The Trump impact on US policy [Archive] - Page 5

OUTLAW 09

05-28-2017, 04:45 PM

HUGH...direct result of Trumps actions....or said better...lack of anything on the part of Trump as a FP that anyone can in fact see...

Breaking: German Chancellor Merkel say the United States is no longer a reliable partner.

http://www.focus.de/politik/ausland/bierzelt-rede-in-muenchen-merkel-sieht-in-usa-keinen-verlaesslichen-partner-mehr_id_7185916.html

In German

Merkel on Trump: "The era when we could fully rely on others has passed. I have experienced this in the last few days."

Although she did not use the name USA...she definitely is referring to Trump and his advisors...SO it appears that Mattis and Tillerson will not be so welcome over the coming months.

Marcon now has three German speakers in his cabinet so you can see where the French German relationship is going....they were the basis of the EU to begin with....

She is calling for Europe to go their way and to build their own security concepts which they have the capacity to do...

Putins geo political goals for his political war against the US.....

1. discredit and damage NATO
2. discredit and damage EU
3. disconnect the US completely from Europe and ME

For 70 years driving a wedge between US and Germany was a Soviet/Russian goal. They've finally succeeded.

Trump has now supported Putin in obtaining these goals....

Success...really.....

Donald J. Trump‏
Verifizierter Account
@realDonaldTrump
Just returned from Europe. Trip was a great success for America. Hard work but big results!

Those of us who urged the Trump administration to build new international institutions did not have in mind a G-6.
https://nyti.ms/2r8YYXN

Merkel: Brexit & Trump mean Europe has to take affairs into its own hands, G7 summit 'unsatisfactory'
https://www.yahoo.com/news/merkel-warns-us-britain-no-longer-reliable-partners-130825785.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=tw#

A post-America defence order in Europe would also force Spain and Italy to work with France to sustain naval dominance in the Mediterranean

This is huge - German Chancellor signalling the end of the post-WW2 Western consensus because a businessman thinks he can lead and is a genius .....

OUTLAW 09

05-28-2017, 04:53 PM

Was this Senators comment before or after the Merkel comments????

MAYBE Corker should seriously rethink his para two....does not seem to fit current European affairs...

Senator Bob Corker‏
@SenBobCorker

I spoke with @realDonaldTrump at length this morning and told him that I could not be more pleased with his first international trip. More:

Trumps destruction of US leadership in Europe definitely was not mentioned here was it....

Joe Scarborough
✔
@JoeNBC
Donald Trump's trip was the most damaging for American interests abroad since JFK's disastrous 1961 Vienna summit with Khrushchev.

Michael McFaul
✔
@McFaul
Putin could not be happier with Trump's trip: embrace of autocrats, sowing division within NATO & G7, threat to pull out of Paris accordd

Michael McFaul
✔
@McFaul
Trump must have said some outrageous things behind closed doors for the cautious Markel to make this statement. Putin plan is succeeding.

OUTLAW 09

05-28-2017, 05:11 PM

WHY is it that former Generals and one active General have abandoned their reputations?????

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly: Intelligence leaks are "darn close to treason"
http://nbcnews.to/2qoEWJP

BUT WAIT....a close advisor to the President and his NSA having close very close connections to Russians and wanting to use Russian secure comms to Moscow to go around US IC and FBI and DoD IS what again????

Why is the White House deeply worried about intelligence leaks when Trump constantly says it's all FAKE NEWS anyway?

SO did he actually confirm that the leaked intelligence is actually correct....

OUTLAW 09

05-28-2017, 05:16 PM

MIT Tech Review
✔
@techreview
Russia gets “the true nature of the battlefield” in a way the West does not. The power lies in information.
http://trib.al/3THjZnt

OUTLAW 09

05-28-2017, 05:17 PM

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump
British Prime Minister May was very angry that the info the U.K. gave to U.S. about Manchester was leaked. Gave me full details!

IC source says it's probable leak came from White House. Deflect and distract.

OUTLAW 09

05-28-2017, 05:28 PM

It's getting harder to say Russian meddling didn't actually help lead to Trump's victory and Clinton's loss
http://cnn.it/2s7QMo2

OUTLAW 09

05-28-2017, 05:51 PM

WHY is it that former Generals and one active General have abandoned their reputations?????

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly: Intelligence leaks are "darn close to treason"
http://nbcnews.to/2qoEWJP

BUT WAIT....a close advisor to the President and his NSA having close very close connections to Russians and wanting to use Russian secure comms to Moscow to go around US IC and FBI and DoD IS what again????

This is the Trump administration trying to usurp the word "treason" as it begins to stick to Trump & now Jared. It means they're worried.

OUTLAW 09

05-28-2017, 05:56 PM

Trump tweets today:

-Montana election: 2
-Fake news: 4
-His foreign trip: 2
-Murder of two Americans who stood up to anti-Muslim abuse: 0

davidbfpo

05-28-2017, 06:59 PM

A sombre assessment by David Wells, a SME with experience in Anglo-Australian intelligence. He writes:
But even if Trump did deliberately share sensitive information, it’s feasible that without the exposure of Trump’s behaviour in the media, Russia might have struggled to join the dots to identify the intelligence asset.
Which is why the third element, ‘the leak of the leak’, is so serious.Link:https://counterterrorismmatters.wordpress.com/2017/05/25/trump-and-the-russians-why-the-leak-of-the-leak-is-so-damaging/#more-1182

OUTLAW 09

05-28-2017, 07:44 PM

A sombre assessment by David Wells, a SME with experience in Anglo-Australian intelligence. He writes:Link:https://counterterrorismmatters.wordpress.com/2017/05/25/trump-and-the-russians-why-the-leak-of-the-leak-is-so-damaging/#more-1182

If the Russians are seriously paying attention and I believe they really are...they will not be astounded by the simple fact that US SIGINT is that thorough...the Russian GRU has been aware of this ever since they started duelling the Equation Group of the NSA....

What they did not see coming was the intensity of European intel services watching Trump and Russian oligarchs especially on the black money flows through European banks.

I think that is the true surprise .....they were surprised by the readiness of the Europeans to share with US IC.......

On the whole they also were surprised by the apparent depth of spy penetration of Russian services....by the Baltics..

OUTLAW 09

05-28-2017, 07:49 PM

This reminder about #Flynn & #Russia just one of the nuggets in this @GlennThrush @maggieNYT piece on #Kushner, WH https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/us/politics/trump-returns-to-crisis-over-kushner-as-white-house-tries-to-contain-it.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news#…

OUTLAW 09

05-28-2017, 07:52 PM

Leaving this here without comment. A senior administration official to reporters on Air Force One:

Azor

05-28-2017, 09:54 PM

By Konstantin von Hammerstein at Der Spiegel (selected excerpts with emphasis added): http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/how-can-nato-best-address-the-russian-threat-a-1148796.html

The alliance has prepared several deployment plans. There is one for the Baltic region, in the event that Russia attempts to replicate its operation in Ukraine there. There is also one for Romania and Bulgaria, in case the onslaught comes across the Black Sea. Plans are still being developed for Turkey and northern Norway.

Norway? Really? Yes, the NATO official confirms. The Norwegian government is keeping a close eye on the Russian military, the official says -- the exercises, troop movements, the submarines, the ships, the aircraft. In Germany, few are paying attention.

The new U.S. president has been more vocal and insistent than any of his predecessors when it comes to NATO states taking on a bigger burden and finally making good on their 2-percent pledge.

At the moment, Germany is catching the most flak. Last year, Europe's strongest economy had a multi-billion euro budget surplus following a significant increase in tax revenues. But defense spending has nevertheless remained at 1.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has spoken of a "rearmament spiral," and Germany's top diplomat, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), has likewise warned of the threat of a "military behemoth" in the heart of Europe. The dispute over higher defense spending, it seems certain, will be one of the issues in the campaign ahead of German elections in September.

The Rand simulation isn't as absurd as it might first appear. The researchers in California weren't trying to determine whether Russia would invade the Baltic states -- they simply wanted to see what would actually happen if it did. That's the decisive difference. When all participants know that an invasion would be successful, it changes the political calculations. If a country can credibly demonstrate that it is capable of successfully invading another country, then it is already in a position of strength. It gives it leverage to demand concessions.

And even if some of the fundamental assumptions used in the Rand wargames are controversial, most Western defense experts now believe that Putin is militarily capable of invading.

Russia appears to have succeeded in recent years in reducing the quality gap with the West, even if Moscow is now numerically inferior to NATO in most areas.

The West is clearly ahead when it comes to the number of soldiers, tanks, combat helicopters, warships and submarines it has at its disposal. But the numbers are deceptive. The lion's share of the alliance's weapons systems come from the Americans, whose military operates primarily outside of Europe.

The Europeans, for their part, maintain a hodgepodge collection of different systems, some of which, in eastern member states, are leftovers from the Soviet era.

Seventeen different combat tank models are currently in use by European armies, 13 varieties of air-to-air missiles and 29 frigate models. More importantly, however, NATO is comprised of 28 armies whose structures and equipment are not always compatible. When it comes to the military, diversity can often be a curse.

The budget figures are also misleading. NATO's European member states spend $241 billion on defense annually compared to Russia's $66 billion. Even if you factor in Russia's numerous shadow budgets, the gap is enormous.

Yet Moscow gets disproportionately more "bang for the buck," as the Americans say. A Russian tank battalion costs only a fraction of what a German one does because the equipment and, particularly, the personnel is so much cheaper. A Russian lieutenant colonel earns only a small fraction of what his German counterpart makes.

Furthermore, Russia is a militarized society and Moscow oversees a military-industrial complex that is run according to Putin's orders rather than economic criteria.

The Kremlin has invested huge amounts of money modernizing its army since its near debacle during the war in Georgia in 2008. Should a crisis develop, Russia's highly sophisticated air defense systems and cruise missiles on warships could severely limit NATO's freedom of movement in its own territory and in the Baltic Sea. Most importantly, however, Russian army leadership regularly conducts extensive military exercises involving as many as 70,000 soldiers to test the readiness and integration of its diverse weapons systems. In one of those exercises, an invasion of the Baltics was simulated.

There is, of course, plenty to suggest that the Russian government and military leadership are exaggerating their own success to play to the domestic audience.

Nevertheless, a recent study released by Carnegie Foundation Russia holds that Russia still has the upper hand. Although Moscow may not be capable of carrying out large-scale military operations outside the immediate post-Soviet region, in a "Baltic-Eastern European scenario," the Kremlin could deploy troops that are among the most sophisticated and best trained in the country, equipped with state-of-the-art weapons. NATO would have little to counter such an onslaught. Many of NATO's reinforcement troops come from smaller member states and are inferior to the better organized, better trained and better equipped Russians.

At the Clausewitz Barracks in the town of Burg, located in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, the consequences of the so-called peace dividend, which Germany and other NATO member states afforded themselves after the end of the Cold War, can plainly be seen. In two-and-a-half decades, Germany's military, the Bundeswehr, shrank from more than a half-million soldiers down to 177,000 and from 2,000 Leopard 2 combat tanks down to 225, as of 2011.

One critical juncture came during a conference of Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet in 2010, after which then-Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg excitedly claimed that the government's requirement to cut 8.3 billion euros from the military budget was a "unique opportunity." The German military still hasn't recovered from his "restructuring."

The lieutenant has diligently listed all his battalion's hardships on a colorful piece of paper. Targeted inventory of five-ton trucks: 22. Actual number available: 5. Number that are operational: 4. Targeted inventory of 15-ton trucks: 50. Actual number available: 20. Number that are operational: 14. And the list goes on.

Of the 117 night-vision goggles the unit is supposed to have, only 17 exist. The battalion doesn't even have its own command post and has to make do with borrowed desks, chairs and tents. It has no mobile accommodations. When it conducts exercises, the unit is forced to scrounge from five similar battalions spread out across the country.

Germany will play a decisive role in NATO's realignment. As a large country at the center of the Continent, Germany is to become a logistical hub, upon which the credibility of the deterrence ultimately hinges.

At the same time, Germany will also be one of the primary providers of troops. Berlin has promised NATO that Germany will establish three deployable army divisions, each with eight brigades, in three stages by 2032 -- a significant strengthening of the country's armed forces. Some of the associated structures are already in place today, but they are largely hollow.

It would make sense to continue developing a more effective division of labor between Europe's armies. Why, for example, does Slovenia maintain its own air force, made up of nine aircraft, when the country is forced to mothball its expensive armored howitzers because it lacks the personnel to operate them?

Why does the Czech Republic spend such a large share of its military budget on leasing payments for Swedish Gripen fighter jets when NATO would be just fine without them? Why don't Slovenia and the Czech Republic instead concentrate on military capabilities that might actually be useful to the alliance? Germany could assume responsibility for monitoring the airspace of both countries -- it wouldn't be a problem. But it is unlikely that such a thing will happen anytime soon.

Relinquishing elements of one's own military is also an issue of national prestige and sovereignty which is, of course, a struggle for all European countries, including Germany. It would make sense for Germany, for example, to eliminate its mountain infantry and instead rely on Austria or Slovenia, which are equally capable in this area.

The spirit of community, however, doesn't extend that far, not even in Berlin. In the case of mountain infantry, Horst Seehofer, the powerful governor of Bavaria, which is home to the largest stretch of the German Alps, stands in the way. And although it does make sense to have deeper political and military integration, that doesn't mean savings. For Germany, things would most likely get more expensive because, as the leading nation, it would have to provide a large share of the infrastructure that would then be shared with its NATO partners.

German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen wants to invest 130 billion euros over the next 13 years just to provide the Bundeswehr with the material and equipment it currently needs. The pledge to NATO to set up three deployable divisions by 2032 will cost even more...It is possible, however, that Germany will indeed ultimately spend 2 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) for these troops.

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 04:41 AM

By Konstantin von Hammerstein at Der Spiegel (selected excerpts with emphasis added): http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/how-can-nato-best-address-the-russian-threat-a-1148796.html

The problem with the article is that when the Russian military is compared to the Europeans and or US "the bang for a buck" gets way to much credit...

The current Russian military is a mixture of draftees still the way larger number and a core of contract time military members and the wages of both cannot be compared to say a Germany, a US or even a Spain.....

Secondly, weapon design and purchases are still being done via a State demanded and supported set price...unheard of in the West....as the sole customer of these defense industries is still the Russian state supported by defense exports which the State uses as an piece of their FP strategies...which the West also does but still there is a profit margin there that does not exist in Russian industrial business deals...

What is interesting is that both the CDU and the SPD will not increase the German military budget beyond what they economically feel the correct level is as they must then sell it to the general public....

Interesting as well is the concept of three new divisions each having 8 Bdes...an unusual configuration as the US runs a different model making these divisions "heavy divisions".....

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 08:49 AM

APPEARS that the bagman for the Russian Intelligence Services hacking operations and Snowdon forgot the NSA in this tweet.....

Julian Assange‏#
@JulianAssange
Kushner correct to create channels with everyone. CIA has no authority over leadership and is financially motivated to increase conflict.

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 08:53 AM

Trump expresses 'total confidence' in Kushner

Well it appears the father-in-law has now thrown the son-in-law under the bus....

This was the same exact sentence that Trump uttered in his support for Flynn before firing him....

NOTICE he did not use the words "fake news" around this article on his son-in-law.....

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 09:02 AM

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump
The Fake News Media works hard at disparaging & demeaning my use of social media because they don't want America to hear the real story!

What does one say about this tweet ....

1. Trump has been caught numerous times basically lying on his tweets
2. Trump has been attacking both the free press, journalists and the judiciary with his tweets
3. Trump has attacked the USG IC with his tweets
4. Trump lied in his tweet on the great things achieved on his overseas trip especially with his failures at NATO and G7
5. Trump tweeted that countless jobs were saved by his "intervention" and then those "saved" got laid off anyway
6. Trump tweeted that his overseas trip made billions for America and that millions of jobs will come as well
7. Trump tweeted there is no Russian connections BUT yet there is a massive FBI ongoing investigation
8. Trump tweeted often about the massive size of the inaugural
9. Trump tweeted demeaning comments about the Federal Judge handling his racketeering fraud case about his failed university...
10. Trump demeaned the Federal Court decisions on his Muslim Ban

And the list goes on and yet he tweets this...."because Fake News does not want American to hear the real story"..

When one lives in an echo chamber one only hears ones own voice.....

The real story is a man child incapable of leading the US and the West....and that is exactly what many in Europe have learned from his very own tweets...

BUT WAIT.....
Trump Had At Least 15 Chances To Address Portland Killings On Twitter. He Didn't.

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 09:37 AM

Foot Soldiers in a Shadowy Battle Between Russia and the West
https://nyti.ms/2sbTqsz

Czech Stalinist paid by Russia to agitate against NATO. Then his accounts get hacked by Ukrainians & msgs published

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 09:40 AM

U.S. Senator calls for probe into promotion of Kushner Cos deal
http://reut.rs/2rNcyAN

500,000 USDs invested into the Kushner Real Estate Company by rich Chinese would get them fast tracked for an EB-1B Green Card and it was being pushed as a great investment because President Trump was behind it....

Sales events across China were then cancelled when social media broke the oblivious "conflict of interest" story and the Kushner family profiting from his position in the WH.......

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 10:09 AM

Trump publicly praises partnership with Georgia, but then cut budget for programs there by more than half:
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/83741

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 10:21 AM

This is why there's growing European discussion of an extreme option to replace US commitments: a Euro nukes program
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/world/europe/european-union-nuclear-weapons.html?mtrref=t.co&gwh=1E751149FA2234181E364F0C1A982588&gwt=pay

Merkel's comment didn't come out of nowhere. Germans have spent months contemplating – and preparing for – a break with the US.

One sr German official really stressed this: Our closest ally is not just going away, but may turn its power against us. Think about that.

Their fear wasn't just that Trump would be an unreliable ally, but that his attacks on the EU and NATO would make the US a threat to Europe.

The Germans really fear Europe will fall apart w/o the US. But they saw Trump as a potential threat to their most core national interests.

They were quite open about their plan: appease Trump and proceed normally. But quietly prepare a Plan B in case that fails. We may be there.

New NATO motto: Keep the Americans out, the Russians in, and the Germans up.

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 10:27 AM

VP Pence looks straight into Fox TV camera on 1/15, puts on his sincere face, says "Of course not," when asked if any Trump/Russia contacts!

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 10:42 AM

Someone rewrote their own wikipedia entry and admins haven't had time to change it back yet

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 10:45 AM

Interesting that the USG IC, the Courts and FBI are "against them"????/

Trump and aides "are becoming increasingly convinced [they're] victims of a conspiracy against Trump's presidency"
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/28/trump-russia-advice-238911#…

There's a reason that conspiracy theories have been referred to as "the last refuge of the dictator."

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 10:50 AM

Is the President of the US in a serious state of "altered reality?????..

Just because the WH has submitted a thick glossy book on their proposed tax cuts.....that is all it is...."a proposed tax cut" as Congress have the power not the WH....

AND based on even Republican comments from both houses this tax cuts are going nowhere fast......

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump
The massive TAX CUTS/REFORM that I have submitted is moving along in the process very well, actually ahead of schedule. Big benefits to all!

How is it possible that someone who is President simply does not know this simple fact...he must have missed the highschool civics and government class...

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 10:54 AM

JUST IN: Trump campaign likely did not save documents key to Russia investigation: report
http://hill.cm/M0owXIL

WOW...now why would they do that????

Reminder: Over the years, Trump has destroyed thousands of documents & records in defiance of court orders.
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/11/11/donald-trump-companies-destroyed-emails-documents-515120.html#…

SEEMS that the Trump WH simply does not function by the concept of "rule of law" as they knew what the federal law is on preserving documents....

BUT WAIT...was this not what they claimed Clinton was doing with her emails?????

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 10:58 AM

MORE delusional Trump tweets...he does not even know what was passed as a Republican House Health Care bill...does he....

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump
I suggest that we add more dollars to Healthcare and make it the best anywhere. ObamaCare is dead - the Republicans will do much better!

THIS statement in the face of MASSIVE cuts and a 20% increase in cost by 2020...and pre-existing conditions which he claimed will never be touched...touched they were and badly.....and 24M losing their health insurance.

REMEMBER this is the very same President that promised Americans the greatest health care possible with no cuts to anything....

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 11:03 AM

REMEMBER the Trump Muslim Ban that was suppose to protect the motherland from jihadist attacks that Trump sworn were coming and the threat to the US was immigration especially from Muslim countries....

Think about this.....

To date, 602 people have been injured & 238 killed in mass shootings in 2017 - an average of 5-6 people every day.
https://www.massshootingtracker.org/data

Last time I checked there has not been a single American killed by a Muslim immigrant named in the seven Muslim banned countries in the last 40 odd years....

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 11:14 AM

No US Attorneys, 177 Ambassador slots are waiting to be filled, over 500 key government agency positions still unfilled, with no end in sight.

And massive budget cuts to virtually all government agencies....

Proposed cuts to Veteran benefits...

AND virtually no one has been nominated...

Could a Trump supporter really please in a simple way explain how this makes America great again?

I can see if all the saved salaries would be paid out to increase the average worker salary but that has not happened.......as now some States want to cut the minimum wage....

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 11:20 AM

After all the recent reports on alleged "back channel Russian WH contacts using Russian servers in the Russian Embassy" with Russians I wonder if he would say this again....

Newt Gingrich‏
#@newtgingrich 16. Mai
The leftwing media isn't committed to the truth, they're committed to being the dishonest opponents of Trump admin
http://bit.ly/2pToiNf

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 11:23 AM

May 17
Trump’s Dumps: ‘Making Dumps Great Again’
https://krebsonsecurity.com/

It’s not uncommon for crooks who peddle stolen credit cards to seize on iconic American figures of wealth and power in the digital advertisements for their shops that run incessantly on various cybercrime forums. Exhibit A: McDumpals, a hugely popular carding site that borrows the Ronald McDonald character from McDonald’s and caters to bulk buyers. Exhibit B: Uncle Sam’s dumps shop, which wants YOU! to buy American. Today, we’ll look at an up-and-coming stolen credit card shop called Trump’s-Dumps, which invokes the 45th president’s likeness and promises to make credit card fraud great again.

One reason thieves who sell stolen credit cards like to use popular American figures in their ads may be that a majority of their clients are people in the United States. Very often we’re talking about street gang members in the U.S. who use their purchased “dumps” — the data copied from the magnetic stripes of cards swiped through hacked point-of-sale systems — to make counterfeit copies of the cards. They then use the counterfeit cards in big-box stores to buy merchandise that they can easily resell for cash, such as gift cards, Apple devices and gaming systems.
When most of your clientele are street thugs based in the United States, it helps to leverage a brand strongly associated with America because you gain instant brand recognition with your customers. Also, a great many of these card shops are run by Russians and hosted at networks based in Russia, and the abuse of trademarks closely tied to the U.S. economy is a not-so-subtle “screw you” to American consumers.
In some cases, the guys running these card shops are openly hostile to the United States. Loyal readers will recall the stolen credit card shop “Rescator” — which was the main source of cards stolen in the Target, Home Depot and Sally Beauty breaches (among others) — was tied to a Ukrainian man who authored a nationalistic, pro-Russian blog which railed against the United States and called for the collapse of the American economy.
In deconstructing the 2014 breach at Sally Beauty, I interviewed a former Sally Beauty corporate network administrator who said the customer credit cards being stolen with the help of card-stealing malware installed on Sally Beauty point-of-sale devices that phoned home to a domain called “anti-us-proxy-war[dot]com.”
Trump’s Dumps currently advertises more than 133,000 stolen credit and debit card dumps for sale. The prices range from just under $10 worth of Bitcoin to more than $40 in Bitcoin, depending on which bank issued the card, the cardholder’s geographic location, and whether the cards are tied to premium, prepaid, business or executive accounts.

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 11:57 AM

Are the two Generals Kelly and MCMaster now fully compromised....??

Kelly & McMaster claim Kushner/Russians story no big deal. Ex-DNI Clapper has a different perspective.

Maybe they have no actual CI experience....

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 01:21 PM

John Schindler‏
@20committee
My latest EXCLUSIVE ==> BREAKING: #NSA issues unprecedented "preservation order" to uncover evidence of Team Trump's collusion with Moscow.

http://observer.com/2017/05/mike-rogers-nsa-issues-preservation-order-kremlingate-russia-trump/

Mike Rogers, "There is no question that we have evidence of election involvement and questionable contacts with the Russians.”

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 01:43 PM

.@mollyesque spent her week talking to Republicans on the Hill. The quotes here are unbelievable:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/trumps-washington-congress/528426/#…

Disappointing to see lawmakers are more concerned about Trump's negative impact on their own job than his negative impact on the country

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 04:52 PM

Notice the tone of leadership towards Putin..distinctly missing with Obama and now Trump...

At press conf w/ #Putin, @EmmanuelMacron says use of chemical weapons in #Syria is a 'red line' that will trigger 'retaliation' by #France

The face you make when your hacking made an important friendly country into a hostile one.

Macron lays into Russian media "lies" during campaign. Next to Putin. Haven't seen him that angry since Le Pen debate
At press conference w/Putin, France Pres Macron says he raised cyberhacking, calls RT & Sputnik "agents of influence" that spread lies

Trump still believes it was 400 lb kid on a bed with a laptop and or the Chinese....

Putin on EU sanctions: I call on French media to fight against all trade barriers. Only with fair competition can world economy develop.
Translated..means get me out from out under the Crimea and eastern Ukraine sanctions please.....

Macron calls for "Normandy 4" to discuss war in Ukraine ASAP. What's new: OSCE is to provide report on what's happening on ground.

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 05:01 PM

The Russian government, which has long sought to expel the United States from the continent, is overjoyed: On Russian television, Trump was said to have turned NATO into a “house of cards.”

Putin has three geopolitical strategic political war goals that he wants to achieve....

1. damage and discredit NATO
2. da´mage and discredit EU
3. completely disconnect US from Europe and ME

Trump has actually assisted Putin in achieving two of his geo political goals....

AND Trump claimed to be this great businessman who could run government????

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 05:06 PM

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 05:07 PM

.@TimothyDSnyder, author of "On Tyranny," outlines the steps of dismantling a democracy.

►Full interview:
http://on.cc.com/2qLBWFE

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 05:13 PM

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 05:53 PM

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump

North Korea has shown great disrespect for their neighbor, China, by shooting off yet another ballistic missile...but China is trying hard!
REMEMBER this is the same President that sent the "lost carrier strike force to Korea"...and threatened and threatened and now it is up to the Chinese?????

