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Wed. Oct.25, 2017
~All Gave Some~Some Gave
All~God Bless America
At Long Last, Donald Trump Previews Release of Classified JFK Files
by CHARLIE SPIERING
President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that he will release the classified CIA files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened,” he wrote on Twitter:
Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.
Trump contradicted reports that he would block the release of the information after several agencies expressed concern about its details.
The documents are scheduled for release on October 26.
The United States Of America No Longer Exists
Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty ImagesI posed a challenge on Twitter not long ago. It was this: Name one fundamental ideal shared by all or most Americans. Over 200 people attempted to come up with one. Sadly, none of the answers were convincing.
I've thought a lot about this over the past several days. I had time to stew over it as I was unemployed for two weeks. It came surging back to the forefront of my mind when I heard John McCain's speech on Monday decrying what he calls "spurious nationalism." He proclaimed: "We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil."
A land made of ideals? What ideals? Tell me exactly which ideals unite and define the United States in 2017? I don't want to hear about what ideals united us in 1776 or 1890 or during WW2. Those days are gone. Tell me about today. This moment. Give me one ideal — just one — that can be said to unite nearly all Americans right now. After all, if we are a country made of ideals, yet we share no common ideals, then we are not really a country. Remove the bricks from a house made of bricks and you're left with rubble. Remove the essence from something and you end up with nothing. So, what are our bricks? What is our essence?
Most of the people who attempted to answer my Twitter challenge suggested that our common ideal must be "freedom" or "equality." But we are only united by "freedom" and "equality" in the sense that we all like the words "freedom" and "equality." If you look at what we consider these words to mean, and how they ought to be applied, you find that my notion of freedom is no more similar to my neighbor's than it is to the average citizen of China or Iran. You won't find very many people on Earth who profess to despise freedom and equality in principle. You will find many who despise it in practice. And I think many in that category live in this country and work for our government.
I can easily disprove the freedom and equality thing right off the bat by pointing out that our wonderful nation under God legally exterminates a million children a year. And it does so with the approval of over half of its citizens. If your love of freedom and equality excludes babies, then you do not love freedom and equality. You love it about as much as Pol Pot loved it.
But it doesn't end there, of course. Our free and equal country also happens to be one where Christian business owners can be forced to participate in gay wedding ceremonies against their will. 60% of Americans agree that Christians ought not have the right of religious expression if such expression would hurt the feelings of a gay person. 60% of all Americans support some version of socialized medicine. Over half of all Americans think their fellow citizens should continue to be forced to fund the abortion industry. A majority believe businesses should be forced to provide contraception to their employees.
The situation gets even worse when you look at the younger generations. 40% of millennials think we ought to limit speech that offends minorities. Over half of adults in their twenties don't believe in free market capitalism. Over 30% are avowed socialists. 50% of millennials would give up their right to vote in order to have their student loans forgiven. The other half couldn't respond to the poll because they were busy throwing molotov cocktails at cop cars over a conservative speaker on a college campus.
I could go on. But you're sufficiently depressed at this point, I'm sure.
Get 100 random Americans into a room and you won't find even half who actually care about freedom. Or they care about a freedom that doesn't include the unborn, Christians, business owners, and taxpayers. Basically, they want freedom for lesbian atheist unemployed college students and few others.
I think the above examples pretty much wipe out "equality" as a uniting principle, but let's take a closer look. It seems that many of us oppose equality where it should exist and insist upon it where it cannot. While unborn children are not considered equal to born children, men in dresses pretending to be women are viewed as equal to women. Polls show that only 20% of Americans correctly identify "transgenderism" as a mental illness. 40% believe cross dressing men have the God given right to use the bathroom with my daughter. This is what millions of our fellow citizens mean when they extol the virtues of equality.
So, we do not share these principles. Not in any meaningful way. What do we share, then?
Americans used to be united by their common belief in a creator God from whom all rights originate. No longer. America today is home to a record number of atheists and a record number of empty or emptying churches. Even Americans who call themselves Christians — a record low number, of course — cannot come to an agreement about what "being a Christian" means. Many attend churches with blasphemous rainbow flags draped across them, where they hear about a God who loves homosexual marriage and doesn't care if we dismember babies. As it turns out, their love for their faith is about as authentic as their love for freedom.
What else do we have? We used to value family, but it's hard to say we have that in common in a country where the average family consists of three people, a record number of women have no kids at all, divorce is rampant, fatherless homes are endemic, record numbers of young people are putting off marriage or swearing it off completely, and we can't come to an agreement about what marriage means and how you define it anyway.
