[HOT AIR] I’m trying to locate this on the spectrum between "take him seriously but not literally," as his supporters do, and "take him literally but not seriously," as the media does. I think it falls somewhere in the gray zone of stuff he’d like to do and would do if American norms were different. But since they aren’t, he’s left musing wistfully about how much better things would be if law enforcement could just take the gloves off with the bad guys, a theme he’s returned to occasionally as president.
It’s also a point he’s reportedly made in private. The fact that we’re hearing it now fits with POTUS’s drift recently towards "letting Trump be Trump," to borrow a phrase from Corey Lewandowski. He was enthusiastic about gun control yesterday; he declared a trade war on steel and aluminum imports this morning; now here he is fantasizing about a Duterte-type solution to America’s drug problem. All of those positions are what you’d expect from a nationalist strongman. Maybe the days of POTUS rubber-stamping conservative policy pushed by Ryan and McConnell are over.
#2
Honestly I am fine with any participation in the drug trade being punished by death. I am tested constantly in my job because druggies get people killed or maimed and it's not always just them paying the price.
#4
And yet we do hit jobs via drones or commando raids against financiers of terrorism. They're not pulling a trigger, setting off the bomb, or are in the front lines either.
#6
Comparisons to Duterte won't sway those like me; hell we were talking about him at Wednesday's campfire. Probably because we are tired of watching nice places turn into shitholes.
However.
There are a number of countries where drug dealing is the death penalty, and has been for a long time.
#7
Trump often puts out controversial comments. As #1 said, he likes scratching at and trolling the opposition. I watched a panel with the head of DHS and other agencies and it sounded like the Trump admin. has a fairly comprehensive program to deal with a complex opioid problem which has many dimensions.
Part of the problem is addiction that results from the medical treatment of acute and chronic pain. Without thinking too hard, I can think of a number of friends, neighbors and relatives who been affected by opioid addiction as the result of both legal and illegal drugs. This goes across all socio-economic strata. The neighbor across the street lost a son, a WWII vet down the street lost a grandson, a friend, a retired cop is dealing with his son's addiction who was injured in an IED explosion in Iraq. I could mention others and I suspect others here probably could similar stories. My great nephew is a 1st responder and about 50 percent of their calls are for drug over-doses.
Addiction is a serious and complex problem. I hope an impact can be made by Trump's program. Wish Mueller's Russian-Trump collusion probe would go away. It is a waste of time and money and nothing has been found in over a year. It has become an instrument for obstructing justice of the real criminality and collusion. Time to get on with more important things like the opiod addiction problem.
[FOX] The town of Canandaigua is nestled in the Finger Lakes region of central New York State, five hours and a world away from New York City. It is here, in a nondescript, unmarked warehouse that Tom Fargnoli runs his small gun fabrication business, Just Right Carbines.
As the child of a father who was vehemently anti-gun, Tom saw firearms as a forbidden fruit. His profound curiosity about them may be one of the reasons the 67 year old is today regarded as a gifted designer, fabricator and assembler of them. His 6 1/2 pound semi-automatic carbine has just 44 parts. He sells 75 of them a week on average. Tom speaks in the same way that buyers describe his carbines ‐ simple, reliable, and accurate.
"In 2013, I was at the shot show in Las Vegas, and everything was fine on Monday. Tuesday morning, when I woke up, my gun was illegal in New York State," he said.
New York State's passage of the SAFE Act ‐ the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act of 2013 ‐ was heralded as one of the strictest in the country. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's comments at the time, coming in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, might have well been spoken today after yet another mass shooting.
[PowderedWigSociety] Vladimir Putin has an election this month, so he is putting on a grand show of badass bravado, announcing via Twitter today that Russia now has nuclear-powered cruise missiles with неограниченный unlimited range.
I don’t know what good unlimited range is when we have a defensive capability that can shoot anything out of the sky, and I believe much of that capability is space-based, but I’m sure Putin’s cocksure machismo plays well in Moscow.
Watch for the tired pics of a shirtless Putin on horseback flooding the interwebs between now and March 18.
#3
All it takes is a little creative hacking of their guidance software and you could have a jolly time watching all the fun and they frantically began pushing self destruct/abort buttons on a zillion rubles worth of hardware.
#10
A nuclear aircraft would work like a jet engine instead of heating air with petrol combustion it would use the heat from the reactor. Quite a bit of work was done on it in the 1950's. My dad worked at the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Division (ANPD) of General Electric and said that at the end it would still have needed a runway as long as Nevada to take off. Until a family tour day, I thought he worked at a food store. Then we got to go in and look into the reactor. Surprised I could have children. Seems like you could get away with a lot less shielding in a missile, but it would still need to be kept in a lot of lead until used. Knowing Russian safety concerns, I wouldn't want to one of the guys loading it on an aircraft or the pilot.
