monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Take a dump. Take a nap.

Take a hike.

oh yeah

smart women

always a problem for old white men

It's all about getting enough fiber when the fellas get old

It is all about undermining the Constitution and do not tell me it is not. If you think the views and people you defend have any other agenda you are truly naive.

Free people are dangerous to the Left, they must be stopped. The only way to stop them is to destroy their country. That is what you are a willing participant in. Remember when freedom dies in the US it will be dead everywhere else.

Not smart enough to avoid being indoctrinated. Does not say much for independent objective critical thought, does it?

http://www.watcherofweasels.org/steyer-soros-axis-the-totalitarian-left-unmasks-itself-kavanaugh-confirmation-protests/

Why North Korea’s latest nuclear concession isn’t one at all

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wants you to believe North Korea just gave up something big. It didn’t.

By Alex [email protected]@vox.com Oct 8, 2018, 4:30pm

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday that he and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made “significant progress” over the weekend toward dismantling Pyongyang’s nuclear program. The problem is it’s not clear what advancement he’s pointing to.

The two met for a nearly three-hour summit in Pyongyang on Sunday to discuss a way to break the impasse in discussions. Speaking after the meeting on Monday, Pompeo told reporters that North Korea has agreed to let international inspectors visit Punggye-ri, the site of all six of North Korea’s nuclear tests. In September 2017, Pyongyang tested a nuke there that was around seven times stronger than the bomb America dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

Letting inspectors visit the facility may sound well and good, except for one thing: It’s already been destroyed.

North Korea blew up that facility in May. And although the country’s leaders had originally invited international inspectors to witness the demolition, they changed their minds and said they would only allow a small group of foreign journalists to watch. CNN, for example, could only watch the destruction from about 1,600 feet away.

Letting inspectors in now to verify that the site is, in fact, destroyed is certainly a welcome step. After all, North Korea has been reluctant for years to let outsiders into its nuclear facilities and question officials at the sites. And while it’s unclear how much access the inspectors will get, it’s understandable that Pompeo is touting this as a victory.

“We made significant progress, we’ll continue to make significant process, and we are further along in making that progress than any administration in an awfully long time,” Pompeo told reporters on Monday.

But experts are skeptical that this move actually represents any meaningful “progress” toward denuclearization.

“Arguably the least interesting nuclear site to inspect in North Korea is the defunct, abandoned former testing facility at Punggye-ri,” Mark Groombridge, who used to advise National Security Adviser John Bolton on Asian affairs, tells me. “Who is Pompeo trying to kid? ... This gets more comical by the meeting.”

He’s not alone in that analysis. “Kim committed to closing these sites six months ago. He is milking them by offering them up piecemeal. It’s brilliant,” says Vipin Narang, a nuclear expert at MIT. “He’s selling the same horses twice and we are buying.”

It seems the administration is grasping for tangible wins to prove to critics of current talks that they are actually making progress. For example, the secretary also said on Monday that he hopes North Korea will allow inspectors into a “missile engine testing site” — likely the one at Tongchang-ri — soon. However, experts tell me Pyongyang doesn’t actually need that site anymore either, which makes Kim’s latest offers less significant than they seem.

Pompeo’s visit, however, might have succeeded in another way.

A second Trump-Kim summit may be on the horizon
The US and North Korea remain in a stalemate over how to dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

Washington wants Pyongyang to destroy much of its nuclear arsenal upfront and offer an inventory list of all parts of its program. Kim’s regime, meanwhile, wants President Donald Trump to sign a peace declaration — a nonbinding document that would formally end the Korean War — before Pyongyang makes any concessions.

Experts are split on whether that’s a good idea. Those who want the US to sign the agreement say it’s costless because it’s nonbinding, and therefore America has nothing to lose and everything to gain by signing it.

Others disagree, claiming that signing the declaration will make it harder for the US to criticize North Korea’s poor human rights record, for example. Further, some in the administration — including Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis — fear it would give Kim greater leverage in asking the US to remove its 28,500 troops from South Korea.

But Pompeo has had trouble breaking the impasse in part because Trump promised Kim during their June Singapore summit that he’d sign the peace declaration. But since then, Pompeo has kept asking for concessions from the North Koreans first, causing Kim’s regime to bristle and ask to deal directly with Trump instead.

After their meeting last weekend, both Pompeo and Kim said their sides have begun planning for a second Trump-Kim summit. It’s unclear when and where it will take place, but some experts tell me it’s likely both leaders will sign the peace declaration at the event.

If that’s the case, Pompeo’s trip may have ultimately proven successful. After all, it’s kept US-North Korea talks ongoing despite the tense stalemate. Stalled negotiations with a chance of a later breakthrough are surely preferable to the return of the specter of war.

“I think the aim of this meeting was to get another meeting,” Narang told me. “And on that count, it succeeded.”

Why not appreciate the fact that someone finally did something about NK? Just full of ideas all of a sudden, or just publishing another story with a negative slant about Trump's administration?

Trump Concession Over Military Drills Blindsides Many South Koreans
By Choe Sang-Hun
June 12, 2018

SEOUL, South Korea — For South Koreans who have long felt threatened by nuclear war, seeing President Trump and North Korea’s leader shake hands and sign an agreement on improving ties brought relief, if not closure, to the decades-old standoff.

But the optimism was quickly tempered by a shocker.

Hours after the summit meeting with Kim Jong-un in Singapore was over, Mr. Trump said he planned to end annual joint military exercises with South Korea, emphasizing their expense.

Mr. Trump suggested that he was ending the “very provocative” war games as an incentive for North Korea to denuclearize, granting the North one of its most avidly sought objectives even before the country has begun dismantling its nuclear weapons.

