On March 16th 2008 I called out and subsequently rejected the Great "Unifier" after he made his responsible negroe speech and repudiated Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Like Obama, Cheat Bootyplug is a nobody selected by elites from sociopath central casting for the purpose of installing a republican blue dog as the head of the DNC corporatist shill party. Bootyplug is toast with Black and Latino voters, so I'm not quite sure who his handlers thought he could "unify" with his glib, empty rhetoric.
Kennedy was the first to inform the audience of the death of Martin Luther King, causing some in the audience to scream and wail. Several of Kennedy's aides were even worried that the delivery of this information would result in a riot. Once the audience quieted down Kennedy acknowledged that many in the audience would be filled with anger, especially since the assassin was believed to be a white, and that he had felt the same when his brother John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. These remarks surprised Kennedy aides, who had never heard him speak of John Kennedy's death. Kennedy continued, saying that the country had to make an effort to "go beyond these rather difficult times," and then quoted a poem by the Greek playwright Aeschylus. To conclude Kennedy said that the country needed and wanted unity between blacks and whites, asked the audience members to pray for the King family and the country, and once more quoted the ancient Greeks. Despite rioting in other major American cities, Indianapolis was calm the night after Kennedy's remarks, which is believed to have been in part because of the speech. The speech itself has been listed as one of the greatest in American history, ranked 17th on American Rhetoric's Top 100 speeches in the 20th century. Former US Congressman and media host Joe Scarborough said that it was Kennedy's greatest speech, and was what prompted him into entering into public service. Journalist Joe Klein has called it "politics in its grandest form and highest purpose," and said that it "marked the end of an era" before American political life was taken over by consultants and pollsters. It is also featured as the prologue of his book, Politics Lost.
downwithtyranny | This is a small point that leads to a larger one. Consider what Mike
Bloomberg is building within the Democratic Party, within the DNC.
According to the following analysis he's turning the DNC into an
anti-Sanders machine, a force loyal to himself, that will operate even
after Sanders is nominated, even after Sanders is elected, if he so
chooses.
With that he hopes to limit and control what Sanders and his rebellion
can do. It's the ultimate billionaire counter-rebellion — own the Party
machine that the president normally controls, then use it against him.
Our source for this thought is Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report.
Ford is one of the more vitriolic defenders of radical change in
America, but in this analysis I don't think he's wrong, at least in
making the case that Bloomberg is giving himself that option. But do
decide for yourself.
Here's his case:
Bloomberg Wants to Swallow the Democrats and Spit Out the Sandernistas
If, somehow, Bernie Sanders is allowed to win the nomination, Michael
Bloomberg and other plutocrats will have created a Democratic Party
machinery purpose-built to defy Sanders -- as nominee, and even as
president.
The details of his argument are here (emphasis added):
Bloomberg has already laid the groundwork to directly seize the party
machinery, the old fashioned way: by buying it and stacking it with his
own, paid operatives, with a war-against-the-left budget far bigger than
the existing Democratic operation. Bloomberg’s participation in
Wednesday’s debate, against all the rules, is proof-of-purchase.
In addition to the nearly million dollar down payment to the party in
November that sealed the deal for the debate rules change, Bloomberg has
already pledged to pay the full salaries of 500 political staffers for
the Democratic National Committee all the way through the November
election, no matter who wins the nomination. Essentially, Bloomberg will be running the election for the corporate wing of the party, even if Sanders is the nominee.
NYPost | Mike Bloomberg’s millions in campaign spending flew right out the window Wednesday night.
The billionaire’s self-bankrolled presidential bid was torn to shreds in the opening minutes
of Wednesday’s Democratic debate as his opponents skewered him for his
checkered past on sexual harassment and his record on stop-and-frisk.
Each candidate on the Las Vegas stage attacked Bloomberg right out of the gate, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren made the former Big Apple mayor visibly squirm and roll his eyes in frustration.
“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against, a billionaire who
calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians,'” she said from the
Paris Theater.
“And, no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.”
Bloomberg, 78, started to surge in national and state polls
after pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of his personal fortune
into a slick campaign with catered campaign events and wall-to-wall TV
ads.
airforcemag | President Donald Trump honored Tuskegee Airman Charles McGee during
his State of the Union address on Feb. 4, hours after pinning stars on
McGee’s shoulders in the Oval Office.
McGee, who turned 100 on Dec. 7, was honorarily promoted from colonel
to brigadier general in the 2020 defense policy bill.
