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In a nondescript office building on West 39th Street, behind doors and a stack of nondisclosure agreements, Raf Simons is at work, rebuilding the house of Calvin Klein. Calvin Klein’s is a name so famous as to have earned pride of place on underwear bands the world over. Maybe yours. Mr. Klein was, in the words of The New York Times, a “pop star” and “the first American designer to become famous. ” That name is synonymous with American fashion design in the 20th century, part of a small, pantheon that includes Ralph (Lauren) Donna (Karan) and Oscar (de la Renta). His forte was sportswear: easy, effortless clothes, later expanded to include blockbuster underwear and jeans. But you knew that. It was more than 30 years ago when a young Brooke Shields cooed that nothing comes between her and her Calvins. She did not need to specify which Calvin. Mr. Simons, though by no means unknown, is not Calvin. His name, Raf (rhymes with “laugh,” with a rolled Flemish R) is invoked with adoration in circles. But even after a successful stint as the artistic director of Christian Dior, he has arrived in New York with less name recognition among the public. His task is to bring energy and excitement back to Calvin Klein — and back, by extension, to New York fashion. “I think it’s very exciting for New York to have someone of his caliber come here,” said Grace Coddington, the creative director at large of Vogue, who first came to the United States as a design director for Calvin Klein in the 1980s. In recent years, New York fashion and especially New York Fashion Week have been dogged by a reputation for spotlighting both too much and not enough. The city’s relatively democratic show schedule packed a couple of hundred runway shows and presentations into a “week” stretching to eight days or more, but much of it has not been considered on par with what is shown in Milan or Paris. “The New York shows have often felt slightly odd to the Europeans, I think,” said Gert Jonkers, a founder of the magazines Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman, who has not attended New York shows in several years. “It’s a busy schedule, but with a lot of things that don’t speak to us. I won’t fly for one or two shows. I know there are other shows in New York, but I just don’t feel the urgency. ” Mr. Simons, 49, considered one of the great designers of his generation, is well positioned to ratchet up that urgency. From the obscure perch of his own Raf Simons men’s wear label, he won over critics in Paris in the late 1990s and early aughts. Cathy Horyn, then the fashion critic of The Times and one of Mr. Simons’s most enduring supporters, wrote in 2004 that in all her years reporting on fashion, she had “stood up from only a handful of shows with a conviction that everything had been transformed. ” Mr. Simons’s was one. Yet he maintained such a low profile that when he was named the creative director of Jil Sander in 2005, many in the industry hardly knew who he was. Mr. Simons breathed new life into Jil Sander, and after six years there, as Ms. Sander returned, he joined Dior, ascending to one of the highest mounts of Parisian and haute couture. He stabilized Dior, rocked by L’Affaire Galliano — John Galliano, its previous designer, went on a drunken, public tirade that cost him his job and tarnished Dior’s image — and won the support of consumers (sales rose 60 percent under his tenure) the press and Hollywood. (It was one of Mr. Simons’s Dior gowns that tripped Jennifer Lawrence on her way to accept her Oscar.) He left Dior in 2015, citing the breakneck pace required to keep up with so many collections and shows each year. Yet the pace is only likely to quicken for Mr. Simons, who has relocated from Antwerp, Belgium, a city small enough that its fledgling designers count seeing him at the supermarket as a celebrity sighting, to Manhattan, with a mandate to revivify Calvin Klein. He has been given complete creative control, of a type not seen since Mr. Klein and his partner, Barry Schwartz, sold the company to the Heusen Corporation in 2002 Mr. Klein stepped down from design the next year. Mr. Simons has oversight of all of the many categories and varieties of products that bear the brand name, from the Calvin Klein Collection and the apparel and accessories carried at malls and Macy’s, to underwear, jeans and fragrances (both for men and women) as well as home goods. As if this were not enough, he has imported his namesake Raf Simons men’s wear collection and keeps a studio for it in the Calvin Klein headquarters. After showing in Paris for some 20 years, Mr. Simons presented the collection last week during the men’s wear shows in New York, where he was received as a conquering hero. “I never really thought it over from the point of view that I would possibly be the activator for New York: Men’s or the savior for New York: Men’s,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “But I would be more than happy if I could be a help. ” Mr. Simons was indeed a help, and his addition to the men’s fashion schedule increased registration and attendance, said Steven Kolb, the chief executive of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which organizes the New York shows. He is likely to repeat the trick with Calvin Klein on Friday at its coed show during New York Fashion Week. “We’re all incredibly excited to see what he does for that brand,” said Glenda Bailey, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar. “It is a real highlight on our calendar, and I know that several of the international editors are coming in, wanting to get here for Calvin. ” The draw could hardly come at a better time. New York Fashion Week has lately been subject to defections of homegrown talent. Several companies, including Tommy Hilfiger, opted to show in Los Angeles rather than in New York this season, and three of New York Fashion Week’s most respected labels are moving their shows to Paris — Rodarte and Hood by Air as of this season, and Proenza Schouler as of next. “New York definitely needs some excitement,” said Jennifer Sunwoo, the executive vice president and general merchandise manager for women’s wear at Barneys New York. Mr. Simons is, in a sense, an unusual person to provide it. He is serious, intense and more discussed but less known by many in the fashion establishment than his more bombastic peers. He keeps close, nearly cloistered company, an inner circle that he has imported with him to Calvin Klein. That includes devoted staff, including Pieter Mulier, his longtime No. 2 and now the creative director of Calvin Klein Mr. Mulier’s boyfriend, Matthieu Blazy, the design director of women’s and Mr. Simons’s boyfriend, d’Orazio, now a senior director of “brand experience. ” He is also continuing to collaborate with artists like Sterling Ruby, who once worked with Mr. Simons on a collection and has been spotted at the Calvin Klein studios, and the duo Willy Vanderperre and Olivier Rizzo, friends from their days at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, who have worked with him on Calvin Klein’s new advertising campaigns. Since Mr. Simons’s designs for the new collections are so tightly guarded that even many Calvin Klein staff members have not yet seen them, these ads are the only glimpse of what Calvin Klein could look like under his watch. (Mr. Simons declined to comment for this article.) Advertising may seem an ephemeral marker of change, but few were as aware of its power and potential as Mr. Klein himself. Many of the ads the fashion world considers iconic were manufactured at Mr. Klein’s CRK Advertising studio: Kate Moss, nude, at her heroin chicest Mark Wahlberg, then known as Marky Mark, grabbing his groin through boxer briefs. The new ad campaign, appearing now, features models in their underpants, just as many of Mr. Klein’s most provocative did. But Mr. Simons runs cool where Mr. Klein ran hot. In one shot, photographed at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, they gaze, backs to the camera, at a canvas by Mr. Ruby. Mr. Klein’s models were barely contained by their Calvins, courting scandal and the occasional recall Mr. Simons’s are gawky in the European style, and barely fill theirs out. Another campaign, for Calvin Klein By Appointment, offsets dresses made to order — a sort of American sportswear version of couture — with flat shots of a pair of classic white Calvin Klein briefs. “I thought it was interesting they put the underwear in every other photograph — the iconic thing he’s known for,” said Sam Shahid, the veteran art director who ran CRK Advertising during the ’80s and early ’90s. “But I’m not sure it’s Calvin. It doesn’t have the same sensuality or sexuality. It doesn’t have the physicality Calvin always had. It’s more like Raf Simons. ” Of course, more like Raf Simons is, in part, exactly what PVH, Calvin Klein’s parent company, wants. Mr. Simons has been handed the keys to the kingdom with the hope that he will reinvigorate a brand that, despite $8. 2 billion in sales in 2015, was seen by many as coasting and too diffuse. Several of the company’s longtime executives left or were dismissed just before his arrival or just after, including the creative directors of its Calvin Klein Collection (Francisco Costa, who designed the women’s line, and Italo Zucchelli, who designed the men’s) Kevin Carrigan, the creative director of its more affordable commercial collections (who recently moved to Ralph Lauren) Amy Mellen, the senior vice president for design of Calvin Klein Home and Melisa Goldie, the chief marketing officer. Calvin in recent years has meant Justin Bieber, Kendall Jenner and their ilk showing off “#mycalvins. ” Now Mr. Simons is busily reinterpreting the whole enterprise from the logo up. “He’s such a visionary,” Ms. Sunwoo, of Barneys New York, said. “We’re very confident about his ability to transform the brand and really make it much more relevant than it has been. ” So much so that Barneys agreed to carry the new collection sight unseen. “We’re all in,” she said. “That’s how much we believe in Raf. ” It is one thing for luxury retailers to believe in Raf it is another for the general consumer, who may not be aware of him. Calvin Klein Collection has historically received the bulk of press coverage and the spotlight offered by runway shows but accounts for a small percentage of the company’s sales. “We used to joke that that whole business was smoke and mirrors,” said a former employee, who declined to speak on the record, citing continuing business relationships. PVH’s goal for Calvin Klein is to reach $10 billion in global sales by 2020. The majority of Calvin Klein revenue comes from its jeans, underwear and fragrances, according to Magdalena Kondej, the head of apparel and footwear research at Euromonitor International. Mr. Simons, whose specialty is in fashion, is relatively untested in these areas. A recent editorial on the Business of Fashion website made the point plain: “Can Raf Go Mass?” Or, to put it another way, since the customer is king (and queen): Will mass go Raf? Calvin Klein is a major draw at Macy’s, which sells its apparel and accessories, jeans, underwear, fragrances and home goods. “It’s a very powerful brand for us,” said Tim Baxter, the chain’s chief merchandising officer. But will the Raf Simons name resonate with Macy’s customers? “It’s hard to say,” he said. “Our customer clearly understands the power of the Calvin Klein brand. Certainly our most customers will understand the change in leadership, but I think the vast majority of our customers just really respect the brand. ” (The store says that Calvin Klein is one of its top five brands.) How Mr. Simons’s Calvin Klein will play out at retail will have to wait. On Friday morning, it makes its runway debut, as one of the most anticipated shows of New York Fashion Week. “I definitely feel this is one of those moments everyone will look back at, seeing Raf’s first season showing,” said Humberto Leon, a founder of Opening Ceremony, which has teamed with Calvin Klein Jeans and Calvin Klein Underwear on projects in recent years. Ms. Coddington is cautiously optimistic about the pairing. “All those houses that take on new people, it’s always a challenge and a gamble,” she said. “You just pray that it works for everybody. ” | 1 |
Poor little Duterte. He's so butthurt because the US wouldn't give him a visa to visit his girlfriend in the US, that even now all these years later, he's willing to destroy the fragile economy and national security of the PI to "get even".
Yeah, he's something to really be proud of Philippines. | 0 |
November 7, 2016, 8:05 pm A+ | a- Warning
Writing at the Federalist , libertarian NeverTrumper Cathy Young [ ] makes a convincing case that the election of Donald Trump, the supposed anti-PC candidate, could actually lead to an intensification of PC culture. Young’s basic thesis is that, if someone as, umm, let’s say immoderate, as Trump could get elected President (in part as an anti-PC champion, no less), it would validate the PC belief that “crude xenophobia” and “toxic masculinity” really are pervasive problems. [ Why Electing Donald Trump Could Make Political Correctness Worse , November 7, 2016] And so the PC crowd would double-down even further.
I think this is a good analysis. Of course, Young’s implicit assumption is that increasing political polarization is a problem that can be solved, that a center-Right, classical liberal consensus is the goal. But the time for that has passed. So kudos to Young for identifying the problem, but we need a new solution—such as Michael Hart’s proposal for the peaceful secession of Red State America. | 0 |
For months, Gov. Chris Christie had said that New Jersey’s transportation funding was not in a crisis, even as the state inched closer toward exhausting its principal fund for roads, bridges and mass transit. But after Mr. Christie embraced plans this week to raise the state’s gas tax, and the State Senate balked at the proposed Mr. Christie quickly changed his tune. Shortly after 11 p. m. on Thursday, Mr. Christie declared a state of emergency and moved to shut down most road work. Allowing the transportation fund to go broke would be “disastrous” and jeopardize people’s safety, Mr. Christie said in an executive order. By raising the prospect of potholes going unfixed and construction workers being laid off, Mr. Christie ratcheted up the pressure on state lawmakers to reach an agreement. But his sudden turnabout stunned politicians and interest groups in the state. The governor directed the state transportation commissioner and the executive director of New Jersey Transit to submit plans by Saturday night for an “immediate and orderly shutdown” of most work funded by the state transportation trust fund. Any work that is federally funded or necessary for safety reasons could continue, Mr. Christie said. Mr. Christie, a Republican, had reached a deal with the State Assembly earlier in the week to raise the state’s gas tax in exchange for lowering the sales tax. But on Thursday, Democratic leaders in the State Senate said they could not support the agreement because it would harm the state budget. State transportation officials said that orders were unlikely to go into effect quickly enough to affect the Fourth of July weekend and that such work was rarely scheduled for holiday weekends. Still, concerns over snarled traffic could cause some people to think twice about using the roads, said Brigid Callahan Harrison, a professor of political science and law at Montclair State University who had been closely watching the debate over transportation funding. “Even if the average New Jerseyan doesn’t see this over the weekend, there is an element of uncertainty that is damaging to the state,” she said. The surprise order came as Mr. Christie was being vetted as a possible running mate for Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Mr. Christie had agreed to support a increase in exchange for lowering the state sales tax to 6 percent from 7 percent by 2018. Lowering the sales tax would cut revenue by about $1. 7 billion each year after it is fully implemented, while the changes to the gas tax would increase revenue by about $1. 1 billion each year, according to the state’s Office of Legislative Services. On Thursday night, Mr. Christie rebuked Senate leaders for failing to approve the legislation. The transportation trust fund is expected to run out of money by August, the executive order said. State Senate leaders favor an earlier plan supported by some lawmakers in both houses to raise the gas tax and phase out the estate tax. Under both proposals, the gas tax would rise by about 23 cents per gallon. Mr. Christie’s decision could intensify political pressure on the Senate president, Stephen M. Sweeney, a Democrat who has close ties to labor unions and may run for governor next year. “You can bet that organized labor and all of the associated businesses will be putting pressure on Sweeney to compromise in some way,” Professor Harrison said. On Friday, Mr. Sweeney said in a statement that he was disappointed by the governor’s decision and that it would lead to layoffs. It was unclear when lawmakers might return to Trenton to address transportation funding Vincent Prieto, the Assembly speaker, said negotiations could resume during the second week of July. Mr. Christie is expected to attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, which starts on July 18. For years, lawmakers and transit advocates have raised alarm about the need for a new source of funding for the state’s roads, bridges and transit system. But Mr. Christie, who ended his presidential campaign this year, was reluctant to raise taxes and said the funding was not in crisis. New Jersey’s gas tax is the second lowest in the country, at 14. 5 cents per gallon. Both proposals would raise it to about 37. 5 cents per gallon, still less than New York State’s gas tax. On Friday, Mr. Prieto said the Assembly was willing to compromise with the Senate on the legislation. “We all know we need a transportation funding plan the governor will sign and we need it as soon as possible,” Mr. Prieto, a Democrat, said in a statement. “This is too important for jobs — especially in our construction industry — and our economy to allow this to continue. ” | 1 |
Samantha Bee: Who Gives A F**K About Trump, The ‘Dauphin Of Breitbartistan’ (VIDEO) By Carrie MacDonald
Warning: This article contains direct quotes from Samantha Bee that may be unsuitable for children.
Comedian and host of Comedy Central’s Full Frontal Samantha Bee never disappoints. Her most recent broadcast was one of her best. I mean, come on — how often do you get to hear the word “dauphin” on late night television? Bee: Trump Is The ‘Dauphin Of Breitbartistan’
Samantha Bee, decked out in a “Nasty Woman” shirt, wasted no time getting the jabs in at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on her Monday night show. In her opening segment, she likened Trump to the cartoon Wile E. Coyote, ever-thwarted by the Road Runner, saying : “Oh, Donald. It’s like you spotted Hillary painting a tunnel entrance onto a mountain, called her on it, and then ran at it anyway.”
Bee pivoted to Trump’s controversial statement from the last debate, in which he said he may not accept the election results. Bee’s response to that? “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re not the president. You’re just the Dauphin of Breitbartistan. Concede, don’t concede, we don’t give a fuck. We’ll be busy swearing in the 45th president.”
Boom.
Bee was, of course, referring to the Breitbart News website – an online haven for neo-Nazis run by Trump’s campaign CEO, Stephen Bannon . She Didn’t Stop With Trump
Samantha Bee’s comic hammer came down on all Republicans, as it so often does. She ripped into them having the nerve to call out Trump’s statement as horrifying after eight years of unprecedented obstructionism.
Honestly, I don’t think my words can do Samantha Bee justice. Just watch her opening segment below and remember how lucky we are to have her voice.
Warning: This video contains graphic language that may not be suitable for all audiences.
Featured Image via screenshot from YouTube video
Note: The character of Pepe the Frog was created in 2005 by Matt Furie and has been co-opted by the alt-right. Furie believes this is just a phase that will die out soon, returning Pepe to his “sly, lovable, and charming status.” About Carrie MacDonald
Carrie is a progressive mom and wife living in the upper Midwest. Connect | 0 |
Hillary Camp Caught on Camera Telling Tiny Crowd What to Cheer for
Fitzpatrick wound up being just one of an estimated 10,000 who reportedly showed up for the event. So many Floridians came to see Trump, in fact, that the hangar ran out of space.
“They said, ‘The people don’t fit into the hangar,'” Trump himself later admitted to his supporters at the start of his speech. “I said, ‘That’s a good problem — isn’t it?'”
Actually, it was a great problem — one unknown to Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, whose rallies have been embarrassingly small in comparison to those for Trump and his own running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. Advertisement - story continues below
For instance, a rally held by Kaine in Florida this Monday reportedly attracted roughly 30 attendees:
Nor was this an isolated event:
The media has cited countless polls to argue that Trump is slated to lose the November election, but the huge enthusiasm gap suggests otherwise. Advertisement - story continues below | 0 |
By Hrafnkell Haraldsson 9:04 am The KKK newspaper features the front page full page story "Make America Great Again" with a big featured center photo of Donald Trump
Rachel Maddow traces the history of the post-Civil War “Enforcement Acts” signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, including the Ku Klux Klan Act , or The Enforcement Act of 1871 (17 Stat. 13), which still makes it illegal to conspire to intimidate voters.
To show that the Klan Act is not “vestigial” but very much relevant in this election, Maddow points to the citation of this law by the Democrat Party in a “whole raft of lawsuits” in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Ohio alleging voter intimidation.
Maddow points out that though voter intimidation is illegal anyway, the significance of the Klan Act is that it prohibits “conspiracy” to “prevent by force, intimidation, or threat, any citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote, from giving his support or advocacy in a legal manner, toward or in favor of the election of any lawfully qualified person as an elector for President or Vice President, or as a member of Congress of the United States.”
As an example of the role the KKK plays in Trump’s campaign, Maddow produced the KKK’s newspaper of today, which bills itself as “The Political Voice of White Christian America,” which, you might note, is identical with Fox News demographic. This paper, she says, “has been turning up on front lawns in the great state of Georgia.”
Watch courtesy of MSNBC (discussion begins at 9:15 mark):
Tonight we just got a hold of this disgusting development. This is the newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan today. It’s The Crusader, the political voice of white Christian America. The premier voice of white resistance. They’ve got — you see the white power symbol there in the upper right-hand corner? They’ve got a whole media operation going on apparently. Watch white pride TV, listen to KKK radio 24 hours a day. This newsletter is about 12 pages long, features articles on “the threat of nonwhite immigration,” a very subtle feature on black people committing terrible crimes against white people. There’s an article by the founder of the America First Party which is all about the terrorist Jews. He brags in his byline that he’s the man who David Duke credits for awakening him to the threat of Jewish supremacism. It’s exactly what you would think from the Ku Klux Klan newspaper. If you knew there was a Ku Klux Klan newspaper these days. But the front page full page story is “Make America Great Again” with a big featured center photo of Donald Trump. It’s one of several articles in the paper about Trump, including this in-set article about how Trump’s candidacy is “moving the dialogue forward.” […] Those are a couple of the many, many robocalls that were made during the Republican primary campaign on behalf of Donald Trump’s candidacy, calls made by a white nationalist group that calls itself the American National Super PAC. The Trump campaign doesn’t appear to have anything to do with these calls. They reportedly returned a donation from the white nationalist guy who you hear on the call when it was first reported that he was making these calls and that he was a Trump donor. It was further embarrassing to the Trump campaign when this guy, this farmer and white nationalist who does these robocalls, he was initially picked to be a Trump delegate to the Republican Convention this year before his delegate status once got yanked once it was widely reported.
Donald Trump’s white supremacist followers have made no secret of the fact that they want a “White homeland” and that, of necessity, the United States must be this White homeland. As Maddow has pointed out in the past, and by their own admission, their “eugenics insanity” is now out in the open because of Donald Trump.
Don’t believe Maddow? Demographics Pro looked at “10,000 Donald Trump Twitter supporters [and] found that more than one third follow white nationalist Twitter accounts.”
The fact is, Trump has mainstreamed white supremacy and by not strongly denouncing it, brought it into his own “movement,” which seems to be a meeting place for much more than disaffected white working-class Americans, whatever the mainstream media tells you.
The Trump campaign is a maelstrom of hate, and the KKK is right at the heart of it. | 0 |
GaryNorth.com October 31, 2016 The world of 1900 was nothing like the world of 1800. The world of 2000 was nothing like the world of 1900. Why? Because of 2% per annum economic growth per capita.
No one can perceive this low an increase in one year. But when compounded, no one can miss the changes in our lives over a lifetime. I dealt with this in my Mises Institute lecture, “ How Come We’re So Rich? ”
In my life, I experienced only one major change in my productivity. In late 1980, I switched to a computer to write. I used a primitive version of WordPerfect on a mini-computer: Satellite Software International. In one week, I doubled my output. I continued to use the DOS-based version of the program for the next 25 years.
For small businesses, the big breakthrough was VisiCalc: the first spreadsheet. This was the “killer App” that made the Apple II the first business microcomputer in 1979. There have been improvements since then, but VisiCalc fundamentally changed the process of business planning. It came as a result of a “what if” class assignment at the Harvard Business School. If any other business program has had a greater impact on how businessmen run their businesses, I am unaware of it. Maybe computerized accounting programs are more widely used, but they are digital versions of paper-based principles that go back six centuries. There has been nothing to match double-entry bookkeeping during this period.
Tim Berners-Lee converted the Internet into the World Wide Web in 1990. It was a hobby project. The graphics user interface for the Internet launched a communications revolution five years later. A group of nerds at the University of Minnesota invented it. YouTube followed a decade later. Facebook changed the way a billion people live. These were revolutions. They were all originally hobby projects. The applications of these technologies have been decentralized and marginal, but our world is different.
There are occasional big ideas. There are not many of them. Then decentralized marginal extensions of them change our world.
This takes the liberty. It takes a free market. No central planner or planning committee could foresee these applications, let alone design one. Yet there are still socialists who imagine that some planning committee could do this. They see all around them the fruits of the private ownership of the means of production, and then they go online to call the rest of us to vote for central planning.
We think of Bernie Sanders as a socialist. But, compared with Marx, Lenin, and Mao, he is a free enterpriser. He wants wealth redistribution. He and his followers use the word “socialism,” but they still want Facebook and YouTube in private hands. The world around us is the world of decentralized capital. Sanders and his camp want government redistribution of wealth, but they don’t want the world run by the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Best of Gary North Tags: Gary North [ ] is the author of Mises on Money . Visit http://www.garynorth.com . He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible . Copyright © 2016 Gary North | 0 |
Paranoid apoplexy over the Russkies By Jacob Hornberger Posted on October 28, 2016 by Jacob Hornberger
As I watch the paranoid apoplexy that U.S. officials and their acolytes in the mainstream press are displaying over the hacking of Democratic Party computers and the disclosure of their emails, I’m tempted to say that it might all be some sort of karmic justice. But since I’m a Christian rather than a Buddhist, I’m more tempted to say that it might all be a ratification of the principle, “You get what you sow.”
Consider their accusation: that it was the Russkies who did the hacking and the disclosing of those emails. Is there any evidence that they’ve shown us? None! But heaven help anyone who points that out. He will be labeled a lover and defender of Vladimir Putin as well as an American who hates America, one who dares to doubt the word of the U.S. “intelligence establishment.” Why, they might even insinuate that he is a communist or a communist sympathizer, as they did during the old Cold War.
When it comes to U.S. national-security state accusations against Russia, Americans are supposed to do what they were expected to do during the previous Cold War: hop to, salute, pledge allegiance, and unconditionally accept the conclusions of the U.S. “intelligence community.” Sort of like when they were expected to blindly support the invasion of Iraq based on those WMD conclusions that were being issued by the national-security establishment.
Don’t ask questions. Just defer to their authority. They know what’s best for us. They have access to information we don’t have. They’re just protecting “national security.”
Evidence? Who needs any stinking evidence? Everyone knows that the Russkies do these sorts of things. It has to be them. Who else?
Never mind that these people lie from time to time. Recall Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who lied under oath to Congress about the NSA’s super-secret illegal surveillance scheme on the American people. (Of course nothing happened to him.) Or CIA Director Richard Helm’s lying to Congress about the CIA’s super-secret schemes in Chile to effect regime change there. (He was permitted to plead out to a misdemeanor and hailed as hero back at CIA headquarters.)
In fact, the subject of Chile raises the possibility that the paranoid apoplexy that these people are experiencing over Russia’s supposed efforts to influence U.S. elections might be some sort of psychological payback for all the things that the U.S. national-security establishment has done to influence elections in other countries.
In the 1960s, one could be forgiven for concluding that the CIA was a super-secret political party in Chile, given the millions of dollars that the CIA spent to support its candidates in Chile’s elections. Of course, that wasn’t the worst of it. When the 1970 presidential election failed to go the CIA’s way, it bribed members of the Chilean legislature, bribed national food truckers to go on strike, assassinated an innocent man (Rene Schneider, the head of Chile’s armed forces), orchestrated a violent military coup that left the democratically elected president of Chile dead, and then supported a regime that raped, tortured, executed, and assassinated thousands of innocent people, including two innocent Americans, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi .
And they’re complaining of a few hacked emails belonging to some U.S. political hacks?
Don’t forget Guatemala. When the Guatemalan people elected Jacobo Arbenz to be their president, U.S. national-security state officials were outraged because he was a socialist (just like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who brought us Social Security and Medicare). So, the CIA did some interfering with that election by instigating a violent military coup in Guatemala, one that sent that nation into a 30-year civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
What about Iran, where the CIA decided that it would do a some influencing in an election in that country by instigating a coup that ousted the democratically elected prime minister of the country? Americans and Iranians are still paying the price for that bit of influencing.
Lest anyone think that those democracy-busting regime changes are ancient history and that the U.S. national-security establishment has reformed itself, let’s not forget the massive amount of weaponry and foreign aid that is poured into the coffers of Egypt’s brutal military dictatorship, which ousted a democratically elected president it didn’t like.
If there weren’t so many innocent people who have suffered death, rape, torture, execution, and assassination from U.S. interference with the elections of other countries, the rank hypocrisy would be rather humorous. The simple fact of the matter is that U.S. officials lack moral standing to complain about any foreign regime’s supposedly influencing U.S. elections.
I’d be remiss if I failed to point out one humorous aspect of this karmic or you-get-what-you-sow experience. U.S. officials just arrested a national-security state official and charged him with stealing U.S. national-security secret secrets. What are the secrets he stole? He stole secret codes that enable U.S. officials to hack into the computers of foreign regimes! How’s that for a bit of dark irony? It’s just a matter of time before they say that Putin is using the codes that their man stole to hack into the email accounts of Democratic Party hacks.
One final question: Why are U.S. officials and their mainstream press supporters complaining that everyone is reading those Democratic Party emails? As those people say to Americans who have had their emails, Internet visits, and telephone calls monitored by the NSA, if you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about? This work by MWC News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License .
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. This entry was posted in Commentary . Bookmark the permalink . | 0 |
“No, I want that one,” asserted O’Reilly.
“Which one in particular?” she asked.
He didn’t care. “April or August.”
Resume stammering: “OK. Um … let’s see. In August, um, let’s see … Um … We had comments that you were going to …‘If someone is being really dishonest,’ referring to the press corps, you would strip them of their credentials as well. It doesn’t sound like an independent thing …”
Nor does it sound like anything remotely related to what O’Reilly asked for.
“That doesn’t have anything to do with ‘Lock her up,'” he said. “You are ill-prepared for this interview, Miss Rubin.”
“No, I’m not. I have a list here,” she said.
A list from which she was utterly, laughably unable to produce the one thing she was asked for.
“Miss Rubin,” said O’Reilly, “I have just given you a minute where you hemmed and hawed. You said I justified a comment, ‘Lock her up.’ You can’t point to it. And then you pivot to something else. You are ill-prepared for this. And this is the point I want to make. Your column and blog are a fraud …”
She then threatened to put the list up on her blog which, according to NewsBusters , never happened.
Watch the interview; seriously, it’s fun.
