Progressives (Liberals)

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/404703-obama-readies-fall-campaign-push-but-some-dems-say-no-thanks





I like the focus on voters and down-ballot candidates.

I hope the strategy works - and that they stick to it.

From Venezuela to McCain, Big Media and Human Rights Industry in Lockstep

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/from-venezuela-to-mccain-media-and-human-rights-industry-in-consensus/

On August 20, the Economist ran an article on Venezuela saying that “forced migration from the country might surpass the Syria crisis.” The magazine reported:

The UN’s International Organization for Migration estimates that at the end of 2017 approximately 1.6 million Venezuelans were living outside their country. Today that number is likely to be far higher: as of June 2018 there were nearly 1 million Venezuelan migrants in Colombia alone. The UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, has recorded 135,000 asylum applications from Venezuelans during the first seven months of 2018, already 20 percent more than for the whole of 2017. The total number of displaced Venezuelans may already have reached 4 million, out of a population of some 30 million. The outflow could eventually surpass the 6 million people who have fled the Syrian civil war.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration estimates that, by July of 2018, 2.3 million Venezuelans were living abroad (which includes hundreds of thousands who have spent decades abroad). Why does the Economist say it “may already” be 4 million? A good guess is that they are relying on the estimates of Tomas Paez, a vehemently anti-government Venezuelan academic who has long been a favorite source for corporate journalists (FAIR.org, 2/18/18). Paez has estimated that 1.6 million people left Venezuela from 1999–2015, about five times more than UN Population Division estimates for that period.

Economist: The exodus from Venezuela threatens to descend into chaos
The Economist‘s claim (8/20/18) that migration from Venezuela “might surpass the Syrian crisis” is off by a factor of seven.

No doubt as Venezuela’s economy entered what could fairly be called a “collapse” starting in 2015, migration began to skyrocket, and it is indeed likely to get worse, thanks to illegal economic sanctions that Trump enacted in August 2017.

What about the Economist‘s Syria comparison? First of all, Syria’s civil war has not just created a massive “outflow” of refugees. It also created an enormous population of internally displaced people, as wars typically do. As of 2017, Syria had 6 million people forcibly displaced within its borders. Another 5 million refugees were still living in three bordering countries (Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey). That brings the total of those forcibly displaced by Syria’s civil war to nearly 11 million—almost seven times larger than the most credible estimate of the numbers displaced (so far) by Venezuela’s economic crisis.


Syria had a population of about 21 million in 2011 when the civil war began. It has now been estimated to be about 18 million. So more than half of Syria’s 2011 population are now refugees, either internally or externally—a far cry from the 13 percent of the Venezuelan population claimed by Paez (and hinted at by the Economist), or the 5 percent (1.6 million) estimated by the UN’s International Organization for Migration to have left since 2015.

In absolute terms, Colombia’s population of internally displaced is even larger than Syria’s. As of March 2018, the UNHCR estimated it at 7.7 million out of total population of about 50 million, or more than one in seven. Of course, relative to population, Syria’s internally displaced population is vastly larger than Colombia’s. Still, 7.7 million internally displaced is a hell of a disaster to sweep under the rug, but those are the benefits of being a government in the good graces of the US and its allies.

The Economist doesn’t mention that US policy (backed by the entire Western establishment) is to use harsh and illegal economic sanctions to deliberately make Venezuela’s economic crisis worse, which will help drive more people to leave the country. US economist Mark Weisbrot, who was recently given a very rare bit of space to state this fact, noted afterwards that

Brian Ellsworth, a journalist for Reuters who reports from Venezuela, has joined the latest avalanche of trolls, bots and blowhards who swarmed me because I dared to mention on BBC World TV, on Friday night, that Trump’s financial embargo against Venezuela makes it more difficult for any government to stabilize the economy—a fact that no economist would dispute. Indeed, that is the purpose of the embargo.

The Western establishment includes prominent human rights groups, who often express the same imperial perspective one finds in the Economist. By citing these outfits, corporate media seem to provide critical assessments that are independent of Western officialdom. Don’t buy it. Amnesty International has refused to oppose US economic sanctions on Venezuela, and has also refused to denounce flagrant efforts by US officials to incite a military coup. Amnesty’s Americas director Erika Guevara-Rosas tweeted the dubious Economist article comparing Venezuela to Syria.

