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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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In recent decades, both the moral injury of the Iraq War and the turbulent state of public discourse has shaped an anti-American narrative strongly held by a minority of Americans themselves. By “anti-American,” I don’t just mean opposition to contentious aspects of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. I am talking about actual oikophobia, aversion to one’s own homeland, which manifests on both the far left and the far right.

People as diverse as Tucker Carlson and Noam Chomsky have embraced this twisted narrative. After Iraq, their logic goes, and after decades of growing political division, the United States can do no right. This is why the United States shouldn’t aid Ukraine, they argue—we are failing as a country and have no authority to intervene. Whatever other countries might be doing, the United States is doing worse.

It’s gotten to the point that U.S. President Joe Biden’s bold surprise visit to an embattled Kyiv earlier this week was met with such howls of consternation at home that I got the impression that some of our extremists would outright cheer if Russia had, in the words of its own propagandists, tried to “whack Biden” in Ukraine.

There is a defeatism in the words and actions of these U.S. supporters of foreign dictators. They believe there is no hope for the United States. No matter how much they may hem and haw, the logical conclusion of this narrative is: “Americans should give up and let people like Russian President Vladimir Putin run the world.”

“Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light,” the Canadian author Margaret Atwood wrote in The Blind Assassin, an extraordinary book published a year before the events of 9/11. As the decade wore on and I became a journalist who worked in a number of countries, I kept coming back to this line. They are not an absolution, but they are a practical way of thinking about the world: There are no utopias.

The call to give up, simply because we are not a utopia, plays on fears about our global standing after decades of the war on terror. Consider Seymour Hersh. As an already-seasoned and celebrated investigative journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, Hersh followed up by reporting on the inhumane torture at Abu Ghraib prison.

Yet years later, Hersh has devolved into a writer who will carry water for a number of war-crime enthusiasts—as long as they are not American. Now, he is an apologist for the brutal regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Most recently, he has been celebrated by Russian war propagandists for alleging that the United States blew up the Nord Stream pipelines. It’s an explosive allegation – based on a single anonymous source. . Not to mention the fact that when one turns to open-source intelligence, glaring holes emerge in Hersh’s detailed narrative.

I understand why some people have been electrified by Hersh’s recent writing, even if it’s bad. Today, the most committed Americans are internationalists, but careful ones—as a 2021 survey by the Eurasia Group Foundation points out, the majority of Americans want the United States to have a greater international role, but not one in which Washington commits our troops at the drop of a hat. Americans are rightfully wary about interventionism, and Hersh’s allegations play into that wariness.

Yet being careful is not the same as projecting our fears and doubts onto the rest of the world. Americans have baggage as a nation—as every nation does—but forcing others to carry it is immature and self-indulgent.

When I was a young person during the George W. Bush years, for example, I began to balk at manipulative and melodramatic rhetoric on freedom, how it cheapened the very idea. Does this give me the right to laugh at Ukrainians who are dying in the thousands because they want to be free of a murderous dictator next door? No, that would be selfish and cowardly.

The devastation of 9/11, the confusion and pain of the wars that followed, the hollowing of our institutions, the increase in bitter divisions—all of these things are real, part of the scar tissue that grows on society. But Americans have choices about how to see those scars and what to do about them.

It’s not my intention to diminish the brutality of some of the United States’ most hotly debated foreign wars, from the Philippines to Iraq. What I do believe is that you can’t effectively reckon with the past if you don’t believe in the future. People who implicitly argue that the failures of Iraq justify a lack of response to Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine have stopped believing in the future. If you rightly think that Abu Ghraib was horrible, you should have something to say about the countless Abu Ghraibs that Russia has created, not turn away and shrug.

Americans should engage with the world, not turn away from it in a spasm of self-hatred. After decades of costly interventionism, the United States is now being practical, using a small fraction of its defense budget to degrade and destroy a significant fraction of Russia’s war machine without putting U.S. troops on the ground. Even a cursory look at Russian propaganda will tell you that this war machine had plans even bigger than taking Ukraine and that this spending is justified in light of the threat Russian fascism has posed. It’s not just 40 million Ukrainians whose lives are on the line here—though they should be enough.

That Americans are tired of war is understandable. In fact, Russians gambled on that in the beginning. Americans proved them wrong. We can, and should, continue to prove them wrong. As a nation, we are greater than our fears.

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newstfionline · 3 months ago

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Monday, August 19, 2024

Deploying on U.S. Soil: How Trump Would Use Soldiers Against Riots, Crime and Migrants (NYT) During the turbulent summer of 2020, President Donald J. Trump raged at his military and legal advisers, calling them “losers” for objecting to his idea of using federal troops to suppress outbreaks of violence during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd. It wasn’t the only time Mr. Trump was talked out of using the military for domestic law enforcement—a practice that would carry profound implications for civil liberties and for the traditional constraints on federal power. He repeatedly raised the idea of using troops to secure border states, and even proposed shooting both violent protesters and undocumented migrants in the legs, former aides have said. In his first term in office, Mr. Trump never realized his expansive vision of using troops to enforce the law on U.S. soil. But as he has sought a return to power, he has made clear that he intends to use the military for a range of domestic law enforcement purposes, including patrolling the border, suppressing protests that he deems to have turned into riots and even fighting crime in big cities run by Democrats.

Venezuelans in Caracas and across the world demonstrate to defend opposition’s victory claim (AP) Venezuelans across the world—some with flags and other patriotic paraphernalia—responded to a call from their country’s political opposition Saturday and took to the streets to defend the faction’s claim to victory over President Nicolás Maduro in last month’s disputed presidential election. The demonstrations in Tokyo, Sydney, Mexico City and several other cities were an effort by the main opposition coalition to make visible what they insist is the real outcome of the election. They also called on governments to throw their support behind candidate Edmundo González and express support to Venezuelans who are fearful in their home country of speaking against Maduro and his allies during a brutal repression campaign.

Austria battles flooding after record downpours (Reuters) Heavy rains lashed Alpine regions of Austria and left parts of Vienna under water at the weekend, causing severe damage in parts of the country and disrupting road and rail transport, authorities and local media said. Fast-moving torrents of muddy water swept cars through the ski resort of St. Anton, in western Austria, on Friday, footage posted on social media showed. Meanwhile record rainfall hit parts of Vienna in the east of the country on Saturday, state broadcaster ORF said. A large proportion of Vienna's average summer rainfall hit on Saturday in just one hour, according to weather data firm UBIMET.

Polish leader urges Nord Stream patrons to ‘keep quiet’ as pipeline mystery returns to spotlight (AP) Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Saturday reacted to reports that revived questions about who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022, saying the initiators of the gas pipeline project should “apologize and keep quiet.” That comment came after one of his deputies denied a claim that Warsaw was partly responsible for its damage. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Ukrainian authorities were responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in September 2022, a dramatic act of sabotage that cut Germany off from a key source of energy and worsened an energy crisis in Europe. Germany was a partner with Russia in the pipeline project. Poland has long said its own security interests have been harmed by Nord Stream. “To all the initiators and patrons of Nord Stream 1 and 2. The only thing you should do today about it is apologise and keep quiet,” Tusk wrote on the social media portal X Saturday. Tusk appeared to be reacting specifically to a claim by a former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, BND, August Hanning, who told the German daily Die Welt that the attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines must have had Poland’s support. Hanning said Germany should consider seeking compensation from Poland and Ukraine.

Russia readies for “decades” under Western sanctions (Reuters) Economic sanctions imposed by the West on Russia will remain in place for decades, even if there is a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, a senior Russian foreign ministry official said on Friday. Russia became the most sanctioned country by the West after its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, surpassing Iran and North Korea. Despite the pressure, Russia’s economy grew by 4.7% in the first half of this year. A Russian official said sanctions had some benefits, forcing Russia to restructure its economy and produce more value-added goods that were previously imported from Western countries.

India’s doctors strike in protest at rape and murder of colleague (Reuters) Hospitals and clinics across India turned away patients except for emergency cases on Saturday as medical professionals staged a 24-hour shutdown in protest over the rape and murder of a doctor this month in the eastern city of Kolkata. More than one million doctors were expected to join the strike, paralysing medical services across the world’s most populous nation. Hospitals said faculty staff from medical colleges had been pressed into service for emergency cases. The walk-out was the latest action in response to the killing of a 31-year old trainee doctor last week inside the medical college in Kolkata where she worked. The crime has triggered nationwide protests among medical workers and a public outpouring of anger over violence against women reminiscent of what followed the notorious gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a bus in New Delhi in 2012.

Inflation has come for one of Japan’s most beloved cheap eats: Ramen (Washington Post) Ramen is an affordable comfort dish in Japan, where a bowl of warm noodles in hearty broth rarely costs more than 1,000 yen, or about $6.80. It’s a quick and reliable meal during a work lunch break, for teenagers hungry after school and salarymen taking a late train home. But as Japan experiences inflation after decades of falling or stagnant prices, one of the country’s favorite cheap meals is taking a hit. Ramen shops are closing at a record pace this year, as owners face the dilemma of raising their prices beyond the “1,000-yen wall” to cope with rising costs or shutting down. As of July, 49 ramen shops filed for bankruptcy, on pace to set a record for most closures in a single year, according to Teikoku Databank, a corporate research company based in Tokyo. The cost of ingredients, labor and electricity making ramen has increased by 10 percent over three years, the company found.

Doubting America’s ‘Nuclear Umbrella,’ Some South Koreans Want Their Own (NYT) Ever since the Korean War was halted in an uneasy truce in 1953, South Koreans have lived under an American promise to defend their country, if necessary, with nuclear weapons. President Biden emphatically reiterated that commitment last year, vowing that any nuclear attack by North Korea would lead to the destruction of its government. But decades of American assurances have failed to deter North Korea from building a nuclear arsenal and then expanding it. Led by Kim Jong-un, North Korea has also become more provocative, testing missiles powerful enough to reach the United States. And it has rattled South Korea by reviving a Cold War-era defense agreement with Russia, another nuclear-armed state. The South has long considered it a taboo to pursue atomic weapons in defiance of Washington’s nonproliferation policy. But jitters about security here have been intensified by the possible re-election of former President Donald J. Trump, whose commitment to the alliance between Washington and Seoul appears to be shaky at best. Now, a growing majority of South Koreans say their country needs its own nuclear weapons instead of relying on the United States for protection.

Israeli strikes in Gaza and Lebanon kill at least 25, officials say (Washington Post) Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon killed at least 25 civilians Saturday, according to Lebanese and Palestinian health authorities, as the United States and allies were racing to conclude delicate cease-fire negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The Gaza strike early Saturday in the town of Zuweida killed at least 15 members of the Al-Ajlah family, according to a relative of the family. A spokesman for the Gaza civil defense said at least 17 members of the family had been killed. In southern Lebanon, a strike on what local officials said was a metal warehouse killed 10 people, including a Syrian woman and her two children, the health ministry said.

‘There Is No Childhood in Gaza’ (NYT) The war in Gaza had barely begun when 9-year-old Khaled Joudeh suffered an unimaginable loss. His mother, father, older brother and baby sister, along with dozens of other relatives, were all killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home. In the months that followed, Khaled tried to be brave, his uncle, Mohammad Faris, recalled. He would comfort his younger brother Tamer, who, like Khaled, had survived the Oct. 22 strike that killed their family. But Tamer, 7, was left badly injured with a broken back and a broken leg, and was in constant pain. “He would always quiet his brother when he cried,” Mr. Faris told The New York Times in a recent phone interview. “He would tell him: ‘Mama and Baba are in heaven. Mama and Baba would be sad if they knew we were crying because of them.’” At night, when the unrelenting Israeli airstrikes on Gaza would start up again, Khaled would wake up shaking and screaming himself, sometimes running to his uncle to seek comfort. It was a short and terrifying existence for the young brothers that ended when another airstrike hit the family home where they were sheltering on Jan. 9, killing Khaled, Tamer, their 2-year-old cousin, Nada, and three other relatives, according to two family members. “There is no childhood in Gaza,” Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA, wrote on social media last month.

The trash in Mali’s capital is piling up. Donkey carts are coming to help (AP) When handling the garbage of a city of over 3 million people and equipped with little more than a face mask and gloves, it helps to have a sense of humor. Yacouba Diallo decided to name the two donkeys that pull his cart after his cousins, Keita and Kanté. Hauling garbage in Mali’s capital, Bamako, can be otherwise grim. The city more than doubled its population in recent years and struggles to manage its waste. Piles of garbage dominate some streets. Residents are turning to donkey carts like Diallo’s for trash pickup. The carts can weave in and out of vehicle traffic and reach more places than trucks can, especially on bad roads. Diallo said he can make up to $166 a month. That kind of money is attractive to youth who come from Mali’s rural areas seeking employment in the West African nation with high unemployment.

#headlines #news

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arpov-blog-blog · 1 year ago

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..."I did not come up with the name,” Biden noted. But he would now embrace it to tout what the White House sees as significant economic achievements and a new vision of economic policy for the country.

And this is where Biden departed from his old ticket mate Obama. He did, also like Obama, denounce the old supply-side economics that have dominated American policy-making since Ronald Reagan put them in place in 1981. But then Biden explained how his policies actually mark a break with this economic model — and while he didn’t say it, how they break with the policies of both Obama and Bill Clinton.

“Trickle-down failed the middle class, it failed America,” Biden said. “It blew up the deficit. It weakened our infrastructure and stripped the dignity, pride and hope out of communities.”

Bidenomics stands on three legs, Biden explained. The first is a reinvigoration of public investment in domestic industry, research and development and infrastructure. Second, the empowerment of workers by protecting and expanding labor unions. And, third, increasing competition through antitrust enforcement and policy.

These are all breaks from the economic consensus that has dominated within both political parties, from Reagan through Clinton up to Donald Trump. That consensus favored private investment directed by a global financial system, not governments; free trade; workforces unburdened by labor unions (to best advantage capital); and mergers and acquisitions favoring monopolization.

Trump first cracked that consensus by jettisoning the GOP’s embrace of free trade in 2016. Biden, who has kept Trump’s trade policy largely in place, looks to crack it further.

In a key part of his speech, Biden touted the public investment his administration has undertaken in legislation passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress in his first two years, including the CHIPS and Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, and the Inflation Reduction Act. These included investments in building new manufacturing facilities, providing broadband internet access, removing lead water pipes from schools and homes, upgrading power grids, and on, and on.

