[Powerline] I paid no attention to the fact that Hollywood was producing a biopic of Ted Kennedy’s famous "accident" at Chappaquiddick in 1969, and would have assumed that it was a typical gauzy pro-Kennedy puff piece if I had known. But Variety magazine, the main trade journal of Hollywood, offers a review that not only says that the forthcoming movie Chappaquiddick is suitably harsh on Teddy, but that he‐and the Kennedy reputation‐deserve it:
The film says that what happened at Chappaquiddick was even worse than we think. Kopechne’s body was found in a position that implied that she was struggling to keep her head out of the water. And what the film suggests is that once the car turned upside down, she didn’t die; she was alive and then drowned, after a period of time, as the water seeped in. This makes Edward Kennedy’s decision not to report the crime a clear-cut act of criminal negligence ‐ but in spirit (if not legally), it renders it something closer to an act of killing.
But this is just the beginning. The reviewer, Variety chief film critic Owen Gleiberman, piles on:
[Zero Hedge] Last week the Washington Examiner reported that Hina Alvi, the wife of Debbie Wasserman Schultz's now-infamous former IT staffer Imran Awan, had struck a deal with federal prosecutors to return to the U.S. where she currently faces charges of conspiracy and bank fraud. The deal with prosecutors mandates a return to the U.S. during the "last week of September 2017" and is structured so that she will not be arrested in front of her children.
Now, if you're the cynical type, then it might have struck you as somewhat odd that Alvi would agree to return from Pakistan, the place to which she successfully fled specifically to avoid the charges she now seems to be embracing.
But, at least according to Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ) who appeared on Fox News recently, there may be more to Alvi's return than meets the eye as he predicts that the Awans could be working on a broader immunity deal with prosecutors in return for a "significant" and "pretty disturbing" story about Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
"I don’t want to talk out of school here but I think you're going to see some revelations that are going to be pretty profound. The fact that this wife is coming back from Pakistan and is willing to face charges, as it were, I think there is a good chance she is going to reach some type of immunity to tell a larger story here that is going to be pretty disturbing to the American people."
"I would just predict that this is going to be a very significant story and people should fasten their seat belts on this one."
Of course, this follows speculation that surfaced last week suggesting that even if the Awans were originally acting to protect/extort Debbie Wasserman Schultz, that may have all changed on April 6, 2017 when Imran seemingly led U.S. Capitol Police directly to her laptop. Per The Daily Caller:
[LI] Hillary Clinton would probably like everyone to forget about her email scandal but she’s not out of the woods yet. There are still many unanswered questions. A Maryland judge has ordered an investigation of her lawyers connected to the deletion of emails.
FOX News reports:
Investigation into Clinton lawyers accused of deleting emails is ordered
A Maryland county judge has ordered the state bar to investigate three lawyers accused of deleting thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Circuit Judge Paul F. Harris Jr. ruled Monday that the Attorney Grievance Commission and Office of Bar Counsel Maryland Office of Bar Counsel must look into complaints against Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson and David E. Kendall, citing "allegations of destroying evidence," according to the Washington Times.
The ruling came after Ty Clevenger, an attorney in New York City, filed the complaint. He recently was denied files from the FBI related to Clinton’s email investigation, due to what the bureau called a lack of public interest.
It’s amazing that Hillary Clinton got so close to becoming president, after intentionally using a private email server and potentially destroying evidence in the investigation.
[THEFEDERALIST] A Dominican woman testified on Tuesday that Sen. Bob Menendez, who faces felony corruption charges, helped her with her U.S. visa application after her alleged ex-boyfriend, who is also on trial, asked the Democratic senator to intervene.
Rosiell Polanco-Suera told the court her visa application was initially denied in 2008, but after her wealthy ex-boyfriend ‐ Dr. Salomon Melgen, who was convicted of Medicaid fraud earlier this year ‐ asked "the senator" to intervene, her application was green-lighted, the News Agency that Dare Not be Named reports.
Prosecutors say Melgen allegedly bribed Menendez for years with luxury vacations and gifts in exchange for political influence and favors. On Monday, one of Menendez’s former staffers told the court one of those favors was lobbying the State Department to get Polanco-Suera and her sister visas to enter the United States. Both Menendez and Melgen stand trial together as defendants and face 18 counts of bribery and fraud, but they say they’re innocent.
Menendez is also accused of lobbying the government on behalf of the wealthy eye doctor over a $8.9 million billing dispute. In 2011, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) found that Melgen was over-charging them for an eye drug, then Menendez allegedly intervened on his deep-pocketed benefactor’s behalf.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/13/2017 00:00 ||
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#1
Isn't this the kind of thing senators supposed to do?
