frustrated efforts by Mr. Trump’s top advisers to curtail his pugilistic instincts — that set off the series of events leading to Mr. Manafort’s departure. On Saturday, Mr. Trump raged at Mr. Manafort, holding him responsible for the article, according to people familiar with the episode. On Sunday, Mr. Trump hastily convened a meeting of paid and unpaid advisers including the pollster Kellyanne Conway Roger Ailes, the ousted Fox News chairman and Stephen K. Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News, a conservative website. Mr. Manafort was present for part of the meeting. Mr. Ailes urged Mr. Trump to reconfigure the campaign’s leadership, according to a Republican briefed on the meeting. A former Republican strategist and ad man who was friends with Mr. Trump long before his ouster, Mr. Ailes had reviewed some of the initial television commercials Mr. Manafort had overseen and told Mr. Trump in blunt terms that they were lackluster. Only on Tuesday was Mr. Manafort informed of the campaign’s impending to be announced the next day: Ms. Conway would become campaign manager, and Mr. Bannon would become the campaign’s chief executive, according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussion. At the same time, the new accounts of Mr. Manafort’s ties to Ukraine quickly eroded the support that he had from Mr. Trump’s family during his earlier battles with Mr. Lewandowski. According to people briefed on the matter, Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s expressed increasing concern after a Times article published on Sunday about allegations of cash payments made to Mr. Manafort’s firm for his work on behalf of his main client, Viktor F. Yanukovych, the former Ukranian president, who is an ally of Mr. Putin. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has repeatedly sought to yoke Mr. Trump to Mr. Putin, citing Mr. Trump’s praise for the Russian leader. And the avalanche of stories about his work for entities in Ukraine were becoming untenable for the campaign, according to people briefed on the discussions. “The easiest way for Trump to sidestep the whole Ukraine story is for Manafort not to be there,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who has become a counselor to Mr. Trump. In North Carolina on Thursday, Mr. Trump was informed of the newest such report: an Associated Press article that, citing emails, showed that Mr. Manafort’s firm had orchestrated a lobbying campaign in Washington without registering as a foreign agent. That was enough, according to people briefed on the calls, for Mr. Trump to call Mr. Bannon and Ms. Conway. He had the same message for each: It was time for Mr. Manafort to go. | 1 |
Don’t worry, after months to prepare their voting machines for election day and repeated assurances from President Obama and the mainstream media that there is nothing to be concerned about, we are sure that all of the potential issues for rigging an election against Trump have been worked out.
Or… maybe not.
Watch as this voting machine in the battleground State of Pennsylvania will not allow a voter to select Trump/Pence and remains “stuck” on Clinton/Kaine:
this is what I was talking about, they fixed it but it was on some nut shit at first. pic.twitter.com/GO5Y9FCnYN
— ædonis | hotep (@lordaedonis) November 8, 2016
Election officials say the issue has now been resolved.
| 0 |
The Left Turns on Bob Dylan for His Pro-Israel Views, Refusal to Acknowledge Nobel Prize Oct 28, 2016 Previous post
So Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” His name is now enshrined among a list of laureates that includes luminaries like T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
It’s a tremendous honor for the legendary singer-songwriter, that’s for sure. But it’s also stirred up its share of controversy. I won’t debate Dylan’s award—I’ll leave that to my esteemed colleagues Andrew Klavan and Ron Radosh —except to say two quick things. First, when the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to people like Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama, did it dim the luster of the prizes in other categories? And second, I like the idea of songs like “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Saved” (and, apologies to Andrew, even “It Ain’t Me, Babe”) joining the pantheon of Nobel Prize-winning literature.
But now that the reliably left-leaning Nobel Prize Committee has given Dylan an award, a funny thing has happened. The left has begun to turn on Dylan for being less than the predictable leftist they have expected him to be. In Defense of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature—He Deserves it!
The first example comes to us from that cherished source of unbiased news, Al Jazeera. In a recent editorial , French sociologist and “media critic” Ali Saad takes the media to task for reporting the news of Bob Dylan’s award without mentioning that he— gasp— supports Israel. Saad gripes that:
…media outlets, both Arab and international, framed the story without taking issue with Dylan’s pro-Israel stance and instead portrayed him exclusively through the prism of his constructed image as defender of the oppressed.
Saad goes on to cite “Neighborhood Bully,” an early ’80s tune from Dylan that expresses support for the nation of Israel.
The song, that Stephen Holden described in The New York Times in 1983 as “ an outspoken defence of Israel “, begins by stating two key precepts emphasising the Israeli perspective: first by comparing Israel to a man in exile whose enemies unjustly “claim he’s on their land”, a sentence that serves as a scolding to those who refute the legitimacy of Israel’s historic claim to Palestine’s land. Then, by metaphorically presenting Israel as a man “outnumbered by a million to one”, which postulates the frequent representation of Israel as the underdog of the Middle East.Such a stance by an anti-war activist raises serious doubts over Dylan’s commitment to humanity
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Good morning. (Want to get California Today by email? Here’s the .) Let’s turn it over to Adam Nagourney, our Los Angeles bureau chief, for today’s introduction. LOS ANGELES — It’s Election Day (again) on Tuesday in California, and while there are no particularly competitive races for office, two voter initiatives are potentially big enough to overshadow the sleepy bid of Mayor Eric M. Garcetti. The first, Measure S, would impose a moratorium on some new construction in the city of Los Angeles. It has created a fierce — and battle — that has rekindled old debates about what Los Angeles should look like and the influence developers enjoy with elected officials. Southern California is going through a building boom, and the city has approved a series of dense and tall projects over the ire of some neighborhood groups upset not only with what they see as overdevelopment, but also the influence of special interests at City Hall. They argue a moratorium will force Los Angeles to adopt uniform zoning plans to guide how neighborhoods should handle developments. Opponents — including Mr. Garcetti and labor unions — warn it would be damaging to the economy and throttle any effort to build desperately needed affordable housing here. Both arguments have been played out in television advertisements and billboards across town. Mr. Garcetti has campaigned nearly as hard against the measure as he has for his own . One side note here: Mr. Garcetti, who faces 10 opponents, needs to win 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff. Low turnout races can be dicey, especially with an initiative that could bring out people upset with the direction Los Angeles is taking under Mr. Garcetti. The second measure worth watching is a Los Angeles countywide sales tax increase to pay for services for the homeless. This follows a vote by Los Angeles city voters last year to finance $1. 2 billion in bonds to build housing for the homeless. Both measures would require a vote by the electorate. Considering how much money will be released should this pass, Los Angeles could offer a test in the years ahead of a key question: Can government spend its way out homelessness? (Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.) • A former mayor of Stockton was arrested. He was booked on felony charges including embezzlement and money laundering. [The Record] • Census data showed that as wealthier Americans migrate to California, the state’s poorer residents are leaving — often for Texas. [Sacramento Bee] • A rally was confronted by in Berkeley over the weekend. It got ugly. [Berkeleyside] • An Afghan family of five, visas in hand, was detained when it arrived in Los Angeles. [The New York Times] • He dropped off his daughter at her school. Immigration agents arrested him moments later. [The New York Times] • Santa Ana has set an example that other cities of immigrants should follow. [Opinion | The New York Times] • Snap’s investors are betting on the kind of rapid growth that few, if any, companies have ever achieved, writes James B. Stewart. [The New York Times] • Nurtured on the public courts of Southern California, Ernesto Escobedo is blazing a tennis trail similar to the Williams sisters’. [The New York Times] • A company is extracting huge amounts of sand from Monterey Bay. The work has been linked to severe erosion of the shoreline. [San Francisco Chronicle] • After years of drought, hydropower is poised for a comeback in California. [San Diego ] • Video: A drone captured the major sewage spill that has polluted Imperial Beach. [Zach Wick | YouTube] • Al Pacino stars in a play by Dotson Rader at the Pasadena Playhouse. Here is why it falls short. [Opinion | Los Angeles Times] • You can blame “Mad Men” and Coachella for the resurgence of Palm Springs. [The New York Times] • Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, will speak Wednesday in San Francisco. The topic: “challenges confronting America. ” • The BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells kicks off today. Roger Federer will return after being absent in 2016. Serena Williams will seek her third title. • “Jim Marshall’s 1967,” a photography exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of San Francisco’s Summer of Love, opens Friday at the Grammy Museum. It runs through May 14. • Dana Point’s 46th annual Festival of Whales will have events on Saturday and Sunday. There will be a children’s fair, a clam chowder cook off and whale watching. We want to get more of your voices in California Today. To that end, a new plan: Each Monday, we’ll come up with a question for you, solicit responses, then feature a handful by the end of the week. Here is one to kick things off. Two state lawmakers have introduced a measure that would allow bicyclists to treat stop signs like yield signs — rolling through them slowly and stopping only if necessary. It sounds dangerous. But some bicycle groups argue that cyclists are in fact safer when they are allowed to move more freely. That’s because they spend less time in intersections, where the risk of a collision is greater. Research has shown that a similar law enacted in Idaho resulted in fewer crashes. Opponents of the change argue that it would invite confusion about the rules of the road and possibly encourage (more) bad behavior among cyclists. What do you think? Should cyclists be allowed to roll through stop signs? Tell us, and please include your full name and city of residence: CAtoday@nytimes. com. California Today goes live at 6 a. m. Pacific time weekdays. The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. Follow him on Twitter. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U. C. Berkeley. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve sent a sharp, simple message to financial markets on Wednesday: Pay attention. The Fed is thinking seriously about raising its benchmark interest rate at its next meeting, in June. The unusually frank bulletin was delivered in the official account of the Fed’s April meeting, which said explicitly that most officials thought “it likely would be appropriate” to raise rates in June if the economy shows clear signs of a rebound from a weak winter. That message was sharply at odds with the expectations of investors, who had largely written off a June increase before Wednesday, betting instead that the Fed would leave rates unchanged until later in the year. Measures calculated from asset prices suggested that investors saw less than a 5 percent chance of a June increase at the beginning of the week by the end of Wednesday, that had spiked above 30 percent. It remains far from certain, however, that the Fed will move at its meeting on June 14 and 15. The economy has yet to demonstrate the strength the Fed says it wants to see, and some officials said in April there might not be time to gain the necessary confidence before the June meeting. Still the account made clear that Fed officials want markets to take the possibility more seriously. “The markets are certainly more pessimistic than I am,” Dennis Lockhart, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and a bellwether for the Federal Open Market Committee, said on Tuesday in Washington. Two other Fed officials similarly said on Tuesday that they were thinking about a June increase. The Fed, which entered the year predicting quarterly rate increases, instead held steady in the first quarter as the global economy weakened and markets swooned. Its benchmark rate remains in a range between 0. 25 and 0. 5 percent. The Fed is holding rates at historically low levels to support economic growth by encouraging borrowing and . It plans to raise rates, gradually reducing those incentives, as the economy gains strength. The April account, published after the standard delay, showed the Fed was continuing to struggle with communications. Officials have said repeatedly that they want to get out of the business of telling markets when rates will rise. They want investors to draw inferences from the economic data. They want to move from date dependence to data dependence. But the account said some Fed officials were frustrated by the conclusions investors had drawn. “Some participants were concerned that market participants may not have properly assessed the likelihood of an increase in the target range at the June meeting,” it said. As a corrective, it offered an account of how the Fed would decide whether to raise rates in June. “Most participants judged that if incoming data were consistent with economic growth picking up in the second quarter, labor market conditions continuing to strengthen, and inflation making progress toward the committee’s 2 percent objective, then it likely would be appropriate for the committee to increase the target range for the federal funds rate in June,” it said. The Fed carefully distinguishes in its meeting accounts between the broader group of 17 officials who attend policy meetings and the 10 of those officials who hold votes. Narayana Kocherlakota, a professor of economics at the University of Rochester who stepped down as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis at the end of last year, noted that those 10 “members” were described in the minutes as more tempered in their assessment of the chances of a June hike. “Members generally judged it appropriate to leave their policy options open,” the account said. William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and one of those voting members, said in a recent interview that it was reasonable to expect the Fed to raise rates twice more this year, but that the decision would depend on the strength of the data. “We should continue to see tightening of the U. S. labor market, probably a gradual acceleration in wages as the labor market gets tighter,” Mr. Dudley said. “And if that’s how the economy plays out, then I think we’re going to see further moves by the Fed to gradually normalize interest rates. ” The labor market has gained strength in recent months, while reported economic growth has been relatively weak. Economists have puzzled over which to take more seriously, but the account said most Fed officials had concluded the economy was doing better than the data suggested. They judged “the apparent softness in spending in the first quarter was unlikely to persist,” it said. Among the reasons: strong job growth, rising incomes and looser financial conditions. Another key question is whether the supply of workers has receded to a normal level, suggesting that continued economic growth will begin to put upward pressure on wages and prices. Officials were described as divided on this issue some noted evidence that people who had left the labor force were returning in significant numbers, seeing better chances of finding work. Concerns about the persistence of inflation below the Fed’s 2 percent annual target appear to have diminished somewhat. The April account said that for many Fed officials, “recent developments provided greater confidence that inflation would rise to 2 percent over the medium term. ” Other familiar concerns remained, in particular about the impact of renewed global weakness. Yet the account portrayed Fed officials as waiting to raise rates largely from an abundance of caution. And it suggested that they did not expect they would be waiting too much longer. | 1 |
By Reuters 5:51 pm Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump by 15 percentage points among early voters surveyed in the past two weeks, according to the Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project.
By Maurice Tamman
NEW YORK (Reuters) – With 11 days to go before the U.S. presidential election, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump by 15 percentage points among early voters surveyed in the past two weeks, according to the Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project.
Though data is not available for all early voting states, Clinton enjoys an edge in swing states such as Ohio and Arizona and in Republican Party strongholds such as Georgia and Texas.
An estimated 19 million Americans have voted so far in the election, according to the University of Florida’s United States Election Project, accounting for as much as 20 percent of the electorate.
Overall, Clinton remained on track to win a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the Reuters/Ipsos survey showed.
Having so many ballots locked down before the Nov. 8 election is good news for the Clinton campaign. On Friday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it is examining newly discovered emails belonging to Clinton’s close aide, Huma Abedin. Those emails were found on a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, Abedin’s estranged husband, during an unrelated investigation into illicit messages he is alleged to have sent to a teenage girl. The Reuters/Ipsos survey was conducted before the news emerged Friday afternoon.
It remains unclear whether the FBI inquiry will upset the balance in the race. The bureau disclosed nothing about the Abedin emails, including whether any of the messages were sent by or to Clinton. Over the summer, the FBI said it was closing its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email system while secretary of state. Until Friday, her campaign seemed to have weathered the initial FBI email probe.
Clinton has held a lead averaging four to seven percentage points in polls in recent weeks as the Trump campaign wrestled with accusations by women of groping and other sexual advances. Trump has said none of the accusations are true. He also struggled in the recent presidential debates and faced questions about his taxes.
As of Thursday, Clinton’s odds of receiving the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency remained at greater than 95 percent, according to State of the Nation polling results released Saturday. The project estimated she would win by 320 votes to 218, with 278 votes solidly for the Democrat.
Clinton’s lead among early voters is similar to the lead enjoyed by President Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney at this point of the 2012 race, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken at the time. Obama won the election by 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206.
But even before the latest email news, it had been a difficult week for Clinton. News coverage of Trump’s accusers had diminished, while Clinton confronted the almost daily release by WikiLeaks of emails purportedly hacked from her campaign manager’s account. This week’s leaked messages raised questions about former President Bill Clinton’s finances.
And her lead in the States of the Nation project fell slightly from last week. Though the projected Electoral College votes hardly moved, the number of states solidly for Clinton slid from 25 to 20 this week. Trump didn’t see any additional states tilt solidly to him, but he did see some gains: The swing states of Pennsylvania, Colorado, Iowa and Nevada all moved from leaning to Clinton to being too close to call.
Still, Trump’s path to a victory is narrow, and any realistic chance rests on his winning Ohio, North Carolina and Florida. As of Thursday, Ohio remained a toss-up. Florida and North Carolina were still tilting toward Clinton, according to the States of the Nation results.
Early voting data for Florida and North Carolina was not yet available this week. In Ohio, Clinton led Trump by double digits among early voters. The project’s broader polling suggests the state is deadlocked between the two candidates.
In Arizona, Clinton also was solidly ahead among early voters. In the past month, Arizona has gradually moved from a solid Trump state to a marginal Clinton state, although it is still too close to call, according to the project results.
In Georgia, she enjoyed a similar lead among early voters. Overall, Georgia leans to Trump, but his lead narrowed to five percentage points this week, down from eights points last week and 13 points a month ago.
Even in Texas, where Trump enjoys a sizable lead, Clinton has a double-digit edge among early voters, according to project results.
The States of the Nation project is a survey of about 15,000 people every week in all 50 states plus Washington D.C. State by state results are available by visiting http://www.reuters.com/statesofthenation/
(Editing by James Dalgleish)
Hillary Clinton enjoys solid lead in early voting: Reuters/Ipsos poll added by Reuters on Sat, Oct 29th, 2016 | 1 |
Videos It’s Rigged: Takes One To Know One Increasing skepticism of the U.S. government can either lead to ugly conspiracy theorizing, or fuel a movement to bend the status quo. Be Sociable, Share!
The system is rigged.
Let’s be clear: the American political system favors the two major parties and our economic system favors the wealthy. The global system is similarly rigged in favor of powerful countries (such as the United States) and powerful economic actors (such as transnational corporations).
This is not, however, a conspiracy. No secret group of Bilderburgers, Illuminati, Masons, or Jews works behind the scenes to control the system in the United States or globally. Concentrations of power distort the fabric of our societies, just as large celestial bodies distort the fabric of space. It doesn’t take an Einstein to understand the structural impact of wealth and influence.
Donald Trump, however, has his own theories about how the world works.
In a chilling, if predictable, development in the presidential campaign, the Republican presidential candidate has amped up his assertions that a conspiratorial cluster of actors is out to get him. Trump’s latest charges — that the media is out to get him, that women “not his type” have invented sexual harassment charges against him, that debate organizers and election officials and international bankers are, as we speak, ensuring that Trump will fail — are of a piece with his earlier claims that President Obama was born in Kenya.
I would dearly love to believe that the system is rigged against racist, xenophobic misogynists, but the fact that Trump has gotten this far – in the election, in his career – suggests otherwise. As my colleague Chuck Collins points out, Trump was born on third base (and, as his latest book demonstrates , Chuck knows an unearned triple when he sees one). A growing All-Star roster of Democrats and Republicans is currently trying to prevent ambitious Donald from stealing home. It’s true: when you’re that loathsome, everyone is out to get you.
And now, within a few weeks of being tagged out at the presidential plate, Trump is crying foul. It beggars the imagination that someone like Trump, who has benefitted from so many backroom deals, now claims that the system that has so richly rewarded his family is tilted against him. But then, Trump the amoralist courts the evangelical vote , Trump the global capitalist casts himself as an American firster, and Trump the billionaire pretends that he’s suddenly a populist. There are not enough bridges in the world to sell to the credulous taken in by Trump’s hucksterism.
For the comfortably well off, this kind of campaign tactic seems ludicrous in its transparently self-serving paranoia. But for the millions of Americans who have not prospered in the new economy, all this talk of conspiracies affirms a deeply held conviction that malevolent puppet masters are at work behind the scenes. It can be a great comfort to blame misfortune on someone specific — the Devil, immigrants, feminists, liberal reporters — rather than a capricious universe or the workings of structural inequality.
You can expend a lot of time and energy patiently explaining the near impossibility of rigging a national election or getting a bunch of journalists to agree to follow any sort of plan. In the absence of any supporting proof, Donald Trump’s supporters have made a leap of faith.
They’ll find out soon enough just how far a drop it will be.
From Practice to Theory
Conspiracies used to be rather straightforward affairs. The former allies of Julius Caesar conspired to rid the world of their power-hungry leader. In 1605, a number of Catholic activists plotted to blow up the British parliament. In 1865, a group of disgruntled Confederate sympathizers succeeded in assassinating Abraham Lincoln, while in 1944 a group of disgruntled Nazis failed in their effort to get rid of Adolph Hitler.
In all of these cases, conspiracy was a necessary tactic. If the secret got out — as it did with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 — the mission would fail.
At some point, however, the balance of power shifted in the equation. Where once the powerless created conspiracies to bring down the mighty — an emperor, a king, a president — “conspiracy” more often meant in the late 20 th century an effort by the powerful to increase their domination. During this shift, the logic of conspiracy seemed to dry up and flutter away. Why should the powerful need to rely on conspiracy to further their aims? Did they not already control all the levers of authority?
What were once concrete acts have become increasingly abstract theories.
Let me anticipate your objection that some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true. Didn’t the CIA indeed attempt to subvert the Cuban system and take out Fidel Castro? Didn’t the Nixon administration orchestrate the Watergate break-in as one of its many dirty tricks? And what about Iran-Contra?
In all three cases, the conspirators didn’t control the system. They engaged in secret missions to get around checks and balances or the political rules of the game. Their efforts were a sign of weakness, not strength. These exceptions prove the rule that the system is not rigged in a wacky conspiratorial way but in far more mundane, structural ways.
Today, conspiracy means so much more than an agency run amok or a president who breaks the rules. Conspiracy theorists believe that the U.S. government is behind the 9-11 attacks, that NASA faked the moon landing, that the Holocaust never happened. Conspiracy theories boil down messy complex reality into digestible pabulum. And where philosophers would impute omnipotence to an omniscient deity, conspiracy theorists now attribute omnipotence to bureaucratic organizations (CIA, UN, World Bank, Federal Reserve). Anyone who has ever worked in these organizations knows, however, that they are too bureaucratically diffuse and, frankly, incompetent to accomplish even one small part of what conspiracy theorists expect them to do.
Modern conspiracy theories are a desperate response to the bewildering proliferation of bureaucratic organizations and the increasing complexity of society. Conspiracy theories are, for the many who tout them, a secular version of God. Surely some invisible hand is behind the inexplicable.
Trump Goes Low and Outside Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton are introduced during the presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., Monday, Sept. 26, 2016.
In a speech last week in Florida, Donald Trump declared that WikiLeaks documents reveal that “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.”
Trump continued, “This is a conspiracy against you, the American people, and we cannot let this happen or continue.”
Let’s look more carefully at this assertion, which was an intriguing bait-and-switch gambit of using veiled anti-Semitism to draw attention away from claims of explicit sexual harassment. The latest Wikileaks dump included a number of remarks Clinton made to bankers. Most of these excerpts were from speeches to domestic institutions like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. But there was also one nugget from a speech Clinton gave to the former Brazilian bank, Banco Itau. “My dream,” Clinton told the Brazilian bankers in 2013, “is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”
The alt-right went crazy over this sentence largely because of the phrase “open borders.” They took this to mean no restrictions on immigration. Really? What international banking institution supports open borders for immigrants ? Banks, of course, want to see money flow around the world with as few restrictions as possible. But people? Clinton obviously meant open economic borders, which comes with its own problems but is hardly a conspiracy.
The second part of Trump’s charge, Clinton’s efforts to destroy “U.S. sovereignty,” is almost laughable. Clinton, like Trump, is a firm believer in American exceptionalism. To keep American atop the global economy is a core belief for anyone who operates at the highest levels of the American political system. Clinton, like many others, believes that free trade is a way to keep America on top. She might alter her position on free trade for the purposes of the presidential campaign. You might believe her or not believe her. But she is firmly, perhaps even maniacally, committed to the preservation and augmentation of sovereign American power.
Where is Trump going with all this?
On April 29, 1991, the sports announcer and former footballer David Icke appeared on the Terry Wogan show on the BBC and declared that the world would end and he was, basically, the son of God. It was the end of one career as a respected public figure and the beginning of another as a serial conspiracy theorist. In perhaps his most famous book, The Biggest Secret , Icke argued that the Earth had been taken over by large alien reptiles that could assume the shapes of world leaders. Give or take a few asylum dwellers, 12 million Americans believe that Icke is right.
I think Donald Trump is now having his David Icke moment. Perhaps his true October surprise will be the revelation, just before the election, that Hillary Clinton is not just a lawbreaker, not just on drugs, and not just in conspiratorial cahoots with a cabal of corporate criminals. Soon, to borrow from TV parlance, Donald will jump the lizard.
On October 31, Trump will declare that Hillary Clinton is an alien.
Meanwhile in Russia Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Vladivostok, Russia in 2012.
The loony right is not the only side of the political spectrum that traffics in conspiracy theories. The loony left has its own bizarre takes on international affairs (I wish we could declare an Internet moratorium on the phrase “false flag”).
But the center too has its conspiracy theories. There has been much speculation about Vladimir Putin’s desire to bring about a color revolution in the United States as payback for all the meddling the United States has done in the Russian near abroad.
I have no doubt that the Russian government is behind the hacking of the DNC, John Podesta’s email account, and so on. I also suspect that Julian Assange has gone off the deep end in his Trumpian effort to disrupt the status quo at any cost. I might even go so far as to presume a joint effort by the Kremlin and Wikileaks to release this information at the most damaging moments possible (just before the Democratic Convention, in the lead-up to the election). It’s not a conspiracy. Call it a marriage of convenience. Or a joint criminal enterprise, if you prefer.
But I don’t think that Vladimir Putin has a grand plan for bringing the United States to its knees or even to disrupt the U.S. elections. Putin has enough challenges keeping his own far-flung network of interests intact. The hacking is a little something on the side, in the great Soviet tradition of disinformation. I doubt that anyone in the Kremlin puts much stock in the effort, particularly since the Russian president knows that Donald Trump would be a disaster for U.S.-Russian relations. Putin values predictable, boring leaders, not ones that can turn on a dime in their affections.
All across the political spectrum in the United States, the lure of conspiracy theories is strong. Many people accept Donald Trump’s particular interpretation that “the system is rigged” — 25 percent of Americans don’t believe the economic data produced by the U.S. government and 41 percent believe that the election could be stolen from Trump.
This radical skepticism can lead to the worst kind of conspiracy theorizing. Or it can fuel a movement to bend the status quo so that it aligns with the long arc of the moral universe. As economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.” Over the last decade, the idea that the growing inequality gap is wrong — morally, politically, economically — has been gradually encroaching upon American public opinion. Out of this sordid election campaign, perhaps Americans can find common ground on a new vision of justice. This work by Foreign Policy In Focus – A project of the Institute for Policy Studies , is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News editorial policy. Be Sociable, Share! | 1 |
You’ve heard it many times: You should get a flu shot. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that anyone older than six months get one by the end of October, though late is better than never. Yet, an online survey by CityMD, a network of urgent care centers, found that 52 percent of millennials don’t plan on getting the vaccine. Turns out we have one such skeptic on staff. Jonah Engel Bromwich, my Times colleague, is a who says he never gets a flu shot, making him exactly the kind of person who experts wish they could reach. But he has agreed to offer up his excuses so we can quash them one by one, and we thank him for that. To help, we asked Dr. Joseph Bresee, chief of the epidemiology branch in the influenza division of the C. D. C. to take us through the rebuttals to the most common excuses he hears. DANIEL: So, tell us, Jonah — what’s going on here? Why are you ignoring the doctors? JONAH: I’m very tough. I’ve never gotten the flu. Why should I get a flu shot? My immune system is … good. I just don’t see the need for it. DANIEL: I have no doubt that you are tough, and I bet your immune system is something to be very proud of. But the fact is, an estimated 5 percent to 20 percent of the United States population gets the flu each year, Dr. Bresee said. The fact that you’ve never gotten the flu is no indication that you won’t get it in the future. You’re essentially rolling the dice anew each year, and there’s a decent chance you’re eventually gonna get a bad roll. JONAH: I’m a gambler. DANIEL: I wish you luck in Atlantic City. But a flu shot isn’t just about you. As a healthy you might not have underlying medical issues that would make the flu extra dangerous. For you, it might just mean a lousy week in bed. But sadly, others don’t have that luxury. To people around you, especially pregnant women, young children and older family members, the flu could be a much bigger problem, even deadly. Once it’s your turn to get the flu — and surely you know it’ll happen eventually — you’d be needlessly exposing other people to harm. “If the message to protect yourself is not effective, maybe do it to be a good community member,” Dr. Bresee said. JONAH: O. K. ugh, I don’t want to make people sick. But don’t flu shots give you a mini version of the flu? Aren’t they just transmitting flu germs into you? DANIEL: Nope. You’re far from alone in thinking so, but it’s just not true. Dr. Bresee said flu shots back in the 1960s and ’70s were associated with some mild reactions, including fevers. But modern vaccines have greatly reduced the negative side effects, most likely leaving you with no more than a mild bit of soreness in your arm. The C. D. C. states it plainly: “No, a flu shot cannot cause flu illness. ” JONAH: But everyone always says that it was getting the shot that made them sick in the first place! Are they lying? DANIEL: I don’t doubt some people got sick soon after getting a shot, but they’re probably misunderstanding what actually caused their sicknesses. People get sick all the time, so it makes a lot of sense that people would come down with a cold or “flulike symptoms” in a time frame that just so happens to be a few days after getting a shot. That in no way suggests that the shot caused it. Though it might be tempting to make the connection to the flu shot when you’re in bed sneezing, correlation is not causation. It’s also possible to be exposed to the flu shortly before the shot or in the period in which the vaccine takes effect. That’s not the vaccine’s fault. JONAH: Hmm. Fine. But how do I know it’s going to work? DANIEL: Well, you don’t — but it definitely increases your odds of staying healthy. The performance of the vaccine changes year to year, but Dr. Bresee said you’re about 50 percent to 60 percent less likely to get the flu by getting the shot. JONAH: All right, Daniel. You got me. These are good arguments. DANIEL: So, you’re convinced? JONAH: No. I just don’t want to get a shot. I don’t want green goo going into my arm. It’s weird! I’m not into it. DANIEL: I confess I did not ask Dr. Bresee about the color of what’s going into your arm, so I can’t help you there. JONAH: … DANIEL: … JONAH: O. K. I’ll say it: It hurts! I’m scared of needles. DANIEL: I get it. But I promise you: It doesn’t hurt that much, and as a giant wuss who recently got my flu shot, I can say that with authority. It’s really not that bad. If you’re especially concerned about it, you can get an intradermal shot that uses a smaller needle that you won’t even see and goes into your skin instead of your muscle. It’s barely a pinch. Get a shot, Jonah. JONAH: Fine. I will. | 1 |
A leading US senator: US Supporting War in Syria
A leading US senator said the war in Syria would have been over by now if the US had put an end to its intervention when Russia entered the war-ravaged country.
“If the United States had just stayed out of it at that point, the war would be over by now; people would be rebuilding, refugees would be returning back to Syria, but the United States rushed anti-Tank missiles, and we used these so-called moderate rebels as a conduit to supply al-Nusra Front (also known as Fatah al-Sham Front), which is al-Qaeda in Syria,” republican member of the Virginia State in US Senate, Richard Hayden Black said in an exclusive interview with Press TV.
“If we were not supporting the war in Syria, I believe that the Syrians, combined with their allied forces from Iran, Lebanon and Russia… would move very steadily and restore the borders of Syria.”
The senate member, who visited Syria in April, refused to distinguish between militants and terrorists fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad, saying, the two are “thoroughly integrated.”
“They really are one and the same, they’re part of the same army,” he said, citing a US defense intelligence agency’s investigation in 2013, which showed Washington’s ties with the terror group.
The outspoken state senator referred to plans by the CIA to transfer arms from Libya to Turkey and from there to Syria to supply the militants, noting that the move “evolved into an indiscriminate program of supplying all militant groups, including specifically ISIL and al-Qaeda.”
“We do it indirectly because it’s unlawful to do it directly,” he said, adding that the US keeps “extremely violent organizations… off the terrorist watch list because these are the agents that take our weapons and then distribute them to ISIL and al-Qaeda.”
In response to a question on why Iran and Russia are portrayed as the “bad guys,” while they are the ones really fighting terrorism there, as put recently by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, Black said the Republican candidate has a “clear understanding of what’s happening over there.”
“Sometimes, his rhetoric has to match the political mood of the moment… but I know a number of his advisers and they believe that our determination to topple the government in Syria is suicidal, that it threatens not only the entire Middle East but literally the entire world.”
He further warned that the US itself could be “threatened,” arguing that, “if Syria falls, it will be dominated by some al-Qaeda-related organization; Lebanon will fall; Jordan will fall and the entire area will be destabilized.”
The Vietnam war veteran also elaborated on his personal definition of the Middle East “axis of evil,” naming Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and “particularly” Turkey over their support for terrorism.
“Probably, three quarters of the rebels are not Syrian at all, they are mercenaries recruited by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia,” he asserted, describing the three countries as “the primary force behind the terrorist movement.”
“Turkey has invaded Iraq and Syria with heavy military forces. Turkey has really become a rogue nation,” he added, referring to a 1923 treaty that set the border between Turkey and Greece, saying that was even being questioned by President Rececp Tayyip Erdogan.
“And now you see this emerging threat against Western Europe by Turkey,” he noted, further adding that Erdogan “has made it clear that he looks to resurrection of the Ottoman Empire.”
“He has become more and more aggressive; he’s crushed the military, the free press; every powerful institution of the Turkish government has come under his iron fist and he’s now a total dictator. He’s a man who has said that he wants the constitution amended so that he will have power similar to those of Adolf Hilter… This is our great ally; we’re allied with a man who would be Hitler.”
He also blasted Washington’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, “where women are not allowed to walk out in the front yard to pick up the newspaper without a man’s permission; they can’t drive a car!”
“Somehow, this is part of the liberalization that we seek to impose on the Middle East,” he said ironically, calling it “bizarre.”
He also praised the resistance against the Saudi aggression by the people of Yemen, saying, “God bless them! The Yemenis are giving the Saudis a bloody nose,” despite being a “tiny little, poor nation.”
“I think the world recognizes that Saudi Arabia has just embarked in massive war crimes in Yemen,” he said, voicing regret over the US support for the monarchy.
“We don’t pay too much attention to them while engaged in war crimes because they’re our good allies,” he said, concluding that Washington is on a “suicidal course of action.”
“Saudi money pays the very top politicians in many Western nations. And they really have co-opted the American military into acting as mercenaries for Wahhabism.”Black referred to the Western media’s portrayal of Iran as a supporter of terrorism, saying, “The fact of the matter is that if you really look at global terrorism, it all emanates from Saudi Arabia.”
He exemplified various terrorists attack, including the 9/11, the Boston bombing, and the Brussels attacks, noting that they are all a “reflection of the Wahhabi philosophy.” | 1 |
BERLIN — A German organization that calls itself the True Religion and that is known for distributing copies of the Quran was outlawed on Tuesday, after the authorities accused it of recruiting jihadists to fight in Iraq and Syria. Thomas de Maizière, the German interior minister, said the government had banned the True Religion organization, which is also known as Read (as in the instruction to read the Quran) because it acted as a “collecting pool” for Islamist fighters. Starting on Tuesday morning, officers raided 190 premises in more than half of Germany’s 16 states. Materials were secured, but there were no detentions, Mr. de Maizière said. “The organization brings Islamic jihadists together under the pretext of the harmless distribution of the Quran,” Mr. de Maizière told reporters in Berlin, stressing that the authorities were acting against the group because of its work to foster violence, not because of its faith. “A systematic curtailment of our rule of law has nothing to do with the alleged freedom of religion,” he said. The move comes after months of surveillance of the organization, whose members have become a common sight in pedestrian shopping areas in major German cities. Mr. de Maizière said that 140 of the group’s supporters are known to have traveled to Syria or Iraq to fight on behalf of the Islamic State. “The translations of the Quran are being distributed along with messages of hatred and unconstitutional ideologies,” Mr. de Maizière said. “Teenagers are being radicalized with conspiracy theories. ” The move comes a week after the authorities arrested five men who were accused of aiding the Islamic State in Germany by recruiting members and providing financial and logistical help. The True Religion is the sixth Islamist organization to be banned in Germany since 2012, under an effort to ensure domestic security and to prevent radicalized young people from leaving the country to fight for extremists abroad. Germany has been gripped by a wave of terrorist attacks this year, including three that were claimed by the Islamic State: the knifing of a policeman in February, an ax attack by a young refugee, and a suicide bombing, both in July. (The only deaths in those assaults were those of the attackers.) Most of the nearly one million migrants and refugees who arrived in Germany last year were Muslims. Security officials have been concerned that those who become frustrated or disillusioned at the difficulty of starting a new life in Europe could provide fertile ground for radical Islamists seeking to recruit members. The campaign to hand out the Qurans to was the idea of Ibrahim a Palestinian who preaches a conservative brand of Islam known as Salafism. German security officials said he was not in Germany at the time of the raids. Mr. de Maizière declined to comment on Mr. ’s possible whereabouts. Mr. who has lived in Germany for more than 30 years, has been on the radar of German security officials since 2005, when he set up a website that officials say spreads extremist propaganda. An attempt to prosecute Mr. in 2012 on charges of incitement of religious hatred failed. Even as they are carrying out a sweeping effort to prevent radical Muslims from committing terrorist acts, the German authorities are also working to stop violence by extremists. There was a 42 percent increase in the number of violent acts committed by the far right in 2015, according to the country’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. On Tuesday, federal prosecutors said they had charged eight men from the eastern state of Saxony with forming a terrorist organization known as the Freital Group, after the city near Dresden where many of the group’s attacks were carried out. The charges were brought by the state court in Dresden last Wednesday, the prosecutors said. “The aim of the organization was to carry out explosive attacks on shelters for asylum seekers, as well as homes, offices and automobiles of political dissidents,” the prosecutors said in a statement. “Through these actions, the suspects wanted to create an atmosphere of fear and repression. ” Others from the group are already facing charges, including attempted murder, carrying out an explosion and vandalism, over a series of attacks that began in late July 2015 and continued through November of that year. Those assaults involved lobbing explosives at the offices of the Left Party and at a refugee shelter in Freital. | 1 |
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Wallonia is not alone. Not only has the region been joined by several other Belgian regional parliaments in opposition to CETA (the Canada-EU Comprehensive and Economic Trade Agreement), but now a Canadian constitutional challenge against CETA has been launched in the Federal Court of Canada.
On Oct. 21, renowned constitutional lawyer Rocco Galati filed the statement of claim against CETA on behalf of the Hon. Paul Hellyer (former Minister of National Defence) and two co-plaintiffs, Ann Emmett and George Cromwell (members of the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform). At the Oct. 25 press conference, Galati referred to the corporate sector as “the new royalty,” and he stated, “What this treaty does is literally revert us back to the divine right of kings, but they are multinational corporations now.”
Galati’s statement of claim argues that CETA is unconstitutional for several reasons, including the fact that it was never given Canadian Parliamentary approval, while “the treaty places the rights of private foreign investors over those of the Canadian Constitution and Canadian citizens.”
Critics on both sides of the Atlantic maintain that massive trade deals like CETA give far too much power to corporations at the expense of citizens and governments, especially through the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism – or the “investor court system” (ICS) as it was rebranded in CETA – that allows foreign corporations to sue governments (in a private court system) over policy decisions or regulations that harm their future profits. [1] Across the planet, national governments have been sued for billions of dollars by companies claiming “lost future profits” because of regulatory decisions. Walloons (and Europeans in general) have been consistently critical of ISDS tribunals for private arbitration.
“It’s ironic that everybody is dumping on the Walloons,” Galati told The Canadian Press in advance of his Oct. 25 press conference. “They have a very similar constitution to ours except they’re respecting theirs. So I don’t know why they’re being criticized for respecting their constitution.” [2]
Because of continued opposition by Belgian regional governments, the scheduled Oct. 27 formal signing of CETA at a summit in Brussels was cancelled at the last moment on Oct. 26. Wallonia’s minister-president Paul Magnette has stated, “We are not against a treaty with Canada. But we won’t have one that jeopardizes social and environmental standards and the protection of public services and we want absolutely no private arbitration [ISDS] mechanisms.” [3]
Galati’s statement of claim similarly warns that various articles of CETA “over-ride Charter guarantees that ground Canada’s ability to mount public programs on Health, Education, Social Services and public utilities including the elimination of subsidies, monopolies, and state enterprises for the public welfare.” As Galati put it during the press conference, the only Canadian public services and entities protected in CETA are “tax collection, national security, and cultural industries,” he said. “Everything else is up for grabs” for privatization. As well, CETA encroaches on “exclusive Provincial spheres of jurisdiction” and “guts and extinguishes the constitutionally protected Judiciary in Canada by creating foreign tribunals” for ISDS arbitration.
The Canadian Press asked International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland whether CETA meets the requirements of Canada’s Constitution and she replied, “Absolutely.” At his press conference the following day, Galati said that “the Trade Minister’s elaborate response – ‘Absolutely’ – doesn’t cut it for me.”
Galati also referred to “residual Crown prerogative” – the belief that the Prime Minister of Canada can sign a treaty without Parliamentary debate and voting – and said, “The federal court has already decided that this notion is a serious question to be resolved.”
The constitutionality of CETA is also being challenged in German courts. [4]
The statement of claim gives the Canadian government 30 days to respond, and it also seeks interim injunctions to prevent the federal government from signing, ratifying and implementing CETA.
During the House of Commons question period on Oct. 26, Canadian Green Party Leader Elizabeth May asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if he was willing to change or jettison the controversial investor-protection section of CETA in order to save the trade deal. Trudeau declined, calling CETA “gold-plated,” and said, “We are confident that in the coming days we will see a positive outcome for this historic deal.” [5] Hours later, the Brussels summit was cancelled indefinitely.
Trudeau, Freeland, and Canadian foreign affairs minister Stephane Dion had been part of a delegation scheduled to meet with EU leaders Donald Tusk and Jean Claude Juncker yesterday, but the trip was cancelled as “crisis talks” in Belgium continue. [6] While some CETA proponents maintain that a new signing summit could happen within days, Magnette has also said, “This treaty affects the lives of 500 million Europeans and 35 million Canadians for years and years. We can take a few weeks, a few months to analyze the problems and overcome them.” [7]
Freeland’s Theatrics
Magnette’s statement raises the question of why the rush to approve CETA? The answer for many is that the longer the delay, the more people (especially in North America) will find out about the ISDS clauses and the actual contents of the massive trade deals similar to CETA – the TransPacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) – and as a result, shift their opinion about these deals.
In other words, the rush to approve CETA isn’t really about the so-called “credibility” of the EU to sign an agreement, as Trade Minister Freeland and others maintain. The rush is about the undesirability of the deals themselves – which are unravelling as more people learn what’s in them.
On Oct. 21, Freeland walked out of talks with Magnette and (“appearing to hold back tears”) told the waiting press that the EU is not capable of making an international agreement, “even with a country with European values such as Canada, even with a country as nice and patient as Canada.” [8]
But as Canadian law professor (and former Member of Parliament) Craig Scott recently wrote, “In the last week, Freeland’s focus on her own disappointment and efforts has projected a sense of a noble mission fallen short due to Europe’s spurning of a country sharing its progressive values…Freeland, holding back tears, went so far as to castigate Europeans for failure to do a deal with ‘nice’ Canada. This is all very rich. Based on a European negotiator’s briefing to [New Democratic Party Members of Parliament] during CETA negotiations (the Harper government refused to brief MPs), it was Canada that insisted on some of the most regressive and dangerous provisions in CETA. The provisions in question were – and still are – the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) procedures.” [9]
Freeland and others like to call CETA and Canada “progressive,” but CETA was never voted on by Canada’s Parliament or by any provincial/territorial legislature. [10]
So under the Harper Conservatives, we had a Canadian federal government that not only insisted on the ISDS provisions in CETA, but refused to brief Members of Parliament on the deal and neglected to have CETA debated and voted on in Parliament. This all happened while Justin Trudeau was leader of the federal Liberals, who Craig Scott says were “100 per cent” behind the deal, “as evidenced by the support Trudeau gave Harper back in the fall of 2013” by “fawning” over CETA’s prospects. [11]
Scott warns about “the continuation of a Liberal-Conservative tag team pushing old-style [neoliberal] economics” and writes: “Have no doubt that the present Canadian government is keen to resist truly progressive revisions to CETA. Have no doubt that Liberals want to retain a flawed ISDS system that undermines the democratic sovereignty of countries – and one that sets the wrong example for future trade policy.” [12]
Investor Lawsuits
The year 2015 saw a record high of 70 new ISDS corporate lawsuits filed against countries under NAFTA and various bilateral treaties, raising concerns worldwide about ISDS and the ways corporations use it to bleed governments financially while putting a “chill” on any new regulations. Even if a government wins an ISDS lawsuit, it will have spent an average of $8 million in legal fees to defend itself.
To date, the most thorough report on ISDS is called Profiting from Injustice, written by Pia Eberhardt of Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and Cecilia Olivet of the Transnational Institute. [13] They revealed that a “small club of international law firms, arbitrators and financial speculators are fueling an investment arbitration boom that is costing taxpayers billions of dollars and preventing legislation in the public interest” across the planet. They found a handful of legal firms “are actively encouraging corporate clients to sue governments” under investment treaties containing the ISDS clause, while “top arbitrators are using their influence to secure investor-friendly rules and sustain the flow of multi-million dollar lawsuits.”
At the heart of this “secretive but burgeoning legal industry,” they found an “inner mafia” of fifteen arbitrators who (as of 2012) had decided on 55% of all known ISDS disputes – earning millions in fees for themselves and billions in ISDS settlements for their corporate clients. That “inner mafia” includes three Canada lawyers: Marc Lalonde, L. Yves Fortier, and Henry Alvarez; four American lawyers: Charles Brower, Stephen M. Schwebel, William W. Park, and Daniel Price; and eight other lawyers from France, Chile, Switzerland, Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. [14]
After CETA opponents in Europe roundly attacked the ISDS private court system, the trade deal’s investor-protection chapter was rewritten this past February. But a March 2016 report from CEO called the rewrite basically a PR re-branding exercise, giving ISDS a new name: the Investment Court System (ICS). Otherwise, “the proposed ‘new’ ICS is ISDS back from the dead,” Pia Eberhardt wrote in the report appropriately called The Zombie ISDS. [15] Under CETA’s rebranded ISDS, the three for-profit arbitrators (now to be called “judges”) who decide each case would be drawn from a pool of lawyers and would be paid US $3,000 per day, on top of a monthly retainer fee of 2,000 euros per month. As well, they can moonlight as lawyers with the same corporations launching the lawsuits.