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The universal background checks passed under Nevada’s Question 1 were scheduled to go into effect January 1, but the state’s sheriffs are making clear that it’s not going to happen. [In fact, sheriffs say the December 28 opinion handed down by Nevada Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt basically renders the checks moot by proving them unenforceable. Breitbart News reported that Laxalt pointed out how the language of Question 1 actually ensnared those who framed it, rendering it “unenforceable” by presuming the FBI would do that which the FBI refuses to do while simultaneously failing to grant the Nevada Department of Public Safety the authority to act in the FBI’s stead — as a “Point of Contact” (POC) for sales in Nevada. Framers of Question 1 wanted licensed gun dealers to serve as POCs throughout the state, but the FBI refused this plan of action in a letter dated December 14. The FBI said they were willing to let the Nevada DPS serve as POC on the universal checks, but that is not possible because the DPS was not granted authority to do so by those who designed the Nevada checks. The Journal is reporting that sheriff’s across the state reacted to Laxalt’s opinion by making clear that they have no plans to enforce the background checks once the January 1 effective date arrives. For example, the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office voiced “support” for Laxalt’s opinion, saying, “We will not enforce any provisions of this ballot initiative until the issues have been resolved. ” Washoe County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Bob Harmon said, “Based on the Nevada Attorney General’s opinion, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office cannot enforce this law at this time. ” And the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office is advising residents of its county to “proceed with private party firearm sells and transfers as they did prior to the passing of ballot question #1. ” Storey County Sheriff Gerald Antinoro went even further, saying Question 1 “is not enforceable even without the opinion. ” The bottom line — Bloomberg Co. appear to have acted prematurely in celebrating the passage of gun control in Nevada. AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com | 1 |
On the first day of confirmation hearings for Federal Appeals Court Judge Neil Gorsuch to be named as a Supreme Court Justice, Sen. Ted Cruz ( ) reminded the Democrats, who one after another criticized the nominee, that during his confirmation hearing a decade ago for the federal seat he holds now, not one Democrat — including Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — voted against Gorsuch. [“A decade ago, Judge Gorsuch was confirmed by this committee for the Federal Court of Appeals by a voice vote,” Cruz said. “He was likewise confirmed by the entire United States Senate by a voice vote without a single Democrat speaking a word of opposition. “Not a word of opposition from Minority Leader Chuck Schumer,” Cruz said. “Not from Harry Reid, or Ted Kennedy, or John Kerry. ” “Not from Senators Feinstein, Leahey, or Durbin, who still sit on this committee,” Cruz said. “Not even from Senators Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden. ” “Not a one of them spoke a word against Judge Gorsuch’s nomination a decade ago,” Cruz said. Cruz said that not only did President Donald Trump play an unprecedented role in the selection of a justice to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia by telling the American people of the 21 people — including Gorsuch — who would be under consideration if he were elected president, but the voters weighed in. Thus, Gorsuch was “no ordinary nominee,” Cruz said. “His nomination carries with it a super legitimacy that is also unprecedented in our nation’s history,” Cruz said. “The American people played a very direct role in helping choose this nominee. ” Cruz also noted that since Democrats voted for Gorsuch’s federal judgeship 10 years ago, his outstanding record since then should make confirming him even easier. Notwithstanding its leftist political leanings, the American Bar Association (ABA) earlier this month gave Gorsuch a “well qualified” rating to serve as a justice on the U. S. Supreme Court. The ABA has three ratings for judicial nominees: not qualified, qualified, and well qualified. The ABA’s standing committee on the federal judiciary was unanimous in granting Gorsuch its highest rating. | 1 |
Israel should bulldoze it and replace it with a 7 11. | 0 |
Sam Sifton emails readers of Cooking five days a week to talk about food and suggest recipes. That email also appears here. To receive it in your inbox, register here. Good morning and welcome to the new cookbook season, which our Food reporters are celebrating in print and online today with our Cookbook Issue, a compendium of all the best new titles and recipes we could find on the shelves this fall. Of course, there are recipes, and we’ll get to them soon enough. Before we do, though, please make sure to read Kim Severson’s luminous profile of Alton Brown, which sees the television chef at a crossroads, hanging around his Georgia man cave and considering the future. Read, too, Melissa Clark’s delightful examination of the British food writer Diana Henry, who has been on a tear of late, publishing excellent cookbook after excellent cookbook. Both articles come with recipes, naturally: for Mr. Brown’s arctic char burger and his breakfast carbonara, and for Ms. Henry’s tuna and white bean casserole, lamb rib chops with dates, feta, sumac and tahini, and sweet potatoes with yogurt and chile. Tejal Rao filed a terrific primer on the latest trend in cookbook aesthetics — simple and modern. It comes with recipes as well: a spaghetti dinner with tomatoes and kale from “A Modern Way to Cook” by Anna Jones, and a Swiss chard slab pie from Kristin Donnelly’s “Modern Potluck. ” Check out Sara Bonisteel’s article on “Land of Fish and Rice” by Fuchsia Dunlop and “All Under Heaven” by Carolyn Phillips. And then cook: Shanghai noodles and bok choy, chicken congee, moo shu pork. Also: David Tanis on Naomi Duguid’s “Taste of Persia” and her recipe for Baku fish kebabs with sauce. Here’s Florence Fabricant on “Eat in My Kitchen” by Meike Peters and “Mozza at Home” by Nancy Silverton. It comes with a fine recipe for a Mozza staff meal of chicken thighs, and another for Ms. Peters’s sautéed endives with balsamic butter and marjoram. The presents keep coming! Oliver Strand dives into “Everything I Want to Eat” from the Los Angeles chef Jessica Koslow, and delivers recipes for sticky toffee date cake and for a socca with shredded vegetables. And Sara has a second article looking at “My Two Souths” by Asha Gomez she delivers Ms. Gomez’s recipe for weeknight fancy chicken and rice along with it. Here’s Christine Muhlke on Naomi Pomeroy’s cookbook “Taste and Technique,” which comes with a recipe for fennel gratin. And Margaux Laskey on “Poole’s: Recipes and Stories From a Modern Diner” by Ashley Christensen, with her recipes for hummingbird cake and a broccoli salad with Cheddar, bacon, grapes and pecans. Emily Weinstein helps round out the table with a look at Marcus Samuelsson’s “The Red Rooster Cookbook” and his recipe for the short ribs he cooked for President Obama. That’s a lot of new recipes for you! Of course, on a Wednesday night in late September, you may not want a recipe at all. Join us instead for a recipe for a tomato salad that we hacked out of Gabrielle Hamilton’s exquisite and bossy “Prune” this weekend. Get the best beefsteak or heirloom tomatoes you can find at the market today. (And they’re still out there!) Cut them into thick planks and arrange them prettily on a platter. Heat some good salted butter in a pan until it is foamy and about to brown, then pour it all over the tomatoes. Sprinkle some sea salt over the top and serve with bread. It’s legit the best meal imaginable for this time of the year. Or take a spin through Cooking to find something else. And if you run into trouble, reach out for help: cookingcare@nytimes. com. We want you to be happy. See you on Friday. | 1 |
Donald J. Trump will become president of the United States after he says just 35 words: the oath of office. What is the oath, you may ask? have taken the oath since the beginning of the republic. George Washington first said it in 1789, and the oath has been the centerpiece of presidential inaugurations ever since, symbolizing the continuity of democratic rule and the peaceful transition of power. The oath of office comes directly from Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. This is the full text, according to the National Museum of American History: The oath is traditionally administered by the chief justice of the United States, but sometimes that can be harder than it looks. In 2009, Justice John G. Roberts Jr. garbled the oath while swearing in Barack Obama. Chief Justice Roberts misspoke — he said, “I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully. ” Then, he left out the word “execute” altogether. Mr. Obama, for his part, seemed to realize the chief justice’s mistake. Mr. Obama’s aides said that they believed the oath was valid, even if it had not gone according to plan. But he was sworn in a second time before a small, private audience the next day — just to make sure. Before they began, Mr. Obama joked with the chief justice, “We’re going to do it very slowly. ” | 1 |
Updated, 3:41 p. m. The heavy rain started on Friday, and as flooding began in towns across the Gulf Coast, the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency. By Saturday the waters were raging: the National Guard was pulling people from their homes, rivers were cresting at historic levels, cars and buses had overturned and the worst was ahead. It was not until Sunday night, at 8:20 p. m. that The New York Times posted a story on its website, which appeared Monday in print. Readers trying to follow the news might have come across a wire story before Sunday, but The Times had devoted no staff resources before then. Only today has a staff writer reached the flood areas — Campbell Robertson, who until now has been covering the floods from dry ground in New Orleans. Many readers have expressed disappointment in the coverage. Here’s Catherine Holmes, of Georgia, who wrote in Sunday afternoon. “Baton Rouge and residents north and east are in the midst of a disaster and I see nothing on The New York Times’s front page. Hundreds of people have been stranded on since yesterday morning, and just a few hours ago got some water delivered to them,” she wrote. “Disappointing that Trump’s latest gaffe and the Olympics totally dominate your front page this morning, when so many in south Louisiana are suffering. ” There was also this from Laura Esfeller, who grew up in Louisiana: “I am outraged that The New York Times is not covering the devastating flooding in Louisiana! People are stranded, have lost everything and are dying, and the nation’s newspaper of record has done no original reporting on this? Make this a priority!” The Times is not the only news organization being criticized for doing too little too late on the floods. Even so, from my scanning of the media’s reaction, The Times’s performance seems particularly weak. I asked national editor Marc Lacey what explains the limited coverage so far. “I think it’s a big story and I think we were on it,” he said. “It’s clear there’s extensive devastation. ” When I pushed about the slow start, Lacey said, “We definitely could have done more and we’re going to do more. Stay tuned. ” (The Times published two additional stories Tuesday afternoon.) Lacey said The Times has covered the floods with wire stories and photography, and with two stories. He said the paper used a stringer in the region to help with the reporting. If there was someone on the ground, it is not very evident to me from the stories that were produced. Most of the quotes from residents, or descriptions of the scene or events, appear to be taken from television or were credited to other news organizations or social media. In other words: aggregation. No doubt this is a busy news period, and the fact that it is August compounds the usual challenges of getting available staff to the site of the news. But a news organization like The Times — rich with resources and eager to proclaim its national prominence — surely can find a way to cover a storm that has ravaged such a wide stretch of the country’s Gulf Coast. Especially when it has brought devastating floods, once more, to the brave state of Louisiana. | 1 |
■ Rudolph W. Giuliani, a fiercely loyal Trump ally, is out of the race for secretary of state. Rex W. Tillerson, the head of Exxon Mobil, appears to be the leading contender. ■ Donald J. Trump’s transition team is asking a lot of questions at the Energy Department. ■ Mr. Trump will name Gary D. Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, to direct the National Economic Council. ■ He could also name Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington, to be interior secretary. Rex W. Tillerson, the president and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, is the leading candidate to be Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, according to a person with direct knowledge of the search process. Mr. Tillerson went to Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday to meet with Mr. Trump, who is said to be close to making a decision. Mr. Tillerson has been strongly recommended by a number of business leaders. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, has been described by Mr. Trump’s advisers as still in the running. But Mr. Trump has said conflicting things privately about his views of Mr. Romney, advisers said, and has indicated to several people that he is unlikely to be named. Trump’s transition team has circulated an unusual questionnaire that requests the names of all employees and contractors who have attended domestic or international climate change policy conferences, as well as emails associated with the conferences. The questionnaire appears targeted at climate science research and clean energy programs. Energy Department employees, who shared the questionnaire with The New York Times and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, described the questionnaire as unprecedented and worrying. “These questions don’t just indicate an attack on civil servants here in Washington,” said an Energy Department employee. “They amount to a witch hunt in D. O. E. ’s 17 national labs, where scientists have the independence to do their work — yet here are questions that are reminiscent of an inquisition rather than actual curiosity about how the labs work. ” The questionnaire asks for lists of employees involved in key climate change programs, including all those who have attended United Nations climate change conferences. It also asks for lists of employees involved in designing a metric known as the Social Cost of Carbon, a figure used by the Obama administration to measure the economic impact of carbon dioxide pollution, and to justify the economic cost of climate regulations. It specifically asks which Energy Department programs are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama’s climate change agenda, which Mr. Trump has vowed to roll back. It includes several questions for the Energy Information Administration, the department’s statistics office, which also measures the nation’s carbon dioxide pollution, asking for justification of its numbers. “In the Annual Energy Outlook 2016, E. I. A. assumed that the Clean Power Plan should be in the reference case despite the fact that the reference case is based on existing laws and regulations,” the questionnaire reads. “Why did the E. I. A. make that assumption, which seems to be atypical of past forecasts?” And it includes several questions focused on the national scientific laboratories, including queries on highest salaries, and outside evaluation of research. Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal allies, is no longer in the running for secretary of state, after removing his name from contention on Nov. 29, according to a statement from the transition. “Rudy Giuliani is an extraordinarily talented and patriotic American,” Mr. Trump said in the statement. “I will always be appreciative of his dedication to our campaign after I won the primaries and for his extremely wise counsel. He is and continues to be a close personal friend, and as appropriate, I will call upon him for advice and can see an important place for him in the administration at a later date. ” Mr. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, will remain on the transition team. “This is not about me it is about what is best for the country and the new administration,” Mr. Giuliani said. “Before I joined the campaign I was very involved and fulfilled by my work with my law firm and consulting firm, and I will continue that work with even more enthusiasm. From the vantage point of the private sector, I look forward to helping the in any way he deems necessary and appropriate. ” The statement came as Mr. Giuliani’s prospects had dimmed for the State Department post, apparently the only one he wanted. He had been offered the job of attorney general and secretary of homeland security, but had no interest, according to a person briefed on the discussions. Some in Mr. Trump’s circle were concerned about the potential for a messy confirmation hearing over Mr. Giuliani’s tangle of foreign business ties and paid speeches. Encouraged by the ’s possible on deporting young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, two senators have crafted a bipartisan bill to help protect them. Known as the Bridge Act, the bill, sponsored by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, is intended to protect roughly 800, 000 young illegal immigrants from deportation should Mr. Trump make good on his campaign promise to end the protections issued by President Obama through an executive order. The Obama program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, granted deportation protection and work permits for two years to immigrants brought to the country as minors who have passed criminal background checks. The measure, which also has at least one from each party, would give current recipients a reprieve even if Mr. Trump undoes the order, and allow new applicants to apply. Mr. Trump, who has included the Dreamers in his broader deportation plan, appeared to back down in an interview published in Time magazine this week when he said, “We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud. ” Mr. Cohn, president of the Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, is expected to be named director of Mr. Trump’s National Economic Council, joining the Treasury secretary pick Steven Mnuchin as Goldman voices on the economic team. Mr. Trump used Wall Street and “the global elites” as constant foils during the campaign, featuring Goldman’s chief executive and chairman, Lloyd Blankfein, in his dark closing argument. Since his victory, however, Mr. Trump has tapped Mr. Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner, for Treasury secretary the billionaire investor Wilbur Ross to be his commerce secretary Todd Ricketts, heir to the Ameritrade fortune, to be deputy commerce secretary and now Mr. Cohn. The National Economic Council was created by President Bill Clinton — another frequent foil of Mr. Trump’s — to show that domestic policy would be equal to foreign policy. Like the older National Security Council, the N. E. C. coordinates the policies of the Treasury, labor and commerce departments, as well as other agencies like the Small Business Administration and the Council of Economic Advisers. And because Mr. Cohn will sit in the White House complex, he is likely to be extremely influential on Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohn is also a big contributor to federal campaigns on both sides of the aisle, including tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats and Democratic campaign committees. Adding Mr. Cohn to the economic team was a favorite idea of Mr. Trump’s Jared Kushner. And he does not break the streak of wealthy Trump teammates. Mr. Cohn’s most recent total compensation package made public at Goldman exceeded $20. 5 million. Goldman Sachs shares, by the way, are up 33 percent since Election Day. Ms. McMorris Rodgers, the woman in the House Republican leadership, is expected to be announced as Mr. Trump’s secretary of the interior as early as Friday, two people close to the transition efforts said. Ms. McMorris Rodgers comes from Washington, a state with large federal land reserves, and she was also critical of Mr. Trump at various points during the presidential campaign. Aides to Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment. In the last part of his winning run, Mr. Trump’s campaign amassed more money than Hillary Clinton’s, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission late Thursday. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign took in $70 million from Oct. 20 to Nov. 28, compared with $86 million for the Trump campaign, of which $10 million came from the candidate’s own pocket. In terms of spending, Mrs. Clinton relied on the war chest she had built up during the course of the campaign to spend almost $131 million, compared with $94 million by Mr. Trump. Mrs. Clinton closed the period with under $1 million dollars in the bank, much less than the $7 million remaining for the Trump campaign. Mr. Trump may have tossed in a few million in the final weeks of his campaign, but he also took a few, soliciting donations from supporters, then reimbursing himself for rent and his airplane. From Oct. 20 to Nov. 28, the period covered by a postelection report filed with the F. E. C. the campaign paid nearly $3 million to properties owned by Mr. Trump, including rent to Trump Tower and event fees to other Trump hotels. The largest part went to Tag Air, the company that operates Mr. Trump’s airplane. The new disclosures bring the total amount that Trump companies earned from his campaign to nearly $12 million. The campaign itself was hardly a moneymaker for Mr. Trump himself, though. The ’s total cash contributions came in at more than $65 million, well short of the $100 million he had originally promised but likely more than his businesses earned off the venture. Linda McMahon, a pro wrestling impresario, put $1 million into Future45, a “super PAC,” in the final stages of the presidential campaign, taking her total contribution to the organization to $7 million. This week, Ms. McMahon — who lost twice in recent years as a Republican candidate for the United States Senate in Connecticut — was chosen by Mr. Trump to head the Small Business Administration. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who took down Gawker, gave $1 million to Make America Number 1, an “super PAC” run by the Mercer family, hedge fund billionaires. He has not been named to a position by the transition team, but he has been mentioned as a possibility for the Supreme Court. And: But: But Mr. Trump did tell Time magazine he had done nothing to divide the country. The Trump inaugural committee offered details for the multiday party planned for Mr. Trump’s inauguration, which in a departure from the norm will include a welcome rally. (The does love his rallies.) The announcement: Not stated: A Million Women March is being organized for the day after with a different message — though organizers did not get formal permits for the mall. | 1 |
Officials in El Salvador held emergency meetings after seeing a sharp increase in the number of violent gang members being deported back to the country from the United States under the Trump administration. [Salvadoran authorities have held emergency meetings and proposed new legislation to monitor returning criminals and gang members that are returning to El Salvador after deportation, according to the Washington Post. The move by Salvadoran officials comes as a direct result of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration and efforts to deport more criminal illegal aliens from the U. S. This year the U. S. has already deported 398 gang members back to El Salvador — compared to only 534 for all of 2016. It is due to this rapid increase in deportations that Salvadoran officials like Héctor Antonio Rodríguez, the director of the country’s immigration agency, are worried about the impact the returning gang members will have in the country. “This clearly affects El Salvador. We already have a climate of violence in the country that we are combating,” Rodríguez said. “If gang members return, of course this worries us. ” Many of the returning gang members belong to a notoriously violent street gang that has plagued communities throughout the U. S. with horrific acts of violence. Although started out in Salvadoran communities in Los Angeles sometime during the 1980’s, lax immigration policies and weak border security helped the gang explode in size as originated from illegal immigrants, Breitbart Texas reported. The recent murders of four teens in New York City have put in the national spotlight with Attorney General Jeff Sessions declaring that U. S. authorities are going after the gang. “The motto is kill, rape, and control,” Sessions said. “I have a message to the gangs that are targeting our young people: We are targeting you. We are coming after you. ” Speaking at a rally in April, President Trump highlighted the importance of removing illegal alien gang members from the U. S.: At the heart of my administration’s efforts to restore the rule of law has been a nationwide crackdown on criminal gangs, and that means taking the fight to the sanctuary cities that shield these dangerous criminals from removal. The last very weak administration allowed thousands and thousands of gang members to cross our borders and enter into our communities, where they wreaked havoc on our citizens. The bloodthirsty cartel known as has infiltrated our schools, threatening innocent children. We have seen the horrible assaults and many killings all along Long Island where I grew up. We are seeing the vicious spread of transnational gangs into all 50 states and the human suffering they bring with them. I have been with the parents. It is devastation. A very respected General recently told me that are the equivalent in their meanness to Al Qaeda. My administration will not rest until we have dismantled these violent gangs, and we are doing it rapidly, and we are sending them the hell out of our country. On Wednesday, Breitbart Texas reported that Sen. Ron Johnson ( ) Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said recently obtained documents from a whistleblower show that the Obama administration knowingly admitted 16 gang members in 2014. Ryan Saavedra is a contributor for Breitbart Texas and can be found on Twitter at @RealSaavedra. | 1 |
Poll: Sexism Was NOT A Factor In Hillary's Loss By: Aaron Bandler November 11, 2016
Some leftists still reeling from Hillary Clinton's stunning defeat on Tuesday are blaming her defeat on supposed sexism against a woman president. However, a new poll suggests that sexism did not play a role at all in Clinton's loss.
The poll, conducted by Conquest Communications Group and published on Just Facts , featured a question specifically geared toward gauging potential sexism: "If you were faced with a choice between a male and a female presidential candidate, who would you vote for?"
Here were the results (emphasis added):
Overall, 69% of voters said “It does not matter,” 15% preferred a female, 12% preferred a male, 3% were unsure, and 1% refused to answer.
Male voters and Trump voters were more likely than any other groups to say “It does not matter,” at 73% and 72% respectively. The other groups were not far behind and within the margins of error, with rates of: 67% for Clinton voters. 66% for undecided voters. 64% for females.
Naturally, supporters of Trump were more likely to support a male president than a female president–25 percent to 2 percent, respectively–and Clinton supporters were more likely to support female president than a male president, 27 percent to 5 percent, respectively.
The survey was conducted from October 11-23, so it was taken a couple of weeks before the election. But it's hard to imagine a majority of voters all of a sudden turned into a bunch of sexists.
There is a little bias towards a male president among Trump voters and a little bias towards a female president among Clinton voters, but the results of the survey suggest that overall, the genitalia of a candidate is not a significant factor involved in most voters when it comes to choosing the next president of the United States.
Democrats will have to find a different strategy for identity politics since the gender card doesn't work. Speaking of identity politics, it looks like the race card seems to be in trouble as well . Tags | 0 |
■ President Trump would not say whether he favors lifting sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and meddling in the election, as his British counterpart rejected such a move. ■ Battle lines are forming within the Republican Party ahead of Mr. Trump’s phone call Saturday with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. ■ The commander in chief said his defense secretary will “override” his views in favor of torture. President Trump said on Friday that it was “very early” to be talking about lifting sanctions on Russia, deflecting a question about whether he would raise the issue with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin on Saturday morning even as his British counterpart flatly rejected such a move. Speaking to reporters after a meeting with Theresa May, the British prime minister, Mr. Trump did not say whether he supports keeping sanctions that were put in place following Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine and its interference in the 2016 election. But he said he hoped to have a good relationship with Mr. Putin. “If we could have a great relationship with Russia and with China and with all countries, I’m all for that,” Mr. Trump said in a brief answer to the question. Ms. May was more direct in her answer to the question about sanctions on Russia. She said the United Kingdom “believes that the sanctions should continue. ” The answers highlight what could be one of the differences between the two leaders, even as both of them insisted Friday that they plan to continue the close working relationship that has long existed between the two nations. President Trump’s phone call scheduled on Saturday with Russia’s president — their first conversation since Mr. Trump took office — has Republicans on edge. As one of his last acts as president, Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the election to help install Mr. Trump in the Oval Office. Senator John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned Mr. Trump on Friday against lifting the sanctions. What came next was a list of Russian abuses: its invasion of Ukraine, its annexation of Crimea and its support of “the murderous Assad regime as it has waged war on the Syrian people and killed more than 400, 000 civilians. ” Then came this: “And in the most flagrant demonstration of Putin’s disdain and disrespect for our nation, Russia deliberately interfered in our recent election with cyberattacks and a disinformation campaign designed to weaken America and discredit Western values. ” UPDATE: Another Republican senator, Rob Portman of Ohio, joins in: President Trump said Friday that he will let his secretary of defense “override” him by banning torture even though he believes the tactics do work in getting information out of terror suspects. In a remarkable show of deference to his own subordinate, Mr. Trump noted that Jim Mattis, the Pentagon chief, does not believe torture is effective. The president, who serves as the commander in chief and usually makes the final call on military action, said he will let Mr. Mattis decide. “I don’t necessarily agree, but I will tell you that he will override because I’m giving him that power,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m going to rely on him. I happen to feel that it does work. ” Mr. Trump appeared to be struggling about the issue even as he spoke, returning several times to his own belief in torture’s effectiveness even as he stated several times that he would let Mr. Mattis would decide. “But I’m going with our leaders,” he said. “We are going to win, with or without. ” Then he added: “But I do disagree. ” President Trump spoke by phone on Friday with Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico, White House officials said, less than 24 hours after the Mexican president canceled a White House meeting over anger about Mr. Trump’s intentions to build a border wall. A senior White House official confirmed Friday that the call had taken place and said that an official description of what the two leaders said will be released soon. In the wake of the deepening diplomatic tensions on Thurdsday, aides to Mr. Trump had said they still intended to keep lines of communications between the two governments open. The call suggests that the two leaders may be attempting to reschedule the planned meeting. That could begin to repair the relationship in the short term, though differences will likely remain about construction of the border wall and who will finance it. Then again, Mr. Trump tweeted another salvo on Friday morning. Mr. Mattis on Friday ordered the review of the controversial fighter jet program, which has been criticized by President Trump for its cost overruns. Mr. Mattis also ordered that plans for a new Air Force One — which has also come under fire from Mr. Trump — should be reviewed, “with the specific objective of identifying means to substantially reduce the programs costs while delivering needed capabilities. ” The review, Mr. Mattis said in a memo, will also look at how to reduce costs while still meeting requirements set out for the fighter jet program. During his confirmation hearings earlier this month, Mr. Mattis defended tweets from Mr. Trump criticizing the program. Mr. Mattis said at the time that Mr. Trump had “in no way shown a lack of support for the program. He just wants more bang for the buck. ” The cost of building the fighter jet, the Joint Strike Fighter, has been an issue at the Pentagon for several years. At an estimated $400 billion over 15 years for 2, 443 planes, the fighter jet is the military largest weapons project. Mr. Trump is just not going to give up his claim that 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton, but he’s grasping for evidence. On Friday morning, he looked to VoteStand, which calls itself “America’s first online fraud reporting app” for the smartphone but does not appear to actually exist beyond the Twitter account of its founder, Gregg Phillips. The president seemed to be responding to an interview with Mr. Phillips on CNN Friday morning that was, shall we say, inconclusive. Mr. Phillips at once said 3 million illegal immigrants voted and said he is still working to prove that. “You can reach a conclusion and still verify it,” he maintained. Mr. Phillips began pressing his case that 3 million illegal votes were cast shortly after Election Day in November, but pressed repeatedly, Mr. Phillips has never produced any evidence. As the debunking site Snopes. com wrote: Mr. Phillips has been adamant on Twitter of course. But as PolitiFact wrote, “There is no report. ” And that is not all Mr. Phillips has asserted. He now has an endorsement from the president of the United States. Mr. Trump’s fallacious argument that he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million because of illegal immigrant ballots started as the stuff of wonderment and ridicule. Now that the Trump administration has shifted to an investigation of the voter rolls, things have gotten serious. Democrats appear to be girding for battle, but if, as is likely, Senator Jeff Sessions, a conservative from Alabama, becomes the attorney general, it does not appear to be a fight that the minority can win. The Democrats fear the hunt for illegal voters will become a pretext to tighten voting requirements nationwide and bar many minority voters who tend to side with the Democrats. Even moderate Democrats are alarmed. Word from Politico is that President Trump will not be attending the fancy, Alfalfa Club dinner Saturday night, a chummy gathering with many of Washington’s politicians, journalists and every president since Ronald Reagan. Lest we get too excited — could the White House Correspondents Association dinner be next? Please? — we should wait and see. It is true that every president since Mr. Reagan has attended the annual roast and silly cabaret dinner of the Alfalfa Club, a Washington clique that seems like it was hatched from a bygone era. But not many of those presidents have attended each year. Mr. Trump may yet keep the soiree alive. Mr. Trump traveled to the City of Brotherly Love on Thursday to decry Philadelphia’s rising murder rate — “I mean, just terribly increasing. ” But it isn’t. Last year’s 277 homicides was down from 280 in 2015. That is up from 2014, when 248 were murdered, and in 2013, when 246 were killed. But recent years are markedly down from 2007 to 2012 when Philadelphia had more than 300 killings, 391 in 2007 alone. “President Trump’s false statements today were an insult to the men and women of the Philadelphia police force — the very same men and women who are working long hours today to ensure his safety,” Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement Thursday. Of course, in the era of alternative facts, Mayor Kenney may be spitting in the wind. The Trump administration’s decision to drop advertisements encouraging people to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act was greeted with anger and alarm by supporters of the law — and a recognition that Mr. Trump wants the law crippled. “This is sabotage, pure and simple,” fumed Leslie Dach, a senior official in President Barack Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services who now heads a coalition to save the law. “This proves that this administration doesn’t care about people who need health coverage. And it clearly shows that they now own the consequences of their efforts to undermine the health care system. ” The ads were to have run only for a few more days, until the annual open enrollment period ends on Tuesday. In the last few years, large numbers of consumers signed up just before the deadline. But Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress are determined to repeal Mr. Obama’s signature domestic achievement. Since Nov. 1, more than 11. 5 million people have signed up for insurance or had their coverage automatically renewed. And when the enrollment period ends, it’s anyone’s guess who will announce the total number of people who would lose their insurance if the law is repealed. The leading candidate to be the Pentagon’s new spokesman is John Ullyot, a former Marine Corps intelligence officer and veteran of Capitol Hill. Mr. Ullyot served as spokesman and deputy chief of staff for two Republican senators, John W. Warner of Virginia and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and as spokesman for the Senate Armed Services Committee from 2003 to 2007. | 1 |
Parts 7 & 8 CONSTANTINE AND THE CROSS & THE RELICS OF ROMANISM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw2x1PQGh-8 | 0 |
By Vin Armani You know the state is in trouble when they’re afraid of one man with an Internet connection. The case of Julian Assange... | 0 |
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One of the worst case scenarios is happening again.
According to reports, Fukushima is being struck again by a tsunami after a large 7.4 earthquake – just updated from reports of a 7.3 earthquake – struck off the main island directly in front of the Fukushima Prefecture where the beleaguered TEPCO nuclear plant is situated.
via CNN : A tsunami warning is in effect for Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture after a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck off Honshu at 5:59 a.m. Tuesday (3:59 p.m. Monday ET), according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.A tsunami wave of 1-3 meters (3-10 feet) is possible, according to the agency.
Numerous aftershocks, somewhere in the range of 5.0 to 5.4 are being widely reported as well.
According to RT , that tsunami has advanced and has now affected the cooling system at Fukushima. Seriously – this is reportedly happening! Fukushima reactor cooling system stops following quake & tsunami
The cooling system of the third reactor at the Fukushima nuclear power plant has stopped circulating water following a powerful 7.3 offshore earthquake.
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) told national broadcaster NHK that the cooling system in the Reactor 3 spent fuel pool stopped working. Japan’s national nuclear agency has confirmed that the temperature rise in the pool is “gradual.” The exact cause of the cooling system stoppage is currently unknown. However, the system might have been “shaken” during the earthquake, according to nuclear agency officials, as reported by NHK. No cooling water leaks or any other “abnormalities” have been reported. According to NHK, cooling equipment for the spent nuclear fuel pool in the reactor No. 3 of Tepco’s Fukushima No. 2 power plant has stopped.
— The Japan Times (@japantimes) November 21, 2016
There may still be large waves – potentially as big as 10 feet – that hit the shores of Japan, though the size and extend, and the potential scope of the damage and/or loss of life remains to be seen.
On March 11, 2011 a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck near Japan and triggered an enormous and devastating tsunami that crippled the nuclear power plant, and exposed that world’s oceans and biosphere to potential contamination.
Fukushima is already an open wound but these new events could exacerbate the problems – or magnify them.
That’s why it is so completely disturbing that the powers that be never properly fixed the problems that were still ongoing after years. The situation at Fukushima Daiichi was never fully contained, and the reactors continued to leak; there is no way to stop the reactions or disable the rods. The authorities simply lied and killed all the press coverage, forcing silence on the issue, except for the online blogosphere, where the issue has lived on as a hotly debated topic that people believe is causing health problems and environmental issues on a widespread basis. RT: Video of blast at Fukushima nuke plant, radiation leak reported 2013:Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Going From Horrible To Horrendous
But whatever has been swept under the rug is likely to come to the forefront if a new tsunami brings massive destruction to Japan’s mainland again.
The failure of the cooling systems is – for now – only the first problem to be acknowledged in news reports. The situation is ongoing, and less than 24 hours have passed.
Considering that the corporate and government authorities in Japan made a concerted effort to silence bad news and pretend the problem away, there is no reason to believe that transparent coverage about what happens after this new earthquake and tsunami will be forthcoming.
So keep your eyes open, and your screen’s recording what is being reported and what other information comes out.
RT has continued live coverage of the events in Japan.
The reality of a potential catastrophe compounding the existing damage at Fukushima, and to everything its waters touch, simply may not be reported.
The powers that be on the Internet, and in the spheres of politics, are going out of their way to censor the grassroots media that thrives online, and are using 21st Century gestapo tactics to silence what they are labeling “false news.”
This story may be updated as more information becomes available.
Flashback: | 0 |
Next Swipe left/right Someone broke a Skype spam bot by typing an emoji and the transcript is what happens when robots go mad
As delpharseven1 says, “Message to programmers: ALL USER INPUT IS EVIL.” | 0 |
Actress and feminist activist Lena Dunham has come under fire recently for her history of racism, for example, a tweet she posted in 2010 referring to African Americans as “rodents. ”[“I’m never mad and I never feel victimized when people point out that they’ve been injured in some way by my behavior. I truly don’t feel like I deserve a certain kind of pass for my feminism or for my politics,” Dunham said during an appearance on comedian Phoebe Robinson’s WNYC podcast, Sooo Many White Guys. “When you’re living your life in the public eye, you will fuck up and you will fall down, and the only power you have is to apologize and keep moving,” Dunham explained. The actress attempted to atone, specifically, for projecting sexist thoughts onto New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. when the two briefly shared a table at last year’s Met Ball. “I’m not saying that this is in any way an excuse, [but] I move through the world feeling very awkward. It was at a table of notably beautiful women sitting there. I’m just having the experience of being a girl around what I consider to be like a hot, desirable athlete. So that was just projecting my own insecurity,” Dunham said about falsely attributing comments to Beckham Jr. rejecting her “marshmallow” body that he did not make. “I hadn’t understood the way that it fed into a very dark history of, you know, black men being lynched for not responding to white women in the way white women felt they were supposed to be responded to,” Dunham said, maintaining that she was simply ignorant of the implications of her actions. “I understood the minute that that was pointed out to me what the issue was. I was seeing myself as the chubby I am inside of myself, and not the person who is a cultural figure, who has the power to say something that could be hurtful and destructive. ” Later in the interview, Robinson, a black actress from New York City, grilled Dunham about the lack of characters in the early seasons of her HBO show Girls — a raunchy dramedy about four privileged white girls living in the Bronx. “There was just a certain amount of ignorance,” Dunham confessed, referencing her privileged white liberal childhood. “I almost wasn’t making a choice because choice implies knowledge. At that point, to be totally frank, I didn’t have enough women of color in my life talking to me about what representation meant to them for me to even understand that my show would be seen and have that kind of power. ” To be sure, Dunham says she has learned from her mistakes and promises never to create another show about “four white girls. ” “We’re not going to make another show that has four white girls on the poster,” she said, “because now, we’ve been very deeply educated about how much representation matters. ” The former Hillary Clinton campaign spokeswoman has been busy since failing to fulfill her promise to move to Canada if Donald Trump won the election. After wishing, last month, that she had an abortion, Dunham gave a “sizable donation to abortion funds” and Planned Parenthood. During the weekend, Dunham got naked, jumped in a tub of water, and took to Twitter to encourage her followers to sign up for Obamacare before the January 31 enrollment deadline: Inspired by @captdope, here’s a commercial for HEALTH INSURANCE. https: . — get what’s yours #pullthisad 🙏 pic. twitter. — Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) January 28, 2017, Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson. | 1 |
Next Swipe left/right Somebody’s thought of a new way to make America great again Over on Reddit, secretly_banana has shared a bumper sticker they spotted on their college campus, which could well have support from both Republicans and Democrats. | 0 |
Warns Russia Can't Maintain Pause if Strikes Continue by Jason Ditz, November 01, 2016 Share This
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned today that the moratorium on Russian airstrikes around Aleppo is in jeopardy from the continued rebel attacks against positions around government-held Western Aleppo.
Peskov insisted Russia wants to enable to exit of civilians from rebel Eastern Aleppo, and to create conditions wherein humanitarian aid can be delivered to the city. Russia has paused its airstrikes for about two weeks now to that end.
While it seemed early on that Russia could afford to be patient, with Eastern Aleppo surrounded and the Syrian military doing well in clashes with the Nusra Front. Late last week, however, Nusra and their allies launched a major counterattack, which has been raging since.
The counterattack came from outside the city, trying to end the siege on the east and threatening government-held territories in the west. Russia has so far not gotten involved, and while the Syrian military seems to have staved off any huge defeats, this likely adds to pressure from Russia’s Defense Ministry.
