sicsempertyrannis | The average American has no idea how alarming is the news that former
CIA Director John Brennan reportedly created and staffed a CIA Task
Force in early 2016 that was named, Trump Task Force, and given the
mission of spying on and carrying out covert actions against the
campaign of candidate Donald Trump.
This was not a simple gathering of a small number of disgruntled
Democrats working at the CIA who got together like a book club to grouse
and complain about the brash real estate guy from New York. It was a
specially designed covert action to try to destroy Donald Trump.
A "Task Force" is a special bureaucratic creation that provides a
vehicle for bring case officers and analysts together, along with admin
support, for a limited term project. But it also can be expanded to
include personnel from other agencies, such as the FBI, DIA and NSA.
Task Forces have been used since the inception of the CIA in 1947.
Here's a recently declassified memo outlining the considerations in the
creation of a task force in 1958. The author, L.K. White, talks about
the need for a coordinating Headquarters element and an Operational unit
"in the field", i.e. deployed around the world.
A Task Force operates independent of the CIA "Mission Centers" (that's the jargon for the current CIA organization chart).
So what did John Brennan do? I am told by an knowledgeable source
that Brennan created a Trump Task Force in early 2016. It was an
invitation only Task Force. Specific case officers (i.e., men and women
who recruit and handle spies overseas), analysts and admin personnel
were recruited. Not everyone invited accepted the offer. But many did.
theintercept |MH: Let’s talk impeachment. The Democrats have launched an
impeachment inquiry into President Trump specifically around this
suggestion that he was pressuring a foreign country Ukraine to dig up
dirt on his political opponent and even withholding military aid until
they agreed to do so. Do you support the House Democrats’ decision to
finally start an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump?
NC: First notice something, they’re going after Trump not on
his major crimes but because he went after a leading Democrat. Does that
remind you of anything? Yes. Watergate. They didn’t go after Nixon on
his major crimes. They were off the record. It was because he had
attacked the Democratic party.
MH: Good point.
NC: So yes, they’ll protect themselves. Is it the right thing
to do? I mean, Trump is impeachable 100 times over. You know, he’s a
major crook. There’s no doubt about it. Is it politically wise? I
frankly doubt it. I think it’ll turn out pretty much like the Mueller
report, which, that I thought was also a political mistake. What’ll
happen is probably the House will impeach, goes to the Senate. The
Republican senators are utterly craven. They’re terrified of Trump’s
voting base. So they’ll vote to turn down the impeachment request. Trump
will come along, say I’m vindicated. Say it was the Deep State and the
treacherous Dems trying to overturn the election. Oh, vote for me.
MH: I had the filmmaker Michael Moore on the show last week,
and he thinks that eventually this evidence is going to pile up against
Trump that’s so damning — and we’ve already seen some of the testimony
from the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and others — that actually he
thinks Republican senators, some of them who you know, who need to save
their skins will join Senate Democrats to vote to remove Trump from
office. You don’t seem to buy that?
NC: I think you may find a handful who will find a way to
evade taking a position But if you just look at the record of the party —
I gave you a couple of examples, but we could go on — it’s very hard to
imagine any bit of principle emerging. It’s true that if some of them
thought they were really going to suffer for it politically or in other
ways, maybe they’d change, but that doesn’t seem too likely. I mean,
just take a look at Trump’s voting base, you know, there are pretty
regular polls and studies. They haven’t changed. They buy his line.
Here’s our hero. The one man in the world who’s willing to stand up for
us.
MH: Although whether it works or not in the Senate, it doesn’t
mean the House Democrats shouldn’t take a stand regardless of whether
Republican Senators convict. Can Trump be beaten at the ballot box next
November? Is there a Democratic candidate who you think can beat him or
more than one candidate?
NC: Well, here it’s very interesting to see what’s being done.
You may have seen a day or two ago in the New York Times was a big
article about a meeting of the Democratic centrists, the establishment,
the billionaires, the donors, you know, the mainstream political
figures. And it was about, their concern about just what you asked, is
there a Democrat who can defeat Trump? And they went through the
possible Democratic candidates and discussed their flaws, and then
asked, can we bring in someone else like Bloomberg or Michelle Obama?
Take a look at the leading candidates they listed: Warren, Biden and
Mayor Pete. Do you notice somebody missing?
MH: Senator Sanders doesn’t make the cut of these lists.
NC: There’s a very good reason for it. He has absolutely
infuriated the liberal establishment by committing a major crime. It’s
not his policies. His crime was to organize an ongoing political
movement that doesn’t just show up at the polls every four years and
push a button, but keeps working. That’s no good. The rabble is supposed
to stay home. Their job is to watch not to participate.
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?
truthdig | A huge national spotlight is now on Adam
Schiff, the member of Congress leading the impeachment inquiry. In his
tenth term, Schiff is really going places. But where is he coming from?