Beyond the laundry list, Biden made a notable argument aimed at the heart of the old economic consensus.

“Under trickle-down economic theory was that public investment would discourage private investment. Give me a break!” Biden said. “Public investment declined here at home. Industries that we invented started to move overseas like semiconductors. ... Over time, we went from producing 40% of those chips to producing 10%. Not anymore! Bidenomics means that industries of the future are going to grow right here at home.”

This is a far cry from the opinion of his Democratic predecessors that economic globalization powered by private markets was like a force of nature that could not be altered or resisted.

Biden administration officials have been emphasizing this as not a one-off, but a shift in economic policy in a series of high-profile speeches in recent months.

In April, national security adviser Jake Sullivan gave a speech at the Brookings Institution outlining the connection between foreign policy and the new economic thinking. In that speech, Sullivan blamed free-market ideology for gutting America’s manufacturing base, lowering wages and harming security.

“There was one assumption at the heart of all of this policy: that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently — no matter what our competitors did, no matter how big our shared challenges grew, and no matter how many guardrails we took down,” Sullivan said.

Instead, the Biden administration would change tack to pursue “targeted public investments ... to lay a foundation for long-term growth.”

“This is about crowding in private investment — not replacing it,” Sullivan said. “It’s about making long-term investments in sectors vital to our national well-being — not picking winners and losers.”

Similarly, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai criticized the old free trade consensus and announced a new direction aimed at helping small business and workers instead of “the bigs” in a major speech on June 15 at the National Press Club.

“Trusting markets to allocate capital efficiently ... We thought a rising tide would lift all boats,” Tai said. But, in doing so, she added, “we did not include guardrails to ensure that it would be the case.” This led, she said, to a “race to the bottom, where exploitation is rewarded and high standards are abandoned in order to compete and survive.”

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secondhand-trash · 5 years ago

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I Take Thee

@shinsoubowl Week Day 1 (Prompt: Promise+”Thank you for everything.”)

A/N: Its Shinsoubowl Week yeyeye catch me having dark circles as big as our boy’s by the end of the week lol

Pairing: Shinsou Hitoshi x reader

Description: You remembered the promises you made to each other in your vows as you waited for your husband to come home.

Word count: 1418

Playlist:

Lullaby//Simi

Whistle for the Choir//The Fratellis

Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby//Cigarettes After Sex

I take thee to be my lawfully wedded husband,

It was a quiet night with nothing but your soft hums and the sound of water bubbling up in the kitchen as you waited for the kettle to bring to a boil. You had just moved into this apartment and everything in the kitchen was brand new, shining without a bit of dust and the signs of being used on it.

You could see your own reflection on the smooth surface of the kettle. The metal was silvery and shiny, very much so like the thin band on your finger. You were always so hyper aware of the ring on your finger ever since you started having an actual reason so keep it on all the time. There were times when you found yourself unconsciously rubbing it with your thumb while you tried to concentrate on something else. Somehow, feeling the metal that grew warm from the heat of your hand gave you a sense of comfort.

You lifted your hand and turn it around to see how the light shined on the ring, reflecting off of the silver band and the small piece of stone embedded into it in the most mesmerizing way.

...to have and to hold,

You let out a soft yelp as you felt the strong arms wrapping on your waist tightly and reflectively pulled back your left arm that was extended towards the light mere seconds ago.

You smiled when you heard the tired voice of your husband. “I’m back.”

Husband. That word still felt so foreign when it rolled off your tongue and it never failed to bring that fuzzy feeling to your chest.

“Welcome home.”

You smiled as you felt Hitoshi buried his head into the crook of your neck and you tilted your head slightly to the side to give him more space. You could feel the vibration on your skin as he let out a content hum and tightened his hold on your waist. You lifted your left hand to give soothing rubs to his neck while the other squeezed his hand ever so lightly.

“Rough day?” you asked, your thumb smoothing over the back of his hand in small circles.

“Yeah.” his head never left your neck as he speak, his voice muffled by your shoulder.

...from this day onward,

People told you to make the most out of your ‘honeymoon phase’ because after a year or two, the spark would be gone and everything you used to enjoy about marriage would soon get tiring. Whenever you heard that, you would only give a polite nod and smile. You couldn’t quite agree with what they said. After all, what’s so wrong about domesticity? Just because things started to fall into routine didn’t mean that it was not a wonderful life to live with someone you love.

Or perhaps it was the newly-wedded bliss clouding your rationality? You weren’t sure but at least for now, being in the kitchen in your love’s embrace seemed to be quite enough.

...for better, for worse,

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t show you enough love.”

“Oh?” you raised a brow, still staring at the kettle. From its shiny surface, you saw the reflection of yourself and Hitoshi with his face buried in your neck. “How so?”

“Well,” he lifted his head and you could see that he hadn’t even taken off his voice modificator, did he went straight to you after stepping into the door? “we just got married and moved in together but I’m barely here with you apart from the early mornings when I leave and late nights when I get back.”

You tried to turn around and look at him but his grip on you was too strong for you to even move. You sighed, “Toshi-”

“And don’t think that I didn’t notice how you always stay up way later than you used to so you could wait up for me.”

...for richer, for poorer,

You wanted to protest and say that it wasn’t true but you knew that there was no way you could lie in front of him. He was way too observant of your habits for you to pass it off as nothing but a change in lifestyle. Truth was, you did push back your normal bedtime to wait for him to come home from patrol each day. He never asked you for it but you just wanted to see him so badly after each long day. You would have been a lot more subtle about it if you had knew that it would bring him so much guilt.

The weight from you back lifted and he retreated his arms from your abdomen. You took the change to spin around with your back leaning on the kitchen counter and put his arms over your shoulder so he was at eye level to you. You pulled the mask off from his face and cup his cheek with one hand. Your smile grew wider as you felt him lean into your touch.

“I want to see you. After all,” you smirked, “can’t let such a handsome face gone to waste, can I? I married you for a reason, you know.”

You felt a wash of relieve as Hitoshi snickered. There were many times in your relationship where you had to assure him that you knew what you were signing up for with dating him and you accepted his lifestyle as a hero for what it was. You hated to see him being so guilt-ridden with apologies towards you when it was the last thing you wanted from him. He was your strength as much as you were his.

You squealed in shock and gripped onto his forearm as his lifted you onto the cold stone counter without warning. He trapped you in between his arms and you put a hand behind you flat on the counter to steady yourself.

“What was that for?” you chuckled at Hitoshi who looked at you with a smile of amusement.

He leaned forward until you could feel his hot breath fanning at your lips which still made your heart flutter even after years of being with this man. “Reminding you why you married me in the first place.”

You hand instinctively went to the back of his head when he pressed his lips against yours. Your back sat up straight as you felt a swipe of his tongue at your bottom lip and you gladly gave him the access he asked for. You hooked your legs around his waist as you kissed him back, feeling his soft hair between your fingers. One of his hands snuck up onto the side of your waist and lingered on the exposed skin from the edge of your shirt that was ridden up.

...in sickness and in health,

You pulled back, gently tugging his bottom lip with your teeth. He leaned forward while you backed away, frowning at the loss of contact and you laughed at out-of-character pout that was forming on his face.

“We both have work tomorrow morning.” he rolled his eyes and you playfully smacked his arm. “Go change, I’ll make you tea.”

“Only if you come to bed with me.” he said as the tip of his nose barely touched yours.

You grinned and gave him a small peck, “Since you asked so nicely."

...to love and to cherish,

“Thank you.” he mumbled as you handed him the mug before slipping under the covers yourself. You slid down and slung an arm around his waist while he sat against the head board. You looked up at him as he blew at the surface of the cup to cool the hot beverage before taking a sip, your heart filled with delight as he let out a satisfied sigh.

“Thank you for everything.” he said, his eyes fixed on you with so much adoration that it made you melt. You smiled and snuggled closer to him, closing your eyes at how nice it was to feel the warmth radiating from the person next to you.

“Don’t be silly.”

Because if anything, you loved everything you had even if it was the same day after day in the humble apartment you called ‘home’. And it was all given to you by this man who you loved with your whole heart and loved you back just as much.

...till death do us part.

#bnha imagines #shinsou x reader #shinsou hitoshi #shinsou hitoshi x reader #shinsou imagine #shinsou hitoshi imagine #shinsoubowl week 2019 #shinsoubowl #bnha imagine #boku no hero academia #my hero academia

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freifraufischer · 4 years ago

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Evil Canadians

[[This is an excerpt of an alternate history role playing game that involved psychics, wizards, and a cold war that never ended I wrote in between 2002-2004. This is an edited part of the section about Canada that several Canadian friends asked to see...]]

Canada is the world’s second largest country and occupies most of the North American Land mass, sharing with the United States of America what was once the world’s longest undefended border. Though not extensively militarized until the Russo-American War, going as far back as the early 1990s many of the border provinces coming under control of the Dominion Unity Party (DUP) began paramilitary patrols to augment the official border crossing points. Canada was settled as British and French colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. France surrendered to Britain its colony of New France, an area that composes present-day Quebec and Ontario at the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

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The Ungava Incident

For almost forty years United States Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC) nuclear-armed bombers flew armed over Canadian territory near the Arctic Circle on routine patrols. These aircraft, by the 1980s aging B-52s with a host of electrical problems, flew from bases within the Continental United States, looped over the northern reaches of Canada, and than landed again at their bases in middle America. Twice in the 1960s SAC B-52 on similar routes crashed with nuclear weapons on foreign soil. The first occurred on January 17, 1966 near Palomares, Spain during an in-flight refueling accident, three bombs were scattered over farmer’s fields and one in the ocean. All four were recovered and the residents of the small Spanish town paid nearly $800,000 in compensation. Just over two years later on January 22, 1968 another B-52 crashed near Thule Air Force Base, Greenland after a fire broke out in the navigator’s compartment. Three hydrogen bombs were scattered across the ice, and one melted through and sunk to the bottom of Baffin Bay, unrecoverable. The incident over Greenland, a Danish possession, caused massive protests in Denmark, and briefly strained relations between the two countries.

These were nothing in comparison to the December 12, 1984 explosion of at least one (though some theorize that it may have been as many as three) hydrogen bomb over the Ungava Peninsula, in northern Quebec. The explosion vaporized the B-52 that the bombs were believed to have come from, killing the crew, and making investigation of the cause of the explosion nearly impossible. Because the region was sparsely populated, mostly by isolated fishing villages, no one knows exactly how many people died, though estimates by both the Canadian and United States governments place the direct death toll from the explosion to be around 450. This does not include the thousands of cases of radiation poisoning from fallout in Quebec, the Hudson Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as fisheries in the North Atlantic and as far away as western Europe.

The United States Air Force immediately sent teams to help relocate survivors and those in the worst affected areas, but the estimated $4,000,000 in compensation has been considered inadequate and insulting by many Canadians and some of those eligible for settlements have refused them in favor of civil suits filed in American courts against the Air Force. The Department of Defense has attempted to have the suits thrown out citing national security concerns, but several Federal judges have kept it alive, even after decades of delay. The mysterious deaths of one of those judges, and of a prominent Ungava survivors advocate are widely suspected to be the result of U.S. military covert operatives.

The Reagan administration dismissed concerns that the incident might permanently soured relations with the northern neighbor. Other American observers wondered though, as nearly fifty percent of Canadian Air Force personnel were recalled from joint programs such as the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Though many of those same officers returned in the following years, but military cooperation between the neighbors has never been the same. Polls carried out in the United States ten and twenty years after the incident show close to forty percent of the American people did not even know that it had occurred, and listed Canada as one of the United States’ closest allies around the world.

-----

The Friendly Dictatorship?

The Prime Minister of Canada has what are often considered extraordinary powers in comparison to other western leaders. Because of a system of strict party discipline within the Canadian House of Commons, an elected member faces great difficulty in voting against the party line (set by the Prime Minister). If any member of the Prime Minister’s governing party votes against any new legislation, he or she may be expelled from the party. An expelled member must sit as an independent, without the right to ask a question, raise any issue before the Parliament, and stands little chance of winning re-election without the party’s resources. These measures mean that members of the governing party almost always follow the will of the Prime Minister. This was best exemplified by former Prime Minster, Pierre Trudeau, who referred to the backbenchers of the (than ruling) Liberal party as “trained seals” and the opposition backbenchers as “noblies when they are fifty yards away from the House of Commons.” The lack of checks and balances as theoretically seen within the US system has lead some to question such power, especially with the unexpected term of Walter Bechmann’s Dominion Unity Party, which has held the office since 2003

The major counterbalance to the power of the Prime Minster of Canada are near autonomous powers of the provincial premiers. They are required to agree to any constitutional change, and must be be consulted over new domestic initiatives within their area of responsibility. Unsurprisingly, traditionally the most difficult primeir to deal with has been the Priemer of Quebec.

The Rise of the DUP

Traditionally there have been two major national parities within Canada, the Liberal Party of Canada, the Conservative Party of Canada (or predecessors under other names), with a large regional party the Bloc Québécois following behind. None of these players took much notice as a small upstart, the Dominion Unity Party (DUP), began to win power on the provincial level in Saskatchewan and Alberta. Rising out of the movements collectively known as “Prairie Socialists” the DUP advocated traditional values, wide ranging social programs, a strong military, and a resistance to what they characterized as the cuddling of the Quebec separatists by Ottawa.

The economic and ecological disaster that was the Ungava Incident, the lack luster American response, and Ottawa’s inability to force the issue lead to a growing sense that Canada had seeded too much of its responsibilities to the United States. If Ottawa would not keep the French in line, or Washington from walking all over the country, than someone would. And that someone, the DUP claimed, was them. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s the DUP gained control of all of Western Canada on the Provincial level, and became the official opposition party after the collapse of the Progressive Conservatives.

Who done it?

The leak of the incriminating file on Liberal Party funding to the CBC have become the Deep Throat of Canadian political history. Both their origins and even their authenticity have been vigorously questioned (and denied). Some leading theories include:

That the deputy prime minister leaked the documents in an effort to force Chrétien to resign in favor of former finance minister Paul Martin. He was taken by surprise when Martin did not win the election and has dropped out of public life.