Kenneth Roth praises John McCain on Twitter
Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth (Twitter, 8/26/18) praised John McCain’s not-so-principled stance on torture.

Guevara-Rosas also tweeted out an article praising John McCain. McCain’s death has been a real “teachable moment,” showing how tiny the ideological differences are between corporate media and the human rights industry. Four different Human Rights Watch (HRW) officials used their Twitter accounts to spread praise for McCain. In 2011, McCain tried to have Venezuela placed on the US “sponsors of terrorism” list—not scary at all, coming from a man who joked about bombing Iran. McCain dutifully echoed the Venezuelan opposition’s line (also the Western media line, and HRW’s line) that the country is a “dictatorship.”

Ken Roth (HRW’s executive director) said McCain “will be remembered for his firm, principled opposition to torture, especially by Bush, a member of his own party.” Jose Miguel Vivanco said McCain was “a giant in North America politics and an ally in the defense of human rights.” Sarah Margon, HRW’s Washington director, said that McCain’s death ”feels exceptionally tough for those of us who have fought for human decency and basic rights alongside and with him.” Dinah PoKempner, HRW’s general counsel, spread an article that called McCain a “war hero.”

HRW followed up with an official statement saying McCain “was for decades a compassionate voice for US foreign and national security policy.”

And, of course, the Economist’s obituary (8/30/18) similarly laid the praise on thick, casting McCain as part of a heroic Republican “resistance” to Donald Trump: “The talk was never straighter, the stance never more upright, than when he called on his fellow Republicans not just to endure, but to resist.” McCain voted with Trump 83 percent of the time, according to the FiveThirtyEight website.

The victims of empire are never more invisible than when it is time to whitewash a departed warmonger. McCain’s “war hero” credibility stems from being a direct perpetrator of, and not simply a cheerleader for, the mass slaughter in Vietnam that took the lives of millions of people—or “gooks,” as McCain unapologetically preferred to call them. It is left to independent voices like Max Blumenthal (Consortium News, 8/27/18), to review McCain’s bloodthirsty record:

McCain did not simply thunder for every major intervention of the post-Cold War era from the Senate floor, while pushing for sanctions and assorted campaigns of subterfuge on the side. He was uniquely ruthless when it came to advancing imperial goals, barnstorming from one conflict zone to another to personally recruit far-right fanatics as American proxies.

In Libya and Syria, he cultivated affiliates of Al Qaeda as allies, and in Ukraine, McCain courted actual, sig-heiling neo-Nazis.

While McCain’s Senate office functioned as a clubhouse for arms industry lobbyists and neocon operatives, his fascistic allies waged a campaign of human devastation that will continue until long after the flowers dry up on his grave.

Unless there is radical change—real “resistance”—that transforms the organizations that people rely on to be ”informed” (media and NGOs included), Donald Trump, like Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, will eventually be whitewashed as well.

I didn't know Camlok had published anything.

See Edgar, deep deep evil envelops the USA. Y'all dance around the edges, Imperialism this and that, euphemisms that can't cover the war crimes, crimes against humanity, the terrorism, the genocides.

If you folks were really "government by the people" you would all be "death camp guards". As it is, your are simply apologists for these evils.

Greg Palast
Sponsored ⋅ Paid for by Greg Palast ·
Florida’s up to its old tricks again, using dubious lists of felons and computers that come up with criminal mismatches to rob votes from people of color.

In yesterday’s Florida election, an African-American attorney named Thomas Joseph Brown, who lives in Tallahassee, had his vote stolen. When he showed up to his polling station in Leon County, he was told he’d been purged from the rolls. When he took the matter up with the Election Supervisors they said it was because his name “matched” that of a felon called Thomas Jerald Brown, who lived 200 miles away in Daytona.

Seems the fact that the middle names, addresses, and other identifying information didn’t match wasn’t an impediment for the state when it came to stripping a citizen of his or her right to vote. Fortunately, as an attorney, Thomas Joseph Brown knew exactly how to steal his vote back, but most people in his position would’ve had their vote irrevocably snatched by the state.