WHEN everyone knows that NK is largely supported now by Russia.....

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 06:13 PM

Took long enought.......
Trump condemns Oregon knife attacks, says ‘victims were standing up to hate and intolerance’
http://read.bi/2r4cZpk

NOTICE he says nothig about this killing machine called a white supremacist.....

White nationalists and or white supremacists have killed three Americans in the last two weeks..and not a single Muslim from the Trump banned Mulsin immigration list has killed a single American in 40 years.....

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 06:25 PM

OTD.....Reference VN Vets and their families....on this Memorial Day.......

Those of us that served in VN and lost friends there...LET us not forget the current President dodged the VN draft FOUR times and he in an campaign interview stated the reason was for a "foot bone spur"......and when the Reporter asked which foot he could not remember....

Most of us can remember each day of VN and he cannot remember what foot?????

We had in Basic Training Ft. Polk a lumberjax from AL who had an axe accident and it had hit his right foot leaving a deep scar and injury that bled badly everytime he did road marches but he always completed them limping all the way and not complaining ...we though he would be eventually medically discharged for an injury eveyone saw he had..BUT no he was then sent to advanced Infantry Training and then on to VN where he was killed four months later...leaving a wife and small daughter .......

BUT WAIT ...when I was slugging it out with the NVA 9th Division in the Fish Hook 111 Corp on the Cambodian border with a Cambodian recon company....this was what Trump was doing with his VN war deferrment....

We fought for the Country, our own honor, and to survive yet Trump cannot seem to remember if he has Russian connections????

AND he cannot stop singing and moving during the National Anthem at the Tomb of the Unknown which contains the remains of an Unknown VN vet...he is not at a proTrump rally....

SAD............

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 06:29 PM

Trump took another family's coat of arms as his own without permission—& changed “Integritas” (integrity) to “Trump”
http://nyti.ms/2qtslAN

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 06:38 PM

AND from the proTrump ultra right ........

Ann Coulter‏
@AnnCoulter

We should form a military alliance with Russia to protect it from Western Europe.

Steve Sailer‏
@Steve_Sailer
Problem with European unification today is that Euro elites see it a desirable not for Europeans but for non-European migrants.

OUTLAW 09

05-29-2017, 07:19 PM

From 2015.........

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump

I would like to wish everyone, including all haters and losers (of which, sadly, there are many) a truly happy and enjoyable Memorial Day!

Azor

05-29-2017, 07:23 PM

The problem with the article is that when the Russian military is compared to the Europeans and or US "the bang for a buck" gets way to much credit...

The current Russian military is a mixture of draftees still the way larger number and a core of contract time military members and the wages of both cannot be compared to say a Germany, a US or even a Spain.....

Secondly, weapon design and purchases are still being done via a State demanded and supported set price...unheard of in the West....as the sole customer of these defense industries is still the Russian state supported by defense exports which the State uses as an piece of their FP strategies...which the West also does but still there is a profit margin there that does not exist in Russian industrial business deals...

What is interesting is that both the CDU and the SPD will not increase the German military budget beyond what they economically feel the correct level is as they must then sell it to the general public....

Interesting as well is the concept of three new divisions each having 8 Bdes...an unusual configuration as the US runs a different model making these divisions "heavy divisions".....

On the contrary, the article does address "bang for the buck". The German general public remain mostly opposed to using military force to protect NATO allies, so perhaps Germany should reconsider its membership in NATO...

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 07:29 AM

On the contrary, the article does address "bang for the buck". The German general public remain mostly opposed to using military force to protect NATO allies, so perhaps Germany should reconsider its membership in NATO...

What you and a lot of Americans tend to forget is the following.....

We the US are responsible for this exact problem....we drove into the heart of Germans after the war that it was their actions that resulted in Hitler and WW2 and we changed the political and educational system to reflect that idea...of no more war...at any cost.....

We drove into Germans a form of democratic views that now are being aimed back at the US and stated "you have sold out your own democratic values"....

You failed to catch Merkel's comment on "shared values"...

It has been that US drive to eliminate anything from looking like ""German miitiarism" that now inhibits Germans as a whole to engage into anything that looks and smells "like war or conflict"....

Secondly, the US drive to re-educate Germans and the forcing of them to accept the results of WW2 as their responsibility has led up to even today a distinct non desire to not look like they are leading Europe out of "fear the Germans are coming again".....which after Merkels beer tent comments did come up in some European MSM.....

They have been content to lead from behind and pay for that leading from behind....

Merkel's speech was actually two fold....1) a warning to Trump and US elites in DC and 2) prepping the German public at large that they will have to start stepping up and accepting that German must lead.....if they value Europe and a majority in fact do value Europe...

CHECK the polling......Germans while not cheering for Article 5 do in high polling numbers thoroughly accept Russian as an existential threat to both Germany and Europe...and are willing to defend both from Russian attack.

German culture is interesting if you confront it..then their back stiffens up and they can get aggressive and defensive...all the while remaining outwardly calm and good mannered......but they will not engage with you....and it has a quiet determination if things gets bad that many had not previously seen until the truck attack in Berlin that allowed the society as a whole to both quietly grieve and get on with every day life....

They inherently know they must now step forward and lead....and you must as a politician gently nudge and gently convince with good arguments and then suddenly they will support it..."as it was their idea"...BUT at the same time they do not like being the "bank" for the EU.

Right now Germans who save and they save a lot... have lost over 38B Euros on their savings and retirement plans in order for the ECB to keep the interest rate at ZERO in order to bail out Italy, Spain, Greece and others who truly overspend with their "EU credit card" and they are growing tired of it....thus they must be nudged and that was what Merkel has started to do....

So when discussing Germany fully understand it and the current German culture.....

Also remember that everything that has proven to have not worked in the US gets imported into Germany with a 10 year time lag and Germany is now coming out of that "US excess of failures" and are now moving again on their own agenda....

So when people critique Germany you are indirectly critiquing the US....

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 07:36 AM

NYT: Investigators are now examining Jared Kushner's motives in meeting with that Russian banker tied to Putin.

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 08:15 AM

What you and a lot of Americans tend to forget is the following.....

We the US are responsible for this exact problem....we drove into the heart of Germans after the war that it was their actions that resulted in Hitler and WW2 and we changed the political and educational system to reflect that idea...of no more war...at any cost.....

We drove into Germans a form of democratic views that now are being aimed back at the US and stated "you have sold out your own democratic values"....

You failed to catch Merkel's comment on "shared values"...

It has been that US drive to eliminate anything from looking like ""German miitiarism" that now inhibits Germans as a whole to engage into anything that looks and smells "like war or conflict"....

Secondly, the US drive to re-educate Germans and the forcing of them to accept the results of WW2 as their responsibility has led up to even today a distinct non desire to not look like they are leading Europe out of "fear the Germans are coming again".....which after Merkels beer tent comments did come up in some European MSM.....

They have been content to lead from behind and pay for that leading from behind....

Merkel's speech was actually two fold....1) a warning to Trump and US elites in DC and 2) prepping the German public at large that they will have to start stepping up and accepting that German must lead.....if they value Europe and a majority in fact do value Europe...

CHECK the polling......Germans while not cheering for Article 5 do in high polling numbers thoroughly accept Russian as an existential threat to both Germany and Europe...and are willing to defend both from Russian attack.

German culture is interesting if you confront it..then their back stiffens up and they can get aggressive and defensive...all the while remaining outwardly calm and good mannered......but they will not engage with you....and it has a quiet determination if things gets bad that many had not previously seen until the truck attack in Berlin that allowed the society as a whole to both quietly grieve and get on with every day life....

They inherently know they must now step forward and lead....and you must as a politician gently nudge and gently convince with good arguments and then suddenly they will support it..."as it was their idea"...BUT at the same time they do not like being the "bank" for the EU.

Right now Germans who save and they save a lot... have lost over 38B Euros on their savings and retirement plans in order for the ECB to keep the interest rate at ZERO in order to bail out Italy, Spain, Greece and others who truly overspend with their "EU credit card" and they are growing tired of it....thus they must be nudged and that was what Merkel has started to do....

So when discussing Germany fully understand it and the current German culture.....

Also remember that everything that has proven to have not worked in the US gets imported into Germany with a 10 year time lag and Germany is now coming out of that "US excess of failures" and are now moving again on their own agenda....

So when people critique Germany you are indirectly critiquing the US....

BTW this is coming from a journalist who has been highly accurate on Trump's Russian connections and it goes to heart that you never have wanted to entertain..a sitting US President tied directly to Russian mob money and RIS.....

AND remember the Merkel comment "shared common values" that she accused Trump of not supporting.....

A source in IC is telling me that while many allies Intel Agencies have sent incriminating evidence against the Trump family-Germany's has "bent over backwards" in providing evidence including large amount of intercepts going back a decade showing pattern of criminality.

My source goes on to say that Trump is aware of Germany's efforts and is blaming Merkel and this explains his recent behavior re Germany.

NOW with this mind..GO back and reread the Trump EU German comments English word for English word....

Trump thinks as a ADAH child...he talks and thinks in short choppy sentences and words.....and does not hold to a thought longer than 14 seconds......

BUT to say..."those Germans really bad...really bad"...paused then he shifts to the German "car thing" but that was not what the first thought on "bad really bad" refers to....that comment was Trump thinking aloud to himself and not meant for the public even though he said it publicily....

Having sent years doing strategic debriefings in three languages you tend to listen to the flow of the words and how that is structured and to pauses...and you then start to be in the mind of the individual saying the words and if you are really good you become literally a lie detector just based on "words".....

Trump does not realize he has been under European intel surveillance and monitoring ever since he decided to do business with Russian money....and that is from 1986...

Many Americans do not inherently understand that Russian oligarchs, Russian state, Russian black money, Russian gangs and Russian intel services are one and the same....the borders are flowing and ever changing so when you get a loan to do business in say Russia and even though an honest business that loan and that came from say VTB or Gazprom or Alfa Bank it was in the end approved by Putin and company...and the RIS.....

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 08:27 AM

Azor...just keep this mind......

NSA has been literally "reading" the Russian diplomatic communications channel which is highly secure ......FOR YEARS..........AND this is critical and HIGHLY CLASSIFIED.

IF the NSA has "allowed this to be leaked" AND it has then it judged the threat of Trump to US democracy....AND that was a stage where the intel collection abilities took a back seat....

We now know #NSA intercepted & decrypted hi-grade Russian dip comms in 2016, so assume FBI knows everything Kislyak told Moscow about Trump.

It's too early to call this VENONA 2.0, but we may be getting close. Which is YUGE, CI-wise. Team Trump has a serious problem.

Which is why there have been NO ACTUAL WH denials on the fact that actual conversations occurred between Kushner and the Russian Ambassador, just weak "cannot recall" lies.

AND rest assured when the Russian shifted their comms so did NSA...

BTW...three social media journalists 2 "conservative and one a Democrat have been driving the Russia Trump story for over three years now and have been largely correct on their breaking stories much of which is now being confirmed by US MSM...

The interesting question is why do IC and DoJ sources trust them vs. US MSM......because MSM has sat on a number of articles and not released them out of fear of corporate sponsor reactions...

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 08:43 AM

Jared Kushner met w/ the head of a Russian state-owned bank (Vnesheconombank) - one that recently played host to a spy ring.

BTW VTB is virtually no actually bankrupt and only supported by the Russian Central Bank as it is closely tied to Putin....thus any loans it makes ...the approval comes from Putin directly....it is his own house bank....

This Russian spy pled guilty to criminal conspiracy in 2016, in the Southern District of NY. That was Preet Bharara's district.
The Trump fired Federal Prosecutor who was at that the time of the firing ALSO handling a Russian mob money laundering RICO case....

So Kushner met w/the head of a bank that:
-is under US sanctions
-is used to fund Putin's "pet projects"
-is used to plant spies in the US

And it was as the Russian bank stated..just trying to get into business in the US and needed Kushners assistance...come on.....

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 08:45 AM

Jared Kushner is being questioned by Senate Intel Cmte for a previously undisclosed meeting w/ the head of a Russian bank. There's more..

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 08:51 AM

Reference the Russian bank VTB.....

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 09:15 AM

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 12:44 PM

Sources: Russians discussed potentially 'derogatory' information about Trump and associates during campaign
By Pamela Brown, Jim Sciutto and Dana Bash, CNN
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/05/30/politics/russians-trump-campaign-information/index.html

In the USG IC the term "derogatory information" means that those that hold it can in fact blackmail you.....

AND should be enough to have a USG security clearance immediately rescinded...

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 01:35 PM

Jared Kushner is being questioned by Senate Intel Cmte for a previously undisclosed meeting w/ the head of a Russian bank. There's more..

This reality above is now seriously clashing with Trump's altered state of reality......

WHY would a sitting President even be concerned about what Russians in this case Putin really "thinks or laughs"??????

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump
Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & how a lame excuse for why the Dems lost the election has taken over the Fake News.

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 01:44 PM

NOTICE just how Trump a supposedly descendent of a German continues his German bashing.....

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump
We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change

LAST time I checked Germany is not about to change simply for Trump.....

WHAT is far more interesting is then the proTrump trolling that kicks in on
is tweet from a known white nationalist.

Mike Tokes‏
#@MikeTokes
John Podesta should be in jail.
Hillary Clinton should be in jail.
The evidence provided by wikileaks is overwhelming.

Please investigate the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich. Intimidation has been used to silence anyone talking about it. Liberal fascism...

The portland killer was a left wing Bernie supporter who wanted to kill trump voters.
These are not alt-right events.
BUT WAIT he was verbally abusing two female Muslims and the two he killed..one was a Republican Iraqi vet....

Meanwhile you have Antifa, a left wing domestic terrorist organization inciting violence and rioting in your city yet you do NOTHING. Shame!

Congressional democrats are trying feverishly to bury this story. @OANN has wiped its website clean of reports on Seth Rich #ExposeTheLeft

The fake news media is nothing more than a globalist propaganda outlet.

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 01:55 PM

Frmr CIA Dir McLaughlin: Trump creating rift w/ Germany and Europe "is one of the most damaging things I have seen in...years and years."

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 01:57 PM

Who assured us that Tillerson would be a responsible steward of American foreign policy.
http://wapo.st/2rerEMQ?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.b5270fdaf5de#

FM Lavrov lashes out at #France Pres Macron criticism of @RT_com, @SputnikInt ... blames Obama admin's "anti-#Russia campaign."

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 02:20 PM

Trump and FOX News starting their info warfare campaign to "save the son-in-law"......

BUT WAIT...did not Trump yesterday bash the FAKE News for using "unnamed sources".....

Donald J. Trump‏
#@realDonaldTrump 28. Mai

Whenever you see the words 'sources say' in the fake news media, and they don't mention names.......it is very possible that those sources don't exist but are made up by fake news writers. #FakeNews is the enemy!

SO based on Trump's own tweets this FOX News tweet is FAKE NEWS.........right?????

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 02:45 PM

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 03:08 PM

Trump raged at Abbas in Bethlehem meeting, telling Palestinian leader "you lied to me"

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-raged-abbas-bethlehem-meeting-you-lied-me-617030?spMailingID=1907309

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 03:12 PM

Why would Trump want to bring Lewandowski to the WH who just quit his firm over the discovery of lobbying for Rosneft??

He left the company out of their demands that he register as a foreign agent under FARA....and he refused to.

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 03:20 PM

House intel chairman: Democrats are using the Russia 'narrative' to justify Clinton's loss
http://read.bi/2qC9sLq

Says the man who recused himself and is facing ethnics violation charges for the illegal release of classified information....

REMEMBER he also tried to pull off a major Trump WH assisted diversion to deflect from the Russian FBI investigation....YET he seems to have forgotten that simple fact.

Azor

05-30-2017, 05:07 PM

What you and a lot of Americans tend to forget is the following.....

We the US are responsible for this exact problem....we drove into the heart of Germans after the war that it was their actions that resulted in Hitler and WW2 and we changed the political and educational system to reflect that idea...of no more war...at any cost.....

CHECK the polling...Germans while not cheering for Article 5 do in high polling numbers thoroughly accept Russian as an existential threat to both Germany and Europe...and are willing to defend both from Russian attack.

Outlaw,

I am well aware of the Western Allies’ efforts to de-militarize the occupied Germans through education and to instill a sense of collective responsibility, in addition to a desire for liberal democracy and civic - rather than ethnic - nationalism. Yet the story is more complicated as Cold War exigencies quickly derailed social reconstruction in all of occupied Germany, with brown replaced overnight with red in the east, and unreconstructed National Socialists allowed back into power in the west.

Much of the contemporary German opposition to militarism is derived more from the student protest movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which itself was a reaction to the unfinished work of de-Nazification. Given those intellectual origins and the fact that the Bundeswehr was hollowed out relatively recently and after reunification (East Germans were hardly under U.S. influence for 45 years), it is rather disingenuous to blame the U.S. for German reluctance to fulfil German military obligations today.

As for polling…

From 2009 to 2015, the number of Germans having a favorable view of NATO fell from 73% to 55%

Most Germans are opposed to using military force to defend other NATO members (53% in Q1 2017)

Germans are the least supportive of defending other NATO members against Russia (only 40% in Q1 2017)

On the Ukrainian issue, more Germans tended to blame the West (12%) and not blame Russia (29%) than other NATO members

Most Germans also opposed Ukraine joining NATO or the EU, as well as NATO arming Ukraine

For all the German angst over Trump, most Germans believe that U.S. military support for NATO is unchanged from 2015 through 2017, and have more confidence in the U.S. (65%) than in France or Poland

Sources: Pew Q1 2015 (http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/06/10/nato-publics-blame-russia-for-ukrainian-crisis-but-reluctant-to-provide-military-aid/), Pew Q1 2017 (http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/05/23/natos-image-improves-on-both-sides-of-atlantic/pg_2017-05-23-nato-00-01/)

Right now Germans who save and they save a lot... have lost over 38B Euros on their savings and retirement plans in order for the ECB to keep the interest rate at ZERO in order to bail out Italy, Spain, Greece and others who truly overspend with their "EU credit card" and they are growing tired of it....thus they must be nudged and that was what Merkel has started to do...

This fiscal irresponsibility in southern Europe keeps the Euro low and aids German exports to China and the United States. Moreover, German banks were more than happy to extend credit prior to the Great Recession.

Outlaw, your mental contortions here make me feel guilty for forcing you to defend the indefensible. Merkel is a mere caretaker who only reacts to events and flails in the dark. Her nuclear phase-out was an ill-advised response to Fukushima much as her welcome for migrants was a response to media of dead children washing up on Greek and Turkish beaches. Yet her nuclear initiative made Germany more dependent upon Russian energy imports and she has quietly rolled up her welcome mat. Now, she is using the Trump presidency as a means to showboat in advance of key elections. Yawn.

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 06:31 PM

Outlaw,

I am well aware of the Western Allies’ efforts to de-militarize the occupied Germans through education and to instill a sense of collective responsibility, in addition to a desire for liberal democracy and civic - rather than ethnic - nationalism. Yet the story is more complicated as Cold War exigencies quickly derailed social reconstruction in all of occupied Germany, with brown replaced overnight with red in the east, and unreconstructed National Socialists allowed back into power in the west.

Much of the contemporary German opposition to militarism is derived more from the student protest movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which itself was a reaction to the unfinished work of de-Nazification. Given those intellectual origins and the fact that the Bundeswehr was hollowed out relatively recently and after reunification (East Germans were hardly under U.S. influence for 45 years), it is rather disingenuous to blame the U.S. for German reluctance to fulfil German military obligations today.

As for polling…

From 2009 to 2015, the number of Germans having a favorable view of NATO fell from 73% to 55%

Most Germans are opposed to using military force to defend other NATO members (53% in Q1 2017)

Germans are the least supportive of defending other NATO members against Russia (only 40% in Q1 2017)

On the Ukrainian issue, more Germans tended to blame the West (12%) and not blame Russia (29%) than other NATO members

Most Germans also opposed Ukraine joining NATO or the EU, as well as NATO arming Ukraine

For all the German angst over Trump, most Germans believe that U.S. military support for NATO is unchanged from 2015 through 2017, and have more confidence in the U.S. (65%) than in France or Poland

Sources: Pew Q1 2015 (http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/06/10/nato-publics-blame-russia-for-ukrainian-crisis-but-reluctant-to-provide-military-aid/), Pew Q1 2017 (http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/05/23/natos-image-improves-on-both-sides-of-atlantic/pg_2017-05-23-nato-00-01/)

This fiscal irresponsibility in southern Europe keeps the Euro low and aids German exports to China and the United States. Moreover, German banks were more than happy to extend credit prior to the Great Recession.

Outlaw, your mental contortions here make me feel guilty for forcing you to defend the indefensible. Merkel is a mere caretaker who only reacts to events and flails in the dark. Her nuclear phase-out was an ill-advised response to Fukushima much as her welcome for migrants was a response to media of dead children washing up on Greek and Turkish beaches. Yet her nuclear initiative made Germany more dependent upon Russian energy imports and she has quietly rolled up her welcome mat. Now, she is using the Trump presidency as a means to showboat in advance of key elections. Yawn.

Your responses are actually quite interesting for their negativity towards Germany???

BUT here is again where you are so off base one and why wonders about your comments.....

Yet her nuclear initiative made Germany more dependent upon Russian energy imports and she has quietly rolled up her welcome mat.

Seems that you completely failed to notice that the green power of wind, water and solar have actually virtually replaced the nuclear capacity and that it now produces roughly 32% of current power needs......AND right now they are the defacto leaders of green power technology and green products...leaders in wind turbine technology and design.......

EU working on expanding its global trade network.
- Germany pushes for post-Brexit EU trade deal with India.
http://www.politico.eu/article/eu-india-trade-germany-pushes-for-post-brexit-deal/#

Next time get your facts straight.....and basically get back onto the thread....

BTW...Azor you really do need to get your facts straight......the US for example had only a 25 supply of artillery and tank ammo.in US German depots..for Desert Storm it was determined that a 90 day supply had to be in KSA if Desert Storm was to kick off....

German emptied all ammo depots and stripped ammo from their tanks units and shipped it to KSA.....

BTW all movement of 7 Corp heavy units in Germany was conducted by heavy German truck haulers and all available German rail....so again get your facts straight...

BUT WAIT........
White House says Trump has a strong relationship with Merkel, 'they get along very well.'
http://reut.rs/

German intelligence service has declined the help of the U.S. in safeguarding their upcoming election, German official tells @NBCNews.

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 06:45 PM

Azor ...you did notice that even UK broke a record this previous week when green power produced allowed them to completely come off coal powered power sources....they indirectly have noticed exactly what the Germans have discovered.....

Right now a large amount of produced German green power is being exported thus cash earning as they slowly come off even coal...

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 06:53 PM

Sean Spicer refuses to answer whether President Trump knew about Jared Kushner’s back channels with Russia

Spicer: Trump's relations with Merkel "fairly unbelievable" & his trip strengthened NATO.

Orwell in Wonderland propaganda, folks.

Merkel: "We can't rely on the US anymore. I have experienced this in the last days. We Europeans should take destiny in our own hands"

This is German for "fairly unbelievable"

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 06:59 PM

Kellyanne Conway insists Jared Kushner was right to set up secret communications with Russia

Wait What? She admitted it?

They had parts of 4 days to get the Kushner story straight and WH has decided not to clarify anything or offer much of an alternative explanation other than it was those sneaky Russians......with a "source" from FOX News....

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 07:05 PM

AND from two very strong Russian supporters....

Glenn Greenwald just said leaks are unethical, Julian Assange thinks the President should be able to do secret business without interference

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 07:07 PM

Russia investigation has expanded to include Donald Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen, ABC reports.

A key player who was first pointed out in the Steele Dossier and it goes to the 12M USD being offered out of the Rosneft sell in exchange for lifting Russian sanctions...

BUT....
Again: #KremlinGate is a dirty money scandal to which espionage is merely an outgrowth. It's really about decades of financial illegalities.

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 07:20 PM

Fmr Rep David Jolly (R) brilliantly refuted absurd claim that Trump strengthened NATO, listing devastating fails of an America in retreat.

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 07:25 PM

Michael McFaul‏
@McFaul
Many assume Putin seeks concrete concessions from Trump. But maybe he just seeks chaos, disruption, & disarray within the US and the West?

It is all about political warfare...

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 07:34 PM

HIGHLY unusual bot activity around Trump twitter account .....this many bots which are largely computer driven and from outside the US is totally out of the norm even for Twitter....

@realDonaldTrump has gained over 5 mil followers in less than 3 days. Take a look- mostly bots.

Someone is playing with Twitter statistics/trends and or follower numbers and or is waiting to unleash a major bot assualt on something....or someone ......

Simply not normal.....this warning from those that watch such buildup of Twitter bots.....DO NOT CLICK ON LINKS of TWEETS w/ TEASER LINES.

Tons of new accts w/ no profile pic or bio. Like this:
THIS is the mark of a computer controlled series of bot accounts....

MIT research has indicated that Twitter in fact has the potential of 45M bots accounts that they do not realize actually exist...so this 5M in three days tends to confirm this research....Twitter at first denied this but stated "they would look into it"...

I'm tracking *45's number right now. He is growing by around 100 bots a minute. Appears to be a propaganda army.

Trump can use this bot army to push HIS topics/hashtags to trending. His "war room" can use this social media effort to form narratives

Twitter a few years ago went on a bot-killing rampage; some accounts lost 100,000s of followers. Wonder if they'll do it again with Trump...

BTW this is exactly how the Russian troll army works that is controlled and based in St. Petersberg Russia...

OUTLAW 09

05-30-2017, 07:55 PM

Azor

05-30-2017, 07:57 PM

Your responses are actually quite interesting for their negativity towards Germany???

I have no negativity towards Germany. I have quite a fondness for the country and its people. What I dislike is the utter hypocrisy in the German popular discourse that masquerades as some sort of virtuous enlightenment.

Seems that you completely failed to notice that the green power of wind, water and solar have actually virtually replaced the nuclear capacity and that it now produces roughly 32% of current power needs......

Next time get your facts straight...and basically get back onto the thread....

No, I have not. The fact is that Merkel made no effort to coordinate the foreign and climate aspects of her energy policy when she initiated the nuclear phase-out. Indeed, until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, natural gas – of which Russia provided 39% - played a key role in German energy plans through 2035 (https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/DBR_INTERNET_EN-PROD/PROD0000000000337663/The_changing_energy_mix_in_Germany%3A_The_drivers_ ar.PDF).