The Bloc Québécois leaked them after obtaining them by means unknown. Thinking that they would have an easier time working with a Conservative government, or at least a better chance of winning the next independence referendum, it blew up in their face when instead of getting the Tories they ended up with their worst nightmare.

One of the Canadian intelligence or security services leaked the document—the finger is usually pointed at the FSS—either out of patriotism or out of cynical and very illegal manipulation of the political process.

One thing is clear to those that are familiar with Jean Chrétien. Few believe that he actually knew about the dirty dealings with the American companies. If the documents were legitimate to begin with.

----

The government of Jean Chrétien came under fire in 2003 as documents began to surface in the press linking the Liberals to campaign funding directly by American corporations with ties to the Department of Defense. The implication being, though never quite proven, that an agreement was in the works to arrange for the Ungava lawsuits to be settled or dropped entirely in return for the illegal funds. The exact origins of the leaked documents have never been established. So angry was the Canadian electorate that not only were the Liberals swept from power, but the Conservatives also took a major loss, leaving the last man standing, the quiet and boring former Premier of Saskatchewan, Walter Bechmann.

Following the election night carnage as the Liberals went from holding a long-standing majority to six seats, barely half what would be needed for official party recognition on the federal level. Still weakened from their collapse under Kim Campbell in 1993, the Conservatives held only 20 seats. And with the effective merger of the New Democratic Party into the DUP, the official opposition party was the separatist Bloc Québécois. Given the DUP’s strong anti-French stances it has made for ugly fighting in Parliament, but with little effect on Prime Minister Bechmann’s policy goals.

Most observers speculate that after years of Liberal rule with virtually no other option, the image of the effective, hard working, non-flaboyant man from Saskatchewan has endeared Beckman with the Canadian people. While the more conspiracy minded suggest that the inability of the other national parties to organize may be linked to more sinister interference. The Bloc, always willing to scream about government and DUP misdoings, points to the Canadian Federal Security Service, which had long been battling Quebec nationalists and had closely allied themselves with the DUP on its rise.

The French Question

Conflict between Canada’s Francophone minority and Anglophone majority is hardly new, though the extensive efforts made on behalf of the federal government to help preserve the French language and French Canadian culture is relatively recent. Unfortunately equalizing language and granting Quebec some special status has not stopped an upswing in separatist activity, violent and non-violent. The first eruption of what have been several decades of sustained violence began on October 5, 1970 with a string of bombings, kidnappings, bank robberies, and attempted assassinations, all the work of a Marxist-Leninist group, Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ).

Like many similar groups, West Germany’s Red Army Faction, Italy’s Red Brigade, and the American Weather Underground, the FLQ was made up primarily of middle class born again radicals who would not hesitate to attack the class structure as much as the Anglos. Two weeks into the emergency Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau ordered the Army into the streets to enforce Martial Law in Quebec under the controversial War Measures Act. The overwhelming force, mass arrest of those associated with the FLQ (and their families), and the stretching of the organization’s resources beyond what they could handle for all practical purposes destroyed the organization. The deaths of some of the detainees in the custody of the army and RCMP, and the disappearance of others have left a sinister note over the ending of the emergency. Rumors still surface decades later of prominent Quebecois, made to disappear during the period, in the custody of particularly vindictive elements of the government.

The next wave of extreme violence occurred in 1990 when a new group, calling itself the Armée de Libération du Québec (ALQ) and trading on the reputation of their similarly named predecessor began targeting Java Works, a nation wide specialty coffee chain which like many corporations continued to use its English name in Quebec. Well-dressed young people, of an age to be university students, used automatic rifles to commit mass murder of the patrons and employees at one Saint-Georges shop. Similar attacks followed within days, with brutality and efficiency associated to a particular terrorist leader soon identified as Amanda Legardeur, the daughter of an upper class Montreal family.

Though relatively brief, the spree lasted just over a month; the brutality displayed cleared the fence sitters out of the way, leaving only those who would clearly choose between a sovereign and independent Quebec, and a united Canada. That was of course, what Legardeur had intended, and the cultivation of a young woman who looked similar to her so that she could shoot her in the head to fake her own death was a small price to pay in her game. It took CSIS and FSS nearly a decade to agree that she was indeed, still alive, though once they had, her legend grew even more. Today she is the most wanted woman in Canada, believed to be not only armed, but possessing the organization and leadership skills to make her a one person national security threat.

In response to the perceived failure of the moderates, the increasing violence of the extreme separatists, and what many particularly among the rank and file of the ruling DUP see as excessive allowances to the French, there has been a backlash. With only the exception of the United States, the primary focus of the Canadian Federal Security Service—the most ruthless, and effective of the competing agencies—has been what is internally called “the French Question.” Some wonder though, if repressive and often highly illegal methods will only divide the country more, just as they did for the British in Northern Ireland.

The federal government believes—not without reason—that the violent separatists are being backed by east bloc communist countries that would use an independent Quebec as a base of operations on the Americans doorstep. Unwilling to see the country torn apart, or to be used by either superpower in cynical games of brinksmanship, the Canadian government has begun to look at solving all their problems on a larger scale.

American Relations

The Canadian government, and to some extent the Canadian people, have understood the true form of the American government longer than any other county in the world. For them it is like having a window on the great superpower, seeing more up close in American news and American television—not to mention in frequent visits to the states to avoid high Canadian taxes—than anyone in the United Kingdom or the Europe ever does. And certainly more than anyone ever gets to see of the Americans’ rival the Soviet Union.

Over the years though, at least from the American side, this familiarity has bread contempt. Washington sees Ottawa, and more importantly in the Americans case, the Pentagon sees them as a joke. The quaint socialist country to the north whose military is more focused on tracking down stray penguins and who police and intelligence services can be characterized by The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show’s Dudley Do-Right. The fact that there are no penguins in Canada has not entered into the American’s calculations. The American public’s view is not much more nuanced, seeing their continental neighbors as unerringly polite, and with the firm belief that every Canadian citizen can kill, skin, and gut a grizzly bear with their bare hands.

The view south from Ottawa is quite a bit more nuanced, though the Canadians have learned a hard lesson about the sometimes friendly sometimes vicious pit-bull they have been planted next to. The the view has been common enough going all the way back to repeated American invasions during the War of 1812, it came to a nasty point when the indifference which the American military seemed to treat the accidental nuking of their country. As one Strategic Air Command general at the Ungava Board of Inquiry commented to another when he did not know that his microphone was on, “All they have are trees and rocks up there, what’s the big deal?”

A firm belief has developed, especially among the security and intelligence communities (with the notable exception of CSIS, who have a close working relationship with the Americans) that there is indeed a major military and security threat to Canada, the Canadian way of life, and even the lives of every Canadian citizen.

Their neighbors to the south.

A Fair Deal, an Even Playing Field, a Slippery Slop—The Canadian Psychic Experiments

Like many countries around the world the Canadians are intimately familiar with the uses and abuses of the paranormal within the intelligence community. As a commonwealth country they have long been familiar with the sorcerer viziers that have advised the crown for centuries. However as with many things that come with the British heritage, the mother country has far more use of the community than the former imperial possessions.

The ruling DUP have an innate distrust of sorcerers owing to a distrust of anything supernatural that gives one man an advantage over another. It is a political, philosophical, and religious distrust that has placed the country’s small sorcerer community at odds with the government… though not yet at war. The leading wizard in the country is the queen’s representative, and a master of the mysteries of the mind, Karen Clarke. She has focused primarily on checking the power of Prime Minister Beckmann and the agenda that most people have not yet discovered behind the party and by extension the government’s actions.

The difficulties between the sorcerers and the government are nothing though, in comparison to the outright war that has been declared on psychic talent within the Dominion. The idea that among the citizens exist a population—small as it may be—who can commit the worst violations on a person’s mind and body without any control by rule or law offends the prairie socialists very nature. In the view of the party psychics are to be monitored, controlled, and eventually eradicated from society as a threat to the rest of the human race.

Most within the power structure would chose to do this through “curing” the afflicted, many of whom themselves would gladly submit at first for any chance to lead a normal life. The main arm of this goal, like so many other things within the party’s plans, has been the Canadian Federal Security Service (FSS). The service itself though, has mixed feelings about the mission. Those that know the ultimate goal also know that enemy countries, particularly the communist nations, have been using their own psychics against Canada. The cleverest among them have begun to play both sides against the middle.

Section C of the FSS has been responsible for the beginnings of an extensive tracking network that will eventually use the DNA markers to identify psychics. Or so they hope. One problem they have discovered—and one that the Soviets have been independently finding at the same time—is that the genes that control psychic gifts are not in the same place for each subset of gifts. The genetic code that turns on a telepath’s ability to read minds is not the same gene that allows a remote viewer to see beyond his body or a pyrokinetic’s ability to set the world ablaze. Complicating matters even farther, some suspect that multiple genes can trigger psychic powers.

In addition to the genetic studies, extensive drug trials have been carried out in an attempt to dampen or control psychics so that they can be returned to society and not imprisoned for life. Unfortunately, as the Americans discovered almost half a century before, psychoactive drugs are themselves a tricky business. It is difficult to determine outside of the subject’s self-reporting if the drug has dampened the powers. The only way of independently determining any drugs affects has been testing on pyrokinetics and telekinetics, whose powers manifest physically. This can be very dangerous, as many test subjects react badly to the conditions within Section C’s hospitals. If not outright killed by the psychics (which usually results in the death of the psychic), the staff often report frightening and wild displays of power as the scared and often mentally ill telekinetic or pyrokinetic looses the concentration and control needed to keep their world together.

As of now, there is no effective drug therapy to control psychic talent.

Those Who Serve

A relative few Canadian psychics are employed by the FSS to battle those of other nations in order not to leave the country vulnerable to attack. This was made abundantly clear during the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics when several east bloc psychics were brought into the country in order to give their athletes an edge in the medal count. The scheme was discovered when a West German coach who had escaped the East recognized a Stasi colonel who had tortured his brother to death among the East German Olympic Committee’s figure skating staff. After a confrontation the night before the figure skating long program, both the West German coach and the East German psychic were expelled from the country.

Unlike the Americans, who rarely use government psychics and have left the practice entirely to corporations and other private enterprises, and the Soviets who have fostered a system of the widespread utilization of psychics, the Canadians keep their mental attack dogs on a very short leash. Each psychic has a strong willed normal agent, known within the community as a Controller (telepaths often have two to prevent one from falling under the spell of their charge). This officer is responsible for all operations that the psychic is used in, and in the field has the authority to summarily eliminate any that become impossible to control. As could be expected, a physical psychic (telekinetics and pyrokinetics) or a mental specialist like a telepath is much harder to control than even the most powerful remote viewer or precognitive.

The Personalities Involved

Her Excellency, the Right Honourable Karen Mendelsen-Clarke, Governor General and Commander-in-Chief in and over Canada. A Vancouver born academic with impeccable credentials, her recent appointment by the Queen as her representative in Canada caused a near constitutional crisis as it went against the advise of Prime Minister Bechmann. The Queen’s growing concern about Bechmann’s politics and leadership of the country led her to appoint Clarke, a Cambridge educated sorcerer with a specialization in the powers of the mind. Publicly she is polite and friendly to the PM, but privately she has been hard nosed and difficult, threatening to withhold royal consent from legislation and implying that she might dismiss several of his ministers. In an unprecedented step, she has also formed her own guard battalion for protection after a suspicious car accident nearly took her life. With the traditions of the reactivated Black Watch (Royal Highlanders of Canada), they are seen by the DUP as her private army and viewed with great suspicion. She is divorced with no children.

The Right Honorable Walter Bechmann, Prime Minister of Canada, Leader of the Dominion Unity Party. A long time provincial politician in his home province of Saskatchewan, he served for nearly a decade as a Progressive Conservative backbencher in the provincial assembly before recognizing a wave of political change in time to ride it to the top. He ended up sweeping the Provincial Party elections when the DUP was first created and then surprisingly took the DUP to the top spot in Saskatchewan. Eventually the Party attained national membership, and gained power in other provinces. After several years as the Premier of Saskatchewan, he retired from politics briefly, before coming back for Federal politics to become the national leader for the party. Often seen in the press as bland and dense, he is actually an astute observer and can be very charismatic when he wants to be. And he usually wants to be charismatic in private. During Question Period many a young MP have learned to underestimate the old man at their peril. He has a wife and three daughters.

David Cherier, Premier ministre du Québec, leader of the Parti Libéral du Québec. A lawyer by trade, David Cherier specialized in defending those swept up in various federal anti-terrorism sweeps. He was first elected to Parliament as Progressive Conservative before returning to Quebec to become the Minister for Natural Resources. Hard work, competence and charm brought him to the head of his party and with the PLQ’s win in elections to the position of Quebec Premier. Though not a separatist himself, he is a strong Quebec nationalist, and has fought vigorously against the policies of Walter Bechman in his attempt to roll back concessions made to Quebec. His sometimes ally in this has been Governor General Clarke, but she has also sided with the prime minister when it suited her. He is generally considered a good man, if relatively unsophisticated when matching wits with the PM. There have been three assassination attempts on Cherier’s life, one when he was Minister for Natural Resources, presumably by separatist groups such as the ALQ, though they have not claimed responsibility.

