Using "Medicine" As A Means Of Political Punishment

brownstone |   How this began: The virus was here (the US) already for months from 2019 and life went on normally. 

Once the consciousness seeped in and the politicians panicked, we moved quickly from travel restrictions to lockdowns to mask mandates to domestic capacity restrictions to vaccine mandates. Somewhere along the way, we learned to classify people by profession, stigmatize the sick, then finally to demonize the noncompliant. It’s been 20 months of intensified controls, driven by political leaders from both parties, with precious little dissent from media organs.

The pace has been furiously fast but somehow just slow enough that people and media personalities adjust to the new, the cycle proceeds, last week’s shock becomes this week’s normal, and then politicians scramble to create the next big intervention, covering previous failures with new nostrums, all while ignoring or censoring opposing views. 

Even hard-won scientific knowledge of 100 years – for example natural immunity – has been memory holed. We reference Orwell often because there is a dystopian feel to it all, describable best by reference to stories we only imagined through the help of books and movies. Hunger Games, Matrix, V for Vendetta, Equilibrium – they all come to mind. 

The policies have been bad enough but the political polarization has been the real poison. In history, we’ve seen where this leads. New and random mandates from political leaders become loyalty tests. Compliant people are viewed as enlightened and obedient. The noncompliant are regarded as stupid and probably politically threatening. They are purgeable. 

In this particular case, the mainstream media has argued for months that noncompliance correlates very closely with Trump support, which everyone knows is a civic sin of the highest order even though he won the presidency 5 years ago. This realization was an invitation to the Biden administration to ramp up its mandates, finding any and every means to get the federal bureaucracies to penetrate the policy walls to the states that exist under the Constitution. 

They easily found the agency Occupational Safety and Health Administration, twisted a few words, and like magic discovered a basis on which to override state-based limits on vaccine mandates. It’s using medicine as a means of political punishment. 

One tip-off of the political agenda here is that the data associations of the unvaxed by Trump support only work with 50 data points, meaning state boundaries, as Justin Hart has pointed out. Expand that out by county-level data with 3,000-plus data points and the correlation almost entirely disappears. Further, if you look at vaccination by race and income, you find very low compliance among voters usually associated with Democratic support. So the war on the “red states” being waged by the federal government today is really just about consolidating political support, state by state. 

Regardless, the effects of the mandates are real and devastating for millions of people. People are losing their jobs because they are unwilling to go along. And all of this occurs in the midst of a chronic labor shortage: bosses are being told by the government to dismiss people from their jobs just when their companies are struggling for resources. 

There are many reasons to refuse these mandates. The people with previous infections know that they have better immunities than they could get with a vaccine, and they want that to count even as the CDC refuses. This is particularly true of health care workers.

DNC Wants To Screen Your Text Messages For Anti-Vaxx 'Extremism'

dailycaller |  The Democratic National Committee reportedly wants Short Message Service (SMS) carriers to step in and police private text messages as part of a new push against COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.

Allies of President Joe Biden, including the DNC, plan to “engage fact-checkers more aggressively” and work alongside phone companies to combat misinformation about vaccines shared via social media and private SMS messages, according to a Monday report from Politico.

White House officials are particularly frustrated with the characterization by some Republicans of their door-to-door pro-vaccination campaign, according to the report.

One example SMS message cited by Politico was sent by conservative activist group Turning Point USA, in which co-founder Charlie Kirk falsely contends that “Biden is sending goons DOOR-TO-DOOR to make you take a Covid-19 vaccine. Sign the petition to: No medical raids in America.”

“When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country’s public health and will not shy away from calling that out,” White House spokesman Kevin Munoz told Politico.

Big Tech platforms and corporate media outlets have consistently cracked down on alleged “misinformation” throughout the pandemic, but in some cases, they’ve censored or suppressed information that turned out to be true. Perhaps the chief example is the lab-leak theory, which hypothesizes that the pandemic originated from an accidental leak of the virus out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

The Biden administration has blamed misinformation for contributing to vaccine hesitancy and slowing down the country’s vaccination campaign. Biden set a goal of achieving a 70% vaccination rate by July 4, but the U.S. fell just short of that benchmark.

“The failure to provide accurate public health information, including the efficacy of vaccines and the accessibility of them to people across the country, including South Carolina, is literally killing people, so maybe they should consider that,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week.