While renewable energy has replaced much of the declining nuclear capacity, gas and coal remain stubborn contributors. Merkel had no problem phasing out German nuclear energy and building the Nord Stream to Russia, circumventing other EU members. The U.S. was the first to slap sanctions on Russia, which are more comprehensive than those of the EU, as the latter conveniently excludes Russian gas.

You have a disturbing disposition to bend and sway whichever way the hot air from Clinton and Merkel blows. Both are virtuous reincarnations of Jeanne d’Arc, of course, and neither would ever twist facts or play to their audiences…

As for this thread, it was created as a dumping ground for you, so as usual the topic is whatever suits your fancy…

...the US for example had only a 25 supply of artillery and tank ammo.in US German depots…for Desert Storm it was determined that a 90 day supply had to be in KSA if Desert Storm was to kick off....

German emptied all ammo depots and stripped ammo from their tanks units and shipped it to KSA...

BTW all movement of 7 Corp heavy units in Germany was conducted by heavy German truck haulers and all available German rail...so again get your facts straight…

I was wondering what this fun fact had to do with the price of rice. But I suppose this is your way of claiming that the German contribution to Desert Storm over a generation ago is grounds to excuse Germany from the 2% agreed-upon defense spending target, and to gift it nuclear weapons…

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 04:37 AM

I have no negativity towards Germany. I have quite a fondness for the country and its people. What I dislike is the utter hypocrisy in the German popular discourse that masquerades as some sort of virtuous enlightenment.

No, I have not. The fact is that Merkel made no effort to coordinate the foreign and climate aspects of her energy policy when she initiated the nuclear phase-out. Indeed, until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, natural gas – of which Russia provided 39% - played a key role in German energy plans through 2035 (https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/DBR_INTERNET_EN-PROD/PROD0000000000337663/The_changing_energy_mix_in_Germany%3A_The_drivers_ ar.PDF).

While renewable energy has replaced much of the declining nuclear capacity, gas and coal remain stubborn contributors. Merkel had no problem phasing out German nuclear energy and building the Nord Stream to Russia, circumventing other EU members. The U.S. was the first to slap sanctions on Russia, which are more comprehensive than those of the EU, as the latter conveniently excludes Russian gas.

You have a disturbing disposition to bend and sway whichever way the hot air from Clinton and Merkel blows. Both are virtuous reincarnations of Jeanne d’Arc, of course, and neither would ever twist facts or play to their audiences…

As for this thread, it was created as a dumping ground for you, so as usual the topic is whatever suits your fancy…

I was wondering what this fun fact had to do with the price of rice. But I suppose this is your way of claiming that the German contribution to Desert Storm over a generation ago is grounds to excuse Germany from the 2% agreed-upon defense spending target, and to gift it nuclear weapons…

Waste of time to continue......if you can prove that all of the current Trump actions along with his WH and his recent overseas trip has contributed greatly to world peace, that he as resolved the Palestinian issue and he has "eradicated IS and AQ from the earth"...then post it...

BTW prove he has "earned millions of back payments from NATO members" for American taxpayers and let me know the amount and where the money went in the US.

Otherwise get back to the thread and do not sidetrack...same tactic you often do on other sites...

The inherent question is actually why???

Concerning this thread...the last time I checked you had massively rejected the Steel dossier and basically assumed that Russian connections were some kind of farce..I can go back and bring up your various posted comments.

So any comments now??

Federal Marshals Execute Seizure Warrants At Trump Tower and Manafort's Apartment for ALL electronic media

FBI searches were also carried out for his electronic media in other locations as well....

We have Kushner now "claiming the Russians did it" about the back channel that was to use Russian diplomatic comms and if you look at all the Trump WH denials NO one completely said this particular meeting NEVER occurred.....

We have the German call out of Trump now being "flipped" and Trump saying..."that is what I wanted them to do all along AFTER the finger was pointed at his FP failures.

Any 3rd grader can flip anything...BUT a soon to be 72 year old conducting what a 3rd grader can do is basically embarassing to watch...

BTW..notice that while Kushners lawyer keeps stating he wants to openly answer all questions around his Russian "deal" he somehow does not get around to openly stating his "story" does he..if you are innocent one would normally be beating down the door to get it into the public domaine....

BUT suddenly he is MIA is he not????

Let's cross back the extremism thread that you also comment on....NOTICE that there was a DISTINCT SILENCE from the personal Trjump used twitter account condemning this attack and supporting their families....FOR a full FIVE days after the attack....

WHEN MSM and social media pushed this problem SUDDENLY a Trump tweet came from the official President account not used personally by Trump so it came from a office worker.........

Care to WHY when three Americans were killed by white supremacists within 10 days and not a single American has been killed by a Muslim immigrant from the so called banned seven countries in the last 40 years THE President is MIA in his comments...???

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 05:00 AM

Obstruction of the Russian investigation...so looks like it.....

Nunes, who still controls House Intel's subpoena power, says Dems are using Russia probe to justify Clinton's loss.

Nunes who in a night time operation claimed in a press conference to "have intel that proved Trump was not connected to Russia"...BUT then it turned out the info came from the WH....

In the process of "talking about this so called intel" he violated security and is thus now under a House ethnics violation investigation....

THEN he claims to have "recused himself from the Russian investigation"....

NOW we see he did not....SEEMS he "recused himself" just like Sessions did when he fired Comey who was involved in the Russian investigation....

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 05:22 AM

Russian purchases of one third of Trump 500 units truly assisted Trump in surviving the real estate recession.....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-little-moscow-russians-helped-donald-trumps-brand-survive-the-recession/2016/11/04/f9dbd38e-97cf-11e6-bb29-bf2701dbe0a3_story.html?utm_term=.cc246a8eecf0

Let's see that is about 160 or so units....

It is a well known fact that on the UK virtually all of the Russian real estate purchases are via unnamed LLCs located in a tax haven....OR what UK states is extensive "Russian black money laundering".....and which now has been stopped by a new law....BUT only after investigative journalists documented it and how extensive it was...

AND Trump has no Russian connections????

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 05:25 AM

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 08:41 AM

Azor...care to comment.....??

ALL American Presidents are controlled by "the men in black".......

IS that not the famous "Deep State" proTrump supporters talk about on the various alt right ie white nationalist blogsites and FOX News????

Putin say it is true so it must be true....just like he says there are ceasefires in eastern Ukraine and in Syria.....

davidbfpo

05-31-2017, 08:57 AM

Citing Outlaw 09 in part from Post 1080:
It is a well known fact that on the UK virtually all of the Russian real estate purchases are via unnamed LLCs located in a tax haven....OR what UK states is extensive "Russian black money laundering".....and which now has been stopped by a new law....BUT only after investigative journalists documented it and how extensive it was...

I recall Prime Minister David Cameron made a speech in Singapore about "dirty money" and extensive property purchases, in July 2015; which is summarized well on:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/28/david-cameron-fight-dirty-money-uk-property-market-corruption

His speech appears to be influenced by an advocacy group Transparency International and their website still has concerns today. See:http://www.transparency.org.uk/

I am not aware of any new law to stop this practice; there were suggestions of a new register for land purchases - that too has yet to appear.

Perhaps you can enlighten me please?

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 09:13 AM

Speaking of bots...

(These accts are tweeting a 2012 article to try to justify Trump's backchannel w/ Russia. Bad false equivalency bots).

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 09:16 AM

Azor....more German economic news.....

1. Berlin Brandenburg 15,000 unfilled blue and white collar apprenticeship positions ...simply no one left to apply

2. German unemployment rate drops to 1989 rates.....continuing to fall for June.

3. ALL EU countries are in an economic growth mode....all increased at the same time in roughly with the same rate...as a block it moved forward not just individual countries....

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 09:27 AM

Citing Outlaw 09 in part from Post 1080:

I recall Prime Minister David Cameron made a speech in Singapore about "dirty money" and extensive property purchases, in July 2015; which is summarized well on:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/28/david-cameron-fight-dirty-money-uk-property-market-corruption

His speech appears to be influenced by an advocacy group Transparency International and their website still has concerns today. See:http://www.transparency.org.uk/

I am not aware of any new law to stop this practice; there were suggestions of a new register for land purchases - that too has yet to appear.

Perhaps you can enlighten me please?

There was a UK expose run as a three part series on the land purchases by Russians and it indicated some of the complete London street blocks that have empty houses owned by Russians and how the black money flows into these purchases....

Actually the journalist pretended to be Russian as he speaks Russian and went through the entire process of dealing with UK real estate sale types...thus much of the story is off the undercover work....

Out of that article the government that was before the May flip into PM indicated they clearly wanted to bring in control mechanisms to clearly indicate who owns the property and to require the money flow be documented....with Brexit and the resulting turmoil not sure that it went through....although there are money laundering laws in place if no one uses them......then they do not exist....even if on the books...

Various articles from JUL 2016....to MAR 2017

1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/20/how-dirty-money-from-russia-flooded-into-the-uk-and-where-it-went
The article concerns the OCCRP article on Russian Laundarmat money laundering

2. London estate agents caught on camera dealing with 'corrupt' Russian buyer
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/07/london-estate-agents-caught-on-camera-russian-buyer

3. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/london-property-boom-built-on-dirty-money-10083527.html

4. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3153060/Estate-agents-help-Russian-criminals-launder-cash-buying-mansions-worth-3million-15million-fuelling-London-s-property-bubble.html

By law, Mr Moran should inform his company of his suspicions about money laundering and they should refer the case to the authorities. However, later that evening, he phoned Mr Borisovich’s assistant and described the deal as ‘too good to be true’.

Away from the UK now

Russians Flocking to Buy U.S. Property After Donald Trump's Win ...
fortune.com/2016/12/08/us-property-real-estate-trump-russian-buyers/ (http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/fortune.com/2016/12/08/us-property-real-estate-trump-russian-buyers/)

https://www.bloomberg.com/.../articles/.../behind-trump-s-russia-...
16.03.2017 - Millionaires scrambled to get their money out and into New York. Real estate provides a safe haven for overseas investors. It has few reporting these investments.......
US Will Track Secret Buyers of Luxury Real Estate - The New York Timeshttps://www.nytimes.com/.../us-will-track-secret-buyers-of-luxury... -
13.01.2016 -
It will shine a light on the darkest corner of the real estate market: all-cash purchases made by shell companies that often shield purchasers'#...

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 09:46 AM

Can someone in the US explain what Trump means by this????

Is it some kind of new FP or something that Germans did and NATO did not do???

Donald J. Trump‏
Verifizierter Account
#
@realDonaldTrump

Despite the constant negative press covfefe

Whatever is behind it..it has opened the flood gates of the meme world....and actually made Twitter "nice" for a few hours....

IMHO Trump was trying to type "confusion" and fell asleep......in mid sentence.....

BUT I am betting this will be said today at the WH press conference.....

"Everyone knows #covfefe is a real word. POTUS has been very clear about his position on it." -Sean Spicer, at tomorrow's WH press briefing.

What’s a ‘Covfefe’? Trump Tweet Unites a Bewildered Nation
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER 2:11 AM ET
Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed has become an essential tool of his tenure. So he grabbed the world’s attention early Wednesday when he tweeted, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/us/politics/covfefe-trump-twitter.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

WOW....Trump just committed a Federal Crime in deleting his delightful early morning tweet...THERE is a Federal Law pertaining to all communications conducted by a President and his WH......AND it explicitly states ALL communications will be secured and stored and then turned over when he leaves office.....

Punishable by a heavy fine and jail time for those that destroy such records.....comes from the Watergate days....

BLUF
AND the Twitter world responded to the sad news of his delete....

RIP #covfefe

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 09:52 AM

Trump Takes Aim at German Trade, but Overlooks Benefits
By MARK LANDLER

The president’s campaign against the trade deficit with Germany ignores the 700,000 jobs its carmakers have brought to America and overstates Berlin’s ability to do much about the imbalance.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/world/europe/trump-merkel-germany-macron.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 10:04 AM

This social media journalist a former UK Parliment Member has been running an accuracy rate of close to 95% on her Trump Russian stories along with two other social media journalists and now US MSM has been racing to catch up and confirm her stories.....

She has been on a hunt for the two servers that communicated between Trump Tower and Alfa Bank Moscow since she broke the story first and then it was picked up by MotherJones and bashed by Trump as "fake news"...appears with this search and seizure it was not "fake news"....

https://patribotics.blog/2017/05/31/exclusive-federal-marshals-execute-seizure-warrants-at-trump-tower/

EXCLUSIVE: Federal Marshals Execute Seizure Warrants At Trump#Tower

Sources with links to the intelligence community report that Federal Marshals executed two search and seizure warrants at Trump Tower on Friday, May 19.
One of the warrants covered an electronic storage space in Trump Tower. Several electronic items were seized#as a result of this search.
Another of the warrants, sources report, was served on Paul Manafort’s apartment in Trump Tower.
Patribotics hopes#to expand reporting and commission other writers. If you would like to donate, there are buttons around the site, or you could make a contribution here.##
Unlike the first warrant, this warrant was served, sources say, with “consent.” That means that Mr. Manafort is almost certainly co-operating with Federal authorities.
The Trump Data team worked out of Trump Tower. Separate sources, with links to the intelligence and law enforcement communities, report that the FBI is looking at photographs posted publicly on #Twitter by members of that team that appear to show a Python server connection loading on the screens of one of the Trump data team workers.
These same sources have confirmed my April reporting that the Russian Alfa Bank server, with an ip address in Trump Tower, was communicating with Russia and Spectrum Health, and that it was ‘washing’ hacked U.S. State voter database information with the social media ‘fake news’ botnet for micro-targeting to voters. There will be a separate piece of analysis on how this might relate to the ‘electronic devices’ that were seized on Friday afternoon, 19 May. Sources report that this was done ‘very quietly’, in an attempt to evade detection by the press.
The servers and data in Trump Tower, and the items taken from Manafort’s apartment, may form part of the “secure communications channel” that Kushner wanted to establish with Russia. I broke on November 7th that a FISA warrant had been secured on any US person’ in relation to two Russian banks, Alfa Bank – with whom the server was communicating – and SVB Bank. SVB Bank, which had a deal with Sberbank, is implicated in the meeting Kushner had with Gorkov. Further to that, Avi Berkowitz, who was on the Trump Data team, working with Boris Epshteyn and Brad Parscale, formed a go-between for Kushner and the Russian Ambassador.
My earlier exclusive report stated that the Kelhios botnet for which the Russian hacker Pyotr Levashov was indicted, was run out of Trump Tower with a ‘command and control server.’
The Trump sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., were interviewed by the FBI, sources say, the day before James Comey was fired. This is because, sources linked to the intelligence and law enforcement communities say, they are suspected of being complicit in the Kelhios botnet’s repurposing to service and pay both pro-Russia and pro-Trump Twitter and facebook bots, but also to deliver ‘fake news’, loaded with malware, and to pay those spreading it through bitcoin transactions.
One of the reasons James Comey was illegally fired by Trump was that his investigation was at the point of interviewing Trump’s own sons. For the avoidance of doubt, White House sources report that Donald Trump himself is considered by investigators to be directly complicit in Russia’s hack of the American election, and Trump fears that the FBI has data-based evidence that will prove this.

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 10:29 AM

Trump's presidency has ushered in a new kind of hypocrisy that is likely to damage the international liberal order.
http://ow.ly/KTUi30caizr

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 10:32 AM

The Hill
✔
@thehill
One arrested, two missing after investigating working conditions at Ivanka Trump shoe factory in China
http://hill.cm/5WTrodt

Azor

05-31-2017, 05:08 PM

Waste of time to continue...

Perhaps this is one thing upon which we agree.

I joined this thread with my article from Der Spiegel, which is a center-left publication and which has no love for Trump: the article dealt with the military spending and capabilities of Germany as well as other continental European NATO members.

In reply, you have tried every trick in the book to evade the article’s allegations and underlying premises. Your responses are akin to a NVAF MiG-21 hopelessly trying to escape a F-4 on its tail.

In February of this year, after Trump’s inauguration, the German government announced that it would increase its military spending. If there was no capabilities gap, if Germany’s foreign aid and EU contributions counted as military spending, and if German anti-militarism was due to U.S. indoctrination, then this was an unnecessary increase, no?

As for the rest of your drivel, I suggest you return to the focus of this thread, which is Trump’s impact on foreign policy, not his troubles at home. As for “tactics”, it is called logic mi amigo. I am not sure what “other sites” you are referring to, but feel free to delve into my past comments at SWC/SWJ at your leisure.

Prove to me how Putin is in more of a commanding position now than during Obama’s tenure. I am still waiting for the piss and prostitutes tape, which is Putin’s trump card (pun intended). Perhaps the Napoleon of the Kremlin is waiting for 2020?

Azor

05-31-2017, 05:12 PM

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 05:15 PM

Azor..something that you tend to miss in your comments allies should pay more and Trump's tweets that they do not pay...

Primer for President Trump: How NATO funding really works

http://www.politico.eu/article/primer-for-president-trump-how-nato-funding-really-works/?utm_content=buffere61b2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Allies including Germany pay far more per capita to the alliance than the US does.
By David M. Herszenhorn 5/31/17, 6:04 PM CET Updated 5/31/17, 7:03 PM CET

After berating NATO allies over military spending in Brussels, U.S. President Donald Trump declared victory at the G7 summit in Sicily.

But his pronouncement that money had begun to “pour in” only confirmed to allies that Trump, even after his visit to NATO headquarters, still didn’t have a clue about how the alliance’s financing actually works.

If he understood the system, Trump#would know that relatively little money ever pours in to NATO. And when it comes to the money that does go directly into NATO coffers, there is a strict cost-sharing formula — and allies are all paying their share.

Should allies decide to meet Trump’s demand for increased military spending, the money will never pour in. On the contrary, it is supposed to pour out, with individual NATO members spending more money on their own military forces, equipment and weapons.

Here’s a simple primer on how NATO’s direct budget (officially known as “common funding”) works, and who’s paying what share. We’ll even use bullet points in the hope that a certain someone in the White House might pay 2 percent of attention.
NATO’s “common funding” budget, the part of the alliance budget controlled by its#international civilian and military staff, is divided into three#main categories:
• Civil Budget
• Military Budget
• NATO Security Investment Programme (for capital expenditures)

As NATO explains, “These are the only funds where NATO authorities identify the requirements and set the priorities in line with overarching Alliance objectives and priorities.”

Allies provide money for these three budget categories according to a two-year cost-sharing formula, based on each ally’s gross national income, meaning the wealthier members pay a proportionally bigger share.

According to the formula for 2016 and 2017 —the United States pays 22.14 percent (rounded to two decimal places; NATO is even more specific on its website). Germany, which has been castigated by Trump, is the next biggest contributor, paying 14.65 percent, followed by France, which pays 10.63 percent, and the United Kingdom, which pays 9.85 percent.

For 2017, NATO’s total budget is roughly €2.18 billion, or $2.44#billion, divided as follows:
• Civil Budget: €234.4 million, or $262 million
• Military Budget: €1.29 billion, or $1.44 billion
• NATO Security Investment Programme: maximum of €655 million or $734 million
From here on, let’s keep the figures in U.S. dollars, just so it’s easier to follow in Washington.

According to the cost-sharing formula, the approximate total share of the wealthiest major allies (presuming NATO spends the maximum allowed on capital investments) for 2017 is:
• U.S. $540.32 million
• Germany $357.46 million
• France $259.46 million
• U.K. $240.3 million
On a per capita basis, that means Americans are paying far less than Germans, roughly $1.68 per person for the 2017 NATO budget. On a per capita basis, Germans are paying more than 2.5 times as much: $4.39 per person. (By this same math, the French are paying $3.88 per person, and Britons $3.69 per person.)

Of course, Trump’s point (and to be fair it’s the same point as many of his predecessors in the White House) is that the important spending by NATO allies is not on the relatively small annual budget for headquarters, but on the soldiers, weapons, equipment and other capabilities that give the alliance its great military might.

On that score, U.S. spending dwarfs that of all other allies. The U.S. forks out more than $600 billion a year on its military compared to about $40 billion spent by Germany.

At NATO headquarters, there is a general sense that Trump doesn’t quite grasp how NATO funding works, though some officials leave open the possibility that he is deliberately simplifying his comments.

At the same time, no one in NATO leadership wants to criticize Trump because they agree with his overarching goal — even if he doesn’t quite understand the goal himself.

In 2014, NATO allies pledged to work toward spending at least 2 percent of annual GDP on defense, a target currently met by the U.S. and just four other countries: Greece, Estonia, the U.K. and Poland.

The pledge in 2014 was voluntary and the alliance set no consequences for countries that fail to meet the target. In response to Trump’s pressure, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg convinced allies not meeting the 2 percent GDP target to agree to develop, by the end of this year, national plans showing how they would do so.

In Germany’s case, meeting the 2 percent GDP target would require nearly doubling its annual military spending to roughly $70 billion from $40 billion.
But even if German officials, who have pushed back on Trump’s demands, agreed to such a sharp increase, that spending would be on Germany’s own national capabilities, which could be shared with NATO — if Germany wanted to do so. Under no circumstance, however, would that money ever “pour in” to NATO.

When Trump talks about pushing for 2 percent of GDP in spending, his comments suggest that money would automatically fill the alliance’s coffers, something that officials at NATO headquarters acknowledge is a mistaken impression — if, in fact, that’s what Trump believes.

“That would be national defense budgets, any portion of which could be contributed to NATO but that would be a national decision based on operational requirements,” a senior official said, describing the potential 2 percent of GDP in spending.

That the U.S. spends far more than 2 percent of GDP on its own military is a sovereign decision that reflects its unique role as the world’s only superpower.

“It’s also about the US’s global reach and global responsibilities,” the NATO official said. “Because the U.S. has this global reach and global responsibility then of course the military defense expenditures are going to be very different from a country like Slovenia or Luxembourg.”

Anyone interested in learning more about NATO funding — perhaps during a break from covfefe memes on Twitter — can find#more detailed information#on the alliance website.

Azor

05-31-2017, 05:20 PM

.@TimothyDSnyder, author of "On Tyranny," outlines the steps of dismantling a democracy.

►Full interview:
http://on.cc.com/2qLBWFE

I am a major fan of Snyder's research. Decades spent studying the horrors of East-Central Europe have left him with a personal need to fight contemporary tyranny. Unfortunately, he has consciously or unconsciously decided that Trump is Hitler and Stalin rolled into one, and that he can be a hero from the comforts of his keyboard.

Yet it doesn't take a doctorate or fluency in a dozen languages to know that the U.S. is not Germany in the early 1930s or Poland, Hungary, Romania or Czechoslovakia in the mid-1940s.

There is a temptation to consider one's time and place to be a fulcrum of history and for one to want to be a hero. This temptation worsens if "heroism" coincides with one's beliefs and imposes no costs.

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 05:28 PM

Perhaps this is one thing upon which we agree.

I joined this thread with my article from Der Spiegel, which is a center-left publication and which has no love for Trump: the article dealt with the military spending and capabilities of Germany as well as other continental European NATO members.

In reply, you have tried every trick in the book to evade the article’s allegations and underlying premises. Your responses are akin to a NVAF MiG-21 hopelessly trying to escape a F-4 on its tail.

In February of this year, after Trump’s inauguration, the German government announced that it would increase its military spending. If there was no capabilities gap, if Germany’s foreign aid and EU contributions counted as military spending, and if German anti-militarism was due to U.S. indoctrination, then this was an unnecessary increase, no?

As for the rest of your drivel, I suggest you return to the focus of this thread, which is Trump’s impact on foreign policy, not his troubles at home. As for “tactics”, it is called logic mi amigo. I am not sure what “other sites” you are referring to, but feel free to delve into my past comments at SWC/SWJ at your leisure.

Prove to me how Putin is in more of a commanding position now than during Obama’s tenure. I am still waiting for the piss and prostitutes tape, which is Putin’s trump card (pun intended). Perhaps the Napoleon of the Kremlin is waiting for 2020?

Azor..something that you tend to miss in your comments allies should pay more and Trump's tweets that they do not pay...maybe this will help you understand that what Trump seemingly does not and you do not fully understand...

Hopes it helps.....it is a shame to have to expalin to some Americans exactly how NATO works since it was the US that help set it up in the first place....

Primer for President Trump: How NATO funding really works

http://www.politico.eu/article/primer-for-president-trump-how-nato-funding-really-works/?utm_content=buffere61b2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Allies including Germany pay far more per capita to the alliance than the US does.
By David M. Herszenhorn 5/31/17, 6:04 PM CET Updated 5/31/17, 7:03 PM CET

After berating NATO allies over military spending in Brussels, U.S. President Donald Trump declared victory at the G7 summit in Sicily.

But his pronouncement that money had begun to “pour in” only confirmed to allies that Trump, even after his visit to NATO headquarters, still didn’t have a clue about how the alliance’s financing actually works.

If he understood the system, Trump#would know that relatively little money ever pours in to NATO. And when it comes to the money that does go directly into NATO coffers, there is a strict cost-sharing formula — and allies are all paying their share.

Should allies decide to meet Trump’s demand for increased military spending, the money will never pour in. On the contrary, it is supposed to pour out, with individual NATO members spending more money on their own military forces, equipment and weapons.

Here’s a simple primer on how NATO’s direct budget (officially known as “common funding”) works, and who’s paying what share. We’ll even use bullet points in the hope that a certain someone in the White House might pay 2 percent of attention.
NATO’s “common funding” budget, the part of the alliance budget controlled by its#international civilian and military staff, is divided into three#main categories:
• Civil Budget
• Military Budget
• NATO Security Investment Programme (for capital expenditures)

As NATO explains, “These are the only funds where NATO authorities identify the requirements and set the priorities in line with overarching Alliance objectives and priorities.”

Allies provide money for these three budget categories according to a two-year cost-sharing formula, based on each ally’s gross national income, meaning the wealthier members pay a proportionally bigger share.

According to the formula for 2016 and 2017 —the United States pays 22.14 percent (rounded to two decimal places; NATO is even more specific on its website). Germany, which has been castigated by Trump, is the next biggest contributor, paying 14.65 percent, followed by France, which pays 10.63 percent, and the United Kingdom, which pays 9.85 percent.

For 2017, NATO’s total budget is roughly €2.18 billion, or $2.44#billion, divided as follows:
• Civil Budget: €234.4 million, or $262 million
• Military Budget: €1.29 billion, or $1.44 billion
• NATO Security Investment Programme: maximum of €655 million or $734 million
From here on, let’s keep the figures in U.S. dollars, just so it’s easier to follow in Washington.