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland to face challenges that include links to Biden and Trump For boosters of Garland, it was his reputation for fairness, honed over more than two decades on Washington, DC’s, federal appeals court, that made him a good fit to lead the department out of the Trump era. His success in rebuilding the public’s trust in the department, however, may hinge largely on his political deftness. “Every attorney general walks into sensitive, high-profile ongoing investigations to one degree or another. Garland is about as well qualified as you can get legally to handle anything that comes his way. The question is whether and how he navigates the political parts of the job,” said Sarah Isgur, the former public affairs chief for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had to confront a probe of President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia upon his arrival to the Justice Department. A person familiar with the matter said Garland will focus his testimony Monday on the importance of the independence of the Justice Department, on the value of integrity within the department, and on prioritizing civil rights under his leadership. Republicans to push on Cuomo, Hunter Biden GOP senators, on the other hand, have already signaled they’ll try to draw the judge out at his confirmation hearing on the hot-button federal investigations into New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and the President’s son, Hunter Biden, setting up the first opportunity for Garland to reveal how he’ll handle his full plate of political problems. “When Judge Garland testifies before this committee, we expect him to commit the Department of Justice to fully investigating this cover-up to determine whether any criminal laws were violated and to prosecute any violations,” a group of Republican Senate Judiciary Committee members wrote in a letter released this week about the Cuomo case. Revolving around an A-list Democratic figure once discussed as a potential Biden attorney general nominee himself, the Cuomo investigation emerged publicly this week as an instant addition to Garland’s day one headaches. On Wednesday, CNN reported that federal authorities in New York were scrutinizing Cuomo’s handling of some of the data surrounding Covid-19 deaths in long term care facilities in New York, according to a law enforcement official. The inquiry is in its early stages, and it was not clear whether authorities were looking at the governor or members of his administration, the source said. John Marzulli, a spokesman for the Eastern District of New York, told CNN that he could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation. Perhaps the thorniest case awaiting Garland, however, has been with the department since 2018 and centers on a figure as close as can be to the new president: his son Hunter. Federal investigators in Delaware have been examining multiple financial issues involving the younger Biden, including whether he violated tax and money laundering laws in business dealings in foreign countries, principally China, two people briefed on the probe told CNN in December. GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, has already urged the current acting head of the Justice Department not to interfere with the case as it progresses, and a Republican aide said senators were planning to bring it up at Garland’s confirmation hearing Monday and Tuesday. Graham has also hinted that he’ll ask Garland about the ongoing probe into the early days of the FBI’s Russia investigation being carried out by special counsel John Durham. Earlier this month, in a traditional changing of the guard, the Justice Department asked US attorneys who had been appointed by Trump to resign, but allowed the top federal prosecutor in Delaware, David Weiss, to remain in office as he oversees the Hunter Biden probe. Durham, who had served as the US attorney in Connecticut, will resign that role but stay on as a special counsel. Biden has made a point of distancing himself from the decision-making at the Justice Department, and as questions about his son swirled earlier this winter, he pledged to install independent leaders at the agency. “One of the most serious pieces of damage done by the last administration was the politicizing of the Justice Department,” Biden said at a CNN town hall on Tuesday. “I made a commitment, I will not ever tell my Justice Department — and it’s not mine, it’s the people’s Justice Department — who they should and should not prosecute.” That put him in sharp contrast with Trump, who routinely called on his Justice Department to investigate and prosecute his political enemies. Garland’s challenges at DOJ Garland, whose 2016 nomination to the Supreme Court was scuttled by Senate Republicans, has said he wouldn’t have accepted the attorney general nomination without assurances from Biden about his independence. Dissent among rank-and-file prosecutors reached a fever pitch at the Justice Department under the last Senate-confirmed attorney general, William Barr, who cast a polarizing figure after several news-making decisions that impacted the friends and political future of then-President Trump. In unusual and striking number, current and former officials defected publicly from Barr as he made legal moves that benefited GOP operative Roger Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and launched a provocative critique of career employees in a September speech. Just weeks after a mob descended on the Capitol building and temporarily shut down the certification of Biden’s electoral win, the massive investigation into the insurrection may present the most pressing matter for Garland if he makes it through a Senate vote. More than 200 men and women have been arrested so far in the investigation, which officials said was the department’s largest since the one that followed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and decisions about whether to bring significant charges like sedition in some of the cases will vex Garland in his early days at the agency. Investigating Trump? Political overtones also loom large over the US Capitol investigation. The House of Representatives impeached Trump last month for inciting the riot, and despite an acquittal in a Senate trial, the senior-most congressional Republican, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, has suggested that the criminal justice system is the right venue to consider those allegations. In an early news conference after the insurrection, the top federal prosecutor in Washington, DC, a Barr ally, indicated that investigators would consider charges against the former President if they proved appropriate, although the Justice Department has walked that back. Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani could also face criminal exposure for his role in the riot after a speech he gave at the rally that preceded it. Giuliani is facing a civil suit filed earlier this week by a House Democrat over the insurrection, and is under scrutiny already in an unrelated federal investigation being run out of New York. Garland, for his part, has only offered vague public comment on the insurrection and its aftermath. In a brief speech after Biden formally nominated him for the role on January 7, one day after the attack, Garland said the events at the Capitol underscored the need for a fair and equal justice system and referred to the “evolving threat of violent extremism.” If confirmed, Garland would bring experience combating domestic terrorism to a Justice Department now facing down that growing threat. In 1995, the day after an anti-government extremist blew up a moving truck at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Garland flew to Oklahoma City to run the federal investigation into what was then the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in the country’s history. A senior official at the Justice Department at the time, Garland has called it the most significant case of his career. “He saw up close the impact that having that kind of movement can have on our country, so I think he’s quite well prepared for this,” Garland’s then-boss, former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, said in an interview. “He knows what the department can do when it’s fully organized to do it. Race and criminal justice system Garland will also likely face questions from both sides of the aisle on how he would steer the Justice Department amid policy debates over race and the criminal justice system, which came to the fore after a summer of mass protests spurred by the police killings of Black men and women. The Republican aide said that senators were planning to press Garland on statements on the topic made by two women nominated to senior positions at the department alongside him that have generated controversy. The aide pointed to the role that Biden’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Kristen Clarke, played as a student in organizing a 1994 Harvard University event featuring an antisemitic professor. Clarke has since said she regrets hosting the event. Vanita Gupta, nominated for the number three position at the department, has also drawn blowback from Republicans for saying that every institution in the US is “suffering from structural racism.” Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union is pressing Garland from the left, writing in a letter released Thursday that he should make clear at his confirmation hearing that he will “adopt policies to build a more racially just criminal legal system” as attorney general. A number of policies put in place by his Republican predecessors, like a 2018 Sessions memo that limited the use of court-ordered agreements with local police departments accused of civil rights violations, could soon be reversed under Garland. Dozens of lawmakers led by Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley have also urged Garland to end the use of the federal death penalty after an execution spree in the final days of the Trump administration that followed a policy change under Barr. Source link Orbem News #attorney #Biden #challenges #Face #garland #general #Include #links #Merrick #MerrickGarlandtofacechallengesthatincludelinkstoBidenandTrump-CNNPolitics #nominee #Politics #Trump

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

Text

Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland to face challenges that include links to Biden and Trump

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/attorney-general-nominee-merrick-garland-to-face-challenges-that-include-links-to-biden-and-trump/

Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland to face challenges that include links to Biden and Trump

For boosters of Garland, it was his reputation for fairness, honed over more than two decades on Washington, DC’s, federal appeals court, that made him a good fit to lead the department out of the Trump era. His success in rebuilding the public’s trust in the department, however, may hinge largely on his political deftness.

“Every attorney general walks into sensitive, high-profile ongoing investigations to one degree or another. Garland is about as well qualified as you can get legally to handle anything that comes his way. The question is whether and how he navigates the political parts of the job,” said Sarah Isgur, the former public affairs chief for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had to confront a probe of President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia upon his arrival to the Justice Department.

A person familiar with the matter said Garland will focus his testimony Monday on the importance of the independence of the Justice Department, on the value of integrity within the department, and on prioritizing civil rights under his leadership.

Republicans to push on Cuomo, Hunter Biden

GOP senators, on the other hand, have already signaled they’ll try to draw the judge out at his confirmation hearing on the hot-button federal investigations into New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and the President’s son, Hunter Biden, setting up the first opportunity for Garland to reveal how he’ll handle his full plate of political problems.

“When Judge Garland testifies before this committee, we expect him to commit the Department of Justice to fully investigating this cover-up to determine whether any criminal laws were violated and to prosecute any violations,” a group of Republican Senate Judiciary Committee members wrote in a letter released this week about the Cuomo case.

Revolving around an A-list Democratic figure once discussed as a potential Biden attorney general nominee himself, the Cuomo investigation emerged publicly this week as an instant addition to Garland’s day one headaches.

On Wednesday, Appradab reported that federal authorities in New York were scrutinizing Cuomo’s handling of some of the data surrounding Covid-19 deaths in long term care facilities in New York, according to a law enforcement official.

The inquiry is in its early stages, and it was not clear whether authorities were looking at the governor or members of his administration, the source said. John Marzulli, a spokesman for the Eastern District of New York, told Appradab that he could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.

Perhaps the thorniest case awaiting Garland, however, has been with the department since 2018 and centers on a figure as close as can be to the new president: his son Hunter.

Federal investigators in Delaware have been examining multiple financial issues involving the younger Biden, including whether he violated tax and money laundering laws in business dealings in foreign countries, principally China, two people briefed on the probe told Appradab in December.

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, has already urged the current acting head of the Justice Department not to interfere with the case as it progresses, and a Republican aide said senators were planning to bring it up at Garland’s confirmation hearing Monday and Tuesday.

Graham has also hinted that he’ll ask Garland about the ongoing probe into the early days of the FBI’s Russia investigation being carried out by special counsel John Durham.

Earlier this month, in a traditional changing of the guard, the Justice Department asked US attorneys who had been appointed by Trump to resign, but allowed the top federal prosecutor in Delaware, David Weiss, to remain in office as he oversees the Hunter Biden probe. Durham, who had served as the US attorney in Connecticut, will resign that role but stay on as a special counsel.

Biden has made a point of distancing himself from the decision-making at the Justice Department, and as questions about his son swirled earlier this winter, he pledged to install independent leaders at the agency.

“One of the most serious pieces of damage done by the last administration was the politicizing of the Justice Department,” Biden said at a Appradab town hall on Tuesday. “I made a commitment, I will not ever tell my Justice Department — and it’s not mine, it’s the people’s Justice Department — who they should and should not prosecute.”

That put him in sharp contrast with Trump, who routinely called on his Justice Department to investigate and prosecute his political enemies.

Garland’s challenges at DOJ

Garland, whose 2016 nomination to the Supreme Court was scuttled by Senate Republicans, has said he wouldn’t have accepted the attorney general nomination without assurances from Biden about his independence.

Dissent among rank-and-file prosecutors reached a fever pitch at the Justice Department under the last Senate-confirmed attorney general, William Barr, who cast a polarizing figure after several news-making decisions that impacted the friends and political future of then-President Trump.

In unusual and striking number, current and former officials defected publicly from Barr as he made legal moves that benefited GOP operative Roger Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and launched a provocative critique of career employees in a September speech.

Just weeks after a mob descended on the Capitol building and temporarily shut down the certification of Biden’s electoral win, the massive investigation into the insurrection may present the most pressing matter for Garland if he makes it through a Senate vote.

More than 200 men and women have been arrested so far in the investigation, which officials said was the department’s largest since the one that followed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and decisions about whether to bring significant charges like sedition in some of the cases will vex Garland in his early days at the agency.

Investigating Trump?

Political overtones also loom large over the US Capitol investigation.

The House of Representatives impeached Trump last month for inciting the riot, and despite an acquittal in a Senate trial, the senior-most congressional Republican, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, has suggested that the criminal justice system is the right venue to consider those allegations.

In an early news conference after the insurrection, the top federal prosecutor in Washington, DC, a Barr ally, indicated that investigators would consider charges against the former President if they proved appropriate, although the Justice Department has walked that back.

Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani could also face criminal exposure for his role in the riot after a speech he gave at the rally that preceded it. Giuliani is facing a civil suit filed earlier this week by a House Democrat over the insurrection, and is under scrutiny already in an unrelated federal investigation being run out of New York.

Garland, for his part, has only offered vague public comment on the insurrection and its aftermath. In a brief speech after Biden formally nominated him for the role on January 7, one day after the attack, Garland said the events at the Capitol underscored the need for a fair and equal justice system and referred to the “evolving threat of violent extremism.”

If confirmed, Garland would bring experience combating domestic terrorism to a Justice Department now facing down that growing threat.

In 1995, the day after an anti-government extremist blew up a moving truck at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Garland flew to Oklahoma City to run the federal investigation into what was then the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in the country’s history.

A senior official at the Justice Department at the time, Garland has called it the most significant case of his career.

“He saw up close the impact that having that kind of movement can have on our country, so I think he’s quite well prepared for this,” Garland’s then-boss, former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, said in an interview. “He knows what the department can do when it’s fully organized to do it.

Race and criminal justice system

Garland will also likely face questions from both sides of the aisle on how he would steer the Justice Department amid policy debates over race and the criminal justice system, which came to the fore after a summer of mass protests spurred by the police killings of Black men and women.

The Republican aide said that senators were planning to press Garland on statements on the topic made by two women nominated to senior positions at the department alongside him that have generated controversy.

The aide pointed to the role that Biden’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Kristen Clarke, played as a student in organizing a 1994 Harvard University event featuring an antisemitic professor. Clarke has since said she regrets hosting the event. Vanita Gupta, nominated for the number three position at the department, has also drawn blowback from Republicans for saying that every institution in the US is “suffering from structural racism.”

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union is pressing Garland from the left, writing in a letter released Thursday that he should make clear at his confirmation hearing that he will “adopt policies to build a more racially just criminal legal system” as attorney general.

A number of policies put in place by his Republican predecessors, like a 2018 Sessions memo that limited the use of court-ordered agreements with local police departments accused of civil rights violations, could soon be reversed under Garland. Dozens of lawmakers led by Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley have also urged Garland to end the use of the federal death penalty after an execution spree in the final days of the Trump administration that followed a policy change under Barr.

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go-redgirl · 7 years ago

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Lying, Spying and Hiding Townhall.com ^ | February 1, 2018 | Judge Andrew Napolitano

I have argued for a few weeks now that House Intelligence Committee members have committed misconduct in office by concealing evidence of spying abuses by the National Security Agency and the FBI. They did this by sitting on a four-page memo that summarizes the abuse of raw intelligence data while Congress was debating a massive expansion of FISA.

FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which was written to enable the federal government to spy on foreign agents here and abroad. Using absurd and paranoid logic, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which only hears the government's lawyers, has morphed "foreign intelligence surveillance" into undifferentiated bulk surveillance of all Americans.

Undifferentiated bulk surveillance is the governmental acquisition of fiber-optic data stored and transmitted by nearly everyone in America. This includes all telephone conversations, text messages and emails, as well as all medical, legal and financial records.

Ignorant of the hot potato on which the House Intelligence Committee had been sitting, Congress recently passed and President Donald Trump signed a vast expansion of spying authorities -- an expansion that authorizes legislatively the domestic spying that judges were authorizing on everyone in the U.S. without individual suspicion of wrongdoing or probable cause of crime; an expansion that passed in the Senate with no votes to spare; an expansion that evades and avoids the Fourth Amendment; an expansion that the president signed into law the day before we all learned of the House Intelligence Committee memo.