The Air Force
legend served three decades in uniform, launching his career in the U.S.
Army Air Corps. McGee escorted bombers over Germany, Austria, and the
Balkans in the P-39Q Airacobra, P-47D Thunderbolt, and the P-51 Mustang
during World War II. During the Korean War, McGee flew the F-51 on 100
interdiction missions from Japan, and he flew an additional 173
reconnaissance missions in the RF-4C during Vietnam.
Throughout his career, McGee flew a record 409 combat
missions, more than any other pilot in the three wars.
“Incredible story. After more than 130 combat missions in
World War II, he came back home to a country still struggling for civil rights
and went on to serve America in Korea and Vietnam,” Trump said. He added, “Gen.
McGee, our nation salutes you. Thank you, sir.”
Trump also offered a glimpse of future
generations of airmen, touting the U.S. Space Force—the nation’s newest
military service—and honoring McGee’s grandson, Iain Lanphier, an eighth grader
in Arizona, who “aspires to go to the Air Force Academy” and one day work for
the Space Force.
“Most people look up at space. Ian says, ‘I want to look down on the world.’”
NYMag | I do not recommend reading the new books by Ezra Klein and Christopher Caldwell one after the other. Klein’s Why We’re Polarized and Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlementcome
from very different perspectives, but convey a near-paralyzing and
plausible pessimism. Klein’s is a political-science explanation of our
intensifying cultural and political tribalism, and its incompatibility
with functional liberal democracy (a theme I explored here).
Caldwell’s is a deeper, wider cultural and constitutional narrative of
the last half-century. If Klein is trying to explain why polarization
fucks everything up, Caldwell is intent on telling us how this
state of affairs came to be. Both are well worth reading (though
Caldwell’s vibrant, mordant prose makes his a more unusual and enjoyable
ride).
Some
might say that the two are among the best and the brightest of left and
right, respectively. On the left, Klein is a near-archetypal member of
the new elite class: progressive but still struggling to be fair-minded,
a liberal who has tactically deferred to wokeness. On the right,
Caldwell swaggers around as the cranky-cool professor articulating the
frustrations of the less articulate, throwing barbs here and there,
gleefully challenging and scorning the elite orthodoxies that culminated
in the election of Barack Obama.
But
both books agree on one central thing: Our fate was almost certainly
cast as long ago as 1964 and 1965. Those years, in the wake of the
Kennedy assassination, saw the Civil Rights Act upend the Constitution
of a uniquely liberal country in order to tackle the legacy of slavery
and racism, and the Immigration and Nationality Act set in motion the
creation of a far more racially and ethnically diverse and integrated
society than anyone in human history had previously thought possible.
Still, at the time, few believed that either shift would have huge, deep
consequences in the long term. They were merely a modernization of
American ideals: inclusivity, expansiveness, hope.
As someone who was born just before these two changes were
instigated, I regarded those tectonic shifts as simply part of the
landscape — something that seemed always to have been here. And what
could be questioned about either? One was reversing a profound moral
evil; the other was banishing racism from the immigration laws.
No-brainers. The strongest resistance to civil rights came from former
segregationists or obvious racists, and there was little resistance to
the Immigration Act, because most in the congressional debate seemed to
think it wouldn’t change anything much at all. (The House sponsor of the
Immigration Act, as Caldwell notes, promised that “quota immigration
under the bill is likely to be more than 80 percent European,” while Ted
Kennedy insisted: “The ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”)
There were a few dissenters to the 1964 Act, such as Robert Bork, who
identified a significant erosion in the freedom of association. And
there were southern senators who worried about immigrants from the
developing world. But the resisters were easily dismissed on both
counts, in the wake of LBJ’s 1964 landslide.
alt-market | In my article 'Trump Impeachment And The Civil War Scenario',
I warned that conservatives and leftists are being pushed to the brink
of a shooting war using various methods of social manipulation and 4th
Gen warfare, and that this conflict, if dictated by gatekeepers of the
false Left/Right paradigm, would only benefit establishment elites in
the long run. Internal division among the public is designed to keep us
at each other's throats while losing focus on the real enemies.
Hard line democrats and the social justice cult are merely a symptom
of the disease, they are not the source of the disease. However, I also
acknowledge that the rift between conservatives and the political left
has become so extreme that reconciliation is almost impossible. War
might be unavoidable, and the globalists love it. If they can pretend
like they had nothing to do with creating tensions, and if conservatives
are so blinded by anger against Democrats that they refuse to admit
that some of their own political leaders (including Trump) have been
co-opted, the elites win.