This conflict of interest is what the Walloons have been arguing against and resisting, noting that the so-called “Joint Interpretive Declaration” of Oct. 13 does not clarify the situation. Investment law professor Gus Van Harten agrees, informing The Canadian Press that “Such matters should be resolved and subject to discussion and debate well before relevant decision-makers are requested to approve CETA.” [16] But there are other highly controversial aspects of ISDS that are getting little, if any, press – for example, what’s called third-party funding of lawsuits.
ISDS Gambling
Profiting from Injustice revealed that private investment funds have been speculating on ISDS court cases: lending money to companies so they can sue governments, and then taking a percentage of the final financial award. Such a gamble can be very lucrative: in a recent ISDS lawsuit, a national government was ordered to pay a whopping $50 billion to the claimant.
So-called “third-party funders” have become a fast growing industry as corporations outsource financial risk to “litigation finance shops” who receive cash to gamble with.
Profiting from Injustice states, “Imagine a multinational company eager to sue a government on the basis of an international investment treaty. It is about to hire a top arbitration law firm as counsel. But the lawyers charge astronomical fees – more than the company is willing to pay. Fortunately for the company, an investment firm offers to invest in the case. It pays parts of the lawyers’ pay cheque in exchange for getting a share of the potential profits at the end. Welcome to the world of third-party funding…A world flush with monumental settlements and glaring opacity, a place where public treasuries are treated like ATMs by arbitral bodies and awards can be enforced globally – this is a world that third-party funders are particularly interested in…Banks, hedge funds and insurance companies also invest in international [ISDS] disputes.” [17]
Obviously, this little-known world of ISDS litigation – where “public treasuries are treated like ATMs” – needs far more exposure. It operates within most of the trade deals currently being pushed across the planet. So not only are signatory countries losing their sovereignty to the corporate sector, they’re losing their shirts (as the saying goes).
While CETA would allow thousands of European companies to sue Canada under ISDS for “lost future profits,” some 42,000 U.S. multinationals that have branch-plants in Canada could similarly sue European governments through CETA – a kind of “backdoor” in case the equally controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the U.S. and the EU collapses. This is another aspect of what the Walloons have been resisting in CETA. At Galati’s Oct. 25 press conference, court challenge plaintiff Paul Hellyer rightly called the trade deal “monstrously immoral.”
High Stakes
But the stakes are even higher for Canada. As Rocco Galati explained, because of NAFTA “the U.S. and Mexico automatically get all the benefits of CETA that are not present in NAFTA,” while Canada would get no further benefits from those two countries.
The Canadian constitutional challenge against CETA is bolstered by an Oct. 17 “Open Letter” by ten prominent Canadian academics to the Parliament of Wallonia and Belgium voters. They write: “…In Canada, our democracy has suffered because the federal government has insisted on pushing through agreements like the NAFTA and the CETA without legislative votes at the federal and provincial levels. As a result, and without the corresponding endorsements by our elected representatives, we have been left with a foreign investor protection system that binds all levels of government and that will bind all future elected governments in Canada for a very long time. Our experience hints at the dangers faced by European democracy in the case of the CETA….From what we can see, you have shown great courage in opposing the CETA and, based on our observations of how the foreign investor protection system has been pushed on Canadians over the years, we wish to express our support for your democratic choices.” [18]
During the press conference, Galati pointed to a stack of paper about three-feet tall on the conference table and identified it as the 1,600-page CETA text. “You’re supposed to read and understand this in your spare time,” he joked to those gathered. Fortunately for other Canadians, Galati has read the CETA text and – like the plaintiffs he represents: Paul Hellyer, Ann Emmett and George Cromwell – wants “democratic choices” beyond what Canadian tradition allows. The erosion of democracy is becoming that evident.
As reports of a new CETA compromise in Belgium began to emerge on Oct. 27, the Council of Canadians issued a press release stating, “The democratic exercise that is taking place in Europe right now – where the Walloon government has looked at the text with its citizens, and asked for changes – needs to take place in Canada.” [19] That is exactly why Galati and the co-plaintiffs have filed their constitutional challenge.
Footnotes:
[1] Joyce Nelson, “Trudeau Bullying on Trade Deal,” Counterpunch.org, October 19, 2016.
[2] The Canadian Press, “Toronto lawyer files constitutional challenge against Canada-EU trade deal,” October 24, 2016.
[3] Reuters, “Wallonia leader rejects EU-Canada trade deal ultimatum,” October 24, 2016.
[4] The Canadian Press, op. cit.
[5] The Canadian Press, “Canadian delegation stays put as EU trade deal remains in limbo,” October 26, 2016.
[6] Jennifer Rankin, “Canadian PM cancels Brussels trip amid crisis talks to save trade deal,” The Guardian, October 27, 2016.
[7] Council of Canadians, “Canada-EU summit cancelled, CETA’s future unknown,” October 27, 2016.
[8] Marie-Danielle Smith (Financial Post), “Canada’s trade minister Chrystia Freeland walks out of EU trade talks on verge of tears,” Vancouver Sun, October 21, 2016.
[9] Craig Scott, “Don’t Be Fooled by Liberal Spin on CETA Deal,” The Tyee, October 24, 2016.
[10] Joyce Nelson, “CETA – No Lawyers Left Behind,” Watershed Sentinel, September-October, 2016.
[11] Scott, op. cit.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Pia Eberhardt and Cecillia Olivet, “Profiting from Injustice: How Law Firms, Arbitrators, and Financiers Are Fuelling an Investment Arbitration Boom,” Corporate Europe Observatory and Transnational Institute, 2012.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Pia Eberhardt, “The Zombie ISDS,” Corporate Europe Observatory, March 2016.
[16] Mike Blanchfield, “Amended CETA declaration not enough to win Walloon support: documents,” The Canadian Press, October 25, 2016.
[17] Eberhardt and Olivet, op. cit.
[18] David Boyd, et al., “An Open Letter to the Parliament of Wallonia and Belgian Voters on the Proposed CETA and Its Foreign Investor Protection System,” October 17, 2016.
[19] Council of Canadians, “CETA cheerleaders shouldn’t break out the bubbly just yet,” October 27, 2016. | 1 |
Posted on November 2, 2016 by Dr. Eowyn | 14 Comments
Democrat support for Hillary Clinton seems to be wavering in the wake of the FBI re-opening its criminal investigation into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unlawful use of an unsecured private email server. The FBI’s decision, announced just last Friday, was provoked by the federal agency stumbling across 650,000 emails on a laptop shared by Hillary aide Huma Abedin with her now-estranged husband, the sexual pervert Anthony Weiner.
As many experts have noted, only something very serious in the new emails — even more serious than what we already know about Hillary’s email thus far — could have prompted the FBI to re-open its investigation. (1) Doug Shoen
A big-name Democrat has abandoned Hillary’s sinking ship.
He is Doug Shoen — Fox News contributor; former Democrat pollster/consultant for over 30 years, who is widely recognized as a co-inventor of overnight polling, whose clients included including British PM Tony Blair, Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, and three Israeli PMs; and a friend of the Clintons since 1994.
On Sunday night, Oct. 30, two days after FBI Director James Comey announced the reopening of the criminal investigation in a letter to Congress, Schoen told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner that he is “reassessing” his support for Hillary, although that doesn’t mean he’s a Trump supporter.
Here’s a partial transcript of what Schoen said by Real Clear Politics :
DOUG SCHOEN: As you know, I have been a supporter of Secretary Clinton… But given that this investigation is going to go on for many months after the election … But if the Secretary of State wins, we will have a president under criminal investigation, with Huma Abedin under criminal investigation, with the Secretary of State, the president-elect, should she win under investigation. Harris, under these circumstances, I am actively reassessing my support. I’m not a Trump —
HARRIS FAULKNER, FOX NEWS: Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You are not going to vote for Hillary Clinton?
SCHOEN: Harris, I’m deeply concerned that we’ll have a constitutional crisis if she’s elected.
FAULKNER: Wow!
SCHOEN: I want to learn more this week. See what we see. But as of today, I am not a supporter of the Secretary of State for the nation’s highest office.
FAULKNER: How long have you known the clintons.
SCHOEN: I’ve known the clintons since ’94.
FAULKNER: Wow! But their friend here has said he’s reconsidering.
SCHOEN: I have to, because of the impact on the governance of the country and our international situation.
FAULKNER: So the news in that is are there other people, I would imagine, like Doug Schoen. (2) Chris Matthews?
Much is made of a video clip of Chris Matthews, infamous for his near-orgasmic exclamation during the 2008 Democratic National Convention that listening to Barack Obama sent a thrill up his leg . Matthews has been a relentless promoter of Hillary, fawning over her performance in the first presidential debate against Trump as a “brilliant”“home run”, and declaring the race for the presidency as “over”.
On October 27, 2016, Matthews seemed to be endorsing Trump on his MSNBC Hardball show:
Alas, that video clip is misleading.
A fuller version of what Matthews said shows that Matthews was simply quoting Trump. In actuality, far from endorsing Trump, Matthews scolded Trump for getting sidetracked on petty issues/feuds, and called Trump’s practice of politics “pathetic”. See the fuller video here . (3) Polls
A more important indicator of the fallout from the FBI’s reopening of its criminal investigation into Hillary are the polls.
The latest USC Dornsife/ Los Angeles Times “Daybreak” poll shows that support for Hillary has plummeted after the third and last presidential debate. Trump is now more than 5 points ahead of Hillary, polling at 47.8% vs. Hillary’s 42.4%. Click image ↓ to enlarge
Despite the increased support for Trump, when asked who they think will win the presidential election, 54.2% think Hillary will win, vs. 41.3% who think Trump will win.
Broken down into demographic groups, however, the LA Times poll shows that Hillary still has a lead among these unregenerate groups : Among those with a college graduate or more education , Hillary still leads at 51.2% vs. Trump’s 38.1%. Among low-income voters (those with less than $35,000 a year in income) who polls show are also the least informed, with the least exposure to Alternate Media, Hillary leads at 53.4% vs. Trump’s 35.6%. Among blacks , Hillary leads at 86.7% vs. Trump’s 4.6%; among Latinos , Hillary leads at 53.1% vs. Trump’s 34.9%. In contrast, among whites, Trump leads at 58.1% vs. Hillary’s 32.2%; among “other” racial-ethnic groups, Trump leads at 49.9% vs. Hillary’s 40.7%. Among females , Hillary still leads at 49.4% vs. Trump’s 40.7%. In contrast, among men, Trump leads at 55.1% vs. Hillary’s 36.3%. | 1 |
Email
Donald Trump is again riling up his voting base with claims that the November election will be rigged against him.
"Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day," Trump tweeted Monday morning. "Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!"
It's a charge that even other Republicans have been quick to refute. Critics have called such talk potentially dangerous and detrimental to trust in the US democratic process.
"States, backed by tens of thousands of GOP and DEM volunteers, ensure integrity of electoral process," Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who is often sharply critical of Trump, tweeted Sunday. "Elections are not rigged."
Jon Husted, the secretary of state of Ohio and the top election official in the key battleground state, also said Monday that he could assure Trump the election would not be rigged.
Trump's most recent claims coincided with a plunge by him in the polls. Before now, Trump most recently made similar claims when his polls numbers were taking a dive in early August.
"And I'm telling you, November 8, we'd better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged," the New York billionaire told Fox News host Sean Hannity in August. "And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it's going to be taken away from us."
Multiple Republicans told Business Insider at the time that Trump's assertion was both ludicrous and dangerous, as Trump would be the first US presidential candidate in modern times, possibly ever, to blame an election loss on voter fraud or a rigged election.
Allen Raymond, a former GOP operative who was involved in the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone-jamming scandal, called Trump's continued insistence that the election would be rigged "detrimental to the Republic."
"The idea that it's rigged, I don't know what he's talking about," he said in August. "I know someone that rigged elections. I mean, you know, the fact of the matter is Hillary Clinton doesn't need to rig this election. Trump's going to win Alabama and that's it. She doesn't have to do anything. It's painful to watch."
Raymond wrote "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative" as a tell-all about the attempt to rig the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election between then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, and Republican US Rep. John E. Sununu. Raymond said that attempted rigging was centered on jamming the phone lines at the New Hampshire Democrats office in Manchester — a task his phone bank was hired to carry out. Sununu went on to win the election by roughly 20,000 votes. Shaheen defeated Sununu in a rematch in 2008.
The operative served a brief prison sentence for his involvement.He said any attempts to rig an election would look similar to that — not what Trump's talking about.
The Manhattan billionaire told The Washington Post in August that a lack of voter-identification laws would let people "just keep voting and voting and voting" and suggested fraud occurred in 2012 against Republican nominee Mitt Romney because there were "precincts where there were practically nobody voting for the Republican."
"I don't even know what he's talking about," Raymond said. "But this idea that it's 1950 or 1960 and the party bosses are going to roll into Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and are going to rig the ballot box and rig the machines — that's nonsense. An election rigging these days means something totally different than what he's talking about. Now it's stupid stuff like what I did in New Hampshire."
He said the lack of voter-ID laws Trump was trying to use as proof of fraud this fall was also bogus.
"These voter-ID laws, what's the intention of that? The clear intention is disenfranchisement," he said, echoing a common complaint in liberal circles that voter-ID laws are put in place to prevent minority voting blocks from being able to cast ballots. "You know, there's a reason we don't have a poll tax anymore. Because it's unconstitutional.
"People don't vote 10 times," he continued. "There might be one bad actor every once in a while who tries to vote a couple of times, but he's talking about an institutional effort. It's a total myth."
He said Trump's statements were an attempt to "basically sideline" Hillary Clinton's first four years in office.
The idea of a rigged election came to the forefront after the Democratic National Committee had its emails hacked and leaked, though both Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Clinton's main opponent in the Democratic primary, had claimed the electoral system was rigged earlier in the primary season. The emails showed that the organization, which was supposed to remain neutral throughout the primary, favored Clinton.
Trump said the email leak proved that the primary election was "rigged" against Sanders in his early-August interview with Hannity, in addition to such claims he perpetuated along the campaign trail. He used the leak as further evidence that the fall election would be rigged against him as well. | 1 |
Former Vice President Al Gore is now telling his climate disciples that God commands us to go forth and fight global warming. [Engaging in some advanced publicity for his new global warming film spectacular, “An Inconvenient Sequel,” Gore told Interview Magazine that God didn’t create global warming and wants us to fix it. In his comments, Gore equated the fight against global warming to a moral crusade similar to the civil rights fight, women’s suffrage, and the abolitionist movement during the Civil War era. Gore insisted that it is a moral imperative to fight against climate change. “Regarding the climate movement,” Gore said warming to his point, “there are people who say, ‘God is in complete control of everything that happens, and if the Earth is getting warmer, then maybe God intends that. ’” Gore then rejected that conceit. “Well, no,” the former veep insisted. “God intends for us to take responsibility for how we treat God’s creation, and if we choose to use the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet as an open sewer for tons of pollution every day, the consequences are attributable to us. ” He concluded saying, “And if you are a believer, as I am, I think God intends for us to open our eyes and take responsibility for the moral consequences of our actions. ” Gore’s new film is a sequel to his famed “An Inconvenient Truth,” a shockumentary filled with mistaken assertions and failed predictions. Despite the many inaccuracies of his previous film, in an interview last year Gore still insisted that he “underestimated” how bad global warming is. “I wish the film had the seriousness of the crisis, but unfortunately it actually underestimated how serious it is,” the Tennessee Senator said. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 0 |
Some Cities Want Their Noncitizen Immigrants to Vote Caroline Winter, Bloomberg Businessweek, October 28, 2016
“Look at illegal immigrants voting all over the country,” Donald Trump recently claimed in a Fox News interview, part of his ongoing effort to cast doubt on the integrity of the presidential election. There’s no evidence to support the Republican nominee’s claims of election fraud, but some cities are moving to expand voting rights to include noncitizens.
The latest is San Francisco, where the Nov. 8 ballot will include a measure allowing the parents or legal guardians of any student in the city’s public schools to vote in school board elections. The right would be extended to those with green cards, visas, or no documentation at all. “One out of three kids in the San Francisco unified school system has a parent who is an immigrant, who is disenfranchised and doesn’t have a voice,” says San Francisco Assemblyman David Chiu, the son of Taiwanese immigrants. “We’ve had legal immigrants who’ve had children go through the entire K-12 system without having a say.” Undocumented immigrants should also have the right, Chiu adds, to bypass the “broken immigration system in this country.”
{snip}
Today there are six jurisdictions in Maryland that let noncitizens vote in local elections. Chicago allows them to take part in elected parent advisory councils but not to vote in school board elections. Four towns in Massachusetts have moved to allow noncitizen voting and are awaiting state approval. And in New York City, where noncitizens make up 21 percent of the voting-age population, the city council is drafting legislation that would allow more than 1.3 million legal residents to take part in municipal elections. The city previously allowed noncitizens to vote in school board elections, but that ended when New York’s school boards were dissolved in 2002.
{snip} | 0 |
Val Kilmer credits love and his Christian Science faith for helping him successfully beat cancer. [Page Six pointed out that in a Reddit AMA on Tuesday, one user asked the actor and devout Christian Scientist: “What would you want fans to know about having, and beating, the Big C. ?” “I am very grateful for all the prayers and good thoughts from around the world,” the Heat star replied. “People that know I am a Christian Scientist make the assumption that I have somehow endangered myself. But many many people have been healed by prayer throughout recorded history. And many many people have died by whatever was modern medicine. ” Kilmer said that multiple doctors prayed for him while he was in the hospital and he even spoke to the inventor of the defibrillator, Dr. Bernard Lowen. Kilmer recounted his conversation with Lowen, saying, “He started to weep without his voice wavering and he leaned into me and said, ‘Fluff their pillow. That what I tell all the interns. LOVE. Love heals. More than any other skills, I urge them to LOVE the life they are entrusted to save.’ Well that’s what is at the heart of Mrs. Eddy’s understanding of the teachings of Jesus. ” Kilmer revealed his battle with cancer in a previous Reddit AMA when one user asked him about actor Michael Douglas’ claim that he was battling a terminal form of the illness. “He was probably trying to help me cause press probably asked where I was these days, and I did have a healing of cancer, but my tongue is still swollen altho healing all the time,” Kilmer replied then. “Because I don’t sound my normal self yet people think I may still be under the weather. ” Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart. com | 0 |
China’s highest ranking prelate, Cardinal Joseph Zen, is urging Pope Francis not to cut a deal with the Chinese government that would undermine the sacrifice and fidelity of members of the underground Catholic Church in the country. [“We are very much worried because it seems that the Vatican is going to make a very bad agreement with China,” Cardinal Zen told LifeSiteNews in an interview published Tuesday. Zen said that Pope Francis “is really naïve” and “doesn’t know the Chinese communists. ” Moreover, “the people around him are not good at all. They have very wrong ideas. And I’m afraid that they may sell out our underground Church,” Zen added. In past months, the Vatican has been engaged in talks with leaders of China’s Communist Party in an effort to establish diplomatic ties with the country. Critics suggest that if the deal happens, the Vatican would likely have to give up its existing ties with the government in Taiwan, which currently only has official ties with a few small, mostly poor countries. The deal being discussed would reportedly hand over a certain amount of power to the Chinese government regarding the naming of new bishops. The government would propose candidates and the Pope would choose from among the clergy vetted by the communists. Priests and bishops in the underground church have faced imprisonment for their fidelity to the Holy See, rather than submitting to the “patriotic” church under the control of the Communist government. Zen, the Bishop Emeritus of Hong Kong, said that China’s communist rulers want “total surrender” from the Church. In an apparent move to placate Chinese leadership, Pope Francis recently defended the practice of religious liberty in the officially atheist country, insisting that in China churches are full and religion is freely practiced. In a lengthy interview with the Spanish daily El País, the Pope said he would love to visit China “as soon as they invite me,” something he says he has made clear to Chinese authorities. Francis said that the Vatican is engaged in ongoing dialogue with China and that a commission has been set up that meets every three months, with Beijing and the Vatican alternating as hosts of the encounter. “China always has this aura of mystery about it that is fascinating,” Francis said, noting that not long ago the Vatican Museums held an exhibition in Beijing and that China would be reciprocating with an exhibit to be housed at the Vatican. “In China the churches are full,” Francis insisted. “You can practice your faith in China. ” Cardinal Zen has said that diplomatic relations with China are not worth selling out the underground Church which has suffered for decades because of its fidelity to Rome. In Zen’s mind, the proposed deal would betray what the Church holds most dear. “You cannot go into negotiations with the mentality ‘we want to sign an agreement at any cost’ then you are surrendering yourself, you are betraying yourself, you are betraying Jesus Christ,” Zen said. The Cardinal also said that a Vatican deal with the Chinese government would undermine the Church’s credibility and set a bad precedent for dealing with other countries as well. According to Zen, some officials of the Holy See consider the underground faithful to be “troublemakers. ” Although he has met with the Pope to explain the situation faced by Catholics in China, Zen isn’t confident that Francis will come to their aid. I’ve written many letters to the Pope, Zen said, but then “he doesn’t answer my letters. ” “The thing we can do is to pray,” said Zen. “We believe in the power of prayer. ” Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome | 0 |
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made good on his threat to cut Justice Department grants to “sanctuary cities” that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. On Friday his subordinates sent letters to nine such jurisdictions demanding proof of compliance. [The letters, sent to the relevant authorities in New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Miami, Milwaukee, and the “sanctuary state” of California, makes clear that Byrne Grants, a major program by which the federal Department of Justice funds local law enforcement, will be withheld if these jurisdictions do not do their part to enforce federal immigration law. In order to avoid losing their funding, the cities and California must provide the Justice Department documented proof of compliance with 8 USC § 1373 no later than June 30. That law states that: [L]ocal government entity or official may not prohibit, or in any way restrict, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from, the Immigration and Naturalization Service information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual. The accompanying press release noted the skyrocketing crime rates that have plagued these jurisdictions and stressed the need to cooperate on immigration in order to fight growing transnational crime organizations like . Combating the recalcitrance of santuary cities has been a cornerstone of Sessions’s policy so far at the Department of Justice. Friday’s move makes good on an earlier pledge to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities. | 0 |
Hillary Clinton has burned through tens of millions of dollars to counter Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in states that are unlikely to be general election battlegrounds, delaying any pivot to the general election and shrinking her potential financial advantage over the eventual Republican nominee. While Mrs. Clinton has built a significant advantage in pledged delegates over Mr. Sanders in the Democratic nominating contest, her lead has come at a significant cost. She spent more than she raised in each of the first three months of the year, according to Federal Election Commission data, including more than $12 million on ads in March alone. According to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, Mrs. Clinton has spent at least $20 million on advertising in states like New York, Illinois and Massachusetts, money that could otherwise have been saved for the general election. Even as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign begins preparing for the general election in November, it has been forced to respond to an advertising blitz by Mr. Sanders, financed by a seemingly unending gusher of small donations. Mr. Sanders spent $46 million in March alone, according to campaign finance records released on Wednesday. Mr. Sanders poured more than $5 million into the expensive New York media market, according to media buyers, hoping to replicate his upset victory in Michigan. Mr. Sanders’s spending — and his ability to keep raising huge amounts of money even while slipping behind in delegates — is likely to intensify criticism from Democratic Party officials and leading donors, who now see Mr. Sanders as waging a costly and quixotic crusade at Mrs. Clinton’s expense. “He is making Hillary Clinton spend money that should be spent defeating the Republicans,” said John Morgan, a Florida trial lawyer who will host a Clinton at his Lake Mary home next week. “Bernie Sanders has the real possibility of being the Ralph Nader. All he’s doing now is hurting Hillary. ” The lengthening primary poses potential problems not just on the spending side of the ledger, but also has delayed a shift to raising money for the general election, where Mrs. Clinton lags well behind the pace set by President Obama during his 2012 campaign, according to data from the commission. Aides to Mrs. Clinton say they had always planned for an extended and primary, hoping to avoid a repeat of her 2008 blunder, when she had to lend her campaign millions of dollars to stay afloat after running short of primary cash. Much of Mrs. Clinton’s spending has gone to build capabilities with data, in the field and prospecting for small donors that will pay continuing dividends through an increasingly likely fall campaign, they said, and Mrs. Clinton remained on budget for the primary race. Her campaign had $30. 8 million on hand. “We head into the homestretch of the primary in strong financial shape with the resources we need to continue to run a competitive race through the end of the primary and the road ahead,” said Robby Mook, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager. But as the Clinton campaign and its allies see the challenge from Mr. Sanders fading and have grown more comfortable with their delegate lead, they are shifting some of their attention away from the primary and looking toward the general election, mapping out plans and sharpening their message. The campaign has begun discussions with senior “bundlers” — donors who volunteer to collect checks from dozens of other donors — to step up contributions to the Hillary Victory Committee, a joint effort with the Democratic National Committee and many state Democratic organizations. By directing her largest donors to give more to party organizations, Mrs. Clinton can sock away tens of millions of dollars that would benefit her campaign during a general election effort while avoiding the appearance of presumption that might come with raising general election money while Mr. Sanders remains in the race. The victory committee had raised $61 million through the end of March, according to commission filings, with most of the money ending up back in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign or at the Democratic National Committee. Much as Mr. Obama did in 2012, Mrs. Clinton’s team has used party contributions to the joint committee to subsidize some costs of her presidential campaign, including prospecting for small donors. Mr. Sanders attacked the arrangement this week as unethical, though campaign lawyers said it was legal. On Wednesday, fresh off a victory in the New York primary, the campaign hosted hundreds of bundlers for a conference at a Sheraton hotel in Manhattan, where some of Mrs. Clinton’s top advisers urged donors to focus on bolstering her for the contest against Mr. Sanders. Advisers to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign said it was remaining focused on primary dollars in part because that money — up to $2, 700 from each supporter — could be used during the general election, too, while general election contributions could not be spent until after the party’s convention in July. The shift in focus has been apparent in Mrs. Clinton’s messaging. In her advertisements, particularly in New York, Mrs. Clinton has started to turn her attention toward Donald J. Trump, who is leading the Republican field in delegates. Her first ad in the state took unsubtle jabs at the Republican and a week later, she ran her first ad directly targeting Mr. Trump, explicitly criticizing his statements. The Clinton campaign also created and ran a ad, titled “Una Bandera,” which recalled that Mr. Trump called immigrants criminals and rapists. The ad made no mention or allusion to Mr. Sanders or a Democratic primary until the end, when it asked people to vote on April 19. A “super PAC” backing Mrs. Clinton is preparing for the worst. Priorities USA Action raised $11. 8 million dollars in March and had $44. 7 million in cash on hand at the start of April, far ahead of the group’s pace during Mr. Obama’s campaign. Some of the largest contributions in March came from the family of Haim Saban, an entertainment mogul, and James H. Simons, a billionaire investor who gave $3. 5 million. And the group has spent relatively little in the fight against Mr. Sanders, meaning it will enter the general election contest with a sizable campaign war chest. Banking on Mrs. Clinton’s increasingly likely victory in the Democratic primary contest, and those pledges, the group has begun reserving $125 million in television and digital advertising for the general election campaign — a significant sum this early in the race. “Priorities will be ready to fight back against the onslaught Republicans are readying against Hillary Clinton,” said Justin Barasky, a spokesman for Priorities USA. | 1 |
This article was written by Tyler Durden and originally published at Zero Hedge .
Editor’s Comment: She’s back! Just over a week after the election, Hillary made her first public appearance again, though she looked a bit worse for wear. Nonetheless, she stuck to the script and talked up the importance of supporting children, more than once quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.’s statement, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Apparently, it was a gig that had been planned to parallel the first event she made with Bill just after his election back in 1992.
Her admission at being disappointed by the election is surprise, but it is a sign that she doesn’t plan on going away, and may well be around, though in what capacity isn’t clear.
War-Torn Hillary Emerges: “I Will Admit, Coming Here Tonight Wasn’t The Easiest Thing”
by Tyler Durden
Hillary emerged from hiding today, for the first time since her concession speech on November 9th, to give a speech at the Children’s Defense Fund gala in Washington D.C. The weathered look on her face indicated that she’s had a pretty rough week and maybe a “medical episode” or two. That said, we suspect her typical $250,000 – $500,000 speaking fee was simply too much to pass up…crying in bed with the dogs can wait just one day.
“I will admit, coming here tonight wasn’t the easiest thing for me. There have been a few times this past week where all I wanted to do was curl up with a good book and our dogs and never leave the house again. ”
While the idea of the Clintons retiring from the public eye forever would certainly be welcome news for about half of the country, somehow we suspect that’s not likely to happen.
Hillary’s comments , among other things, touched on the disappointment of the election results which she is clearly still trying to absorb herself.
“I know many of you are deeply disappointed by the results of the election. I am too, more than I can ever express.”
“But as I said last week, our campaign was never about one person or even one election. It was about the country we love, and building an America that is hopeful, inclusive and big hearted.”
“For the sake of our children, and our families and our country, I ask you to stay engaged, stay engaged on every level.”
“ The divisions laid bare by this election run deep , but please listen to me when I say this. America is worth it, our children are worth it.”
“ Believe in our country, fight for our values and never, ever give up .”
As Bloomberg points out, Hillary’s appearance at the event was planned before election day and was supposed to be a post-election victory lap since it was also the first event the Clinton’s attended after Bill’s election.
Clinton’s appearance was planned before Election Day and, had she won, would have been a clear signal that she was staying true to her roots. Instead, it was an opportunity for her to begin to chart a path ahead after a loss she didn’t expect and a wake of sorts for ardent supporters and staff. Marian Wright Edelman, the Children’s Defense Fund’s founder, described the event as “a love-in for our dear friend” and noted Clinton has a lead of more than 1 million in the popular vote. “She is the people’s president!”
Clinton didn’t hint at her future plans except to suggest that she’ll keep doing what she’s done throughout her career. “America is still the greatest country in the world. this is still the place where anyone can beat the odds. It’s up to each and every one of us to keep working to make America better and stronger and fairer,” she said.
Ironically, Hillary still said nothing to the 1,000’s of violent rioters in NYC, Oakland and Portland who have decided that destroying other people’s property is the appropriate way to deal with their grief.
With that, here are Hillary’s full remarks:
This article was written by Tyler Durden and originally published at Zero Hedge . | 1 |
EAST HAMPTON, N. Y. — Sometimes, Valerie Smith reminds herself that she is not a pollster, she is just selling cups — plastic drinking cups with the presidential candidates’ names. But she has been keeping track, just like a pollster, and hoping that her cup count is as reliable as it was in the last three presidential races. The tally on the final weekend before Election Day — the number of cups sold in her shop here since just after the Super Tuesday primary contests in March, when she started counting in earnest — was 4, 946 for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and 3, 388 for Donald J. Trump, her Republican rival. If the cup count is wrong, Ms. Smith will join famous prediction makers like The Literary Digest, which had a perfect record for 20 years until it called the election of 1936 for Alfred M. Landon over President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Or The Chicago Tribune, which was so sure in 1948 that it published the infamous banner headline “Dewey Defeats Truman. ” Ms. Smith’s count is not the usual survey. It is based on a random sample — whoever walks into her store, the Monogram Shop, and buys the cups. But it is skewed toward the extremely wealthy. East Hampton’s average household income is $126, 382 a year, almost two and a half times the national average. And the results can be clouded another way, when customers buy more than one cup. The cups are labeled with campaign logos she has copied when they are available, or designs she has created when they are not. Professional pollsters have used computers since the days when they were primitive, but at the Monogram Shop, the daily running total is kept on a handwritten piece of paper. It is updated at closing time, and the numbers are posted on the store window, just as in 2004, 2008 and 2012. The final counts from those races are elusive. “They must be in the computer,” she said last week, “but I can’t find them. ” She does not talk the talk of a professional pollster. The shop is a place where seldom is heard a statistical term like “sampling error,” “standard deviation” or “ . ” The only margin of error is whether she has enough cups on hand, and when she does not, things are fungible in ways that they are not in a real poll. The store all but sold out of Clinton cups on Saturday. At closing time, only 17 were left from a shipment of 250 delivered last Wednesday. Ms. Smith and her staff members blocked out the logos on Trump cups and replaced them with Clinton logos. Shoppers on Sunday received the cups and were promised real ones after another shipment arrives on Wednesday. Yes, Wednesday. After the election. “You have to be nimble in this game,” Ms. Smith said. Her shop specializes in personalized items — she can put a name, a logo or even an email address on napkins, towels or . Ms. Smith, 68, started selling cups, and keeping count in 2004, the year the Democrats nominated John Kerry to run against the Republican incumbent, President George W. Bush. The price of each cup was $3, as it is now. “I didn’t sit up in bed one night and say, ‘Let’s count the cups,’” she recalled. “We just did it, and we started posting the results in the window every night. People were intrigued, in a kind of happy way. They’d be on the way to dinner and they’d say, ‘Look at this crazy little store.’ There were, yes, the Bush masters of the universe who would say, ‘Give me a hundred cups I want to change the numbers on the window.’ They definitely did that. But there was no rancor. It was, ‘He’s my guy and I’ll buy a whole bunch.’ Or it was, ‘20 Bush cups and 20 Kerry cups, and we’ll have a party. ’” Mr. Kerry was significantly ahead all of that summer. “And then George W. man, he came out of nowhere in late September or October and started selling a lot of cups,” she said, “and ended up winning the cup count. ” And the election for a second term. Ms. Smith began selling cups for the 2008 presidential election in 2007, when Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, entered the race for the Republican nomination. She opened the first box of Giuliani cups, which she had designed, only to find that she had misspelled his name. He dropped out of the race in January 2008, and before long she was selling cups for Senator John McCain. In the Democratic primary contests that year, the race was between Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama. One day Chelsea Clinton walked in. “She said, ‘I’d like to buy some cups,’” Ms. Smith recalled. “And I said, ‘Which ones? ’” Then Mrs. Clinton finished third in the Iowa caucuses, and her campaign never recovered. Ms. Smith ordered cups with Mr. Obama’s name. He won the count against Mr. McCain, as he did in 2012 against Mitt Romney. Ms. Smith started preparing for the 2016 election a year ago, with cocktail napkins that said “No Trump. ” As the Republican field of candidates ballooned, she had another batch of napkins printed that looked like ballots. But she limited herself to three kinds of cups — for the Republicans Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, and for Mrs. Clinton. “The Hillary cups sold out,” she said. “I ordered 100, that’s the minimum. She managed to sell 100 cups, not briskly, but she sold them. Rubio’s cups, one day I looked up and they were all gone. Maybe they were stolen. You know, you’re not always paying attention. And I couldn’t sell Jeb Bush cups. ” In February, after he dropped out of the race, she gave them away. She waited to order Trump cups. “I kept thinking the dude’s going to crater,” she said. He did not, and in April, she ordered the first 100. That was when she started the 2016 count. It does not include the Clinton cups sold during the primaries. The Trump cups led the count from April to she said. Mrs. Clinton caught up on July 17. “Since then, she has, in a very way, doggedly, slowly, cup by cup, pulled ahead,” Ms. Smith said. “She didn’t meteorically sell tons and tons of cups. It’s been a gradual widening. ” “The thing that’s been so pronounced and remarkable is the complete lack of humor or jocularity,” Ms. Smith added. “When a Trump person comes to buy their cups, it’s steely. There’s a level of certainty with the Trump people — ‘This is the right thing for our country. This is the right guy, and there’s no question about it.’ And the same for the Hillary people, although the Hillary people are a little more willing to engage in conversation. But there’s not the enthusiasm where people are excited and . ” Nor can Ms. Smith predict which customers will buy which cups this time around. The cups are in big buckets at the front of the store. The cash register is on a wide counter at the back. “All I see is somebody walking toward the desk, and they have a cup,” she said. “What flickers through my mind is, ‘Here comes a Hillary person,’ and down go the six Trump cups. Or, a fireman from Staten Island, a burly guy, we engaged in a big conversation. I thought, ‘Here come the Trump cups,’ and he put down Hillary cups. There’s no profile. ” | 1 |
VIDEOS I just lost all faith in our deeply corrupt legal system and in the Rule Of Law in the United States If the law does not apply equally to all persons at all times and in all circumstances, we might as well not even have a legal system By Michael Snyder - November 7, 2016
The FBI just gave Hillary Clinton the biggest gift in the history of presidential politics. Two days before the election the FBI has announced that they are ending their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information. After reviewing the emails that were found on electronic devices owned by Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner, FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress telling them that “we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.” That means that there will be no indictment, and the path is now clear for Hillary Clinton to become the next president of the United States on Tuesday unless an election miracle happens.
These days it is unusual for a news story to hit me on a deeply emotional level, but this one sure did. When the FBI originally announced that they were renewing this investigation, it gave me a glimmer of hope that there may be a little bit of integrity left in our legal system.
But after today’s announcement I have lost all faith in our deeply corrupt system of justice. America has become a lawless nation, and the rule of law is completely dead in this country.
Yes, it is true that those of us in the general public do not know what was contained in those emails, and Director Comey says that nothing significant was found in them … In a letter to lawmakers, Comey said the FBI is standing by its original findings, made in July, that Clinton should not be prosecuted for her handling of classified information over email as secretary of State. “The FBI investigative team has been working around the clock to process and review a large volume of emails from a device obtained in connection with an unrelated criminal investigation,” Comey said in the letter. “During that process we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of State,” Comey wrote. “Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.”
But of course the truth is that the FBI already had more than enough to go after Clinton based on what they discovered the first time around.
In the world of national security, if you transmit a single classified document via a channel that is unsecured, you will lose your security clearance in a heartbeat and it is quite likely that you will be prosecuted and sent to prison for mishandling classified information.
In fact, two different members of the U.S. military were recently convicted for doing precisely that … Just last month, Bryan Nishimura, a California Naval reservist, was sentenced to two years’ probation and a $7,500 fine after he pleaded guilty to removing classified material and downloading it to a personal electronic device. The FBI found no evidence he planned to distribute the material . Last year, Bronze Star recipient and combat veteran Chief Petty Officer Lyle White pleaded guilty to storing classified documents on a nonsecure hard drive in Virginia. He received a suspended 60-day sentence and a suspended $10,000 fine in return for the plea. White said the information was for training purposes to study and that he had no intent to communicate with anyone .
Neither of those individuals intended to mishandle classified information, and they certainly never intended to share it.
But they were both convicted anyway.
So what makes Hillary Clinton any different?
During the initial investigation, the FBI found 113 emails that contained classified information … Clinton had repeatedly said she did not have any classified emails on her server, but the results of the FBI investigation show that claim was incorrect . Of the tens of thousands of emails investigators reviewed, 113 contained classified information, and three of those had classification markers. FBI Director James Comey has said Clinton should have known that some of the 113 were classified, but others she might have understandably missed.
And I would be willing to bet that the FBI found some more classified emails that they had not seen previously among the 650,000 or so that they reviewed for this renewed investigation.
But it doesn’t matter now. Hillary Clinton is free as a bird even though she mishandled 113 classified emails, and it looks like she is going to become the next president of the United States on Tuesday.
As a law student and then later as an attorney working in Washington D.C., I got to see just how deeply corrupt our legal system has become.
But after today, I don’t see how any American can ever have faith in the rule of law again.
If the law does not apply equally to all persons at all times and in all circumstances, we might as well not even have a legal system.
At this point, there is only one way that some sort of justice can be achieved in this case. And that is if the American people go to the polls on Tuesday and vote to keep her out of the White House.
It won’t be perfect justice of course, but at least it would keep Hillary Clinton from getting what she wants more than anything else in life.
The choice before the American people is very simple. Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt politician to ever run for the presidency, and the extremely long laundry list of Clinton scandals and crimes has been well documented over the past three decades.
The voters know exactly what they are getting with her. And if they choose her anyway despite all of the things that have been revealed, that means that America is willingly choosing lawlessness.
To most conservatives, this election is all about Trump, but I believe that it is far more about Hillary Clinton.
I am convinced that we are at a pivotal moment in American history, and if the American people willingly choose Hillary Clinton it will be an indication that there is zero hope for the future of this nation.
So let us pray for an election miracle, because right now Donald Trump is behind in most national polls and time is running out. | 1 |
Waking Times
Was JFK murdered mostly because he was trying to gain access to classified information on UFOs, ETs and aliens? As we approach the 53rd anniversary of the JFK assassination (which occurred on November 22, 1963) and mark the death of the greatest US president ever to challenge the New World Order Secret Government, it is worth briefly looking back in time to realize the tremendous lessons from the Kennedy murder. Last year in 2015 I released an in-depth 3-part series on the JFK assassination, dealing with the Who , How and Why of the event, which was a sacrificial mass ritual designed (among other things) to traumatize the American public. In part 3 I compiled a list of the various motives certain people and groups had to kill Kennedy. JFK had crossed the CIA, the Nazis, the Zionists, the Military Industrial Complex, the Federal Reserve and the Mafia – all the while not being part of Secret Society Freemasonic brotherhood. However, was the ultimate reason he was killed due to his persistence and demands in obtaining top secret intelligence on the alien matter? Was JFK murdered because he challenged the power of Majestic-12 or MJ-12, the hidden group Truman had created to be the keepers of UFO and alien secrets? There is substantial evidence to indicate this is indeed the case. Released JFK Letters to CIA and NASA Show His Demand for UFO Files – 10 Days Before His Death
Two memos authored by Kennedy were released to researcher William Lester under FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). Both were written on November 12, 1963, just 10 days before JFK was murdered. One of them is a letter (pictured below) to CIA Director John McCone, who succeeded CIA Director Allen Dulles, one of the JFK assassination conspirators and masterminds (see part 1 ). In the memorandum with the subject “ Classification review of all UFO intelligent files affecting National Security” , JFK explicitly writes that he has initiated a joint space program with the USSR. He is telling the CIA that he wants to share its UFO, ET and alien data with NASA, and wants to distinguish between knowns and unknowns (we can interpret the “knowns” as US controlled secret technology such as anti-gravity craft and the “unknowns” as genuine extraterrestrial phenomena). Here is the text:
“As I had discussed with you previously, I have initiated [redacted] have instructed James Webb to develop a program with the Soviet Union in joint space and inner exploration. It would be very helpful if you would have the high threat cases reviewed with the purpose of identification of bona fide as opposed to classified CIA and USAF sources. It is important that we make a clear distinction between the knowns and unknowns in the event the Soviets try to mistake our extended cooperation as a cover for intelligence gathering of their defense and space programs.
When this data has been sorted out, I would like you to arrange a program of data sharing with NASA where Unknowns are a factor. This will help NASA mission directors in their defensive responsibilities.
I would like an interim report on the data review no later than February 1, 1964.”
The other memorandum (National Security Action Memorandum No. 271, pictured below) is addressed to then NASA administrator James Webb. It carries the subject line of “ Cooperation with the USSR on Outer Space Matters” . JFK outlines how he wants NASA to develop a program of cooperation with the Russians in the field of outer space. JFK Murdered Over UFO Intelligence Access – The Bigger Picture
However, to put these two memos in context, you need to understand that Kennedy had been chasing the golden goose for a long time. Authors and experts such as Dr. Michael Salla, Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara, some of whose work you can read here in “ President Kennedy’s deadly confrontation with the CIA & MJ-12 over ET/UFO X-Files – Part II” , have done extensive research to show that JFK was determined, before his presidency even began, to get full UFO intelligence access and as president re-take control of the information. He wanted it out of military, unelected hands and placed back into civilian, elected ones. He was out to undo the damage Truman had done, and Eisenhower had continued, by setting up the hidden MJ-12 group in 1947 and keeping the UFO and alien subject under wraps as a giant secret.
The following is from a review or synopsis of Salla’s book Kennedy’s Last Stand: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 and JFK’s Assassination :
“In searching for answers to who killed President Kennedy we need to start with the death of his mentor, James Forrestal in 1949. Forrestal became the first Secretary of Defense in 1947, a position he held until March, 1949. Forrestal was a visionary who thought Americans had a right to know about the existence of extraterrestrial life and technologies. Forrestal was sacked by President Truman because he was revealing the truth to various officials, including Kennedy who was a Congressman at the time. Forrestal’s ideals and vision inspired Kennedy, and laid the seed for what would happen 12 years later.
After winning the 1960 Presidential election, Kennedy learned a shocking truth from President Eisenhower. The control group set up to run highly classified extraterrestrial technologies, Majestic-12, had become a rogue government agency. Eisenhower warned Kennedy that Majestic-12 had to be reined in. It posed a direct threat to American liberties and democratic processes. Kennedy followed Eisenhower’s advice, and set out to realize James Forrestal’s vision. The same forces that orchestrated Forrestal’s death, opposed Kennedy’s efforts at every turn. When Kennedy was on the verge of succeeding, by forcing the CIA to share classified UFO information with other government agencies on November 12, 1963, he was assassinated ten days later.” Joint US-USSR Space Missions: JFK Murdered Over Clever Strategy
Although JFK surely and naturally had other reasons for wanting to work together with the Soviets (and thus avoid any possibility of a nuclear war), it is quite possible that his proposed joint US-USSR program was an excuse and a clever means to wrest control of the ET issue from the hands of MJ-12. To have NASA cooperate with the Soviet space administration on lunar missions and outer space exploration would necessarily mean sharing data on UFOs. After all, the existence (and extreme technological capacity) of such craft were an obvious security factor and threat that would impact any space expedition. Kennedy already had Soviet leader Nikita Kruschchev on board. Salla writes:
“Documents confirm that on November 12, 1963 Kennedy and Khrushchev had agreed on steps to share UFO information precisely for this reason, and Kennedy identified the CIA as the lead U.S. agency to implement the process. Unknown to Kennedy, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, Angleton, implemented a secret set of directives that would deny access to classified UFO information to Kennedy, his national security staff and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” The MJ-12 Kennedy Assassination Directive
Truth is heavily guarded by layers of secrecy, deception, falsehood and propaganda. Often, government officials hide the truth by overseeing partial disclosures which are carefully orchestrated to give away just enough of the secret without going in too deep. Ever since the Roswell crash of 1947, the US Government kept 2 sets of UFO files. The tamer cases and less controversial information were made publicly available through Project Blue Book, which was the official public investigation into UFOs by the USAF. It formally ended in 1970. However, the really good stuff with high classifications was kept under lock and key by the CIA and MJ-12. Kennedy must have learnt enough about the situation to have known this, and have slowly but surely been making his way to the source of the information. By the time it got to November 12th, 1963, it was the final straw; MJ-12 who controlled the CIA would not allow Kennedy to have UFO intelligence access – at any cost.