 

"KNOCK KNOCK!!! I'm With Lil'Fauci And Have An mRNA Jab For Dat Ass"

politico |  The Biden administration is casting conservative opponents of its Covid-19 vaccine campaign as dangerous and extreme, adopting a more aggressive political posture in an attempt to maneuver through the public health conundrum.

The White House has decided to hit back harder on misinformation and scare tactics after Republican lawmakers and conservative activists pledged to fight the administration’s stated plans to go “door-to-door” to increase vaccination rates. The pushback will include directly calling out social media platforms and conservative news shows that promote such tactics.

“The big misinterpretation that Fox News or whomever else is saying is that they are essentially envisioning a bunch of federal workers knocking on your door, telling you you've got to do something that you don't want to do,” Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview on Sunday. “That's absolutely not the case, it's trusted messengers who are part of the community doing that — not government officials. So that's where I think the disconnect is.”

Fauci took some of that messaging to Sunday cable news shows, including underscoring the idea that door-to-door vaccination efforts are an attempt to remove barriers to access and that 99.5 percent of deaths due to Covid are among people who are unvaccinated.

“Those data kind of hits you right between the eyes,” Fauci said of the fatalities.

Beyond Fauci, press secretary Jen Psaki has pushed back on Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — a lawmaker she once said she’d not mention from the podium — who compared the administration’s vaccine campaign to Nazis. Jeff Zients, the White House’s Covid response director, rebuked Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who contended falsely in a tweet that government “agents” were going door-to-door to “compel vaccination.”

Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

“We are steadfastly committed to keeping politics out of the effort to get every American vaccinated so that we can save lives and help our economy further recover,” White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said. “When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country's public health and will not shy away from calling that out.”

Russiagate Criminal Investigation Story - DailyKos Version

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.

Russiagate Criminal Investigation Story - Sara Carter Version

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 Director James 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.

Does Eric Ciaramella Have a Husband? Is the Husband Mad?

redstate |  Eric Ciaramella, the alleged whistleblower, was a young man on a mission. This Ivy-league graduate, said to be fluent in Russian, Ukrainian and Arabic, a favorite among Obama Administration officials, was introduced to us by investigative reporter Paul Sperry on Thursday. Washington insiders, including the mainstream media, have known his identity for quite some time, and for obvious reasons, have remained silent. Even after Sperry outed him this week, we’re hearing crickets from those on the left. The conservative media, however, which understands that history is repeating itself, has gone into overdrive to expose the truth.

Here’s what we know about Eric Ciaramella (EC):

He submitted a whistleblower complaint on August 12th.

He is a registered Democrat.

He is a CIA analyst who specializes in Russia and Ukraine. He ran the Ukraine desk at the National Security Council (NSC) in 2016.

He was detailed over to the NSC in the summer of 2015 and worked for then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

He worked for former Vice President Joe Biden when he served as the Obama administration’s “point man” for Ukraine. He may have flown over to Ukraine with Biden on Air Force Two.

He worked for former CIA Director John Brennan and appeared to have been a highly valued employee.

In June 2017, then-National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster appointed EC to be his personal aide.

EC did not have direct knowledge of the July 25th conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It is very possible he learned about the call from NSC Director for European Affairs Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified last week before Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee.

EC contacted at least one of Schiff’s staff members prior to filing his complaint. Two of EC’s colleagues from the NSC were hired by Adam Schiff this year, one of whom, Sean Misko, was hired in August.

He was posted to the NSC in the White House’s West Wing in mid-2017 and “left amid concerns about negative leaks to the media. He has since returned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.”

Black American Political Strategy MUST Focus On Black DOS Interests, PERIOD

theintercept |  Dr. Touré Reed, professor of 20th Century U.S. and African American History at Illinois State University, observed that the presumption that black Americans aren’t equally or more invested in economic interventions as white Americans is “pregnant, of course, with class presumptions” which work well for the black and Latinx professional middle class — many of whom play a significant role in defining public narratives via their work in politics or media. Since “the principal beneficiaries of universal policies would be poor and working class people who would disproportionately be black and brown,” he told me, “dismissing such policies on the grounds that they aren’t addressing systemic racism is a sleight of hand of sorts.”

Intersectionality, the “buzzword” taken up so faithfully by mainstream Democrats in 2016, requires an acknowledgment that like race and sexual identity, class is a dimension that mediates one’s perspective. That means the hashtag #trustblackwomen shouldn’t collapse the interests of Oprah, a billionaire, with, well, anyone else’s. Similarly, not all blacks or latinos should be presumed to speak equally to the interests of poor and working class people of color. This is a truth easily internalized when Democrats consider figures like Ben Carson or Ted Cruz. It’s a more difficult reality to swallow when considering one of our own.

