Someone's Little Princess playing revolutionary.
[Vogue] I am going to try to write this calmly. I want to remain calm because I want to remain lucid. Also, if my hands are shaking with rage, I cannot type. So you'll have to give me a minute, as I work up to the bit about Molotov cocktails. I’ll get there, but first I have to talk about podcasts.
My podcast feed can be divvied up into two types of show: shows about politics and the news, and shows that I listen to in order to escape politics and the news. Of the latter, Karina Longworth’s Hollywood history, You Must Remember This is a favorite. I also like to dip into the BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time, where I can find out about cephalopods and hear eminent scholars discuss Middlemarch. There are some junkier podcasts, too, but I’ve found, over the past year or so, that the best way for me to eject myself from the crashing fighter jet of current events is to expand my mind. Learning allows me to see myself as part of the tapestry of earth and time, rather than someone stuck in a present that’s all too often dumbfoundingly horrifying. Thus did I dive into to the Revolutions podcast, Mike Duncan’s five year-old series exploring history’s great revolutions.
It was somewhere in the midst of Duncan’s season on the July Revolution, when the post-Bastille, post-Terror, post-Napoleonic Empire French terminated the Bourbon Restoration and got rid of the Bourbon monarchy once and for all, that I realized I wasn’t escaping current events; rather, I was understanding them. In 1829, King Charles X of France made the same epic error as had King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland 200 years earlier: Sick of the bitching of people who didn't 100 percent agree with their policies, both of these unpopular kings told the loudmouths to eff off and moved to consolidate power. In the case of King Charles X, that entailed suspending civil rights and denouncing anyone who complained as a hotheaded insurrectionary—actions that the king and his Royalist defenders spun as protective of France’s Charter of Government, the country’s sorta-kinda constitution. Nevertheless, elections did loom—and an energetic group of liberals had been organizing furiously, under the banner of a club called Help Yourself and Heaven Will Help You. Parrying Royalist efforts to disenfranchise voters and otherwise game the polls, the Help Yourself club fielded such a strong fleet of candidates, and mobilized so many fed-up French citizens, they swept the election. Whereupon the king and his enablers embarked on a Royalist coup. In a matter of weeks, France didn’t have a king anymore.
Maybe you see where I’m going with this? History rhymes, as they say, and if you listen to a few seasons of Revolutions, what you’ll discover is that the prerevolution rhyme scheme tends to go something like: People demand more rights and more economic equality/ The minority of people with the majority of the money and power get freaked out and respond by seizing even more money and power/ The people get very mad but at first they try to work within the system, like, they might storm the Bastille but even then they’re still basically cool with the king/ The rich, powerful minority make a big show of giving the masses the finger, pretty much to make the point that they're in charge, and they always will be/ Blammo, revolution.
If you’d asked me, before last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings with Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, where we were on the road to revolution, I’d have said we were somewhere around “the people are very mad but they’re working within the system.” As of today, I feel like the revolution could kick off any minute now, because with the vote to send Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the GOP (and Joe Manchin) have officially flipped us the bird. Executing a Constitutional obligation is not "flipping people the bird."
When I say “us,” I mean all of us. Not just women. Not just Democrats. Standing by Brett Kavanaugh—a historically disliked nominee, with crappy poll numbers (even before Dr. Ford came forward with a credible allegation that he’d sexually assaulted her in their teens) who walked right up to the line of perjuring himself in his Senate testimony and exposed himself as a both a jerk and a partisan hack—was, make no mistake about it, a display of power. A president who badly lost the popular vote, abetted by 51 Senators who represent a mere 44 percent of Americans, rammed through their nominee just to show us they could. Trump and McConnell could have easily jettisoned Kavanaugh in favor of an equally conservative replacement; instead, fearful of looking weak, they stuck with him, not in spite of all the protest but because of it. God forbid they seem to entertain the concerns of their constituents, because then those constituents might think they have a claim on how this country is run, and who for. The country is run by the people. The government is run by politicians. Big difference if you don't include that in your arguments. This princess' problem is that her political allies aren't running it all.
Ask yourself: For whom, right now, is this country being run?