As mentioned in part 3, the Kennedy assassination directive (pictured above) was written in code language to disguise the hit they were ordering. It uses the Russian spy term “wet” (i.e. wet from being drenched in fresh blood) to mean a killing. The memo reads:
“when conditions become nonconductive for growth in our environment and Washington cannot be influenced any further . . . it should be ‘wet.’”
This is from Salla’s commentary:
“Dr Robert Wood who is the foremost expert in analyzing MJ-12 documents using forensic methods, has concluded that the burned document is an assassination directive … he pointed out that the cryptic phrase “it should be wet” originates from Russia, where the phrase ‘wet works’ or “wet affairs” denotes someone who had been killed and is drenched with blood. The codeword ‘wet’ was later adopted by the Soviet KGB and other intelligence agencies … In drafting this cryptic directive, Allen Dulles was seeking approval from six of his MJ-12 colleagues, to lay the justification for the assassination of any elected or appointed official in Washington DC whose policies were “non-conducive for growth”. The cryptic directive was a pre-authorization for the assassination of any U.S. President who could not “be influenced any further” to follow MJ-12 policies.” CIA Wiretap of Marilyn Monroe Also Suggests JFK Murdered Over UFO Issue
Popular actress Marilyn Monroe was a famous lover of both JFK and his brother Robert, who served as Attorney General in the Kennedy Administration. In April 2014, evidence came to light in the form of an alleged CIA transcription (pictured below). If real – and it appears genuine – it shows that the CIA were wiretapping Monroe and knew she was about to go public and blow the whistle on JFK and UFOs . Here is what the alleged CIA wiretap document (dated August 3, 1962) states:
“Rothberg indicated in so many words, that she [Monroe] had secrets to tell, no doubt arising from her trists [sic] with the President and the Attorney General. One such “secret” mentions the visit by the President at a secret air base for the purpose of inspecting things from outer space. 2. Subject repeatedly called the Attorney General and complained about the way she was being ignored by the President and his brother. 3. Subject threatened to hold a press conference and would tell all.” Robert Kennedy Also Briefed On UFOs
Another piece of evidence substantiating the “JFK murdered due to UFOs” hypothesis is that his brother and Attorney General Robert Kennedy was also briefed on the matter. Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso, a man who served in a number of National Security Council committees from 1953-57 during the Eisenhower presidency, says Bobby actually sought him out. In this short video Corso says he personally briefed Bobby Kennedy on the subject of flying saucers or UFOs. Bobby was JFK’s closest advisor. Conclusion: Highly Likely JFK Murdered Over UFOs and ETs / Aliens
So at the end of the day was JFK murdered over the UFOs and aliens? While there were many motives for (and conspirators involved in) the killing of JFK, the evidence is overwhelming that his demand for more control over the UFO and alien subject was the crucial factor in the decision by MJ-12 to assassinate him. It may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but more likely it was the central issue all along. JFK inherited a system from Eisenhower and Truman, US presidents who had already given away substantial control to the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex. Indeed, the very term “Military Industrial Complex” (MIC) has only become so commonplace thanks to Eisenhower using it in his farewell speech , where he issued a grave warning to the American public about the power that the MIC already held (but which he also allowed to a large extent).
To study the New World Order and the worldwide conspiracy at the deepest levels is to study the UFO, ET and alien agenda. To study UFOs and aliens, in turn, is to accept the existence of free energy technology (aka zero point or over unity energy). This is the gamechanger . Once people accept the reality of free energy and learn how to create and share it, the control grid and conspiracy will evaporate – because knowledgeable and abundant people cannot be controlled. There is so much at stake at here! Thank you JFK and to all others who have dedicated their lives to making this information public, widespread and accessible. The truth cannot be hidden forever. About the Author
Makia Freeman is the editor of The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com ( FaceBook here), writing on many aspects of truth and freedom, from exposing aspects of the worldwide conspiracy to suggesting solutions for how human ity can create a new system of peace and abundance
**Sources embedded throughout article. | 1 |
Democrats’ efforts to raise suspicions about alleged — and, thus far, imaginary — links between President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government may have backfired spectacularly. [The spotlight is now on President Barack Obama and his administration’s alleged surveillance of the Trump campaign, as well as his aides’ reported efforts to spread damaging information about Trump throughout government agencies to facilitate later investigations and, possibly, leaks to the media. On Sunday morning, the White House released a statement indicating that the president would ask the congressional committees investigating Russian hacking theories to add the question of “whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016. ” Media outlets continued to repeat that the story was based on “no evidence,” though the evidence was plain. President Donald Trump originally tweeted about the alleged surveillance — which radio host Mark Levin called a “silent coup” by Obama staffers keen to undermine the new administration — on Saturday. Levin’s claims, reported at Breitbart News early Friday, were in turn based on information largely from mainstream outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. Heat Street was one source, but the BBC also reported similar information in January. So, too, did the UK Guardian, which is a mainstream source (albeit with a decidedly slant, hardly favorable to Trump). All day Saturday, former Obama staffers tried to put out the fires. A spokesperson for President Obama responded — and Obama aide Valerie Jarrett tweeted: A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U. S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false. As Breitbart News’ Matthew Boyle noted, however, it was a “ denial. ” It is worth examining the statement in detail. Note that this sentence does not dispute any of the key factual allegations at issue: that the DOJ approached the FISA court for permission to spy on Trump aides that surveillance, once granted, continued after no evidence was found of wrongdoing that the Obama administration relaxed National Security Agency rules to facilitate the dissemination of evidence through the government and that Obama staffers allegedly did so, the better to leak damaging (and partial) information to the media. In addition, there is reason to doubt the claim that the White House never “interfered”: the New York Times reported in January that “intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House. ” Moreover, the first part of the sentence raises doubts about Lewis’s entire statement. Lewis could simply have said: “No White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the DOJ. ” That would have been a clear denial. Instead, he referred to a “cardinal rule” that supposedly existed. All that does is create deniability for the rest of the White House in the event that evidence turns up that someone was, in fact, involved with a Department of Justice probe. (No doubt Obama will be outraged to find out if someone broke the “cardinal rule,” and will claim to have found out through the media, rather than directly.) The Obama communications operation is notoriously careful with the way denials are worded. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U. S. citizen. ” This is a meaningless denial, since the FISA court deals with communications with foreigners, with U. S. citizens potentially swept up in the investigation. It would have been possible for the DOJ to approach the FISA court with a request to monitor foreign entities allegedly communicating with the Trump campaign, using those intercepts as a way to monitor the Trump campaign itself. According to news reports cited by Andrew McCarthy, that could have been precisely what happened. And, again, this sentence does not deny that someone in the Obama administration may have ordered such surveillance. “Any suggestion otherwise is simply false. ” What we have here is a blanket denial crafted to protect President Barack Obama himself, but allowing him to admit later — once the facts emerge — that his administration was, in fact, up to something. In addition, the Democrats have been adept at constructing elaborate chains of communication to create plausible deniability for . That is how the “ ” scheme — through which activists instigated violence at Donald Trump’s rallies — was arranged for the Clinton campaign. (The organizer behind that scheme visited Obama’s White House 340 times, meeting Obama himself 45 times.) As the New York Times — supposedly the paper of record — recently reported, there is “no evidence” that the “Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election. ” But there is ample evidence that the outgoing Obama administration could have used intelligence agencies to carry out a political agenda against Trump. The media, as Mark Levin pointed out again on Sunday’s Fox and Friends, simply refuse to report their own earlier reports. Even without Trump’s more sensational accusations of wiretapping, it is, so far, undisputed that there have been many leaks of classified information to damage Trump, and that the Obama administration took steps that could have made such leaks more likely. (Charles Krauthammer — who is skeptical of “deep state” theories — called this the “Revenge of the Losers” on Friday.) Those are serious allegations that the former administration is likely going to have to explain to Congress. But if the Obama administration did order surveillance of the Trump campaign during the election and if Obama or any other White House officials knew about it (or created a “plausible deniability” scheme to allow such surveillance while preventing themselves from knowing about it directly) then there is an even bigger problem. It would then seem that the “Russia hacking” story was concocted not just to explain away an embarrassing election defeat, but to cover up the real scandal. Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. Formatting has been changed to improve clarity. | 1 |
From US Herald :
So, a protest riot broke out in peaceful downtown Chicago. Who is to blame?
Donald Trump of course! If he is in the room when anything untoward happens it’s his fault. In this latest display of suck-up to Sharia, the mainstream media is not reporting what actually went down.
MUSLIM’S IN CHICAGO CHANTING: “FREE PALESTINE”PRO PALESTINE PROTEST IN SEPTEMBER 2014. HTTPS://YOUTU.BE/QOQQVXXMVSYWHERE WAS THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA ON THIS?(THANK YOU TO A VIEWER THAT CONFIRMED THIS INFORMATION)
POSTED BY THE ROCCI STUCCI SHOW ON SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016
This was not a spur of the moment, thugs getting their panties in a wad, beef with a white guy. This was a well-organized, well-executed attempt by the thugs and the Sharia Law Islamofascists among us to try and throw their weight around.
A little pre-emptive voter intimidation for ya’ll.
“Free Palestine.”
“Death to Israel.”
Death to America.”
Ummmm…that is not the Black Lives Matter mantra. This is not the Sanders fan-base mantra—they’re too wussy. This was not the Latino angry-of-the-wall clan.
This was the rise of the Caliphate .
Where is our president? Nowhere. Oh, wait, that’s not true. He’s busy with his SXSW speech to the idiot masses about how freedom of speech should be regulated. | 0 |
HONG KONG — An American labor union is pushing the United States to impose broad, steep tariffs on aluminum imports using a but trade law that has riled the country’s trading partners in the past. The effort by the United Steelworkers union comes with trade increasingly an issue in the United States and elsewhere. More than of the United States aluminum smelting industry that existed five years ago will have been idled or shut down by this summer as imports have surged, according to the union’s legal petition. The union blames China’s rising exports, though if successful its effort would also affect American imports from Canada and many other countries. The union’s law firm on Monday filed a petition covering raw aluminum imports with an American trade panel. The petition invokes Section 201 of the 1974 Trade Act. The section was last invoked by President George W. Bush in 2001 to start a legal process that led to American tariffs on steel imports the following year. A Section 201 case covers essentially all imports of a product from all over the world. That makes it more substantial than and cases against imports from a single country. The European Union objected to President Bush’s use of Section 201, which resulted in American tariffs on a wide range of steel products, until the administration dropped them in late 2003. But Section 201 cases are also harder to win. They require proof that a domestic industry has been “seriously injured” by imports, a harder test than the mere proof of “injury” from imports that is required for other trade cases. Terence P. Stewart, the managing partner of the law firm Stewart and Stewart and the lead lawyer on the aluminum case, contended that raw aluminum could meet the test. “The domestic industry is disappearing before our eyes,” he said. ”Quick relief and addressing the underlying imbalance between global supply and demand are essential if we are going to have any industry left. ” The union also argues that aluminum is important to national defense because it is widely used in military equipment. Section 201 cases are reviewed by the United States International Trade Commission, a bipartisan, group of trade experts in Washington. The commission then makes a recommendation within two to six months to the president, who makes the final decision on whether to impose tariffs. The law allows government officials, industries or unions to file claims. Presidents have almost always followed the commission’s advice, although President Carter turned down a recommendation for tariffs on stainless steel flatware in 1978 and President George H. W. Bush rejected a recommendation for tariffs on extruded rubber threads in 1992. The Office of the United States Trade Representative declined to comment on the union’s contentions. China, which already produces more than half the world’s aluminum, is expanding capacity even as its economy decelerates. The result has been a surge in exports and falling prices for aluminum. Chinese exports of aluminum jumped more than 27 percent in the past two years, Chinese customs figures show. A spokesman for the China Aluminum Association, who gave his family name as Zeng, said aluminum’s increasing use in railway equipment, aerospace and electronics justified China’s expanding production capacity and rising exports. Smelters in Canada and elsewhere, having been displaced in their traditional international markets, have stepped up shipments of raw aluminum to the United States. American imports of raw aluminum from Canada, the biggest supplier, jumped 10 percent by tonnage last year, United States customs data shows. Other factors are influencing the aluminum trade. Alcoa, the main aluminum smelting company in the United States, has announced the closing of a series of smelting operations in the United States while relying more on production in Canada, Iceland and Saudi Arabia, as part of what it describes as an effort to improve overall efficiency. In a statement it said, “Alcoa has a long history of cooperation with the U. S. government. We haven’t seen the petition and look forward to reviewing it. ” Exports to the United States are an important source of employment in China, and Chinese officials have been increasingly concerned about Donald J. Trump’s populist appeals for a tougher trade policy, including a steep tariff on goods from China. Finance minister Lou Jiwei of China told The Wall Street Journal during a visit to Washington in the past week that imposing such a tariff would violate World Trade Organization rules. | 1 |
Its in the article and apparently one of the videos ate part of the Quote: because of the way the code was for the embed video.. the Quote: has been updated and fixed.
As for Dan.. I’m not a liberal you arsehat. More of an anarchist of Loki trickster like proportions. Or a villain if you will who believes the planet needs to be ecologically purified from morons at this time. You wouldn’t make the cut Danny. And don’t worry Momma Earth is going to fix it all real soon. I know I know you all think you are going to be handed a new Earth while you treat this one like an ashtray.. you got a rude awakening coming Danny. You all do. Enjoy it.. Treasure the chaos and oblivion. | 0 |
This month on Film, Literature and the New World Order, James is joined by Prof CJ of the Dangerous History podcast to explore James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid.” What do you get when you have a novel with fictional FBI/CIA/Mafia/Anti-Castro Cuban stooges embroiled in a years-long mess that ends up with the assassination of the president? A more plausible scenario than 99% of the documentaries and books out there on the subject, that’s what. Find out more in this edition of FLNWO.
For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.
For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).
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THE GOVERNMENT has put a number of survivors of symphysiotomy minds at ease with their latest explanation for why the State have failed to operate and administer a compensation scheme in a time effective and compassionate manner, WWN can reveal.
“Ah, ye can’t trust that Eircode, it’s a load of shite,” confirmed a government spokesman, failing to be drawn on the fact the scheme was set up in such a way as to avoid bringing anyone to account for administering the non-consensual and often unnecessary surgeries to over 1,500 women.
“But listen, get onto An Post there and complain, we swear we sent it. This isn’t like all the other times we were just delaying giving women, many of whom are now in their 80s, their compensation for having their pelvises broken against their wishes by a medical professional working for the State,” the spokesman added, full of compassion.
Survivors have been relentlessly campaigning since the compensation scheme was first put in place, simply to access the money rightfully owed to them.
Keen to remain in the public consciousness in order to force successive governments to honour their commitment and admonish them for so openly working against victims, many of the women have died in recent years without receiving any of the money they are entitled to after those administering the compensation scheme have demanded an unrealistic amount of paperwork.
It is thought Ireland’s main opposition party Fianna Fáil would be in an ideal position to make an issue of the scandalous roadblocks and delays put in front of the women, however, the party’s leader Micheál Martin stood over a number of delays when he was minister for health along with his successors in the position Mary Harney, James Reilly and Leo Varadkar.
“Honestly, this is a terrible misunderstanding, we’re not trying to limit the State’s liability and just drag this out until all the women have passed away, relying on the public’s apathy to let us go unchallenged, that’s not our style. Argh, it’s that blasted Eircode, we’re telling you,” the spokesman added.
If you would like to learn more about why the government continues to ignore these women click HERE . | 0 |
November 8: Daily Contrarian Reads By David Stockman. Posted On Tuesday, November 8th, 2016 My daily contrarian reads for Tuesday, November 8th, 2016. You need to login to view this content.
David Stockman’s Contra Corner isn’t your typical financial tipsheet. Instead it’s an ongoing dialogue about what’s really happening in the markets… the economy… and governments… so you can understand the world around you and make better decisions for yourself.
David believes the world -- certainly the United States -- is at a great inflection point in human history. The massive credit inflation of the last three decades has reached its apogee and is now going to splatter spectacularly.
This will have lasting ramifications on how governments tax and regulate you… the type of work you and your family members will have available and what you get paid… the value of your nest egg… and all other areas comprising your quality of life. Login
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LONDON — The terrorist attack in London, with its combination of random deaths and the strong symbolism of Parliament shut down, comes in an important election year in critical European countries, as well as at a moment of high anxiety — about the rise of populism, migration and the integration of Muslims. With France, Germany and possibly Italy going to the polls, analysts have long wondered whether an act of terrorism could jolt electoral dynamics and boost the broader “Europe in crisis” narrative that has elevated parties across the Continent. “This will have an echo in France and in Germany,” said Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It becomes part of a pattern. It’s another link in the chain. ” But if it is an echo, it may be a muted one. Many European voters, anxious but increasingly inured, have essentially priced in the cost of terrorism — at least when it happens outside their own borders and when the toll is not so high. A relatively limited attack, like the one in London, was considered unlikely to shift the electoral terrain. “This connects London to Paris, Nice, Berlin and Brussels in the context of the political space we’re in,” said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, rattling off the list of European cities that have been scarred in the last two years. While a terrorist attack may feed the narrative of a minority, “politically it can also pull people together at a time when we’re at a constant risk of fragmenting,” he said. Unity is what the leaders of the European Union want to emphasize when they gather this weekend in Rome to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the bloc. But the London attack is a reminder of yet another problem on the list: Britain’s pending exit from the bloc, regional divisions, economic disparities, unemployment, sentiment and terrorism. While the effect of another attack in a voting country could still be dramatic, the ability of Islamist radicals to organize such assaults appears to have been sharply diminished. Like voters, police and counterintelligence officials are also getting used to the threat and have toughened tracking and border controls in many parts of Europe. Even as British investigators looked for evidence that might link this lone attacker to a larger network, Europeans seemed particularly hardened to terrorist attacks like this one — unsophisticated, if almost unstoppable, the death toll relatively small and a far cry from the organized mayhem perpetrated in Paris in January and November 2015. The London attack, then, was a reminder of ways that the West will always be vulnerable: The means used were ordinary and available everywhere the targets were landmarks the victims were civilians of 10 nationalities going about their daily lives. For that, there may be no remedy a ballot box can provide. “People here know it is an international problem,” said François Heisbourg, a senior adviser with the French Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “I would be very surprised if this would have any significant effect on the campaigning in France. ” Even Marine Le Pen, the National Front candidate in France, had relatively little to say about the London attack, although a marquee promise of her campaign is to “put France back in order. ” “Once again terrorism strikes at the heart of Europe, in a European capital where victims are young French,” she said in a relatively mild interview with the newspaper Le Figaro. “This cruelly reminds us that terrorism is a daily threat. ” But the rhetoric in and around Europe remains generally incendiary, as the problems facing it loom. Just hours before the London attack, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey issued a strange warning to the Western nations that have criticized his rule. “If you go on behaving like that, tomorrow nowhere in the world, none of the Europeans, Westerners would be able to walk in the streets in peace, safely,” he said. It’s hard to know what he meant, but he has repeatedly threatened to renege on a deal with Brussels under which he has restrained the flow of Middle Eastern migrants to Europe. That migration, sometimes erroneously, sometimes not, has been linked to prominent terrorist attacks in European capitals, which have been interspersed with numerous others much more minor in smaller towns and cities, including in Germany and France. Many attackers, like Khalid Masood, 52, who had a long criminal history but no terrorism convictions, have been homegrown, if influenced from abroad, particularly by the Islamic State. Certainly the group, which called Mr. Masood, the London attacker, one of its soldiers, has been interested in staging an attack in Britain for at least the past two years. One of the phones used by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Islamic State’s coordinator of the 2015 attacks in and around Paris, contained photographs of a trip to England, according to Claude Moniquet, a former French intelligence official. Among the photographs were shots of Birmingham, London and one other city. “He had photos of Canary Wharf, the Thames and nightclubs and bars,” said Mr. Moniquet, who still works closely with European intelligence agencies on various cases. Mr. Abaaoud is believed to have met with people in England and met or traveled there with Mohammed Abrini, who is now in prison in France, after surviving the Paris and Brussels attacks. “We know that for the last year, they have invited people to act where they are,” Mr. Moniquet said of the Islamic State. The British have said publicly that they have disrupted 13 plots since July 2013, when a soldier, Lee Rigby, was hit by a car and then knifed to death by British Muslim converts. At least two of the disrupted plots, the British said, were meant to be larger scale. But organizing larger attacks has apparently been difficult in Britain, which has stronger border controls than most of Europe and strict gun laws. Britain is also known for good counterterrorism work. “I’m a bit wary of saying this is reflective of massive success by the authorities,” said Raffaello Pantucci, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute. “But the fact is we have seen plotters in the U. K. have had a lot of difficulty getting access to guns and finding other means. ” An attack like the one Wednesday, with a car and a knife, is nearly impossible to prevent. While the symbolism is very strong, the death toll was low and the attack failed to provoke a lingering sense beyond the first chaotic day of security falling apart, especially when viewed from a Continent grown more jaded about terrorism. Christoph Schult, an analyst with Der Spiegel in Berlin, noted that Germans reacted surprisingly calmly to the major attack on a Christmas market in Berlin last December. “Life was largely back to normal in a day,” he said. “So an incident like London is even less likely to create any extra sense of insecurity. While some people do feel insecure about terrorism and might link it to the refugee crisis, they think the government is now doing O. K. that there are some fanatics in the world and what can you do?” Guntram Wolff, a German who leads the Bruegel research institution in Brussels, an economic think tank, noted that “people don’t see any of the populist forces doing a better job on terrorism, and the government is responding. ” Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that the London attack was consistent with the recent pattern of less organized attacks and less frequent simultaneous attacks, which are harder to organize especially for the Islamic State, which is now under intensive pressure in Syria. “It’s spectacularly easy to kill a bunch of people with a car or a truck if you don’t care who they are,” he said. Organized attacks like those in Paris are increasingly difficult to pull off, he said, but “the capacity of one person inspired by some ideology to do damage is inescapable. ” It is “a senseless tragedy,” he said, but similar things happen in the United States, too. “And it’s sad also because our societies overreact to it and make it worse,” Mr. Shapiro said. | 1 |
A Tennessee prison program designed to help inmates become better fathers graduated nearly 40 inmates Friday. [The selected inmates graduated from the Malachi Dads program at the Morgan County Correctional Complex, which teaches inmates skills and fosters personal growth so inmates can become better fathers, WBIR reported. “I picked the streets before my family, and this program has shown me that God is first, then my family second,” inmate Darryl Wiseman said. For the past year, Wiseman has been taking classes facilitated by volunteer mentors of the program. The program culminates Saturday with the Returning Hearts Celebration, where the fathers reunite with their families in the prison yard and participate in activities with them. “I think I’m going to cry real hard first,” Wiseman said ahead of Saturday’s celebration. “I’m going to be nervous to see them because I want them to see a new side of me. They’re going to be able to see that I have that glow, that I have that light and that I’m walking for him now, for Jesus. They’re going to see the gentler side of me. ” Wiseman, who has served three years out of a sentence, says he found purpose in life as a result of these classes. “It changed my life, it really did. If changed me on how to be a man and a father to my children,” he said. Robert Reburn, a public information officer for the Tennessee Department of Corrections, said there is no statistical data to measure the impact of the program but stated that corrections officers have noticed inmates’ behavior change because of programs like Malachi Dads. “We can say for a fact that offenders who are still in our custody and enrolled in these programs are less argumentative, they get less discipline, they cause fewer problems and they are overall much more well behaved than those who are not participating,” Reburn said. Other states have similar programs implemented in their prisons, mostly organized by ministries. These programs have been in Michigan, Colorado, and Wisconsin. | 0 |
Store Obamacare Architect LAUGHS About Skyrocketing Premiums [VIDEO] Ezekiel Emanuel stopped by “Morning Joe” on Wednesday to talk about the Affordable Care Act premium increases that will affect more than one million Americans Daily Caller
Ezekiel Emanuel stopped by “Morning Joe” on Wednesday to talk about the Affordable Care Act premium increases that will affect more than one million Americans.
WATCH:
Mika Brzezinski noted that Emanuel, one of Obama’s former advisors, is “often called one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act.”
“How’s that working for you right now, Zeke?” chimed in Joe Scarborough.
Emanuel’s response?
Laughter.
“Be honest, though,” Scarborough continued. “Zeke only worked on the part of the Affordable Care Act that’s causing increases 25 percent on average.”
Brzezinski stated she’s “all for it.”
Again, Emanuel responded with a case of the giggles. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles | 0 |
Ryan McMaken blog/cronyism-gas-pump/
Gas station owners have come up with a creative way to take more of their customers’ money via the power of taxation, says Nathan Keeble . 9:13 am on October 26, 2016 | 0 |
Monday on Fox News Channel’s “The First 100 Days,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich excoriated FBI Director James Comey for his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee earlier in the day. Gingrich called Comey’s answers “pathetic” and asked why he was able to verify an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and not one about leaks to the media from within the intelligence community. “What he said was, ‘I’m allowed to tell you there’s an ongoing investigation about the Russians and the Trump campaign. I’m not allowed to tell you about any investigations involving Americans who are committing felonies with up to 10 years in jail leaking secret information,’” Gingrich said. “Now how come he could tell us the one but not tell us the other. I mean it makes no sense. ” “I find the performance by the FBI director very, very disappointing and frankly a little alarming,” he continued. “He has too much power to be as politically clever as he is. ” Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 0 |
As the Prime Minister’s Article 50 letter made its way to Brussels, Brexit campaign leader Nigel Farage paid “a personal tribute and thank you” to former Breitbart boss Stephen K. Bannon for the role he played in securing victory for the Leave campaign in the European Union (EU) referendum. [In an interview with Breitbart London Editor in Chief Raheem Kassam on Breitbart News Daily, to mark the occasion of Britain finally triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and officially commencing the Brexit process, the former UKIP chief was bursting with enthusiasm: “Good morning everybody! It’s a happy day here in London!” he began. “All through the campaign, I went round the country with a placard that said, ‘We want out country back’ — and I’m just getting a marker pen, and I’m going to cross out the ‘want’ and put ‘got’. “It’s a big, big day, and I think at 12:30, when that letter is delivered in Brussels we will have passed the point of no return. We are going to become an independent, normal democratic nation again. ” Kassam asked the veteran campaigner if he had ever worried that “legacy Remainers” such as former prime minister Tony Blair and millionaire financier Gina Miller, might succeed in preventing this day from coming to pass. “Well, it shouldn’t have taken nine months,” Farage replied. “Talk about a long gestation!” He did not believe, however, that there was any realistic way out for the political class after more than 17 million British voters backed Brexit, and suggested the delay may have been due to the fact that “the establishment did not want us to vote to leave [and] did not expect us to vote to leave” and made no contingency plans for it. Asked if he thought diehard Remainers might now turn their efforts towards making a success of Brexit, Farage was sceptical. “I don’t think they’ll ever give up they’ve been so used to having their own way,” he said. “But they will begin to look more and more ridiculous. ” Farage confessed that family, friends, and colleagues “all thought I’d been smoking something funny” when he first set out in politics, and that actually achieving Brexit “looked completely and utterly impossible in every way”. “But it’s been a journey. At first, dozens of people were there helping and supporting me. Then it was hundreds, then it was thousands, then it was millions — and today, the impossible dream came true. ” Farage attributed Brexit to failures within the EU itself, including the euro “which nearly all the Remoaners would have signed the country up to 15 years ago”. He took the opportunity to pay tribute to Breitbart News Network in general and former Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon, now a leading figure within President Donald J. Trump’s administration, in particular, for giving eurosceptic voices shut out by the establishment media a platform where they could speak to the public: “One of the very important things that happened is, because we had the entire media against us, and not even willing to give us a fair hearing, I think when Bannon opened up the Breitbart office in London and began to give the arguments that I was making a fair hearing, and very quickly, as Breitbart does well, started to reach a very, very big audience. I think actually on this great Brexit day I have to say a personal thank you and tribute to Steve Bannon for having the foresightedness of doing that with Breitbart, and I’m extremely grateful. ” | 0 |
Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump are spoiling for an extraordinary clash over race and gender that could come as early as Monday’s debate, with both presidential candidates increasingly staking their fortunes on the cultural issues that are convulsing the nation. Mrs. Clinton helped pressure the police in Charlotte, N. C. to release video footage on Saturday of an officer’s shooting of a black man. She has expressed concern that too many feel that their lives are disposable. And she has repeatedly denounced Mr. Trump for making racist and sexist statements, recently releasing a commercial that shows Mr. Trump describing a woman as “a slob” and another as “ . ” Mr. Trump last week emphatically endorsed “ ” a contentious policing tactic that is loathsome to many . His political pitch to black voters, as he put it at a rally on Saturday in Roanoke, Va. is, “What do you have to lose?” At the same event, Mr. Trump mangled the name of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture and bragged about his respect for women, just hours after threatening to invite Gennifer Flowers, who accused Bill Clinton of having an adulterous relationship with her, to the debate. In a campaign that has veered from traditional policy arguments toward a battle over national identity and values, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump are more sharply opposed over racial and gender issues than any two presidential opponents in decades. Rather than play it safe with milquetoast positions, Mrs. Clinton wants to increase turnout among and women by tackling issues of bias and respect. Mr. Trump is positioning himself at the vanguard of white men. “The extremity of the divergence is unlike anything I have confronted in my adult life,” said Randall L. Kennedy, a professor of law at Harvard whose books include “The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency. ” “The analogies that come to mind are Goldwater versus Johnson in 1964, and Lincoln versus Douglas in 1860. ” Both candidates are preparing for race and gender to come up during Monday’s debate, which has three advertised themes, including one called “America’s direction. ” Many Democrats believe Mrs. Clinton has an edge: Her party is energized around these issues and seems eager for a fight, while some Republicans sound fatigued about racism in law enforcement. “Race and gender are often ignored, often belittled with ridiculous sound bites,” said Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. “Having the two of them debate race and gender issues would show more clearly than anything else that one candidate has a record and vision to bring people together, and one has offered the most divisive, bigoted and sexist comments and policies we’ve seen from a major party nominee. ” Yet Republicans see electoral advantages for Mr. Trump. He won the nomination largely by appealing to the resentments of whites, especially voters who say they are tired of debating racism and appreciate Mr. Trump’s message of law and order. He is also emphasizing security at a time of unpredictable violence in American cities, such as Friday’s fatal shooting of five people at a mall near Seattle. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said that Mr. Trump, whom he has advised, had an opening to present himself as a stern leader and an agent of change for minorities. Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Gingrich said, was vulnerable to being tagged as part of what he called a “wing of American intellectual culture” defined by the concept that the “police are dangerous, and if only we didn’t have any guns, nobody would get hurt. ” But Mr. Gingrich also encouraged Mr. Trump to acknowledge directly that blacks faced “a steeper hill to climb. ” “I’m hoping he’ll do more of it,” Mr. Gingrich said, “and communicate that being black in America is different and is harder, that the legacy of slavery and discrimination is real. ” Even in other times of social unrest, few if any presidential candidates have constructed their political arguments around themes of race, gender and cultural diversity as much as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump. And their message has only intensified before the first debate, which looms as a showdown for a wide spectrum of voters — minorities and women and more educated voters on one side, white men and voters on the other. Mrs. Clinton, who holds a slim lead in national poll averages, has responded to the violence of the last week by casting herself again as a champion of diversity and inclusion. She spoke out quickly after the fatal police shooting of a black man in Tulsa, Okla. to denounce “systemic racism” against blacks. And after the recent bombings in New York and New Jersey, she rushed to make the case that Mr. Trump had endangered the country with his oratorical attacks on Muslims. She also gave a speech last week criticizing Mr. Trump for having shown disrespect to people with disabilities. Her new commercial about Mr. Trump and women ends with a powerful question: “Is this the president we want for our daughters?” Mark Mellman, who advised John Kerry’s campaign in 2004, said Mrs. Clinton’s challenge on Monday would be to channel the frustrations of minority voters, while reassuring whites who are sympathetic on racial issues. “You have to understand the problem, empathize with the problem, talk about how to solve the problem,” he said, “without appearing to condone the violent response to it. ” Mr. Trump has hardened his own arguments recently, and dialed up his warnings against excessive social tolerance. He speculated last week that political correctness might have held back authorities from stopping the attacks in New York and New Jersey, and he asserted that admitting more refugees from Syria would harm the American “quality of life. ” After the police shootings in Tulsa and Charlotte, Mr. Trump’s running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, complained that there was “too much of this talk of institutional bias or racism in law enforcement. ” Mr. Pence and several Republican lawmakers have drawn criticism for such remarks on race, including a congressman from North Carolina, Robert Pittenger, who said that protesters in Charlotte “hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not. ” Mr. Pittenger later apologized. Facing polls that show most voters see him as intolerant of minorities and women, Mr. Trump has sought to reassure voters that he could also be an inclusive president. He has visited black communities a few times, and at the rally in Roanoke on Saturday, Mr. Trump called the new museum in Washington “a beautiful place” and vowed to support black Americans as president. But he did botch the museum’s name, calling it the “Smithsonian Museum of American History, Art. ” Mr. Trump also boasted of having employed women in influential jobs. But he risked alienating some women voters over the weekend by threatening to provide a seat at the debate to Ms. Flowers as retaliation to remarks by Mark Cuban, the billionaire who has been a vocal Trump critic. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, said Mrs. Clinton’s focus on “bringing people together” would resonate with female voters, many of whom are troubled by the recent police shootings. “Hillary Clinton has a real chance to get these independent women out of the undecided column with her messages about race and gender rather than Trump’s divisive views,” Ms. Lake said. | 1 |
Experts from across the technology industry appeared alongside growing startup companies at the Dublin Tech Summit in Ireland Thursday to discuss the future of the industry. [Held at Dublin’s Convention Centre, the Dublin Tech Summit features speakers from across the globe discussing innovation and development in multiple fields of technology. The venue features a large exhibition hall where startup companies from around the world had set up shop to advertise their companies and brands, geared towards consumers and industry professionals alike. One startup, Funderbeam, is seeking to help other young companies gain funding by utilizing Blockchain technology to create an online investors’ marketplace. “We’re Funderbeam,” said a company rep at DTS, “we have three businesses, we have a data platform where we provide information on startup companies, we have a crowdfunding platform where we help companies raise funds and we have a secondary market where we use Blockchain technology to help investors in startups who have used our platform to buy and sell their investments quickly and easily. ” Other companies on the exhibition floor aimed to appeal to a social audience such as the dating app AirDates, which advertises itself as an dating app, allowing travelers to connect with each other without internet access via direct or Bluetooth. The app’s creator, Michael Richard, spoke to Breitbart, briefly describing how the app works. “Basically to explain your travel experience when you’re flying, you just forward your boarding ticket to our servers, we parse the data, we update your profile and at this moment you will meet all the people using our app to your trip. So if you are flying from London to Ibiza, you have the possibility of meeting people at London city, London airport, during your flight, at the arrival airport and the arrival city. ” The Dublin Tech Summit is continuing until February 16 at the Dublin Convention Centre. Breitbart Tech will be covering the event until it’s close. Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart. com | 0 |
Breitbart News Senior Peter Schweizer — hailed as the “chief in the media” by SiriusXM host Alex Marlow — joined Breitbart News Daily Wednesday with a progress report on President Trump’s efforts to drain the “swamp” of Washington corruption. [“I will say this: I think the table has been set,” Schweizer said. “The tone I think has been very, very good. The Washington establishment is often obsessed with the notion of things running smoothly, and why are things not running smoothly. The problem with that is, it’s kind of akin to saying ‘my car is running well’ as we drive over the cliff. ” “You don’t want things to run smoothly if bad decisions and bad leadership is occurring, and that’s what we’ve had for a long time,” he continued. “So I like very much the tone that has been set, that business as usual is not good for the country, that there needs to be change, that there’s rampant corruption and . The tone has been very good. ” “In the first hundred days, there has not been a lot of movement in terms of legislation or actions that need to be taken,” he added. “The president has instituted this policy where there’s a ban on lobbying if you serve in the Trump administration. Great idea in theory the reality is, it’s not really a law, it really can’t be enforced, somebody can ignore it when they leave. ” “My hope is that we’re going to see, in combination with people in the Freedom Caucus and other reformers, working with this administration to really get at the root of the business model of official Washington,” said Schweizer. “What I always tell people is, if you don’t like the decisions that are being made and you feel like Washington, DC, is unresponsive to you, chances are it’s because somebody is being paid off or palms are being greased. The reason we don’t have representative government is because we have corruption, and we have payoffs. That’s really the root cause, in my mind, of a lot of the issues we’re talking about today,” he said. Schweizer said there are “a number of reforms that have been floating out there for a couple of years” that would help to drain the swamp. “Some of them have been pushed by guys like Sen. Rand Paul, others of them going back 20 years,” he said. “One of them I think would be term limits. I was not a big fan of term limits. I think term limits now are a great idea for Congress. It’s the way you get entrenched people out of there, and I think nobody is irreplaceable. ” “The second thing is, you need to have a lifetime ban on lobbying by members of Congress when you leave, and you need to have a ban on lobbying by immediate family members,” he continued. “The third reform that I think would be very helpful is one that Rand Paul has pushed, which is a requirement. ” “One of the ways in which they hide a lot of nasty things in legislation is, there will be a big highway bill, and they will insert some obscure language two or three sentences is sometimes all it takes, and it could be related on a totally different subject,” Schweizer explained. “They insert it into the bill, and then, lo and behold, everybody realizes after that transportation bill becomes law that there was some boondoggle inserted. Under a rule, you could not attach unrelated issues, or embed them or amend them, to complex pieces of legislation. ” “Those three things — term limits, a ban on lobbying by congressmen and their family members, and ruling — I think would be very powerful in getting started this process of draining the swamp,” he recommended. Schweizer gave the media a poor grade overall for monitoring Washington corruption during the Obama years, although he acknowledged there are “some great reporters out there that do work individually. ” “The large news organizations, I think either some of them certainly had an ideological or philosophical predilection to support Barack Obama. I think second of all when you did have honest news outlets and honest reporters, there’s the resource issue. They just aren’t willing to spend money on it. But the third issue is this issue of transparency,” he said. “Look, I’ve been critical, I think, that the Trump administration should not stop releasing the White House visitor logs. I think that is a transparency issue that’s a good thing,” Schweizer said. “Yes, I know that in the Obama administration, if somebody in the White House wanted to meet with a lobbyist, instead of doing it in the White House where it would be logged, they would go across the street in a coffee shop, so there are ways around it. But I do think it’s important for there to be transparencies, so I would urge the Trump administration to reverse itself on that issue. ” He said there was “positive work being done by the Trump administration” in the area of regulatory reform. “This problem of transparency is a vital one. The reason that bills are so complex, or regulations put out by the EPA are so complex, is because people get paid for complexity,” said Schweizer. “This is a business model. It’s not just about liberals at the EPA who want to control people’s lives. It’s about people who work for the EPA who know that if you make a regulation complex and hard to understand, the person that wrote that can quit their job and get a very, very lucrative consulting career, by being hired by companies to comply with the rules the wrote. That’s another area where we have this problem of the revolving door where reform needs to occur. ” “It begins with transparency. It’s like having good intelligence on the battlefield. You can’t know precisely how to respond to the enemy unless you know where the enemy is lurking. That’s what transparency allows us to do with corruption — find out where it’s lurking,” he said. “I hope on the area of transparency, where it comes to the big infrastructure projects, we’re going to see transparency, and we’re going to really see a commitment to making sure that the infrastructure projects being done reflect the interests of the country,” Schweizer said. “I’m somebody who believes that spending money on infrastructure is a legitimate action for the government. This is part of the nerve system of the country. ” “The problem is that things like the Transportation Committee in the House of Representatives, these massive infrastructure projects often are designed not so much to meet the infrastructure needs of the country, but to line the pockets of the supporters of the politicians who are crafting and designing these projects,” he warned. “I think the infrastructure project is important. I think it’s going to be helpful to the country. I think it’s something that’s long overdue, having driven roads all around the United States. I think we’re all aware of the shortcomings there. But again, it’s going to be crucial how it’s done,” he said. “This is a classic problem in Washington, DC,” Schweizer recalled. “You go back and you look at Ronald Reagan, you look at FDR. It’s not just a question of having a certain idea we’re going to implement and do this, it’s how it’s implemented. So often, presidents get tripped up because the Deep State, or the permanent political class, essentially hijacks the project and says, ‘Yeah, we think infrastructure’s a great idea. We’re now going to use this massive program to serve our terrific purposes and to help our people, rather than really design something for the benefit of the country. ’” “I think infrastructure’s important, and I’m hopeful that we’re going to have sufficient transparency so it’s not hijacked by the permanent political class,” he stressed. Peter Schweizer is a senior for Breitbart News, president of the Government Accountability Institute, and author of books such as Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. | 1 |
Big promises are to be expected from presidential candidates, but reality often intrudes. The elder George Bush broke the “no new taxes” pledge that helped lead to his election. And Barack Obama’s administration has yet to live up to his prediction that his nomination would go down in history as the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. ” Donald J. Trump’s vow to restore what he says is America’s lost luster, while perhaps not as flowery, comes with campaign promises that are equally grandiose. But Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has typically provided scant details on how he might make good on his promises — and ambitious ideas, even the concrete kind, do not always add up. Central to Mr. Trump’s campaign, and to his national security strategy, is his intent to clamp down on illegal immigration, using a vast deportation “force” to relocate people to the other side of a wall, funded by Mexico, that would stretch nearly the length of the southern border. Mr. Trump has suggested he will flesh out his ideas in a forthcoming speech. But experts across many fields who have analyzed his plans so far warn that they would come at astronomical costs — whoever paid — and would in many ways defy the logic of science, engineering and law. Mr. Trump has a simple plan to reduce the population of 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States: Deport them. How? He says he would follow the example of the roundups authorized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954. The initiative, known as Operation Wetback, expelled hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. Mr. Trump contends that the start of deportations would show immigrants he meant business and prompt many to leave on their own, and that it would take about two years to finish the job. There, the specifics end. Former senior immigration and border officials are skeptical, to put it mildly. Deportations have peaked recently at about 400, 000 a year, so the increase in scale to reach Mr. Trump’s goal would be exponential. And many legal procedures and constitutional constraints on the police did not exist in the Eisenhower era. “I can’t even begin to picture how we would deport 11 million people in a few years where we don’t have a police state, where the police can’t break down your door at will and take you away without a warrant,” said Michael Chertoff, who led a significant increase in immigration enforcement as the secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush. Finding those immigrants would be difficult, experts said. Police officers across the country would need to ask people for proof of residency or citizenship during traffic stops and street encounters. The Border Patrol would need highway checkpoints across the Southwest and near the Canadian border. To avoid racial profiling, any American could expect to be stopped and asked for papers. To achieve millions of deportations, the Obama administration’s focus on deporting serious criminals would have to be scrapped, said Julie Myers Wood, a director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, under Mr. Bush. “You would not care if the person had a criminal record,” she said. raids, rare under Mr. Obama, would resume at farms, factories, restaurants and construction sites, with agents arresting hundreds of workers and poring over company records. And prosecutors would bring criminal charges against employers hiring unauthorized immigrants. Mr. Trump has said he would triple ICE’s deportation officers, to 15, 000 from about 5, 000. But even if that could be accomplished quickly — difficult given the vetting and training required — it would still be insufficient, experts said. The F. B. I. and other agencies would have to set aside some of their missions to help. John Sandweg, who led ICE for seven months under Mr. Obama, said wholesale deportations could make it easier for immigrant gang members and drug traffickers to escape detection. “If the agents are looking for volume, they won’t spend the time to do the detective work tracking down the bad guy who has fake documents, the hardened criminals in the shadows,” he said. To prevent flight after arrest, the authorities would have to detain most immigrants awaiting deportation. Existing facilities, with about 34, 000 beds, would have to be expanded to hold at least 300, 000, Mr. Sandweg estimated, perhaps with tens of thousands of people in detention camps, similar to the internment of during World War II. Most deportations must be approved by judges. But backlogs in the 57 immigration courts are already severe, with waits as long as two years for a first hearing. The federal government would have to open dozens of emergency courts and hire hundreds of judges, shortcutting the painstaking selection process. The millions of immigrants from Central American countries, China, the Philippines, India and other noncontiguous nations would have to be flown home at the federal government’s expense. Arranging flights would in itself be a huge and very costly task. At the border, where illegal crossings have fallen to the lowest levels since the 1970s, the Border Patrol would face a rush of newly deported immigrants trying to return, experts said. “Many of these people have been here for decades,” said David V. Aguilar, who was the chief of the Border Patrol and then the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. “We should expect an immediate effort to reunify with the family left behind. ” Mr. Aguilar said a surge of returning deportees could divert the Border Patrol from the hunt for terrorists trying to infiltrate the country, now its top priority. Ms. Wood said mass deportations would add chaos to a dysfunctional immigration system. By any tally, the costs would be enormous. The American Action Forum, a research group, calculated the federal outlay to be at least $400 billion, and then only if the deportations were stretched over 20 years. But the proposals’ main flaw, former officials said, is that they are unrealistic. “Unless you suspend the Constitution and instruct the police to behave as if we live in North Korea,” Mr. Chertoff said, “it ain’t happening. ” Mr. Trump has promised that the wall will be big, beautiful, tall and strong. Spanning 1, 000 miles along the southern border, it will stem the flow of immigrants bringing drugs and crime. And, yes, Mexico will pay for the Great Wall of Trump, as he has called it. But the wall — symbolic of an immigration policy and providing a rallying cry for his supporters — has proved to be as divisive in theory as it would be in practice. And experts in domestic security, immigration policy and civil engineering say that building it would be a daunting task and cause more problems than it would solve. Mr. Trump has shared few details. He has said that the wall would be built from precast concrete and steel and that it could be 50 feet tall, if not higher. After calling for it to extend across the entire southern border, he more recently said half that length could be sufficient because of natural barriers. He has pegged the cost at $4 billion to $12 billion, most recently settling on around $10 billion. Some see that as low. “There’s a lot of logistics involved in this, and I don’t know how thoroughly they’ve thought it out,” said Todd Sternfeld, chief executive of Superior Concrete, a builder of walls. “The resources alone would be astronomical. ” Mr. Sternfeld, who has led major wall projects across the country and approached the Trump family last summer, suggested that Mr. Trump was overly optimistic about the cost and was underestimating the complexity of the undertaking. Running the numbers, Mr. Sternfeld said a concrete wall using a “post and panel” system that went 10 feet below the ground — to minimize tunneling — would cost at least $26 billion. The logistics would be nightmarish, including multiple concrete casting sites and temporary housing for a crew of 1, 000 workers if the job were to be completed within Mr. Trump’s first term. Maintenance would be an additional recurring expense, said Walter W. Boles, an engineering professor at Middle Tennessee State University who specializes in concrete construction. Deep trench work would also be necessary for keeping a wall of that height from toppling, he said, and seismic sensors to detect digging would be wise for preserving its integrity from below. “That’s one heck of a construction project,” said Mr. Boles, who assessed Patrick J. Buchanan’s 1996 proposal for a border barrier. “It’s certainly a lot more ambitious than I was imagining. ” The most common benchmark used for assessing Mr. Trump’s wall is the fencing that already exists at the border. In 2006, the Bush administration signed the Secure Fence Act, and $2. 4 billion was spent to construct 670 miles of fencing over three years, according to a 2009 Government Accountability Office report. Many Republicans, including Mr. Trump, have argued that the fence turned out to be too porous, with much of it designed to keep out only vehicles, not pedestrians. Thad Bingel, the chief of staff at Customs and Border Protection during the Bush administration, said the fence offered a cautionary tale. It became mired in lawsuits and environmental controversies that sowed deep anger along the border, and required the extensive use of eminent domain, a practice that Mr. Trump has been criticized for using to seize private properties for his big developments. A wall would be even more complicated, requiring redirection of water so that concrete could be mixed on location, difficult work on rocky terrain and a potential disruption of archaeological sites. Also, Mr. Bingel said, a solid wall could hamper border agents by blocking their view of the wall’s other side. Setting aside the need for congressional approval and a likely fight with Mexico over financing, many who study borders doubt that a mass of concrete would accomplish its purpose. From the ancient Great Wall of China to Israel’s modern security barrier, walls rarely prove totally impervious to people set on traversing them. Walls tend to be crude solutions to complex problems and are evidence of geopolitical failure, said Michael Dear, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in the border with Mexico. “People always find a way to go above or below or through a wall,” said Professor Dear, the author of “Why Walls Won’t Work. ” “It’s just political window dressing and of the worst order. ” What about the water? Billions of gallons flow between the United States and Mexico, funneling lifeblood to farms and communities on both sides of the border. The Colorado River sends water south the Rio Grande, a natural boundary for hundreds of miles, delivers precious water from Mexico, through dozens of canals, to much of South Texas. Water experts in the Southwest question how Mr. Trump’s border wall could accommodate those crucial flows and still provide the barrier he wants. Another complication is that a nearly treaty between Mexico and the United States prevents any construction that obstructs or diverts the flow of the waterways. The wall, in other words, could not interfere in any way with the flow of water in either direction. “We’ve been joking: How big does the hole in the wall have to be to let the water run through it?” said Patricia Mulroy, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and former Nevada water official. One option would be a wire fence, but that would catch all sorts of trash. “There are going to be consequences for any kind of fence you build,” said Gabriel Eckstein, a water law expert at Texas AM University. Asked whether the proposed wall might impede water flows, Hope Hicks, a Trump spokeswoman, did not directly respond. “The proposal speaks for itself,” she said, adding that details could be found on Mr. Trump’s website. But the site does not address water flows. Complicated environmental science and a fraught diplomatic history await anyone seeking to determine how to build a wall that cuts off the flow of people without violating the nation’s water treaty obligations. Experts on those subjects, in interviews, were skeptical that one would ever be built. They speculated that the financial and political challenges were too great, among other reasons. With the will and the financial wherewithal, though, an engineering solution can be found, said Sally Spener, the United States secretary for the International Boundary and Water Commission, which manages the water relationship between Mexico and the United States. But she acknowledged longstanding and delicate issues between the United States and Mexico — a point emphasized by Michael Connor, deputy secretary of the Interior Department, who has worked closely with Mexico on those subjects. A wall could be built that accommodates water flows, Mr. Connor said, but “the question becomes, when does it become economically significant to address those issues?” (Officials from the Bureau of Reclamation, which reports to Mr. Connor, said they could not quantify the cost given that they had not envisioned or studied such a project.) A bigger concern, he said, was the addition of a potential major wrinkle into the delicate bilateral diplomacy over water sharing. “Any proposal that would threaten that relationship or trust we’ve built would concern me,” Mr. Connor said. Several treaties, particularly one from 1944, outline rules for sharing water from the Colorado River, the Tijuana River and the Rio Grande. It is a complex system that involves water flowing down the Colorado River through Nevada and Arizona into Mexico, and down the Rio Grande from New Mexico into Mexico, where it is replenished by major tributaries before turning to Texas. (On the United States side, the Rio Grande watershed alone includes well over four million people.) The relationship has been strained by drought: Tensions have flared over the last 15 years when Texas accused Mexico of delivering insufficient supplies of water. The Texas Commission of Environmental Quality, overseen by appointees of the governor, cited a 2013 Texas AM study saying that Mexico’s failure to deliver its annual water allotment cost the state economy nearly 5, 000 jobs and $400 million each year. Mexico countered that it did not have the water because of drought — a position that some American environmentalists said was valid. The issue was resolved this year when the United States, jointly with Mexico, said the water debt had been paid off. Separately, the United States and Mexico took five years, from 2007 to 2012, to reach a landmark agreement to fix canals and water delivery systems to cope with historic drought. As part of that agreement, Mexico agreed to share some of its water supply from the Colorado River so that the water could be retained in Lake Mead, near the border. That situation worked out well, highlighting friendly but delicate relations. “I was there, and I know the hurdles we had to overcome to assure them we weren’t manipulating the system,” said Ms. Mulroy, from Brookings. “We are dependent on the Mexicans trusting us,” she said. “ It’s an enormous diplomatic issue. ” With a wall, Ms. Mulroy said, “the chances of another cooperative agreement would be nil. ” | 1 |
Why the Left Loves the New Cold War Why the Left Loves the New Cold War By 0 134
The Clinton campaign’s full-scale effort to turn this election into a referendum on Vladimir Putin is causing liberals like Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation , and Glenn Greenwald , the energizing force behind The Intercept , much heartburn. Here is Ms. van den Heuvel wondering what the heck is going on :
“How does new Cold War – which ends space for dissent, hurts women & children, may lead to nuclear war – help what Clinton claims she is for?”