None of this is to say that in every scenario, race, gender, sexuality, and class are equal inputs. Affluent black athletes are still tackled by cops despite their wealth, and black Harvard professors are arrested trying to unlock their own front doors. But the fact that racism hurts even those with economic privilege is not “proof” that class doesn’t matter, as some race reductionists have claimed. It’s simply affirmation that racism matters too. 

Consider, for instance, my colleague Zaid Jilani’s review of comprehensive police shooting data in 2015, in which he found that 95 percent of police shootings had occurred in neighborhoods where the household income averaged below $100,000 a year. Remember that Philando Castile was pulled over, in part, because he was flagged for dozens of driving offenses described as “crimes of poverty” by local public defender Erik Sandvick. Failure to show proof of insurance, driving with a broken taillight — these are hardly patrician slip ups. If anything is privileged, it’s the fiction that there’s no difference between the abuses suffered by wealthy black athletes and working class blacks like Philando Castile. Race can increase your odds of being targeted and abused. Money can help you survive abuse and secure justice — something which sadly eluded Castile.

“There is a tendency to reduce issues that have quite a bit to do with the economic opportunities available to all Americans, African Americans among them, and in some instances overrepresented among them, to matters of race,” explained Dr. Reed, who is currently writing a book on the conservative implications of race reductionism. He pointed to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, as well as the mass incarceration crisis, as examples. “In both those instances, Flint and the criminal justice system, whites are 40 percent, or near 40 percent, of the victims,” he said. And that’s an awfully high number for collateral damage.” He went on: “There’s something systemic at play. But it can’t be reduced, be reducible, to race.”

Status Update On The CIA Democrats

First Posting on this March 13, 2018.

WSWS |  The Democratic Party has made a strategic decision to bypass candidates from its progressive wing and recruit former members of the military and intelligence agencies to compete with Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. The shift away from liberal politicians to center-right government agents and military personnel is part of a broader plan to rebuild the party so it better serves the interests of its core constituents, Wall Street, big business, and the foreign policy establishment. Democrat leaders want to eliminate left-leaning candidates who think the party should promote issues that are important to working people and replace them with career bureaucrats who will be more responsive to the needs of business. The ultimate objective of this organization-remake is to create a center-right superparty comprised almost entirely of trusted allies from the national security state who can be depended on to implement the regressive policies required by their wealthy contributors. 

The busiest primary day of the US congressional election season saw incumbent Democrats and Republicans winning renomination easily, while in contests for open congressional seats the Democratic Party continued its push to select first-time candidates drawn from the national-security apparatus.

On the ballot Tuesday were the nominations for 85 congressional seats—one-fifth of the US House of Representatives—together with five state governorships and five US Senate seats.

Of the five Senate seats, only one is thought competitive, in Montana, where incumbent two-term Democrat Jon Tester will face Republican State Auditor Matt Rosendale, who has the support of the national party, President Trump and most ultra-right groups. Trump carried Montana by a sizeable margin in 2016.

Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi won renomination and faces only a token Democratic opponent, while three Democratic incumbents, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Diane Feinstein of California, won their primaries Tuesday and are expected to win reelection easily.

Among the five governorships where nominations were decided Tuesday, Republicans are heavily favored in Alabama and South Dakota and Democrats in California and New Mexico, with only Iowa considered a somewhat competitive race. Republican Kim Reynolds, the lieutenant governor who succeeded Terry Branstad after Trump appointed him US ambassador to China, will face millionaire businessman Fred Hubbell, who defeated a Bernie Sanders-backed candidate, nurses’ union leader Cathy Glasson, to win the Democratic nomination.

The most significant results on Tuesday came in the congressional contests, particularly in the 20 or so seats that are either open due to a retirement or closely contested, based on past results.

Perhaps most revealing was the outcome in New Jersey, where the Democratic Party is seriously contesting all five Republican-held seats. The five Democratic candidates selected in Tuesday’s primary include four whose background lies in the national-security apparatus and a fifth, State Senator Jeff Van Drew, who is a fiscal and cultural conservative. Van Drew opposed gay marriage in the state legislature and has good relations with the National Rifle Association.

The CIA Democrats: Warsocialist Welfare Trash Flooding Midterm Elections...,

wsws |  An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.

If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.

Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the field for a favored “star” recruit.