#11
Rumor was we built a nuke powered bomber in the late 40s. Rumor went on that it only had shielding facing the crew cabin. I flew once the crew got off and it was too radioactive to approach again. It's supposed to be in a hanger with other mistakes on a Idaho desert.
[Townhall] "We got China wrong. Now what?" ran the headline over the column in The Washington Post.
"Remember how American engagement with China was going to make that communist backwater more like the democratic, capitalist West?" asked Charles Lane in his opening sentence. But, but, but that's what Henry Kissenger told us !
America's elites believed that economic engagement and the opening of U.S. markets would cause the People's Republic to coexist benignly with its neighbors and the West.
We deluded ourselves. It did not happen.
Xi Jinping just changed China's constitution to allow him to be dictator for life. He continues to thieve intellectual property from U.S. companies and to occupy and fortify islets in the South China Sea, which Beijing now claims as entirely its own.
Meanwhile, China sustains North Korea as Chinese warplanes and warships circumnavigate Taiwan threatening its independence.
We today confront a Chinese Communist dictatorship and superpower that seeks to displace America as first power on earth, and to drive the U.S. military back across the Pacific.
Who is responsible for this epochal blunder?
The elites of both parties. Bush Republicans from the 1990s granted China most-favored-nation status and threw open America's market.
Result: China has run up $4 trillion in trade surpluses with the United States. Her $375 billion trade surplus with us in 2017 far exceeded the entire Chinese defense budget.
[Newsmax] Former Bush administration secretary of state Condoleezza Rice on Thursday urged House Intelligence Committee member and ranking Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff to "wrap it up" on the panel's probe of Russian meddling because "the country needs to get back to business."
In remarks on ABC's "The View" ‐ on which the California lawmaker was a guest as well ‐ Rice, who also served as a national security adviser to former President George W. Bush, was sympathetic to the job the intel panel was doing.
"I spent a lot of time in Washington and I know you got a really hard job and I appreciate what you're doing for the country," she said. "But I really hope you can wrap it up. The country needs to get back to business. So that's my greatest hope. This gets done."
"I just want to say on Robert Mueller this is somebody I know, I worked with him. He was FBI director when I was national security adviser. I have enormous respect for him and he is going to do this in a very fair way and so I just hope we can get it done," she added.
Beforehand, Schiff had told Rice and "The View" co-hosts that the country needs "a whole government response" to Russia's interference.
"There are still bipartisan sanctions sitting on the president's desk that he refuses to implement," Schiff said. "We need to send a clear message to Russia that any further meddling won't be tolerated."
[Lifezette] Talking heads in the mainstream media think attorney general is in president's doghouse again, but maybe both men know exactly what they are doing.
I think that what we saw on Wednesday from the president and his AG is a bit of Kabuki theater. That exchange was designed to produce exactly the reaction in the Establishment news media that ended up taking place, i.e., a knee jerk among all the Democrat talking heads to defend and praise IG Horowitz as an upright and impartial arbiter of the facts.
Why? Well, because it’s likely that we are about to see the release of the IG’s report related to his 14-month investigation, and by that, I mean within the next week. It is likely that that report is going to contain numerous findings of criminal wrongdoing, not only related to the FBI’s fake investigation of the Clinton email server, but to related scandals like Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation. The report will likely also include numerous referrals to the attorney general and his staff for prosecution of Obama-era officials.
The news media, which is just the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, will have an initial knee-jerk response to go after Horowitz and try to destroy him personally, but that’s going to be pretty hard to do, given that they will have just spent a week praising him to the rafters in their never-ending efforts to try to harm Trump.
That’s a lot of expectations out of a single tweet and a one-paragraph response, but as I said above, the president really doesn’t just toss stuff like this out onto his Twitter account for no reason. There is a method here, and we will find out soon enough what it is.
#1
It would be helpful if we actually saw some progress happening in the Trump swamp-draining efforts. That is why he was elected. In the face of all the apparent criminality committed by swamp denizens it would seem there is much low-hanging fruit to be picked.
#2
The media has no idea what they are dealing with. Trump is way out in front of them on this.
A great rope a dope to get the media to go all in on Horowitz...and then the IG report hangs all of the media heroes in the FBI and AG office out to dry as felons and traitors.
The mental somersaults and logic gymnastics of the left will leave most rational people with a nose bleed or a migraine headache.
It is going to be fun to watch Shiff(less) and Charles Microphone Shumer flip flop to debunk the report.
It will be even more fun to watch all of the conspirators being put into police cars in handcuffs.
"The loudest voices are echoing for limiting the ownership of guns to those Americans who are 21 years of age, or older.
"And here's the conundrum.
"When my boys turned ten years, I bought them B-B guns."
--snip--
"So, let us confront the conundrum.