According to the cost-sharing formula, the approximate total share of the wealthiest major allies (presuming NATO spends the maximum allowed on capital investments) for 2017 is:
• U.S. $540.32 million
• Germany $357.46 million
• France $259.46 million
• U.K. $240.3 million
On a per capita basis, that means Americans are paying far less than Germans, roughly $1.68 per person for the 2017 NATO budget. On a per capita basis, Germans are paying more than 2.5 times as much: $4.39 per person. (By this same math, the French are paying $3.88 per person, and Britons $3.69 per person.)

Of course, Trump’s point (and to be fair it’s the same point as many of his predecessors in the White House) is that the important spending by NATO allies is not on the relatively small annual budget for headquarters, but on the soldiers, weapons, equipment and other capabilities that give the alliance its great military might.

On that score, U.S. spending dwarfs that of all other allies. The U.S. forks out more than $600 billion a year on its military compared to about $40 billion spent by Germany.

At NATO headquarters, there is a general sense that Trump doesn’t quite grasp how NATO funding works, though some officials leave open the possibility that he is deliberately simplifying his comments.

At the same time, no one in NATO leadership wants to criticize Trump because they agree with his overarching goal — even if he doesn’t quite understand the goal himself.

In 2014, NATO allies pledged to work toward spending at least 2 percent of annual GDP on defense, a target currently met by the U.S. and just four other countries: Greece, Estonia, the U.K. and Poland.

The pledge in 2014 was voluntary and the alliance set no consequences for countries that fail to meet the target. In response to Trump’s pressure, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg convinced allies not meeting the 2 percent GDP target to agree to develop, by the end of this year, national plans showing how they would do so.

In Germany’s case, meeting the 2 percent GDP target would require nearly doubling its annual military spending to roughly $70 billion from $40 billion.
But even if German officials, who have pushed back on Trump’s demands, agreed to such a sharp increase, that spending would be on Germany’s own national capabilities, which could be shared with NATO — if Germany wanted to do so. Under no circumstance, however, would that money ever “pour in” to NATO.

When Trump talks about pushing for 2 percent of GDP in spending, his comments suggest that money would automatically fill the alliance’s coffers, something that officials at NATO headquarters acknowledge is a mistaken impression — if, in fact, that’s what Trump believes.

“That would be national defense budgets, any portion of which could be contributed to NATO but that would be a national decision based on operational requirements,” a senior official said, describing the potential 2 percent of GDP in spending.

That the U.S. spends far more than 2 percent of GDP on its own military is a sovereign decision that reflects its unique role as the world’s only superpower.

“It’s also about the US’s global reach and global responsibilities,” the NATO official said. “Because the U.S. has this global reach and global responsibility then of course the military defense expenditures are going to be very different from a country like Slovenia or Luxembourg.”

Anyone interested in learning more about NATO funding — perhaps during a break from covfefe memes on Twitter — can find more detailed information on the alliance website.Putin says Trump is right to ask NATO countries to spend more on defense
http://read.bi/2rbXLyD

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 05:43 PM

BREAKING: James Comey plans to testify that Trump pushed him to end FBI probe into aide’s Russia ties, a source says
Real obstruction of justice issues raised.
http://cnn.it/2qGBXHX

Let's see...

1. Flynn claimed 5th amendment when asked to testify suddenly now says he will provide the documents...

2. Manafort signed the FBI search and seizure served on his apartments which means he has been talking to FBI.....

3. Comey was held back from this by SC due to not wanting to damage the ongoing investigation so now it appears what he will say will not damage it..means investigation is now solid and has moved on to other areas thus the ability to now state what he wants to state...

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 05:44 PM

Azor..care to comment....??

Trump foreign policy looks like Trump:"selfish, isolated, brutish...and driven by immediate appetites"
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/05/mcmaster-cohn-trump/528609/?utm_source=twb#

Worth noting that Trump’s most important acts as President were negations: first withdrawing from TPP ; now Paris.

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 06:22 PM

EXCLUSIVE: @DevinNunes has TS/SCI security clearance revoked for leaking classified information

Sources with links to the intelligence community report that Devin Nunes, the former leader of the Russia inquiry, and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee* has had his TS/SCI clearance revoked.
As we reported in April, Nunes obstructed justice when, in collusion with Michael Ellis, his former lawyer on the Intelligence Committee, he blurted out evidence in an ongoing criminal case.
Patribotics hopes#to expand reporting and commission other writers. If you would like to donate, there are buttons around the site, or you could make a contribution here.#
As we also reported, this evidence included revealing one White House staffer, Boris Epshteyn, was still under investigation. From that report:
sources stated Epshteyn was named to the FISA court in June as a target, but – and I re-emphasize this point – that application was denied by the court.
Knowing the above, his departure from the White House after two epic failures by Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is not, I believe, a coincidence. Mr. Epshteyn has not been indicted (as far as I know) still less convicted of any crime. But it seems fairly obvious to me that Nunes is obstructing justice in plain sight
Mr. Nunes still retains a security clearance, sources say. But he has been denied access to the most sensitive intelligence information. This is an extraordinary situation for a member of the House Intelligence Select Committee and reflects appallingly on Paul Ryan and on the House Oversight Committee, respectively the elected official and the Republican-led Committee responsible for ensuring the integrity of Congress.
In a later story we also reported exclusively that sources with links to the intelligence community said that Boris Epshteyn paid hackers from the Kelhios botnet on behalf of both the FSB, of which, these sources say, he is an agent, and Donald Trump. We will expand on this reporting later today. Mr. Epshteyn has emphatically denied he is an FSB agent. He has refused to answer our questions as to whether he is a registered agent of influence of the Russian state under FARA. Our report has been updated to reflect Mr. Epshteyn’s denials. Nevertheless, we continue to report what we have been told on the matter by sources with links to the intelligence community.

BTW...the alleged Russian hacker who drove this Kelhios botnet was recently arrested in Prague and is fighting to not be sent to the US..his court case was yesterday and he is appealing the court decision to allow him being sent to the US...

Azor

05-31-2017, 06:38 PM

Azor..something that you tend to miss in your comments allies should pay more and Trump's tweets that they do not pay...maybe this will help you understand that what Trump seemingly does not and you do not fully understand...

Hopes it helps.....it is a shame to have to expalin to some Americans exactly how NATO works since it was the US that help set it up in the first place....

Primer for President Trump: How NATO funding really works

http://www.politico.eu/article/primer-for-president-trump-how-nato-funding-really-works/?utm_content=buffere61b2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

By David M. Herszenhorn 5/31/17, 6:04 PM CET Updated 5/31/17, 7:03 PM CET

Putin says Trump is right to ask NATO countries to spend more on defense
http://read.bi/2rbXLyD

Outlaw,

I’m not getting into Trump’s semantics. Unlike Herszenhorn, I’m not paid per word. Unlike Trump, I make clear, concise and mostly correct statements.

The 2% NATO target was arrived at in 2006, when Merkel was a new Chancellor. It was later reaffirmed in 2014, when Merkel had been Chancellor for more than nine years. From 2006 to present, German defense spending as a percentage of GDP has actually fallen. As the Spiegel article noted, Merkel authorized more than EUR 8.0 billion to be slashed from defense spending after she had committed to the 2% target.

Germany’s declining capabilities degrade NATO’s collective defense and cause a greater burden to fall on the British, Americans and others. In fact, German defense spending (% of GDP) fell precisely as Russia invaded Ukraine. One could make a compelling argument that Merkel's actions have largely enabled Putin, regardless of her lip-service to Trans-Atlantic solidarity.

Posting the same article on multiple threads is only making your hole deeper.

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 06:39 PM

Trump blasts Russia probe, touts ex-adviser Page over FBI, CIA
http://reut.rs/2qBNg4I

U.S. President Donald Trump sought to insert himself into congressional investigations on Russia on Wednesday, urging lawmakers to hear from one of his former advisers, Carter Page, to counter testimony by directors of the FBI and CIA.
Trump has been dismissive of probes by the FBI and several congressional panels into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and potential collusion with his presidential campaign.
In a series of morning tweets, the Republican president quoted a Monday letter from Page in which he asked to address the House Intelligence Committee promptly and referred to faulty testimony from U.S. intelligence officials.
Trump accused Democrats of blocking Page's testimony, without citing evidence but referring to an unidentified report.
"So now it is reported that the Democrats, who have excoriated Carter Page about Russia, don't want him to testify. He blows away their case against him & now wants to clear his name by showing 'the false or misleading testimony by James Comey, John Brennan...' Witch Hunt!" Trump wrote on Twitter, referring to the former directors of the FBI and CIA.
Trump's early morning tweets came as his advisers are planning to establish a "war room" to combat mounting questions about communication between Russia and his presidential campaign before and after November's election.
However, the president's penchant for tweeting could complicate White House efforts to tamp down the scandal if the messages appear to address the investigations.
Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, swatted back at Trump on Twitter with a reference to the president's acknowledgment to NBC that he was thinking of "this Russia thing" when he fired Comey on May 9.
"@POTUS, appreciate suggestion on witnesses but feel you may not have probe's interests at heart. Ex: Firing FBI Dir because of Russia probe," Schiff wrote.
Democrats say Comey's dismissal was aimed at hindering the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Russia investigation, which has since been taken over by a special counsel, Robert Mueller, himself a former FBI director.
'STOP TWEETING ABOUT IT'
Trump's fellow Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have urged him to tweet less and more wisely. U.S. Representative Sean Duffy said on Wednesday the Russia investigations were becoming too much of a distraction in Trump's 4-month-old presidency.
"I think the president should step aside from any comments, any tweets on the investigation and focus on the agenda that he ran on," Duffy said on CNN. "Stop tweeting about it, stop talking about it and get about the business of your agenda."
Page, who provided a copy of his letter to Reuters, said the committee postponed an appearance scheduled for next week without giving a specific reason.
Schiff said he and the Republican overseeing the committee's probe, Representative Mike Conaway, want to review documents before interviewing witnesses.
Comey to confirm Trump pressured him on Flynn investigation: CNN
"While we anticipate interviews to begin shortly, we have agreed that the pace of those interviews will be dictated by the needs of the investigation and not the preferences of outside parties," he said in a statement.
Republicans control both the House and the Senate.
Page, a businessman who worked in Russia at U.S. investment bank Merrill Lynch, advised Trump during his presidential campaign.
Russia has denied U.S. intelligence agencies' conclusion that Moscow interfered in the election campaign to try to tilt the vote in Trump's favor. The president has denied any collusion.
Congressional committees have contacted a parade of Trump associates and advisers, as well as former White House officials, to request information in their probes.
They include former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, Trump, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, former White House press officer Boris Epshteyn, personal lawyer Michael Cohen and informal adviser Roger Stone.

Donald J. Trump‏
#@realDonaldTrump
So now it is reported that the Democrats, who have excoriated Carter Page about Russia, don't want him to testify. He blows away their.......case against him & now wants to clear his name by showing "the false or misleading testimony by James Comey, John Brennan..." Witch Hunt!

The word "Witch Hunt" is also being used by Putin.....in his recent press conference.....

BLUF...Carter Page is also under investigation WHICH Trump does not tweet about....

Carter Page a consultant at Gaz Prom is under federal investigation for Russian ties.
http://thinkprogress.org/feds-investigating-trump-advisors-meeting-with-russian-officials-seeking-to-influence-u-s-a29a5f98d3b#.a4na5ijkv#

Trump campaign likely did not save documents key to Russia investigation: report
http://hill.cm/keWih4u

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 06:47 PM

This is an extraordinary paragraph from McMaster and Cohn's op-ed, and I don't mean "extraordinary" in a good way. https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-first-doesnt-mean-america-alone-1496187426#…

Azor

05-31-2017, 07:01 PM

NEW Trump "back channel".....

The Associated Press‏
@AP

BREAKING: President Trump has been urging world leaders to call him on his cellphone, raising security and secrecy concerns.

MY suggestion to Trump WH...

Dear @POTUS: Please do not use your cell phone for sensitive calls. SS7 flaw in networks allows foreign intel to monitor conversations

THAT flaw will not be fixed for a long while as it is a true engineering problem....

https://memegenerator.net/instance/65795926/hotline-bling-drake-call-me-on-my-cell-phone

https://memegenerator.net/instance/66307344/hotline-bling-drake-need-anything-you-can-call-me-on-my-cellphone

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 07:14 PM

Outlaw,

I’m not getting into Trump’s semantics. Unlike Herszenhorn, I’m not paid per word. Unlike Trump, I make clear, concise and mostly correct statements.

The 2% NATO target was arrived at in 2006, when Merkel was a new Chancellor. It was later reaffirmed in 2014, when Merkel had been Chancellor for more than nine years. From 2006 to present, German defense spending as a percentage of GDP has actually fallen. As the Spiegel article noted, Merkel authorized more than EUR 8.0 billion to be slashed from defense spending after she had committed to the 2% target.

Germany’s declining capabilities degrade NATO’s collective defense and cause a greater burden to fall on the British, Americans and others. In fact, German defense spending (% of GDP) fell precisely as Russia invaded Ukraine. One could make a compelling argument that Merkel's actions have largely enabled Putin, regardless of her lip-service to Trans-Atlantic solidarity.

Posting the same article on multiple threads is only making your hole deeper.

NOW go back and recheck the NATO 2014 decision as to when each country has to met the 2%......check...2026....

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 07:27 PM

Sean Spicer bemoans "fake news" and then immediately lies about the success of Trump's foreign trip, claiming he strengthened NATO ties:

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 07:31 PM

China Sees an Opening in Rift Between Trump and Germany
https://nyti.ms/2roLfMG

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 07:45 PM

Fox News has to retract another conspiracy story about the nonexistent "Obama surveillance scandal."

Fox could not substantiate anything in the report that they carried on the program...thus were force to admit it...

OUTLAW 09

05-31-2017, 07:49 PM

Trump Aides ‘Dreading’ a Return of ‘Trainwreck’ Corey Lewandowski
Current White House staff predict Corey Lewandowski would make a hellish work environment worse.

BUT WAIT he is also under investigation for a number of business deals with Russians....

Azor

05-31-2017, 08:15 PM

NOW go back and recheck the NATO 2014 decision as to when each country has to met the 2%......check...2026....

Go back to 2006...

From the NATO spox: http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2006/s060608m.htm

Finally, I should add that Allies through the comprehensive political guidance have committed to endeavour, to meet the 2% target of GDP devoted to defence spending. Let me be clear, this is not a hard commitment that they will do it. But it is a commitment to work towards it.

So why is Germany further from the 2% target in 2016/2017 than it was in 2005/2006? Merkel "committed to endeavour" in 2006, and yet her actions contravened this commitment.

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 05:02 AM

Go back to 2006...

From the NATO spox: http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2006/s060608m.htm

So why is Germany further from the 2% target in 2016/2017 than it was in 2005/2006? Merkel "committed to endeavour" in 2006, and yet her actions contravened this commitment.

Man...stay current...go to the 2014 meeting where the target date of 2026 was in fact accepted by all 28 members....

Stop comingling facts....

NOTICED you failed to respond to the simple fact that the per captia meaning what a nation state pays for evry single taxpayer with the US at under 2USDs and say Germany, France and UK far higher....

Seems you simply forgot that by saying one thing and in reality it has moved on....

If you have read the German underlined in German article you will notice German comments meaning the figures have to be crafted into their projected yearly tax and spend plans....

Something totally not known in the US....setting a financial budget and holding to it....

That is what angers the weaker EU members.....Germany does not live over its means..something we see daily in the US...

Go back and check your figures....

Your comments on "some will not like Germany leading" tend to fly by reality...if you read and again in foreign languages...an interesting number of Central and Eastern European countries want Germany to led...VS say the original smaller members of the EU....which has always been an issue even from say 1980...

You might have noticed that while many worry about UK leaving EU...Ukraine replaces UK far a factor of 4 in size, potential economic development and what it can export to EU and outside EU....

Again check the latest grain export figures......an increase of 26% in agricultural exports in just one year under the association agreements..not even matched by UK and other member states....and notice how the exchange rate is coming daily steadying down against the USD...

BTW...now go back and check the Trump comments about making US strong again in exporting and levelling the playing field....the USD has basically under Trump weakened by 9% making US products cheaper BUT not resulting in an increase in exports...

WHY is that??

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 10:51 AM

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/870096329007038464

How Jared Kushner built a luxury skyscraper using loans meant for job-starved areas

JERSEY CITY — Jared Kushner and his real estate partners wanted to take advantage of a federal program in 2015 that would save them millions of dollars as they built an opulent, 50-story residential tower in this city’s booming waterfront district, just across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan.
There was just one problem: The program was designed to benefit projects in poor, job-starved areas.On the south side of Jersey City, which has some of the most entrenched poverty in the New York City region, many people interviewed one day last week were surprised that their neighborhood’s troubles were part of the reason that 65#Bay Street got cheap financing.

“That’s very sad,” said Pastor Shyrone Richardson of the World Outreach Christian Church in the struggling Bergen-Lafayette section of Jersey City. “Unfortunately, the people who are benefiting from this are not the people in this area.”

Richardson’s church is in a five-block area where nearly 1 in 5 were jobless and three fatal shootings occurred in 2015, according to an analysis of crime and census data.

So the project’s consultants got creative, records show.
They worked with state officials in New Jersey to come up with a map that defined the area around 65 Bay Street as a swath of land that stretched nearly four miles and included some of the city’s poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods. At the same time, they excluded some wealthy neighborhoods only blocks away.

Continued....

His neighborhood seems a world away from the gleaming office towers and trendy cafes that surround 65#Bay Street. The Jersey City waterfront saw a building boom after 9/11 that transformed the area into one of the hottest real estate markets in the New York metro region, drawing residents from Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Apartments in the Bay Street building, marketed as Trump Bay Street, rent for up to $4,700 a month and offer sweeping views of Lower Manhattan. A nearby commuter train shuttles passengers to the World Trade Center within minutes. The area within a roughly three-block radius around the building had an unemployment rate of just 2.6#percent in 2015, according to census data.

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 10:56 AM

JΞSŦΞR ✪ ΔCŦUΔL³³º¹‏#@th3j35t3r

#FLASH Multiple people now reporting their account followed @realdonaldtrump without them doing it. Check ur account.

Accounts that have never followed @realdonaldtrimp account are suddenly being defined by Twitter as Followers...then unchecked and then suddenly back as Followers with the end user not making any changes....

Amazing to see Trump's Twitter account bloat up today with non-tweeting bots...

This is interesting as it ties into these Trump bot "Followers"....

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/politics/%E2%80%98something-fishy%E2%80%99-is-going-on-with-trump%E2%80%99s-twitter-account-researchers-say/ar-BBBL1Dv?li=AAmiR2Z&ocid=spartandhp

Reports have zinged around the Internet this week about a sudden and mysterious surge in President Trump’s Twitter following, along with dark musings that something nefarious may be afoot.
The wildest of these claims — including the suggestion that Trump had gained up to 5 million followers in just a few days and that nearly half are “fake” — are clearly overblown, analysts say. But several researchers who study social media have also reached the conclusion that something fishy may be going on with Trump’s account.
That something fishy may involve the mass creation of “bots,” a catch-all term for accounts that are automated, meaning a single individual or a team can run hundreds or thousands at time. This is something Trump’s supporters have a history of doing well, far better than his political opponents, according to work by several researchers.
“In my expert opinion, something strange is going on,” said #Samuel C. Woolley, research director for the Computational Propaganda project at Oxford University. “It’s consistent with other strange things that have gone on before with this politician’s Twitter feed.”
First, a few facts: Trump’s Twitter following, which is one of the largest in the world, has been surging since his inauguration in January, rising this month alone from 28.6 million to more than 31 million, according to Twitter Counter, a tracking site. That’s an increase of 2.4 million in May, for an average of nearly one each second of every day, around the clock.
That would be extremely impressive for most people but less so for one of the world’s most famous men, not to mention one known to use Twitter to convey some of his bluntest and newsiest utterances. Bear in mind, for perspective, that the Twitter feed for Trump’s predecessor, @BarackObama, has more than 89 million followers, including a substantial percentage of bots, according to various reports.
But here’s the catch: There is a strangely large percentage of Trump’s followers — and especially his newest followers — that have only the most rudimentary account information, with no profile picture, few followers and little sign that they have ever tweeted. These are so-called “egg followers” because instead of a profile photo they traditionally carried the image of a blank egg on Twitter account pages.
And that, say some researchers, is odd.
“This is very, very obvious when you just go and click on the newer followers,” said Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. “The quality of the new followers is pretty bad.”
SocialRank, a New York-based analytics company that works with Southwest Airlines, L’Oreal and the NFL, reported this week that as Trump’s number of followers surged from 24.1 million in February to 31 million in May, his number of “egg followers” grew sharply as well, from 5 million to 9.1 million. Of that group, more than half have never tweeted and only 4 percent have 25 or more followers; 927,000 of Trump’s egg followers opened new accounts in May, according to SocialRank’s analysis posted Tuesday.
That doesn’t necessarily make the accounts “fake,” as some reports have claimed. Most academic researchers say that determining what percentage of followers are actual individual humans can be extremely difficult — and almost impossible with an account with as many followers as Trump’s. Twitter itself has acknowledged that as much as 8.5 percent of all of its accounts are likely automated, though independent researchers say the number may be twice as high. (The company also has a team that searches for bots and, when found in violation of Twitter policies, shuts them down.)
There another possible explanation for Trump’s mysterious follower surge. Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio said that newer users often appear without profile photos#because they have not yet developed their accounts fully. The company’s most recent earnings report shows that the number of Twitter accounts overall grew by around 9 million in the first quarter of 2017, up to 328 million, meaning plenty of newcomers may be using the platform merely to browse what others are saying. (In March, Twitter abandoned the egg image for users without profile pictures, but the term "egg followers" has endured among researchers).
Alexander Taub, chief executive of SocialRank, said that both theories may be true. Trump may be drawing an unusual number of new — but real — egg followers. And he may also be benefitting from an aggressive new campaign of bot creation.
“It’s probably a combination of both,” Taub said, “but there’s something fishy.”
Here’s where a little history may help sharpen the picture. Last year, during the election campaign, several academic researchers tracked the use of Twitter bots supporting either Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. They reported that the bots supporting Trump massively outperformed the bots supporting Clinton, by a margin of 5-to-1# in the final days before the vote.
Among accounts that researchers had identified as “highly automated” — meaning likely bots — 81.9 percent carried at least some messaging supporting Trump, according to a November paper written by Woolly and two colleagues, Bence Kollyani of Corvinus University and Philip N. Howard of Oxford.
It’s that history, in part, that makes Woolley suspicious that Trump’s surge may benefit from aggressive bot development. “There’s a legacy of this.”
But even Woolley and other researchers skeptical of Trump’s total say there is no definitive way to determine who is behind making Twitter bots, nor is there any plausible way to determine their motives.
Descriptions of how to build Twitter bots are widely available on the Web, and they can even be purchased en masse from companies that specialize in developing them. Spoofing location, language, profile pictures and other information for Twitter accounts is also easy, making it hard to get clear answers, said University of Southern California researcher Emilio Ferrara.
“A 13-year-old kid with access to Google can figure out how to create a smokescreen,” Ferrara said.

Something I have pointed out in previous comments....

Twitter needs to fight bots by ending anonymity as Facebook has done BUT Twitter also has one of their largest individual investors a Russian oligarch who sits in Twitter Hdqs Ireland....he invested over 18M USDs into Twitter several years ago when they had a sudden cash flow problem....

How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/technology/how-twitter-is-being-gamed-to-feed-misinformation.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 11:03 AM

Wow...that was really quick for the Trump WH.....Putin in his last press conference demanded they be returned....if not he would close US facilities...BUT WAIT there are no private US Embassy facilities inside Russia as they are all monitored by Russian intelligence...

WAPO #BREAKING: Trump administration moves to return Russian compounds in Maryland and New York

Pitin demanded Trump jumped...how strange is that???

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 11:13 AM

1988 Feds investigate Trump for helping mobster Robert Hopkins launder money by buying 2 apartments in Trump Tower

A quick review of 40 years of investigations into Donald Trump and his businesses

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/31/a-quick-review-of-40-years-of-investigations-into-donald-trumps-businesses/?utm_term=.fd617e48b546

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 11:21 AM

Per @RyanLizza the day after Trump tweeted that he wasn't in touch with Roger Stone, he called Roger Stone.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/trumps-good-job-call-to-roger-stone#

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 11:25 AM

BUT it "ain't us it is those little Green hacking men" and just because they sit inside Russia does not mean they work for the Russian government.....

Putin virtually admits to hacking the US..but not at the state sponsored level...this was the same "little Green men seen in Crimea and eastern Ukraine" where Putin even stated "maybe they were on vacation and just happened to take their tanks with them"..........

https://apnews.com/281464d38ee54c6ca5bf573978e8ee91/Putin:-Russian-state-has-never-been-involved-in-hacking?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=AP

ST.PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) — President Vladimir Putin says the Russian state has never been involved in hacking.
Speaking at a meeting with senior editors of leading international news agencies Thursday, Putin said that some individual “patriotic” hackers could mount some attacks amid the current cold spell in Russia’s relations with the West.
But he categorically insisted that “we don’t engage in that at the state level.”
Putin also said that “no hackers can influence election campaigns in any country of Europe, Asia or America.”
U.S. intelligence agencies have accused Russia of hacking into Democratic Party emails, helping President Donald Trump’s election victory.

NOTICE Putin did not mention directly the Russian state hack on the current French President Marcon.....which used Wikileaks to leak the hacked emails....just as they did in the US election...

Azor

06-01-2017, 03:51 PM

Man...stay current...go to the 2014 meeting where the target date of 2026 was in fact accepted by all 28 members....

Stop comingling facts...

Irrelevant. The point is that German defense spending as a percentage of GDP did not rise from 2006-2014 or from 2014 to present. In fact, it is lower now than in 2006.

Merkel deliberately refused to uphold her commitments.

NOTICED you failed to respond to the simple fact that the per captia meaning what a nation state pays for evry single taxpayer with the US at under 2USDs and say Germany, France and UK far higher....

Seems you simply forgot that by saying one thing and in reality it has moved on...

It seems that Schnapps assisted with the writing of the above paragraph... :confused:

If you have read the German underlined in German article you will notice German comments meaning the figures have to be crafted into their projected yearly tax and spend plans...

Something totally not known in the US...setting a financial budget and holding to it...

That is what angers the weaker EU members.....Germany does not live over its means..something we see daily in the US...

We'll see how Germany lives if the EUR trades more like a new DM. It must be nice to make the world safe for German products and banking whilst not having to defend oneself or one's allies.

