monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

A cache of hacked emails revealed that a senior figure in the Bradley Foundation, a prominent financier of right-wing groups in the US, attended a gala alongside Russian oligarchs and officials shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

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Even at the time, the event was not without controversy. Some American conservative groups decided not to participate in the conference and gala. The Concerned Women for America, for example, withdrew from the event. Explaining the reasoning behind the decision, the group said it didn’t want to “appear to be giving aid and comfort to Vladimir Putin,” Think Progress reports.

Bill Clinton campaigned on and signed NAFTA...

You seem to think more laws and regulations equal freedom

Benjamin Franklin once said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Stop with the heavy hand of the law making you free.

There was no choice in the confrontation...

By Harley Schlanger
29
January 2019
The pre-dawn raid on the home of Roger Stone on January 25, in which armor-clad FBI agents brandishing weapons pounded on his front door, in front of a TV camera, was scripted like a scene out of a movie. In this case, the target was not a notorious terrorist, a violent narcotics trafficker, or a murderous psychopath, but a well-known, successful political consultant, who is charged with crimes such as "lying to the Congress." In a release from LaRouchePAC, it is described as "yet another Mueller 'bombshell' in which the crime alleged has been created by Mueller, based on harassing and bankrupting potential witnesses—a so-called process crime for falling into created perjury traps—a concocted crime that has nothing to do with Trump himself."

Famed civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz pointed out that, like most of Mueller's indictments, the charges have nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the investigation, which is to prove Trump campaign collusion with Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Instead, the majority of the "crimes" by Trump campaign officials occurred after the election, in response to the investigation! Dershowitz said that the "purpose of the indictment was to get [Stone] to cooperate against Trump." The charges against Stone came in part from Mueller's thuggish tactics against two of Stone's former associates, Randy Credico and Dr. Jerome Corsi, in which the special counsel's team badgered them to get them to turn on Stone.

The indictment comes after nearly two years of a campaign against Stone, from anti-Trump media and Democratic Party elected officials, such as Rep. Adam Schiff, which complemented Mueller's team's ongoing threats against Stone and his associates. Mueller has been trying to prove that Stone had advanced notice of the Wikileaks' dump of Clinton campaign documents, to provide evidence that Trump, through Stone, his former campaign manager and long-time friend and associate, was in "collusion" with Vladimir Putin and his Russian team of election meddlers. Failing to find any evidence to back up charges of meddling, or collusion by the campaign, or of Stone's "Russian connections," Mueller is using "process" indictments to convince Stone that he should "flip" on Trump, and give the special counsel the evidence he needs to justify his witch hunt.

But Stone continues to refuse to give Mueller what he wants. Following his release on bail, he said that he will "cooperate" with Mueller, by telling the truth of what he knows, that there has been no contact by him with the Russians, nor any discussion with Trump of the Wikilieaks' documents, but that he will not make up a story to implicate the President in anything illegal.

Stone has been a fixture in American politics for decades, going back to his work with Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. From his time with Reagan, he developed an appreciation for Lyndon LaRouche, who had been brought in by Reagan to negotiate with the Soviet Union on the proposed Strategic Defense Initiative. LaRouche's involvement with this triggered a campaign against him from the highest levels of British intelligence, who demanded that the FBI expose LaRouche as a "Russian agent." Mueller served as a key part of the Get LaRouche task force in the mid-1980s. Stone played a key role in shaping Trump's successful campaign, and is a strong supporter of the President's commitment to break with the provocative geopolitics of the establishment behind the Bush and Obama presidencies, especially in their threats against Russia, and replace it with dialogue and cooperation with Putin, as well as with China's Xi Jinping.

The whole point of the British sponsorship of Russiagate has been to prevent Trump from succeeding in doing this. Staging a brute force raid against Stone, which has more in common with the Nazi regime or the East German Stasi than with an honest, truth-seeking investigation, makes more clear that Mueller and the war mongers behind him will continue to trample upon the Constitution until they are stopped.

Right before Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December 2017, President Trump proclaimed:

“It’ll be fantastic for the middle-income people and for jobs, most of all ... I think we could go to 4%, 5% or even 6% [GDP growth], ultimately. We are back. We are really going to start to rock.”

A year later, it’s very clear that the tax cuts boosted gross domestic product and jobs a bit — and just for one year. Its effects are fading as U.S. GDP growth appears likely to weaken in 2019. The only thing that “rocked” were corporate profits and the stock market. And we’re facing trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.