Though President Putin has so far insisted the pause should continue, the defense ministry has made much of calling for an end to it and resuming airstrikes. It is unusual for them to publicly dissent from official policy, and the pick-up in fighting will only increase those calls. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz | 0 |
House Republican leaders previewed parts of an Obamacare repeal bill at a Thursday press conference. [House Speaker Ryan announced: Here is what is important for us all to understand: Obamacare is not simply stuck in some kind of status quo. It is getting worse by the day, and it will keep getting worse unless we act. We need to rescue people from this collapsing law, and we need to replace it with a true system. One that gives every American access to quality, affordable coverage. That means more choices and lower costs. It means real protections and peace of mind. And it means returning your care to your control. Patients and doctors should be making the big decisions — not government bureaucrats. Step by step, this is what our plan to repeal and replace Obamacare will do. We look forward to making progress in the coming weeks and keeping our promise to the American people. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady ( ) and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden ( ) joined the speaker in reaffirming their commitment to repealing and replacing Obamacare. House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady ( ) said, “We’re going to continue to work through this through the district work period next week. And as we come back in the weeks ahead we’re going to be moving forward with legislation. ” Republicans leaders hope to soon provide a credible alternative to Obamacare. House congressional committees including Ways and Means, as well as Energy and Commerce, will start the markup of the bill after the president’s day recess next week. The Republican proposal would include health savings accounts, pools for sick people, and states receiving greater control over health care. The plan also includes tax credits for individuals to buy health insurance dependent on age and family size rather than Obamacare’s income basis. The Republican plan lowers Medicaid back to each states’ traditional match rate. The proposal says, “This ensures continuity of care and coverage for adults, but does not reward states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare and allows individuals to cycle off the program into other coverage sources naturally. ” States that did not elect to expand Medicaid would receive additional resources to make states more equal. The plan would limit per capita spending on Medicaid however, states can elect to choose a block grant. The block grant does not include Obamacare’s expanded Medicaid funding and presumes that individuals find coverage outside of the Medicaid program. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price told lawmakers that the president backs repeal and replace occurring at the same time, and that “the president is all in on this. ” | 1 |
Drug stocks plummeted as Donald Trump announced that he wants “new bidding procedures” for Big Pharma that would force drug companies to compete for government contracts. [“They are getting away with murder,” Trump said about drug companies at a press conference Wednesday. “Pharma has a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power and there is very little bidding on drugs. We’re the largest buyer of drugs in the world and yet we don’t bid properly and we’re going to start bidding and we’re going to save billions of dollars over a period of time. ” “The NASDAQ Biotechnology Index fell 2. 6 percent at 11:28 a. m. in New York, and the Standard Poor’s 500 Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology Life Sciences Index was down 1. 7 percent,” Bloomberg reports. Trump also noted many drug manufacturers have relocated their legal addresses overseas to save on taxes, a situation he says he plans to address. “We have to get our drug industry coming back,” Trump said. “Our drug industry has been disastrous. They’re leaving left and right. They supply our drugs but they don’t make them here, to a large extent. ” Trump added he has plans for similar actions in other industries. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Senator Jeff Sessions, Donald J. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, pledged on Tuesday to “say no” to Mr. Trump if he tries to go beyond the law, and he spoke out against torture, a ban on Muslim immigration and other ideas that had been floated by Mr. Trump. Mr. Sessions, a deeply conservative Republican from Alabama who was an early Trump supporter, appears headed for confirmation after completing more than nine hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Sessions and his allies had girded for a coordinated attack on his civil rights record, but Democrats tempered their criticism and Republicans mounted a defense, describing him repeatedly as a man of integrity. In his two decades on Capitol Hill, Mr. Sessions has questioned whether the Constitution guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States, has said courts have interpreted the separation of church and state too broadly and has declared marriage a threat to American culture. He also voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. Much of the hearing focused on Mr. Sessions’s long record as a prosecutor and a senator, but Mr. Trump proved a dominant figure in absentia for much of the debate as Democrats sought to question the by proxy. They asked whether Mr. Sessions supported Mr. Trump’s most controversial statements and questioned whether he had the independence to rein in the Mr. Trump if he seeks to exceed his presidential authority. In his cool, Southern drawl, Mr. Sessions vowed repeatedly that he would, saying that an attorney general “cannot be a mere rubber stamp” for the president. “If an attorney general is asked to do something that’s plainly unlawful,” he said, “that person would have to resign ultimately before agreeing to execute a policy that the attorney general believes would be unlawful or unconstitutional. ” But he indicated that he did not believe he would reach that impasse. If he advises Mr. Trump that a policy is illegal, he said, “I am confident that he would” heed that advice. A Methodist, he also pledged to set aside his personal beliefs and aggressively enforce all federal laws — even in areas like abortion, gay rights and hate crimes where he has made his opposition well known. “I don’t think it would be hard for me to be impartial and enforce laws that I didn’t vote for,” he said. “I think I can separate my personal votes of maybe years ago from what my responsibilities is today. ” He was asked, for instance, about a law he opposed in the Senate making attacks based on sexual orientation a hate crime. “The law has been passed, the Congress has spoken, and you can be sure I will enforce it,” Mr. Sessions said. Many of Mr. Sessions’s answers appeared calculated to distance himself from some of Mr. Trump’s most contentious threats and pledges on the campaign trail. He said, for instance, that current law “absolutely” bans waterboarding and the use of other torture techniques against prisoners — even though Mr. Trump promised to reinstitute the practice and Mr. Sessions himself supported it for years. Asked about last week’s report by intelligence agencies that Russia tried to influence the American election, he said that “I have no reason to doubt that and no information that would indicate otherwise” — a sharp contrast from Mr. Trump’s weeks of skepticism. Mr. Trump last week called the uproar over Russia’s role a “political witch hunt. ” He said he also opposed creating a registry of American Muslims or banning Muslim immigrants, as Mr. Trump proposed repeatedly during the campaign in response to terrorist attacks. “I have no belief and do not support the idea that Muslims as a religious group should be denied admission to the United States,” Mr. Sessions said. But he said he supported using “extreme vetting” of immigrants that might take into account religious beliefs — an idea Mr. Trump now appears to have endorsed. Mr. Sessions also appeared to play down the prospects that his Justice Department would seek to jail Hillary Clinton over her private email server, another pledge that Mr. Trump made repeatedly during the campaign. Mr. Sessions surprised lawmakers by declaring that he would recuse himself from any decisions on Mrs. Clinton’s emails or the Clinton Foundation because he said that critical statements he made about her during the campaign might pose a conflict. Mr. Sessions had previously supported appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Mrs. Clinton. The F. B. I. ’s investigation into her private email server is closed, and while a preliminary investigation into the Clinton Foundation is open, senior law enforcement officials say there is little basis for the case to move forward. He deflected questions about Mr. Trump with a calm stoicism, but he grew angry and emotional when Democrats pressed him on a more personal matter: accusations of racial insensitivity toward his employees and others as a federal prosecutor, which doomed his nomination for a federal judgeship in 1986. Protesters in the ornate Senate hearing room, who disrupted the proceedings more than a dozen times during the day, erupted in chants of “Sessions is a racist!” and “No Trump, no K. K. K. no fascist U. S. A. !” Two men dressed as Klansmen in white robes and hoods shouted their mocking support for Mr. Sessions before security officers hustled them out of the room. With his voice rising, Mr. Sessions called accusations that he had made racist remarks in the 1980s “damnably false. ” Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican friend who introduced Mr. Sessions for the hearing, came to his defense, pointing to Mr. Sessions’s prosecution of Klan members in an Alabama murder and his appointment of the first chief counsel to the Judiciary Committee’s Republican staff. “These are not the actions of an individual motivated by racial animus,” she said. Mr. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump’s presidential bid in early 2016, and they bonded over their shared agreement that immigration had had devastating effects on working people. While Mr. Sessions sought to distance himself on Tuesday from some of Mr. Trump’s controversial stances, he embraced the ’s focus on toughened immigration laws and a “law and order” agenda — priorities he himself has stressed for years. He promised to escalate federal arrests and prosecutions of undocumented immigrants, drug dealers, gun traffickers and violent criminals in response to a rise in crime in some cities, and he declared that “protecting the American people from the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism will continue to be a top priority. ” Critical to that agenda, he said, will be improving federal relations with the police after the intense scrutiny that has followed a string of police shootings of black men, often unarmed. “Law enforcement as a whole has been unfairly maligned and blamed for the unacceptable actions of a few of their bad actors,” Mr. Sessions said. “They believe the political leadership in the country has abandoned them. ” Indeed, Mr. Sessions questioned the Obama administration’s use of civil rights lawsuits and consent decrees to force changes in training and policies at police departments that have been accused of unconstitutional tactics. Although Mr. Sessions has completed his testimony, the hearings will continue on Wednesday with testimony by advocates on both sides. Witnesses supporting Mr. Sessions will include former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and Larry Thompson, a former deputy attorney general. Testifying against him will be officials from the American Civil Liberties Union and the N. A. A. C. P. as well as Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, a rare case of a senator testifying against a colleague. | 1 |
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On the October 27, 2016 Fox News Special Report Brett Baier digs deep into the latest Wikileaks release. It’s clear two of Hillary Clinton’s top aides were left completely in the dark about the email server. There is evidence of Bill Clinton lining his pockets.
Baier also takes a look at Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud in Florida. SF Source The Right Wing Conspiracy Oct. 2016 Share this: | 0 |
LONDON — A Romanian architect who plunged into the River Thames when a terrorist plowed a vehicle into pedestrians in London became the fifth victim to die as a result of the attack last month, the police said on Friday. The story of the Romanian woman, Andreea Cristea, captured the hearts of Londoners — and many people around the world — after the March 22 attack on Parliament, which also wounded more than 50 people. Her boyfriend, Andrei Burnaz, had been planning to propose to her that day, according to Romanian news reports and officials, and the couple was in London to celebrate his birthday. The police said Ms. Cristea had received medical treatment in London but that life support had been withdrawn on Thursday. It was not clear whether Ms. Cristea was thrown into the Thames after being hit by the vehicle the assailant, Khalid Masood, was driving, or if she leapt into the water to escape. She was rescued from the water by a lifeboat crew before being hospitalized. During the attack, Mr. Masood, a with a history of violence, rammed a rented Hyundai into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge. He then crashed the vehicle into a fence, burst through a gate of the Palace of Westminster and fatally stabbed an unarmed police officer. He was shot and killed by the police. The Islamic State claimed responsibility, although the extent of Mr. Masood’s links to the militant group remains unclear. The police have been investigating whether he acted alone. The four others who died in the attack were Keith Palmer, 48, the unarmed police officer Kurt Cochran, 54, an American tourist who was traveling with his wife to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary Aysha Frade, 43, a teacher who was on her way to pick up her two young daughters and Leslie Rhodes, 75, a retired window cleaner from south London. Mr. Burnaz, who, like Ms. Cristea, is reportedly from the Black Sea port city of Constanta, was also hospitalized after the episode, in his case with a broken foot, but he was discharged. Ms. Cristea’s family and Mr. Burnaz said in a statement that they were convulsed with grief. Ms. Cristea, they said, was “cruelly and brutally ripped away from our lives in the most heartless and spiritless way. ” “There are no words to even begin to describe the crushing pain and emptiness that is left in our hearts,” they said, adding that unused money that had been raised to finance her recovery would be donated to charity. London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, extended his condolences to the family. “Deeply saddened to hear of the death of Andreea Cristea,” he wrote on Twitter. “Londoners hold her her loved ones in our thoughts today. ” | 1 |
MALIBU, Calif. — The golf shoes on display in a back room at Nobu Malibu, a restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean, would have looked at home in the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. They were artwork for the sole, pairs of shoes adorned with leis, plaid, a California grizzly bear and numbers — notable scores and finishes that marked steps in the ascent of Jordan Spieth’s career. The Spieth One shoes available soon at an Under Armour retail outlet near you are not at all like the decorative footwear that caught the eye of those at the United States introduction of Spieth’s new spikes. The Spieth One is distinctive in ways that do not catch the eye: the springiness, the snug heel support and the wide placement of the spikes for better stability. Even the stylistic elements — vertical and horizontal lines that Spieth requested from the designers — emphasize utility. “That’s going to help me when I look down and I’m trying to line up,” Spieth said. “But it also looks cool. It’s a cool way to be subtle because I don’t want a giant J. S. on there. ” Be it his signature shoe or his life, Spieth prefers form over flash. Just as his golfing attire leans toward grays, blues, browns and whites, his public persona leans toward vanilla malted. Except for Spieth’s results, nothing about him screams “Look at me!” That made Nobu, where the beautiful people go to be seen while grazing on yellowtail sashimi, a novel place for Spieth, 23, to promote the shoe last Monday. The day before, Spieth had held his first lead on the PGA Tour since flubbing the 2016 Masters, and this one he converted into his ninth tour title. His victory, at the ATT Pebble Beach was just what the psychologist had ordered for Spieth, who hoped he would not have to return to Augusta National in April weighed down by the baggage of the lead squandered in last year’s final round. “It was definitely in the back of my head all day,” Spieth said. He added: “You have that voice in your head that says: ‘Who cares what anybody else says or thinks? We just do what we do.’ But, obviously, that round was going to be on my brain because it was the most recent lead that we had. If I didn’t hold this one, what kind of repercussions would that have?” Having exorcised the ghost of leads lost, Spieth could have slept in the next morning, enjoyed a day, and then luxuriated in the rave reviews of his new shoes that night. Instead, he was out at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, Calif. when the sun came up, playing in the Collegiate Showcase with amateur partners who included the heralded Texas senior Gavin Hall. Spieth was accompanied by his coach, Cameron McCormick, who took videos of his swing to review between shots. Spieth, who dropped out of Texas early in his sophomore year to turn pro, said he was striking the ball as well as he did in 2015, when he came close to winning the first three legs of golf’s Grand Slam. He posted 27 consecutive rounds under par in stroke play until his third round Sunday at the Genesis Open, where he finished tied for 22nd at six under, 11 strokes off the lead. But you would never know he was striking so well from watching him prepare. In his practice rounds, he bemoaned approach shots that found the green but were more than 10 feet from the pin and lamented drives that were not perfectly struck but nevertheless found the fairway. Last month, Spieth played a round with another Under Armour athlete, the swimmer Michael Phelps, who said he had been struck by how much Spieth expected of himself. McCormick and Spieth’s caddie, Michael Greller, consider Spieth’s perfectionism a sword: It motivates him to keep working diligently, but he can be steered off track by the internal torrent of negativity when he falls short. “I’m very reliant on Michael for positive energy, positive voice,” Spieth said of Greller. Then there are the external pressures. A story in a local newspaper two days before the start of the Genesis Open mentioned that Spieth, a winner in had “only” two victories last season, as if he had fallen on hard times. If that is struggling, most of Jordan’s contemporaries have never experienced such success: Of the 144 players in the Genesis Open field, 88 had fewer than two career victories on the PGA Tour. “If that’s those individuals’ perception, they’ve got an extremely high perception of what I’m capable of, so I guess, thank you,” Spieth said, adding, “If that’s a low point for a year, then we’re going to surpass Phil Mickelson. ” Mickelson, 46, has 42 PGA Tour victories but is winless since the 2013 British Open. That, combined with Tiger Woods’s being sidelined with a bad back and stuck indefinitely (perhaps enduringly) on 79 tour victories, has tagged Spieth, 23, America’s “it” player in a game with no discernible safe zone. Before the tournament in Pebble Beach, Spieth tried to accommodate young fans seeking his signature while ignoring the professional autograph hunters, a few of whom became profane when they realized he was not going to engage with them. Spieth later expressed frustration over the adults who obtain his autograph to sell online, saying, “Get a job instead of trying to make money off of the stuff that we have been able to do. ” Appropriately, then, Spieth’s inner circle is a few short of an entourage. Greller, his caddie, eschewed the chic boutique properties that ring the nearby beaches and spent the first two nights here with his wife at a budget hotel. Spieth’s parents missed his victory in Pebble Beach because they were watching their younger son, Steven, a senior starter on the Brown basketball team, play in home games against Harvard and Dartmouth. Spieth’s girlfriend, Annie Verret, was in Pebble Beach but did not accompany him to Malibu. Spieth has his friends on the tour, like Justin Thomas and Kelly Kraft, the in Pebble Beach, whom Spieth has included in his favorites on his PGA Tour app, which allows fans to track their favorite players’ statistics and results. One player not on Spieth’s favorite list: himself. That would be too meta, the equivalent of talking about oneself in the third person. “I normally check my app when I’m not playing that week, so there’s no use in having myself on there,” Spieth said. Grinning, he added, “Plus, I kind of know where I am at all times. ” Spieth is also close to his Under Armour family, whose members are always no more than a text away. After his victory in Pebble Beach, Spieth received messages from the Patriots quarterback and Super Bowl most valuable player Tom Brady and the reigning N. B. A. player of the year, Stephen Curry. Both of those stars have found themselves, intentionally or not, thrust into the political conversation. Brady has been questioned over his friendship with President Trump, and Curry has taken issue with the relationship of Under Armour’s founder, Kevin Plank, with the president. The understated Spieth was apologetically quiet when asked about Plank during a round on Wednesday. “I have been advised to not say anything politically by my team,” he said. He added, “I’m sorry. ” At the shoe event, Spieth sat in a director’s chair with his back to the sun as it set over the Pacific. It was a scene straight out of Hollywood, complete with a celebrity interviewer. The model and actress Kelly Rohrbach informed those in attendance of her own accomplishments — filming a new “Baywatch” movie and swimsuit modeling for Sports Illustrated — before turning her attention to Spieth, who corrected her when she described his win at Pebble Beach as his 10th tour victory. At the end of the event, as they were saying their goodbyes, Rohrbach blurted out, “You’re lovely. ” When Spieth was out of earshot, she said: “I was struck by how well spoken he is and how incredibly humble he is. He’s focused, but in the warmest way. There’s a confidence in him that seems to come from work ethic and not bravado. ” During their interview, Spieth told Rohrbach that he felt “so strongly” about his role in the design of the shoes, which was all geared toward performance. It is about science, he added, not style or even sales. “It’s like when I’m playing golf,” Spieth said. “It’s about how am I going to shoot the best score, even if it’s not the prettiest. ” | 1 |
We all know the stereotype: silly millennials, tethered to their phones, unable to accomplish the simplest tasks without scrolling their Instagram feeds, snapping their friends tweeting inanely. But a Nielsen report released last week shows that Americans from 18 to 34 are less obsessed with social media than some of their older peers are. Adults 35 to 49 were found to spend an average of 6 hours 58 minutes a week on social media networks, compared with 6 hours 19 minutes for the younger group. More predictably, adults 50 and over spent significantly less time on the networks: an average of 4 hours 9 minutes a week. Sean Casey, the president of Nielsen’s social division, said the finding initially surprised him because “the going thought is that social is vastly owned by the younger generation. ” “It’s kind of synonymous,” said Mr. Casey, who wrote the foreword to the report. “When you think of millennials, you think of social. ” Mr. Casey, 46, said that eventually, the finding started to make more sense to him. “At a time when we wanted to be connected, it came out right when we were at the top of our media consumption,” he said. “It’s become second nature to our generation. ” The finding underscores how ubiquitous the smartphone has become. The report, released on Jan. 17, found that in the United States, 97 percent of people 18 to 34, and 94 percent of people 35 to 49, had access to smartphones. percent of those 50 and older used smartphones, the report found. The report was based on data from 9, 000 smartphone users and 1, 300 tablet users across the country from July through September. The data was not . The report also broke out which social networks were most popular on smartphones, finding that Facebook still dominated on mobile, with about 178. 2 million unique users in September. It was followed by Instagram, with 91. 5 million unique users Twitter, with 82. 2 million unique users and Pinterest, with 69. 6 million users. Snapchat, a favorite of younger users, was sixth on the list, behind the professional networking site LinkedIn. Finally, the report looked at activity on social media, measuring how many times Facebook and Twitter users employed those sites to post about programs they were watching or to interact with others’ posts. Again, in this category, it was Generation X that could not look away from its devices: On an average day, the report found, 42 percent of those interacting with television on Facebook were from 35 to 49 only 40 percent were millennials. | 1 |
MOSCOW (AP) — A trial for the blogger who is accused of inciting religious hatred for playing “Pokemon Go” in a church has begun in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. [advertisement | 1 |
Artwork by Anthony Freda, AnthonyFreda.com
Trump claims that Clinton’s policy on Syria would lead to World War 3.
Let’s fact check …
The Washington Post points out that a vote for Clinton is a vote for escalating military confrontation in Syria and elsewhere:
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 .
***
The studies, which reflect Clinton’s stated views, break most forcefully with Obama on Syria …. call[ing] for stepped-up military action to deter President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Russian forces in Syria.
***
Most of the studies propose limited American airstrikes with cruise missiles to punish Assad ….
***
Last year, Obama dismissed calls for a no-fly zone in northwestern Syria — a position advocated by Clinton — as “ half-baked .”
***
Even pinprick cruise-missile strikes designed to hobble the Syrian air force or punish Assad would risk a direct confrontation with Russian forces, which are scattered throughout the key Syrian military bases that would be targeted.
“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.
The most liberal presidential candidate still running – Green Party candidate Jill Stein – says: "It should clear to everyone that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war." — @ajamubaraka Watch live: https://t.co/0B6NJLNY5j
— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) October 13, 2016 Under Hillary Clinton, we could very quickly slide into nuclear war with her declared policy in Syria. I call for a #PeaceOffensive .
She explains :
Hillary Clinton wants to start an air war with Russia. Let’s be clear: That’s what a no-fly zone means. It is tantamount to a declaration of war against Russia.
***
Clearly the Democrats are incredibly embarrassed about the nature of these [email] revelations, and they’ve created a smokescreen here to try and distract from that. But that smokescreen is pushing us to the brink of warfare with Russia now, where you have the U.S. head of defense, Ashton Carter, talking about nuclear war. We just did a dry run dropping fake nuclear bombs over Nevada. This is really dangerous stuff; this is not pretend. So we need to take a deep breath here, we need to step back and stop beating the war drums. In this context, Hillary Clinton is talking about starting an air war with Russia. Which could slide—you know, we’re on the verge of nuclear war right now.
***
The most likely nuclear threat right now is with Russia. There’s no doubt about that. When you have Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the prime minister of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, saying that the threat of nuclear war is hotter now than it has ever been in all of history, you’ve got to take that pretty seriously. And when you have Hillary Clinton then beating the war drums against Russia, and essentially saying that if she’s elected that we will declare war on Russia—because that’s what a no-fly zone over Syria amounts to. Shooting down Russian warplanes.
***
Hillary Clinton is a disastrous nuclear threat right now in a context where we’re already off-the-charts in the risk of nuclear war. She has stated in this context that she’s essentially opening up a battlefront with Russia. So to my mind, this emerges as the clearest and most present danger.
Prominent liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs writes in the Huffington Post, in an essay bannered “ Hillary Is the Candidate of the War Machine “:
It is often believed that the Republicans are the neocons and the Democrats act as restraints on the warmongering. This is not correct. Both parties are divided between neocon hawks and cautious realists who don’t want the US in unending war. Hillary is a staunch neocon whose record of favoring American war adventures explains much of our current security danger.
Just as the last Clinton presidency set the stage for financial collapse, it also set the stage for unending war. On October 31, 1998 President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act that made it official US policy to support “regime change” in Iraq.
It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.
Thus were laid the foundations for the Iraq War in 2003.
Of course, by 2003, Hillary was a Senator and a staunch supporter of the Iraq War, which has cost the US trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and done more to create ISIS and Middle East instability than any other single decision of modern foreign policy. In defending her vote, Hillary parroted the phony propaganda of the CIA:
“In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members… “
After the Iraq Liberation Act came the 1999 Kosovo War, in which Bill Clinton called in NATO to bomb Belgrade, in the heart of Europe, and unleashing another decade of unrest in the Balkans. Hillary, traveling in Africa, called Bill: “I urged him to bomb,” she told reporter Lucinda Frank.
Hillary’s record as Secretary of State is among the most militaristic, and disastrous, of modern US history . Some experience. Hilary was a staunch defender of the military-industrial-intelligence complex at every turn, helping to spread the Iraq mayhem over a swath of violence that now stretches from Mali to Afghanistan. Two disasters loom largest: Libya and Syria.
Hillary has been much attacked for the deaths of US diplomats in Benghazi, but her tireless promotion of the overthrow Muammar Qaddafi by NATO bombing is the far graver disaster. Hillary strongly promoted NATO-led regime change in Libya, not only in violation of international law but counter to the most basic good judgment. After the NATO bombing, Libya descended into civil war while the paramilitaries and unsecured arms stashes in Libya quickly spread west across the African Sahel and east to Syria. The Libyan disaster has spawned war in Mali, fed weapons to Boko Haram in Nigeria, and fueled ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In the meantime, Hillary found it hilarious to declare of Qaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”
Perhaps the crowning disaster of this long list of disasters has been Hillary’s relentless promotion of CIA-led regime change in Syria. Once again Hillary bought into the CIA propaganda that regime change to remove Bashir al-Assad would be quick, costless, and surely successful. In August 2011, Hillary led the US into disaster with her declaration Assad must “get out of the way,” backed by secret CIA operations.
Five years later, no place on the planet is more ravaged by unending war, and no place poses a great threat to US security. More than 10 million Syrians are displaced, and the refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean or undermining the political stability of Greece, Turkey, and the European Union. Into the chaos created by the secret CIA-Saudi operations to overthrow Assad, ISIS has filled the vacuum, and has used Syria as the base for worldwide terrorist attacks.
The list of her incompetence and warmongering goes on. Hillary’s support at every turn for NATO expansion, including even into Ukraine and Georgia against all common sense, was a trip wire that violated the post-Cold War settlement in Europe in 1991 and that led to Russia’s violent counter-reactions in both Georgia and Ukraine. As Senator in 2008, Hilary co-sponsored 2008-SR439 , to include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. As Secretary of State, she then presided over the restart of the Cold War with Russia.
It is hard to know the roots of this record of disaster. Is it chronically bad judgment? Is it her preternatural faith in the lying machine of the CIA? Is it a repeated attempt to show that as a Democrat she would be more hawkish than the Republicans? Is it to satisfy her hardline campaign financiers? Who knows? Maybe it’s all of the above. But whatever the reasons, hers is a record of disaster. Perhaps more than any other person, Hillary can lay claim to having stoked the violence that stretches from West Africa to Central Asia and that threatens US security .
Jakob Augstein notes in Der Spiegel:
Trump would probably be the better choice in the question of war and peace than Clinton.
Clinton has expressly expressed the wish to establish a flight ban on Syria, or parts of it. *** In truth, it would be an act of war. The risks are unpredictable. Above all, the risk of a military conflict with Russia.
***
The highest soldier of the United States of America, General Joseph Dunford, President of the United States General Staff of the United States Forces, is certain. To control the entire airspace over Syria would mean war with Syria and Russia. Dunford’s predecessor in office estimated a few years ago that an effective flight ban over Syria would involve the use of 70,000 soldiers and a monthly cost of $ 1 billion.
But the bottom line is Clinton’s proven historical track record … she’s at least partly responsible for war after catastrophic war and coup after disastrous coup in Libya, Syria, Kosovo, Haiti, Honduras and other countries around the world.
And it’s interesting, indeed, that the Neocons who got us into the Iraq war have endorsed Clinton instead of Trump .
Trump might speak in a crude, knee-jerk manner … but Clinton is probably more likely to actually get us into war . | 0 |
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With just 12 days until Election Day, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and wife, Melania, sat down to discuss the campaign's “best and worst moments” on “Good Morning America.”
Journalist George Stephanopoulos began by asking Melania if she's still confident in her husband winning the race to the White House:
“I see the connection with the American people and my husband, and he created a movement. The crowd and the people that are behind him are unbelievable to see.”
But when Stephanopoulos questioned whether she'd physically get out there on the campaign trail and stump for Trump, she wasn't as confident:
“We will see. My priority is my son Barron and I support [my husband] 100% and I’m there for him every time he needs me.”
Trump was quick to interject, saying Melania would actually give two or three speeches soon, something that seemed to be news to Melania: Image Credit: Screenshot/ ABC News
Trump explained that her speeches would be “big” and “important”:
“She’s amazing when she speaks. She is an amazing public speaker. She’s agreed to do two or three speeches, and I think it’s going to be big speeches, important speeches.”
It's understandable if Melania isn't eager to give speeches on the campaign trail, given what happened at the Republican National Convention in July.
Trump's wife was publicly ripped apart after journalist Jarrett Hill pointed out the similarities between her speech and Michelle Obama's in 2008.
Though a side-by-side video comparison showed how certain passages were identical, Melania said she wrote the speech herself...with a little help from Hillary Clinton's former speechwriter.
Despite the controversy, however, many commended her speech as “beautiful” and given “with tremendous poise”— reflecting skills Trump's campaign may benefit from in these next two weeks. | 0 |
Iraq Civilians leave their homes as Iraqi troops fight against Daesh militants in the village of Tob Zawa. (Photo by AP)
Daesh terrorists have abducted tens of thousands of civilians from near Mosul to use them as human shields as government forces inch closer to the city proper in an operation to retake it, the UN says.
UN human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said the terrorist group also killed at least 232 people on Wednesday, including 190 former Iraqi security forces and 40 civilians, who refused to obey its orders.
“Many of them who refused to comply were shot on the spot,” Shamdasani said in Geneva, citing reports corroborated by the UN that were “by no means comprehensive but indicative of violations.”
As the news emerged, Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi volunteers said they were set to launch an offensive against Daesh west of Mosul imminently.
Ahmad al-Assadi, a spokesman for the popular forces, confirmed that the fighters had completed preparations to move in the direction of Tal Afar, a Daesh-held city 63 kilometers west of Mosul.
He added that the fighters would move to capture Tal Afar from their positions in the Iraqi town of Qayyara, situated some 60 kilometers south of Mosul.
“A few days or hours separate us from the launch of operations there,” Asadi said.
Iraqi forces liberated three key areas from Daesh terrorists east of Mosul. Army officials said troops also seized a tank and artillery from the terrorists, and found a two-kilometer-long tunnel full of ammunition.
The army is edging closer to Mosul by liberating villages around the city. Nearly 80 Daesh-held towns and villages have been retaken by the army since the Iraqi forces began the battle to liberate Mosul last week. Loading ... | 0 |
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Executive Director Daniel McAdams stated that Donald Trump’s victory has proven the entire political class in Washington and especially the mainstream media that does their bidding to be completely out of touch with the American people.
The victory of Republican Party candidate Donald Trump in the US presidential elections proves that Washington’s political class and the mainstream US media are completely detached from the actual US electorate, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Executive Director Daniel McAdams told Sputnik.
“More than anything else, Donald Trump’s victory has proven the entire political class in Washington and especially the mainstream media that does their bidding to be completely out of touch with the American people,” McAdams said.
According to McAdams, over the course of the election, the mainstream media has proven not to be independent resources seeking out inconvenient truths, but rather “a lapdog to the power elite.”
Earlier in the day, Trump won the US presidential elections despite most of the analysts and opinion polls predicting his defeat to Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton.
Source
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Kurt Eichenwald, a senior writer for Newsweek, took to Twitter Friday and wished that Republicans who voted for the American Health Care Act see a family member suffer from a serious illness, lose their health insurance, and die. [“As one preexisting condition: I hope every GOPr who voted 4 Trumpcare sees a family member get a long term condition, lose insurance, die,” Eichenwald said in a series of tweets that have since been deleted. After being confronted by Twitter users, Eichenwald doubled down and insisted that Republican lawmakers’ family members be “tortured. ” “Nobody tell me how to feel knowing if I lose my insurance, I’m dead. I want the GOPrs who support this to feel the pain in their own families,” Eichenwald tweeted. “Because I want them to be tortured. GOPr only gain empathy when they are touched by the consequences, never before,” he continued. Eichenwald issued a statement to the Daily Caller over his remarks hoping for the death of Republican lawmakers’ families: Asked @kurteichenwald for comment on his tweets wishing death upon Republicans’ family members. He sent me this: pic. twitter. — Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) May 6, 2017, Eichenwald, who claims to be a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and an MSNBC contributor, made headlines earlier this year after a Maryland man was arrested by federal agents and charged with cyberstalking. The man had sent a tweet to Eichenwald allegedly intended to induce a seizure, investigators said. Eichenwald, a Pulitzer has advocated for the repeal of the Second Amendment. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson | 1 |
In a Thursday appearance on “The Fox News Specialists,” ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith sparred with host Eric Bolling over President Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Smith argued that Trump brings on criticism from Democrats because of how he handles himself on Twitter. “Every time he tweets, he gives added fuel for them to come after him,” Smith said. He later added, “If you are the president of the United States of America, you are 70 years of age, and you are tweeting — literally competing with and that is a problem. ” Watch: Bolling asked what was wrong with the president getting his message out to “100 million people,” which Smith replied, “Did you just ask that question with a straight face?” “I want to be clear,” he continued. “You just asked the question, what is wrong with Twitter, while mentioning Donald Trump’s name in the same sentence. You don’t have a problem with his tweeting?” Bolling said he worked with the president and advised him to “keep tweeting” to “go around the fake news. ” “That’s terrible advice, horrible advice,” Smith responded. Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 1 |
Norwegian Government to Deport White Patriot While Nation is Swamped by Tens... Norwegian Government to Deport White Patriot While Nation is Swamped by Tens of Thousands of Non-White Invaders By 0 129
Seven policemen searched Norwegian Nordic Resistance Movement member Ronny Bårdsen’s apartment to find the Norwegian-Russian nationalist Yan Petrovskiy (also knnown as Veliki Slavian; pictured). He will be deported from Norway. The police informed Petrovskiy that he has two days to get a flight ticket and five to leave the country.
The police wanted to see Petrovskiy’s passport and know if he accepts the decision and leaves Norway voluntarily or if he has to be forced. Petrovskiy answered that according to the advice of his lawyer, Nils Christian Nordhus, he doesn’t keep the passport in his apartment, and he will talk with his lawyer before giving an answer concerning his departure.
After this Petrovskiy attempted to call his lawyer while the police were waiting, but because his lawyer didn’t pick it up, the police decided to arrest Petrovskiy and search Bårdsen’s apartment. Petrovskiy has lived in the address for some time and has been registered as a Norwegian resident.
The real reason behind the search was to acquire Petrovskiy’s passport, as without it he cannot be deported. Despite the efforts of the police, the passport was not uncovered.
The decision about the deportation was made by the Directorate of Immigration (Utlendingsdirektoratet) after the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) sent a letter to the directorate. In the letter PST stated that Petrovskiy was “a threat to national security.” The police — in Norway, Rotherham, or anywhere… | 0 |
0 комментариев 0 поделились Герман Греф. Фото: Fotodom.ru/Коммерсантъ
"Настоящие патриоты — те люди, которые пытаются все время очень много работать над собой, над своим бизнесом, над своими учреждениями с тем, чтобы соответствовать и даже немного опережать время. Это очень тяжело, это не всегда популярно, это всегда связано с тем, что приходится меняться самому и менять окружающих, влиять на изменение окружающих", — заявил Герман Греф.
Прокомментировал его слова председатель правления советов директоров Pravda.Ru Вадим Горшенин:
- Вот определение того же слова от словаря Ушакова: "человек, преданный своему народу, любящий свое отечество, готовый на жертвы и совершающий подвиги во имя интересов своей родины".
А это по словарю Даля: "любитель отечества, ревнитель о благе его, отчизнолюб, отечественник или отчизник".
Обратили внимание, что из определения Грефа выпало, как абсолютно ненужное, даже упоминание Отечества ?
На мой взгляд, Греф с этим определением — один из того распространенного типа чиновников в России на высоких постах, которые являются "гражданами мира" и смогут нормально себя чувствовать при любом государственном режиме: демократическом, авторитарном, оккупационном — каким угодно.
Когда-то, если помните, в конце восьмидесятых — начале девяностых прошлого века в стране, с подачи партии старовойтовых, ельциных, бурбулисов "Демократической России" резко поменялись все политические определения. И традиционно левых коммунистов, выступающих за равные возможности для всех, общественную собственность и т. д., начали называть "правыми", а тех, кто продвигал частную собственность на средства производства, землю, природные ресурс, — "левыми".
В результате "левые" совершили переворот с помощью руцких и теперь стесняются так называться. Спросите того же Грефа — левый он или правый политик. Как думаете, что ответит?
И сейчас есть у меня такое чувство, что "граждане мира", они же космополиты, пытаются сделать то же самое, но уже с более глубокими понятиями для каждого человека, любящего свое Отечество (как в России, так и в Америке, Франции, Германии, Сирии и т. д.)…
Обратите внимание, как сейчас в либеральных изданиях начнут распространять эту откровенную идеологическую чушь от главы Сбербанка, как начнут ее цитировать оппозиционные блогеры. А когда обратите, попробуйте ответить на вопрос: почему ее никогда не повторят, например, Сергей Лавров или Сергей Шойгу. Почему она дико смотрелась бы, припиши ее кто-то Суворову, Кутузову, Екатерине II, Столыпину?
Или я опять пытаюсь отстаивать "замшелые истины", как мне указали в одном из комментариев?
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Think you have witnessed enough amazing inventions in the world? These unusual gadgets will probably change your mind. Here are the strangest and most unbelievable Japanese inventions you have not... | 0 |
Just days before the it’s time to vote our next President into the White House, the Clinton family get bad news, after bad news, after bad news. Now..guess what is happening?
MORE bad news!
However, bad news for the Clintons means good news for us.
We all knew that Hillary was a scheming snake of corruption who loves nothing but power and money. However with each new hit that came her way in October, many of us were still shocked over the sheer madness of it all.
Now, Wikileaks is giving Bill Clinton some time under the microscope of truth.
Via The Daily Caller :
Ira Magaziner, the CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, asked former President Bill Clinton to thank Morocco’s King Mohammed VI for “offering his plane to the conference in Ethiopia.”
“CHAI would like to request that President Clinton call Sheik Mohammed to thank him for offering his plane to the conference in Ethiopia,” Magaziner gushed in a November 22, 2011 email released by WikiLeaks.
Clinton frequently has expected free, luxurious private jet travel during his post-presidential life. Clinton, his wife and daughter have artfully secured free air travel and luxurious accommodations since they left the White House. It’s an effective way to accept gifts of great value without declaring them for the Clinton Foundation.
“It’s highly illegal and it’s likely that the owners of these aircraft took tax deductions as a gift to the Clinton Foundation,” Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst and critic of the Clinton Foundation, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Of course! Classic Clinton crap… living the life of luxury on the backs of hardworking Americans.