According to both vanden Heuvel and Greenwald, the Clintonian assault on Russia – the crude, J. Edgar-Hooverish smear campaign conducted against WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and especially Donald Trump – is an opportunistic deviation from “true” progressive values. It’s a corruption of American liberalism that has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with winning the election. As Greenwald puts it , in answer to vanden Heuvel’s question:
“Exploiting Cold War rhetoric & tactics has helped her win the election. I guess the idea is: deal with the aftermath and fallout later.”
Yet this evades what Mrs. Clinton and her supporters have clearly stated about the alleged immediacy and seriousness of the “threat” represented by Russia under Putin.
Clinton has likened Putin to Hitler – and hasn’t that always been the prologue to a regime change operation by the United States? Remember that Saddam Hussein was supposed to be the Iraqi incarnation of Hitler . Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was also another “ Hitler .” If we go back far enough, we can recall how George Herbert Walker Bush said that Manuel Noriega was “ worse than Hitler .”
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The ideological underpinning of this nonsense is part and parcel of the American liberal canon, which valorizes World War II as the “good war” – a heroic struggle against fascism by the forces of progressivism and Goodness – which was only opposed by anti-Semitic cretins and Hitler apologists (a.k.a. “isolationist” conservatives). And it goes deeper than that, for progressivism is an ideology that seeks universal moral “uplift” – not only on the home front but on a global scale.
Woodrow Wilson’s argument for getting us into World War I – arguably the most futile and unjustifiable conflict ever to be engaged in by the United States – was that it was a “war to end all wars,” a struggle to bring the benefits of democracy and national self-determination to the long-suffering peoples of the world. And this was echoed by the collectivist intellectuals who provided the amen corner for Wilson’s war. One such cheerleader was the philosopher John Dewey, who hailed the war as the beginning of the end of laissez-faire because “private property had already lost its sanctity” and “industrial democracy is on the way.” The revered avatar of American liberalism, Walter Lippmann, in a speech uttered as America was entering the war, enthused:
“We who have gone to war to insure democracy in the world will have raised an aspiration here that will not end with the overthrow of the Prussian autocracy. We shall turn with fresh interests to our own tyrannies — to our Colorado mines, our autocratic steel industries, sweatshops, and our slums. A force is loose in America. Our own reactionaries will not assuage it. We shall know how to deal with them.”
Tied in to the campaign for progressive “reform” was a religious factor: the postmillennial pietist movement that swept the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Stamping out “sin” and stamping out the alleged evils of capitalism were sentiments inextricably intertwined: thus we saw the advent of the “ Social Gospel .” The Prohibitionist movement was a key source of the early progressive movement. Yet as the educated classes – the political class – shed the remnants of religious belief, their determination to stamp out “sin” was hardly extinguished: it just took on new, secularized forms.
The modern definition of “vice” was shifted to conform to the new religion of political correctness: instead of drunkenness, prostitution, and other avenues of self-gratification, the new vices have been redefined as “racism,” “homophobia,” “xenophobia,” and all the rest of the “phobias” and “isms” denounced by Hillary Clinton in her infamous “basket of deplorables” speech . Indeed, her condemnation of Trump supporters as “irredeemable” is couched in the very language used by the old-time religionists who saw their political and social enemies as instruments of Satan headed straight for the lowest rungs of Hell.
And this messianic impulse to cleanse humanity of “sin” wasn’t limited to a single country, the United States: if the human race was going to be made ready for the Second Coming it first – according to the postmillennial pietists – had to undergo the reign of virtue for a thousand years. The Kingdom of God on earth – the entire earth – had to be established: then and only then would the redeemed by saved and ushered into Eternity, whilst the “irredeemables” would burn in hellfire forevermore. | 1 |
CANNES, France — “The BFG,” the latest from Steven Spielberg, is based on the 1982 book of the same title by Roald Dahl. It’s the story of young Sophie (the newcomer Ruby Barnhill) who one night is plucked from her bed by a giant hand. She soon discovers that the hand belongs to the BFG — voiced with an ache by Mark Rylance — or the Big Friendly Giant. The girl and the giant bond, naturally, and soon enough this funny, creepy, quirky story turns into an tale about two lonely souls who set out to vanquish a gang of giant hooligans who snack on “human beans” — people. Using a combination of physical sets, performance capture and digital wizardry, Mr. Spielberg creates a visually seamless world that looks startlingly real. “The BFG” is most touchingly an expression of Mr. Spielberg’s movie love, evident in its emphasis on dreams, a lovely interlude involving a kind of shadow play and even in an allusion to a Zoetrope, a protocinematic device that creates the illusion of motion. The film was adapted for the screen by Melissa Mathison, who died in 2015, and remains best known for her screenplay for “E. T. The ” which screened in Cannes in 1982. It was Mr. Spielberg’s second appearance as a director in the festival’s main competition, following “The Sugarland Express” in 1974. (He won the prize for best screenplay that year.) Since then, his appearances at Cannes have been infrequent: “The Color Purple” played out of competition in 1986 (“The BFG” was also shown out of competition) and he served as president of the feature jury in 2013. On Sunday, I spoke with Mr. Spielberg about his new movie, accusations that Dahl was and what he would change in the film industry, at the Carlton hotel. Here are excerpts: Q. How did the project come to you? A. Kathy Kennedy. She got the rights from the Dahl estate about 9, 10 years ago. And she hired Melissa to write the screenplay. I read Melissa’s script and loved it. There was a lot of work to be done, but it was a wonderful first draft. I got involved in directing it because Melissa and I have been so close all these years we raised our families together practically. And then it was just like old home week again, it was such a familiar feeling being in — you can’t call them story meetings, they’re like life jam sessions — and out of it sometimes comes an idea that Melissa will write down and it may or may not go into the script. They were very casual, very beautiful sessions. It’s hard being here without her. Q. Was the melding of technology and human beings part of your interest? Not really, because at first I thought we would do it with actors — “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” with forced perspective, staging, actors with false eye lines. But then I realized if I shot the movie that way it would be no different from “Tom Thumb,” “Thumbelina,” “Jack and the Beanstalk” — it wouldn’t be magical. And I thought that the most important thing I could contribute was to try to create real cinematic magic. Not magic as a result of an audience’s experience but physical, literal alchemy on the screen that was somehow similar to things we’ve seen before but somehow also very different. To do that, I thought, I need all the giants to be creatures. Now, I could certainly make them creatures through prosthetic makeup. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had complete freedom that the creatures were done digitally? I felt like we were just on the cusp of inventing soul. That we could really infuse actual, human, soul [into] an animated character. They had gotten close to it on several movies like “Avatar” and even “Planet of the Apes. ” I didn’t want the technology to subvert Mark’s honest performance. And that was the big risk we took. Would they be able to get Mark’s soul into BFG’s face and body? Mark is 100 percent responsible for his performance. The technology of motion capture with the suit he wears and the dots on his face delivered 80 percent of pure, soulful performance to the animators and the video cameras that recorded his performance from six different angles gave the animators the next 20 percent. Q. At this point, do you feel like there are any new and interesting hurdles for you? “The BFG” was a huge hurdle for me — I’d never done a fairy tale before. Every movie I make, there’s a hurdle to it. I look for things that will scare me. Fear is my fuel. I get to the brink of not really knowing what to do and that’s when I get my best ideas. Confidence is my enemy and it always has been. My sequels aren’t as good as my originals because I go onto every sequel I’ve made and I’m too confident. This movie made a dollars, which justifies the sequel, so I come in like it’s going to be a slam dunk and I wind up making an inferior movie to the one before. I’m talking about “The Lost World” and “Jurassic Park. ” Q. Is it fear of failing, fear of disappointing yourself, your critics, your admirers? What is the fear? It’s a fear of getting lost. And then staying lost in a quagmire of having made a bad choice and now I’m stuck with it for the next 60 days of shooting. I felt that way on “Jaws” only because it was so hard to make, not because I didn’t know how to make it. I was lost. For a movie that became awesomely successful and gave me complete personal creative freedom, I still look back at it and even now say it was my most unhappy time in my life as a filmmaker because whole days would go by and we wouldn’t get a shot. Q. I want to bring up the question that someone in the press conference asked regarding Roald Dahl [whom some, including a biographer, have said was] an . Can you enjoy the work and not think about the artist? How do we deal with that? I think that all of us who stand on the shoulders of the giants who began the industry — have run into that conundrum when talking about “The Birth of a Nation” and D. W. Griffith and the exaltation of the Ku Klux Klan. Now, I don’t know what I would have done if I’d known this [about Dahl] before “BFG. ” I didn’t research Dahl. That’s no excuse. I was completely enthralled by his writing, by “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “James and the Giant Peach” and especially “The BFG,” which is my favorite of his books. I read it to my kids. So, my only involvement was interpreting the book. But I said this in the press conference, and I really mean it: For somebody who has proclaimed himself to be telling stories that just do the opposite, embracing the differences between races and cultures and sizes and language, as Dahl did with “The BFG,” it’s a paradox. Later, when I began asking questions of people who knew Dahl, they told me he liked to say things he didn’t mean just to get a reaction. And that a lot of the comments he made weren’t things that he fervidly believed, because everybody in his life, basically, his whole support team, was Jewish. And all his comments, which I’ve now read about — about bankers, all the stereotypes we hear from Germany — he would say for effect, even if they were horrible things. So, I don’t know. I just admire “The BFG” and I admire his values in that and it’s hard even for me to even believe that somebody who could write something like that could say the terrible things that had been reported. Q. People are complicated. Artists are complicated. Q. In 2013, you and your friend George Lucas were at the University of California and you said some big things about the movie industry. I still stand by [that]. What I said was that it’s only going to take three or four to damage the bottom line because these movies are all now costing between $225 and $300 million. If the general public finds another genre — maybe some young filmmaker will invent a genre — which starts to supplant the superhero movie this thing could happen. It almost happened a couple of summers ago, not to the extent that it hurt Hollywood. But I don’t believe that the superhero genre has the legs of the western genre, I don’t even think it has the legs of the genre. I think that there’s a firewall between and superhero — I don’t like to mix them because I think it’s sacrilegious. [Laughs.] At the same time, if I had a chance to make a superhero movie, I’d do it because it’s good business to do it right now. If I could find a huge superhero franchise — I’ve got one called “Transformers” — why not? Q. If it were up to you to restructure the business, the studios, what would you do? How would you fix the studios? I don’t think that the studios need fixing, as long as [they] keep their specialty divisions active and alert to what’s on the market and to what young filmmakers are ready to be given that big break. My only advice — and I don’t have a studio, I have a very small company — is that there needs to be a good balance of and movies that are good for the soul, that get us to dwell in the aftertaste of an experience that is so or out of the box, but three days later we realize that we saw something that might change our lives. The other thing that I’m a huge advocate of — and that I have practiced in my own television and movie business — is diversification behind the camera. We have a lot of diversification in front of the lens, but we don’t have diversification behind the camera. We don’t have women directors. We have more women directors in television — they’re doing great work — than we have on soundstages or on location making movies. That needs to change. And I don’t believe in the quota system, either. That’s tokenism. True talent is what we need to judge from, and there is tremendous talent in all those fields of diversity, from gender to race to religion. And a lot of this good work is being done in television. So how do we build a bridge from TV to the movies? And how do we build a bridge from those who haven’t been given a break yet? Casting directors go out into the hinterlands and find actors who had no desire to act but are plucked out of school, like Ruby Barnhill, and put in “The BFG. ” Why can’t there be the same effort to find filmmakers? | 1 |
When Evan M. Goldberg founded NetSuite in 1998, he did so with backing from his former boss, Lawrence J. Ellison, who started the software giant Oracle. On Thursday, their relationship came full circle as Oracle agreed to acquire NetSuite for $9. 3 billion to beef up its cloud offerings. Oracle will pay $109 per NetSuite share in cash, according to a news release issued by Oracle on Thursday. That represents a 19 percent premium above NetSuite’s closing price on Wednesday. The NetSuite deal is Oracle’s largest acquisition since it bought PeopleSoft for $10. 3 billion in 2004, according to data from Standard Poor’s Global Market Intelligence. That deal, a hostile takeover fought out over 18 months, extended Oracle’s customer base and product offerings. It made Oracle bigger, but it did not change its business model. About 5, 000 PeopleSoft employees, close to half the company, were laid off in the following months. The NetSuite purchase, on the other hand, is at the heart of Oracle’s fight to remake itself for the modern world of cloud computing, or providing accessing to vast computational resources over the internet. This transition has shaken up the software business for the last several years. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have created markets worth billions, and older companies like IBM, and Oracle have struggled to change the way they make and sell their products. The deal also illustrates that, for all the reach and novelty of tech, Silicon Valley remains a very small place with long personal histories. Mr. Goldberg got the idea for NetSuite after conversations with Mr. Ellison about where else the internet might go. Down the hall was another rising star at Oracle, named Marc Benioff. Mr. Benioff started a company called Salesforce. com within weeks of NetSuite’s start, also with backing from Mr. Ellison. Today, Salesforce is regarded as the leading company selling only cloud software, with a market capitalization of $55. 7 billion. The relationship between Oracle and Salesforce is testy, however. In 2011, Mr. Benioff was kicked out of a big Oracle conference after he lampooned Oracle’s cloud efforts. And now the NetSuite technology will help Oracle compete more directly with Salesforce for customers. NetSuite’s chief executive, Zachary Nelson, is a leader who also worked at Oracle and is close to Mr. Ellison. NetSuite has held customer events at Mr. Ellison’s Silicon Valley estate. He is likely to occupy a senior role at Oracle. Mr. Ellison, through personal and family holdings, owns more than 40 percent of NetSuite, which makes the deal to acquire it a phenomenal payday for a man who was already among the world’s richest. NetSuite has more than 5, 000 employees and specializes in accounting and other software, particularly for smaller businesses. It has also created online software for manufacturing that is akin to some of Oracle’s software applications. But that online software is created, sold and serviced differently. Oracle has, for most of the last decade, bought cloud companies and spent big on remaking its engineering and sales staff for the cloud world. That has paid off some: In the last fiscal year, the company had $12. 2 billion in core cloud software sales, an increase of 49 percent from fiscal 2014. That is enough to make Oracle one of the largest cloud companies, but it was still just 8 percent of the company’s revenue. Overall revenue shrank 3 percent last year, as demand for older products fell. It might have been worse. Giant tech companies like IBM and have endured sharp revenue drops as cloud computing becomes more important, and have struggled to cope in the new environment. Oracle has fared relatively well, in part because its core product, a powerful database used for financial and managerial work, is at the center of most major companies worldwide. Competitors are trying to sell more modern databases to replace Oracle, with relatively little success so far. “Oracle and NetSuite cloud applications are complementary, and will coexist in the marketplace forever,” Mark Hurd, chief executive of Oracle, said in the statement. An Oracle special committee made up of independent directors led the process to sign a deal with NetSuite. The transaction is expected to close this year, subject to regulatory approvals and agreement by a majority of NetSuite’s shareholders, not including shares owned by executives of NetSuite or anyone affiliated with Mr. Ellison. Shares of NetSuite surged to a level just below the deal price in early trading on Thursday and closed at $108. 41. | 1 |
Videos CETA: Canada Has Challenged The EU’s Chemical Regulations 21 Times Canada – like the United States – takes issue with the European approach to regulation, which is described as the ‘precautionary principle’. | October 28, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! A man protests against international trade agreements TTIP and CETA in front of EU headquarters in Brussels on Thursday, Oct. 27, 2016.
The Canadian government raised concerns over the European Union’s regulations on chemicals on more than 20 occasions over the course of a decade, according to a letter seen by Energydesk .
In a note sent to the Belgian government on October 19 , the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) claims that the Canadian state challenged the EU’s REACH regulations at the World Trade Organisation 21 times between the years 2003 and 2011.
The UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) describes the REACH regulations as providing “a high level of protection of human health and the environment from the use of chemicals.”
The news will raise concerns that Canadian companies may use the trade and investment deal CETA to undermine EU regulations.
“The threat of undue Canadian influence on environmental regulations such as REACH is real,” CIEL CEO Carroll Muffett wrote .
The CETA deal – which sets up private courts that enable foreign corporations to sue countries – has been held up by the British government as a model for post-Brexit free trade deals.
Corporate courts
Canadian companies have also used the trade agreements to take legal action against countries on 42 occasions, according to data from the Investment Policy Hub — with Canada ranked 5th among the nations in which this type of investor-to-state lawsuit have been filed.
Earlier this year, for example, the Canadian pipeline company TransCanada sued the United States government for $15 billion over its decision to scrap the Keystone XL project — using a provision in the NAFTA trade deal.
CETA, which is currently being signed by EU members following a week-long blockade by Wallonia and two other Belgian regions, sets up an investor dispute system called the Investment Court System (ICS) .
In fact the ICS was among the reasons that the Wallonian government took a stand, with the region’s leader Paul Magnette saying: “I would prefer that [the ICS] disappears pure and simple and that we rely on our courts or at the very least, if we want an arbitration court, it must provide equivalent guarantees to domestic ones.”
As part of the newly negotiated agreement, the Belgian government will ask the European Court of Justice to rule on the legality of the deal — and the ICS in particular.
Beyond REACH
REACH – the r egistration, e valuation, a uthorisation and restriction of ch emicals – is a set of extensive rules “adopted to improve the protection of human health and the environment from the risks that can be posed by chemicals” — so says the European Chemicals Agency .
Canada’s concerns – which were not formal actions, but rather issues raised at the WTO – largely related to rules around competition and whether the regulations would be burdensome to business .
The 21 complaints spanned the administrations of the Liberal Paul Martin, when REACH was just a draft, and the Conservative Stephen Harper.
Essentially Canada – like the United States – takes issue with the European approach to regulation, which is described as the ‘precautionary principle’.
This approach means products need to be proven safe by companies who seek to market them, before they enter the market. In North America, the burden of proof is on public authorities, which have to prove that a product is dangerous.
Documents unearthed by CIEL show that Canada has filed objections to the EU using this approach to regulate endocrine disrupting chemicals, arguing that the “EU’s hazard-based approach could unnecessarily disrupt trade in food and feed”.
Scientific studies show a range of health impacts caused by exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals – which are found in food containers and plastics – including IQ loss and adult obesity. This work by Energy Desk | 1 |
snoofle Over thirty years of professional experience designing and developing high performance parallel transactional server side systems in "C", "C++" and Java on *nix and Windows platforms for military, financial and health platforms. Bachelor's in Geological Engineering and Masters in Computer Science.
We’ve all inherited legacy systems. You know the sort; 20 years old, more than 50,000 lines of code, poorly designed - even for its time, completely undocumented externally and useless code comments within, mangled beyond recognition due to countless developers making myriad ad-hoc changes upon changes and so-on. Now imagine such a system written in a tool that’s been around for nearly half a century, but rarely used for the intended purpose of the application.
Reg worked for a firm that built space-rocket related applications; specifically an Ada compiler, written in SNOBOL , for a 15+ years obsolete legacy processor used in the rocket. The system itself consisted of more than 100 SPITBOL (a speedier compiler of SNOBOL) programs, most of which were written by one guy nearly four decades ago, Barry. Barry was a former sixties hippie-turned-coder. Though long since retired, he had been called back to active duty to try and help decipher what this thing does.
The code is full of comments explaining what each block does, but not why . Nor were the comments up to date with what the code actually did, which was one set of “bugs”, in addition to the more normal set of errors. Of course, in those days, nobody wrote unit tests (was it even possible to write test suites for SNOBOL?) Some of the more interesting phenomena included mangled memory addresses, incorrect hex/decimal conversions, offsets disappearing, seemingly random mangling/unmangling/remangling of variable names, etc.
Reg’s ongoing project was to replace this mess with a shiny new Ada compiler written in Python.
Along the way, Reg had to deal with all the control flow of SNOBOL (e.g.: goto’s), on-the-fly execution of strings containing arbitrary SNOBOL code, the immediate-value-assignment operators (‘.’ and ‘$’) and pattern matching that would reduce a regex-wizard to a quivering mass of Jello.
Even Barry, the tie-dyed, retired, hippie could no longer decipher what the internals were doing. Maybe he’d just fried too many neurons. Reg couldn’t get any further- maybe he just wasn’t smoking enough marijuana to understand what the hippie had done. Reg decided to simply try to replicate the output of the legacy system. This was accomplished by running both systems on the same input and doing diffs.
This project started long before Reg joined the firm, and will probably be going strong long after he’s gone.
Reg got the number of diffs on the output down to less than 1,000. That might not sound great, but almost all of them were caused by bugs in the legacy code.
Now his toughest job begins: explaining to management why success must be defined as about 1,000 differences in the output between the legacy and replacement systems, and, more importantly, determining whether correcting the output of the previous systems will cause the rocket to act in an undesirable manner. Like exploding. [Advertisement] Manage IT infrastructure as code across all environments with Puppet . Puppet Enterprise now offers more control and insight, with role-based access control, activity logging and all-new Puppet Apps. Start your free trial today! | 0 |
MOSCOW — From a certain perspective, certainly the Kremlin’s, Vladimir ’s behavior in Washington could be seen as treasonous, a brazen betrayal of his homeland. In a series of public meetings on Capitol Hill, Mr. a leader in the Russian opposition, urged American lawmakers to expand economic sanctions against the Russian government under a law known as the Magnitsky Act. That would hasten political change in Russia, he argued. Back in Moscow a month later, in May 2015, the changes Mr. detected were going on in his own body. Midway through a meeting with fellow dissidents, beads of sweat inexplicably dotted his forehead. His stomach churned. “It all went so fast,” he recalled. “In the space of about 20 minutes, I went from feeling completely normal to having a rapid heart rate, really high blood pressure, to sweating and vomiting all over the place, and then I lost consciousness. ” He had ingested a poison, doctors told him after he emerged from a weeklong coma, though they could find no identifiable trace of it. While Mr. survived, few others in his position have proved as lucky. He said he was certain he had been the target of a security service poisoning. Used extensively in the Soviet era, political murders are again playing a prominent role in the Kremlin’s foreign policy, the most brutal instrument in an expanding repertoire of intimidation tactics intended to silence or otherwise intimidate critics at home and abroad. Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has made no secret of his ambition to restore his country to what he sees as its rightful place among the world’s leading nations. He has invested considerable money and energy into building an image of a strong and morally superior Russia, in sharp contrast with what he portrays as weak, decadent and disorderly Western democracies. Muckraking journalists, rights advocates, opposition politicians, government and other Russians who threaten that image are treated harshly — imprisoned on charges, smeared in the news media and, with increasing frequency, killed. Political murders, particularly those accomplished with poisons, are nothing new in Russia, going back five centuries. Nor are they particularly subtle. While typically not traceable to any individuals and plausibly denied by government officials, poisonings leave little doubt of the state’s involvement — which may be precisely the point. “Outside of popular culture, there are no highly skilled hit men for hire,” Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University and an authority on the Russian security services, said in an interview. “If it’s a skilled job, that means it’s a state asset. ” Other countries, notably Israel and the United States, pursue targeted killings, but in a strict counterterrorism context. No other major power employs murder as systematically and ruthlessly as Russia does against those seen as betraying its interests abroad. Killings outside Russia were even given legal sanction by the nation’s Parliament in 2006. Applied most notoriously in the case of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a Putin opponent who died of poisoning in London in 2006, murders and deaths under mysterious circumstances are now seen as such a menace that Kremlin critics now often flee the country and keep their whereabouts secret. Russia has never acknowledged using the authority under the 2006 law and has specifically denied any government ties to cases, including the Litvinenko murder. Among those fleeing Russia recently is Grigory Rodchenkov, a in Russia’s sports doping scandal. This is not without reason. In the case over doping, two other officials with knowledge of the scheme died unexpectedly as the outlines of the scandal began to emerge. Just this month, another Yulia Stepanova, a runner in hiding with her husband in the United States, was forced to move amid fears that hackers had found her location. “If something happens to us,” she said, “then you should know that it is not an accident. ” “The government is using the special services to liquidate its enemies,” Gennadi V. Gudkov, a former member of Parliament and onetime lieutenant colonel in the K. G. B. said in an interview. “It was not just Litvinenko, but many others we don’t know about, classified as accidents or maybe . ” Most recently, a coroner ruled that trauma caused the death of a Kremlin insider, Mikhail Y. Lesin, 57, in a Washington hotel room last year, not the heart attack his colleagues first said. In July, the Russian Interfax news agency reported that Aleksandr Poteyev, 64, an intelligence officer accused of defecting and betraying a ring of Russian spies living undercover in American suburbs, had died in the United States. Still, the Magnitsky Act, the law that Mr. was in Washington urging lawmakers to expand, has proved to be perhaps the most lethal topic of all over the years. Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor, was jailed on tax evasion charges while investigating a $230 million government tax “refund” that corrupt Russian officials had granted to themselves. He died in 2009 after having been denied essential medical care in prison, earning the Kremlin widespread condemnation. In response, William F. Browder, an American financier who was the target of the tax fraud during time he spent working in Russia and had employed Mr. Magnitsky, campaigned in Congress for a law punishing the officials involved in the misdeeds and subsequent mistreatment of the auditor. The proposed measure, which eventually passed in 2012 as the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law and Accountability Act, denied visas and blocked access to the American financial system for Russians deemed to have committed rights abuses and avoided punishment at home — including those involved in the Magnitsky tax fraud case. Mr. Putin, perceiving an intrusion into his country’s affairs, campaigned hard against the measure. When it passed, he retaliated by ending American adoptions of Russian children. The law became a prototype for the blacklisting of prominent Russians accused of murders, human rights abuses and financial theft, among other violations. The question of who was involved in the tax fraud became vitally important first to the investigation, and eventually to the final scope of the legislation. Access to inside information became pivotal and, it turned out, lethal. To date, five people who either handed over such information or were potential witnesses have died under mysterious circumstances that, in their sophistication, suggest killings. One of the victims was Mr. Magnitsky, whose death was hardly the stuff of security operations. Two others died before Mr. Magnitsky. And as the case gained greater prominence, others began dying under mysterious circumstances. One victim whose death preceded Mr. Magnitsky’s, Valery Kurochkin, a potential witness whose name appeared on documents related to the fraud, fled Russia for Ukraine but died there of liver failure at the age of 43. The other, Oktai Gasanov, a figure in the fraud case but one who might have shed light on the group’s modus operandi, died of heart failure at 53. Then, after Mr. Magnitsky’s death in prison, a fourth insider met an untimely end in a plunge from a balcony. A fifth, a banker linked to the scheme, Alexander Perepilichny, made it to London in 2009 and passed records to Swiss investigators. In 2012, however, at the age of 44 and in apparently excellent health, he suffered a heart attack while jogging. The police were left scratching their heads over the body found crumpled on a road in a housing development, home to Kate Winslet and Elton John. An autopsy initially did nothing to clear up the questions. It was not until 2015 that a botanist was able to identify the presumptive cause of Mr. Perepilichny’s death: His stomach held traces of gelsemium, a rare, poisonous plant grown in the Himalayas and known to have been used in Chinese assassinations. A coroner’s inquest is scheduled for September. “All of this sounds like paranoid conspiracy theories,” Mr. Browder said in a telephone interview. “But there are too many of these happening to important people. Captains of industry and lawyers are not dying left, right and center like this in the West. ” Poison has been a favorite tool of Russian intelligence for more than a century. A biochemist, Grigory Mairanovski, labored in secret from 1928 on the task of developing tasteless, colorless and odorless poisons. In 1954, a K. G. B. defector described a secret lab near the agency’s Lubyanka headquarters and “experiments on living people. ” The agencies developed an arsenal of lethal, poisons that, analysts of Russian security affairs say, is still in use. The terrorist known as Khattab died in 2002 in his mountain in Chechnya after opening a letter laced with a form of sarin, a nerve agent. In 1995, a Russian banker, Ivan K. Kivelidi, died after coming in contact with cadmium, which is deadly to the touch. His secretary died of the same symptoms, apparently because the poison had been spread on an office telephone handset. In 2008, Karinna Moskalenko, a Russian lawyer specializing in taking cases to the European Court of Human Rights, fell ill in Strasbourg, France, from mercury found in her car. And in one case, a Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, was killed on Waterloo Bridge in London in 1978 with an umbrella tipped with a pellet of ricin. Mistakes abound. In 1971, a year after he won the Nobel Prize for literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn survived a poisoning attempt. Ricin, made from castor beans, was probably involved, according to news media accounts and a biography of the dissident writer. Ukraine’s former president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, was left with his face disfigured after a dioxin poisoning — most likely concealed in a meal of boiled crayfish — that Mr. Yushchenko attributed to Russian assassins. The attempt on Mr. ’s life turned out to be one of those mistakes, though that was not immediately certain. As his colleagues looked on surprised, Mr. ’s head flopped down onto a table. The poison threw him into a weeklong coma with a puzzling range of symptoms, including swelling in his brain and kidney failure, giving his legs and arms a blue hue, his wife, Yevgenia, recalled. He endured nerve damage that left him limping, but has otherwise made a full recovery. A French laboratory found heavy metals in his blood but was unable to identify a specific poison or explain how he might have ingested them accidentally. Mr. 34, has insisted that the police open an investigation. He is convinced that he ingested the poison during a flight on Aeroflot. If so, it would not have been the first time such an episode occurred. In 2004, the opposition journalist Anna Politkovskaya drank poisoned tea on a domestic flight operated by Karat, another Russian airline, but she survived. Two years later, she was shot and killed in her apartment elevator. “How can you protect yourself?” Mr. ’s wife asked. “What can you do? Not eat? Bring your own lunch everywhere? How can you predict a poisoning?” Some do take precautions. Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and now an opposition figure, has long had bodyguards carry bottled water and prepared meals for him. In a chilling epilogue to Mr. ’s ordeal, a warning appeared in February on the Instagram account of Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya. It showed Mr. outside the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, where he was speaking in favor of sanctions against Russia. He was in cross hairs, with a caption: “Those who haven’t understood will understand. ” | 1 |
The mainstream media lost no time in attempting to undermine President Donald Trump, as opposed to actually reporting information. [After eight years of kowtowing to Obama, they have suddenly discovered a civic responsibility to hold the government accountable. But they are focusing on minutiae, and in some cases actually telling lies, both of omission and commission. That risks alienating the public even further — making it harder, actually, for the media to act as watchdogs. Lie #1: President Trump was focused on the crowd size at the inauguration. He mentioned it in passing in his speech at the CIA, and Press Secretary Sean Spicer took the media to task for trying to downplay attendance figures. But to say — as CNN’s Anderson Cooper did — that crowd size was Trump’s focus on his first day in office is simply absurd. On Cooper’s program Saturday, CNN played a clip of Spicer’s first press conference that only mentioned the crowd size issue — leaving out Spicer’s preceding comments taking a journalist to task for reporting, falsely, that Trump had a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. removed from the Oval Office. The crowd issue was secondary — but CNN chose to focus on it because it was less of a against the media than the bust. Whatever the numbers on Inauguration Day, Spicer’s point was that the media were more interesting in undermining Trump, and promoting protests, than in covering the actual news of the day. Lie #2: President Trump insulted the CIA. Extending the faux outrage at Lie #1, the mainstream media criticized Trump for talking about crowd size in front of the CIA’s memorial wall for agents who have died in the course of their duties. The media showed considerably less concern when President Barack Obama spoke before the same wall about the release of the prior administration’s interrogation memos, impugning the integrity of the CIA and giving valuable intelligence to terrorists. @AceofSpadesHQ @jaketapper ¯’_( ツ) ¯ CNN: In CIA visit, Obama defends interrogation memo releasehttps: . pic. twitter. — Trigger Warning (@AshLikeSnow17) January 22, 2017, Lie #3: The protests in Washington, D. C. were important. The protests were nothing more than the venting of outrage at Trump’s election. For all the talk of “women’s rights,” there was nothing particular to point to that Trump had done about anything relating to women. The demonstration was large, but also disorganized, as well as vulgar, and protesters left heaps of trash over the various routes they took, including protest signs abandoned at Union Station as they left the capital. Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. | 0 |
What to do when the October surprise aimed at your opponent flops and your polls are bad, so bad, really bad?
How about more propaganda!
The losing Trump campaign’s latest Hail Mary is to try to fool voters with a last ditch media propaganda push by recruiting volunteers to blitz talk radio with “talking points” and “monitor” discussions and callers.
Shared by Talk Show host and Editor-in-chief of Right Wisconsin.com Charlie Sykes: Welp. Trump campaign planning "talk radio blitz." Recruiting volunteers to call shows with talking points. https://t.co/eWR5qLKRjR
— Real Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) October 31, 2016
From the Trump campaign’s call to action:
Trump Talk Radio Blitz 2016 Help get Donald Trump elected! Please sign up below to volunteer to call into talk radio over the final days of this Presidential campaign and tell Wisconsin’s voters why you support Donald Trump. We are looking for volunteers to sign up as a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Call Captain and/or a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Caller.
Thank you for your willingness to help elect Donald Trump and Mike Pence this very important election year!
What will these call captains do? Oh, “monitor” other the show and discussions, give talking points — you know, propaganda:
I am willing to help! (check all the apply) I am willing to serve as a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Call Captain, taking responsibility to monitor and recruit other callers for one or more talk radio programs between now and election day
I am willing to be a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Caller and select one or more 15 minute segments for local talk radio shows to call into and promote Donald Trump’s campaign
Call “Captains” will be in charge of entire shows to make sure the Trump message gets out and “monitor” discussions lest anyone bring any facts to the air:
Call Captains will sign up to be responsible for an entire talk radio program or programs between now and the election to 1) help recruit callers to call in and promote Donald Trump’s campaign throughout the program for that day, 2) remind Trump Talk Radio Blitz Callers who have sign up of their commitment to call into the show, 3) help ensure your Trump Talk Radio Blitz Callers are prepared to discuss the show’s topics, 4) monitor the show and the discussions, and 5) report your successes back to the campaign.
Paid for by the Trump campaign:
I mean, it’s working so well for the Trump spokespeople, especially those propaganda artists embedded on a certain cable network. Why not organize non-professionals to give the same talking points and disseminate them in a way that appears “organic”. LOL, I kid. If you’ve run into these people in a comment section or forums you know they have the campaign message down so exactly as to be a screaming siren of talking points.
So when you hear screaming tinfoil about fake polls and accusations that Hillary Clinton committed treason even though she was actually cleared, you needn’t worry that your entire country has gone insane.
This is the last gasp of a sinking campaign trying to fool the voters with media propaganda dished out by “volunteers”. | 0 |
Archives Michael On Television Barack Obama Is Wrong: 18 Facts Which Prove That Illegal Immigration Is An Absolute Nightmare For The U.S. Economy By Michael Snyder, on May 11th, 2011
Barack Obama has declared that “ immigration reform is an economic imperative “, and is promising to do his best to get an immigration bill pushed through Congress this year. But will “legalizing” all of the illegal immigration that has taken place over the last several decades improve the struggling U.S. economy or will it actually make our economic problems worse? One of the favorite tricks of top politicians is to promise that the economy is going to improve if we just support what it is that they are currently pushing. Hopefully the Americans people will not buy the nonsense that Obama is spewing. The truth is that Barack Obama is wrong about the economic impact of illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants don’t do jobs that Americans “don’t want” to do. A million Americans recently showed up to apply for a job at McDonald’s. That is how desperate Americans are for work these days. Please don’t try to tell me that there aren’t millions of Americans out there that would not pick fruit for minimum wage. The millions upon millions of illegal immigrants in this country are stealing jobs, they are depressing wages in a whole host of industries and they are a huge factor in the erosion of the middle class. Millions of middle class American families can’t afford to provide for their families anymore and are losing their homes, drowning in debt or going bankrupt. Rather than what Barack Obama is proposing (which is to essentially “legalize” illegal immigration), we need an immigration policy that makes sense and that protects American jobs.
Before we go any further, it is important for me to make a few points. It is not a bad thing that people want to come to this nation from another country. A lot of people that want to come to the United States are really hard working and have really solid character. This nation has a long tradition of immigrants arriving to build a better life here. At different times this country will need different levels of immigration, but we will always need new immigrants. People on one side of a border are not more “valuable” than people on another side of a border. There is a reason why our founding fathers believed that “all men are created equal”. In every nation on earth there are really wonderful people. We should love all men, women and children no matter where they were born and no matter what they look like. God created us all and He loves us all dearly.
The reason I went into all that is because of the way politics is played in America in 2011. The moment that anyone suggests that there might be a problem with illegal immigration they are immediately branded with all kinds of horrible labels. To put a horrible label on someone that is completely and totally untrue just to score political points is absolutely despicable.
The funny thing is that some of the organizations that denounce others the loudest should actually be examining themselves. For example, one of the largest pro-illegal immigration organizations is called “La Raza”, which literally means “ The Race ” (as if we all couldn’t figure it out). Perhaps it is time for them to come up with a new name.
Look, we all have to start learning to love each other. If not, our society is going to continue to break down.
A majority of the American people (yes, that is what the polls show) are not against illegal immigration because they “hate” another group of people. Rather, they just want all immigrants to go through the “front door” and they want the government to be sensitive to changing economic conditions.
The sad truth is that the U.S. government has absolutely refused to secure the U.S. border with Mexico for decades, and this has allowed millions upon millions of criminals, drug dealers and gang members to cross freely into the United States. In addition, by refusing to secure the border we have allowed new diseases to spread unchecked into this country.
Meanwhile, the law abiding people that would like to get into this country legally are put through absolute hell. I used to practice law and I have filled out immigration forms. The process is a complete and total nightmare.
So we have been making it really easy for law breakers to sneak in the back door of our country and we have been making it really hard for law abiding people to get in the front door.
What in the world could be wrong about wanting to fix that?
Once many illegal immigrants arrive in the United States they either try to make a living legally (by directly competing with blue collar American workers for jobs and driving their wages down) or illegally by selling drugs or being involved in other kinds of criminal activity.
Apparently Barack Obama believes that this kind of behavior should be rewarded with a “path to citizenship”.
The vast majority of illegal immigrants pay absolutely no federal or state income taxes and they never intend to. At the same time, they seem more than happy to take advantage of the free social services and benefits offered to them. In fact, stories of how “good” life in America is just encourages more and more immigrants to come to the United States illegally.
We need an immigration policy that insists that everyone come in through the front door.
Is there anyone out there that cannot agree with that?
We also need to set immigration levels that our economy can handle.
Right now our economy is struggling. Millions upon millions of Americans are out of work. 44 million Americans are on food stamps. 47 million Americans are living in poverty. We just can’t take in a whole lot of extra workers right now.
You would think that would just be common sense.
But instead, Barack Obama wants to grant amnesty to all of the illegal immigrants that are already here and put them on a path to citizenship.
Wow – do you think that might embolden millions more illegal immigrants to come flooding in?
Barack Obama is against a border fence. He says we don’t need it.
Meanwhile, thousands more illegal immigrants pour into this country every single day.
Barack Obama supports all of the “sanctuary cities” that have openly declared that they are not going to enforce our immigration laws.
So where do you think illegal immigrants are going to flock to? The truth is that word about these “sanctuary cities” gets around really fast. If you live in one of these cities, then you probably know all about it.
If Barack Obama gets his way, nobody will be breaking our immigration laws because essentially there will not be any more immigration laws.