The danger in any civil war is that BOTH sides end up being
manipulated and controlled, and that the situation is maneuvered towards
an outcome that only serves the interests of a select few.
Virginia may be a test bed, a trial run for a nationwide
conflagration, and if it does hit a point where state officials compel a
violent response from the citizenry, then it is important that liberty
advocates remain vigilant and steer clear of incompetent or controlled
leaders. It is also important that they remember there is a much larger
agenda at play here; the Democrats may be useful idiots fueling that
agenda, but most of them are oblivious to their role. Our fight is not
with the Democrats, our fight is with the globalists that influence
them; the same globalists that are trying to influence us.
First and foremost we have to address the propaganda, because all
wars begin first in the public consciousness. The current situation in
Virginia remains a battle of political rhetoric and “fluid”
interpretations of the law. Here are the arguments I've seen from the
political left so far on the issue of 2nd Amendment Sanctuaries:
CNN | The stakes were high when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met at Warren's apartment in Washington, DC, one evening in December 2018. The longtime friends knew that they could soon be running against each other for president.
The
two agreed that if they ultimately faced each other as presidential
candidates, they should remain civil and avoid attacking one another, so
as not to hurt the progressive movement. They also discussed how to
best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main
reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a
robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female
voters.
Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.
The
description of that meeting is based on the accounts of four people:
two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two
people familiar with the meeting.
That
evening, Sanders expressed frustration at what he saw as a growing
focus among Democrats on identity politics, according to one of the
people familiar with the conversation. Warren told Sanders she disagreed
with his assessment that a woman could not win, three of the four
sources said.
Sanders denied the characterization of the meeting in a statement to CNN.
"It
is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren
told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a
woman couldn't win," Sanders said. "It's sad that, three weeks before
the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who
weren't in the room are lying about what happened. What I did say that
night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would
weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of
course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes
in 2016."
Warren's communications director Kristen Orthman declined to comment.
americanpartisan | Rolling into 2020, all eyes are on Virginia following Governor Ralph
Northam’s declared intention to pass onerous new gun control laws that
could mandate the forced confiscation of common semi-automatic firearms
which have been legal for Virginians to own for more than a century,
ever since their invention. The first date in the coming showdown to be
aware of is Monday, January 20th, when the Virginia Citizens Defense League,
a pro-Second Amendment group, is organizing a “Lobby Day” rally to be
held at the state capitol to oppose these new gun control laws. It’s
estimated that thousands of Virginians will attend the VCDL rally, many
arriving in buses from all over the commonwealth.
In response to Northam’s plans, 90% of Virginia’s counties and many
of its independent cities have declared themselves to be “second
amendment sanctuaries.” After receiving vociferous pushback, Northam has
recently stepped away from promising the outright confiscation of
currently owned semi-auto weapons, and he is instead now demanding that
gun owners register “grandfathered” weapons with the state government.
Based on recent experiences in New York, Connecticut and other states
that mandated registration, it’s assumed that very few Virginians will
comply, instantly turning hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding
citizens into paper felons.
What will Northam’s response be to mass defiance of his gun control
edicts? Common investigative tools could easily be used to locate
non-compliant Virginians and arrest them on felony gun charges. At least
some gun confiscation raids would inevitably lead to armed resistance,
beginning a cycle of action and reaction that could, over time, grow
into a low-intensity guerrilla conflict or a “dirty civil war.”
How plausible is this unwanted outcome? And what forms might a civil
war over gun rights take? In certain respects we are in uncharted
waters, because there are some new and unique variables in the known and
studied civil war and counter-insurgency equations that are far out of
line with available historical precedents. Chief among them: in all of
history there has never been a civil war where, at the outset of
hostilities, the resisting indigenous population was armed to the teeth
with rifles capable of making 500 to 1,000 yard aimed precision shots.
Never.
WaPo | Van Cleave has appealed to his supporters not to come bristling with
intimidating long guns — including assault-style rifles such as the
AR-15 — and politely suggested that militia members are welcome but do
not need to provide security. Police will take care of that, he said,
“not to mention enough citizens armed with handguns to take over a
modern midsized country.”
That
firepower is a concern for gun-control advocates, who also plan to turn
out on Jan. 20 — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — for what is a traditional
day of citizen lobbying at the state Capitol.