That’s what they do! Related Items | 0 |
Breitbart News Senior Editor MILO claimed that the Democrat Party has gone from being the part of the working man to “the party of the cuckold,” during his talk at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs tonight.[ “The Democrats have absolutely no idea what happened to them this election. But to me, it is extremely obvious,” proclaimed MILO. “The Democrats have gone from being the party of the common man, to the party of the cuckold. ” “Once upon a time, this was the voter the Democrat party supported,” he continued, displaying a picture of a working miner. “This man worked hard in a dirty and dangerous environment, often shortening his life from disease and injury, for the American to give his family a better life. This type of man built the backbone of this country, and they exist today in factories and yes even in coal mines. Coal mines the left will proudly tell you they want to put out of business. ” “But this type of guy is no longer welcome by the leftists. They have a new favored voter,” MILO explained, displaying a picture of a SJW. “Here he is! The current year democrat. The social justice warrior. He doesn’t work, or if he does it is the service industry, because he is too busy complaining about things. He probably joined the Women’s March on Washington trying to hook up with some women after white knighting them. ” MILO continued to claim that “What this profound change represents is a massive shift completely into the extreme fringe of leftist politics, which we call Identity Politics. ” “What matters is your minority group, and how aggrieved you are,” he explained. “The white working class is incompatible with those that have taken over the left. Nannying schoolmarms. Haughty college professors and worse yet, their brainwashed students shouting slogans. Race hustlers that define them as “part of the problem” just because they are white. I frankly don’t blame for running away from the left, do you?” Written from prepared remarks. MILO wears glasses by Givenchy, $350. Distressed blue jeans by True Religion, $329. Brown leather belt with gold buckle by Louis Vuitton, $450. Light pink dress shirt by Brooks Brothers, $92. Sparkly purple suit jacket by Angelino, $225. Burgundy crushed velvet slippers by Crockett Jones, $370. Socks by Ralph Lauren, 3 pairs for $21. 98. Jewellery and pearls, too much money to count. Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 1 |
David Rockefeller, the banker and philanthropist with the fabled family name who controlled Chase Manhattan bank for more than a decade and wielded vast influence around the world for even longer as he spread the gospel of American capitalism, died on Monday morning at his home in Pocantico Hills, N. Y. He was 101. His son David Jr. confirmed the death. Chase Manhattan had long been known as the Rockefeller bank, although the family never owned more than 5 percent of its shares. But Mr. Rockefeller was more than a steward. As chairman and chief executive throughout the 1970s, he made it “David’s bank,” as many called it, expanding its operations internationally. His stature was greater than any corporate title might convey, however. His influence was felt in Washington and foreign capitals, in the corridors of New York City government, in art museums, in great universities and in public schools. Mr. Rockefeller could well be the last of a less and less visible family to have cut so imposing a figure on the world stage. As a peripatetic advocate of the economic interests of the United States and of his own bank, he was a force in global financial affairs and in his country’s foreign policy. He was received in foreign capitals with the honors accorded a chief of state. He was the last surviving grandson of John D. Rockefeller, the tycoon who founded the Standard Oil Company in the 19th century and built a fortune that made him America’s first billionaire and his family one of the richest and most powerful in the nation’s history. As an heir to that legacy, David Rockefeller lived all his life in baronial splendor and privilege, whether in Manhattan (when he was a boy, he and his brothers would roller skate along Fifth Avenue trailed by a limousine in case they grew tired) or at his magnificent country estates. Imbued with the understated manners of the East Coast elite, he loomed large in the upper reaches of a New York social world of glittering galas. His philanthropy was monumental, and so was his art collection, a museumlike repository of some 15, 000 pieces, many of them masterpieces, some lining the walls of his offices 56 floors above the streets at Rockefeller Center, to which he repaired, robust and active, well into his 90s. In silent testimony to his power and reach was his Rolodex, a catalog of some 150, 000 names of people he had met as a . It required a room of its own beside his office. Spread out below that corporate aerie was a city he loved and influenced mightily. He was instrumental in rallying the private sector to help resolve New York City’s fiscal crisis in the . As chairman of the Museum of Modern Art for many years — his mother had helped found it in 1929 — he led an effort to encourage corporations to buy and display art in their office buildings and to subsidize local museums. And as chairman of the New York City Partnership, a coalition of business executives, he fostered innovation in public schools and the development of thousands of apartments for and families. He was always aware of the mystique surrounding the Rockefeller name. “I have never found it a hindrance,” he once said with typical reserve. “Obviously, there are times when I’m aware that I’m treated differently. There’s no question that having financial resources, which, thanks to my parents, I learned to use with some restraint and discretion, is a big advantage. ” With his powerful name and his zeal for foreign travel — he was still going to Europe into his late 90s — Mr. Rockefeller was a formidable marketing force. In the 1970s, his meetings with Anwar of Egypt, Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union and Zhou Enlai of China helped Chase Manhattan become the first American bank with operations in those countries. “Few people in this country have met as many leaders as I have,” he said. Some faulted him for spending so much time abroad. He was accused of neglecting his responsibilities at Chase and failing to promote aggressive, visionary managers. Under his leadership, Chase fell far behind its rival Citibank, then the nation’s largest bank, in assets and earnings. There were years when Chase had the most troubled loan portfolio among major American banks. “In my judgment, he will not go down in history as a great banker,” John J. McCloy, a Rockefeller friend and himself a former Chase chairman, told The Associated Press in 1981. “He will go down as a real personality, as a distinguished and loyal member of the community. ” Mr. Rockefeller’s forays into international politics also drew criticism, notably in 1979, when he and former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger persuaded President Jimmy Carter to admit the recently deposed shah of Iran into the United States for cancer treatment. The shah’s arrival in New York enraged revolutionary followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, provoking them to seize the United States Embassy in Iran and hold American diplomats hostage for more than a year. Mr. Rockefeller was also assailed for befriending autocratic foreign leaders in an effort to establish and expand his bank’s presence in their countries. “He spent his life in the club of the ruling class and was loyal to members of the club, no matter what they did,” the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in 2002, citing the profitable deals Mr. Rockefeller had cut with “ dictators,” “Soviet party bosses” and “Chinese perpetrators of the Cultural Revolution. ” Still, presidents as ideologically different as Mr. Carter and Richard M. Nixon offered him the post of Treasury secretary. He turned them both down. After the death in 1979 of his older brother Nelson A. Rockefeller, the former vice president and governor of New York, David Rockefeller stood almost alone as a member of the family with an outsize national profile. Only Jay Rockefeller, a of John D. Rockefeller, had earned prominence, as a governor and United States senator from West Virginia. No one from the family’s younger generations has attained or perhaps aspired to David Rockefeller’s stature. “No one can step into his shoes,” Warren T. Lindquist, a longtime friend, told The Times in 1995, “not because they aren’t good, smart, talented people, but because it’s just a different world. ” The youngest of six siblings, David Rockefeller was born in Manhattan on June 12, 1915. His father, John D. Rockefeller Jr. the only son of the oil titan, devoted his life to philanthropy. His mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was the daughter of Nelson Aldrich, a wealthy senator from Rhode Island. Besides Nelson, born in 1908, the other children were Abby, who was born in 1903 and died in 1976 after leading a private life John D. Rockefeller III, who was born in 1906 and immersed himself in philanthropy until his death in an automobile accident in 1978 Laurance, born in 1910, who was an environmentalist and died in 2004 and Winthrop, born in 1912, who was governor of Arkansas and died in 1973. David grew up in a mansion at 10 West 54th Street, the largest private residence in the city at the time. It bustled with valets, parlor maids, nurses and chambermaids. For dinner every night, his father dressed in black tie and his mother in a formal gown. Summers were spent at the Rockefeller “cottage” in Seal Harbor, Me. and weekends at Kykuit, the family’s country compound north of New York City in Tarrytown, N. Y. The estate was likened to a feudal fief. As Mr. Rockefeller wrote in his autobiography, “Memoirs” (2002) “Eventually the family accumulated about 3, 400 acres that surrounded and included almost all of the little village of Pocantico Hills, where most of the residents worked for the family and lived in houses owned by Grandfather. ” In that bucolic setting, he developed a fascination for insects that would lead to his building one of the largest beetle collections in the world. David was 21 when John D. Rockefeller died. “He told amusing stories and sang little ditties,” Mr. Rockefeller recalled in 2002. “He gave us dimes. ” Mr. Rockefeller’s sense of noblesse oblige was heightened by his early education at the experimental Lincoln School in Manhattan, founded by the American philosopher John Dewey and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation to bring together children from varied social backgrounds. He went on to study at Harvard, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1936, and then spent a year at the London School of Economics, a hotbed of socialist intellectuals. Mr. Rockefeller was awarded a Ph. D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1940. Moved by the Great Depression at home and abroad, he stated in his doctoral thesis that he was “inclined to agree with the New Deal that deficit financing during depressions, other things being equal, is a help to recovery. ” The notion that a Rockefeller would take such a liberal economic view was major news the family, Republican, was known for its fierce opposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal’s author. After receiving his doctorate, Mr. Rockefeller became a secretary to Fiorello H. La Guardia, New York’s pugnacious, liberal Republican mayor. In 1940, he married Margaret McGrath, known as Peggy, whom he had met at a dance seven years earlier, when he was a Harvard freshman and she was a student at the Chapin School in New York. His wife, a dedicated conservationist, died at 80 in 1996. Besides his son David, he is survived by his daughters, Abby Rockefeller, Neva Goodwin, Peggy Dulany and Eileen Growald 10 grandchildren and 10 . Another son, Richard, died in 2014 at 65 when the small plane he was piloting crashed shortly after takeoff from Westchester County Airport. Mr. Rockefeller enlisted in the Army in 1942, attended officer training school and served in North Africa and France during World War II. He was discharged a captain in 1945. He began his banking career in 1946 as an assistant manager with the Chase National Bank, which merged in 1955 with the Bank of Manhattan Company to become Chase Manhattan. Banking in the early postwar era was a gentleman’s profession. Top executives could attend to outside interests, using social contacts to cultivate clients while leaving management to junior officers. Mr. Rockefeller found plenty of time for such activities. In the late 1940s, he replaced his mother on the Museum of Modern Art’s board and eventually became its chairman. He courted art collectors. In 1968, he put together a syndicate, including his brother Nelson and the CBS chairman, William S. Paley, to buy Gertrude Stein’s collection of modern art. David and Peggy Rockefeller’s own prized paintings — by Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso — were lent to the museum permanently. Mr. Rockefeller’s rise in banking was swift. By 1961, he was president of Chase Manhattan and its executive with George Champion, the chairman. Promoting expansion overseas, Mr. Rockefeller clashed with Mr. Champion, who thought that the bank’s domestic business was more important. After Mr. Rockefeller replaced Mr. Champion as chairman and sole chief executive in 1969, he was able to enlarge the bank’s presence on almost every continent. He said his brand of personal diplomacy, meeting with heads of state, was crucial in furthering Chase’s interests. “There were many who claimed these activities were inappropriate and interfered with my bank responsibilities,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote in his autobiography. “I couldn’t disagree more. ” His “ outside activities,” he insisted, “were of considerable benefit to the bank both financially and in terms of its prestige around the world. ” By 1976, Chase Manhattan’s international arm was contributing 80 percent of the bank’s $105 million in operating profit. But instead of vindicating Mr. Rockefeller’s avidity for banking abroad, those figures underlined Chase’s lagging performance at home. From 1974 to 1976, its earnings fell 36 percent while those of its biggest rivals — Bank of America, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover and J. P. Morgan — rose 12 to 31 percent. The 1974 recession hammered Chase, which had an unusually large portfolio of loans in the depressed real estate industry. It also owned more New securities than any other bank in the when the city was edging toward bankruptcy. And among major banks, Chase had the largest portfolio of nonperforming loans. Chase also got caught up in a scandal in 1974. An internal audit discovered that its bond trading account was overvalued by $34 million and that losses had been understated. A resulting $15 million drain in net income tarnished the bank’s image. In 1975, the Federal Reserve and the comptroller of the currency branded Chase a “problem” bank. Even as he struggled to reverse Chase Manhattan’s decline, Mr. Rockefeller found time to address New York City’s financial problems. His involvement in municipal affairs dated to the early 1960s, when, as founder and chairman of the Manhattan Association, he recommended that a World Trade Center be built. In 1961, largely at his instigation, Chase opened its headquarters in the Wall Street area, a huge investment that helped revitalize the financial district and encouraged the World Trade Center project to proceed. In the with New York City facing a default on its debts because of sluggish economic growth and uncontrolled municipal spending, Mr. Rockefeller helped bring together federal, state and city officials with New York business leaders to work out an economic plan that eventually pulled the city out of its crisis. At the same time, he put his bank’s affairs in order. By 1981, he and his protégé Willard C. Butcher had restored Chase Manhattan to full health. He yielded his chairmanship to Mr. Butcher that year. From 1976 to 1980, the bank’s earnings more than doubled, and it outperformed its archrival, Citibank, in returns on assets, a critical indicator of a bank’s profitability. Even after retiring from active management in 1981, Mr. Rockefeller continued to serve Chase as chairman of its international advisory council and to act as the bank’s foreign diplomat. He did not hesitate to criticize United States officials for policies he considered mistaken. He was notably harsh about President Carter. In 1980, he told The Washington Post that Mr. Carter had not done “what most other countries do themselves, and expect us to do — namely, to make U. S. national interests our prime international objective. ” But Mr. Rockefeller also played the gadfly to Mr. Carter’s far more conservative successor, President Ronald Reagan. While the Reagan administration was supporting guerrillas in Africa, Mr. Rockefeller took a tour of the continent in 1982 and declared that African Marxism was not a threat to the United States or to American business interests. Late in life, Mr. Rockefeller was involved in controversies over Rockefeller Center, the Art Deco office building complex his father built in the 1930s. In 1985, the Rockefeller family mortgaged the property for $1. 3 billion, pocketing an estimated $300 million. In 1989, the family sold 51 percent of the Rockefeller Group, which owned Rockefeller Center and other buildings, to the Mitsubishi Estate Company of Japan. Mitsubishi later increased its share to 80 percent. The purchase represented the high tide of a buying spree of American properties by Japanese corporations, and it opened the family to criticism that it had surrendered an important national symbol to them. When Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 1990s and Mitsubishi was forced to declare Rockefeller Center in bankruptcy in 1995, Mr. Rockefeller was criticized again, this time for allowing the site to slip into financial ruin. Before the year ended, Mr. Rockefeller put together a syndicate that bought control of Rockefeller Center. Then, in 2000, it was sold in a $1. 85 billion deal that severed the center’s last ties with the Rockefeller family. As an octogenarian, Mr. Rockefeller, whose fortune was estimated in 2012 at $2. 7 billion, increasingly devoted himself to philanthropy, donating tens of millions of dollars in particular to Harvard, the Museum of Modern Art and the Rockefeller University, which John D. Rockefeller Sr. founded in 1901. Even in his 90s, David Rockefeller continued to work at a pace that would tire a much younger person. He spent more than half the year traveling on behalf of Chase or groups like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. In 2005, when he was interviewed in his offices at Rockefeller Center, he remained physically active, working with a trainer at the center’s sports club. He continued to collect art, including hundreds of paintings as well as furniture and works in colored glass, porcelain and petrified wood. That same year, he pledged a $100 million bequest to the Museum of Modern Art. Such giving became grist for the society pages. One gala at the museum in 2005 drew 850 people paying as much as $90, 000 for a table. The occasion was Mr. Rockefeller’s 90th birthday, and at the end of the evening, he was presented with a birthday cake modeled after his house in Maine. Then it was off to a week in southern France to continue the celebration with 21 members of his family. With the book “Memoirs” in 2002, he became, at age 87, the first in three generations of Rockefellers to publish an autobiography. Asked why he wrote it, he replied in his characteristic reserved tone, “Well, it just occurred to me that I had led a rather interesting life. ” | 1 |
Civil War Historian: Election 2016 could lead bloody repeat October 27, 2016 Dr. WIlliam Forstchen & Pastor Carl Gallups emphasizing importance of Election 2016 on “The Jim Bakker Show”. Branson, MO, October 27, 2016. TRUNEWS/Edward Szall/YouTube Screenshot
Montreat College professor William Forstchen says Election 2016 could lead to another bloody civil war. Professor Forstchen specializes in Civil War history. Forstchen gave warning on the October 25th edition of “The Jim Bakker Show” during their weeklong, “Ready Now Expo Oct. 2016.” Forstchen: “I’m a civil war historian.” The U.S. election of 1860 “is the closest I can parallel this to.” “And we all know what the price was. When we went to a civil war, they killed 660,000 young men because we became so divided.” Forstchen urged voters to turn out even if they disliked the candidates, because of other US congress races and the Supreme Court appointment. Forstchen: “I do believe we are at 1860. We are that close to the edge of the debacle.” Baptist pastor Carl Gallups then alluded to false Christian doctrine: “The prophecy clock started ticking” when the modern nation of Israel was established in 1948. In 1860: Four candidates received substantive amounts of votes in the U.S. presidential election. Abraham Lincoln (39.8 percent), Stephen Douglas (29.5 percent), John Breckinridge (18.1 percent) and John Bell (12.6 percent). On December 20, 1860 (44 days after Republican Lincoln was elected): Delegates to a convention in South Carolina unanimously voted to secede from the United States. Forstchen has co-authored books with Newt Gingrich.
(WASHINGTON, DC) A professor who specializes in the Civil War appeared on a special edition of “The Jim Bakker Show” last week to warn America that the 2016 presidential election could lead to another secessionist melee.
“I’m a civil war historian,” the Montreat College professor, William Forstchen , explained by way of introduction.
The U.S. election of 1860 “is the closest I can parallel this to,” Forstchen said.
“And we all know what the price was,” the professor then said. “When we went to a civil war, they killed 660,000 young men because we became so divided.”
Next, Forstchen went on a lengthy diatribe about the U.S. Constitution and the importance of voting.
He urged “those of you who feel ‘I can’t quite pull the lever for this person or that person'” in the presidential election to vote because U.S. senators and representatives are up for election, and because the Senate must confirm Supreme Court justices.
Forstchen failed to explain how the results of the 2016 election will hasten — or prevent — a civil war. He also did not specifically mention or endorse any candidates for office.
Nevertheless, the professor concluded with an adamant exhortation that a civil war is nigh.
“I do believe we are at 1860,” Forstchen said, looking directly into the camera. “We are that close to the edge of the debacle.”
From there, another guest, Baptist pastor Carl Gallups, declared that “the prophecy clock started ticking” when the modern nation of Israel was established in 1948.
Gallups, who introduced Donald Trump at a Donald Trump rally in January 2016, is famous because he has used his radio show to give a platform to people who deny the reality of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, according to the Connecticut Post http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Trump-disavows-Sandy-Hook-truther-who-6880064.php. Gallups has also said he believes neither Marco Rubio nor Ted Cruz are eligible to be president because of the circumstances of their births.
The segment featuring Forstchen and Gallups was part of The Jim Bakker Show’s weeklong “Ready Now Expo Oct. 2016”— featuring several survival products.
Four candidates received any substantive amount of votes in the U.S. presidential election in 1860: Abraham Lincoln (39.8 percent), Stephen Douglas (29.5 percent), John Breckinridge (18.1 percent) and John Bell (12.6 percent).
On December 20, 1860, delegates to a convention in South Carolina unanimously voted to secede from the United States — 44 days after Lincoln, a Republican, was elected.
Montreat College, Forstchen’s employer, is a small Christian liberal arts college with a main campus located in rural North Carolina.
Forstchen has written a couple dozen novels and several short stories. His co-author for some of the books is Newt Gingrich.
This article was contributed by Daily Caller Please contact TRUNEWS correspondent Edward Szall with any news tips related to this story. Email: | Twitter: @EdwardSzall | Facebook: Ed Szall DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP on Apple and Google Play ! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news
We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories | 0 |
MEXICO CITY, Mexico — A Texas man with relatives in Iraq has been arrested in connection with the parental kidnapping of his child. The man had managed to take the child to Mexico City where he had been trying to get an Iraqi passport. [On Monday morning, federal agents took Ismail Khaleel al Gebory before U. S. Magistrate Judge Mary Milroy, who formally notified him of his charges and ordered that he be held by the U. S. Marshal’s Service pending a detention hearing at a later date. During the hearing, al Gebory was provided with a attorney. According to information provided to Breitbart Texas by the U. S. Attorney’s Office, authorities arrested al Gebory on February 24 in Mexico City based on a criminal complaint filed by the FBI in Brownsville, Texas. The criminal complaint revealed that the child’s mother had sole custody and al Gebory would travel from his home in San Antonio to Brownsville for his regular visitations. During one of the visits on February 17, al Gebory took the child and did not return. The mother contacted authorities and told them that al Gebory had relatives in Iraq. The FBI, the U. S. Department of State, and Brownsville Police were able to locate the child in Mexico City the child has since been returned to the mother. Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. | 1 |
Financial Markets Clinton Foundation , Hillary emails , Huma Abedin , Jim Comey , Weiner laptop admin
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall (King James Bible). Throughout recorded history, hubris has been the Achilles’ Heel of political despots. Hillary Clinton and her political crime machine has been operating above the law for decades, stretching back at least to when Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas. “Hillary Clinton is a toilet scrubber for Goldman Sachs” – John Titus on the Shadow of Truth
During her 2016 Presidential Campaign, it became routine for her get in front the public and lie with convincing ease. In Greek tragedy, “hubris” was an anti-hero’s excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to the character’s unforeseen demise.
When Hillary was deposed by the FBI about the 33,000 emails on her private server that were wiped clean forever using BleachBit, she assumed her tracks were irrevocably covered up. But it wasn’t just 33,000 emails that were incinerated, reams of evidence including laptops, server back-ups and Blackberries either “disappeared” or were wiped clean.
Out of the blue, as if sent to earth from a Higher Power, the FBI in its child pornography investigation of Anthony Weiner stumbled on to a laptop with 650,000 emails that appeared to have been downloaded from Hillary Clinton’s private server. It is highly probable that among this treasure trough of emails will be copies of the 33,000 emails that Hillary arrogantly assumed were wiped from the Universe. Hubris gets ’em every time.
But it gets better than that. 650,000 is a decade’s worth of emails. It’s also possible that Weiner’s laptop will finally shed the light of Truth on Benghazi. “Jim Comey did not re-open this investigation of to go over old ground. Worse infractions were discovered.” – John Titus
In addition to exposing Hillary to all sorts of felonies, her statement to the FBI under oath undermined by this unforeseen “Black Swan” event that has engulfed her campaign.
The Shadow of Truth is pleased to present John Titus of Best Evidence productions adds his unique insight into this event. The two-part podcast covers analysis that has not been presented in either the mainstream or alternative media: Share this: | 0 |
IMPLOSION: Trump Campaign Insiders Report–‘Think Of The Bunker Before Hitler Killed Himself’ By Andrew Bradford on October 30, 2016 Subscribe
For months, Donald Trump has assuring his supporters that he is going to win on November 8. This is despite nearly every poll showing him behind by as much as 12 points. And now we have an inside look at the Trump campaign which would seem to indicate that the entire campaign apparatus is on the verge of collapsing on itself.
New York magazine has just published an article by Gabriel Sherman in which one Trump staffer commented: “Think of the bunker right before Hitler killed himself. Donald’s in denial. They’re all in denial.”
Overall, the mood of the staff working out of Trump Tower goes from gloom, denial, rage, and glee on Friday when the FBI reported it would review new materials in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was still Secretary of State.
While the Trump camp should be able to make hay of the announcement from FBI Director James Comey, one problem remains: The candidate is so undisciplined that any progress made is quickly undone by Trump himself. As a top donor told Sherman : “Trump has the following personality: NIH-NFW, meaning ‘If it’s not invented here, not invented behind these eyes, then it’s no fucking way.'”
Sherman’s report echoes another article from the New York Times in which an advisor to the GOP nominee commented: “In Trumpworld as Hitler’s Bunker terms (it’s) like when Goebbels thought FDR’s death would save the Nazi regime.”
And plans for what comes after the election–rumors of a new Trump TV network–also seem unlikely some inside the inner circle reveal. One prominent member of the GOP told Sherman: “It’s too expensive. Trump won’t put his own money in.”
Disgraced former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes has parted ways with Trump, reportedly because the candidate refused to stay on message and follow direction from campaign staff. Others are also positioning themselves for what happens after the election is over with. One former Mitt Romney staffer says the lifeboats are out early: “It’s a window into a campaign in a downward spiral when the positioning begins, but I’ve never seen it begin this early.”
So was the entire Trump campaign nothing more than ego fulfillment and an attempt to gain endless media attention for the Donald? With nine days left, that explanation seems to be the most likely reason Trump embarked on this suicide mission in the first place.
Featured Image Via Gage Skidmore for Flickr available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License About Andrew Bradford
Andrew Bradford is a single father who lives in Atlanta. A member of the Christian Left, he has worked in the fields of academia, journalism, and political consulting. His passions are art, music, food, and literature. He believes in equal rights and justice for all. To see what else he likes to write about, check out his blog at Deepleftfield.info. Connect | 0 |
• The record seven awards for the musical “La La Land” included for best picture comedy or musical and wins by Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. “Moonlight” won for best picture drama. • Meryl Streep gave an impassioned, politically charged speech after receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award. • Casey Affleck, Viola Davis, Isabelle Huppert and Tracee Ellis Ross also won awards. Here is a list of the winners. • And in TV categories, “The Crown” and “Atlanta” were triumphant. • Wesley Morris, Melena Ryzik and Dave Itzkoff provided commentary. And The Times was also on the red carpet. The “La La Land” dominated the 74th Golden Globes on Sunday, receiving a promotional boost in the form of a lavish tribute that kicked off the awards telecast and collecting a record seven prizes, including one for best comedy or musical. No film has won more than four Globes since 1979, when the crime drama “Midnight Express” received six, the previous number. “I’m in a daze now officially,” said the force behind “La La Land,” Damien Chazelle, 31, as he accepted the directing award. Noting the “La La Land” plot — dreamers try to make it in show business — Emma Stone said in accepting the award for best actress in a musical or comedy, “I think that hope and creativity are two of the most important things in the world, and that’s what this movie is about. ” “La La Land,” made by Lionsgate, also won Globes for song, score, screenplay and actor. The bliss felt by the “La La Land” cast and crew was likely mirrored by the disappointment of those involved with “Moonlight,” the night’s film. Despite six nominations, “Moonlight,” about a young black man growing up in Miami, received a lone trophy — albeit an important one: best drama. “Please, tell a friend, tell a friend, tell a friend,” Barry Jenkins, the director of “Moonlight,” said in accepting the award, trying to boost the art film’s box office performance. A year after Hollywood was excoriated for its lack of diversity at the Oscars, inclusion was a major theme on Sunday. “This is for all of the women of color and colorful people whose stories, ideas, thoughts are not always considered worthy,” said Tracee Ellis Ross, as she accepted the best television actress Globe for her role in the ABC series “ . ” “I want you to know that I see you. We see you. ” Ms. Ross was the first black woman to win in the category since 1983, when Debbie Allen won for “Fame. ” There were several surprises. Isabelle Huppert took best actress in a drama for the French film “Elle,” beating Natalie Portman, who was favored to win for “Jackie. ” (“Elle,” a thriller about a businesswoman who tracks her rapist, also won best foreign film.) The foreign journalists who bestow the Globes are known for spreading their awards far and wide, but several films received nothing, including “Florence Foster Jenkins,” “Lion,” “Hacksaw Ridge” and “Hell or High Water. ” “Manchester by the Sea,” despite five nominations, was honored only in the best actor category for Casey Affleck. HBO, despite 14 nominations, the most of any network, was shut out altogether. The first award of the night, for best supporting actor, dropped jaws: Aaron won for his performance in Tom Ford’s “Nocturnal Animals,” beating favorites like Mahershala Ali of “Moonlight. ” “I made it — thank you,” Mr. said, looking a bit startled. To the surprise of almost no one, Viola Davis took the supporting actress prize for playing a 1950s homemaker in “Fences. ” After doling out two kisses, one to her husband and one to Denzel Washington, who directed “Fences” and stars in it, Ms. Davis thanked its producers for taking a risk on the film. “It doesn’t scream moneymaker,” she said. “But it does scream art. It does scream heart. ” Early television awards were widely distributed. The FX series “Atlanta,” about an aspiring rapper and his manager cousin, was honored as best comedy and Donald Glover won for best comedic actor for his performance in the show. Beating the likes of Rami Malek (“Mr. Robot”) and Bob Odenkirk (“Better Call Saul”) for best actor in a drama was Billy Bob Thornton, honored for his performance in “Goliath,” a show with little buzz. Best actress in a TV drama went to Claire Foy, who plays a young Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s “The Crown,” which won for best dramatic series. As expected, “The People vs. O. J. Simpson: Crime Story” was named best and Sarah Paulson, repeating her win at the Emmys, collected a trophy for her portrayal of the prosecutor Marcia Clark in that show. A Ms. Paulson was showered with hugs from as she returned to her seat. The night got off to a jerky start. After the host, Jimmy Fallon, opened the show with the taped “La La Land” number, he became befuddled after a teleprompter malfunction. Still, he kept it breezy. “Let’s make tonight a celebration,” Mr. Fallon said in his monologue. Despite promises in preshow interviews to zing Donald J. Trump ahead of his inauguration, Mr. Fallon even kept his political jokes to a minimum. “One of the few places left where America still honors the popular vote,” he said, almost in a mumble. For casual movie fans, the annual Oscar race starts with the Globes. (Oscar nomination ballots are due on Friday.) But the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group behind the Globes, has worked in recent years to make its television honors more relevant by leaning toward rookie shows like “The Affair” and “Transparent. ” Hollywood stylists spent most of the week fretting about the weather forecast. For days, it looked like torrential rain would threaten a repeat of the 2010 Globes ceremony, when the red carpet turned into a swamp. On Sunday, however, Angelenos awakened to “another day of sun,” to borrow a lyric from “La La Land. ” When Meryl Streep, a Globes nominee and winner, accepted her Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award, she gave an impassioned speech that, while never mentioning Mr. Trump by name, was a clear reaction to the election. “Take your broken heart, make it into art,” she said, quoting Carrie Fisher. Mr. Trump, in a brief telephone interview, said that he had not watched the Globes or Ms. Streep’s speech, but that he was “not surprised” that she and some other entertainment figures had criticized him during the Hollywood event. “Meryl Streep introduced Hillary Clinton at her convention, and a lot of these people supported Hillary,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ms. Streep’s remarks at the Democratic National Convention last summer on behalf of Mrs. Clinton. While winners steered away from directly criticizing Mr. Trump, several used their moment onstage to take clear jabs. The British actor Hugh Laurie, collecting a actor award for “The Night Manager,” said: “I can say I won this at the Golden Globes. I mean, it has the words ‘Hollywood,’ “Foreign’ and ‘Press’ in it. ” He added, “I also think to some Republicans, even the word ‘Association’ is sketchy. ” Some Trump supporters, either anticipating the barbs or irritated that many Hollywood stars have been outspoken in their horror at his election, made #BoycottGoldenGlobes trend on Twitter early on Sunday. The Golden Globes are great fun, and so is its red carpet. Among this year’s first arrivals were the Stallone sisters, this year’s Miss Golden Globes, shepherded about by their father Sylvester’s publicist no buttering up of reporters. A news crew from Canada was promised a question with the sisters but then told “They need to go do Twitter” first. Issa Rae and Donald Glover were among the luminaries who admitted to feeling slightly intimidated to being there. Mr. Glover said he really wanted to meet Ms. Davis, and that he was still shocked at the huge response to “Atlanta,” his FX series. “It was supposed to be a punk show,” he said. “And they screened it at A. F. I. and Scorsese was laughing. ” Ms. Rae, of the HBO show “Insecure,” said she was still adjusting to her growing fame. “I’m an introvert, I barely leave the house,” she said. “To be out here is a blessing but I’m like: ‘Wow, guys. It’s just me. ” Even though Netflix has upended the TV industry, that streaming service had never won in the best drama or comedy category at the Globes (and the Emmys, for that matter). That changed this year with “The Crown,” which was named best drama. Claire Foy, who plays Queen Elizabeth, won for best actress in a drama. “The Crown” beat out “Stranger Things,” also from Netflix “Westworld,” the HBO series that practically requires a Ph. D. to understand it NBC’s “This Is Us” and HBO’s “Game of Thrones. ” Another closely watched television race was for best comedic actress, where Ms. Ross beat out some stiff competition to become the first black woman to win in the category since Debbie Allen in 1983. Also nominated were the Globe winner Sarah Jessica Parker, for her role as a suburban mother in HBO’s “Divorce” Ms. Rae, nominated for her performance in HBO’s “Insecure” Julia from the network’s “Veep” and last year’s winner, Rachel Bloom (“Crazy ”). Globe voters have ardently tried to leave behind their reputation for paying more attention to celebrity than honoring the year’s best performances. Once upon a time, Globe attendees also bellied up to the open bar in a boozy spectacle, but nominees — heeding the scolding eyes of their publicists — have largely started sticking to water. Despite moments of seriousness, however, the Globes lived up its raucous reputation. The “Modern Family” star Sofia Vergara made anus jokes from the stage. NBC censors bleeped expletives from Amy Schumer. Dinner guests in multiple instances chatted right through the speeches. As ever, the ballroom’s smoking patio was chockablock with stars at one moment, Sophie Turner from “Game of Thrones” lit her cigarette off one held by her Maisie Williams. The young “Stranger Things” cast members ran around taking selfies. As ever, the ceremony’s success will be determined by the Nielsen ratings. About 18. 5 million people watched last year, down from 19. 3 million in 2015. Televised award shows in general have been suffering from viewer erosion, partly because there is a seemingly endless array of them, but NBC had high hopes for Mr. Fallon. He has a much wider fan base than Mr. Gervais and has been using his “Tonight Show” perch as a promotional platform for the gig. | 1 |