The FISA expansion would never have passed the Senate had the House Intelligence Committee memo and the data on which it is based come to light seven days sooner than it did. Why should 22 members of a House committee keep their 500-plus congressional colleagues in the dark about domestic spying abuses while those colleagues were debating the very subject matter of domestic spying and voting to expand the power of those who have abused it?

The answer to this lies in the nature of the intelligence community today and the influence it has on elected officials in the government. By the judicious, personalized and secret revelation of data, both good and bad -- here is what we know about your enemies, and here is what we know about you -- the NSA shows its might to the legislators who supposedly regulate it. In reality, the NSA regulates them.

This is but one facet of the deep state -- the unseen parts of the government that are not authorized by the Constitution and that never change, no matter which party controls the legislative or executive branch. This time, they almost blew it. If just one conscientious senator had changed her or his vote on the FISA expansion -- had that senator known of the NSA and FBI abuses of FISA concealed by the House Intelligence Committee -- the expansion would have failed.

Nevertheless, the evidence on which the committee members sat is essentially a Republican-written summary of raw intelligence data. Earlier this week, the Democrats on the committee authored their version -- based, they say, on the same raw intelligence data as was used in writing the Republican version. But the House Intelligence Committee, made up of 13 Republicans and nine Democrats, voted to release only the Republican-written memo.

Late last week, when it became apparent that the Republican memo would soon be released, the Department of Justice publicly contradicted President Trump by advising the leadership of the House Intelligence Committee in very strong terms that the memo should not be released to the public.

It soon became apparent that, notwithstanding the DOJ admonition, no one in the DOJ had actually seen the memo. So FBI Director Chris Wray made a secret, hurried trip to the House Intelligence Committee's vault last Sunday afternoon to view the memo. When asked by the folks who showed it to him whether it contains secret or top-secret material, he couldn't or wouldn't say. But he reportedly saw in the memo the name of the No. 2 person at the FBI, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, as one of the abusers of spying authority. That allegedly triggered McCabe's summary departure from the FBI the next day, after a career of 30 years.

The abuse summarized in the Republican memo apparently spans the last year of the Obama administration and the first year of the Trump administration. If it comes through as advertised, it will show the deep state using the government's powers for petty or political or ideological reasons.

The use of raw intelligence data by the NSA or the FBI for political purposes or to manipulate those in government is as serious a threat to popular government -- to personal liberty in a free society -- as has ever occurred in America since Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which punished speech critical of the government.

What's going on here?

The government works for us; we should not tolerate its treating us as children. When raw intelligence data is capable of differing interpretations and is relevant to a public dispute -- about, for example, whether the NSA and the FBI are trustworthy, whether FISA should even exist, whether spying on everyone all the time keeps us safe and whether the Constitution even permits this -- the raw data should be released to the American public.

Where is the personal courage on the House Intelligence Committee? Where is the patriotism? Where is the fidelity to the Constitution? The government exists by our consent. It derives its powers from us. We have a right to know what it has done in our names, who broke our trust, who knew about it, who looked the other way and why and by whom all this was intentionally hidden until after Congress voted to expand FISA.

Everyone in government takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. How many take it meaningfully and seriously?

TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Government KEYWORDS: intelligence

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bigbirdgladiator · 5 years ago

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Trump hopes that his dangerous, self-serving actions will be normalized by sheer force and volume. We must push back After three years of dangerously and unnecessarily escalating tensions with Iran, Donald Trump rang in the new year by creating a crisis that almost started a war with Iran – and still very well could.As we enter the fourth year of Trump’s presidency, it is more necessary than ever to remind ourselves daily: this is not normal.The list of despicable domestic actions by Trump that must not be normalized is long – from the policy separating migrant children from their parents and detaining them in cages to the president’s call for his critics to be investigated or jailed.And while Trump’s foreign policy in 2017 and 2018 was shocking – including regular praise for dictators Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un, for instance – 2019 was the year that Congress and the American people finally had enough. The Ukraine scandal made crystal clear Trump’s unprecedented and dangerous assault on national security norms and led to his impeachment. But the extortion of Ukraine for personal gain was far from the only national security norm that Trump attacked in 2019.In 2019, Robert Mueller’s report outlined in extensive detail how Trump’s 2016 campaign asked for and received Russia’s help in attacking his campaign opponent. While the story of Trump’s collusion with Russia has gone on so long that it can sometimes seem to have faded into the background of the national consciousness, the 448-page Mueller report should be treated every day like the bombshell it is – the story of how Trump worked with a foreign power to win an election.In 2019, the American people also learned that Trump’s attempts to get foreign help to further his political interests extend beyond Russia. In addition to Ukraine, Trump also asked China to help smear his political rival.In 2019, Trump also attempted to circumvent Congress to fund his border wall by taking money from the military and sending US troops – who are not supposed to be deployed on US soil – to the border.In 2019, Trump’s administration formally began the process to remove the US from the Paris climate agreement. Unless we get our act together, humanity will look back on America’s withdrawal from this global effort as unforgivable. This is not normal: while climate is too often treated in Washington like a policy disagreement, Trump’s actions must be seen for the shocking disregard of reality that they reflect. One of the president’s top priorities should be tackling the existential threat of climate change, not denying its existence and adopting policies that will make it worse.In 2019, in both Afghanistan and Syria, off-the-cuff interventions by Trump shattered delicate, hard-fought progress and undermined national security. In the 18th year of America’s war in Afghanistan, and after months of talks, the president blew up a potential deal with the Taliban in a moment of haste. And in Syria, after years of American troops fighting side by side with Kurdish partners against Isis, Trump gave the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the green light attack the Kurds as American forces abandoned them.And while it almost seems like a joke, in 2019 the president of the United States cancelled a trip to visit a US treaty ally – Denmark – because the country would not sell him Greenland.Trump also continued to attack people because of their race, ethnicity and religion in ways that erode the very model of America as a welcoming, tolerant and diverse society. He told members of Congress (who of course are Americans) to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”. He repeatedly accused people of being antisemitic and questioned their national loyalties because they do not blindly support the dangerous policies of the Israeli government. And he encouraged the Israeli government to prevent two members of Congress from visiting Israel. The list goes on.None of this is normal. These actions go far beyond policy disagreements. They are not only disturbing and unbecoming the office of the president – they undermine the democratic values America embodies, and damage America’s national security.Trump hopes that his offensive and dangerous actions are normalized by the sheer force and volume of them. He obfuscates, gaslights and lies – in his three years in office has made more than 15,000 false or misleading claims, according to the Washington Post.As 2020 begins and Trump teeters on the edge of starting a war with Iran, it is a stark reminder that America no longer knows what it’s like not to be at war – roughly a quarter of Americans have only been alive while America has been fighting a war. This should not be normal – but sadly America has already begun to treat it like it is.We may not be able to dedicate the same level of outrage or oversight to every single one of Trump’s despicable actions. But we cannot allow them to be seen as normal, and we must push back on them all.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security

The network’s furthering of lies from foreign adversaries and flagrant disregard for the truth have gotten downright dangerous.

By Garrett M. McGraff | Published 12.11.19 8:00 AM ET | Wired | Posted December 11, 2019 |

Monday’s split-screen drama, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed impeachment charges against President Trump and as the Justice Department’s inspector general released a 476-page report on the FBI’s handling of its 2016 investigation into Trump’s campaign, made one truth of the modern world inescapable: The lies and obfuscations forwarded ad infinitum on Fox News pose a dangerous threat to the national security of the United States.

The facts of both dramas were clear to objective viewers: In the one instance, there’s conclusive and surprisingly consistent evidence that President Trump pushed Ukraine to concoct dirt on a domestic political rival to affect the 2020 presidential election, and in the other, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the FBI was proper to investigate Trump’s dealings with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.

But that set of facts is not what anyone who was watching Fox News heard. Instead, Fox spent the night describing an upside-down world where the president’s enemies had spun a web of lies about Trump and Ukraine, even as Horowitz blew open the base corruption that has driven every attack on the president since 2016.

Sean Hannity, who had long trumpeted the forthcoming inspector general report and expected a thorough indictment of the behavior of former FBI director James Comey and other members of the “deep state,” had a simple message for his viewers during Fox’s Monday night prime time: “Everything we said, everything we reported, everything we told you was dead-on-center accurate,” he said. “It is all there in black and white, it’s all there.”

Except they weren’t right and it wasn’t there. But Fox News’ viewers evidently were not to be told those hard truths—they were to be kept thinking that everything in their self-selected filter bubble was just peachy keen.

Over on Fox Business, Lou Dobbs said the mere fact that the IG found no political bias in the FBI’s investigation of Trump and Russia in 2016 was de facto proof of the power of the deep state.

John Harwood, long one of Washington’s most respected conservative voices in journalism, summed up Fox’s approach Monday night simply: “Lunacy.”

It’s worse than lunacy, though. Fox’s bubble reality creates a situation where it’s impossible to have the conversations and debate necessary to function as a democracy. Facts that are inconvenient to President Trump simply disappear down Fox News’ “memory hole,” as thoroughly as George Orwell could have imagined in 1984.

The idea that Fox News represents a literal threat to our national security, on par with Russia’s Internet Research Agency or China’s Ministry of State Security, may seem like a dramatic overstatement of its own—and I, a paid contributor to its competitor CNN, may appear a biased voice anyway—but this week has made clear that, as we get deeper into the impeachment process and as the 2020 election approaches, Fox News is prepared to destroy America’s democratic traditions if it will help its most important and most dedicated daily viewer.

The threat posed to our democracy by Fox News is multifaceted: First and most simply, it’s clearly advancing and giving voice to narratives and smears backed and imagined by our foreign adversaries. Second, its overheated and bombastic rhetoric is undermining America’s foundational ideals and the sense of fair play in politics. Third, its unique combination of lies and half-truths has built a virtual reality so complete that it leaves its viewers too misinformed to fulfill their most basic responsibilities as citizens to make informed choices about the direction of the country.

In the impeachment hearings, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill and other witnesses made clear how those who, like Fox News hosts and the president, advance the false narrative that Ukraine meddled in the US election are serving the Kremlin’s interests. Russia is playing a weak hand geopolitically—its economy is sputtering along and its population shrinking—and so its greatest hope is to stoke internal discord in the West. Robert Mueller warned of this; James Clapper has warned of it; and now Fiona Hill has done the same. “Our nation is being torn apart,” she said. “Truth is questioned.” Yet Fox, and the GOP more broadly, has warmly embraced almost every twist of Kremlin propaganda, up to and including the idea that Russia never meddled in the 2016 election to begin with.

Fox’s clear willingness to parry the wingnuttiest ideas in service of the president, long-term implications to the United States be damned, should worry all concerned about the state of the United States. The Ukraine myth is hardly the only example; for years, it has repeated false conspiracies about the murder of Democratic staffer Seth Rich, a conspiracy literally cooked up by Russian intelligence and fed into the US media. (To say nothing of Fox’s long-term commitment to undermining and questioning climate science, leaving the US both behind in mitigating the worst effects of climate change and also ill-equipped to face the myriad security consequences of a warming planet.)

It’s possible to paint Fox with too broad of a brush—Chris Wallace remains one of the toughest and best interviewers on television and has repeatedly stood up to vapid GOP talking points, and Bret Baier is a talented journalist and historian—but it’s clear from this year that something fundamental and meaningful has tipped inside the network.

While propagandizing has long been a key facet of Fox’s business (Stephen Colbert debuted his own Fox News host alter ego, in dedicated pursuit of “truthiness,” all the way back in 2005), the situation is clearly getting worse: the lies deeper, its always-tenuous commitment to “Fair and Balanced” unraveling further. Whatever loose adherence to a reality-based world the Fox worldview once possessed, whatever guardrails on truth the network might have once installed, are now gone. Shep Smith, long one of the network’s biggest names and best reporters, literally walked out of the Fox building this fall, departing abruptly after apparently deciding that he couldn’t in good conscience be part of a “news” operation that treated facts so fungibly.

Indeed, as the year has unfolded, Fox’s evening talk shows and its presidentially endorsed morning show have proven to be a particularly egregious and odious swamp of fetid, metastasizing lies and bad faith feedback loops that leave its viewers—and, notably, its Presidential Audience of One—foaming at the mouth with outrage and bile.

It’s hard not to think that the increasingly odd behavior and untethered-to-reality pronouncements of the president’s two top lawyers—Attorney General Bill Barr and personal defender Rudy Giuliani—have not been deeply influenced by the filter bubble on the right created, fostered, and fertilized by Fox News. As Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey tweeted after Barr set out on his Quixotic quest to prove the deep state was behind the FBI’s 2016 investigation, “The Attorney General is a fully-committed Fox News conspiracy theorist.”

The network’s pantheon of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, and the rotating couch-cast of Fox & Friends’ morning show dunces-by-choice together represent a level of ill-informed demagoguery that would make Father Coughlin and Huey Long wince.

More than simply embarrassing themselves by spouting obvious falsehoods, though, Fox News’ incendiary, fanatical rants serve to delegitimize to its viewers the very idea of a political opposition. Every Democrat is evil. Every person who disagrees with President Trump is an enemy of the state. Every career federal employee is a member of a deep state opposition.

As writer Gabe Sherman, who authored a history of Fox News, tweeted over the weekend, “Been thinking a lot about why Trump will survive impeachment when Nixon didn’t. For 20+ years Fox News (and rightwing talk radio) has told GOP voters that Democrats are evil. As lawless as Trump is, Republicans believe Dems are worse. That’s the power of propaganda.”

These pronouncements—uttered around the clock on weekdays and doubled down on weekends by hosts like the president’s favorite, Jeanine Pirro—are an attack on the very ideals and foundations of the American experiment.

The founders settled on political parties as a mechanism to institutionalize channels for ongoing debate. As historian Joseph Ellis wrote in American Creation, political parties “eventually permitted dissent to be regarded not as a treasonable act, but as a legitimate voice in an endless argument.” It is that willingness to view opponents as legitimate that has long allowed America to hold together even under trying political times and to deal with political disagreements in the political arena, rather than resorting to violence against national leaders. For all of Fox News and President Trump’s daily declaration of coups and attempted coups against the administration, American history has actually been shockingly free of actual coups.