This year, as chair of the House
Intelligence Committee, he has relentlessly built a case against a
horrendous president. For progressives eager to see Donald Trump
impeached, Schiff is an enemy of their enemy. But whether he’s a friend
is another matter.
“Schiff’s record on foreign policy, civil
liberties, human rights and other key issues has often put him more in
line with Republicans than with liberal Democrats,” international
affairs scholar Stephen Zunes told me. “It is ironic, therefore, that
Trump and the Republicans are portraying him as some kind of
left-winger.”
For a backstory perspective on Schiff, I
contacted a progressive activist who has been closely tracking his
political career for two decades. Howie Klein, the publisher and editor
of DownWithTyranny.com, lives in Schiff’s congressional district in the
Los Angeles area. They met when Schiff was a state senator running for
Congress in 1990 against a Republican incumbent.
“I was all gung-ho and raised a lot of
money for him from my music industry colleagues,” Klein told me. “I
didn’t understand at the time that although he was a Democrat, he was a
conservative Democrat. There were a couple of hints during the campaign,
but it wasn’t until he was elected and joined the Blue Dogs and started
voting that I realized that we had traded a right-wing Republican for a
GOP-light Democrat.”
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.
technologyreview | Memes come off as a joke, but some people are starting to see them as the serious threat they are. In October 2016, a friend of mine learned
that one of his wedding photos had made its way into a post on a
right-wing message board. The picture had been doctored to look like an
ad for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and appeared to endorse the idea of
drafting women into the military. A mutual friend of ours found the
image first and sent him a message: “Ummm, I saw this on Reddit, did you
make this?”
This was the first
my friend had heard of it. He hadn’t agreed to the use of his image,
which was apparently taken from his online wedding album. But he also
felt there was nothing he could do to stop it.
So
rather than poke the trolls by complaining, he ignored it and went on
with his life. Most of his friends had a laugh at the fake ad, but I saw
a huge problem. As a researcher of media manipulation and
disinformation, I understood right away that my friend had become cannon
fodder in a “meme war”—the use of slogans, images, and video on social
media for political purposes, often employing disinformation and
half-truths.
While today we tend to think of memes as funny images online, Richard Dawkins coined the term back in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene,
where he described how culture is transmitted through generations. In
his definition, memes are “units of culture” spread through the
diffusion of ideas. Memes are particularly salient online because the
internet crystallizes them as artifacts of communication and accelerates
their distribution through subcultures.
Importantly, as memes are shared they shed
the context of their creation, along with their authorship. Unmoored
from the trappings of an author’s reputation or intention, they become
the collective property of the culture. As such, memes take on a life of
their own, and no one has to answer for transgressive or hateful ideas.
cjr |On May 1, The New York Times carried a story on its front page, “For Biden, a Ukraine Matter That Won’t Go Away,”
by Kenneth P. Vogel and Iuliia Mendel. It delved into the effort by
supporters of Donald Trump to connect Joe Biden, through his son Hunter,
to corruption in Ukraine. Within the Times,
the story has been treated as a big win, an early look at the matter
that has now led to an impeachment inquiry of Trump. Vogel has popped up
on a segment of the Times podcast The Daily, telling host Michael Barbaro his reporting was “prescient.” And he’s been on a recent episode of the Times’s TV show, The Weekly, where he and an image of that front-page headline both feature prominently on-screen.
But outside the paper, the response to the story has been far less enthusiastic: the piece has been labeled “controversial,” accused of getting its facts wrong, and of pushing a “Republican conspiracy theory” into the “mainstream.” Podcast host and former Obama White House staffer Dan Pfeiffer went so far as to accuse Vogel and the Times of having a “Watergate-style scoop about Trump … and fumbled the ball.” To which Vogel responded, “I literally broke the story upon which the impeachment inquiry is based.”
On October 9, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfeld, sent a letter to Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet: “The Times had an outsized hand in the spread of a baseless conspiracy theory advanced by Rudy Giuliani,” she wrote. “What was especially troubling about the Times
active participation in this smear campaign is that prior to its
reporting on the subject by Ken Vogel, this conspiracy had been
relegated to the likes of Breitbart, Russian propaganda, and another
conspiracy theorist regular Hannity guest John Solomon.”
(The piece also generated a separate controversy when Mendel, who worked as a freelance reporter in Ukraine for the Times, announced in June
that she had been hired as the spokesperson for President Volodymyr
Zelensky—who President Trump had pressured in the now infamous July 25
phone call. The Times wasn’t happy
to learn of the clear conflict of interest but said that the
international desk conducted a review of her work and found it “fair and
accurate.”)
What has made this such an alluring
media story is that the battle lines are so firmly drawn: Is the piece,
as Vogel has described it, a seminal journalistic work that opened the
gates to the entire Ukraine saga? Or is it, per its critics, clickbait
better suited to Breitbart than the Times?
theconservativetreehouse | After the 2018 mid-terms, and in
preparation for the “impeachment” strategy, House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Adam Schiff and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry
Nadler hired Lawfare group members to become House committee staff.