A new survey from CNBC shows that Americans are highly optimistic about the economy and strongly support for President Donald Trump’s economic agenda. [The “CNBC All American Survey” recorded the highest level of economic optimism in its 10 year existence. percent of the public say the economy is good or excellent, a four point improvement from December. Forty percent expect the economy to improve over the next year, which is close to the record set in 2010 — when the economy was in truly dire straits. The survey also shows overwhelmingly strong support for Trump’s plans to improve America’s infrastructure, cut taxes, and renegotiate trade deals. Nearly 75 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s infrastructure improvement plans, with just around 10 percent disapproving. More than 60 percent of the public endorse plans to cut individual taxes, with just over 20 percent opposing. Renegotiating trade deals is favored by 58 percent of the public, and opposed by just over 25 percent. Reducing taxes also wins the approval of most Americans, but it generates opposition from over a third of the public. Cutting business regulations has an approval rating in the high forties, and a disapproval rating in the . The results on trade show that while Americans are divided over the benefits of free trade — 34 percent say it helps the U. S. and 31 percent say it hurts — they aren’t divided on the president’s efforts to strike better trade deals. According to CNBC’s Steve Liesman, even Americans who like free trade say they approve of those efforts. percent of Republicans say that they want their party to “work to pass Trump’s agenda” rather than “hold the line on conservative positions. ” Democrats divide nearly evenly on whether their party should compromise with the president. The president’s personal popularity is far weaker than his economic agenda. Just 39 percent say they approve of how he is doing his job, compared with 48 percent who disapprove, and 13 percent who said they don’t know or were unsure. One reason for this may be that many of the most public actions taken by the Trump administration have been in areas where public support is weaker. Nearly half of Americans say they disagree with the Trump administration’s attempt to replace Obamacare. The border wall also divides Americans, with slightly more Americans opposing it than supporting it, according to the CNBC survey. Efforts to rollback some of the Obama administration’s policies on climate change also have more opposition than support. The survey is not perfect. It’s results show that nearly half of Americans oppose Trump’s “Immigration Ban,” when there was no ban on immigration. Instead, the administration tried to put in place a temporary halt on travel from certain countries. Perhaps the actual question asked, which CNBC has not released, was less contentious. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — President Trump ignites a lot of fights, but his failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the biggest defeat in his short time in the White House, was the result of something else: a Republican civil war that humbled a generation of party leaders before he ever came to Washington. A president who believes that Washington’s usual rules do not apply to him, Mr. Trump now finds himself shackled by them. In stopping the repeal of President Barack Obama’s proudest legacy — the Republican Party’s professed priority for the last seven years — from even coming to a vote, the rebellious far right wing Mr. Trump, taking on and defeating the party establishment with which it has long been at war and which he now leads. Like every one else who has tried to rule a fissured and fractious party, Mr. Trump now faces a wrenching choice: retrenchment or realignment. Does he cede power to the wing of his party? Or does he seek other pathways to successful governing by throwing away the partisan playbook and courting a coalition with the Democrats, whom he has improbably blamed for his party’s shortcomings? “It’s really a problem in our own party, and that’s something he’ll need to deal with moving forward,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, an ally of the Tuesday Group, which stuck with Mr. Trump in the health care fight and earned the president’s praise in the hours after the bill’s defeat. “I think he did a lot — he met with dozens and dozens of members and made a lot of accommodations — but in the end, there’s a group of people in this party who just won’t say yes,” Mr. Cole said. “At some point, I think that means looking beyond our conference. The president is a deal maker, and Ronald Reagan cut some of his most important deals with Democrats. ” Mr. Trump is not there yet. Before becoming a presidential candidate, he seemed to have little fixed ideology. But as president, he has operated from the Republican playbook, embracing many of the positions of Speaker Paul D. Ryan and the party establishment. While he is angry and thirsty for revenge, he seems determined to swallow the loss in hopes of marshaling enough Republican support to pass spending bills, an unformed tax overhaul and a $1 trillion infrastructure package — legislation that could attract considerable Democratic support but has the potential to split the party. On Friday evening, a somewhat shellshocked president retreated to the White House residence to grieve and assign blame. In a search for scapegoats, he asked his advisers repeatedly: Whose fault was this? Increasingly, that blame has fallen on Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, who coordinated initial legislative strategy on the health care bill with Mr. Ryan, his close friend and a fellow Wisconsinite, according to three people briefed on the president’s recent discussions. Despite the public displays of unity with the speaker, Mr. Trump and his team now regret outsourcing so much of the early drafting to Mr. Ryan. One aide compared doing that to a developer’s staking everything on obtaining a property without conducting a thorough inspection. And they were stunned by his inability to master the politics of his own conference. Mr. Trump, an developer with a lifelong indifference toward the mechanics of governance, made a game effort to negotiate with members of the Freedom Caucus, even if it seemed to some members of that group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, that he did not have the greatest grasp of health care policy or legislative procedure. He told one adviser late Friday that his loss — a legislative debacle foreshadowed by the intraparty fight that led to the 2013 government shutdown — was a minor bump in the road and that the White House would recover. In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Mr. Trump asserted that the administration was “rocking. ” The problem, he suggested, was divisions among Republicans. There are “a lot of players, a lot of players with a very different ” Mr. Trump said. “You have liberals, even within the Republican Party. You have the conservative players. ” But his advisers were more realistic. Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, according to people familiar with White House discussions, described the president’s decision to withdraw the health care bill in the face of its defeat as a failure that could inflict serious damage on this presidency — even if Mr. Bannon believes Congress, not Mr. Trump, deserves much of the blame. Mr. Bannon and the president’s more legislative affairs director, Marc Short, pushed Mr. Trump hard to insist on a public vote, as a way to identify, shame and pressure “no” voters who were killing their best chance to unravel the health care law. One Republican congressional aide who was involved in the negotiations said Mr. Bannon and Mr. Short were seeking to compile an enemies list. Mr. Ryan repeatedly counseled the president to avoid seeking vengeance — at least until he has passed spending bills and a increase needed to keep the government running. In the end, the president decided to back down. But Mr. Trump’s advisers worry about the hard reality — the developer with the veneer was steamrollered by factions in the Republican Congress. As the dust settled on the health care debacle, it was clear that Mr. Trump’s lieutenants in the Republican civil war had been divided on how they thought the health care fight should have been handled, which does not augur well for the political battles to come. Mutual disgust with the Freedom Caucus seems to be pulling Mr. Ryan and, despite his misgivings, Mr. Trump, together, at least for now — just as it briefly united President Barack Obama and John A. Boehner, Mr. Ryan’s predecessor, during their doomed effort to reach a “grand bargain” on a tax overhaul in 2011. Until the very end, Mr. Trump’s team was deeply divided over whether he should fully commit to a hard sell on a bill they viewed as fundamentally flawed, with Vice President Mike Pence pointedly advising the president to label the effort “Ryancare,” not “Trumpcare,” according to aides. A Pence spokesman denied that the vice president tried to tie the bill to the speaker. Many on Mr. Trump’s team disengaged from the process even as he dug in. Gary D. Cohn, Mr. Trump’s top economic adviser, had originally been tasked with playing a large role in shepherding the legislation from the White House side. But Mr. Cohn had grown leery of the bill, and the White House recognized that Mr. Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs and a Democrat, was not a good messenger to deal with recalcitrant conservatives. Mr. Trump’s Jared Kushner, a key adviser, had said for weeks that he thought supporting the bill was a mistake, according to two people who spoke with him. But he was on a family skiing trip in Aspen, Colo. last week, and did not return to Washington until Friday — much to the annoyance of Mr. Trump, who thought he should have been in Washington in the whole week, according to two Republicans close to the White House. But Mr. Trump brushed aside those concerns in the last few days and embraced the conventional role as leader of his party. He has one speed when he decides to shift to sales mode, aides said, and he had trouble modulating his tone, issuing superlatives like “wonderful” to describe an ungainly bill his aides described as anything but. After it was all over, the president dutifully blamed the Democrats, a party out of power and largely leaderless, after turning his back on their offers to negotiate on a bipartisan package that would have addressed shortcomings in the Affordable Care Act while preserving its core protections for poor and patients. Aides advised him the argument was nonsensical, according to a person with knowledge of the interaction. For Mr. Trump’s Republican opponents, here was revenge served cold. As a candidate in 2016, he initially scoffed at signing a Republican loyalty pledge, at times behaving more like an independent invading the Republican host organism than like a typical presidential candidate. As president, Mr. Trump has left dozens of critical administration jobs unfilled, rejecting stalwart Republican applicants deemed insufficiently loyal to him — and now he is decrying the disloyalty of the 20 to 30 conservative members who outmaneuvered and overpowered him on health care. “We all learned a lot — we learned a lot about loyalty,” a solemn Mr. Trump told reporters late Friday. The dynamic that led to his defeat is bigger than Mr. Trump, despite his tendency to personalize every win or loss. Republicans who gained power by savaging Washington are in full control and cannot agree on a path forward. “We were a opposition party,” Mr. Ryan said in assessing the defeat late Friday. “Being against things was easy to do. ” Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump supporter, said after the health bill was pulled that he was “getting some déjà vu right now. ” “Do you think Donald J. Trump goes home tonight, shrugs and says, ‘This is what winning looks like’?” Mr. Gingrich added. “No! But this is where the Republican Party is right now, and it’s been this way for years. ” But Mr. Trump put on his best face on Saturday morning. “ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE,” he said on Twitter. “Do not worry!” | 1 |
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, whose emphasis on welcoming refugees has been at odds with the harsher stance of the Trump administration, on Wednesday night brought Ivanka Trump to a Broadway show that celebrates generosity toward foreigners in need. The surprise pairing at the new musical “Come From Away” was rich with symbolism, as Mr. Trudeau tries to maintain his country’s close relationship with the United States despite substantial differences in public policy. Ms. Trump, the president’s daughter and a close adviser, sat in Row F between Mr. Trudeau and Nikki R. Haley, the American ambassador to the United Nations, and directly behind a former Canadian prime minister, Jean Chrétien. In brief remarks from the stage before the performance, Mr. Trudeau did not discuss government policy explicitly. Instead he focused on praising the show’s story, about a small town in Newfoundland that fed and housed thousands of air travelers from around the world, diverted when North American airspace was closed during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “The world gets to see what it is to lean on each other and be there for each other through the darkest times,” he said. Mr. Trudeau, who was seeing the musical for the first time, said he also saw it as a demonstration of the importance of close relations between Canada and the United States. “There is no relationship quite like the friendship between Canada and the United States,” he said. “This story, this amazing show, is very much about that, and it’s about friendship as well. ” Mr. Trudeau’s celebration of a show about Canadians opening their borders and homes to foreigners in need comes at a complex moment for his country’s relationship with its southern neighbor. Beyond the Trump administration’s demands for reworking the North American Free Trade Agreement, its ban on immigrants from six predominantly Muslim countries, blocked on Wednesday by a federal judge, has set off a surge in asylum seekers fleeing from the United States to Canada, where they have largely been welcomed. Mr. Trudeau, who was greeted at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater with a sustained standing ovation, led a delegation of 600 people — including more than 125 ambassadors to the United Nations — brought to the show on Wednesday by the Canadian consulate general in New York. The audience was filled with exuberant Canadians, some bearing flags or wearing clothing decorated with the maple leaf. “Come From Away” is written by a married Canadian couple, Irene Sankoff and David Hein, and tells a distinctly Canadian story. The show also depicts the shame that Muslim air travelers feel at being singled out for scrutiny cheers the welcome given a gay couple in Newfoundland and features a black passenger worried about being mistaken for a thief and being shot — all issues that have deep resonance during the Trump era, with critics of the new administration skeptical of the president’s understanding of those concerns. The show opened on March 12 and received a positive review in The New York Times. The critic Ben Brantley called it a “big bearhug of a musical. ” The show had several productions, including one in Toronto from November 2016 through January 2017, and is scheduled to open another production in Toronto next February. It is rare, but not unprecedented, for a foreign head of government to attend a Broadway show. Last year, Mr. Trudeau and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel attended “Hamilton. ” | 1 |
Get short URL 0 18 0 0 As many as 22 children and six teachers were killed in an attack on a school compound in the Syrian city of Idlib, which may amount to a war crime if it were deliberate, Anthony Lake, the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), According to Lake, the attack was the deadliest since the Syrian war began in 2011. © Sputnik/ Michael Alaeddin Aleppo’s 'Humanitarian Pause': Militants Launch Mortar Attack on Civilians Preparing to Leave "Twenty-two children and six teachers were reportedly murdered today when their school compound was repeatedly attacked in Idlib, Syria. This is a tragedy. It is an outrage. And if deliberate, it is a war crime," Lake said in a statement on Wednesday.
Since 2011, Syria has been engulfed in a civil war, following the protests that had turned violent, as part of the so-called Arab Spring. During the conflict, hundreds of thousands Syrians have been killed and millions more have been displaced. ... | 0 |
“Polandball,” a popular Facebook meme page, has been permanently suspended from the platform, losing over 350, 000 followers in the process. [The page, which focused on “ satire,” was notified by Facebook that they would be permanently deleted on Saturday for unknown reasons. “Hello, friends. Today Poland has received news that his old page will not be coming back. It was finally permanently deleted by Facebook on 3rd February, 2017, along with over 350, 000 fans, many years of laughs and comics that are now gone forever,” declared Polandball in a statement on their replacement page, which has accumulated over 25, 000 likes. “Something that you should understand is that it was not any particular group of people that got our page deleted, other than Facebook. They were the ones who decided to get rid of our page, and they did this because of the many times we were banned previously. They decided now was the time to end it. ” “We will not be giving up on Polandball and the wonderful community that has been made around it,” they continued. “Thanks to you all very much for being fans, we at Polandball love you. Please continue to support us and our misadventures in geopolitical satire. ” Facebook has repeatedly been criticized for removing comedy pages, some of which have had hundreds of thousands of fans. In December, Breitbart News reported on a Facebook group of nearly a thousand of the social network’s top page owners, most of whom had been affected by Facebook’s suspensions and were attempting to fight back under the #PowerToThePages hashtag. Several other Facebook page resistance groups have also popped up over the past two years. Devin Shire, a Facebook page owner and member of the meme page revolt that took place last year, was sanctioned on the social network after he posted a comedy picture of rapper Drake morphed into a Nintendo 64 controller. “Originally we only had my page Young Thugga La Meme, Everything Is A Social Construct, another page I admin Chair Memes, Digiannantonio Aesthetic, and Kevin 3 I believe, then we went reaching out to everybody we knew who had pages and had them reach out to every other page admin they knew,” said Shire in August on the topic of the revolt. “It was not easy trying to talk some pages into being apart of this because a lot of them feared the backlash they might receive from Facebook for trying to stand up for this issue. ” Like the #PowerToThePages movement, Shire’s revolt included many different affected page owners and garnered support from top content creators, including the Polandball. In July, a popular Facebook page called “Meninist,” which had nearly 400, 000 likes, was permanently suspended, only to be reinstated after Breitbart Tech called Facebook out on the bizarre move. In the same month, a meme page mocking Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was also removed, with the social network citing a joke image as the reason for deletion. Numerous other examples of Facebook censorship have taken place almost daily, including the suspension of gay conservative Lucian Wintrich after he used the word “fag,” the removal of a men’s rights conference page on the day of the conference, the censorship and restriction of WikiLeaks links, and the deletion of and even content. Despite the crackdown on harmless and inoffensive content, Facebook has refused to deal with real infringements upon their policies, such as the cartoon posted by the Black Panther Party of Mississippi’s page in July that portrayed a man in a black robe and mask slitting the throat of a police officer. When contacted for comment, Facebook said that it was investigating the suspension. Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 1 |
Good morning. I’ll be spending a lot of today with Kim Severson, our national food correspondent, up from Atlanta to help us welcome guests to our Food for Tomorrow conference, which starts tomorrow in Pocantico Hills, N. Y. at the Stone Barns Center for Food Agriculture. It would be great if we were cooking, but we’ll be in a car, talk, talk, talking, and when we need gas, we’ll stop, and Kim will scout for pork rinds, because you never know: There may be a better kind than Golden Flake. I hope you’ll be cooking. (Not in the mood? Head on over to Facebook and watch our cool little video about making a ricotta tart. See if you don’t want to make that baby tonight or later this week.) If I were cooking, I’d be pleased this evening to serve Pierre Franey’s great old recipe for chicken breasts with lemon alongside some plain rice and a platter of green beans with shallots. It makes for a relatively fast meal, and it should leave you time to clean up ahead of the first debate of this election season. (Alternatively, you can roast up some loaded nachos and eat them while watching, drinking beer and taking a shot of whiskey every time Mrs. Clinton says “breaking down barriers” and each time Mr. Trump mentions “the wall. ”) I’d be making plans for the rest of the week, too. I’m excited to try my hand at David Tanis’s recipe for lamb steaks with Lebanese spices. I’d like to serve Florence Fabricant’s recipe for broccoli rabe made . I want to make Nigella Lawson’s recipe for salmon in a ginger and lemongrass broth. It’s getting to the time of year when I want to eat David’s recipe for pork chops with apples and cider. And who doesn’t want, as fall begins to cool off our evenings a little, to settle into a dinner of Jamie Oliver’s recipe for eggplant Parmesan? The Food for Tomorrow conference runs through Wednesday, so perhaps I’ll get to one of those toward the end of the week. If you beat me to the punch, take a photograph of what you cook and post it to social media, where we monitor the hashtag #NYTCooking on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. We’ve got a growing community of home cooks going. Let’s share our work! You can find many more recipes on Cooking. Search through our collections and see if you can’t find something delicious to cook. Then cook it! You can rate your results on a scale of one to five stars, and, if you have a good substitution or hack to suggest, you can post a note on the recipe. And, as always, I’ll ask you to reach out to us for help if you need it. There are kind and careful people standing by at cookingcare@nytimes. com. Now, have you read this piece in our Sunday Review arguing that industrial farms are good for the environment? Discuss. | 1 |
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump said in an interview that aired on Sunday that a replacement health care law was not likely to be ready until either the end of this year or in 2018, a major shift from promises by both him and Republican leaders to repeal and replace the law as soon as possible. “Maybe it’ll take till sometime into next year, but we’re certainly going to be in the process,” Mr. Trump said during an interview with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, after Mr. O’Reilly asked the president whether Americans could “expect a new health care plan rolled out by the Trump administration this year. ” “It statutorily takes awhile to get,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re going to be putting it in fairly soon, I think that, yes, I would like to say by the end of the year at least the rudiments but we should have something within the year and the following year. ” Mr. Trump acknowledged that replacing former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act is complicated, though he reiterated his confidence that his administration could devise a plan that would work better than the law — despite having provided few details of how such a plan would work. “You have to remember Obamacare doesn’t work, so we are putting in a wonderful plan,” Mr. Trump said. Speaker Paul D. Ryan has vowed to move legislation for a replacement for the Affordable Care Act by the end of March. But some Republicans are worried about a political backlash if they repeal the law without an adequate replacement — potentially throwing millions of people off their insurance — and have urged a more methodical approach. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a Republican who is the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, recently proposed repairing parts of the health care law ahead of scrapping the whole package. Mr. Trump said last month that he wanted to present a replacement soon after the Senate confirmed his nominee for secretary of health and human services, Representative Tom Price, Republican of Georgia. The Senate is scheduled to vote on Mr. Price’s confirmation this week. “We’re going to be submitting, as soon as our secretary is approved, almost simultaneously, shortly thereafter, a plan,” Mr. Trump said in January. Last month, the president signed an executive order to begin unwinding the Affordable Care Act. It gave the Department of Health and Human Services the authority to ease what it called “unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens” from the existing law. | 1 |
Who? Comedian.
Where would she move? Spain. “I did buy a house in another country just in case, so all of these people that threaten to leave the country and then don’t, I will leave the country,” she said on Live with Kelly and Michael.
(Weirdly, she called Trump charming in the same interview.)
3. Neve Campbell
Who? House of Cards actress.
Where would she move? Canada.
“His honesty is terrifying,” she told Huffington Post UK.
4. Barry Diller
Who? Founder of IAC Interactive.
Where would he move? Unspecified.
“If Donald Trump doesn’t fall, I’ll either move out of the country or join the resistance,” he told Bloomberg.
5. Lena Dunham
Who? Creator of Girls.
Where would she move? Vancouver.
“I know a lot of people have been threatening to do this, but I really will,” she said at the Matrix Awards.
6. Keegan-Michael Key
Who? Star of Key & Peele.
Where would he move? Canada.
“It’s easy. It’s like 10 minutes from Detroit and that’s where I’m from,” he told TMZ.
7. Chloë Sevigny
Who? Actress and guest star in Portlandia.
Where would she move? Nova Scotia.
She answered simply, “Nova Scotia” to a question of where she would move if Trump were elected.
8. Al Sharpton
Who? Activist.
Where would he move? Out of here.
“If Donald Trump is the nominee, I’m open to support anyone, while I’m also reserving my ticket out of here if he wins,” he said at a press conference.
9. Natasha Lyonne
Who? Actress in Orange Is the New Black.
Where would she move? A mental hospital.
“[I’ll move] to a mental hospital for a while because you’re like ‘why is this happening?’” she said.
10. Eddie Griffin
Who? Comedian.
Where would he move? Africa.
“He’s good at making money, but he’s ignorant…If Trump wins, I’m moving to Africa,” he told DJ Vlad.
11. Spike Lee
Who? Director of Malcolm X.
Where would he move? …Brooklyn.
If Trump wins, he’ll be “moving back to the republic of Brooklyn, New York,” he reported to Vanity Fair.
12. Amber Rose
Who? Model.
Where would she move? Unspecified.
“I can’t even think about it! I’m moving, I’m out! I can’t. And I am taking my son with me!” she told US Weekly.
13. Samuel L. Jackson
Who? Actor.
Where would he move? South Africa.
“He’s just running for popularity. C’mon, just let it go,” he said on The View.
14. Cher
Where would she move? Jupiter
“IF HE WERE TO BE ELECTED, IM MOVING TO JUPITER >:|” she tweeted.
15. George Lopez
Who? Comedian and star of George Lopez.
Where would he move? Mexico.
“If he wins, he won’t have to worry about immigration, we’ll all go back,” he told TMZ.
16. Barbra Streisand
Who? Singer.
Where would she move? Australia or Canada.
“He has no facts. I don’t know, I can’t believe it. I’m either coming to your country [Australia], if you’ll let me in, or Canada,” she told Australian journalist Michael Usher.
17. Raven-Symoné
Who? Actress and host of The View.
Where would she move? Canada.
“My confession for this election is if any Republican gets nominated, I’m going to move to Canada with my entire family. I already have my ticket,” she said on The View.
Note: Her leaving was contingent on any Republican candidate winning the election–not just Trump.
18. Whoopi Goldberg
Who? Actress and host of The View.
Where would she move? Unspecified.
“I don’t want it to be America. Maybe it’s time for me to move, you know,” she said.
19. Omari Hardwick
Who? Actor in Power.
Where would he move? Italy.
“I’ll move from Denver to Italy… If Donald Trump wins the presidency, I’m out,” he told The Wrap.
20. Miley Cyrus
Who? Pop star.
Where would she move? Unspecified.
“My heart is broken into a 1 pieces…I am moving if this is my president! I don’t say things I don’t mean!” she wrote in an Instagram post.
21. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Who? Supreme Court Justice.
Where would she move? New Zealand.
“I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president… Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand,” she told The New York Times.
22. Amy Schumer
Who? Comedian and actress.
Where would she move? Spain.
“I will need to learn to speak Spanish because I will move to Spain or somewhere… It’s beyond my comprehension if Trump won. It’s too crazy,” she told BBC Newsnight.
23. Katie Hopkins | 0 |
Trump seguirá viviendo en su domicilio particular al considerar que la Casa Blanca es “un cuchitril” SE NIEGA A REBAJAR SU NIVEL DE VIDA SÓLO PORQUE MILLONES DE AMERICANOS LE HAYAN VOTADO vivienda
El nuevo presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, ha informado esta tarde que seguirá viviendo en su domicilio particular al considerar que la Casa Blanca es demasiada pequeña.
El empresario y político neoyorquino ha declinado mudarse a la residencia oficial de la presidencia alegando que es “un cuchitril y ahí no me cabe nada”. Al líder republicano le parece absurdo rebajar su nivel de vida sólo porque millones de americanos le hayan votado.
El presidente electo establecerá como principal centro de trabajo la mansión de Palm Beach, en Florida, donde reside, aunque ha ordenado a su equipo que queme todas las cortinas de la residencia presidencial “porque huelen a negro”.
Los seis pisos y 5100 metros cuadrados que tiene la Casa Blanca provocan claustrofobia al vencedor de las elecciones, que ha querido tender la mano a Barack Obama y le ha ofrecido un puesto de mayordomo. | 0 |
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A Colombian peace deal that the president and the country’s largest rebel group had signed just days before was defeated in a referendum on Sunday, leaving the fate of a war suddenly uncertain. A narrow margin divided the vote, with 50. 2 percent of Colombians rejecting the peace deal and 49. 8 percent voting in favor, the government said. The result was a deep embarrassment for President Juan Manuel Santos. Just last week, Mr. Santos had joined arms with leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, who apologized on national television during a signing ceremony. The surprise surge by the “no” vote — nearly all major polls had indicated resounding approval — left the country in a dazed uncertainty not seen since Britain voted in June to leave the European Union. And it left the future of rebels who had planned to rejoin Colombia as civilians — indeed, the future of the war itself, which both sides had declared over — unknown. Both sides vowed they would not go back to fighting. Mr. Santos, who appeared humbled by the vote on television on Sunday, said the that his government had signed with the FARC would remain in effect. He added that he would soon “convene all political groups,” especially those against the deal, “to open spaces for dialogue and determine how we will go ahead. ” Rodrigo Londoño, the FARC leader, who was preparing to return to Colombia after four years of negotiations in Havana, said he, too, was not interested in more war. “The FARC reiterates its disposition to use only words as a weapon to build toward the future,” he said in a statement. “With today’s result, we know that our challenge as a political party is even greater and requires more effort to build a stable and lasting peace. ” The question voters were asked was simple: “Do you support the final agreement to end the conflict and construct a stable and enduring peace?” But it was one that had divided this country for generations, as successive governments fought what seemed to be a war without an end and the Marxist FARC rebels dug into the forest for a hopeless insurgency. To many Colombians who had endured years of kidnappings and killings by the rebels, the agreement was too lenient. It would have allowed most fighters to start lives as normal citizens, and rebel leaders to receive reduced sentences for war crimes. “There’s no justice in this accord,” said Roosevelt Pulgarin, 32, a music teacher who cast his ballot against the agreement on a rainy day at an elementary school in Bogotá, the capital. “If ‘no’ wins, we won’t have peace, but at least we won’t give the country away to the guerrillas. We need better negotiations. ” María Fernanda González, 39, an administrator at a telecommunications company who voted against the deal, said she simply did not trust the FARC. “Why didn’t they turn in their arms and tell the world what happened to the people they kidnapped, as a gesture during the talks?” she asked. Her household seemed to reflect the deep divides in Colombia, with her husband, Carlos Gallon, 42, an engineer, voting for the deal. Mr. Gallon said the country had no choice but to stop fighting. But still, he admitted, “I understand why she is voting no. ” The referendum result overturned a timetable intended to end the FARC insurgency within months. The rebels had agreed to immediately abandon their battle camps for 28 “concentration zones” throughout the country, where over the next six months they would hand over their weapons to United Nations teams. Under the agreement, fighters were expected to be granted amnesty. Those suspected of being involved in war crimes would be judged in special tribunals with reduced sentences, many of which were expected to involve years of community service work, like removing land mines once planted by the FARC. On Sunday, the government said it had sent negotiators to Havana to begin discussing the next steps with the rebels. After the president’s statement that he was reaching out to opposition leaders in the Colombian Congress like former President Álvaro Uribe, experts predicted a potentially tortured process in which Mr. Uribe and others would seek harsher punishments for FARC members, especially those who had participated in the drug trade. “Everyone has said, including those who sided ‘no,’ that they could renegotiate the deal, but obviously that would have political challenges,” said César Rodríguez, the director of the Center for Law, Justice and Society, a nongovernmental organization in Colombia focusing on legal issues. “It was a small majority, but a valid majority, and that has consequences. ” On Sunday night, politicians who had strongly opposed the deal were already signaling that it was time to negotiate more stringent terms with the rebels. “We want to redo the process,” said Francisco Santos, a vice president under Mr. Uribe, who was against the deal but supports an eventual peace with the FARC. “In democracy, sometimes you win, but sometimes you lose. ” The war left brutal scars in Colombia. About 220, 000 people were killed in the fighting, and six million were displaced. An untold number of women were raped by fighters, and children were given Kalashnikov rifles and forced into battle. Unable to put down the insurgency, the government turned in the countryside to paramilitary groups run by men who became regional warlords. The state seemed swept aside in the fighting. In the end, the war lasted so long that it might have been difficult for many Colombians to forgive the FARC. “The adults that were born before the war now number very few,” said Juan Gabriel Vásquez, a novelist who voted for the deal. “As a society, we are a massive case of stress, because we have grown up in the midst of fear, of anxiety, of the noise of war. ” Many people lost because of the outcome. Among them was President Santos, who had staked his legacy on the peace deal and had been rumored as a possible contender for the Nobel Peace Prize. FARC members, who had been on the run in the jungle for decades, saw their hopes of rejoining Colombia as political leaders, including 10 seats in Congress, suddenly dashed for the time being. Perhaps the biggest winner on Sunday was Mr. Uribe, the former president, and the Colombian far right, which had vowed to defeat the deal at the ballot box. Mr. Uribe had argued that the agreement was too lenient on the rebels, who he said should be prosecuted as murderers and drug traffickers. “Peace is exciting, the Havana agreement disappointing,” Mr. Uribe wrote on Twitter on Sunday after casting his “no” vote. In the end, a small majority of Colombians agreed with him. | 1 |
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Alexandra Bruce – Dr. Joseph Mercola interviews Dr. Alexander Wunsch about the hidden dangers of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting.
Our eyes were designed to receive the light frequency of the Sun. Rays strike the optic nerve, which signals the pituitary gland, triggering the release of hormones and neurotransmitters that regulate our bodily functions.
The mitochondria of each cell in the human body produce almost one’s entire bodyweight in adenosine triphosphate (ATP) per day (!) and the human body can only live for 15 seconds without it, as compared to 4-10 minutes without air, 3-4 days without water. Another shocking thing we learn is that we only receive 1/3rd of what is converted into ATP from the food we eat. The overwhelming percentage of our ATP production comes from the light we receive through our eyes and skin.
With many of us staring at screen devices or spending most of our time indoors with energy-saving LED lighting, few of us are aware of the adverse effects that LEDs have on retinal health, hormonal health and mental health, because these do not emit the correct frequency of light, in order for us to produce ATP.
Dr. Mercola calls his conversation with Dr. Wunsch “One he most important interviews you will ever see.” SF Source Forbidden Knowledge TV Nov. 2016 Share this: | 0 |
Sunday on MSNBC’s “Am Joy,” while discussing the new lead character on latest Star Trek series “Discovery,” actor George Takei of “Star Trek” fame called President Donald Trump a “troll,” and added that he though Trump was “as foolish and as uninformed and as ignorant as these trolls. ” George Takei said, “Today in this society, we have alien life forms that we call trolls and these trolls carry on without knowing what they’re talking about and knowing even less about the history of what they’re talking about and some of these trolls go on to be presidents of nations. ” “The president was totally ignorant of the history of internment here,” he continued “I invited Donald Trump to come see ‘Allegiance’ that we did on that subject. He never came. so he’s ignorant of that chapter of American history, and these people that are claiming that “Star Trek” is racist genocide or whatever they’re calling white genocide, don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re equal to the president of the United States. I think the president is as foolish and as uninformed and as ignorant as these trolls are. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
WASHINGTON — President Trump plans to take executive action on a nearly daily basis for a month to unravel his predecessor’s legacy and begin enacting his own agenda, his aides say, part of an extended exercise of presidential power to quickly make good on his campaign promises. But in a reflection of the improvisational style that helped fuel his rise, he has made few, if any, firm decisions about which orders he wants to make, or in which order. That is a striking break from past presidents, who have entered office with detailed plans for rolling out a series of executive actions that set a tone for their presidencies and send a clear message about their agendas. It was plain that Mr. Trump had devised no such strategy by his first day in office, as advisers expressed doubt until the last moments about whether he would issue any directives on Friday. “It’s going to be a decision,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, told reporters that afternoon. Then, around 7 p. m. reporters were suddenly summoned to the Oval Office. After sprinting from the briefing room, they watched Mr. Trump sign a directive to federal agencies to begin scaling back parts of the Affordable Care Act. “There are a number that are being looked at, but it’s just a question of which ones he feels like doing, and when,” Mr. Spicer had said of executive orders earlier on Friday. In recent days, he had said that Mr. Trump’s top aides were still deciding on the “sequencing” of the unilateral actions. Still, there is little doubt about the policy areas in Mr. Trump’s sights: international trade deals, illegal immigration, the fight against the Islamic State, climate change and Washington lobbying. In his first in office, Mr. Trump focused on health care, ordering the machinery of government to look for every opportunity to pull back on President Barack Obama’s signature achievement by waiving fees or granting exemptions to states, businesses, individuals and insurance companies. He also moved quickly to freeze the Obama administration’s unfinished regulations, a routine step for an incoming president of the opposite party. During the campaign, Mr. Trump railed against Mr. Obama’s use of executive authority to sidestep an uncooperative Congress on issues like immigration and health care. After his victory, Mr. Trump vowed to use those same powers to quickly reverse the country’s ideological course. Aides said they hoped to group Mr. Trump’s executive actions thematically for maximum impact. They gave few other details, though some advisers suggested that executive actions on illegal immigration could be among the first issued after the inaugural weekend. Advocates for undocumented workers are anxiously waiting to see what Mr. Trump will do. If he moves aggressively, he could immediately overturn Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — the program Mr. Obama created to protect young immigrants who were brought illegally to the United States as children, giving them legal status and access to work permits. Ending that program would put as many as 800, 000 of them at risk of being removed from their families and sent to the countries they had left as children. The White House could instead unwind the program slowly, giving the young people, often called Dreamers, more time before their immigration protections and work permits expire. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said on Friday that in a brief conversation with the new president, Mr. Trump had given him assurances about the program. The president, Mr. Durbin said, told him that “we don’t want to hurt those kids we’re going to do something. ” “Thank goodness he said that,” the senator added. The president could also order federal agents to conduct workplace raids to crack down on immigration violations. He could take action against sanctuary cities, those that shield undocumented immigrants from deportation. Or he could issue an order reinstating a program known as Secure Communities, in which the local authorities cooperated with federal agencies to detect and deport illegal immigrants. And he could order work to begin, at least symbolically, on a wall at the southern border. Financing construction of the entire wall would require congressional action, however. But on the border wall and other promises, Mr. Trump now faces the challenge of translating slogans into action. He has already missed the deadline for a vow he made in August to start deporting illegal immigrants with criminal records on his first day in office. “We will begin moving them out, Day 1,” he said during a rally in Phoenix. “My first hour in office, those people are gone. ” Mr. Trump’s approach to using his newly minted executive power mirrors his often chaotic transition to the White House. The nature of the new president’s first 24 hours reflected his management style, both in his business empire and in the campaign, which went through four as aides fell into and out of favor. His travel schedule was rarely planned out more than a few days in advance, and Mr. Trump did not hesitate to tear it apart when he wanted to. Decisions would be telegraphed by top advisers, only to be pulled back within hours, or never formally announced. The lack of planning stands in stark contrast to the approaches of past presidents, who have sought to demonstrate the change in direction they hope to lead and maximize the effectiveness of their unilateral actions. Ronald Reagan retreated to the President’s Room just off the Senate floor only moments after being sworn in and signed an order freezing federal hiring, echoing the declaration in his inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem government is the problem. ” Mr. Obama also decided well in advance which executive actions he wanted to take in his first days, after a team of lawyers led by Gregory B. Craig, his first White House counsel, spent much of his transition planning what he could do without Congress to illustrate a stark break with George W. Bush’s presidency. On his second full day in office, Mr. Obama ordered the closing of the Guantánamo Bay prison — a directive still unfulfilled — and banned torture by mandating that terrorism interrogations be guided by the Army Field Manual. Mr. Obama’s embrace of executive orders — early in the administration and later, when a Congress blocked his legislative agenda — may have helped pave the way for Mr. Trump to take quick action. Since many of Mr. Obama’s achievements were put in place with executive action, Mr. Trump can reverse them, at least over time, the same way. | 1 |
X Dear Reader! VDARE.com isn’t just a website. We are the voice of the Historic American Nation . Our goal is nothing less than to develop a full spectrum media network to speak up for our people during this difficult time for our country. Part of that means building institutions which are offline and in the real world. There’s something about a paper journal that suggests permanence, which inclines people to take it more seriously. And because the news cycle is so fast, some of the most important, substantial, and potentially influential writings fall through the cracks and don’t get the attention they deserve. For that reason, we’re proud to announce the creation of VDARE QUARTERLY, a print journal featuring the best material from our webzine. This will replace our yearly anthologies and ensure that the information and analysis you really don't want to miss will get in front of you as quickly as possible. However, we need your help. For us to unveil this exciting new product we need 600 magazines ordered to cover the print expenses. Fill out the form below to instantly receive a digital copy of VDARE QUARTERLY, and when we have the number of necessary subscribers it will go to print and your exclusive paper copy will ship directly to you! Depending on the package you choose, you will receive multiple paper copies (provided enough readers support the community effort). We encourage you to pass these around – they serve as an excellent gift for friends and family, while at the same time helping to build our community. VDARE QUARTERLY is aesthetically pleasing as well as ideologically powerful. But this isn’t just a service we are providing. VDARE QUARTERLY is a tangible manifestation of your investment in us, and in our country. A subscription is one of the most effective ways you can help us build our media network, expand our influence, and build the kind of movement we will need to take back our country and ensure our children have a recognizable America.
