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Impeachment-era evidence against Bill Clinton still sealed 60,000 pages stored in 'locked, guarded room' Published: 5 mins ago
(DAILYCALLER) — Tens of thousands of pages detailing the case for impeachment against former President Bill Clinton have remained locked away from the public for almost 20 years.
Although many believe that the report issued by then Independent Counsel Ken Starr revealed the final findings of his investigation of Clinton in the late 1990’s, around 60,000 pages of documents seen by only a few people describe the House Judiciary Committee’s case against the 42nd president.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde hired Chicago attorney and Democrat David Schippers to be the Chief Investigative Counsel to help prosecute the committee’s case against Clinton. Schippers described to American Family Radio’s Sandy Rios Friday how the evidence against Clinton was stored and studied by Congress at the time. | 0 |
Tragic? Right.. who cares. She is rich enough. | 0 |
A former University of Oklahoma football player was arrested last month for pimping out a former Oklahoma cheerleader. [Lance “LJ” Moore, 22, a defensive back at OU allegedly pimped out Micah Madison Parker, 23, according to KOKH in Oklahoma City. The unraveling of the unholy alliance between the two began after Parker allegedly solicited an undercover officer for sex in exchange for $200. According to reports, the officer set up a meeting with Parker via the website Backpage. com. Authorities linked Moore to Parker through social media messages and calls. In the process of analyzing that correspondence, police came to believe that Moore was involved in Parker’s prostitution. According to the New York Post, “Parker was taken to the Oklahoma City Jail on complaints of destruction of evidence, offering to engage in acts of prostitution, in addition to two counts of possession of a controlled dangerous substance. Moore was booked on pandering, aiding and abetting prostitution, possession of marijuana and possession of a dangerous substance. ” Also, according to the Post, Parker is actually the daughter of OU’s cheerleading coach. Moore played one year for the Sooners, 2013. Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter: @themightygwinn | 0 |
0 comments Attorney General Loretta Lynch has admitted she is guilty by pleading the 5th and Congress is slamming her for it!
Obama sneaks $1.7 Billion in cash to Iran, who wants to destroy us, and they can’t understand why someone might question that insanity.
You ONLY plead the 5th if you COULD INCRIMINATE yourself. Thanks Loretta for admitting guilt!
Newsmax reports :
Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with a probe into the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year to avoid incriminating herself, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo wrote in a letter that Lynch chose to “essentially plead the Fifth,” after the Republican lawmakers presented her with questions about the cash payment!
Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with a probe into the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year to avoid incriminating herself, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo wrote in a letter that Lynch chose to “essentially plead the Fifth,” after the Republican lawmakers presented her with questions about the cash payment.
It is high time the the entire Obama corruption scheme of the last 8 years comes toppling down. We know how the left works and revelations this year from WikiLeaks and Project Veritas have confirmed exactly how horrific it all is.
THEY LIE!
They lie, cheat, steal, deceive! They make real bad decisions!
Serious…. IRAN SAYS THEY WANT TO DESTROY US! Why are we sending them CASH??? $1.7 Billion dollars in CASH!!! THAT IS INSANITY!!
I think we need to make a law that elected officials cannot plead the 5th. Loretta needs to answer questions NOW!
WE THE PEOPLE are the masters and our public servants are the servants. | 0 |
Syrian War Report – October 27, 2016: Russian Strikes Destroyed Over 300 Terrorists’ Oil Facilities ‹ › South Front Analysis & Intelligence is a public analytical project maintained by an independent team of experts from the four corners of the Earth focusing on international relations issues and crises. They focus on analysis and intelligence of the ongoing crises and the biggest stories from around the world: Ukraine, the war in Middle East, Central Asia issues, protest movements in the Balkans, migration crises, and others. In addition, they provide military operations analysis, the military posture of major world powers, and other important data influencing the growth of tensions between countries and nations. We try to dig out the truth on issues which are barely covered by governments and mainstream media. Deterioration of Interracial Relations During Barack Obama’s Presidency By South Front on October 27, 2016 …from SouthFront
Inter-racial conflict in the US continues to escalate despite the fact that a black president has been leading the country for 8 years. All of the various ethnic groups that comprise American society, hoped that Barack Obama would be able to “sew” together the fabric of a nation torn by racial and social divisions, but racism is still on the rise. This poses a significant threat to US homeland security. Government institutions and big business continue to be controlled by the white elites and the perilous social situation of ethnic minorities continues to be accompanied by an increase in crime. This causes growing racial intolerance at all levels. People are frustrated by the lack of change in inter-racial relations, which has led to a new round of racial violence.
The most striking example of the exacerbation of racial conflict is the situation prevailing around so-called police violence. Every case of the killing of an unarmed African American in recent years becomes an occasion for demonstrations, which very often degenerate into riots. The new mass protest movements are thriving and growing in influence, aided by social media. For example, “Black Lives Matter,” which is compared to the ‘Black Panthers’ of the 70s. Despite the lack of talented leaders and clear programs, in such associations, their ongoing radicalization is evident. That was demonstrated by the riots in Ferguson of 2014 and the case of the murder of police officers in Baton Rouge.
The indignation of the colored population at police actions is justified. The level of police violence in the United States is quite high. It is known that American cops kill 5 times more people than Canadian police, 40 times more than German police, and 140 times more than police in England and Wales.
All segments of the American population are suffering from a disproportionate use of force by police. According to the resource “Mapping police violence”, from the 1st of January, 2013 to the 31st of December 2015, 3,486 people were killed by police, or approximately 1100 people per year. Of these, 571 were Hispanic (16%), 949 African-American (27%) and 1522 (43%) were White. These figures must be compared to the fact that Whites are 64% of the US population, African-Americans are 13% of the overall population, while 16% are Hispanic. However, the divergent behavior of the white population is much rarer due to a higher level of income and social stability. Of course, most of those killed by police were carrying weapons, and the lives of the policemen were in danger. But it is generally thought that US cops are more willing to open fire on people of color, because the policemen believe that the level of criminality and readiness for violence of Hispanics and African Americans is much higher. Additional factors which lead to an increase in racial tensions are racial prejudices and the established practice of cops consistently being acquitted by the U.S. court system.
Largely because of the actions of the US ruling elites, there now exists a group of people who are above the law whose members have a license to kill. Shooting at unarmed people, including children and teens, beating of pregnant women, shooting at people with disabilities and other “controversial” actions of American cops all are commonplace occurrences in the United States. The Members of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) noted that in the United States there exists such inhumane methods as testing experimental medicines on inmates (predominantly African American) in prisons, the forced sterilization of minority women, and numerous incidents of police abuse of power directed towards the non-white population. However, the increased use of cameras amongst both the civilian population and police departments has facilitated increasingly frequent recordings of such cases of violence and has helped in gaining them publicity. That increased awareness that, in turn, has led to the outrage of the African-American population.
Many US police forces continue to subject African Americans to more thorough searches and more forceful tactics during arrests. Unofficially, they explain these practices by referring to statistical data presented by such sources as American Renaissance and Daily Stormer. For example, blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery. They are also three times more likely to use a hand gun, and twice more likely to use a knife. A number of police officers believe that “special attention” to African American citizens improves crime detection rates. However, it has a significant impact on the rise in police dissatisfaction. Although the number of attacks on police and their killings has declined in recent years, experts explain it by the fact that US police are increasingly avoiding “black” neighborhoods, where they can be particularly vulnerable.
Moreover, a large part of the US population is puzzled with the public position of President Obama who invariably condemns the actions of the police and grieves for the black victims of police violence, but is silent about the cases of murder of police officers in the course of discharging their official responsibilities. Such a situation leads to an increase in real crime, which is not reflected in official statistics. We should not forget that the number of firearms in the United States recently surpassed the number of inhabitants and according to various estimates there are more than 320 million guns in the US, of which more than 270 million are in the hands of the civilian population. Therefore, a further escalation of violence in the American society, at any time, can lead to very dire consequences. In general, ethnic tensions peaked since the beginning of the Barack Obama presidency. Thus, according to the official FBI statistics, in 2015 the number of white-on-black murders and vice versa reached their highest levels in 2008. The number of white-on-black murders has increased by 12%, while the number of black-on-white murders increased 22%.
According to the report of the Chair-Rapporteur of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent Ricardo III Sunga (Philippines), the US maintains “structural racism”. It is a correct assessment of the situation. Despite the fact that the police officers are under the special protection of the state, laws aimed at fighting race discrimination, have the opposite effect of reverse discrimination, harming ordinary Americans. The use of unofficial, but very real quotas for the appointment of people of color at schools and businesses sometimes does not allow qualified “white” experts to get jobs or promotion. In case of conflicts of a civil nature between people with different skin color, they are usually subjected to racial profiling. At the same time, public opinion and the Supreme Court often find themselves on the side of national minorities.
On the other hand, the US still has a low level of political representation of ethnic minorities. As of November 2015, there have been a total of 1,963 members of the United States Senate, but only nine have been black, including Barack Obama. Out of 10,884 US Representatives, only 131 have been black. At present, there are no black governors at all. This lack of political representation also leads to more social tension.
No improvement has been observed during the final year of the first US African American presidency, instead, considerable aggravation of interracial conflict has been noted, to the point of it becoming one of the most dangerous threats to homeland security. Obama failed to cope with social problems, although he managed to stabilize the economy following the crisis. Still, 27% of African Americans continue to live below the poverty line, an average of 12% do not have steady employment. In some cities this figure reaches 40% and even as high as 50%. The level of culture, education and labor skills is also low. All this leads to an increase in crime among African Americans, and thus foments racist sentiment in society at large. This also leads to an exacerbation of black on black crime. For example, in Chicago, over the past 3 years, 75% of murder victims are young black males and 72% of murder perpetrators are also young black males. Social conditions in such places are affected by the fact that a large percentage of children grow up in broken homes.
As far as inter-party competition is concerned, it is obvious that in spite of the election of a black president, the Democrats failed to improve the lives of African Americans. Their criticism of the GOP’s harsh race rhetoric in order to attract voters, this is also an attempt to hide the fact they are not interested in changing the status quo. Paradoxically, only Republicans with their strict “law and order” approach are truly interested in the implementation of certain changes. Although the consequences of their policies in the event of capturing the White House, remain to be seen.
Summing up President Obama’s activities in the sphere of interracial relations, we can say that he has not developed a new national idea in order to deal with the problem of racism. US history will remember the first black president not as an idealist fighting for the rights of the oppressed, but as a servant of the ruling white elite and its interests. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by South Front on October 27, 2016, With 221 Reads Filed under World . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments | 1 |
Share on Facebook Polar bears are already endangered species according to the Red Data Book of the Russian Federation. There are many reasons why such creature will be one day extinct, one is animal abuse. A heartbreaking video showing a polar bear writhing in pain, after she was allegedly fed with a firecracker, went viral online and sparked outrage among internet users. The female polar bear who was fighting for her life, can be seen suffering, as blood comes out from her snout. She was twisting in deep pain, while a group of men were recording the scene and discussing what is happening to the bear. According to a report, a Russian military base cook fed the polar bear with a kind of firecracker used by the military. Witnesses said, the bear and her cub were frequently seen around the base looking for food and being fed by the cook. If proven, the alleged cook may spent up to 7 years in prison. Somehow, upon getting in touch with LifeNews, the cook said that the bear who regularly visit the base in Wrangel Island in far east Russia, to get food, had “itself grabbed a rocket flare and began chewing on it.” The cook also stated that the bear did not die and workers were already looking for her, but failed to find her. In contrary, a report said that the bear was shot to death, ending her suffering, but this was not verified. However, it is still unclear what exactly the polar bear ate. According to other versions of the story, it was a rocket flare instead of a firecracker. It is also said that the bear accidentally ate the fire cracker, thinking of it as food while other report suggested that she was tricked into eating an explosive charge concealed in the food fed to her. Nobody knows what exactly happened to the poor bear but experts believed that her chance of survival is slim. Meanwhile, Russia's Military of Natural Resources is hoping for an investigation regarding the disturbing matter. Here's The Heartbreaking Footage: We were given the privilege to think wisely and that's what makes us human, but doing such kind of animal abuse only proves that we are nothing but lower than animals. Whoever did this must be punished! | 0 |
License DMCA The financial system in America is a scam of world proportion. All of our lives, we've been taught, and often reminded, that the so-called "income" tax originated with the 16th Amendment in 1913, and authorized a tax on our earnings. The IRS repeatedly claims this as their authority to tax American's wages, but is this true? Have YOU ever looked into the evidence and history of this tax to see if you actually owe such a tax, or actually even receive "income"? Most Americans will have to say, no they haven't. So, we simply plod on taking what we've been told as true and factual, and comply by voluntarily assessing ourselves every year without another thought... except that we hate having to do it unless it is to get back some or all of what should never have been taken in the first place. With the advent of the personal computer and the internet, things have changed. What once took many months or even years of research in law libraries and other sources of actual documents now takes days or weeks... perhaps months, and what is being discovered is not only revealing, it is shocking. Is it possible that we have been deceived for over 100 years on the topic of our financial system and "income" taxes? Let's start with in "income" tax. What does the 16th Amendment actually tell us? "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration." The key words in this amendment are "incomes" and "whatever source derived". "Income" is the one which is grossly misunderstood. We will come back to what this amendment is actually speaking to further down in this article. First, we must realize how millions of people can be deceived... "When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." Dresden James. It's time we look carefully at the evidence of historical records and decide if this is the ravings of a lunatic, or simply a message based on actual evidence that has, at best, been misunderstood, or at worst, purposefully suppressed and manipulated for many decades. Reader beware: This will likely fundamentally change your outlook on things if you are willing to actually take the time to understand this fraud. It may seem boring and of little interest to you right here and now, but I can assure you, if you want truth, you most likely won't want to put this down until you've completed the series. Let's begin with the 16th Amendment's claimed source for the income tax. If you take a look at page iii of the preface to the 1939 Internal Revenue Code, ( click here ), you will see reference to the now standing tax laws being enacted as far back as July 1, 1862, and carried forward to today. - Advertisement - Huge portions of our modern body of lawful "income" tax law pre-dates the 16th Amendment. Congress published a comprehensive "Derivation of Code Sections of the Internal Revenue Code of 1939 and 1954" table ( click here ), dated January 21, 1992, which explicitly identifies the pre-16th origins of these still-current statutes. (Highlighted sections within pages 20-76). It must also be noted that the 1986 Internal Revenue Code is based on these enactments and is still in place today. Throughout the Derivation table, you will see that there are well over 300 examples of the pre-1913 16th Amendment throughout, proving that the "income" tax was not "enacted" through the 16th Amendment. So, we now have to ask a couple questions and look for the plain answers in the record. The first question is "If there is substantial evidence that the income tax was not "enacted" in 1913, and no such tax on American's wages existed (at least for very long as it was declared unconstitutional) prior to the 16th Amendment, what law actually authorizes a tax on American's wages?" The answer is, there is no actual law. Is there supporting evidence of this fact? Let the U.S. Supreme Court tell us the facts from those days; "The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution has not enlarged the taxing power of Congress..." This is brought out clearly by this court in Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co., 240 U.S. 1, and Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co., 240 U.S. 103. "We are of opinion, however, that the confusion is not inherent, but rather arises from the conclusion that the 16th Amendment provides for a hitherto unknown power of taxation; that is, a power to levy an income tax which, although direct, should not be subject to the regulations of apportionment applicable to all other direct taxes. And the far-reaching effect of this erroneous assumption will be made clear by generalizing the many contentions advanced in argument to support it." Brushaber v. Union Pac. R.R. Co., 240 U.S. 1, 11, 12, 18 (1916); "In the former case it was pointed out that the all-embracing power of taxation conferred upon Congress by the Constitution included two great classes, one indirect taxes or excises, and the other direct taxes, and that of apportionment with regard to direct taxes. It was held that the income tax in its nature is an excise; that is, it is a tax upon a person measured by his income . . . It was further held that the effect of the Sixteenth Amendment was not to change the nature of this tax or to take it out of the class of excises to which it belonged, but merely to make it impossible by any sort of reasoning thereafter to treat it as a direct tax because of the sources from which the income was derived." ([14-15]; Peck & Co. v. Lowe, 247 U.S. 165 (1917). Brief for the Appellant at 11, 14-15; See also Stratton's Independence, LTD. v. Howbert, 231 US 399, 414 (1913)." (Emphasis added - "derived from" discussed below). "... It manifestly disregards the fact that by the previous ruling it was settled that the provisions of the 16th Amendment conferred no new power of taxation." Evans vs. Gore, 253 US 245, 263 (1920). "It was not the purpose or effect of that amendment to bring any new subject within the taxing power." Bowers v. Kerbaugh-Empire Co., 271 U.S. 170; 46 S.Ct. 449 (1926). - Advertisement - "... It manifestly disregards the fact that by the previous ruling it was settled that the provisions of the 16th Amendment conferred no new power of taxation." Evans vs. Gore, 253 US 245, 263 (1920). "It was not the purpose or effect of that amendment to bring any new subject within the taxing power." Bowers v. Kerbaugh-Empire Co., 271 U.S. 170; 46 S.Ct. 449 (1926); So, if there was no "new" tax created by the 16th Amendment, as the Supreme Court has stated over and over again, how can the IRS make our wages "income", and how did this tax on our wages begin? The answer comes within the second question we must ask: "What exactly is 'income?'" Here is where the deceit so easily enters out lives. U.S. v. Ballard, 535, 575 F. 2D 400 (1976); (see also Oliver v. Halstead, 196 VA 992; 86 S.E. Rep. 2D 858); "The general term 'income' is not defined in the Internal Revenue Code . . . | 1 |
For Mitt Romney, Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina was a natural ally — perhaps even an ideal running mate. A young, conservative woman of Indian descent, Ms. Haley endorsed Mr. Romney early in the 2012 race and campaigned alongside him in the to his choice of a candidate. This year, Ms. Haley is not even in the hunt for a spot on the Republican ticket. As Donald J. Trump prepares to select a running mate, he has whittled the list of potential partners to a slim few, including Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, and Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, with whom he campaigned on Tuesday. Entirely absent are virtually all of the Republicans who were seen, as recently as a few months ago, as the bright stars of the party: young officeholders who by virtue of their background or political biography, or the states they represented, seemed primed to expand the party’s electoral horizons. By dismissing much of the party’s talent — people who would probably have been on the short list for a different nominee, like Jeb Bush — Mr. Trump has reaffirmed his determination to go his own way, ignoring the conventional impulses of the Republican establishment. It is a mark, too, of Mr. Trump’s extraordinary isolation within the party, even as he is poised to claim its nomination, that there is no clamor among its most popular and diverse young officeholders to enlist one of their own in the race against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Tim Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor, said Mr. Trump’s short list was notable for the absence of virtually all of the people regarded in Washington as the Republican Party’s most electable figures. “In their private moments, candidates acknowledge that the pick has a lot to do with who they think could help them win,” said Mr. Pawlenty, a Republican contender in 2008 and 2012. “That’s the traditional analysis, but I’m not sure that will apply in the nontraditional Trump campaign. ” Mr. Trump has declined to consider a group of Hispanic Republicans, including Govs. Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Susana Martinez of New Mexico, as well as Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. People close to all three, on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that they were not being vetted for vice president. He has skipped over leaders who might have delivered a crucial state in the Electoral College: Ohio. Gov. John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman, Ohio politicians with deep experience in Washington, are not under consideration, according to aides. Nor is Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who became a hero to conservatives for his clashes with organized labor. Mr. Trump has also overlooked prominent Republican women, including Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, a foreign policy hawk who is well regarded by national party leaders. Neither she nor Ms. Haley is being vetted. Rob Godfrey, a spokesman for Ms. Haley, said the governor declared in May that she did not want the job and had not budged. “Since the governor made it clear that she was not interested in serving as anyone’s vice president, there was no reason for her to participate in the vetting process,” he said. But the mutual estrangement between Mr. Trump and many of the party’s rising leaders is more than a matter of individual job preferences. Mr. Trump has mainly considered people who can be made to fit his political mold, like Mr. Gingrich and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who have been publicly solicitous of him, as well as Mr. Pence and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, Midwestern conservatives with little demonstrated appeal to groups. His top criterion, Mr. Trump has said, is someone who can help him navigate the legislative branch. His advisers have been dismissive of suggestions that he seek to broaden his appeal with a female or nonwhite running mate. Depending on his ultimate choice, Mr. Trump’s selection may put the lie to what had been an article of faith for many Republicans: that the party’s bench was meaningfully deeper heading into 2016 than at any point in recent memory, with an array of diverse personalities and talents that would help Republicans recover from electoral thrashings by President Obama. The brightest prospects who went up against Mr. Trump in the primaries were soundly defeated. Nearly all of the rest appear to have been sidelined heading into the general election. Yet there is little sense of chagrin among those excluded from consideration for the vice presidency. Several who would probably have been finalists in another nominee’s vetting process have withheld their support from Mr. Trump, as Ms. Martinez and Mr. Kasich have done others have given him only grudging or limited support. For these Republicans, many of whom are popular in their home states and have their own political futures to consider, being asked to join Mr. Trump’s ticket would have forced them to balance the pressures of party loyalty in the near term against the risks of being shackled for many years to the most divisive figure in modern Republican politics. Already, mainstream Republicans who have aligned themselves with Mr. Trump have suffered by association: Mr. Christie’s dismal poll numbers in New Jersey plunged again after his embrace of Mr. Trump. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, an early prospect who recently withdrew from consideration, suffered through multiple embarrassing television interviews in the spring, when he struggled to defend Mr. Trump’s ideas and readiness for the presidency. Mr. Kasich, whose state will host the Republican convention next week, has had no such trouble. His top political adviser, John Weaver, said there had never been any possibility that Mr. Kasich would join forces with Mr. Trump. The governor has opted instead to defend his own brand of Republicanism, and has leveled pointed criticism at Mr. Trump since the last round of contested primaries in the spring. “We made sure there were no expectations back in May,” Mr. Weaver said. “No avenue. No way. Not happening. Forget about it. ” | 1 |
Pope Francis has become the first pope in history to bless America’s premier sporting event, sending a video message with his benediction to participants and viewers of Super Bowl LI. [“May the Super Bowl this year be a sign of peace, friendship and solidarity to the world,” Francis said in his native Spanish, in a video message released on Super Bowl Sunday. Sunday’s contest between New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons, held in Houston, Texas, at 6:30pm Eastern Time, is one of the most watched television event of the year, popular not only in the United States but around the world. “Major sporting events like the Super Bowl are highly symbolic and show that it is possible to build a culture of encounter and a world of peace,” the Pope said in his message. “Taking part in sports activities makes us go beyond and in a healthy way to learn the meaning of sacrifice and grow in respect and respect for the rules. ” This is the first time a pontiff has ever blessed the football signaling his esteem for athletics and their importance for forming key human virtues. A soccer lover, Francis has often invoked sports as an apt place to learn virtue and practice fraternity. Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome | 0 |
Pulitzer playwright Tony Kushner defended the onstage assassination of a Donald Julius Caesar in the Public Theater’s contemporary iteration of the play, telling the New York Times in an interview that the Shakespeare classic is supposed to be “upsetting. ”[The Oskar Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar — a modern take on the play in which the main character is dressed to look like the president, and which includes references to tweeting — opened Monday night to a standing ovation from an enthusiastic audience, according to Variety. But the play has generated controversy over the Caesar character’s close resemblance to Trump. Some critics have said that the mock assassination of the Trump — in a graphic scene filmed and published by Inside Edition last week — crossed the line, particularly after another “artwork” depicting Trump’s death, a “beheading” photograph featuring comedian Kathy Griffin, stirred outrage last month. In response to the controversy, Public Theater sponsors Bank of America and Delta Air Lines pulled their support, while American Express clarified that its funding did not go directly toward Shakespeare in the Park and that it did not “condone” the theater’s interpretation of Julius Caesar. Ironically, the companies’ withdrawal of support set off another round of outrage, this time from some celebrities and theater figures, including from Kushner, the Angels in America playwright. “It’s an upsetting play, but if there’s a production of Julius Caesar that doesn’t upset you, you’re sitting through a very bad production,” Kushner told the New York Times. “It’s clear that the corporate sponsors who pulled out are just being cowardly and caving in to a lot of cranky people because Breitbart and Fox News told them to. ” Kushner wasn’t the only person to blame Breitbart and other conservative media for the sponsors’ withdrawal in their article for the New York Times about the timeline of the controversy, writers Michael Paulson and Sopan Deb accused Breitbart of having “driven a campaign on social media against the Public [Theater]” that prompted the sponsors to make their decision. Of course, Breitbart News had simply reported on the controversy, and never led a “campaign on social media” against the play. Early stories about the play centered on one theatergoers’s reaction to the graphic assassination scene, while stories about the corporate sponsors pulling out simply reported on the statements that each had made. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Times failed to accurately report on what appeared to be the real reason for the backlash over the play that the level of vitriol against Trump has reached a heightened new level in recent weeks, and that it has now become acceptable to make jokes or art about the assassination of President Trump, and to be celebrated for doing so by theater critics, celebrities and the media. | 0 |
Will Trump Honor the Iran Nuclear Deal? by Stephen Lendman The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is an international agreement involving the five permanent Security Council members plus Germany. Completing it successfully required many months of hard bargaining, Iran giving more than it got in return – to free itself from sanctions imposed solely for political reasons, serving US and Israeli interests mainly. Its nuclear program has no military component, not now or earlier, claims otherwise falsified. Since ending a generation of US-installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi rule in 1979, Washington treated the Islamic Republic deplorably. It’s not at war with its neighbors, threatens no one, and advocates a nuclear-free Middle East – Israel the sole regional nuclear armed and dangerous nation, yet nothing is done to contest its arsenal, no JCPOA-type deal to eliminate it. Why challenge Iran? Because it’s a sovereign independent nation Washington doesn’t control. And there’s all their hydrocarbon riches Big Oil wants exploited for its own bottom line interests. On November 25, The Wall Street Journal reported Washington “and its Western allies…pressing pressing Iran to take steps to sharply cut the amount of radioactive material it holds in a bid to shore up last year’s nuclear deal and discourage the incoming Trump administration from abandoning it,” citing unnamed Western officials. Will Trump scrap or renegotiate JCPOA as vowed while campaigning? Highly unlikely. It’s an international agreement, America one of six countries involved plus Iran. Renegotiating what took many months to agree on would begin his tenure on the wrong foot, irresponsibly challenging the other permanent Security Council members plus Germany. He’s more likely to continue a hard line on Tehran in other ways, maintaining illegal US sanctions, maybe adding more, breaching the letter and spirit of JCPOA – instead of responsibly ending 37 years of hostility, treating Iranian sovereignty with the respect it deserves. Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Reza Najafi, warned against taking steps to undermine JCPOA terms, stressing Tehran’s full compliance, saying: “The P5+1 countries have a clear responsibility to abide by the JCPOA with good will and in a constructive atmosphere based on mutual respect and through avoiding any steps that run contrary to the text and spirit of the JCPOA and undermine its successful implementation.” Complaints about Tehran exceeding its agreed on heavy water inventory of 130 metric tons were overblown – the issue resolved when 11 tons were sent to Oman days earlier. IAEA director general Yukiya Amano confirmed Iran’s full compliance with JCPOA terms. Last April, he praised the Islamic Republic for exceeding its obligations under the agreement. Washington continues breaching it by maintaining sanctions, imposing new ones since JCPOA’s implementation in January, and failing to unfreeze all Iranian assets. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. Related | 0 |
Sad that Isis got its hands on Russian tech.
And that crew is unfortunately toast - no pun intended... | 0 |
Julian Assange says Russia wasn’t his source Pres Obama is trying to ’delegitimize’ Trump with Russia hack claims (@seanhannity exclusive) pic. twitter. In an interview with Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity, WikLeaks founder Julian Assange doubled down on a claim he had made last month on Hannity’s radio show, which was the Russian government nor any state party of Russia were the source of hacks that exposed thousands of confidential Democratic Party emails. “We can say — we have said repeatedly over the last two months, our source is not the Russian government and it is not the state party,” Assange said. Assange said the backlash over the hacked emails was nothing more than an effort to “delegitimize” the incoming Trump administration. “So why such a dramatic response?” he added. “Well, the answer is obvious — they’re trying to delegitimize the Trump administration as it goes into the White House. They’re going to try to say — they are trying to say President Trump is not a legitimate president. ” Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 0 |
Scientists believe that our magnetic poles are shifting. In fact, they could even flip in our lifetime. The South Pole has changed its location drastically, and the North Pole is moving across the Arctic Ocean at a pretty rapid pace. If this keeps occurring the Earth’s magnetic field could collapse and cause power outages on epic levels.
The Earth’s magnetic field is also what shields us from much solar radiation. It appears to be weakening, and experts don’t know why. At a rate of around 5% per century, the Earth’s magnetic field has been diminishing for the last 400 or so years.
What would happen if the magnetic poles were to flip?
First, the magnetosphere would weaken, and our planet would no longer be protected from solar radiation. In turn, the radiation would burn off large portions of our atmosphere and make Earth uninhabitable for mankind. In the process weather patterns would drastically change and entire power grids would go down and not be able to be brought back on line.
Is it really happening? Many people believe so, and you can see from the attached video that unprecedented insights have been formed on the Earth’s magnetic field. Also, accompanying reports show trends of our planets magnetic field weakening and it’s poles moving at a rate of around forty miles a year.
With a pole shift we can expect weather patterns that would be unlike anything expected before. Floods, hurricanes, and tornados will be much more common and will happen in areas where they did not use to occur. Earthquakes and other planetary happenings will be on par to bring about extinction events .
Measurements do confirm this to be true; the North Pole appears to be heading towards Siberia and the South Pole will follow suit at the opposite end of the planet. So, Yes, Yes it is happening, and it has already started. This is true, though while the field is weak, it allows more space debris to come our way a lot more often, the magnetic field also helps to deflect objects. Mars may have been hit because it lost its shield and then most of its atmosphere. If life has once flourished on Mars then life reestablished itself here then I hope we learn from the mistakes and don't repeat them.
WATCH THE VIDEO:
Disclose TV SOURCE | 0 |
By Abby Martin With the Wikileaks release of thousands of emails belonging to John Podesta, very little is known in US society about Podesta himself.... | 0 |
posted by Eddie In a surprising twist to the Ebola outbreak story, the Liberian Government has accused the United States of purposely spreading the Ebola Virus in an attempt to test a weaponized form of the virus. An unfortunate unintended consequence. VERY REAL CONCERN OF A ZOMBIE OUTBREAK The crime against humanity is that victims of Ebola are now rising from the dead in this besieged African nation. Captured footage shows a man rising after mortally succumbing to the Ebola virus. The name of this victim is being withheld by the World Health Organization out of alleged privacy concerns. Some believe concerns for the safety of the Man’s. The family is the real reason for the embargo of his identity. It is believed the original form of the weaponized virus has mutated into what can only be described as a zombie virus. With Texas now struggling with an outbreak of Ebola, there is a fear of the undead evolving into a new form of an undocumented worker, and being a very deadly one at that. The State of Kansas is concerned not only about the Ebola outbreak of it’s neighbor to the South, but also is very concerned with regards to a resulting outbreak of Zombies. Sam Brownback, the Governor of Kansas, has issued an executive order declaring October “Zombie Awareness Month”. KANSAS ON HIGH ALERT OVER ZOMBIE OUTBREAK? The State of Kansas rests in a state of high alert over this very real concern of a zombie outbreak. Mailings of pamphlets are being sent out across Kansas warning its citizens how to prevent both Ebola and the resulting zombie attack. Note that this story is in its infant stage and is rapidly developing. It is expected that Ebola will overtake 5 million more victims in the next two months and left untreated will result in certain death. With this strain of the Ebola virus spawning zombies, it is unknown as to what catastrophe awaits the yet uninformed public. It is important to continue following this story in the media as to be better prepared for when this outbreak reaches your community.
source: | 0 |
Breitbart Senior Editor MILO criticized the feminists who stood in solidarity with Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour, joking “nothing says women’s rights like a Sharia law activist in a hijab. ”[“This is Linda Sarsour, the Muslim woman throwing up the ISIS sign that somehow was in charge of the women’s march on Washington. Because nothing says women’s rights like a Sharia law activist in a hijab,” proclaimed MILO ironically. “Seriously, this is how stupid liberals are. ” “How did women become so insane, that they’d march with Muslims and talk about how terrible it is to be a woman in America? They all stopped at Starbucks before marching too. Starbucks that cost more than many women on earth make in a week,” he continued. “Linda isn’t a pretty woman, look at that schnozz, and that jaw line! Plus she has the little smirk Muslim women always have when they are pulling the wool over the eyes of western civilization. I always argue against the full burka but she could use one. ” “You see a lot of masculine jaw lines, especially on young female journalists,” MILO concluded. “Some of them are trannies of course so the jawline make sense, but others have it due to heightened levels of testosterone typically driven by aggressive masculine postures. Activists are pushy, and that raises testosterone. ” Written from prepared remarks. Milo wears tan shirt by UNCL, $55. White women’s suit jacket by Calvin Klein, $60. White jeans by Robin, $550. Limited edition Timberlands, $180. Louis Vuitton belt, $350. Silver Versace shades, $340. Chains and pearls, too much to count. Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 0 |
Written by Ron Paul Monday November 7, 2016 I have said throughout this presidential campaign that it doesn’t matter much which candidate wins. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are authoritarians and neither can be expected to roll back the leviathan state that destroys our civil liberties at home while destroying our economy and security with endless wars overseas. Candidates do not matter all that much, despite what the media would have us believe. Ideas do matter, however. And regardless of which of these candidates is elected, the battle of ideas now becomes critical. The day after the election is our time to really focus our efforts on making the case for a peaceful foreign policy and the prosperity it will bring. While we may not have much to cheer in Tuesday’s successful candidate, we have learned a good deal about the state of the nation from the campaigns. From the surprising success of the insurgent Bernie Sanders to a Donald Trump campaign that broke all the mainstream Republican Party rules – and may have broken the Republican Party itself – what we now understand more clearly than ever is that the American people are fed up with politics as usual. And more importantly they are fed up with the same tired old policies. Last month a fascinating poll was conducted by the Center for the National Interest and the Charles Koch Institute. A broad ranging 1,000 Americans were asked a series of questions about US foreign policy and the 15 year “war on terror.” You might think that after a decade and a half, trillions of dollars, and thousands of lives lost, Americans might take a more positive view of this massive effort to “rid the world of evil-doers,” as then-president George W. Bush promised. But the poll found that only 14 percent of Americans believe US foreign policy has made them more safe! More than 50 percent of those polled said the next US president should use less force overseas, and 80 percent said the president must get authorization from Congress before taking the country to war. These results should make us very optimistic about our movement, as it shows that we are rapidly approaching the “critical mass” where new ideas will triumph over the armies of the status quo. We know those in Washington with a vested interest in maintaining a US empire overseas will fight to the end to keep the financial gravy train flowing. The neocons and the liberal interventionists will continue to preach that we must run the world or everything will fall to ruin. But this election and many recent polls demonstrate that their time has passed. They may not know it yet, but their failures are too obvious and Americans are sick of paying for them. What is to be done? We must continue to educate ourselves and others. We must resist those who are preaching “interventionism-lite” and calling it a real alternative. Claiming we must protect our “interests” overseas really means using the US military to benefit special interests. That is not what the military is for. We must stick to our non-interventionist guns. No more regime change. No more covert destabilization programs overseas. A solid defense budget, not an imperial military budget. US troops home now. End US military action in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and so on. Just come home. Americans want change, no matter who wins. We need to be ready to provide that alternative. Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given. | 0 |
You are here: Home / US / New Gallup Poll Reveals What Americans REALLY Think About Gun Control New Gallup Poll Reveals What Americans REALLY Think About Gun Control October 28, 2016 Pinterest
A new Gallup poll found that a record low number of Americans, just 36%, favor a ban on “assault rifles,” also known as standard semiautomatic sport rifles. This is the lowest number seen in the 20 years since Gallup first asked Americans the question.
