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The Islamic State militant group (ISIS) got its hands on vast supplies of weapons by taking advantage of U.S. weapons transfers that may have violated international agreements between Washington and its allies, according to a new report.

As much as 90 percent of ISIS's arms and ammunition were found to have originated in Russia, China and Eastern European states. The jihadis were able to obtain much of this arsenal as a result of former President Barack Obama's support for rebels in Syria, U.K.-based Conflict Armament Research reported after analyzing 40,000 items recovered by its investigators along ISIS front lines between July 2014 and November 2017. By purchasing "large numbers" of European arms and ammunition and then diverting them to nonstate actors in Syria without notifying the sellers, the U.S. reportedly "violated the terms of sale and export agreed between weapon exporters...and recipients."

"The United States and Saudi Arabia supplied most of this materiel without authorization, apparently to Syrian opposition forces. This diverted materiel, recovered from IS forces, comprises exclusively Warsaw Pact–caliber weapons and ammunition, purchased by the United States and Saudi Arabia from European Union (EU) member states in Eastern Europe," the report found, using an alternative acronym for ISIS.

"Supplies of materiel into the Syrian conflict from foreign parties—notably the United States and Saudi Arabia—have indirectly allowed IS to obtain substantial quantities of anti-armor ammunition," it later added.

ISIS emerged out of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other jihadi groups in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and overthrow of its leader, President Saddam Hussein. After announcing its establishment in 2013, ISIS spread into Syria to take advantage of the ongoing war between the Syrian military and the rebel and jihadi groups trying to overthrow it since 2011. In Syria's conflict, the U.S. had been supplying arms to insurgents opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since at least 2012 and, when ISIS began rapidly seizing territory in 2013 and 2014, many U.S.-armed rebel groups were either defeated by the incoming militants or joined them. ISIS reportedly received most of its initial supplies by overtaking Russia-backed Syrian and U.S.-backed Iraqi military positions, but later vastly received a massive boost from the U.S.'s effort to overthrow Assad.

As ISIS began to take nearly half the country, the U.S. continued to train and equip Syrian rebels, using local allies like Jordan and Turkey as intermediaries. In its report, Conflict Armaments Group included dozens of photographs of EU-manufactured weapons believed to have been procured by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, shipped to Syrian rebels and later obtained by ISIS, which moved them between Iraq and Syria. These included a powerful anti-tank missile launcher bought from a Bulgarian manufacturer by the U.S. Army and wielded by ISIS only weeks later.

Low information Blatham... fits.

The ideological views of most low-information voters tend to be more moderate than those of high-information voters. Low-information voters are less likely to vote and when they do they generally vote for a candidate they find personally appealing. They tend to be swing voters and they tend to vote split-ticket more than well-informed voters do. Researchers attribute this to low-information voters not having developed clear cut ideological preferences. Some are single-issue voters, i.e. they vote primarily on a single issue they care very much about, such as gun control.

Linguist George Lakoff has written that the term is a pejorative mainly used by American liberals to refer to people who vote conservative against their own interests and assumes they do it because they lack sufficient information. Liberals, he said, attribute the problem in part to deliberate Republican efforts at misinforming voters.

In a 2011 article titled "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult", thirty-year Republican House of Representatives and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren characterized low-information voters as anti-intellectual and hostile-to-science "religious cranks" and claimed Republicans are deliberately manipulating low information voters to undermine their confidence in American democratic institutions.

Popular syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh became aware of the term in the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election, initially joking that it could be interpreted to signify stupidity. However, Limbaugh later clarified that a low information voter may also be considered in his view a "high liberal information voter", expounding on media bias thusly: "I have never said that low-information voters are stupid. I just said they don't know what they think they know. They are prisoners to the media, which has dumbed them down. Low-information voters can be doctors. Low-information voters can be scientists. They can be among all walks of life. It has nothing to do with IQ. It has to do with what they don't know because of their media sources. Low-information voters are clearly people that don't have all the information available to make a voting choice. That's all they are. And they're all over the place. And most of them do vote Democrat. Most of them did vote for Obama. It's not a comment on their intelligence. It's not that they're stupid or don't understand the issues. They just haven't had it all explained to them".

A 2012 paper by six American political scientists called "A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics" challenged the idea that Republicans want a low-information electorate and argued instead that both major American parties do. Noting that 95% of incumbents in the highly polarized House of Representatives win re-election despite voters' preference for centrist representation, the paper theorizes that voters' infrequent penalizing of extremist behaviour represents not approval, but a lack of attention and information. This, the paper says, is supported by the fact that when congressional districts and media markets overlap to create more informed electorates, extremist House members are at much greater risk for defeat. The paper proposes that in the American political system interest groups and activists are the key actor and that the electorate is uninformed and bamboozled.

it's a "crude substitute for rational argument."

This sort of verbal abuse is simply a lazy form of character assassination where, rather than coin an original and clever insult, the name-caller merely misappropriates a preexisting term in the hope that a few of the BB's land near the intended target. As with other propaganda techniques, it's a "crude substitute for rational argument."

Quote:

This sort of verbal abuse is simply a lazy form of character assassination where, rather than coin an original and clever insult, the name-caller merely misappropriates a preexisting term in the hope that a few of the BB's land near the intended target. As with other propaganda techniques, it's a "crude substitute for rational argument."

As one poster pointed out, this is a technique Trump uses all the time and Lash's use was similarly motivated and equally juvenile. But what caught my attention/curiosity was - What on earth did she imagine would follow from her use of the phrase? Who did she imagine might be swayed by it? Did she even think that far or was she merely following the sort of discourse models often found in the Ann Coulter-style commentary she attends to?

Disgraced former House speaker Dennis Hastert’s name was trending on Twitter Saturday morning after President Trump suggested “Nancy Pelosi will go down as the absolute worst Speaker of the House in U.S. History!”

Trump’s morning tweet is the third time in 24 hours the president has made this prediction about the California Democrat’s legacy, placing the first woman in the role below the 53 other men to have served as speaker since 1789.

“She is obsessed with impeachment, she has done nothing. She is going to go down as one of the worst Speakers in the history of our country,” Trump said Friday night during an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “And she’s become a crazed lunatic. But she will go down as — I think maybe the worst speaker in the history of our country.”

But some Twitter users were quick to point out the track record of other past speakers, namely Hastert (R-Ill.), the longest -running Republican speaker, from 1999 to 2007, and an admitted sex offender who molested teenage boys he had coached in high school wrestling. Hastert was convicted of bank fraud in a scheme to buy the silence of his victims.

I will continue to call it as I see it.

Who do you think will be swayed by your constant insinuation that I'm a Russian? Or a secret GOP operative?

Josh Marshall
@joshtpm
Fascinating dimension of the Trump era: all news orgs now hitting live with Trumps claim about four embassies and considering it as claim to be litigated even while simultaneously everyone universally understands he made this up on the spur of the moment.

My next book is imminent, and I am planning to finish it at some point.

That's a lot of fact-free nonsense

Now the FBI is going to reform those tactics and it is a good thing in the end.