We count on your support! Yours sincerely, Peter Brimelow, Editor of VDARE.com VDARE QUARTERLY countdown: 244 already ordered, 356 still to go | 0 |
Putin On The Migration Crisis: 'Europeans Have No Future' # thinkbig 0
In a truly shocking twist, the Supreme Court of Austria has decided to acquit the Iraqi man, "that may not have realised the 10-year-old Austrian boy did not want to be sexually abused by him." Amir, 20, was visiting the Theresienbad pool in the Austrian capital of Vienna in December 2015, as part of a trip to encourage integration, when the incident occurred. Tags | 0 |
Email Britain has been providing military training to the Saudi Arabian Air Force, while the country is carrying out atrocities in neighboring Yemen, a report says. The UK's Liberal Democrats revealed that the British government is providing the training in both Saudi Arabia and Britain itself, The Independent revealed on Saturday. The party’s Foreign Affairs spokesman, Tom Brake, obtained a parliamentary letter from UK Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, in which he acknowledged that the British government provides the training to Saudi pilots bombing civilians in Yemen. Brake denounced the move as “shameful,” calling on the Ministry of Defense to end the training immediately. “The Government must end its complicity in this murderous campaign,” he said. "It is shameful that the UK government is not only arming Saudi pilots, it is training them as well.” Saudi Arabia has launched a war in Yemen on March 26, 2015, in a bid to undermine the HouthiAnsarullah movement and restore power to Saudi-backed former president AbdRabbuh Mansur Hadi. Since the beginning of the aggression, almost 10,000 people, including over 2,000 children, have been killed. The Liberal Democrats also wanted to know what the instructions and advice had been given by the British government on authorizing military operations and the “targeting of aerial operations” over the last year. "The indiscriminate bombing of innocent civilians by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, in clear breach of international humanitarian law, is now well documented,” Blake added. In response, Fallon claimed the government helps the Saudi Air Force in order to “improve their targeting processes and to support International Humanitarian Law (IHL) compliance.” Fallon said the UK had delivered two training sessions in Saudi Arabia on the process for investigating alleged International Humanitarian Law violations, under a joint incident team it supported. He, however, said that the government “has not provided any specific operational advice to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for operations in Yemen and has not provided training on political authorization of military operations.” The Liberal Democrat party also insisted that the latest revelation requires an urgent action by UK Foreign Secretary Boris Jonson, who personally signs off any arms sales to countries such as Saudi Arabia. London, which has been one of the biggest suppliers of weapons to Riyadh for 40 years, has come under fire for its continued sales of weapons to the kingdom during its war on Yemen. Charity group Oxfam accused the British government of being in a state of “denial and disarray” over its arms supplies to Riyadh. Earlier this year, Amnesty International found a banned British-made cluster bomb used by the Saudis in Yemen. The un-detonated bomb which was found in a remote village in northern Yemen was BL-755 cluster bombs. | 0 |
3 More Emotions Men Should Master 3 More Emotions Men Should Master
André is a young European who left his decaying country in 2012 for greener pastures. He enjoys exploring subterranean places, reading about a host of interconnected topics, and yearns for Tradition. November 3, 2016 Mind
Passions and emotions are an almost bottomless pit. Start digging there and you will find new ones, or new relations between this and that tidbit of emotional content. So-called Enlightenment philosophers who tried to theorize the passions—something that had been done at greater length, actually, by Thomas Aquinas—could never agree on how many there were or even how much they exactly mattered in the course of life.
Whether or not you have been reading my last two pieces on the topic, remember this is about mastering passions in the most general sense. This is not only about emotional restraint or seduction. Our own emotional states are the first in line, but mastering the passions is also about spotting what other people are feeling, how they can be led to a specific course of action, and what tends to make them tick. Mastering the passions is far from evident, it rather takes times and experience: the concepts and directions I am providing here aim at giving some conscious clarity about things that are by nature a bit muddy.
Artists, though they often suffer from mental problems, are skilled at painting a particular vision in vivid colours, allowing their public to share a specific point of view and emotional state. This is something the elite know very well. Critics trashed Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged because they could see themselves painted there as passive-aggressive cultural parasites. Rand’s novel was more cogent, and attracted more heat, than her barely original “philosophical” pieces today sold at the cheapest price on the second-hand book market.
More recently, the movie The Fall (2004) got backlashed by some of the mainstream media on the grounds that it depicted Hitler as “too human.” While seeing actor Bruno Ganz pondering, eating, talking to his closest company or getting angry, the viewer could perhaps feel a bit of empathy to him. Which is, of course, unacceptable to a Left that clings to the idea of a crazy, careless, “inhuman” dictator to be forever cast as an embodiment of evil. Hollywood directors do not like witnessing others competing with their own emotional mastery.
We need artists, as well as qualified cultural critics, to take some distance from the mainstream propaganda disguised as entertainment and expand an alternative culture and artworks. Emotions explored in the present series can be used just that way. 1. Gratitude
Gratitude denotes a trained and refined disposition. Being graceful means “recognizing that the good in our life can come from something that is outside us and outside our control” (Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell , chap.8, p.61). It focuses on positive things we already have and that cannot be ascribed to our sole merit or efforts.
The traditional world, whatever the particular cultural or religious form it was embodied into, always emphasized the necessity of being grateful. You owed your existence to God, to your family and your community. None of these goods were actually deserved, which meant you had to be grateful for them and repay them by being a dutiful member of the community as well as a dutiful father for your own children. A lot of prayers and ancient rites imply a thanksgiving for what one already has.
Moving later in time, it is striking to see that modern progressivism breeds the exact opposite mindset. The ideology of rights make many goods granted, not a “thank you for” but an “I have a right to.” Neophilia (the relentless pursuit of novelty) always casts a bad shadow on what has been around for some time, as if what was coming later was always better.
Advertisement, gossip culture, economic growth pressure, quest for victimhood lead to envy and always being more or less frustrated with what one already has, regardless of what it is. By leading us to always want more, progressivism makes us oblivious to what we already have or how it does not stem from pure individual merit—and, when it flatters the ego, it makes us complacent and far from cultivating the art of being thankful.
Turning our backs from the modern, ungraceful mindset is easier said than done. To start with: loud-mouthed girls should be remembered they owe their nice, luxurious workplaces to the men who built them, LGBTBBQ should thank their heterosexual parents and ancestors for their very lives, anti-white black activists should remember they would not even exist had their ancestors not benefited from their white colonizers healthcare technology. Feel free to expand the list. Ultimately, I think, every person who is modern or westernized enough can be outed as ungraceful for something. 2. Trust
A famous study showed that multiculturalism was closely correlated with defiance and a lack of trust in each other. Provided that we enlarge a bit our definition of multiculturalism, this absolutely makes sense. Some ethnic groups are especially prone to violence, and some “minority” groups are rewarded for freely accusing the silent majority, but the hegemony of political correctness made it a taboo. Communities have been fragmented by individualism, i.e. each person looking to take as much as she can, and by an “antiracist” white guilt that soon became an intra-white generalized suspicion of “racism.” People do not identify anymore with the larger society and often cannot even identify with a smaller community—which makes everyone else a potential enemy.
Yet, without trust, life becomes unbearable. If you can’t go to the streets without the possibility of getting mugged by, say, BLM activists , or go to a family meal without the prospect of a lukewarm struggle with aging leftist parents, or have a relationship with a girl without the possibility of her making a false rape accusation , there aren’t a lot of things you can do on the long run. Without trust in other people, you have to trust the complex of big corporations, NGO, and State institutions we call the system—and be dependent from it for things as basic as food and shelter.
Only trust in each other can make life sustainable and long-term projects workable. To re-create trust, we have to make people accountable and bound to precise rules, reward good behaviours while punishing bad ones. Actions must bear consequences. But before neomasculinity gets into power, men should strive to establish a reputation through reliability, persistence, and a strong mindset. I could wager you have been more trusting of your Facebook friends last years than of the mainstream media , the former conveying more trustworthy information than the latter. 3. Desire
Modern capitalism and progressivism always ran on desire. Want cheaper prices? More goods? Better goods? More TV channels to watch? More monies? More ego and thinking you are the hot shit? Well, just buy in X or do some work for Y, and here it is… um, nah, you just have to do some more, and some more, and some more. In the end, you forgot why exactly you are doing what you’re doing, or why you started to watch TV. But it all started with you led to perform something, no matter how surreptitiously framed as spontaneous or normal it was.
The system plays on desires in three ways. It sets things to be desired, things to be feared or never desired at all, and things to be consummated without end. Things to be desired include everything the advertisement wants you to desire, like a revolving credit, a new sofa, an SUV or whatever, as well as the next step of “ progress ” as it has been elaborated on the top of the pyramid.
Things to be feared are where the system wants you to be resigned and fatalistic: did you ever feel sad to see all these girls losing themselves into a sea of fat, bitching, and SJW-propaganda spouting? Too bad, that’s globalization, resistance is futile, move on! At last, things to be consummated are mainly produced to keep you busy and programmed though you are not really practising anything beyond staring at a screen.
Lately, an important shift has been happening between the first and third ways to play on desires. Decades before, the average consumer had to desire owning more junk or being part of the “progress”: the system needed him to work and monitor his peers. Today, the junk is already everywhere, PC culture is already hegemonic, and the average American worker is no longer needed. Active desire is not needed anymore.
Thus, the system has shifted into making the average Joe more passive. Instead of actually desiring more, the consumer should be content with surrogates of everything—pseudo-group identity with team sports, pseudo-sports with football and basket on TV, pseudo-sex with porn, pseudo-life with video games, pseudo-family life with animals, pseudo-expertise when the average libtard obnoxiously parrots the media on everything. This is Brzezinski’s tittytainment in a nutshell.
Even if you don’t give up on having a real life instead of a surrogate, the system will still want you to desire things only for yourself, thus retreating into individualism, instead of trying to actually weight on the world. Either you surrender to “the progress” or you try to ignore it before it comes for you. As if nothing could change.
Don’t let the elite frame the world according to its own interests. Desire self-realization and weighting on the course of the world. Of course, our female counterparts should desire being loving, caretaking, and definitely on our side. To conclude this series
Once again, it is hard to sketch in a few words what could be done with passions or emotions. What I have mostly dwelled into is how those already in power manipulate them and what we could do as to take them back. If you find the topic worthy of interest, you can expand it in two directions: first, documenting yourself on a particular passion or emotion, and second, using some by stirring it with a certain aim in mind.
In the former case, I would recommend Neel Burton’s Heaven and Hell (quoted several times in the course of this series) as a point of departure. In the latter, being creative or simply assertive is up to you. Whether this looks more like efforts or self-persuasion or artistry does not matter much.
Here, as well as in seduction, a tight framing is key. Whatever the topic, no vocabulary and no picture are really neutral, which is a problem as our perception and thinking orientation are often conditioned by these. The mastery of emotions is reinforced—and reinforces—the mastery of representations. If this sounds far-fetched, let me provide some examples of use, examples you are absolutely free to expand as it suits you.
In the comments space, several guys here have been giving a very negative portrayal of the nice guy: he would be a fake, a “sneaky bastard,” a “jerk.” So guys who want to get laid or have their own interests, just as everyone else, are jerks? This looks like internalized feminist thinking. In my opinion, nice guys should elicit empathy, which goes through a positive portrayal emphasizing their willingness to respect the girl or how they were likely raised by an unmanly culture.
A recent ROK piece about mainstream media has shown how these are making a conscious effort to hide and de-legimitate white victimhood: they paint vividly any crime where the victim is non-white and the perpetrator is, but mention no detail or do not mention at all any crime perpetrated by non-white(s) on white(s).
The same pattern appears in the movie Elysium (2013), when the (of course) white villain mentions children she wants to protect from a mass of brown invaders, yet these children are never shown and consequently stir no empathy from the average watcher, whereas the brown-skinned are vividly depicted as humane and not responsible for their own poverty.
Analyzing these phenomena is fine, but ultimately insufficient. Creative people on our side have to provide an alternative that includes mastered emotions. Picking up girls is part of, and gives some experience in, this wider game. | 0 |
During a event in New Hampshire on Thursday night, Donald J. Trump made a passing remark about the first presidential debate last week and about the audio equipment that he has blamed for his performance. “It wasn’t that the mike didn’t work,” Mr. Trump said, during comments about the difficulties he had faced during the debate. The problem, he said, was that the people operating the soundboard had been “oscillating” as he spoke, changing the levels of his voice. In any other election, this would have been an anodyne comment. But it came after Mr. Trump had spent days insisting he had had a “bum mike” and theorizing that there may have been foul play. Mr. Trump’s new comments may be obscured somewhat by the arrival of Hurricane Matthew. But, ahead of the crucial second debate with Hillary Clinton on Sunday, they represented an adjustment by Mr. Trump of what had been a rallying cry portraying him as a potential victim of sabotage. In an email Thursday evening, a Trump spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, pointed to a brief statement by the Commission on Presidential Debates last week saying that an audio issue had affected how Mr. Trump was heard in the hall. “We’d like to reiterate, as the commission stated independently, that Mr. Trump experienced audio issues the night of the debate,” Ms. Hicks said. “Regardless of the exact technical cause or effect, it was unfortunate. ” The event on Thursday was intended to help Mr. Trump find a comfort zone before the Sunday debate, which shares the format. But it was moderated by a friendly conservative radio host, questions were screened in advance, and Mr. Trump spoke for only about 30 minutes. Mr. Trump, who faced some criticism for seeming ill prepared for the first debate, will spend time today and over the weekend preparing for the second. But the hurricane — potentially the worst to hit the United States in many years — threatens to drown out attention on the race, perhaps even on debate day. | 1 |
Whether lambasting racial inequity with his trademark eccentricity, or putting on a Jheri curl wig for a parody of Rick James, Dave Chappelle has long been considered one of the most exciting in comedy. But he hasn’t issued a special or album since his infamous decision to walk away from the critically acclaimed “Chappelle’s Show” on Comedy Central — and a $50 million contract — in 2005. [ Read a review of the Netflix specials ] He in the spotlight in 2013, rekindling his love of in what one critic called “magnetically compelling” sets in a variety of spaces: comedy clubs, festivals and 10 shows at Radio City Music Hall. the medium that first made Mr. Chappelle famous, was again his life’s work. On Tuesday he releases two new specials on Netflix, “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “The Age of Spin,” culled from a 2015 performance in Austin and a 2016 show in Los Angeles. In an interview that touched on the death of Prince and his conflicted feelings about Bill Cosby, Mr. Chappelle spoke by phone on Thursday about his contract with Netflix, his “Saturday Night Live” appearance and how the election of President Trump affects comedy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. You caught flack for walking away from a lucrative TV deal more than a decade ago. Now Netflix is reportedly paying you $60 million to air these two prerecorded performances and create a third one. It wasn’t like I made a deal and had to go out and do a lot. [Laughs] I just had to deliver the shows. And you’ll be releasing another special for Netflix this year as part of the deal. Yeah. I’m working on that now. Not a bad deal. Do you have other unreleased shows still in the vault? I have hundreds of hours of audio recording of shows I did after I quit my television show. And then I [taped] three specials — one in Chicago, one in Austin, and one in L. A. Oh, and I also recorded the Radio City shows. These specials showcase a comedian who is reinvigorated by comedy. I could quit my show, and that’s one kind of difficulty. But quitting doing would be another. I’m sure everybody gets to a point where they run out of [stuff] to say, and they’ve got to take a knee and recharge and be introspective and live their life. But it’s hard to not ever come back to. Guys might walk away from it and close the door, but they don’t lock it behind. Eddie Murphy always entertains the possibility of doing it again. Even though he doesn’t do it, I’m sure he thinks about it all the time. It’s just one of those things where you’ll do it for 10 years, and then you’ll think about it for the next 30. Many of your contemporaries are still performing. It kind of reminds me of the ’90s: Chris [Rock] is back out there, I see Jerry [Seinfeld] around, I hear Jon Stewart is around again. All these people who are great comics that stopped doing . It’s fun to see everybody back. It’s a good time for comedy in that respect. But the whole Trump thing makes it harder for comedians. How so? He’s so skewed, it’s hard to find an angle that sounds fresh. If you talk about him, it’s almost like you’re part of the chorus and not a soloist. How do you view the dynamic between comedy and bringing truth to power? I think it’s interesting that people perceive us as having a sanctuary. Because I don’t. In fact, I think we’re almost disproportionately taken to task over what we say. “Chappelle’s Show” brought you a level of ubiquity few comedians ever achieve. A lot of times when you’re a famous dude, you don’t really feel like a person is actually looking at you. They’re looking at the phenomenon that you’ve become. Every once in a while, a person will engage with you, and you’ll be like, O. K. this person actually sees me. But I didn’t want the headache or the scrutiny. It was too much for me at that point. I felt like after I quit my show, the crowds could actually see me. The audience recalibrated with me. They listened to me again. And it was great. I started playing clubs again just because I enjoyed it. It was reaffirming a love for [ ]. It was important for me to do that. I needed that. I loved it. In the last few years, I’ve found an altitude I’m comfortable with. You famously parodied Prince on your TV show. How did you react when you learned of his passing? It’s a hard thing to talk about. I looked up to him like everybody did. I didn’t know him that well, but the times that we hung out were fun and very memorable and often funny. He was very generous with his advice, and he was very generous with his access. He let me see some of his process. He fostered a community among artists. He used to have these parties where we would go over to his house, and there would be all these musicians that I admired, and they’d just do these jam sessions in the basement. Everybody at the party was playing something. I think when he died there was the icon dying, but then there was this pillar in the community of people dying. Take me through hosting “Saturday Night Live” last November in the immediate wake of the election. At a certain point [on election night] we were all in the writers’ room, and as the night went on, and Trump was picking up these Electoral [College] votes, everyone stopped writing. And then everyone was just staring at the TV. I saw people tear up sketches they were writing. They’d assumed Hillary was going to win. Now there was essentially no show on Saturday. It was like the wind got knocked out of the writers’ room. I was really worried. And yet you delivered a humorous, poignant monologue reflecting your equal parts hope and fear for the future. The best advice I got was from Louis C. K. I went to a comedy club Friday night [before the show] and saw him. And Louis told me: “[Forget] the rest of the show. The monologue is all that matters. ” I was stressed out all that day. But right before I went onstage, this calm just washed over me. Everything just felt right. As someone who idolized Bill Cosby as a child, it’s surprising you dedicate so much time in both specials to the rape allegations against him. The Bill Cosby thing was tough for me. I’m not saying that to detract from his alleged victims at all. But he was a hero of mine. Is there a mourning process involved? So many bad things happened to our heroes: Muhammad Ali had Parkinson’s Richard Pryor had M. S. Prince died too young. And Bill just looked like one of the guys who was going to get to the finish line and just die of old age. And this happened. Jesus Christ. It’s awful. How do you respond when critics put you in the same conversation as comedy greats like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock? I appreciate it, but it’s not a useful thing. I don’t know what to do with that but just be humbled by it. You never feel like you’re better than your heroes. What does life look like moving forward? I need time to think. I need to have experiences. I have to live in order to get onstage. When I’m sitting there staring into space, that’s the heavy lifting. I’m like everybody: Sometimes I’m wildly optimistic sometimes I feel doom and gloom. We all just keep moving. | 1 |
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Battered by four defeats in Tuesday night’s primaries, Bernie Sanders is planning to lay off hundreds of campaign staffers across the country and focus much of his remaining effort on winning the June 7 California primary. The Vermont senator revealed the changes a day after Hillary Clinton’s victories widened her delegate lead and left her all but certain to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Despite the changes, Mr. Sanders said he would remain in the race through the party’s summer convention and stressed that he hoped to bring staff members back on board if his political fortunes improved. But political experts say the layoffs signal Mr. Sanders is beginning to accept that he will not be the Democratic nominee and is now focused on pulling the party toward a more progressive agenda. “We want to win as many delegates as we can, so we do not need workers now in states around the country,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “We don’t need people right now in Connecticut. That election is over. We don’t need them in Maryland. So what we are going to do is allocate our resources to the 14 contests that remain, and that means that we are going to be cutting back on staff. ” When asked how many people would be let go, Mr. Sanders did not give an exact number but did say, “It will be hundreds of staff members. ” “We have had a very large staff, which was designed to deal with 50 states in this country 40 of the states are now behind us,” he said “So we have had a great staff, great people. ” The development came a day after Tad Devine, Mr. Sanders’s senior campaign strategist, said in an interview that the senator would reassess his candidacy, looking into issues of staffing and messaging. The remarks set off something of a backlash within the Sanders campaign, as officials disputed Mr. Devine’s comments, saying that no such reassessment would take place. Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager told NBC News that there would be “no big pow wow. ” When asked about Mr. Devine’s remarks, the senator’s wife, Jane Sanders, pushed back in a MSNBC interview. “No, no. We assess on an everyday basis,” Ms. Sanders said. “Even if he had a string of wins, like eight in a row or he’s won states by landslide victories, nobody in the media and certainly not The New York Times has ever said he has a chance to win. ” Stu Loeser, who owns a media strategy firm and was a longtime spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, said he had seen this sort of back and forth in campaigns involving Mr. Devine before. During Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign, Mr. Devine had a reputation as a strategist who would be upfront with the candidate. “Every elected official needs two kinds of loyalists close to them. One kind are the people who are with them no matter what, agree with them no matter what, and help them execute their vision,” Mr. Loeser said. “And the other is an adviser who is able to stand up and tell the candidate what he or she needs to hear regardless of whether the candidate wants to hear it. Tad Devine had that role with Gore in 2000. ” Mr. Sanders has started to talk more openly about the possibility of not winning the Democratic contest. During a rally in Indiana he talked not just of his path to victory but discussed what he might do if he lost. He stressed he was in the race to “win and become the Democratic nominee. ” But he also said if he did not succeed he would try to get as many delegates as possible and “put together the strongest progressive agenda any political party has ever seen. ” Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Mr. Sanders, said in a statement that the campaign would keep on staff more than 300 workers focused on the remaining contests. Mr. Loeser said Mr. Sanders’s comments showed that he was beginning to pivot his message, perhaps because people within the Sanders campaign are realizing that the senator would not be able to beat Mrs. Clinton. “By the math, it’s been impossible for Senator Sanders to catch up for quite some time,” Mr. Loeser said. “Now it looks like he’s finally looked down, realized there is no ground underneath him, and is starting his descent. ” | 1 |
How Haunted Is Your House? Posted today Do you believe in ghosts? Take this quiz and find out if your house is haunted! 1. Check off all the things you have noticed about your house: Sometimes I get woken up at night by the loud sobbing of a translucent widow, and she won’t go away until I spritz her with a water bottle. Every time I make the sign of the cross, a hellish, guttural voice says “I’d really rather you didn’t.” My vegetables always seem to go bad a little quicker than you’d think they would. The bone-chilling whispers telling me to “get out” and “get out now” are just white noise at this point. My decorative suits of armor sat down on the couch to watch TV and won’t let me change the channel if Ice Road Truckers is on. No matter which way the wind blows, my weathervane always points toward the former headquarters of Enron. My reflection is constantly doing jerk-off motions at me. I have a grandfather clock that, for all I know, was built by a murderer. The koi in my koi pond died and turned into ghost fish, which is actually really convenient since I don’t have to feed them anymore. There’s just a lot of dust. My daughter’s head hasn’t stopped rotating since we moved in, but her grades are still good so we’re not too worried. I had a priest come to exorcise my house, and a year later he’s still not even done with the foyer. Get results Results for How Haunted Is Your House? Your House Is Very Haunted! Wow! The resounding answer is that your house is haunted beyond compare, with spirits infesting every corner of the whole place. It's time to collapse from fear, because you are living in a haunted house! Share Your Results | 0 |
CHARLOTTE, N. C. — A cellphone video made by the wife of Keith Lamont Scott as he was fatally shot by the police here shows the moments before and after the episode, including the wife’s pleas to her husband to get out of his truck, and her pleas to the officers not to shoot him. But the video, which was given to The New York Times on Friday by lawyers for the family, does not include a view of the shooting itself. Nor does it answer the crucial question of whether Mr. Scott had a gun, as the police have maintained. This question and others surrounding the case have transformed Charlotte into the latest crisis in the divisive debate over police treatment of minorities. In the last several nights here, hundreds of protesters have taken to the streets demanding justice. Many have done so peacefully. Others have vandalized property and clashed with the police. One of the lawyers, Justin Bamberg, who is representing the family along with Eduardo Curry, said in an interview on Friday that the video did not prove whether the shooting was justified. Rather, he said, it offered “another vantage point” of the episode. He said he hoped the Police Department would release its own videos of the shooting, as protesters have demanded since Mr. Scott was killed on Tuesday. The video provided a vivid glimpse of the drama that played out as Mr. Scott’s wife of 20 years, Rakeyia, first pleaded for a safe outcome to her husband’s encounter with the police, and then was heard reacting in uncomprehending horror as he was shot to death. Mr. Scott, a father of seven, had parked his white Ford Explorer in a visitor’s space at the apartment complex where he lived, about a south of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He often waited there, on a stretch of Lexington Circle, for one of his children to return home from school. Officers of the Police Department arrived in unmarked vehicles shortly before 4 p. m. to serve a warrant on another person. Ms. Scott left their apartment to bring Mr. Scott a cellphone charger, the lawyers said, when she saw the officers around him and began recording the scene on her phone. The Police Department has said that officers saw Mr. Scott, who was black, standing beside his S. U. V. holding a handgun, then saw him get into the vehicle. The video, which lasts 2 minutes 12 seconds, begins with shaking images of grass and the voice, apparently that of an officer, shouting, “Hands up!” Immediately, Ms. Scott said, “Don’t shoot him,” and began walking closer to the officers and Mr. Scott’s vehicle. “Don’t shoot him. He has no weapon. He has no weapon. Don’t shoot him. ” An officer can then be heard yelling: “Gun. Gun. Drop the gun. ” A police S. U. V. with lights flashing arrived, partly obscuring Ms. Scott’s view, and a uniformed officer got out. From that point, there are five officers, most of whom appeared to be wearing body armor over plain clothes, around Mr. Scott. “Don’t shoot him, don’t shoot him,” Ms. Scott pleaded, her voice becoming louder and more anxious. “He didn’t do anything. ” Officers continued to yell “drop the gun” or some variation of it — at least 12 times in 38 seconds. “He doesn’t have a gun,” Ms. Scott said. “He has a T. B. I. ” — an abbreviation for a traumatic brain injury the lawyers said Mr. Scott sustained in a motorcycle accident in November. “He’s not going to do anything to you guys. He just took his medicine. ” “Drop the gun,” an officer screamed again as Ms. Scott tried to explain her husband’s condition. The officer then said he needed to get a baton. “Keith don’t let them break the windows. Come on out the car,” Ms. Scott said, as the video showed an officer approaching Mr. Scott’s vehicle. “Drop the gun,” an officer shouted again. Ms. Scott yelled several times for her husband to “get out the car,” but on the video, he cannot be seen through the window of the S. U. V. “Keith, don’t do it,” Ms. Scott shouted, as the video showed her backing away and panning to the ground. Mr. Bamberg said that Ms. Scott was trying, in those statements, to “get him to stand still” after he got out of the car. It was only in the final moments before the shots — less than two seconds on the video — that the camera panned back and Mr. Scott could be seen, still unhurt. He was standing between the vehicles and officers, wearing bright aqua pants, a dark and a white ball cap, his head turning from side to side. Neither of his hands — and what, if anything, he was holding — could be seen clearly. Friends and neighbors have raised the possibility that he was holding a book. The police claimed that he was holding a gun, and that a gun was recovered from the scene. But the police chief, Kerr Putney, has acknowledged that in police videos of the shootings, he could not see Mr. Scott’s hands. “The video does not give me absolute, definitive visual evidence that would confirm that a person is pointing a gun,” he said on Thursday. Fifty seconds into Ms. Scott’s video, four shots rang out. The Police Department has identified the officer who fired as Brentley Vinson, 26, who is black, and has been with the force since 2014. Ms. Scott seemed to flinch at the first gunshot, and the picture immediately left her husband. “Did you shoot him? Did you shoot him?” Ms. Scott shouted, her voice becoming louder each second. “Did you shoot him? He better not be [expletive] dead. ” She moved closer, and the video showed Mr. Scott lying face down on the pavement, his white sneakers pointed to the camera, with officers standing and kneeling around him. “I’m not going to come near you. I’m going to record, though,” Ms. Scott said. “I’m not coming near you. I’m going to record, though. He better be alive. ” Mr. Bamberg said of the video: “Right now, we don’t have enough facts to say whether this shooting was justified or unjustified. That’s what we’re trying to find out. ” The lawyers also brought attention to an object that they said could be seen on the ground near Mr. Scott after he was shot. They said the object seemed to appear in the video after the camera panned away briefly, in a place where no object was previously visible. The video had been widely viewed both online and on television by Friday afternoon. City and police officials did not respond to Ms. Scott’s video. But in a statement on Friday, Jennifer Roberts, the mayor of Charlotte, pressed the state’s Bureau of Investigation to speed up its efforts to release the police recordings. “I urge it to use every resource at its disposal to get this done, and release the information to the public as quickly as possible,” she said. Chief Putney arranged for Mr. Scott’s family members and their lawyers to privately view two police videos on Thursday. Beforehand, they had been uncertain whether the videos should be released to the public, Mr. Bamberg said, but after seeing them, they called for release of the recordings. While the family members differed with the police on some major points about the videos, they seemed to be in agreement with the police chief on one aspect. “It is impossible to discern from the videos what, if anything, Mr. Scott is holding in his hands,” they said in a statement. Mr. Bamberg and Mr. Curry also described the two police videos — one from a dashboard camera and the other from a body camera — that the police allowed the lawyers and family members to view. The video, Mr. Bamberg said, provided few significant details of the shooting. But he said the dashboard video showed two officers taking up positions behind a pickup truck and yelling commands at Mr. Scott, who was inside his vehicle. The dashboard video, the lawyers said, appeared to show that the front window on the driver’s side was rolled up. The video, Mr. Bamberg said, then showed Mr. Scott stepping out of the vehicle, his hands down, with his right hand empty and “some type of object” in his left hand. “It’s impossible to make out what it is,” the lawyer said, noting that Mr. Scott was . “He doesn’t make any dramatic movements,” Mr. Bamberg said. He also said Mr. Scott seemed “confused. ” In the video, Mr. Scott took a couple of steps forward “in a nonaggressive manner,” the lawyer said, and then a step back. Then shots were fired. According to court records, Mr. Scott, who was born in South Carolina, was charged in that state with a number of offenses including check fraud, aggravated assault and carrying a concealed weapon. Later, he moved to Texas, where he shot and wounded a man in San Antonio in 2002. He was convicted and sentenced, in 2005, to seven years in prison, and was released in 2011. His lawyer in the Texas shooting case, Gloria Yates Early, said Mr. Scott had claimed his family was being “stalked. ” “Allegedly, people were following them around with weapons, pointing them at their bodies,” Ms. Early said. “He carried a gun around and he admitted to shooting a guy. He alleged of himself and his family. ” When asked on Friday if Ms. Scott knew whether her husband owned a gun at the time he was shot by the police, Mr. Curry replied, “Not that she knew of. ” | 1 |
0 http://ydouthink.com/deforestation
Donald Trump has finally done it! Less than a week after his presidential nomination, Trump has kept his word on “Draining the Swamp” in Washington DC with a new ruling that has lobbyists p*ssing all over themselves!!
In a historic move never before seen by a US President, Trump declared that ALL officials working with his campaign, on his transition team, and in his cabinet will be BANNED from working as DC lobbyists for 5 years to prevent them from abusing their connections for self-gain! Image From Gawker
Not only that, but ANYONE who wants to work for Trump is now required to immediately end ALL of their current connections to lobbying groups or be FIRED instantly.
But the Donald was not done yet. To put icing on the cake, he has also moved to officially have the term lobbyist apply to ALL DC insiders working as “consultants” or “advisors” when in reality, “we all know they are lobbyists.” Video by CNN – Trump Drain the Swamp!!
Of course, you know all the long-time Senators and lobbying groups are already freaking out. Mitch McConnel refused to acknowledge the ban when pressured by reporters while the National Institute for Lobbying and Ethics tried to intimidate Trump by saying “This will have a chilling effect on his hiring, no doubt.”
Uh, yeah. Now Donald Trump will have to hire people NOT trying to line their pockets with hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars. Sounds like a real loss to me…NOT!!
