Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The US is not the only global villain, for sure, but if you’ve ever read about our own government’s admission of international and national COINTELPRO programs, and if you have a basic understanding of what’s happening currently on the global stage—and if you further can dispassionately assess who has motivation to make a move—you could at least understand why someone might suspect a certain player of a certain action.

Adam Kinzinger #fella @AdamKinzinger
2h
Of everything that never happened, this never happened more than anything

So, you don't acknowledge that we have any interest in the collaboration or success of the BRICS alliance?

We've never dealt with the level of crime he produced, and he did things no one else has ever committed from the White House before.
He's going down and Garlin will be one of his biggest prosecutors.

Trying to pin down jelly? Good luck! Get ready for the side-step.

https://www.axios.com/2022/11/14/turkey-claims-us-complicit-istanbul-attack
Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu on Monday rejected the condolences the U.S. offered following this weekend's deadly attack in Istanbul and accused Washington of complicity.

The big picture: The U.S. also considers the PKK — which advocates for Kurdish autonomy and has a long history of conducting attacks inside Turkey — to be a terrorist group.

For Turkey to make the accusation is notable, but far more notable is the BRICS alliance, its ultimate goals, and how severely that alliance and that goal effects the US.

I believe that Russia v Ukraine and the attacks in Turkey, and the wrecking of the Nordstream pipeline was directed by the US in order to stop or to send grave warnings to the BRICS / Russia + China + OPEC+ alliance.

The US is not the only global villain, for sure, but if you've ever read about our own government's admission of international and national COINTELPRO programs, and if you have a basic understanding of what's happening currently on the global stage—and if you further can dispassionately assess who has motivation to make a move—you could at least understand why someone might suspect a certain player of a certain action.

Turkey has problems with Kurdish separatists, and the Kurdish nationalist group the PKK is classed as a terrorist organisation.

Turkey has been luke warm about Sweden and Finland joining NATO due to them giving asylum to Kurdish figures.

While the Turkish PKK is branded as a terrorist group not only in Turkey but also in the EU and the USA, the PYD/YPG is considered a terrorist organisation only by Turks.

Stephen Colbert @StephenAtHome
26m
Kari Lake is on the short list for the ex-president’s VP, but she might want to do a little research into why that gig’s available.

"We got people in Washington that have gotten too weak. All they want to do is let people ride their bike. That's what Sen. Warnock is doing. Let Joe Biden ride his bike."

Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a Republican often mentioned as a potential 2024 candidate, said she did not believe Mr. Trump offered “the best chance” for the party in 2024.

Covid Lockdowns Disqualify Trump in 2024
‘Fifteen days to stop the spread’ turned into an eternity.

Lance the Boil

Trump is back. Twice impeached, facing a slew of legal and financial issues, the disgraced former president made good on his threat to run in 2024 in a weird and draggy hour-long mess of a speech to the faithful last night at Mar-a-Lago. The announcement was everything you’d expect from a Trump performance: the accordion hands, the singsong voice, the tussle with the teleprompter as if the machine were a hostile headmaster testing him on Latin declensions.

Whoever wrote the speech loaded up the usual gobbledygook about “globalist sellouts” and China and rebuilding the military, but to no avail. Trump, as usual, seemed uninterested in the prepared text, and he shifted to all the greatest hits, including his many grievances, the meandering stories, and the bragging that defies fact-checking. Among the many weird gems of improvisation, Trump said that, during the four years of his presidency, there were “decades without a war.” (Pretty sure that one’s inaccurate, but forget it, he was rolling.)

As a former speechwriter, I can’t really blame Trump for being bored by the text. Whatever Trump’s idiosyncrasies and failings as a public speaker, his speechwriters—I assume Stephen Miller, in most cases—are terrible, writing for themselves with attempts at high drama and Gothic menace, rather than for the simpler cadences of a Queens casino boss with a limited vocabulary.

I’m sure that many Americans, if they bothered to watch the speech, rolled their eyes. Even the loyalists at Fox kept cutting away, while reassuring the viewers that it was a great speech. (Among the network’s many over-the-top moments: Joe Concha said it sounded like a State of the Union address, which I suppose made sense if you couldn’t hear the actual words.) As I used to do during the Trump years, I live-tweeted my commentary on the speech, and many Twitter users angrily told me to ignore Trump—to stop amplifying him and stop giving him attention, as if he would just disappear if we looked away.

But I have to admit that I welcome Trump’s candidacy.

I know that Trump reentering the political fray is a threat to our political system and a pollution of our civic hygiene. I know that if he wins again, he will bring with him people who might be far less stupid, and therefore much more dangerous, than the gang of goons and opportunists who infested our institutions the last time around. And yet I think he should run.

It’s time for us to once and for all declare who we are as a people. There is still an illness lurking in our political immune system. We discovered (or rediscovered) in our elections last week that American democracy has great regenerative power. But the elections of 2022 only suppressed a fever. The people of the United States, until now, have been reluctant to lance the boil, cleanse the wound, and just get it over with.

America needs a reckoning. If Trump were to slink off into the night—that is, if he had even a microgram of decency—his supporters would never have to come to grips with what they, and he, have done to this country. Even worse, if Trump stayed in exile in Florida, Trumpists and their cowardly Republican enablers could quietly nurture a 21st-century version of a GOP Dolchstoßlegende, a modern stab-in-the-back theory in which Republicans and the conservative media could continue muttering darkly about how Trump was unfairly defeated in 2020 by The Swamp, or The Lamestream Media, or the “China Virus.” Some of them could even pretend they never liked him. All of them could bloviate at will while safe in the knowledge that they would never have to defend voting for Trump again.

To pretend, however, that Trump is irrelevant is not only a mistake; it provides no resolution to our democratic crisis. It is denial, the equivalent of a drunk driver telling us to ignore the whiskey bottles on the lawn and the damage to the family car, whining that dents can be fixed and that no one got killed—not this time, anyway.

izzythepush wrote:

Turkey has problems with Kurdish separatists, and the Kurdish nationalist group the PKK is classed as a terrorist organisation.

I reject this classification.