Gallup reported :
The fewest Americans in 20 years favor making it illegal to manufacture, sell or possess semi-automatic guns known as assault rifles. Thirty-six percent now want an assault weapons ban, down from 44% in 2012 and 57% when Gallup first asked the question in 1996.
Assault rifles have been a contentious issue in American life for decades. Two years after President Bill Clinton signed a federal assault weapons ban in 1994, Gallup found that a solid majority of Americans favored such a ban. By the time the 10-year ban expired in 2004, Americans were evenly divided. And by 2011, public opinion had tilted against the assault weapons ban, with 53% opposed and 43% in favor. In Gallup’s 2016 Crime poll, conducted Oct. 5-9, opposition now exceeds support by 25 percentage points, 61% to 36%.
Support for a ban on assault rifles has waned across party lines, though the level of support has dropped most markedly among Republicans. Among Democrats, 50 percent support a ban whereas just 25 percent of Republicans do. In 1996, Democrats supported a ban on assault rifles at a rate of 63 percent along with 50 percent of Republicans.
For independents, the trend is downward as well. In 2000, 63 percent of independents backed a ban on assault rifles, but now that number is all the way down to 31 percent.
People who own guns aren’t the only ones who care about the issue, either. For people who don’t have a gun in the home, 55 percent supported banning assault rifles in 2004; today, the number is down 10 points at 45 percent.
In 2004, 44 percent of those in households with a gun supported an assault weapons ban, but today that number has shrunk to 26 percent — which represents an all-time low.
Gallup reported that this trend fits an overall trend of decreasing support for strict gun laws — particularly relative to the levels seen in 1990:
The decline in support for an assault weapons ban mirrors the trend for those saying there should be a law banning the possession of handguns, except by the police or other authorized people. Currently, 23% of Americans favor such a ban, down from 26% in 2011 and 36% in 2004.
At the same time, 55% of Americans say laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, with 10% saying the laws should be less strict and 34% saying they should be kept as they are now. The percentage favoring stricter gun laws has fluctuated between 43% and 60% since 2004, with no clear increase or decrease in support. But it is down from levels consistently at or above 60% in the 1990s, including a high of 78% in 1990.
Maybe people are starting to see through the media’s narrative that getting rid of guns will keep us safe? Many Americans know how important the Second Amendment is and are unwilling to let the government scare them into giving up their right and cede more power to the federal government.
Good, hopefully more people wake up and refuse to give up their rights. | 0 |
Getty - Kevin Mazur The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR.
Anderson Cooper is known to be the cool, mild-mannered news host of CNN's AC 360. But the shade he threw on Newt Gingrich after his rant against Megyn Kelly was nothing short of scorching.
“I’m sick and tired of people like you using language that’s inflammatory, that’s not true!” Gingrich exploded on The Kelly File. “When you use the words, you took a position. And I think it’s very unfair of you to do that!”
Then, the former Speaker went for the throat:
“You wanna go back through the tapes of your show recently? You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy! That’s what I get out of watching you tonight!”
Anderson Cooper noticed something unusual about Gingrich's line of attack:
“For Newt Gingrich to accuse Megyn Kelly of being fascinated by sex,” Cooper stated. “This is a guy, who’s what, on his third marriage, cheated on his first two wives and was having an affair when he was impeaching Bill Clinton. Isn’t that right?”
That's about right. Newt Gingrich admitted to cheating on his first and second wives and having an affair during the Clinton impeachment hearings.
Watch the segment:
Trump supporters may not be pleased with the way Megyn Kelly has commented on all of those accusations, and her throwing doubt upon Juanita Broaddrick's rape claims against Bill Clinton did not win her friends in that camp. But love her or hate her, it's not Megyn's job to be the Trump campaign's unofficial spokeswoman.
It may be her job to assume the role of a news commentator, however, rather than that of an “objective” journalist. The idea that there is “objectivity” when it comes to reporting the news is a tired and dangerous cliche the American people should put to rest.
As for being “fascinated by sex,” it just might be that Kelly is professionally interested in sexual assault and groping allegations against a presidential candidate, unfounded or otherwise, since the way those are perceived by the public just might sway a national election. | 0 |
Truth Bomb from Rasmussen: More Americans Want Hilary Indicted Than Elected!
And the list goes on…(Proverbs 24:21; Hebrews 4:13)
Now Hillary and the foreign agent in the people’s White House, Barack Hussein Obama, are being exposed for voter rigging . Obama has been visited 45 times out of his 340 visits to the White House by election rigging guru and former prison inmate Robert Creamer .
The new scapegoat for Obama and Clinton is Russia. They are now being blamed for the crime when it is Clinton and Obama who are literally exposed in their own corruptions.
America, do not be diverted from these diplomatic magicians from hell (John 8:44-45). The Clintons have been selling uranium ore to the Russians . This is now World Wrestling Entertainment on a global scale, as they continue to play off of each other. They are not archenemies. They are allied in crime together, period.
Furthermore, like that of the Bushes, China, Russia and America, as well as the Pope, they are all calling for the new world. They are allied with the covenant of Hell, which I remind you disannulled (Isaiah 28:15-18).
Many are wondering why Hillary Clinton is even up on the platform during debates. It comes to this, the American people have been soft on these corrupt criminals, and have been soft on themselves. However, God will not be soft (Nahum 1:3), and these corrupt individuals have been encouraged to act out in a more corrupt manner.
Americans have also allowed the appeasers that identify themselves as prosecutors and government oversight to talk big . Yet, they produce nothing when it comes to justice (Amos 5:7). They are the fox in the chicken coop, acting as if they actually mean what they say. They are protecting themselves as much as the establishment in which they are a part.
Then there are those who pose as some sort of patriotic representatives when, in fact, they are the same people that have given Barack a pass every step of the way. These are a few of those who are the establishment: Colin Powell | 0 |
Should Russia rejoice at Donald Trump's victory? 09.11.2016 The head of the Civil Society Development Fund, Konstantin Kostin, is certain that the victory of presidential candidate Donald Trump has demonstrated people's disappointment in the old American elite. "No one was expecting Trump to win. They did not expect the Republicans to take the majority at the Senate elections. This speaks of people's disappointment in Obama's policies. The American people have shown that they do not want to see Democrats either in the White House or on Capitol Hill," one of Russia's leading political strategists said. "The Americans were ready to accept Obama's tax increases. At the same time, many people had to cut their living standards. Yet, no one wants to give the money to the lazy instead of the poor," the analyst believes. According to Konstantin Kostin, "Trump will defend US interests, while reducing the budget spending on the export of democracy." "Let's wait for the formation of the Trump administration. It is hard for me to understand the Russian MPs, who applauded to the news about Trump's election. Trump is the US President, and he will act in the interests of his country first and foremost," the analyst said. Donald Trump's victory is not a perfect occasion for applause on Russia's part, yet, Russia has two reasons for restrained optimism, Mr. Kostin believes. Print version Font Size "First off, US-Russian relations have always been better and more predictable during the times of Republican presidents. Secondly, Trump, as an adherent of realpolitik, will certainly be against the USA's mission of the global hegemon, exporter of democracy and color revolutions," he explained. "Trump is most unusual and anti-system candidate in modern US history. The support that Trump has received means that most Americans are a lot more interested in their own income, taxes and safety than in the rights of sexual minorities, migrants and issues associated with color revolutions. "Trump has taken a complete advantage of this in his campaign. His winning recipe contains such ingredients as bright and extraordinary style in conjunction with absolutely conservative rhetoric," Konstantin Kostin said. Politonline | 0 |
Being a better cook is more than mastering recipes. It’s also getting the most from your food, wasting little and repurposing leftovers in creative, even ingenious ways. Below, Food reporters and editors share their ideas for improving kitchen storage and using up odds and ends. Have a suggestion? Post it in the comments section. Give vegetables some space. A crowded vegetable crisper is soon a rotten one. Allow air to circulate. Most vegetables are best left in plastic bags that are open and punched with holes. (Onions and potatoes are outliers. Leave them in a cabinet or pantry, alone in the dark, away from the other vegetables and each other.) Wrap lettuce and cucumbers well in paper towels and refrigerated in plastic bags. For best results, wrap cucumbers individually. Rinse herbs lightly, roll them in paper towels and refrigerate in a plastic bag with the top left open. Or, if you have shelf space in your refrigerator, trim the ends off a bunch, put it in a glass of water like a bouquet, and cover with a plastic bag. Sauté lettuce that has begun to wilt in olive oil and season with garlic or shallot. Blanch and then purée carrot tops into chimichurri or pesto. For chimichurri, blend with red wine vinegar, olive oil, herbs and garlic or shallots. For pesto, blend with olive oil, pine nuts and a hard cheese like Parmesan. Use it to top fish, season soup or sauce pasta. (Taste the tops first if they’re very bitter, blanch more than once.) Radish tops and roasted asparagus bottoms are good for pesto, too. Eat carrot tops in a salad: blanch once or twice, then toss in sesame oil and soy sauce. Garnish foods with fennel fronds, celery leaves and carrot tops (used sparingly). Chop and sauté radish tops or turnip tops. Add a poached or fried egg. Call it breakfast. Stop peeling so many of your vegetables. Carrots, parsnips, cucumbers and many others are just fine to eat with a good scrub. Make chocolate mousse with overripe avocados: purée with melted chocolate chips, almond or cow’s milk, cocoa powder, a little sweetener and vanilla. Or mash them with a little lime juice and freeze for an instant guacamole base. Or blend with spinach or basil, olive oil and herbs to make a sauce for pasta. Or add to salad dressing and purée for a thicker emulsion. Boil carrots and blend with a neutral oil, a little garlic and a egg for a fluffy alternative to mayonnaise. Save vegetables (or use up kale stems and cucumber butts) with a quick pickle. Pour a boiling mixture of white vinegar, sugar, salt and water and some herbs or peppers or garlic. Refrigerate. Make a steak salad and add some sliced pickled vegetables. Keep the stems from cilantro or parsley, along with celery leaves, onion peels, mushroom stems and the like in a bag or bowl in the refrigerator or freezer. When you have enough, simmer into a stock for risotto or soup. Toss those last few berries, half an apple, peeled brown bananas (cut into chunks for easy puréeing) or other fruit in a bag in the freezer. Soon you’ll have enough for a smoothie, which is also a good way to use up the last bit of sour cream, yogurt or ice cream at the bottom of the carton. Save orange rinds, especially those from juiced oranges. Dry them and use as fire kindling, where they release a delightful aroma against the wood smoke. Keep lemons in the fridge. Wrap zested lemons in plastic, and keep extra lemon halves cut side down in a bowl or on a plate to be used for salad dressings. They can also be preserved or cooked down to a quick marmalade, or used for cleaning: rub the cut side on aluminum pots to shine them, or on cutting boards to clean them. Or put them down the garbage disposal to make the house smell good. Throw woody stems (like rosemary and thyme) into a roasting pan with meat or root vegetables. Chop tender, thinner parsley and cilantro stems and use them as you would the leaves. Thicker stems can be chopped and sautéed with the onion in any recipe that calls for the herbs as a garnish. Any stem can be used in stock. Steep mint for tea. Stir in honey after steeping. Purée herbs and olive oil and freeze in plastic bags or ice cube trays. Use as the base for pesto or other herb sauces. Resprout scallions by using the green parts, then taking the white bulbs and putting them in a jar of water. Replenish the water regularly. Hang sturdy herbs upside down to dry. Use as you would any dried herb. Make stock. In the refrigerator or freezer, save poultry, beef and ham bones and scraps shrimp, lobster and crab shells and fish heads and bones (from fish) until you have enough for a big pot of whatever kind of stock you want to make. Or make a small batch of stock immediately. The carcass and pan drippings from a roast chicken can go right into a pot with whatever bits of vegetables you have. Add a carrot, half an onion and a bay leaf or other herbs. Cover with water, bring to a boil and then turn heat down to a slow simmer for a couple of hours. Don’t forget to check for seasoning and skim for fat or impurities. Use for soup the next day or to cook a pot of rice. Reduce stock and freeze for a fast broth. When you’ve made stock, strain it and then simmer it again, reducing by perhaps 10 times. Freeze it in ice cube trays or small containers. Reconstitute with water. Reserve any excess skin or fat from the chicken you are about to cook. Freeze it until you have enough to render into schmaltz. Save even small amounts of bacon grease and rendered pork fat from roasts. Use to roast potatoes and root vegetables, or with greens. Bacon grease can be especially good in baked goods. Freeze the chicken liver if you get one with a whole chicken. Accumulate enough and sauté with butter, a little shallot and a shot of wine to blend into paté. Or just sauté it as a cook’s treat. Save pickle brine for brining chicken. Give meat — and not just fruit — a second life in a pie. A few balls of savory dough wrapped in plastic or foil and then put in a plastic bag will last up to three months in the freezer. Or use leftover meat for soup, quesadillas, enchiladas, tacos or salads. Use sour milk to make pancakes or other baked goods that call for buttermilk. Save Parmesan and pecorino rinds in the freezer to make stock, or slip them directly into a pot of soup to enhance the flavor. Mash blue cheese with olive oil and keep it in the refrigerator for salad dressing or to use on potatoes. Combine small mixed scraps of cheese to make fromage fort, fondue or macaroni and cheese. Or grate or crumble them on salad or on top of sliced fruit. Whirl stale bread into bread crumbs and freeze. Toast as a topping for pasta or gratins, as a coating for cutlets or as a thickener for blended soups or gazpacho. Mix into ground meat for meatballs or meatloaf. Use stale bread for French toast, bread pudding or strata. Or turn it into croutons, use it in panzanella or ribollita, or as bed for roast chicken. A loaf of aging bread is a good excuse to make a fondue or a pot of French onion soup. And you don’t need to make bread crumbs to use old bread in meatballs if the bread has personality, you can increase the ratio of bread to meat. Freeze bread by wrapping it well, then reviving it by bringing it back to room temperature, unwrapping it, spritzing it with water a few times and popping it into a oven for 8 to 12 minutes. (Stale loaves that aren’t frozen can be brought back to life this way, too. Spritz them with a little water first.) You could slice the bread first, which affects the quality but makes it easier to take a piece directly from the freezer to the toaster. Slice up a leftover baguette, let the pieces dry out, then bag them to repurpose as croutons or crackers. Cut leftover bread slices or crusts into sticks, butter and bake for “soldiers” to serve with eggs or soup. Crush leftover party nuts and sprinkle them on top of a salad or cooked brussels sprouts. The dates on your packages have nothing to do with food safety, nor are they federally regulated. They are the manufacturer’s suggestion for when the products are at their peak quality. Properly stored food that looks good and smells good is probably good. Freezer bags are wonderful, but food is better if it’s wrapped tightly before it goes into the freezer bag. Pour cool stock in a freezer bag, carefully get the air out and put it in the freezer flat. Label and date everything. Painter’s tape and a Sharpie work well. When I buy corn on the cob, I cut the kernels off and serve that day (or freeze them for instant corn niblets) and save the cobs for later. I make corn broth out of the cobs the next time I make a vegetable soup. I cut 4 to 6 cobs in half and boil them for about 45 minutes in 9 cups of lightly salted water. Strain after boiling this results in about 6 cups of corn broth. If you skip the salt, you can chill it and it makes a nice, light drink. I can’t believe I used to just throw the cobs out before! Courtney Shannon Once a day I review the fridge contents and put all items that need to be consumed in the next 72 hours in a certain spot. That way, when we go to cook, we always look there first to determine what we should be using. Mike McCarthy Candied orange peels. Varsha Maharaj Making soup on Saturday morning (before heading to the grocery store) lets me inventory what veggies are limp and need to be thrown into the pot, as well as which ones are still good for the following week’s recipes. Jurate Kutkus Burns Quinoa or brown rice, Braggs (a healthy alternative for soy sauce) and most any leftover can be mixed together for a hot, tasty meal. Gary Schutze Peel citrus with potato peeler, freeze it and use as needed for zest. Vickie Lynn Fisher We’ve started a new “leftover” tradition of taking what’s left, maybe adding little extras like cheese, then wrapping in pizza dough for individual potpies. Larissa Larivee Every now and then I’ll have a couple of tablespoonsfull of a dish leftover. I’ll pulse it and add it to a sauce or soup for some extra depth and flavor. Catherine Wynne We turn leftover dry bread into a very simple delicious recipe. With olive oil heated, add small square chopped onion and 4 gloves of garlic. Then add 2 cups of water for each loaf, and let it boil. Add 1 teaspoon of paprika or dried red chile pepper, and a similar amount of rich dried peppermint (you can use fresh green peppermint) and 2 spoons of tomato paste. Stir well, then add the chunks of bread and leave it for 5 minutes on calm heat. Ehsan Al Rifai Stop building a pantry for every cuisine on earth. Focus on what is in season or accessible locally. Build out a pantry based on the tastes you love most. Simplify always. Sarah Edell | 1 |
Donald Trump & Hillary Clinton: Two Figures in a Derailed World What is the Way Out? By Dieter Duhm / terranovavoice.tamera.org
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton – truly two representatives of a derailed world. Both hold up a mirror to our current society. One spoke for the establishment; the other for people's rage against the establishment. Rage prevailed, yet both represent the exact same system, just from two different angles. The fact that Trump won, taking into account all the outrageous things he said, shows what kind of turbulent revolt arises among large parts of the American population. It is the revolt of people who feel betrayed by an unfathomable system and who call for, as so often already, a strong leader. Thus the unrestrained demagogue gets on stage, calling for restoring the nation, for security and unity, and the common fight against all those who could disturb this unity. Sorry to say, w hat comes together here is something we have already once seen in the collective insanity under Hitler. But things will not go so far this time because there is neither a concept nor a political vision behind all these “tremendous” words. Through the grotesque victory of this megalomaniac player, a movement for freedom could arise in the United States, one which strives for new objectives beyond the existing parties. In addition, positive counter-powers rise up across the globe – these are the ones that will set the course of things on a new track. Both ways, the one of Trump and Clinton alike, aim toward a deeply inhumane world; both generate unspeakably many victims. The emotional substratum Donald Trump activates is directed against all those of another race, religion or sexual identity. This is self-protection by way of exterminating others. Hillary Clinton pursues the policies of the political class, of calculated globalization, in collaboration with the international dictatorship of financial power, generating victims in all parts of the planet that are subdued by this globalization. This is the self-protection of the dominating system through market strategies and military force. Donald Trump has alleviated the souls of his audience by granting them permission to think the thoughts they anyway do. It has been a fundamental feature throughout human history that people come to power who are able to mobilize the subliminal “mass psychology of fascism” as Wilhelm Reich called it – this hunger for unity under a powerful ruler. This story has been repeating for millennia and will continue repeating until we put an end to it. Humanity needs a new life order with a new vision of leadership and unity. What is meant is not external leadership, but leadership coming from within . It is not the unity proclaimed through banners and election slogans, but the inner unity of people who coexist in trust to assist fellow beings and serve the Earth. We refer to the unity in the natural connectedness with the great family of life – in the self-evident empathy, love and solidarity that immediately come into being when we reach the basis of trust, mutual acceptance and truth. This is the foundation for a life in love, power and health. Another kind of society will arise from this fundament, no longer based on power and capital, but on the truth within human relations. And if our estimate is right, this society will be compatible with the higher order of life, which we call the “Sacred Matrix.” This movement will give rise to many new centers, birthplaces of a new planetary community. We need to get there, otherwise we will content ourselves with substitutive solutions that regularly lead to catastrophes. As humanity we have long worked with these substitutions. We have set up ideological, political, religious and moral systems intending to secure a fulfilled existence for ourselves. Yet now we are collectively facing the edge of abyss. The era of these substitutions has come to an end. Fascism was a substitution; capitalism was a substitution; the ideas of power and obedience, of autocracy and democracy were a substitution; the Catholic Church was a substitution; the mystic paths all the way to Nirvana were a substitution. The Chosen People, all the smaller and bigger empires, all gods were a substitution; and renouncing all gods and teaching materialistic nihilism was a substitution too. Today, we need another solution on a different social, interpersonal, ethical and spiritual foundation. We need a solution based on truth among real people, above all between the genders, man and woman, because this is the realm that has been most terribly destroyed by the violence of patriarchal history. In other words, if we want to end the worldwide injustice and the unspeakable suffering of humanity and the animal kingdom, we need to base the entire civilization of this planet on another foundation. Neither Trump nor Clinton will assist us here; what is required is a fundamental correction of our civilization and a new vision for inhabiting our planet. I know this sounds out of touch with reality, but it is inevitable and can clearly be done. If there is the vision of a humane existence on Earth it can also be realized. All people are made of the same matter. It is not just fantasy when we see the ONE, which is the same in everyone, within ourselves and all fellow citizens of this planet. We all come from the same universe, are reached by the same sun and have all come to this world from between the enormous legs of our Great Mother. We all share the same longing for love and peace. We all are happy about the friendliness of our alleged opponents – and we all would be able to make this friendliness our guiding orientation, could we let go of old, negative forces. For example in Colombia –it is clear that there are the same souls, the same young people, the same hopes and goals in both conflicting parties. It is clear that there is a potential friendship behind this cruel hostility. Isn't it also clear that there is an original love even behind the fiercest relationship crises, that which has once brought the two together? Likewise, there is another possibility of existence behind the entire massacre of this world, which we recognize when we are not entangled in conflicts. We can understand what love is, how to follow its rules and what a global community of love could look like. We can also see the social, ecological and ethical preconditions needed to make it happen. These preconditions give rise to a new concept of coexistence among people, as well as between people and animals, people and nature. This is what we call the “ Global Healing Biotopes Project .” Slowly spreading, the project works to create a new global field stronger than all violence. We do not tolerate any cruelty on this planet. In the name of love for all that lives. Further Reading: | 1 |
US launches cyber attack on Russia’s power grid, telco networks and Kremlin command systems November 5, 2016 Google + Russia expects Washington to provide an explanation after a report claimed that Pentagon cyber-offensive specialists have hacked into Russia’s power grids, telecommunications networks, and the Kremlin’s command systems for a possible sabotage.
“ If no official reaction from the American administration follows, it would mean state cyberterrorism exists in the US. If the threats of the attack, which were published by the US media, are carried out, Moscow would be justified in charging Washington ,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said, according to the ministry’s website .
NBC News said earlier in an exclusive report that US military hackers have penetrated crucial infrastructure in Russia, “ making them vulnerable to attack by secret American cyber weapons should the US deem it necessary. ”
The report was based on the account of a senior US intelligence official and top-secret documents. NBC said the hack was carried out in preparation for waging a full-scale cyberwar with Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also commented on the report, saying Russia had “ cybersecurity measures taken at the level proper for the current situation, and the threats voiced against us by officials of other nations .”
US officials earlier alleged that countries like Russia and China could use hackers to disrupt American power grids and other crucial infrastructure.
Moreover, US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s allegations that Moscow engaged in hacking to damage her bid for the White house have become a major issue in the ongoing US election campaign. Though she provided no proof, the Democrat candidate accused the Kremlin of hacking into the Democrats’ computer networks and publishing sensitive information in order to swing the election in favor of her GOP rival, Donald Trump. In particular, she claimed that Russia had supplied the whistleblower website WikiLeaks with emails hacked from the account of her campaign chair, John Podesta.
Russia has repeatedly denied the accusations, asserting that it has no interest in influencing the election and questioning whether such publications would even have a major impact on how Americans would vote. No hard evidence of the alleged Russian hack has ever been made public, despite media reports claiming that US intelligence communities are “convinced” of the Kremlin’s guilt.
So far, the only country with a record of conducting cyber-attacks on other nations is the US itself. An operation called ‘Olympic Games,’ which was reportedly conducted by the US in corroboration with Israel, involved infecting the computer networks of Iranian uranium enrichment facilities with a computer virus that affected industrial controllers of centrifuges in order to destroy them.
The operation is said to have significantly damaged Iran’s production of nuclear fuel at the Natanz site. Washington apparently decided to go public about it after the virus, dubbed Stuxnet by the IT community, escaped and was identified by major cybersecurity companies. | 0 |
After three weeks of private preparations, Senator Bernie Sanders is expected to endorse Hillary Clinton on Tuesday at a campaign event in New Hampshire, according to three Democrats who have been involved in the planning. The Clinton campaign on Thursday announced the New Hampshire trip but did not provide details, including any mention of Mr. Sanders. Mr. Sanders, in an interview Thursday with Bloomberg View’s Al Hunt, came as close to endorsing Mrs. Clinton as he ever has, saying: “We have got to do everything that we can to defeat Donald Trump and elect Hillary Clinton. I don’t honestly know how we would survive four years of a Donald Trump as president. ” The three Democrats, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal confidential conversations, said that the endorsement was partly the result of daily talks between Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, and the Sanders campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, about bringing together the two rivals and advancing the policy priorities of Mr. Sanders. The discussions included a dinner between Mr. Mook and Mr. Weaver in Burlington, Vt. where Mr. Sanders has his campaign headquarters. One possible obstacle to party unity — a fight between Sanders and Clinton allies over a congressional vote on the Partnership trade deal — is not seen as a deal breaker to the eventual endorsement, the Democrats said. Mr. Sanders wants language added to the party’s policy platform opposing any vote on the deal, despite it being a high priority of the Obama administration. Mr. Sanders has been a staunch opponent of the trade pact, and Mrs. Clinton, who once called it “the gold standard in trade agreements,” has come out against it as well. But her allies on the committee, in line with the wishes of administration officials, have blocked an effort by Sanders allies to insert language opposing it. The Sanders camp will try again at a platform committee meeting in Orlando, Fla. on Friday and Saturday. Mr. Sanders’s endorsement is also expected to ensure that he has a prominent speaking slot at the Democratic convention late this month, the three Democrats said. They added that it was not clear yet when Mr. Sanders would speak or whether the convention would include a full vote on Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders as candidates for the party’s nomination. Mrs. Clinton has already begun moving toward Mr. Sanders on other issues. On Wednesday she proposed eliminating tuition at public college and universities for families with annual incomes up to $125, 000 Mr. Sanders, who had supported making public colleges free for all, praised her plan. The Democrats also said that the Sanders campaign was eager to see Mrs. Clinton take another step toward him on the issue of health care, perhaps by making a new commitment to press Congress to add a “public option” to the Affordable Care Act. Mrs. Clinton has long supported the public option, but she also criticized Mr. Sanders during their nomination fight for wanting to reopen congressional debate over health care debate and replace the Affordable Care Act with health insurance. The refusal by Mr. Sanders to endorse Mrs. Clinton — or even to suspend his campaign after she clinched the nomination on June 7 — has increasingly turned the senator into an in the presidential race. President Obama endorsed Mrs. Clinton during a joint event in North Carolina on Tuesday, and she is set to campaign with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Pennsylvania on Friday. She also campaigned in another swing state, Ohio, with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who shares many progressive policy goals with Mr. Sanders — as well as many of his admirers. Senator Warren’s support for Mrs. Clinton, in particular, threatened to marginalize Mr. Sanders among liberals and provide Mrs. Warren with the highly visible role of progressive champion during the fall election. While some allies of Mr. Sanders worry that his endorsement will be he still has some sway over the 12 million Americans who voted for him in the nominating contest. Mrs. Clinton is eager for party unity, especially since a sizable minority of Sanders supporters is resisting her. With some of them planning to hold events and demonstrations outside the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, there is obvious value to Mrs. Clinton in making peace with Mr. Sanders and having him in her camp. Asked if anything had changed to bring around Mr. Sanders around, the three Democrats said that he wanted to see progress on his policy goals like free public college, but that he was also going through a natural grieving period for his candidacy after a yearlong, race. | 1 |
SnoopWall, Inc. CEO Gary Miliefsky joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the massive ransomware attack that swept the world over the weekend. [Miliefsky said the details of the story sounded like something from a movie script: “This group called the ‘Shadow Brokers’ got ahold of NSA eavesdropping worm code, malware that worms its way across vulnerabilities in Windows, and somebody merged it with ransomware and created the world’s first ransom worm. ” “The software doesn’t just affect you if you click a link. You may click the link and get infected then have to pay the ransom. But it also worms its way across your Intranet looking for more computers with same vulnerability,” he elaborated. Marlow asked if the outbreak of this malevolent software was under control after the chaotic events of the weekend. “A lot of people worldwide have gotten concerned about it, but you’re not going to believe the numbers. Over the weekend, we thought it was slowing down. It started out, it hit about 100, 000 computers by Sunday. By the end of the day yesterday, it was about 179, 000. Today, sadly, the numbers are more than double. We’re at 367, 589 infected,” Miliefsky replied. “Most of them are offline. That means they’ve been unplugged from the Internet so that people can decide: ‘Do I wipe the drive and reinstall, or am I going to pay the fee? But I don’t want it to propagate to other computers.’ But there’s still about 426 computers online that continue to propagate the worm,” he added. Milifesky said his company’s technology, which he unsuccessfully tried to sell to the “big guys” in the computer industry, is focused on protecting “small to enterprises where all the GDP really comes from. ” “And guess what? All of our customers in the SME [Small and Enterprise] space can not get infected with this worm. We can block it in milliseconds,” he said. “I’ve had technology to do this for years, but I can’t sell it to the big guys. It’s called NetShield. ” He explained that NetShield is a corporate product that was the first software to “go on the offensive” against malware. “For consumers, I have some great advice today,” he said. “I put a consumer advisory out, and you can just Google it, ‘SnoopWall consumer advisory.’ In the advisory, I have links to the current stats of the worm infection, what countries are getting infected in real time. But I also have a link to Microsoft’s TechNet page where they didn’t really want to tell everyone right away, two months ago they had the fix. So I have the link to the fix for every version of Windows in that advisory. ” Marlow asked about reports that a North Korean hacking group appeared to be behind the ransomware attack. “I’ve been told by someone who’s connected to someone in Anonymous that there’s actually, believe it or not, a kind of Russian cyber arms dealer who sells weaponized malware, somewhere in Russia, and also hacks videogames, and that person may have sold it to North Korea,” Miliefsky said. “I don’t know much more, I’m told that on hearsay, but I’m passing that on to the authorities and I know they’re going to research it. ” Miliefsky said this was a “watershed moment in cybercrime history. ” “I have to tell you, drug crime in 2015 was bigger than any other form of crime worldwide. By 2016, cybercrime surpassed drug crime and reached $600 billion. This year, I’m predicting cybercrime will be a industry. It is not going to go away. It is only going to get worse,” he warned. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. | 0 |
Report from the Refugee Camp in Calais, France: “the Jungle” Report from the Refugee Camp in Calais, France: “the Jungle” By 0 114 “I was in jail with a Libyan man, his friends came and broke into the jail and let us go, too. There was fighting everywhere. You pray to be in jail with Libyans, because they do not recognize the current government, they will do what they want.” (spoken by a refugee in “the Jungle”) Forty-two percent of the people who came to the Jungle are from warring parts of Sudan and South Sudan; thirty-two percent are from Afghanistan. Others are from Syria, Yemen, Iraqi Kurdistan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Egypt, and more; they have crossed between 6 and 13 countries to arrive in Calais, with their final goal to reach the U.K. In Calais, it seems they are facing the hardest border to cross. A plume of smoke rises from the Sudanese quarter of “The Jungle” in Calais as police begin demolishing the refugee camp. (Photo credit:Alexandra Vuillard) There are many who have died or been seriously injured in their attempts to cross the border to the U.K. One couple was trying to cross by train. Her boyfriend made it on; she leapt, wrapped her arms around him, but did not get her bottom half onto the train. She was cut in half. He was deeply traumatized by her tragic death. In another case, a brother and sister tried to cross to the U.K. by truck. They were both hit on the road; he died and she is in the hospital. Most people from the Jungle Camp who are in the hospital were wounded in accidents while trying to get into the U.K. Broken bones and deep cuts on arms,… | 0 |
The Trump administration released the financial disclosure forms from members of the White House staff. Here is some of what they reveal. ■ The disclosures include the complicated assets of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s daughter and who retain vast business holdings. ■ Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s senior adviser, made as much as $2. 3 million last year. ■ Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council and the former No. 2 executive at Goldman Sachs, has assets valued at $252 million to $611 million. ■ Mr. Bannon and Mr. Cohn, who both have past ties to Goldman Sachs, nonetheless took very different paths to their fortunes. Read more » Mr. Cohn, who until late last year was the No. 2 executive at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, has assets worth $252 million to $611 million, according to a disclosure filing released Friday. That makes Mr. Cohn, now the director of the National Economic Council and a central adviser to Mr. Trump, one of the wealthier members of the Trump administration, which includes more than one billionaire. In addition to the many millions of dollars in cash and stock Mr. Cohn received from Goldman Sachs that made up the lion’s share of his personal assets, he held a slew of positions in publicly traded stocks — many of which he has already said he plans to sell — and in various private entities. Those entities include a stake valued at more than $1 million in a consumer education and consulting business called Payoff, a position in a cosmetics retailer also valued at more than $1 million, investments in several concerns in Ohio valued at $100, 000 or more each, and an investment in a venture capital fund run by Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley powerhouse, valued at $100, 000 or more. — Kate Kelly Mr. Bannon may be one of the best known figures in the Trump White House, but as the Trump administration goes, he’s probably not one of the wealthiest. But by the standards of many Americans, he appears to be doing quite well. Mr. Bannon earned at least $1. 3 million and perhaps as much as $2. 3 million last year, according to the disclosure report. He disclosed $191, 000 in consulting fees he earned from Breitbart News Network, the conservative media organization $125, 333 from Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked for the Trump campaign and $61, 539 in salary from the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative nonprofit organization. All three organizations are backed by the major Republican donors Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah. Mr. Bannon’s most valuable asset was Bannon Strategic Advisors Inc. a privately held consulting firm from which income from his other investments appeared to flow into. It was valued at $5 million to $25 million. He also listed the value of his Bannon Film Industries at $1 million to $5 million. His bank accounts were valued at as much as $2, 250, 000, while he listed rental real estate valued at as much as $10. 5 million. Mr. Bannon made clear in his disclosure report that he intended to sell some of his assets, including his stake in Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm that sells “psychographic” profiles that it asserts can predict the personality and hidden political leanings of every American adult. Mr. Bannon served until last summer as vice president of Cambridge’s board. — Eric Lipton, Steve Eder and Jonathan Weisman ■ The president’s daughter and will remain the beneficiaries of a sprawling real estate and investment business still worth as much as $740 million, despite their new government responsibilities. ■ Ms. Trump will maintain a stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D. C. ■ Mr. Kushner’s financial disclosures said that Ms. Trump earned from $1 million to $5 million from January 2016 to March 2017, and puts the value of her stake at $5 million to $25 million. Read more from Jesse Drucker, Eric Lipton and Maggie Haberman » Kellyanne Conway, one of Mr. Trump’s top advisers, is wealthy, but modestly so when compared with some of her superrich colleagues. Ms. Conway, a Republican strategist and pollster, made over $800, 000 last year, her filing shows. As head of her own consulting firm, Ms. Conway’s clients included an assortment of conservative causes, including the National Rifle Association and the Tea Party Patriots, as well as Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm that advised Mr. Trump’s campaign. She was also paid for a speaking engagement at Point72 Asset Management, the investment firm run by the billionaire stock picker Steven A. Cohen. — Ben Protess Julia Hahn, until she went to work in the White House, was known as the reporter who filled Breitbart. com with conservative screeds. But she is also quite rich for her age. A PNC custodial account owned by Ms. Hahn is valued at $500, 000 to $1 million. And various stock funds listed on her financial disclosure are worth as much as $1. 5 million. Her work as a journalist was also nothing to sneeze at. As a reporter, she made $117, 217 last year at Breitbart. On top of that, she earned $74, 082 from Laura Ingraham’s radio show. — Jonathan Weisman ■ Omarosa Manigault, a White House aide who is a longtime associate of Mr. Trump and was once a contestant on “The Apprentice,” received a wedding dress, veil and accessories valued at $25, 000 in exchange for appearing on the TLC reality show “Say Yes to the Dress. ” ■ Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s trade czar and resident China hawk, is not a wealthy man, but his salary as an economics professor at a public university wasn’t bad. According to his disclosure form, Mr. Navarro earned $240, 000 in salary and bonuses from the University of California, Irvine. He also earned $10, 500 for delivering a speech in November to the Casket Funeral Supply Association of America. ■ Sean Spicer, the press secretary, reported stakes in the Company, McDonald’s and several real estate investments. But, despite his taste for gum, he reported no investments in chewing gum companies (although he does invest in Walmart, which sells chewing gum). ■ Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to Mr. Trump and a former editor at Breitbart News, reported consulting fees of $38, 200 from Breitbart. He also reported royalties of $50, 000 to $100, 000 for his book “Defeating jihad: The Winnable War” — and also said that he signed a contract for a second book. ■ Boris Epshteyn, who served during the presidential campaign as one of Mr. Trump’s chief attack dogs and television talking heads, stills owes over $50, 000 on college loans he took out more than a decade ago, his filing indicates. Recently, Mr. Epshteyn left his White House post under circumstances that were unclear. ■ Jason Greenblatt, the Trump Organization lawyer tasked with helping to bring peace to the Middle East, earned $1, 025, 000 in compensation from Mr. Trump’s company last year. At his daily briefing on Friday, the White House press secretary Sean Spicer tried to put the best spin on the vast wealth that would be on display Friday night: The White House disclosures fit an pattern in Washington of dumping mountains of documents on Fridays, when normal people have left work and are beginning to enjoy their weekend. Not many are likely to be glued to their computers and television sets to track the wealth of White House officials. After all, as Josh Lyman, the fictional White House deputy chief of staff on “The West Wing,” put it, “No one reads the paper on Saturday. ” Here’s the list of the disclosure forms we’ve received so far: Stephen K. Bannon, counselor to the president Thomas Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism and deputy national security adviser James W. Carroll, senior counsel Justin Clark, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs Gary D. Cohn, director of the National Economic Council Conway, Kellyanne, counselor to the president Reed Cordish, special assistant to the president for intragovernmental and technology initiatives Makan Delrahim, deputy White House counsel Uttam Dhillon, special assistant to the president, Ethics Compliance Team Carlos Diaz Rosillo, director of policy and interagency coordination, Domestic Policy Council Jessica Ditto, deputy communications director Ann Donaldson, chief of staff to the White House counsel John Eisenberg, N. S. C. legal adviser, and deputy counsel to the president for national security affairs, National Security Council Michael Ellis, associate counsel Boris Epshteyn, assistant director of communications Helen Ferre, director of media affairs Scott Gast, special assistant to the president, Ethics Compliance Team George Gigicos, director of advance and operations Robert T. Goad, education policy adviser Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president Alexander Gray, deputy director for the defense industrial base, National Trade Council Jason Greenblatt, special representative for international negotiations Stephanie Grisham, deputy press secretary Joseph Hagin, deputy chief of staff for operations Julia Hahn, deputy policy strategist Vincent Haley, adviser for policy, strategy and speechwriting, Domestic Policy Council Hope Hicks, director of strategic communications Kenneth Juster, deputy assistant to the president for international economic affairs and deputy director of the National Economic Council Katsas, Gregory, deputy counsel to the president Joseph K. Kellogg, Chief of Staff and Executive Secretary, National Security Council Shahira E. Knight, special assistant to the president for tax and retirement policy, National Economic Council Andrew D. Koenig, special assistant to the president and policy special assistant Jared Kushner, senior adviser to the president for strategic planning Gerrit Lansing, chief digital officer Chris Liddell, director of strategic initiatives for the White House Strategic Development Group Omarosa Manigault, director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison Ashley Marquis, chief of staff of the National Economic Council John McEntee, personal aide to the president Kathleen McFarland, deputy national security adviser Donald F. McGahn, counsel to the president Bill McGinley, associate counsel Stephen Miller, senior adviser to the president for policy Peter Navarro, director, National Trade Council Reince Priebus, chief of staff Marc Short, director of the office of legislative affairs Sean Spicer, press secretary | 1 |