If you are proud of President Trump for standing up against the DC lobbyists and career politicians, let him know by sharing this out to every person you know!! | 0 |
It first spread on social media, rippling through immigrant communities like the opposite of fear and rumor: a call to boycott. In the New York region and around the country, many cooks, carpenters, plumbers and grocery store owners decided to answer it and not work on Thursday as part of a national “day without immigrants” in protest of the Trump administration’s policies toward them. The protest called for immigrants, whether naturalized citizens or undocumented, to stay home from work or school, close their businesses and abstain from shopping. People planned for it in restaurant staff meetings, on construction sites and on commuter buses, but the movement spread mostly on Facebook and via WhatsApp, the messaging service. No national group organized the action. “It’s like the Arab Spring,” said Manuel Castro, the executive director of NICE, short for New Immigrant Community Empowerment, which works primarily with Hispanic immigrant day laborers in Jackson Heights, Queens. “Our members were coming to us, asking what the plan was. Frankly, it kind of came out of nowhere. ” But what began as a movement quickly reached the highest levels of federal government. In Washington, the Pentagon warned its employees that a number of its food concessions, including Sbarro’s, Starbucks and Taco Bell, were closed because immigrant employees had stayed home and that they could expect longer lines at restaurants that were open. Restaurants, from San Francisco to Phoenix to Washington, D. C. were some of the most visible spots affected, with chefs closing some of their eateries for the day in support. Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef and owner of the Frontera Grill, closed several of his restaurants and said he would give a portion of the revenue from the ones that remained open to an immigrant and refugee rights group. “What really makes our country great is the diversity we experience here,” Mr. Bayless said in an interview. “I can’t say enough about the lack of respect and the and that I’m sensing around us these days. ” Some people felt that the support of immigrants who are undocumented was wrongheaded. “Of course, nobody wants to do without immigrants — they are what made America,” Sarah Crysl Akhtar, 67, a writer in Lebanon, N. H. said in a telephone interview. “But there is a difference between legal immigrants and illegal aliens. ” The latter, she said, “bring down the quality of life for everyone. ” Some schools and centers across the country experienced a drop in attendance. At KIPP Austin Comunidad, a charter school in Austin, Tex. one teacher posted on Twitter that only seven of her 26 students came to school on Thursday. “Some of our school buses were coming to school with two and four children on them,” said Sarah Gonzales, a bilingual teacher at the school. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. ” By the end of the day, the KIPP Austin Public Schools network executive director, Steven Epstein, said only 60 percent of students attended its 10 schools with 5, 000 students. Usually the attendance rate is 98 percent or above. At Siler City Elementary School in rural North Carolina, where 65 percent of the school population is Hispanic, 263 of the 662 students were absent on Thursday. Just 18 were absent on Wednesday, said John McCann, a spokesman for the county school district. Still, cities did not grind to a halt, and for most people, the action registered as an inconvenience — a longer wait for lunch, a favorite restaurant closed, a bus driver who wasn’t there. In the Hasidic neighborhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn, some customers noticed the absence of the usual Latino immigrant employees at their local stores. “I thought, ‘Oy, my coffee will not be as good as any day,’ but I felt, ‘Good for them, they are standing up for their rights,” said Rabbi Joel Labin, 34, a writer and activist who shopped at Center Fresh market. “We grew up with these stories. I hear from my grandparents the issue of immigration from Europe. I feel like it’s kind of my story, too. ” Mexican workers participated in large numbers in New York. In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, most bakeries and taquerias were closed, and a public library was crowded with parents and children they kept home from school. But the action was not limited to Hispanic immigrants: On several blocks in Midwood, Brooklyn, virtually all stores were shuttered on Thursday as part of a protest planned by Pakistani shop owners. There, an auto repair shop on Coney Island Avenue posted a handmade sign on its metal shutter: “We Are Immigrants. ” The driver of a discount shuttle bus outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Sam Ahmad, originally from Egypt, said on Wednesday night that he was not going to work on Thursday and many members of his mosque in New Jersey would not, either. Asked why, Mr. Ahmad, 57, said, “Because that crazy guy,” he said, referring to President Trump. “Because I’m Muslim and I got a lot of family here. They can get separated, and it’s not right. Our children are born here and grow up here. ” In downtown Newark, a gathering outside the stately Essex County Hall of Records started with only a couple dozen protesters and turned into a spirited event when students from nearby Science Park High School charged in with signs, banners and chants. “We are loud, we are clear, immigrants are welcome here,” they said, drawing honks from cheering passing motorists. Gina Alvarado, one of the students, said the plan to ditch school for the rally had spread spontaneously Thursday morning via social media, texts and . In Manhattan, the flower district, mostly concentrated on West 28th Street, was as quiet as the wholesale jewelry and garment district around it. At one point, two construction workers from a nearby site took a coffee and cigarette break. “Half the job didn’t come in,” said Joe Burns, 32. “About 10 people, Spanish guys,” he added. “We’ve got to labor for ourselves today. ” It did seem that in New York, at least, pockets of the nonunion construction industry were shut down. A carpenter from Cuenca, Ecuador, who gave only his first name, Santiago, said in Spanish that at his construction site in Astoria, Queens, a supervisor asked on Wednesday whether workers were coming the next day. They were not, the workers told him. About 500 people from several companies were employed at the site, Santiago said, including carpenters, electricians and plumbers. The Davis Museum at Wellesley College took an innovative approach to the protest. It removed or cloaked 120 works of art that had either been created by an immigrant or donated by an immigrant — about 20 percent of the museum’s display. With entire galleries shrouded in black felt and placards replacing paintings, the director of the museum, Lisa Fischman said, “I’ve been calling it an intervention, because it takes what we have and reframes it. ” The protest seemed to get less traction in downtown Boston, with a few restaurants and stores closing. Still, a number of places posted supportive messages on social media, such as one from Eataly Boston, the Italian marketplace, which showed a picture of pasta, olive oil, wine, coffee beans and other goods with the headline: “We were all imported. ” | 1 |
Sophia Wilansky, 21, who grew up in the Bronx, rested in a Minneapolis hospital bed, her father by her side, recovering from surgery to try to save her left hand and arm after an explosion at a pipeline protest in North Dakota this week. “From an inch below the elbow, to an inch above her wrist, the muscle is blown off,” her father, Wayne Wilansky, said from the hospital, Hennepin County Medical Center. “The radius bone, a significant amount of it, is blown away. The arteries inside her arm are blown away. The median nerve is mostly blown away. ” As many as 20 operations lie ahead, Mr. Wilansky said, and it was unclear whether she would keep the arm. Her injury is the most serious to have been reported during months of increasingly acrimonious conflict over the Dakota Access Pipeline, which Native American tribes, led by the Standing Rock Sioux, fear would pollute the Missouri River and harm sacred cultural lands and tribal burial grounds. The project was delayed in September when the Obama administration temporarily blocked it from crossing under the Missouri River. And this month, President Obama called on both sides to show restraint and revealed that the Army Corps of Engineers was considering an alternative route for the project. But Kelcy Warren, the chief executive of the pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners, told The Associated Press last week that it would not consider a different route. On Wednesday, Gov. Jack Dalrymple, Senator John Hoeven and Representative Kevin Cramer, all North Dakota Republicans, urged Mr. Obama to authorize the Army Corps of Engineers to allow construction to resume. All the while, the protests have gone on, and the polarization between the police and protesters extended to their sharply differing explanations of how Ms. Wilansky was injured early Monday. Law enforcement accounts suggest that fellow protesters caused the explosion the demonstrators insist the police are to blame. The clash that led to Ms. Wilansky’s injury began Sunday night when protesters with homemade wood and plastic shields tried to dismantle obstacles, including burned vehicles and concrete barriers, and push past a bridge to the pipeline construction site. They were turned back by officers using water hoses several protesters were treated for hypothermia. Mr. Wilansky, who spoke by telephone and checked details with his daughter as he did, said the explosion had taken place around 4 a. m. Monday, when most of the protesters were gathered around a bonfire near the foot of the bridge. His daughter and a handful of others were farther up on the bridge, he said, “playing around,” using pieces of plastic and wood as sleds to skid across icy sections of the highway, when an officer began firing foam or plastic bullets at her and another person. “She was backing away as they were shooting her,” Mr. Wilansky said, adding that someone from the police lines then threw a device, which he called a grenade, that hit her in the forearm and exploded. Lt. Tom Iverson of the North Dakota Highway Patrol offered a different version of the episode, which he said was being investigated by the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Around the time of the explosion, Lieutenant Iverson said, officers fired sponge and beanbag rounds at three people who had shielded themselves behind a length of plywood near a burned vehicle on the bridge. The three were thought to be acting suspiciously and refused orders to emerge, he said. Officers saw someone roll metal cylinders to the protesters by the burned vehicle, Lieutenant Iverson said, and then heard an explosion. Afterward, he said, several protesters ran up, pulled a woman from under the vehicle and ran off. Three propane canisters were recovered from the vicinity of the explosion early Tuesday, he said. Lieutenant Iverson said that officers did not use concussion or flash grenades at any time. Instead, officers used tear gas, pepper spray canisters and what are known as stinger balls, round grenadelike objects that spread tiny rubber pellets to try to disperse protesters, he said. Mr. Wilansky said that doctors in Minnesota had removed fragments from his daughter’s arm that he hoped could be used to find out what caused the injury and to hold someone responsible. Ms. Wilansky headed to North Dakota around the beginning of November, bringing a subzero sleeping bag and planning to stay through the winter with the protesters, who call themselves “water protectors. ” Friends said they were not surprised that Ms. Wilansky would gravitate to the North Dakota protest. She had also protested the construction by Spectra Energy of a natural gas pipeline in New York. In June, she locked herself to an excavator at a natural gas pipeline dig in Vermont. About three weeks later, she was arrested in Massachusetts after lying down in a trench dug for the West Roxbury Lateral pipeline. “Every time I talked with her she was doing something new, going to a rally,” said Rebecca Berlin, 23, from Yorktown Heights, N. Y. “She was really plugged in, really passionate. ” | 1 |
Edmondo Burr in Weird // 0 Comments A male Chinese boss has come under fire for ordering his female workers to perform a daily kissing ritual.
The female workers of a Beijing company are forced to line up every morning and give their boss a kiss.
The creepy Chinese boss forces his female employees to kiss him every morning, claiming that it fosters good relationships among colleagues.
Daily Trends reports:
Women working at a company that sells home brewery machinery, in Tongzhou District, Beijing, are required to line up between 9:00 and 9:30 each morning to kiss their boss. And we’re not talking about a little, innocent smooch on the cheek, although that would be pretty weird as well, but a kiss on the lips. China Press reports that while the women were initially reluctant to accept the bizarre daily ritual, they eventually gave in to the boss’ demands in order to keep their jobs. Only two of the company’s female workers refused to kiss their boss on the mouth and chose to resign instead. According to Chinese media reports, over half the unnamed company’s staff members are women.
Facing increasing pressure from both the media and the general public, the boss explained that he picked up the idea for the daily morning kiss while visiting a company in the United States, and claimed that the disgusting daily ceremony helps “foster good relationships among colleagues”, allowing him and his female staff to get along “like fish and water”. Not only that, but he says that some of his women worker genuinely miss him when he is away, and send him messages on WeChat.
Needless to say that the boss’ explanation didn’t really satisfy the millions of social media users outraged by the viral video of him kissing his female staff.
“How can these female workers accept this? Do their boyfriends or husbands know?” one person commented on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. “I want to ask these female workers: Do you have no money? Would you starve if you changed jobs?” another added.
And while all of them condemned the man for his sleazy rule, some said that the women carried some of the blame as well, just for putting up with the situation. “The boss is a perv, but the workers are foolish,” someone wrote. | 0 |
November 13, 2016 Why Polls Fail
Today I discussed the U.S. election with a friend who studied and practices statistics. I asked about the failure of the polls in this years presidential election. Her explanation: The polls are looking at future events but are biased by the past. The various companies and institutions adjust the polls they do by looking at their past prognoses and the real results of the past event. They then develop correcting factors, measured from the past, and apply it to new polls. If that correcting factor is wrong, possibly because of structural changes in the electorate, then the new polls will be corrected with a wrong factor and thus miss the real results.
Polls predicting the last presidential election were probably off by 3 or 5 points towards the Republican side. The pollsters then corrected the new polls for the Clinton-Trump race in favor of the Democratic side by giving that side an additional 3-5 points. They thereby corrected the new polls by the bias that was poll inherent during the last race.
But structural changes, which we seem to have had during this election, messed up the result. Many people who usually vote for the Democratic ticket did not vote for Clinton. The "not Clinton" progressives, the "bernie bros" and "deplorables" who voted Obama in the last election stayed home, voted for a third party candidate or even for Trump. The pollsters did not anticipate such a deep change. Thus their correction factor was wrong. Thus the Clinton side turned out to be favored in polls but not in the relevant votes.
Real polling, which requires in depth-in person interviews with the participants, does not really happen anymore. It is simply to expensive. Polling today is largely done by telephone with participants selected by some database algorithm. It is skewed by many factors which require many corrections. All these corrections have some biases that do miss structural changes in the underlying population.
The Clinton camp, the media and the pollsters missed what we had anticipated as "not Clinton". A basic setting in a part of the "left" electorate that remember who she is and what she has done and would under no circumstances vote for her. Clinton herself pushed the "bernie bros" and "deplorables" into that camp. This was a structural change that was solely based in the personality of the candidate.
If Sanders would have been the candidate the now wrong poll correction factor in favor of Democrats would likely have been a correct one. The deep antipathy against Hillary Clinton in a decisive part of the electorate was a factor that the pseudo-science of cheap telephone polls could not catch. More expensive in depth interviews of the base population used by a pollster would probably have caught this factor and adjusted appropriately.
There were some twenty to thirty different entities doing polls during this election cycle. Five to ten polling entities, with better budgets and preparations, would probably have led to better prognoses. Some media companies could probably join their poll budgets, split over multiple companies today, to have a common one with a better analysis of its base population.One that would have anticipated "not Hillary".
Unless that happens all polls will have to be read with a lot of doubt. What past bias is captured in these predictions of the future? What are their structural assumptions and are these still correct? What structural change might have happened?
Even then polls and their interpretation will always only capture a part of the story. Often a sound grasp of human and cultural behavior will allow for better prediction as all polls. As my friend the statistician say: "The best prognostic instrument I have even today is my gut." 13, 2016 at 03:17 PM | Permalink | 0 |
Beauty contracts have long been a brass ring for celebrities: acknowledgment of their rising profiles that also provides additional income and the chance to tap wider audiences. So what does it mean that CoverGirl’s latest face (joining the ranks of Zendaya, Katy Perry, Pink and more) is … a boy? And a noncelebrity boy at that? He is James Charles, 17, a high school senior from Bethlehem, N. Y. who lives with his parents and a younger brother and does makeup for friends in his spare time (at no charge). In the past year or so, Mr. Charles has amassed nearly 650, 000 followers on his Instagram account and more than 90, 000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, where he posts tutorials for creating fake freckles or layering chunky glitter around the eyes. He gained attention last month when he posted to social media about retaking his senior photos because he didn’t like how the highlighter on his cheekbones looked in the originals. For the second set, Mr. Charles brought his own ring light. His post spread on Twitter, garnering a comment and repost from the singer Zendaya, who wrote, “You win. ” The selection of Mr. James by CoverGirl comes amid a broader questioning of traditional gender boundaries in fashion and beauty, and the growth of a crop of beauty junkies who have built followings through social media. On the more traditional celebrity end, there’s Jaden Smith and his unceasing effort to make skirts mainstream for men: The musician and actor, son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, appeared in Louis Vuitton’s women’s wear campaign last January, donned a shift dress for prom and is generally a fan of “super drapey things,” he told GQ. There’s also the rapper Young Thug, who made waves in August when he released the cover art for his album “No, My Name Is Jeffery,” featuring him in a tiered froufrou dress that recalled both Japanese kimonos and the antebellum South. Before then, he’d worn dresses for a Calvin Klein campaign (“There’s no such thing as gender,” he said in the ad) and for Dazed magazine. Within fashion, designers such as Alessandro Michele of Gucci, J W Anderson, Demna Gvasalia of Balenciaga, and Shayne Oliver of Hood by Air have all become known for testing notions about gender dressing. And in beauty, a group of young men have made their way into the industry through a entrepreneurial effort entrenched in YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. With devoted followings, they have carved out a space to experiment and expand the notion of being male. From these intersecting forces comes Mr. Charles. Despite his newfound fame, he is spending a lot of his time figuring out where to apply for college. Still, he did find a few minutes to discuss his new role, online bullying and why what he does is different from drag. This interview has been edited and condensed. What was it like when you found out about your new gig? I screamed and started to cry. It’s all been so ridiculous and crazy and fast. I’ve barely gotten any sleep, but I’m . K. with it. What was it like to work with Katy Perry? It was the coolest surprise ever. She was so kind. We were posing for pictures together, and we were hugging each other, and she said: “I can feel you shaking. I’m just as nervous as you are. ” To hear that someone at her level was just as nervous for a shoot as me calmed my nerves and put me in a place of “Oh, I can actually do this. ” What can you bring to CoverGirl as a boy? I love to do glam. But I also love a lot of creative, stuff. The fact that I am the first boy is so cool. It shows that this industry is actually becoming genderless, and we’re really making the push toward equal opportunities for everybody, regardless of race, sexuality, gender. I think it’s a huge steppingstone for such a big and iconic company. Hopefully other people will see this, and when they think, “Oh, this random kid just started doing makeup recently and is now the face of CoverGirl,” I hope that inspires them to really be themselves and feel comfortable and wear makeup and express themselves in a manner they haven’t been comfortable doing before. Do you think a lot of boys want to try makeup? Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. I see new guys on my Instagram feed every single day rocking amazing makeup looks and crazy stuff. It’s a growing industry, and the population of boys in the industry is growing as well. As more and more guys come to light, the way the internet is, there will be people who don’t agree. Those negative comments probably make people not want to do it, because lots of people take that stuff very seriously, which is totally understandable. Online bullying has been a huge problem forever. Men in makeup is becoming more widely accepted. But it’s going to take so much more to have it be a common thing. How do you deal with negative online comments? My followers are some of the most loyal people out there. They know everything about me and my life. They know all my drama with guys that I have crushes on, all that stupid stuff that doesn’t really matter. But all that stuff allows me to build a close relationship with them. So even though I get hate comments every once in a while, it doesn’t affect me, because I have so many more people who are supporting me and loving me for who I am. If somebody doesn’t like me behind the keyboard, oh, well. Everybody has the right to their own opinion. I’ll just continue to do me. Have you ever responded to people who are critical? Not really. It’s kind of a waste of my time. I have to focus on me and on school and my friends and family. In the past, the only ones I have replied to are the ones that questioned my character. I don’t care if someone makes fun of me, but if someone calls me a mean person or something, I reply. If you don’t like me in makeup, that’s O. K. But I would like people to like me as a person. What do you think of where we are as a country on gay rights and gender identity? The place we’re in is phenomenal compared to where we were a few years ago. We’ve made so many amazing progressions with gay rights, gender inclusivity and . But I think we still have so, so much longer to go. A lot of people still don’t support or understand it. Gay marriage laws were passed recently. Now with people on social media and boys in makeup, we’re becoming more accepting in general. We have a lot longer to go. All of our biggest issues have taken a long time. What compelled you to try makeup? Before I did makeup, I did hair. For one of my best friends, I did her hair for a military ball at a local school, and she was an hour late for her makeup appointment at a local counter, and she asked me to do her makeup. I’d been watching makeup tutorials for years and years, but I’d never actually done it. And I was, like: “Girl, I will do your makeup. But if you look awful, I’m not taking credit for it. ” She was, like, “O. K. we’ll do it because I have no other option. ” And she ended up looking absolutely stunning. I wanted to continue. I bought a starter set online. I did my friends’ makeup for fun, not charging them anything. Then I started charging $5 or $10. And then I’d take that money to buy new brushes or new equipment. After about three months, I made my Instagram page. And here we are, one year later. Were you experimenting on yourself before creating your Instagram? I mostly did my friends’ makeup. I did drag makeup on myself twice, just to see what it was, because I’ve always been a fan of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and drag in general. It looked absolutely horrible. I have the pictures in a locked folder on my phone. They will never, ever be released anywhere. Speaking of drag, how is what you do different? They are really similar in expressing yourself and releasing your creative juices. But boys in makeup are boys in makeup. When you’re a drag performer, you’re a boy in makeup performing as a female. Drag is performance artistry. What look are you dying to try? I have a bunch of really cool Halloween tutorials planned. I have a huge list. I need to make sure they’re totally appropriate and everybody can enjoy them. Halloween is always a touchy subject. But other than that, I don’t really plan my looks ahead of time. I’ll do my base makeup, and then I’ll just start throwing some colors on there and ask, “What can I create now?” What’s your best makeup tip? Highlighting is a huge trend right now. If you really want your highlights to pop — which is obviously what the goal is, duh — when you’re applying your highlighter, spritz your brush with water before you dip it into your highlighter. It will be and magnetic. You will be blinding people left and right. | 1 |
and you should be ashamed of how uneducated you are, it doesn’t matter who wins the election you numskull. “There’s a terrible danger in voting for the lesser of two evils because the parties can set it up that way.” – Hunter S. Thompson | 0 |
Friday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh reacted to President Donald Trump’s tweets aimed at the House Freedom Caucus, which is considered by many to be what kept the American Health Care Act, House GOP leadership’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, from passing the House. If @RepMarkMeadows, @Jim_Jordan and @Raul_Labrador would get on board we would have both great healthcare and massive tax cuts reform. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017, Where are @RepMarkMeadows, @Jim_Jordan and @Raul_Labrador? #RepealANDReplace #Obamacare, — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017, Limbaugh mentioned a Politico story describing the House Freedom Caucus leadership as “ringleaders” before saying there was a better way to handle the House Freedom Caucus than calling them out on Twitter. “Now, to this health care business. As I mentioned earlier today, the president has doubled down on the Freedom Caucus, the 30 or so members of the conservative members of the House of Representatives, The Politico and such others in their headline are referring to the three Freedom Caucus leaders as the ringleaders, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Raul Labrador. The ringleaders? What do you associate ringleaders with? Ringleaders — crime, gangs,” he said. “Exactly right. Bank robbers. The ringleaders of the group were hiding in the getaway car parked one block down the street. ” “So now these guys are being characterized as ringleaders of some gang, some gang in the House, and Trump has doubled down on it,” Limbaugh continued. “Look, folks, calling them out like this, I know it’s Trump’s technique I know it’s Trump’s method. But there’s a better way of doing this. These guys are not the enemy. The Democrats are the enemy. The Freedom Caucus has actually made a pretty big move here. ” Limbaugh went on to cite a Washington Examiner editorial calling the Freedom Caucus’ conditions reasonable and urging the White House, House Speaker Paul Ryan and congressional GOP centrists to accept those conditions. “That’s the problem with the first effort: It didn’t kill the law,” Limbaugh said. “It sustained much of it and then put in the hands of the secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, the responsibility of removing a bunch of things from it. And the Freedom Caucus said, ‘We’re not really getting rid of it, if we’re just letting the secretary remove it and nothing else happens, then the next time the Democrats win they can put those things back in. We need to take them out by statute. ’” “But it’s clear that the objective here was to get a win,” he added. “The objective was to really knock it out of the park in the first two months, fulfill a campaign promise, say that Obamacare had been repealed and the replace effort was underway, first phase of three. But the ringleaders of the Conservative Caucus were suspicious that this was not gonna end Obamacare, and they had campaigned promising to do so. ” Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
Home / Be The Change / Hillary Turns Her Back on Standing Rock Sioux: ‘Path Forward Must Serve Broadest Public Interest’ Hillary Turns Her Back on Standing Rock Sioux: ‘Path Forward Must Serve Broadest Public Interest’ Jay Syrmopoulos October 29, 2016 Leave a comment
Brooklyn, NY – With tensions escalating rapidly after the militarized police action at the Standing Rock Sioux “Treaty Camp,” which included the use of armored police tanks, attack dogs, batons, rubber bullets, high-velocity bean bags, tear gas and LRAD sound weapons, and that saw the arrest of over 100 water protectors, the Clinton campaign, after months of silence, could no longer sit quietly on the sidelines and released a statement about the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) one day after the violent assault.
The statement from the Clinton campaign director of coalitions press, Xochitl Hinojosa, who oversees Hispanic, black, and women’s media for the Clinton campaign, reads in full:
We received a letter today from representatives of the tribes protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. From the beginning of this campaign, Secretary Clinton has been clear that she thinks all voices should be heard and all views considered in federal infrastructure projects. Now, all of the parties involved—including the federal government, the pipeline company and contractors, the state of North Dakota, and the tribes—need to find a path forward that serves the broadest public interest. As that happens, it’s important that on the ground in North Dakota, everyone respects demonstrators’ rights to protest peacefully, and workers’ rights to do their jobs safely.
On the same day the militarized action in North Dakota took place, Native youth from the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes — tired of the damning silence from Hillary Clinton — demonstrated outside of Clinton campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, New York.
A number of brave Lakota youth and their Lenape relatives erected a teepee and prayed in the lobby of Clinton’s Brooklyn office as a militarized police force evicted water protectors from their traditional Treaty Lands in North Dakota. They were there to deliver a letter to Clinton about the pipeline.
A 14 –year-old girl from Standing Rock attempted to deliver a letter to Hillary Clinton’s Brooklyn campaign HQ to ask her to take a stand on the Dakota Access Pipeline. The youth stood at the front desk in tears asking for someone to please come down to accept the letter. The guards completely ignored the young girl, and the Clinton campaign refused to show enough respect to send a campaign staffer to cordially accept the letter.
Just after this dozens of police arrived and ordered us to disperse or we would be arrested.
“ What a crock,” said Ruth Hopkins, a Dakota-Lakota Sioux writer for Indian Country Today Media Network.
“Hillary Clinton managed to make a statement about the Dakota Pipeline that literally says nothing. Literally,” 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben tweeted in response to the Clinton campaign statement.
“Kind of a BS statement by the Clinton camp on #NoDAPL, frankly,” wrote MSNBC host Joy Reid. “The outrage taking place out there cries out for outrage.”
Or as Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting journalist Adam Johnson put it, this “is the most Clinton thing of all times.”
This curiously appears to be another case of Clinton having a “public and private position,” as revealed in her leaked speeches to Wall St. banks, the primary drivers behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. The fact is that Clinton has completely turned her back on the Standing Rock Sioux. Her statement was essentially a non-statement, which speaks volumes as to who she is truly beholden too… and it isn’t the American public. The words “find a path forward that serves the broadest public interest” can be directly translated into “this pipeline is good for Merica, and we don’t care about Native issues… but we’ll pretend we do until I’m elected.”
Please share this story if you believe Clinton’s statement is a blatant disrespect to all Native peoples! Share | 0 |
Which branch of science has the worst trouble with names? You might think it’s physics, which has bestowed names like quarks, neutrinos, selectrons and bosons on the most elemental constituents of nature. But in astronomy the confusion can be, well, cosmic. Where would we be without the North Star, also known as Polaris, Alpha Ursae Minoris, HD 8890 and a host of other names, including (in Inuit) Niiqirtsuituq? The stars are our oldest promise of order in the universe and the most profound symbols of our possible destiny. But only a relative handful of the billions of twinkling lights in the sky have names, misspelled and mistranslated as they have been handed down through the ages in a variety of cultures, recognizable to the average adult who probably lives in a city and can’t see many of the stars anyway. Still more stars have designations using Greek letters to rank them by brightness within their constellations, but constellations have arbitrary and shifting boundaries, and are anyway. All stars do have numbers. In fact, many have more than one number, corresponding to their listings in the voluminous catalogs that have been compiled over the century by astronomers. The PPMXL catalog, combining data from the United States Naval Observatory and the University of Massachusetts, lists the positions and motions of some 900 million stars. This makes for awkward moments when modern astrophysics vaults one of these previously anonymous stars into the limelight, because it is exploding weirdly or turns out to harbor possibly habitable planets. Such dramatic destinations as HR 8799 HD 85512 and Gliese 581 don’t exactly trip off the tongue. Now, however, the International Astronomical Union, an organization of stargazers, is coming to the rescue. In November, it published what it calls “the first set” of approved names for 227 stars. The I. A. U. has traditionally concerned itself with policing the names of asteroids, craters and comets, and famously demoting Pluto from status 10 years ago. It is also worth reminding readers here that the I. A. U. ’s hegemony is absolute and cosmic no amount of money donated to a registry or anywhere else will get your name officially on a star. Never mind the engraved certificate that comes along with it. The problem of star names came up in 2015 when the astronomical union ran a contest to name some of the new planets that were being discovered in droves around other stars by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft and astronomers. The game included names for the stars around which those new worlds were orbiting. It turned out that some already had names, albeit not ones that were well known, even to the professionals: Edasich, for example, an orange star in Draco, the Dragon, whose name derives from an Arabic term for “male hyena. ” Or Ain, Arabic for “eye,” an orange giant star in Taurus, the bull. Should they overwrite these names by popular vote or give them new life? The committee opted for tradition. The result was the formation of a new I. A. U. committee, the Working Group on Star Names. Eric Mamajek of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the chairman of the group, said its main priorities so far have been collecting star names from the scientific literature and astronomical cultures around the world. The new list is the first fruit of their efforts. How far it goes will depend on how interested the international community is in having a mechanism for naming interesting objects, Dr. Mamajek said, noting that planetary astronomers have had committees for naming craters, asteroids and such for decades “with only minor hiccups. ” “The alternative is chaos,” he added. The first list contains the most stars, and their inclusion will prevent the names from being used for something else, like an asteroid or an exoplanet, Dr. Mamajek said. Their names go back as far as the Arab astronomer Abd in the 10th century, but the words have been Latinized and misspelled over the years. Dr. Mamajek said he had found 30 versions of the star Fomalhaut in astronomical literature. Sirius, the brightest star of all to the eye, just now making its presence known in the winter sky, also goes by the names of the Dog Star, Aschere, Canicula, Al Shira, Sothis, Alhabor, Mrgavyadha, Lubdhaka and Tenrōsei, as well as Alpha Canis Majoris, after its constellation, Canis Major, the big dog. Not all the names on the new list are so familiar. I never knew there was a star named Musica. Or Mimosa, the second brightest star in the Southern Cross, or Crux. Just saying the name made me want to drink one, settle into a hammock and gaze up at the constellation. I would love to find out someday that somebody or something lives there, calling those blissful sounding rays home. | 1 |
Chart Of The Day: Private Residential Construction Stalls-Out 40% Below Pre-Crisis Peak By David Stockman. Posted On Tuesday, November 1st, 2016
David Stockman's Contra Corner is the only place where mainstream delusions and cant about the Warfare State, the Bailout State, Bubble Finance and Beltway Banditry are ripped, refuted and rebuked. Subscribe now to receive David Stockman’s latest posts by email each day as well as his model portfolio, Lee Adler’s Daily Data Dive and David’s personally curated insights and analysis from leading contrarian thinkers. | 0 |
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Democrats have been caught stuffing absentee ballots with campaign material, in what must be a direct violation of federal law.
It happened in Fairfax County, Virginia. When Jena Jones opened up her absentee ballot, she got more than she expected. Stuffed into the envelope was the actual ballot and several pieces of leftist campaign propaganda, WND reports :
Jones, will be out of town on Election Day and requested an absentee ballot from the Virginia Department of Elections. She was surprised to what else came with her ballot.
“I found a letter from the governor of Virginia asking me to please vote Democrat and ‘help keep Virginia blue’ this year. Then I got a letter from the Fairfax County Democratic Committee, giving me a step-by-step, yes-and-no what I should vote for as far as the meal tax and all those other things on the ballot,” Jena explained to WND and Radio America.
The step-by-step letter that Jones is described is called a “sample ballot” and it is handed out by campaign workers outside polling places (at a legal distance), telling people how to vote for one particular party or candidate.
There was no material promoting any of the GOP candidates on the ballot or any information on the numerous proposals or propositions. Jones said she is not a registered Democrat and did not request the ballot from the party.
Although Jones is not a political junkie of any sort, the inclusion of fliers from Democrats but nothing from Republicans struck her as odd.
“I was a little confused as to why we didn’t get anything Republican at all, and I wasn’t sure why that was included in my ballot at all,” she said.
On the back of the letter from McAuliffe were lengthy, glowing biographies of Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine and her local congressman, Rep. Gerry Connolly.
Her husband, David, was serving as a witness to Jena’s vote. He was even more frustrated by all the pro-Democrat literature while no GOP materials were included.
“I also was a little befuddled because I figured that this would be a time that you wouldn’t want to encourage voters to go one way or the other,” David Jones said. “It’s just like when you walk into the precinct or the polls, they can’t be within a certain amount of feet from the voting booths, and I figure they shouldn’t be able to put a piece of paper in the envelope with your ballot.”
David was also surprised by the letter from the Governor (Democrat Terry McAuliffe) urging the to “keep Virginia blue” this year.
“If it was just a letter saying, ‘Hey we appreciate you voting. Every vote counts,’ that would make sense and I would totally back that. But when there’s a specific flier that says, ‘Hillary Clinton for President’ and ‘Tim Kaine for Vice President,’ laying out their platform, to me it was just biased. It was one side.”
Here are some images, courtesy WND, of the materials the the Jones’ received in their ballot. Isn’t this against federal law? | 0 |
President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement Thursday marked a decisive win for Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, as reported by the New York Times. [From the Times: advertisement | 1 |
In another extraordinary outburst, MSNBC “ analyst” Malcolm Nance called on the Islamic State to bomb a building owned by Donald Trump in the Turkish city of Istanbul. [Responding to a photo of a Trump property in Istanbul, Nance tweeted: “This is my nominee for the first ISIS suicide bombing of a Trump property. ” He later deleted the tweet but has yet to issue an apology or explanation. In the to last year’s presidential election, Nance described Donald Trump as the “ISIS candidate,” and following his victory, predicted that Donald Trump’s security and military advisors would lead to “the end of U. S. East relations as it exists today. ” He also questioned whether Trump’s victory meant America was “teetering on the edge of fascism. ” Despite being a expert, Nance also has a history of denying terrorist acts’ connection to Islamism, describing the terrorist responsible for the bulldozing of civilians with a truck in Nice as “mentally unstable,” Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen as suffering from a “physchosexual problem,” and the San Bernadino mass shootings as “a hybrid act of violence. ” Nance’s comments also come at a time of a rising Islamist terror threat in Turkey, as the country’s President Recep Erdoğan turns the country into a religious state. In 2016 alone, the country was the target of dozens of terror attacks, ranging from car bombs to nightclub shootings. You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart. com | 1 |
After spending Friday searching for him, we met with Mayor Roger Claar of Bolingbrook, Ill. at City Hall. He had been a bit difficult for us to locate since a he helped organize for Donald J. Trump became an issue in the village’s mayoral race. BOLINGBROOK, Ill. — It was supposed to be an easy glide to yet another term for the longtime mayor of this suburb of Chicago. But then Mayor Claar helped throw the and things got complicated. Jackie Traynere, 54, a labor organizer, is mounting an ambitious challenge against him. Here’s the story of one village election on Tuesday that has become as much about Mr. Trump as the candidates on the ballot. • Ms. Traynere was so mad about the event last fall that she decided to run against Mr. Claar. The Democratic apparatus in Illinois — senators, members of Congress, you name it — is lining up behind her. • Mayor Claar hadn’t answered our interview requests, so we had been hoping to catch up with him Friday. • Finally, we talked with him at City Hall — he does not regret the though he has been disappointed by the reaction. Here’s how the search unfolded. A little about Bolingbrook, 30 miles southwest of Chicago: About 74, 000 people live here and it’s fairly diverse. The mayor’s race is officially nonpartisan, and usually only several thousand people show up to vote. But with a challenger to Mr. Claar and all the attention on the race, this year could be different. The “Rog Mahal” — also known as the Bolingbrook Golf Club — was the scene of the for Mr. Trump. It was built by the city for $36 million in 2002, according to The Chicago Tribune, and many people in Bolingbrook see it as a sign of lavish excess. Mayor Claar’s election HQ is along a stretch of strip shopping centers, tucked between an optometrist’s office and a cellphone store. Campaign signs are plastered on the glass doors, and little wooden Uncle Sams decorate the entry. Three workers are milling around. One of them: the mayor’s wife. Ms. Claar was polite but said she had nothing to add about how the campaign was going or why Mayor Claar might not want to meet. Onward. Around here, Mayor Claar has plenty of fans. Everyone seems to know him. He’s been around through this village’s expansion. Subdivisions have replaced cornfields. The population has almost doubled since 1990, and Mayor Claar has been there through it all. At Sophia’s House of Pancakes, Ms. Traynere is meeting with supporters over club sandwiches and bowls of soup. She seems energetic and talks fast, but she also says she’s starting to come down with a cold as her campaign reaches the homestretch. Her complaints about her competitor, the mayor? She says the village’s debt is too high. She says he runs the whole village — top to bottom — and that he can be a “bully. ” But most of all, she says the Trump event turned her stomach. “Trump’s own words,” she says are what threw some residents here for a loop. Bolingbrook is 20 percent black, 25 percent Hispanic and 11 percent Asian — a big change, she says, from when she was growing up here. “The way he talks about minorities,” she says, “that’s not what we experience in our community. That just doesn’t jibe with our town. ” She goes on: “When people realize that that was the mayor who brought him here, that definitely turned their head to think, ‘hmm, maybe I ought to look at a few other things. ’” But why is such an array of prominent Democrats lining up behind her for a little municipal race? Critics say it seems a bit much. Her supporters don’t seem the least bit troubled by all the backing, though. They’re thinking more about the mayor and the . Off to City Hall — we need to find Mayor Claar. After a wait in the lobby of Bolingbrook’s municipal building, Mr. Claar suddenly appears in the doorway. Mayor Claar has gotten word of our search for him, and is actually clutching a printout of the story we have been writing today. For the record, he acknowledges that he has gotten our earlier phone messages and email requests for interviews, but says that he simply had not wished to talk to us. That said, he shows us to a conference room and patiently takes more than half an hour of questions. The mayor says that the he helped throw for Mr. Trump is the essential reason that he finds himself with such a race. He doesn’t regret the . Not at all, he says. But he adds: “I’m disappointed that some people will take that one thing over 31 years and that’s it. ” | 1 |
Waking Times
Derek Nance is a Kentucky man who has chosen to eat only raw meat in his effort to get rid of a mystery illness. He found himself with little appetite for regular food and vomiting after he ate, which resulted in significant weight loss. After eliminating food after food after food, he discovered that a carnivorous version of the Paleo diet cured his digestive problems and left him feeling pretty fantastic.