A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, who worked as Iraq director for the National Security Council in the Obama White House and as a top aide to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. After her deep involvement in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, her areas of responsibility included drone warfare, “homeland defense” and cyber warfare.

Year Old Russian Article Outlines The Troll Factory "Indictment"

rbc.ru  |  The total budget for promotion in social networks was about $ 5 thousand per month, that is about $ 120 thousand for two years, follows from the internal statistics of the "factory", which is available to RBC magazine. These figures confirm the source of RBC inside the organization. Employees of the "factory" promoted posts from at least 40 communities: about half of the budget went to publications touching on racial issues, slightly less - with political bias.

The interlocutors of the magazine RBC argue: on Twitter, advertising was not bought, as it was not bought in Tumblr or Imgur. "We spent a little bit on the promotion of Twitter-accounts - wrote bots to gain weight, but this is a miserable expense," - clarifies the employee of the "factory". According to him, in the Facebook communities the bots were not used, because "it does not make sense, we needed live people", but RBC magazine could not verify this. The fact that repostili publications real users, not bots, also wrote The New York Times. Placing advertisements on Google platforms, interlocutors from the "factory" also deny, specifying only that "there were tests, but they did not receive continuations."

Approximately 10 million unique users from among US residents have seen at least one ad, created by structures associated with the "factory", cited statistics on Facebook. Savushkin is preferred to measure by coverage: in August 2016, the minimum was 15 million per week, in October 2016, the maximum bar was reached - 70 million hits per week, follows from the internal statistics of the "factory" received by RBC magazine in early 2017, th. Facebook in one of its applications pointed out that about 25% of advertisements from structures associated with the "factory" never appeared to anyone - because of their irrelevance to the audience.

The average CPM (the price for 1,000 impressions) in the US is $ 5-7, so the campaign coverage of 10 million people is not very much, you could do 30-40% more, says Sergei Efimov, director of customer services OMD Resolution . Moreover, the audience usually reacts to posts of a political type much better than the usual advertising of brands, which means that the CPM can be even lower - $ 2-3, the expert adds. Director General of Agency One Touch Anatoly Emelyanov says that the price of a subscriber in Facebook rises from $ 0.5 to 2, but with a good campaign creative "the cost of attraction reaches 1 cent for involvement."

However, a significant part of the advertising budget of the "factory" was not aimed at promoting the groups as such, but on scaling the experience with hot dogs.

Remote meeting

In May 2016, the famous American activist and one of the founders of the Occupy Wall Street movement Mika White received an email from a certain Jan Davis. He introduced himself as a freelance journalist of the BlackMattersUS community, dedicated to the problems of the black population, and asked for a telephone interview. The activist agreed, gave his number, but the conversation that took place eventually seemed strange to him. "The quality of the connection was poor, and the interviewer, in my opinion, was not a native speaker of the English language," an activist told the RBC magazine, which in 2014 Esquire magazine ranked among the "most influential people under 35".

Now you can read the interview with White only on the site BlackMattersUS - community pages in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram with a total number of subscribers more than 250 thousand are blocked (only Tumblr is available). Deactivated and the account of "Jan Davis" on Facebook. A correspondent of the RBC magazine sent him a letter to the same address from which he communicated with White, but the "freelance correspondent" did not open it (data from the Readnotify service). The @BlackMattersUS account on Twitter was registered to a phone number starting with +7. According to the source of RBC magazine, close to the "factory", the same people who worked on the night shift engaged in interaction with various American activists, responding to comments in groups.

Unlike most communities that were run by the "factory", BlackMattersUS positioned itself as a non-profit news portal with its own edition. Anyone could also support the fighters against racism by sending a donation through PayPal to a wallet tied to a post on Gmail with xtimwalters online. In the editorial office, in addition to "Jan Davis," there were six more people working on the site. A correspondent of the RBC magazine discovered the accounts of two more "employees" on Twitter: one of them is blocked, the other has not been updated since 2016.

BlackMattersUS, 44.2% of the audience who visits the site from the search engines (data from Similarweb), managed to collect a whole portfolio of interviews with famous fighters for the rights of blacks. In addition to White, the community representatives talked with the legendary member of the Black Panthers movement Erica Huggins, the mother of a black teenager Ramarli Graham, murdered by police in New York, Columbia University professor and cross rapper Tupac Shakur Jamal Joseph, as well as Ramone Africa, a member of the Philadelphia movement of black MOVE , one of the few survivors of the unprecedented local police raid in 1985 (with a helicopter law-enforcement officers dropped a bomb at the headquarters of the organization).