Dienstag, 15. November 2016 40 Kilo "richtig feines Zeug": Polizei stellt exzellentes Marihuana sicher Augsburg (Archiv) - Dicker Fang! Der Augsburger Polizei gelang es am Wochenende bei einer Routinekontrolle, über 40 Kilogramm Marihuana sicherzustellen. Bei dem konfiszierten Rauschgift handelt es sich laut Polizeibericht "um richtig feines Zeug" von "höchster Qualität", mit dem man sich "ordentlich wegballern" könne. Muss ständig kichern: Wosniak "Das ist erstklassige Ware, sogenanntes Shining Silver Haze. So etwas sieht man in Augsburg leider selten", erklärt Polizeisprecher Mark Wosniak, der gerade von einer ausgedehnten Raucherpause zurückkommt. "Kurz nach dem Konsum fühlt man sich auf entspannte Weise berauscht und lässt sich von den einfachsten Dingen, wie zum Beispiel einer *hehe* Stubenfliege auf der Schulter eines Kollegen, faszinieren." Rauche man noch mehr, sei man einfach nur "richtig gechillt". Der sichtlich übermüdete Wosniak betonte abschließend, dass erste Meldungen, es handle sich um über 40 Kilogramm an sichergestellter Ware, stark übertrieben seien. Man habe nur etwa halb soviel gefunden. ssi; Foto oben: © David Strange - Fotolia.com, Foto rechts: © Kzenon - Fotolia.com; Hinweis: Erstmals erschienen am 10.8.09 Artikel teilen: | 0 |
Fired former FBI Director James Comey said during his appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday that the New York Times reporting on President Donald Trump colluding with the Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign was “not true. ”[Sen. Jim Risch ( ) asked Comey about the reporting. “Okay, so again,” Risch said. “So the American people can understand this, that report by the New York Times was not true, is that a fair statement?” “It was not true,” Comey said. “Again, all of you know this, maybe the American people don’t. The challenge — I’m not picking on reporters about writing stories about classified information … [the challenge is] that people talking about it often don’t really now what’s going on and those of us who actually know what’s going on are not talking about it. ” “And we don’t call the press to say, hey, you got that thing wrong about this sensitive topic,” Comey said. “We just have to leave it there. ” | 0 |
At least four babies have been born in New York City with brain developmental symptoms since July, the city’s health department said on Wednesday, bringing the total number of such births to five. The numbers were announced in an alert the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene sent to doctors, urging them to remain vigilant and to continue to warn pregnant women and sexually active women of reproductive age not using a reliable form of birth control against traveling to places where the virus is spreading. It was a reminder that while the threat of the virus may have eased in many places around the world, it still poses a danger and its consequences are likely to be felt for some time. Zika is primarily transmitted by mosquitoes but can also be passed on through sex. In most cases, the virus causes only mild illness, but the danger to women pregnant or trying to become pregnant is much greater, because of the impact the disease can have on fetal development. A small percentage of women with the virus have given birth to infants with a abnormally small heads and stunted brain growth — a condition known as microcephaly. As of Friday, about 8, 000 New Yorkers have been tested for Zika and 962 have tested positive, including 325 pregnant women, according to the health department. All the cases were associated with travel six involved sexual transmission by a partner who had been to the areas hit hardest by the Zika epidemic. In addition to the five babies with brain developmental symptoms, eight other infants have tested positive for Zika virus in New York City but have not shown evidence of what is being called congenital Zika virus syndrome. Though much of the early focus of public health officials centered on children born with microcephaly, there is concern that the virus could cause a host of other developmental problems, including brain and eye abnormalities, shortened or hardened muscles and tendons, and neurological impairment. “Today’s news is a reminder that Zika continues to be a threat to pregnant women and their babies,” said the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Mary T. Bassett. “We are closely following all babies born to mothers who test positive for Zika infection and will connect parents to available services to improve their child’s quality of life,” she added. | 0 |
Anna Dewdney, whose “Llama Llama” picture books amused and comforted millions of preschool children, died on Saturday at her home in Lower Bartonsville, Vt. She was 50. The cause was brain cancer, her sister the anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann said. Ms. Dewdney, whom the children’ journal The Horn Book once called a “rock star to preschoolers,” introduced her most famous character in “Llama Llama Red Pajama. ” Published in 2005, it told the rhyming story of a llama upset when his mother delays bringing a nighttime glass of water. Mama eventually turns up and the crisis is averted. Baby llama learns that Mama will always be nearby. Parents and children loved the book. “Dewdney gives a wonderfully fresh twist to a familiar nighttime ritual,” Booklist wrote. Booksellers loved it, too. The title flew off the shelves, as did its nearly 20 successors, which sold more than 10 million copies. Netflix plans to offer an animated version of the books next year. Anna Elizabeth Luhrmann was born on Dec. 25, 1965, and grew up in Englewood, N. J. Her father, George, was a psychiatrist her mother, the former Winifred Bruce, wrote books for young readers. Anna attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. and the Putney School in Vermont before earning a bachelor’s degree in art from Wesleyan University in 1987. She was a mail carrier, a waitress and a boarding school teacher before landing the assignment to illustrate “The Peppermint Race,” by Dian Curtis Regan. Ms. Dewdney illustrated several more books before discovering her llama. She told The of Newark in 2013 that the idea had come from car trips with her two daughters in the back seat she made animal sounds to them as they passed farms. “I would say, ‘Look, there are cows,’” she said. “And I would moo and make sheep noises and chicken noises. Our vet had a field with donkeys, and then she got a llama. And I would go ‘ . ’” Written in rhymes, each book starts with a simple life problem and proceeds to solve it, with lessons learned along the way. After writing and illustrating “Grumpy Gloria,” about a bulldog jealous of a doll, Ms. Dewdney reeled off a string of “Llama Llama” books, including “Llama Llama and the Bully Goat. Her most recent one, published last year, is “Llama Llama Gram and Grandpa,” in which Llama forgets his toys on an overnight trip. “I think children are far more like animals than they are like adults,” Ms. Dewdney told The Horn Book in 2013. She added: “Small children are ‘unadulterated’ beings. They experience and recognize feelings in themselves and others much like animals do, without all that other stuff on top. ” Ms. Dewdney also wrote the books “Roly Poly Pangolin,” “Nobunny’s Perfect” and “Nelly Gnu and Daddy Too. ” Ms. Dewdney’s marriage, to John Ronald Dewdney, ended in divorce. In addition to her sister Tanya Marie, she is survived by her parents another sister, Alice Laughlin her companion, Reed Duncan and two daughters, Berol and Cordelia Dewdney. She recently completed “Little Excavator,” to be published in June by Viking Children’s Books. “A good children’s book can be read by an adult to a child, and experienced genuinely by both,” Ms. Dewdney told The . “A good children’s book is like a performance. I don’t feel my world really exists until an adult has read it to a child. ” | 0 |
The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the and its assigns. Notices Posted by VNN on November 2, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Africa , Asia , Australia & Oceana , Europe , North America , South America , World . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments One Response to " Putin: ‘America is a great nation, not some banana republic. Correct me if I’m wrong’ " Debbie Menon November 2, 2016 at 4:40 pm
Trump: At the Third debate: Now we can talk about Putin. I don’t know Putin. He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good. If Russia and the United States got along well and went after ISIS, that would be good. He has no respect for her (Hillary). He has no respect for our president.
She (Hillary) doesn’t like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way.
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From Texas to Alabama to Wisconsin, more than a dozen states in recent years have passed laws requiring that abortion clinics have facilities or use doctors with admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Now, Monday’s Supreme Court ruling — that those provisions in a Texas law do not protect women’s health and place an undue burden on a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion — will quickly reverberate across the country. It will prevent the threatened shutdown of clinics in some states, especially in the Deep South, that have been operating in a legal limbo, with laws on temporary hold. But legal experts said the effect over time was likely to be wider, potentially giving momentum to dozens of legal challenges, including to laws that restrict abortions with medication or ban certain surgical methods. “The ruling deals a crushing blow to this most recent wave of state efforts to shut off access to abortion through ” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, the director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School. Adopting stringent regulations on abortion clinics and doctors that are said to be about protecting women’s health has been one of the movement’s most successful efforts, imposing large expenses on some clinics, forcing others to close and making it harder for women in some regions to obtain abortions. Republicans like Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who deplored Monday’s ruling, argued that they were requiring clinics to “be held to the same standards as other medical facilities. ” Now, the court has ruled that any such requirements must be based on convincing medical evidence that the rules are solving a real health issue to be weighed by a court, not by ideologically driven legislators — and that the benefits must outweigh the burdens imposed on women’s constitutional right to an abortion. groups expressed anger at Monday’s decision, insisting that abortion care is rife with unreported medical risks and malpractice, and vowed to press on. Americans United for Life, which has been a principal architect of the legislative strategy of putting requirements on clinics in the name of protecting women’s health, said it would continue to fight “to protect women from a dangerous and greedy abortion industry. ” “I’m confident that the states will move ahead to fill the public health vacuum that the Supreme Court has created,” said Clarke Forsythe, the acting president of Americans United for Life. “This decision does not foreclose more narrowly tailored regulations,” he said, promising that new ones will be developed state by state. Since the Supreme Court has long held that women have a constitutional right to an abortion, groups over the past decade have turned to the states to pass hundreds of laws designed to discourage abortions, such as waiting periods, mandated fetal sonograms and parental consent requirements. Most recently, promoting stringent regulations on abortion clinics and doctors has been one of the movement’s most successful efforts. Since 2011, for example, nine states have passed physician requirements, bringing the total, including Texas, to 11, though in several cases the laws have been temporarily blocked. Similar proposals are pending in five more states, according to Elizabeth Nash, a researcher with the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. The latest law, though a weaker one than that in Texas, is due to take effect on July 1 in Florida. Gov. Rick Scott said he was studying the implications of Monday’s Supreme Court decision. The Florida law allows clinics, as an alternative, to have a general transfer agreement with a nearby hospital, but it is unclear whether all of the state’s clinics can comply. The clearest and probably quickest effect of the Supreme Court decision will be in the other states with laws — which mainstream medical groups say are medically unnecessary, and which clinics in some regions cannot meet because of hostility to abortion. Such laws threatened to force the shutdown of four of five clinics in Alabama, three of four clinics in Louisiana and the sole abortion clinic operating in Mississippi. Given Monday’s decision, none of the laws in those states, or in others where similar requirements are temporarily blocked, including Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, are likely to survive. Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, said in a statement: “Today the court has put women’s health and safety on the back burner for the profits of Planned Parenthood and abortion providers. ” He added: “As a legislator, I will continue to support legislation that protects the life of an unborn child and the health of the mother. ” On the other side of the issue, Dr. Willie Parker, who as a roving doctor who performs abortions at two Alabama clinics in cities where he cannot obtain admitting privileges and at the one clinic in Mississippi, said with relief that the Texas decision was “a huge victory. ” After years in which ever more forceful laws spread in the South, he said, “now the chain reaction can go in the other direction. ” requirements that are now in effect in Missouri, North Dakota and Tennessee may also come under new challenge. Five other states, besides Texas, impose some form of standards on clinics performing abortions in the first trimester. The effect of the new ruling may have to be considered state by state, legal experts said. While laws outside Texas have forced a few clinics to shut down, the laws in several states including Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Virginia allow for waivers to the strict requirements, allowing some existing clinics to be exempt from rules governing, for example, storage space or flooring materials the Texas law struck down Monday was, by comparison, inflexible. Because the Supreme Court case was focused on provisions that were justified in terms of women’s health, the ruling is likely to have a less direct effect on some other contested abortion restrictions such as waiting periods or ultrasound requirements. But the same standards would presumably apply to legal efforts to restrict nonsurgical, medication abortions in the name of protecting women. Battles are underway, for example, in some rural states over whether doctors can remotely prescribe drugs. The greatest effect of the decision may come in the future, as the battle over abortion takes new forms. Nancy Northup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, the New legal group that represented Texas clinics before the Supreme Court, said, “This opinion makes it clear that the court is going to look at the stated justification for a law, and look at the burdens it imposes. ” “It’s about making sure that regulations are truly justified,” she said. For now, the Supreme Court is expected to make sure that states where cases are pending, like Louisiana and Mississippi, follow the principles laid out on Monday. | 1 |
Bureaucrat who said “stupidity” of Americans helped get law passed doubles down
Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com October 26, 2016
Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber – the bureaucrat who once bragged that the “stupidity” of the American people was crucial for passing the health care law in the first place – told CNN that the “fix” for Obamacare was to impose a “larger mandate penalty”. CNN’s CAROL COSTELLO: “So let’s talk about how exactly you can fix Obamacare. I just need you to be specific because I think people really want answers. So Hillary Clinton says she can fix Obamacare. So what would one fix that would drive premiums down?” JONATHAN GRUBER: “Look, once again, there’s no sense it has to be fixed. The law is working as designed. However, it could work better. And I think, probably the most important things experts would agree on is we need a larger mandate penalty“… Gruber’s arrogance is incredible. Even after the Obama administration acknowledged that premiums are set to skyrocket next year, Gruber thinks that the answer is to financially punish Americans to an even greater degree. Gruber is essentially admitting that Obamacare is designed to make Americans destitute. “ObamaCare was never designed *not* to overwhelm you with the shifting of massive costs. ObamaCare was designed to crush you in costs,” points out the Conservative Treehouse blog . His comments shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given what Gruber thinks of the American people. A series of videos that emerged in 2014 featured Gruber admitting that Obamacare was deceptively crafted in order to fool “stupid” Americans into not realizing that it would mean massive price hikes and that the law’s “lack of transparency (was) a huge political advantage” in selling it.
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It is interesting that President Barack Obama, who during eight years in office has, historically, been slow to act on international challenges, has moved quickly to impose sanctions upon Russia for alleged interference with the 2016 election. He moves well before a detailed investigation into the issue can be concluded. [Compare the timeline for the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized use of her email servers. In March 2015, it became publicly known that during her tenure as Secretary of State she utilized a private server for email communications rather than the secure government server. This act was clearly in violation of State Department protocols and federal record keeping regulations. Upon learning Clinton also used her private server to send classified material, the FBI launched an investigation into it later that year. In May 2016, the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General released an report on both the Department’s email practices as well as Clinton’s unauthorized practices. Finally, in August 2016, the FBI finally released a report on Clinton’s email practices investigation, finding while Hillary was extremely careless, it was believed there was no basis for criminal prosecution. From the time Clinton’s email scandal became public knowledge to the time detailed investigations were completed by both the FBI and State Department took 14 and 17 months respectively. On December 4th, Obama ordered a CIA investigation into Russia’s alleged interference with the presidential election and now, remarkably, less than four weeks later, it would appear the investigation has been completed as he prepares to impose sanctions against Moscow. While Moscow demands it be shown evidence of complicity, none has been offered. How is it, while an investigation into Hillary’s email scandal took more than a year, one into possible Russian hacking has taken less than a month. Of interest too is Obama’s claim he knew about the Russian interference for months prior to the election. However, he failed to act due to his inability to decide how best to respond without “escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Clinton’s campaign. ” The logic to Obama’s argument is this: Russian hacking occurred disclosing it before the election ran the risk he would be criticized for favoring Clinton’s campaign thus, he opted to do nothing (unsurprisingly) other than simply await the election’s result. Since election day polls projected an 85% chance of a Clinton win, why — Obama apparently rationalized — should he bother interfering by giving the allegation a high profile? After all, pressing alleged Russian hacking claim might only disrupt Hillary’s victory. However, totally unexpected to Obama, the severe negativity surrounding Clinton’s private server use as well as the damning content of her emails resulted in Russian hacking supposedly swaying the election in Donald Trump’s favor. Thus, only now does it become an issue! It would now appear it has only been Clinton’s loss that has motivated Obama to press forward with allegations of Russian involvement. The logical conclusion seems to be, therefore, had Hillary prevailed, Obama would not have raised the hacking issue, leaving it to Hillary to act, or not, against Moscow. While there are reasons why Obama may be unwilling to disclose evidence of Russian involvement, there are also reasons why none may exist. Refusing to provide evidence may stem from a concern that producing it might disclose potential U. S. sources used to obtain it. However, a group of retired senior U. S. intelligence officials — among them NSA whistleblower William Binney — claim a system is in place to monitor remote data removal that would have detected Russian hacking. Its failure to do so could only lead to one conclusion — a fiber network was never used but, rather, a thumb drive was to download DNC emails. In other words, it was an inside job. But why would Obama rush to judgment against Russia, imposing sanctions for allegedly interfering with the US presidential election? We have repeatedly been reminded by the President, in the aftermath of Muslim terrorist attacks in the U. S. not to rush to judgment linking the violence to Islam. Yet rushing to judgment is exactly what he has done here. This raises a strong concern that perhaps, having overseen one of the worst political upsets in history and with his party clinging to a minority in both the House and Senate, Obama seeks to deflect blame. In an effort to salvage his legacy, it would not be surprising for Obama to seek to place responsibility for the Republican victory upon alleged Russian hackers rather than where such responsibility firmly lies — the Democratic Party he led. Both during and after the presidential election, Obama has opted to play a shell game with alleged Russian hacking interference, refusing to play it up when a perceived Democratic win seemed inevitable, only turning to it afterwards to try to explain why it failed to happen. | 1 |
MIDWAY ATOLL — years ago, a naval battle off this remote spit of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean changed the course of World War II. Last week, President Obama flew here to swim with Hawaiian monk seals and draw attention to a quieter war — one he has waged against rising seas, freakish storms, deadly droughts and other symptoms of a planet choking on its own fumes. Bombs may not be falling. The sound of gunfire does not concentrate the mind. What Mr. Obama has seen instead are the charts and graphs of a warming planet. “And they’re terrifying,” he said in a recent interview in Honolulu. “What makes climate change difficult is that it is not an instantaneous catastrophic event,” he said. “It’s a issue that, on a basis, people don’t experience and don’t see. ” Climate change, Mr. Obama often says, is the greatest threat facing the world, as well as a danger already manifesting itself as droughts, storms, heat waves and flooding. More than health care, more than righting a sinking economic ship, more than the historic first of an president, he believes that his efforts to slow the warming of the planet will be the most consequential legacy of his presidency. During his seven and a half years in office, Mr. Obama said, a majority of Americans have come to believe “that climate change is real, that it’s important and we should do something about it. ” He enacted rules to cut emissions across much of the United States economy, from cars to coal plants. He was a central broker of the Paris climate agreement, the first accord committing nearly every country to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But while climate change has played to Mr. Obama’s highest ideals — critics would call them messianic impulses — it has also exposed his weaknesses, namely an inability to forge consensus, even within his own party, on a problem that demands a bipartisan response. He acknowledged that his rallying cry to save the planet had not galvanized Americans. He has been harshly criticized for policies that objectors see as abuses of executive power and far too burdensome for the economy. That has made Mr. Obama’s record on climate curiously contradictory, marked by historic achievements abroad and frustrating setbacks at home. The threat of global warming inspired Mr. Obama to conduct some of the most masterful diplomacy of his presidency, which has bound the United States into a web of agreements and obligations overseas. Yet his determination to act alone inflamed his opponents, helped polarize the debate on climate change and will carry a significant economic cost. Mr. Obama chalks up the contradictions both to politics and to the amorphous, unseen nature of the threat. “It feels like, ‘Meh, we can put this off a little bit,’” he said. The president spoke in a cottage on a Marine base that overlooks Kaneohe Bay in his home state, Hawaii. Angry waves crashed on the rocks below the house, the sea churned by one of two hurricanes spinning close to the island. Hawaii, as one of Mr. Obama’s climate advisers pointed out, normally does not get hurricanes. “When you see severe environmental strains of one sort or another on cultures, on civilizations, on nations, the byproducts of that are unpredictable and can be very dangerous,” Mr. Obama said. “If the current projections, the current trend lines on a warming planet continue, it is certainly going to be enormously disruptive worldwide. ” Eight years ago, when Mr. Obama ran for president against Senator John McCain of Arizona, both men had essentially the same position on global warming: It is caused by humans, and Congress should enact legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions and force polluters to buy and trade permits that would slowly lower overall emissions of gases. But in the summer of 2010, a bill Mr. Obama had tried to push through Congress failed, blocked by senators from both parties. “One would have hoped for transformational leadership, in the way J. F. K. would have done it,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. That domestic defeat was compounded by failure on the world stage after efforts to enact a highly anticipated United Nations climate change treaty in Copenhagen fell apart in 2009. By the fall of 2010, Tea Party “super PACs” supported by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch had seized on as a political weapon, with attacks that helped Republicans take control of the House. Polls showed that few Americans thought of climate change as a high public policy priority, and the percentage of voters who accepted the reality that it was caused by humans had tumbled. “There is the notion that there’s something I might have done that would prevent Republicans to deny climate change,” Mr. Obama said. “I guess hypothetically, maybe there was some trick up my sleeve that would have cast a spell on the Republican caucus and changed their minds. ” In fact, some Republicans, including Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, were willing to go forward with a more limited climate bill that would have restricted emissions only from power plants. But the president’s own party would not unify even around that, with Democrats from industrial and coal states digging in against him. Ironically, Mr. Obama would end up with regulations that narrowly target power plant emissions. “The White House wanted 60 votes on climate, and they weren’t interested in Republican votes,” Mr. Alexander said in an interview. “Now it’s back to power plant only. The lesson here is that if people who want a result would be a little bit more flexible, they might actually get one. ” In defeat, the president appeared cowed. Campaigning against Mitt Romney in 2012, he barely mentioned climate change. But soon after Election Day, Mr. Obama interrupted a broad discussion with historians about the country’s challenges with a surprising assertion. Douglas Brinkley, a historian who attended the session, recalled, “Out of nowhere, he said, ‘If we don’t do anything on the climate issue, all bets are off. ’” Mr. Obama, who understood that a legislative push would be fruitless, told his advisers to figure out how to enact deep emissions cuts without Congress. They found a way through the Clean Air Act of 1970, which gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to issue regulations on dangerous pollutants. In 2014, Mr. Obama unveiled the first draft of what would become the Clean Power Plan: a set of Clean Air Act rules that could lead to the closing of hundreds of power plants. The move enraged critics, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, whose state relies heavily on coal. Another critic, Laurence H. Tribe, likened the rules to “burning the Constitution” — a charge that might have stung, since Mr. Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar, was a mentor to Mr. Obama at Harvard Law School. Mr. Obama dismissed the criticism as the voice of Mr. Tribe’s client, Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal company, which filed for bankruptcy protection in April. “You know, I love Larry,” he said, but “when it comes to energy issues, Larry has a history of representing fossil fuel industries in big litigation cases. ” The legality of the climate rules is likely to be decided by the Supreme Court, the composition of which depends on the outcome of the presidential election. corporations will not give up the legal fight easily, even after a Supreme Court decision, and Republicans in Congress will continue their legislative attacks. If the rules survive, they will almost certainly cost the coal industry thousands of jobs. “What we owe the remaining people who are making a living mining coal is to be honest with them,” Mr. Obama said, “and to say that, look, the economy is shifting. How we use energy is shifting. That’s going to be true here, but it’s also going to be true internationally. ” Few people would have described Mr. Obama as a climate evangelist when he ran for the White House in 2008. While he invoked the rising seas and heating planet to thrill his young supporters, he did not have the long record of climate activism of Al Gore or John Kerry, who is now his secretary of state. Like many things with Mr. Obama, his evolution on climate was essentially an intellectual journey. Mr. Obama immersed himself in the scientific literature, which left little doubt that the planet was warming at an accelerating rate. “My top science adviser, John Holdren, periodically will issue some chart or report or graph in the morning meetings,” he said, “and they’re terrifying. ” The morning Mr. Obama unveiled the final version of the Clean Power Plan last year, he summoned his senior climate adviser, Brian Deese, to the Oval Office. Mr. Deese expected that the president would hand him some changes to his speech. Instead, he brought up an article in the journal Science on melting permafrost. The research not only documented faster increases in temperatures, but also drew direct links between fossil fuel emissions and extreme weather. Mr. Obama scrutinized reports like the 2014 National Climate Assessment, which tied climate change to events like flooding in Miami and longer, hotter heat waves in the Southwest. “More and more, there are events that are happening that are astoundingly unusual, that knock your socks off, like the flooding in Louisiana,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. “Those are the kinds of events where it’s becoming possible to draw attribution. ” Benjamin J. Rhodes, one of the president’s closest aides, recalled Mr. Obama talking about “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” Jared Diamond’s 2005 best seller, which explored the environmental changes that wiped out ancient societies like Easter Island and discussed how modern equivalents like climate change and overpopulation could yield the same destruction. The president’s Pacific roots also came into play. In Honolulu last week, he told a meeting of Pacific Island leaders that few people understood the stakes of climate change better than residents of their part of the planet. Crops are withering in the Marshall Islands, he noted. Kiribati is buying property in another country for the day that its own land vanishes beneath the waves. And villagers in Fiji have been forced from their homes by high seas. Shifting monsoon patterns in South Asia could affect a billion people who depend on agriculture, Mr. Obama said in his interview. “If you have even a portion of those billion people displaced,” he said, “you now have the sorts of refugee crises and potential conflicts that we haven’t seen in our lifetimes. ” “That,” he added, “promises to make life a lot more difficult for our children and grandchildren. ” Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton never seem to tire of telling the story of Copenhagen: In December 2009, with the climate conference on the verge of failure, the two learned of a meeting of the leaders of Brazil, China, India and South Africa, from which they had been pointedly excluded. Elbowing their way past a Chinese security guard, they crashed the meeting, and over the course of 90 minutes of tense negotiations with the abashed leaders, they extracted an agreement to set goals for lowering emissions. The Europeans, who had been cut out of the talks, derided the deal as toothless, but Mr. Obama learned from the experience. A global climate accord could not simply be a compact among developed economies, he said. It had to include the major developing economies, even if they resented being held to standards that had never applied to the club of wealthy nations. And any agreement had to be led by the two largest emitters, the United States and China. Mr. Obama set about persuading President Xi Jinping of China to join the United States in setting ambitious reduction targets for carbon emissions. Tensions were already high over China’s hacking of American companies, and the United States was balking at China’s colonization of the South China Sea. A casual, summit meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi at the Sunnylands estate in California in June 2013 had failed to break the ice. But the meeting did produce one headline: an agreement to explore ways to reduce emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, known as HFCs, potent chemicals found in refrigerants. In hindsight, it would prove significant. The final international accord on the chemicals is expected to be ratified next month in Rwanda. “It was a place Obama and Xi found some common ground,” said John D. Podesta, a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton whom Mr. Obama recruited to lead his climate efforts in his second term. (Mr. Podesta is now the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.) Mr. Podesta and Todd Stern, the State Department’s climate envoy, began arduous negotiations with China. They were backed by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama, who sent Mr. Xi a letter with a proposal in which the United States would pledge to increase its target for reducing carbon emissions by 2025 if the Chinese pledged to cap and then gradually reduce their emissions. China had historically resisted such agreements, but the air pollution there had become so bad, Mr. Obama noted, that the Twitter page in China was the daily monitor maintained by the United States Embassy in Beijing. “One of the reasons I think that China was prepared to go further than it had been prepared to go previously,” Mr. Obama said, “is that their overriding concern tends to be political stability. Interestingly, one of their greatest political vulnerabilities is the environment. People who go to Beijing know that it can be hard to breathe. ” The Chinese were also swayed by Mr. Obama’s announcement in 2014 of his regulations to reduce emissions from power plants, which gave Mr. Kerry and his team of climate diplomats the leverage they needed in months of meetings with China. On Nov. 11, 2014, after a quiet stroll across a bridge in the Chinese leadership compound beside the Forbidden City, Mr. Xi and Mr. Obama sealed their agreement. “By locking in China,” Mr. Obama said, “it now allowed me to go to India and South Africa and Brazil and others and say to them: ‘Look, we don’t expect countries with big poverty rates and relatively low carbon emissions to do exactly the same thing that the United States or Germany or other advanced countries are doing. But you’ve got to do something. ’” A little more than a year later, in Paris, the United States led negotiations among 195 countries that resulted in the most significant climate change agreement in history. And this past weekend in Hangzhou, China, Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi formally committed their two nations to the Paris accord. For Mr. Obama, it was not just redemption for Copenhagen, but a vindication of his theory of the United States’ role in the world. “There are certain things that the United States can do by itself,” Mr. Obama said. “But if we’re going to actually solve a problem, then our most important role is as a leader, vision setter and convener. ” To his successor, Mr. Obama leaves an ambitious and divisive legacy: a raft of new emissions rules that promise to transform the United States economy but are likely to draw continuing fire from Republicans, and an aggressive — some say unrealistic — pledge made in Paris to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050. All of this, he acknowledges, could be undone at the ballot box. “I think it’s fair to say that if Donald Trump is elected, for example, you have a pretty big shift now with how the E. P. A. operates,” he said. Mrs. Clinton has embraced Mr. Obama’s approach, promising to meet and in some cases exceed his goals without trying to pass legislation. She is proposing marquee projects like installing 500 million solar panels by 2020 and giving states and cities $60 billion to invest in public transportation and buildings. “It will be business,” Mr. Podesta said. But Mrs. Clinton will face the same partisan fire Mr. Obama has. He noted that, like him, Mrs. Clinton had been pilloried in coal country for acknowledging that coal mining would have a declining role in a economy. Mr. Obama’s bet is that as his regulations get woven into the fabric of the economy, they will be harder for anyone to unwind. He says that his successor should promote past victories, including those of Republicans like Richard M. Nixon and George Bush. For his part, Mr. Obama said he planned to stay active in fighting climate change in his life. During his tour of the wildlife on Midway, he paused to make an improbable remark. “My hope,” he said, “is that maybe as I can have a little more influence on some of my Republican friends, who I think up until now have been resistant to the science. ” | 1 |
VIDEOS Man who caused scare at Nevada Trump rally listed in Wikileaks Podesta emails Registered Republican possibly hired by Clinton campaign to disrupt Trump rally and potentially bring harm to Donald Trump November 6, 2016 Right Side Broadcasting/YouTube RENO ( INTELLIHUB ) — Austyn Crites, 33, was released by authorities with no charges after Crites purportedly interfered with U.S. Presidential Nominee Donald Trump’s speech during a Trump rally Saturday.
Although it was reported that at least two people in the crowd saw Crites with a ‘gun,’ authorities maintain that no gun was ever found. Man at heart of Trump scare. Austyn Crites, 33, “registered Republican” and “business guy” from Reno who’s been campaigning for Mrs Clinton. pic.twitter.com/wbHPRT4oOD
— James Cook (@BBCJamesCook) November 6, 2016
But that’s not all — the suspect Austyn Crites, was listed in the Wikileaks Podesta emails as seen below and somehow has ties to the Clinton camp. 16786_Copy of Full list at BN 01212011.xls (Wikileaks)
Why would this guy have a connection to the Clinton campaign and what was he up to at the Nevada rally?
“Austyn Crites” name shows up 6 times in #Wikileaks documents. #Hillbully pic.twitter.com/JrTduwTc1B
— ♥Deplorable in Pink♥ (@pink_lady56) November 6, 2016
If you have any information on this matter please email [email protected] or post in the comments section below. | 0 |
Thursday, 10 November 2016 LITTLE CHILDREN MAY NOT BE ABLE TO SEE HIM LEAVE THE NORTH POLE
As the holiday season approaches, Fox News talk show host Bill O'Reiley will, as usual, warn Americans about the "secular progressive" war on Christmas. O'Reiley, on his program "The O'Reiley Factor, has charged that the secular left wants to ignore traditions of America and build a more inconclusive nation where Judeo-Christian philosophy is tamped down.
Yesterday on Fox, O' Reilly said that "We are all aware that NORAD Tracks Santa is an annual Christmas-themed entertainment program, which has existed since 1955,[1] produced under the auspices of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Every year on Christmas Eve, "NORAD Tracks Santa" purports to track Santa Claus as he leaves the North Pole and delivers presents to children around the world."
"But The Factor has exclusively learned that there is a left-wing conspiracy to stop Norad from tracking Santa. We have heard from reliable sources that a shadowy group of humanists and atheists are working with hackers and various kids of technicians to shut down NORAD computers upon which the tracking of Santa depends to communicate with the public."