"In Oregon, to hunt big game, you need a Youth License. At age 12. To hunt upland game and waterfowl, youth 13 and younger need to answer HIP validation, and that license is free.
"To hunt small game, youth 11 or younger do not need a license."
My kids have the same Constitutional Rights as any other American.
Except for the unborn. We've taken their rights away.
.
#1
If you are willing to draft them or conscript them and have them roll into war at 18, I would say they are also able to become personally responsible for their own lives and the lives of their Brothers in combat with their own expertise.
All their narrative of arguments are stupid.
This Tragedy was the government not protecting their people and had nothing to do with guns.
All their ideas are stupid.
Why do we always get sucked into their stupid narrative? Talk past those idiots. They are not listening anyway.
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
-
§311. Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
Only the blind, deaf, or mentally impaired can not connect the dots. Its those bent on evil themselves who refuse to see the connection.
#7
(1) If your gun is used in a crime and you haven't reported it stolen or somehow proved you had it adequately secured, you are considered an accomplice to that crime. Do that and the vast majority of gun deaths (suicides mostly) would disappear.
If you commit a crime with a gun you get life in prison without possibility of parole. Doesn't matter if anyone was injured during the crime or if the perp was a minor. Do that and gun crimes will drop dramatically.
#8
My problem is the fast grip squeeze.
Different weapons, different grips with two fingers or three.
A changeout of the EDC and I always roll the first rounds down and to the right...what?
#9
Age is not a factor in these shootings. If 18 year olds are old enough to go to war and vote, they are old enough to own a firearm.
The statists here will be trying to grab guns long after all of us have gone on to greener pastures. That has not worked out well for people where it has been actually been done.
[Teslarati] In statements provided to the Brownsville Herald, a Texan paper dedicated to a South Texas region that includes SpaceX’s Boca Chica launch site, state representative René Oliveira hinted that SpaceX’s plans for the region could go “well beyond conducting launches.”
Dale Ketcham, Space Florida: people who worked on LC-39A and SLC-40 here for SpaceX now working on their Brownsville site. Georgia will be offering a spaceport site just as attractive to launch customers as Brownsville.
3dc: I put the SpaceX story here today as the factory will be building the world's largest rocket ever. It's next to what will soon be one of the world's largest LNG ports (about 1.5 miles away) and the mouth of the Rio Grande (about 1 mile away) The LNG is important as the rocket runs on LOX and LNG. The scale of this effort is right out of StarTrek. The rocket will be able to carry over 100 passengers at a time. Brownsville is a poor city. This might turn its future around. One other point: US Navy aircraft carriers go to be scrapped about 2 miles from this site. Currently the USS Saratoga and USS Independence are being scrapped.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] In all probability, Iran will eventually succumb to popular demonstrations and protests, simply because it doesn’t have the solutions to its growing economic problems, unless it abandons its costly expansionist practices. Most of Iran's revenues are siphoned off by militias raised in pursuit of its expansionist goals.
Furthermore, a large portion of this funding is spent on developing advanced weapons’ programs, particularly ballistic missiles. When it finally gives up these programs, it will become clear that all of its political and expansionist agendas ‐ be they in Iraq, Syria, Leb and Yemen ...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of. Except for a tiny handfull of Jews everthing there is very Islamic... have been complete failures.
The IRGC are as brutal as the ISIS militia, the only difference between the two being their sectarian divergence
Mohammed Al Shaikh
Thus, I truly believe that Iran will have no choice but to snuff out protests, which subside in one place but erupt somewhere else, via the Revolutionary Guards and by adopting the practices of the SAVAK which the deposed Shah utilized to govern the country with. Such practices may be successful only for some time, but eventually they would yield to the will of the protesters, just like they protested against the Shah and toppled him.
More pernicious than Shah’s repression
The difference between the revolution against the Shah and the revolution against the theocracy is that the claws of the repressive holy manal power, in the form of the Revolutionary Guards, are far more pernicious and dreadful than those used by the Shah’s army and security forces in their time.
The Shah’s security and army were not ideologically driven and their military tactics had nothing to do with religion. Their aim was to defend Iran, the nation. However, some people cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go... Iranian Revolutionary Guard militia are religiously driven, are deeply embedded in Vilayat-e-Faqih doctrine and by what the holy mans say.
ALSO READ: Israeli satellite pictures allegedly show new Iranian military base in Syria
They do not ponder for a second before striking down anyone who faces them, and remain adamant even if they may have to wipe out half of the Iranian people. In fact, they are as brutal as the ISIS militia, the only difference between the two being their sectarian divergence.
Plagued by hunger, poverty and corruption, the floundering economy of Iran and the ineptitude of the regime in improving economic conditions gives me the confidence to firmly predict that Iran will, in the next two to three years, witness a civil war, especially if the United States persists with its sanctions against the regime and diminishes Iran’s ability to become part of the global economy.