Chairman Schiff hired former SDNY U.S. Attorney Daniel Goldman (link), and Chairman Nadler hired Obama Administration lawyer Norm Eisen and criminal defense attorney Barry Berke (link). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi then hiredDouglas Letter as House General Counsel – all are within the Lawfare network.
In the last month many people have surmised that Pelosi and Schiff moved to utilize the Ukraine/NSC impeachment angle *after*
the Mueller angle for impeachment ran into trouble. However, CTH
research (widely criticized in 2018) doesn’t reflect the Whistle-blower
impeachment plan as an ‘add-on’. Instead, what we see is the use of the
HPSCI; and the use of embeds within National Security Council staff; by
design. The Schiff events of today were always part of a prior planned
design.
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.
sicsempertyrannis | I was chatting last night with a retired CIA colleague, a person well
connected to many folks still working at our former employer, and he
dropped a bombshell--he had learned that John Brennan set up a Trump
Task Force at CIA in early 2016.
This is definitely something Prosecutor John Durham should explore. A
"Task Force" normally is a short term creation comprised of operations
officers (i.e., guys and gals who carry out espionage activities
overseas) and intelligence analysts. The purpose of such a group is to
ensure all relevant intelligence capabilities are brought to bear on the
problem at hand.
While a "Task Force" can be a useful tool for tackling issues of
terrorism or drug trafficking, it is not appropriate or lawful for
collecting on a U.S. candidate for the Presidency. But Brennan did it,
so I'm told, and it had the blessing of the Director of National
Intelligence Jim Clapper.
The Task Force members were handpicked. The job was not posted.
Instead, people were specifically invited to join up. Not everyone
accepted the invitation, and that is now a problem for John Brennan. If
those folks are talking to Durham's folks then Brennan's days are
numbered.
Brennan reportedly took it upon himself to recruit foreign
intelligence organizations, such as MI-6, the Aussies, the Italians and
the Israelis, to help in spying on Trump and his campaign. He sold it as
a "counter-intelligence" mission citing his fear that Trump was a
Russian puppet. And these foreign services agreed to help. But they did
more than passive collection. They helped create and implement covert
actions, such as entrapping Michael Flynn as a foreign agent and
cultivating and ensnaring George Papadopoulos.
sicsempertyrannis | I do not believe in coincidence. I do not
believe that it is a mere coincidence that these three events occurred
late last night:
1. The investigation of the roots of the plot to destroy Donald Trump and his Presidency is now a criminal matter.
2. A letter from Inspector General
Horowitz announcing that his report on the FISA fraud would be out
shortly with no major redactions.
3. The Government caved to Honey Badger
Sidney Powell and allowed her to fully expose criminal conduct by
Michael Flynn's prosecutors.
What is going on? Two words. Bill Barr. The Attorney General has
pulled the trigger and altered the landscape in the Russiagate saga.
Having been granted full authority by the President to declassify
information, including intel from the CIA and the NSA, he has now acted
in a powerful, but low key way.
The announcement that this is now a criminal investigation means that
anyone, including FBI agents and CIA officers, who try to hold back
information or hide information will be vulnerable to obstruction of
justice charges. Criminal penalties attach.
npr | House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced in a letter to Democrats on
Monday that the House will vote to formalize the procedures in the
ongoing impeachment inquiry of President Trump.
The resolution
will outline the terms for public hearings, the disclosure of deposition
transcripts, procedures to transfer evidence to the House Judiciary
Committee and due process rights for Trump.
Senior Democratic aides said the resolution will be released on Wednesday, with a House vote on Thursday.
"We
are taking this step to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump
Administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony,
disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House
of Representatives," Pelosi wrote.
House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff confirmed that the resolution will establish a format for open hearings.
"The American people will hear firsthand about the President's misconduct," Schiff said in a statement.
politico | Democrats are accusing Attorney
General William Barr of using the Justice Department to do President
Donald Trump's political bidding.
Democratic criticism of the attorney general comes amid media reports
that a department probe into the FBI's investigation connections
between Russia and the Trump 2016 campaign has now become a criminal
investigation. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, accused Barr on Sunday of “weaponizing” the
Justice Department. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have called on Barr to
recuse himself from the department's investigation.
"Bill
Barr, on the president’s behalf, is weaponizing the Justice Department
to go after the president’s enemies,” Schiff said on ABC‘s “This Week
with George Stephanopoulos.” “He’s demonstrating once again that he is
merely a tool of the president, the president’s hand, not the
representative of the American people.”