What else? Language? No, we haven't shared a common language in many decades. What's left? Nothing of substance: Physical proximity. Zip codes. And, I guess, our vices. We all love to buy things. We watch too much TV. Most of us are pretty excited for Stranger Things 2. Is that enough to make a country? I doubt it. That's enough for a Reddit community or an after school club, but not a nation, especially not one built upon ideals.
It appears that I'm not imagining things when I get the feeling that I no longer live in the same country as my fellow Americans. Many of them exist in a place where there is no God; there is no such thing as a man or woman; there is no truth; there is not objective morality; babies aren't people; marriage is a social construct; the whole point of life is to make money and go on nice vacations, and the government's job is to take care of our every need from cradle to grave.
I do not relate to a person like this. He is foreign to me. I share nothing at all with him. Ideals? We don't even share a universe.
But, hey, we both have iPhones. So that's something.
Now, this is the part where I'm supposed to offer an answer. People will be angry at what they've read, and if I don't wrap it up with a neat little bow, they'll take out their anger at the state of things on the guy who made the observation. "Why are you so negative?" "Why did you make me sad with all of these unhappy facts? I don't want to be sad!" "Don't just complain! Give us solutions!"
Well, I don't have solutions. Not easy or definite ones. Who has ever been able to "solve" a societal implosion while in the midst of it? The Romans couldn't manage it. Neither could the Mayans or the Mesopotamians. Could we be the first to make a U-turn and avert the cliff after we've already gone over it? Not as long as so many of us refuse to look reality in the face, clinging to silly slogans that nobody really believes. "Americans love freedom!" "Americans believe in equality!" You know that isn't true. I just spent 1,000 words debunking an argument that everyone knows is nonsense, even if they're too afraid to admit it.
Here's what I can say: If there's any chance at some kind of national revival, it's only going to happen with God's blessing. So, pray. And tend to your family. Hold your children close. That's the best way to save a country from collapse and the best way to shield your children from the falling debris if the collapse cannot be stopped. Beyond that, be vigilant. I think there are tough times ahead. Get ready. It wouldn't hurt to buy a gun.
If you believe everything is fine and all of the indicators I've cited here are really no big deal, good for you. I envy your delusion. I wish very much that I could live inside it. I'm afraid it won't protect you or your children, though. Best to emerge from the bubble, then, and look around. We are in trouble. We are not united. We are states in America, but we are not united states. We are not one people, we are not one country, anymore.
Steve Bannon’s already murky Middle East ties deepen
BY ANITA KUMAR AND BEN WIEDER McClatchy Washington Bureau
Shortly after Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon left the White House, a company with close ties to him was hired by the United Arab Emirates to launch a social media campaign against its Arab neighbor, Qatar.
It was part of a multimillion-dollar effort by several Middle Eastern nations to isolate Qatar that received a boost when Trump criticized the country that for years had been a critical regional ally.
The UAE is paying $330,000 to a firm with the same parent company as Cambridge Analytica, the business Trump employed to reach voters with hyper-targeted online messaging during the campaign, to blast Qatar on Facebook and Twitter, among other sites, according to federal records.
Bannon, who remains one of Trump’s closest advisers, has long had an interest in the region. He has huddled with UAE officials behind closed doors, visited the country as recently as last month and pushed for a group of Middle Eastern nations, including the UAE, in their bitter dispute with Qatar.
On Monday, Bannon is scheduled to speak at a day-long conference in Washington organized by the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank and paid for by multiple donors, entitled “Countering Violent Extremism: Qatar, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The speech follows Bannon’s September meeting in the UAE with its crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. The two weren’t strangers: Bannon, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and ousted National Security Adviser Michael Flynn met with the crown prince at Trump Tower during the presidential transition in December. That meeting triggered controversy, as the UAE hadn’t notified the outgoing Obama administration about the visit as is customary.
The UAE also helped broker a meeting in January between a Bannon friend, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin to try to establish a back-channel line of communication to Moscow for Trump just days before Trump’s inauguration, according to the Washington Post; Prince met with the Russian in the Seychelle islands off East Africa.
Prince lives in the UAE and had a multimillion dollar contract with that government to assemble a mercenary security force there. His firm also does security work in Africa, much of it for Chinese interests. But Bannon has encouraged Prince to move back to the U.S. and run for office, and in recent weeks, Prince has begun to publicly consider a primary challenge to Wyoming GOP Sen. John Barrasso.
The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt cut off all ties with Qatar in June, supposedly in response to its alleged support of terrorism and ties to Iran, and mounted a blockade against the nation. Trump abruptly began accusing Qatar of funding terrorism despite its importance as host to al Udeid, the largest American military base in the Middle East, home to nearly 10,000 troops.