Such measures are tantamount to adding fuel to fire. This would worsen Iran’s domestic situation and would stoke the flames of popular resentment which will spread until it exhausts the Revolutionary Guards.
The IRGC will make it violent
In contrast, the Revolutionary Guards will never tolerate the downfall of the 1979 revolution, which they deem their doctrinal duty to protect and preserve. Hence, they will certainly try to suppress protests at all costs.
Therefore, all the objective indicators point that if hungry people revolt en masse, the Revolutionary Guard can only confront them with the force of arms. If we look at Bashar's experience in Syria as a case in point, then we can see that he was only able to withstand the ire of Syrian masses with the help of Russians.
If the hungry masses come out to revolt, their revolution will likely turn into a bloody civil war, just as the one that took place in Syria. All I want to say is that economic failures that stare in the face of the theocracy will always be the cause and trigger for civil wars.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/02/2018 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[8 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iran
#1
a smug opinion piece from a Saudi national
the Saudis have more money than Iran but they are losing it faster
Posted by: lord garth ||
03/02/2018 1:43 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Insert your state here:
Plagued by hunger, poverty and corruption, the floundering economy of California and the ineptitude of the regime in improving economic conditions gives me the confidence to firmly predict thatCaliforniawill, in the next two to three years, witness a civil war, especially if the United States persists with its sanctions against the regime and diminishesCalifornia’s ability to become part of the global economy.
[PJ] There are few names as associated with modern Christianity as Reverend Billy Graham. For decades, the pastor has served as an advisor to presidents regardless of party. He was a living embodiment of how people should act toward those who may disagree with them.
As the day of the funeral fast approaches, past presidents and other dignitaries are paying their respects: former President George W. Bush did on Monday, and former President Bill Clinton did the same on Tuesday. President Donald Trump will be attending Graham's funeral on Friday.
Yet former President Barack Obama will be skipping it, according to the Associated Press: "Former President Barack Obama is not planning to attend memorial services for the late evangelist Rev. Billy Graham this week."
Obama did tweet that Graham was "a humble servant who prayed for so many," but the former president is still opting to skip the services. The message sent by this drops any pretense that Obama actually respects what Graham stood for.
None of this is overly surprising, at least for many American Christians. Obama, despite his claims of sharing their faith, routinely acted in a manner that showed disdain for the faithful. He rarely made an effort to reach out to Christians during his presidency, and actively targeted them with his policies and actions: See his stance on Hobby Lobby, and his never-forgotten feelings on rural Americans being simpletons clinging to guns and religion.
Obama worked to be divisive during his presidency, efforts that ran contrary to Graham's outreach to politicians of both parties, so it's not surprising Obama won't be there. It's not surprising that the best the former president can muster is a tweet for the fallen spiritual leader.
Yet Graham wouldn't harbor ill will toward Obama because of the slight. It's not the Christian way, after all.
If the former president wants to know why our nation is so divided these days, perhaps he would do well to look at this and remember his role in those divisions.
#1
Its sentimental. Nevertheless, it IS true, for all of that. He did get old. And he did get boring. And he may have been your old Dad, and you bore with him even when he was boring , which he was. But you understood his stories after you came home from VietNam yourself. And you got old yourself and he is long gone now. So yu hold your tongue when you see a young man who has an earring in ear and a rainbow T-shirt.
And you see what NBC says about vets and the newsreels about the Iraq War. And the vets who have done two and sometimes three deployments and their families live in trailers and their wives struggle to raise the two little kids alone while their father is in Afghanistan. And these men are so few, and the families suffer so much. And sometimes they come home and have lost everything because the young wife just couldn't bear up. And they have to adapt to coming a civilian again and stacking cartons of Coke in a Supermarket when they used to Command a Platoon. And they remember too much hurt and can't talk about it to anyone. And their own children don't know who that are even though they love they love those children very much. And love that wife who is no longer is a wife and they and she are alone now Separated...nothing is more profound than ordinary hurt.
Serving the Flag. All those years and ...sentimentality isn't the right word. And you got old and never got any of it back, you still hurt. And your kids need the insight of heroes to see it in you. And to understand.
He got a govt. headstone and was buried in family graveyard in a small community churchyard and I go down once a year and mow the lawn and sit in the truck alone, myself. I am all those men. going back to the generation of 1835, every generation. One Flag. At a cost.
Posted by: Andy Bumble5704 ||
03/02/2018 6:16 Comments ||
Top||
#2
50th anniversary of the 82nd deployment to Vietnam. All the way airborne..
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Teslarati] In statements provided to the Brownsville Herald, a Texan paper dedicated to a South Texas region that includes SpaceX’s Boca Chica launch site, state representative René Oliveira hinted that SpaceX’s plans for the region could go “well beyond conducting launches.”