The son of US President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn is being investigated as part of the ongoing federal probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US election, NBC News reported on Wednesday.
Citing four current and former US officials, NBC said it was unclear when the probe into Michael Flynn Jr. began. But is said it was at least partly focused on his work for the lobbying firm run by his father, already a known subject of the US probe that is also examining any potential collusion by Trump's campaign.
The younger Flynn has denied any collusion with Russia, according to NBC. Lawyers for both men declined to comment to NBC.
[TIME] Former President Jimmy Carter offered a damning indictment of U.S. foreign policy and domestic affairs Tuesday, saying money in politics makes the nation more like an "oligarchy than a democracy" and casting President Donald Trump as a disappointment on the world stage.
Carter's criticisms, offered at his annual presentation to backers of his post-presidency Carter Center in Atlanta, went beyond Trump, but he was particularly critical of the nation's direction under the Republican president's leadership.
The 39th president, a Democrat, offered this advice to the 45th: "Keep the peace, promote human rights and tell the truth."
Carter, 92, did not mention explicitly Trump's threatening exchanges this summer with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, but the former president said the U.S. should engage directly with the insular leader and discuss a peace treaty to replace the cease fire that ended the Korean War in 1953.
"I would send my top person to Pyongyang immediately, if I didn't go myself," Carter said, noting that he's been three times to the country, even as successive U.S. administrations have refused to deal with the regime.
The North Koreans, Carter said, want a treaty that guarantees the U.S. will not attack unless North Korea attacks the U.S. or an ally, particularly South Korea. "Until we talk to them and treat them with respect ‐ as human beings, which they are ‐ I don't think we're going to make any progress," Carter said.
He also dismissed Trump's optimism that he can engineer Middle East peace. Trump has tasked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with handling the issue that has vexed U.S. administrations for generations, but the president notably backed off the long-held U.S. position calling for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.
N.B. It's been a oligarchy for over a generation, slow one. Maybe because you swim in the party that promoted special interests over democracy, you missed it from the bubble.
#6
Fuck the "world stage". Trump is what's good for America. The world hates us, so why should we do anything for them? The more we do, the more they hate us.
Posted by: Herb McCoy7309 ||
09/13/2017 9:18 Comments ||
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#8
"Until we talk to them and treat them with respect ‐ as human beings, which they are ‐ I don't think we're going to make any progress," Carter said.
Typical globalist on his knees inhaling furious amounts of tyrant dick.
They don't care about that idiot. They care about power and you being afraid of them, which you clearly are. They won't stop until you force them, which you can't since you are choking on their members.
[Iran Press TV] The White House has denied any arrangements with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak to stay at the Trump International Hotel during his visit to the United States to meet with US President Donald Trump ...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told news hounds on Tuesday that no efforts had been made to make the premier stay at the president’s hotel and that Razak made a "personal decision."
The Malaysian leader is reportedly staying at the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/13/2017 00:00 ||
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$20 says Jim Acosta's e-mailing these guys ideas like this.
[DCWHISPERS] POTUS Trump has laid out some general and lofty tax reform goals. Whispers indicate he’s willing to concede some of those as leverage to getting a bipartisan bill through Congress ‐ a signal the President is pivoting to his lifelong experience as a deal-maker. The first six months of his presidency has been marred by Congress’s repeated rebuke of the President’s agenda.
It appears POTUS is now prepared to amp up the public pressure to try and force Congress to get something done and stop worrying about merely holding on to their House or Senate seats.
Word is this approach is working which could set up a very successful and ultimately beneficial 2018 for the American people.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/13/2017 00:00 ||
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...has been marred by Congress’s repeated rebuke of the President’s agenda.
You mean things like Obamacare repeal, which pretty much every GD "Republican" ran on as well? That agenda?
[FOX] Security at the State Department's Benghazi compound was so dire that another contractor was brought in to clean up the mess just two weeks before the 2012 terror attack ‐ and was later pressured to keep quiet by a government bureaucrat under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to two men from the American security company.
Brad Owens and Jerry Torres, of Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions, say they faced pressure to stay silent and get on the same page with the State Department with regard to the security lapses that led to the deaths of four Americans.
They spoke exclusively with Fox News for "Tucker Carlson Tonight," revealing new information that undermines the State Department's account of the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, where Islamic militants launched a 13-hour assault from Sept. 11-12 that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith and former Navy SEALS Ty Woods and Glenn Doherty.
Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions provides security for U.S. embassy and consulate personnel around the world in some of the most dangerous locations spanning Africa, the Middle East and South America, according to the firm.
#2
"Blue Mountain U.K. is a teeny, tiny, little security company registered in Wales that had never had a diplomatic security contract, had never done any high threat contracts anywhere else in the world that we've been able to find, much less in high threat areas for the U.S. government.
One might almost think that Benghazi was like Hillary's server--an invitation to come in.
#3
Reading the full article, the still-in-place State Department contracting office, Jan Visitainer, commented that she didn't think security guards should be armed... Why is this woman still in public service Rex?
[Al Jazeera] Donald Earl Collins is an Associate Professor of History with University of Maryland University College. Yeah, buddy! A scholar of the first rank. Howard Zinn is smiling in his grave.
Let there be no doubt. US President Donald Trump is a mercurial, inept, me-first racist. In recent weeks, Trump has thrown in with Charlottesville's white supremacists and pardoned known anti-immigrant xenophobe Joe Arpaio. Trump has pursued an agenda of rescinding more and more of President Barack Obama's executive orders, including the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), potentially leading to the deportation of undocumented immigrants who were children when they came to the US.
Trump's behaviour isn't unprecedented. His racist, incompetent, and callously narcissistic performance as president shares similarities with that of Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson, and Richard Nixon. And although he continues to follow the lead of some of America's most racist and inept presidents, he continues to retain many of his supporters.
Millions of supposedly non-racist Americans - people who say they wouldn't align themselves with Neo-Nazis - continue to support Trump. Why?
Subconscious hatred or fear alone cannot fully explain why they tacitly support the Trump administration's racist and xenophobic policies, and Trump's racist and xenophobic words and deeds along with them.
The answer to this question lies in understanding the power of racial advantage and narcissistic self-gratification, the combination of which has made the Trump presidency possible. All that power is embodied in the reality of segregation in the US. Its diffusion in all aspects of American culture and life reinforces the idea of white superiority over Americans of colour and of America as a perpetually great and righteous nation, even as it isolates whole social and racial groups of Americans.
Racial and social segregation and the dominant white narrative
Residential segregation is the root cause of all other forms of segregation in the United States. Its immediate effect is that white children tend to go to school isolated from interaction with children of colour. As education expert Diane Ravitch wrote in her 2013 bestseller Reign of Error, "Today, racial segregation remains a pervasive fact of life for millions of black [and equally impoverished Hispanic] children, primarily as a result of residential segregation." Working-class and poor whites are residentially segregated not only from all social classes of Americans of colour, but also from affluent whites.
At the same time, white children tend to be almost exclusively taught by white teachers. Currently, nearly five out of six teachers in the US (82 percent) are white, and the majority of teachers of colour teach in school districts where students of colour are predominant.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/13/2017 00:00 ||
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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.
[Powerline] I paid no attention to the fact that Hollywood was producing a biopic of Ted Kennedy’s famous "accident" at Chappaquiddick in 1969, and would have assumed that it was a typical gauzy pro-Kennedy puff piece if I had known. But Variety magazine, the main trade journal of Hollywood, offers a review that not only says that the forthcoming movie Chappaquiddick is suitably harsh on Teddy, but that he‐and the Kennedy reputation‐deserve it:
[Zero Hedge] Last week the Washington Examiner reported that Hina Alvi, the wife of Debbie Wasserman Schultz's now-infamous former IT staffer Imran Awan, had struck a deal with federal prosecutors to return to the U.S. where she currently faces charges of conspiracy and bank fraud. The deal with prosecutors mandates a return to the U.S. during the "last week of September 2017" and is structured so that she will not be arrested in front of her children. 
[LI] Hillary Clinton would probably like everyone to forget about her email scandal but she’s not out of the woods yet. There are still many unanswered questions. A Maryland judge has ordered an investigation of her lawyers connected to the deletion of emails.
[TIME] Former President Jimmy Carter offered a damning indictment of U.S. foreign policy and domestic affairs Tuesday, saying money in politics makes the nation more like an "oligarchy than a democracy" and casting President Donald Trump as a disappointment on the world stage.
Lawn care and the animal kingdom shall not go unscathed! These invasive critters kept a number of people from going to the polls. 
[DCWHISPERS] POTUS Trump has laid out some general and lofty tax reform goals. Whispers indicate he’s willing to concede some of those as leverage to getting a bipartisan bill through Congress ‐ a signal the President is pivoting to his lifelong experience as a deal-maker. The first six months of his presidency has been marred by Congress’s repeated rebuke of the President’s agenda.
[Al Jazeera] 