Trump
has repeatedly called on Barr to investigate how the FBI began its
Russia probe. John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, is leading
that effort. The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General
has also been conducting an investigation into aspects of the FBI's
Russia probe. That report is expected to be released in the near future.
thefederalist | Last weekend, NBC News reported
that the Justice Department’s probe into the origins of the Russia
collusion investigation is now focusing on the CIA and the intelligence
community. NBC News soft-peddled this significant development by giving
former CIA Director John Brennan a platform (a pen?) to call the probe “bizarre,” and question “the legal basis for” the investigation. Politico soon joined the spin effort, branding the investigation Attorney General William Barr assigned to Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham “Trump’s vengeance.”
However, if the media reports are true, and Barr and Durham have turned
their focus to Brennan and the intelligence community, it is not a
matter of vengeance; it is a matter of connecting the dots in
congressional testimony and reports, leaks, and media spin, and facts
exposed during the three years of panting about supposed Russia
collusion. And it all started with Brennan.
That’s not how the story went, of course. The company story ran
that the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane surveillance of the Trump
campaign on July 31, 2016, after learning that a young Trump advisor,
George Papadopoulos, had bragged to an Australian diplomat, Alexander
Downer, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. This tip from
Downer, when coupled with WikiLeaks’s release of the hacked Democratic
National Committee emails and evidence of Russian efforts to influence
the 2016 presidential election, supposedly triggered the FBI’s decision
to target the Trump campaign.
thefederalist | Earlier this week, Michael Flynn’s star attorney, Sidney Powell,
filed under seal a brief in reply to federal prosecutors’ claims that
they have already given Flynn’s defense team all the evidence they are
required by law to provide. A minimally redacted copy of the reply brief has just been made public, and with it shocking details of the deep state’s plot to destroy Flynn.
While the briefing at issue concerns Powell’s motion to compel the government to hand over evidence required by Brady and
presiding Judge Emmett Sullivan’s standing order, Powell’s 37-page
brief pivots between showcasing the prosecution’s penchant for
withholding evidence and exposing significant new evidence the defense
team uncovered that establishes a concerted effort to entrap Flynn.
Along the way, Powell drops half-a-dozen problems with Flynn’s plea and
an equal number of justifications for outright dismissal of the criminal
charges against Flynn.
What is most striking, though, is the timeline Powell pieced together
from publicly reported text messages withheld from the defense team and
excerpts from documents still sealed from public view. The sequence
Powell lays out shows that a team of “high-ranking FBI officials
orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new president’s National
Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of
criminal activity—they already had tapes of all the relevant
conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn—but for the purpose
of trapping him into making statements they could allege as false.”
counterpunch | With Bernie Sanders the people’s choice
for winner of the Democratic primary in terms of political organizing
and campaign contributions, the powers-that-be in the DNC are putting out a call for establishment figures
like Hillary Clinton or Michael Bloomberg to join the race. Not being
‘reported’ by the establishment press is that these same kingmakers 1)
weighted the Democrat’s choice against Mr. Sander’s and towards Ms.
Clinton in 2016 and lost and 2) chose Joe Biden as their ‘heavyweight’
candidate for 2020.
The idea, popular on the American left, that winning against Donald
Trump is all that matters, runs up against the fact that these DNC
kingmakers have a less than stellar track record when it comes to
winning elections. Not only is Ms. Clinton one of the most enthusiastically despised people on the planet— more so than Donald Trump
even after his impeachment was announced, but Michael Bloomberg was a
Republican for the entirety of the wildly misguided American war against
Iraq. Why isn’t he running as a Republican?
The rationale for the reappearance of the ‘grownups’ from the DNC
appears to be that Joe Biden’s political prospects are sinking faster
than Bill Clinton’s libido in the presence of women over the age of consent.
That Mr. Biden’s failure comes as a surprise to DNC insiders
illustrates the political ineptitude mentioned above. In fact, this
practice of perpetually failing upward— of being wrong about absolutely
everything while maintaining leadership positions in quasi-public
institutions like the DNC, suggests that winning elections isn’t the
objective.
According to the political campaign funding website opensecrets.org,
Bernie Sanders is second only to Donald Trump in terms of campaign
contributions raised toward his 2020 presidential campaign. And given
the source of Mr. Sanders’ contributions— small donors, a.k.a. ’the
people,’ he is quite conspicuously the people’s choice for President
amongst Democrats. This leaves the rich, business executives and their
bourgeois aspirants— the richer 10% of the country, with a choice of Mr.
Trump or the Democratic Party equivalent.
The question of where Elizabeth Warren is in all this gets to the
issue of motives. Ms. Warren is both brighter and more competent in a
performative sense than Joe Biden. And she signaled early on that she will drop her entire political program
if doing so gets her the nod from donors and DNC insiders. This
willingness to ‘compromise’ sets her apart from Mr. Sanders. The
question ‘can she win,’ the seeming pragmatic question of the day, is
proved a farce through the first insider choice of Joe Biden, and then
with the call for more ‘heavyweight’ losers.