Communication with the characters did not end after the interview. The same White received from the "Jan Davis" several letters asking to support the BlackMattersUS shares - for example, flash mob in support of the colleagues of Ramona Africa, caught up in prison. The essence of the request was to publish photos and videos in social networks with the demand to release them.

CIA Roaches Scurrying Before That Bright Light Hits Them Too!!!

NYTimes |  After months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials.

The cash, delivered in a suitcase to a Berlin hotel room in September, was intended as the first installment of a $1 million payout, according to American officials, the Russian and communications reviewed by The New York Times. The theft of the secret hacking tools had been devastating to the N.S.A., and the agency was struggling to get a full inventory of what was missing.

Several American intelligence officials said they made clear that they did not want the Trump material from the Russian, who was suspected of having murky ties to Russian intelligence and to Eastern European cybercriminals. He claimed the information would link the president and his associates to Russia. Instead of providing the hacking tools, the Russian produced unverified and possibly fabricated information involving Mr. Trump and others, including bank records, emails and purported Russian intelligence data.

The United States intelligence officials said they cut off the deal because they were wary of being entangled in a Russian operation to create discord inside the American government. They were also fearful of political fallout in Washington if they were seen to be buying scurrilous information on the president.

American spies are not the only ones who have dealt with Russians claiming to have secrets to sell. Cody Shearer, an American political operative with ties to the Democratic Party, has been crisscrossing Eastern Europe for more than six months to secure the purported kompromat from a different Russian, said people familiar with the efforts, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging their relationship with him.

Reached by phone late last year, Mr. Shearer would say only that his work was “a big deal — you know what it is, and you shouldn’t be asking about it.” He then hung up.

Mr. Shearer’s efforts grew out of work he first began during the 2016 campaign, when he compiled a pair of reports that, like the dossier, also included talk of a video and Russian payoffs to Trump associates. It is not clear what, if anything, Mr. Shearer has been able to purchase.

Shut Down Gubmint and #ReleaseTheMemo

foxnews |  A four-page memo circulating in Congress that reveals alleged United States government surveillance abuses is being described by lawmakers as “shocking,” “troubling” and “alarming,” with one congressman likening the details to KGB activity in Russia.

Speaking with Fox News, the lawmakers said they could not yet discuss the contents of the memo they reviewed on Thursday after it was released to members by the House Intelligence Committee. But they say the memo should be immediately made public.

“It is so alarming the American people have to see this,” Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan said.

“It's troubling. It is shocking,” North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows said. “Part of me wishes that I didn't read it because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much.”

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz said he believed people could lose their jobs after the memo is released.

“I believe the consequence of its release will be major changes in people currently working at the FBI and the Department of Justice,” he said, referencing DOJ officials Rod Rosenstein and Bruce Ohr.

“You think about, ‘is this happening in America or is this the KGB?’ That's how alarming it is,” Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry said.

 

Rank, Dank, and Stank Swamp Gasses Billowing Out The DOJ...,

conservativetreehouse |   However, the ongoing Dossier story gets far more intriguing as it is now discovered that Bruce G Ohr’s wife, Nellie H. Ohr, actually worked for Fusion GPS and likely helped guide/script the Russian Dossier. (Link)

Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.

But wait, it doesn’t stop there… Mrs. Nellie Ohr was not only a Fusion GPS contracted employee, but she was also part of the CIA’s Open Source Works, in Washington DC (link)

Both Mr. and Mrs Ohr worked on a collaborative group project surrounding International Organized Crime. (pdf here) Page #30 Screen Shot Below

But wait, it gets even better.

 

Intersectionalism Suffocating On Its Own Fumes

theintercept |  Shortly after the 2016 election, Columbia University historian Mark Lilla published an op-ed in The New York Times lamenting that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.”

Lilla attacked “identity politics” as atomizing the American public and losing elections, contrasting it with a holistic variation of liberalism that powered the New Deal Coalition — Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which focused not so much on who individual Americans were, but what rights they all needed. The column went viral, sparking countless hot takes, and he quickly padded out the argument into enough words to call it a book, “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.” Let the hot takes resume.

The reaction to Lilla’s original piece from left and liberal writers was harsh. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lilla’s Columbia University colleague Katherine Franke compared his ideology to that of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s, arguing that “Duke is happy to own the white supremacy of his statements, while Lilla’s op-ed does the more nefarious background work of making white supremacy respectable.”