Santa could not be reached for comment. Make Keith Shirey's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!) | 0 |
CLEVELAND (AP) — The man who randomly killed a Cleveland retiree and posted video of the crime on Facebook shot himself to death on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, police said. [advertisement | 0 |
Betsy DeVos has accepted the position of education secretary for President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet. On Nov. 23, 2016, the Trump transition team verified the appointment, according to NBC News. Trump stated, “Betsy DeVos is a brilliant and passionate education advocate.”
The 58-year-old hails from Michigan where she is the chairman of the board for the American Federation for Children. DeVos is a strong proponent of education vouchers and charter schools.
Trump believes they will end the political stranglehold that prevents American children from succeding. He further states the overall plan is to establish programs that will bring the schools up to par with the rest of the world.
Since DeVos contends that charter schools and vouchers are a good idea, enacting this policy will likely bring school choice for every child and family in America.
John F. Kirtley, the vice chairman of the foundation issued a statement of congratulations for his colleague’s appointment. “We applaud [Trump] for choosing and placing his trust in Betsy DeVos to serve as the next U.S. Secretary of Education,” wrote Kirtley.
The American Federation for Children is a national advocacy organization that promotes the fact that family choice for the education of children, kindergarten through grade 12, is essential. They support Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), which is a voucher program that allows parents to choose whatever school they deem best for their children, particularly private and home schools. They further advocate the need for school choice and scholarship tax credit programs.
Written by Cathy Milne
Sources:
NBC News: Trump Selects Charter School Advocate Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary
Amercian Federation for Children Website: Mission Statement
American Federation for Children Website: AFC Congratulates Betsy DeVos on Nomination for U.S. Secretary of Education #CMJournalist , DeVos , Donald Trump , Education Savings Accounts , Michigan | 0 |
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This election has been exhausting for all of us, but can you imagine how Alec Baldwin must feel, having to portray a man like Donald Trump every week? I truly hope he gets an Emmy out of this — it might be the only thing that could make all of this seem worth it to him. And Kate McKinnon deserves one too. The two of them are perhaps the best match-up in the history of SNL’s political satire.
Saturday’s cold open on SNL began much like they have since Alec Baldwin took on the role of Donald Trump. He and Kate McKinnon, who portrays Hillary Clinton, appeared on Erin Burnett’s (played by Cecily Strong) show Out Front to speak one last time before the election this Tuesday.
After trading their usual scripted insults, Baldwin had clearly had enough and stopped.
“I’m sorry, Kate. I just hate yelling this stuff at you like this.”
Kate agrees, saying she finds this election all so “mean,” Then, while addressing the camera and the SNL audience, Alec Baldwin says:
“Don’t you all feel gross about all of this?”
What happens after that is amazing. Watch the full sketch below:
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Would Roger Goodell feel awkward handing Tom Brady the Super Bowl trophy? Goodell: “Not for a second … It would be an honor” pic. twitter. During Wednesday’s “The Herd” on Fox Sports 1, host Colin Cowherd asked NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell if it would be awkward for him to hand New England Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady the Lombardi trophy for winning Super Bowl LI after suspending him the first four games for “ . ” Goodell denied any discomfort in handing the trophy to him on the stage, saying it would be an “honor. ” “Not for a second,” Goodell responded. “Tom Brady is one of the greats. He has been for several years,” he added. “He’s on the precipice of at least potentially winning his fifth Super Bowl ring. He’s an extraordinary player, great performer, and a surefire Hall of Famer. So it would be an honor. ” Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 0 |
advertisement - learn more It’s been more than one hundred years since Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics, said that he regards “consciousness as fundamental,” that he regards “matter as a derivative from consciousness,” and that “everything we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” He is basically saying that the immaterial ‘substance’ of consciousness is directly intertwined with what we perceive to be our physical material world in some sort of way, shape or form, that consciousness is required for matter to be, that it becomes after consciousness….and he’s not the only physicist to believe that. “It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”– Eugene Wigner, theoretical physicist and mathematician. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 Scientists have been urging the mainstream scientific community, which today is littered with scientific fraud and industry influence as well as invention secrecy , to open up to a broader view regarding the true nature of our reality. “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade that in all of the previous centuries of its existence.”– Nikola Tesla advertisement - learn more Not long ago, a group of internationally recognized scientists came together to stress this fact and how it’s overlooked by the mainstream scientific community. It’s ‘post-material” science, an area of study dealing with the ‘non-physical realm, and it’s challenging the modern scientific worldview of materialism that’s dominated mainstream science. The idea that matter is not the reality is finally starting to gain some merrit. The summary of this report presented at the International Summit On Post-Materialist Science can be found HERE . “The modern scientific worldview is predominantly predicated on assumptions that are closely associated with classical physics. Materialism—the idea that matter is the only reality—is one of these assumptions. A related assumption is reductionism, the notion that complex things can be understood by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things such as tiny material particles.”– Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science MIT’s Max Tegmark,a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is one of the latest to attempt explaining why he believes consciousness is a state of matter. He believes that consciousness arises out of a certain set of mathematical conditions, and that there are varying degrees of consciousness – just as certain conditions are required to create varying states of vapor, water, and ice. As PBS emphasized, “understanding how consciousness functions as a separate state of matter could help us come to a more thorough understanding of why we perceive the world the way we do.” ( source ) Tegmark describes this as “perceptronium,” which he defines as the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware and this substance should not only be able to store information, but do it in a way that form a unified, indivisible, whole. “The problem is why we perceive the universe as the semi-classical, three dimensional world that is so familiar. When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, we do we perceive this solution?”– Tegmark ( source ) This new way of thinking about consciousness has been spreading throughout the physics community at an exponential rate within the past few years. Considering consciousness as an actual state of matter would be huge, considering the fact that modern day definitions of matter require a substance to have mass, which consciousness does not have. What it does have, however, is some sort of effect on our physical material world, and the extent of this effect and how far it goes is the next step for science.
The quantum double slit experiment is a very popular experiment used to examine how consciousness and our physical material world are intertwined. It is a great example that documents how factors associated with consciousness and our physical material world are connected in some way.
One potential revelation of this experience is that “the observer creates the reality.” A paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Physics Essays by Dean Radin, PhD, explains how this experiment has been used multiple times to explore the role of consciousness in shaping the nature of physical reality.
The study found that factors associated with consciousness “ significantly” correlated in predicted ways with perturbations in the double slit interference pattern. ( source ) “Observation not only disturbs what has to be measured, they produce it. We compel the electron to assume a definite position. We ourselves produce the results of the measurement.” (source) For a physicist to brush off the fact that understanding consciousness is necessary for the advancement and understanding of the nature of our reality is not as common as it used to be but, despite the empirical success of quantum theory, even the suggesting that it could be true as a description of our reality is greeted with harsh cynicism, incomprehension and even anger.
R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University wrote in a 2005 publication for the journal Nature:
According to [pioneering physicist] Sir James Jeans: “the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter… we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” . . . The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy.
(“The Mental Universe”; Nature 436:29,2005) (source) Thanks for reading. | 1 |
Kellyanne Conway knows all about the caricature of her. And the criticisms of her work for Donald J. Trump. And the questions about whether she will go to work in the White House. Ms. Conway, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager in the final months of the 2016 presidential race, sat for an extensive interview with The in her office in Trump Tower. To get there, we were led through a secret passageway toward the elevators in the lobby, then up and past a row of offices, one of them with a sign reading “National Security Council,” where Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn has been working over the last few weeks. In the interview, Ms. Conway rebukes her critics, defends her boss, describes the atmosphere within the transition team and sheds light on the ’s relationship with the elusive next first lady, Melania Trump. “I sometimes think I’m in the men’s room at a bachelor party at the Elks club in Republican politics,” Ms. Conway tells us. “In some ways, being able to have a seat at the table is remarkable, and being able to have the seat at the table as a campaign manager, I think, has been pretty spectacular. ” From a desktop or laptop, you can listen by pressing play on the button above. Or if you’re on a mobile device, the instructions below will help you find and subscribe to the series. On your iPhone or iPad: 1. Open your podcast app. It’s a preloaded app called “Podcasts” with a purple icon. (This link may help.) 2. Search for the series. Tap on the “search” magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen, type in “The ” and select it from the list of results. 3. Subscribe. Once on the series page, tap on the “subscribe” button to have new episodes sent to your phone free. You may want to adjust your notifications to be alerted when a new episode arrives. 4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, tap on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you will be able to stream the episode. On your Android phone or tablet: 1. Open your podcast app. It’s a preloaded app called “Play Music” with an icon. (This link may help.) 2. Search for the series. Click on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the screen, search for the name of the series and select it from the list of results. You may have to scroll down to find the “Podcasts” search results. 3. Subscribe. Once on the series page, click on the word “subscribe” to have new episodes sent to your phone free. 4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, click on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you will be able to stream the episode. | 0 |
Netanyahu Accuses Obama of Plan to Destroy Israel’s Air Force Oct 29, 2016 Previous post
Normal people can’t just make this stuff up…but who said Netanyahu is “normal?” In a story in today’s Israel National News, Netanyahu claims he was forced to abort a planned tactical nuclear attack on Iran. According to a series of sources, a newspaper in Kuwait, a news service in “Bethlehem” and the ever faithful Israel National news, it is all true. Israel’s slated 2014 nuclear attack on Iran, to be launched from Azerbaijan using nuclear weapons landed at Poti, Georgia in 2010, was averted due to threats of US reprisals against Israel. Despite continual denials by Azerbaijan, Israel has maintained, not only nuclear armed F15’s in Azerbaijan but a drone base as well.
Sources in the Ukraine indicate that combat aircraft from one of Israel’s two covert bases in Western Azerbaijan was in the vicinity of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 when it was shot down last year.
In a story by Mark Langfan, a convoluted tale involving a discussion with Secretary of State Kerry from either 2013 or 2014, somehow intermingled with statements that may or may not have been made by Carter national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in 2008, has hit the news prior to Netanyahu’s scheduled address to some members of the US Congress.
Framing the rambling and incoherent claim that so many wish was actually true is a curious reference to the 1967 attack by Israel on the USS
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CNN (also known as the Clinton News Network) has gone out of its way to try to rig the election for Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton this year. It hasn’t even tried to hide its bias in an attempt to destroy Republican nominee Donald Trump’s chances at becoming president.
Over the weekend, CNN tried desperately to find anything it could to distract the American people from the FBI’s announcement that it was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s use of an email server while she was secretary of state.
CNN ran a story on Sunday about a Trump rally in Colorado, only it blatantly lied about what Trump said at the rally in an attempt to smear him, Mediate reported .
The article in question originally ran with the headline “Trump, skeptical of mail-in balloting, encourages voting more than once if necessary.” Here’s a screen grab of the original.
“If you go to university center, they’ll give you a new ballot, they’ll void your old ballot, in some places they do that four or five times, so by tomorrow, almost everyone will have their new ballots in,” Trump said at the rally, according to CNN’s original article.
However there was more to that quote, which CNN decided not to run with.
“If you go to university center, they’ll give you a new ballot, they’ll void your old ballot. They’ll give you a new ballot, and you can go out and make sure it get’s in. Now in some places, they do that four or five times, but we don’t do that. So by tomorrow, almost everyone will have their new ballots in,” is the full quote of what Trump said.
By selectively editing the quote, CNN made it appear that Trump was encouraging voter fraud.
After publishing the original story, CNN changed the headline, and the content, to actually reflect what Trump actually said. Initially, the network did not indicate it had done so. However, a line was later added at the end of the article to indicate it had been changed.
The new headline can be seen below:
CNN also took down the tweet that had the incorrect headline.
Maybe next time CNN will think twice before publishing such blatant lies. Instead of trying to cover up Clinton’s corruption, maybe the network should just to its job and report on the news.
This is what the media is doing these days, they chop speeches, edit them, falsify them! Let this be a warning to you for any future BS that may come out from the media. No matter how much they hype it. Do NOT believe anything the media tells you!
You know what you have to do, go out and vote for Trump! Avoid electronic voting because the machines are owned by George Soros, a Clinton donor, request paper ballot because they are obligated by the law and if they refuse to give you a paper ballot, make a scene, call the cops on them.
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A hacker took control of Harvard’s student newspaper to troll one of the Ivy League institution’s famous former students, Mark Zuckerberg, ahead of his commencement address to the Class of 2017.[ A hacker utilized the Harvard student newspaper, the Crimson, to troll former student Mark Zuckerberg ahead of his commencement address. Zuckerberg, who dropped out of the university due to the success of Facebook, also received an honorary degree during the commencement ceremonies. “MARK ZOINKERBURG AT IT AGAIN,” one headline read. “ : How Come Everyone Talks About How I Stole Facebook But Nobody Talks About How I Murdered Eduardo Saverin,” another read. “Earlier today, The Harvard Crimson’s website was altered by an unauthorized user,” Crimson president Derek Choi said in a statement. An archived version of the hacker’s handiwork can be viewed here. Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about economics and higher education for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart. com | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Russian aircraft mistakenly bombed Syrian Arab fighters who were being trained by the United States, the commander of the operation in Iraq and Syria said Wednesday. American advisers were about three miles away when the Russian strike occurred. The episode pointed to the risk of unintended clashes among the myriad forces operating on a fluid battlefield in Syria, as the American command looks toward the fight to retake Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in the country. Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, who commands the task force that is fighting the militants in Iraq and Syria, said the strike by Russian and Syrian government planes led to casualties among the Syrian fighters, but he declined to say how many were hurt or if any were killed. He added that the Russian attack appeared to have been a mistake: The Russian military thought it was bombing villages held by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, when in fact they were recently occupied by Syrian Arab fighters. “We had some Russian aircraft and regime aircraft bomb some villages that I believe they thought were held by ISIS,” General Townsend said in a video news conference with reporters at the Pentagon. “Actually on the ground were some of our Syrian Arab coalition forces. ” A spokesman for the command in Baghdad said that the Russian airstrikes took place about 10 miles southwest of Manbij. The Russian bombing stopped after American military officers at the air war command in Qatar called their Russian counterparts in Syria. In Moscow, the Defense Ministry asserted that the United States had provided the coordinates of forces in northern Syria before the airstrikes and that Russian and Syria warplanes had not struck any areas that had been properly designated. “No airstrikes were carried out by either Syrian or Russian aircraft in areas designated by the U. S.,” the ministry said in a statement. The battlefield in northern Syria is crowded with a diverse array of forces near Al Bab, including Syrian militias, Syrian government forces, Kurdish and Arab fighters backed by the United States, and ISIS militants. “Around Al Bab, all the forces that are acting in Syria have converged literally within range of one another,” General Townsend said. There has been a similar convergence of forces to the east where Syrian government forces have advanced to the point where they are within “rifle range” of Syrian Arab fighters backed by the United States who are defending the area around Manbij, the general added. “It’s very difficult and complicated,” he said. General Townsend said the United States was encouraging all sides to focus on the fight against the Islamic State and not let tensions among groups divert them from the need to take Raqqa. “That’s what we ought to keep our efforts focused on and not fighting deliberately or accidentally with one another,” he said. This is the second time in recent weeks that there has been an episode of friendly fire involving the Russians. Last month, Russian fighters mistakenly bombed Turkish soldiers near Al Bab. The Russian airstrikes also raise the question of whether the American military needs to broaden its dialogue with Russian commanders over operations in Syria. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met last month in Azerbaijan with Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff. It was their first meeting and the discussion included how to “enhance communications,” the Pentagon said. Discussing the fighting in Iraq, General Townsend also said that some Islamic State fighters had sought to escape from Mosul disguised as civilians, but that they had been detained. He said that there were 12, 000 to 15, 000 ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, some 2, 000 of them in western Mosul and in and around the nearby town of Tal Afar. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has presented the White House with his recommendations on how to step up the military campaign against ISIS, which President Trump vowed to “demolish and destroy” in his address to Congress on Tuesday. General Townsend suggested that he did not foresee the United States “bringing in large numbers of coalition troops” to help with Iraq and the assault on Raqqa. | 1 |
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Why hello boys and girls! Today’s topic, we try to tell the difference between another two often-confused terms: charting and sharting. Let’s go!
Charting refers to the process by which health care providers replace face-to-face time with face-to-chart time. If you did something, it needs to be charted . If you saw a patient, write a progress note . If you gave a patient a sandwich , write a sandwich note .
On the other hand, sharting refers to the process by which health care providers replace their underwear and pants because they shat themselves when they thought they were just farting . Or charting for that matter.
Charting , though painful because it consumes over 99% of the entire workday, is never embarrassing, so in that respect it’s a good thing. This is different from sharting , which is never painful but always embarrassing. Especially if wearing white pants.
First priority when sharting is to survey the surroundings: is anyone around? If the coast is clear, the second priority is to assess the damage: tire tracks or swamp? In this respect, charting is not as stressful as sharting .
When you’re charting , all you can think about until you finish writing notes is, “Wow, this really sucks.” When you’re sharting , all you can think about until you change clothes is, “Wow, this really smells” and “Darn it, it’s going down my leg!” Whereas charting makes one pooped, sharting is pooping.
When someone sees you charting , they sympathize , maybe even empathize : “Gee, I hope that she finishes charting soon.” When someone sees you sharting , they laugh and point and tell others: “HAHAHAHAHA!! WHAT A LOSER!! ONLY LOSERS SHART!” It’s true: only losers shart.
Sometimes when you’re charting you make a mistake, but it’s easy to addend or even mark in error and start a new note. Not with sharting . Sharting in and of itself is a mistake, a huge mistake, and way harder to erase the evidence of it. In fact, you need to discard your clothes immediately. But can you get to new clothing before someone spots you? For that reason, sharting is always worse than charting .
Now, do you know the difference between… | 0 |
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Who will be the winners and the losers in the coming U.S. presidential election? Trump or Clinton, Clinton or Trump? The mainstream media is consumed with personality politics. Who could hold their nerve in a time of crisis? Whose integrity is purer (or less damaged)? If you were forced to choose, who would you trust your house keys with? It’s entertainment for the masses.
There will only be one group of winners: the interlocking oligarchy of financial, oil, military, agribusiness and pharmaceuticals interests than run the U.S. Whether it’s Trump or Clinton, policy nuances aside, Washington’s empire will stumble on. And it will do so not because of its inherent dynamism but because of its lies, manipulations, militarism and ability to crush any tendencies that exist towards a multi-polar world.
The U.S. as a nation is bankrupt. It was in dire straits in the 1960s as a result of the Vietnam war and the emergence of economic rivals, such as France and Germany. Shifting off the gold standard and moving towards petrodollar recycling and treasury bond imperialism allowed the empire to remain on course and the dollar to remain as the world’s reserve currency. Oil, not gold, became the mainstay of the empire. As long as the (oil-backed) dollar remains the global currency, the U.S. can continue to secure a free lunch courtesy of the rest of the world.
Today, more than 60 per cent of all foreign currency reserves in the world are in U.S. dollars, and the U.S. will attempt to prevent countries moving off the dollar by any means possible, not least military.
Washington’s economic infrastructure is too weak to mount an economic recovery of note and U.S. corporate cartels will do anything to prevent policies that eat into their profits. They serve their own interests, not any notional ‘national interest’, and offshoring large parts of the US economy has served them well.
Indeed, Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary to the U.S. Treasury, notes that much of the most productive part of the economy has been moved offshore to increase corporate profits. By doing so, the U.S. has lost critical supply chains, industrial infrastructure and the knowledge of skilled workers. The U.S. could bring its corporations back home by taxing their profits abroad and could also resort to protective tariffs, but such moves would be contrary to the material interests of the ruling oligarchy of private interests, which hold sway over U.S. politics.
Void of a suitable industrial manufacturing base or the will to invest in productive infrastructure, the U.S. continues with its speculative finance-related bubbles, its non-productive rentier economy and its predatory hold over the institutions of global capitalism (WTO, IMF, World Bank), while its drags its European vassal states into imperialist wars to help maintain global hegemony and ensure allegiance to the U.S. dollar. And this is exactly what we are seeing today as the strategy for global supremacy is played out.
Over the past two decades, the U.S. has extended its influence throughout Eastern Europe and, among other places, in the Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan (with Washington’s presence in neighbouring Afghanistan to all intents and purposes being a proxy war against Pakistan and Chinese influence there). With each passing year and each new conflict, the US has been drawing closer to direct confrontation with Russia and China.
Russia is holding firm over Syria, which is vital to wider U.S. geopolitical goals that involve the weakening of the Russian energy-dependent economy and ousting Russia from its only naval base outside of the former USSR. A global US strategy is already in force to undermine China’s growth and influence, part of which was the main reason for setting up AFRICOM: US Africa Command with responsibility for military operations and relations across Africa. But China is not without influence, and its actions are serving to weaken the hegemony of the U.S. dollar, thereby striking at a key nerve of U.S. power.
China has been implementing bilateral trade agreements with a number of countries, whereby trade is no longer conducted in dollars but in local currencies. Over the past few years, China and other powers such as Russia have been making agreements to move away from the U.S. dollar in international trade. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) also plan to start using their own currencies when trading with each other. Russia and China have been using their own national currencies when trading with each other for more two years.
A report from Africa’s largest bank, Standard Bank, stated a few years back:
“We expect at least $100 billion in Sino-African trade – more than the total bilateral trade between China and Africa in 2010 – to be settled in the renminbi by 2015.”
Under Saddam, Iraq was not using the dollar as the base currency for oil transactions, neither is Iran. Libya’s Muammar Gadhaffi was talking about using a gold-backed dinar as the reserve currency for parts of Africa. U.S.-backed destabilisation and war followed. In 2000, Iraq converted all its oil transactions to euros. When U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, it returned oil sales from the euro to the dollar. Little surprise then that we have over the years seen on on-going saga by the U.S. to remove the Iranian regime via sanctions, destabilization, intimidation or the threat of all-out war.
Iran has looked east to China, Pakistan and central Asia to counteract the effects of U.S. sanctions and develop its economy and boost trade. To sustain its empire, the US has effectively pushed the world into different camps and a new cold war: one not based on competing/alternative political or economic systems but a simmering conflict based on competing capitalist elites or ruling oligarchies who require control over their regional spheres of influence.
Imperialism still reigns and neither side – whether the U.S., Russia or China – is particularly appealing, not least to those who believe that democratic (green) socialism is the best hope for humanity. In the absence of such a solution, a world not hurtling towards nuclear conflict would serve us well for the time being.
The U.S. economy appears to be in terminal decline. The only way to prop it up is by corrupt, secretive, lop-sided trade agreements or by waging war to plunder resources and to ensure the print-as-you-go dollar remains the world reserve currency. An empire in decline armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and trapped in a cycle of endless war to stave off ruin is a frightening scenario. Even more alarming is the talk of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against other nuclear powers such as Russia and China.
This is the reality that faces the world. This is the reality that the corporate media will not inform the U.S. electorate about. The empire demands a sufficiently ignorant, misinformed public courtesy of a Fox News/CNN made-for-TV election stupor. An electorate that is sufficiently convinced to believe that millionaire-billionaire politicians who climb into bed with Wall Street banks and the rest of the ruling oligarchy have their interests at heart.
A public for whom the term ‘class consciousness’ or ‘class interest’ figures little if anywhere in their political lexicon. The class that appears to be highly conscious of its interests is the one in control: the one that does its level best in ensuring that any such consciousness emerging within the ruled over is shut down at birth – or suffocated within the mind-manipulating control mechanism that is the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
They sold your jobs to the lowest bidder abroad under the lie of ‘efficiency’ to make every greater profit, and they get you to blame your plight on immigrants. They use your taxes to kill and destroy countries under the lie of ‘humanitarianism/fighting terror’ to secure ever more mineral riches, and they get you to fear the latest bogeyman. And they sell you a vision of democracy that much of the rest of the world regards as shambolic. America, it’s time to wake up. | 1 |
Take a vacation break between clicks on Amazon or Etsy on Nov. 28, a. k. a. Cyber Monday, the biggest internet shopping day of the year. Hotels and resorts, including the following, commonly hold Cyber Monday sales, discounting future stays. The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas will hold its holiday sale from Black Friday, Nov. 25, through Cyber Monday, offering a second night free on a booking over select dates November through February. Rooms start at $150 a night. Appealing to beachgoers, the Copamarina Beach Resort Spa in southwest Puerto Rico will sell rooms Black Friday through Cyber Monday starting at $129 a night for stays between Jan. 2 and April 30 (there are some blackout dates). The resort requires a minimum stay. In Miami, four Victor Hotels, a small collection of boutique hotels in South Beach, will offer rates at 40 percent off on bookings made Nov. 25 through 28 on travel through June, with a few blackout dates over the December holidays. Discounted rooms will start at $79 a night at the Casa Victoria Orchid and the Hotel Ocean. Plan spring break in Costa Rica, where Nayara Springs resort in Arenal Volcano National Park is offering 35 percent off stays from Jan. 1 to April 1. The discounted price of $1, 950 includes daily breakfast, yoga classes and free minibar items. In the wine country of Napa Valley, Silverado Resort Spa will offer rooms at 30 percent off and include a $50 resort credit on bookings made Nov. 25 through 28 for travel Nov. 25 to March 31. The deal is also offered April 1 to Oct. 31 on Sundays through Thursdays only. Rates start at $159 a night with the discount. Apparently, it’s never too early to think about baseball in Boston, where the Hotel Commonwealth will hold a sale on Cyber Monday, which is 127 days from baseball’s opening day. Beginning at 1:27 p. m. on Nov. 28, rooms will cost $127 a night for stays until April 3. | 0 |
Joseph Farah, a author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that “cultural Marxists” were plotting to destroy the country. But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream. That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it. “What can we do to get to the bottom of this?” Mr. Trump asked him. “What can we do to turn the tide?” Mr. Farah recalled that Mr. Trump even proposed dispatching private investigators to Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s birthplace, to resolve the debate. Mr. Trump’s eagerness to embrace the birther idea — long debunked, and until then confined to conspiracy theorists — foreshadowed how, just five years later, Mr. Trump would bedevil his rivals in the Republican presidential primary race and upend the political system. In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination. “The appeal of the birther issue was, ‘I’m going to take this guy on, and I’m going to beat him,’” said Sam Nunberg, who was one of Mr. Trump’s advisers during that period but was fired from his current campaign. “It was a great niche and wedge issue. ” And starting in March 2011, when he first began to test the idea that a reality television star with no political experience could mount a campaign for the presidency, Mr. Trump could not stop talking about it. “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” he asked on ABC’s “The View. ” “I want to see his birth certificate,” he told Fox News’s “On the Record. ” And on NBC’s “Today Show,” he declared, “I’m starting to think that he was not born here. ” The more Mr. Trump questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Obama’s presidency, the better he performed in the early polls of the 2012 Republican field, springing from fifth place to a virtual tie for first. That frenzied period culminated six weeks after it began in a surreal televised split screen between Mr. Trump and the White House briefing room, where aides released an image of the president’s birth certificate proving he was born in Honolulu and Mr. Obama directly addressed the issue. It was a remarkable moment that Mr. Trump celebrated as a political victory. Then Mr. Trump did something decidedly : He dropped the issue and rarely spoke of it publicly again. According to people apprised of the conversations, people close to him had been worried about the negative attention. Officials at NBC had also been concerned that he was alienating the large black audience of his hit show, “The Apprentice. ” Indeed, damage had already been done. Some black leaders denounced him, with Jesse Jackson accusing Mr. Trump of appealing to the president’s detractors with “coded and covert rhetoric for stirring up racial fears. ” Several days later, Mr. Obama relished his own chance to belittle Mr. Trump with a string of taunts at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, as Mr. Trump, seated in the audience, grew increasingly . “But no one is happier, no one is prouder, to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,” he said to laughter. “And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter: Like, did we fake the moon landing?” Mr. Trump, who declined to be interviewed about the subject, was not the first to question Mr. Obama’s birthplace. The narrative that Mr. Obama, whose father was Kenyan and mother American, might not meet the requirement that the president be a “ citizen” first arose during his 2008 bid. Mr. Obama’s aides initially decided it was better to ignore the questions addressing them, they reasoned, would just given them credibility. And Mr. Trump, too, at first seemed uncertain about just how much skepticism to express over the president’s place of birth. “The reason I have a little doubt, just a little, is because he grew up and nobody knew him,” he said in a March 2011 interview. “The whole thing is very strange. ” Yet, quickly, the world took notice. One headline referred to Mr. Trump going “Birther Lite. ” Another said he was a “Teeny Bit Birther. ” And MSNBC’s “Hardball” replayed the comments, with the intro: “Let’s listen to how he joins the birthers. ” If Mr. Trump was offering a political trial balloon, he appeared to like the results. He started making the rounds, offering interviews on the topic and stoking public interest in the birther claims. Mr. Trump was egged on by one key adviser — Roger J. Stone Jr. a dapper dresser and political operative known for mischief and mayhem. Mr. Stone said that he did not plant the idea with Mr. Trump, but that once Mr. Trump came to him with it, he extolled what he saw as the political upside. “He was suspicious about it, or at least interested in it,” Mr. Stone said. Among Republican base voters, he added, “many of them believe the president is and Trump has an ability to interject any idea that is outside of the mainstream into the mainstream. ” A Gallup poll from that period showed that only 38 percent of Americans surveyed believed that Mr. Obama was “definitely” born in the United States. That number rose to 47 percent after Mr. Obama released his birth certificate. Mr. Trump also continued to reach out to Mr. Farah, founder of WorldNetDaily, a conservative website, as well as to Jerome Corsi, another conservative writer and author of “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama is Not Eligible to Be President. ” (The book came out shortly after Mr. Obama released his birth certificate, but shot to the top of Amazon. com’s best sellers before it was even officially published.) “He was looking for affirmation that he was on the right track,” Mr. Farah said. “He was looking for a smoking gun kind of sound bite that would resonate with people. ” But what most impressed Mr. Farah was just how many hours Mr. Trump was willing to devote to the question. “This was a busy guy, this was a multibillionaire, and I was surprised that he was willing to spend that kind of time on it,” he said. Mr. Farah also stressed to Mr. Trump that the issue was one of “transparency,” and Mr. Trump began using the phrase. “He started saying ‘transparency,’” said Mr. Nunberg, Mr. Trump’s former adviser. “It’s code for, ‘This guy is the Manchurian candidate. ’” Mr. Trump also said repeatedly that he had sent a team of investigators to Hawaii to unearth information about Mr. Obama’s birth records. “They cannot believe what they are finding,” Mr. Trump told ABC’s “The View. ” But as the issue exploded, people close to Mr. Trump were growing nervous. Some people in Mr. Trump’s orbit were discomfited by the line of attack, which had already been examined and rejected by many conservative news outlets. Among them was an informal political adviser, Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster, who cautioned that if he did run, he would need to beat Mr. Obama “on the merits. ” Even executives at NBC, which aired “The Apprentice,” privately called on him to tone down his remarks, fearing he would hurt ratings at a time when more than a million tuned in every Thursday night, according to a former executive with knowledge of the discussions, speaking anonymously to share candid conversations. The White House, too, had growing concerns. Once reserved to the fringe, the issue had now begun popping up at events around the country. The turning point came in 2011, when the president delivered a major speech on the budget, only to find his remarks obscured by questions about his birth certificate. “It was basically a message blocker that was preventing us from talking about the issues we needed to talk about because the press was chasing Donald Trump around for the next crazy thing he was going to say,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director then. The White House counsel dispatched someone to Hawaii to find the president’s original birth certificate from 1961. (Years before, the president had released the “short form,” an official document that contains the information from the original.) With the document finally in hand, aides quickly scheduled a news conference. They worried that having Mr. Obama himself release his birth certificate from the White House briefing room would undermine the dignity of the office. So they first passed out copies to reporters, and then had the president deliver remarks, in which he warned the nation about getting distracted by “sideshows and carnival barkers. ” Then, almost as quickly as it began, the controversy subsided. And several weeks later, Mr. Trump decided not to seek the Republican nomination. Though he continued to do well in polls, he seemed to be more focused on his reality television pursuits. Now, Mr. Trump almost assiduously refuses to discuss the topic, which, according to several people close to him, was always more about political performance art than ideology. “I don’t talk about that anymore,” Mr. Trump told the MSNBC host Chris Matthews after a Republican debate last year. Raising questions about the president’s birth certificate — and even threatening to send a team of investigators to Hawaii — had served its purpose, raising Mr. Trump’s political profile and, whether he knew it or not at the time, providing him with the rudimentary foundation upon which he built his 2016 campaign. He even skirted close to birther innuendo after the massacre in Orlando, Fla. last month, calling into “Fox Friends” to insinuate that Mr. Obama might sympathize with Islamic extremists. “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands,” Mr. Trump said. But for all of his fascination with the president’s birth certificate, Mr. Trump apparently never dispatched investigators or made much of an effort to find the documents. Dr. Alvin Onaka, the Hawaii state registrar who handled queries about Mr. Obama, said recently through a spokeswoman that he had no evidence or recollection of Mr. Trump or any of his representatives ever requesting the records from the Hawaii State Department of Health. | 1 |
Reporters Stunned to Learn Trump Fans Lining Up 12 Hours Before Rally Starts
Reagan won so big that Carter even conceded the election before California was counted. The moral of the story, it ain’t over til it’s over — and it’s definitely not over yet. It wasn’t in 1980 and it isn’t today in 2016.
The mainstream media wants Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to win, there’s no doubt about it. WikiLeaks released emails from the account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, and one of those emails even discussed the use of “oversampling” to rig the polls . Advertisement - story continues below
Oversampling is a tactic where more of a certain group is polled — such as more Democrats than Republicans — in an effort to sway the results.
This isn’t anything new, but the concrete evidence of it out of the horse’s mouth is huge. For the Clinton campaign to admit the use of this biased and dirty tactic in an email is something people should remember every time the media trots out a poll.
As Ann Coulter noted in her book “ Slander ,” the liberal media has used rigged polls to sway public opinion for years. This election isn’t the first time and, sadly, it won’t be the last.
The mainstream media is massively biased , and their polls are often rigged. Keep Reagan’s 1980 landslide win in mind over the next two weeks — and ignore the games being played by the media. Advertisement - story continues below | 0 |
Yesterday, tensions between law enforcement workers and peaceful protestors with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe escalated. A series of standoffs resulted in “protectors” being maced, shot with rubber... | 0 |
Videos American And Saudi Weapons Recoverd From ISIS Positions In Mosul An anonymous Iraqi official recently stated that front line troops “always see US helicopters flying over the ISIL-controlled areas and dropping weapons and urgent aids for them.” | November 8, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! This Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2015 photo shows, photos of gunsmith Bahktiyar Sadr-Aldeen as a child, center, and his father, right, hung on a wall at his shop, in northern Iraq. Sadr-Aldeen, has seen his business shoot up by 50 percent since ISIS took over the Iraqi city of Mosul.
Mosul, Iraq — Since the beginning of Operation: Inherent Resolve, the Islamic State has shown itself to be a very shadowy force. Many people assume they know where the group originates, with some admitting to it’s connection to US foreign policy decisions and regional allies. Others ignore this, and even the curious will only go so far. Now, as the group’s stronghold in Mosul is surrounded, Iraqi forces find yet more IS stockpiles of Saudi and American weapons and supply.
Mosul has been under assault by Iraqi forces for around a month now, as they clash with IS. The offensive followed a surge in US troops to Iraq , the majority being special forces and accompanying marines. Exactly what those forces will be doing is unclear. Shortly after the battle’s activation, a US Navy SEAL was reported KIA (Killed In Action) by an IED blast . Officials were careful not to directly connect the operatives death with the Mosul battle.
Five other Americans– three marines , a Delta Force operative and another Navy SEAL –and a Canadian special forces soldier have died since 2014. This is only that we know of, since the statuses of thousands of military contractors and other forces are unknown.
Iraqi militia commander Uday al-Khaddran reported the weapons after capturing former Islamic State positions. According to GeoPolitics Alert , the weapons are of Saudi origin, and are by no means an isolated incident. Iraqi forces have reported Saudi and even American supplied ISIS weaponry and food shipments since the war began. Militiamen believe the weapons are, in part, being transported by the Turkish government.