“There’s
a dangerous intersection here of speech and guns, and what I think is
critically important is that we don’t see the sort of armed intimidation
and even violence that resulted . . . in Charlottesville,” said Adam
Skaggs, chief counsel and policy director at Giffords Law Center.
Democratic
lawmakers who now control both houses of the General Assembly are
considering making rules changes to limit where guns can be carried when
the legislature convenes on Wednesday.
Visitors
are currently allowed to bring guns onto Capitol Square and — with a
concealed-weapons permit — into the Capitol itself and the adjacent
Pocahontas Building. Firearms are even permitted in the House gallery,
though the Senate gallery is off- limits.
WaPo | At
his resort in Florida, the president was told that Soleimani was going
to be coming to Baghdad; senior officials felt he was taunting the
United States by showing up in the Iraqi capital, implying that he could
move around with impunity.
Calls
among the national security principals were convened by the vice
president throughout the week after initial discussions on Sunday to
kill Soleimani, a senior administration official said.
Officials
reminded Trump that after the Iranians mined ships, downed the U.S.
drone and allegedly attacked a Saudi oil facility, he had not responded.
Acting now, they said, would send a message: “The argument is, if you
don’t ever respond to them, they think they can get by with anything,”
one White House official said.
Trump
was also motivated to act by what he felt was negative coverage after
his 2019 decision to call off the airstrike after Iran downed the U.S.
surveillance drone, officials said. Trump was also frustrated that the
details of his internal deliberations had leaked out and felt he looked
weak, the officials said.
The
United States tracked Soleimani’s movements for several days, keeping
Trump apprised, and decided that their best opportunity to kill him
would be near the Baghdad airport, the senior administration official
said.
He
ultimately gave final approval just before the strike, a senior
administration official said, making the call from his golf resort.
Trump
also had history on his mind. The president has long fixated on 2012
attacks on U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya, and the Obama
administration’s response to them, said lawmakers and aides who have
spoken to him, and he felt the response to this week’s attack on the
embassy and the killing of an American contractor would make him look
stronger compared with his predecessor.
“Benghazi
has loomed large in his mind,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in
an interview, explaining the response this week.
Graham
was at Mar-a-Lago on Monday and said the president told him he was
concerned they “were going to hit us again” and that he was considering
hitting the Iranians.
No specific plan was ready to kill Soleimani, but it was on Trump’s mind, Graham said.
“He
was more thinking out loud, but he was determined to do something to
protect Americans. Killing the contractor really changed the equation,”
Graham said.
“He was saying, ‘This guy is a bad guy, he’s up to no good, we have to do something,’ ” Graham said.
dailykos | Attorney General William Barr is racing to complete a new “report”
before Thanksgiving. And if Barr’s very poor summary of the Mueller
report threw Trump a lifeline by distorting the real findings of the
special counsel investigation, this new report looks to be more like an
atom bomb, designed to incinerate Washington by putting the whole
Justice Department behind a conspiracy theory that rewrites history and
declares open warfare on political opponents. And Republicans are
already meeting with Barr to plan a “roll out” for this supposedly
classified report in order to maximize its impact.
Barr appears to have taken the results of an inspector general report
that was expected to end weeks ago, rolled it together with the
investigation-into-the-investigation that he launched under the nominal
control of prosecutor John Durham, and capped it all with the “findings”
of a world tour that included attempts to get the Australian
government, the Italian government, and the U.K. government to
participate in attacks on U.S. intelligence agencies. What’s going to
come out the other end could be a dud, but it could launch an effort to
derail the impeachment process—and more.
Barr’s effort to create a comprehensive,
all-conspiracy-theories-combined report seems to have delayed delivery
of the long-expected findings from Department of Justice Inspector
General Michael Horowitz. Republicans were generally thrilled by Horowitz’s earlier report
in which he was critical of former FBI director James Comey for his
handling of some classified materials. That report had right-wing news
outlets clamoring over potential charges against Comey. But despite
claims that the findings justified Republican attacks on the
entire Russia investigation, the actual complaints were minor and led to
nothing.
That seems unlikely to be the case this time. As The Washington Post
reports, Barr has subsumed Horowitz’s work because “the inspector
general does not have the authority to declassify information” and Barr
apparently intends to release information that dips into classified
documents at both the FBI and CIA to tell his story of how the Russia
investigation was unjustified from the start.
saracarter | Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s
much anticipated report on his investigation into the FBI’s probe into
President Trump’s campaign is expected to be made public before
Thanksgiving and the outcome is alleged to contain several criminal
referrals, according to sources who spoke with SaraACarter.com.