But while Lilla may be a white male professor in New York City, his concerns are hardly uncommon among those in left-liberal politics. For instance, former Democratic state representative LaDawn Jones — an African-American woman who chaired Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in Georgia — lamented earlier this year that her party’s Atlanta convention seemed to offer caucuses and councils for every racial and affinity group except white people. In the state of Georgia, less than 25 percent of white voters choose Democrats at the ballot box, meaning that white Democrats are indeed a minority group. Would the logic of identity liberalism then dictate that the party design messaging aimed directly at them? Traditionally, identity liberalism justifies itself by organizing around groups that have been historically oppressed, but when traditional majority in-groups become out-groups in certain organizations and societies, is there a need for special categorization and organizing for their inclusion as well?

These are the sort of questions Lilla tries to wrestle with in the short book released this month. “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics” is a breezy 165 pages that he uses as a short overview of contemporary American political history and what he believes are the shortcomings of modern American liberalism.

The book is at its best when it is reviewing the strengths of modern conservative thought and liberal shortcomings — when Lilla reviews the towering political rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, who reset American politics, to his laments of over-reaching identity sectarianism on American campuses — but comes up much weaker when suggesting an alternative way forward.

TheNewYorker |   Now into the arena comes a distinctly more conservative brand of liberal and Trump opponent, Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia, who, on November 18th, published an Op-Ed in the Times declaring, “One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.” His article, written while Clinton voters were still in a kind of disbelieving haze, outraged not a few readers of the paper with its blasts at “the fixation on diversity in our schools” and the “moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force.” Lilla is hardly indifferent to injustices against women, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and people of color, but he claims that too many liberals and leftists, indulging in a politics of “narcissism,” are “indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.”

Lilla, who has expanded that article into his new, brief book, “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics,” insists that his is the pragmatic view: that in order to secure progress for overlooked and oppressed peoples—in order to advance a liberal economic, environmental, and social agenda—political power must be won, which means that elections must be won. At the moment, the Democratic Party—from elections for the White House to state legislatures—is failing. The Democrats, he says, were once the party of the working class; now the Democrats are largely a loose coalition of educated coastal élites and minorities. Why is it now possible to drive across the country for thousands of miles without hitting a blue state or county? How did the Democrats lose a decisive number of Obama voters to someone like Donald Trump? Lilla believes that identity politics is a central part of the answer.

When I read Lilla’s book and then talked with him for The New Yorker Radio Hour, I found much to disagree with, not least his cutting dismissals of “social-justice warriors” or movements like Black Lives Matter, which he sees as a “textbook example of how not to build solidarity.” Lilla was once an editor at The Public Interest and a neoconservative on domestic issues, though not on foreign policy; Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan were his elders and allies. He still writes with marked ambivalence and irritation about the contemporary left, particularly as he sees it on university campuses. Beverly Gage, Adam Gopnik, Michelle Goldberg, and others have already delivered serious critiques of Lilla’s argument about identity politics.

RussiaGate Is Really HillaryGate

Forbes |  According to an insider account, the Clinton team, put together the Russia Gate narrative within 24 hours of her defeat. The Clinton account explained that Russian hacking and election meddling caused her unexpected loss. Her opponent, Donald Trump, was a puppet of Putin. Trump, they said, “encourages espionage against our people.” The scurrilous Trump dossier, prepared by a London opposition research firm, Orbis, and paid for by unidentified Democrat donors, formed a key part of the Clinton narrative: Trump’s sexual and business escapades in Russia had made him a hostage of the Kremlin, ready to do its bidding. That was Hillary's way to say that Trump is really not President of the United States—a siren call adopted by the Democratic party and media.

Hillary and the Orbis Dossier

The most under covered story of Russia Gate is the interconnection between the Clinton campaign, an unregistered foreign agent of Russia headquartered in DC (Fusion GPS), and the Christopher Steele Orbis dossier. This connection has raised the question of whether Kremlin prepared the dossier as part of a disinformation campaign to sow chaos in the US political system. If ordered and paid for by Hillary Clinton associates, Russia Gate is turned on its head as collusion between Clinton operatives (not Trump’s) and Russian intelligence. Russia Gate becomes Hillary Gate.

Neither the New York Times, Washington Post, nor CNN has covered this explosive story. Two op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal  (Holman Jenkins and David Satter). The possible Russian-intelligence origins of the Steele dossier have been raised only in conservative publications, such as in The Federalist and National Review.