North Korea has long insisted that it would not relinquish its nuclear weapons program unless the United States removed its “hostile policies.” The North has cited military drills between the United States and South Korea as a prime example of American hostility, calling them rehearsals for invasion. Washington and Seoul have always dismissed such accusations as propaganda.

“We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should,” Mr. Trump told a news conference in Singapore. “Under the circumstances we are negotiating a comprehensive and complete deal. It is inappropriate to have war games.”

“No. 1, we save money. A lot,” he said. “No. 2, it is really something they very much appreciated.”

Mr. Trump’s remarks apparently blindsided South Korea. The office of President Moon Jae-in and the Defense Ministry in Seoul said they were both scrambling to “figure out the exact meaning and intentions in President Trump’s comments.”

Ending the joint military exercises could help Mr. Kim persuade his people, especially hard-line generals, to agree to denuclearize and focus on building the country’s poor economy, said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior analyst at the Sejong Institute in South Korea. Still, Mr. Trump’s announcement stunned many South Koreans.

Ever since the 1950-53 Korean War, the United States troops deployed in South Korea and the annual exercises have been the most visual display of the alliance. Previous efforts to halt the exercises often have faced tremendous resistance, especially from conservative South Koreans who regard the alliance as the main defense against the North.

“President Trump said something the United States’ commander in chief should not say to its ally,” said Cheon Seong-whun, an analyst at the Asan Institute in Seoul. “It’s a great insult to all South Korean soldiers who have been training for the alliance.

“He sees everything in terms of money but there are values other than money in an alliance,” he added.

South Korean officials have been open to the idea of readjusting the exercises to help persuade North Korea to denuclearize. They delayed them this year to encourage the North to participate in the Winter Olympics in the South in February.

But the South Korean government has always considered the American military presence and joint drills an integral part of its security in the region, regardless of the North’s nuclear intentions.

Many South Koreans and Japanese fear that North Korea and China will turn talks over denuclearizing the North into regional disarmament negotiations aimed at undermining the American military influence in Northeast Asia.

When United States, South Korean and Japanese officials meet in coming days to coordinate their policies, “it should become clear that any suspension of military exercises is not permanent policy but rather a short-term confidence building measure with North Korea,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.

The United States military in South Korea — also apparently blindsided by Mr. Trump’s remarks — said it had received “no updated guidance on execution or cessation of training exercises,” including the annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian joint exercise scheduled for this fall.

But Mr. Trump’s remarks fed fears among many South Koreans that his “America-first” diplomacy will leave them fending for themselves, with no sure sign that North Korea is bargaining away its nuclear weapons anytime soon.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly unsettled South Koreans by threatening to withdraw the 28,500 American troops stationed in South Korea, accusing Seoul of not paying enough for their presence. On Tuesday, he again said that he wanted to bring soldiers home but that a troop withdrawal was “not part of the equation” in current negotiations with North Korea.

His announcement on ending joint military exercises indicated intense bargaining that had not been reflected in the broadly worded joint statement Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim signed.

Although vaguely worded, the joint statement contained a rough road map for ending the North Korean nuclear crisis that Mr. Moon’s government in Seoul has been advocating.

In their statement, Mr. Kim made a “firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” while Mr. Trump promised to provide “security guarantees” for the North.

Both leaders also agreed to establish “new” relations between their countries and build a “lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.” They said they would implement the agreement “expeditiously.” Aides for both will start negotiations as early as next week.

Mr. Moon called the agreement “a historic event that has helped break down the last remaining Cold War legacy on earth.”

“I would like to pay my respect to President Trump who achieved a feat that no one else has ever delivered,” Mr. Moon said.

North Korea and the United States made similar, broadly worded commitments in the past, in nuclear disarmament accords signed in 1994 and in 2005, for example. Those agreements collapsed in later talks on what actions North Korea should take toward denuclearization and how to verify them, as well as what incentives Washington should provide in return.

The lack of such details in the Trump-Kim statement suggested that despite many rounds of lower-level talks before the summit meeting, wide mistrust persists between the two sides.

“The joint statement is not the end but just the beginning” of what could be a bumpy road toward denuclearizing North Korea, said Kim Dong-yub, an analyst at the Seoul-based Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul. “Both sides probably realized that they needed to build confidence first rather than making excessive demands.”

Officials said the Tuesday statement was more likely to succeed because it had been signed and endorsed personally by two strong-willed heads of state.

But critics said Mr. Trump gave away too much too soon to Mr. Kim, helping the dictator debut as a major international diplomat and implicitly recognizing North Korea as a de facto nuclear weapons state while failing to commit Mr. Kim to a specific timetable for denuclearization.

In North Korea, the video images of Mr. Kim with Mr. Trump will be a propaganda bonanza for the young North Korean leader, they said.

“The whole summit was a big win for Kim Jong-un,” said Yoo Dong-ryul, director of the Korea Institute for Liberal Democracy in Seoul.

You crack me up

I'd miss you if you didn't post.

Right , me too, hahahahahahahahaha

That's nice, you disappoint me.

http://patriotretort.com/hey-white-women-are-you-ready-for-another-lecture/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/08/donald-trump-2016-campaign-rick-gates-israeli-help-report

So Nikki Haley resigned as the US ambassador to the UN.
Perhaps we'll get to know the reason(s), otherwise it's a wide open field for speculations.

Getting ready for her run sooner than expected? (gotta throw that in)

Perhaps we'll know after the big announcement with his friend Ambassador Nikki Haley in the Oval Office at 10:30am (now?)

Given that the news about her until about an hour ago was an ethics investigation

https://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article219714725.html

she may want to get out before that stains future runs for the WH