Well before she was co-bylining New Yorker exposés with Ronan Farrow, Jane Mayer published the indispensable book Dark Money. Though it’s primarily a history of the Koch Brothers, the donor network they founded, and the inscrutable ways they funnel money to conservative candidates and causes, Dark Money digs deeper into the past, and presents for readers’ consideration “the Powell memo,” penned in 1971 by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell. In the wake of the civil rights and women’s rights movements, with labor unions strong and the government expanding its oversight of business via environment regulations and consumer protections, corporate America, Powell wrote, was on its heels. What was required, he argued, was for “business,” writ large, to cultivate political power and use it “aggressively and with determination.” Before Powell circulated the memo, there were about 100 corporate lobbying offices in Washington, D.C.; by the mid-1980s, amid the ascendancy, under Ronald Reagan, of neoliberal economic doctrine, there were more than 1,200. Funny thing about money. The people still can donate to the political candidate of their choice. Because of the limits of means they can't dump millions into a campaign, but they can in small amounts. It's called Freedom.
The movement kick-started by the Powell memo was avowedly reactionary. Because most voters didn’t particularly like the idea of having their waterways polluted, or their banks given free reign to fleece them, and because mostly they did like the ideas FDR had presented in his New Deal–era “Second Bill of Rights” (proposing guarantees of health care, a good education, a decent home, and a job that paid enough to provide “adequate food and clothing and recreation”), the anti-tax, anti-regulation, pro-maximizing-shareholder-value corporate agenda required a certain savoir faire in order to take hold. It demanded the curtailment of unions, and with it labor’s ability to rally members’ votes. It necessitated aggressive—Powell’s word—furtherance of Nixon’s Southern strategy, not only ratcheting up white racial resentment all across the country, but also taking steps to keep black voters away from the polls. Religion and patriotism were drafted into the cause, in order to taper the expectations of women and queer people and immigrants that they were fully equal members of society. Poor folk—especially those of color—had to be warehoused in jails and rich folk had to be safeguarded their institutional sinecures. As long as the United States remained majority-white, and its representatives nearly uniformly straight and male, there was, periodically, a coalition that could be cobbled together which, as a whole, voted in support of declining investment in public infrastructure and increasingly regressive taxation. And so on. This is all right out of the Communist Manifesto, and the Democratic party platforms for the last 60 years. From my personal perspective, it had the basic flaw in relying on federal legislation and the courts to remedy matters. But the thing is what Princess Maya Singer lists aren't problems unless you have a deep and abiding love of big and ever expanding government.
But, despite the reactionaries’ best efforts, the future kept on coming.
Now, I’ll say this straightforwardly: Democrats were often complicit in kowtowing to corporate interests and the 0.001 percent. But all you need to do is look at the Republicans and Democrats in Congress to comprehend that one party is at least partially committed to principles of universalism, and the other not at all. More and more, the GOP is the party of the old, the white, the homophobic, and the rich, and, to a greatly disproportionate degree, the male. And as the country’s demographics have shifted away from that profile, and as, meanwhile, the lingering effects of the 2008 economic crash and America’s forever wars singe populations one would generally expect to be moderate in their views, the GOP and their dark money funders have had to tighten the screws on democracy. Hence, insane voter ID laws, changes to the census, norm-busting à la refusing to hold hearings on Obama’s judicial nominees. (Merrick Garland, cough.) OMG, I almost forgot to mention Citizens United! And the flip side to all this chipping away at people power, which is the vast expansion of the rights of the powerful. The writer is anti free speech, the cornerstone of freedom with her criticism of Citizens United.
No wonder we cling by our fingernails to the rights we do have. For some people it’s guns. Me, I bemoaned Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, for he had helped to preserve Roe and make gay marriage a reality. But let’s get real here. Kennedy voted to stop ballot-counting in Florida in 2000 and anoint George W. Bush president. He wrote the Citizens United opinion. In just his last session on the Supreme Court, he sided with the majority in Janus v. AFSCME, a decision that gutted public sector unions, and he forced a punt on a group of gerrymandering cases that submitted extreme redistricting to the scrutiny of the law. So, you know, ol’ Kennedy was a mixed bag where the rights of everyday citizens were concerned. Or he was, right up until the moment he delivered another Supreme Court seat to Donald Trump, and perhaps quietly proposed to our offender in chief that his former clerk, Brett Kavanaugh, would make a terrific nominee. In both those court cases Kennedy sided with the people.