The Fusion story has been known since Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a heavily-footnoted letter to the Justice Department on March 31, 2017 demanding for his Judiciary Committee all relevant documents on Fusion GPS, the company that managed the Steele dossier against then-candidate Donald Trump. Grassley writes to justify his demand for documents that: “The issue is of particular concern to the Committee given that when Fusion GPS reportedly was acting as an unregistered agent of Russian interests, it appears to have been simultaneously overseeing the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier of allegations of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.” (Emphasis added.)

Former FBI director, James Comey, refused to answer questions about Fusion and the Steele dossier in his May 3 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey responded to Lindsey Graham’s questions about Fusion GPS’s involvement “in preparing a dossier against Donald Trump that would be interfering in our election by the Russians?” with “I don’t want to say.” Perhaps he will be called on to answer in a forum where he cannot refuse to answer.

Eric Holder Prepping for 2020 by Defending the Negroe Replacement Program...,

yahoo |  “California is in so many ways a trendsetter, whether it is in pop culture or in politics,” Holder told Yahoo News. “That’s why it was such an attractive possibility for me to go to California and work with the legislators there in crafting their response to the Trump administration — because I think what California does gives courage to other states and other public officials in other parts of the country who might be thinking about principled opposition. It shows how that opposition can take shape.”

So far, the legal resistance has been largely improvised, with young liberal lawyers spontaneously descending upon airports in the wake of Trump’s Muslim travel ban and state attorneys general individually butting heads with Jeff Sessions, their federal counterpart.

Holder wants to change that.

“You look at this as kind of a continuum, where you oppose the policy as it is proposed, you hope that it doesn’t become law, but then, to the extent that it does, you use the courts to try to overturn it,” he explained. “As the different states and different public officials start to stand for the same things and take the same positions — as they start to use the same tactics — the opposition becomes that much more effective.”

For now, Holder will continue to set the stage in California. (Earlier this month, the state assembly decided not to renew his $25,000-a-month contract; the state Senate, however, plans to retain his services indefinitely.) And while immigration isn’t the only hot-button topic on Holder’s to-do list — de Leon is also soliciting his advice on climate change and health care — it’s the one that’s front-and-center right now, as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents ramp up noncriminal deportations and the courts consider whether Trump’s executive order on sanctuary cities is constitutional.

“We’re here with a very clear purpose: to underscore the undeniable truth that preserving and enhancing trust, real and genuine trust between law enforcement and the diverse communities they serve, is essential for the safety and well-being of all residents of this great state — indeed, this great nation,” Holder said at Monday’s event, alluding to the argument that undocumented immigrants will stop reporting crimes to the local cops if those same officers are also tasked with deporting them.

“California is leading,” Holder concluded. “California is doing the right thing. This is something that needs to be done nationwide.”

If Holder gets his way, he will spend the months and years ahead ensuring that’s exactly what happens.

Partisan Fraud Spotting: 1600 Words With No Mention of Organic Competency Development

NYPost |  Since the 1960s, black leaders have placed a heavy emphasis on gaining political power, and Barack Obama’s presidency represented the apex of those efforts. The assumption — rarely challenged — is that black political clout must come before black social and economic advancement. But as JASON L. RILEY argues in this excerpt from his new book, “False Black Power” (Templeton Press), political success has not been a major factor in the rise of racial and ethnic groups from poverty to prosperity.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was followed by large increases in black elected officials. In the Deep South, black officeholders grew from 100 in 1964 to 4,300 in 1978. By the early 1980s, major US cities with large black populations, such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia, had elected black mayors. Between 1970 and 2010, the number of black elected officials nationwide increased from fewer than 1,500 to more than 10,000.

Yet the socioeconomic progress that was supposed to follow in the wake of these political gains never materialized. During an era of growing black political influence, blacks as a group progressed at a slower rate than whites, and the black poor actually lost ground.

In a 1991 book, social scientist Gary Orfield and his co-author, journalist Carole Ashkinaze, assessed the progress of blacks in the 1970s and ’80s following the sharp increase in black officeholders. The thinking, then and now, was that the problems of the cities “were basically the result of the racism of white officials and that many could be solved by black mayors, school superintendents, policemen and teachers who were displacing white ones.” The expectation, they added, “was that black political and education leaders would be able to make large moves toward racial equity simply by devising policies and practices reflecting their understanding of the background and needs of black people.”