Gotta imagine AOC’s response here to Lawrence O’Donnell’s condescending question is rattling a few establishment cages. pic.twitter.com/OB3WHMnb7h
theconservativetreehouse | The reaction from CNN to news that U.S.
Attorney John Durham is now conducting a criminal investigation is
actually quite funny when contrast against their positions in 2017 and
2018. Jeffrey Toobin doesn’t have any idea about the background of
Joseph Mifsud, and his narration is a jumbled mess of dissonance:
“clearly no evidence” he proclaims.
When Weissman and Mueller were traveling
the world to investigate Trump-Russia it was an example of prudent and
thorough investigative approaches. However, Durham and Barr doing the
same thing is an example of the most horrific investigation imaginable.
When Mueller sent a subpoena it held a seriousness that could not be
ignored; however, if Durham sends a subpoena, everyone can just
shrug-it-off and “take the fifth”.
Accordingly, Weissmann & Mueller
opened investigations, the targets were automatically guilty and should
be alarmed. However, when Durham & Barr open investigations, it
means nothing to the targets and not even the possibility of guilt.
Meanwhile, former ODNI James Clapper’s muttering responses are, well,
also quite humorous.
tablet |A
very, very interesting interview — you can skip past the lengthy intro —
with an old school national security mandarin, Angelo Codevilla. Here
is the important nugget:
INTERVIEWER:
I have some close personal friends who are more on the left, and I said
to them: OK. Where’s the evidence?
Who did what when to whom? Where are the quids and where are the quos?
What’s going on here? And all they could say is, “Well, the
investigation is going on.”
Whose fault is this?
[CODEVILLA:]
The fault here is not of Democrats on the left. The fault here is of
Donald Trump and his friends who
have refused to enforce the most basic laws here. The most obvious one
is Section 798, (18 U.S. Code), the simple comment statute. Now anybody
in the intelligence business knows that this is the live wire of
security law. It is a strict liability statute.
It states that any revelation, regardless of circumstance or intent,
any revelation period, of anything having to do with U.S. communications
intelligence is punishable by the 10 and 10. Ten years in the slammer,
and $10,000 fine. Per count.
Now the
folks who went to The Washington Post and The New York Times in
November and December of 2016 and peddled
this story of the intelligence community’s conclusion that Trump and
the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, these people ipso facto
violated §798.
Considering
these matters are highly classified, and that the number of the people
involved is necessarily very small, identifying them
is child’s play. But no effort to do that has been made.
I’m not a lawyer, but Codevilla seems like an authoritative source (e.g., “directly involved in the drafting of the
original FISA law in 1978”).
Is an independent and non-partisan research organization. Its purpose
is to evaluate the clinical and economic value of prescription drugs,
medical tests, and health care and health care delivery innovations.
ICER conducts rigorous analyses of all clinical data with key
stakeholders to include patients, doctors, life science companies,
private insurers, and the government and translate the evidence into
policy decisions that lead to a more effective, efficient, and just
health care system.
As explained by their site information, ICER is known as the nation’s independent watchdog
on drug pricing. It’s drug assessment reports include a full analysis
of how well each new drug works and the resulting “clinical value,
quality of life, benefit to the health-care system and society” used to
establish a price. Using the drug assessment report, a “value-based
price benchmark” is established reflecting how each drug should be
priced addressing all four factors. Reports also evaluate the potential
short-term budget impact of new drugs to alert policymakers to
situations when short-term costs may strain health system budgets and
lead to restrictions on patient access. Ensuring objectivity in its
work, all ICER reports are produced with funding from non-profit
foundations and other sources that are free of conflicts of interest
from the life science industry or insurers.
What I have seen in the past is the ICER establishing pricing for new
drugs taking into consideration these factors; “the patient’s quality
of life, and the resulting benefits to the health-care system, and
society.” This is the first time I am seeing the ICER looking at price
increases and determining whether the value delivered substantiates a
price increase. By the numbers: Here are the drugs (and manufacturers)
highlighted in a recent ICER’s report, with the increase in net spending
attributable to each drug’s price increase, and citing the increases
could not be justified by the value delivered.
nakedcapitalism | Yves here. Reader Christopher J sent a contribution from Down Under,
with a long note about his treatment for his first major medical
treatment. I thought I would run it as a long-form example of how health
care works in other advanced economies. Admittedly, my personal data
points are stale, but when I was in Sydney (2002-2004), the caliber of
health care was on a par with the US, and even with my paying out of
pocket, the charges were about a third of what they would have been in
the US. A couple I knew who had the option of the wife giving childbirth
in New York City or Sydney chose Sydney because they deemed the care to
be better.
One of the big things that allows for America’s health care looting
to go well beyond what ought to have been its sell by date is our
provincialism.
You can read about the Australian scheme here;
the short version is citizens and permanent residents pay 2% of their
annual income over a threshold for Medicare; they can then either buy
private insurance or pay a surcharge for the balance of their coverage.