You can't refute a single one of my arguments and going off-road is just making me feel embarrassed for you.

At least Trump's election provoked Berlin to commit to raising defense spending, which is surprising given that you claimed all of this was resolved in 2014 in Wales...

Now that is one impact of Trump on policy that I can get behind.

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 03:59 PM

It is interesting that both the Republcian Party in Congress and Trump and the entire Trump WH tries to deflect from the FBI Russian investigation....

Russian Propaganda works on the 6Ds Principle.....

Deflect....Distort...Distract...Dismay....ALL designed to create Doubt and Distrust....

Knowing the above 6Ds what is Trump using in this particular tweet of his?????

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump

The big story is the "unmasking and surveillance" of people that took place during the Obama Administration.

DEFLECT....DISTORT....DISTRACT...DOUBT and DISTRUST....

FIVE out of the 6Ds.....

IMPORTANT..this same exact "myth" theory was pushed by FOX News which was forced this week to admit the story was indeed "FAKE NEWS"

NOTE this tweet also is a major indicator that both Trump and the Republican Party in Congress do not know understand the classification and declassification process of NSA and the entire IC...

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 04:10 PM

BREAKING

@CNN reports @SenFranken & @SenatorLeahy asked #FBI to investigate SESSIONS for meetings w/#Russia at #Mayflower + others

BREAKING: Senators asked Comey to investigate whether AG Jeff Sessions committed perjury
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/01/politics/sessions-russian-ambassador-letter/index.html

Almost immediately after this request for the FBI to check for Sessions possible perjury Comey was fired by Trump

REMEMBER Sessions lied about his meetings with the Russian US Ambassador during his Senate hearings THUS he recused himself from the Russian investigation reach he has not actually done....

NOW it appears that he also lied to the Senate about these meetings as well....

REMEMBER when asked specifically by Sen. Franken "have you had any meeting with Russian officials...he stated no" ....Franken repeated the same exact question a second time to avoid any confusion and the answer was again "no".......

WHEN confronted..."suddenly he remembered something and then he stated he had misunderstood the question"...

REALLY...misunderstand a clear and concise question????

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 04:22 PM

In November, the same ex-Breitbart employee warned that Breitbart was becoming "the propaganda arm of the Trump WH."
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/ex-breitbart-consultant-warns-right-wing-site-has-become-propaganda-arm-of-the-trump-white-house/#…

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 04:25 PM

Trump WH issues an ethnics waiver for Bannon the Trump Special Advisor so he can continued to be the Director of Breitbart.com a alt right ie white nationalist
blogsite claiming to be a "news site"....

Ex-Breitbart employee: There is now a "concrete paper trail" showing Bannon still runs Breitbart from the WH.
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/ex-breitbart-employee-theres-now-a-concrete-paper-trail-showing-steve-bannon-still-runs-breitbart/#…

........so Breitbart.com is now officially state-sponsored propaganda outlet WHICH BTW often carries "Russian media accounts that are often out right propaganda and or disinformation", supported by your tax dollars paying his government salary....

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 04:34 PM

Interesting just how a proTrump white nationalist triggers a Twittering trending narrative...

The phrase 'Deep State Terrorist' is trending. Started w/one user who tweeted his own article >50 times. And then Jack Posobiec picked it up

The alt right ie white nationalist term "Deep State" is used to refer to the USG IC and the FBI....and is being used by the alt right ie white nationalists to counter any reporting by the FBI or USG IC that is negative towards Trump....

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 04:37 PM

This is the activity pattern for the phrase 'Deep State Terrorist.' Almost like someone wants to deflect from other breaking news...

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 04:41 PM

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 04:43 PM

Putin says U.S. missile systems in Alaska and South Korea are a challenge to Russia:
http://reut.rs/2sskfZN

This indications more such complaints are coming....question is will Trump WH withdraw them as he demands...??

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 04:45 PM

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 05:00 PM

“If you triangulate Russia, WikiLeaks, Assange + Trump associates, person who comes up w/ most hits is Nigel Farage"

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/01/nigel-farage-is-person-of-interest-in-fbi-investigation-into-trump-and-russia#

UK's Nigel Farage is a 'person of interest' in the Trump-Russia investigation: Guardian.
http://reut.rs/2ruKiSQ

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 05:07 PM

Clinton Says Trump Campaign Gave 'Guidance' To Russian Election Hackers
https://www.rferl.org/a/hillary-clinton-says-trump-campaign-gave-guidance-russian-election-hackers/28521984.html#

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 05:07 PM

UNCLAS Intel report on Russia’s alleged US election hack devotes 6 pages to RT's operations & connections to Kremlin
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf#

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 05:12 PM

Hurricane season starts today, is predicted to be particularly bad, and FEMA and NOAA have no leaders.
http://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/531012881/disaster-agency-to-weather-hurricane-season-with-no-leader-proposed-cuts?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170601#

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 06:18 PM

Putin now moving slowly toward acknowledging Russian responsibility for US election hacks. .
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/world/europe/vladimir-putin-donald-trump-hacking.html?action=Click&contentCollection=BreakingNews&contentID=65381707&pgtype=Homepage&_r=0#
…

Putin's typical pattern of angry denial followed by winking denial, usually followed by tacit admission & then domestic boasting. eg Crimea.

Exact same drill when he admitted possibly, maybe, could be "little green men in eastern Ukraine....

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 06:21 PM

This is a) evidence Putin knows little about painters and b) the kind of lie you say when you are too lazy to try.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/putin-russian-state-has-never-been-involved-in-hacking/2017/06/01/efe4b576-46b1-11e7-8de1-cec59a9bf4b1_story.html#

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 07:21 PM

Interesting now that Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee who violated security releasing classified information now tweets this....

Devin Nunes‏
@DevinNunes

Seeing a lot of fake news from media elites and others who have no interest in violations of Americans' civil liberties via unmaskings.

BUT WAIT.....
This same Republican voted for the following laws which allow "unmasking".....

Voted YES on H.R. 3199 (109th), H.R. 6304 (110th), H.R. 5949 (112th), S.990 (112th), & H.R. 514 (112th) — all of which authorized this.

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 07:45 PM

REPORT: Secy of State office declined call with EU’s foreign-policy chief after Tillerson visit to Russia in April.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/01/after-putin-visit-tillerson-snubbed-top-eu-official-russia-moscow-mogherini/

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 07:46 PM

NBC News: FBI & Congress are examining campaign event where Trump, Sessions, Kushner met w/ Kislyak, other diplomats
http://nbcnews.to/2qFHfIq

5 US officials "are aware of classified intel suggesting there was some sort of private encounter between Trump, his aides, & [Kislyak

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 07:55 PM

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 08:01 PM

The Associated Press‏
#@AP

BREAKING: White House says Trump delaying Israel embassy move to maximize chances of peace deal, but still intends to move it.

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 08:03 PM

Bannon "hacked into the mainstream media & propagated these negative anti-Clinton stories."
http://www.npr.org/2016/11/17/502413784/journalist-says-steve-bannon-had-a-years-long-plan-to-take-down-hillary-clinton#…

The most important thing, at this point, is to realize that this disinfo campaign is still happening. It's not over.

OUTLAW 09

06-01-2017, 08:10 PM

Miguel Arias Caete‏
@MAC_europa

A sad day for the global community, as the US turns its back on the fight against climate change. EU deeply regrets this unilateral decision

BBC Breaking News‏
@BBCBreaking
"We're getting out" - President Donald Trump announces US is withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement
http://bbc.in/2rZ81v1

BUT WAIT...THEN Trump states he will talk about re-entering it on his terms....

This great businessman does not realize that if you walk out on an international signed agreement where China and 193 others sighed it...WHAT are these 194 going to give him...??

Interestingly a large number of large American companies were actually behind this treaty....AND if Trump really READ the fine print..in the future a large number of products that make up international trade MUST adhere to a new set of energy standards AND if US companies cannot adhere to those standards......THEY cannot then export their products to those countries that signed the agreement....

NOT exactly sure WHY he assumes this supports American companies and their workers IF they are export focused....

The price he will pay is then far higher.......

Interesting that Trump has now handed China a massive "win"......both politically and economically....

United States joins Nicaragua and Syria as the only 3 countries to not support the Paris climate change agreement

President Trump triumphantly announced that he was elected by Pittsburgh rather than Paris. Well, actually, he lost in Pittsburgh.

BUT WAIT.....
bill peduto
✔
@billpeduto
As the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future.

Oil is yesterday. Green tech is the business of the future. Will be trillions of dollars there. Can the U.S. afford to miss out?

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 04:19 AM

Miguel Arias Caete‏
@MAC_europa

A sad day for the global community, as the US turns its back on the fight against climate change. EU deeply regrets this unilateral decision

BBC Breaking News‏
@BBCBreaking
"We're getting out" - President Donald Trump announces US is withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement
http://bbc.in/2rZ81v1

BUT WAIT...THEN Trump states he will talk about re-entering it on his terms....

This great businessman does not realize that if you walk out on an international signed agreement where China and 193 others sighed it...WHAT are these 194 going to give him...??

Interestingly a large number of large American companies were actually behind this treaty....AND if Trump really READ the fine print..in the future a large number of products that make up international trade MUST adhere to a new set of energy standards AND if US companies cannot adhere to those standards......THEY cannot then export their products to those countries that signed the agreement....

NOT exactly sure WHY he assumes this supports American companies and their workers IF they are export focused....

The price he will pay is then far higher.......

Interesting that Trump has now handed China a massive "win"......both politically and economically....

United States joins Nicaragua and Syria as the only 3 countries to not support the Paris climate change agreement

Interestingly Trump somehow believed he could renegoiate with 190 or so countries to demand what he wants for the US...OR did he basically lie when he stated that he would do that....in public media from the Rose Garden....

APPEARS that EU, China and India ALL stated yesterday...there is no further talks..as it took FIVE years alone for this agreement and they all feel the agreement is valid and protects all interests...

Trump should have realized this when China the largest polluter signed onto the agreement...the US is the second largest polluter...

NOW China politically leads the world into the Green Era and US..has what gained more jobs.??.......not really...

As the new President of France Marcon stated in French national TV...."There is no Plan B as there is no Planet B....

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 04:23 AM

THIS is exactly what the FBI is investigating and the WH dances around it with the argument---"it's all about "unmasking"......

Flight data suggests Russian banker went directly from Kushner meeting to join Putin in Japan. h/t @AmyJBrittain http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/explanations-for-kushners-meeting-with-head-of-kremlin-linked-bank-dont-match-up/2017/06/01/dd1bdbb0-460a-11e7-bcde-624ad94170ab_story.html#…

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 04:26 AM

“There was serious consideration by the White House to#unilaterally rescind the sanctions” on Russia.

How the Trump administration’s secret efforts to ease Russia sanctions fell short

In the early weeks of the Trump administration, former Obama administration officials and State Department staffers fought an intense, behind-the-scenes battle to head off efforts by incoming officials to normalize relations with Russia, according to multiple sources familiar with the events.

Unknown to the public at the time, top Trump administration officials, almost as soon as they took office, tasked State Department staffers with developing proposals for the lifting of economic sanctions, the return of diplomatic compounds and other steps to relieve tensions with Moscow.

These efforts to relax or remove punitive measures imposed by President Obama in retaliation for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and meddling in the 2016 election alarmed some State Department officials, who immediately began lobbying congressional leaders to quickly pass legislation to block the move, the sources said.

“There was serious consideration by the White House to unilaterally rescind the sanctions,” said Dan Fried, a veteran State Department official who served as chief U.S. coordinator for sanctions policy until he retired in late February. He said in the first few weeks of the administration, he received several “panicky” calls from U.S. government officials who told him they had been directed to develop a sanctions-lifting package and imploring him, “Please, my God, can’t you stop this?”

Fried said he grew so concerned that he contacted Capitol Hill allies — including Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., the ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — to urge them to move quickly to pass legislation that would “codify” the sanctions in place, making it difficult for President Trump to remove them.

Tom Malinowski, who had just stepped down as President Obama’s assistant secretary of state for human rights, told Yahoo News he too joined the effort to lobby Congress after learning from former colleagues that the administration was developing a plan to lift sanctions — and possibly arrange a summit between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin — as part of an effort to achieve a “grand bargain” with Moscow. “It would have been a win-win for Moscow,” said Malinowski, who only days before he left office announced his own round of sanctions against senior Russian officials for human rights abuses under a law known as the Magnitsky Act.

The previously unreported efforts by Fried and others to check the Trump administration’s policy moves cast new light on the unseen tensions over Russia policy during the early days of the new administration.

It also potentially takes on new significance for congressional and Justice Department investigators in light of reports that before the administration took office Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his chief foreign policy adviser, Michael Flynn, discussed setting up a private channel of communications with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak — talks that appear to have laid the groundwork for the proposals that began circulating right after the inauguration.

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 04:36 AM

AND the Russian Information warfare now kicks in to remind Trump what he has to do....

From the major Russian propaganda machine Sputnik....

New US Anti-Russian Sanctions May Backfire, Fuel Hatred of America

NOTICE they use a so called "former" US Army officer.....

New economic sanctions against Russia proposed in the US Senate will backfire on the United States, helping create a climate of hatred around the world against Americans, former US Army major and historian Todd Pierce told Sputnik.

© Sputnik/ Natalia Seliverstova

WASHINGTON (Sputnik)— New economic sanctions against#Russia proposed in the US Senate will backfire on the United States, helping create a climate of hatred around the world against Americans, former US Army major and historian Todd Pierce told Sputnik.
On Thursday, Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Chairman Mike Crapo and Ranking Member Sherrod Brown announced a bipartisan agreement on legislation to strengthen and expand current US sanctions on Russia.
"These new sanctions will continue to backfire," Pierce, a historian and former military lawyer said on#Thursday. "We are creating a world which hates us, outside of where our propaganda organs have a captive audience."
Imposing additional sanctions on Russia could only serve to#hurt millions of ordinary people and make them feel hostile towardsthe United States, Pierce warned.
"Additional sanctions on Russia serve to make Americans feel good because that’s what Americans love to do today: make others suffer," he said.
Pierce said countries around the world were learning to create their own security arrangements with each other and the steer clear of the United States and its allies.
"The rest of the world has come to learn they can’t trust the world’s biggest hypocrite so they are building alliances outside of the Western countries that have been engaged in a war against the rest of the world now for 16 years," Pierce said.
Efforts to boost sanctions on Russia were particularly ironic given the enormous US federal government debt and annual deficit and the problems of domestic economic decline, Pierce pointed out.
"The US recedes into a former Superpower, with its people burdened under the debt it eagerly went into to finance its wars and serving as a form of self-imposed sanctions, except for the beneficiaries of the Military Industrial Complex," he said.
The proposed new legislation will strengthen existing sanctions on Russia, especially on energy projects and ondebt financing in#key economic sectors.
It will also impose new sanctions on Russian individuals and companies including those alleged to be supplying weapons to#the internationally recognized government of Syria and againstindividuals and groups alleged to be conducting malicious cyber activity, according to#media reports.
The proposed legislation will also impose broad new sanctions on key sectors of the Russian economy, including mining, metals, and railways, the reports said.

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 07:37 AM

HAS Putin come off his meds in the last few days...????

First he alludes to maybe, could have been, well......it was those "little green hacking men" that just might have hacked DNC and meddled in the US election...BUT it was not the "Russian government".....????

NOTICE the individual next to Putin when he makes this statement...he also knows it was state sponsored Russian hackers....

NOW this .........

Putin, driving @TheOliverStone, praises @Snowden for acting publicly but says he shdn’t have whistleblown on NSA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD4eIM-8Vrc#

HEY it is his own Russian words...not mine....and it was translated correctly....

MAYBE it was that massive ransomware attack using NSA tools that hit Russia badly that woke hm up??????

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 07:42 AM

Trumps climate change negation will be coming back to haunt him and the GOP......

If Republicans believe in states' rights they should be perfectly fine with the most powerful US states determining US climate change policy

GOP has voiced for years States right "trump" federal rights....

SO when the worlds 6th largest economy California states it will adhere to the Climate Treaty Trump and his merry band of white nationalists will have to but up or shut up on their support to States rights....

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 07:44 AM

Speaking from "Belgian airspace" @JunckerEU says #Trump is pushing #EU towards #China
http://www.politico.eu/article/juncker-a-luxembourger-is-not-afraid-of-an-american/?utm_source=POLITICO.EU&utm_campaign=f8d1c5313c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_06_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_10959edeb5-f8d1c5313c-189676245#

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 07:48 AM

Lets see Trump and his merry band of white nationalists claim that climate change is Gods will and not human caused.....

Maybe they should look hard at these photos of a country that does not have a lot of humans running around in it.....also not a famous tourist draw.

June 2014 vs. 2016 on the Greenland ice sheet.

NOT photoshopped.....

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 07:52 AM

Musk, Iger to quit Trump advisory councils after Paris accord decision
http://reut.rs/2qHjhbG

More will follow as many large American corporations were also in favor of the Climate Treat simply out of potential trade prospective in the coming years in Green technologies....now those technologies will come out pf EU, India and China...not the US....

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 07:55 AM

THIS, on how @realDonaldTrump non-explicitness on Art 5 TOTALLY blew out the "delicate bluff of deterrence"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/to-die-for-estonia/2017/06/01/465619a6-46f1-11e7-a196-a1bb629f64cb_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.a861976a2b89#

NATO will now move from a "bluff deterrence to an actual deterrence built on the French nuclear abilities paid for by NATO excluding the US.....BUT it will include the nuclear financial weapon and total restriction of Russian banks being able to operate in Europe.......cutting off Russia from SWIFT....

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 08:00 AM

Today's big story ISN'T Paris; when Trump is gone we'll re-up. The story is Russia PUBLICLY threatened Trump and he PUBLICLY caved.

Such a great negoiator..Trump got nothing in return for caving on Russian demands..especially since their so called property is US owned not Russian owned...

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 08:07 AM

Trump appears to not be able to make decisions on his own without checking into FOX News to see what he can get for info warfare support....

Trump Sought Reassurance From Fox News Before He Dumped Climate Pact

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 04:20 PM

EXCLUSIVE: U.S. special counsel expands probe to include Michael Flynn's dealings with Turkey
http://reut.rs/2qIqAQr

This was first reported by two social media journalisst three weeks ago.....

Pence lied saying he didn't know Flynn lobbied for foreign govt/paid by Russia. Yet Rep Cummings told Pence about BOTH in NOVEMBER.

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 04:25 PM

Putin Rips Earpiece Out When Megyn Kelly Asks About Russian Interference In The Election [VIDEO]

http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/02/putin-rips-earpiece-out-when-megyn-kelly-asks-about-russian-interference-in-the-election-video/?utm_source=site-share#…

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 04:34 PM

"Hearing smack-talk from the Frenchman 31 years his junior irritated and bewildered Trump, aides said".

@JoeNBC says Steve Bannon bragged about having damaging info about Kushner days before Kushner meeting w/ Gorkov leaked to the NYT.

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 04:39 PM

Russian spies appear to be targeting our telecom infrastructure as they intensify their espionage against the US.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/01/russia-spies-espionage-trump-239003#…

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 04:43 PM

Trump team only backed off on plan to lift sanctions b/c it would look bad. Not b/c they changed their minds

Former diplomat fears that even if Trump WH doesn't lift sanctions, it will stop vigilantly enforcing them.

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 05:05 PM

Putin praises Trump, says U.S. spies may have faked hacking evidence
http://reut.rs/2qIi6c4

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 05:40 PM

“There is no such thing as a retroactive waiver. If you need a retroactive waiver, you have violated a rule.”

White House Waivers May Have Violated Ethics Rules
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/us/politics/stephen-bannon-white-house-ethics-waivers.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 05:46 PM

Memo to Pence: the CEOs of GE, Goldman Sachs, and Uber are not generally viewed as "the left."

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 05:51 PM

Putin to corporate America: You should 'help' President Trump
https://www.unian.info/world/1956906-putin-to-corporate-america-you-should-help-president-trump.html#

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 05:55 PM

Trump's plan to eradicate IS by using the US named Communist Kurdish terrorist group PKK.....will in fact lead to far more confrontation inside Syria than the Trump WH and CENTCOM have ever envisioned...

Those U.S. plans to monitor weapons given to #YPG by their serial numbers?
Yeah - that’s pretty unlikely to work…
http://wapo.st/2rjvmq6?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.9d62da394b2a#…

BREAKING Kurdish militants claim downing of Turkish military chopper: report

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 06:02 PM

Putin: It would be nice for Russia if NATO were 'falling apart'
http://cnb.cx/2slXJCN

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 06:03 PM

9 times Donald Trump twisted facts in his speech quitting the Paris Agreement
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-paris-speech-fact-check_us_59309ab8e4b02478cb99f151?ncid=engmodushpm g00000004#

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 06:13 PM

NBC's @KeirSimmons asks Sergey Gorkov, the Russian banker who met w/ Kushner, over and over about their meeting. Gorkov refuses to answer.

Azor

06-02-2017, 06:16 PM

Despite differences, Germany still needs to find common ground with US in the Middle East

By David P. Goldman at The Asia Times (http://www.atimes.com/article/merkel-throws-trump-briar-patch/): *

Donald Trump and Angela Merkel now agree about the main issues in US-German relations. “The times in which we could rely fully on others — they are a way past us,” Merkel told a beer-tent rally of her political party. “We Europeans really have to take our fate into our own hands.” That is just what President Trump has been telling the Europeans since the beginning of last year’s US election campaign, demanding in particular that Europe pay more for its own defense. Both Trump and Merkel, moreover, say they want the Euro to strengthen against the US dollar. That buries the two bones of contention between Berlin and Washington. Everything else is political posturing and fake news.

The German Chancellor in effect threatens to throw President Trump into the proverbial briar patch, giving him what he wants while appearing to denounce him.

Merkel is running for re-election to a fourth term in next September’s national elections, and it does her more good to denounce Trump than to speak of policy convergence. The German public hates Donald Trump with a visceral passion. The country’s largest-circulation news magazine, Der Spiegel, titled an editorial last week, “It’s time to get rid of Donald Trump,” explaining: “Donald Trump has transformed the United States into a laughing-stock and he is a danger to the world. He must be removed from the White House before things get even worse.”

Trump’s unashamed nationalism elicits revulsion in a land whose 20th-century experience with nationalism was less than satisfactory. The Germans never will understand American populism; for them, populism is the dank fen of German politics that incubated National Socialism. Germany’s self-styled populists of the Alternative for Germany party are infested with Nazi apologists. In the distorting mirror of German history, Trump looks like a monster.

Even worse, Trump stepped on Germany’s sore toe with big boots when he denounced Germany’s 2015 decision to admit more than 1.2 million Muslim refugees supposedly from Syria, but including economic migrants from as far away as Afghanistan. For Germans, this was a grand national sacrifice to world-citizenship; to Trump and the American political right, it was a hallmark of civilizational decline. That may be true, but the Germans insist on their right to decline in their own chosen fashion.

Trump also raised hackles in Germany earlier this year by complaining that Germany had kept Europe’s common currency artificially weak in order to boost exports. This theory came from Trump advisor Peter Navarro (I characterized it at the time as “Navarro-Navarro Land”). The Germans responded that his was unfair: Germany had allowed Europe’s central bank to engineer negative interest rates for the benefit of economic laggards such as Italy, Spain and Portugal, to the detriment of German savers. Last week, Chancellor Merkel herself declared that the Euro was “too weak.” Again, she is running against the European Central Bank’s negative-interest rate policy, a smart move for a German politician before a national election. And once again, she agrees with Trump. Prof. Navarro meanwhile hasn’t been heard from in months.

Berlin and Washington agree on another important strategic issue, namely relations with Russia. If Berlin harbored concerns that President Trump might be too soft on Russia, they were allayed when presidential advisor Gary Cohn declared May 26 that Washington had no intention of removing economic sanctions on Russia imposed after its intervention in Ukraine. That is Merkel’s position.

Where do Trump and Merkel disagree? In Germany, where environmentalism is very nearly the established religion, Trump’s doubts about the Paris Climate Agreement place him outside the bounds of civilized discourse. But that is an ideological rather than a practical matter.

The Middle East, to be sure, remains an area of disagreement between Berlin and Washington. Trump sold $350 billion of advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia during his visit to the kingdom last week and denounced the Saudis’ main rival, Iran. By contrast, Germany’s Foreign Ministry, now directed by Merkel’s Social-Democratic coalition partners, hails Iran “as an important regional actor.” Germany has always taken a more benign view of Iran, and that is a disagreement of substance. It is nonetheless a secondary one.

Merkel and Trump both want a solution to the Syrian civil war, which among other things would reduce the stream of refugees pouring into Europe. As a practical matter, that requires an agreement with Russia, which adroitly inserted itself into Syrian affairs and cannot easily be extracted. Iran, Russia’s ally of convenience, can deploy a nearly inexhaustible reserve of Shi’ite fighters from Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as Lebanon as mercenaries in the Syrian war. Berlin knows as well as Washington that a Syrian deal requires a nasty negotiation. Trump’s effort to isolate Iran well might define the boundaries of a prospective deal with Russia.

For all the beer-tent talk about taking Europe’s destiny into its own hands, Chancellor Merkel knows perfectly well that she needs the United States to deal with the actual and prospective crises on Europe’s borders. Germany will increase its defense spending, but young Germans will not join the Bundeswehr to fight for future generations, for the simple reason that there won’t be much in the way of future generations. German women (excluding immigrants) average 1.3 children, one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. Germany’s infecund, aging population has no reason to fight for a dubious German future.

Germany’s military is in disrepair. As Elisabeth Braw reported in Foreign Policy, “Most of the Navy’s helicopters were not working , and of the Army’s 64 helicopters, only 18 were usable. And while the Cold War Bundeswehr had consisted of 370,000 troops, by last summer it was only 176,015 men and women strong.”

Berlin spends only 1.4% of GDP on defense [1.17% in 2015]. An increase to the 2% NATO target, as Trump has demanded, will not make Germany into a military power. There is talk of a common European army, but only talk. That’s the sort of thing one discusses after a few beers in the depths of the briar patch.

[I]* Emphasis added

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 06:28 PM

Getty has a photo of Jeff Sessions and Russian Ambassador Kislyak at the Mayflower Hotel last April. It IS #REAL.

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 06:50 PM

Why Trump's climate deal exit may be a major win for China:
http://reut.rs/2qJ3lph

NOW Putin is using "little green underage daughters" as the excuse for who conducted Russian state sponsored DNC hacking....