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The numbers couldn’t be clearer: Corporations, big shareholders and top corporate executives reap the lion’s share of the gains from the 2017 tax cut, which should be renamed the Shareholder and CEO Enrichment Act of 2017. It didn’t boost economic growth that much, didn’t start a capital spending boom or U.S. manufacturing renaissance, didn’t bring overseas profits back home, and might have led to modest job growth but little discernible wage increases. And we’ll all be stuck with the bill for a long, long time.

Face it, you're just another brick in President Trump's wall...

Six migrants on hunger strike at an immigration detention centre in Texas are being force-fed.

Immigration officials are using plastic nasal tubes to feed the men, which family members say are causing severe nosebleeds and vomiting.

The detainees are refusing food over conditions at El Paso Processing Center, the Associated Press reports.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says a federal judge authorised the force-feeding this month.

AP says the detainees, mainly from India and Cuba, went on hunger strike to protest against guards verbally abusing them and threatening to deport them.

They are also protesting against the length of time they are being detained while they await legal proceedings.

As well as the detainees in El Paso, another four men are on hunger strike in Miami, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco, ICE says.

When a person is force-fed through the nose, a lubricated tube is pushed through the nostril until it reaches the throat. Liquid food is then pumped into the stomach.

ICE spokeswoman, Leticia Zamarripa, told AP that a federal court had approved the use of force-feeding against the hunger strikers in mid-January, about two weeks after detainees started refusing food.

Kellyanne Conway, White House adviser, recently dismissed as a “silly semantic argument” questions about President Trump’s use of the word “wall” — is it concrete, steel, see-through, a “smart wall,” slatted, piked, solar-powered, a chain-link fence or just a metaphor?

The semantics, however, are anything but trivial. If the White House and House Democrats are to reach a deal to avert another government shutdown by the Feb. 15 deadline, they must first reach a rough détente over what they are talking about — in particular, the definition of Mr. Trump’s “wall,” and of “border security,” the Democrats’ catchall description of their own approach.

“There’s no magic glossary telling you the difference between a fence and wall or a barrier, they are kind of interchangeable,” said Jeh Johnson, who served as President Barack Obama’s homeland security secretary from 2013 to 2017.

“There is a distinction between governing and political rhetoric, and people should not get trapped in the binary,’” Mr. Johnson said. “The moment when we reach a compromise on the vocabulary is the moment we reach a compromise on the policy.”
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Rachel Martin talks to John Sipher, formerly of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, about President Trump blasting intelligence officials' assessments on Iran, North Korea and other matters.

It was an act of God that propelled then-citizen Donald Trump from his golden hued high-rise on Fifth Avenue to the Oval Office, according to the White House’s press secretary.

“I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times and I think that he wanted Donald Trump to become President, and that’s why he’s there,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a professed Christian told the Christian Broadcasting Network Wednesday. “I think he has done a tremendous job in supporting a lot of the things that people of faith really care about.”

Neocon, fundie, Russiagate-fanatic Dan Coats, from his unfortunate position as Director of National Intelligence, issued a frontal assault on the President of the United States on Tuesday in his written testimony before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. In the annual global risk assessment testimony from the intelligence community, Coats targetted several key efforts which Trump has undertaken to end American subservience to British imperial dictates. Trump was unfazed, and counter-attacked on each front, including a suggestion that "intelligence should go back to school!"

Coats said that Russia and China "will collaborate to counter US objectives, taking advantage of rising doubts in some places about the liberal democratic system." To a certain extent he was correct — but he is leaving out that there is a popular revolt taking place, not in Russia or China, but across the US and Europe, against the failed "liberal democratic order," which would better be identified as the "British system." This, in fact, was the root of the revolt in the US which resulted in the election of Donald Trump, driven by disgust with the collapse of industry, infrastructure, health care, and education, as well as the mass drug war destroying the citizenry, and the "endless wars" which Trump has sworn to end. It is also the root of the Yellow Vests revolt in France, the Brexit in the UK, and the election of the new government in Italy, which is denouncing EU austerity dictates and embracing China's Belt and Road Initiative.

Coats is also, clearly, attacking Trump's insistence that he intends to make the U.S. a "friend" of Russia and China — a direct threat to the British division of the world so beloved by Coats and his neoconservative Republican friends, as well as his neoliberal Democratic friends.......