Not that George W. Bush was any better. He was an absolute disaster on immigration as well.
The truth is that our immigration policy has been slowly eroding the U.S. middle class for many decades.
But according to Barack Obama , we desperately need to implement his “immigration reform” plan for the good of the middle class….
“One way to strengthen the middle class in America is to reform the immigration system, so that there is no longer a massive underground economy that exploits a cheap source of labor while depressing wages for everybody else.”
What a joke. The reality is that illegal immigration hurts that U.S. middle class and it is severely damaging to the U.S. economy. Because of illegal immigration, every single day wages are lost, taxes don’t get collected, hospitals provide “free health care” for which they are never paid, huge criminal gangs of foreigners are roaming our streets and the cost of providing social services to illegal aliens is slowly bankrupting state and local governments.
The following are 18 facts which prove that illegal immigration is an absolute nightmare for the U.S. economy….
#1 Illegal immigrants take jobs away from American citizens. According to a review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data, legal and illegal immigrants gained over a million additional jobs between 2008 and 2010 even as millions of American citizens were losing their jobs during that same time period.
#2 The majority of our immigrants now sneak in through the “back door” that the federal government purposely leaves open. Thanks to the negligence of the federal government, far more people move into the United States illegally than come in through the legal immigration process. This has got to change.
#3 Illegal immigrants generally don’t pay taxes. The vast majority of illegal aliens would never even dream of paying income taxes, but Mexicans living in America send billions upon billions of dollars out of the United States and back to Mexico every single year.
#4 Although illegal aliens pay next to nothing in taxes, they have no problem receiving tens of billions of dollars worth of free education benefits, free health care benefits, free housing assistance and free food stamp benefits. Many communities in the United States now openly advertise that they will help illegal aliens with these things.
#5 The cost of educating the children of illegal immigrants is staggering. It is estimated that U.S. taxpayers spend $12,000,000,000 a year on primary and secondary school education for the children of illegal immigrants.
#6 Thanks to illegal immigration, California’s overstretched health care system is on the verge of collapse . Dozens of California hospitals and emergency rooms have shut down over the last decade because they could not afford to stay open after being endlessly swamped by illegal immigrants who were simply not able to pay for the services that they were receiving. As a result, the remainder of the health care system in the state of California is now beyond overloaded. This had led to brutally long waits, diverted ambulances and even unnecessary patient deaths. Sadly, the state of California now ranks dead last out of all 50 states in the number of emergency rooms per million people.
#7 It was estimated that there were approximately 7.7 million illegal aliens employed by U.S. employers during 2008. How much better would our economy look if all of those jobs were being filled by American workers?
#8 The region along the U.S./Mexico border is now an open war zone. Just across the U.S. border, the city of Juarez, Mexico is considered to be one of the most dangerous cities on the entire planet because of the brutal drug war being waged there. In fact, Juarez has now become the murder capital of the western hemisphere . Much of that violence has begun to spill over into areas of the southwestern United States.
For example, a while back NPR described one incident in the Juarez Valley that involved American citizens….
A couple of weeks ago, gunmen in the Juarez Valley killed the Mexican relative of a Fort Hancock high school student. When the student’s family in Fort Hancock heard about it, they crossed the border at 10 a.m. to see the body, and took the student with them.
“By 10:30, they had stabbed the relatives that went with him, which included his grandparents, with an ice pick,” says school superintendent Jose Franco. “My understanding is that the gentleman is like 90 years old, and they poked his eyes out with an ice pick. I believe those people are still in intensive care here in a hospital in the U.S.”
#9 A substantial percentage of young illegal immigrants end up in gangs. U.S. authorities say that there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs operating inside the United States. According to federal statistics, these 1 million gang members are responsible for up to 80% of the violent crimes committed in the U.S. each year. Latino gangs made up primarily of illegal aliens are responsible for much of this violence.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies , some of the most notorious gangs in the country are made up almost entirely of illegal immigrants….
“Gang investigators in Virginia estimate that 90% of the members of MS-13, the most notorious immigrant gang, are illegal immigrants.”
#10 The “18th Street Gang” is certainly giving MS-13 a run for their money. It is believed that the 18th Street Gang has thousands of members in the city of Los Angeles alone. In fact, the gang has become so notorious that there are even rumors that some police officers in Los Angeles simply will not venture into the areas most heavily controlled by the 18th Street gang.
The following is what Wikipedia says about the 18th Street Gang….
A US Justice Department report from 2009 estimates that the 18th Street gang has a membership of some 30,000 to 50,000 with 80% of them being illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America and is active in 44 cities in 20 states. Its main source of income is street-level distribution of cocaine and marijuana and, to a lesser extent, heroin and methamphetamine. Gang members also commit assault, auto theft, carjacking, drive-by shootings, extortion, homicide, identification fraud, and robbery.
#11 The “drug war” in northern Mexico is one gigantic bloodbath. The Mexican government says that as many as 28,000 people have been slaughtered by the drug cartels since 2007. A very significant percentage of those deaths have happened in areas right along the U.S. border, and yet our federal government still sees no reason to get serious about border security.
#12 It is an open secret that Mexican drug cartels are openly conducting military operations inside the United States. The handful of border patrol agents that we have guarding the border are massively outgunned and outmanned.
One agent who patrols the border and who asked to remain anonymous told Fox News the following….
“To say that this area is out of control is an understatement.”
A different federal agent put it this way in an email to Fox News ….
“Every night we’re getting beaten like a pinata at a birthday party by drug, alien smugglers.”
#13 Federal border officials say that Mexican drug cartels have not only set up shop on U.S. soil, but they are actually maintaining lookout bases in strategic locations in the hills of southern Arizona. If you go to Arizona today, there are actually signs that have been put up by the federal government warning American citizens not to venture into certain wilderness routes that are used by Mexican drug cartels to bring in drugs.
#14 The drug war being waged on both sides of the border is so violent that it is almost unimaginable. For example, one very prominent Mexican assassin known as “the soupmaker” has confessed that he made approximately 300 bodies disappear by dissolving them in acid baths. But right now there is essentially nothing that is preventing the next “soupmaker” from crossing the U.S. border and moving into your neighborhood.
#15 Arizona police are being openly warned by the Mexican drug cartels that if they try to interfere with the drug traffic in their area that they will be “taken out” by drug cartel snipers .
#16 While the U.S. military endlessly hunts for “members of al-Qaeda” in the caves of Afghanistan and on the streets of Iraqi cities, a very real threat has been building just south of the border. Over the past 15 to 20 years, Hezbollah has set up operations all over Mexico, Central America and South America . Hezbollah is reportedly making a lot of money in the drug trade and in trafficking illegal aliens. Sadly, our government is largely ignoring this.
#17 Each year, it costs the states billions of dollars to incarcerate illegal immigrant criminals that should have never been allowed into the country in the first place. It is estimated that illegal aliens make up approximately 30 percent of the population in federal, state and local prisons and that the total cost of incarcerating them is more than $1.6 billion annually .
#18 The drug cartels and the gangs always seem to be a couple steps ahead of our agents along the border. Approximately 75 tunnels along the U.S. border with Mexico have been discovered by law enforcement authorities in the last four years alone.
How much do you think all of this crime, gang violence and drug cartel activity is costing our economy?
Why won’t the federal government do what the Constitution requires and secure the border?
Oh, but Barack Obama says that he has a plan.
He says that he is going to save the day.
The following is how Barack Obama describes his plan…
“We are not going to ship back 12 million people, we’re not going to do it as a practical matter. We would have to take all our law enforcement that we have available and we would have to use it and put people on buses, and rip families apart, and that’s not who we are, that’s not what America is about. So what I’ve proposed… is you say we’re going to bring these folks out of the shadows. We’re going to make them pay a fine, they are going to have to learn English, they are going to have to go to the back of the line…but they will have a pathway to citizenship over the course of 10 years.”
So how many illegal immigrants do you think are going to step forward to pay a fine?
One percent?
How many of them do you think are going to show up for English classes?
Who is going to make them do it?
Obama?
Are we going to have law enforcement officials running around trying to collect fines from illegal immigrants and trying to get them to attend their English lessons?
According to Obama, the millions upon millions of illegal immigrants that are in this country are going to be glad to willingly do the following….
1) Admit they broke the law
2) Pay back taxes and a fine
3) Learn English
4) Be willing to undergo background checks before starting the legalization process
Those four points are taken directly from Obama’s plan.
So what are illegal immigrants going to do when this plan is passed?
99 percent of them are going to laugh and they are just going to keep on doing what they have been doing.
Large numbers of illegal immigrants are already enjoying the “high life” in the dozens of “sanctuary cities” across the United States.
The following is how the Ohio Jobs & Justice PAC defines sanctuary cities….
Generally, sanctuary policies instruct city employees not to notify the federal government of the presence of illegal aliens living in their communities. The policies also end the distinction between legal resident aliens and illegal aliens–so illegal aliens often benefit from taxpayer funded government services and programs too.
Sounds like a good deal to me.
Can I sign up for that plan?
After all, who wouldn’t want to earn all income tax-free and yet enjoy unlimited government services?
Today we are being told that we need to make life as comfortable as possible for the waves of illegal immigrants that are coming in. In fact, Barack Obama says that all of us need to make sure that our kids are learning how to speak Spanish ….
“I don’t understand when people are going around worrying about, we need to have English only. They want to pass a law, we just, we want English only…Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English, I agree with this. But understand this, instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English, they’ll learn English, you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.”
All of this is utter insanity.
The cold, hard reality of the matter is that we have tightly secured the border between South Korea and North Korea for over 50 years and we could secure our own borders if we really wanted to.
But instead, we continue to leave our border with Mexico completely wide open. Thousands of criminals, gang members and drug pushers continue to come in completely unchecked every single day.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have to subject ourselves to some of the most humiliating “security measures” imaginable before we are even allowed to get on to an airplane.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it? Don’t Buy A House In 2011 Before You Read These 20 Wacky Statistics About The U.S. Real Estate Crisis » Gary2
I am against all illegal immigration. There are more progressives that agree with my point of view on this but we are a minority.
The reason we have illegal immigration is because the scum bag rich and corporations want to pay poverty wages and this has worsened the income and wealth inequality. It has allowed all wages for Americans to be driven down.
This problem could literally be solved in a month if the politicians wanted it fixed. Very few cross form North to South Korea so it can be done. The reason it is not fixed is simply because the rich business owners and corporations buy the politicians to get their way.
There is absolutely nothing positive about illegal immigration for regular folks, only the rich.
We already have way too many low/no skill Americans and many skilled who are grossly underemployed. We also have way too many people in this country period. When is the last time you drove down any road and said that you wished there was more people/cars clogging up the road ways.
It is a myth that there are jobs Americans will not do, they just will not do them for a dollar an hour so some greedy scum business can get rich by exploiting them.
Michael I am with you on this one! Michael
Gary:
I have to say I am a little surprised. I am glad we are in agreement!
Michael Terry
They will leave when forced to. This will not happen at the hands of government people.
How do you deport 12 (more like 30) million people? One busload at a time. We should not worry about “ripping apart families”? These people created the problem. Take your anchor babies with you. The current interpretation of the 14th amendment is a court perversion (notice a pattern with the judiciary?). This amendment was intended to confer citizenship on the offspring of freed slaves, who otherwise could never be citizens. randy
those “security measures” won’t be limited to airports. wait until the next major phony “terrorist” attack on us soil. try getting on the interstate highway system after the next one! a bomb in the shoe…in the underwear…ya right! Mark
You wrote: “The millions upon millions of illegal immigrants in this country are stealing jobs, they are depressing wages in a whole host of industries and they are a huge factor in the erosion of the middle class”.
It’s not just ourselves at this time of economic chaos that we should think of. What about our children and grandchildren? They are going to have to deal with the descendents of these illegal invaders, not just in economic terms but in social terms as well, as the invaders’ offspring become radicalized politically and then become more and more demanding, hostile, and belligerent toward the European-American population. 2012 the last chance for america
read ron pauls position on illegals… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul and vote for him..he is the last chance… Hans Kohler
Why it is imperative to have a massive immigration into the United States now:
Americans -mainly the ones of European ancestry- are indeed the offspring failed generations. In fact, the states involved in eugenics during the first decades of the twentieth century did not strictly enforce the sterilization laws on those people (low IQs, retards, deformed individuals, disease carries, imbeciles, etc). In fact, their ancestors were labeled as undesirables in Europe and expelled from their native countries.
Consequently, the following generations are the best evidence that defective genes has been transmitted from one breed to the next and worst of all, the chances that their descendants’ DNA carrying a more complex sequence of these defective genes are 100% guaranteed – they can be confirmed by performing scientific tests (i.e. bizarre mutations that will make these individuals being categorized as subhumans).
Besides that, never forget the following: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)
Therefore, the only way to sustain this unproductive generation of Americans (approximately 80% of the entire population of the United States) is by allowing a massive immigration of people from elsewhere in order to be assimilated into the system, so government can heavily tax these newcomers.
America will need more than a hundred million foreigners to help paying the upcoming cost related to the care of these subhumans. Bob
I used to live in Southwest Phoenix for a while. I am glad I don’t anymore. If it isn’t a sanctuary city, it is very close. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is Public Enemy Number One in most of the media here (and yes, there are chain gangs with shotguns, too.) The reality of the situation is that America had the nicest house on the block, that we worked hard to keep up, and it is now being destroyed a little at a time, every day. Our politicians have lost the political will to deport those people who cannot or will not obey the rules of our country, and do not have the guts to kill (yes I said kill) those who repeatedly commit violent felonies. Mexico’s politicians are worse than hypocrites. Ask a Guatemalan how easy it is to sneak across Mexico’s “other” border.
To me, there is almost no point in fighting Muslim terrorism half a world away, if we will not fight violent armed felons right here. Jane
..as the clowns in the house live large, we as a people are heading toward Mad Max. KB
It seems as if the proverbial barn door is trying to be closed after every illegal has left the building.
I regularly have contact with multiple Hispanics, and they are all generally wonderful, wonderful people with one major exception: This generation’s disrespect is truly astounding, not to mention the crap that they hide behind. If the young ones do something that is wrong and get caught, they start screaming, “You’re a racist, you’re a racist” to whomever has caught them. What a crock, but they’ve learned that it works in our politically correct society.
I truly believe the US government should legalize drugs immediately and monitor them the same way prescription drugs are monitored and take the crime out of it. When Prohibition was instituted, criminal activity flourished. Now with drugs being illegal, the evils that are being committed are beyond belief. And for whatever reason, the American people are committed to indulging in drugs…which is truly beyond my understanding.
The way it is going now, I can easily visualize a United States that is merely an extension of Mexico and South America. You have to wonder if that is what they intend anyway. I give it ten years before Spanish is the official language of the U.S. Singapura
The US has rapidly become a rancid den of whiners that blame everyone but themselves for all the “hardships” they have to endure. They keep buying Chinese goods at low prices and complain if the manufacturers prefer to have their sweatshops set up in China rather than the US. In reality, who in the US (except “illegal immigrants” would want to work 10 hours a day for 2 bucks an hour? Then there’s the outrage against the banks that “sold” the US economy and enriched themselves. Yet at the hard of the economic crisis is the fact that Joe Smoe just had to own a house that was at least as big as his neighbors, preferably bigger. Never mind the fact that he probably couldn’t afford his mortgage in the long run. And every penny that was used to pay of the housing loan was immediately borrowed back to buy that big screen TV everyone was talking about. Renting and saving is for losers. Then there’s the group that cries about all the “illegals” and “criminals” that “poor over the border with Mexico”. As if there aren’t enough criminals inside the US! Most of the poor immigrants are currently mowing your lawns, washing your dishes and cleaning your toilets. Again jobs that “true” Americans feel are beneath them. When is the US going to wake up and take personal responsibility instead of blaming the rest of the world? Just Me
you deport 20 million people by making it public that if you’re here illegally, you have 30 days to get out of the country, if after 30 days, you’re caught, you’ll go thru living hell for 60 days before you’re deported,bring our troops home and put them on our borders after word gets out and thousands are picked up and put thru the process, the borders will be run down with people leaving, other countries do not have this problem.Stop using our cops for just cash cow jobs, writing traffic tickets ect, let them enforce the laws. If lilly white english people are in a car, you usually assume they’re from here, but when spanish speaking people are pulled over, you find out where they are from and what they’re doing here, stop the politically correct crap and inforce our laws. If I was wandering around in the middle of Iran or China, their cops would have no problem asking me where i was from. Mark McBee
MS-13 is bad ass and I don’t mean it in a good way. DM
It’s about cheap labor and corruption at the local, state federal levels. Big and small business like illegal workers. They are cheaper than legal workers. If leaders are not willing to enforce our laws, they need to be FIRED. I am not talking elections. I am talking impeachment. When Americans get mad and demand impeachment of corrupt government officials who thumb their noses at our laws, the fear of God will finally set in.
No elections, just straight impeachment. emma
as if it wasnt a night mare already, but this is a great article.
It is hard to try and trade this market that is manipulated I reckon.
The guy from FFT is oz is good, I been following him for a while and he called the market crash in 2008.
I belong to his membership site, its awesome and has live videos and everything to follow along. Makes it easy to take money from the market even if you are a newbie!.
His new monthly trading club is opening tomorrow, and over at :- Matt
You keep mentioning how insane things are. I’m not sure that you understand the gravity of the situation. When an empire goes into decline with clearly insane policies like we have, then it is a time of great danger. Quite literally, the United States might not be here in two years.
Historically, the probably of war when an empire goes into decline in the presence of powerful rivals is 6 out of 7. One historian even gives more signs to watch – the three Es: Empires in decline, economic volatility and ethnic conflict.
The ethnic conflict to watch is war with Israel. Currently, there is a very high probability of war with Israel before the end of summer. This war will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
So this website is giving you signs that a massive collapse of the present world order is close. Buy American
I usually agree with the articles produced, but this one is very biased and doesn’t take into consideration many important points. First of all, many illegals are very law abiding residents who would never do anything to hurt a fly in our country. They respect our laws and have TIN numbers so they can pay their taxes. I doubt many of them cheat on their taxes or try to find loopholes. Secondly, I have known several illegal immigrants and they were working jobs that other Americans didn’t want. I talked once to a fast food restaurant owner and he said a typical American teen or young adult lasted about 1-2 weeks. They were lazy, didn’t want to do anything more than required, wasted time, couldn’t keep their pants up, had poor manners, showed up late or not at all, etc. A foreign worker was alway on time, respectful, did more than required, etc. He often lost money with American workers while foreigners made him profitable.
So the problem isn’t the aliens, it is our society, a large percentage of the lower class doesn’t have the basic job skills necessary to keep an employer in business. Would you want to be served by someone like that young woman who jumped up on the BK counter? I’ve eaten at innercity restaurants where the American workers didn’t give a crap about anyone – In one case my whole family got food poisoning. If we were to get rid of all the immigrants, we would see a lot of business failures and probably wouldn’t find Americans willing to work the jobs these foreigners worked.
There is also one other important factor. For any society to maintain itself, there needs to be a fertility rate of at least 2.2. Americans produce 1.6 kids per family. Muslim (legal) immigrants average 8 kids per family. In 50-80 years our country could become 35% Muslim – what would this do to our congress? Latins tend to have larger families and at least can counterbalance some of the Muslim influence. I would much rather have a Catholic Latin neighbor than a questionable Muslim Yemeni neighbor…
I believe we need to have a balanced immigration policy as was proposed about 10 years ago. Let immigrants who can prove they have been good “non-citizens” pay any taxes they owe and come on board. Any showing any type of illegal activity – deport them immediately. Then, after that point make a very clear immigration policy to prevent future illegals from coming in. (With the economy collapsing, this may no longer be a problem). Silver Bean
Unfortunately this author rants a lot and offers little substance for preventing more illegal entry. In addition there were no solutions offered on how we send home those who are here now illegally. The article whips up emotions but offers no real solutions. Just like last September, I believe it was the first Friday in September, Bill O’Riley interviewed Sarah Palin. He asked her THREE times what she proposed to do with people who are here now illegally. She offered NO solutions. Why? No politician wants to touch that hot potato. My suggestions: Finish the fence, bring back the troops and station them along the border with “shoot to kill orders”. (Try entering Mexico, North Korea, Iran, and a host of other countries illegally and see what happens to you). As for the ones here, people must offer proof of citizenship or a “green card” before receiving any social services, when pulled over at a traffic stop, and as a condition for employment. If they cannot offer proof then they can go the hell home. As for the sanctuary cities, the elected officials and city, county, state, and federal employees should be required to report suspected illegals. Anyone here illegaly is breaking the law and should be prosecuted and sent the hell home. How about using Americorp “volunteers” to help with the process? Matt
Gary, we finally agree on something. But, I don’t hate the rich just for being rich. I hate people who cheat, lie, and break the law rich or poor. If you won powerball I would not despise you nor want to tax your winnings. Xander cross
All is going as planned. What are you all upset about? You all voted for this several decades ago staring with the kkk to ms 13. it’s all about gang violence. I wonder if Michael watches gangland that comes on spike tv. Very good and informative show. I think Michael should do an article about that show. American
Below are economic studies from the Immigration Policy Center:
“Tax Day would seem to be an appropriate time to inject some bottom-line reality into the long-running debate over whether or not immigrants in the United States “pay their own way” as taxpayers. As with nearly all aspects of the immigration debate, the controversy over how immigrants impact the public treasury is far too often dominated by emotionally charged rhetoric rather than hard facts. Many of these much-needed facts are provided in a forthcoming report from the Immigration Policy Center by Stephen Moore, Senior Economics Writer at the Wall Street Journal and former director of Fiscal Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and Richard Vedder, Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2005 Current Population Survey and other sources, Moore and Vedder find that immigrants not only pay their own way in taxes, but play a hefty role in shoring up the teetering Social Security system, and provide a fiscal windfall to U.S. taxpayers by tending to come to the United States during their prime working years—after the costs of their education and upbringing have been borne by their home countries.”
“Immigrants Pay More in Taxes Than They Use in Services Over Their Lifetimes: Depending on skills and level of education, each immigrant pays, on average, between $20,000 and $80,000 more in taxes than he or she consumes in public benefits.” William
Remember Carter’s amnesty, followed by amnesty from Ronnie Raygun?? This allowing foreigners to infiltrate America has been deliberate and planned. The result is that the white, Anglo Saxon, Christian way of life in America is being destroyed. WHO benefits??? Your masters, of course. Hint, they are not what they say they are……..they destroyed Russia and they will destroy America, turning what was the home of the free and the brave into a nation of slaves. karen
A few years ago Bush met with the president of Mexico and Canada, the reason for this is to combine this to countries to for The North American Union, open borders, research for your selves, all in the Grand Game of a NWO. gohome
Immigrants were very important when countries were young and developing. At that time developing countries needed cheap labor. People that were so depressed about their current standard of living would leave to countries like the United States and Australia and Canada for a better life. Now none of these countries needs more people. The message is loud and clear “We do not want you” and “you are not welcomed here”.
This article is missing one big part. The biggest winners of the drug trade are the banks. Wachovia was caught not too long ago washing money for the cartels. They got a slap on the hand. SmokeDogg
But I love Immigrant women….. Sighs..
Muy Caliente!!! SmokeDogg
The MS 13 are here as an NWO plot to start a Race war between us Blacks and Hispanics. The Racial Tribe brainwashing must cease. Bill
http://www.humanists.net/pdhutcheon/humanist%20articles/Multiculturalism.htm Patriot Alice
With millions of immigrants depressing wages, the Corporations will have a larger pool of cheap labor to choose from, besides China, India etc… We’ve exported our wealth and imported the world’s poverty through globalization. Jane
Hans is right. I just read an article “Can a society be mentally ill”? Add to that illness: vaccines, fluoride, GMO fake food etc…yep, we have a big problem. David Gurney
Obama believes that borders are just book stores. Brett
Why are you blaming illegal immigrants for problems that are, at it’s heart, the fault of the US govt? e.g. free education, free health care, etc. How about getting rid of those programs instead? Paul
You can’t take somebody’s job away. A job is given to you – by the employer.
So, book the employer and put him in jail for a year or two when he employs illegal immigrants. Paul David
President Obama’s immigration reform proposals are simply an attempt to gain Hispanic votes for the 2012 election.
Sadly, our leaders don’t make decisions based on what’s good for our country… they make them based on how they will help them get reelected.
David Free Food 2Go
With such a high jobless rate, you would think that our leaders would do everything possible to protect jobs for American citizens. Sadly that is not the case.
The original role of the U.S. government was to SUPPORT states, but this administration is fighting against states who are trying to protect their borders, their jobs and their economy. David
Politicians will continue to say what sounds good to the people, but the real political strength in this country is the corporate business world that pays the politicians. Corporate thinks it needs the illegal immigrants to keep wages low, so nothing really is going to change.
checkpoints on interstate enterances and border walls to keep you in….. Crystal
I live in the southwest part of the United States and I can tell you illegal immigration here is a major problem.
For many jobs you need to speak Spanish. This includes jobs such as housekeeping. This is because of the illegal aliens who have these positions. I know. I tried to get a housekeeping job and was told I would have to learn their language.
I no longer feel sorry for illegal aliens like I did in the past. I don’t care if they are hard workers. They don’t care about the American citizen who is unemployed and homeless.
Also, many of them are on the social welfare system. Evenutally, I see the social welfare system collapsing and that safety net will not be there for American citizens who need it.
If we ever hope to repair the damange done to the economic system in the US, one of the factors that needs to be addressed is illegal immigration.
To Hans Kohler: You are kidding, right? Bill Meyer
Another aspect of the problem: We the Sheeple LOVE “our” socialism benefits. You can’t have universal access to socialism benefits without setting up a massive police state to try and keep “them” from getting the benefits, too. (certainly when facing national bankruptcy) Dismantling the social welfare state would do much do decrease the attraction for these aliens. Here in Oregon listeners complain about having to jump through the police state drivers license process –“And if we have to, why aren’t those darn Mexicans doing it, too?”. Wrong question…Better to ask “Why are you allowing the USA to force YOU to jump through police state hoops?” One criticism on the post – the focus on all the drug cartel violence…what triggers this, and the profit motive? Yep, state interference and prohibition. These are state-created crimes and conditions. Crystal
Oh! One more thing.
This was a very good article. I have been fighting against illegal immigration for years and I’m glad that this article lists facts that can be used to stop and reverse illegal immigration.
Keep up the good work! VegasBob
Few remember that in 1986, a bi-partisan immigration reform bill (Simpson-Mazzoli) was passed that granted amnesty to several million illegals who were in this country as of 1/1/1982.
So what America got as a reward for amnesty was an exponential increase in the number of illegals.
Very few native-born Americans seem to understand that both political parties want a continued influx of illegals.
Democrats view the illegals as a source of votes that can be cheaply bought for the cost of a few social programs.
Republicans view the illegals as a source of cheap labor that can be used to force down working class wages so that CEOs and their cronies can keep the mega-million$ in bonuses and stock options flowing. hunter
They should be given 30 days to vacate, after which a bounty of $500. will be placed for each one turned in. After 6 months the bounty will be raised to $2000. and a mandatory sentence of 10 years hard labor will apply. Lets see if that thins them out, if not I have lots of ideas. Ohh and most importantly lets call for the impeachment of Obomba. liberranter
The vast majority of illegal immigrants pay absolutely no federal or state income taxes and they never intend to. At the same time, they seem more than happy to take advantage of the free social services and benefits offered to them. In fact, stories of how “good” life in America is just encourages more and more immigrants to come to the United States illegally.
No one, American citizen or immigrant, illegal or otherwise, should be paying ANY form of tax, period. Conversely, these “bennies” that the illegals enjoy and that serve as the bait for their crossing the border in the dead of night and setting up house here, wouldn’t exist, as no one would be paying taxes used to unjustly enrich anyone at anyone else’s expense.
Simply stated, without all these taxpayer-furnished bennies, Juan the Wetback and his one hundred relatives would have no reason to cross the Rio Grande unless they were planning on earning every penny of their bread by themselves, without the American taxpayer’s stolen dollars to assist. (And should Juan and his familia be tempted to turn to some form of organized crime, a well-armed American citizenry would put an abrupt and permanent end to any such scam.)
#1 Illegal immigrants take jobs away from American citizens.
So do legal immigrants. Don’t forget about the Reigning State-Corporate Establishment’s gift to itself called the “H-1B visa program.”
#11 The “drug war” in northern Mexico is one gigantic bloodbath …
#12 It is an open secret that Mexican drug cartels are openly conducting military operations inside the United States.
That the Mexican drug cartels are conducting military operations inside of U.S. sovereign territory should only surprise someone who has been living in a cave or in a coma for the last twenty years. With all of the imperial legions deployed in wars of conquest abroad, there is no one left at home to actually DEFEND THE UNITED STATES ITSELF other than a handful of lightly armed patriots ( real patriots, not the Fox News-viewing, state-worshiping fascists defined by the MSM.)
As for the WoD itself, we’re all aware of the very simple solution to that: complete decriminalization of ALL “controlled substances.” Of course since the both the U.S. government and the Drug Cartels, bound up in a symbiotic relationship. are reaping HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of dollars in profit off of this bloody criminal enterprise, such a common-sense approach is the last thing either of them want to see implemented. Ron in Colorado
We should have made Joe Arpio head of Homeland Security. We should build a Marine Sniper training base on that border. (let your mind fill in the blanks) I believe that Mr sotoreo (alias Obama) will make this country what it once was, A vast barron wasteland! Fed Up
Michael,
Thanks for the great article and organized info with links. The consequences of massive immigration (both illegal and legal) are bringing our country down super quickly. These immigrants are the poorest, most unskilled and uneducated of Mexico’s society. Basically we are subsidizing Mexico’s poor. Hispanics are now the majority population under 18 years of age in California. This is mostly due to illegals and their anchor babies. Over 5,000 illegals were caught voting in Colorado’s last election.
Question is always asked, “How do you deport 12-20 million illegals?”
The easiest way to deport them is to stop ALL the incentives that bring them over here—they got here by themselves, they will get back to Mexico by themselves once the incentives are gone:
–Stop all welfare, free education, and health care benefits–Stop the enticement of birth right citizenship for all their anchor babies.–Crack down with severe fines and/or jail time to all businesses and landlords that hire and provide housing to them.–Stop being a slave to pollitical correctness, and speak out in your communities–we are too afraid of being called racists, so we don’t show up.
With these enticements gone they will stop coming, and those here will go home on their own—except the gangs which we are stuck with for a LONG time, and will probably only get worse—the consequences of our supidity. bobi
The cause of the economic crisis is NOT because of illegal immigrants. It is with the blatant spending in our government. What does it cost to operate the White House totally for one 24 hour period? The Congress, when they retire, receive the same amount of their salary plus their spouse gets $125,000.00 and this is per year, for life. They also do not pay into Social Security and have a medical plan, paid for by the govt. Nancy Pelosi has her own personal jet, which is owned by the government, to take her home to San Francisco every week and back to DC. The fuel cost is around $100,000.00 per trip. And who pays for all of this? WE DO, taxpayer money for these people to live way above what they need. Think about it. If you have enough money, you can lobby congress and get whatever you want. The big chemical and pharmaceutical corporations have made marijuana illegal and keep it that way by lobbying congress. And it goes on and on. We are all pretty much history anyway so I suppose it really doesn’t matter much now. Open your eyes folks, look and SEE what is up and has been for many many years. The human race is very close to extinction.
Both sides would like to embrace the citizenship of Hispanics -simple put as they would become loyal Catholic, bumper children producers and loyal as VOTERS to the political party that gets them settled.
This is not immigration but is a migration.
We need a constitutional amendment on anchor babies. Since they are born with dual citizenship they are still citizens of south, so send them all back.No anchor children,
It is time to beef up the border and not restrict border patrol from real firearms, ie: paint ball guns. Give up Afganastan and put the troops on the border.
Your political party- no mater who is in the white house is all smoke and mirrors. OT^ ZEROtolerance
Interesting though is that countries which do not tolerate illegal immigration such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Australia, China, are doing so much better economically then countries that welcome illegals with open arms. Try to enter one of those countries illegally and see what happens. rickM
If our country wasn’t so badly led, we could turn legal and illegal immagration into our favor.
Wake up America! It’s time…“Join the Revolution” Don’t expect change when you’ve done nothing.
Read “Common Sense 3.1” at ( http://www.revolution2.osixs.org )“Spread the News”
The biggest problems are access to the USA by all sorts of criminals. We need to stop access by smugglers of all stripes. It’s only a matter of time before the same parasite-bombers infesting the Middle East, bring it to our door- steps.
We have much larger problems than immoral hiring practices. This situation is a poster child to the phrase, “the road to Hell is lined with good intentions”. McKinley Morganfield
VegasBob has the money quote:
“Democrats view the illegals as a source of votes that can be cheaply bought for the cost of a few social programs. Republicans view the illegals as a source of cheap labor that can be used to force down working class wages…”
This is what it is all about. Few of the kleptomaniacs & sex trade workers in DC have any real interest in tackling this issue (or any other issue) head on. Most of them hire illegals as nannies, maids, and groundskeepers without having to pay a decent wage or social security & medicare matching funds.
Anyone who looks to DC to solve real problems in the real world is pitifully naive at best. Within 2-5 years the easy credit-debt-deficit bubble will not burst, it will implode. The concept of “too big to fail” will soon become “too big to save”. Ashes, ashes we all fall down. blueskies
If we could trade our welfare generations and alcoholic/drug addicted citizens for a hard working illegal, I’m okay with that. One loser for every hard working illegal. The biggest issue I have with illegal immigration is the Dream Act. The taxpayers send an illegal kid through the 12th grade which is very generous. In Mexico, a family has to pay for this achievement for example. The illegal should apply for citizenship before being given a free ride to college. If this is the only country they’ve known and truly care about it, becoming a citizen should be a priority. It’s total BS that we accept people to do those crap jobs and usher their offspring to compete with our children and let them do it debt free, on the house. In this case, we don’t need no stinking illegals. John
It is too late. The damage has been done. The best thing now is for complete economic and societal collapse, start over on a local level and rebuild. Our government is so corrupt and full of liars, one can expect nothing but more evil comming from Washington. My country abandoned me a long time ago. Look at the wonderful Ronald Reagan, a man whom most Republicans idolize. He signed the amnesty act of 1987, giving eight million illegals, illegal citizenship. It does not matter who you vote for, the game is fixed. Ron Paul won’t make a difference. Prepare for the worst. mark
A couple of items would help with this problem. One would not allow employers to deduct from their taxes the wages of workers that the social security number does not match and the other idea would be to move military bases to the border with Mexico. Turn the border into a training area with live fire training and bombing areas. Not many would try to go through a military base. Get rid of the bases in the cushy parts of the country and move them to train in the desert where most of the wars seem to be fought. This would also stop a lot of the drugs coming from Mexico. This would also save on hiring more border guards to patrol the rural areas that the bases would include. We could sell the land where the old bases were located, it would have to be worth a lot more than desert ranch land. Craig
Anybody who lives in a major metro area knows that the U.S.A. is overpopulated. ALL immigration needs to be stopped, otherwise our standard of living and quality of life will continue to decline. Adam
Amazing you two find agreement on an issue that you tout North Korea as a possible solution. Interlaced
“Americans” are here illegally anyways so what’s the point. When was it alright to come here in the first place? … Forget MS-13, they’re small potatoes when you consider the slaughter of nearly an entire race by European expatriation, then set rules to who should and should not come here? Spare me the patriotism … the “Americans” are complaining because they now want the jobs that they didn’t want before. What gives you the right? … The privilege of your ancestory? Drop dead. neo
Canadian idiot !!! I live on your stinking border and I know that your borders are AIR TIGHT because you do not want Mexicans coming into CANADA !! Your a typical brain dead young puke wanting a free ride for yourselves or for other greasy deadbeats. Grow up. Shiu Hung
I have lived and run my own construction business in the San Francisco Peninsula for over 30 years and over these past few years, my business has been greatly effected by the economic downturn, and especially from the huge influx of “illegal” immigrants from the south of our boarder. I consider myself to be progressive in my political leaning, and now have nearly separated myself from the so-called ‘left’ of this country. The sad thing about this ‘illegal’ immigration issue from the left perspective is that the word ‘illegal’ is always left out when this issue is being discussed and debated. It is obvious that many millions of American workers are being directly effected by the ‘out of control’ entry of ‘illegal’ immigrants, especially from Mexico, and according to President Obama, his logic is that by ‘legalizing’‘illegal’ immigrants, which according to the 2008 census, there are 14 millions ‘illegal’ immmigrants living and working in the US since. The 2011 figure we can bet is a lot higher. Just like everything he says, he doesn’t bother to explain to the American people how will granting Amnesty to ‘illegal’ immigrants, and to completely open the boarder will help our economy? He must think American people are too dumb to figure it out that their own government doesn’t care a damn bit about the citizens of this country. To them, it’s all about their re-elections and insure maximum profits for the corporate fascists that are ruining this great country. Things gets worse by the day, and ‘illegal’ immigrants are now becommng a ‘threat’ to our survival. We need to demand our government to end all international trade policies (NAFTA; GATT; FTA with Panama; Columbia; Korea, etc.)and to demand that big businesses bring back all the factories from overseas. Obama recently told the American people that by giving amnesty and completely open up the US boarder will insure that there will be highly trained and skilled workers from the ‘illegal’ sector, which he claims is sorely lacking in the US currently. That’s deceptive because there are plenty plenty of highly trained and skilled US citizens whom many are out of work. Obama is willing to make Ameican citizens the ‘sacrificial lambs’ by allowing ‘illegal’ immigrants to take away all of our well paying jobs by ‘undercutting’ and ‘falsely competing’ with us. It’s a fact that ‘illegal’ immigrants does not pay income tax and do not pay into our social security system but they are putting a tremendous burden on our social security system; health system; basic societal infranstructure. American citizens who don’t or can’t afford health insurance are turned away at local emergency rooms but ‘illegal’ immigrants are giving full privilage without any consequences. It’s a complete lie and ‘machiavillian’ tactic to claim that Ameican people are too lazy to do work which the ‘illegal’ immigrants are willing to take on. We want the same jobs they are getting but ‘WE WANT LIVING WAGES’ and not willing to undercut our own citizenry. “Illegal” immigration is a genuine problem that we all are facing and we must not be deter from fixing this problem out of fear of being labeled as ‘racists’ or not ‘politically correct’. The US left is living in a myth that our country can continue to carry the current capacity of people, especially from the continuing invasion of ‘illegal’ immigrants from south of the boarder. The US is facing water shortage; fuel and food shortage will also become an issue a lot sooner than we think. Aside from demanding big businesses stop hiring ‘illegal’ immigrants, which is also a must step to take to take on this problem, it is also important that American homeowners STOP hiring ‘illegal’ immigrants for all all their domestic work and to go back to hiring their fellow citizens, and to pay them ‘FAIR’ wages, rather than looking out for ‘cheap labor’ from the illegal immigrants. The solution to the ‘illegal’ immigration problem starts with all of us. Whatever happen to teenagers mowing lawns and doing gardening work for their neighbors, which I remembered from my childhood, was sort of a ‘passage to learning responsibility and work ethics, but from what I can see, even these jobs are taken away by ‘illegal’ immigrants. Everywhere I go these days, I see at least half dozen ‘illegal’ immigrant gardeners on every block in my neighborhood. Many of them are taking on landscaping work that are paid in excess of $600 per job, which if they are not properly licensed per the state’s contractor licencing law, are operating illegally. We need to demand from our state’s licencng board to go after these illegal immigrants whom are taking away these jobs from legitimate licensed landscaping contractors.
Shiu mondobeyondo
Well, as a resident of a border state (Arizona), illegal immigration is an extreme hot-button issue here.
In my view, the best way to attack it is to focus on the causes rather than the effects. Fences won’t help. For every 30 foot fence you build, the illegals have a 31 foot ladder to climb over it. Border Patrol won’t help either. The drug gangs have scouts who use cell phones to tell the “coyotes” (human smugglers) where “La Migra” are, and how to avoid them. These people are determined. They’ll cross miles of desert in 110 degree heat for a better life.
We should focus more on why are they coming here, and try to solve the problem from there.
1) Low wage jobs – low wage to us, but to an illegal, it’s like hitting the jackpot. They will gladly pick lettuce for $3.00 an hour. Back home, they’d make $3.00 a DAY.
2) Money from the illegal drug trade – it is EXTREMELY lucrative, and that’s an understatement! The reason why there is so much bloodshed in Ciudad Juarez, Guadalajara, etc. is because drug cartels are fighting each other for that lucrative American business in L.A., Phoenix, Denver, Des Moines, New York City, Seattle, Minneapolis, etc. etc. Supply and demand. We have the demand (oh do we ever have the demand!!), and the cartels have the supply. They are literally killing each other, and innocent people too, to supply that demand.
Is legalizing drugs the answer? I’m torn on that issue. I do not want to see cocaine sold over the counter at the local Walgreens, but on the other hand, it would greatly reduce the profit incentive of the drug cartels.
Prohibition during the 1920’s is a good example. Al Capone would not have become such a big gangster if alcohol was legal at that time. Likewise, the Zetas and their ilk would not have such an influence if hard drugs were legalized in the U.S. But again, that’s a rather prickly cactus to put your arms around… Red-blooded American
After you, jackass. You live off the productivity and ingenuity of our forefathers you ungrateful sack of shit. Enjoy it while it lasts. Richard
@ Red-blooded American, we live off the productivity and ingenuity of your forefathers???? lol What productivity?? You call torturing Bull’s, making blankets and pottery productive?? You live like animals, you can’t even feed your own people. Thats why you come to America to escape that cesspool called Mexico that your forefathers “productivity” and “ingenuity” has provided. If it wasn’t for the money coming from America you would starve living off your own productivity. Now go back to your Siesta, it’s the one good thing you do best. Manuel
After reading and deciding which “facts” do not apply if the U.S. ended the war on drugs and bring the troops back from overseas, i ended up with 7. And most of them have to deal with NAFTA, corporatism and outsourcing. Although i agree that Obama is completely wrong on this -i do not believe any word he says by the way-, they all come down to an external solution that has nothing to do with “legalizing” them. They will always be the scapegoat for politicians to get what they want and people in need that have been robbed so drastically by their government and their nanny state. rhea
Illegal immigrant populations seem to rise in proportion to Americans on social assistance. Correlation or causation? I figure that illegal immigrants are only doing the work that Americans on social assistance are too proud to do.
Want to do something about illegal immigrants? Make poverty unpleasant so people will choose to work instead of soak off the government. Then, when illegals can’t find work, they will find somewhere else to go.
Outsource your job search to us. Premium job search assistance – http://www.jobwaltz.com Tom
Very good article, well argumented. I found out a some things that I did not know. Good job. Anthony
There is NO “War on Terror”……..The only “war” is on Your RIGHTS, not Terror. Remember the Jan. 2005 PANIC due to a rumor that Chinese with a NUKE had crossed the Mexican border and were headed to blow up Boston. The border is STILL wide open …… so like …. they care about airplanes but NOT about whole cities being NUKED?! http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/26/60minutes/main4831806.shtml Above is a transcript from March 2nd 2009 (rerun on June 21) 60 MINUTES. In brief, the Government acknowledges that it has no control of the border. TONS of drugs and Millions of ILLEGALS enter this country. TONS of cash and TONS of weapons leave this country. They have no way of knowing how many “TERRORISTS” have crossed (IF there IS such a creature) TWO things were of major interest: (1) The Department of Homeland STUPIDITY acknowledges they have no control – therefore, HOW are they going to protect YOU from TERRORISTS, if they cannot stop GANGBANGERS, YARD WORKERS, NANNIES, COOKS from strolling across. (2) The “head” of the Department of Homeland STUPIDITY (and others) tries to blame your RIGHT to keep and bear ARMS for the weapons going south. The only trouble is …….. they showed and talked of MISSILES, HAND GRENADES, BELT FED MACHINES GUNS. Those are weapons STOLEN FROM THE AMERICAN MILITARY. They are not coming from the SEMI-auto Civilian world! They are direct from your Military’s ARMORIES. Not only can your Government NOT PROTECT the borders …. and YOU. The Government CANNOT HANG ON TO IT’S OWN WEAPONS!!! MEANWHILE – Your government cannot stop THESE terrorists ……. just how SAFE is YOUR FAMILY?! To Janet Napolitano and the DHS, What say yee about the footbridges???? - Anthony
You are being TRAINED to SUBMIT …….. The TSA is specifically designed to lull the American Public into passively accepting random, pointless, searches at the whim of the government. Look at them. TSA screeners are being trained to be smiling and polite. WHY? To appear benign and unthreatening as they strip you of your Freedom. The reason they came up with an underwear bomber is the same reason they came up with a shoe bomber. First they wanted to get into your shoes and then they wanted to get into your underwear. After that they want to get into your body. But job one, day one, they want to get into your head. These are stages of humiliation designed to strip you of your dignity. Look at their faces, if YOU seriously believed the next passenger might be an armed and murderously suicidal killer, would you be all relaxed and cheery? If you seriously believed that the next suitcase you open may blow you to Kingdom Come, would you be a Perky Pixie? If you do NOT believe that ……… WHY ARE YOU HERE!? Renee
Way too many people are like dazed and confused cattle… hopeless
heres an idea, pull our troops from the middle east and liberate mexico of the drug lords, help them set up a new goverment, improve their life style so they may not want to come over the boarder to the USA. they still have pride of their mexican roots when they try to adapt in american (can you imagion their pride if they had a home to proud of?) if we could pull this off we would have a great ally. again just a thought, please don’t grade me on the my spelling or grammer. Pottertill Ron
They will more likely to commit crimes, like theft, because they do not have to worry about getting deported.
You forgot to mention that these southern thugs possess weapons at will to kill innocent Americans and Obama is promoting full speed ahead taking away weapons from Americans. Go Figure! Wake-up America! vanessa
It’s funny cause if you really think about it, the citizens that are already living in the united states legally are killing more people than those who are undocumented. Randome-11
What needs to be done?
1) Cut welfare for illegals.
2) Cut social security for illegals.