US manufactured missiles were also allegedly retrieved from the cleared IS area’s. In this case, according to Reports Afrique , Iraqi commanders believe the weapons were dropped to ISIS by coalition planes . Such claims, once again, have circulated throughout the war.
An anonymous Iraqi official recently stated that front line troops “ always see US helicopters flying over the ISIL-controlled areas and dropping weapons and urgent aids for them.” The commander went onto claim ISIS fighters are even transported by US aircraft to medical facilities in Syria and countries friendly to the group.
In 2015, Iraqi commanders reported they’d begun shooting down coalition craft seen aiding the group. Iraq’s parliament disclosed that year that two British planes seen aiding the enemy were shot down, with wreckage photographed . The government of Iraq called on western leaders to claim the crash, but no response ever came.
Commander Al-Khaddran also accuses the Turks of sending advisors to aid in IS artillery, and other operations. Since these kinds of reports first surfaced nearly two years ago, they’ve been largely disregarded. It’s only recently, with Hillary Clinton’s email leaks allegedly confirming Saudi Arabia funds ISIS, that the mainstream can re-examine these reports.
Turkish special forces operatives have been stationed outside Mosul for months now without Iraq’s approval. Turkey’s prime minister was brazen in telling Iraqi’s leadership to “know your place” when asked to pull troops out. American officials, who also train Syrian rebels in Turkey–the majority of which are linked to jihadist groups–approve of the forces in northern Iraq. All of these operations, from rebel training to Turkish troop deployments, have coincided with a brutal government crackdown on Turkish media .
Clinton was emailing her campaign chairman in 2014, advocated for pressure on Saudi Arabia because they “are providing clandestine financial and logistical support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” Saudi government officials, Daily Caller reports , has donated over $25 million to the Clinton Foundation. | 1 |
TEL AVIV — In a radio interview last night, Jackie Mason, the famous standup comic who dubs himself “The Ultimate Jew,” declared that President Donald Trump is “even more Jewish than me. ”[Mason quipped: He’s even more Jewish than me. I thought I was an Orthodox Jew but he is much more Orthodox than me because every time he talks it’s all about how he could help Jews and protect Jews. And every child he has is looking for someone to marry that’s a Jew. They go to shul [synagogue] even when there’s no reason for it. He creates Jewish holidays that don’t even exist. His is not only Jewish but he’s Orthodox. And his daughter became even more Orthodox than the husband. So, he can’t even go with them to a restaurant because as soon as they sit down they complain that it is not Kosher enough. “I think he forgot he’s a gentile altogether,” Mason said of Trump. “Pretty soon he’ll be wearing that yalmukah (kippah) every time he goes to the White House. ” The Borscht Belt legend was speaking during his regular segment on this reporter’s talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM. Listen to the full audio here. Mason was asked for his thoughts on what Trump should do during his reported upcoming visit to Israel later this month. The trip has not yet been officially announced but multiple news media reports cite anonymous Israeli and U. S. officials saying the purported trip is slated for May 22. “I would like him to declare that nobody should disturb Israel for the next thousand years,” responded Mason. “And I would like him to declare that if anybody makes one bad move against Israel that he would wipe them out in a minute and a half. ” Mason continued on Trump and Israel: He is going to be a fantastic contrast to what we went through with Obama. Obama not only resented Israel. He resented Jews in general. He is the first American president who couldn’t tolerate the thought of Israel’s existence. And every time that [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu came to the White House he wound up sitting on a chair outside of a building or in front of the grass or under a sink. [Obama] couldn’t stand the sight of [Netanyahu] and the thought of him being there. He resented any kind of progress that Israel wanted to make to accomplish anything or any effort to find peace there. If he could start his own war against Israel he would have declared war on Israel himself. He just didn’t have a chance to do it. Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. ” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook. | 0 |
More than 130 female activists from 38 countries pressed the leader of the United Nations on Tuesday to fulfill a goal he declared after assuming the job a decade ago: a permanent peace treaty to end the Korean War. In an open letter to Secretary General Ban a former foreign minister of South Korea whose tenure will expire at the end of the year, the women implored him to “lead the process of bringing formal closure to the longest standing war before you leave your post at the United Nations. ” The letter was by Women Cross DMZ, a group that organized a peaceful walk last year across the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, a prominent antiwar group that is more than 100 years old. Mr. Ban, rumored to be contemplating a run to be president of South Korea after he leaves the United Nations, has often expressed a wish to reduce tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Those tensions have escalated under Kim the North Korean leader, who has conducted missile and nuclear weapons tests in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions that have left the country deeply isolated. Despite hopes that Mr. Ban, 72, might visit North Korea before he leaves the United Nations, he said recently that such a trip was highly unlikely. Mr. Ban, born during the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula, was 9 years old when an armistice halted the Korean War in 1953. The armistice, not a formal peace treaty, has left the war’s principal antagonists in a technical state of war for 63 years. “This war must end,” the women’s letter to Mr. Ban stated. It reminded him of a pledge he made in a 2007 speech: “Beyond a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue with North Korea, we should aim to establish a peace mechanism through transition from armistice to a permanent peace treaty. ” Mindful of Mr. Ban’s possible presidential aspirations, the letter said he should “aim to conclude this peace process” by 2018, the 70th anniversary of the Korean Peninsula’s division into two states. Christine Ahn, the international coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, said in an email that the letter was sent on Tuesday, the last day of the annual General Assembly session in New York, “in the hopes of encouraging Mr. Ban to uphold this promise long after he leaves the U. N. ” The signers of the letter included a number of prominent women in education, the arts and activism on disarmament issues. They included the filmmaker Abigail Disney, the playwright Eve Ensler, the feminist leader Gloria Steinem and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee. | 0 |
Мир » Европа » Евросоюз Россия помогла Испании выбраться из дипломатического скандала. Российская эскадра военных кораблей во главе с авианосцем "Адмирал Кузнецов" отменила дозаправку в Сеуте. Мадрид сопротивлялся давлению Вашингтона, указывая, что процедура обслуживания военных кораблей России давно апробирована и прозрачна, но затем сдался. Скандал грозит Мадриду экономическими потерями. А России? 0 комментариев 16 поделились Поход, который всполошил НАТО
15 октября корабельная авианосная группа Северного флота из Североморска начала поход в район Средиземного моря. В составе группы -авианесущий крейсер "Адмирал Кузнецов" , атомный ракетный крейсер "Петр Великий", противолодочные корабли "Североморск" и "Вице-адмирал Кулаков", а также корабли обеспечения. Через неделю всполошились британские таблоиды. Ссылаясь на анонимный источник в НАТО, газеты указывали, что через Гибралтар в Сирию идет эскадра в составе "всего Северного флота и большей части Балтийского". "Атомные военные корабли Владимира Путина продвигаются к Ла-Маншу, а ВМС Великобритании готовятся поднять флот по тревоге", — писала газета The Sun . Издание предупреждало, что российский флот может "окружить" Великобританию, и начало "отсчет до третьей мировой".
Однако вскоре выяснилось, что это всего лишь группа кораблей и направляется она не к берегам Туманного Альбиона, а в Тартус для поддержки действий нашей авиагруппы в Сирии. Тут же поднялась другая волна возмущения тем, что эскадра должна зайти в испанский порт Сеута (на марроканском побережье) для дозаправки и отдыха. Как же так, высказывались западные политики, Испания — это член НАТО, она только что подписала заявление ЕС о "военных преступлениях России в Сирии". Что же она поощряет эти "преступления"?
Скандал нарастал, так как испанские власти не спешили реагировать, объясняя, что ведут со всеми сторонами консультации. Наконец, подтянулась тяжелая артиллерия. Министр обороны Великобритании Майкл Фаллон сказал, что он "крайне обеспокоен тем, что страна НАТО рассмотрит вопрос об оказании помощи российскому флоту, который будет участвовать в бомбардировке мирных жителей в Сирии". Была дана команда и в Испании. Так, парламентская группа Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) попросила министров иностранных дел и обороны Хосе Мануэля Гарсия-Маргальо и Педро Моренеса объяснить "возможное сотрудничество Испании с российскими фрегатами, которые принимали участие в военных операциях в Сирии". Испания привыкла к страстям по Сеуте
Речь не идет о тяжелых кораблях и авианосце, а всего лишь о трех кораблях сопровождения, оправдывался Моренес. И это ему было делать не впервой , потому что вопрос о том, что Сеута стала негласной базой российского флота, давно будоражит умы брюссельских депутатов и чиновников. "В данном конкретном случае было предварительное разрешение, потому что цели кораблей не были четкими", сказал Моренес. Тоже стандартная отговорка испанцев в отношении российских кораблей и подлодок. Министр добавил, что если подтвердится, что корабли направляются в Сирию, то разрешение будет отменено. МИД Испании со своей стороны подчеркнул, что подобные услуги не запрещены санкциями, введенными ЕС против России, так как они (услуги) "оговариваются индивидуально с учетом характеристик судна и безопасности для окружающей среды, населения и самого порта и утверждены с полной прозрачностью, отчетностью перед союзниками".
Понятно, почему так неохотно отступала Испания. Обслуживание российских военных кораблей, пишет El Pais , ведется с 2010 года, это приносит Сеуте и бюджету "огромные деньги". Помимо прямой платы в казну за обслуживание, это еще примерно миллион евро в год из карманов моряков, сошедших на землю, подсчитала El Pais . Последние заходы российских кораблей в Сеуту были 16 октября, это были корветы "Зеленый Дол", "Серпухов" и буксир SB-36, пишет газета.
Испания сдалась только после вызова Моренеса на ковер с генсеку НАТО Столтенбергу. "Страны НАТО имеют право на самостоятельное решение по поводу того, пускать ли в свои порты российские корабли для дозаправки и пополнения запасов, но в данном случае я послал очень четкий сигнал: мы обеспокоены потенциальным участием авианосца "Адмирал Кузнецов" в боевых действиях в Сирии", — сказал Столтенберг. Сразу же появилось сообщение от российского посла в Испании о том, что флотилия пересекла Гибралтарский пролив без остановки в Сеуте, так как "был изменен путь следования". Представитель минобороны России Игорь Конашенков сказал о предупреждении испанских властей, что заход российских кораблей в порт нецелесообразен из-за позиции НАТО. Мадрид и Москва будут искать варианты
Есть впечатление, что Москва и Мадрид играют с НАТО в непонятки: мол, все успокоится, и мы все вернем на круги своя. Так, кстати, за шесть лет было не раз. Но сейчас на Мадрид могут нажать и посильнее. И он потеряет свою "обычную практику", но это его печаль. Печаль Москвы — найти новые порты для отдыха моряков и дозаправки на пути в Тартус. Конкретно эта эскадра не пострадает, она автономна в своем плавании на несколько недель, и можно подтянуть танкеры из Севастополя. Есть практика дозаправки на Мальте и в Греции. Мальта сегодня заявила, что не будет принимать эскадру, значит, вероятно, не будет и другие корабли, так как давление на Россию усиливается. Есть еще Греция. Посмотрим, что скажут там, поспешат ли делать заявления.
Заметим, что Испания недавно на Совете Европы возражала против новых санкций в отношении России. Генеральный директор Торговой палаты Испании Инмакулада Риера заявила, что надеется на развитие сотрудничества в области инфраструктуры и транспорта "из-за многочисленных проектов, которые правительство России развивает в этой области", пишет La Vanguardia . Испания хочет сотрудничать с Россией, она истощена рецессией, ее аграрный сектор страдает от российского эмбарго, а в ответ слышатся угрозы со стороны Брюсселя о наложении санкций ЕС за несоблюдение предельного уровня дефицита бюджета. Теперь вот Мадрид получит еще один экономический удар. Иногда кажется, что ЕС сам себе роет могилу непродуманными действиями в целях мифической солидарности с Вашингтоном. "Дымовая завеса": в чем секрет "Адмирала Кузнецова"? | 1 |
Trump Suffers Bizarre Memory Disorder: Says He Always Opposed Obamacare (VIDEO) By Karen Shiebler on October 26, 2016
Oh, ha,ha,ha!
That silly old Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is so, so funny!
He doesn’t seem to remember anything. He doesn’t remember what he has done , or what he has said , or what he believed or didn’t believe in the recent past.
Now we have another example of Trump insisting that he said what he didn’t say, that he didn’t say what he said, and that he never believed what he said he believed.
Confused?
Yup. We are, too.
Mediate reports that Trump’s memory about Obamacare is very murky, too. The candidate has been hitting the stump hard claiming that he will overturn the “disaster” of Obamacare.
In fact, Trump has been claiming to anyone who will listen that he has always been against Obama’s health care plan. To listen to him, you would think that the man had taken to the airwaves as soon as the Affordable Care Act was passed, proclaiming that it would be the end of civilization as we know it.
Except that he didn’t.
After it was announced the other day that insurance premiums are going to be increasing this year, Trump pumped his fists and congratulated himself with his usual fervor. He crowed to Fox News: “I think it’s a disaster, and I’ve been saying it from the time before they even voted for it. I said this is a plan can’t work, it’s going to be a disaster.” He told Rush Limbaugh that : “Obamacare is a disaster. And you remember, I called that from before it was approved. I said, ‘This can’t work, because it’s just … the plan is no good. The concept is no good.’”
Once again, though, the truth seems to have nothing in common with Trump’s faulty memory. In reality, back when the law was passed, Trump had not yet declared for the Presidency. He went on the air with Joy Behar on the day in 2010 when the law was passed. She asked him what he thought about the Act, and he replied that he had mixed feelings.
Trump said that he hated to think about people being unable to get health care, but he worried about the cost to businesses. Then he commented on the President, saying: “It’s a pretty tough thing, but yeah, right now, he’s certainly looking like a hero.” So. Um. Mr. Trump’s memory is pretty damn shaky if you ask me. It seems that he is either trying to desperately to revise reality in order to put himself in a better light, or he is suffering from a very serious memory disorder. See if you can make any sense at all out of this mess . Featured image via YouTube Screengrab . About Karen Shiebler
Karen is a retired elementary school teacher with many years of progressive activism behind her. She is the proud mother of three young adults who were all arrested with Occupy Wall Street. To see what she writes about in her spare time, check out her blog at "Empty Nest, Full Life" Connect | 0 |
Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” U. S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions explained to host Sean Hannity how border security has changed since President Donald Trump took office nearly three months ago. Sessions went on to add it was the intention of the Trump administration to send the message the border was not open. “[C]an you believe that we have had the lowest number of entrances at the border in 17 years? This is the direct result of Donald Trump’s strong, clear leadership. It has an impact. The most important thing for us is to send a message to the world that the border is not open. Please don’t come. You will be apprehended if you do come, and you will be deported promptly. And if you’re a criminal, you’ll be prosecuted. And if you assault our officers, we’re going to come at you with a ton of bricks. This is the kind of message we need to send. It is already being sent. It is having a dramatic effect so far. I knew strong presidential leadership unlike the we’ve seen in the past would impact the flow, but not as much as we’ve seen already. The numbers are down 70 percent since President Obama left office. It is really a remarkable achievement. ” ( RCP Video) Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 0 |
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Ivanka Trump’s Instagram account stands apart from her father’s candidacy. It’s the public feed of Ivanka, the brand. “American wife, mother & entrepreneur. EVP at the Trump Organization. Founder of IvankaTrump.com and #WomenWhoWork,” her bio says.
Scrolling through, it sometimes feels like an alternate reality. When Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is in free fall, or facing controversy, Ivanka is posting a mix of inspirational quotes, family pics, and the occasional selfie. Photos of her on the campaign trail are far and few between.
That’s on purpose.
“My Women Who Work initiative and my brand, was launched far before the presidential cycle commenced and will continue long afterwards,” she said this month at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit.
Still, the Donald Trump campaign and Ivanka Trump brand do coexist, and it’s often jarring to witness them side-by-side. This is the story of the 2016 campaign, juxtaposed with @ivankatrump.
June 16, 2016: Donald Trump announces his presidential campaign at Trump Tower in New York City. Ivanka introduces him as “a man who needs no introduction.” Actors are paid to wear shirts and pretend to be supporters. Trump accuses Mexico of sending drugs, rapists, and murders across the border and promises to build a wall on the southern border.
Ivanka posts a photo of her introduction. See her speech on IvankaTrump.com (link in profile).
A photo posted by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) on Jun 16, 2015 at 4:55pm PDT
December 7, 2015: Donald Trump calls for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” following an ISIS-inspired shooting in San Bernardino.
Ivanka posts five black and white photos to promote her Ivanka Trump Jewelry campaign. “I love the idea of elevating an otherwise simple look with stunning accessories,” she writes.
A photo posted by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) on Dec 7, 2015 at 10:56am PST
February 18, 2016: Donald Trump calls Pope Francis “disgraceful” after his comment that anyone who wants to build a wall is “not Christian.”
“No leader, especially a religious leader, has the right to question another man’s religion or faith,” Trump says.
Ivanka posts a photo with the (Link in profile) to her next #dinner #menu. “The #recipes are sure to warm you up when it’s cold outside!” she writes.
A photo posted by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) on Feb 18, 2016 at 2:15pm PST
March 13, 2016: Donald Trump says he will pay the legal fees of a man accused of assaulting a protester at his rally in North Carolina.
“From what I heard, there was a lot of taunting and a certain finger was placed in the air,” he says on “Meet The Press.” “I don’t condone what he did. But you know what, not nice for the other side, either.”
Ivanka posts that she finally saw @HamiltonMusical the previous night and was blown away.
“Definitely a must-see!” she writes, with two thumbs up emoji.
A photo posted by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) on Mar 13, 2016 at 6:58pm PDT
March 30, 2016: Donald Trump defends his then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who the day before was charged with battery after being accused of grabbing then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields. Trump tells “Today” Fields lied.
Ivanka posts an inspirational #WomenWhoWork quote from Dorit Jaffee about tranquility.
A photo posted by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) on Mar 16, 2016 at 6:37am PDT
September 30, 2016: Donald Trump goes on an early morning tweetstorm, attacking Hillary Clinton and Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe contestant Trump once called “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping,” between 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. He accused Machado of being in a sex tape, which she was not.
Ivanka posts a photo of a woman with a card in her purse that reads “Women Who Do It All” and writes “The weekend is calling your name! #WomenWhoWork.”
A photo posted by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) on Sep 30, 2016 at 11:03am PDT
October 22, 2016: During a policy speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump threatens to sue the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.
“Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign,” he says. “Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these lill be sued after the election is over.”
Ivanka posts a looping video of her feet in front of a toasty fire. | 1 |
In a city full of marquee buildings and landmarks under constant watch, it is just one among many. But as the primary residence of the Republican nominee in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, Trump Tower holds a particularly perch. The sleek edifice of luxury apartments and shops in Midtown Manhattan, already a tourist attraction, has been under a magnifying glass since Donald J. Trump kicked off his campaign there last summer. And it has been a stage for many of the same strong emotions inspired by the candidate himself. Seen through the weary gaze of law enforcement, it is a potential target for protests — which have unfolded there numerous times in the last year — tussles, or worse. All of which leaves open the question of how a lone man with a collection of gear was able to mount its exterior in broad daylight on Wednesday and climb up 21 floors before anyone was able to stop him. By the time the police pulled the man into the building, he had been climbing for about three hours — a stunt broadcast live to a wide audience on television and social media. The police identified him as Stephen Rogata, 19, and charged him with felony reckless endangerment and misdemeanor trespassing. They said he had driven from Virginia and checked into an hotel on the Bowery in Lower Manhattan the night before the climb. The police said they received a 911 call about the climb shortly after it began around 3:30 p. m. When they came upon Mr. Rogata, he was already five stories up, using suction cups and what appeared to be a harness to aid his ascent. On Thursday, Mr. Rogata was still at Bellevue Hospital Center, where he was taken for an evaluation after he was detained, the police said. At Trump Tower that day, four police officers, including two from a counterterrorism unit, surveyed the premises. Two private security guards stood in the lobby as tourists flowed in and out. At least seven cameras dotted the lobby and the building’s exterior, in addition to those on nearby buildings and traffic lights along Fifth Avenue. A spokesman for the New York Police Department said Trump Tower had at least one police officer posted there every day, an assignment created as the election cycle has picked up during the last year. The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment. The climb was hardly the first time a New York City building had been turned into a stage. From Philippe Petit’s famous cable walk above the World Trade Center in 1974 to the Puerto Rican nationalists who occupied the Statue of Liberty in 1977, draping the island’s flag from the crown, those seeking attention have, at times, found it at the top of the city. But in a world, the stunts and the outrageous images they often generate have the potential to grab attention more quickly than ever. One video stream of the Trump Tower climb, posted on Facebook, drew about 5. 8 million views, with a majority of those from people tuning in while the climb was in progress. “It’s so much easier to get your message out and do it live,” said Glenn Corbett, a professor of security, fire and emergency management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Back then all you got was the nightly news. ” The developer Douglas Durst spoke about the two climbers who scaled The New York Times Building on the same day in 2008. He said he had taken steps at two of his buildings — Via 57, a residential building on the West Side of Manhattan, as well as 1 World Trade Center — to discourage climbers. At Via, on 57th Street near the West Side Highway, an overhang was designed for the base of the building instead of the angular walls reaching down to the sidewalk that were initially planned. “We’re now very aware of having to design buildings so they are not scalable,” Mr. Durst said. Security experts described the challenge of securing large buildings as a constant push, one that involved sufficient staffing in addition to shrewd design. “There’s always going to be people who are going to try to steal and commit assault, and climb buildings,” said Mark Lerner, the president of Epic Security Corporation, which provides security for more than 100 buildings in New York City. “You need the proper security and personnel to act as a deterrent. ” But the precautions have their limitations. Three daredevils off the top of the World Trade Center in 2013, filming their exploits from a helmet camera. The next year, a sneaked past security and made it to the top of the 1, 776 foot tower. The police said Mr. Rogata told them the brazen stunt had a simple purpose: He wanted to meet Mr. Trump, a motivation that he laid out in a YouTube video that was posted before the climb. A spokeswoman for the police said they believed he had “some type of mental disorder. ” Tourists strolled by the tower on Thursday, with some stopping to snap selfies in front of it. Richard Monacchio, 50, who was in town with his son to see a Broadway show, said he decided to visit the tower after watching the video stream. “I’m surprised security didn’t start running out immediately,” Mr. Monacchio said of the stunt. Still, he added about Mr. Rogata,“I was hoping he would make it. ” | 1 |
Email
When FBI Director James Comey (shown on right) announced that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private, unsecured e-mail server was being reopened, there seemed reason for cautious hope that justice just might be served. That hope, it would appear, was in vain. Comey announced Sunday afternoon, eight days after it was revealed that 650,000 e-mails were found on the laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, that the FBI again was closing the investigation without recommending indictment.
Donald Trump wasted no time accusing the FBI of pulling punches and being part of a “rigged system” protecting Clinton from the consequences of her crimes. On Sunday night, he told a crowd of 8,000 in the Detriot, Michigan, suburb of Sterling Heights, “The investigations into her crimes will go on for a long, long time.” He added, “The rank-and-file special agents in the FBI won't let her get away with her terrible crimes — including the deletion of 33,000 emails after receiving a congressional subpoena.” Trump's remarks drew enthusiastic applause from the crowd, many of whom were undoubtedly aware of Comey’s decision hours earlier. Trump went on to say, “Right now she's being protected by a rigged system!” As proof of that “rigged system,” Trump said, “You can't review 650,000 new emails in eight days! You can't do it, folks!”
But is Trump correct? He has shown his woeful lack of understanding of technology in the past, referring to the need to protect “the Cyber” in the first presidential debate and calling on Americans to “boycott Apple until such time as they give that security number” for the encrypted iPhone used by San Bernardino shooter, Syed Farook. Of course there is no such animal as “the Cyber,” and Apple had made clear the fact (known by anyone who knows anything at all about the way encryption — especially that found on any iPhone running iOS 8 and up — works) that it did not hold “that security number” to unlock Farook’s device. Listening to Trump discuss technology is sometimes like trying to explain to your grandmother that Facebook is a website you visit, not something “on your computer.” So, is Trump’s assertion that it would be impossible to “review 650,000 new emails in eight days” just another of his disconnected moments as he looks for the correct exit to get off “the information superhighway”? Or was he on to something.
As it happens, he was right on the money.
Even with powerful, modern computers and a large team trained to sift the data, it is difficult to believe that the FBI actually looked at, analyzed, cross referenced, and cleared 650,000 e-mails in eight days. That would be 81,250 per day. Even if the FBI team working on clearing those e-mails was comprised of 500 agents (an unrealistic number), they would each have had to clear more than 20 e-mails an hour. This assumes an eight-hour workday and the agents (all 500 of them) working over the weekend.
The task would have required an agent actually reading each e-mail and cross referencing the information it contained. Simply doing a keyword search would not have been sufficient, since that would require that the agents all know every keyword to be found in all classified e-mails — or at least have a master-list of those keywords (which would be a security nightmare to create and maintain). Plus, it is likely that an e-mail discussing classified intelligence would not use any of those keywords anyway.
So, Trump is correct: “You can’t review 650,000 new emails in eight days!” Taking into account, then, that there was not time to make the determination (based on the data) that there was insufficient cause to recommend indictment, it also appears that Clinton is “being protected by a rigged system.”
Unfortunately for Clinton, that system may not extend to either the “rank-and-file special agents in the FBI” or the rank-and-file detectives in the NYPD. As The New American reported when the reopened “investigation” was made public, the case stems from a search that was conducted on the laptop of ex-congressman Anthony Weiner when NYPD officers and detectives served a search warrant in relation to allegations of child pornography. Once the investigators found the Clinton e-mails, they brought the FBI into the loop, and Comey announced that the investigation would be reopened.
As The New American ’s Selwyn Duke wrote then: Sex crimes with children, child exploitation, money laundering, perjury, and pay to play, reads the partial list of crimes that, claim New York City Police Department sources, could “put Hillary and her crew away for life.”
According to a report by True Pundit , those sources also said that if the FBI gave Clinton another pass, they were prepared to go public with the information themselves: NYPD detectives and a [sic] NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices. “What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.”
Hopefully between the rank-and-file FBI agents and the rank-and-file NYPD detectives, something may yet come of this. Of course, Clinton may be in the White House by then and the investigation could be even more mired in politics than it has been so far. Having another Clinton in the White House, it seems, would be just like the last time. | 1 |
« on: Today at 01:06:08 AM » New Lunar Craters Mystery | Space News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz0GhlVKQuk Oct 26, 2016 ThunderboltsProject New scientific reports are once again forcing planetary scientists to rewrite the history of our own moon. Study reveals lunar surface features younger than assumed http://phys.org/news/2016-10-reveals-lunar-surface-features-younger.html A new study into the lunar surface contradicts the notion that cratering on the moon occurs incrementally over vast eons of time. A team of scientists studied several thousands of before and after images of the moons surface, with the visual data covering nearly a million square miles. What they found is that lunar cratering appears to occur at a rate more than 100 times faster than the standard impact model has predicted. Could electrical processes on the moon be responsible for the cratering? Our Electrically Scarred Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9WOucaz-0 The Missing Ceres Craters Mystery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibSeyMzPClU Electric Crater Chains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5EjXhtKagg Logged | 0 |
Get short URL 0 0 0 0 The US military conducted airstrikes targeting two senior al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, Department of Defense spokesperson Peter Cook said in a statement.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — In April, Maj. Gen. Jeff Buchanan, the deputy chief of staff for Operation Resolute Support, admitted that previous US estimates on al-Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan were too low.
According to Buchanan and other Operation Resolute Support officials, the al-Qaeda terror group has formed ties with the Taliban militants since 2010. "On October 23rd, US forces conducted precision strikes in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, targeting Faruq al-Qatani and Bilal al-Utabi, two of al-Qaeda's most senior leaders in Afghanistan," the statement said on Wednesday. "We are still assessing the results of the strikes." ... | 0 |
A Florida man accused of raping an girl after he lured her into his home said her “provocative clothing” signaled consent, police said. [Sydney Allan Markland, 68, was arrested Friday and charged with sexual battery on a victim under 12 years old after police conducted an investigation that lasted several months, WESH reported. Police said the girl lived in the same neighborhood as Markland and was walking to a friend’s house in July 2016 when he asked her to help carry some fried chicken into his home. The girl told police that she helped Markland because he appeared to be injured. While she was inside the house, Markland allegedly raped the girl and told her not to tell anyone. The Tampa Bay Times reports that the girl told one of her parents, who then called police. Investigators say that Markland’s DNA matched DNA samples taken from the victim’s clothing. Detectives state that Markland told them that his actions are permissible in his culture and that the victim’s “provocative clothing” and “actions” suggested that she consented to “sexual contact,” WKMG reported. “She was wearing provocative clothing,” Markland said, according to the detectives’ report. “Her actions suggested that she was consenting to sexual contact. ” Detectives say Markland admitted to “sexually battering” the child after they ate chicken wings and prayed together. Markland is being held without bail at the Marion County Jail. Investigators say Markland may have sexually assaulted others because he knows a lot of the children in the neighborhood, and neighbors reportedly say they saw children stop by Markland’s home regularly. “Kids will go in there, and he will give them candy and stuff,” said neighbor Steve Sarju. “Not to go inside, he will stay on his porch and say ‘Have a candy. ’” | 0 |
bankensektor Der russische Staat werde die Banken weiterhin stützen. Quelle:AP
Die Ratingagentur Moody’s prognostiziert bessere Gewinnaussichten für russische Banken in diesem Jahr – trotz der Verschlechterung von Aktiva und Zunahme von Problemkrediten.
Der russische Staat werde die Banken weiterhin stützen, wie aus zahlreichen Erklärungen der Notenbank und der Regierung des Landes hervorgehe, heißt es in der Moody’s-Mitteilung. Dies habe dazu geführt, dass die Agentur das Rating russischen Bankwesens von negativ auf stabil gehoben habe.
„Die langsame Erholung der Wirtschaft und die makroökonomische Stabilisierung in Russland werden das Arbeitsumfeld für russische Banken tragen“, so Moody’s weiter.
Laut Stanislaw Kleschtschew, Chef-Analyst bei VTB24, ist die Verbesserung der Finanzlage russischer Banken hauptsächlich auf die Leitzinssenkung von vergangenem September auf 10 Prozent zurückzuführen.
Anton Strutschenewskij, Chef-Ökonom bei Sberbank CIB, bekräftigt: Die zuversichtlichere Prognose sei begründet, „weil die Rezession der Wirtschaft gestoppt ist und die Unternehmensumsätze heute höher sind als vor zwei Jahren“, sagt er.
Auch Standard & Poor’s verbesserte ihre Aussichten für Russland: Im September dieses Jahres erhöhte die Agentur das Rating des Landes von negativ auf stabil – wegen gesunkener externer Risiken. Fitch Ratings wertet Russlands Wirtschaftslage ebenfalls als stabil und bestätigt das Land auf dem Niveau BBB-. | 0 |
The White House has asked Congress to spend an extra $3 billion in 2017 to fund a border wall and to bolster other security and repatriation programs run by the Department of Homeland Security. [“The president’s budget requests demonstrate a renewed focus on supporting the hard work of the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security,” said a statement from the Secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly. The budget document sent to Congress March 16 is titled “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again. ” It is not the formal budget request for 2018 but outlines spending plans for 2018, and it requests amendments to the 2017 budgets set by Congress late last year. If the requested budget amendments are approved by Congress, the DHS 2017 budget in 2017 would rise by $3 billion. The budget plan also calls for the DHS 2018 budget to be set at $44 billion. A comprehensive budget request for FY 2018 will be delivered to Congress in May. According to a department statement: The FY 2017 Budget Amendment would provide $3 billion [in 2017] for DHS implementation of recent Executive Orders. The request would fund efforts to plan, design, and construct a physical wall along the southern border, and make other critical investments in tactical border infrastructure and technology. The request also proposes funding to increase immigration detention capacity, which is necessary to ensure the removal of illegal aliens from the United States. Finally, the request funds additional capacity at DHS to prepare for hiring additional immigration law enforcement officers and agents … | 0 |
BREAKING – Investigative Journalist Found Dead, Was Working For…
Talk about Hillary and a bad way and there is a very good chance you could wind up dead. Is that what happened here?
Gavin MacFadyen, the WikiLeaks Director and Founder of the Center for Investigative Journalism, has died. WikiLeaks has officially confirmed it on their Twitter by posting a tribute to the man, saying that he is now taking “his fists and his fight to battle God.” ( inquisitr.com )
This Twitter message was signed JA, referring to the WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange. Somehow even with massive restrictions, Assange was able to post his message.
Wikileaks also shared a statement from MacFadyen’s wife, Susan Benn. The statement was published on MacFadyen’s Center for Investigative Journalism site where she noted that he was a “fierce defender of justice and human rights around the world.”
Susan states her husband was a strong force behind the ever-changing world of journalism, and had always been committed to ethical, yet hard-hitting, journalism. She even quoted him, saying, “Good journalism is always political journalism.”
This man was Assange’s mentor and closest friend, as well as the mentor for many other people in the industry.
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK | 0 |
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Greg Hunter – Internet data mining expert Clif High predicted that “Trump would win” the election and that Hillary Clinton would go “missing” after the election. Sure enough, Hillary was missing the night of her defeat. What does that mean?
High thinks, “That there was a breakdown among a very delicate relationship among a lot of powerful parties that failed to deliver as promised. The plan didn’t work. So, now there is no real plan “B.” There never could be under the circumstances.
We are in a situation where there can’t be a plan “B” for the Federal Reserve, for example. They (FED) have to go on a certain path, they’re doomed. That is true of the criminal organization we call CGI (Clinton Global Initiative). Any criminal gang, no matter where it is in the social order, progresses along a certain path, runs into opposition and dies. It always happens, and it always will.”
So, does Clif High think Hillary Clinton is in jeopardy? High answers, “I certainly do.” High’s data mining also shows that “Clinton minions are worried . . . all I get in the data is all these people have fear and worry.”
On the financial front, High contends we will have inflation and deflation at the same time. And High says interest rates are headed up and will continue to rise. High explains, “My definition is deflation, but maybe we should define it as debt destruction and inflation.
The powers that be and the Federal Reserve in the data sets that I have are showing that they are really worried and start to get worried by the 12 th of December, and it breaks out into the public in early January. They are worried about the destruction of all of this debt by dollars pouring back into the U.S.
The debt is actually being paid off by all this money coming back into the U.S. It’s not an actual increase of actual cash. It is a destruction of all the derivatives . . . It is debt destruction for sure. . . . Also, a component of the hyperinflation is they can’t destroy all the repatriated dollars (flowing back in) fast enough. So, some of those do show up in the supply chain of the digital cost we have to deal with. . . .So, as this deflation starts, the hyperinflation is already going to be ongoing.” In short, High says your home will go down in value while you are paying much more for supplies to live in it.
On gold and silver, High says never mind the recent price drop. High says, “They’re real money, always have been, and you are going to need it. . . . How can it be silly to hold real money? Americans are going to have to face up to the fact that we have been deluded by a propaganda press that was attempting to sow a particular viewpoint around the world. We tried to conquer the world with dollars and the threat of bullets . . . . Our dollars were accepted all around the world, and people gave us real stuff for those green pieces of paper. They’re not going to do that anymore. So, if you want that coconut from Malaysia . . . you are going to have to pay something that has value. Those little green pieces of paper will not after a short period of time. They are going to have value inside the country for a while, but outside the country, people are going to say I want gold or silver or oil. I want to see something of value.”
High can’t name a price for gold and silver, but his “predictive linguistics” says, “At some point in 2017, probably past mid-year, we’re going to be looking at hyperinflation so bad that the DOW will be measured around $100,000 to $125,000. Meaning, the dollar will be so worthless that it will take $125,000 to buy the little basket that is the DOW. I also have language that says an ounce of gold will be approaching the DOW in terms of value. This is not ludicrous. In the last depression in 1933 and 1934, after the shutting of the banks . . . we had a point where gold and the DOW were the same, and gold dominated the DOW for decades.”