It’s the same exact scam that stole the race from Al Gore in 2000. I demand y’all watch this cartoon about the original theft of Florida. It’s by Keith Tucker who drew Who Framed Roger Rabbit and is featured in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case Of The Stolen Election.

View the clip here then watch the whole move — available for FREE on Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Democracy-Money-…/…/B078SHBQLB/…

Had the Supremes not handed Bush the election, 9/11 would never have happened, millions of innocents would have been murdered by the US and 2,996 westerners would still be alive, not to mention all the large number who have died from the dust, poison air at GZ. Another thing the Bush government lied about.

Lordy lordy lordy, you folks are gullible!!!!!

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-slaves-rebel/

The only way to end slavery is to stop being a slave. Hundreds of men and women in prisons in some 17 states are refusing to carry out prison labor, conducting hunger strikes or boycotting for-profit commissaries in an effort to abolish the last redoubt of legalized slavery in America. The strikers are demanding to be paid the minimum wage, the right to vote, decent living conditions, educational and vocational training and an end to the death penalty and life imprisonment.

These men and women know that the courts will not help them. They know the politicians, bought by the corporations that make billions in profits from the prison system, will not help them. And they know that the mainstream press, unwilling to offend major advertisers, will ignore them.

But they also know that no prison can function without the forced labor of many among America’s 2.3 million prisoners. Prisoners do nearly all the jobs in the prisons, including laundry, maintenance, cleaning and food preparation. Some prisoners earn as little as a dollar for a full day of work; in states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas, the figure drops to zero.

Corporations, at the same time, exploit a million prisoners who work in prison sweatshops where they staff call centers or make office furniture, shoes or clothing or who run slaughterhouses or fish farms.


If prisoners earned the minimum wage set by federal, state or local laws, the costs of the world’s largest prison system would be unsustainable. The prison population would have to be dramatically reduced. Work stoppages are the only prison reform method that has any chance of success. Demonstrations of public support, especially near prisons where strikes are underway, along with supporting the prisoners who have formed Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, which began the nationwide protest, are vital. Prison authorities seek to mute the voices of these incarcerated protesters. They seek to hide the horrific conditions inside prisons from public view. We must amplify these voices and build a popular movement to end mass incarceration.

The strike began Aug. 21, the 47th anniversary of the 1971 killing of the Black Panther prison writer and organizer George Jackson in California’s San Quentin. It will end Sept. 9, the 47th anniversary of the 1971 Attica prison uprising. It is an immensely courageous act of civil disobedience. Prison authorities have innumerable ways to exact retribution, including placing strikers in solitary confinement and severing communication with the outside world. They can take away the few privileges and freedoms, including the limited freedom of movement, yard time, phone privileges and educational programs, that prisoners have. This makes the defiance all the more heroic. These men and women cannot go elsewhere. They cannot remain anonymous. Retribution is certain. Yet they have risen up anyway.

In addition to making demands about wages, the prisoners are calling for an end to the endemic violence that plagues many prisons. During a riot in April at Lee Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in South Carolina, seven prisoners were killed and 17 were injured as prison guards waited four hours to intervene.

Prisons in America are a huge and lucrative business. The private prison contractors Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group have annual revenues of $1.6 billion and more than $2 billion, respectively. They spent a combined $8.7 million on lobbying from 2010 through 2015, according to OpenSecrets.org. Global Tel Link, which runs the privatized phone services in many prisons, is valued at $1.2 billion. The food service corporation Aramark, a $8.65 billion company, has contracts in 500 prisons across the country although it has been accused of serving contaminated and spoiled food that has led to food poisoning. The money transfer corporation JPay Inc. is a subsidiary of the telecommunications firm Securus Technologies, which is owned by the private equity firm Abry Partners. JPay made $53 million in 2014 on transfers of $525 million, through an average charge of 10 percent to those sending money to prisoners. Corizon Health has a contract to provide health care to more than 300,000 prisoners nationwide. It earns about $1.4 billion a year. And there are many other corporations with equally large revenues and profit margins within the prisons.

Private corporations exploit prison labor in at least 40 states. In some cases these workers are paid next to nothing. They have no benefits, including Social Security participation, and cannot form unions or organize. They are not paid for sick days. And if they complain or are seen as troublesome they are placed in solitary confinement, often for months.