3) The penalty for employing illegals is jail time.
4) The penalty for housing illegals is jail time.
5) Cut education for illegals.
6) Illegals put in jail are forced to work, so they are no longer a drain to society.
7) Revoque citizenship for childrens of illegals, kick the anchor babies out.
8) Have the army put along the border, destroy anything trying to sneake in with drones, artillery, tanks and daisy-cutter bombs.
9) If illegals comittes heinous crimes against citizens, make them suffer as much as possible.
10) Encrochement into territory by military unites shall be considered acts of war and met with airstrikes.
11) Deport those who organized “sanctuary cities” along with the illegals.
12) Illegals are to be rounded up and sent to worker battalions, where they will work the cost of sending them back to whatever hell-hole they came from. Gunny
Chuck Schumer, Mayor Blumberg, New Yorkers (city and state), and a number of President Obama’s administration have all endorsed “sanctuary states & communities”, amnesty programs, pathways to legal citizenship, AS WELL AS “anti-gun” programs, etc. So they should ALL love this proposal:
1. Make New York state the model “amnesty state”. Build a bus station at all border crossings (Texas, California, Arizona, et al) and have direct bus pathways to New York. All stops along the pathways will be heavily guarded so that these amnesty state seekers CANNOT escape in any other state. Any and all undocumented immigrants who want may go directly to Mr. Schumer’s state to take advantage of all the thousands of excess jobs he and his citizens continue to vote to offer up. (Obviously, most of NY’s citizens WANT this because they keep voting Schumer & Blumberg into office and they are ALWAYS offering up “immigration reform” to legalize the illegal aliens…) I’m sure the social and medical services of New York can easily absorb all the antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, sexually transmitted disease infected and humans with other pre-existing diseases, etc., that will be coming their way. As well, I’m sure the NY prison system can easily handle all the sociopaths, criminals, non-licensed drivers, alcoholics, and other NY-desirable types that will soon be filling the facilities up. Mr. Schumer wants this not only for his state but also for the rest of our country. 2. Mandate that each and every one (who has come into the country via illegal methods) sign an affidavit verifying that they understand that what they did was illegal – a U.S.A FEDERAL FELONY. Fifth Amendment rights do not apply to non-citizens so if they attempt to invoke this “right”, they will be immediately deported and shipped back to the border. By signing the affidavit, they legally admit and agree to become de facto convicted FEDERAL U.S.A. FELONS, subject to a period of parole of no less than 20 years. By signing said documents, they agree to give up certain U.S.A.-guaranteed citizen rights: 1. The right to vote; 2. The right of gun ownership; 3. The rights to any social service monetary benefits until they have worked and paid taxes for a period of no less than 20 years; 4. They agree to be “on a probation period” of no less than a full 20 years. (should they violate this probation, they will immediately be deported BACK to whatever country the immigrated from); 5. They agree to pay a non-negotiable, flat 10% federal income tax of any income or money they make; 6 They agree to 500 hours of community service PER YEAR for the entire period of their probationary period (to help take care of all the other “immigrants” & services); 7. They agree to learn ENGLISH, the U.S.A.NATIONAL language; 8. They agree not to drive drunk, partake of illegal drugs, create public disturbances, run for elected offices, etc.; 9. They agree to meet with parole agents or to have the parole agents come to their domicile to inspect for any contraband included but not limited to drugs, firearms, ammunition, or whatever may be deemed illegal; 10. Any other requirement that may be levied at the time of enactment of Mr. Schumer’s bill into law. If they successfully pass the 20 year probationary period and meet all these requirements, then and only then will they be granted U.S.A. Citizenship.
What? Mr. Schumer, Mayor Blumberg, and B. Hussein Obama Bin Laden thinks this is too radical and too harsh? I thought they all wanted GUN CONTROL? They are forcing THOUSANDS of U.S. Military combat veterans to give up gun ownership (due to PTSD, which the government now claims is a “mental disorder”), so why not FELONIOUS ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS? Why not make New York a test/model amnesty state? We could add Illinois (specifically the city of Chicago)! Let’s let each and every state VOTE on if they want to become an “amnesty state”.
Senator Scott Brown was recently elected by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on a platform that included refusing to legitimize illegal aliens’ rights. Martha Coakley campaigned for the opposite and wanted to make MA an “amnesty state”. In fact, she illegally turned a blind eye on enforcement of immigration laws while she was the state’s attorney general.
Send every undocumented alien back to the border, anchor baby or not, no matter how long they’ve been in the U.S.A., no return rights at all. One felony is too many for a non-citizen.
I say vote all the anti-U.S.A. leaning bums out of government at all levels, as soon as possible, but most especially come November, 2012.
New York, California, Rhode Island, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Arizona, Florida, and all you other RED STATES – ARE YOU LISTENING??? Terry Beatty
You might have more credibility if your article wasn’t splattered with random blue, underlined highlights. Just silliness, not not very professional. Great article though, after I got it cleaned up.
Hey dummy, those “Blue highlights” are links to articles that reinforce his article. Duh! Loveitorleaveit
May 12th, 2011 at 1:28 am Interlace wrote: “Americans” are here illegally anyways so what’s the point. Forget MS-13, Spare me the patriotism … the “Americans” are complaining because they now want the jobs that they didn’t want before. What gives you the right? … The privilege of your ancestory? Drop dead. .
Hmmm you sound like quite a bitter person. You are probably from Mexico, or some South or Central American country, who is enjoying the American way of life. Yet you would like to bring your intolerance of European Americans to the front. Sorry Chap, pack your bags and get your sorry azzz back to that mud hole of a country you and your parents came from, because European Americans are here to stay! operation iraqi freedom war vet
You really should go to a website about FAIR and how the immigrants are taking the “TRUE AMERICANS” JOBS FROM US BECAUSE THEY WILL TAKE LESS PAY AND DON’T NEED A DEGREE!! I fought for this great nation and WTF!! have you done for it exactly? Oh and not all Americans are immigrants, so why don’t you read up on true American History or do they not have it where you are? ANOTHER THING BECAUSE IMMIGRANTS WILL TAKE LESS PAY THEY ARE CAUSING AMERICANS TO LOSE THERE JOBS AND WHAT ABOUT THEIR FAMILIES? IT SOUNDS TO ME LIKE YOU DON’T REALLY CARE ABOUT THE UNITED STATES OR THE CITIZENS!! Interlace
“Hmmm you sound like quite a bitter person. You are probably from Mexico, or some South or Central American country, who is enjoying the American way of life. Yet you would like to bring your intolerance of European Americans to the front. Sorry Chap, pack your bags and get your sorry azzz back to that mud hole of a country you and your parents came from, because European Americans are here to stay!” LOL … I’m Canadian. How does it feel to be someone that has had a American education and still not amount to anything? Or should we pity you because you have had every advantage given to you and your level of intellect is still only a fraction of a primate? So I believe it is you that resembles the mud hole origination. My mudhole is proudly Canada, I don’t live in the US. BTW: How do we have major cities with millions of people and less than 100 homicides? We are more diverse than you are, yet people like you off each other at record rates. Talk about intolerance … LOL!
I have nothing against “European Americans” which by your logic makes me “European Canadian” to which I prefer “Canadian” btw. I have something against ignorance, plain and simple and yet you solidify my stance that people like yourself are more fearful than knowledgeable and have to rely on short statements like “You and your sorry azz …” to convey through weakness what your brain can not construct through rationale since you have assumed that I am “probably from Mexico or some …” which isn’t even in the right direction! LOL, that great education at work!
But you are right …“European Americans” are here to stay, albeit I believe the statistics are not in your favor within a few generations …
I’m for people without ignorance and am partial enough to disqualify people of my own “race” if they are not general in their overall outlook. Look up north and see how our civilization has broadened … or you can still stay in your “mud hole” to the south … andrew
if all illegals had blond hair and blue eyes immigration would not even show up on the radar screen. stop promoting racist nazi propaganda.all races except the Native american Indian and Native Mexicans of the southwest are legal everybody else had ancestors who were illegals. Space
We are not Illegals anymore. No where close, my ancestors yes. But I’m me, and I was born in AMERICA, nowhere else. WAR VETERAN
BITTER MUCH?? MAYBE YOU ARE GETTING GOVERNMENT HELP OR GETTING TAX FREE MONEY AND DON’T WANT TO LOSE IT!! Richard
andrew, there is no such thing as a Native Mexican in the southwest United States. Mexican’s slaughtered Native Indians who lived there by the thousands and stole their land, they are no more entitled to be called Native Americans than white Europeans are. Maybe you should bone up on history before trying to sound knowledgeable about a subject you obviously know nothing about. Another thing you are mistaken about is the fact that most original immigrants to the U.S didn’t have blond hair and blue eyes. Golden Child
I just started at a job at a produce warehouse. Nearly everyone working at this job is Mexican and none of them speak English at all. This comes as no surprise because what American would work for $8 an hour when gas is over $4 a gallon? If you take in to account that a gallon of gas was barely over a dollar eight short years ago, $8 an hour is basically like working for $2 an hour in 2011. The only reason why illegal Mexicans can afford to work for such depressed wages is because most of them live in tiny one bedroom apartments with 20+ other single men! Unless Americans start living like this, there will be hundreds of thousands of more homeless formerly middle class families in the months and years to come. Unemployed Americans will continue to be unemployed month after after month until they accept minimum wage jobs that haven’t been adjusted for inflation and the astronomically rising cost of living. Jordan
Decriminalize drugs, completely eliminate the welfare state, and allow open immigration.
This path will provide a huge boost to the economy because only the hard workers and producers will bother coming. The leechers (of free welfare benefits) and drug runners will have no incentive and will no longer be the drain and bad name of immigration.
Most importantly, this path fulfills our tradition of liberty where all men have the right to pursue a better life for their families and should not be punished because they had the chance of being born in a failed state. Kudos to this article for doing a nice job of pointing this uniquely American attribute out.
Let’s return to our values illustrated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that made America the greatest country in the history of humanity. Loveitorleaveit
Interlace wrote{ LOL … I’m Canadian. How does it feel to be someone that has had a American education and still not amount to anything? Or should we pity you because you have had every advantage given to you and your level of intellect is still only a fraction of a primate? Figures it would be a “CANADIAN” who proudly and arrogantly trashes their “neighbors” the “USA” and you trash the USA with a envious sense of pride all the time basking in the USA protective Armed forces. Not to forget to mention your country hardly sacrifices anywhere in the world to protect “YOUR” freedom! Just remember what ever befalls our great country of USA will ultimately come to bite you Canadians in the Arzzzz! You despicable, ungrateful, Ice Cold, little brats! A-Ron
I’m not reading through all of the comments…. BUT….
WHAT DO YOU DO ABOUT THE CHILDREN OF THE IMMIGRANTS
I am for amnesty of all illegals without a rap sheet for the reason that it is inhumane to break up families by sending back dad and/or mom. And then we dig a moat/wall/motion detection system whatever and require “front door” entry into the US. David N
I realized the whole focus is on USA illegal immigrants. But many have not seen the other side of the coin yet. Due to global crisis for the past three years, do you know how many Illegal Americans, Canadians, Australians and any other Non European nations are living in Europe? You may be more shocked to know more than what you know what is going on in USA right now! I want to be fair with everyone here, what is like to be an illegal in another country? Because millions have already done that to leave USA, CANADA and other countries for the better life elsewhere. When you get to that situation, then you may open your eyes and your mind about this. People are the victom of politcal agendas of law makers in most country. I am talking about innocent people who decided to better themselves to go elsewhere. What is happening here many criminals and corrupted politicians abusing the laws of the land for special interests sadly to say! But my point is you all need to look at the both side of the coin. Don´t be blind sided about this! Cheryl
It’s not that Obama’s wrong, he knows exactly what he’s doing. They know they are deliberately destroying America with all of their activities. Get a grip, he’s the enemy with the rest of them, posing as our leader. People need to wake up criminals are at the helm and have been slowly destroying our country for decades. Cheryl
I also wanted to add we have an illegal immigrant as President, someone who is not a natural born citizen who photoshopped his recent birth certificate. Once these criminals get political power they can basically do whatever they want. Politicians are among the worst criminals on the planet.
You’ve got criminals in the U.S. gov’t and do nothing about it. monk
The real “absolute nightmare for the U.S. economy” isn’t illegal immigration but the U.S. economy itself, which is based primarily on borrowing and spending. And not just government but corporations and households have been in engaged in such, leading to over $57 trillion in total debt, four decades of trade deficits. and very high wages.
The only way out of this is to decrease wages considerably, return to factory work, decrease spending considerably (which means the decline of a middle class lifestyle, military power, and much of infrastructure) and work to export goods to reverse the trade deficit and decrease debt.
Ironically, if these take place, most will not bother to move to the U.S.
The catch is that most citizens, the government, and corporations will not agree to such terns. In which case, it won’t matter because illegal immigration will be the least of citizens’ worries when the economy collapses. Samantha
Have you lost your mind? To say that American economic problems is not made by Illegal immigrants but by the US economy itself. That is like a dog chasing its own tail.
Another reason the economy is in such a mess is too many of jobs are being exported out of the country. Companies do this to save money because labor is cheap in sweat shops.
There is not just one reason the US economy is such a mess but that does not mean illegal immigrants are not one of the reasons things are so bad in this country.
So you want decrease wages. fine I would like to suggest we start with decreasing your wages and that should be enough. How can we go back to the factories when more and more of them are closing every day. That is the true irony. The main export in the US is the American dream.
The middle class lifestyle is needing to work two or three jobs. More and more adult Americans make money by delivering newspapers. More and more white people are homeless because they cannot find work. Thirty-nine percent of white people are homeless compared with 13% Hispanics that are homeless.
The truth is the tide is starting to turn.illegal immigrants are finding out that the wages are not good enough in America these days so they are starting to leave the country. . You can only stretch the dollar so far before it starts to squeal.
Who knows maybe time and allot of hard work maybe the economy will start to heal. Americans who earn decent wages are good for the country. Decreasing salaries is not going to cut the cheese. When you decease wages you also decrease the amount of tax dollars that are paid. Americans who spend their money in America and don’t send their income back to their country of origin.
I believe Americans are tough and strong. I know that it does not appear so right now but we have lived through bad times before and have come out the other side stronger. When a bone is broken after it is healed the bone is actually stronger then it was before the break. America has proven this time and time again. Loveitorleaveit
interlace wrote: LOL … I’m Canadian. How does it feel to be someone that has had a American education and still not amount to anything? Figures you would be a radical Canadian who would enjoys trashing their neighboring country USA. Of course any country that never has to spend money and Soldiers lives to fight wars on terror to protect their freedoms because their neighboring country USA does all the work for them. They would be the ungrateful, spoiled, little brats the “Canadians” Jeff198524
Mass immiation, both legal and illegal, is a failure. The West tells Japan and other nations with declining populations to open up their borders, but look what a nightmare the Unites States of Mexico and Eurabia are because they opened the floodgates and weren’t choosier about who they let in.
Immigrants can make a nation better, but mass unchecked immigration destroys the host society. interlace
@Loveitorleaveit :“Figures you would be a radical Canadian who would enjoys trashing their neighboring country USA. Of course any country that never has to spend money and Soldiers lives to fight wars on terror to protect their freedoms because their neighboring country USA does all the work for them. They would be the ungrateful, spoiled, little brats the “Canadians”” You make me laugh “Loveitorleaveit”…
Not for a second did you address the education or crime situation in the US. All you can do is name call and talk about what we do.
Oh and you are wrong again in attempting to state that whatever happens to us will happen to you. Detroit and Windsor are a stones throw distance apart and yet the divergences in culture are stunning. Detroit’s culture hasn’t crossed over to Windsor and it’s been there for a while.
If anything, it isn’t the immigration that has caused the majority of problems here but those problems that are caused by motorcycle gangs which have come here UNWANTED via the US.
BTW : Your comment about us being spoiled, ungrateful brats … I believe it is your culture that capitalizes on the McMansions, fear, unequal distribution of resources, unfair education policies, horrible unemployment concealment, bad medical practices, crippling tax applications, devastating divorce rates, etc.
You want me to feel sorry for you that you have been put under the bus by your own system and as a way for you to “get back”, you focus your energy on what you think is the problem instead of what the real problem is? … Ok, here is a few tear drops and a violin melody … LOL!
The problem with people like you is that you are non-observant and that your rhetoric is distasteful and untrue yet you believe it since it fills a void in your emotional insecurity. Imagine you are probably a grown man by age but still a child by emotional age. HA!
Your problems go deeper than you think and before you breed ugly offspring … do humanity a favor and just end yourself or … Open your eyes … No one is against, you are against yourself … Lindaxxx
well this country does not belong to Mexicans I’m sick and tired of hearing that we stole this land form the Indians ……this Continent was’nt all Habited in the 1st place .If the Europeon’s did’nt come and build this country into what it is now …we would be a 3rd world country like Mexico and Central and south America ……if we do not stand up to to The Illegal Aliens in our Country ….the Quality of Life will change here and it’s already showing that In California …they are so broke and closing Hospitals and schools like crazy …….we need to look at California more closer before this kind of quality moves into the rest of our Nation…….Coming here Legal is the only right thing to do …No to anchor Babies to Illegals, they are draining our system ..this is not a race issue , this is an Illegal Issue….wake up America you Jeff198524
OH please, 9/11 was America’s fault and the war on terror has resulted in untold millions of innocent deaths. Why would anyone be thankful to a nation of savages (America). Madeleine
OK, for over five years my family was embattled with two school districts, the Township, the state of New York and approximately 12 of their attorneys. We had to hire attorneys to defend our rights when someone from the school district that my children attended since kindergarten decided that my home was NOT within their district. Really? Funny this home was in the district of the previous homeowner whom I purchased this home from and for over two decades had been treated as being inside the district that my children attended. Suddenly one day out of the blue we are being sued for over one million dollars. For fraud, conversion, stealing a public education on the public and quasi contract. I swear to the good Lord. My husband and I spent over 100,000.00 fighting this on a New York City fire fighters salary. We had to empty the contents of our home and rent a home around the corner, considered in the district, if my poor daughters both in their junior and senior year of high school were to finish up where they started since kindergarten. The district dragged my family through the system, the districts spent tax payers dollars fighting us to the tune of millions and they were 100% wrong! It took five years, my childrens lives being ruined beyond belief (honors students, Captains of the girls varsity soccer team, outgoing and vibrant, bringing nothing but honor and pride to their district) My husband, a first responder on 9/11, walking away with his life, spending months at the site of ground zero digging for his buddies and civilians, was no longer trying to overcome the sufferings of September 2001, but no sooner was suffering the Septembers where his children were being ripped from their life long schools, abused beyond belief by the educators who stress the importance of educational continuity. My children were forced to attend the neighboring district, which we have no neighbors, which they had to walk each day five blocks away to catch the bus. When the bus for their life long school is at the end of our driveway. While the districts raked us (a private homeowner through the coals) being totally wrong, illegal are living here scott free. They are breaking the laws, they are causing havoc while receiving a free public education while my children were punished, treated like criminals, their educational achievements erased, my one daughter ended up spending her final year of high school in the neighboring district. All she had worked for her whole educational career between sports and academics went unrecognized by the district she was forced to graduate in. In the end, after five years of being embattled, after getting rid of our lousy, stupid attorneys that we spent truck loads of money on, as I said, on a firefighters salary, we found the laws that these administrators and educators and politicians were hiding from us. With no attorney to help us, just the laws of New York State as our weapon, we finally won our case. Our dear children were finally returned to their rightful place in the schools of their entire tenure. The damage they have done to their minds and their hearts, and to me and my husband cannot be forgiven. Will never be forgotten. This is a story that can happen to any of you, don’t think it can’t. We were not special and neither are any of you. Had I been illegal and my children illegal this would not have taken place. The law states that the children of illegal parents are not to be injured by the actions of their parents. Yet in one affidavit after the next, these scum bags lawyers for the districts, with the support of the board of ed, each said that if any injury came to the children of said parents(meaning me and my husband) it was our fault for stealing a public education. They were so wrong and yet they got away with what they did to us for over five long years. Imagine being my husband? Surviving the terrorist attack on our soil, running in when everyone else was running out and then he is attacked by our district, shamed in front of our community, his children and me his wife destroyed, mentally and emotionally every single day. These people are huge hypocrites, these law makers are scandalous theives and thugs. I cried every single day weeping for my poor kids, how they suffered. My husband worked so much overtime (when there was any) that he was numb. This poor man came home each day and he persevered when a weaker man would have collapsed. I love him so much! He is my hero! He did get caught in a terrible fire that almost cost him his life, saving another firefighter, his crew. He was badly burned and spent a week in the Cornell Burn unit. We were living in the rental house when that call came in, my children overheard the call, they were sick with grief. This story has so much more to be told but I just am tired of the way laws are broken. The way good and decent Americans, like my husband and I, are abused by the system. We are very good Americans and we don’t live above our means and we are humble people. Illegals can come here and ask for amnesty after breaking our laws? Really? Why did I have to prove our innocence and pay for expensive attorneys who actually were a waste? Why was the governement allowed to rake my husband and I and our children through the fire and be completely wrong doing so and get away with doing so. The only victory we got was to return our children back to their beloved schools where they always belonged along with the 120 other homes who live on the same block. Did we get a financial compensation? NO! Were we made whole again financially? NO! So in my opinion, NO to illegal immigration. They are here breaking our laws and yet no one will do to them what was done to us. It’s wrong and it cannot be justified. I don’t care! Wrong is wrong and liberals like Obama and others are trying to force Americans to break the law, yet hold people like myself and my husband and family to a totally different accountability even while being 100% innocent. Sickening! TheAmericanDream
It Amazes me that Canadians use American products, watch American tv, adopt American slang and wear American made clothing, yet complain CONSTANTLY about “stupid Yanks”, “arrogant Americans”, “dumb Americans” and the like. There are thousands of Canadian people who have never visited the United States or even met an American before, but have based their entire knowledge of the USA on a tv show or the fact that there’s a McDonald’s in their town. It’s disheartening and shows how “small minds” are on both sides of the border. Brittanicus
WE THE PEOPLE.
AMNESTY or as the Pro-illegal immigration groups prefer to label it–Immigration Reform. The truth is not ever going to happen? The 1986 IRCA was a utter calamity and costly for taxpayers. The 1986 (IRCA) Immigration Control and Reform Act that was a mass amnesty, which became the prime deception, played on the American taxpayer of all time. Because of despicably fraud and supreme neglect, the 2 million farmer’s laborers and other illegal workers who were provided a legal course to citizenship, that ultimately turned into 6 million. Even inexplicable those people, who received this pardon, vanished from their usual places of employment and turned up in the job force around the country that Americans citizens had to compete with. Future wise, Congress proposed the I-9 Form (Employment Eligibility Verification Form.) to ensure that all employees presented documentary proof of their legal eligibility, to accept employment in the United States. If the employee has a hiring issue, and chooses to contest an irregularity notice, the employer prints out the “Referral Letter” from the E-Verify program.
The letter contains information about resolving the problem, as well as the contact information for the (SSA) Social security Administration) or (USCIS) US Citizenship and Immigration Service, depending on which bureau was the source of the non-authorization to resolve the problem? As constantly the open border zealots, US Chamber of Commerce, ACLU and a radical mix of anti American organizations, have used the Liberal Press as a fulcrum to regrettably try to suppress the implementation of E-Verify. Are we not in the poorhouse with China, as it is? But this is no firm binder, because millions more people will strive to reach here, before that ominous Using the media these groups have also brought pressure on the administration not to espouse the Secure Communities law, which identifies criminal aliens through fingerprints by informing ICE. Then Subsequently E-Verify that is increasingly more popular each day by business owners. They are now cautiously aware that an I-9 audit puts their business license in jeopardy, as upheld by the Supreme Court.
NOW THE RUSH HAS BEGAN TO DEFEND CITIZENS AND LEGAL RESIDENTS AGAINST THE ILLEGAL ALIEN INVASION. FIRST ARIZONA, NOW ALABAMA, GEORGIA AND SOON MANY MORE STATES WILL FOLLOW. E-VERIFY IS THE LAW OF THE LAND AND THOUSANDS OF FOREIGNERS NOT WANTING BE CONFRONTED THESE LAWS, WILL HEAD FOR THOSE STATES THAT HAVE BEEN KIDNAPPED BY THE LEFTIST PROGRESSIVES OF OPEN BORDERS AGENDA’S.
As with the 1986 (IRCA) bill those who advocate against the laws are profiteers for more wealth, or to accumulate more votes or just to prepare America (according to the WikiLeaks group founder Julian Assange in secret documents) for merging with some kind of traitorous program, with Canada and Mexico with one currency. This stealth agenda was collusion between the Canadian and American Ambassadors.
The other side of the aisle on the corrupt Washington beltway, says we cannot afford to enforce immigration laws? Then my question we had better figure someway, for as the law stands we are just encouraging more illegal newcomers? So the second question, when does this invasion end, when does the lawmakers install laws, that make it impossible to stop this travesty? Are we just going to leave the doors open and hope for the best? All we are encouraging is even more poverty and distressed people, that taxpayers have to bear the full fiscal impact? Ten years from now, population numbers will be skyrocketing and the only winners are the profit-takers.
Whether we are coming out this miserable recession or not, we cannot afford any immigration amnesty. The first Amnesty in 1986 Ronald Reagan’s term of office, cost–$76 BILLION DOLLARS–by the time it was fulfilled. In today money it’s expected to cost $2.6 TRILLION DOLLARS as stated the Heritage Foundation. So taxpayers would be expected to cover that bill, lending most of it from China again? Are we not in the poorhouse with China, as it is? But this is no firm binder, because millions more people will strive to reach here, before that ominous inauguration day of a new Immigration Reform bill. If Congress is unable to cut spending in this recent of 14 .5 Trillion dollars US Treasury deficit, can anybody in the right frame of mind, tell us where we intend to get another $2.5 trillion dollars, to subsidize those illegal immigrants already living here? These dollars are inconceivable and even if there was another. It’s outrageous that Washington politicians would expect to bleed even more money from traumatic Taxpayers, when we are confronted by rejuvenating two nations abroad, in millions of dollars a day.
Amnesty, it will only further multitudes of people to come here? Washington legislators come and go, author bills, but are never held accountable for the financial wrecks they leave behind? Only Secure Communities, E-Verify can mitigate some of the pressure that will make foreign nationals think twice before crossing the border, or entering America by other means. This isn’t about any particular race, a person’s politics, religion as we are all suffering. It’s not even about the legal Hispanic population, as they are under the same pain of finding a job, stagnant wages and some type of exploitation. We are all the same boat and without stringent restrictions on immigration and its costs, that boat is heading towards rough waters and could easily sink. The TEA PARTY will slow down this process by confronting Washington aggressively on birthright citizenship to rescind it, which will sever the bond of 300.000 babies from foreign nation getting instant citizenship; cutting down on the annual monolithic cost to subsidize these offspring and families.
It will also bring to a halt, which it attributed to this wrongly conferred law, saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year? The TEA PARTY will examine these unfair taxes placed on Americans, by Liberal oriented courts, to appoint obligations to educate, provide health care that comes with the never ending tide of illegal aliens skirting our laws. The TEA PARTY will created bills to up the penalty, for entering America as a felony. This should have been the law of the land, decades ago? Personally, it has always translated to prove there was no serious intention to enforce these laws. It’s in the vein of a conspirator’s reason, why the Southern border fences completion remains a fiasco. The Tea Party will enforce the 1986 (IRCA) law as was planned, with no complicity of government agencies to stifle those laws, such as the business influence.
The TEA PARTY in 2012 will remove the Liberal influence and even have the empowerment to construct the real border fence, and mandating with no exemptions E-Verify and Secure Communities and indefinitely remove Sanctuary Cities nationwide. As the Tea Party grows against the powerful influences in Washington, these Representatives like TEA PARTY Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota will retire those pro-illegal immigrant politicians, Governors, mayors and all those who have adversely affected strong laws that have been introduced. The American People should not be forced by law, to pay for the impoverished people that trespass into America from other countries.
We can aid our fellow legal workers out, by taking immigration one step towards generic “Citizens Arrest. We cannot apprehend a suspicious individual, as it could lead to legal action. But we have the opportunity to join other “Whistle blowers” to inform ICE or local police as irregularities stand out. Not speaking reasonable English is a dead give-away, specifically in factory environment and if somebody has an accident through not comprehending a warning notice.
The time is ripe to contact their federal and State Representatives to insist they enact mandatory E-Verify, Secure Communities for every State Wake Up! America
Wake Up America! We got played out Respect all nationalities but show them the right way if nationalties that dont want to participate the right way send them back This has been a war of its own of potraying our country as the wild west No one is to blame accept our Government allowing our system to collapse without proper structure in policies theres only one road with citizens trying disparely in trying to do the right thing straight collspsr down we are carrying a nation that is NOT promoting HONOR Scams wall street scam private oversea companys Haliburton bad loans AIG should illegals think differantly we showed them there is no ethics or morales from our bad government not stanfing up for the average smerican but covering a sick pyramid of using decieving our own people They will use everyone including our soldiers name in vein They wi ll use illegals for there future credit its as new wave of deThey allready sucked the blood of our tax paying americans and will not stop we are dealing with a sick demonic government that favors the rich breaks the back of the so called middle class pay check to pay check promotes kay os suppression and depression the illegals our smart give an inch take a yard. Everyone deserves to become an American but for god sakes have them pay taxes we cant afford to continue this pattern we are dinking our own boat because we as americans let PIRATES during the George Bush and Republican party yo mske a mockery of our very root of american values complete corruption bailing out AIG out all the elderly americans that they robbed punish the banks that gave bad loans punish a previous government that used there position in making profits in washing out our taxes to private sectors in Iraq who overseas these contracts Dick Sick Cheney our dollars at work ex ceo hsliburton / vicepresident of the United States of America LY AN AMERICAN Wake Up! America
If Americans want justice connect the dots we had a sick governmeny in office that all had a shady past how can we proud when we had a cabinet that tried to destroy our country and values Why would George Bush have so many affiliations in our tragedy because he comes from a root of tragedy the flag he wares is dollar signs of the cost of solid elderly Americans soldiers people who believed and made America now Americans can see how bad people in powerful rule making decisions can use there country and manipulate and hurt our American values and standards he set us up for failure who is going to account for all the money that went to the culprits that should have been for our schools healthcare elderly qaulity of life american values our patrotic troops who came to our front with no choice but in faith. Our government in yhe Bush era should be accountable God Bless you Dick sick Cheneyand George Secret Cloon George Bush using our country name in vien for your agendas an maybe your friends you make for your personal agendas will not have faith in your back door deals and maybe the United States has no faith in you. Because it seems faith is chaklenging corruption and it sure hell seem to be on your crew watch our im sorry watching for personal agendas maybe to many dots that connected I connected mine and that faith is spirit maybe that is what Red Whit and Blue should stand for , for the people not world dominatuon yes we are th 99 percent but the 99 percent who knows what life is all about the rich may have power money control but I know what they dont have is a soul .
e back tond you Geoge Cloon Bush your mama
obama is doing nothin worng yall just acting like | 1 |
China has unveiled a new advanced missile government officials say can hit regional rivals India, Japan, and Taiwan, just days after Defense Secretary James Mattis left the region. [The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) recently released a video of a military drill in China featuring the ballistic missile, according to the Indian publication Hindustan Times. State media reports did not reveal when or where the drill took place, but Beijing released the video a day after Mattis left Tokyo on Saturday, concluding his first trip abroad as defense secretary. “Obviously we watch Chinese military developments with great interest. That they in and of itself is not cause for concern,” Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis told reporters during an press briefing at the Pentagon. “Where we have concerns, and where we express our concerns, is when they unilaterally change the status quo, such as reclaiming and remilitarizing islands that are under dispute or in ways that otherwise bring additional tension or additional uncertainty to the region,” he said. Mattis said during a joint press conference with Japanese Defense Minister Tomomi Inada on Saturday that a U. S. policy recognizing islands at the center of a territorial dispute between China and Japan remains the same. “Today the minister and I discussed the security situation and I made clear that our longstanding policy on the Senkaku Islands stands. The United States will continue to recognize Japanese administration of the islands, and as such article five of the U. S. Security Treaty applies,” he said. The following day after those remarks, China sent three Chinese Coast Guard vessels around those islands, located in the East China Sea, according to the Japan Coast Guard. “Three ships entered the waters surrounding the uninhabited chain,” the Japan Coast Guard said in a statement, according to the Times. Chinese state media outlet China Daily also issued a veiled threat to neighbors that the new advanced missile, first unveiled in September 2015, could challenge “foreign military installations” on the islands. The article also quoted a retired Chinese major general saying the missile has a strike range of 1, 000 kilometers, which would make it able to reach Okinawa, Japan. The Pentagon said Tuesday it watches Chinese military developments “with great interest. ” U. S. tensions with China have risen since President Trump entered office. Shortly after defeating Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, Trump accepted a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai challenging longtime U. S. diplomatic protocol and angering Chinese leaders who consider the country a breakaway province. A commentary on the PLA’s website on the day Trump assumed office said the chances of war had become “more real. ” | 0 |
According the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, white people need to experience the kind “oppression” that black people have experienced before Americans can truly be equal. The cat is out of the bag.
Via TruthAndAction
Many who believed that all of these movements and protests started by Black Lives Matter, the New Black Panthers and their supporters aren’t about equality at all, they’re about racial superiority, specifically over white people. In fact, if you look up “racism” in the dictionary, it’s basically defined as one race seeking racial superiority.
Video Evidence Below. While speaking to a group of baptists in New Orleans, Tim Kaine suggested that in order to achieve equality between races, white people must willingly submit themselves to a state of repression. What exactly is he talking about exactly? Nobody will deny that slavery and the acts that followed were atrocious, but like it’s been asked many times, what right does anybody have to claim offense at acts they weren’t alive to be offended by?
Why can’t anybody see that this kind of policy isn’t going to bridge the racial divide, it’s only going to make it bigger. It’s this type of thinking, created by the Obama Administration, that got us here in the first place. Not to mention that these types of policies are bad even for white democrats.
These are the types of politics being put into place by democrats and the left as a whole. The sad thing about it is that what black people don’t realize is that these policies only sound good to them because it puts down white people. However, it doesn’t really do anything for them except make them dependent on the government. We’re all hamsters to them, looking for pellets.
The ever-increasing rate at which good-paying, blue-collar jobs are being off-shored by bad trade deals — something to which the modern Democratic Party appears committed fully — will continue to have a devastating effect on working-class white communities. The disproportionately negative effect globalization has had on blue-collar whites was a large factor in GOP nominee Donald Trump’s success in the GOP primaries.
Moreover, this destruction of the middle American economy is having very real, very negative effects on white Americans. “Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans,” The New York Times reported in 2015. “Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.”
Some of the Democratic Party’s favorite progressive policies — like affirmative action — are directly and openly discriminatory against white Americans. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s decision this summer in Fisher v. University of Texas gave legal sanction to this obvious form of anti-white discrimination.
Then there’s the Democratic Party’s stringent support for open borders and mass non-white migration, which is quite literally turning white Americans into a minority in the country their own ancestors built. White Americans are already a minority among school-aged children, and will be a nationwide minority by 2050, according to predictions by the Census Bureau.
According to democrats, resistance to their cause is rooted in racism and a desire to protect “white-privilege”. If anybody really took the time to think about it, they’d know that that’s racism in itself, trying to breathe life into a myth. The left wants that racist curtain to continue to divide Americans down the middle by making one race look like monsters, mainly white people. This is a toxic form of politics, and will lead to America’s downfall, should it be allowed to continue. This will be Hillary’s America.
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Well, this isn’t good.
Most people think of Costco as the place that sells bulk quantities of pretty much everything. But the warehouse superstore is now making headlines for a very different reason, and it could serve to tarnish their brand: The Blue Angels accidentally flew into the Costco in Augusta, GA and are currently stuck flying around inside the discount retailer.
Worst of all, it doesn’t seem like Costco has any idea how to get the airplane stunt squadron to leave.
The Blue Angels were performing at a routine air show in Augusta, GA earlier today when they veered too close to the Costco and zipped through the automatic doors as they slid open for a customer. Before Costco employees could react, the diamond formation of five F/A-18 Hornets had entered the store and began performing death-defying aerial feats right over the shelves of bulk cereals and jumbo-size ketchups.
Customers are trying to ignore the roaring jets overhead, but it’s hard to concentrate on your shopping list when sonic booms keep knocking over pallets of Kirkland-brand dog food. It’s usually a welcome treat to see the Blue Angels conduct synchronized barrel rolls, but inside Costco, the elite pilots are proving to be a serious nuisance.
So far all attempts to evict the Blue Angels have proved unsuccessful. At first, Costco staff just propped the front door open with a bucket, assuming the Blue Angels would find their way back out eventually. After an hour, when choreographed smoke trails continued to plague the store, the manager grabbed a lacrosse stick from a sporting goods display and tried to shoo the planes toward the exit. Unfortunately, that only caused the Blue Angels to accelerate to 700 mph and perform several loop-the-loops in the freezer aisle, where the pilots hit a truly exhilarating 8 G’s.
Your heart just has to break for this poor manager.