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Internet predictive linguistics expert Clif High of HalfPastHuman.com. SF Source USA Watchdog | 1 |
"We Risk Being Collateral Damage In The Neocon Lust For War" Published: October 30, 2016 Source: Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com
The winds of change are now swirling so rapidly that it's hard to make sense of what’s happening. And adding to the confusion is an all-out effort by the establishment to convince the masses that, despite the multiplying signs of instability, "everything is fine".
The deceptions surrounding us are now constant and impossible to avoid. How much longer will it take until a critical mass of the populace starts to see through the delusion?
The stock and bond markets are rigged by central banks and their allies to go ever higher, enriching an elite few at the expense of everyone else. The mainstream media over-reports the inconsequential, and under-reports the most important things. It’s truly astonishing what is not being reported on, presumably in an effort to minimize attention on some really important matters (Yemen, Russia’s increasing concerns over western actions, Wikileaks on HRC, etc).
If it all weren’t so serious, it would be humorous because the chicanery is now so over-the-top obvious.
The elites often commit crimes without any consequences. It's so bad, we've seen the architects of wars based on lies get promoted to positions of greater power, now telling new lies on an even grander scale. (In DC, the polite term du jour is “fabrications”. But we’re all friends here, so let's use proper language: lies are lies.)
Meanwhile, whistleblowers end up facing the full weight of the law. And the little people face harsh, draconian consequences for even the most minor of infractions.
As James Howard Kunstler succinctly puts it: Racketeering is ruining us .
If you can make a lot of money doing it, in the US that’s A-OK with the powers that be. Who cares about the collateral damage, as long as Uncle Sam and his cronies get their cut? The Winds Of Change
But this all is going to come crashing down, because it has to. Not because of a sudden case of enlightenment by the elites, but because of math.
Simple math, too.
While there are lots of sub-equations we could parse through, the parent of them all is this one: Endless exponential growth on a finite planet is impossible.
It’s really that simple. And what’s transpiring now is nothing more complicated than what happens when a culture’s main growth narrative no longer matches the limits of its reality.
Unfortunately, it’s possible to fool people for just long enough into thinking it’s a workable plan. Give something a couple of decades in the sun (cheap, plentiful petroleum, for example) and entire institutions, political and monetary systems and dogmas will be fashioned around it.
This kind of self-delusion is not new for humans. It's no different than if an ancient tribe was luckily blessed with 40 years of dependable rains which they attributed to a specific set of rituals. It’s not too long before correlation becomes confused with causation. And when the expected rains start ceasing to arrive, the rituals get more convoluted and increasingly desperate measures are called for to appease the angry gods.
Eventually, finally, people slowly wake up to the fact that their rituals and the weather never had anything to do with each other. But by then, society has usually torn itself apart, unable to align the contradictions.
This is what’s happening now. The narrative we live by is breaking down, and increasingly, our desperate ruling elites simply don’t know what to do. People are confused and so they want to either return to the past “Make America Great Again!”) or they want to cling to the present (“Stronger Together"…as in don’t rock the boat, preserve the status quo!).
Neither will work of course because the rains have ceased for reasons that have nothing to do with America's elaborate but quirky rituals (the current presidential race being a prime example of such).
And this is why, despite the fact that our true challenges are rooted in the mathematics of resource depletion, our undoing will come when the social fabric tears apart.
Which is why the current unrest escalating all over the globe is so important to track. As we watch less-resourced societies begin to fail in advance, we better understand the nature of the reckoning heading our way.
Among the many conflicts that are boiling over, the one that concerns me the most -- by far -- is the West's very intentional efforts to demonize Putin specifically, and Russia generally.
The tactics being used are no different from those used to disparage Saddam and his regime right before the invasion of Iraq. We’ve been down this path before; the playbook is literally exactly the same.
Blatantly obvious propaganda is being used, most heavily by the very same (and unrepentant) main stream media outlets that were used the last time around -- when we ended up commencing a 'pre-emptive' war based on ginned-up intelligence that turned out to be wholly false. We owe it to ourselves not be so easily led this time around. The Winds Of War
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
~ H. L. Mencken
Now, I'm sensitive to the idea put forth by some that this whole Putin demonization is merely the latest use of a hobgoblin intended to help get HRC elected president.
Obviously if this is true, it goes well beyond HRC herself. In the military industrial complex, there's a vast host of self-interested parties who feast on war and whose paychecks and future prospects depend heavily on it. There even are a few demented souls in the halls of power who believe in war as the best way to project one’s influence. Stew them together and you have a pretty good handle on what DC is all about these days.
So I'm sympathetic to the temptation to think: “Hey, it’s always a safe bet during an election year to try and appear tougher than your opponent…this is all just election year politicking and it will pass and fade after November 8 th .”
Here’s why I don’t think that’s accurate. In fact, I think something deeper and more sinister has been set in motion.
The blackballing of Putin and Russia started years ago, in 2013, when Putin managed to convince then-president of Ukraine Yanukovych to back out of the agreement intended to bring Ukraine into the EU fold as the final NATO brick in the wall.
That set-back enraged the neocons in Washington DC mightily and they’ve been rapidly anti-Putin ever since. This neocon grudge has found help and support ever since from the UK, US, and EU press which were also willing partners in selling the fraudulent “evidence” that led to the Iraq war -- and Libya, too, and now Yemen and Syria.
As examples, these cartoonish magazine covers (both from 2014) look like they were designed by Intro to Psychology 101 students asked to create a propaganda hit piece:
Heck, there's even potential evidence as far back as 2008: as exemplified by this TIME magazine cover where the "TIME" banner was placed behind Putin’s head in such a way that the peaks of the M gave him "horns". (For fun, see how many example of other leaders you can find where TIME did this -- there are precious few. The logo is almost always in front):
So the demonization began a long time ago, well before it’s reasonable to suspect HRCs advance team could start scheming about how to use an anti-Putin stance against Trump, or any other opponent.
But the media has continued to beat the Putin=bad drums, and with increasingly volume. Here are a few more recent examples:
The message: Putin is manipulating us, and anybody who falls for it is a sucker . And if you dare to question the integrity of the US elections, which there is ample evidence that it is vulnerable to fraud & manipulation (listen to our podcast with election integrity analyst Brad Friedman ), you are Putin’s patsy.
And here’s my favorite propaganda piece to date because it’s so blatantly over-the-top that it takes on a very special quality of being so bad it’s good. This is The Rocky Horror Picture Show of magazine cover art:
Okay, with all that said, we’ve established that “someone” has had it out for Putin for quite a long time. We might surmise who or what agencies that might be, but such speculation is best reserved for those with greater insights than I happen to have.
I just know propaganda when I see it. And I see it in the examples above, and in the media pervasively today. So where does this lead us?
Well, given the fact that Russia has just undertaken the largest nuclear readiness drill in its history involving its citizens , maybe we should think that Putin and Russia are no longer amused by all this antagonism and are taking it as something more sinister than simple politicking.
Or we should pay attention that Russia recently announced the arrival of its latest nuclear ICBM (nicknamed Satan-2) capable of delivering 15 warheads each.
And let’s not forget the even more recent announcement that a hypersonic glider warhead had been successfully tested , against which our military currently has no defense.
None of those Russian moves are being made in a vacuum of course. They've come only after many repeated provocations by the West, including assembling the largest gathering of military brigade forces on Russia’s borders since WW II. These are the kind of threats, mind you, that would have caused the US to go into an absolute snit long ago were the situation reversed.
The real question is: Why? What’s the plan here, if any exists? Who’s behind all this and why? If we can answer any of these, then perhaps we can assess the risks regular people like us and our loved ones may be facing as potential "collateral damage" of this warmongering. The So-Called Elites
The “who” has emerged in this election, at least partially. We now have a few names to put to the program, and they're familiar ones.
This is, generally speaking, the same cast of characters that has been agitating for a more belligerent global stance prior to 9/11. Many of these names surfaced on my radar when the Project for a New American Century statement of principles was published in 1997. That document is pretty much all you need to read to understand the last 20 years of US foreign policy.
I mean, if you only had just one document to read on the topic, this one would pretty well sum it all up.
Well, here they all come again. This time right on the front page of the Washington Post, making renewed calls for an even more aggressive and bellicose US military posture. For anybody concerned about conflict with Russia, this is more terrifying than any haunted house you could possibly visit this Halloween:
Washington’s foreign policy elite breaks with Obama over Syrian bloodshed
Oct 20, 2016
There is one corner of Washington where Donald Trump’s scorched-earth presidential campaign is treated as a mere distraction and where bipartisanship reigns. In the rarefied world of the Washington foreign policy establishment, President Obama’s departure from the White House — and the possible return of a more conventional and hawkish Hillary Clinton — is being met with quiet relief.
The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork for a more assertive American foreign policy, via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House.
It is not unusual for Washington’s establishment to launch major studies in the final months of an administration to correct the perceived mistakes of a president or influence his successor. But the bipartisan nature of the recent recommendations, coming at a time when the country has never been more polarized, reflects a remarkable consensus among the foreign policy elite.
This consensus is driven by a broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach and the need for restraint, especially in the Middle East. “There’s a widespread perception that not being active enough or recognizing the limits of American power has costs,” said Philip Gordon, a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama until 2015. “So the normal swing is to be more interventionist.”
“The American-led international order that has been prevalent since World War II is now under threat,” said Martin Indyk, who oversees a team of top former officials from the administrations of Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton assembled by the Brookings Institution. “The question is how to restore and renovate it.” The Brookings report — a year in the making — is due out in December.
Taken together, the studies and reports call for more-aggressive American action to constrain Iran, rein in the chaos in the Middle East and check Russia in Europe.
The studies, which reflect Clinton’s stated views, break most forcefully with Obama on Syria. Virtually all these efforts, including a report released Wednesday by the liberal Center for American Progress, call for stepped-up military action to deter President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Russian forces in Syria.
“You can’t pretend you can go to war against Assad and not go to war against the Russians,” said a senior administration official who is involved in Middle East policy and was granted anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.
( Source )
There’s a lot to unpack in there. Let’s get started.
The article begins with the disquieting assertion that the presumptive return of a more hawkish Hillary Clinton to the white house is “being met with quiet relief.” You mean the longest stretch of active war in US history hasn't been enough for some of these folks?
I talk with a lot of people in the military who are sick and tired of America's endless wars and their endless rotations with no end in sight and no clear mission. Nobody can articulate what the US is doing in Afghanistan any more (and noting the enormous increase in heroin production is considered impolite).
Next, the article is loaded with “normalizing” words, such as ‘consensus,’‘broad-based’ and ‘bipartisan’ to make it seem that a more hawkish stance is really getting back to something we can all agree on. It’s centrist, bipartisan and broad-based after all.
It’s also insane when you combine it with the later part about how these folks want to undo the restraint of Obama and go after Syrian and Russian forces directly.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Getting into a shooting war with Russia would be a terrible idea. Insane really.
Not least of which is because, even if things don’t go nuclear (which they very well could given where we are in the shredding of the past narratives), then the US will discover that projecting its power all over the world is a heck of a lot harder when your navy is being sunk by the latest next-generation anti-ship missile technology.
Trust me, the petrodollar will get a lot weaker in a skinny minute as soon as American military power is revealed as stoppable.
I have a lot of faith in the training and equipment of the US military. But I also have faith in the power of a swarm of anti-ship hypersonic missiles to do a lot of damage. The US Presidential Election
I'm on record as saying that I very much distrust the close relationship HRC has with the neocons and her hawkish foreign policy stance. Also, I do trust her readiness and willingness to get the US into more wars.
In the second presidential debate, she came right and said that she supports a no-fly zone over Syria. Quoting a US military general, I've since explained that doing so would meet the definition of an open act of war against Russia.
While there are a lot of issues on the table this election, I'm very much a single-issue voter when it comes to getting into a war with Russia. I want no part of it. I can't imagine any sane American would.
At best, it would be a wildly destructive waste of time, life and money. At worst it ends with an EMP (if we're lucky) or nuclear disaster (if we're not). Instead, we in the West should be confronting our massive overhang of debt, our looming energy predicament, and a host of ecological train wrecks right now -- not stuck in the fantasy that global warfare is somehow glorious or 'winnable'.
After the next war, there won’t be any bountiful period of economically-simulative rebuilding that some have wistfully longed for . That takes energy. And in case anybody missed it, the 'high net energy' conventional oil slipped into the rearview mirror almost ten years ago now. There won’t be any super-duper rebuilding after the next big war. Just a massive struggle to get us back to even.
So hey, let’s not do that. OK?
Back to the main point here. The HRC campaign has several very close ties with the neocons who were instrumental in selling the Iraq war. None quite as prominent as Michael Morell:
Clinton Adviser Proposes Attacking Iran to Aid the Saudis in Yemen
Oct 26, 2016
Michael Morell is a former acting director of the CIA and a national security adviser to Hillary Clinton — one who is widely expected to occupy a senior post in her administration.
He is also an opponent of the Iran nuclear agreement, a defender of waterboarding, and an advocate for making Russia “pay a price” in Syria by covertly killing Putin’s soldiers.
On Tuesday, Morell added another title to that résumé: proponent of going to war with Iran, for the sake of securing Saudi Arabia’s influence in Yemen.
“Ships leave Iran on a regular basis carrying arms to the Houthis in Yemen,” Morell said, in remarks to the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank founded by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. “I would have no problem from a policy perspective of having the U.S. Navy boarding their ships, and if there are weapons on them, to turn those ships around.”
Morell did note, per Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, that this policy “raised questions of international maritime law.”
Which is a bit like saying, “Breaking into someone’s home, putting a gun in their face, and demanding they hand over all their weapons raises questions about armed-robbery law.”
( Source )
To me this is not an individual interested in a little Putin-bashing for the sake of votes. This is a guy who's deadly serious about using US power to get into a conflict not just with Russia, but with Iran as well.
Either of these adversaries could lead us into an armed confrontation that could escalate in ways we’d very seriously regret.
Even ‘just’ the shutting of the Strait of Hormuz would be a huge and mortal blow to a world economy saddled with low growth and enormous piles of debt. Iran could accomplish this easily using the mobile, land based missile launchers they currently have in stock.
Sink a couple of Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) and it’s a whole new ball game for world trade.
In case you don’t take Mr. Morell all that seriously, I should remind you that he was the person who personally vetted and scrubbed the presentation that Colin Powell gave to the UN on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that led to the final war resolution.
Clearly telling a few, uh, "fabrications" is well within his talent center if/when needed to get the job done. He’s deadly serious about entering a conflict with Russia and Iran and he has Hillary’s ear. Hopefully other more moderate people do as well, but my concern still lies with the fact that some people will hear equal arguments but then make the decision based on how they lean.
Hillary leans hawkish. That’s just a matter of record at this point. As even liberal-leaning Chris Matthews of Hardball said recently , “People don’t change because we swear them into the White House.”
Nope. The best rule of relationships I have is: You'll be disappointed if you are expecting (requiring, or hoping for) them to be different tomorrow than they are today. Conclusion
While I've focused on the election in this article, it may not even be relevant at all. That is, there may well be a machine running in the background that is larger than any potential candidate or President . It may well be that the careful preparation of propaganda groundwork against Putin that began in 2008 is part of a large plan the public is being intentionally kept in the dark about. Who knows?
But learning how Obama has frustrated the aspirations of the neocons vis-a-vis Syria and Russia tells me that the office of the president does matter, at least to a point.
I was personally horrified by what the US has brought to bear on Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. All in the service of Deep State objectives that are anything but obvious.
My growing concern here is that the juggernaut that leads to war has already been untethered and is building up steam. I see it in the propaganda pieces against Russia on an almost daily basis. And I see Russia doing everything it can to both try and get the West to calm down and be reasonable, while getting its own citizens ready in case those efforts fail.
NATO is ramping up the pressure. Western media is faithfully (again) running necon talking points as if they were pearls of wisdom. We are heading back to the future.
Recently, for the very first time in my entire life, I have begun undertaking actual personal preparations for nuclear war.
I absolutely deplore that I feel this is necessary. But a core tenet we live by here at PeakProsperity.com is that when anxiety builds, you need to align your actions with your beliefs. Right now, my beliefs are loudly telling me that the risk of a serious conflict with Russia breaking out are no longer dismissable.
Similarly, I've committed to readers that when something concerns me enough to take action in my own personal life, I'll share it.
In Part 2: My Personal Preparations For Nuclear War , I share the steps I've taken this week as well as additional precautions folks concerned about this topic should consider.
Look, it's crazy were even talking about this. But as this article has shown, there's ample evidence that the pressure between the West and Russia is building. Given the outsized risks involved, making an investment in safety is only prudent. After all: nuclear way is one of those potential scenarios where its far better to be early or overenthusiastic in your precautions, than a day late.
Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access) | 1 |
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You may remember when Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore was removed from the bench in 2003 for disobeying an unlawful mandate to remove a Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama Supreme Court building. Ten years later, however, the people of Alabama overwhelmingly voted their heroic defender of liberty back to his position in 2013. This example proves that many American citizens are looking for elected officials who uphold hold moral conviction!
Sadly, the Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice has again been unlawfully removed from the bench at the hands of liberal activists on Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary (COJ), due to an administrative order issued by Moore that stated, “Until further decision by the Alabama Supreme Court, the existing orders of the Alabama Supreme Court that Alabama probate judges have a ministerial duty not to issue any marriage license contrary to the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Amendment or the Alabama Marriage Protection Act remain in full force and effect."
Chief Justice Moore remarked, “I have been targeted for my belief in marriage, a belief shared by the majority of Americans. No one can point to any illegal, unlawful or unethical aspect of my four-page Administrative Order. That order was a status report on the case. A justice should not be removed from office because of a political agenda.”
You see God created marriage - not man, not governments.
Consider the following analogy. You lease a home in a residential neighborhood for your personal residence. You sign a contract –your vow—and move in to enjoy that new home. Later, you decide you want to open a retail business in that home against the owner’s wishes and against your contract. No matter what kind of attorney arsenal you have, you cannot change the zoning of that residence into a business; it is not permissible in the contract, and you don’t own the home.
In the same way, marriage belongs to God, and He has given us the benefit of it. For this reason, when you make marriage vows, you are asked to repeat them twice. The first time is a vow to God, who creates the marriage, and the second time is your vow to the other person.
Our founders have long since passed into the annals of history. Their monuments are lifeless stone and can no longer rectify or redeem the champions of their spiritual cause of liberty. That is our job as Americans. To defend and pray for Chief Justice Roy Moore is our duty. Why? Because as Americans, we believe in the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” that were set in motion by our Creator to protect the Rights He has given us.
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Ever since Wikileaks and hacking groups began releasing incriminating evidence against the Democrat National Committee and their presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the US establishment has... | 0 |
Women and children from African countries attempting to make the journey to Europe are being detained in unofficial detention centers in Libya — where they are subjected to rape, beaten, forced into labor, and starved, in addition to various other atrocities, according to the United Nations. [“They arrested us and brought us into the Zawia prison. No food. No water. They beat us every day. No doctor, no medicine,” a Nigerian girl identified as Kamis told the U. N. children’s agency, UNICEF, from an unofficial jail in Libya. “The results of this rapid assessment demand action. We can’t have a situation where children and women disappear into a hellhole. They are sexually assaulted, abused, exploited and killed,” declared Justin Forsyth, UNICEF deputy executive director. While thousands of African citizen seeking refuge from poverty, violence, and despair make it into Europe, thousands more only make it as far as Libya, where militiamen carry out shocking forms of abuse against them. Some militia groups have established detention centers described as “hellholes” to imprison migrants caught while passing through. In a new report, UNICEF notes: The militias developed their own detention centers because they could profit from migrants who wished to pass through certain areas. Each militia typically operates its own centre, detaining migrants on the perceived grounds that they bring disease, engage in prostitution and are criminals or mercenaries. … When asked whether they paid anyone to help them migrate, nearly all the children surveyed indicated they had paid smugglers. Smugglers charged the women and children between US$200 and $1, 200 each for the journey, though it was unclear whether the children had made the payment themselves. According to the U. N. there are at least 34 detention centers across Libya. The Libyan government runs 24 that hold between 4, 000 and 7, 000 detainees. Meanwhile, militias are holding migrants in an unknown number of unofficial detention centers. UNICEF reports: The survey confirmed that sanitation conditions were substandard and the centers were, worryingly overcrowded, increasing the likelihood of the spread of infectious diseases. … The detention centers were no more than forced labour camps, farms, warehouses and makeshift prisons run by armed groups. For the thousands of migrant women and children incarcerated, they were living hellholes where people were held for months at a time without any form of due process, in squalid, cramped conditions. Serious violations, including allegations of violence and brutality, were commonplace. The militiamen often cram as many as 20 migrant prisoners into cells not larger than two square meters. | 0 |
BISMARCK, N. D. — About an hour after some 200 police officers cleared the last demonstrators against the Dakota Access Pipeline from their sprawling encampment on the North Dakota prairie last week, Gov. Doug Burgum signed into law four bills aimed at making it easier to control such protests. With a few strokes of a pen, he placed the state in the vanguard of an emerging backlash by conservative forces against political and social advocates who see demonstrations — however unruly — as free speech protected by the Constitution. In a season rife with demonstrations over immigration, pipelines, abortion, women’s rights and more, Republican legislators in at least 16 states have filed bills intended to make protests more orderly or to toughen penalties against ones that go awry. Republicans in two other states, Massachusetts and North Carolina, have said they will file bills. Those numbers include only bills whose sponsors have specifically linked them to protests, said Jonathan Griffin, a policy analyst who tracks the measures at the National Conference of State Legislatures. How many will be enacted is unclear a few already have been pronounced dead in committee. Some sociologists and legal experts say the bills are in line with a general trend toward tougher treatment of protesters after especially disruptive demonstrations like the Occupy Wall Street movement in Manhattan and the 2014 violence in Ferguson, Mo. But interviews and news reports suggest that some of the measures are either backed by supporters of President Trump or are responses to demonstrations against him and his policies. After a Nashville motorist struck safety workers who were escorting protesters at a crosswalk, a Tennessee state representative introduced legislation that would relieve motorists of any liability should they accidentally hit someone deliberately blocking a street. An Iowa bill, filed after about 100 protesters closed Interstate 80 near Iowa City, would make blocking roads a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and $7, 500 in fines. Similar legislation in Mississippi would impose a fine of up to $10, 000. In Washington State, a Republican senator who helped run Mr. Trump’s campaign there filed legislation that would make it a felony to commit “economic terrorism,” defined as intentionally breaking the law to intimidate private citizens or to obstruct economic activity. A Minnesota bill, responding to protests over the police shooting last year of an man in a suburb of St. Paul, would allow cities to sue demonstrators who violate the law for the cost of policing their protests. And in North Carolina, a legislator promised to propose a measure making it illegal to “threaten, intimidate or retaliate” against state officials after hecklers denounced Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican who lost a bid in November. Those two measures and perhaps others may face constitutional hurdles, said Kevin F. O’Neill, a scholar of protest law at the College of Law at Cleveland State University. “There’s a First Amendment right of access to sidewalks, public squares and even public streets,” he said. “Heckling is a First Amendment right. ” But demonstrators who fail to inform authorities of protest plans and locations and to secure a permit are on far shakier legal ground, he added. In those cases, actions like blocking a street would most likely be subject to prosecution. Most of the proposals appear to address protests that lack permits. In many cases, the bills’ sponsors emphasize that they are trying to improve public safety or keep order, not squelch free speech. “We support the First Amendment altogether and want people to get out and do what they want,” said State Senator George B. Gainer, Republican of Florida, who has proposed legislation that would raise fines for blocking traffic and, like the Tennessee measure, indemnify drivers who accidentally hit protesters. “But they shouldn’t endanger themselves or others. ” Some advocates, however, have their doubts. “There are already laws on the books in states that say if you break something or harm somebody, you’re going to be prosecuted,” said Patrick F. Gillham, a sociologist at Western Washington University who studies protests. “They’re troubling. They potentially have a chilling effect on protest. ” In Georgia, where the State Senate has passed legislation toughening the penalty for obstructing traffic, Worth Bishop, a volunteer for the movement Indivisible, said the proliferation of bills took aim at the First Amendment. “These laws are clearly designed to abridge the right of the people to lawful assembly,” Mr. Bishop said. He called the proposals “intimidation from the right,” saying there was scant demand for the measures from the police. In North Dakota, legislators rejected a bill similar to Tennessee’s that would have shielded motorists. But they enacted measures that expand the criminal trespass law, raise penalties for riot offenses, criminalize wearing masks and hoods while violating the law, and make it easier for police officers to assist local authorities during events like protests. Kyle Kirchmeier, the sheriff in Morton County, N. D. where the main protest camp was, cast the measures as needed additions to existing laws that were insufficient to contain the huge demonstrations. “As this went along,” he said, “there was definitely areas in the law that we’ve seen that weren’t fitting, especially when people tie themselves to equipment and that type of thing. ” But demonstrators and civil liberties advocates sense a dark ulterior motive, and describe the new North Dakota measures as thinly veiled attempts to quell dissent and criminalize protest. The bills passed the legislature with large majorities, and took effect immediately after the governor signed them. “They’re looking for clever ways to send chilling effects,” said Chase Iron Eyes, a prominent pipeline protester and recent congressional candidate who was charged with inciting a riot after a February arrest. “The state will try to devise ways to squash opposition and chill the will of people who are willing to face risks to their liberty to further their cause. ” Opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline led to a remarkable mobilization of activists, many of them Native American, who spent months camped out demanding a halt to construction. The gathering drew international headlines, prompted violent clashes with law enforcement and led to the mobilization of the National Guard and the installation of razor wire and roadblocks on rural byways. In North Dakota, a rural state with a large energy industry where gatherings of such magnitude were unprecedented, the protests exhausted police resources and brought unwelcome scrutiny. “You have something that’s chewing up tens of millions of dollars of extra law enforcement cost that we don’t have,” said Mr. Burgum, a Republican who took office in December when tensions were at a fever pitch, and who ordered the evacuation of the main camp last week. Mr. Burgum, a politician, earned praise for taking a more approach in meeting with tribal officials and protesters, and for arranging for the state to cover the cost of bus tickets and meals for demonstrators who needed help getting home. Kelly Armstrong, a state senator and the chairman of the North Dakota Republican Party, said the political environment in the state was sympathetic to law enforcement, and concerned about the monetary and reputational cost of the protests. “For the most part, everyone in North Dakota was about ready for this to be over about two weeks after this started,” Mr. Armstrong said. “The politics of it, there’s not really an upside to being a politician,” he added, using initials for the pipeline. But in that context, civil liberties advocates see the new laws as especially dangerous. Jennifer Cook, policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Dakota, said there was a “concentrated effort to criminalize protests” in the state and that the new laws were “masked as ways to protect public safety. ” “We know that the bills were inspired by the events down in Morton County,” Ms. Cook said, “and that they are focused on preventing protesters from protesting, essentially. ” | 1 |
With a supplemantry note by Lasha Darkmoon on the Transhumanist Depopulation agenda “We are now in a far worse condition than if Hitler’s clone were to become President on January 20, 2017…. Their plan is far worse than just cloning Hitler and making him President and Commander in Chief. The day of reckoning has arrived.” — Vid Rebel I never said I supported Donald Trump because I liked where he wanted us to go. I did say I was interested in the anger of the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump voters. On election night a BBC reporter tried to explain how Hillary lost that state which has a huge black vote and lots of technically advanced people from out of state in what Americans call Research-Triangle Park. Obama went there in a last ditch effort to get out the vote. He was popular there amongst the college students. They had voted for him in 2012 but not so much for Hillary in 2016. The BBC reporter told us the people who lived there said they were all Bernie voters. They had zero enthusiasm for Hillary.
I previously quoted Mike Rivero who had said that if Hillary Clinton were running in November against Godzilla, the lizard would have his vote. We have seen the Hillary Kool-Aid drinkers go crazy after Donald won. They all live in Bubbles where it would have been career suicide to say you voted against Hillary’s Pay for Pay corruption.
I have seen a lot of domestic anti-Trump propaganda from the Far Right because Donald is a Zionist. I agree with Donald that we should stop funding ISIS and let Vladimir Putin take them down. It was Obama who armed ISIS and let a small band become an international menace overnight by allowing them to take Mosul in 2014 and refusing to let the USAF take them out on that highway from Syria. But I do disagree with Donald’s intention to confront Iran. For what? Resisting Zionism?
But fortunately for Iran, what Trump and America’s rulers want will soon become irrelevant. Of course that is not Good News for Americans who blindly follow the people who think they own the government of the United States.
I have just now seen from Europe sheer post-election idiocy. Some are claiming that Donald Trump is the puppet of the Fourth Reich and is backed by the same industrialists and money men that had elevated Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship in 1933.
It is silly to think that the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds backed Trump.
I do admit that America is run by a criminal elite. I had written that Catherine Austin Fitts said the US Military and Intelligence Services had given Donald a Green Light to dish out dirt on Hillary. These men were on the inside of the vile Mechanism that runs America but even they thought Hillary was one Witch Too Far to go.
I have reported on the Elite End Game many times before. Their plan is far worse than just cloning Hitler and making him President and Commander in Chief. Far worse.
The people who had owned the governments in the West until recently were the 30 Families and their 6,000 Minions. That is according to David Rothkopf, the former CEO of Kissinger Associates and author of Superclass.
Fortunately for us, the people of the US and Europe are learning to resist.
I voted once in a Presidential election where the Democrat was a member of the Trilateral Commission headed by David Rockefeller in North America and Sir Evelyn de Rothschild in Europe. The Republican was a member of the Bilderberg Society headed by Sir Evelyn de Rothschild in Europe and headed by David Rockefeller in North America. You never read that in our Corporate Media.
Please do not call those people who run Hollywood and our TV News Nazis. They are either Jewish or work for Jewish companies.The direct ties of those who thought they were born to rule over us are more to banking than to industry. They are not Nazis. — § — THE TRANSHUMANIST DEPOPULATION AGENDA LD : In a breakthrough interview on The Transhumanist Agenda and the 2016 Presidential Election, Catherine Austin Fitts, former US Assistant Housing Secretary and Publisher of the Solari Report, spoke of the engineered rise of autism, GMO proliferation, the expansion of Entrainment Technology, the rise of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and the dumbing down of American students with Common Core. (See here) . These were all, she argued, part of an overarching conspiracy to promote a massive Transhumanist Depopulation Agenda. This would be achieved by an engineered economic Armageddon, leading to mass starvation, food riots and race wars that would wipe billions of people off the face of the planet. How soon this apocalyptic scenario is likely to unfold is anyone’s guess. Any moment now, many doomsayers declare. The coming of Donald Trump is regarded by many as an omen of the End Days. (LD) Vid Rebel continues:
Catherine Austin Fitts said the Bankers stole $50 trillion from us. I think they stole a lot more.
The Bankers gave themselves the right to charge us interest on money they created out of nothing in 1694 when they founded the Bank of England. America copied the Bank of England and the German Central Bank when they drafted the legislation for the Federal Reserve in 1910. It became law in 1913 just in time for America to create enough Unpayable Debt at Interest to fund WW I.
The United States entered WW I because the Elite did not want the Allies to accept Germany’s offer to stop the fighting in 1915. The Elite wanted the war to last long enough to bankrupt Britain and France, to set up a Jewish Communist dictatorship in Russia and to make Palestine a British colony for the Jews. None of that benefited voters in Europe or America. And the Bought and Paid For Media cannot understand why we despise both them and the 30 Families that sent them.
We are now in a far worse condition than if Hitler’s clone were to become President on January 20, 2017.
The Elite stole all of our pensions and savings. They sold hundreds of trillions in bad bets otherwise known as Credit Default Swaps just so they could pocket tens of trillions of dollars in premiums. Don’t cry for them. They made people like you (i.e. taxpayers) liable for the inevitable consequences for their actions. Just add another few hundred trillion dollars onto the pile of Unpayable Debts to be taken out of your pension fund, your savings, your bank account and your paycheck. Their malfeasance will become your obligation in the very near future. At least, that is what they are planning.
The Bankers gave you a system in which you cannot have money unless you go into debt. The Federal Reserve will not issue paper money until the Treasury gives them a bond obligating us to pay them interest on money they created out of nothing. You cannot have checking account money until someone takes out a loan and is willing to pay the Bankers interest on money they created out of nothing.
If we had Lincoln’s non-interest bearing Greenbacks, we would not have $20 trillion in national debt and be paying $500 billion a year in taxes to pay the resulting interest.
The recent sharp rise in the interest rate on 30 year Treasury bonds means our financial system is near collapse.
A Depression is a period in time when Unpayable Debts are cancelled en masse. Since we foolishly have a debt based system, that means money vanishes every time a debt is discharged in foreclosure or in bankruptcy court. It is this sudden sharp Contraction in the Money Supply that creates all the unemployment.
I have quoted Dr Steve Keen many times before. We are headed to the worst Financial Crisis in the past five centuries because we have more Unpayable Debts to cancel than at any time in the past 500 years.
So what is worse than the Fourth Reich? Tens of millions of Americans starving to death or killing their neighbors because they have nothing to eat.
In short, a Race War to end all wars.
Of course this is what America’s Elite had planned for them. They stole all of the pension funds and the savings. They created the Trade Deals that closed 58,000 manufacturing plants and sent millions of jobs overseas. They added 55 million people to the country’s population through legal and illegal immigration. They papered over unemployment by using Funny Money to hire 30.6 million federal, state and local workers making it appear like everyone was engaged in productive work. They used Funny Money to give out unearned benefits to tens of million of people to minimize starvation until the Day of Reckoning.
The Day of Reckoning has arrived.
The 30 year Treasury bond’s interest rate at 3% is at record highs for recent years. That means the crash and the Nationwide Food Riots and the Race Wars will soon be upon us. It was only Zero interest rates that kept the Ponzi scheme going this long.
The only Exit Path I see, is for the US military to be asked to stop the Food Riots as soon as they begin to ravage the country.
And the junior officers in the military must respond by arresting Bankers and seizing their assets to fund Debt Cancellation.
Only Debt Cancellation will provide a painless way out of the coming Financial Collapse. | 1 |
How Western Media Teleported a Child 'Victim' from Homs to Aleppo (PHOTOS, VIDEO)
Western media is capable of amazing feats which defy even the laws of physics Originally appeared at Russian Spring
The West keeps fighting its informational war on Russia blaming Russian Air Force for bloody crimes in Syrian Arab Republic. To persuade the world community of the fact that Moscow is to blame for catastrophic humanitarian situsation in Syria and not «moderate opposition» fighters turning the country into chaos world media descend into manipulating facts and publishing fakes.
The easily expected maximum effect has photos and videos showing children suffering from war and bombardments. Western readers keep on commenting such stories and blaiming “Assad’s regime and Putin”, but haven’t the slightest idea that those stories are skillfully made up.
«Russian Spring» has already covered a story of a girl who had been saved again and again, several times in just one month , and now we are offering a tear-squeezing vide about a girl who was teleported from Homs province to Aleppo by the Western media.
Child, where are you from?
On October 10 a footage showing allegedly one of the “bombardment victims» of Syrian Talbiseh in Homs province was published on YouTube channel of local informational resource talbisah.
And then the taer-sqeeinf video started its walk of fame thriugh media and social media: it was published on AJ+ Facebook page in particular (a Qatar-based telecom giant Al Jazzera) where it was reached by over 10 mln people (as of October 24).
Al Jazeea accompanied the video with pitiful subttles and corresponding title: «Happy Moday from Syria: this little girl is calling her dad after her house was destroyed by an airstrike».
BBC dealt with that video shortly and "relocated" the girl called Aya (as she introduced herself on the video) from Talbiseh to Aleppo by including a footage called «Aleppo: Where is my dad?» aya_bbc.jpg
Have a more attentive look on how medical staff working: even if we omit the shooting location fraud look at how strange the doctors behave. Instead of giving the first aid necessary for a kid after (alleged) bomberdment, instaed of cleaning head and face wound to minimize comtamination risk the doctors (or the actros playing doctors) keep walking around the girl wearing a troubled look not to hinder filming the vdeo.