Some of you may find these images disgusting, but for Nance, this is what meal time look like.
Nance doesn’t just grab a steak every time he’s hungry. A lot of thought and planning goes into his diet. He mostly eats grass-fed lamb, which he buys locally and slaughters himself. He avoids animals that are pumped full of hormones , such as pig. The animals he chooses are free-range and raised on several varieties of grass, which impacts the taste and quality of the meat.
When Nance slaughters an animal, it seems that no part goes unused. In addition to the meat, the organs give him Vitamin C. He eats lots of animal fat and also uses it to brush his teeth. Brains are considered a delicacy, followed by a nice glass of blood to wash it all down.
Probiotic -rich rotten meat is also on Nance’s menu. In an interview with Vice.com , Nance explains why he eats rotten meat:
“Half of the problem with my digestion was actually just lack of enzymes. My body just doesn’t produce enough enzymes to digest starchy foods. So the probiotic bacteria in rotten meat actually help me to digest the food.” The Fight Against the Modern Diet
Some may think it very unusual and actually unhealthy for a man to live only on raw meat. Yet, we cannot deny that our contemporary way of eating has resulted in an increase in modern diseases such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
Humans in general suffer from more chronic illnesses than ever before. Is an all-meat diet, or even a Paleo diet , the solution? Many health professionals and nutritionists would strongly disagree, but they will agree that our food choices play a major role in how healthy a person is. Diets, such as the Paleo diet with mostly meats and seasonal vegetables, fruit, nuts and roots, cut out processed foods that are often full of sodium, preservatives, and genetically-modified ingredients.
“The nutritional qualities of modern processed foods and foods introduced during the Neolithic period are discordant with our ancient and conservative genome. This genetic discordance ultimately manifests itself as various chronic illnesses, which have been dubbed ‘diseases of civilization.’ ~ Dr. Loren Cordain, author of The Paleo Diet
Derek Nance is an example of what can happen when a person is willing to make the effort to address illness by changing up the diet. For Nance who’s been following his unusual diet for over seven years, after the first few weeks of raw meat, “I felt absolutely great, and I never went back.”
“Listen to your body. Do what feels right for yourself. Be your own guinea pig. As soon as something doesn’t feel right or doesn’t make sense to you, maybe you can tweak it a little bit.” ~ Pete Evans, TV personality, award-winning chef and author of Healthy Every Day and The Complete Gut Health Cookbook Read more articles by Anna Hunt . About the Author
Anna Hunt is co-owner of OffgridOutpost.com , an online store offering GMO-free healthy storable food and emergency kits . She is also the staff writer for WakingTimes.com . Anna is a certified Hatha yoga instructor and founder of Atenas Yoga Center. She enjoys raising her children and being a voice for optimal human health and wellness. Visit her essential oils store here . Visit Offgrid Outpost on Facebook .
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CHARLOTTE, N. C. — As Hillary Clinton braced for political fallout from her use of a private email server, President Obama delivered a stemwinder on her behalf on Tuesday, praising her “steady judgment” as his secretary of state and criticizing Donald J. Trump for his own lack of transparency. Sleeves rolled up and declaring himself “fired up” on her behalf, Mr. Obama heaped admiration on Mrs. Clinton and assailed Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, saying American voters face a critical choice between “some imaginary past, or whether we are going to reach for the future. ” “I can tell you this, Hillary Clinton has been tested,” Mr. Obama said as he interrupted repeatedly by the cheering crowd. “There has never been any man or woman more qualified for this office,” the president boomed. But the jubilant rally — Mr. Obama’s first campaign appearance with Mrs. Clinton — unfolded at an awkward moment, just hours after the F. B. I. director, James B. Comey, accused Mrs. Clinton of being “extremely careless” in her email use as he announced the end of an investigation that has engulfed her candidacy and put the Obama administration on the defensive. The dueling political events on Tuesday were as discordant as they were separate: The president and his secretary of state sidestepped the email issue at their rally, where Mr. Obama clasped hands with his onetime rival and predicted victory in the fall, making no mention of Mr. Comey’s dramatic announcement in Washington faulting Mrs. Clinton even as he recommended against criminal charges. Without mentioning the email controversy, Mr. Obama pointed to the political attacks that have chipped away at Mrs. Clinton’s trust among voters. “Can I be blunt?” he said. “Hillary’s got her share of critics. ” But, he added, “That’s what happens when you dedicate yourself to public service over a lifetime. ” Mr. Obama delicately touched on Mrs. Clinton’s perceived weaknesses as a candidate even as he marveled at her tenacity in the nominating fight they waged against each other eight years ago. In an election year in which outsider candidates have railed against the establishment, Mr. Obama portrayed Mrs. Clinton’s experience as a plus. “Sometimes we take somebody who has been in the trenches and fought the good fight and been so steady for granted,” he said, recognizing that voters’ yearning for the next new thing had helped his own 2008 campaign. “We don’t do that, by the way, for airline pilots. ” At a time when her State Department tenure is being picked apart by political critics, he defended her turn as the nation’s top diplomat, noting how her popularity faded only once she returned to the political spotlight. “It’s funny how the filter changes a little bit,” he said. “The filter is a powerful thing. ” Mrs. Clinton, perched on a stool behind the president, grinned and gently nodded. The rally in North Carolina was rescheduled after a previous campaign event in Wisconsin was hastily canceled after the Orlando shootings. But in some ways, the moment had been years in the making. Eight years ago, after a brutal primary fight, Mrs. Clinton appeared arm in arm with Mr. Obama for the first time in Unity, N. H. where she declared, “Unity is not only a beautiful place, it’s a wonderful feeling, isn’t it?” Mr. Obama referred to that event at Tuesday’s rally in North Carolina, a rally that served as a kind of bookend to two remarkable careers that at times seemed destined to clash. “We went to Unity, N. H. just in case people missed the point,” Mr. Obama said. “I saw the grace and the energy with which she threw herself into my campaign. ” Mrs. Clinton spoke before the president, an unusual departure from how she appears at events with surrogates, and at times it felt like she was campaigning not for herself, but for Mr. Obama’s legacy, praising his “heart, depth and humility. ” She repeatedly referred to their former rivalry, even praising Mr. Obama’s political deftness at defeating her. “He knows a thing or two about winning elections, take it from me,” she said. The F. B. I. ’s decision not to recommend criminal charges came days after an unplanned, brief meeting between former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch at an airport in Phoenix. To avoid any appearance of political interference, Ms. Lynch said Friday that she would accept the recommendations of career prosecutors and the F. B. I. director on whether to bring charges against Mrs. Clinton. On Saturday, Mrs. Clinton and her lawyers met with officials from the F. B. I. and the Justice Department to answer nearly four hours of questioning related to her email server. Aides to both Democrats said Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton did not discuss the F. B. I. investigation on the flight to Charlotte. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, added that Mr. Obama looked at photos of Mrs. Clinton’s grandchildren aboard Air Force One. Serving as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton engendered good will with the White House, and the experience of accepting Mr. Obama’s offer to run the State Department became one of the most popular stories she relayed on the campaign trail, particularly when wooing black voters. Mrs. Clinton also fired away at Mr. Trump, saying that Mr. Obama was “someone who has never forgotten where he came from — and Donald, if you’re out there tweeting, it’s Hawaii,” a reference to Mr. Trump’s calls in 2011 for the president to produce his birth certificate. For several attendees, many of whom waited for hours in sweltering conditions to get into the rally, the chief draw was the chance to glimpse Mr. Obama as he sets off on something of a farewell tour. The crowd was heavily flashing clothing and trinkets dedicated to the sitting president. Vendors sold tote bags and emblazoned with images of Mr. Obama’s teenage daughters, and promising to continue Mr. Obama’s historic 2008 victory by electing the first female president. “It was on my bucket list,” Ivy Dunn, 69, said of seeing him. Asked if she thought Mrs. Clinton could be as effective in office, Ms. Dunn paused. “I’m not going to say yes,” she said, “but she’ll be good. ” Mrs. Clinton will need to nurture Mr. Obama and his supporters, particularly after she strayed to the left of his policies during her nominating fight on issues like the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal and the Keystone XL Pipeline. A majority — 51 percent — of Americans approve of the president, according to a recent Gallup poll. As Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton touched down at the Charlotte airport, and strode off Air Force One together in a sign of solidarity, a reporter asked John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman and a former White House chief of staff to Mr. Obama, whether the F. B. I. announcement overshadowed the rally. He replied with a single word: “Hardly. ” | 1 |
Actress Lindsay Lohan hit the beach in Thailand last week in a “burkini” swimsuit, as she vacationed in the Southeast Asian country to take a break from her refugee advocacy and studies of Islamic scripture. [According to the Daily Mail, the Mean Girls star donned the hybrid swimsuit for a paddleboarding session in Phuket, where she spent two weeks on vacation. The actress previously spent time visiting family in Dubai, according to snapshots posted to her Instagram account. Lindsay Lohan wearing a in Thailand, part of her upcoming modest fashion line pic. twitter. — bella vita (@drugproblem) April 5, 2017, Oh Good Lord! Lindsay Lohan has lost her mind — Well, more of it anyway!😂 There wasn’t much left. Here she is👇sporting a Burkini in Thailand. pic. twitter. — Boston🇺🇸Bobblehead (@DBloom451) April 5, 2017, In a February interview with the Daily Mail, Lohan said she had been studying the Koran for “some time,” but that she had not yet fully converted to Islam. “It’s a process to convert to anything,” she told the outlet. “I respect all religions … it’s a beautiful religion and I am a very spiritual person … it’s something I’ve been studying. You can’t just convert overnight to a religion. ” That month, Lohan told the New York Post that she was racially profiled for the first time in her life at London’s Heathrow Airport, where she was traveling while wearing an Islamic headscarf. The actress said she wears the headscarf out of “respect” for certain countries to which she travels. In recent months, Lohan has been busy with her advocacy work on behalf of Syrian refugees. The actress met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan inside the country’s presidential palace in January, and has previously visited with refugees in hospitals and homes in Istanbul. The “burkini” swimsuit has previously been at the center of some controversy last year, authorities in the French town of Nice banned the garment, reportedly claiming it posed a risk to public order. A court in Nice later overturned the ban. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
Inside the Invisible Government
By John Pilger
The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term public relations as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.
In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo! Bernays influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War.
The secret, he said, was engineering the consent of people in order to control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it.
He described this as the true ruling power in our society and called it an invisible government.
Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged.
Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people. But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.
In the second city in another country nearby almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics. The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by us by the United States and Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America. Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.
Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.
What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria. Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.
Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was vindicated for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powells fabrications. The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?
He replied that if journalists had done their job, there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq.
It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous. In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul. There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7 th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.
When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoi Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollandes bombast about France being at war and showing no mercy. That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.
When the truth is replaced by silence, said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, the silence is a lie.
The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.
The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an agreement that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable. As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.
From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage. Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.
The Wests medieval client, Saudi Arabia to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars worth of arms is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half the children are malnourished. Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs our bombs that the Saudis use against dirt-poor villages, and against weddings, and funerals. The explosions look like small atomic bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news.
Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia and with careers on the BBC, the Guardia n, the New York Times , the Washington Post . These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.
And they love war.
While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life. In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.
In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call regime change in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafis influence in the continent and, above all, his independence were intolerable. So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, We came, we saw, he died!
The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian : Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong. Intervention what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.
According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 strike sorties against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, most [of them] under the age of ten. As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital of ISIS.
Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times , the Washington Post and the Guardian , and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.
This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washingtons military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up withduring the first cold war. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil.
The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.
Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.
There is almost the joie desprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to Americas design for the 21 st century.
This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China.
To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China. In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, its over. That was not news.
Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House. The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.
Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to totally obliterate Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras and set in train the baiting of China. She has now pledged to support a No Fly Zone in Syria a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime a distinction for which the competition is fierce.
Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public. That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders.
Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target. Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8 th, If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clintons victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defence drills being conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays torches of freedom.
George Bushs press spokesman once called the media complicit enablers.
Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history.
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.
This text is adapted from an address to the Sheffield Festival of Words, Sheffield, England , On 27 October 2016. http://johnpilger.com | 0 |
Thursday at 9 a. m. ET, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will kick off and continue through Saturday. Schedule as follows: Thursday (all times Eastern) 9:10 a. m. — White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, 10:05 a. m. — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, 11:10 a. m. — Sen. Ted Cruz ( ) and radio host Mark Levin, 11:30 p. m. — The Blaze host Dana Loesch, 12:50 p. m. — Interview with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, 1:05 p. m. — Conversation with White House strategist Steve Bannon, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp. 2:20 p. m. — Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch, 7:10 p. m — Actor Robert Davi, 7:20 p. m. — Judge Jeanine Pirro, host of “Justice” on Fox News, 7:30 p. m. — Vice President Mike Pence, Friday (all times Eastern) 8:10 a. m. — Former Navy SEAL Rob O’Neill, 8:25 a. m. — Dr. Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to President Trump, 9:55 a. m. — Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs, 10:20 a. m. — President Donald Trump, 11:55 a. m. — Nigel Farage, British politician and Fox News contributor, 12:55 p. m. — NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, 1:35 p. m. — Katie Pavlich, 2:20 p. m. — Amb. John Bolton, 2:30 p. m. — Rep. Kevin Brady ( ) 3:00 p. m. — Carly Fiorina, 7:30 p. m. — The Ronald Reagan dinner, with keynote remarks by Michael Reagan. Saturday (all times Eastern) 10:05 a. m. — David Bossie, Citizens United, 1:50 p. m. — Scott Pruitt, EPA Administrator, 2:25 p. m. — Former Sen. Rick Santorum ( ) 3:05 p. m. — CPAC Straw Poll, 3:25 p. m. — Sheriff David Clarke, Follow Breitbart. tv on Twitter @BreitbartVideo | 1 |
The President of the Nigerian Catholic bishops’ conference has appealed to the government to be “more proactive” in defending Christians from the atrocities being wrought by the Muslim population in Nigeria. [During December, more than 800 people — mostly Christians — died in violence in the south of Kaduna state, which forms part of Nigeria’s middle belt, where the chiefly Muslim north of the country meets the mainly Christian south. According to Vatican Radio, the Muslim Fulani Cattle herdsmen in the area have recently committed “atrocities” resulting in the deaths of “thousands of Christians and the destruction of property worth millions of Naira. ” The Nigerian government claims that the death toll is actually lower than the one given by the Catholic church. In a statement, Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama, President of the Bishops’ Conference, said the bishops were “particularly saddened by the constant and wanton destruction of lives and properties,” noting that violence had spread around the country and “no one knows which community will be the next victim. ” The crisis and violence in Southern Kaduna has destabilized the region and “brought untold hardship and tensions” on the local Christian population, Kaigama said. Muslim Fulani herdsmen have perpetrated much of the violence against the predominantly Christian local farmers, and some Christians have reportedly also carried out retaliatory killings as well. Government officials have tried to downplay the religious dimension to the conflict, suggesting instead that it is largely about “ethnic” rather than religious tensions. “We live in a country that is and complex in nature,” Kaigama said. “That is why we must constantly appeal to the sensibilities of our political leaders not to be seen to promote the interest of any particular group but to be neutral and seek the common things that will promote unity, fairness and equity in the country. ” Another local bishop, Joseph Bagobiri of Kafanchan, blamed the government for the systematic elimination of Christians in Southern Kaduna, noting that it will be difficult for Christianity to survive in northern Nigeria. “The crisis here has persisted because of the way and manner the federal and state governments, as well as the security agents are handling it,” Bagobiri said. “The root cause of this crisis is the institutionalisation of what could be regarded as structural injustice. ” In my view, he said, this is “a deliberate policy of injustice designed to shut our people out from the scheme of things and deny us our rights. ” “We as a Church must evolve new ways on how we can face violence without losing faith,” Bagobiri said. “It is our prayer that God will give us his strength and the needed direction on how to make Christianity survive despite the constant attacks and persecutions we received. ” He added that people have turned to prayer in the absence of government help. “It is only God that can save us from our present situation,” the bishop said. “Our hope in Him is never in vain since he knows our problem and He will deliver us one day just as he delivered the people of Israel from the hands of the Egyptians,” he said. Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome | 1 |
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This is just too rich! The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops that Clinton and her aides turned over during the EmailGate investigation… and then agents REFUSED to do it. Now, the laptops have been subpoenaed and the FBI is just waiting for Congress to ask for them. Oh goody! All that evidence is about to come back into play along with Weiner’s laptop that has over 10,000 emails of Huma’s dealings with Hillary Clinton. Good times. Stick a fork in them… I’d say they may just be about done.
Washington D.C. attorney Joe DiGenova is the one that broke this explosive revelation. Hillary Clinton must be having multiple panic attacks right about now. I guess we are going to see just how well her health holds up over her corruption being exposed. I understand that she looks dead tired over all this. I’ll bet. Her lies are finally beginning to catch up with her. They should have long ago.
From The Daily Caller:
Agents within the Federal Bureau of Investigation never destroyed laptops given to them by aides of Hillary Clinton as previously reported , a Washington D.C. lawyer with a source close to the Clinton investigation says.
Washington D.C. attorney Joe DiGenova said on The David Webb Show on SiriusXM Friday night that despite the FBI agreeing to destroy the laptops of Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson as part of immunity deals made during the initial investigation of Clinton’s email server, agents involved in the case refused to destroy the laptops.
“According to the agreement reached with the attorneys who handed over their laptops, the laptops were to be destroyed per the agreement after the testimony was given –the interviews were given – – by the attorneys. The bureau and the department agreed to that,” DiGenova said. “However the laptops contrary to published reports were not destroyed and the reason is the agents who are tasked with destroying them refused to do so. And by the way the laptops are at the FBI for inspection by Congress or federal courts.”
DiGenova said the laptops have already been subpoenaed and the FBI is waiting for Congress to ask for them.
I’m sure Donald Trump is all smiles over these developments. In the end, Hillary Clinton was her own worst enemy and Donald Trump’s biggest supporter in this election.
“When I found out last Sunday that those laptops — by the way from somebody who is involved in the investigation by the FBI– had not been destroyed contrary to published reports, I could not believe that the Republicans had not gotten their hands on them even yet,” DiGenova said. Neither can I… come on GOP… you’ve just been handed the keys to the kingdom here. Time to go in for the kill. Don’t blow it this time. Related Items Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Terresa Monroe-Hamilton owns and blogs at NoisyRoom.net . She is a Constitutional Conservative and NoisyRoom focuses on political and national issues of interest to the American public. Terresa is the editor at Trevor Loudon's site, New Zeal - trevorloudon.com . She also does research at KeyWiki.org . You can . NoisyRoom can be found on Facebook and on Twitter . | 0 |
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One of the foundations of living a good life in today’s times is having a good place to call home. Whether you want a solid, comfortable place with which to pursue your hobbies, recover from the day’s tribulations, and just to be, or whether you want a bachelor pad for your romantic pursuits, or both; a good home is essential to the modern man.
I purchased a home and I decided to be my own general contractor for the renovations. My home was an as-originally-furnished home of the 1970s, and I brought its multi-color painted, green shag carpeted datedness up to a sharply trimmed, hardwood-floored modernity while being of a somewhat timeless style. A general contractor is a person hired by the architect or engineer to run the job site, source the labor, follow the schedule, get the materials, and execute the vision of the plan. Here are ten things I learned as my own general contractor.
1. There are good contractors, and there are bad contractors
You will run into both good and bad contractors out there. A good contractor does good work, at good value, follows the schedule, and is honest and doesn’t lie to you. A bad contractor will do any or all of the above. I fired a contractor who had good value, but did poor work, could not follow the schedule, and lied to me. I paid more for a later contractor who did excellent work, hit the schedule on time, and was a perfectionist. Give a bad contractor a second chance, mainly to see how he corrects it; and, if he fails to shape up, cut him loose.
A good contractor has the correct amount of paperwork, but no more. Some firms I turned down did things by hand and had no contractor’s license, and that is too little, whereas a firm that gives you fifteen pages of legalese allowing them to take out an uncontested mechanic’s lien on your home if you do not pay is too much.
A lot has to do with the presentation of the representative. Tradesmen are naturally rough people who work with their hands, but a man that does not have a good handshake, good eye contact, and is evasive on important details is shady.
2. Good contractors cost more, and they are busy The best indicator of a good contractor is that they have a busy schedule, and I mean they are booked often a month or so in advance. The guy I fired kept trying to work me in on the weekends and at night, which, while it SEEMS like he’s busy, he’s actually operating in the red and trying to use your funds to cover his other jobs.
A good contractor will negotiate terms up front and not change them, and he will, when awarded the job, put you in his schedule at an agreed-upon time. My best contractor was so busy that I had to do other things first before I could get his firm to bid my work, and they did what good contractors do when they are too busy; they turned down my work until later.
3. You need to establish a reputation
General contractors in an area have a reputation amongst their customers and the contractors they sub-contract to, and the only difference between those that do it for a living and you is that you have no reputation.
A busy contractor will work with a GC who will give them work in the future over one who will not. I was an unknown, so the busy guys during the busy season (fall and pre-holidays) would pass on me and work with ones they knew.
However, word got around to the others that I gave jobs of good scope, and paid on time. I hired a sub contractor for a set of jobs, and, once they found out who I used as my electrician (it was who they subbed their own electrical jobs to), they called and the electricians vouched that I was picky as all hell, but paid on time, and let them run their own schedule and have the run of the house. At that point, I was in.
4. Good contractors know other good contractors
Reputation works the other way too. A good roofer who I only turned down because he was too busy and wouldn’t meet my timetable has a brother who runs the electrical shop mentioned above. Although you should ALWAYS get multiple competing quotes (bid to three, two will generally respond, and pick the better one), the deciding factor was that his brother, the roofer, ran a good shop, and it stood to reason he would, too.
My plumbers knew my AC guys and my chimney guy. My flooring guys knew my kitchen cabinets guys. Everyone works with and around everyone else, and I saved all my paperwork and contact info for all my vendors so that, on any future projects, I know who to call for what, and, even if I don’t know, I know who to ask for recommendations.
5. It will take more money than you think it will
Home renovation is expensive, and it’s mainly for the nasty reason that, once you commit to action, you can get hit with extra costs. You can mitigate this with good bid scopes that you give to your contractors so all parties know what is what, but you will find that the home will need things you didn’t think about, or that the hourly rate of the laborers is higher than you budgeted, or materials will simply cost more.
Part of the balancing act that is required is you will learn what to spend money on now, and what to spend money on later. Right now, I live in the place (finally), but I still have construction paper down on my floors as I have not yet bought furniture pads or rugs for the high traffic areas. My bathrooms have plumbing in, but no mirrors, cabinets, towel racks, or toilet paper holders. Entire rooms are without furniture. All of these can, and should, be taken care of later, but things like flooring and painting needed to happen earlier.
6. It will take more time than you think it will You may not need something this complicated, but a Gantt chart shows dependency of one job on others.
Contractors have their own schedules, and there is also the time outside the work time where they have to arrange a site visit, you have to juggle quotes, they have to then write you in, then they do the work, then there’s follow-ups and punch-lists, and then, finally, that job is done and you pay them.
You can’t do some other jobs before you finish the first one. This is where having a master schedule and knowing who is doing what and affecting whom matters. My floor guys had to have the run of the place when they were finishing the floors, but they did not when they were laying sub-floor, and I was able to have plumbers in that day as well. Contrariwise, I could not start the kitchen install until after the floors were done.
7. Some of your ideas are wrong, some are right I had my own thoughts about what to do with the place. Sometimes I was wrong; it was stupid to try to reuse the baseboard that was over the carpet and put it over the hardwood (even though it was the same color) and I listened to my contractor and used new. Sometimes I was right, my backsplash behind my sink was supposed to match the counter-tops’ colors, and the ratio of white I wanted was correct, but I was persuaded to add more by my contractor.
Know what is important in your vision and be able to explain your intent, but the contractor might have a better way of how to do it in mind than if you had told them the how, instead of the what. I have a rather creative way of running the drains on my basement fixtures; they did what I wanted, but did it in a better way than I would have suggested, and they got it almost completely right to my intent in the process.
8. There will be gaps in your manpower coverage
The one thing a professional general contractor does that you, as a private operator, will not is do all the basic stuff themselves. A GC will hire an electrician to wire fan boxes for mounting fans, but he will install the boxes and hang the fans himself. My electricians did install and hang them for me anyway.
This was for two reasons, and this is how you can mitigate having little shit jobs that no one will want to do as a single job. The first is to provide all the materials yourself, which also allows you to pick out what you want. I had a pile of fixtures, fans, and bulbs laid out for them with a plan of what went where, and this helped them just throw them up after the technical wiring part was done.
The second reason is to provide a good scope of work. Will a plumber come install a single faucet? Maybe. Will he come install five and a garbage disposal? Certainly, that’s a good day’s work, so, if you have little jobs, have a LOT of little jobs, and you’ll get more interest.
9. There are things with which you will not be satisfied; good enough is good enough
This house is old, but renovated. Some things simply cannot be fixed without massive upheaval; I cannot have perfectly flat ceilings because the drywall is 40 years old and it had popcorn texture on it. Some things I did not address; I have new baseboard and new window trim, but the door trim is original and has the nicks and stains of time.
Some things were done, but were not perfect. The drywall where my kitchen cabinets’ bulkhead used to hang from the ceiling has one spot where, even after two reworks, still has a hairline paint crack. Some of the window film has pull away lines, and there’s a couple things trapped under the film in places. One of the toilets will top itself off for a few seconds signifying a small seal issue. You cannot have perfection, but you can go for reasonable excellence.
10. Code enforcement sucks The Man sucks. Someone called Code Enforcement on me, and I had to go get a permit of a cost of X% of the renovation’s cost, mainly so they can jack my taxes up.
I got the permit, and I expect my taxes to go up. The inspector was a real schmuck, as most appointed officials are, but the joke’s on him, as I only got the permit on what I had left to do and I omitted some things that would still happen, but weren’t too noticeable.
With code enforcement and county ordinances, the idea is reasonable cooperation and being able to explain things away with saying you were mistaken, instead of flouting the law. I went and got the permit when I was busted for it, but they only know a third of the story. Had I gotten a permit earlier, perhaps whatever nosy neighbor that ratted me out might not have called at all. Another tactic, which I will do on a future project I have planned, is to get the permit months ahead of time, then hit it hard over a few days and be done before anyone notices.
Conclusion If you have the time, the patience, and the skill to know exactly what you want, who to get for it, and how to juggle a massive schedule, running your own home renovation is a lot of fun and very educational. If you want it done faster and just want to deal with one person for everything, then hiring a professional general contractor might be the way to go instead.
Read More: 14 Essential Subjects That We Will Teach Children At The ROK International School
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In between nearly daily campaign stops shilling for Hillary, President Barack Obama has been promoting his record as Head of State. To Obama’s credit, he talks nice and appears to be both thoughtful and rational, qualities that were not always evident in his predecessor in office. But the hype about what was achieved in his eight years appears to be more than a bit overblown, particularly if one considers the flagship domestic project, Obamacare. It is a program in which the government forces individuals to buy a product that has been crafted together by private, for profit companies. If the people do not buy, they will be penalized by the government. The companies in turn have learned that it is tough to make money insuring people who are actually sick so they are leaving the program while those individuals who have to buy their own coverage without government subsidies are discovering that the significant annual price increases mean that they cannot afford insurance at all. Donald Trump is right that the program is in crisis, is “over,” and should be repealed.
Against that, what has Obama accomplished domestically? I will not consider the constant pandering on gender and race because that is, after all, what Democrats do. But if one considers immigration a part of domestic policy, he is responsible for refusing to enforce immigration law, letting Haitians stay illegally in the U.S. as compensation for a hurricane that occurred in 2010, while also failing to deport whole categories of Hispanics who are in the country without visas or residency permits. Domestic would also include the continuation of several types of surveillance of citizens by the NSA and FBI, the hounding and prosecution of whistleblowers, and the increased reliance on the State Secrets privilege to derail the use of the judicial system to pushback against government overreach. And in a just concluded parole hearing involving a Guantanamo detainee who had been repeatedly tortured, the Obama Administration has now determined that some individuals can be held in prison forever without ever being charged with a crime or convicted.
But it is in the foreign and national security policy areas that Obama has been most visibly active as he has a relatively free hand based on what he considers to be his own “unitary executive” authority. In his famous Cairo speech delivered to the Muslim world in 2009 he promised change but basically did not deliver, though there have actually been several successes in foreign policy that date to the past year. He should get full credit for confronting the Israel Lobby and Congress (essentially the same thing) to obtain a nuclear program agreement with Iran. Likewise, he went against the Cuban Lobby and GOP in Congress (also essentially the same thing) to ease relations with Havana. He still might do the right thing by the Palestinians and allow the U.S. to recognize their statehood at the United Nations later this month or even support the French plan for a multinational conference to create a Palestinian state but I wouldn’t want to bet on it, particularly as the incoming Administration headed by Hillary Clinton will be firmly in the Israeli pocket and Obama would presumably defer to her before doing anything dramatic.
And Obama should also get credit for some things that he didn’t do. He did not exacerbate tensions with Russia by arming Ukraine with game changing offensive weapons in spite of intense pressure from Congress and the media and he did not get involved in a new land war involving tens of thousands of American soldiers in Asia even though some of his advisers were urging him to do so in Syria. But by the same measure starting yet another war by proxy, in Libya, was a complete failure, though it did not involve American boots on the ground. It was a war that might in part be attributed to the aggressive advocacy of Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time.
And while it should also be recalled to Obama’s credit that he made no effort to maintain a troop presence in Iraq, he was unable to extricate U.S. forces from America’s longest war in Afghanistan, which continues and is likely to be on the presidential agenda for the next decade or even longer. Nor could he dissuade the Saudis from initiating their brutal and senseless war on Yemen, which has had devastating consequences with more to come for the entire region. And President Obama has also failed to closed Guantanamo prison in spite of promises made eight years ago to do so.
President Obama has also changed the actual mechanics of America’s intervention in the world, using drones and aerial bombardment instead of soldiers on the ground to enforce Washington’s diktat. A Pentagon press release in September boasted how over Labor Day weekend U.S. warplanes attacked targets in six countries. The United States was not at war with any of them. And then there is Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, American citizens who were executed in Yemen by drone without any legal process, by executive order, after they were placed on a “kill list” compiled by the White House.
But Obama’s poorest grades relate to his handling of Russia, Syria and Israel, all three of which might plausibly be seen as linked issues as Secretary Clinton once commented that Syria’s government would have to be brought down to benefit Israel while Russia is Syria’s most important ally. The problem with Syria is the policy itself. The only serious direct threat emanating from the country is ISIS, which has the capability to send suicide bombers and other dedicated terrorists to strike targets in the United States and Europe. To be sure, Washington is operating against ISIS, providing intelligence, equipment and training to its proxies and the “moderate” rebels that it supports in the country, but the effort is a mish mash, involving as it does feckless allies and clashing loyalties. The Pentagon and CIA have meanwhile been training batches of dubious recruits, some of whom turn their weapons over to the crazies at first opportunity. The Defense Department deflected completely accurate charges that it was supporting terrorists by changing the names of the groups involved. Amid the chaos, President Obama has even conceded that there are no moderate rebels.
Defeating ISIS would be relatively simple if everyone were on the same page, but the White House persists in seeing the removal of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as the top priority, as if creating a power vacuum in Damascus would be a solution to what ISIS has been doing. And pressuring al-Assad also creates and feeds the ongoing problems with Russia. As the beltway groupthink goes, Syria minus al-Assad and Vladimir Putin would magically become a place where all the moderate, nation-building and democratically inclined forces would be able to come together and form a new government that would immeasurably benefit the Syrian people.
That formulation is, of course, complete nonsense and it is Moscow that has a clear understanding of what is at stake, not Washington. The reality is that creating a power vacuum is precisely what provides the opportunity for militant groups to settle in and expand their authority. It is how al-Qaeda and ISIS both came into prominence. It happens because, as in Iraq and Libya, the Washington interventionists have no idea what might succeed as a post-civil war political system in Syria. Nor do they have any real plan for achieving a functioning polity.
U.S. administrations have already tried decapitation of existing leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya with catastrophic results but one of the delights of the American political system is that all the key policy players change every four to eight years meaning that lessons learned are lost and have to be discovered a second time around, repeating as necessary. That regime change would work any better in Syria defies belief but it is nevertheless what Washington chooses to believe and by seeing al-Assad as an enemy it is hampering the effort against ISIS’s most effective asset: the Syrian Army backed up by Russian air support.
And then there is Israel. Israel is, according to many Congressmen and the media, America’s best friend and greatest ally. It is a judgment that also defies belief as Tel Aviv and more particularly its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been persistently pursuing policies that are nominally opposed by the United States government, most particularly the expansion of its settlements. It has also interfered in U.S. internal politics during elections and did not hesitate to exploit political divisions in Congress when Netanyahu was invited by GOP leaders to speak to a joint session to provide his perception of President Obama’s “misguided” negotiations with Iran. Israel is no friend of the United States even if it does receive an annual handout currently running at in excess of $3 billion and unlimited political cover in international bodies. Obama reportedly hates Netanyahu but did not have the courage to do anything about him.
So the Obama record is a mixed bag, but mostly a disappointment. His presidency will be somewhat untouchable by those who do retrospectives, as least for a while, protected by Obama’s status as America’s first black president. It would have been nice to see real health care reform, a backing off from police state norms in the war on terror, and less lethal engagement in other people’s quarrels overseas, but I suppose Obama would argue that GOP obstruction and the Establishment consensus caused him to support policies and engage in compromises that he really wanted to avoid. There may be some truth to that but ultimately Obama comes across as yet another morally deficient head of state who presumably saw the folly in the status quo but ultimately decided that loyalty to his party and dedication to its continuation in power was more important than doing what was right. Ultimately, the acquisition of money and power are everything in our system of government and the brief trajectory of Barack Hussein Obama is no exception to that rule. | 0 |
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