Some of the country’s biggest corporations have moved into prisons to take advantage of this bonded labor force. They include Abbott Laboratories, AT&T, AutoZone, Bank of America, Bayer, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, the former Chrysler Group, Costco Wholesale, John Deere, Eddie Bauer, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Fruit of the Loom, GEICO, GlaxoSmithKline, Glaxo Wellcome, Hoffmann-La Roche, International Paper, JanSport, Johnson & Johnson, Kmart, Koch Industries, Mary Kay, McDonald’s, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Sarah Lee, Sears, Shell, Sprint, Starbucks, State Farm Insurance, United Airlines, UPS, Verizon, Victoria’s Secret, Walmart and Wendy’s.

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Prisons expose how far a state will go to exploit and abuse its most vulnerable. Life in the American prison system is a window into the corporate tyranny that will be inflicted on all of us once we are stripped of the power to resist. The poorest families in the country are forced to pay an array of predatory fees to sustain incarcerated relatives. This is especially cruel to those children whose only contact with an incarcerated parent is through phone service that costs four or five times what it does on the outside. Prison life is one of daily humiliation and abuse. It entails beatings, torture, rape—especially for female prisoners who are preyed upon by prison staff—prolonged isolation, rancid food, inadequate heating and ventilation, substandard or nonexistent health care and being locked in a cage for days at a time, especially in supermax prisons.

Slavery within the prison system is permitted by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1865 at the end of the Civil War to create a new form of slave labor. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States. …” Plantations in the South and industries such as Florida’s vast turpentine farm operations, which survived into the early 20th century, used the 13th Amendment to force black convicts to do the same uncompensated work that many had done as slaves.

“Imprisoned in stockades or cells, chained together at night or held under armed guards on horseback, the turpentine farms were bleak outposts miles from any chance of comfort or contact with the outside world,” Douglas A. Blackmon writes in “Slavery by Another Name,” a description of convict life for tens of thousands of African-Americans that is eerily similar to today’s prison conditions. “Workers were forced to buy their own food and clothes from a camp commissary and charged usurious interest rates on the salary advances used to pay for the goods—typically at least 100 percent.”

Prisons, which contain mostly poor people of color, over half of whom have never physically harmed anyone, are part of the continuum of slavery, Black Codes, Jim and Jane Crow, convict leasing, lynching and the lethal, indiscriminate force used by police on city streets. Prisons are not primarily about crime. They are about social control. They are about profiting off black and brown bodies, bodies that in blighted, deindustrialized neighborhoods do not produce money for corporations but once locked away generate some $60,000 a year per prisoner for prison contractors, police, parole agencies, corrections officers, phone companies, private prisons, money transfer companies, medical companies, food venders, commissaries and the industries that manufacture body armor, pepper spray and the gruesome array of restraints and implements—four- and five-point restraints, restraint hoods, restraint belts, restraint beds, stun grenades, stun guns, stun belts, spit hoods, body orifice security scanners (BOSS chairs), tethers, and waist and leg chains—that look like a collection amassed by the Marquis de Sade. Prisons are also where we warehouse the poor who are mentally ill. It is estimated that 25 percent of the prison population has severe mental illness. Those with crippling mental disorders are given not therapy but cocktails of powerful psychotropic drugs that turn them into zombies sleeping 20 hours a day.

Once corporations moved manufacturing overseas and denied those in poor communities the possibility of a job that could sustain them and their families, they began to extract billions in profit by putting bodies in cages. Since 1970 our prison population has grown by about 700 percent. We have invested $300 billion in prisons since 1980. The prison-industrial complex mirrors the military-industrial complex. The money is public; the profits are private. Those who enrich themselves off the incarcerated are morally no different from those who enriched themselves from the slave trade.