Putin to Megyn Kelly: 'Your underage daughter' could hack an election
http://nbcnews.to/2qNK2uf#

OUTLAW 09

06-02-2017, 06:52 PM

Donald Trump just accomplished the impossible — a united Europe
http://politi.co/2qNAeAo

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 04:12 AM

Again US MSM confirming what two social media journalists reported on three weeks ago...that Trump AG Sessions is also under FBI Russian collusion investigation...

The Associated Press‏
@AP
BREAKING: Special counsel's Trump campaign investigation includes Manafort case, may expand to include Attorney General Sessions.

Sessions was caught lying which was actually perjury in his Senate confirmations to once meeting the Russian Ambassador outside of his Senate dealings....THEN he submitted a statement indicating he "had forgotten" one meeting...NOW there is photo evidence of at least two more meetings not covered by his "first single meeting statement...

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 04:18 AM

Trump's Cabinet pick for Education DeVos is now targeting K12 science teachers who teach climate warming to their classes...these are 18 years olds.....

DeVos backed group is targeting every K-12 science teacher in the US in effort to sow doubts about climate science
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/opinion/sowing-climate-doubt-among-schoolteachers.html

Like abortion, climate has nothing to do with the climate. It’s about authoritarians who want to teach free people to obey without question.

PAUL SMITHS, N.Y. — The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank known for attacking climate science, has been mailing a slim, glossy book to public school teachers throughout the United States. The institute says it plans to send out as many as 200,000 copies, until virtually every science educator in America has one.
The book, “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming,” presents the false premise that the evidence for human-driven climate change is deeply flawed. To understand where the Heartland Institute is coming from, consider a recent comment by its president, Joseph Bast, who called global warming “another fake crisis” for Democrats “to hype to scare voters and raise campaign dollars.”
The book was first published in 2015, to coincide with the Paris climate conference and influence policy makers. The second edition was released this year with an instructional DVD.

LITTLE KNOWN FACT...
deVos is a “dominionist,” a branch of Christianity about absolute control. It has nothing to do with Christ or the Gospels, but pure authority.

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 04:23 AM

Reuters: Sources say FBI chief recruiting process is 'chaotic', interviews led by Trump only lasting 10-20 mins.

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 04:30 AM

NOW Trump and his merry band of white nationalists are in a "dispute" with MIT although he is just a real estate salesperson over the false use of the Trump WH on the MIT climate study.....

MIT openly stated yesterday that the Trump WH had falsely misused or misunderstood their study.

White House scrambles to defend Trump’s use of climate data, disputed by the authors themselves
https://www.yahoo.com/news/white-house-scrambles-defend-trumps-use-climate-data-disputed-authors-200714240.html

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 04:46 AM

HOW does one explain "hyprocriscy" ?????

Nunes-led House Intelligence Committee asked for ‘unmaskings’ of Americans
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has cast the practice of “unmasking” U.S. individuals and organizations in classified reports as an abuse of powers by the Obama administration. But the panel he leads requested five to six such unmaskings between June 2016 and January 2017, according to a tally by U.S. spy agencies.

Nunes is bashing the former Obama administration for doing this as a protection for Trump and attempts to change the Russian investigation narrative to one of "Obama unmasking" and THEN suddenly "he requested the same thing"......

Old American Indian saying......"white man speaks with forked tongue"....

Second old American saying....."never directly challenge USG IC agencies as they keep records".....

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 04:48 AM

The real victim of Trump’s NATO outburst: The US
http://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-nato-outburst-united-states-real-victim/#

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 07:29 AM

Reuters: Sources say FBI chief recruiting process is 'chaotic', interviews led by Trump only lasting 10-20 mins.

Reuters: In interviews with FBI director finalists, Trump "spoke mostly about himself and seemed distracted"

Being massively investigated by the FBI for criminal activities (money laundering) and Russian collusion might do that????

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 07:34 AM

It is just not only Trump having problems now the SoS is being investigated at the New York State level...

Exxon challenged us to put forth evidence of their potentially wide-ranging fraud. Today, we answered.
Quote from the NY AG Scheinderman

Rex Tillerson misled Exxon Mobil investors on climate change, NY AG says

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/06/02/exxon-mobil-rex-tillerson-eric-schneiderman-climate-change/102418492/

IS there truly anyone in the Trump WH that is not currently being investigated at the State and or Federal levels?????

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 07:42 AM

HOW does one explain "hyprocriscy" ?????

Nunes is bashing the former Obama administration for doing this as a protection for Trump and attempts to change the Russian investigation narrative to one of "Obama unmasking" and THEN suddenly "he requested the same thing"......

Old American Indian saying......"white man speaks with forked tongue"....

Second old American saying....."never directly challenge USG IC agencies as they keep records".....

APPEARS that all the tam tam by Nunes and the Congressional GOP about Susan Rice's "unmasking" WAS actually LESS than Nunes requested of IC.....

BUT they still try to deflect using Rice as a deflection story....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nunes-led-house-intelligence-committee-requested-unmaskings-of-americans/2017/06/02/5c098dc0-47bc-11e7-98cd-af64b4fe2dfc_story.html?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.79517c115175#…

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 07:50 AM

SPOTTED at White House earlier today: high-wattage defense attorney Abbe Lowell. Told me he had a meeting in the EEOB, not to do w/Russia.

RUMINT...he was meeting with Kushner and his wife on RICO money laundering issues....WHICH in theory "is not about Russia".....

This lawyer does not "just simply drop by for a chat at 6K per hour billing charges"....

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 08:06 AM

For those that do not know this small fact and I was here during the following riots......

OTD 50 years ago, the unprovoked killing of a student by a right-wing cop set off years of left-wing protests & worse in West Germany WHO then turned out to be a high level GDR Stasi officer.

In the light of the current Russian investigations, criminal investigations around RICO and money laundering on a grand scale AND obstruction of an ongoing Federal investigation.....

American history is not going to be the same after these investigations are completed....

REALLY READ this article....

What if everything you know is wrong?
February 24, 2013

https://20committee.com/2013/02/24/what-if-everything-you-know-is-wrong/

WHEN viewing what is currently ongoing with the Trump Russian investigations one must be thoroughly prepared that what we think the "current reality" is.....it ani't necessarily so.....

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 08:20 AM

This 'joke' in K.Pravda says a lot about US-Russian ties:

"If it hadn't been for Columbus, we'd have to put up with Americans in Europe."

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 08:22 AM

Many need to keep this in mind when dealing with things around Russia and Putin.....

"Aggressive patriotism has become the psychological foundation for a whole nation..."
https://granta.com/russia-verge-nervous-breakdown/#

One might in fact say we are seeing a similar trend in certain voting blocks inside the US right now.....

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 08:57 AM

Very much enjoying the German press at the moment. "Earth to Trump..."BTW in the small print at the bottom is states "Is Trump now a danger for all of us"????

Trump is currently doing more to unify EU around Germany and France than anything done by the US in the last 25 years....even the US climate supporting groups, companies and US States are receiving high praise from all of EU....and Merkel stated they can look forward to receiving EU support in the coming years.....as climate change effects everyone regardless of political party.

Heck even the Chinese and India are now closer than ever to the EU....and vice versa....

BUT WAIT..Trump's response was "this is what I have wanted all along"?????

I am not so sure he fully understands what he has unleashed with this "idea of his"????

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 12:40 PM

White House is silent after Putin's election hack taunts:
http://on.msnbc.com/2rsq8H3

Kind of eliminates that Trump lame excuse of a 400lb kid on a bed and the Chinese does it not????

Hate to say it..but anyone watching this Putin press conference inherently knows Putin was threatening Trump....Putin did this drill before when he deliberately was at first stating no Russians in eastern Ukraine then switching saying there were and then suddenly saying no there were none....

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 12:44 PM

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 12:46 PM

Despite differences, Germany still needs to find common ground with US in the Middle East

By David P. Goldman at The Asia Times (http://www.atimes.com/article/merkel-throws-trump-briar-patch/):

You do realize that..that "so called beer talk of the EU Army" is being exercised right now in the Baltics under German command leadership.....??

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 12:55 PM

House Russia probe veers close to dysfunction at end of rocky week

Nunes' decision to send out subpoenas re-opened old wounds and allegations that he was coordinating with the White House to undercut the House Russia investigation.
"We have very little insight into what the chairman is doing here. I think the only guidance we can get is that we hear coming out of the White House," Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer Thursday.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/02/politics/russia-investigation-house-intelligence-committee/index.html

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 01:01 PM

I seriously do not believe Trump and his merry band of white nationalists really "get it"....

14 US States support the Paris agreements CA being the 6th LARGEST world economy
20 major large US corporations and leading investment banks and other large banks support it....

So what was Trump and his merry band thinking....that really a general election minority elected President was some how empowered to override the interest of the majority that did not vote for him and his merry band????

AND when Trump talks about protecting US jobs and the coal industry REMEMBER there are only 78,000 working in the coal industry and that counts everyone including office workers VS literally thousands now in the Green alternative energies.....and the Green jobs are growing by the hundreds weekly now...VS stagnation in the coal industry....

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 01:08 PM

Azor...for the first time US MSM now talks about this.....it was not Trump that caused this but rather Russia .......

Not Trump's doing: "In 2016 non-US NATO defense spending ticked up by $10 bil#lion, an in#crease of 3.8%."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-reckons-with-its-depleted-armies-1496444305#
…

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 03:16 PM

White House eyes Bannon ally for top broadcasting post
With sweeping new powers, the position would oversee public media reaching 100 countries.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/01/michael-pack-candidate-broadcasting-board-of-governors-239022

This will be the white nationalist counterpart to the Russia Today and Sputnik propaganda media outlets that pumps out thousands of hours of propaganda to 127 countries....

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 03:17 PM

"Sophisticated US leadership is the sine qua non of a stable world order..." — Dr. Brzezinski
https://twitter.com/zbig/status/860177803194630144#

OUTLAW 09

06-03-2017, 03:25 PM

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 07:54 AM

Very much enjoying the German press at the moment. "Earth to Trump..."BTW in the small print at the bottom is states "Is Trump now a danger for all of us"????

Putin's political war against the US has three geopolitical strategic goals he has never come off of since 2004.......and he has actually voiced them since then....and AGAIN in his last press conference and interview..

AND this is extremely important.....he views Trump as the way to achieve those three geopolitical goals....

1. damage and discredit NATO
2. damage and discredit EU
3. completely disconnect US from Europe and ME

Trump's actions and attitudes in the NATO, EU and G7 massively moved Putin's goals forward...the core question is WHY...and for many Europeans it is because he is tied to Russia and Putin....

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/trump%E2%80%99s-tangle-with-europe-leads-the-continent-to-find-partners-elsewhere/ar-BBBQGVM?li=BBArDa6&ocid=spartandhp

BRUSSELS — A day after President Trump pulled out of a key climate agreement, declaring he was fighting for “Pittsburgh, not Paris,” an international realignment was already taking shape on Friday, as European and Chinese officials signed a raft of agreements to bind themselves tightly together.
The pullout left the United States as a global outlier, and, many European leaders and experts said, a severely diminished force in the world. And it gave China fresh weight in a newly unbalanced landscape where longtime U.S. allies are searching for stability.
Friday’s landmark moves came after German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared this week that Europe must stand on its own, and after she had a warm Berlin tete-a-tete this week with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an up-and-coming rival to U.S. global power.
“Today China and Europe have demonstrated solidarity with future generations and responsibility for the whole planet. We are convinced that yesterday’s decision by the United States to leave the Paris agreement is a big mistake,” European Council President Donald Tusk said Friday after meeting with Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang. But, he said, “Strong transatlantic ties are far more important and far more durable than the latest unfortunate decisions of the U.S. administration.”
Li also said that China’s relations with Europe were more important than ever, given “destabilizing factors” in the world.
“A stable China-E.U. relationship is useful to counter the uncertainties in this world,” he said.
In a single Brussels meeting last week, Trump blasted European leaders for their handling of defense spending, called for terrorists to be “humiliated” and bragged behind closed doors that he had already done more to fight terrorism than President Barack Obama did in four years.
The 3 ½ days of meetings between Trump and the Europeans may stand as a turning point in an alliance that was born from the ashes of World War II, as Europe turns toward China and other economic partners it views as more stable. Many senior European officials were jolted by the talks, which started in the winding streets of Brussels and continued on to muggy Sicily. They said they had made a mistake by allowing themselves to be lulled by Trump’s more conventional-sounding Cabinet members.
“Anti-Americanism will bloom,” said Tomas Valasek, a former Slovak ambassador to NATO who is now the head of the Carnegie Europe think tank. “It will be much harder to politically explain to the European publics that we would cooperate with the U.S. president, because Donald Trump has made himself so unpopular now.”
Now, many European officials say, they are steeling themselves for years of conflict with Trump, and searching for other partners in areas such as climate change, where the United States has become a roadblock. In other arenas, such as defense, Europeans are far more dependent on the American security umbrella, though they are scrambling to achieve self-sufficiency now that they fear the validity of U.S. guarantees.
The European message has been unusually tough.
“Nothing is renegotiable in the Paris accords,” France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron, told Trump in a five-minute phone call after Trump pulled out of the agreement, according to an official briefed on the conversation. “The United States and France will continue to work together, but not on the subject of the climate,” he was described as telling Trump.
And on Friday, the French government redid the video the White House released to promote the decision, marking it up with comments that derided Trump’s reasoning.
It is a sharp comedown from just eight days ago, when European hopes were high after the first leg of Trump’s international trip. On his swing through the Middle East, the U.S. leader laid off his punchy Twitter habit and offered conciliatory messages to assembled monarchs and other leaders.#
This account of Trump’s European visit is based on interviews with more than 10 E.U. diplomats, officials and people familiar with the trip. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared further strain with the United States.
Trump touched down in Brussels on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. After munching fine chocolates with the Belgian prime minister, Charles Michel, and locking with Macron in a white-knuckled handshake that the French leader was later to call “a moment of truth,” Trump rolled up on Thursday to dedicate NATO’s new glass-and-steel headquarters.
Diplomats had been told that Trump would recommit the United States to the all-for-one, one-for-all principle of the defense alliance, which he had questioned on the campaign trail. But the president — who told the authoritarian leaders of the Middle East that he was “not here to lecture” — blasted America’s closest allies for being “unfair” to U.S. taxpayers. Standing in front of a twisted beam from the World Trade Center, Trump said they owed money to the alliance and offered no high-flown praises of the idealistic principles on which NATO was founded.
As the world’s cameras rolled, Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel wiggled his eyebrows and leaned over to whisper to Macron. The normally disciplined Merkel later said it was all she could do not to make a face as Trump spoke, according to someone who traveled back to Germany with her.
Sitting down for dinner, Trump continued on the theme, railing for more than five minutes against the alliance, speaking off the top of his head.
“The United States has not been treated fairly,” Trump said, according to a senior European diplomat who took notes at the dinner. “It has been taken advantage of.”
“He clearly discarded the nice words for the shock-and-awe effect. And this he clearly achieved,” the diplomat said. “We saw it on everyone’s faces during the meeting.”
Trump also mixed domestic partisan politics into his comments, the diplomat said — an unusual step in the usually nonpartisan world of NATO. He was matched only by the Kremlin-friendly Czech president, Milos Zeman, who did something similar, according to the diplomat.
The Trump administration “achieved more in eight weeks than Obama did in four years” against terrorism, the president said, according to the NATO diplomat. Trump called for “ruthlessness in stamping out the terrorists,” saying they should be “humiliated,” the diplomat said.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg tried to put a bright face on the meeting at its conclusion, saying Trump sent a “strong signal” of commitment just by coming to NATO in the first place.##
But others had a starkly grimmer conclusion.
“We have just witnessed President Trump putting an end to European-American relations,” said François Heisbourg, a French defense expert who advised Macron during his campaign.
“By talking about NATO as a transactional alliance,” he said, “it’s very difficult to rebuild that kind of inbuilt trust.”
The contention continued the next day in Sicily at the Group of Seven summit, where leaders implored Trump to stay in the Paris agreement. He refused to commit, leading a dejected Merkel to exit the talks with an unusually grim assessment.
The next day, she told a beer-tent rally in Munich that Europe “must take its fate into its own hands,” offering poor prospects for cooperation with Washington.
A top Merkel confidant said that Trump seems to be more focused on winning votes than on embracing the mantle of leader of the free world.
“You get the feeling that sometimes the U.S. president first and foremost speaks to his voters in the U.S. and not as the leader of the biggest and most important country in the world,” said Jürgen Hardt, the foreign policy spokesman for Merkel’s Christian Democrats, who is a key Merkel ally.
Analysts say that German elections in September may be sharpening voices in that country, which is turning into Trump’s loudest rival.
“People aren’t holding their punches like they once did,” said Robin Niblett, the head of the London-based Chatham House, a think tank.
European leaders kept close tabs on the White House’s thinking in the days after the talks, sucked into the reality-TV-type suspense that Trump fed with a weekend tweet promising an announcement in the days ahead.#
But when Trump stepped into the Rose Garden on Thursday to pull his nation from the agreement, Europeans were quick to hit back.
Trump’s face-to-face meeting with the Belgian prime minister may have been cordial. But on Thursday, Michel minced no words after the White House announcement.
“I condemn this brutal act,” Michel wrote on Twitter. “Leadership means fighting climate change together. Not forsaking commitment.”

So again WHY does Trump do this ..either knowingly and again then for what reasons or simply out of stupidity????

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 08:03 AM

"US under Trump will be the cleanest & most environmentally friendly country on Earth"

WHAT is extremely interesting is that none of these leaders nor their governments have indicated that such a conversation has taken place...as it definitely would have been mentioned in the German press as the Trump hyprocrisy would have been pointed it...

BUT WAIT...THEN supposedly he calls FOX News for their take on his leaving the agreement....

One of those called in this Trump WH announcement is indicating that the call occurred BUT is also indicating that what the WH wrote about Trump's comments to him IS in fact not true....and that person did not go into whether the lie was blatant or not....

THIS is not the first time the Trump WH has put out a summation of conversations with foreign leaders that does not quite match ground reality...and again the serious question is why not???

AND far more importantly the Trump WH summation does not include what comments were made to Trump by those that were called...

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 08:09 AM

Putin's political war against the US has three geopolitical strategic goals he has never come off of since 2004.......and he has actually voiced them since then....and AGAIN in his last press conference and interview..

AND this is extremely important.....he views Trump as the way to achieve those three geopolitical goals....

1. damage and discredit NATO
2. damage and discredit EU
3. completely disconnect US from Europe and ME

Trump's actions and attitudes in the NATO, EU and G7 massively moved Putin's goals forward...the core question is WHY...and for many Europeans it is because he is tied to Russia and Putin....

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/trump%E2%80%99s-tangle-with-europe-leads-the-continent-to-find-partners-elsewhere/ar-BBBQGVM?li=BBArDa6&ocid=spartandhp

So again WHY does Trump do this ..either knowingly and again then for what reasons or simply out of stupidity????

SECONDLY and FAR MORE IMPORTANTLY...this above article reflects the simple fact that Mattis, Tillerson and Pence has been totally discredited in the eyes of European leaders because they feel they were totally misled and setup by them for this Trump abuse....

WHAT Trump and his merry band of white nationalists failed to fully and completely understand is that Europe tailored these meetings towards Trump and built in elements that would address some of Trump's voiced issues...AND then were caught flat footed by his actions and statements...

With past President's this would not have been so stated by a SecDef....

James Mattis asks US allies to 'bear with us' amid backlash over isolationism
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/03/james-mattis-donald-trump-paris-climate-accord-isolationism?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other#

WHAT Mattis simply does not "get" is that he has been both privately and publicly discredited because of what he has previously told Europeans and then What and how Trump conducted himself...Europeans will simply look at him, listen to him in the future and nod their heads and then tell him to his face..."show us the money"...meaning Trump statements and actions have countered your statements and actions....thus we do not believe what you are saying until your Boss tells us personally....or via Twitter...

Mattis...

The secretary of defense added it would be a ‘crummy world’ if Americans retreat, as US leadership and international commitment came under question

“Yet despite the enormous admiration allies have for Mattis, every question was some version of, ‘How can we believe you when the president talks and acts so differently?’ added Schake, who was a senior defense official in the Bush administration.

BUT WAIT..it has in fact come under question ALL caused by a sitting US President that hired Mattis....

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 08:17 AM

Indication of just how bad US politics has become....

Bill Maher, a comedian, uses the n-word and everyone wants him to lose his job.

Jeff Sessions says it, believes it, has a history around it, and commits perjury and he becomes Attorney General

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 08:29 AM

Per Putin 2017 statement these Russian Army GRU SOF operators in Crimea in 2014 are "patriotically minded artists"
https://twitter.com/krymrealii/status/871264025992019968#

BUT for Trump it was and still is that 400 lb. kid on a bed with a laptop....that hacked DNC......

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 08:31 AM

Rogozin foresees collapse of NATO. Right after collapse of USD. Which he and his colleagues foresaw 15 years ago.
https://twitter.com/ru_rbc/status/870688514484035584#

So the inherent question is and it should be...IS Trump actively supporting this main Russian geopolitical goal????

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 08:37 AM

Trump uses London terror attack to push his travel ban
http://toi.sr/2rFez1n
# via @timesofisrael

Donald J. Trump‏
#@realDonaldTrump

We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!

WHAT Trump apparently does not seem to fully and completely understand is that most of those so called terrorists "are home grown" not immigrants fro Muslim countries holding a visa....

He sent out this tweet before he offered condolences to UK.....which came as the next tweet......so he really does not care how many were killed or injured as long as it drives his Muslim Ban....

BUT WAIT...Trump's own DoJ lawyers have been arguing that it is not a Muslim Ban in Federal Appeals Court which has been soundly rejected...NOW Trump himself used the "Banned" word.....

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 08:46 AM

Trump campaign just blasted out an email that contains a link to InfoWars in its support to Trump's leaving the Climate Agreement...

Infowars run by Alex Jones who in court defined himself as a "performance artist" and which is a leading alt right ie white nationalist blogsite not a true news media outlet...

Trump campaign is citing Infowars which stated that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax. They also have stated 9/11 was an inside job not a jihadi attack.....

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 09:02 AM

How many of the BRAND NEW bots created to follow @RealDonaldTrump are now tweeting out racist propaganda on the UK? 100%.

Massive and sudden spike in new bots that were "following Trump" in pushing out completely racist comments referring to the London attack....the same messaging was being used..thus a solid indication that this Trump botnet is computer controlled and not individuals....

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 09:06 AM

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 11:07 AM

It is interesting to see how some "leftists" crossed over and suddenly became "right wingers on a mission"...which if thoroughly understood they are doing exactly what Bannon who himself professed to wanting to be "Lenin"..destroy the existing US government....

Long read but really worth the reading as it goes into facts, names and organizations many Americans do not know exist....

How a ‘shadow’ universe of charities joined with right wing political warriors to fuel Trump’s rise
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/how-a-%E2%80%98shadow%E2%80%99-universe-of-charities-joined-with-political-warriors-to-fuel-trump%E2%80%99s-rise/ar-BBBVChG?li=BBArDa6&ocid=spartandhp

The crowd rose to its feet and roared its approval as Sen. Jeff Sessions bounded onto the stage at the Breakers, an exclusive resort in Palm Beach, Fla. Stephen Miller, an aide to the Alabama Republican, handed him a glass trophy honoring his bravery as a lawmaker.
“Heyyyy!” Sessions yelled out to the crowd.
The ceremony that day, in November 2014, turned out to be a harbinger: It brought together an array of hard-right activists and a little-known charity whose ideas would soon move from the fringes of the conservative movement into the heart of the nation’s government.
The man behind the event was David Horowitz, a former ’60s radical who became an intellectual godfather to the far right through his writings and his work at a charity, the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Since its formation in 1988, the Freedom Center has helped cultivate a generation of political warriors seeking to upend the Washington establishment. These warriors include some of the most powerful and influential figures in the Trump administration: Attorney General Sessions, senior policy adviser Miller and White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
Long before Trump promised to build a wall, ban Muslims and abandon the Paris climate accord, Horowitz used his tax-exempt group to rail against illegal immigrants, the spread of Islam and global warming. Center officials described Hillary Clinton as evil, President Barack Obama as a secret communist and the Democratic Party as a front for enemies of the United States.
The Freedom Center has declared itself a “School for Political Warfare,” and it is part of a loose nationwide network of like-minded charities linked together by ideology, personalities, conservative funders and websites, including the for-profit Breitbart News.
Horowitz’s story shows how charities have become essential to modern political campaigns, amid lax enforcement of the federal limits on their involvement in politics, while taking advantage of millions of dollars in what amount to taxpayer subsidies.
In interviews with The Washington Post, Horowitz, 78, acknowledged the Freedom Center’s partisan mission and said its aim is to protect “traditional American values” against adversaries on the left, who operate their own network of charities. “This is a shadow political universe,” he said.
Horowitz makes a good living as the Freedom Center chief executive, earning $583,000 from a charity that received $5.4#million in donations in 2015, according to the latest available records. But he said he has come to believe that his group and others across the political spectrum ought to be reined in to ensure they fulfill the original spirit of the Internal Revenue Service’s charitable rules, even though such overhauls would be “personally devastating for me.”
“They should redefine what a charity is,” he said. “A charity should be something that helps everybody.”
The IRS prohibits charities from directly or indirectly participating in political campaigns, for or against candidates.
In an essay he published online in response to The Post’s questions after refusing further interviews, Horowitz wrote the center “does not engage in political activities in the narrow sense used in the I.R.S. code.”
A lefty moves right
Horowitz looks like a professor, with a salt-and-pepper goatee and small oval glasses. He speaks with a scratchy voice that carries strong hints of his New York roots. He is quick to use fiery rhetoric and no-holds-barred tactics he had learned as a student radical.
Horowitz was a “red diaper baby” of communist parents in New York City. After attending Columbia University in the 1950s, he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, an anchor of leftist thinking.
Over the next two decades, he took on prominent roles in the New Left. He served as an editor of Ramparts, an influential muckraking magazine in San Francisco.
But by the late 1970s, he had decided that the left represented a profound threat to the United States. On March#17, 1985, he and a writing partner came out as conservatives in a surprising Washington Post Magazine article headlined “Lefties for Reagan.”
In August 1988, Horowitz launched the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, a nonprofit group that would become the Freedom Center.
Charities have been around since the nation’s beginning, as citizens sought to help schools, churches and the poor. Decades ago, Congress created a special section of the IRS code to define and regulate charities, which are known as 501(c)(3) groups under the code. They have a special allure for donors: They can deduct contributions from their taxes.
IRS rules give charities wide latitude, but they may not devote a “substantial part” of their resources or activities to lobbying or “carrying on propaganda.” And they “are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.
In his IRS application for tax-exempt status in August 1988, Horowitz wrote his center would be “entirely non-profit, non-partisan,” according to records obtained through a public records request. “It will not be organized to promote any particular political program.”
Twenty years later, a brochure for one of the charity’s events would sharply contradict that claim: “In 1988, Horowitz created the Center for the Study of Popular Culture to institutionalize his campaigns against the Left and its anti-American agendas.”
From the start, Horowitz was supported by contributions from stalwart conservative groups, including the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, along with donations from the wealthy Scaife family of Pittsburgh.
In 1989, he co-wrote “Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties,” a harsh critique of the radical left. He also began hosting events. A gathering called the Wednesday Morning Club catered to conservatives in liberal Los Angeles. In the 1990s, one of the regular guests was Bannon, then a former Wall Street investor seeking to make his mark in Hollywood, according to Lionel Chetwynd, the event’s co-founder.
“Conservatives are nervous around me, and they’re nervous because I’m very outspoken,” Horowitz told The Post. “Steve Bannon was not nervous because he’s like me.”
Bannon did not respond to requests for interviews.