Quite thick and artificail-looking blood cathes our eye as well as dark-blue bruises under girl’s eyes lookking a lot like make-up.
The whole video looks like a staged one, the authors and creators have just used a win-win tactics for their short film: a child wounded at war.
Twitter star
The journalists kept on using the pretty-looking mode in their propaganda. Som time later the girl was given a poster which read “Don’t bomb me again. It hurts. Aya” and made another tear-sqeezing photo which was then published by some Omar Qayson calling himself war journalists and media activist on his Twitter page . aya_twit.jpg
It’s laughable but “media activist’s” Twiiter «has only 11 posts open to public and the first of them is a photo of a bird killed by bombardments, the three last are reposts of the aforementioned Aya’s photograph.
Hashtags he chosen for his photo (Children of Syria and Russian kills us ) confirm the obvious fact: social media accounts like that are created by Western journalists with just one aim — to spread false photo and videos blaimimg Russia for «bloody crimes against Syrian people». | 0 |
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There are times that we are guilty of doing things that are offensive and we are unaware. Not knowing the culture you offend puts you in a position to seem bigoted. But are you responsible for how others perceive your words? Are you accountable to ensure that no one is ever offended by your words and actions? Is that even possible?
It seems that this is now what is expected of DePaul University students. They are only to express themselves in ways that others will not take offense.
The Washington Times reports :
The nation’s largest Catholic university told a group of pro-life students that it could not display posters reading “Unborn Lives Matter,” lest they provoke the Black Lives Matter movement.
In a letter to the College Republicans, DePaul University president Father Dennis Holtschneider said the posters contained “bigotry” veiled “under the cover of free speech,” the Daily Wire reported.
“By our nature, we are committed to developing arguments and exploring important issues that can be steeped in controversy and, oftentimes, emotion,” Mr. Holtschneider said in the letter. “Yet there will be times when some forms of speech challenge our grounding in Catholic and Vincentian values. When that happens, you will see us refuse to allow members of our community be subjected to bigotry that occurs under the cover of free speech.”
So to twist the popular slogan of one group to fit another group is bigoted? Would they feel this way if the sign were different? What if the sign read, “Black Unborn Lives Matter,” would that be bigoted?
The truth is, the university is beginning to crack down on freedom of speech and expression, if those thoughts and expressions are conservative. More mind control from the left.
Article reposted with permission from Constitution.com shares | 0 |
Posted on October 31, 2016 by Carol Adl in News , US // 0 Comments
The United Nations and Amnesty International have both announced that they are sending officials to investigate allegations of human rights violations at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.
According to a UN press release expert Grand Chief Edward John was due to arrive at Standing Rock on Saturday 30th October to gather information on human rights violations RELATED CONTENT UN Panel Warns About Israel & Saudi Arabia’s Human Rights Violations
Grand Chief Edward John has been an Indigenous expert member of the UNPFII from North America for the past six years.
As a UN expert, he will be visiting in his official capacity to observe the continued impacts of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) construction such as threats to water, treaty rights and sacred areas.
He will also collect information and testimonies on the escalating levels of repression, violence and intimidation against tribal members and their supporters by state law enforcement, private security and the National Guard. Roberto Borrero representing the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) will accompany him as a human rights observer. IITC Board member William Means of the Oglala Lakota Nation is already on site.
Inquisitr reports:
Amnesty International announced Friday that they were sending a delegation of human rights observers to monitor the response of law enforcement against DAPL protesters after concerns mounted about increasingly violent actions towards the peaceful protesters. “A Shameful Moment for This Country”: Report Back on Militarized Police Raid of DAPL Resistance Camp https://t.co/grje8XIA3N pic.twitter.com/mzDNDDy7tS
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) October 28, 2016
Police have responded to protesters in some instances with pepper spray, bean bags, and other controversial means, and used private security staff with guard dogs in one confrontation with protesters that included women and children. Amnesty International also reports that those recently arrested have reported being strip searched and forced to pay bail for minor offenses.
Members of the media and legal observers have also been arrested or charged with minor offenses. The arrest of journalists and filmmakers covering the #DAPL is a threat to democracy #StandWithAmy
— Sam Praus (@SamanthaPraus) October 17, 2016
Amnesty International sent a letter to the Morton County Sheriff’s Department expressing concern about the degree of force used against the protesters and is calling on the Department of Justice to investigate the police practices being used against them.
“Arrests of protesters, who call themselves water protectors, have increased in recent weeks and law enforcement has employed a more militarized response to protests and encampments near the construction site of the Dakota Access Pipeline.” The international human rights agency sent a delegation of observers to the area in August. They report that they have stayed in contact both with members of the Standing Rock community and those policing the protests since then. Live from #StandingRock #NoDAPL prayer ceremony/drum circle on road blocked by police for DAPL workers- making clear who they serve&protect pic.twitter.com/tD3iUzcm3g
— NYC Revolution Club (@NYCRevClub) October 29, 2016 * | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Rex W. Tillerson, the former chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday in a vote to become the nation’s 69th secretary of state just as serious strains have emerged with important international allies. The votes against Mr. Tillerson’s confirmation were the most in Senate history for a secretary of state, a reflection of Democratic unease with President Trump’s early foreign policy pronouncements that threaten to upend a multilateral approach that has guided United States presidents since World War II. Thirteen senators voted in 2005 against Condoleezza Rice in the midst of a deteriorating Iraq war, and in 1825, Henry Clay was confirmed 27 to 14, the record for votes against until Wednesday, according to a tally provided by the Senate Historical Office. In a brief ceremony in the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump said Mr. Tillerson understood “the importance of strengthening our alliances and forming new alliances to enhance our strategic interests and the safety of our people. ” Mr. Trump added, “It’s time to bring a focus on foreign affairs, to take a fresh look at the world around us, and to seek new solutions grounded in very ancient truths. ” Mr. Tillerson thanked him and promised to “represent the interests of all of the American people at all times. ” Mr. Tillerson is expected to appear at the State Department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters on Thursday morning, when he will address department employees. Mr. Trump’s unapologetically nationalistic approach has put into question the value of many alliances and multilateral institutions. How Mr. Tillerson’s translates Mr. Trump’s vow of “America First” into the kind of polite diplomatic parlance that will maintain vital ties will be a significant test. Among his other challenges are dealing with Mr. Trump’s promises to recast relations with China and Russia, move the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, and an international nuclear deal with Iran. In a White House briefing on Wednesday, Michael Flynn, the national security adviser, issued a stern warning to Iran. “The Obama administration failed to respond adequately to Tehran’s malign actions,” he said. Mr. Tillerson, 64, a Texan, earned an engineering degree from the University of Texas at Austin, got a job at Exxon in 1975 and climbed his way to the top, leaving only last year. Neither a diplomat, soldier nor politician, he is an unconventional choice for the job, but has vast international experience. With operations on six continents, Exxon Mobil is in some ways a state within a state. As its chief executive, Mr. Tillerson struck deals with repressive governments — in at least one case, against the advice of the State Department. Environmentalists largely opposed his nomination. But his views on international affairs are in many ways more conventional than those of Mr. Trump, which is why even foreign affairs experts said they welcomed his selection in hopes he would bring ballast to a turbulent administration. “Rex Tillerson will have the most demanding and complex agenda to face a secretary of state in a very long time,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor and career foreign service officer. Another crucial question will be how much influence Mr. Tillerson has on Mr. Trump. All cabinet secretaries must compete for power with White House aides who have long personal relationships with and frequent access to the president. But Mr. Trump’s reliance on a close circle of advisers to write and vet executive orders while keeping departments that must implement them largely in the dark is without precedent. Mr. Trump invited Mr. Tillerson for a private lunch at the White House on Wednesday, the first time Mr. Tillerson has appeared on the president’s official schedule. Mollifying allies infuriated by Mr. Trump’s orders could be a job. A ban on refugee arrivals and entries from seven Muslim countries, for instance, has enraged Iraqi officials whose cooperation is vital in the fight against the Islamic State — a top administration priority. It has also infuriated many European leaders crucial to efforts not only in Syria, but Afghanistan and Libya as well, and it has tarnished what had been viewed as a successful trip by Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, who on Monday said she opposed the ban. Relations with Mexico have plunged to their lowest level in decades after Mr. Trump insisted he would build a border wall regardless of Mexican opposition. The relationship with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany threatened to become toxic after Peter Navarro, the director of Mr. Trump’s new National Trade Council, denounced the relatively low value of the euro as an unfair currency advantage for Germany. “Tillerson faces the most difficult task of any secretary of state in the postwar era in trying to reconcile President Trump’s intention to make a stark break from decades of bipartisan consensus U. S. foreign policy leadership with the reality that, if he succeeds, such a break could lead to global chaos,” said Ryan C. Crocker, who served as the United States ambassador to five Muslim countries. Mr. Tillerson may also face difficult internal hurdles. Much of his department’s top leadership has departed — many because the Trump administration, like others before it, refused to keep political appointees. But the Trump transition team has been so and the pickings among Republican foreign policy veterans who had not criticized Mr. Trump so slim that dozens of positions are likely to remain empty for some time. More worrisome, morale among the department’s career officers has plunged, with a dissent memo against the administration’s refugee and entry bans being submitted on Tuesday garnering more than 900 signatures, an extraordinary number. Whether Mr. Tillerson meets these challenges with defiance or moderation will be a telling indication of his leadership. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said Monday that foreign service officers “can get with the program or they can go. ” | 1 |
Some of the most fascinating conversations about class anxiety aren’t happening on cable news networks these days but on a more unexpected place on television: shows like “Atlanta,” “ ” and “Insecure,” which have explored a profound, if largely ignored, economic issue — black downward mobility. On “” the Johnson family is led by Dre, a marketing executive, and Bow, a doctor. They have four children in private school and a house in an affluent, predominantly white neighborhood in Los Angeles. They took a vacation to Disney World estimated to cost more than $20, 000. But despite the family’s seeming stability, “ ” is largely about class tension. A central dilemma is Dre’s battle between his financial aspirations and racial authenticity, his and his loyalty to his roots. One of the best episodes this season, “Jack of All Trades,” opens with Dre (Anthony Anderson) and Bow (Tracee Ellis Ross) learning of their young twins’ career test results: Diane (Marsai Martin) might be in a “position of power in a political organization,” while Jack (Miles Brown) is likely to be “a member of a unionized group of skilled laborers. ” Despite Jack’s obvious excitement about, and talent for, the manual trades, his parents become obsessed with redirecting his career trajectory, worried that he will be pigeonholed, like Dre’s father, Pops (Laurence Fishburne) in a job for the rest of his life. As Pop’s presence reminds us, while Dre’s parents worked hard to provide him with an education, Dre did not inherit wealth, making his status both new and fragile. This is a legitimate worry because more and more members of the middle class are finding themselves in an economic downslide, with little hope that the next generation will earn more than the one before. In 2015, the Pew Research Center released a report detailing that the number of American households earning a income had reached its lowest point in over 40 years. And the gap between the wealth of white and black families has widened to its highest level since 1989, according to a Pew report from 2014. Black male children raised in households in the late 1970s and early ’80s have fallen out of the middle class at particularly higher rates than white male children after becoming adults, another Pew report found. On shows like Donald Glover’s “Atlanta” on FX and Issa Rae’s “Insecure” on HBO, both about a group of professionally striving and financially struggling (and both, along with “” nominated for Golden Globes) the theme of black downward mobility is put into high relief. “Comedy in the black community is almost always about struggle,” said Mary Pattillo, author of “Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class. ” “And while exploring class differences is not new for black sitcoms, it is important that these themes are reproduced and restaged for each generation. The specifics might be different, but every generation returns to this theme because the precarity of the black middle class has not disappeared. ” On “Atlanta,” we meet Earn, a Princeton dropout who grew up in a family and who works at an airport kiosk. He quits that job to manage his cousin, an rapper named Alfred Miles, known as Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) who has a song on the radio but makes a living as a drug dealer. Earn’s economic instability is exacerbated when his girlfriend and his daughter’s mother, Van (Zazie Beetz) loses her job as an elementary schoolteacher because it was the only constant source of income for the family. “‘Atlanta’ offers up a realistic portrait of the vulnerability that the black middle class faces today,” said Jessica S. Welburn, a sociologist at the University of Iowa who researches downward mobility. “While the election of the first president gives many a sense of progress, racial disparities have also intensified and limited what has typically been a pathway to the middle class for like a college degree or a government job. Knowing this, still try to break through these barriers with obviously mixed results. ” “The Jacket,” the season finale of “Atlanta,” offers up one of the most pointed critiques of structural racism that I have seen on television this year: Neither Earn’s childhood nor his Princeton education can protect him from the constraints that he and his friends find themselves under. After Earn wakes up in a strange house in a strange bed without his jacket, we follow him on an increasingly desperate search in increasingly dangerous situations. He finally arrives outside the home of the Uber driver who has his jacket, only to witness him being shot by the police. As extraordinary as that trauma might be for most Americans, the show portrays the sort of everyday violence to which and Latinos, of various classes, are vulnerable. If race is intimately tied to class, so is gender, as Ms. Rae’s “Insecure” so poignantly reminds us. The main conflict on the series is its female protagonists, Issa and her best friend, Molly (Yvonne Orji) navigating the muddy waters of millennial dating. We first meet Issa, who works at a nonprofit, and her boyfriend, Lawrence (Jay Ellis) on shaky ground. Despite his Georgetown degree, Lawrence is an entrepreneur unable to finalize his business plan or find a corporate job. He settles on working at Best Buy, and later, with encouragement from Issa, sets aside his dream of developing an app to take a gig at a tech . And while the season concludes with a breakup, their relationship was perhaps doomed from the beginning, by his inertia, his unemployment and their economic insecurity. Through Molly, a lawyer who brilliantly between corporate and colloquial vernacular, the show explores how class mobility often differs for women and men. After a string of disappointing romantic encounters, Molly ends up dating Jared (Langston Kerman) a witty, caring guy whom Issa jokingly calls “ ” because he works at Enterprise. Molly ends their relationship (the first of two times) after she and her friends find out he did not attend college. Averil Y. Clarke, author of “Inequalities of Love: Black Women and the Barriers to Romance and Family,” said: “ black women are plagued by a very common racial problem. They, like most women, are encouraged to pursue the script: Go to college, get a good job and get married and have kids. ” She added, “But, when it comes to dating, black women’s class aspirations are more likely to be unfulfilled than white women, their femininity and sense of value more likely to feel under assault. ” Historically, whether it was the striving of “The Jeffersons” or “The Fresh Prince of ” or the settings of shows like “Sanford and Son,” “Roc” or “Thea,” class differences have dominated black sitcoms in the era. That these three recent shows are all created by (Kenya Barris created “ ”) might enable them to attend differently to these nuances of lives. Ms. Rae said in an interview with Vox, “This isn’t a show exclusively about, like, the struggle of being black. ” Instead, “It’s just regular black people living life. ” By setting her show in South Los Angeles, she is able to reveal the spectrum of class diversity, as she noted in an interview with The Daily Beast: “Yes, there’s poverty there, there are gang members there, but there’s also affluence, there’s middle class, and everybody meshes together. ” Likewise, Mr. Glover said in an interview with Vulture, “I wanted to show white people, you don’t know everything about black culture. ” In that same interview, he underscores that one key difference is how he depicts class diversity. When Mr. Glover heard a suggestion that Paper Boi live in a “traplike” home, he refused. “We were like: ‘No, he’s a drug dealer, he makes enough money to live in a regular apartment. ’” He added, “There were some things so subtle and black that people had no idea what we were talking about. ” Taken together, these sitcoms remind us of the centrality of race, not just to our conversations but to policies around income inequality. That the coming years may yield a hiring freeze on the federal work force, the continuing decline of unions, and more suffering for both and is no laughing matter. But, as the adage goes: Sometimes we simply have to laugh to keep from crying. | 1 |
Report: Friend Has Been Going By Middle Name This Whole Fucking Time CALABASAS, CA—Astounded that it had never come up at any point in the six years they had known each other, local woman Lucy Reed, 25, reported Tuesday that her friend Nicole Silberthau had apparently been going by her middle name this whole fucking time. Teary-Eyed Tim Kaine Asks Clinton If His Hair Will Grow Back In Time For Election Day NEW YORK—His lower lip quivering while showing his running mate the uneven patches on his head where he attempted to give himself a trim, a teary-eyed Tim Kaine reportedly asked Hillary Clinton this morning if his hair would grow back in time for Election Day. | 0 |
Marissa Alexander no longer wears an ankle monitor. She is now free to go to the park and play basketball with her children in her Jacksonville, Fla. neighborhood. She can ride a bicycle and stroll on the beach, which she dreamed about in prison. “I didn’t carry an umbrella when I first got home,” she said, “because I wanted to feel the rain drops on my skin. ” Ms. Alexander, 36, spent almost a years either locked in prison or confined to her house after she was convicted of aggravated assault charges in 2012 for firing a warning shot at her husband, who she said had abused her. According to her account in court documents, he had threatened her nine days after she gave birth to their daughter. Ms. Alexander was finally freed on Jan. 27. She plans to take up the fight for domestic abuse victims and push for a change in what advocates have called the uneven application of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. She will advocate amending the law in order to take the burden of proof off defendants who have to demonstrate in pretrial hearings that they acted in and deserve immunity from trial. In Florida, the law allows for the use of deadly force in with no duty to retreat when a violent intruder breaks into a home or car. That shield was denied her in 2011, when a judge in a pretrial hearing rejected her attempt to use the law, saying she did not meet the burden of proof because there was a “factual dispute” on her Stand Your Ground defense. That led to her trial and ultimate conviction, said Faith E. Gay, one of Ms. Alexander’s lawyers. “Here is a black woman who had a history of abuse against her and tried to use Stand Your Ground and ended up with a sentence,” Bruce Zimet, one Ms. Alexander’s lawyers, said in a telephone interview. Ms. Alexander said of how she believed the court viewed her defense, “It was a crime from the jump,” adding, the Stand Your Ground law “was never considered. ” On Thursday, she plans to speak before a Florida Senate committee meeting in support of that proposed amendment to the law. If enacted, it would shift the burden of proof from defendants to prosecutors. State Senator Rob Bradley, a sponsor of the bill, said, “I think it is important that anybody who feels that the criminal system has affected them shares their stories. ” In the years since the shooting, Ms. Alexander has become the face of efforts to challenge laws, like the state’s rules, that can have an impact on cases. The events that sent Ms. Alexander down a path to prison began in August 2010. She and her husband began arguing, according to court records, and Ms. Alexander said she fired at him in . But prosecutors noted that the bullet went into the wall behind her husband rather than into the ceiling, and they asserted that she had fired “out of anger,” Mr. Zimet, her lawyer, said. Ms. Alexander was convicted and, because of the sentencing laws, initially received 20 years in prison, according to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Her husband at the time, Rico Gray Sr. acknowledged in a hearing that there had been previous instances of violence, and the trial judge allowed the testimony to be introduced as evidence, court documents and Ms. Gay said. Mr. Gray could not be reached for comment. But the lawyer who represented him, Richard R. Kuritz, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that Mr. Gray cooperated with prosecutors because he wanted the case resolved so as not to put his children through the process. “People have lost sight of the fact that he was standing with his son when she came back into the house with the gun,’’ Mr. Kuritz said. “He was unarmed and she shot at him. ” In 2013, Ms. Alexander’s conviction was overturned on appeal. As she was awaiting a new trial, she negotiated a plea agreement that allowed her to serve three years in prison and two years confined to her house. Some have compared her case to another, more prominent, one in Florida: that of George Zimmerman, who was tried and cleared in 2012 in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager. Although the Stand Your Ground law was not a factor in Mr. Zimmerman’s defense — his lawyers argued he shot in — it was part of the jury’s instructions and played a role in the way the police approached the initial investigation. Protesters have demanded changes to the law, which some prosecutors and police officers say is vague and has been misused by people to avoid prosecution. “It was highly controversial because it encourages vigilantism, but it seems to have not been applied evenly,” Ms. Gay said. Florida was the first state to pass a Stand Your Ground law, in 2005, with strong support from the National Rifle Association. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 23 other states have such laws. In Louisiana, the authorities invoked the state’s own version of the laws to defend the pace of their investigation into the shooting death of the former N. F. L. player Joe McKnight and their treatment of the suspect, Ronald Gasser Jr. who was freed initially. The sheriff said officials needed time to build a better case. Eventually, Mr. Gasser was indicted on a murder charge last week. The Miami Herald also reported that last month defense lawyers invoked the state law to try to have charges dismissed against a Louisiana man accused of shooting three people outside a Key West strip club in 2016. Ms. Alexander’s case also became part of the debate over the state’s mandatory sentencing laws, which require 10 years, 20 years or life in prison in cases involving someone firing warning shots and the possession or use of a firearm. Some have argued that the guidelines take discretion out of judges’ hands. “It is pure ” Ms. Gay said. Florida lawmakers eventually removed the charge of aggravated assault — the same charge Ms. Alexander was given. Ms. Alexander served her sentence in Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala, Fla. Her time in prison took her away from her job at a payroll processing company, as well as from her three children. Now, she is doing consulting work for an elementary school and has established a nonprofit called the Marissa Alexander Justice Project, which will provide advocacy in cases of domestic violence, as well as promote policy reform. Free Marissa Now, an alliance of activists that had campaigned for Ms. Alexander’s release, said in a statement that there were many more such cases, and it linked to those compiled by Survived and Punished advocates that involve abused women caught up in the system after being charged, or in prison or immigration detention. Ms. Alexander said: “I have had another opportunity, a second chance, and I believe everybody deserves that. So I am going to live my best life going forward. ” | 1 |
Nathan Wellman | November 17, 2016
The felony charges facing some of the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters who were arrested during last October’s raid have been dismissed by a local judge.
The protesters – who prefer to be referred to as water protectors – clashed with police in riot gear who were under orders to clear them out of the way for the controversial pipeline. The water protectors refused, saying they owned the land according to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 , which gave control of the land to various Native American tribes. (The treaty was quickly broken after its ratification, mostly by the U.S. government, but also by a few rogue tribe members.)
The confrontation lasted for hours, with police deploying ear-damaging sound cannons against protesters, as well as pepper spray and rubber bullets. Protesters set a few contained fires and a few of them threw objects at police.
After the confrontation, 147 people were arrested, with 139 of them being charged with a felony count of conspiracy to endanger by fire or explosion and two misdemeanor counts.
For the felony charge, prosecutors claimed that some form of informal agreement was made by the accused to set fires throughout the day, putting local state officials and the natural surroundings at risk. South Central District Judge Cynthia Feland noted that the affidavit against the protesters did not name who planned this crime, nor how and when the crime was committed, or even when this agreement was made. “As far as the court can tell from the facts alleged in the affidavit, these fires were set sporadically, at different locations, by different individuals, seemingly at random,” Feland said. “The state has not alleged facts sufficient to show an explicit or implicit agreement between the 139 defendants to commit the offense charged.” While the felony charge was thrown out, protesters continue to be charged with misdemeanor counts of engaging in a riot and maintaining a public nuisance. While the ruling is a victory for the Dakota water protecters, Feland did make a point to note that “the court recognizes the extreme stress under which law enforcement officers and the prosecutors bringing these charges have been operating. This order should not be considered a criticism of their efforts or a suggestion the arrest in this matter was not appropriate.”
Nathan Wellman is a Los Angeles-based journalist, author, and playwright. Follow him on Twitter: @LightningWOW Filed under | 0 |
Lines Profit Misses Estimates as Ads Push Meets Slow Growth
26 October 2016 , by Pavel Alpeyev and Takashi Amano (Bloomberg)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-26/line-s-third-quarter-operating-profit-misses-analyst-estimates
- Users increased 3.5% to 220 million as of September
- Line forecast full-year sales will climb on ad revenues | 0 |
Topics: Twitter , Pies Wednesday, 26 October 2016
Greggs bakery shops in Ashton, Manchester, Salford and Liverpool were targeted by angry mobs yesterday, after a hoax message on Twitter, announced that the company were withdrawing pasties from their product range.
The Greggs pastie is renowned as the staple diet of the working classes, and its devotees can been seen walking around town centres clutching its famous blue bag with the ubiquitous hot, greasy snack poking out of the top.
Thousands of the treats are consumed daily, by the lower ends of society, who cannot afford luxury foods such as baked beans or spaghetti hoops, and fears grew that there would be mass cases of starvation as low earners and benefit claimants were priced out of the food chain completely.
A Red Cross spokesman told us that the situation was so bad, that they were flying back 50,000 corned beef hash and 25,000 sausage and baked bean slices that were on their way to Syrian refugee camps.
Riot police and fire fighters were deployed in the affected areas, and police told us that by late afternoon the crowds had been dispersed and order had been restored. They did however say that there was still some areas of disorder in Liverpool, but they were hoping to restore order soon, as the police helicopter had circled low over the crowd dropping thousands of job application forms, which seemed to be scattering the rioters away from the trouble spots.
Late yesterday afternoon the chairman of Greggs, Sir Fred Battenburg, told a hastily gathered press conference that they had been the victims of a malicious hoax, and that the company had no intentions of withdrawing its best selling product. He went on to say that the company did intend to remove an item from their shops next month, namely the fruit scone, as this was not a big seller with mainstream pastie eaters. He appealed for calm in the affected areas, and assured customers that the fire damaged stores would be open for business as soon as possible.
Last night police reported that groups of angry pensioners and housewives had gathered outside Greggs shops in the stockbroker areas of Hale, Wilmslow, Bowden and Alderly Edge. A spokesman said the protesters were angrily tapping on the shop windows with umbrellas and shoe heels, and shouting "shame on you""how dare you" and "do you know who I am" at staff who had locked the doors in panic.
An elderly woman, believed to be chair of the Dunham Massey Womens Guild, Lady Dorothy Schiffer-Brains, was arrested by police and later charged with 'aggressively prodding a police officer with a rolled up copy of Cheshire Life.
Lady Schiffer-Brains is due to appear before Knutsford magistrates later today. Make dulcie gabbani's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!) | 0 |
Reports of the number of layoffs to befall employees at cable sports network ESPN have been steadily increasing, but no one expected that the full measure would amount to 100 employees. The shocking toll was realized today as employees began receiving their pink slips. [Weeks ago some reports speculated that as many as 40 employees would be shown the door, and on Tuesday some were raising that ceiling to perhaps 70. But, as April 26 dawned, the final number was revealed with a whopping 100 employees fired. ESPN President John Skipper sent out the feared memo on Wednesday informing employees that the time had come. About half of those let go are names to ESPN fans. One of the first to alert fans to his fate was reporter Ed Werder, who took to Twitter to tell the sorry tale. After 17 years reporting on #NFL, I’ve been informed that I’m being laid off by ESPN effective immediately. I have no plans to retire, — Ed Werder (@Edwerderespn) April 26, 2017, Among the many others fired are hockey writers Pierre LeBrun, Scott Burnside and Joe McDonald, college reporter Dana O’Neil, and soccer reporter Mike L. Goodman, according to the New York Post. Other employees taking reduced roles and reduced paychecks at the sports network including Hannah Storm, Karl Ravech, and ESPN Radio’s Ryen Russillo. The layoffs come just ahead of Disney’s financial report and on the heels of the company’s announcement of a major deficit due to high costs of keeping the sports cable network afloat. The sports network has steadily lost ground and profitability, losing over 10, 000 subscribers a month while saddled with hundreds of millions in broadcast fees levied by the various national leagues. ESPN also has reportedly lost over 12 million subscribers over the last five years. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 0 |
posted by Eddie Scientists at Zurich-based DNA genealogy center, iGENEA, have reconstructed the DNA profile of King Tut, his father Akhenaten and grandfather Amenhotep III. Researchers discovered that King Tut belonged to a genetic profile group known as haplogroup R1b1a2. More than 50 per cent of all men in Western Europe belong to this genetic group as do up to 70 per cent of British men. But among modern-day Egyptians, less than 1 per cent of residents belong to this haplogroup, according to scientists. King Tut and Europeans share a common ancestor genetically who lived in the Caucasus region, the blue-eyed race spreading out with agricultural about 9,500 years ago. The geneticists were not sure how Tutankhamun’s paternal lineage came to Egypt from its region of origin, though it is clear that technology such as chariots and domesticated horses was introduced from a foreign source. Along with the discovery, researchers made another announcement this week: they will conduct testing to find which modern-day European is the closest living relative of King Tut. “The offer has only been publicized for three days but we have already seen a lot of interest,” Roman Scholz, lead director at the DNA genealogy center in Zurich, Switzerland.
Dating almost 6,000 years to the Pre-dynastic period of ancient Egypt, this figure is of a man, with a shaven head and a long pointed beard. There is little detail on the figure but what there is, is concentrated on the face, his eyes are inlaid with light green stones and are the most arresting part of the figure. This is already typical of Egyptian art – they are obsessed with the eyes and more attention is usually given to them than almost any other aspect of a person. Louvre, Paris, France. Archaeologists in Egypt have recently unearthed a beautiful 5,000+ year-old wooden statue, complete with gold wrapping paper and precious lapis lazuli stones as striking blue eyes, dated from Egypt’s pre-dynastic era (3,700-3,200 BC), before the age of pharaohs, among the oldest such artifacts ever found to date. source: | 0 |
Waking Up in Hillary Clinton’s America Wall Street in the Saddle Email This Page to Someone Your Name Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email =>
As this endless election limps toward its last days, while spiraling into a bizarre duel over vote-rigging accusations, a deep sigh is undoubtedly in order. The entire process has been an emotionally draining, frustration-inducing, rage-inflaming spectacle of repellent form over shallow substance. For many, the third debate evoked fatigue. More worrying, there was again no discussion of how to prevent another financial crisis, an ominous possibility in the next presidency, whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton enters the Oval Office — given that nothing fundamental has been altered when it comes to Wall Street’s practices and predation.
At the heart of American political consciousness right now lies a soul-crushing reality for millions of distraught Americans: the choices for president couldn’t be feebler or more disappointing. On the one hand, we have a petulant, vocabulary-challenged man-boar of a billionaire, who hasn’t paid his taxes, has regularly left those supporting him holding the bag , and seems like a ludicrous composite of every bad trait in every bad date any woman has ever had. On the other hand, we’re offered a walking photo-op for and well-paid speechmaker to Wall-Street CEOs, a one-woman money-raising machine from the 1% of the 1%, who, despite a folksiness that couldn’t look more rehearsed, has methodically outplayed her opponent.
With less than two weeks to go before E-day — despite the Trumptilian upheaval of the last year — the high probability of a Clinton win means the establishment remains intact. When we awaken on November 9th, it will undoubtedly be dawn in Hillary Clinton’s America and that potentially means four years of an economic dystopia that will (as would Donald Trump’s version of the same) leave many Americans rightfully anxious about their economic futures.
None of the three presidential debates suggested that either candidate would have the ability (or desire) to confront Wall Street from the Oval Office. In the second and third debates, in case you missed them, Hillary didn’t even mention the Glass-Steagall Act, too big to fail, or Wall Street. While in the first debate, the subject of Wall Street only came up after she disparaged the tax policies of “ Trumped-up, trickle down economics ” (or, as I like to call it, the Trumpledown economics of giving tax and financial benefits to the rich and to corporations).
In this election, Hillary has crafted her talking points regarding the causes of the last financial crisis as weapons against Trump, but they hardly begin to tell the real story of what happened to the American economy. The meltdown of 2007-2008 was not mainly due to “tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy” or a “failure to invest in the middle class,” two subjects she has repeatedly highlighted to slam the Republicans and their candidate. It was a byproduct of the destruction of the regulations that opened the way for a too-big-to-fail framework to thrive. Under the presidency of Bill Clinton, Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era act that once separated people’s bank deposits and loans from any kind of risky bets or other similar actions in which banks might engage, was repealed under the Financial Modernization Act of 1999. In addition, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was passed, which allowed Wall Street to concoct devastating unregulated side bets on what became the subprime crisis.
Given that the people involved with those choices are still around and some are still advising (or in the case of one former president living with) Hillary Clinton, it’s reasonable to imagine that, in January 2017, she’ll launch the third term of Bill Clinton when it comes to financial policy, banks, and the economy. Only now, the stakes are even higher, the banks larger, and their impunity still remarkably unchallenged.
Consider President Obama’s current treasury secretary, Jack Lew. It was Hillary who hit the Clinton Rolodex to bring him back to Washington. Lew first entered Bill Clinton’s White House in 1993 as special assistant to the president. Between his stints working for Clinton and Obama, he made his way into the private sector and eventually to Wall Street — as so many of his predecessors had done and successors would do. He scored a leadership role with Citigroup during the time that Bill Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs co-Chairman ) Robert Rubin was on its board of directors. In 2009 , Hillary selected him to be her deputy secretary of state.
Lew is hardly the only example of the busy revolving door to power that led from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration via Wall Street (or activities connected to it). Bill Clinton’s Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs , Timothy Geithner worked with Robert Rubin, later championed Wall Street as president and CEO of the New York Federal Reserve while Hillary was senator from New York (representing Wall Street), and then became Obama’s first treasury secretary while Hillary was secretary of state .
One possible contender for treasury secretary in a new Clinton administration would be Bill Clinton’s Under Secretary of Domestic Finance and Obama’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman, Gary Gensler (who was — I’m sure you won’t be shocked — a Goldman Sachs partner before entering public service). These, then, are typical inhabitants of the Clinton inner circle and of the political-financial corridors of power. Their thinking, like Hillary’s, meshes well with support for the status quo in the banking system, even if, like her, they are willing on occasion to admonish it for its “mistakes.”
This thru-line of personnel in and out of Clinton World is dangerous for most of the rest of us, because behind all the “talking heads” and genuinely amusing Saturday Night Live skits about this bizarre election lie certain crucial issues that will have to be dealt with: decisions about climate change, foreign wars, student-loan unaffordability, rising income inequality , declining social mobility , and, yes, the threat of another financial crisis. And keep in mind that such a future economic meltdown isn’t an absurdly long-shot possibility. Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve, the nation’s main bank regulator, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation , the government entity that insures our bank deposits, collectively noted that seven of our biggest eight banks — Citigroup was the exception — still have inadequate emergency plans in the event of another financial crisis.
Exploring a Two-Faced World
Politicians regularly act one way publicly and another privately, as Hillary was “outed” for doing by WikiLeaks via its document dump from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s hacked email account. Such realities should be treated as neither shockers nor smoking guns. Everybody postures. Everybody lies. Everybody’s two-faced in certain aspects of their lives. Politicians just make a career out of it.
What’s problematic about Hillary’s public and private positions in the economic sphere, at least, isn’t their two-facedness but how of a piece they are. Yes, she warned the bankers to “ cut it out ! Quit foreclosing on homes! Quit engaging in these kinds of speculative behaviors!” — but that was no demonstration of strength in relation to the big banks. Her comments revealed no real understanding of their precise role in exacerbating a fixable subprime loan calamity and global financial crisis, nor did her finger-wagging mean anything to Wall Street.
Keep in mind that, during the build-up to that crisis, as banks took advantage of looser regulations, she collected more than $7 million from the securities and investment industry for her New York Senate runs ( $18 million during her career). In her first Senate campaign, Citigroup was her top contributor. The four Wall-Street-based banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) all feature among her top 10 career contributors. As a senator, she didn’t introduce any bills aimed at reforming or regulating Wall Street. During the lead-up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008, she did introduce five (out of 140) bills relating to the housing crisis, but they all died before making it through a Senate committee. So did a bill she sponsored to curtail corporate executive compensation. Though she has publicly called for a reduction in hedge-fund tax breaks (known as “closing the carried interest loophole”), including at the second debate , she never signed on to the bill that would have done so (one that Obama co-sponsored in 2007). Perhaps her most important gesture of support for Wall Street was her vote in favor of the $700 billion 2008 bank bailout bill. (Bernie Sanders opposed it.)