Horowitz’s investigation on the bureau’s probe into the now debunked
theory that Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 presidential election
will more than likely result in the declassification of documents —
requested by senior Republican lawmakers
for more than several years. These are the same documents President
Trump turned over to Attorney General William Barr in May, giving him
‘full and complete authority” to declassify.
Those documents will contain several classified pages of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
on former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, exculpatory evidence that
was withheld from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the
so-called ‘Gang of Eight’ folder (which contained exculpatory
information), as well as the email chain between FBI investigators in
the Russia probe and then-FBI DirectorJames Comey.
Those emails also include discussions with lawyers in the DOJ’s
national security division. As previously reported, the email chains
will contain information that prove the FBI knew prior to obtaining a
warrant to spy on Page that former British spy Christopher Steele’s
information in his infamous dossier on Trump could not be proven.
It is also expected to reveal that the FBI knew that Steele was
leaking to the media but then used those media reports as separate
evidence in their request for a FISA warrant, known as circular
intelligence reporting. Circular reporting is when a law enforcement
official uses false confirmation by making a piece of information appear
to come from multiple independent sources.
nakedcapitalism | Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc. is the most insightful and revelatory book about American politics to appear since the publication of Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal almost four full years ago, near the beginning of the last presidential election cycle.
While Frank’s topic was the abysmal failure of the
Democratic Party to be democratic and Taibbi’s is the abysmal failure of
our mainstream news corporations to report news, the prominent villains
in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite
social circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class. In fact, I would strongly recommend that the reader spend some time with Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal! (2016)
as he or she takes up Taibbi’s book. And to really do the book the
justice it deserves, I would even more vehemently recommend that the
reader immerse him- or herself in Taibbi’s favorite book and vade-mecum, Manufacturing Consent (which
I found to be a grueling experience: a relentless cataloging of the
official lies that hide the brutality of American foreign policy) and,
in order to properly appreciate the brilliance of Taibbi’s chapter 7,
“How the Media Stole from Pro Wrestling,” visit some locale in Flyover
Country and see some pro wrestling in person (which I found to be
unexpectedly uplifting — more on this soon enough).
Taibbi tells us that he had originally intended for Hate, Inc. to be an updating of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1988),
which he first read thirty years ago, when he was nineteen. “It blew my
mind,” Taibbi writes. “[It] taught me that some level of deception was
baked into almost everything I’d ever been taught about modern American
life…. Once the authors in the first chapter laid out their famed propaganda model [italics
mine], they cut through the deceptions of the American state like a
buzz saw” (p. 10). For what seemed to be vigorous democratic debate,
Taibbi realized, was instead a soul-crushing simulation of debate. The
choices voters were given were distinctions without valid differences,
and just as hyped, just as trivial, as the choices between a Whopper and
a Big Mac, between Froot Loops and Frosted Mini-Wheats, between Diet
Coke and Diet Pepsi, between Marlboro Lites and Camel Filters. It was
all profit-making poisonous junk.
“Manufacturing Consent,” Taibbi writes, “explains
that the debate you’re watching is choreographed. The range of argument
has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it” (p. 11).
And there’s an indisputable logic at work here, because the reality of
hideous American war crimes is and always has been, from the point of
view of the big media corporations, a “narrative-ruining” buzz-kill.
“The uglier truth [brought to light in Manufacturing Consent],
that we committed genocide of a fairly massive scale across Indochina —
ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three
countries — is pre-excluded from the history of the period” (p. 13).
So what has changed in the last thirty years? A lot! As a
starting point let’s consider the very useful metaphor found in the
title of another great media book of 1988: Mark Crispin Miller’s Boxed In: The Culture of TV.
To say that Americans were held captive by the boob tube affords us not
only a useful historical image but also suggests the possibility of
their having been able to view the television as an antagonist, and
therefore of their having been able, at least some of them, to rebel
against its dictates. Three decades later, on the other hand, the
television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets, the
workings of which are so precisely intertwined with even the most
intimate minute-to-minute aspects of our lives that our relationship to
them could hardly ever become antagonistic.
johnsolomon | In recent interviews, Joe Biden has distanced himself from
his son’s work at a Ukrainian gas company that was under investigation during the
Obama years, with the former
vice president suggesting he didn’t even
know Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings.