Prisoners, once released, often after decades, commonly suffer from severe mental and physical trauma and other health problems including diabetes (which is an epidemic in prisons because of the poor diet), hepatitis C, tuberculosis, heart disease and HIV. They do not have money or insurance to get treatment for their illnesses when they are released. They have often become alienated from their families and are homeless. Stripped of the right to public assistance, unable to vote, banned from living in public housing, without skills or education and stigmatized by employers, they become members of the vast criminal caste system. Many are burdened with debts because of monetary charges in the criminal justice structure and a predatory system of prison loans. Over 60 percent end up back in prison within five years. This is by design. The lobbyists for the prison-industrial complex make sure the laws and legislation keep the prisons full and recidivism high. This is good for profit. And it is profit, not justice, that is the primary force behind mass incarceration. This system will end only when those profits are wrested from the hands of our modern slaveholders. The only people who can do that are the slaves and the abolitionists who fight alongside them.

The full list of national demands from “the men and women in federal, immigration, and state prisons” reads:

1. Immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons and prison policies that recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women.

2. An immediate end to prison slavery. All persons imprisoned in any place of detention under United States jurisdiction must be paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.

3. The Prison Litigation Reform Act must be rescinded, allowing imprisoned humans a proper channel to address grievances and violations of their rights.

4. The Truth in Sentencing Act and the Sentencing Reform Act must be rescinded so that imprisoned humans have a possibility of rehabilitation and parole. No human shall be sentenced to death by incarceration or serve any sentence without the possibility of parole.

5. An immediate end to the racial overcharging, over-sentencing, and parole denials of black and brown humans. Black humans shall no longer be denied parole because the victim of the crime was white, which is a particular problem in southern states.

6. An immediate end to racist gang enhancement laws targeting black and brown humans.

7. No imprisoned human shall be denied access to rehabilitation programs at their place of detention because of their label as a violent offender.

8. State prisons must be funded specifically to offer more rehabilitation services.

9. Pell grants must be reinstated in all U.S. states and territories.

10. The voting rights of all confined citizens serving prison sentences, pretrial detainees, and so-called “ex-felons” must be counted. Representation is demanded. All voices count!

Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books,…
Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish
Cartoonist
Mr. Fish, also known as Dwayne Booth, is a cartoonist who primarily creates for Truthdig.com and Harpers.com. Mr. Fish's work has also appeared nationally in The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Vanity…
Mr. Fish IN THIS ARTICLE:

A New NAFTA Without Canada? Unions and Tech Push Back Against Trump's Mexico-Only Deal

TRUMP ANNOUNCED A NEW TRADE DEAL WITH MEXICO

By DAVID MEYER Updated: September 3, 2018 7:40 AM ET
President Donald Trump may be insisting that the U.S. will be “better off” without a North American free trade deal that includes Canada, but American unions do not agree—and neither does the tech industry.

Richard Trumka, the president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO,) said Sunday that Canada needs to be on board, alongside the U.S. and Mexico, due to existing economic integration across the continent.

“The three countries in North America, the economy is pretty integrated,” Trumka said in a Fox interview. “And it’s pretty hard to see how that would work without having Canada in the deal.”

In a tweet Monday morning, the president lashed out at Trumka over his remarks, saying the union head “represented his union poorly on television this weekend.”

“Some of the things he said were so againt [sic] the working men and women of our country, and the success of the U.S. itself, that it is easy to see why unions are doing so poorly,” Trump said, before calling Trumka “a Dem!”

A week ago, the U.S. and Mexico reached an agreement on revisions to the current North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Trump and the unions alike have criticized as a “disaster” (in Trump’s words) or “devastating” (in Trumka’s) for U.S. workers.

Trump then said Canada had until Friday to climb on board—a significant date because Congress needs 90 days’ notification to approve a new NAFTA, and Mexico gets a new president at the start of December. However, Canada and the U.S. did not meet the negotiating deadline, and talks are to continue this week.

The U.S. president took to Twitter to claim there was “no political necessity to keep Canada in the new NAFTA deal,” while Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland took a somewhat more upbeat tack.


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
There is no political necessity to keep Canada in the new NAFTA deal. If we don’t make a fair deal for the U.S. after decades of abuse, Canada will be out. Congress should not interfere w/ these negotiations or I will simply terminate NAFTA entirely & we will be far better off...
11:03 AM - Sep 1, 2018

Chrystia Freeland
✔
@cafreeland
We are making progress in our talks to update and modernize #NAFTA, but we are not there yet. Our focus remains squarely on 🇨🇦 workers, families and business. We know that a win-win-win agreement is within reach. We will resume talks next week.
4:56 PM - Aug 31, 2018

The tech industry has also weighed in on the idea of a deal sans Canada will its own set of worries. “We are concerned that excluding Canada from a final agreement will limit our export opportunities and hurt the U.S. economy,” said Gary Shapiro, the head of the Consumer Technology Association, in a statement.