THE NATION OF QATAR, UNFORTUNATELY, HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN A FUNDER OF TERRORISM AT A VERY HIGH LEVEL, AND IN THE WAKE OF THAT CONFERENCE, NATIONS CAME TOGETHER AND SPOKE TO ME ABOUT CONFRONTING QATAR OVER ITS BEHAVIOR
“The U.S. has a pretty substantial presence across the Middle East, but al Udeid is the most important,” said Mara Karlin, who worked at the Defense Department during the prior two administrations and is now a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Bannon, who through a spokesman declined to comment for this story, has said little publicly about Qatar. But Breitbart News, the far-right website he ran before going into the White House and where he is now once again ensconced, published more than 80 Qatar-related headlines since the blockade began, most of which were critical of the nation.
“Jihad-Friendly Qatar May Have Inspired Former Gitmo Detainees to Return to Terror,” declared a June 15 headline.
Another, 10 days later, read “Report: Qatari Ruling Family Importing Hezbollah Fighters for Protection.”
Bannon has said he is planning to start a global conference series through Breitbart. “We are in advance discussions about having Breitbart sponsor a major security conference in sub-Saharan Africa, the Persian Gulf, central Europe, and East Asia, in early to mid-2018,” he told Bloomberg recently.
Trump’s comments attacking Qatar this summer were at odds with what other administration officials were saying. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called for the Gulf countries to resolve the dispute. “We certainly would encourage the parties to sit down together and address these differences,” he said.
During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar - look!
“Many people felt blindsided because they were getting mixed messages,” said Marc Lynch, director of the project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University. “Trump’s tweets really undermined the administration.”
Tillerson is traveling to the Middle East, where he has planned stops in Saudi Arabia and Qatar to discuss the Gulf dispute with leaders from both countries.
H.E. Sheikh Saif bin Ahmed Al-Thani, director of the government communications office for Qatar, said his country — aided in part by an agreement with the U.S. — has done more to combat terrorism than any other nation in the region. He said there has been no shift in U.S. policy toward Qatar and declined to respond to questions about Bannon.
“While Qatar works openly and transparently with the United States and its allies to share information and fight terrorism wherever it exists, UAE spends its energy and resources hacking websites and planting fake news stories,” he said. “When that doesn’t work, they pay to spread disinformation about Qatar through advertising and social media. That is their choice, but it won’t change the facts.”
Representatives of the UAE and Saudi Arabia declined to comment.
The conflict – and Trump’s apparent willingness to encourage it – spurred a costly and coordinated, multi-faceted campaign. The situation began to escalate last May, when the UAE orchestrated the hacking of Qatari news and social media sites to plant incendiary quotes falsely attributed to Qatar’s emir.
In Washington, it set off a feeding frenzy in influence circles, with the Gulf states on both sides forking over more than $7 million in new contracts since June to influence-peddlers, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s law firm and the Podesta Group, co-founded by a longtime ally of Hillary Clinton, according to federal records.
Another firm, the Harbour Group was paid more than $2.5 million by the UAE for work between October 2016 and March 2017, according to the most recent filing available, and signed a contract with the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia 11 days before the blockade was announced paying the firm $80,000 per month. Harbour, which has represented the UAE for 15 years, declined to comment.
“Since very little is actually happening on the ground, they’re ramping up the propaganda,” Lynch said.
Those attending Monday’s conference in Washington will be given copies of a new documentary with a strong point of view about the Middle East conflict. “Qatar: A Dangerous Alliance,” supposedly has been watched by more than 10 million viewers online and is now available on Amazon.
The event features two other keynote speakers, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former CIA Director David Petraeus, both of whom worked in the Obama administration. They were hired to speak through Washington Speakers Bureau, where they are clients. Bannon is not listed as a client on the website and the company did not respond to a request for comment.
Panetta , who said in an interview that he was not aware Bannon was speaking at the event, called the administration’s rhetoric on Qatar a “knee-jerk reaction” to the blockade.
One of the donors is Elliott Broidy, a Los Angeles-based investment manager who serves as a deputy finance chair for the Republican National Committee, according to a person with knowledge of the arrangement who was not authorized to speak publicly. Broidy, who also sits on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, referred questions to the Hudson Institute, which did not return calls.
SCL Social Limited, which shares the same ownership and leadership as Cambridge Analytica, recently disclosed a $330,000 contract with the National Media Council of UAE for “a wide range of services specific to a global media campaign,” according to Foreign Agents of Registration Act records. It received $166,500 Sept. 20.