Christopher J lives in Cairns, which is a remote city of 150,000 near the Great Barrier Reef.
By Christopher J
I follow your blog most days and have been a part time commenter for
well over 10 years now, since I worked for the Bureau of Transport
Economics in Canberra.
Here is a story about my first medical emergency. I was born in the
UK in 1961 and now live in Cairns after working in the public sector for
30 plus years in the finance and treasury sectors. I currently work for
self as handyman and have a partner who also works.
Last September 2018, I gave up smoking cigarettes due to the expense.
Heavily taxed to ‘discourage use’, a 20 pack of Marlboros now costs
around A$30 – $20 US. And, I reckon my habit was costing around $750 a
month, or the cost of an annual river cruise in Europe! I’d given up
several times for months or even years, but this was the first time I’d
given up arising from anger at how the Federal Government was tackling
the problem with a huge tax on, mostly, working people.
After that first month, I withdrew the money I’d saved in cash and
bought myself a flash wallet to put it in. Smug I was at the pub around
my smoking friends. I found huge improvements in my health. For many
years sleeping on my side led to my arms going to sleep as my
circulation was constricted by all that smoke residue. After a month or
so of not smoking, my blood circulation improved and I found I could
sleep again on my side. I told partner we were going to extend all our
run circuits by about 800 m and we started to hike up Mount Whitfield,
and jog down, about an 8km round trip with an up and down of around
350m, with the trail along the ridge line. I was feeling very fit for my
age and was feeling generally positive about my health and well being.
At the end of May, or so, and out of the blue, I found a lump as I
was sitting on the bed one morning. This was a Monday about 4 months
ago. At the top of my right thigh and groiu area was a lump, not
painful, about the size of a small egg.’
counterpunch | Something very unusual happened on Thursday, Oct. 17. The New York
Times suddenly ran an article on its opinion page explaining how to cut
$300 billion from the $1-trillion military budget — enough, the article
explained, to fund Bernie Sanders’ proposed program for an expanded
Medicare program to cover all Americans without raising a dime in new
taxes.
The article, written by Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the Institute
for Policy Studies’ National Priorities Project, explained that by
shifting the US diplomatic and military strategy from one of
confrontation, endless wars, expansive overseas basing, and
unilateralism to one of diplomacy, a pull-back from foreign bases and
global deployments, with a concomitant reduction in the nation’s 2.4
million-person military could be accomplished with no threat to US
national security.
Koshgarian’s opinion article actually listed the cuts that could be made, attaching a dollar value to each one. Examples were:
* End the practice of supplemental appropriations for war funding,
much of which is actually used for more spending on other unintended
military programs and which have only led to unending wars that have
done nothing to make the US safer, for example in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Savings: $66 billion per year.
* End funding for other nations’ militaries. Savings $14 billion a year.
* Close foreign bases (Almost one-third of all uniformed US military
personnel serve abroad, most of them in non-crisis-zone locations or
combat zones). Savings: $90 billion
businessinmexico | If you’ve ever considered a move across the southern border, you may
wonder what healthcare in Mexico is like for expats. While in many ways,
the Mexican system is much friendlier than the U.S. healthcare system —
so much so that Americans cross the border to get healthcare — there
are still a lot of things you need to know.
What kind of healthcare system does Mexico have? Can you get
insurance there as a resident, or while doing business in Mexico? What
is the IMSS, or Seguro Popular, and how do those apply to you
as a non-citizen? When it comes to medical care, south of the border,
understanding your options is essential.
When many Americans think of Mexico, they think of a poverty-stricken
country that people are trying to escape. While that might be true in
some cases, primarily because of corruption, Mexico is a cosmopolitan
21st-century country and its healthcare system reflects that.
There are thousands of healthcare facilities throughout the country,
about one-third of which belong to the taxpayers. Most healthcare
providers in Mexico received at least part of their education in the
United States, Canada or Europe. Finding an English speaking doctor
should not be a problem.
kctv5 | As the officer in charge of COMBAT, Jackson County’s Drug Trafficking
Task Force Dan Cumming deals with a lot of dangerous people.
“About
100% of what we recover, if you follow it back far enough up the drug
train so to speak, comes from Mexico and is cartel related,” Cummings
said.
Just last week, COMBAT worked a case at the request of Independence police.
A tip led them to a Kansas City, Missouri street where a search warrant led to the seizure of tires filled with meth.
“My guess is that’s the way it was shipped from Mexico to Kansas City,” Cummings said.
Cartels get creative when smuggling drugs in customs and border protection has a few recent examples.
Fentanyl in a vehicle transmission, heroine in a gas tank, marijuana inside a car door and cocaine in clay figurines.