The current failure to conclude the Canadian negotiations isn’t the only issue for the unions—Trumka also pointed out that the Mexican agreement remains vague for now. “The language isn’t drafted. We haven’t seen whole chapters of the thing. We’re anxious to move forward with it and anxious to have all three countries involved,” he said in the Fox interview.

The Mexican deal guarantees workers the right to union representation, and insists that 40-45% of cars are made by workers who are being paid at least $16 per hour. It is not surprising that the unions want to see the fine print on these elements of the pact.

Trump slams AFL-CIO chief on Labor Day
By Yaron Steinbuch September 3, 2018 | 10:00am | Updated

President Trump launched a Labor Day attack at AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, who a day earlier said the commander-in-chief has hurt US workers more than he’s helped them.

“Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, represented his union poorly on television this weekend,” Trump tweeted minutes after wishing the nation a “Happy Labor Day!”

“Some of the things he said were so against the working men and women of our country, and the success of the U.S. itself, that it is easy to see why unions are doing so poorly. A Dem!” he added.

During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Trumka said about Trump: “Unfortunately, to date, the things that he has done to hurt workers outpace what he’s done to help workers.

“He hasn’t come up with an infrastructure program that could put a lot of us back to work. He overturned a regulation that would deny 5 million overtime that they would’ve had. He overturned some health and safety regulations that will hurt us on the job.”

He added: “We said when [Trump] was elected that when he did something good for workers, we’d support him. When he did something bad for workers, we’d oppose him.”

On Monday, Trump tweeted that “our country is doing better than ever before with unemployment setting record lows. The U.S. has tremendous upside potential as we go about fixing some of the worst Trade Deals ever made by any country in the world. Big progress being made!”

When Fox News host Chris Wallace mentioned to Trumka on Sunday that unemployment is down to 3.9 percent and employment numbers have held steady, the AFL-CIO chief said that while those numbers are positive, Trump is still falling short.

“Those are good, but wages have been down since the first of the year, and gas prices have been up since the first of the year,” Trumka said. “So workers really aren’t doing that well.”

Trumka also criticized Trump’s recently announced trade agreement with Mexico, saying that any effort by the White House to retool the North American Free Trade Agreement also should include Canada.

“We’re anxious to move forward with it and anxious to have all three countries involved, because NAFTA has had a devastating effect on the working people of this country for the last 25 years,” he told Wallace.

Last week, Trump announced he was proceeding with plans to abandon NAFTA and was working out the details of a new bilateral trade agreement with Mexico.

Talks between Team Trump and Canadian leaders collapsed Friday, the same day the Toronto Star published off-the-record comments the president made in an interview with Bloomberg News.

Trump told Bloomberg Thursday that he would not make any compromises in the talks with Canada — but that he could not say that publicly because “it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal,” the Toronto Star reported.

“Wow, I made OFF THE RECORD COMMENTS to Bloomberg concerning Canada, and this powerful understanding was BLATANTLY VIOLATED,” Trump tweeted Friday.

The next day, he added: “There is no political necessity to keep Canada in the new NAFTA deal. If we don’t make a fair deal for the U.S. after decades of abuse, Canada will be out.”

They are no different than you and all the other USians trapped in what has always been a major klpetocracy, Edgar.

Forget the bullshit Dishonest Abe tried to feed you about "government of, by for the people". He was as evil as any US prez has been and there are some real doozies when it comes to evil.

I want to thank neptuneblue and ebeth among others for posting positively here, where information is all I want to spread, not egos and grudges.

A big thumbs up on that, EB.

When is the award show, and will you be hosting?

You're welcome, Edgar.

You and many others here should take those words to heart, Edgar.

Brave man, isn't he?

The voters handed Bush the election.

The Supreme Court merely prevented Democrats from causing a Constitutional crisis after the vote counting was over.