Part of what drives the unique national interest in the rivalry of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr was that their fatal showdown represents the only case of a founder taking another founder’s life. It was one of only a handful of times in our entire national history where we’ve seen political figures fight each other and inflict real wounds. (The caning of Senator Charles Sumner in the pre–Civil War Capitol comes to mind as another such rare instance.)

In the midst of his own presidential run in 2008, John McCain stopped one of his own supporters in her tracks attacking Barack Obama as a Muslim to defend the Democratic nominee: “No ma’am,” McCain said. “He’s a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

That tradition and idea of American politics as an ongoing conversation, an endless argument, is key to preserving our democratic experiment. The idea that you will be in power sometimes, and out of power other times, is what preserves norms and traditions, and curbs the worst abuses and impulses; politicians traditionally understand that actions taken in the majority could serve to bite them if and when they return to the minority.

Donald Trump, who rose to prominence trumpeting the very “birther” falsehood that McCain once batted away, seems bent on undermining that tradition; he has proven he’s perfectly willing to burn down political norms for short-term gain. Fox News seems intent on helping him—and on a daily basis, they’re telling their viewers he’s right and anyone who disagrees with him is less than human. Trump’s lies are the one constant and consistent position of his presidency (13,000 and counting!), and Fox News has gone all in.

We, as a democratic society, cannot survive such consequences-be-damned, winner-take-all, facts-don’t-matter politics. Fox News has upended Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous proclamation that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Its daily programming seems driven by the idea that everyone might be entitled to their own facts, but that there is only one correct opinion: President Trump’s.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote his imagined dystopian regime “told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” but Fox News has actually figured out a tactic even more pernicious: Fox News’ own masters of Orwellian doublespeak, its Hannitys, Carlsons, and Doocys, the ones who smugly declare down up and up down, aren’t even bothering to tell their viewers to ignore their eyes and ears, because the truth never even approaches their airtime.

Let’s hope that Fox News today, unlike in Orwell’s world, doesn’t manage to succeed in transforming our country from a functional democracy into an authoritarian cult.

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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Why Pelosi and her party finally embraced impeachment

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/why-pelosi-and-her-party-finally-embraced-impeachment/

Why Pelosi and her party finally embraced impeachment

Hoyer responded that he’d come to the same conclusion over the weekend following a wave of stunning news reports about Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine — and potentially withhold military assistance from the U.S. ally — for his own political benefit.

“The facts drove the timing and the decision,” Pelosi told POLITICO in a brief interview. “And that’s what I’ve said all along — when we get the facts, we will be ready. And we’re ready.”

Pelosi’s decision followed months of Democratic infighting. She had also faced a barrage of criticism from the party’s activist base, which had begun to question her once-impeccable progressive credentials.

And the move comes with risks. Public opinion, for now, still remains against impeachment, and the inquiry could jeopardize her majority in 2020 while giving Trump a boost in his reelection bid.

But Pelosi had also maintained her keen sense of the caucus, and knew that Democrats were erupting in the days after the Ukraine scandal began to unspool.

While on a plane back to Washington that night, Pelosi scrolled through a Washington Post op-ed that had published minutes earlier from seven vulnerable Democratic freshmen — and long-time impeachment holdouts — backing proceedings to remove Trump from office. The op-ed underscored how quickly the political ground was shifting among Democrats.

In fact, Pelosi had spoken to the group on a conference call on Monday night, offering guidance before their op-ed went live.

She then started jotting down notes, the first draft of her own speech endorsing an inquiry — words that would not only formalize the House investigation but potentially change the course of the nation and define her storied career.

But there was a hiccup: “I put down some notes on the plane at 10 p.m. at night but then I left it on the plane,” Pelosi said.

Less than 24 hours later, after first informing her 235-member caucus of the decision in a private meeting, Pelosi walked out to a podium on the speaker’s balcony, in front of a wall of American flags, and spoke to the country.

“The president must be held accountable. No one is above the law,” Pelosi declared, describing Trump’s actions as a “betrayal of his oath of office.”

And then Pelosi went where she hadn’t been willing to go before publicly: “Therefore, today I’m announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.”

For the Democrats who had been pressing for an impeachment probe for months — at times experiencing Pelosi’s wrath along the way — the speaker’s words were stunning. Just a week before, those very same Democrats were privately lamenting that their campaign to impeach Trump was quickly running out of time after several attempts to win public support had failed to materialize.

Now, the pro-impeachment forces feel vindicated.

“I’ve always thought it was inevitable,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said of impeaching Trump. “Here, he essentially bragged about what he had done. And the truth is plain to see. The Latin phrase isres ipsa loquitur— the thing speaks for itself.”

‘Let All This Mueller Stuff Go’

Four months earlier, Democratic leaders worried they were on the verge of losing control of the impeachment narrative.

It was May 22, and two days before, Trump had barred former White House counsel Don McGahn from testifying before the House Judiciary Committee about the president’s alleged obstruction of justice.

Furious with Trump’s stonewalling — and the missed opportunity to hear from special counsel Robert Mueller’s star witness — a few members of Pelosi’s leadership team clashed with her privately over the issue and were now getting ready to break with the speaker and openly call for impeachment proceedings against the president.

So Pelosi, who keeps a notoriously tight grip on her members, convened her lieutenants in bid to rein in the pro-impeachment revolt before it was too late.

That was when Rep. Cheri Bustos, an Illinois moderate who chairs the House Democrats’ campaign arm, made a pronouncement that stunned the room.

“We just need to let all this Mueller stuff go,” Bustos said, according to three sources who attended the meeting.

Bustos’ comment reflected a deepening sentiment among senior House leaders and a faction of Democratic moderates who wanted nothing to do with impeachment talk. Bustos has said publicly that she supports the House’s Mueller-related investigations, but she has also long argued that voters care more about kitchen-table issues.

But to the faction of Democrats seeking formal impeachment proceedings, Bustos’ suggestion had come at precisely the moment they needed to get more aggressive with a hostile White House. The Trump administration would soon stonewall Congress on a host of subpoenas for witnesses and documents, effectively making a mockery of lawmakers’ constitutional oversight powers.

That meeting was the beginning of a rupture that consumed the Democratic Caucus for months. It marked one of the first times Pelosi tried to walk the tightrope between the liberals who helped elect her as speaker and the moderates who delivered Democrats the House in 2018 — a delicate balancing act that became ever more difficult to manage.

It was also when Democrats who backed impeachment made a conscious choice: they weren’t going to simply fall in line with their party leaders and were going to continue organizing colleagues to join the impeachment cause.

“I believe we had enough to file articles of impeachment right after the [Mueller] report initially came out,” said Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), one of just three lawmakers who sits on both the Judiciary and Intelligence committees.

In the weeks and months following the release of the Mueller report, pro-impeachment Democrats believed that the holdouts in the caucus were underestimating Trump’s ability to “self-impeach” through his actions and penchant to seek revenge against political enemies.

“I feel like we were indecisive and overly cautious,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), an early impeachment supporter. “And frankly we did way too much political parsing when we should have taken this obvious bombshell, added it to the many other obvious impeachable bombshells that we already had, and begun doing our job.”

But the caucus was divided and the fracture was getting harder to ignore.

Pelosi and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) had been sparring for months over the issue. Just last week, Pelosi criticized the Judiciary Committee’s handling of impeachment in harsh terms behind closed doors and even encouraged people in the room to leak her complaints.

And then, just as the impeachment effort appeared to be sputtering, everything changed.

A nondescript, late-night press release from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) landed in reporters’ inboxes on Sept. 13revealing the existence of an intelligence community whistleblower that the Trump administration had refused to let talk to Congress. Within days, the Trump-Ukraine scandal had exploded across Washington.

Pelosi Makes Her Move

The calls started rolling in to Pelosi in earnest last Friday night.

Earlier that week, the Washington Post had revealed details about a mysterious whistleblower complaint being withheld from Congress. It involved a “promise” Trump made while talking with a foreign leader.

Then a blockbuster follow-up report from the Wall Street Journal a few day later blew apart Democratic leaders’ delicately knitted attempt to hold off an impeachment investigation. The report detailed how Trump “repeatedly” pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son in a July phone call while simultaneously withholding military aide from the country.

For many Democrats, that was what was missing from previous Trump scandals. Trump was allegedly using his office to extort a foreign leader to help benefit his reelection campaign, a move that smacked of the Richard Nixon era for many in the party.

“Here we’re talking about potentially ongoing, gross abuses of power. We’re talking about a sitting president, not a candidate for president. And we’re talking about the current campaign, not a past campaign,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) said in an interview just minutes after viewing the classified whistleblower complaint in the Intelligence Committee’s underground bunker at the Capitol Wednesday night.

As the Ukraine scandal quickly ballooned, progressive activists got restless. Late Saturday night, freshman liberal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote on Twitter that Democratic leaders’ refusal to impeach Trump was “the bigger national scandal” than the president’s “lawbreaking behavior.”

But Pelosi wasn’t going to rush into any decision. She was a rising backbencher when the House impeached President Bill Clinton in 1998, and she knew that impeachment proceedings against Trump would be just as divisive to the nation.

Pelosi was also convinced that it would distract from her party’s legislative priorities on health care and drug costs, gun violence and other key issues. The Democratic domestic agenda — as well as Trump’s growing unpopularity in the suburbs — had driven the party to a huge House win in November and vaulted Pelosi back into the speaker’s chair after eight years in the minority.

The California Democrat also knew that Trump’s stranglehold over the GOP meant no Republicans were going to back impeachment unless there was an air-tight case against the president. And shefeared that impeaching Trump on partisan lines was a risk to the Democratic majority.

So Pelosi took the heat from the Democratic base — and within her own caucus — over her resistance to impeachment. She at times grew exasperated by the criticism, privately clashing with some members of her leadership team while asserting publicly that Trump “isn’t even worth” impeaching.

One other important factor weighed heavily on Pelosi — her “frontline” members in the toughest swing districts were overwhelmingly opposed to impeaching Trump, and some had directly told her so. It was her duty to represent the whole caucus, so Pelosi did what she felt she had to do as speaker: Say no to impeachment.

But the Ukraine scandal upended all that.

By Saturday morning, Pelosi informed her staff to be ready to prepare a statement endorsing an impeachment inquiry. She continued to field calls from dozens of Democrats throughout the weekend in between delivering back-to-back eulogies — first for the veteran journalist Cokie Roberts on Saturday and then for Mrs. Clyburn in South Carolina on Sunday.

Dozens of other House Democrats had also traveled to South Carolina to pay their respects to Emily, Clyburn’s wife of 58 years. But on the sidelines of the weekend’s memorial events, impeachment chatter dominated the conversations.

“She was in regular contact with the entire spectrum of the House Democratic Caucus over the last few days,” said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).

Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, other Democrats were also coming to their own painful conclusions about Trump’s alleged behavior and what needed to be done.

‘I’ve Done My Job’

For two of Minnesota’s vulnerable Democrats, the move to support impeaching Trump was a deeply personal decision made at 30,000 feet.

Rep. Dean Phillips emailed his staff to inform them he’d decided toendorse an impeachment inquiry while on a flight returning to Washington on Sunday. On her own D.C.-bound flight the next day, Rep. Angie Craig, who sits in a bordering district, said her thinking also crystalized mid-air.

When the two of them spoke on a panel on Capitol Hill Monday, Craig pulled Phillips aside afterward to tell him of her decision to call for an impeachment inquiry — and learned that he’d already drafted a similar statement to release that afternoon.

Within hours, the two Minnesota freshmen became the first battleground Democrats to back impeachment following Trump’s own admission that he pressured Ukrainian officials to investigate Biden. It was the beginning of a wave of support that would ultimately push the number of impeachment inquiry backers in the House to a majority — 218 members — by midweek.

“At the end of the day, I asked myself, if this were a Democratic president with exactly the same set of admissions, or behavior, would I have the courage to stand up and call for an inquiry on my own Democratic president?” Craig said in an interview.

In Washington, much of the attention on the shift within the caucus has focused on the seven battleground freshmen who published the op-ed on Monday night. That 427-word statement came after days of nonstop texts and conference calls among a tight-knit group of lawmakers who all have backgrounds in national security,including in the military and CIA.

But Trump himself contributed to the momentumfor impeachment as well. Many Democrats say it was Trump’s defiant comments on Sunday, directly acknowledging that he had spoken to Ukrainian officials about investigating Biden, that made lawmakers feel they could no longer ignore the situation.

Some called senior members in their state delegations and conferred with Pelosi about how to proceed. Others were deciding at home with family or out in their districts. Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), who endorsed an impeachment inquiry on Tuesday, made up her mind while speaking at a Democratic picnic near a playground where she grew up.

Some freshmen were still deliberating when they returned to Washington on Tuesday, where the issue came up at a closed-door meeting of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition and resistance to impeachment lingered.

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who survived the Democratic wipeout in the 2010 midterms, offered a warning to the undecided freshmen in the room.

“Don’t get caught up with the party,” the conservative Democrat cautioned. Other party elders, like Reps. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), nodded in agreement, according to multiple people in the room.

Cuellar and Schrader are among the few remaining Blue Dogs who lived through the party’s humiliating defeat eight years earlier, when the moderate caucus’ ranks were depleted by half after a series of tough votes, including on Obamacare.

This time, if Democrats were going to take a vote that could wipe them out, Cuellar said they needed to vote their conscience.

Multiple freshmen in competitive districts said that they tried to put politics aside. But they couldn’t entirely ignore the idea that impeachment could cost them their seat.

“If I serve one term, and do it with honor and principle, and lose because of that, so be it. I’ve done my job,” Phillips said. “Has it crossed my mind? Of course. But it’s very liberating to reflect my truth, and I think the nation’s truth.”

‘Give Us A Goddamn Message’

Hours before her historic announcement on Tuesday, Pelosi received a call from Trump. The conversation was ostensibly about gun control, but Trump veered into the Ukraine controversy.

Trump then told Pelosi that he wasn’t personally holding up the whistleblower complaint. “Well, then undo it,” she told him, relaying the conversation to lawmakers later in the day.

But even after it became clear that an impeachment inquiry wasinevitable, Democrats were still far from agreement over the actual mechanics ofit.