Cummings says he’s seeing more cartel related drug busts in Kansas City now than he has in his 35 plus years in law enforcement.
reuters | The mug shot-style photo of Ovidio Guzman that appeared as he was
apprehended oozed defiance. Chin jutting out, eyes trained on the
camera, the handsome youth bore a strong resemblance to his infamous
father, jailed drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
He had reason to be cocksure. In response to his capture in an
upscale neighborhood, hundreds of heavily-armed Sinaloa Cartel henchmen,
guns blazing, were pouring into Culiacan, briefly taking the modern
city of about a million people near Mexico’s Pacific coast hostage.
Within hours they had pried him loose from authorities.
It
was like nothing Mexico had seen before, a military-style operation
that outfoxed and outnumbered security forces, leaving the city shocked
and smoldering. The show of strength dashed hopes the cartel was
seriously weakened by the life sentence the elder Guzman received in the
United States this year.
Not only were the new generation of
Guzmans, collectively known as Los Chapitos, keeping alive their
family’s near-mythical outlaw reputation, they were doing it with a
brazenness akin to open warfare.
“We’re facing a new generation
of organized crime that doesn’t respect civilians,” Cristobal Castaneda,
head of Sinaloa state security, told Reuters after the attacks.
Four
surviving sons of El Chapo were already regulars in Culiacan’s
nightclubs and restaurants, despite U.S. indictments against them,
before last Thursday’s dramatic act of armed insurrection.
NEW: “We got a QUEER running for President... the white man has very few rights.” Watch @SevierCounty Commissioner Warren Hurst’s homophobic, bigoted outburst Monday, telling folks to “wake up”. Mayor’s office: 865-453-6136 Hurst: 865-453-8513 WVLT: https://t.co/GFwJLqehUfpic.twitter.com/bfXrAACfPh
sicsempertyrannis | Any fair reporter with half a brain would see these events as
pointing to a conspiracy. But not the liars at the New York Times. But
the Times does tip us off to the upcoming mad scramble for life boats.
It will it the FBI and DOJ against the DNI, the CIA and NSA. According
to the Times:
It is not clear how many people Mr.
Durham’s team has interviewed outside of the F.B.I. His investigators
have questioned officials in the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence but apparently have yet to interview C.I.A. personnel,
people familiar with the review said. Mr. Durham would probably want to
speak with Gina Haspel, the agency’s director, who ran its London
station when the Australians passed along the explosive information
about Russia’s offer of political dirt.
There is no abiding affection between the FBI and the CIA. They mix
like oil and water. In theory the FBI only traffics in "evidence." The
CIA deals primarily with well-sourced rumors. But the CIA will argue
they were offering their best judgement, not a factual conclusion.
Brennan and Clapper will insist they were not in a position to determine
the "truth" of what they were reporting. It is "intel" not evidence.
The Horowitz report will not deal with the CIA and NSA directly.
Horowitz can only point out that the FBI folks insisted that they were
relying on the intel community and had no reason not to trust them. This
is likely to get ugly and do not be surprised to see the intel folks
try to throw the FBI under the bus and vice versa. Grab the popcorn.
sicsempertyrannis | U.S. officials had been
concerned that Russian sources could be at risk of exposure as early as
the fall of 2016, when the Obama administration first confirmed that
Russia had stolen and publicly disclosed emails from the Democratic
National Committee and the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign
chairman, John Podesta.
In October 2016, the
Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence said in a joint statement that intelligence
agencies were “confident that the Russian Government directed” the
hacking campaign. . . .
In January 2017, the Obama administration
published a detailed assessment that unambiguously laid the blame on
the Kremlin, concluding that “Putin ordered an influence campaign” and
that Russia’s goal was to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process
and harm Clinton’s chances of winning.
“That’s a pretty remarkable intelligence
community product — much more specific than what you normally see,” one
U.S. official said. “It’s very expected that potential U.S. intelligence
assets in Russia would be under a higher level of scrutiny by their own
intelligence services.”
Sounds official. But there is no actual forensic or documentary
evidence (by that I mean actual corroborating intelligence reports) to
back up these claims by our oxymoronically christened intelligence
community.
Vladimir Putin ordered the hack? Where is the report? It is either in
a piece of intercepted electronics communication and/or in a report
derived from information provided by Mr. Smolenkov. Where is it? Why has
that not been shared in public? Don't have to worry about exposing the
source now. He is already in the open. What did he report? Answer--no
direct evidence.
Then there is the lie that the Russians hacked the DNC. They did not.
Bill Binney, a former Technical Director of the NSA, and I have written
on this subject previously (see here)
and there is no truth to this claim. Let me put it simply--if the DNC
had been hacked by the Russians using spearphising (this is claimed in
the Robert Mueller report) then the NSA would have collected those
messages and would be able to show they were transferred to the
Russians. That did not happen.