The origin of Stephen Miller
After the Sept.#11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Horowitz and his center argued that liberals had been too tolerant of radical Islam and illegal immigration.
Open to that message was Stephen Miller, a 16-year-old high school student in Santa Monica, Calif. In the fall of 2001, Miller asked Horowitz for help in disputes with administrators at his school. Miller complained his teachers and classmates were insufficiently patriotic and refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Horowitz’s charity launched a group called Students for Academic Freedom, framing it as a counterweight to the dominance of the left in high schools and on college campuses. Miller formed a chapter and sought permission from school officials to invite Horowitz to the school to speak. When administrators delayed, Miller and Horowitz accused them of stifling free speech.
Horowitz eventually spoke at the school, and in November 2002, Miller wrote about the visit in an essay in Frontpagemag.com, the online news and opinion site run by the center. Miller portrayed himself as the victim of indoctrination and called on the system’s superintendent to ensure “that his schools stress inclusive patriotism, rather than a multiculturalism.”
When Miller went on to Duke University, he formed another chapter of Students for Academic Freedom and again invited Horowitz to speak. At the time, Horowitz had just published “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” a book some condemned as a political blacklist.
After graduation, Miller wanted to work in Washington. Horowitz reached out to conservatives on Capitol Hill who had supported his group. He helped Miller land jobs with four lawmakers, including former representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Sessions. “I highly recommended him to Jeff,” Horowitz told The Post.
Miller did not respond to requests for interviews.
Continued-

The meet-and-greet
On Nov.#12, 2013, Bannon hosted a book party for Horowitz at a Washington, D.C., townhouse that served as Breitbart’s capital office and Bannon’s living quarters. Horowitz had just published a compendium of anti-liberal writings called the “Black Book of the American Left.”
As Horowitz mingled, Bannon introduced himself to Ronald Radosh, a prominent conservative intellectual and historian. Radosh had known Horowitz for a half-century and also worked his way through the ranks of the New Left before becoming a conservative.

Continued....

“I’m a Leninist,” Bannon said, according to Radosh. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
Continued.....]

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 11:16 AM

REMEMBER this name.....David Horowitz...was one of the driving forces and writers on the "New Left" and rose to fame after the VN war...a number of his books and articles were university required reading in political science and IR classes....during that period as he bashed the heck out of the US and it's FP......

WHO suddenly and it is a serious question HOW does a radical left winger suddenly and completely "sell out his own core belief system????

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/david-horowitz

David Horowitz
Despite Horowitz being a founding intellectual member of the New Left in the 1960s, and an advocate for civil rights and equality, he has since the late 1980’s become a driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black movements

Background:
David Horowitz was born on January 10, 1939, in Forest Hills, N.Y., into a household of schoolteachers and Communist Party USA members. In his 1998 memoir Radical Son, recounting his life and departure from 1960s member of the New Left, Horowitz describes the political convictions of those around him.
Underneath the ordinary surfaces of their lives, my parents and their friends thought of themselves as secret agents. … Even if we never encountered a Soviet agent or engaged in a single illegal act, each of us knew that our commitment to socialism implied the obligation to commit treason, too.
Horowitz moved to London following the completion of his graduate degree and began work with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. Established in 1963, the Foundation sought focused on human rights, social justice and peace with a particular interest in the ending the nuclear arms race. He returned to the United States five years later in 1968, where he took work as co-editor at #Ramparts, a magazine associated with the New Left movement of liberal activists seeking to drastically reform the cultural landscape with a wide range of social reforms. #
By the 1970s, though, Horowitz had begun working with the Black Panther Party in Oakland, Calif., and formed a close relationship with the group’s co-founder, Huey P. Newton. Horowitz collected funds for the purchase of a Baptist church that was then converted into a learning center for children of members of the Black Panthers. But the relationship soon soured.
In 1974, Betty Van Patter, Horowitz’s friend and colleague at Ramparts who he brought into the Black Panther movement, was found dead on a San Francisco Bay beach. She had been severely beaten, and Horowitz was convinced members of the Panthers were involved.
Hugh Pearson, author of the Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in American, wrote in recounting Horowitz’s feelings: “Without question, David Horowitz was extremely traumatized by what happened with Betty Van Patter, as I think anyone would be. … As a result, David just totally went berserk with regard to the left-liberal community.”#
It isn’t an overstatement, in fact, to note that Van Patten’s death served as a grand catalyst for Horowitz’s quick departure from the radical left he helped found.
Increasingly disillusioned with his political course in life, the decades that followed would see Horowitz adopt increasingly right-wing positions on matters of sexual promiscuity in the gay community, LGBT rights, U.S. foreign policy, the question of racial equality and affirmative action and, in 1985, he publicly announced that he had voted for Ronald Reagan the year before.
In the essay published in The Washington Post titled “Goodbye to All That.” Horowitz and his writing partner Peter Collier –- both luminaries on the Left – came clean. “Casting our ballots for Ronald Reagan was indeed a way of saying goodbye to all that –– to the self-aggrandizing romance with corrupt Third Worldism; to the casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism; to the hypocritical mainstream politics,” the pair wrote.
The essay was the beginning of a new course for Horowitz. Three years later, he founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC) in Los Angeles, which sought to “establish a conservative presence in Hollywood and show how popular culture had become a political battleground.” Horowitz spent much of the 1990s securing financing for the CSPC while railing against “political correctness” in American universities.
In 1992, he began publishing the monthly tabloid “Heterodoxy,” which was “meant to have the feel of a samizdat publication inside the gulag of the PC [politically correct] university.” #The tabloid targeted university students who Horowitz viewed as being indoctrinated by the entrenched Left in American academia. Horowitz has maintained his assault on the political left to present day, and in 2005 established DiscoverTheNetworks.

WHAT is extremely interesting is that while one can find a total of 38 Horowitz books online dating back to 2000 from the Right..you cannot seem to find a single article or book or interview from him written during his Black Panther days and even before that when Horowitz was a US Communist Party member and considered himself to be a Marxist...

BTW...now of his Rampart articles seem to be listed in Google....

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 12:05 PM

Reference David Horowitz.....

'60s Activists Now Converts of the Right : Ex-Radicals of Left Support Military Buildup to Deter Soviets
October 18, 1987|ERIC LICHTBLAU | Times Staff Writer
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-18/news/mn-15283_1_military-buildup

WASHINGTON — Two decades ago, David Horowitz was an editor of the radical Ramparts magazine, a leader of the frenzied student movement against the Vietnam War who called publicly for "revolution by any means necessary."
This weekend, wearing a suit and tie while sitting at a posh Washington hotel that he once would have denounced as bourgeois, Horowitz faced more than 200 fellow "refugees from the '60s" and declared dead the liberal tenets of a movement that he once believed in passionately.
Now a best-selling author who voted for Ronald Reagan, Horowitz is leading former left-wing activists of the 1960s--ex-members of the Young Communist League, Students for a Democratic Society and Marxist-Leninists among them--in a revisionist rebuke to a time of "destructive self-delusion."
Support Aid for Contras
Once violently and visibly opposed to the war in Vietnam, many of those from around the country who paid $100 to take part in this weekend's Second Thoughts Conference now favor U.S. support of the contras in Nicaragua and a military buildup to deter Soviet oppression.
Once marchers behind the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in civil rights demonstrations, several now say they believe that Judge Robert H. Bork should sit on the Supreme Court. And many who had once took pride in calling themselves "radicals" would now admit to being radical only in their conversion to the right of the political spectrum.
Dramatized by Mailer
The conference was held almost exactly 20 years after several thousand members of the "New Left" stormed the Pentagon in a tumultuous Vietnam War protest that was subsequently dramatized by author Norman Mailer in the book "Armies of the Night." But the memory of that protest--in which several here took part--generated neither homage nor nostalgia as the weekend-long panel discussions opened.
Instead, as conferees heard conservative scholars and writers turn their "second thoughts" back to that turbulent time of flag-burning and draft-resisting, those who lived through the movement talked of "chaos and brutality," "bigotry and anti-intellectualism," "political blindness" and "moral frivolity."
To be sure, the conference's 200 participants and two-dozen panelists, who included New Republic Editor Martin Peretz, author Michael Medved and political activist Arturo Cruz Jr., son of the contra leader, were not always in agreement in their shifts away from the liberal ideals of the 1960s and their current views on political issues.
Former SDS Leader
For instance, Jeff Herf, a former Wisconsin SDS leader who is now a research associate at the Naval War College, found himself forced to defend his contention that the "heady" war protests of the '60s were not a major factor one way or the other in the resolution of the Southeast Asian conflict.
And not all have undergone the same degree of change in political thinking. David Ifshin, another 1960s activist, now supports the contras and condemns his generation's "unthinking acceptance of tenets of the New Left," although he also served as general counsel to 1984 Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale.
But some consensus did emerge from the group, made up predominantly of white, male, middle-aged professionals. Panelists at one session agreed that their rejection of the "utopian" staples of the 1960s movement was not an overnight metamorphosis but a slow, often-painful process of realization, one marked perhaps most vividly by revulsion at the communist "gulags" of postwar Vietnam.
That shift away from liberal beliefs "is not about Damascus Road experiences or great conversions," said Father Richard Newhaus, a former civil rights activist and war protester. "It's about stumbling and trying to find your feet again."
Shaken by Experience
Many--shaken by the Vietnam experience and further disillusioned by a left wing that Horowitz said "rationalizes genocide" in countries such as Cambodia and Tibet--found the answer in conservativism. They are now convinced, several said, that military strength and resistance are needed to fight the global enemies they once thought to be only imagined by the far right.
During the student war protests of the 1960s, Herf said, he and fellow activists held a "utopian" view on the potential for democracy, world community and economic abundance. "We believed anything was possible," he said.
But his views began to drift from the widely held liberal ideals in 1970, heightened by the effects of post-withdrawal communist rule on the Vietnamese people. The one-time activist gradually retreated from the political scene to the world of scholarship.
Today, he said, "when I hear the word 'movement,' I reach for my books and word processor."

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 12:09 PM

Does Sen. Jeff Sessions Think Obama Is Secretly a "Radical Machiavelli"?

At a conservative conference organized and led by David Horowitz, this GOP senator praised a book that contends the president is a totalitarian extremist pretending to be a pragmatist.
David CornJun. 12, 2013 6:45 AM

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/jeff-sessions-david-horowitz-obama-secret-totalitarian-radical

NOTICE that these Horowitz books were the core reading in a lot US universities in the 60s and 70s....
In his Marxist days, Horowitz authored several books including Free World Colossus, Corporations and the Cold War, Empire and Revolution, Marx and Modern Economics, Shakespeare: An Existential View and The Fate of Midas, which he has subsequently repudiated.

The Spectator, February 4, 1970
CORPORATE CAP1TALI$M
By Steve Mi lien Corporations and the Cold ^Jar^ edited and with an introduction by David Horowitz; New York, Monthly Review Press, 1969. The revisionist historians mirror the ideological odyssey of the movement since their disovery that the International Communist Conspiracy was a farce. David Horowitz, in The Free World Colossus and Containment and Revolution which he edited, both published in 1965, put forth the early New Left viewpoint of a liberal-turned-radical aghast at discovering that the Cold War was a front for American aggression. Yet his position was primarily that of moral outrage leaving revolutionary’ ideological response largely untouched. Corporations and the Cold WoTj the second volume in a series entitled Studies in Imperialism and the Cold War^ edited by Horowitz for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, is quite explicit in identifying the capitalist ruling class and their ruthless methods for the conception, growth, and governing of the American (or Free World) Empire. The six essays are well chosen, the first two being partial summaries of two books by their authors. William Donihoff's "l*/bo Made American Foreign Policy?" comes largely from his vtork^Who Rules Amerioa? as "The Large Corporation and American Foreign Policy" by William A. Williams comes for his Tragedy of Amerioan Foreign Poliay. Domhoff's essay identifies quite clearly those responsible for postwar policy, putting little blame upon the silent majority or their "democratically" elected officials, but a tiny yet mighty corporate elite. "In a summary of the role of Congress in sixteen post-war foreign policy issues that have been the object of case studies," he states, "(James A.) Robinson is able to find only one initiated by Congress and three where Congress had ’major influence'." (page 51) In America, where money is power, the creators and perpetrators of the American E^tipire are clearly identified as power elites within the foimdations, gd^emment commissions and the major 500 U.S. corporations which control two thirds of this nation's wealth. Williams skips back to the 1890s to America's most openly imperialistic era to trace its philosophical basis with Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis (i.e. America's greatness is due to its political and economic expansion--an observation which may as well been accredited to Lenin). He sees the Open >Door Policy as being the rule rather than exception in America's twentieth century foreign policy, providing a basis for America's treatment of Qiina during the »20s and'30s. There was no alternative to economic expansion except radical economic and political changes. This was an unavoidable dilemma faced by the creators of the New Deal and America's post-war economic policy. These two major economic crises are dealt with in more detail, in chronogical order, by "The New Deal, New Frontiers, and the Cold War" by
Corporations and the Cold War Edited and with an Introduction by David Horowitz
Published with the Bertrend Russell Peace Foundation
Lloyd C. Gardner, and "Business Planners and America's Post-war Expansion" by David W. Eakins. Gardner applies the Frontier Thesis to the New Deal. He tends to emphasise the role of such capitalist reformers as Henry Wallace whose far-sighted adjustments helped preserve American imperialism despite contrary myths, a sobering analogy to the Fulbrights and McGoverns of today. Yet even these adjustments were insufficient for it was the vast economic expansion brought about by the Second World war (the Frontier thesis again) which caused America to fully recover . Eakins moves ahead to the years following the World war with America's critical need for continued prosperity tied closely to the problem of keeping the war-racked nations of western Europe from going Communist. From the depression there came a new corporate awareness of the purpose of government being to keep the economy from stagnating. So overseas trade was generated through billions of dollars of aid, particularly that which passed through the Marshall plan. These funds also provided America with political leverage with the internal affairs of foreign nations. The last two essay, "Economic Effects of the Cold War" by John Phillips and the "The Militarisation of the American Economy" by Charles Nathanson are fairly good conclusive essays in that they show the results of the Frontier Thesis extended to the point of another major economic crises for America. At first impression they seem to dwell too heavily upon an overdone subject; the military-industrial complex. Yet this is unavoidable when describing our post-war economy, for large and vital segments of it are largely oriented towards the military. This is totally the opposite of the 'encystment' theory of liberal economists which contends that
military production is isolated and inconsequential to the rest of the economy. Also important is the explosion of the liberal myth that the military is an independent rightwing force (e.g. Seben Days in May). The military, subservient to the business interests of America, may disagree with business policies, but, as do the liberal politicans, remain answerable to the corporate ruling class. The American empire is controlled by the carrot of aid and investment and the stick of the threat of military intervention and the main argument is over which tactics to use. This well integrated collection of essays provide an excellent Critique of the global ruling class. Similarly to the mercantile system, the elite exploits the world as efficiently as any absolute dictator. But the consensus of the authors of this collection is very certain that there is a rising tide of resistance to American imperialism, and another crisis is occuring. If not created at home by inconsequential student radicalism or labour militancy ("As with the corporation labour sometimes divided within itself, but it never proposed or fought militantly for a fundamentally different foreign policy."—page 73) then by the very real ■yireat of revolution in the Third World. They cautiously perceive hopeful signs of revolt and see the economy on the edge of disaster. If and when the revolution comes, it is far more feasible that it shall result from an imperialist super-power unable to exploit a militantly antagonistic Third World rather than any internally generated dissatisfaction. Corporations and the Cold War may not be as spectacular nor sell half as well as Abbie Hoffman's Woodstock Ration^ yet it remains an excellent critique of the dynamics of American imperialism and a realistic harbinger for its imminent destruction.

Fred Gardner, a contemporary of Horowitz's during his Ramparts days, described his political transition from the left to the right in 1991:
The phone rings and a guy in my office says, "It's David Horowitz." I haven't spoken to David Horowitz since the end of the '60s, when we both worked at Ramparts. Since then, with another former Ramparts editor, Peter Collier, this little creep has written a series of best-selling portraits of ruling class families--The Rockefellers, The Fords, The Kennedys--and boasted in print about voting for Ronald Reagan. Horowitz and Collier say they once believed fervently in left causes and institutions (from the Soviet Union to the Black Panther Party), and when they discovered these institutions to be corrupt and murderous they had to denounce them and come out for the other side.

There are many flaws in this "logic." For openers, there aren't just two sides in this world (the fake left and the cruel right). And sure it's demoralizing to learn that the party that supposedly stands for equality is run by opportunists and actually stands for privilege. But that wouldn't lead a real radical to endorse the all-out pursuit of privilege. It should lead you to call for a movement that's serious about establishing equality. Horowitz and Collier were never radicals for a minute. Their goal was and is personal success. It's no coincidence that they were "left" in the '60s and "right" in the '80s

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 12:36 PM

The Guardian
✔
@guardian
Donald Trump criticises London mayor Sadiq Khan for the way he responded to last night's terrorist attack – live
http://trib.al/AkfcWHP

APPEARS that Trump is now on a twitter rant again.....

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump
We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people. If we don't get smart it will only get worse

At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is "no reason to be alarmed!"

Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That's because they used knives and a truck!

BUT WAIT...Trump's first tweet was that this attack supports his Muslim Ban and then condolences...AND this set of tweets.....

So Trump has covered all his campaign talking points..1) Muslim Ban, 2) political correctness a right wing theme all the time, 3) 2nd amendment Guns and 4) chastising a Muslim London City Mayor......

BUT WAIT....Trump twisting the "truth again".....

@POTUS Trump twisting what London Mayor @SadiqKhan actually said.. "no reason to be alarmed by increased police presence"

Mayor's quote: "Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days. No reason to be alarmed."

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 12:45 PM

Imagine having access to the best intelligence services in the world & just re-tweeting the Drudge Report instead

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 01:01 PM

How the Soviet Union Transformed Terrorism
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/how-the-soviet-union-transformed-terrorism/250433/

KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky in1971:'when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon'

Worth noting how Russia is exploiting terrorism for its foreign policy objectives

Russia's Kostantin Borovoi on a new attack in Britain: "Putin has warned many times that you MUST collaborate with Russia."

Just so readers understand the correct translation of "you MUST collaborate"....

Третий теракт за месяц в Британии: Фургон-убийца и клинок в 25 сантиметров в центре Лондона
https://twitter.com/kborovoi/status/871241145153662976

BUT REMEMBER Putin told in person the UNGA he was going to be fighting (IS/AQ) terrorism in Syria and has yet to do so.....

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 01:34 PM

Is it not interesting just how fast the term Left gets thrown around in US politics.....

Single-Payer Party? Democrats Shift Left on Health Care
By ALEXANDER BURNS and JENNIFER MEDINA
Liberal Democrats have pressed lawmakers to support a single-payer health care system, and supporters say the party has moved further left on the issue.

Germany by far one of largest healthcare nations next to Australia has a single payer system and no one has accused either of being Leftist?????

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 03:01 PM

WH pool tells us @realDonaldTrump has arrived at his Virginia Trump National Golf Club. He visited yesterday as well.

He can play golf but needed a golf cart to keep with the leaders of the G7 in Italy....

Trump has been playing more golf lately than Tiger Woods....

REMEMBER Trump in his tweets was constantly bashing Obama for playing golf....appears he has a rather short memory...

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 03:12 PM

The Guardian
✔
@guardian
Donald Trump criticises London mayor Sadiq Khan for the way he responded to last night's terrorist attack – live
http://trib.al/AkfcWHP

APPEARS that Trump is now on a twitter rant again.....

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump
We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people. If we don't get smart it will only get worse

At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is "no reason to be alarmed!"

Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That's because they used knives and a truck!

BUT WAIT...Trump's first tweet was that this attack supports his Muslim Ban and then condolences...AND this set of tweets.....

So Trump has covered all his campaign talking points..1) Muslim Ban, 2) political correctness a right wing theme all the time, 3) 2nd amendment Guns and 4) chastising a Muslim London City Mayor......

BUT WAIT....Trump twisting the "truth again".....

@POTUS Trump twisting what London Mayor @SadiqKhan actually said.. "no reason to be alarmed by increased police presence"

NBC News
✔
@NBCNews
Spokesperson for London Mayor Sadiq Khan: "He has more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump's ill-informed tweet"

.@MrBrendanCox (wife MP Jo Cox killed by a far-right terrorist) puts @realDonaldTrump in his place–a world beneath London Mayor @SadiqKhan

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 03:17 PM

In the middle of all the tragedy with terrorism it is important to relate as well. It's been worse

JUST a side note....

What's not rare in the U.S. is people dying from gunshots ... 65 Americans shot dead since London attack, over 500,000 since 9/11

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 03:20 PM

Strange coincidence is it not?????

Life.ru reports London terrorist attack - 4 minutes after midnight Moscow time, 2204 London, 4 minutes b4 Police receive report at 2208???!

OUTLAW 09

06-04-2017, 03:23 PM

Amid Trump tweets, notable there is no FBI Director; no US Ambassador to London; and the State Department is missing leaders at all levels.

davidbfpo

06-04-2017, 09:03 PM

Citing Outlaw 09 in part, from Post 1110:
You might have noticed that while many worry about UK leaving EU...Ukraine replaces UK far a factor of 4 in size, potential economic development and what it can export to EU and outside EU....Really? I do not doubt the potential of a Ukraine truly at peace to be a significant economy, but to 'replace' the UK is almost impossible.

Economic statistics support my contention:
1) The Ukraine's GDP US$93 billion -v- UK's US$2,629 trillion
2) Ukraine per capita 2.1-8.3k -v- UK's US$42k
3) Ukraine's exports & imports US$58 billion -v- UK's exports US$674 billion and imports & US$724 billion

Stats from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Ukraine and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_Kingdom

Leaving aside the Dutch referendum in 2016 which rejected even as EU association for the Ukraine. See:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/06/dutch-voters-reject-closer-eu-links-to-ukraine-in-referendum

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 06:19 AM

Citing Outlaw 09 in part, from Post 1110:

Really? I do not doubt the potential of a Ukraine truly at peace to be a significant economy, but to 'replace' the UK is almost impossible.

Economic statistics support my contention:
1) The Ukraine's GDP US$93 billion -v- UK's US$2,629 trillion
2) Ukraine per capita 2.1-8.3k -v- UK's US$42k
3) Ukraine's exports & imports US$58 billion -v- UK's exports US$674 billion and imports & US$724 billion

Stats from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Ukraine and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_Kingdom

Leaving aside the Dutch referendum in 2016 which rejected even as EU association for the Ukraine. See:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/06/dutch-voters-reject-closer-eu-links-to-ukraine-in-referendum

Ukraine has shown in the last two harvest years that it can and will by next years harvest replace anything in the way of agricultural shortfalls that the UK currently exports into the EU. Ukraine met the EU set export amounts in a number of agricultural product areas within four months and EU has signalled those figures will be expanded.

Some of the major US agriculture companies and equipment makers have already signalled major investment both into Ukrainian farming and two farm machine manufacturers are building major production plants.

It is being estimated that the Ukrainian "bread basket" is coming back growth wise....and will increase even more if the land reform program being envisioned is in fact passed...some even state it can become one of the largest grain growing regions of the world due to the black soil which even Hitler wanted...

Ukrainian territorial size easily replaces UK what is not replaced by Ukraine is the UK fishing and shipping as Ukraine has never been strong in those areas.

Ukraine defense industries and defense technology is rebuilding after years of neglect...especially in the areas if missile and aircraft design and production.

Ukraine IT industry growth is now on track to become a major powerhouse player in both software development and hardware development as their coders are well respected for their work already in the US.

Ukraine population will easily replace UK in numbers.....economic growth while in a total eastern front war is actually growing faster than UK GDP...and the currency has stabilized against the dollar and inflation is under control all caused by the Donbass war....that war has been seen to have shot a 20% hole in overall GDP growth....and yet the economy still is moving forward...and currently is growing at a steady pace.

There are so hints that if car manufacturers pull out of UK due to not being a single EU trading zone which would then increase their car prices just to export into the EU..that they might trend towards Ukraine due to the lower costs of production especially now that the association agreement is in place....you saw see a similar development after the Turkish EU trade agreements where a number of old line German companies moved their production there.

BTW...one of the main reasons the Dutch did not want to approve the association agreement was over their fear of being replaced in the agricultural sector...and that will be a hurdle if Ukraine does in the future join EU.

The EU is a composite of small and large countries and a lot of effort goes into protecting the smaller member states vs the large ones and Ukraine will join France and Germany as a large future member state causing a minor panic among the smaller member states...

So overall still stand by my comment...Ukraine will eventually replace all EU UK loses.

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 06:26 AM

EXCLUSIVE: Russia's Putin accuses U.S. of interfering in elections around the world
http://nbcnews.to/2qRhtAX

Typical Putin statement..blame others for what you yourself does...have seen such statements constantly on the Ukraine from Putin since his invasion into eastern Ukraine in 2014....

Russia has interfered into three recent elections in Eastern and Balkan areas and was involved in one coup attempt against a proWestern leader....

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 06:31 AM

Florida Republican Aaron Nivens who dumped Russian hacked DNC election voter data for Roger Stone and was caught at it in a series of achieved tweets now wants a retraction by two social media journalists who broke the story....

They remain with their stories and want Nivens to disprove his very own tweets to a Russian hacker Guccifer behind the DNC hack....