Bannon, who served as White House chief strategist until August, retained an ownership stake in Cambridge Analytica worth $1 million to $5 million when he entered the White House, according to his financial disclosure report. He had served as vice president and secretary for Cambridge Analytica and received a monthly consulting fee for his work before resigning his position there in August 2016. Bannon was supposed to sell the stake while he served in the administration as part of his ethics agreement and obtained a certificate of divestiture in April 2017 to defer taxes on the potential sale. However, there’s no indication that he actually sold the stake, as he never filed the transaction report that’s required after the purchase or sale of any asset.
Another of the company’s owners is Robert Mercer, the billionaire who spent millions of dollars helping Trump get elected. Cambridge Analytica didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The House Intelligence Committee, which is looking into whether Trump associates worked with Russia to meddle in the 2016 election, has questioned Cambridge Analytica, according to the Daily Beast.
SCL had a $75,000 budget specifically for pushing social media during the United National General Assembly that included ad buys exhorting a boycott of Qatar on Facebook, Twitter, Google AdWords, YouTube and Outbrain, an online advertiser. The ads primary target audience were non-governmental organizations, foreign diplomats and specific reporters, according to the records.
Example of one of the tweets promoted by SCL Social Limited to target NGOs, foreign diplomats and reporters attending the September United Nations General Assembly in New York.
But there were signs that the campaign may not have worked, at least not with the president.
Trump’s tone on Qatar softened in the weeks after Bannon left the White House, placing a greater emphasis on the need for a resolution to the conflict. At the U.N. in September, Trump met with Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, emphasizing the deep ties between the two countries while failing to respond to questions about his previous allegations.
“We've been friends a long time; people don't realize that,” Trump said. “And we are right now in a situation where we’re trying to solve a problem in the Middle East, and...I have a very strong feeling that it will be solved pretty quickly.”
REPORT: Trump Planning Huge Move For Seniors, This Will Change America Forever
William Widener
President Trump promised to make America great again, and that is what he is trying to do. This is especially evident in his latest tax reform plan.
According to Washington Free Beacon, the President’s tax reform plan, The Unified Framework, will be particularly helpful to struggling seniors. Economists who studied the plan stated, “All generations benefit from the policy. The old benefit slightly from higher rates of return on their investment, and the young from higher wages.”
Boston University economists who studied the tax framework determined that it could increase GDP as high as 5 percent, and wages as high as 7 percent. The tax plan would provide “small increases in lifetime welfare to current retirees and moderate ones to workers and future generations.”
The tax plan will enable better returns on retirement money, which is especially helpful to seniors who struggle to survive on meager social security and retirement. Economics estimated an increase in US capital stock of 12 or 20 percent, saying the reform is “projected to have significant positive macroeconomic effects” due to the reduced corporate tax rate that makes investment more attractive.
The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) also determined that, by reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent, average household income could increase “by, very conservatively, $4,000 annually.”
This is a drastic contrast to Former President Obama’s policies, which consistently hurt seniors — inflicting increases in taxes and fees, thus limiting their access to health care.
The Heritage Foundation noted that Obamacare contained “$716 billion in Medicare payment reductions from 2013 to 2022,” a change that is predicted to bankrupt an estimated 15 percent of “hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health agencies” by 2019. Such an impact would greatly inhibit seniors’ access to care.
Americans for Tax Reform explained that five of 20 tax increases mandated by Obamacare hurt seniors the most. Among those include taxes on medical devices, reduced medical deductions, increased penalties on both individual mandates and the high-cost Cadillac plan, and an increased dividends tax from 15 percent to 39.6 percent.
The studies on President Trump’s tax proposal haven’t calculated the effects of his proposed personal income tax cuts. Fortune noted that middle class incomes could “benefit substantially from lower tax rates and a near doubling of the standard deduction to $12,000 for individuals and $24,000 for families.” Small business owners that report business income on their personal returns will see their tax rate fall from 39.6 percent to 25 percent.
Kevin Hassett, head of the CEA, says there aren’t enough details to make projections of those tax cuts yet.
Despite the projected relief provided to seniors under President Trump’s tax plan, the media still finds ways to criticize it. Some, such as CBS, have claimed that the plan only benefits the rich, touting a poll in which 58 percent of Americans believe the tax plan “favors the wealthy.”
President Trump expressed confidence for getting his tax reform plan passed in Congress. In an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News, he said, “I think we’re going to get our taxes,” calling it the “biggest cuts ever in the history of this country” in terms of taxes.
However, President Trump has one big hurdle before his tax plan can reach Congress: the 2018 budget. Both chambers must pass a budget plan before advancing a tax plan, a move which will prove challenging as Democrats and anti-Trump GOP members have proven to be detrimental to the president’s plans.
G’ day…Ciao…Helen and Moe Lauzier
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