With the store set to close in only a few hours, Costco better think up a solution fast, or Blue Angels will be locked in overnight. If that happens, then tomorrow’s customers will be aggravated by more of the same world-class aeronautic showmanship. What an absolute hassle. | 0 |
Two members of Microsoft’s Online Safety Team are suing the company, citing stress and auditory hallucinations after being made to filter through and remove videos and pictures of child porn, murder, and bestiality as part of their job. [“Members of Microsoft’s Online Safety Team had ‘ ’ status, former employees Henry Soto and Greg Blauert allege in a lawsuit filed on Dec. 30. They ‘could literally view any customer’s communications at any time,’” reported the Daily Beast. “Specifically, they were asked to screen Microsoft users’ communications for child pornography and evidence of other crimes. ” “But Big Brother didn’t offer a good health care plan, the Microsoft employees allege. After years of being made to watch the ‘most twisted’ videos on the internet, employees said they suffered severe psychological distress, while the company allegedly refused to provide a specially trained therapist or to pay for therapy,” the report alleges. “The two former employees and their families are suing for damages from what they describe as permanent psychological injuries, for which they were denied worker’s compensation. ” Soto, who was one of the first employees in the department, claims to have been “involuntarily transferred” to the position, adding that he was “not informed prior to the transfer as to the full nature” of the job. Soto was also forced to remain in the position for at least a year and a half before being able to request another transfer — the usual practice for any position at Microsoft. As part of the job, Soto claimed that he had to watch and filter through “horrible brutality, murder, indescribable sexual assaults, videos of humans dying and, in general, videos and photographs designed to entertain the most twisted and people in the world. ” “Many people simply cannot imagine what Mr. Soto had to view on a daily basis as most people do not understand how horrible and inhumane the worst people in the world can be,” proclaimed the lawsuit, adding, “He had trouble with sleep disturbance, [and] nightmares. ” “He suffered from an internal video screen in his head and could see disturbing images, he suffered from irritability, increased startle, anticipatory anxiety, and was easily distractible,” the lawsuit claims. Microsoft defended the department and its employees, citing the importance of the job in an email. “Microsoft applies technology to help detect and classify illegal images of child abuse and exploitation that are shared by users on Microsoft Services,” responded a Microsoft spokesperson to the Daily Beast. “Once verified by a specially trained employee, the company removes the image, reports it to the National Center for Missing Exploited Children, and bans the users who shared the images from our services. We have put in place robust wellness programs to ensure the employees who handle this material have the resources and support they need. ” However the “wellness program” allegedly consisted of just an “ counselor,” which resulted in a “compassion fatigue” diagnosis, instead of the mental health program that was allegedly available for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. Greg Blauert, who is also currently suing Microsoft, cited similar concerns about the job, declaring that he had to sift through “thousands of images of child pornography, adult pornography and bestiality that graphically depicted the violence and depravity of the perpetrators. ” “He began experiencing nightmares and intrusive images,” claimed the Daily Beast. “If he or a broke down at work, their employers allegedly encouraged them to merely ‘leave work early’ as part of the department’s ‘Wellness Plan. ’” Both men have been diagnosed with PTSD and are currently on leave from work. Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 0 |
Six days after he was sworn in as America’s 45th president, Donald J. Trump traveled to Philadelphia to address Republican lawmakers at their annual retreat. Standing behind a lectern emblazoned with the presidential seal, Trump predicted, “This Congress is going to be the busiest Congress we’ve had in decades. ” Being Trump, he could not resist a superlative: “Maybe ever. Maybe ever. Think of that. ” The legislators responded with a curious silence — perhaps awed by the thought, perhaps also a bit unnerved. After years mired in the Congress had both the means and, Trump believed, the mandate to roll back Barack Obama’s liberal legacy. At the top of their hit list was Obama’s monumental health care legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. During the six and a half years since its passage, Republicans maintained a striking unanimity in their hatred of what they derisively called Obamacare. And over that same period, they became thoroughly united in the conviction that Trump expressed from the outset of his candidacy — namely, that he “would repeal and replace” the health care law “with something far better. ” But in the months since Trump’s victory, many of the lawmakers in attendance that day had become increasingly worried about how they would go about undoing the legislation. That same weekend in Philadelphia, Republican members of Congress were caught on tape fretting aloud about what the “something far better” to replace the law should be. Should they allow states to accept expanded Medicaid benefits, as Obamacare had done? Should they enter what Representative John Faso, a New York Republican, called the “political minefield” of defunding Planned Parenthood as part of the package? For that matter, should they really be rushing to repeal the A. C. A. before they had any idea of what would replace it? Looming over the gathering was a question that it was perhaps now too late to ask: Had Republicans become trapped by their pledge to do away with Obamacare? A few days before the retreat, I met up with the man who, perhaps more than any other figure in the conservative movement, had maneuvered the party toward complete and unbending opposition to Obamacare: Michael Needham of the Heritage Foundation. Needham, 35, is the chief executive of Heritage Action for America, a feral cur of a lobbying organization established by the venerable conservative think tank in 2010 to (as its website puts it) “hold Congress accountable to conservative principles. ” Though other organizations — among them the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform — have vigorously opposed Obamacare from its inception, Heritage Action has spent the last six years almost monomaniacally focused on demanding that legislators abolish the hated law. It scores them on what it deems critical votes and loudly condemns any and all apostasies. It names names and, when necessary to its ends, is happy to defy the Republican leadership. In violating Reagan’s “11th Commandment” not to speak ill of others in his party, Needham has come to rival Ted Cruz as one of the least popular Republicans in Washington. Needham would not seem an obvious choice for this distinction. and passively handsome in the manner of Mitt Romney, he grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His youthful acquaintance with struggle was limited to being a Mets fan. After graduating from Williams College in 2004, Needham went straight to work for Heritage, where he was made its director of Asian studies, despite having never visited Asia. In 2007 he briefly left the think tank to become a policy aide for the presidential campaign of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the most liberal of the dozen or so Republican candidates in that cycle. By the time Obamacare was signed into law in March 2010, Needham had again temporarily left Heritage, attending Stanford Business School and dating a Democrat whom he would later marry. There was little in the cards to prefigure his imminent future as the — and at times deeply reviled — lead driver in the Obamacare demolition derby. Like virtually every Republican in Washington, Needham was not especially enamored of Trump during the primaries. “Donald Trump’s a clown,” he said on “Fox News Sunday” just a month after Trump announced his candidacy — adding, with evident distaste, “This is a guy who believes in socialized medicine. ” Needham’s preferences ran more to Bobby Jindal, and of course to Cruz, whom Needham reflexively referred to by his first name. Still, Needham and his adopted cause had emerged as unambiguous winners of the 2016 election. On the first day of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order to “seek the prompt repeal” of Obamacare. Thus had Trump and Needham — two men who had never met — become allies. “I think one of the big disagreements we’ve had with the party for a long time is that we think when you’re trying to win an argument, it can only happen when you start them,” the young C. E. O. said as he sat in his Capitol Hill office, looking somewhat fatigued from having spent the previous weekend his child. “And this kind of maniacal focus on ‘governing’’u2009” — his voice taking on a mocking tone — “when all governing means is a to get good press, instead of laying out a vision of where you want to take the country, was one of the big divides we had. ” But the long, and at times quixotic, struggle to repeal Obamacare in which Needham has been a lead combatant has more closely resembled a street fight than anything that could reasonably be termed an “argument. ” And though it may appear otherwise in a dawning age of Republican on government, the argument is today far from over. According to a January Fox News poll, Obama’s signature program now enjoys a 50 percent approval rating. There is no guarantee that Republicans in the Senate will sign onto legislation that risks leaving millions of their constituents suddenly without health care coverage while alienating key donors — drug makers, insurance companies and doctor associations — who helped shape and support the law Trump now seeks to replace. “The joke around Washington,” the former Democratic congressman Jim McDermott told me, “is that the Republicans are going to repeal Obamacare — and they’ll replace it with the Affordable Care Act. ” The building that houses the Heritage Foundation, on Massachusetts Avenue near the Capitol, stands as an monument to perversity. It was here, in 1989, that the intellectual framework was first developed for what would become the Affordable Care Act. And it is here where Needham has spent the last six years trying to exterminate what he sees as the Frankenstein’s Monster that Heritage inadvertently set loose upon the land. The basic architecture of the bill that would eventually become the A. C. A. was conceived in 1989 by the Heritage Foundation policy analyst Stuart Butler as a conservative alternative to health care. It was first put into practice in 2006 by Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who devised his state’s health care policy with the help of two other Heritage health care specialists, Bob Moffit and Ed Haislmaier. But for many decades, conservatives had resisted increasing the federal government’s role in health care. That remained true in 2009, when the newly elected President Barack Obama undertook to pass legislation that would extend health care coverage to tens of millions of Americans. What Obama and the Congress ultimately settled on was a framework of health care exchanges — marketplaces where health insurance could be purchased, and had to be, if you weren’t already covered. This was the “individual mandate” first advocated (albeit in the context of a health care system) by Butler and later embraced by Romney. Obama opposed the concept as a candidate, in favor of an unspecified plan that he claimed would lower costs. What many Democrats on the Hill — “probably more than half of our caucus,” McDermott says — preferred was a system, in which health care costs are borne not by insurers but instead by a single fund, typically originating from taxpayers, as Medicare does. But half of the Democratic caucus wasn’t enough for a bill to pass the House, much less the Senate. When a congressional majority failed to materialize for a hybrid measure, known as the “public option,” in which consumers would be allowed to choose among insurance plans as well as private ones, Democrats were left with the individual mandate. The final legislative package would aim to “increase the quality, availability and affordability of private and public health insurance to over 44 million uninsured Americans,” as the administration put it. Applicants whose income was between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty line would be eligible for federally subsidized insurance. Those with incomes at or below 138 percent would now qualify for Medicaid in states that chose to participate in the program. Young people up to the age of 26 were permitted to stay on their parents’ health insurance. Americans with medical conditions could not be denied coverage. And a variety of other regulations, taxes, penalties and incentives would be set up to maximize participation on the part of insurers, recipients, physicians and health care centers. Though the details of the Affordable Care Act, as the final bill came to be called, left plenty of room for disagreement, its fundamental reliance on health care overseen by the federal government was a concept anathema to most Republicans. In a memo written by the Republican pollster Frank Luntz in spring 2009, Republicans were urged to use the phrase “government takeover” when referring to the Democrats’ health care package. Less heeded was another admonition in Luntz’s memo: “It’s not enough to just say what you’re against. You have to tell them what you’re for. ” In the end, Republicans lacked the numbers necessary to block the bill. On March 21, 2010, the House finally passed on a vote a version of the bill that was sure to be agreed to by the Senate. “We didn’t give in to mistrust or to cynicism or to fear,” Obama, announcing the bill’s passage that night in the East Room of the White House, said. “Instead, we proved that we are still a people capable of doing big things and tackling our biggest challenges. ” The day after Obama signed the bill into law, a Republican backbencher from Iowa named Steve King drafted his own bill in the House to repeal it in its entirety. Since there was no hope of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s considering King’s bill, he had decided to try a rarely successful legislative tactic known as a discharge petition — which, if it gathered signatures from 218 of the 435 House members, would force Pelosi to bring King’s bill to the floor for an vote. A couple of days after King made his move, in 2010, the two newly minted leaders of Heritage Action — Needham, then 28, and the old chief operating officer, Tim Chapman — met in the Capitol with Barry Jackson, chief of staff to John Boehner, the House minority leader at the time. Though Jackson today says that he has no recollection of their visit, Needham and Chapman both say they remember it clearly. After explaining the general mission of their new organization, the young conservatives brought up the recently passed Affordable Care Act. Heritage Action, they informed Jackson, intended to push House members to sign King’s petition. Jackson’s response surprised Chapman and Needham. “He was very clear,” Chapman recalls, “that if we pushed forward on it, we would probably not get all the Republicans on it, and it would be politically detrimental to a lot of Republicans to be on it. He said, ‘I’ve seen all the ads the unions have prepared to run on this stuff.’ I don’t know where he’d seen them. We let off on the gas. We said, ‘We’ll agree to disagree on this one.’ It was the ‘aha’ moment for us: We just don’t see the world the same way. ” As both Chapman and Needham today concede, Jackson might also have had his own “aha” moment, recognizing them as impudent young jerks. Still, their aggression had the full blessing of Ed Feulner, then Heritage’s president, who says fondly of Needham, “He reminded me of myself 40 years earlier. ” As for Heritage Action, he said: “We knew we’d be breaking some china. ” Among Republican elected officials, the Heritage Foundation had long been regarded as a tweedy grandfather, revered but not feared. The think tank was proficient at spewing out white papers and keynote speeches. But because of its status as a 501( c)(3) nonprofit, it could not devote a substantial part of its activities to taking positions on congressional votes or campaigning against political foes. Heritage sat by helplessly in 2003 while President George W. Bush, dismaying conservative purists, promoted and then signed into law a new federal entitlement that used Medicare to extend prescription benefits to senior citizens. Two years later, Heritage could do nothing to rescue Bush’s Social Security privatization measure from defeat. Now, with Heritage Action as a 501( c)(4) “social welfare organization,” the foundation at last had its own squad in the fight. And in Needham, Feulner had a lieutenant whose job, as Feulner put it, would be “to run the flag up the flagpole and see who salutes. ” Steve King’s bill was Heritage Action’s first flag. It had not occurred to Needham and Chapman to see things Barry Jackson’s way — to consider that Republicans’ taking an unambiguous stand to completely repeal Obamacare could cost them House seats five months later. Jackson’s hesitancy to campaign on full repeal was in fact shared by many Republican leaders. One of them, Senator John Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said of Obamacare in May: “There is noncontroversial stuff here, like the conditions exclusion and those sorts of things. Now, we are not interested in repealing that. And that is frankly a distraction. ” To Needham, there was only one way to look at the matter. “What’s the point in having a conservative party if we’re not going to fight a massive federal intervention in health care?” he told me. “It’s of our economy!” Needham and Chapman knew there were risks in allying themselves with King, an inveterate with a deep yearning for the spotlight. But King was also a tenacious conservative. On June 16, he introduced his discharge petition, and Heritage Action began sending out emails to the foundation’s 661, 000 members, urging them to pressure representatives on both sides of the aisle to sign it — ominously adding in a news release that “those who fail to support this effort are responsible for Obamacare. ” The petition soon picked up two highly influential signatories: Representative Tom Price of Georgia, an orthopedic surgeon who was chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the House’s internal conservative think tank and Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, a staunch conservative and personal hero of Needham’s who refused to vote for Bush’s Medicare bill in 2003. A month later, Heritage Action turned up the heat on the 34 Democrats — most of them conservative Blue Dogs — who voted against Obamacare in March but had yet to sign King’s discharge petition. In a press statement, Needham declared, “I know their constituents, who will be attending town halls this August, are eager to hear why they do not support the repeal effort. ” In September, a single Democrat, Gene Taylor of Mississippi, added his signature. The tally reached 173, well short of what it would take for King’s bill to make it to the House floor — much less to get it passed and then sent over to the Senate, where Republicans’ appetite for abolishing Obamacare altogether was less acute than it was in the House. But though the discharge petition had stalled, King and Heritage Action could justifiably declare a victory of principle and, eventually, an . Overall, those who pledged fealty to repealing Obamacare fared better that November than those who didn’t. As King told me recently: “The Barry Jacksons and the John Cornyns were clearly wrong. Look at what happened to the Blue Dogs in 2010. There were 53 of them when Obamacare passed. Now I don’t know if you can count three of them. ” King was exaggerating, but not by much — there are 18 members of Congress’s Blue Dog Coalition today. “Pelosi made them walk the plank, and they fell like tenpins after that. Since then, I don’t think there’s been a freshman Republican who didn’t run on the full repeal of Obamacare. ” Bashing Obamacare instantly became a winning Republican message — an indictment of its polarizing namesake, of Democrats and of the boogeyman of creeping socialism all rolled into one. During the 2010 midterm election cycle, opponents of the A. C. A. spent $108 million on ads pillorying it. As a reward to the 87 Republican freshmen whose victories had enabled the party to retake the House, Eric Cantor devoted part of his first day as the House majority leader to introducing H. R. 2, the “Repealing the Health Care Law Act. ” It would become the first of more than 50 bills that would pass the House over the ensuing four years designed to repeal, defund, restrict or delay implementation of Obamacare. None of them stood any chance of becoming a law — they were dead on arrival in the Senate. But to Heritage Action, they served a purpose: in the organization’s parlance, to “lock in” members, to “orient” the Republican Party to conservative principles so that it would “do the right thing. ” At times, however, what looked like the “right thing” was, from Needham’s vantage, in fact the wrong thing. In April 2011, for example, a bill dismantling part of Obamacare did clear the House and then the Senate, and was signed into law by President Obama without hesitation. It was a measure to eliminate the requirement that small companies submit 1099 forms for all transactions exceeding $600, which essentially served as a tax to help pay for the program and which Heritage Action had condemned as “burdensome” and “onerous,” guaranteed to generate paperwork and high accounting fees. But Heritage Action, because of its ironclad resistance to “partial repeal,” actually opposed the measure to get rid of the 1099 provision. Yes, it would help small businesses — but then those same small businesses would no longer care to be part of Heritage Action’s crusade. As Needham later told me, “We felt that when anything less than full repeal becomes acceptable, you open the door for every lobbyist in town to say: ‘Hey, while we’re working on full repeal, let’s fix the 1099 issue. Or let’s fix the issue’’u2009” — the popular shorthand for an A. C. A. provision requiring companies with 50 or more employees to provide health care to anyone working over 30 hours a week. “You eventually over time whittle off various constituencies that we want to keep as part of the platform. ” Partial repeal would be well and good if it got rid of what Needham called a “vital organ” of the law: the individual mandate, say, or Medicaid expansion. But “those vital organs were never going to go down if repeal was defined by Washington’s lobbying class. It would be 1099s and these heavily lobbied issues, and then we’ll be stuck with Obamacare. ” In Heritage Action declared that it would “key vote,” or place greater emphasis on, bills it deemed especially relevant as litmus tests of members’ conservative bona fides. Needham also began issuing scorecards on how frequently members of Congress were voting down spending bills. The notion of a former Giuliani aide grading veteran lawmakers on their principles did not go over well. Representative Rob Wittman of Virginia was taken to task in a Heritage Action analysis for casting only four of a potential 11 votes to cut spending during a series of roll calls he had to inform Chapman that he had missed those votes because his father had died. (Chapman did not change Wittman’s score but did explain the reason for Wittman’s absence on the Heritage Action website.) Representative Geoff Davis of Kentucky, a onetime target of Heritage Action’s grading system, fumed to me about the organization’s absolutist browbeating, which came as Republican members were doing their best to thwart Obama’s agenda. “If I’m trying to stop someone’s bleeding on the side of the road, I don’t need to also give them a lecture about how they need to do aerobics and lift weights three times a week,” he said. Echoing the opinion of many Republicans in Washington, Davis asserted that Needham’s operation was less about legislative results than its own : “Very quickly, it became a conservative operation,” he said. More than once, Chapman recalls, Republican leaders on the Hill called Feulner to say, “You’ve got to rein these guys in. ” But Heritage Action had other defenders besides Feulner. The new Republican Study Committee chairman, Jim Jordan of Ohio, felt that Needham’s organization was instrumental in pushing the party rightward. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, a rising star in the Tea Party class of 2010, characterized Heritage Action’s messaging as “invaluable. ” Even the complaints were tacit acknowledgments of the organization’s growing clout. As a 501( c)(4) Heritage Action was not obliged to disclose its finances, but it was known to have received millions, including $500, 000 from the Koch brothers. House members pointed with pride to their high Heritage Action scores. Leadership aides saw no choice but to include Needham and Chapman in strategy meetings. And Heritage Action’s relentless focus on its message — Obamacare is a disaster that must be repealed in full — was already taking its toll. Before the law had even gone fully into effect, polls consistently showed that most Americans disapproved of it. The A. C. A. ’s unpopularity persisted despite a number of modifications meant to improve the program and thus quell discontent. As Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary at the time, told me: “The notion from Day 1 was to make this work and listen carefully to the feedback, and to help dampen anxiety without gutting key provisions in the law. What made things difficult was that most of the law wasn’t going to be implemented right away. There was this huge gap in time between designing the bill and actually having the benefits fully in place, which gave a lot of opportunity for the opposition to say, ‘This will kill jobs, pestilence will come, vermin will fall from the sky’ — and very little opportunity for us to say anything other than, ‘Wait and see. ’’u2009” On this point, if nothing else, Sebelius and Needham could agree: The war on Obamacare would become far more difficult for opponents to wage once the actual benefits became available. New enrollees would begin receiving health care coverage on Jan. 1, 2014. It was a glum axiom among conservatives that once Americans were handed a new entitlement — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance — they were loath to part with it. Moreover, once a gigantic program fully insinuates itself into the federal governing apparatus, disentangling it is a formidable task. “One of my political heroes in town is Don Rumsfeld,” Feulner told me. “And one of Rumsfeld’s rules is that you want to act as quickly and aggressively as you can, because every day someone in the bureaucracy is narrowing the options you’ll have two days later. That’s clearly what’s happening with Obamacare. Every day the options for full repeal get fewer and fewer. ” On Sept. 24, 2013, House Republicans, goaded by Heritage Action and Ted Cruz, drafted legislation in which they agreed to raise the debt ceiling if Obama agreed to a number of conditions, including delaying implementation of his health care law by one year. Senate Democrats objected, but House Republicans wouldn’t budge. As a consequence, the United States Treasury warned it would soon default on its obligations, and on Oct. 1 the government began shutting down. A couple of days later, Tim Chapman met with several senior Republican staff members and members of conservative activist groups in a House conference room. The shutdown was the crisis point Heritage Action had hoped for — that cherished moment when Republicans finally took a bold, principled stand. The public would express outrage that the president was willing to hold America’s full faith and credit hostage over the Obamacare. Democrats would go wobbly. Republicans in both the House and the Senate would stand firm. In the end, Obama would cave. Or so Needham and Chapman hoped. “Kudos to leadership for doing the right thing,” Chapman told the group. “Now let’s prosecute this case!” His enthusiasm was met with a wall of silence. The others in the room stared at him with a welling resentment. Finally, a analyst at Americans for Tax Reform said to Chapman: “You’ve been saying the Republicans need to be brave. Well, we’re doing that. We’ve shut the government down. But what does Heritage Action intend to do to put pressure on the Democrats? So far, the only money you’ve spent over the past few months has been a dollars attacking Republicans. ” Chapman went visibly . Only a couple of days into the shutdown, it was now occurring to the chief operating officer of Heritage Action that he and Needham had been abandoned by conservative leaders. Within days, the Republicans in the Senate buckled and, with the House Republican leaders in tow, signed a deal with Obama that said almost nothing about health care. Congress was blamed by the public for causing the shutdown, and its approval ratings plummeted. Throughout the shutdown, Needham insisted that the public would eventually reward Republicans for standing up to Obamacare. “Look,” he told me at the time, “there’s more Americans who are aware right now of the fact that we have one political party that owns Obamacare and was willing to go to the great lengths of shutting down the World War II Memorial in order to preserve it, and another party that tried to stop it. And Americans deserve that type of clarity. ” This opinion was apparently not shared by Speaker Boehner. In December 2013, he told reporters that groups like Heritage Action had “lost all credibility. ” A month later, on the “Tonight” show, he called the government shutdown a “predictable disaster. ” But the continuing intransigence of the repeal advocates was beginning to wear down the White House. Initially, Sebelius says, “we were more focused on the Republican attorneys general across the country who challenged the constitutionality of the law. Until that was resolved by the Supreme Court in June 2012, that was our focus. The congressional action was viewed more as sour grapes and not altogether realistic. Clearly the president wasn’t going to sign anything that would strike down his law. ” By the time of the shutdown, though, the repealers appeared to have succeeded in getting inside the Obama administration’s collective head. As Oct. 1, 2013 — the date HealthCare. gov was to be open for enrollments — approached, little time was available to subject the website to tests that could expose its shortcomings. But “the one thing that wasn’t feasible, knowing how vehemently the Republicans were determined to stop it at any cost, was moving the deadline,” she said. “That would have mobilized the opposition to the point that we might never have been able to launch it at all. ” And so the White House rolled out a deeply flawed website. By this time, the Republican critique of Obamacare was already becoming a prophecy. The A. C. A. had been passed with only about of the funding that it would need to be fully operational, with the expectation that the rest would be portioned out by Congress annually, through the appropriations process that funds discretionary government programs. From 2011 through 2014, as the House Republicans played round after round of fiscal brinkmanship, Obama reluctantly signed budget deals that continually shortchanged Obamacare. “They did a very effective job making sure there would never be enough to fund implementation,” Sebelius told me. “And they came after the budget over and over. Anything that looked like it could be used, they made sure was gone. ” That was especially the case, Sebelius said, when it came to educating the public about the program’s benefits — funding that would have made a difference in the 19 states where governors and legislatures had refused to expand Medicaid and had no interest in promoting Obamacare. “Any effort to put in dollars for outreach on the federal level,” she said, “were immediately stripped out. ” It’s impossible to know for sure how much of a role the hobbling of Obamacare played in the outcome of the 2014 midterm elections, in which the Republicans captured the Senate and expanded their majority in the House. But Republicans uniformly campaigned against the program, while Democrats found themselves at pains to demonstrate its virtues. As a bonus for Needham and Chapman, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader had been drubbed in the primary by a Tea Republican. In September 2015, Boehner would step down as well. A month after Boehner resigned, the House considered yet another bill targeting Obamacare. But this one was different from its predecessors. Sponsored by Representative Tom Price, who in just over a year would be Trump’s pick as secretary of Health and Human Services, H. R. 3762 was a “reconciliation bill,” a budgetary measure to defund the health care program that would, in accordance with Senate rules, require only 51 votes to pass in the upper chamber. That threshold was attainable, now that the Republicans had 54 Senate seats. The bigger hurdle was a more arcane one: To qualify for this lower passage threshold as a reconciliation bill, every item in the legislation had to be deemed a budgetary fix, rather than an extraneous provision, by the Senate parliamentarian. Accordingly, it did not include repealing the individual mandate and Medicaid expansion. Better to let the Senate legislative aides confer on those matters with the parliamentarian, one staff member who helped write the bill told me. That approach was not good enough for Needham and Chapman. Heritage Action announced its strong disapproval of the reconciliation bill, instructed members to vote it down and warned that the measure would be . Insisting that it was “universally acknowledged” that the repeal of the exchange subsidies and Medicaid expansion would qualify as reconcilable items, Heritage Action stated that it would be satisfied with nothing less. The new speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, ignored Heritage Action. On Oct. 23, the reconciliation bill went to the House floor, where all but seven Republicans voted for it. Apoplectic, Needham termed the act a “charade” that “undermines the party’s longstanding position of full repeal. ” He added, “We expect the Senate to do better. ” The Senate Republicans did. Their version of the bill included repeal of the individual mandate and Medicaid expansion. The parliamentarian ruled that both provisions were extraneous and did not therefore qualify in their present form for a vote. A version of the bill, which kept the individual mandate and Medicaid expansion but stripped away the ability to enforce either, then passed the Senate and was reapproved by the House. It was sent over to President Obama. On Jan. 8, 2016, he vetoed it. Obama’s final defense of his namesake program would come almost exactly 10 months later, when he received Trump in the Oval Office and urged him not to eviscerate Obamacare. Obama’s words, Trump said the following day to The Wall Street Journal, had made him reconsider abolishing the law in full. But 10 weeks later, as one of the very first acts of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order whose mission statement was the “prompt repeal” of Obamacare in its entirety. The Affordable Care Act’s approval rating has rarely exceeded 50 percent. And over time, as it has strained under the multitude of compromises that were necessary for its passage, it has proved itself worthy of several of the criticisms aimed at it. Though for 80 percent of health care recipients (including those receiving health care from Medicare, Medicaid or their employers) annual rate increases are at historic lows, for the rest the story has been different. The premiums have been rising because of a variety of structural reasons, and because federal assistance to recipients to offset the costs has been in many cases inadequate. Or, as the analyst Robert Laszewski puts it, “They created a Cadillac with Chevrolet subsidies. ” But it is also because unit costs have continued to soar — like the price of prescription drugs, thanks to the sweetheart deal that the pharmaceutical industry cut with the Democrats in exchange for being an early supporter of the law. Some rural states like Alaska have seen very little competition among insurers — something that a public option might have addressed, had the insurance lobby not spent a fortune to defeat that provision. Of the 23 nonprofit insurance set up by the Affordable Care Act to compete in such areas, only a handful remain — probably at least in part because the received from Congress only $2. 4 billion of the $6 billion originally appropriated to establish them. To make Obamacare economically feasible for insurers, the program needed to attract a large pool of young and healthy recipients to offset the costs of providing care for the older and less healthy. That ratio has yet to prove satisfactory for many insurance companies — one of which, Aetna, announced last year that it would be abandoning the program in several states. (Aetna publicly blamed Obamacare, saying that it was losing money participating in the exchanges, but a federal judge ruled that Aetna’s real motive was to escape scrutiny for its possibly illegal merger with Humana, and court documents have shown that the company was making money in some states where it was claiming not to.) Then again, it was always the industry’s expectation that the law would prove flawed in places, and that those shortcomings would be addressed legislatively. As Karen Ignagni, the lead lobbyist for the industry during the formation and passage of Obamacare and now president and C. E. O. of EmblemHealth, tactfully puts it: “On the Affordable Care Act, there was a strong difference of opinion between Democrats and Republicans going back to the initial days of discussion. And so there was never a . ” In spite of all this, Obamacare has done far more good than its critics predicted it would. As of 2014, insurers cannot deny coverage to anyone based on their current health status — a meaningful protection for the 133 million Americans with chronic illnesses. Over 15 million poor or citizens are now receiving Medicaid benefits in the 31 states (as well as the District of Columbia) that have opted for this expansion. Another 3 million Americans under the age of 26 have been allowed to stay on their parents’ health care plans, thanks to the provision in the A. C. A. that Heritage Action warmly refers to as the “slacker mandate. ” Meanwhile, during each month that Obamacare has been in existence, the private sector has grown. The bill has not proved to be the “job killer” apocalyptically described by its Republican opponents. Now that the law is in place, trying to tinker with it in a measured fashion, deciding which parts to discard and which to keep, would be more complicated than simply determining what the public likes and what it doesn’t. As Jim McDermott says: “You can’t just reach in and pull out one thing. It’d be like a doctor doing surgery and saying, ‘Well, since you’re not using your spleen today, let’s take it out.’ It’s all wired together in a very complex way. ” That wiring represents, among other things, the compromises worked out with the various players in the health care ecosystem — doctors’ and nurses’ associations, hospital groups, insurers, drug companies — that enabled the passage of Obamacare in the first place. As Ignagni points out: “It was very unique that all of the different industries were willing to sit at the table and engage in together. I don’t really recall any time when that has happened in our economy on any issue. ” Collectively, those groups spent close to $273 million on lobbying during the height of the Obamacare debate. They will surely spend a similar sum haranguing Congress to pass a replacement that favors them. Many conservative remedies have been floated over the years and have been consolidated into Speaker Paul Ryan’s “A Better Way” summation: expanded health savings accounts, assorted tax credits and refunds, reform, portability of insurance from one job to the next and the ability to purchase insurance across state lines. But the problem for Republicans is that Obamacare’s sweeping coverage has changed the paradigm. Of the 31 states that have opted for expanded Medicaid coverage, 16 have Republican governors. None of these governors have expressed a desire to throw their states’ residents off the rolls. At the same time, the fitful and at times rhetorically muddled transition from the known (Obamacare) to the unknown (“something terrific”) has risked throwing the health care industry into turmoil. The aftershocks are likely to be not only economic but also political. “If you take Obamacare as it looks right now,” says the policy analyst Robert Laszewski, a longtime critic of the legislation, about half of enrollees “don’t get a subsidy because their incomes are too high. They make $90, 000 or $100, 000 a year but are in the individual market. These tend to be Trump supporters. So if he further destabilizes this thing and there are rate increases, he’ll be screwing his own people. ” Last month, Representative Steve King once again offered his legislation, maintaining that in doing away with Obamacare, the country would immediately be “far better off,” even if nothing were done to replace it. To King and Heritage Action, failing to seize this moment of opportunity would constitute a grave betrayal. “It’s pretty clear that the conservative base is expecting Congress to do this,” Chapman told me. “If Congress goes back to the voters in 2018 and people are still enrolling in Obamacare, I think that’s going to be disastrous. ” Speaking of the base, Chapman predicted, “They’re basically going to splinter off and create a third party. ” But it took more than the conservative base to elect Donald Trump, and it will take more than them to many Republican senators and representatives in 2018 and 2020. The rest of the public has begun a decided turn against King’s and Heritage Action’s position. The same Fox News poll last month that found Obamacare’s overall favorability to be 50 percent also found that only 23 percent of respondents favored fully repealing it — a new low since the law was signed nearly seven years ago. After Trump remarked to The Washington Post on Jan. 15 that he planned to provide “insurance for everybody,” I thought I had better gauge Michael Needham’s reaction. Taken at face value, Trump did not sound much like a man hellbent on tilting health care policy rightward. “I’m concerned when I hear that kind of talk,” King had told me. “I don’t know how deeply he’s gone into the details. ” But Needham chuckled breezily when I brought up Trump’s statement. “I think right now there’s a lot of people who want to jump on words,” he said. “Everybody wants to ensure every American has access to health care. That is pretty clearly what Trump was saying. What’s the overused phrase? Trump supporters take him seriously, not literally. ” Nor did it seem to bother him that Republicans on the Hill were in a frenzy to develop a consensus for replacement legislation. Up to now, Needham reminded me, the goal had been to inculcate in the party a ceaseless lust for Obamacare repeal. “For the last eight years,” he said, “it hasn’t made sense to litigate the nuance of, Do you use a tax credit or a tax deduction, or what are your views of ?” The Republicans might not end up with a single gargantuan replacement bill, and maybe that was as it should be. “We’re probably in an age where smaller, humbler pieces of legislation are easier to get consensus around. ” This struck me as sensible and, at the same time, somewhat naïve. If, as in Heritage Action’s dream scenario, Obamacare were to be immediately vaporized, it would leave a yawning vacuum — and the first thing to fill it would be anxiety. Every gruesome case of families now left to die would be duly chronicled by the media. Legislators would panic — but, if recent history is any judge, their reaction would be tame compared with that of the man who now thoroughly owned the landscape. Was it really so hard, I asked Needham, to imagine Trump faltering under the specter of bad press and equally bad approval ratings and hastily offering up a Trumpcare that bore a suspicious resemblance to Obamacare? Needham paused for a moment before saying, in a vaguely amazed voice: “I’m a little surprised by the question. Right now, I don’t see much evidence of that playing out. ” Trump’s vice president was Mike Pence, “my first hero when I came to Washington. ” Tom Price, the nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, and Mick Mulvaney, whom Trump tapped to run the Office of Management and Budget, were longtime supporters of Heritage Action. The former senator Jim DeMint, Ed Feulner’s replacement as president of the Heritage Foundation, was helping to shape the selection of Trump’s prospective Supreme Court nominees. Trump’s team was loaded with Heritage staff members. All this counted for as much as whatever the new president himself thought. “Richard Viguerie, one of the icons of the conservative movement, said to me that what was great about Reagan was that when he walked into the room, you saw your friends and allies walking with him,” Needham told me. It was a pleasing image, conveying undying fellowship. Yet even Reagan, fierce inveigher against socialized medicine that he was, did not make a dent in Medicare, the program he so loathed, during his two terms in office. Quite the contrary, in fact: He briefly expanded its benefits to include catastrophic care for the elderly before Congress struck down the measure less than a year after Reagan left office. Now came the president whom Needham once accused of embracing socialized medicine. Maybe he would somehow turn out to be a more reliable friend to the conservative movement than Reagan had been. Or maybe Washington would prove, hardly for the first time, that even the best of friends will let you down. | 1 |
Fugitive director Roman Polanski will reportedly attempt to have his child rape case resolved so that he may return to the United States without fear of arrest or incarceration. [According to TMZ, the director’s attorney, Harland Braun, has asked a Los Angeles judge to review what it reports is a “ transcript” of the prosecutor’s testimony during Polanski’s trial. The attorney claims the transcript proves that the Pianist director had agreed to a plea deal to serve just 48 days in jail, and that the judge had agreed to the deal. Polanski was convicted of raping a child after a photo shoot in Los Angeles in 1977 and spent 42 days in prison before being released. But the director later fled the country for Europe when he feared that the judge in his case backed out of the deal and suggested prosecutors give him 50 years in prison. According to TMZ, Polanski’s victim has asked the judge to close the case without giving the director any more jail time. Polanski has lived mainly in France in the years since he fled the United States, though he also holds Polish citizenship. The director has escaped extradition several times in the decades since his conviction, most recently in December, when Poland’s Supreme Court rejected a request by a lower court to have him returned to U. S. custody. Polanski last attempted to return to the U. S. in 2014, when his attorneys filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, claiming the agency engaged in “serious misconduct” while prosecuting and attempting to extradite the director. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 0 |
SiriusXM host Alex Marlow welcomed billionaire businessman Mark Cuban of ABC’s Shark Tank to Breitbart News Daily on Friday. [Marlow asked Cuban about his “Radical Transport” Kickstarter campaign to create hoverboards with two key features previous products lacked: they will be made in the U. S. and they will not explode. “It’s made in the United States. We have a few parts we have to import, that we couldn’t make here. It’s going to be assembled in Dallas, so it’s going to be made with a lot more care,” Cuban explained. “We’re which the previous boards out of China were not,” he noted. “Everything is redesigned. It’s intellectual property. The previous hoverboards, they were designed to push the price down, be as inexpensive as possible, and appeal to as many kids as possible. We’ve taken a completely different approach: intellectual property, a whole new design. It’s a lot more responsive. It’s a lot safer from a manufacturing perspective. ” “It’s a lot more oriented toward riders, if you will. Believe it or not, there’s a group of people who don’t just want to ride them around the house or the driveway. They want to do tricks and kind of be an alternative to skateboards. That’s the market we’re going after, so they’ll be a little bit more expensive, too,” he said. Cuban said that in all of his companies, “we’re not allowed to buy anything overseas until we’ve priced it here in the United States first. ” “There are some products we just can’t get here, like with the Mavericks, I can’t get my all made here. They’re twice as expensive. But anything else, all the tchotchkes, whatever we give away, it always has to be priced here in the United States, just in case something’s changed. If it’s even close, the tie goes to the U. S. A. company,” he said. Marlow saluted Cuban, a supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and critic of President Donald Trump, for appearing on Breitbart News Daily. “I like facilitating dialogue between people who disagree,” said Marlow. “You’d be shocked at how hard it is to get Hillary supporters to come on a show like this and talk to me. ” Cuban in turn applauded Marlow and the Breitbart News Daily crew for welcoming such guests when they do appear. “I agree with you. I take the same approach. I don’t need to go and talk to people who agree with me. We already agree,” he said. “I learn from people who disagree with me. I call it checking my hole card: you know what you have underneath there, but you’re always checking to make sure you’re still being consistent in your thoughts. I want people to challenge me. That’s how I get smarter. That’s how I learn. ” “I try not to be an ideologue about anything. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, and I’m willing to evolve. Coming on a show like this is a great opportunity for me,” he added, stressing that he was not a partisan for the left or the Democratic Party, but an independent. Cuban agreed with Marlow that the healthy exchange of ideas was vital, especially in a time when so many people are living in ideological bubbles or actively calling for the suppression of speech with which they disagree. “I don’t know if there’s necessarily a ‘crackdown’ on free speech, but I do agree with you that we kind of insulate ourselves and tend to live in our own little bubbles,” he said. “We tend to see the news with which we agree. To me, that’s a real problem. It was a problem during the election, and it continues to be. ” “When we have two people that disagree or groups that disagree, if we can have an open dialogue, we both get a chance to get a little smarter, and that’s always a good thing,” he said. Cuban said he could not divulge the details of his private meeting with White House strategist and former Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon months ago. “The heart of the matter is, I’ve known Steve since the late 90s, early 2000s, when he was in the entertainment business, so it was just a chance to catch up,” he said. “He ran a company called The Firm, which did a lot of work in Hollywood, so I had occasion to meet with him. We have a good relationship. But again, like us, we don’t have to agree on everything, but we can certainly discuss it all. ” Marlow asked if President Trump’s success was inspirational as Cuban pursues his own political ambitions or if it “terrifies you that Trump is the president. ” “I would say it inspires me because we’re so different,” Cuban replied, after laughing at the phrasing of the question. “I think the commonality is that we’re both businesspeople, but we take a completely different approach to how we do business. If you’ve read anything I’ve said, I haven’t been a big fan of his approach. I have been a fan of some of his economic policies. ” “I’m trying to be and see what works and what doesn’t work,” he said. “A lot of my — I wouldn’t call them political aspirations, but more willingness to get out there and talk more about these things — is just from my desire to learn and my desire to do what’s best for the country. ” Cuban added that as an entrepreneur, he has “a desire to try to help create as many jobs as possible. ” “These days, more than ever, politics and entrepreneurship intersect,” he observed. He thought it was not quite right to say that he and Trump are similar in background and personality but diametrically opposed politically because there are issues upon which they agree. “I believe in lower taxes. I believe in more efficient government. I believe in reducing bureaucracy. I believe that we shouldn’t have lobbyists who can go in or former government workers who can come back and lobby. So in a lot of respects, we’re very much the same,” he said. “I disagree with him on trade, but I think he’s evolving his trade position. You know, he’s backed off on NAFTA. He’s backed off on the border adjustment tax stuff, at least from initial appearances. He’s not been as aggressive on trying to not work with other countries,” Cuban said of Trump. “I think there’s a lot of things that we’re on the same page about, but those are more conservative values, I think, than they are Donald Trump values. Where I disagree with him vehemently is that he doesn’t do a good job of communicating, and I don’t think he has great leadership skills. I say that based off of a long history in investing in companies and working with a lot of different corporate leaders. That’s where I really take issue with him,” he explained. Cuban strove to make a distinction between President Trump’s ability to draw large crowds at his rallies and the kind of leadership skills to which he was referring. “Going to a rally is part of an entertainment and part of a social gathering. More power to him, right? Whether there’s 15 or 50, 000, more power to him for bringing them in, more power for getting them excited. He is a good marketer. He gets credit for that,” Cuban allowed. “But once you get the job — this may not seem like a great analogy, but trying to get an investor, whether it’s from Shark Tank or me or anybody investing in your company, that’s an accomplishment. But once you get the investment, you have to run the company profitably,” he continued. “You have to be able to execute on the things that you’ve said the company is going to do. ” “Donald Trump going out there and holding rallies. That’s him bringing in the investors, the voters. Now that he’s been elected, it’s time for him to execute and be a leader and try to take the entire country — not just the people who voted for him — to a place that’s best for the United States. That’s the challenge for him right now, from my perspective,” he said. Cuban observed that Trump “didn’t campaign as a politician, but he’s becoming a politician. ” “I think there’s a variety of business leaders, from Bill Gates to Warren Buffett to — not Mark Zuckerberg, but Sheryl Sandberg, people that I respect as businesspeople. Howard Schultz,” he added, offering some examples of the leadership style he believes Trump should emulate. “Put aside their politics. They’ve taken companies that have tens of thousands — even Rex Tillerson, right? People have taken companies with tens of thousands of employees, and despite the varied political viewpoints of those employees, have put them working together towards a common goal that has led to significant accomplishments for the company and for the people at that company,” he said. “That’s the position he’s in right now, that he’s got to achieve. That’s where a lot of people had hoped he would be able to deliver with business acumen and business skills as a leader. I don’t believe he has,” Cuban said of Trump. Marlow asked if Cuban would agree Rex Tillerson was a “bold pick of the president, to put a CEO into the secretary of state position. ” “I have no problem with it. I thought it was a good pick, simply because Rex has managed 75, 000 people,” Cuban said. “I had no problem with that pick at all. But now, look at whether Donald Trump, President Trump, is letting Rex Tillerson do his job. We haven’t seen Rex Tillerson stand up and say, ‘This is my vision for the State Department.’ We haven’t seen him stand up. Where he’s stood up and spoken has almost been a contradiction to what the president has said in terms of policy. ” “And so you’re starting to see that bifurcation, those challenges between the people that he’s picked for these cabinet positions and the positions they’re taking when they’re out there doing their jobs and the positions the president has taken when he’s tried to communicate with the people. That’s a problem. That’s a leadership issue,” he argued. Turning to some specific issues, Marlow brought up health care, which he noted Cuban has referred to as a “right. ” He asked Cuban to explore that logic by explaining why people don’t have an equivalent “right” to food and housing. “Let’s take a step back,” Cuban began. “First of all, we all have to eat, we all need a place to live, and we all get sick. We all play that genetic lottery. No one dies healthy. You’re going to get sick. Everybody you know is going to get sick. ” “The decision we make as a country is, how much are we going to help people when they get sick? Because when someone gets sick and they don’t have the means to pay for their health care, we pay for it anyway,” he contended. “You pay for it. I pay for it. All taxpayers pay for it, one way or the other. There’s nobody who gets sick and we just let die. There’s nobody that gets sick and there’s no economic consequences. ” “So from my perspective, the question isn’t is it a right because it’s in the Constitution, or why not food, why not everything else. The question is, what’s the best economic course for the United States? What’s the best economic course for the American people?” he asked. “The reality is, given we all have to pay for everybody’s health care — whether it’s directly or indirectly — I’d rather see us just take on this problem and say, ‘Let’s do it’ in the most manner. ” “And because health care, really, we all face the same genetic risk. We all face the same randomness of life risk, where you can be in an accident, et cetera, when you’re able to spread the cost among everybody for — not all healthcare issues if you sprain your ankle, that’s on you. If you break your finger, that’s on you, right? But if you get a chronic illness, if you get a serious illness or illness, that’s something I think we should all share the cost in because we all face the same unknowns and the same risks,” he said. “And when we have people that fall through the cracks, and we don’t pay for them, we end up paying more indirectly. When someone has to go to the hospital because they don’t have insurance — and by the way, I think the insurance companies should be out of the mix altogether — but when someone needs health care and they don’t have the ability to pay for it, in our communities, we end up paying for it one way or the other. That means my property taxes go up. That means sales taxes go up in order to pay for a local hospital, local medical services, et cetera,” he said. “I would rather just all of us recognize that these are shared risks and share in paying the costs — not for all healthcare issues, like I mentioned, but for chronic and serious injuries and healthcare problems. For everything else, just leave a free and open market. You’re taking the greatest cost away from the insurance companies,” Cuban said. “Now, the insurance companies will hate it because they’re making twenty percent,” he added. “They make a twenty percent VIG off of all those costs. Their net income might only be about seven percent, but when insurance companies are doing $180 billion or $160 billion in revenue, that could fall to $30 billion. So they’re going to hate this idea. ” “But the reality is, we all pay for each others’ health care, directly or indirectly,” he stressed. “As a businessperson, as an entrepreneur, I’d rather just say, ‘What’s the best way to solve the problem of health care?’ rather than just putting it all into the government as, ‘Okay, you come up with Obamacare or an alternative.’ I don’t think that’s the right way to do it. ” Another issue Cuban has been involved with is student loan debt. “We’ve got a problem, and I’ve been speaking about this for years,” he said. “I said the same thing to Obama when Secretary Clinton came out with her suggestion that all student loans should basically be dismissed and college should be free. I said that was a bad idea. I told her that was a bad idea. ” “Right now, I think the cost of tuition has increased dramatically over the past 20 years, simply because there’s too much easy money to be borrowed for tuition,” he explained. “Now, I have no problem with Pell grants. I have no problem with basic loans, up to $5700, I think it is. But what’s happening now is, private lenders are lending to families thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars per year in some cases. And because that money is so easy to borrow, it’s really easy just for colleges to continue to increase their tuition. ” “I’m not suggesting that we dismiss all loans that students have, even though that’s what some people would like,” he emphasized. “But what I am suggesting is, if we’re going to arrest the increases and inflation in college tuition and living expenses, we’re going to have to end the easy money. ” “Whatever the number is, I’d like to see a cap on the amount of money that a family could borrow in any given year and in total,” he suggested. “If you do that, the easy money stops for colleges. They have to become more efficient. ” “Right now, particularly big public universities, they’ll have more administrators making over $200, 000 a year than they have teachers or professors making over $200, 000 a year,” Cuban pointed out. “The economics are just wrong in universities. They’ll have a sociology building, a psychology building, a business building — none of which has unique features that are required for their teaching purposes, but they’re there just because a donor paid for them. I think all that just creates tuition inflation, and that needs to change. ” Cuban disagreed with Marlow that too many university resources are devoted to liberal arts classes that have few applications in the working world. “I think right now the argument could be made that liberal arts majors aren’t going to make as much, and it’s far more difficult to get a job,” he countered. “But we’re going to go through a complete change in the nature of work over the next five to ten years. ” “What’s happening with artificial intelligence and its derivatives and robotics, machine learning, deep learning, neural networks — if you work for software, or if you are in a position that you’re doing the same job, or it’s a repetitive job, over and over, or if you’re in a job — if this, then that — there’s a good chance your job’s going to be displaced over the next ten years,” he predicted. “As we get more into a machine learning environment, we’re going to need more free thinkers who know how to use data than we’ll need people who maybe were bookkeepers or accountants, even some lawyers. Those jobs, because they’re there’s not going to be a need for those. We’re literally going to have machines more capable of doing that. It used to be that we told machines what to do. Now we’re asking machines what to do,” said Cuban. Marlow clarified that he was concerned about students who incur enormous debt earning degrees that offer them no real prospect of repaying the debt through gainful employment. He cited someone he knows personally who incurred $200, 000 in student loan debt to earn a Women’s and Gender Studies degree, realized it was of little use to her career ambitions, and started over as a medical student, studying alongside his wife. “Two questions there,” Cuban responded. “One, she went to the wrong school. She went to a school that was too expensive. She didn’t go to a school she could afford. That was the first issue, and that was her choice. She’s obviously dealing with the consequences. ” “Two, it’s all going to change. We don’t know what the best jobs are going to be in ten years, for the reasons I mentioned earlier,” he continued. “Between robotics and deep learning, not to get too technical, the nature of work is going to change. There’s going to be significant displacement. I don’t have a relationship with the administration, but the people I know that work in and around the White House that I have been able to talk to, that’s the overriding theme that I’ve been preaching to them. ” “This goes back to an issue I have with President Trump: he doesn’t have a curiosity to learn. He doesn’t a quest for knowledge,” Cuban charged. “Part of that has led to his excitement over creating factories and what he calls ‘bringing in jobs.’ The reality is — write this down — look at the companies that he is saying are opening up factories, and make a note for their total employment the day he makes an announcement — whether it’s Ford, GM, whoever it may be. And then two years from now, look at the total employments for those companies. I guarantee you, the total number of employees for those companies will be down because the factories that President Trump is so excited about will lead to fewer jobs, not more jobs. ” “Technology marches on,” he mused. “That’s not a bad thing. I’d rather have that technology be hosted in the United States, where we have some level of control over our own destiny, than those factores be created in China where they are being created, and they are changing the cost and the nature of work there already. The point being that unless you recognize the changes and disruption that are coming in the very short term, it’s going to be very difficult to say, ‘Okay, this is the type of classes you should take. ’” “And so I’ve said publicly, I don’t have a problem with a women’s studies major if they’re smart, if they’re inquisitive, if they’re willing to continue to learn. I tell this to all my friends and their kids, et cetera, and my own kids — my oldest is 13 — the greatest skill that you can have is a thirst for knowledge, loving and learning how to learn because things are going to be changing so dramatically over the next ten years in terms of technology that we don’t know what the best jobs are going to be. So we’re all going to have to continue to learn how to find new skills,” he said. “Now, your wife and her friend, they’re in great shape. You talk about, going back a little bit to health care, if it was up to me, one of the programs I would start is a program that paid to have more doctors because if we’re going to push down the cost of health care, we should subsidize the cost of medical school — not to any amount that the school would charge us, but offer your wife $50, 000 a year, and make it available not just to her, but so that instead of there being 90, 000 med students in school in any given year, there are 180, 000 med students in school in any given year. We spend the $900 million or $1 billion a year, whatever it may be, knowing that that increased competition, because we have more doctors, is going to push down the cost of medical care,” said Cuban. “Those are the types of things that I think, if we start to anticipate what’s coming down the pike in the future, we can be smarter and have an impact on health care, on insurance costs, on medical costs. There’s just so many things that we can do. Again, I’ll go back to the president: these aren’t the types of conversations that are being held in the White House. They’re looking backwards to the way things used to be and trying to recreate those, as opposed to looking forward to the way things should be,” he said. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. LISTEN: | 1 |
You are here: Home / US / The Clinton Shakedown Scam Summed Up With One Meme The Clinton Shakedown Scam Summed Up With One Meme October 28, 2016 Pinterest
Regan Pifer writes that everyone should donate to the Clinton Foundation immediately!
After all, it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Bill and Hillary, along with the Clinton Foundation board members, to fly around the world in their Boeing 757, and to stay in $13,900/night villas with a 60-foot swimming pool.
That kind of luxury ain’t going to pay for itself!
Oh, and–in between the opulence and indulgence–former president Bill Clinton and his donors stopped to serve “meals to 250 underprivileged children” in Jaipur, India on July 16, 2014.
I wonder how many more meals, medicine, or school supplies could have been provided with an extra $13,900.
This is a typical Clinton Foundation site visit.
According to The Daily Caller :
The trip provides a glimpse into the lavish lifestyle of the Clinton Foundation and dozens of its wealthiest donors — all done in the name of charity, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation…
The Clinton excesses on this particular trip were seen in several Third World nations. Indonesian officials, for example, warned the foundation that Pangkalan Bun Airport’s landing strip was too short for the Boeing 757 and that the party would have to switch to a smaller aircraft.
Officially, the Indonesian stop was to visit a Clinton Climate Initiative project where a local forest preserve was being cultivated to offset carbon emissions. But flying 41 people — donors, their families and foundation staff — aboard an aircraft designed for nearly 300 sent the trip’s “carbon footprint” sky high…
…[T]he 757 and Gulfstream burned 60,000 gallons of jet fuel, worth at least $220,000 using current commercial aviation rates.
Sixty thousands gallons of jet fuel produced 200 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, enough energy to power 21 average U.S. homes for a year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It would fuel a passenger car 478,000 miles in a year.
The Clinton entourage’s carbon dioxide consumption exceeded a year’s total emissions by countries like Guinea-Bissau, Tonga, the British Virgin Islands, Lichtenstein and the Solomon Islands, according to the World Bank .
The Clinton Foundation led a workshop in what not to do –a mismanagement of funds and resources for the gluttonous indulgence of donors.