There is plenty of evidence that conflicts with the former vice
president’s account, including Hunter
Biden’s own story that he discussed the company once with his famous father.
There also was a December
2015 New York Times story that raised the question of whether Hunter Biden’s
role at Burisma posed a conflict of interest for the vice president, especially
when Joe Biden was leading the fight against Ukrainian corruption while Hunter
Biden’s firm was under investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors.
But whatever the Biden family recollections, the Obama State
Department clearly saw the Burisma Holdings investigation in the midst of the
2016 presidential election as a Joe Biden issue.
Memos newly released through a Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit filed by the Southeastern Legal Foundation on my behalf detail how State
officials in June 2016 worked to prepare the new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine,
Marie Yovanovitch, to handle a question about “Burisma and Hunter Biden.”
In multiple drafts of a question-and-answer
memo prepared for Yovanovitch’s Senate confirmation hearing, the department’s
Ukraine experts urged the incoming ambassador to stick to a simple answer.
“Do you have any comment on Hunter Biden, the Vice President’s
son, serving on the board of Burisma, a major Ukrainian Gas Company?,” the draft Q&A
asked.
The recommended answer for Yovanovitch: “For questions on Hunter
Biden’s role in Burisma, I would refer you to Vice President Biden’s
office.”
dailymail | Nearly a thousand protesters took to the
streets of Brooklyn to demonstrate against the NYPD after a spate of
violent arrests on the subway and over its plans to put more officers on
the beat to catch anyone who skips paying the fare.
The
protesters started gathering in Downtown Brooklyn near Barclays Center
at about 7pm Friday, with their signs reflecting the dual nature of the
march.
While flashier banners bore
slogans such as 'Don't let these pigs touch us,' 'F**k the police,'
'Punch that cop' and 'NYPD out of MTA,' other signs read 'Free transit,'
'Poverty is not a crime' and 'Our subways need more $ for elevators,
not for cops.'
Their grievances stem
from two issues. One, alleged police brutality against New Yorkers
including a group of teenagers who officers were seen fighting with in a
recent viral video.
The
other issue is that police have vowed to create 500 additional jobs
specifically for officers to monitor the subway network and arrest
anyone who jumps the barriers rather than pay the $2.75 fee.
Over the last month. several videos have emerged of NYPD cops violently arresting seemingly nonviolent subway riders.
One,
which circulated last week, showed them pounding on the windows of a
subway car, waiting for the doors to open, before rushing on board,
tackling the man to the ground. It is unclear why he is wanted. He had
his hands in the air for several minutes before they arrested him and
bystanders say the officers drew their guns.
Why I ain't see this covered in the Kansas City Star or more realistically, as an item in Go-ogle News?
unz |Cohen observes in his latest conversation with
John Batchelor that the so-called Impeachment inquiry, whether formal or
informal, will make the new Cold War even worse and more dangerous than
it already is, noting that an inflection point has been reached,
because at the core of these allegations—most of which are undocumented
and a substantial number of which are untrue— revolving around
Russiagate and now Ukrainegate is an underlying demonization of Russia.
Relations between America and Russia will continue to deteriorate either
due to the fact that the entire political spectrum is engaging in a
frenzy of Russophobia or that President Trump, who ran and won on a
platform of improving relations with Russia, is now completely shackled,
thus it is inevitable that the new Cold War will continue to become
more dangerous.
moonofalabama | The New York Times continues to lie about Joe Biden's
involvement in the Ukraine and about Ukrainian involvement in the U.S.
election. Today it also lied about a fact in relation to Lieutenant
Colonel Vindman who was yesterday questioned by the Democrats
'impeachment inquiry'. The NYT reported that very fact just a
day ago. During the hearing Lt.Col. Vindman expressed a rather
preposterous view about who should define U.S. foreign policy.
The NYT claims to debunk falsehoods but spreads more of them:
Debunking 4 Viral Rumors About the Bidens and Ukraine As
lawmakers examine whether President Trump pushed Ukraine to investigate
the Biden family, here are some of the most prominent falsehoods that
have spread online and an explanation of what really happened.
Why was Ukraine’s top prosecutor fired? ... A
year later, Viktor Shokin became Ukraine’s prosecutor general, a job
similar to the attorney general in the United States. He vowed to keep
investigating Burisma amid an international push to root out corruption
in Ukraine.
But the investigation went dormant under Mr. Shokin.