This kind of chaotic leaking about an old intel op is symptomatic of
panic. CIA is already officially denying key parts of the story. My
money is on John Brennan and Jim Clapper as the likely impetus for these
reports. They are hoping to paint Trump as a national security threat
and distract from the upcoming revelations from the DOJ Inspector
General report on the FISA warrants and, more threatening, the decisions
that Prosecutor John Durham will take in deciding to indict those who
attempted to launch a coup against Donald Trump, a legitimately elected
President of the United States.
asiatimes | Trump’s real liability isn’t impeachment. It’s China and the economy.
What the Trump administration has been doing so far, vis-Ã -vis China,
is an own goal — ein Eigentor [“an owner”].
Why is it an eigentor?
Because the effect of the tariffs on the US economy is at least as
bad as the effect of the tariffs on the Chinese economy. American export
orders are collapsing. We have the weakest industrial reading since
June of 2009. We are in a manufacturing recession, according to the
Federal Reserve. Factory output is contracting. Trump won in 2016 by
carrying key manufacturing states like Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Michigan, and
Wisconsin. This blunder could lose him the election. This is much more
dangerous than the impeachment masquerade. China’s also suffering, but
appears to be suffering less.
And the big difference is Xi Jinping
[China’s president] doesn’t have a presidential election in 2020 and
Trump does.
In fact, President Xi will never face an election. He is elected for life.
That is true. But all that can change if he fails to succeed.
You have compared the situation that the US is facing toward China to the siege and conquest of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258.
The Mongols, by themselves, did not have the capability to penetrate
the twelve-foot-thick walls of the city of Baghdad. But they hired a
thousand Chinese siege engineers. Within three weeks, the Chinese
mercenaries breached the walls, at which point the Mongol horsemen went
in and killed the entire population of Baghdad.
Who are today’s Chinese siege engineers who are breaching the American fortress?
Huawei very much is the spearhead, because in the Chinese model of
economic expansion and the development of world economic power,
broadband is the opener to everything else.
It’s a company with a lot of very talented people. Ten years ago – if
you asked people, “What Chinese products do you buy?” – you wouldn’t
mention a single brand name. But everyone now knows Huawei. They produce
the world’s best smartphones. They certainly dominate 5G internet. But
Huawei is not a Chinese company. It is an imperial company.
The Chinese empire is doing better than us because it’s absorbed the talent of a very large number of others.
oftwominds | If you're truly interested in finding solutions to humanity's pressing problems, then start helping us pry open the Overton Window.
The Overton Window describes the spectrum of concepts, policies and approaches that can be publicly discussed without being ridiculed or marginalized as "too radical," "unworkable," "crazy," etc. The narrower the Overton Window, the greater the impoverishment of public dialog and the fewer the solutions available.
Those holding power in a socio-economic-political system that's unraveling devote their remaining energy to closing the Overton Window so that only "approved" narratives and policies that support the status quo are "allowed" into the public sphere.
Everything outside this narrow band of status-quo-supportive narratives is immediately disparaged as "fake news," "Kremlin talking points," or other highly charged accusations designed to close the Overton Window--a process Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman called manufacturing consent: if no "outside" ideas are allowed, people accept the status quo as "all there is and all there can possibly be."
This narrow Overton Window benefits those in power who are "legally looting" the system.
There is another source of a narrow Overton Window: the cultural, social and political elites have no new ideas and so they cling to doing more of what's failed, relying on the past successes of now-failing strategies to cement their power.
Michael Grant described how this failure of imagination and devotion to the past leads inevitably to decline and collapse in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a short book I have been recommending since 2009:
NYTimes | Speaker Nancy Pelosi has traveled to
Jordan to meet with the Jordanian king for “vital” discussions about the
Turkish incursion into Syria and other regional challenges, amid uncertainty about whether an American-brokered cease-fire with Turkey in northern Syria was holding.
The
visit by senior United States officials came as sporadic clashes
continued on Sunday morning along the Turkish-Syrian border, where,
according to the Turkish Defense Ministry, a Turkish soldier was killed
by Kurdish fighters in the Syrian border town of Tel Abyad.
Confusion and continued shelling have marred the cease-fire deal
announced by Vice President Mike Pence last week, with both Turkey and
Kurdish leaders accusing each other of violating the truce.
Ms.
Pelosi, a California Democrat, led a nine-member bipartisan
congressional delegation to Jordan that included Representatives Adam
Schiff, Democrat of California; Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York;
and Mac Thornberry, Republican of Texas. The group met with King
Abdullah II of Jordan on Saturday evening.
tomluongo | Tulsi Gabbard has stones. She has the kind of stones born of a life dedicated to the cause of serving others.
She is the direct opposite of Hillary Clinton, for whom all causes serve herself and her enormous narcissism and pathology.
So seeing Gabbard go directly after Hillary Clinton after her debate
performance the other evening where she explicitly called out both the New York Times and CNN (the hosts of the debate) for the hit jobs on her puts to rest any idea she’s someone else’s stalking horse.
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a ...
A Foundation of Joy
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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 ...