Swing-district lawmakers, in particular, were actively pushing Democratic leaders to adopt an entirely new strategy from their Mueller days — one that didn’t involve what they saw as overly aggressive members of the House Judiciary Committee.

On Tuesday morning, a handful of Judiciary Committee members met with some of the national security-minded freshmen who wrote the op-ed the night before. The meeting was organized by Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.), another vulnerable freshman Democrat who also sits on the Judiciary panel.

The Judiciary members had a key goal: Convince these influential freshmen that their panel was best equipped to carry out an impeachment proceedings, rather than a select committee handpicked by party leaders, as some moderate lawmakers had been advocating for in recent days.

Still a concern of many was a circus-like hearing the week before featuring former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who sparred with Democrats and defiantly refused to answer questions about his role in the Mueller investigation.

Democrats privately described the showdown — the first public hearing with a Mueller-report witness — as an embarrassment, and they blamed Nadler for the mess. Pelosi herself said in a closed-door meeting that she would have held Lewandowski in contempt immediately, a comment several attendees viewed as a dig at Nadler.

Judiciary Committee members pushed back during the meeting with frontliners, arguing that they understood the gravity of the Ukraine scandal and why it was different than the myriad other investigations Democrats have been pursuing against Trump.

In fact,Democratic leaders are now coalescing around a strategy to narrow the focus of their impeachment inquiry to the Ukraine scandal, in part because it has unified the party in outrage.

In the end, the Judiciary members won out and Nadler’s starring role in the impeachment drive was preserved. Pelosi held a private meeting with six committee chairs on Tuesday afternoon and told them to come up with their best cases for impeachment and send them to the Judiciary Committee for potential consideration of impeachment articles.

Yet even after Pelosi helped steer the party to an impeachment inquiry, holding her members together over the next critical weeks and months could prove difficult.

A closed-door session with the full caucus on Tuesday made that clear, as some moderates complained that they weren’t being given a clear message to deliver to voters about why proceeding toward impeachment was necessary on Trump’s Ukraine maneuverings.

Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) was the most colorful, grousing that Democratic leaders needed to “give us a goddamn message to stay on,” according to lawmakers and aides in the room.

“I think we all know we’re at a historic moment,” Slotkin latertold reporters. “Obviously we have a lot of investigations already ongoing. But I think it’s important that we focus on this one. It’s clear, it’s understandable, it’s strategic, and we need to bring along the country with us.”

#embraced #Foreign #impeachment #Politics

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clubofinfo · 7 years ago

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Expert: Europe is suffering the tortures of the damned as it struggles with split-personality psychosis. Here in the center of Western Europe one can tune in Germany’s national public broadcasting networks any day of the week and hear scornful diatribes against Trump, outrage over his withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, shock and anger regarding his threats against our German automobile industry in his incipient trade war, calls for more EU independence and self-sufficiency. Every Washington Post CIA-funded-Big-Breaking-News-Report about Mueller’s latest move to impeach and bring down the Orange Menace is always the top headline here: “The Washington Post reports that …” No mention of Jeff Bezos and his relationship to the CIA. If the Post says Trump is on shaky ground and cruisin’ for a bruisin’, Europe gets excited. They wanted Hillary here, badly. Europeans knew Hillary. They trusted Hillary. They associated her with that good-looking, smooth-talking young President Barack Obama. Sure, he blew it with the NSA stuff, but nobody cares about that anymore, either here or in the USA. All forgotten. Obama talked a good game on Europe. Polite young man. Went to Harvard. I want to tell you that there was some serious panicking and freaking out going on here in Europe the morning after election day 2016. Europeans don’t often run around shrieking their fears in public, a cool façade is the preferred mode here, but they did that day, and for many weeks afterward. They had just spent more than a year sneering and raising their eyebrows and scoffing at the ludicrous orange-cartoon-figure-come-to life, both physically and in print. They had reassured each other and the public in endless columns and debates and editorials that he didn’t have a chance to (first) win the nomination and (then later) to become President. They were already doing a major freak over Brexit. Trump winning was just too much. The sky was falling. And he has not disappointed them in putting into effect the catalogue of horrors they had anticipated. Pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords. Refused to pay even lip service to gun control (lip service goes a long way here in the EU, actual progress is less important). Continued to flaunt that ridiculous comb-over that looks as though it’s deliberately designed to show his contempt for fashion and good taste. Threatened to pull out of the nuclear treaty with Iran, which is very popular here – and practically the only way in which the EU has ever been willing to go against Israel, otherwise we are World Champion Israel-Ass-Kissers here. Trump ranted against Muslims and foreigners, defended white racists (here we mostly just pretend they don’t exist, although they carried out 1,000 attacks on Muslims last year in Germany alone), created new legal hurdles to immigration. Of course, the EU does all of that last bit with immigrants too, except for the ranting part. One does these things quietly, don’t you see, while simultaneously claiming to care about refugees and wanting to help them. No-sirree, the new man in the White House is near the bottom on the European Hit Parade of Favorite Americans. What is the dang DEAL with these Americans? How could they elect such a monstrous ambulatory joke? Time to stand up and get independent and show the world that Europe will not sit still for just any old nonsense. Most of us highly-progressive and politically conscious Euros agree about that. Therefore one might think the EU would be ready to go cold turkey from that highly addictive CIA-Neocon Brand Evil Russia Kool-Aid … right? (extended silence) Well, uh … on the other hand … I mean, now let’s not get TOO carried away with this independence business. As a matter of fact, all of these American military bases here in Europe, specifically all of these NATO nuclear weapons here in our allegedly once-again-sovereign Germany (a sovereignty which is often called into question by smartasses peddling conspiracy theories, who assert Germany is still controlled by the USA), make some of us feel a whole lot safer from the wicked Lord Sauron aka/ Vlad the Impaler just a few hundred kilometers to the east. While the government has agreed in principle to gradually increase German military expenditures to 2% of the gross domestic product – thereby almost doubling military spending – in the coming years, mostly under pressure from the USA, it doesn’t want to get nailed down too firmly to that unofficial commitment. There are other things it would rather use that money for. And as long as the USA maintains its military outposts and missile installations in Europe, EU countries feel as if there’s no big rush. There is also the fact to consider that NATO already outspends Russia on military matters by 900 billion dollars per year to 60 billion dollars per year. But that imbalance rarely comes into the “aggressive Russia” debate, any more than does the fact that Russia (and China too for that matter) is encircled by US military bases. A real extremist who did not understand Russia’s evil nature might go so far as to say that NO ONE needs to increase military spending, and that if anyone is a threat, it is NATO, in particular its leading nation which has already laid to waste much of the Middle East and overthrown numerous governments around the world – often installing nasty and brutal authoritarian rulers as puppets to do its bidding. But we Europeans never mention such nuances in our advocacy of a Weltanschauung (“way of looking at the world”) which has to be kept very black and white, good versus evil, if the empire is to function properly. And if we want to keep the USA in Europe, in charge of the nuclear arsenal and continuing to give EU nations the luxury of not having to put any of this to the test, then there must be some terrifying menace to justify having those troops and atomic weapons here. We are very nervous about Trump’s threats to force Europe to stand up on its own, but we fervently hope that in a few years he will disappear and our good old Democrats or more moderate Republicans – yes, of course, they still exist, they must — will return to pamper us. No, for us here in Europe it’s not the USA that is the problem, it’s Trump. As psychotic and bizarre as America is, with its mass shootings and its primitive death penalty, its shocking refusal to enact a reasonable national healthcare program, its police killings of unarmed blacks, its warmongering and overthrowing of foreign governments, its drone massacres of wedding parties, drone massacres and assassinations which we generously allow to be controlled from here on German soil — we would have happily continued to overlook all of that if the USA had only elected another head of state who pretended to care about those things, or at least put a noble and urbane mask on them. Someone like Obama, like Hillary. The way we here in the EU pretend to have noble values while deporting helpless refugees into war zones, turning them back over to Libyan torturers and slave traders, etc., intoning solemn avowals of “European Democratic Values” all the while. Presidents like Obama, or like Hillary would have been — make it so very much easier to get away with our pretense of innocence. It’s embarrassing having Trump as an ally. It’s painful and frightening too. It’s like being possessed by a demon. http://clubof.info/

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moonwalkertrance · 7 years ago

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Puerto Rico governor vows midterm revenge for tax bill

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló says he plans to mobilize 5.3 million Puerto Ricans living on the mainland to shake up the midterm elections in states ranging from Florida to California.

Rosselló, a Democrat and member of the island's pro-statehood New Progressive Party, is infuriated about a Republican tax plan that he says could hobble the island’s economy even as thousands of residents remain without power and water three months after Hurricane Maria.

“Everybody has seen the damage of the storm and yet policy decisions go in the opposite direction of where they should go,” Rosselló said in an interview with POLITICO on Tuesday. “We’re not just going to stand by. We are going to take action.”

The 3.4 million U.S. citizens living on the island have no vote in Congress, but they do have 5.3 million fellow Puerto Ricans scattered across the mainland who do have a vote. It’s that political power Rosselló plans to leverage.

“We are a significant voting bloc in the United States that perhaps hasn’t been organized well in the past,” he said. “The diaspora, the Puerto Rican exodus, has always wanted to help Puerto Rico, it just hasn’t been crystal clear how they can do it. If we can establish that organization we can have plenty of influence.”

For Rosselló, the idea gelled with the tax vote, which blew a hole in tax and manufacturing rules granting the island both foreign and domestic status. The system has made Puerto Rico a tax haven for drug and medical device makers, who can incorporate in the commonwealth as foreign subsidiaries but label their products as made in the U.S.

The new tax plan treats companies on the island the same as those operating outside the U.S., subjecting them to a tax of up to 12.5 percent on intellectual property.

Even if he can get the tax changes fixed and pick up other legislative wins, Rosselló said he intends to stick to his plan. His office has begun cataloging Puerto Ricans and Latinos living on the mainland to see where they can have an impact.

So far, he figures they can sway congressional district votes in 14 states, including Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. He pointed to the influence of Florida’s 2.7 million Cuban-Americans, a powerful and well-organized constituency.

Rosselló has been trading barbs this week with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) over Rubio's support for the tax bill.

“We are twice the size. If we can get organized, we can certainly start swaying decisions our way and having at least some political leverage,” he said. “We will evaluate those who gave the good fight for the people of Puerto Rico and those that didn’t.”

His plan also would draw attention to Puerto Rico’s legal status, which he calls “this big elephant in the room”.

“What are we going to do with a colonial territory in the 21st century?” Rosselló said. “The United States has unfinished business. It holds the oldest and most populated colonial territory in the world.”

“Having no representation is a clear disadvantage and if you need any more evidence of this just look at the tax reform,” Rosselló said. “Just because we don’t have representation we got railroaded.”

#Donald Trump #Puerto Rico #Taxes #Tax Cuts #Politics #GOP #Republicans #Hurricane Maria #Hurricane Relief #Hurricane Disaster

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silviajburke · 8 years ago

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It’s Tulip Time!

This post It’s Tulip Time! appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

[Ed. Note: To see exactly what this former Reagan insider has to say about Trump and the fiscal threats from politics and the debt ceiling, David Stockman is sending out a copy of his book Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back to any American willing to listen – before it is too late. To learn how to get your free copy CLICK HERE.]

At the peak of the Dutch tulip mania, bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman and a single rare specimen bulb (Semper Augustus) purportedly changed hands for the equivalent of 12 acres of prime land.

But after rising 8X in a few months, the reckoning came in February 1637. The tulip bulb price index came crashing back to where it had started in, well, November of the prior year!

So it might be wondered whether this most recent November to February (into March) mania is “there” yet. That question is especially important in light of the fact that Trump’s recent address to Congress amounted to the proverbial clanging bell at the top.

In giving the most fiscally irresponsible speech since LBJ’s “guns and butter,” the Donald proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he and his team have no clue about the horrific fiscal facts of life confronting them.

They are utterly unaware, apparently, that they are plowing right into a Grand Debt Trap that will put the kibosh on not only the vaunted Trump Stimulus, but on the entire 30-year era of Bubble Finance.

But before I get back to more detail on the Grand Debt Trap ahead, it is worth noting what happened during a more recent November to March blow-off rally. I am referring to the infamous dotcom mania, of course, and it just so happens that there is a nice symmetry in the numbers as they pertain to the present.

Between October 24, 1999 and March 22, 2000, the NASDAQ 100 rose from 2,460 to 4,600 or 87%. After that parabolic climb, however, it soon plunged back to where it had started in October. Nor was the year 2000 collapse close to done — it plunged a further 67% through October 2002.

Like the NASDAQ blow-off of 2000, the current Trump-O-Mania rally started on November 2. As it happened back then, however, the NASDAQ 100 peaked shortly after the Fed raised interest rates (again) on March 21. Yet as CNN reported that day, the Fed’s action was considered to be no big threat to a then unstoppable bull:

For financial markets, the rate increase and the short announcement that followed was a non-event, mostly because Wall Street had widely expected the Fed to do exactly what it did.

There wasn’t a black swan in the sky, it seemed — until there suddenly began a dizzying two-year plunge of almost 85% from the nosebleed peak.

This time there is an Orange Swan hovering above the market, but it appears equally unrecognized by today’s punters. I am referring to the fact that the headline reading algos have totally misread the Trump Stimulus.

The robo-machines — and the remaining troop of day-trading carbon units that mimic them — can only read words, not the political tea leaves. Accordingly, when the Donald promised a “big, big” corporate cut and a “massive tax reduction for the middle class” and also a $1 trillion infrastructure bill to rebuild “America’s roads, bridges, airports, hospitals and schools,” the machines dutifully “priced it in.”

But what they haven’t reckoned with is that the debt ceiling clock starts ticking on March 15 when the current “holiday” expires. It will then freeze in at approximately $20 trillion, leaving the Treasury’s coffers with about $200 billion in cash.

But the Trump Administration blew through $204 billion of cash during its first 35 days in office. That fact was apparently unbeknownst to the President, who tweeted the complete falsehood that he had already reduced the public debt by $12 billion.

Au contraire!

The U.S. Treasury is bleeding red ink profusely — notwithstanding Janet Yellen’s comical claim that the American economy is closing in on the Keynesian nirvana of “full employment.” During the first four-and-one-half months of FY 2017, in fact, Uncle Sam’s net debt increased an astonishing $532 billion. That amounts to an annualized borrowing rate of $1.3 trillion.