Imagine if the “C” in the Clinton Foundation stood for compassion as opposed to corruption… | 0 |
Top White House officials told media outlets on Tuesday that they’re open to a compromise deal on immigration. [But the new reports lack any details about what compromise would be acceptable to President Donald Trump or the voters who elected him into power. CNN reported Tuesday that, The President is thinking about adding the topic to his speech tonight to a joint session of Congress, though either way an immigration bill remains a desire for his first term. The topic of enforcing current immigration laws is already in the speech, the official said. The actual details of any proposal are vital because every faction in the huge political dispute over imported labor says they want a compromise. In 2013, for example, the eight senators who drafted the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill claimed their bill was a compromise — even though it would have gutted sanctions for employers, granted an amnesty to millions of illegals, increased the inflow of refugees, and doubled the annual inflow of legal immigrants to roughly 2 million per year. reformers have pushed their own compromises, which include an amnesty for the 11 illegals in the nation in exchange for sharp reductions in annual legal immigration plus rules to sanction employers who hire illegal immigrants. That’s the supported by Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, who notes that any overhaul of immigration law requires some purchased support from some Democrats. In his winning 2016 campaign, Donald Trump won huge public support because of his opposition to amnesty and to policies, and because of his promise to “buy American and hire American. ” In one 2016 speech, he urged a cutback in legal immigration to historical norms. He also called for a temporary pause in legal immigration, while repeating his promise for a wall that would stop illegal immigration. In August 2015, his policy paper declared: We need to control the admission of new workers in order to: help wages grow, get teenagers back to work, aid minorities’ rise into the middle class, help schools and communities falling behind, and to ensure our immigrant members of the national family become part of the American dream. On Feb. 9, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said the president is still opposed to the 2013 “Gang of Eight” bill. But if Trump were to reverse his policies, he’d likely face severe political problems in 2018 and 2020. According to CNN, “It has to be a negotiation,” the official said, arguing that the bill theoretically could make people on both the “far right” and “far left” happy. “It could be good for everyone,” the senior administration official said. “People are exhausted” from debating the topic. Any immigration reductions would be a strategic problem for Democrats because they are hoping that the rising tide of immigrant voters will bring them into power. Any reduction is also a problem for Wall Street investors because their calculations assume a growing population of immigrant consumers. | 0 |
“Changes? This place never changes,” Dave Gelfman, 101, said as he leaned back in his beach chair at his regular spot at the Silver Gull Beach Club and pressed his feet on the warm concrete deck. It was a warm Saturday and Mr. Gelfman had a pool behind him and the ocean in front of him, just beyond a nearly empty beach that stretched into the hazy distance. All around him, the Silver Gull was coming to life. Children ran from the beach to the family pool. In the breezeways between the blocks of cabanas, groups of women — with their outfits and makeup just so — started their daily games. Deeply tanned men followed suit, but their games of choice were pinochle and poker. The cabana staff carried chairs out to the beach, set up tarps and tables, and carried the day’s first round of drinks to members sitting poolside at this oceanfront summer colony that lies on an oddly deserted stretch of federal seashore near the western tip of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. The Silver Gull is part of a disappearing world of private waterfront clubs in New York City, where most people flock to crowded public beaches or head elsewhere for more pristine seashore spots. But in a city of constant change, these timeless clubs offer tradition and continuity — a reunion that lasts a few balmy weeks every year, pulling together familiar faces who may not see much of one another after the chill of fall settles in. The New York Times will visit the Silver Gull throughout the summer, chronicling a season at a beach club where Mr. Gelfman is among its members, having joined a couple of years after it opened in 1963. A of active summers at the club might not have helped him live this long, he said, “but it certainly didn’t hurt. ” The idea of trudging to the Hamptons or to the Jersey Shore, as armies of New Yorkers do every year, brings a chuckle to members of the Silver Gull. Why subject themselves to traffic jams or to the struggle of squeezing luggage aboard packed buses or trains when they can make a quick trip from their nearby homes and take an ocean swim at a club with a view of the Manhattan skyline? For Mr. Gelfman, the seaside retreat is a mere drive from his home in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Several days a week, he drives to the Silver Gull, one of a dwindling breed of organizations that include longstanding swim clubs on the East River in the northeast Bronx and boating clubs in Sheepshead Bay and in Broad Channel, Queens. The Silver Gull is run by Ortega National Parks, which also runs the Breezy Point Surf Club, about two miles to the west, which sits back from the water. But the colony is unique in the city because it sits directly on the open ocean, resembling the string of clubs to the east in Nassau County. It is one of the few remaining clubs of the sort portrayed in the 1984 film “The Flamingo Kid,” in which Matt Dillon plays a cabana boy, and the Silver Gull retains much of the early 1960s feel of the movie. Mr. Gelfman sat next to a cluster of cabanas where most of the movie was filmed. Sure, there have been amenities added over the years — a gym, a tiki bar, — but, over all, the Silver Gull has remained largely a traditional cabana club, and to an outsider it might seem soaked with the kitsch of bygone summers. Not far from Mr. Gelfman, three members sat in the sun enjoying cocktails. “This club is the secret on the East Coast because nobody knows it’s here you could be in Tahiti,” said one of them, Jerry Schackne, 84, who kept a bottle of Chivas Regal Scotch by his side, along with two friends, Art Maiese and Tony Costanzo. Mr. Costanzo nodded and said the club was “like Lourdes — you come here and all your worries are gone. ” Nearby was Dr. Leonard Kane, 91, a retired psychiatrist who decorated his cabana with red life buoys bearing the name “HMS Kane. ” Dr. Kane, a former Army medic, said he landed on Normandy Beach during the invasion and served in the Battle of the Bulge. His medic training came in handy at the club, he said, when he decided to rig an inverted bottle of vodka as an dispenser, feeding a rubber tube that filled shot glasses. Like Mr. Gelfman, most Silver Gull members tend to be longstanding and return every June to catch up and make new memories. “No one leaves this club we just die,” Mr. Gelfman joked. Members are virtually all white and consist mostly of families and retired couples from southern Brooklyn, a short drive away on the Belt Parkway. They include teachers, school secretaries and garment industry workers. Many joined after clubs in Brooklyn closed, places like the Palm Shore Club or Brighton Beach Bath and Racquet Club where they used to spend their summers. Some members are avid ocean swimmers while others never touch the sand, preferring to socialize on the patio or from a cushioned lounge chair in a cabana. Another group plays paddleball, heading for the courts past the parking lot and sweating for hours in the blazing sun, honing their skills for the club’s championships in August. Last year, Mr. Gelfman’s wife of 74 years, Leah, died. She was 95. Their summers at the Silver Gull were as routine as the tides. They would show up in the morning and open their cabana. Then she would play and canasta, while he played tennis and paddleball and, afterward, relaxed in front of their cabana. Over the years, they would bring their two daughters and their grandchildren. This year, Mr. Gelfman is renting just a small locker. Returning to the club both hurts and heals. Even at his age, he refuses the valet parking the club provides and sets up his own beach chair on the club’s broad concrete patio. On this particular Saturday, he hit the gym, took a dip in the pool, sat for a while in the whirlpool, and then went for a walk on the beach past the rows of cabanas jutting toward the surf. The piers and cabanas sustained extensive damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. It was just one of the many times over the years that the club seemed on the brink of closing in the past the federal government has threatened not to renew its permit. But that demise has been avoided with the help of local elected officials, including Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, whose family belonged to the club when he was a teenager. The Silver Gull, which is open from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, has 2, 300 members and 457 cabanas. The cabanas are like large closets that serve as miniature beach houses, though no overnight sleeping is permitted. Many members decorate them elaborately and pass them on to their children. Most cost nearly $5, 000 for the season, and include a shower, electricity and two chaise longues. On top of the cabana rental fee, patrons must buy summer memberships ($530 for each adult, with reductions for children and older people). Jamie Blatman, the general manager of the Silver Gull and Breezy Point Surf clubs, said that because the private organizations are concessions of the National Park Service, they offer daily passes ($30 each for an adult $20 for children) to the public. “It’s amazing it’s still here,” said Mr. Gelfman, who was slim and tan and dressed for summer: swimming trunks, a and espadrilles. Mr. Gelfman, who looks much younger than a man born in 1915, said he grew up on a farm in Mansfield, Conn. before his family moved to Brooklyn and struggled through the Great Depression. He put himself through college and later worked at an aluminum factory in SoHo that made munitions used in World War II. He bought a liquor store in Marine Park, Brooklyn, in the 1950s, which allowed him to spend summer afternoons at the Silver Gull. But after being held up at gunpoint five times, he sold the store in 1978 and retired. He can still hold his own in pinochle and has many friends at the club whose conversations gravitate toward current events, summers past and health problems. “He doesn’t have anything wrong with him,” said a friend, Jeff Coven, 62, sitting next to Mr. Gelfman. “I take 17 pills a day. This guy doesn’t take one pill. ” Mr. Gelfman smiled and looked around the Silver Gull and said, “I’m just grateful I’m still here. ” | 1 |
Security Council Meeting of October 28th, 2016
Concept paper by the Russian presidency Voltaire Network | New York (USA) | 27 October 2016 français Español русский عربي 中文 Cooperation between the United Nations and regional and subregional organizations in the maintenance of international peace and security: Collective Security Treaty Organization, Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Commonwealth of Independent States As a centrepiece of its presidency of the Security Council, the Russian Federation plans to hold a debate on 28 October 2016 on the topic: “Cooperation between the United Nations and regional and subregional organizations in the maintenance of international peace and security: Collective Security Treaty Organization, Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Commonwealth of Independent States”.
In view of the global nature of contemporary challenges and threats, the formulation of the collective approaches needed to tackle them effectively requires an enhancement of cooperation between the United Nations and regional and subregional organizations in the maintenance of peace and security.
In relation to the United Nations this is primarily a function of its universal nature, in terms of both the membership of the Organization and its work, and also of its internationally recognized legitimacy. Regional organizations, in turn, often have a better understanding of the situation in their areas of responsibility, and in many cases, they are equipped with preventive and peacekeeping mechanisms which are adapted to local realities. In this regard it is important for the activities of regional organizations to be directed towards seeking peaceful, political solutions to emerging conflicts.
It is precisely in this context that regular coordination with the main regional partners of the United Nations on issues of the maintenance of international peace and security is highly relevant. For instance, the Security Council regularly holds meetings on cooperation with the African Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the European Union. In recent years there have been reviews of cooperation with the League of Arab States, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Union of South American Nations and other regional actors.
As is well known, cooperation between the Organization and its regional partners covers an ever broader range of issues. Peacekeeping and peacebuilding goals have been complemented by efforts to counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and illegal flows of small arms and light weapons and to combat cyberterrorism and illegal migration — all of which are areas in which cooperation between the aforementioned organizations and the United Nations has been gaining momentum. This is of critical importance to the maintenance of peace and stability over the vast expanse of Eurasia, and especially in the Central Asian region.
It is precisely in this sphere that three relatively young organizations are operating in the huge region from Eastern Europe to the Far East — the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). These organizations are building their political influence in the world and making a significant contribution to strengthening regional and international security.
The debates will focus on the contribution by CSTO, SCO and CIS to countering threats to peace and security in the region, including combating terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime. The event will also provide an opportunity to reconfirm the commitment of these three organizations to the development of practical cooperation with the United Nations, including its Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia.
CSTO is a multifaceted structure which is capable of responding firmly to the wide range of contemporary challenges and threats that may be faced by its member States. In this regard, there is good potential for enhanced cooperation between the United Nations and CSTO in the area of peacekeeping. Within CSTO, intensive work is under way to develop its own peacekeeping capacity, including capacity that may be made available for United Nations peacekeeping operations. At the same time, CSTO is actively contributing to international efforts for post-conflict reconstruction in Afghanistan and for neutralizing the drug threat emanating from the territory of that country.
Its relations with the United Nations are successfully developing in many areas: combating terrorism and drug trafficking, peacekeeping, and control of organized crime. CSTO maintains and develops productive contacts with specialized United Nations structures, including the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the Security Council and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Every two years the General Assembly adopts a resolution on cooperation between the United Nations and CSTO. A resolution on that topic is scheduled for adoption at the seventy-first session in the context of the consideration of the agenda item entitled “Cooperation between the United Nations and regional and other organizations”.
The legal framework for cooperation between the United Nations and SCO on issues of international peace and security in accordance with Chapter VIII of the Charter of the United Nations was created by the signing in 2010 of a joint declaration on cooperation between the secretariats of the two organizations. Currently SCO and the United Nations cooperate actively in such areas as conflict prevention and resolution, combating terrorism (for this purpose, a regional counter-terrorism structure is operating within SCO), non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, countering transnational crime and illicit drug trafficking and ensuring international information security.
In this context SCO actively supports efforts by the international community and United Nations bodies to restore peace in Afghanistan and consistently advocates maintaining the central coordinating role of the Organization in the Afghan settlement process.
Cooperation in ensuring security and countering contemporary challenges and threats has always been and will remain one of the priority areas of integrated cooperation among member States of CIS.
Constructive cooperation with international organizations is also a key factor in actively countering emerging threats. The CIS States are parties to all the most important international instruments governing cooperation in ensuring security, promoting disarmament, and countering contemporary challenges and threats and are making a significant contribution to their implementation.
Joint measures are being carried out taking into account the leading role of the United Nations and the need to develop constructive partnerships with other international bodies and their specialized structures, such as the Counter-Terrorism Committee, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), the International Organization for Migration, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF).
The further strengthening and deepening of cooperation between the United Nations and CSTO, SCO and CIS on the basis of Chapter VIII of the Charter of the United Nations is playing a constructive role in promoting the goals of the Organization, including tackling contemporary challenges and threats. These regional organizations must actively position themselves in terms of using their potential in the interests of the United Nations. At the same time, the United Nations itself should continue to pay the necessary attention to increasing coordination and cooperation with those organizations, in strict observance of the prerogatives of the Organization and its Security Council.
In this context we should like to suggest that Member States present their own vision of ways to strengthen security in the Eurasia region using existing regional mechanisms. It is obvious that stability in this macro-region will be the basis for economic growth and nation-building of the Eurasian countries and we would therefore welcome the views of delegations, including on linking security and development. We are convinced that here, in the United Nations, which has universal legitimacy, we will be able collectively to propose innovative approaches to issues of stabilizing vulnerable regions which may subsequently be applied to other parts of the world which are a focus of the Security Council.
The debate will feature remarks by Mr. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. N.N. Bordyuzha, Secretary-General of CSTO, Mr. R.K. Alimov, Secretary-General of SCO, and Mr. S.I. Ivanov, Vice-Chair of the Executive Committee of CIS. Member States of the aforementioned regional organizations and representatives of other interested States are also invited to take part in the meeting. | 1 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. How often do we get to start off with good news? The Census Bureau’s latest report showed that U. S. household income grew 5. 2 percent last year, the fastest rate since at least 1967. There were especially large declines in the poverty rates among and Hispanic households. Many economists greeted the report with ebullience. The chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers tweeted that this was “unambiguously the best” such census data “ever. ” _____ 2. Hillary Clinton is recovering from pneumonia at her home in Chappaqua, N. Y. so President Obama campaigned for her. “We cannot afford suddenly to treat this like a reality show,” he told an enthusiastic crowd in Philadelphia. Mrs. Clinton’s illness highlighted the gap left by her campaign’s strategy, leaving her team without a positive message to focus on in her absence. Donald Trump sought to seize campaign momentum, with appearances in Des Moines and, with his daughter Ivanka, in Philadelphia, where he will talk about maternity leave and child care. His running mate, Mike Pence, met with the Republican National Committee and some Republican leaders, but failed to persuade them to rally behind Mr. Trump. _____ 3. “I think people today feel disappointed, frustrated, ticked off or just plain sad, or a combination of all of the above. ” That was the head of a sports organization in North Carolina, a day after the N. C. A. A. pulled its championship events from the state over a law limiting the rights of gay and transgender people. Frustration was running particularly high among Republicans, and in areas that have supported L. G. B. T. rights, where people feel unfairly punished. _____ 4. Russian computer hackers published documents showing that three renowned U. S. athletes — Serena Williams, Venus Williams and Simone Biles — obtained medical exemptions to use banned drugs. The World Agency, the source of the documents, denounced the effort to smear athletes who had received permission to use “a needed medication. ” The hackers, a group known as Tsar Team or Fancy Bear, said they would release records of athletes from around the world. Many Russians were barred from the Rio Olympics after a vast doping program came to light. _____ 5. What a difference a film festival can make. Forecasts for the coming Oscars season shifted after several films received powerfully positive receptions in Toronto. The most buzz went to “Lion,” a film by Harvey Weinstein’s company based on the true story of a Indian boy who steps on the wrong train and is separated from his family — and who, years later, sets out to find his parents. “Harvey’s baaack,” a longtime Academy Awards handicapper wrote on Twitter. _____ 6. activists and health experts made a personal appeal to President Obama to ban menthol cigarettes. The flavoring, which makes it easier to start smoking and harder to quit, is embraced by four out of five black smokers. About 45, 000 die a year from illnesses, and black men have the highest lung cancer mortality rate of any demographic group. _____ 7. The U. S. completed a $38 billion, package of military aid for Israel, the largest of its kind ever, American officials said. The aid includes financing for missile defense systems that defend against rockets fired by groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and phases out a provision allowing Israel to buy Israeli arms, instead channeling the money only to U. S. military systems. Above, Israeli forces on drills. Shimon Peres, 93 and one of the last living founders of the modern state of Israel, suffered a serious stroke. _____ 8. A Syrian appeared to be largely holding on its second day. But aid convoys idled, still waiting for word that routes into the besieged city of Aleppo were secure. The part of a deal between the U. S. and Russia, calls for the two to share targeting information on Islamic State forces if the holds for seven days. But skepticism of the unusual collaboration, which Secretary of State John Kerry brokered with his Russian counterpart, above, is running high within the U. S. military and the White House. _____ 9. What’s in the Kaaba, or cube, the black building that encloses the most sacred space in Islam? That was one of the questions readers sent to our correspondent who is on the annual hajj in Saudi Arabia. Very few people have been inside, she answered, but what’s interesting is how few objects are there. “Muslims are internalizing in every prayer that the one god they worship cannot be represented in an image and cannot be imagined, to the point where the house sanctified to God is empty,” she wrote. Watch a video of her experiences, above. _____ 10. Finally, while there’s been a run on a credit card with a $450 annual fee with a lavish rewards program, a professor of economics has pointed out that many of us don’t pinch our pennies in the right spots. He notes that consumers often waste money by chasing deals that offer a big percentage of savings — but in dollars and cents, not so much. Think about money in absolute terms, he urges: “After all, when your shopping is done, it is dollars — not percentages — that will be in your bank account. ” _____ Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
Region: USA in the World So why did the US Secretary of State John Kerry going to the South Pole, as US presidential elections were being held on November 8, 2016, and why was the news provided late in the game and as an unexpected surprise? One need to keep in mind that many US states allowed early voting, so millions of Americans had already cast their ballots beforehand; they and perhaps Kerry too did not have to be in their home districts on polling day, or perhaps he did not want to wait in long lines like in places like Ohio where the number of polling stations were reduced to keep some categories from voting. Presumably John Kerry is not one of these and his vote would have been counted. It will be remembered that Kerry stood for president himself, against George W. Bush, and would have beaten him if he had won Ohio, which he failed to do by only a few thousand votes. So you would imagine a man of such experience and seniority would be out on the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton right until the polls close in the East of the country, which is when candidates traditionally claim victory or concede defeat. But Kerry wasn’t even in the country in November 8th. He was considered so important that he had been sent to – of all places – the South Pole. While the rest of his party was hard campaigning for Clinton he was chilling it at the US military-scientific facilities there, apparently looking into something to do with “ environmental policy ” which wasn’t part of his job description last time anyone looked. However, perhaps now, in retrospect, he knew the election results that many are now claiming was a total surprise—how all the poll results were wrong and the American people had spoken in rejecting the status quo, and all what Clinton and those who stand behind her stand for. Nonetheless, on a lighter note, no one knows the full extent of the US footprint in Antarctica as it is all classified. The bases there are known primarily for drug abuse, which was once widespread, with the US itself supplying the drugs to its own employees as it did in Vietnam. But Kerry’s visit there was unlikely to have influenced the outcome of the election, or indeed much else. Unless the US is willfully changing the environment of regional countries from its Antarctic bases it seems very odd that Kerry should have gone to the South Pole, and then followed up with a tour of the Southern hemisphere countries, to discuss such an issue at such an inopportune time. So why was Kerry sent to the South Pole, about as far away from the election as possible? There are plenty of possibilities, many of which are credible. But as ever, the most unlikely one is the most likely to be true – and it isn’t pretty. Poles not so far apart One day the performance artist Laurie Anderson decided she would go and visit the North Pole, just like that. She managed to get near it and found it was a restricted area, owned by the US military, so she couldn’t actually reach the pole itself . Anderson’s North Pole trip was in 1974. Five years later a New Zealand airliner crashed into one of the Antarctic mountains, or so we were told. As a result, all civilian over flights of the South Pole were also banned. The US doesn’t extend as far north as the North Pole, or as far south as the South Pole, but they have somehow become US-controlled territory regardless, part of the vast swathe of land where the US exacts different forms of taxation without giving the inhabitants representation. In Merab Ratishvili’s novel White Lama the leading character ends up going to the South Pole. He finds a gap in the ice and discovers a hidden colony of very tall psychics, who live in a temperate climate and grow tropical fruit trees . That is only a story, but it is based on a real event: the attempted Nazi colonisation of Antarctica in 1938. These characters are alleged to be descendants of those Nazis, maintained by foreign powers for the own purposes . For many years it has been rumoured that the Nazis built some sort of scientific-military base in Antarctica. They are most unlikely to have gone all that way on a fishing expedition. As their victims knew, the Nazis were very well-organised and efficient. We know for example that if they had invaded England they were intending to use the town of Bridgenorth as their UK operations base – a very sensible choice, as it is near the geographical centre of the UK, between its two main industrial hubs of the time and gives easy access to all the important cross-country transport and communications routes. Operation Highjump After the Second World War a number of leading Nazis were spirited away to the US on ratlines so that they would neither stand trial for their crimes or have their knowledge fall into the hands of the Russians. In 1947 US Admiral Richard E. Byrd led 4,000 American , British and Australian troops in an invasion of Antarctica called “Operation Highjump”. This and at least one follow-up expedition was called off because the troops came under attack by what are described as “flying saucers”. Even in the country whose citizens went running to the hills when Orson Welles told them that the Martians had landed their military do not run away from flying saucers. Why is the US unable to describe what forces were unleashed against the invasion force, and by whom? What truth is so frightening it has to be shrouded in science fiction terms in order for people to dismiss the reports? Whatever the Nazis did in Antarctica, the US probably found out about it. The US biolab in Tbilisi is one of a number of dubious former Soviet facilities it has taken over and turned into restricted areas in the same way. It would be in character for the US Antarctic base to have once been operated by a foreign power, and have been taken over for “scientific purposes” most self-respecting scientists would never touch, those with military applications the US always denies until it can gain political capital from them. Cats among the penguins Kerry does have an indirect connection with the Nazis. Like the Bush family, he too is part of the Skull n Bones secret society. George Bush Sr’s father, Prescott Bush, ran the Bank of America which financed the Nazi Party’s initial bid for power, and got its own money from somewhere. Antarctic expeditions cost a lot of money, particularly when a country is spending vast amounts on armament production preparing for war. Kerry may have a personal connection with whatever is going on down there now, which the US keeps strictly under wraps. But there are also precedents for sending important people to the South Pole at historic turning points, which this US election is bound to be, whoever wins. The most famous concerned Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. He was on his way to the South Pole on a government mission at the time John F. Kennedy was shot, and for the rest of his life maintained that that was not a coincidence but a deliberate attempt to get him out of the way so that he could not impede what he later stated was a plot. Prouty retired from military service soon after the assassination, despite the siren call of the pension, and always maintained that the CIA assassinated Kennedy to prevent him taking it over after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba. He also maintained that the CIA itself answered to a shadowy global elite rather than the US government, and that this elite acts with impunity throughout the world. If so, it does so through secret societies, like Skull n Bones. As Colonel Prouty had worked in senior CIA roles for years he had considerable inside knowledge of how that organisation operated and who did what. He was dismissed as a crackpot, as all those who dispute the official version of the Kennedy assassination are, but his claim that Edward Lansdale, the basis of Burdick and Lederer’s novel The Ugly American, was present at the scene as one of the “Three Tramps” is perfectly consistent with what the public knows about Lansdale and his work, let alone what Prouty must have known. We should all hope that no one is planning a political assassination. But there is some reason why Kerry was being kept out of the way. We can speculate what his connections with the shadowy global elite are, but we know his connections with the US government. If the government wanted him out of the way on Election Day, with all his campaign experience, we can assume that whatever someone doesn’t want him to see, or he himself doesn’t want to be implicated in, involves the current US administration itself. He who knows least lives longest Though various Americans once claimed to have been the first man to reach the North Pole the claims of each one were disputed, largely by other Americans. The first people who undoubtedly reached the North Pole were the crew of the airship Norge, which flew over it in 1926. Their commander was Roland Amundsen, who had also famously been the first person to reach the South Pole in 1912, that time by land . Amundsen did not enjoy this triumph for long, as he disappeared along with his plane and five crewmen two years later. He was searching for the missing crew of the Airship Italia, commanded by one of his 1926 crew, Umberto Nobile. Neither most of Amundsen’s plane, or any of the bodies, have ever been found. The Airship Italia disaster aroused a lot of suspicion at the time and since. The Italian government refused to fund this polar flight. When the airship crashed one of the crew twice tried to commit suicide. The Italian ship supposedly monitoring the distress signals from the survivors ignored them and the Italian government made no attempt to rescue its stranded citizens. Eventually Captain Nobile and his pet dog were rescued while his men were left on the ice, most unusually, and many of these later disappeared without trace, just as Amundsen was later to do, having volunteered as a private citizen to lead a rescue attempt. Maybe Nobile himself didn’t know what his polar mission was supposed to accomplish. But it was clearly something people in high places did know, and were embarrassed by. Amundsen’s death left Nobile as the person who knew more about the two poles than anyone else, and he was subject to a smear campaign which had the effect of damaging anything he might say later, just as the one against Prouty did. Now we have a situation where the poles are considered so important that they are restricted areas controlled by the world’s only superpower. But few people fight over other inhospitable areas. This is why various Eskimo and desert peoples are allowed to continue their traditional way of life, rather than being forcibly “civilized” by great powers, as, for example, the highly cultured Tibetans are by the Chinese. This changes when energy resources are involved. But even then the oil and gas-rich zones do not become restricted. They may be taken over by big corporations working hand in glove with foreign governments, but what they are doing is trumpeted to the skies, not restricted to an inner circle which probably doesn’t include most of those carrying out the work. Frozen before the politicians get there John Kirby, the man who is trying to minimise terrorism and helping John Kerry prevent the Saudi government being prosecuted for their part in 9/11, was apparently expecting to go along with Kerry to the South Pole base when he gave his briefing. We do not know what is going on at the US South Pole base but we do know what is happening at some other US bases with a similar classified level. In each case, what we know is connected with terrorism: manufacturing biological weapons, arming and training terrorists, spying on the local population and then strangely failing to discover successful terrorist outrages in advance, despite the US admitting straight after them that it knows a great deal about the terrorists involved. At one time the Southern hemisphere wasn’t a problem to the US. A string of compliant democratic governments and military dictatorships kept things under control well enough, despite some local terrorist groups doing their best to remove them. It could concentrate on other parts of the globe, like the Middle East, and simply send in new diplomats, or CIA torture trainers, to sort out any government that started backsliding. Now the worm has begun to turn. The Broad Left remains in control of Uruguay, despite being composed of former urban guerrillas who were tortured by previous US-backed regimes. Philippines president Roberto Duerte is cosying up to China and telling the US it has lost an ally, and despite his backtracking on this in later statements his new deals with China remain in place . Chile and Paraguay have elected leaders determined to move on from the US-controlled past, and even Nauru, the tiny phosphate-rich but future-challenged Pacific state, is selling itself to the highest bidder, a new one every week, whatever the US thinks about it . So there are reasons Kerry wanted to go to the Southern hemisphere and find new levers of influence. But he doesn’t know whether he will be Secretary of State after the election, or who any new Secretary of State will report to. Whatever Kerry does now the new US president, Donald Trump, will just have to tolerate. Of course Kerry cannot take overtly political initiatives without knowing who the new president was going to be. But he started his diplomatic tour by having visited the South Pole – as mysterious, but nevertheless blatant, a command and control centre as the US has anywhere, as its own behaviour towards it makes clear. It may well be true that Kerry went to the South Pole to keep him away from something serious the US government or Soros funded NGOs are planning. But more likely his job may be to take actions which will forestall anything a new government might want to do—such as draining the swamp. Such actions are not likely to be legal or desirable actions if they began with a visit to the US South Pole base. Whoever Kerry was really working on a highly-contested election day remains a big question; it was likely someone whose interest is in a transparent government, rule of law which are the kind of things a real democratic system is supposed to stand for. Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “ New Eastern Outlook ”. Popular Articles | 1 |
Certain districts of Bogotá, like the Zona G, seem to have more types of restaurants than they do people. There are BBQ joints that look straight out of Brooklyn gastro pubs with cocktail gardens and a chain of crepe restaurants that has set up shop in nearly every neighborhood. Yet regional Colombian fare from outside the capital has long been the city’s weak spot. Until now. As Bogotá has increasingly become a melting pot of cultures from every part of Colombia, restaurants focusing on regional dishes and ingredients are opening with regularity. “We’re seeing not only an increase in the quality of food, and better service in restaurants, but a boom of interesting concepts,” said Gaeleen Quinn, who founded the Bogotá Wine and Food Festival. Leonor Espinosa has been exploring rural Colombian flavors for a decade at her upscale restaurant Leo Cocina y Cava, but in late 2014 she opened the less pricey Misia, a fresh take on traditional snack spots, in a space decorated with clay tiles and recycled . The restaurant showcases the popular cuisine of Colombia’s Caribbean coast with coconut milk ceviches and cured meats, like blood sausages, and longanizas, made from smoked hen. The star plate is the posta negra, based on a family recipe of Ms. Espinosa’s, which features an eye of round roast doused in a rich, dark sauce made with garlic, various spices and an unrefined cane sugar called panela. Each table is set with bottles of hot sauces and vinegars, which can be bought on the way out. It has been such a success that a second location was opened in the Zona G last February. At El Panóptico, located a short walk from Misia inside the sprawling Museo Nacional, the chef Eduardo Martinez clipped herbs from a pot in the courtyard. Mr. Martinez, an agricultural engineer who also owns the restaurant Mini Mal in the Chapinero Alto neighborhood to the north, has worked with several foundations to foster culinary diversity in the country. With El Panóptico, which opened in 2013, he looks to neglected regional ingredients, many of them from the Andes or the Amazon, like ají negro, a fermented and reduced yuca extract. Mr. Martinez thinly slices a forgotten native tuber called guatila like a carpaccio, in the hopes of reintroducing it to local kitchens. “Many don’t like it,” he said. “They call it the ‘potato of the poor,’ or ‘food for pigs.’ All of these tubers seem strange to many people. They aren’t in supermarkets. We try to present them in a way they’ll understand. ” Some ingredients have been overlooked for so long that few can even remember how to use them. The recipe for a corn and peanut soup called samai, in fact, comes from a grandmother named Mercedes Tisoy, who serves it during celebrations in the Sibundoy Valley, in the southwest of the country. You can smell the freshly baked pan de bono, a cheese bread typical of Cali, Colombia’s city, as you walk past Escuela Taller, a school for youth just down the street from Bogotá’s Capitolo Nacional, the capital building. It houses the La Escuela, a restaurant and bakery serving inexpensive dishes from remote regions like the Chocó and Arauca. Inside, 60 students enrolled in a program do a range of tasks, like roasting their own coffee, which is sold in the cafe working the register and plantains to make fritters. The menu offers dishes like fried Magdalena River fish, called mojarra, with coconut rice, or the chuleta valluna, a breaded pork chop typical of the rural Cauca Valley outside Cali. The young servers also help decipher the long list of freshly pressed juices like arazá or camu camu. Colombia’s undeveloped and rarely visited Pacific Coast has a set of ingredients all its own, like a shark called a toyo, and an herb called cilantro cimarrón if you wanted to taste them, however, you were probably better off going to the port town of to Buenaventura. Now Rey Guerrero has established himself as Bogotá’s ambassador to the recipes of that region, which have gained recognition since his appearance on the Colombian TV cooking show “La Prueba” in 2014. His Bogotá restaurant, Rey Guerrero Pescadería Gourmet, a single, large dining room painted with vibrant murals on the walls, serves a long list of and dishes, like the arroz tumbacatre, a spicy regional version of arroz con mariscos, or seafood rice. “In Europe they have foie gras, in the Pacific we have piangua,” he said, referring to the region’s flavorful, black clam, with which he makes a ceviche. “Esto es puro Pacifico. ” | 1 |
Sen. Joe Manchin ( ) a Democratic U. S. Senator from the heart of coal country in West Virginia, told Breitbart News exclusively that he was shocked and disappointed in White House National Economic Council director Gary Cohn’s comments in Europe this week. [Manchin said in the exclusive interview that he hopes that Cohn will allow him to “educate” him more on his uninformed standpoint, and that he looks forward to a deeper conversation with the official from President Donald Trump’s White House. “Yeah, Gary, I don’t know what the hell happened with Gary. Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with these people?” Manchin joked when asked for a response to Cohn’s comments this week that coal “doesn’t make much sense anymore. ” Cohn’s comments run counter to President Trump’s position on the issue, too, since Trump said the “war on coal is over” with him as president. Cohn is a former Goldman Sachs banking executive. Manchin told Breitbart News: I’d tell Gary to check out the world consumption of coal, and tell India and tell China and tell all these different countries that are sometimes getting electrified for the first time — the first time in a developed nation or developing nation. That’s how the Obama administration was, and I guess it looks like I’m going to have to go and try and work on Gary and give a little history lesson. It’s a base load fuel. It’s simple. We can depend on it . If we would just develop technology, we’ve got the ability to develop technology that makes using it much, much cleaner. The numbers are there. About 8 billion tons of coal is burned per year in the world. The United States of America burns less than one billion tons of coal a year, so we’re less than one eighth of the world’s consumption. That tells you seven eighths of all the coal in the world is being burnt somewhere else. Four billion tons is being burned in just China alone. They’re all talking about how they’re doing all these wonderful things, but day in and day out they’re using coal because they know it’s uninterruptible, it’s laying right there, and you can use it. But here’s the thing, we can’t even get our allied countries — let’s say Poland, which relies 90 percent or more on coal. Europe, a lot of Europe relies on coal. They need to do what we’ve already done which is scrubbers, low NOx boilers, mercury baghouses. They’re not even using those. Coal is much needed and it’s going to continue to be. Ask Gary how he thinks they make steel, where does the cooking come from? I’m going to give him a history lesson. Hopefully they’ll let me come over and talk to him. Manchin added that Cohn’s comments were “absolutely not” helpful for President Trump in any way, shape, or form in coal country, and that his comments “gives them doubt” in coal mines across West Virginia. Manchin also said that while Cohn’s comments were problematic, it is also true that President Trump has by and large been a major booster for the coal industry outside of this particular comment. He went on to say: Let me just say: What President Trump has been able to help us with, in coal country and in areas where we’ve been doing the heavy lifting all of these years, is help us stabilize by getting rid of these onerous regulations that were just piled on — piled on. We’re always going to have the Clean Water and the Clean Air Act, everybody is for that, but these regulations from EPA weren’t doing anything except piling on and making it so unbearable that nobody could afford coal. So, he stabilized us — okay? Bringing the market back, the market is what the market is, we understand that too. So people thinking a lot of the coal jobs, we do have them now moving coal in West Virginia, world markets and U. S. markets — we’ll continue to do that — but it makes it very difficult now and I just talked to people who were asking ‘what happened? I thought the Trump people, they were all for us.’ I said, ‘well, that’s one person within President Trump’s team who’s from New York who we’re going to have to educate a little bit better.’ When asked if Cohn, in his view, would be open to such a meeting, Manchin simply replied: “I think he will be. ” The White House has not answered whether Cohn would be open to such a meeting with Manchin. But a White House official did tell Breitbart News after publication of this article that President Trump has been great on coal. Manchin also praised President Trump on coal. “From rolling back the burdensome regulations that were strangling our domestic energy production to securing healthcare benefits for miners in the latest government funding bill, President Trump always has the best interests of America’s coal workers at the top of his mind,” the White House official told Breitbart News in an email. In his interview, though, Manchin explained exactly how he would go about teaching the uninformed Cohn about the energy, specifically coal, industry. “Well first of all you have to have base load — base load is uninterrupted,” Manchin said when asked how such a lesson would go. He continued: You only have two things which are base load, two products — that’s coal and nuclear. When you have the coal, you have 60 days to 90 days of coal power boiling — it’s uninterruptible. You follow me? You boil it and you make electricity. No matter what the weather is, no matter what. And if you have the nuclear rods and nuclear fuel, you’re able to keep nuclear plants going nonstop. Gas will become and it’s pretty much been relied on now as a base load fuel. But think about this: Gas has to be delivered by a gas line. Gas is not right on site. When you build a plant, you’re not going to have gas underground right there to run that plant forever. So you have to bring gas. That can be interruptible. You can have lines break, you can have lines freeze up, you can have a lot of things happen and you can also have — it’s an easy target for terrorists. He added that Cohn needs to understand this idea of base load energy sources like coal. Manchin said: Coal, that’s what we call base load. And Gary is going to have to understand, we have to have so much base load here. So just give me a chance to explain the role coal has played in the United States and how we built our country, how we won every war, how we made our own steel because we had our own coal to make it. We didn’t rely on any foreign country for the energy we use to defend ourselves. Manchin said in the interview that, outside of these Cohn comments, President Trump has been better for coal in his first few months in office than the entire previous eight years of former President Barack Obama. The comment from a Democratic U. S. Senator praising Trump — a Republican — as better already than Obama on one of his core issues is remarkable, in that Trump is winning at least some bipartisan praise despite opposition from many Democrats on a number of other issues. The Senator went on to say: I’ve said this, I think we have had a better relationship in three or four or five months and had more conversations on how we can find a balance and move forward and help us with the Trump administration and the president himself than in the last eight years. He has given us some stability. I don’t want dirty water and dirty air. I haven’t met a West Virginian who wants to breathe dirty air or drink dirty water. And there’s a balance between the economy and the environment. We’ve never had the hardcore right or hardcore left trying to find that balance. That’s my problem. They just think they don’t like people mining it, they don’t like the job of mining coal and if you don’t mine it that means you don’t use it and hey that means you don’t need to mine it. So, we were running upstream all the time saying ‘hey guys, we wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t done the heavy lifting.’ So hopefully I’ll be able to explain that to Gary Cohn and he’ll know the role that coal has played and the role that coal needs to play. If you take the 30 percent of energy that coal provides, you take 30 percent out, you’ve got serious problems — you’re going to have rolling brownouts and blackouts. So that’s what I hope to explain to him. Manchin also said that despite Cohn’s comments, he thinks Trump still stands with coal workers nationwide: I really believe in all my heart that the president still believes in an energy policy that includes coal — and that we don’t turn our noses to any others they’re trying to develop. We’re always using research and technology to find better ways to use energy that we have and who knows maybe when your children’s or grandchildren’s lifetime it will maybe happen. Commercial hydrogen — I mean, water — those things. I’m all for technology and using the best we have but I’m not for a and telling the world ‘sure that did feel good and I hope you all do the same as well.’ Manchin noted that countries like China and India and others are not going to give up competitive advantages against the United States — and that he thinks President Trump should use his “negotiating skills” to scrap the Paris climate deal and start over. He said: They’re not. Their main thing is provide the energy and if they can get a competitive advantage, they’ll take it. That’s where I think these agreements we’re talking about if it says ‘okay, not only are we going to let you catch up, but we’re going to give you a head start on us and we’re going to lose part of our [industry],’ I’m not going to do that. I thought it was wrong. So I think, Mr. President: Use your negotiating skills, use your understanding of the marketplace and make it competitive and strike the balance between economy and environment. And use the strength of our trading dollar, our trading market, to make sure that the countries that want access to our markets are at least using the technology we’ve already perfects. Make the Polish, make India, make China use the scrubbers, use the low NOx boilers, use the baghouses for mercury. And then work together to develop the technology for CO2. It can be done. Specifically, on the Paris climate accord, Manchin told Breitbart News that the president should renegotiate it so it does not disadvantage the United States. Manchin said, when asked where he stands on the Paris deal: First of all, I’m saying this: The technology has to be proven, commercial technology before you’re telling us to meet certain things. If the president wants to sit down and I believe they would renegotiate it — he’s good at negotiations — then renegotiate it because it is not good for the United States of America and puts us at a disadvantage and gives everyone else much more of an advantage in getting our markets and taking our market share. That’s not who we are. Now, I know we have to lead the way and we have led the way if we can just get them to use what we’ve already perfected. In China and in India, it’s not CO2 killing people. It’s particulates. It’s SO2. We’ve removed about all of the SO2 out of the market in America. We’ve cleaned up the environment more in 20 years than has ever been done in history. So I would say, ‘Mr. President, sit down and renegotiate and tell them you’re not going to put the United States at an unfair disadvantage’ which is what the Paris Accord did the way it was written. Manchin added that the key thing in climate agreements that a president needs to ensure is that the United States has no disadvantage as a result. “I think in all those agreements on the climate the thing is we shouldn’t put the United States of America at a disadvantage,” Manchin said. “We’ve done a lot. If we can get carbon capture and use the waste from carbon when you solidify it as a fuel — there’s so much more, hopefully, with carbon capture sequestration. President Obama said ‘if you want to build a power plant, go ahead and build it, we’ll break you.’ He knew it wasn’t economically or commercially feasible to do that, unless you had enhanced oil recovery where you could take the carbon you sequestered put it in the ground and push up more oil to pay for it, it made no sense. So if you weren’t in an area where you had oil, and you could recover more oil, then it didn’t make sense. It made it very difficult. The thing on any of these agreements, giving China or India a leap forward, or giving any of these others a leap home, let’s all move and use the technology that we can develop together to make sure that the whole world is on a competitive cycle, not making the United States way up or putting onerous conditions on the United States or giving other countries 20 or 30 years to get to the same level where we are. ” | 1 |
Waking Times
“How is the government going to get people to pay their taxes if the government is not viewed as legitimate?” ~ Catherine Austin Fitts
The world economy is designed to fail through the mechanism of a banking system that requires all users of money to pay usury every time a transaction takes place. In this way, the financial systems of the world can be manipulated into a managed collapse, thereby causing global chaos so that the world’s nations and citizens can be tricked into demanding a global currency managed a global elite.
Problem, reaction, solution. Economic hit man John Perkins wrote about this strategy as it was used in the 20th century to bring developing nations under the control of the international monetary fund and transnational profiteers, and at present this scheme is being globalized.
“If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money—and another country is added to our global empire.” ~John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
For decades now, the dollar has been in a slow burn style of collapse, and while many journalists, primarily outside of the mainstream, have been warning the world about how and why this is happening, we’re quickly approaching a turning point, where the slow burn moves into something more severe. While at first glance this seems like a frightening potentiality, the truth is that an economic collapse may very well be our best chance at freeing ourselves from the rule of the Gods of Money . A Whistleblower Warns Us and Gives Us Hope
Speaking to Greg Hunter of USA Watchdog news , former Wall Street banker and former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration , Catherine Austin Fitts explains why the slow burn is about to come to an end.
“The system has the capacity with monetary policy in one sense to keep going forever if the force and military capacity is there to do it, but at some point, you burn through the fat, you burn through the muscle and then you have to change institutions.” ~ Catherine Austin Fitts
During the financial crisis of 2008, the government was able to prevent an uncontrolled firestorm collapse of the system by colluding with the chiefs of the financial sector, giving them bailouts of extraordinary magnitude , then inflating the dollar by the Federal Reserve’s introduction of quantitative easing . Eight years later, this tactic has reached its limit, however it has given the public significant reason and time to understand why our economy functions the way it does, and people are losing faith in our leadership.
“It’s going to be extremely difficult to get people to continue to pay their taxes when they’re highly confident the money’s not being spent legally and it’s going to the advantage of small parties or things that they don’t understand. And so you can’t move further without institutional overhaul.” ~Catherine Austin Fitts READ: Former Wall St. Banker Suggests Global Debt May Not be Owned by Humans
The thing that frightens her most is the fact that groups within the U.S., such as ALEC , are already calling for changes in the law and even a new constitutional convention to overhaul these institutions. The financial sector has already been operating outside of the law and beyond the constitution for some twenty plus years, and if we haven’t been using the constitution, she notes, then why do they wish to change it?
“If you want to enforce the Constitution or fix things, that’s what you do. The reason you get a Constitutional Convention is you want to tear it up because you’re worried, now that people realize the extent of the corruption, that they’re going to try and enforce.” ~Catherine Austin Fitts
Her warning is that as people continue to wake up to the corruption of our government and financial rulers, the entrenched elites who are fully invested in destroying the middle class will fight tooth and nail to prevent us from holding them accountable, by means of bringing more Draconian laws into place to protect themselves.
In this light, the economic war that is brewing isn’t completely technical, it is social as well, quickly becoming class warfare. The world’s financial elite are in grave danger of being held to the fire for their crimes, and surely they know they how quickly things can change in favor of the populous, as historical events like the French Revolution have shown. Prepare Now
As individuals stuck in the debt-slave matrix , there is very little we can do to challenge this sort of massive global scheme as it’s happening, however, preparing now for collapse is our best chance of chucking our burden of debt to these people, if they are even human , and of creating a future without such obvious criminal financial tyranny holding us back.
Working now to expose these criminals is imperative so that when the ball drops, ordinary people understand why, how and who is truly to blame, thereby making resisting to the takeover possible. Taking care of personal emergency preparations by gathering healthy storable foods , networking in your community, and having plans in place to survive are absolutely necessary at this stage, and once this is done, efforts to awaken others are critical.
View the full interview here : Read more articles by Isaac Davis . About the Author
Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here . This article ( Financial Whistleblower Explains What’s About to Happen to the Economy and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Isaac Davis and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. | 1 |
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