Much of the recent discussion of Kavanaugh’s nomination has turned on the rights of women. And justly so. It’s an undigestible, poisonous irony that a man credibly accused of sexual assault—twice credibly, by my lights, and another time that, for the sake of rigor, I’ll give a pass—will sit on the highest court in the land and hear cases pertaining to the autonomy of women’s bodies. Indeed, given that he’ll be taking his seat on the Court alongside Clarence Thomas, credibly accused sexual harasser, and forming a reliable conservative majority with his seat-stealing former Georgetown Prep classmate Neil Gorsuch, I really wouldn’t be surprised if millions of American women spend the weekend Googling “how to make Molotov cocktails.” (See, I told you I’d get there.) I have yet to see any increasing reports on house fires yet, not ones where an accelerant was used. Your female allies may have Googled Mototov Cocktails, but they haven't started building them yet.
The problem is that no one, with an intrusive and expanding government we have now has autonomy over their body. Not even wimmin.
And make no mistake, women do start revolutions. As Mike Duncan elucidated, in my beloved Revolutions podcast, the French one only got started in earnest when thousands of furious Parisiennes marched on Versailles. The National Guard—the King’s army—met them along the way, and, hedging their bets, decided to see the ladies to the palace gates. Mass uprising: It works! (Sometimes.) I have a theory: Every Communist revolution at its base has been vigorously prosecuted by it biggest majority ethnic group. Liberals have been keeping minorities stirred up about revolution, but when it comes time to start the violence, it will be the ethnic minorities who will suffer the most. It is a dangerous game for liberals because once minorities figure out how things are being rigged, liberals such as this individual may well find herself swinging from a lamp post on the local Martin Luther King Street.
But this isn’t just about women. If I had to wager, I’d guess that Mitch McConnell, the architect of this whole nightmare, doesn’t care a whit about abortion, either way. Not in the depths of his shriveled heart. (Ditto Susan Collins.) What McConnell does care about is power. He genuinely believes in the concept of a ruling class, wherein boys’ club mediocrities like Brett Kavanaugh—Yale undergrad legacy admit, unexceptional student at Yale Law—get promoted and promoted and promoted until they’re in position for the rabble to petition them, mostly fruitlessly, for a soupçon more fairness. The word privilege comes from the Latin for “private law,” as in, the privileged are governed by their own set of norms, which don’t apply to the rest of us. And vice versa. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was a lethal threat; 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh was “just a boy.” Privilege. Donald Trump glides to the presidency on a wave of unpaid taxes; Detroit residents get their homes possessed because of overdue water bills. Privilege. Pedigreed white men loudly feel sorry for themselves, tuning out the quavering voices of women forced to relive the worst days of their lives. Privilege. That’s what this whole fight was about—the culmination of a 30-year war to codify private law for the few. Kavanaugh, in accordance with nearly every GOP nominated SCOTUS justice will screw McConnell over worse than Stormy Daniels on a weekend bender. This is why I failed to see why all the fuss about Kavanaugh.
Other conservative Supreme Court nominees would have helped consolidate the privileged’s grip on power. But thanks to the firestorm around Kavanaugh, no other nominee could demonstrate so plainly to the American public that consolidating power is precisely what McConnell, and his fellow GOP senators, and their wealthy backers, intend to do. Well, history rhymes. They’ll have no one to blame but themselves if we riot. Hope for the writer's sake she can run faster than 2,800 feet per second. You'll surely need to get into shape.
#2
"Learning allows me to see myself as part of the tapestry of earth and time, rather than someone stuck in a present that’s all too often dumbfoundingly horrifying."
The only thing "horrifying" is the fact that people as crazy as you are allowed to vote, you dimwitted bitch.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
10/11/2018 8:39 Comments ||
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#3
So, I'm thinking she's not going to vote for Trump in 2020. Or shall we put her in the "undecided" category?
Posted by: Matt ||
10/11/2018 8:58 Comments ||
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#4
Better idea, easier and less likely to get you killed or sent to prison for life: Little Princess should move to another country and get on with its life.