Given the Treasury’s cash burn rate of $3-4 billion per calendar day, the U.S. Treasury will have 50-75 days of cash when the debt ceiling clock starts ticking again on March 15. That’s less than a week away.

And that means it will run out of cash long before any tax bill even gets out of the House Ways and Means Committee or infrastructure bill even gets tabled.

Indeed, the Wall Street robo-machines are abysmally un-programmed with respect to the entire budgetary process. The fact is, none of the components of the Trump Stimulus can happen until both houses pass and agree to a FY 2018 budget resolution with its 10-year path for revenues, spending, deficits and the public debt.

It is only through a budget resolution that encompasses a comprehensive long-term fiscal plan that it is possible to get a “reconciliation instruction” for the tax bill; and without that parliamentary mechanism, tax reform will die in a Senate 60-vote filibuster stage managed by the K-Street lobbies.

But here’s the thing. The ticking debt ceiling clock will mightily interfere with — if not block completely — the process of reaching an agreement within the GOP caucuses on the FY 2018 budget resolution.

In fact, the legislative and political maneuvering in the run up to this summer’s debt ceiling vote will powerfully concentrate the minds of the backbench fiscal hawks. It will remind them that their fate under the massive deficits embedded in the Trump Stimulus will be to walk the plank time after time to raise the debt ceiling!

Moreover, as the media finally begins to focus on the rapidly dwindling cash balance at the Treasury, it will elicit a maneuvering, bargaining and posturing spectacle inside the GOP caucus that will make Speaker Ryan wish to send the gavel back to John Boehner.

The fiscal conservatives will demand entitlement reforms, but Trump says no. The Trump White House has embraced an utterly stupid and unnecessary plan to bust the sequester caps and add $54 billion to the already bloated $600 billion defense budget for FY 2018 alone — and proposed to offset it with draconian cuts to domestic agencies and the State Depart/foreign aid budget which are already “dead in the water” in the GOP Senate.

But here’s the newsflash. The FY 2018 sequester caps of $548 billion for defense and $518 billion for non-defense discretionary spending are chiseled in law under the BCA (Budget Control Act).

There is not a snowballs chance in the hot place that a bill could pass the House which raised defense to more than $600 billion, while slashing the domestic cap to under $500 billion. There would be blood on the floor from one end of the Capitol Building to the other.

By the same token, there would be an outright revolt by the Freedom Caucus if both caps are raised — which is the only way to assemble a legislative majority.

In the meanwhile, the drive to “repeal and replace” Obamacare is already deeply fracturing the House GOP, and it’s going to get progressively worse.

What’s happening is that the Freedom Caucus is quickly figuring out what I documented already. Namely, that the Ryan plan for “repeal and replace” is actually little more than Obamacare Lite. Not only will the $7 trillion 10-year cost under current law not be reduced in any material way, but the Ryan plan will also establish what amounts to a new age-based entitlement to health tax credits.

Taken together, all of these battles over the sequester caps, Obamacare repeal, a new continuing resolution for FY 2017 appropriates which will be needed to avoid a government shutdown in later April will take their toll.

Accordingly, the Mother of All Debt Ceiling Crisis will occur for the simple reason that there is no pathway to a House and Senate majority for a multi-trillion debt ceiling increase.

Perhaps that’s because Washington has never been there before. That is, facing down a $20 trillion public debt with $10 trillion more in the pipeline over the next decade, and a clueless team in the White House that wants to pile trillions more of red ink on top of that.

In a word, the algorithms driving the stock averages to tulip bulb mania highs can’t possibly anticipate the political firestorm that is coming down the pike.

When it hits, the machines will begin puking up a tsunami of sell orders like never before. When the dust finally settles, there will surely be some new charts that will give the October-March plunges depicted above a run for their money.

Regards,

David Stockman for The Daily Reckoning

The post It’s Tulip Time! appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

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junker-town · 8 years ago

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The Super Bowl in Houston gave Roger Goodell a chance to be human and he blew it

The commissioner may view the Super Bowl as “an opportunity to be entertained,” but he and the NFL are long past sticking to sports.

HOUSTON — On Wednesday, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was asked to clarify the league’s stance on President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. Goodell passed up the opportunity.

“As commissioner of the NFL I’m singularly focused on the Super Bowl right now,” Goodell said. “As I’ve said before, we have a unique position to have an event on Sunday that will bring the world together. They will have an opportunity to be entertained, feel good about what we’re doing, and that’s something that we feel very proud of, and it’s something that we’re going to continue to be focused on through this game.”

Goodell’s response wasn’t too different, at its face, from the one that Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Mohamed Sanu gave on Opening Night. Sanu, a Muslim whose mother left war-torn Sierra Leone in the 1970s, was asked at the start of his podium appearance how Trump’s travel ban affected him. He told reporters, several times, that he would only be talking about the upcoming game.

“Obviously, my name’s Mohamed. A lot of people know I’m Muslim,” Sanu said. “But I’m here because of my football talents, not because I’m Muslim. So if you guys are going to continue to ask me about my religious beliefs, then I’m going to keep telling you the same thing, because I’m here to talk about football.”

Though the words themselves are similar, the responses were given in very different contexts. Sanu hinted that he might address the ban at a later date. He is likely aware that taking a stance on anything before the Super Bowl could create a week-long distraction for his teammates, and heap stress on himself. Goodell, meanwhile, hid behind the Super Bowl during his de facto State of the League address. Sanu had to face media scrums all week. Goodell held one brief, moderated press conference.

While Goodell was too “singularly focused on the Super Bowl” to talk about the ban, he had no problem answering questions about relocation, Deflategate, sports gambling, marijuana, broadcast changes (441 words on that), celebration penalties, starting a developmental league, and Ezekiel Elliott’s domestic violence case. He used the same excuse players do to avoid questions during Super Bowl week, except he will be watching the game Sunday while Sanu blocks, runs, catches passes, and absorbs a series of subconcussive hits.

Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports

Falcons WR Mohamed Sanu faced rounds of questions about his faith during media scrums leading up to the Super Bowl.

The NFL seemed to be running from the Trump question during Super Bowl week. That quote by Sanu is one of the few relatively political answers that snuck past the NFL’s transcriptionists. The New York Times reported Tuesday that there were virtually no mentions of Goodell or Trump from the publicly released transcripts from Opening Night, even though Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady (and others) were asked several questions about their relationships to both men. Goodell was asked about the transcripts on Wednesday, too, and denied any knowledge.

Goodell did embrace the city of Houston, however. He opened his address by thanking Mayor Sylvester Turner, the thousands of local volunteers, and the community in general for hosting the Super Bowl. Goodell also applauded the Patriots and Falcons for the outstanding seasons they’ve had, and called 2016 “one of the most competitive seasons in the history of the NFL.”

Goodell invoked Houston and NFL players for his own goodwill. The former is sacrificing resources — space, time, money — to host the game. The latter are sacrificing their bodies. They’re perhaps the two most integral parts of one of the world’s biggest spectacles.

And as it so happens, both are deeply affected by Trump’s executive orders.

Houston resettles more refugees every year than any other city in the United States. Roughly 30 of every 1,000 refugees resettled anywhere by the United Nations land in Harris County, which is more than all but three countries in the world. NFL players make up their own diverse body of people, including many who are Muslim. These groups are the Super Bowl. There will be refugees working inside the stadium during the game when Sanu is on the field.

By refusing to address the travel ban — even after leagues like the NBA have done it without staking a strict political viewpoint — Goodell revealed that he isn’t focused on the Super Bowl at all. If he were, he would have noticed the people he might be alienating with his silence. That’s the best case scenario, anyway, because the flipside is that he did consider Houston and his players, and decided he didn’t care.

Turner reiterated Houston’s place as a haven for immigrants and refugees well before Trump’s travel ban. In December, as Trump was preparing to become president, Turner announced the creation of an Office of New Americans and Immigrant Communities in Houston that would provide resources for anyone who was moving to the city from a foreign country.

“I want to be very clear: The City of Houston that existed prior to the election, that welcomed you to this city, that rejoiced in your diversity — that city still exists today,” Turner said in a press conference. “I intend to do everything within my power to respect you, to protect you and to serve you as mayor."

Turner staked Houston’s reputation at a time when the state of Texas is actively trying to drive away refugees. Last September, Governor Greg Abbott pulled Texas out of the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program, and is trying to crack down on “sanctuary cities” -- cities that protect illegal immigrants by not pursuing federal immigration law violations. This week, he canceled $1.5 million in criminal justice grants to Travis County, which includes the state capital of Austin.

By doubling down on its immigrant community, Houston may be inviting similar repercussions. The definition of a “sanctuary city” is nebulous and the city’s refugee policies arguably fall under it. The Houston Police Department has long had a policy of not asking the public about immigration status. That will continue, despite the changing national political climate.

“If anything, [Mayor Turner] has been even more supportive [than previous mayors],” Lauren West told me. West is the senior program and operations manager for Partnership for the Advancement and Immersion of Refugees, PAIR, which supports refugee youths in Houston. The city’s stance has helped her explain current events to some of her kids.

“You've got to give them some hope,” West says. “They've already gone through so much in their lives, and to throw this on them, that's just horrible. But it's also not good to lie to them completely, or to ignore the situation as if they're not being affected by it.”

The NFL Players Association didn’t shy away from the travel ban because of Super Bowl week. One day after Goodell made his remarks, I asked union president Eric Winston if the NFLPA had a stance.

Of course we do. Our Muslim brothers that are in this league, we empathize. And that's it. And we're going to go do whatever we can. I'll go stand with them if people want to come to my house or family or whatever, I'll be there with them. ... These guys are players in the National Football League, their families are ours. And I take that seriously.

I think about them like that, in that we are going to do whatever it takes to protect them and their families. They can call on us, they can call on me, they can call on [executive director DeMaurice Smith], they can call on any of these guys, and we'll be there for them. I don't think that's who we are as a people, but I'll leave that discussion for another day.

This all circles back to what the Super Bowl is. Sara Kauffman, the Houston Area director at Refugee Services of Texas told me that there will be dozens of refugees working the game: “Working security around the Super Bowl, who are catering parties, and cleaning up at Super Bowl parties. They are very much a part of our city.”

Pittsburgh Steelers offensive tackle Ryan Harris reminded me that there are also multiple Muslim Super Bowl champions.

“Myself, [Denver Broncos cornerback] Aqib Talib -- not only are we a part of this country, but we are a part of this league,” Harris said. “They talk about to us that we wear the shield everywhere we go, so if we're standing up for equality, if we're standing up for police training, if we're standing up for constitutional rights, in a way the league is there with us.”

Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports

Houston mayor Sylvester Turner has been an outspoken advocate for refugees.

These statements are risky. Houston is provoking a combative governor. Players, by stating their opinions, are inviting criticism, solicited or not. “Stick to sports” has become a common refrain over the last few months as athletes and sports writers respond to Trump’s election and presidency.

Former Minnesota Vikings and Kansas City Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah defended his right to speak freely in a story published for Sports Illustrated on Thursday. He closed it by invoking one of the most revered athletes in history.

Muhammad Ali, the greatest athlete of our time. A global and American icon. Unapologetically Black. Unapologetically Muslim. He wouldn’t remain silent during all this turmoil. And neither will we.

Abdullah and his brother, Hamza, have been outspoken as former NFL players, especially on the issues of concussions and the concussion protocol. They are also devout Muslims. They started a support group called the Ashad Network to give Muslim athletes and entertainers a space to discuss their unique issues. Abdullah disagrees with the “stick to sports” mentality, but he understands it.

“Entertainment is how we escape reality, whether it's listening to music, watching movies, binging on Netflix, watching sports, playing video games,” Abdullah told me. “So if you start bringing up executive orders, and human rights, and war -- if you start to bring up these real issues, people are going to be like, 'I came to look at this to get away from that stuff. Don't bring that stuff into here.'”

Roger Goodell may view the Super Bowl as “an opportunity to be entertained,” but he and the NFL are long past sticking to sports. The league has pushed forward on many player issues, donating millions to research traumatic brain injuries, creating a domestic violence policy and giving players better post-career access to benefits and health services. The NFL has always been concerned with more than just putting an entertaining product on the field, even if reluctantly.

“[The NFL] is bringing a little more awareness about issues, but they have to have it first in order for them to respond to it,” Latasha Batch said Wednesday at an NFLPA wellness panel in Houston. She discussed how her husband, former Detroit Lions quarterback Charlie Batch, struggled when he transitioned out of the NFL.

“Domestic violence had to come to the forefront, at the worst it could possibly be because of video and social media, in order for them to create a domestic violence campaign. Many players had to commit suicide for them to take initiative on [concussions]. Why is there a waiting period?”

The answer to that question is complicated. One reason is that Goodell is beholden to NFL owners, too, not just players or whichever city is hosting the Super Bowl in a given year. Billionaires often have different political viewpoints than their minor-millionaire athletes and the United States’ general populace.

Empathy doesn’t have to be political, however, and not every stance has to be boisterous. The Ashad Network, for example, isn’t planning to make a unified statement. Harris will happily speak his mind about issues facing the Muslim community when asked, but he hasn’t published an op-ed like Abdullah. He prefers discussing things over coffee.

“Everyone who I have ever played with or been coached by has been nothing but inclusionary and respectful of my beliefs,” Harris said. “And we've had tough conversations sometimes, but I invite those. I invited people who I know to ask me questions that they may think are stupid or disrespectful, but let's talk.”

On Monday, Mayor Turner gave a press conference to directly address Trump’s executive orders and what they mean for Houston. He echoed Goodell by setting a global stage, but for him the stakes were much higher.

“This weekend, we will host the single biggest sporting event there is,” Turner said. “The eyes of this world are on us right now. And it’s a perfect opportunity to set an example and show them how it is done, and — as we stand up for the values that we believe in: diversity, inclusion, respect and appreciation of differences — the recognition that in our diversity is our strength.”

Goodell believes he is doing his job by refusing to address questions about Trump’s executive orders. Instead, he is neglecting Muslim players and a city that prides itself on being a welcoming place for everyone, not just Super Bowl guests. Once again, Goodell refused to acknowledge reality, and passed up his chance to be a human being.

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