In the fall of 2015, Joe Biden joined the chorus of Western officials
calling for Mr. Shokin’s ouster. The next March, Mr. Shokin was fired. A
subsequent prosecutor cleared Mr. Zlochevsky.
Zlochevsky had hired Joe Biden's son Hunter for at least
$50,000 per month. In 2015 Shokin started to investigate him in two
cases. During the fall of 2015 Joe Biden's team begins to lobby against
him. On February 2 Shokin seizes Zlochevsky's houses. Shortly afterwards
the Biden camp goes berserk with Biden himself making nearly daily
phonecalls. Shokin goes on vacation while Poroshenko (falsely) claims
that he resigned. When Shokin comes back into office Biden again takes
to the phone. A week later Shokin is out.
Biden got the new prosecutor general he wanted. The new guy made a bit of show and then closed the case against Zlochevsky.
and:
It is quite astonishing that the false claims, that Shokin
did not go after Burisma owner Zlochevsky, is repeated again and again
despite the fact that the public record, in form of a report by Interfax-Ukraine, contradicts it.
moonofalabama | Since Donald Trump was elected president the New York Times'
understanding of the 'Deep State' evolved from a total denial of its
existence towards a full endorsement of its anti-democratic operations.
A wave of leaks from government officials has hobbled the
Trump administration, leading some to draw comparisons to countries like
Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where shadowy networks within government
bureaucracies, often referred to as “deep states,” undermine and coerce
elected governments.
So is the United States seeing the rise of its own deep state? Not quite, experts say, but the echoes are real — and disturbing.
The concept of a “deep state” — a shadowy network of agency
or military officials who secretly conspire to influence government
policy — is more often used to describe countries like Egypt, Turkey and
Pakistan, where authoritarian elements band together to undercut
democratically elected leaders. But inside the West Wing, Mr. Trump and
his inner circle, particularly his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon,
see the influence of such forces at work within the United States,
essentially arguing that their own government is being undermined from within.It is an extraordinary contention for a sitting president to make.
American institutions do not resemble the powerful deep
states of countries like Egypt or Pakistan, experts say. Nor do
individual leaks, a number of which have come from President Trump’s own
team, amount to a conspiracy.
The diagnosis of a “deep state,” those experts say, has the problem backward.
...
Though Mr. Trump has not publicly used the phrase,
allies and sympathetic news media outlets have repurposed “deep state”
from its formal meaning — a network of civilian and military officials
who control or undermine democratically elected governments — to a
pejorative meant to accuse civil servants of illegitimacy and political
animus.
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to
expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a
former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior
staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with
Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to
impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his
national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to
hold Moscow accountable.
This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.
"The fact that my predecessor had a son who was paid $50,000 a month to
be on a Ukrainian board, at the time that vice president Biden was
leading the Obama Administration’s efforts in Ukraine, I think is worth
looking into." - VP @mike_pence
theintercept |The problem for Democrats is that a review of Hunter Biden’s career
shows clearly that he, along with Joe Biden’s brother James, has been
trading on their family name for decades, cashing in on the implication —
and sometimes the explicit argument — that giving money to a member of
Joe Biden’s family wins the favor of Joe Biden. Democrats have been
loath to give any credibility to the wild rantings of Trump or his
bagman Rudy Giuliani, leaving them to sidestep the question of Hunter
Biden’s ethics or decision-making, and how much responsibility Joe Biden
deserves. Republicans, though, have no such qualms, and have made clear
that smearing the Bidens as corrupt will be central to Trump’s
reelection campaign. The Trump approach is utterly without shame or
irony, with attacks even coming from failson Eric Trump.
Biden has been taking political hits over of the intersection of his
family’s financial dealings and his own political career for some four
decades. Yet he has done nothing publicly to inoculate himself from the
charge that his career is corruptly enriching his family, and now that
is a serious liability. By contrast, one of his opponents in the
presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., went so far as to
refuse to endorse his son Levi Sanders when he ran for Congress, saying
that he does not believe in political dynasties. In defending the
Biden’s nepotistic relationship, Democrats would be forced to argue
that, to be fair, such soft corruption is common among the families of
senior-level politicians. But that’s a risky general-election argument
in a political moment when voters are no longer willing to accept
business-as-usual. For now, Biden’s opponents in the presidential
campaign appear to all hope that somebody else will make the argument,
while congressional Democrats don’t want to do anything to undermine
their impeachment probe. And so Biden skates.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...