After her secretary of state stint, she returned to the scene of banking crimes. Many times. As we know, she was also paid exceedingly well for it. Friendship with the Clintons doesn’t come cheap . As she said in October 2013, while speaking at a Goldman Sachs AIMS Alternative Investments’ Symposium, “running for office in our country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it. New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle.”
Between 2013 and 2015, she gave 12 speeches to Wall Street banks, private equity firms, and other financial corporations, reaping a whopping $2,935,000 for them. In her 2016 presidential run, the securities and investment sector (aka Wall Street) has contributed the most of any industry to PACs supporting Hillary: $56.4 million .
Yes, everybody needs to make a buck or a few million of them. This is America after all, but Hillary was a political figure paid by the same banks routinely getting slapped with criminal settlements by the Department of Justice. In addition, the Clinton Foundation counted as generous donors all four of the major Wall Street-based mega-banks. She was voracious when it came to such money and tone-deaf when it came to the irony of it all.
Glass-Steagall and Bernie Sanders
One of the more illuminating aspects of the Podesta emails was a series of communications that took place in the fall of 2015. That’s when Bernie Sanders was gaining traction for, among other things, his calls to break up the big banks and resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The Clinton administration’s dismantling of that act in 1999 had freed the big banks to use their depositors’ money as collateral for risky bets in the real estate market and elsewhere, and so allowed them to become ever more engorged with questionable securities.
On December 7, 2015, with her campaign well underway and worried about the Sanders challenge, the Clinton camp debuted a key Hillary op-ed , “How I’d Rein in Wall Street,” in the New York Times . This followed two months of emails and internal debate within her campaign over whether supporting the return of Glass-Steagall was politically palatable for her and whether not supporting it would antagonize Senator Elizabeth Warren. In the end, though Glass-Steagall was mentioned in passing in her op-ed, she chose not to endorse its return.
She explained her decision not to do so this way (and her advisers and media apostles have stuck with this explanation ever since):
“Some have urged the return of a Depression-era rule called Glass-Steagall , which separated traditional banking from investment banking. But many of the firms that contributed to the crash in 2008, like A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers, weren’t traditional banks, so Glass-Steagall wouldn’t have limited their reckless behavior. Nor would restoring Glass-Steagall help contain other parts of the ‘shadow banking’ sector, including certain activities of hedge funds, investment banks, and other non-bank institutions.”
Her entire characterization of how the 2007-2008 banking crisis unfolded was — well — wrong. Here’s how traditional banks (like JPMorgan Chase) operated: they lent money to investment banks like Lehman Brothers so that they could buy more financial waste products stuffed with subprime mortgages that these traditional banks were, in turn, trying to sell. They then backed up those toxic financial products through insurance companies like AIG, which came close to collapse when what it was insuring became too toxically overwhelming to afford. AIG then got a $182 billion government bailout that also had the effect of bailing out those traditional banks (including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which became “traditional” during the crisis). In this way, the whole vicious cycle started with the traditional banks that hold your deposits and at the same time could produce and sell those waste products thanks to the repeal of Glass-Steagall. So yes, the loss of that act caused the crisis and, in its wake, every big traditional bank was fined for crisis-related crimes.
Hillary won’t push to bring back Glass-Steagall. Doing so would dismantle her husband’s legacy and that of the men he and she appointed to public office. Whatever cosmetic alterations may be in store, count on that act remaining an artifact of the past, since its resurrection would dismay the bankers who, over the past three decades, made the Clintons what they are.
No wonder many diehard Sanders supporters remain disillusioned and skeptical — not to speak of the fact that their candidate featured dead last ( 39th ) on a list of recommended vice presidential candidates in the Podesta emails. That’s unfortunately how much his agenda is likely to matter to her in the Oval Office.
Go Regulate Yourselves!
Before he resigned with his nine-figure golden parachute, Wells Fargo CEO and Chairman John Stumpf addressed Congress over disclosures that 5,300 of his employees had created two million fake accounts, scamming $2.4 million from existing customers. The bank was fined $ 185 million for that (out of a total $10 billion in fines for a range of other crimes committed before and during the financial crisis).
In response, Hillary wrote a letter to Wells Fargo’s customers. In it, she didn’t actually mention Stumpf by name, as she has not mentioned any Wall Street CEO by name in the context of criminal activity. Instead, she simply spoke of “he.” As she put it, “He owes all of you a clear explanation as to how this happened under his watch.” She added, “Executives should be held individually accountable when rampant illegal activity happens on their watch.”
She does have a plan to fine banks for being too big, but they’ve already been fined repeatedly for being crooked and it hasn’t made them any smaller or less threatening. As their top officials evidently view the matter, paying up for breaking the law is just another cost of doing business.
Hillary also wrote, “If any bank can’t be managed effectively, it should be broken up.” But the question is: Why doesn’t ongoing criminal activity that threatens the rest of us correlate with ineffective management — or put another way, when was the last time you saw a major bank broken up? And don’t hold your breath for that to happen in a new Clinton administration either.
In her public letter, she added , “I’ll appoint regulators who will stand with taxpayers and consumers, not with big banks and their friends in Congress.” On the other hand, at that same Goldman Sachs symposium , while in fundraising mode, she gave bankers a pass relative to regulators and commented: “Well, I represented all of you for eight years. I had great relations and worked so close together after 9/11 to rebuild downtown, and [I have] a lot of respect for the work you do and the people who do it.”
She has steadfastly worked to craft explanations for the financial crisis and the Great Recession that don’t endanger the banks as we presently know them. In addition, she has supported the idea of appointing insider regulators, insisting that “the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.” (Let’s not forget that former Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman Hank Paulson ran the Treasury Department while the crisis brewed.)
Among the emails sent to John Podesta that were posted by WikiLeaks is an article I wrote for TomDispatch on the Clintons’ relationships with bankers. “She will not point fingers at her friends,” I said in that piece in May 2015. She will not chastise the people who pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop to speak or the ones who have long shared the social circles in which she and her husband move.” I also suggested that she wouldn’t call out any CEO by name. To this day she hasn’t. I said that she would never be an advocate for Glass-Steagall. And she hasn’t been. What was true then will be no less true once she’s in the White House and no longer has to make gestures toward the platform on which Bernie ran and so can once again more openly embrace the bankers’ way of conducting business.
There’s a reason Wall Street has a crush on her and its monarchs like Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman Lloyd Blankfein pay her such stunning sums to offer anodyne remarks to their employees and others. Blankfein has been coy about an official Clinton endorsement simply because he doesn’t want to rock her campaign boat, but make no mistake, this Wall Street kingpin’s silence is tantamount to an endorsement.
To date, $10 trillion worth of assets sits on the books of the Big Six banks. Since 2008, these same banks have copped to more than $ 150 billion in fines for pre-crisis behavior that ranged on the spectrum of criminality from manipulating multiple public markets to outright fraud. Hillary Clinton has arguably taken money that would not have been so available if it weren’t for the ill-gotten gains those banks secured. In her usual measured way, albeit with some light admonishments, she has told them what they want to hear: that if they behave — something that in her dictionary of definitions involves little in the way of personalized pain or punishment — so will she.
So let’s recap Hillary’s America, past, present, and future. It’s a land lacking in meaningful structural reform of the financial system, a place where the big banks have been, and will continue to be, coddled by the government. No CEO will be jailed, no matter how large the fines his bank is saddled with or how widespread the crimes it committed. Instead, he’s likely to be invited to the inaugural ball in January. Because its practices have not been adequately controlled or curtailed, the inherent risk that Wall Street poses for Main Street will only grow as bankers continue to use our money to make their bets. (The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act was supposed to help on this score, but has yet to make the big banks any smaller.)
And here’s an obvious corollary to all this: the next bank-instigated economic catastrophe will not be dealt with until it has once again crushed the financial stability of millions of Americans.
The banks have voted with their dollars on all of this in multiple ways. Hillary won’t do anything to upset that applecart. We should have no illusions about what her presidency would mean from a Wall Street vs. Main Street perspective. Certainly, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon doesn’t. He effectively endorsed Hillary before a crowd of financial industry players, saying , “I hope the next president, she reaches across the aisle.”
For Wall Street, of course, that aisle is essentially illusory, since its players operate so easily and effectively on both sides of it. In Hillary’s America, Wall Street will still own Main Street.
Nomi Prins, a TomDispatch regular , is the author of six books. Her most recent is All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power (Nation Books). She is a former Wall Street executive. Special thanks go to researcher Craig Wilson for his superb work on this piece. (Reprinted from TomDispatch by permission of author or representative) | 1 |
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Federal law enforcement officials said they were investigating whether the gunman who opened fire on Friday at the airport here, killing five people and wounding eight, was mentally disturbed and heard voices in his head telling him to commit acts of violence. According to a senior law enforcement official, the gunman, identified as Esteban Santiago, 26, walked into the F. B. I. office in Anchorage in November and made disturbing remarks that prompted officials to urge him to seek mental health care. Mr. Santiago, appearing “agitated and incoherent,” said “that his mind was being controlled by a U. S. intelligence agency,” the official said. Other officials said it was too early to tell whether Mr. Santiago, who was captured in the airport, had been inspired by terrorist groups, including the Islamic State. The officials said he had viewed extremist materials on the internet. Shortly after 1 p. m. Friday, the suspect, who had been an airline passenger, pulled a semiautomatic handgun out of his bag and opened fire in a crowded baggage claim area in Terminal 2, officials said. The shooting spurred a scene of panic and confusion that played out on live television as scores of travelers burst out of the terminal and onto the tarmac, running and seeking cover, at times in response to erroneous rumors of attacks. David Fogarty, a carpenter from Key West, was heading to Cancún, Mexico, on vacation when the people around him suddenly began running toward the gates. “Everybody was dropping gear, panicking, jumping over tables,” Mr. Fogarty said in a phone interview. “We were saying: ‘What is going on? Are there people shooting?’ I am not hearing any gunshots, and the whole place is panicking. ” Officers took Mr. Santiago into custody without firing a shot, and on Friday evening, he was being interviewed by F. B. I. agents and county investigators, as the wounded were being treated at hospitals. The senior law enforcement official said Mr. Santiago was making “disjointed” statements in his Anchorage F. B. I. visit. “Although Santiago stated that he did not wish to harm anyone, as a result of his erratic behavior, interviewing agents contacted local authorities,” who took him to a medical facility for evaluation, the official said. “The F. B. I. closed its assessment of Santiago after conducting database reviews, interagency checks, and interviews of his family members,” the official said. On Twitter, Donald J. Trump said that he was “monitoring the terrible situation in Florida” and that he had spoken to Gov. Rick Scott. Hours after the attack, a picture began to emerge of Mr. Santiago as a man who had served his country, but who had experienced trouble and failure. Mr. Santiago was discharged in August from the Alaska Army National Guard for “unsatisfactory performance,” according to Lt. Col. Candis A. Olmstead, the spokeswoman for the Alaska Guard. In September, Mr. Santiago became a father when his son was born, according to an aunt, Maria Luisa Ruiz, a resident of Union City, N. J. who spoke on Friday to the newspaper The Record. In an email, Ms. Olmstead said that Mr. Santiago joined the Puerto Rico National Guard in December 2007. In 2010, he deployed to Balad, Iraq, with the 130th Engineer Battalion, which spent a year clearing roads of improvised explosives and maintaining bridges he was awarded a Meritorious Unit Commendation. At least two soldiers from his company were killed in insurgent attacks during the tour, but there is nothing in the record that indicates Mr. Santiago had been in combat. Ms. Olmstead said he served in the Army Reserves before joining the Alaska Army National Guard in November 2014. Before his discharge last year, he worked as a combat engineer as a private first class. An official service record released on Friday by the Army showed that Mr. Santiago had received a number of commendations, including the Army Good Conduct Medal. Mr. Santiago’s brother, Bryan Santiago, told The Associated Press that Esteban was born in New Jersey and moved to Puerto Rico when he was 2. Nelson Cruz, a Puerto Rico senator who represents Peñuelas, the city in Puerto Rico where Mr. Santiago grew up, said he met Mr. Santiago about seven or eight years ago, and found him to be a “good young man” who loved his family. Mr. Cruz said he spoke on Friday with Bryan Santiago, who relayed that the family was shocked by the news of the killings. The family offered no known motive for the crime, but noted that Esteban had recently been hallucinating and was receiving psychological treatment. “Bryan said his brother went to Iraq or Afghanistan, one of those places, and came back with psychological problems,” Mr. Cruz said. “He would suddenly see visions, but that he was a calm young man and was never violent. ” Esteban Santiago liked sports (particularly boxing, as Bryan is a boxing trainer) and was proud of his military career. “We don’t know what happened with this guy,” Mr. Cruz said. “He was an intelligent, brilliant young man who came back affected. When he came back from the conflict, he did not return well. ” He added that the family wanted to express condolences, but was in a state of panic over the number of news reporters outside their house. At a news conference late Friday in Florida, officials warned that learning the gunman’s motive would be a long, complex process. “We have not ruled out terrorism, and we will pursue every angle to try to determine the motive behind this attack,” said George Piro, the special agent in charge of the F. B. I. ’s Miami division. The shooting comes at a tense time for a nation that has been watching nervously as terrorist attacks have occurred elsewhere in the world, and as Mr. Trump, who has promised to bar Muslims from entering the country, prepares to ascend to the presidency. Officials said that he had flown on a flight from Alaska to Minneapolis, and then to Fort International Airport. In a Facebook post, a Broward County commissioner, Chip LaMarca, said the assailant had been a passenger on a Canadian flight who had checked his weapon in his luggage and then, upon disembarking, went to the airport bathroom to load it. “Came out shooting people in baggage claim,” Mr. LaMarca wrote. On CNN, Mark Lea, a witness, said the gunman “just randomly shot people, no rhyme or reason. ” After the shootings, the gunman lay facedown, spread eagle and “waited for the deputies to come get him,” he said. At that point, the gunman showed no remorse, Mr. Lea said. “He didn’t say anything,” he said. “Nothing. No emotion, no nothing. About as as you could get. ” Witnesses also recounted scenes of confusion and fear. “All of a sudden there was a stampede,” said Tara Webber, 41, of Allentown, Pa. who was heading home after a cruise to the Bahamas and was waiting with relatives in Terminal 3 for her flight. Those who were not running, she said, “hit the floor. ” She and her father, Dan Trinkle, 63, dived under a set of plastic chairs. Ms. Webber said she almost landed on a little girl, who was crying, and tried to comfort her. “This was the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” said Ms. Webber, who works for her father’s limousine company. “We’re going to get a car and drive all the way home. ” Her father said he went for the floor like everyone else. “Then the cops told us to leave all our stuff and get out,” he said. “Everything was thrown around all over the place. ” Mr. Trickle said the police and airport authorities seemed unsure of how to handle the situation. “As far as I’m concerned, they weren’t prepared for something like this,” he said. “We were all out on the runway for hours. It made no sense. ” He said he and his family were allowed to leave after three hours and go to a hospital only because his girlfriend, Barbara Keinert, 57, had left her insulin on the cruise ship and needed another dose. The suspect’s name was made public by Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, soon after the shooting. Mr. Nelson said he had learned the name from the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, Peter V. Neffenger. Mr. Nelson said Mr. Neffenger had also told him the suspect was in possession of an American military identification. Barbara Sharief, the mayor of Broward County, said authorities were confident that the gunman had acted alone. “Based on the preliminary reviewing of the footage tapes, he is a lone shooter,” Ms. Sharief said. “He is alive, he was not harmed, not shot. ” Airport police officers chased the gunman through the terminal as he continued to fire before apprehending him unharmed near a departure gate and arresting him. The scene that unspooled after shots rang out was intensely chaotic. Live TV showed government vehicles blocking the roads to and from the airport and scores of travelers milling on the tarmac, apparently having been evacuated from the building. Some could be seen marching en masse across the pavement, wheeling bags behind them. Moments later, the passengers would burst into movement, like frightened birds, running one way or another, apparently in reaction to concerns, which authorities later said were unfounded, that more attacks were underway. A number of witnesses called in to television news programs almost immediately after it happened. John Schlicher, a traveler who spoke in a phone interview with MSNBC, said he had been traveling with his wife and and they were retrieving their bags from a carousel when he heard the first shot. “I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but I saw the person right to my side fall to the ground, and I turned and looked and the shooter was in the center hallway,” he told MSNBC. Mr. Schlicher did not hear the gunman speak, and described him as slender, with dark hair, and possibly wearing a blue “Star Wars” . Mr. Schlicher said he and everyone around him dropped to the ground. “I put my head down and prayed,” he said. The shooting came as Florida lawmakers were preparing to consider legislation that would relax prohibitions on firearms. State laws allow for the purchase of rifles, handguns and shotguns without a permit, though a license is required to carry a concealed weapon in the state. The legislation, which was proposed last month, would eliminate some “ zones” in Florida — which currently include airport terminals, schools and government meetings. The bill was introduced by State Senator Greg Steube, a Republican and longtime opponent of zones. As the false alarms subsided at the airport, the scene remained tense. Workers and passengers leaving the airport were searched by law enforcement personnel. Passengers who had been on planes on the tarmac were forced to stay in their seats, where they received updates from captains and crew members. Television news stations showed video of medics taking care of a bleeding victim outside the airport. News helicopters showed hundreds of people standing on the tarmac as an ambulance drove by. With the airport shut down, the Federal Aviation Administration said that flights headed to Fort Lauderdale had been delayed or diverted to other airports. A number of travelers described harrowing moments of panic. Melody Dorward and a colleague, Amberly Buccholz, had just stepped off a Spirit Airways flight from Ohio when they got caught up in the tide of people who ran down the terminal. They joined in and were directed out to the tarmac, clustered there with others, shifting from spot to spot. Rumors of more gunfire spread through the crowd, with many convinced they had heard shots. “I called my family to say goodbye,” said Ms. Dorward, 22, an worker, “to tell them I love them. ” | 1 |
October 27, 2016 - Fort Russ News - Novorossiya - translated by J. Arnoldski -
During a press conference in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, official spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told journalists that Ukraine is purposefully disinforming the public on the question of providing weapons to OSCE observers in Donbass.
“Kiev’s statement that some kind of agreement on deploying an OSCE police mission in Donbass has been achieved does not match reality. The mission will have a purely civil character,” Zakharova explained.
According to her, Russia supported the possibility of providing observers with service weapons during discussions , but the issue did not go forward due to a lack of consensus.
Zakharova added that the deployment of a police mission is possible only on the contact line.
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Mainstream media in shock after a solid Trump victory; Clinton concedes; will Obama go quietly into the night? Liberals infuriated; people chanting "lock her up, lock her up [...]" By Shepard Ambellas - November 9, 2016 ( INTELLIHUB ) — Early Wednesday morning Donald J. Trump accepted the Presidency of the United States like a true gentlemen, even thanking Hillary Clinton for her long-winded service to the country.
“Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division. […] It is time for us to come together as one united people.,” Trump said.
Trump also reached out to those who chose not to support him in the past for their “guidance and help” to make America great again.
“It’s a movement comprised of Americans from all races, religions, backgrounds and beliefs who want and expect our government to serve the people, and serve the people it will.”
[…]
“Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream. I’ve spent my entire life and business looking at the untapped potential in projects and in people all over the world. That is now what I want to do for our country,” Trump said.
“We must reclaim our country’s destiny and dream big and bold and daring. We have to do that. We’re going to dream of things for our country and beautiful things and successful things once again.”
At a victory party Trump supporters could be heard chanting “lock her up, lock her up […],” Tom Llamas told ABC News, pointing out that Hillary Clinton’s problems may not be over just yet. Not to mention how such rhetoric infuriated liberals nationwide. Chants of “LOCK HER UP!” at Trump party raise the necessary Q: Will Trump appoint a special prosecutor to take on Clinton, as promised?
— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) November 9, 2016
As the night went on most mainstream figureheads and pundits went into panic mode as the results started to flip, showing overwhelming favor of Trump. They just couldn’t figure out how or why Mr. Trump won. It’s as if they actually believed their masters fake polls that they were airing the entire race.
Let me also mention that in many documented cases, people who voted ‘all Republican’ across the board had issues at the polls with the machines actually switching their votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that a number of Soros deployed voting machines were likely rigged, Trump still won with some lead.
— TheAngryOne (@The_AngryGuy) November 8, 2016
It makes you wonder what the actual numbers were. In fact they probably were consistent with many Intellihub polls which have shown Trump vs. Clinton at an 60/40 to and 80/20 split, like the following poll taken on Election Day which shows Trump at 62% over Hillary’s 33.
We are in the midnight hour #ElectionDay , who will win
— Shepard Ambellas (@ShepardAmbellas) November 8, 2016
It was also noted by an analyst friend of mine that the Hillary campaign likely was devastated by what they thought was going to be a guaranteed victory and that we will likely see some corrupt politicians flee Washington D.C., like ‘rats in the streets.’
Then we have to contend with the fact that Trump does not take office until Jan. 20, 2017, which may give the rats in D.C. enough time to conduct a counter strike on the Trump campaign. Will Obama go quietly into the night?
The short and simple answer is: no, he will not. At minimum we can expect more executive orders and the pardoning of connected individuals on his way out. Not to mention that Obama likely has a trick up his sleeve.
There is always a ‘Plan B,’ which is essentially orchestrated chaos which would allow Obama to then suspend Trump’s inauguration. In fact, all that Obama needs to make it happen, legally, through executive order, would be for a crisis of some type to occur in between now and the inauguration — it’s that simple.
Even an ‘act of God,’ such as a ‘ devastating space weather event ‘ could trigger such action and may.
We can also expect pockets of unrest, especially in major cities.
The bottom line is: the elites do not want to loose their power and are not going to wait another four years to regain it.
#RemainVigilant
#MAGA Shepard Ambellas is an opinion journalist, filmmaker , radio talk show host and the founder and editor-in-chief of Intellihub News & Politics. Established in 2013, Intellihub.com is ranked in the upper 1% traffic tier on the World Wide Web. Read more from Shep’s World . Get the Podcast . Follow Shep on Facebook and Twitter . ©2016. Intellihub.com. All Rights Reserved. | 1 |
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There’s no doubt about it – the election of Donald Trump to be the next President of the United States has riled up the reality television star’s hateful supporters – hate crimes have dramatically increased across the country. To add to the fear and frustration that many Americans are feeling, the Republican Party doesn’t even have the guts to admit that the divisive rhetoric it has been spewing for decades has contributed to not only Trump’s rise, but the hateful attitudes that helped him get elected.
This denial and lack of responsibility was on full display on CNN’s State of the Union this morning, when host Jake Tapper interviewed Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. When Tapper cornered Ryan and asked him to speak to the people who are afraid of the violence and hate crimes against minorities and women that have occurred post-election, Ryan said:
“First of all, I hate it that people feel this way. And second of all, they should not. I think people should be rest assured, America is a pluralistic inclusive country. It is, it has been and it will continue to be. So, I really think people should put their minds at ease.”
Tapper pressed him, reminding him that this was a serious, nationwide issue. Ryan responded by shocking Tapper and Americans when he denied that the GOP had any role in it, stating that the Trump supporters that were responsible for these awful acts aren’t Republicans.
“That’s terrible. By the way, that’s not Republicans. We are the party of Lincoln. People who espouse those views, they’re not Republicans. We don’t want them in our party even if they’re thinking about it.”
For the record, these attackers ARE most certainly conservatives whose main goal is to Make America White Again – there is no getting around this fact. And just when you thought Ryan couldn’t be any more full of sh*t, he said:
“And I’m confident Donald Trump feels the same way.”
Is he serious? Ryan and many other prominent Republicans have spent the last several months condemning Trump for his racism and hateful, divisive rhetoric – and even then, they were complete cowards. These GOPers distanced themselves from his actions, but never had enough of a backbone to actually do what was right and vote against him. Their loyalty to their hateful, discriminatory party has always prevented them from doing the right thing, and thanks to them we will now have a racist misogynist leading our country.
You can watch the interview below:
For Republican leaders to deny responsibility in what is now happening in our country is repulsive. They created a political climate that allowed Trump to thrive, and they supported a presidential candidate who encouraged the very violence and discrimination that we are now seeing. The GOP will not be forgiven, and they should not be able to pretend they didn’t contribute to this mess.
Featured image is a screenshot 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 most prominent sculptures at Tufts University, my alma mater just outside Boston, show Jumbo, the storied circus elephant permanently lodged in the college’s mythology. But a fascinating artistic discovery is shedding new light on a lesser known, but perhaps more consequential, piece of the college’s history. MEDFORD, Mass. — The marble sculpture was filthy, with no nose and a doodle on its eyeballs. It had been hidden away for decades. Adding insult to injury, no one here at Tufts University seemed to have any idea who the person depicted was. “Unknown Artist (Brown? )” read the inventory after the piece was moved to storage in 1998. “Bust of a bearded man. ” And there it stayed, until last year, when an intern came across a letter written in 1950 referring to a “marble bust of John Brown,” the abolitionist whose 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry is viewed as a precursor to the Civil War, that had lost its nose “in an accident. ” Laura McDonald, the registrar of art collections, read the letter and felt a jolt of recognition. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘You know, we have a bust that has no nose,’” she said. “I wonder … . ” So began the rediscovery of a remarkable piece of antebellum history far from the line: a tale of a lost piece of art, rife with missed connections, that ended with Mr. Brown getting a new nose. The story begins in 1859, when Mr. Brown was waiting to be hanged in Virginia after his failed attempt to start a slave rebellion by capturing the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. He had become a deeply polarizing figure, respected in the North and reviled in the South as he awaited his execution. Mr. Brown had gotten some financial help from George and Mary Stearns, prominent abolitionists whose estate here in Medford was a stop on the Underground Railroad. They paid a sculptor, Edward Brackett, $120 in gold coins to travel from Boston to Virginia, where he gathered measurements of Mr. Brown’s face for a marble bust. The bust was unveiled on the day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in 1863, at a party attended by luminaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott, and it was reproduced in plaster and in photographs. Despite its auspicious beginnings, the bust faded into obscurity. Ownership of it passed to Tufts in 1902, and it was displayed in a library until it went into storage at some point. The sculpture actually says “John Brown” on the back — but it was wrapped up alongside a sculpture of Mr. Stearns and put on a storage pallet, and no one, it seems, stood the piece of marble upright to read the inscription. A plaster copy of the bust can be found at the Athenaeum, a private library in Boston, but no one connected it to the sculpture at Tufts. When the bust was pulled out of storage, though, the plaster copy became quite useful. A scan was made of the nose on the copy, and then of the broken part of the marble sculpture’s face, allowing conservators to create a plaster replica of what was missing. The replacement nose was then attached, with medical tape used to hold it tightly in place while the adhesive dried. A conservator, Rika Smith McNally, used a tiny paintbrush and sparkly flecks to make it look like marble. Today, the bust, nose and all, can be seen at the Tufts University Art Gallery for the first time since it went into storage decades ago. The final resting place of the original nose and how it was broken, however, remain a mystery. | 0 |
59 Views November 11, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News
In the aftermath of a brutal takedown in the gold and silver markets, today whistleblower and London metals trader Andrew Maguire told King World News that the paper gold market traded a jaw-dropping 6,800 tonnes of gold in just one day.
Andrew Maguire: “Just to illustrate how ludicrous the paper markets have become, during the U.S. election day daily session the total swap of Comex Open Interest constituted a staggering 2,268 tonnes (of paper gold)! This volume does not include the unallocated paper-centric over-the-counter markets, where volume exceeded the Comex by a factor of (more than) 2 times… Continue reading the Andrew Maguire interview below… Advertisement To hear which company investors & institutions around the globe are flocking to that has one of the best gold & silver purchase & storage platforms in the world click on the logo:
Andrew Maguire continues: “Now brace yourself; in total this conservatively places the swap of paper gold positions at a ludicrous 6,800 tonnes. That’s unprecedented, Eric. The record daily volume totals more than two years of (annual global gold production or total annual) mine supply…To continue listening to this extraordinary KWN audio interview with whistleblower Andrew Maguire that will be released within hours, where he discusses the gold and silver smash, at what price the large sovereign wholesale bids are located, and much more, you can listen to it when it’s released by CLICKING HERE.
Is This Why The Smash In Gold & Silver Is Happening? A Shocking Game-Changer For Gold & Silver Is Now Unfolding… | 0 |
Donald J. Trump was emphatic in the second presidential debate: Yes, he had boasted about kissing women without permission and grabbing their genitals. But he had never actually done those things, he said. “No,” he declared under questioning on Sunday evening, “I have not. ” At that moment, sitting at home in Manhattan, Jessica Leeds, 74, felt he was lying to her face. “I wanted to punch the screen,” she said in an interview in her apartment. More than three decades ago, when she was a traveling businesswoman at a paper company, Ms. Leeds said, she sat beside Mr. Trump in the cabin of a flight to New York. They had never met before. About 45 minutes after takeoff, she recalled, Mr. Trump lifted the armrest and began to touch her. According to Ms. Leeds, Mr. Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt. “He was like an octopus,” she said. “His hands were everywhere. ” She fled to the back of the plane. “It was an assault,” she said. Ms. Leeds has told the story to at least four people close to her, who also spoke with The New York Times. Mr. Trump’s claim that his crude words had never turned into actions was similarly infuriating to a woman watching on Sunday night in Ohio: Rachel Crooks. Ms. Crooks was a receptionist at Bayrock Group, a real estate investment and development company in Trump Tower in Manhattan, when she encountered Mr. Trump outside an elevator in the building one morning in 2005. Aware that her company did business with Mr. Trump, she turned and introduced herself. They shook hands, but Mr. Trump would not let go, she said. Instead, he began kissing her cheeks. Then, she said, he “kissed me directly on the mouth. ” It didn’t feel like an accident, she said. It felt like a violation. “It was so inappropriate,” Ms. Crooks recalled in an interview. “I was so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that. ” Shaken, Ms. Crooks returned to her desk and immediately called her sister, Brianne Webb, in the small town in Ohio where they grew up, and told her what had happened. “She was very worked up about it,” said Ms. Webb, who recalled pressing her sister for details. “Being from a town of 1, 600 people, being naïve, I was like ‘Are you sure he didn’t just miss trying to kiss you on the cheek?’ She said, ‘No, he kissed me on the mouth.’ I was like, ‘That is not normal. ’” In the days since Mr. Trump’s campaign was jolted by a 2005 recording that caught him bragging about pushing himself on women, he has insisted, as have his aides, that it was simply macho bluster. “It’s just words,” he has said repeatedly. And his hope for salvaging his candidacy rests heavily on whether voters believe that claim. They should not, say Ms. Leeds and Ms. Crooks, whose stories have never been made public before. And their accounts echo those of other women who have previously come forward, like Temple Taggart, a former Miss Utah, who said that Mr. Trump kissed her on the mouth more than once when she was a pageant contestant. In a phone interview on Tuesday night, a highly agitated Mr. Trump denied every one of the women’s claims. “None of this ever took place,” said Mr. Trump, who began shouting at the Times reporter who was questioning him. He said that The Times was making up the allegations to hurt him and that he would sue the news organization if it reported them. “You are a disgusting human being,” he told the reporter as she questioned him about the women’s claims. Asked whether he had ever done any of the kissing or groping that he had described on the recording, Mr. Trump was once again insistent: “I don’t do it. I don’t do it. It was locker room talk. ” But for the women who shared their stories with The Times, the recording was more than that: As upsetting as it was, it offered them a kind of affirmation, they said. That was the case for Ms. Taggart. Mr. Trump’s description of how he kisses beautiful women without invitation described precisely what he did to her, she said. “I just start kissing them,” Mr. Trump said on the tape. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. ” Ms. Crooks and Ms. Leeds never reported their accounts to the authorities, but they both shared what happened to them with friends and family. Ms. Crooks did so immediately afterward Ms. Leeds described the events to those close to her more recently, as Mr. Trump became more visible politically and ran for president. Ms. Leeds was 38 at the time and living in Connecticut. She had been seated in coach. But a flight attendant invited her to take an empty seat in first class, she said. That seat was beside Mr. Trump, who did not yet own a fleet of private aircraft, records show. He introduced himself and shook her hand. They exchanged pleasantries, and Mr. Trump asked her if she was married. She was divorced, and told him so. Later, after their dinner trays were cleared, she said, Mr. Trump raised the armrest, moved toward her and began to grope her. Ms. Leeds said she recoiled. She quickly left the cabin and returned to coach, she said. “I was angry and shook up,” she recalled, as she sat on a couch in her New York City apartment on Tuesday. She did not complain to the airline staff at the time, Ms. Leeds said, because such unwanted advances from men occurred throughout her time in business in the 1970s and early 1980s. “We accepted it for years,” she said of the conduct. “We were taught it was our fault. ” She recalled bumping into Mr. Trump at a charity event in New York about two years later, and said he seemed to recall her, insulting her with a crude remark. She had largely put the encounter on the plane out of her mind until last year, when Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign became more serious. Since then, she has told a widening circle of people, including her son, a nephew and two friends, all of whom were contacted by The Times. They said they were sickened by what they heard. “It made me shake,” said Linda Ross, a neighbor and friend who spoke with Ms. Leeds about the interaction about six months ago. Like several of Ms. Leeds’s friends, Ms. Ross encouraged her to tell her story to the news media. Ms. Leeds had resisted until Sunday’s debate, which she watched with Ms. Ross. When Mr. Trump denied having ever sexually assaulted women, in response to a question from Anderson Cooper of CNN, Ms. Ross said she immediately looked at Ms. Leeds in disbelief. “Now we know he lied straight up,” Ms. Ross recalled saying. In the days after the debate, Ms. Leeds recounted her experience in an email to The Times and a series of interviews. “His behavior is deep seated in his character,” Ms. Leeds wrote in the message. “To those who would vote for him,” she added, “I would wish for them to reflect on this. ” For Ms. Crooks, the encounter with Mr. Trump was further complicated by the fact that she worked in his building and risked running into him again. A few hours after Mr. Trump kissed her, Ms. Crooks returned to her apartment in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn and broke down to her boyfriend at the time, Clint Hackenburg. “I asked, ‘How was your day? ’” Mr. Hackenburg recalled. “She paused for a second, and then started hysterically crying. ” After Ms. Crooks described her experience with Mr. Trump, she and Mr. Hackenburg discussed what to do. “I think that what was more upsetting than him kissing her was that she felt like she couldn’t do anything to him because of his position,” he said. “She was 22. She was a secretary. It was her first job out of college. I remember her saying, ‘I can’t do anything to this guy, because he’s Donald Trump. ’” Days later, Ms. Crooks said, Mr. Trump, who had recently married Melania, came into the Bayrock office and requested her phone number. When she asked why he needed it, Mr. Trump told her he intended to pass it along to his modeling agency. Ms. Crooks was skeptical, but relented because of Mr. Trump’s influence over her company. She never heard from the modeling agency. During the rest of her year working at Bayrock, she made a point of ducking out of sight every time Mr. Trump came into view. When Bayrock employees were invited to the Trump Organization Christmas party, she declined, wanting to avoid any other encounters with him. But the episode stuck with her even after she returned to Ohio, where she now works for a university. When she read a Times article in May about the Republican nominee’s treatment of women, she was struck by Ms. Taggart’s recollection of being kissed on the mouth by Mr. Trump. “I was upset that it had happened to other people, but also took some comfort in knowing I wasn’t the only one he had done it to,” said Ms. Crooks, who reached out to The Times to share her story. Both Ms. Leeds and Ms. Crooks say they support Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, and Ms. Crooks has made contributions of less than $200 to President Obama and Mrs. Clinton. Ms. Crooks was initially reluctant to go public with her story, but felt compelled to talk about her experience. “People should know,” she said of Mr. Trump, “this behavior is pervasive and it is real. ” | 1 |
By Cassius Kamarampi (Era of Wisdom) In 1912, the theory of vitamins was spearheaded by Polish biochemist Casimir Funk. He published a paper proposing the existence of four vitamins: “one preventing... | 0 |
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