Guccifer has now been identified as a front for Russian GRU hackers....

Nivens tweet was deleted, but I have screenshots.
The site is
http://hellofla.com

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 09:54 AM

I have been posting enough around the use if Russian and US proTrump bots, botnets, Russian and US proTrump disinformation and propaganda and how they are tied together.....

Finally someone from inside the bot world steps up and calls it what it is an information war being driven straight at Americans by both proTrump supporters and Russian trolls...and actually IMHO deliberateyl coordinated....

This is a long read but worth it as it goes into good detail and supports his argument with screen shots to back up what he is saying....

As someone who has a cybersecurity company which is deeply involved in identifying Russian botnetworks both criminal and state sponsored..what this article describes is both factual and highly accurate....and depicts what is really going on with an estimated 15M bots that claim to be ALL Trump "Followers".....

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/how-the-trump-russia-data-machine-games-google-to.html

How the Trump-Russia Data Machine Games Google to Fool Americans
By Roger Sollenberger June 1, 2017

A year ago I was part of a digital marketing team at a tech company. We were maybe the fifth largest company in our particular industry, which was drones. But we knew how to game Google, and our site was maxed out. We did our research and geared the content for the major keywords that we knew people used most frequently when they were shopping for drones or researching drones or looking for drone video. We knew our audience: their buying habits, their interests, ages, geography, etc., and soon our Google results were up there with a company that was literally an order of magnitude bigger than we were. A few months later, we were beating them at Google.
Our sales reflected this nearly immediately, but perhaps more importantly, we were perceived as being much bigger and more influential than we actually were. It was unfair and fair at the same time. It’s just how that game is played, everywhere.
But then the giants wised up, poured a ton of people and money into it and squashed us.
Thing is, it doesn’t take all that much to do what we did. Ask any digital marketer. You just need a little experience and a whole lot of time and money. I’m not going to get into the weeds of SEO (search engine optimization). But I am going to say something that sounds completely insane, and warn you that we’re in the middle of something we’ve never experienced in America: a full-on psychological war. And Google, of all places, is a main battlefield.
I’m going to show you one specific weapon in this war that’s being used against you and me and the United States right now: Google. There are other information weapons, such as bots and fake news sites, but other stories have those pretty well covered. But before we get started, though, two things to keep in mind:
First, most of us don’t even know we’re in this war yet. You don’t know when you’ve been wounded, when you’ve been killed. And that’s the whole point: You’re not supposed to.
Second, the attacks in this war aren’t aimed at your enemies. You attack your own side.
Independence Is Division
First: Why this is important. Why this is a war.
Google, whether you’re aware of it or not, is a total slaughterhouse. Trump’s data team (he’s reportedly set up a “war room” to combat the Russia story) has weaponized information, and for about a year now has been slaying American brains: Trump supporters’ brains. It started with the election, then died down, but now it’s coming back, vengeful and desperate.
As a result, we’re at a pivotal point not just in the life of our democracy, but in how we think, read, and make choices. Selective information is being presented to us in a way that encourages selective reading and offers psychological and social rewards for, to put it bluntly, being stupid and submissive and spreading stupid to submit others.
This is, of course, about the truth, and about the cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities of Americans. This is nothing new for propagandists. What’s different now is that this propaganda is being gamed by professionals in a massive, orchestrated data campaign at a volume, pace, and consistency that not only muddies the truth, but completely eclipses the truth. Destroys the very notion of truth.
I can describe it in no other terms but a war.
The truth about the truth is that we believe because we want to, because our ability to think independently is a point of pride for Americans. The people behind the curtain are telling us the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves. But this is also a vulnerability: Independence is in its purist form a kind of division. If you exploit it the right way, you can turn a democracy against itself. If I think about this for too long I grow terrified and want to take everyone’s computer away. But it might be too late.
Beyond the Bots: Trump’s Twitter Toupee
The past few days, we’ve seen some good reporting about the surge of Trump bots on social media. (Bots are automated, non-human accounts.) And though he didn’t, as some people have claimed, net five million new Twitter followers in three days (though he did gain three million in May), nearly half of his followers, a full 49 percent, aren’t real people.
That’s right: Trump is being followed by 15 million robots.
The Washington Post just ran a pretty cowardly piece about Trump’s bot following. They titled it “Something Fishy Is Going on with Trump’s Twitter Account,” but didn’t say why this fishiness mattered in the first place. Who really cares if his followers are fake? So what if he wears a Twitter toupee? (A Twoupee, if you will.) We’re used to that from Trump.
Here’s where WaPo wouldn’t, for some reason, go: those bots aren’t just digital codpieces. They’re attack vectors for weaponized information. What does that mean?

Misinfotainment
When we think about the Russian attacks during the election, most of us probably think of the DNC hacks, Podesta, and the steady drips from WikiLeaks of that stolen information. If you hate Hillary Clinton, I’m sure that at some point in the past nine months you’ve said something like, “Well, who cares how that information got out there, it’s the truth!”
I won’t argue. Instead, I’d like to point out that’s not the whole story. According not just to me and FAKE NEWS! reports, but to the declassified U.S. intelligence report on Russian subversion in the 2016 election, the attacks included weaponizing false information (what “fake news” really is: stuff that’s entirely made up; pure fiction) and creating real-seeming sites to host this fake news. So no, the whole hacking effort was not just publishing “the truth” about Clinton. Much of it was publishing fake news. Or, perhaps more dangerously, misleading news.
This brings us to Google today. A couple weeks ago I saw an insane person on my Facebook feed screaming about how Obama had leaked classified information about the Bin Laden raid that got people killed. What the ####? I’d never heard anything about this, and the raid was six years ago, and this guy was a total right-wing crackpot, which is the trifecta for guaranteeing at least fifteen full minutes of bat#### conspiracy theory misinfotainment. So I duly Googled “obama classified information bin laden.” If you do that right now, here’s what you get.

WHAAAAAT?! Obama’s mouth killed people! Media is libturd hypocrites!
Let’s ignore the criminal level of stupidity for a minute. Look instead at the dates on those articles. May 16 and 17 of this year. This year. The Bin Laden raid, again, was six ####ing years ago. What’s happening here? Why are all these different white nationalist news sites suddenly writing about this together? Why did they start doing it on May 16? Why do those articles even exist?
Well, on May 15, you might remember, The Washington Post broke this little gem: President Trump shared top secret intel with the Russian Foreign Minister and Russian Ambassador. In the Oval Office. In front of Russian state media.
Whoops-a-daisy!
The right-wing bull#### factory lurched to life. These outlets launched a broad “what about?” attack, a coordinated attack, on Obama and the left. That bull#### story about Obama’s “dangerous” classified “leak” suddenly broke throughout the right-wing media sphere. Some of these articles are even cut-and-paste jobs. There’s no effort here, just content. Tons of content, made quickly, made together, all spewing the same lies, but optimized.
And when I googled the search term the night of May 31, as I’m writing this, it’s even worse. The Washington Post, which had a page two hit on May 29, is now at the bottom of page four.

Continue.....

See? You’d either miss this caveat altogether, or you’d forget about it or write it off as meaningless or some kind of error. It’s so small, after all. This is completely forgivable: It’s a human vulnerability. I exhibit it. Everyone does. We want to be right. We trust our brains. We believe in ourselves, in our capacity to execute sound, independent judgment. But this is the very thing that’s being strategically exploited on a truly massive scale. This is a scheme to generate an overwhelming amount of misinformation, not just to combat a more nuanced truth, but to marginalize the truth, to weaken it, to BURY it underneath your own misplaced convictions about yourself.
We’re being flattered into stupidity. Here’s how it works.

How The SEOsage Is Made
First: Create content that subtly masks the truth.
Second: Shape that content into something people will share.
Third: Make it identical, and make a ton of it.
Fourth: Flood the internet with that content.
Fifth: Flood the internet with that content.
Six: Flood the ####ing internet with that content.

Continued......

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 10:01 AM

Trump has filled 5 out of 53 top jobs at the Pentagon, and 2 out of 16 at the Department of Homeland Security.

Why are they not being filled..good question is it not?????

AND he has virtually no ambassadors in place SO who is he suppose to turn in this emerging ME crisis?????

The Latest: Saudi airline suspending flights to Qatar.....Saudi cutting also ties to Qatar as they view Qatar as fully suppori9nt Iran and since Trumps visit KSA views the US as fully supporting moves both political and military against Iran....

Speed, scope and severity of escalation in Gulf crisis is stunning. Quite different than recent episodes of tension.

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 10:22 AM

In a series of automated bot tweets that have recently joined in "following" Trump we see the following ongoing....

Bannon beating the drums to pressure U.K. into "removing Sadhiq Khan from office." Pres angry at mayor's criticism & "wants him out."

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 10:33 AM

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 10:38 AM

Serious warning from those that monitor social media accounts...

Trump's got 2 million new Putin bots
& the Russians are hackin' Twitter like never before. Trump's bracin' for his worst week yet. Eyes up!

There is a major attempt to block any twitter account that appears to be any thing close to anti Trump...before the former FBI Director Comey public hearing....

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 10:45 AM

17 US intelligence agencies, the Five Eyes Intel alliance, and NATO: now known as “the Democrat Media,” like they’re the local arts weekly.

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 10:48 AM

Eric & Donald Trump are scared to death of #TrumpLeaks, so they blocked @funder for revealing money laundering ties
https://thesternfacts.com/democratic-coalition-just-blocked-by-trumps-two-terrified-sons-for-exposing-their-russian-money-e9ad6a851bae#

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 10:51 AM

European leaders tried to convince Trump on climate, but he wouldn't listen. The rift within the West is real
http://m.spiegel.de/international/world/trump-pulls-out-of-climate-deal-western-rift-deepens-a-1150486.html#

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 10:53 AM

TRUMP DOUBLES DOWN: I'm calling it what it is 'a TRAVEL BAN'
http://read.bi/2qXm2EW

SEAN SPICER Jan 31st: "Well, first of all, it's not a travel ban...What it is, is to make sure people who are coming in are vetted properly

TRUMP is on a twitter rant again....a kid in a man`s body it appears.....

Trump seriously does not believe he must function "under the rule of law" and he believes as King he can in fact tell lawyers what to defend and what not to defend especially if going in front of the SC....

DoJ can only argue case law and right now Trump us giving the USSC with each of these tweets AMMUNITION to turn down his Ban...using his very own words as the reasoning...

Donald J. Trump‏
Verified account
#@realDonaldTrump 11m
11 minutes ago
In any event we are EXTREME VETTING people coming into the U.S. in order to help keep our country safe. The courts are slow and political!

Donald J. Trump‏
Verified account
#@realDonaldTrump 17m
17 minutes ago
The Justice Dept. should ask for an expedited hearing of the watered down Travel Ban before the Supreme Court - & seek much tougher version!

Donald J. Trump‏
Verified account
#@realDonaldTrump 26m
26 minutes ago
The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.

Donald J. Trump‏
30 minutes ago
People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!

BTW the 4th Federal Appeals Court District in fact stated with their stay that the Trump Ban EO was in fact a travel ban based on religion and now SUPPORTs that court statement with this tweet...

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 11:05 AM

Don't really understand why American president is more eager to speak out on London terrorism deaths than Portland terrorism deaths.

WHY...the killer was a white nationalist and white supremacist not a Muslim jihadist....

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 12:55 PM

REMEMBER Trump convinced his voters he was the best to "drain the swamp thingy"...well it is his own created swamp and he is missing in action in draining it.....

17 WH issued exceptions to the Office of Government Ethnics for members of his Stafff.....AND then this...Trump's very own business advisor...hard at building his very own swamp...

Net worth of Trump's economic adviser Schwarzman (Blackstone CEO)–$10,200,000,000–alone more than his entire cabinet

Schwarzman sold his stake in Hilton to a Chinese conglomerate…
Obama admin raised national security concerns about such acquisitions pic.twitter.com/Ga2iEju3WS

Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, is Trump's "business advisor"-he, Kushner bought building from Putin pal @nicobintell

So two top Trump advisers, Schwarzman, Kushner did a $450M deal with Putin pal Leviev who is personally impacted by sanctions on Russia

Elaine Chao's brother-in-law/McConnell donor, Jim Breyer (wife is Angela Chao, Bank of China director) is now on the Blackstone board.

Senator McConnell's wife is Elaine Chao and is the Dept. of Transportation head in the Trump cabinet....

NOW back to Trump "draining that swamp thingy" he told his voters he would be doing while in DC.....how is that going????

Trump adviser Schwarzman's Blackstone just got $20 billion from Saudis to buy up US infrastructure, a deal Elaine Chao will get to bless

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 01:01 PM

THIS is from an ardent alt right ie white nationalist supporter of Trump who was also behind a twiiter support campaign for Le Pen and her Front National during the French election....

Jack Posobiec #
@JackPosobiec
There's never been a terrorist attack at a Nascar race. Nascar fans are all armed. Draw your own conclusions

This proTrump account does not apparently know the following...

Weapons are barred at Nascar races. And gunshows. And NRA Hq. Draw your own conclusions.
http://www.daytonainternationalspeedway.com/Visitor-Center/Facility-Rules-And-Prohibited-Items.aspx#…

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 01:07 PM

BUT I thought this GOP Senator on the Senate Intelligence Committee "wanted to get to the bottom of the Trump Russian connections"....

At least that he what he has been claiming in his media interviews....so now well maybe get to the bottom..not so fast after all????

Washington Examiner‏
@dcexaminer

Lindsey Graham worries Comey testimony could be "hit job"
http://washex.am/2qIxpRT

Since when is telling one's side of the story using Memorandum for Record which is exactly how the government works when something or someone is attempting to block an investigation....

REMEMBER Trump alluded to the fact that he supposedly recorded their dinner meeting so if anything is stated by Comey that is a lie THEN Trump could produce the recording and publicly correct Comey....

BUT there is no recording as it would have been produced already to disprove the "fake news story" of a Russian collusion....

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 01:16 PM

Interesting is that this German bank was hit with a massive money laundering fine for a 1B USD fake series of market purchases that enriched the US banker working of DB and he still is sitting in Moscow and the rest of the money was laundered into Russian oligarch overseas offshore bank accounts...

Deutsche Bank has loaned Trump $364M, but it won't tell Congress whether any of those loans were backed by Russia.

Sun Jun 4, 2017 | 3:21 PM EDT
Deutsche Bank ignores U.S. Trump/Russia query: Democratic staffer

Germany's largest bank has failed to respond to a request from Democrats on a U.S. House of Representatives panel for details about U.S. President Donald Trump's possible ties to Russia, a Democratic staffer said on Sunday.
Several Democrats on the U.S. House Financial Services Committee sent a letter last month to John Cryan, Chief Executive Officer of Deutsche Bank, seeking details that might show if Trump's loans for his real estate business were backed by the Russian government.
The letter asked for details of internal reviews of Trump's transactions and gave the prominent German bank until Friday to respond. The bank's response did not address any of the numerous questions posed in the letter and its Frankfurt headquarters declined to comment, as it has in the past.
"Deutsche Bank’s outside counsel has confirmed receipt of our May 23, 2017, letter but did not provide substantive responses to our requests," a Democratic member of the staff told Reuters in an email on condition of anonymity.
The congressional inquiry is also seeking information about a Russian "mirror trading" scheme that allowed $10 billion to flow out of Russia.
"Congress remains in the dark on whether loans Deutsche Bank made to President Trump were guaranteed by the Russian government, or were in any way connected to Russia," the Democrats wrote in their request to Deutsche Bank.
"It is critical that you provide this committee with the information necessary to assess the scope, findings and conclusions of your internal reviews," they said.
The Democrats cannot compel Deutsche Bank to hand over the information. The House committee has the power to subpoena the documents, but Republican committee members - who make up the majority of the panel - would have to cooperate.
No Republicans have signed the document request.
As Russia probe grinds on, Trump struggles to gain traction on agenda
Citing media reports, the Democrats had called for the bank to hand over any documents tied to internal reviews of Trump’s personal accounts at the bank. They also said the bank should state publicly that it had reviewed both the "mirror trading" scheme and Trump’s accounts.
Mirror trading involved buying stocks, for example, in Moscow in rubles, with related parties selling the same stocks shortly thereafter through a bank's London branch.
The House panel request to Deutsche Bank came as Trump was mired in controversy over FBI and congressional probes into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and potential collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 01:19 PM

Gorkov's bank, re Kushner meeting
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/business/vnesheconombank-veb-bank-russia-trump-kushner.html?_r=0#…

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 01:23 PM

MSNBC says NSA Director Mike Rogers poised to ‘drop a bomb’ on Trump admin during Wednesday testimony.
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/nsa-director-mike-rogers-poised-to-drop-a-bomb-on-trump-admin-during-wednesday-testimony-msnbc/#…

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 01:36 PM

From the Putin press interview.....

Among recent Putin lying whoppers: #Russia Pres #Putin sat next to former Defense Intel Agency head Flynn and had no idea who he was?

Simply. Not. Credible

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 01:39 PM

Trump's undoing of US-Europe relations => negative consequences. US allies may not be there next time we need them.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2017/05/31/is-trump-undoing-trans-atlantic-relations/#

NOTICE how many come out of the woods to make money on the Trump Wall boondoggle....

Oculus founder talked with Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel about building a virtual border wall
http://read.bi/2rsMwlt

Money inside the Trump "swamp" talking to money outside the Trump "swamp".....

YET Trump sold his voters on the fact that "he was going to drain the swamp in DC"....

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 01:47 PM

Split between Gulf countries as six Arab countries inc Saudi cut ties with Qatar.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-40155829#

THIS just have been the reason behind the actions of KSA....

Qatar paid around $20m to Nusra to evacuate Kua and Kefraya (Shia villages in Syria) in exchange for Iran's release of royal falconers.

This deal will have teed off KSA. Also gave the lie to the idea that "ceasefires" are locally negotiated:
https://www.google.com.mx/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/14/besieged-syria-towns-evacuated-as-regime-and-rebels-begin-huge-people-swap#

So the Trump trip to KSA results are going down the drain as he has no one that can step in from the USA side that is accepted by KSA in this dispute....

BUT REMEMBER.....
Donald & Ivanka Trump do extensive business with Qatari Gov't—Qatar Airways (fully owned by Qatari Gov't) US HQ was in Trump Towers.

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 01:57 PM

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 02:09 PM

GOP strategists say Republicans plan to make 2018 a referendum on the media.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article154106459.html

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 05:01 PM

Fox News‏
@FoxNews

.@VP: "For some reason, this issue of climate change has emerged as a paramount issue for the left - in this country and around the world."

APPEARS both FOX and Pence are bascially lying.....

Most center-right parties agree w/ "the left" on climate change. Even France's Le Pen's National Front does as well....

GOP's an outlier.

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 05:04 PM

NOW when we understand exactly just how Bannon and Miller fit within the alt right ie white nationalist movement then their wishing as does David Horowitz for the destruction of NATO and EU is not so surprising...

THE GLOBAL POLITICO
Trump National Security Team Blindsided by NATO Speech
They thought the president would commit to the principle of collective defense. They were wrong.
By Susan B. Glasser June 05, 2017
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/05/trump-nato-speech-national-security-team-215227

Richard N. Haass‏
@RichardHaass

This lack of formality & discipline in which the formal NSC process is effectively ignored is a recipe for disaster

Question becomes: what happens if the decision is on use military force and the formal NSC process is ignored again?

So much for that whole "it goes without saying" story. It doesn't & key members of Trump's team knew it

It also evicerates a senior admin official who told us with straight face on AF1 that no one in admin had ever heard of Article 5 concerns.

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 05:11 PM

NOTICE Trump and his merry band of white nationalists failed to see this small UK event...

More Than 130 Imams Are Refusing To Perform Funeral Prayers For The London And Manchester Attackers https://www.buzzfeed.com/aishagani/imams-refusing-to-do-funeral-prayers-for-uk-attackers?utm_term=.psqDORvZmV …

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 05:12 PM

David Rank, no.2 @USEmbassyBJ, has resigned, sources say. He couldn't back Trump on climate. Rank had 27yr career including @USEmbassyKabul

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 05:14 PM

ICIJ
✔ @ICIJorg Previously undisclosed #PanamaPapers docs shed new light on Trump associates' deals with Russia-owned VEB bank https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/business/vnesheconombank-veb-bank-russia-trump-kushner.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 …

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 05:23 PM

WHEN will this President truely and completely stop lying....????

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump

.@foxandfriends Dems are taking forever to approve my people, including Ambassadors. They are nothing but OBSTRUCTIONISTS! Want approvals.

WELL then nomiate ambassadors for the process...Trump has only nomiated tqwo and they were approved.....

SECOND problem that Trump does not tweet about is those he has initially nominated did not get Government Office of Ethnics clearances....

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 05:27 PM

Trump tweets a quote that he claims the London Mayor stated WHICH turned out to be FALSE and then re attacks this mayor again....

WHY is that..because the London Mayor corrected him and he hates to be corrected by a Muslim it seems....

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump

Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his "no reason to be alarmed" statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!

Donald J. Trump‏
@realDonaldTrump · 4. Juni

At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is "no reason to be alarmed!"

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 05:28 PM

Putin's toolkit harkens to the 70s/Brezhnev period:
https://republic.ru/posts/83640?code=35e0e0e4e815a269f072994c1c9a3505

Excellent article although in Russian...

OUTLAW 09

06-05-2017, 05:41 PM

Watching McMaster: The first rule of Realism is you don’t talk about Realism

By Thomas E. Ricks
June 5, 2017
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/05/watching-mcmaster-the-first-rule-of-realism-is-you-dont-talk-about-realism/

Tom,

As you may recall, we first met when you were embedded with the 3d ACR in Tal Afar, Iraq in 2005. Sectarian violence had plunged the town into a Hobbesian state of nature; for civilians and combatants alike, life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

You were working on a book to describe this reality to the American public, and wondered aloud about a fitting epigram. I suggested Pericles’ admonition to the Athenians in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War: “Your empire is now like a tyranny: It may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.”

Thus began our decade-long conversation about the moral ambiguity of power, narrated largely by Thucydides. Sophisticated readers of History of the Peloponnesian War recognize the complexity of the text. The early stages of the war offer a primer on Realpolitik, but the narrative later becomes a morality play on the temptations of power. Initially, Athens fought its rival Sparta to preserve its empire and consolidate its hegemony over the Hellenic world. The Athenian leader Pericles counseled a policy of prudence: To preserve Athens’ navy, avoid expanding the empire during the course of the war and do nothing to risk the city itself. The policy was largely successful, producing the Peace of Nicias on terms largely favorable to Athens.

The Realpolitik of Pericles began to deteriorate after his death, setting the stage for the morality play that ended with the destruction of Athens. Cunning men of low character jockeyed for power, more interested in personal glory and wealth than the security of Athens. In Mytilene, Cleon nearly convinced his countrymen to commit genocide. In Melos, the Athenian ambassadors sang a hideous, cartoonish paean to brute force: “The strong do what they can, and the weak accept what they must.” Finally and most tragically, Alcibiades convinced his countrymen to wage a war of aggression in Sicily, promising quick conquest and plentiful treasure. This last blunder was fatal to the Athenians: the whole Hellenic world turned against them, ultimately setting the stage for Persia to aid Sparta in defeating Athens.

The destruction was as much moral as political. Thucydides describes an Athens in which “[w]ords had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice.”

Mark Twain is said to have cautioned us that history may not repeat itself but it often rhymes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the American Pericles; his guiding principle was neither ambition nor morality, but prudence. He affirmed liberal principles in the Atlantic Charter in hopes of moving the American public to the British war effort. He back slapped “Uncle Joe” Stalin, making a deal with one monster to defeat another. Above all else, he preserved the security of the American people and the institutions that kept his country unified, free, and perhaps most importantly, amenable to improvement. FDR’s immediate successors built on this legacy, creating the institutions that cloaked American political and economic advantage in the language of mutual benefit: the United Nations, NATO, and a liberal international system of free trade. Realism is the prudential calculation of probabilities, cloaking the mailed fist of power in the velvet glove of morality. FDR, Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower were quintessentially realists.

The degeneration of American prudence began in the latter stages of the Cold War, and accelerated precipitously after the 9/11 attacks. Cunning men of low character jockeyed for power, consumed by ambition and hubris. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon fought a reckless and unwinnable war, while their advisors were derelict in their duty to speak truth to power. George W. Bush launched a war of aggression in Iraq, promising quick conquest and plentiful treasure in a unipolar world transformed by American power. Most recently, Donald Trump’s principal advisors annunciated his “America First” foreign policy with a hideous, cartoonish paean to brute force:

The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a “global community” but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. We bring to this forum unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.

As in Athens, the destruction is as much moral as political. Words have ceased to convey their ordinary meanings; alternative facts, fake news and pseudo-science are sufficient substitutes for the genuine articles.

Unsophisticated observers mistakenly believe that Realism is the glorification of brute force, and that Trump’s foreign policy is a manifestation of realist principles. Careful readers of Thucydides know that the’ glorification of brute force makes more enemies than friends. America’s enemies will recognize that they need not fear an administration prone to empty bluster abroad and scandal at home. Of greater concern, America’s friends may calculate they cannot trust an administration that discards the work of decades so casually.

In Tal Afar, I witnessed a sophisticated application of the principles of Realpolitik. Then-Colonel H.R. McMaster made a prudential series of calculations regarding the application of diplomacy and force necessary to break the back of the insurgency that gripped the region. In public, he couched American objectives in the language of justice and morality. He affirmed the legitimacy of the Iraqi government, acknowledged the previous errors in the American war effort and pledged to support those committed to creating a peaceful and prosperous Iraq. In private, he revealed the mailed fist of American power, presenting tribal sheikhs with an unambiguous ultimatum: “The time for honorable resistance is over. Don’t make me kill your young men to convince you that I’m serious.”

In Washington, President Trump is rapidly dismantling the system of mutual obligations that produced the longest period of great power peace in the nation-state era. He publicly glorifies brute force, unaware or uninterested in the dangers of destroying the liberal international system that FDR and his successors created. Thucydides’ lessons were meant to last forever, but cannot be easily distilled into 140 characters. Nevertheless, the least informed president in American history might benefit from adopting the Durden Doctrine: The first rule of Realism is you don’t talk about Realism.

Regards,
Paul

Lt. Col. (Ret.) Paul Yingling was on the staff of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment when it was commanded in Iraq by then-Col. H.R. McMaster, who is now the national security adviser. Yingling subsequently became the deputy commander of the regiment

Azor

06-05-2017, 05:41 PM