But the integration of these institutions proved to be insufficient. “Many blacks have reached positions of local power, such as mayor, county commission chairman or superintendent of schools, positions undreamed of 30 years ago,” they wrote. Their findings, however, showed that “these achievements do not necessarily produce success for blacks as a whole.” The empirical evidence, they said, “indicates that there may be little relationship between the success of local black leaders and the opportunities of typical black families.”  Fist tap Big Don.

You May Not Know It But This Man's a Spy - An Undercover Agent For the FBI...,

NationalReview | Jeff Sessions looked at the morning newspapers. Both the Times and the Post had the story. He turned on Morning Joe just in time to hear Mika Brzezinski speculate that his career as attorney general may be over.

 “Ну, дерьмо,” he sighed, as he pulled down the bottom of his cashmere sweater vest to eliminate any unwanted creases. He then calmly walked to his private Senate office and pulled a painting of some ducks and spaniels off the wall. He paused to look at the scene, as if for the first time. “Ridiculous, Americans,” he muttered to himself. “Bears. Men hunt medvedi,” he said, letting himself enjoy speaking Russian after all of these years.

EUTimes |  Need we remind each and every single one of you Demonrat schizophrenics that Jeff Sessions was a US SENATOR up until only a few days ago? He was not part of the Trump campaign. If the Demonrats manage to destroy Sessions as they did with Flynn then there will simply be no hope left.

Now top House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi demands US Attorney-General Jeff Sessions resign for “lying under oath” during his confirmation hearings. Sessions’ spokeswoman said he was speaking of Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia, not of his own activities. Ohh yeah everybody is a Russian spy according to those schizophrenics.

“Jeff Sessions lied under oath during his confirmation hearing before the Senate. Under penalty of perjury, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, ‘I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.’ We now know that statement is false,” mentally ill demonrat Pelosi wrote.

Unnamed Justice Department officials told the Washington Post on Wednesday that Sessions spoke to Russian Ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak twice last year, which would contradict statements Sessions made as US senator during Senate hearings for his confirmation to the Attorney General post.

Once You See The Mechanism Of Political Control, You Can't Unsee It

Tonight: Stephen read through James Comey's pre-written testimony, and found some pretty weird stuff. #LSSC pic.twitter.com/XUWcabcyul

— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) June 8, 2017

dailybeast |  Colbert relished imagining just how President Trump informed Comey that he “had not been involved with hookers in Russia.” As the host joked, “Comey replied, I understand Mr. President, but I just asked what you had for breakfast.”

On their unexpectedly private dinner, which took place a few weeks later, Colbert said, “Oh, c’mon, that’s the oldest trick in the book. You invite your FBI director over for a movie, saying it’s going to be a ‘group thing.’ When he shows up, it’s just the two of you. Can’t make Netflix word so, you know… so you obstruct justice.”

Trump’s “bombshell” at that particular meeting was telling Comey, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” In response, Comey says, “I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed.” “Basically, Comey treated Trump like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park,” Colbert said. “It makes sense, they both have the same sized hands.”

Among the “weird stuff” in Comey’s remarks, Colbert said, was the fact that Trump repeatedly referred to his Russia scandal as “the cloud” over his administration. “Mr. President, that’s not a cloud,” Colbert told Trump. “Meteorologists call that a shitstorm.”

Obamacare Will Die Because the Medical Industrial Lobby Wants To Kill It...,

mishtalk |  Despite accelerating progress towards fully autonomous cars and trucks, many people still do not accept the obvious fact it’s going to happen soon.

For example, in response to Death Spiral for Car Ownership? End of Fuel-Powered Cars by 2024? one reader suggested it will not happen because of capitalism.

Failure to Understand Capitalism

People who believe in this utopia do not understand capitalism. We own cars because consumers chose what they wanted and backed that up with their hard earned cash.

It is already far cheaper to ride the bus or carpool. Few choose that because sharing has its downsides. Fleets of driverless cars are really just a more modular bus service. Some will use this, but most will prefer ownership.

Ass Backwards

The above line of thinking is ass backwards.

Capitalism is precisely why driverless is coming. Corporations are betting their money and resources. The government is not resisting. The trucking industry will save hundreds of millions of dollars. People who believe driverless is not coming are the ones who do not understand capitalism!

Fully autonomous vehicles are not some pie in the sky prediction by Al Gore. Real companies (hundreds of them) all working on driverless. A bet against them is a foolish bet against capitalism.