#5
um... that's not what I took away from that season of the Revolutions podcast. (Highly recommended BTW.) There are very few parallels between the French revolution of 1829 and the Trump Administration. Now, the revolutions of 1848 where the liberals and radicals were violently crushed all over Europe? She should listen to the next season.
#9
etter idea, easier and less likely to get you killed or sent to prison for life: Little Princess should move to another country and get on with its life.
Posted by: rjschwarz
Problem with that is most countries require someone to actually be productive before they move there.
#10
All I can say is she needs to realize who he is talking about having a revolution against. Not the government, but the conservatives. They have far more veterans, and far more weaponry, and far more support from the police and armed forces. If she thinks her Antifa buddies can face down real armed opposition, she has a very bloody surprise coming, as do they.
Posted by: Boss Spoper5850 ||
10/11/2018 16:40 Comments ||
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[Paris AFP via Breitbart] The world must drastically reduce its meat consumption in order to avoid devastating climate change, scientists said Wednesday in the most thorough study so far on how what we eat affects the environment.
As humanity grapples with tough choices to offset a rapidly heating planet, the research suggests that the Western world would need to slash its meat intake by 90 percent to avoid crippling Earth’s ability to sustain an anticipated 10 billion people by 2050.
Food production ‐ which produces damaging greenhouse gases from livestock, ruins enormous swathes of forests and uses unsustainable amounts of water ‐ is a major contributor to climate change.
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature offers the most comprehensive look yet at just how bad intensive agriculture is for the planet.
Without a huge drawdown in the amount of meat consumed, its authors said, the food industry’s already vast impact on the environment could increase by as much as 90 percent by mid-century.
That coupled with a sharp projected rise in global population would devastate mankind’s ability to effectively feed itself ‐ and dash any realistic hope of curbing runaway global warming.
#3
"The world must drastically reduce its meat consumption in order to avoid devastating climate change, scientists said Wednesday in the most thorough study so far on how what we eat affects the environment."
Oh, good grief. FOAD, already...
Posted by: Dave D. ||
10/11/2018 8:24 Comments ||
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#4
But if we slash meat consumption there will be millions more cows left alive and farting to destroy the climate. Eat a steak, save the world!
#7
Tut-tut-TUT!! *Harrumpf!! How DARE those poor, ignorant Third-World Peons aspire to an extravagant First-World Lifestyle of eating meat! Uppity savages!
(/sarc, if it was needed...)
[LI] The Baltimore police officers who are suing State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby for maliciously investigating and defaming them when she criminally charging them over the death of Freddie Gray while he was in police custody have appealed the 4th Circuit’s dismissal of their case to the US Supreme Court, according to the Baltimore Sun.
A copy of the officers’ petition for certiorari to the US Supreme Court is embedded at the bottom of this post. In addition, you can find my extensive coverage of the Freddie Gray cases over at Legal Insurrection by clicking here.
The Freddie Gray case isn’t technically a self-defense case, in that none of the officers raised the legal defense of self-defense in response to the criminal charges against them. Rather, their defense was that they simply used no unlawful force on Gray at all. As a result this case would not normally be the subject of coverage by Law of Self Defense.
This case is, however, akin to many high-profile self-defense cases in the news in recent years since it’s another example of very serious criminal charges, premised on a claimed unlawful use of force, in the absence of any actual evidence to support such charges.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] On July 26, 2013, unidentified button men assassinated leftist Tunisian politician Mohammed Brahmi, who opposes the Tunisian Brotherhood Ennahda Movement. He was fatally shot in front of his house in Tunis. Few months before that, Chokri Belaid, the official in the Popular Front and who also opposed Ennahda and its government, was also killed.
Who assassinated the two politicians who oppose Ennahda?
Nothing is clear until now but the team defending the two victims dropped a political bombshell when it revealed that Ennahda has a "secret apparatus" that performs dark practices and that it’s the party which covered the killers and hid documents. This is of course according to the defense team’s statements.
The team defending Brahmi and Belaid confirmed in a presser that Ennahda Movement has a special organization that’s linked to political liquidations. The man who supervised the apparatus ‐ the defense team publicly stated his name ‐ possessed documents linked to the liquidation of Brahmi and Belaid.
The defense team confirmed that in December 2013 it found documents in the place where the apparatus’ supervisor lived, and who, by the way, is currently detained on accusations of manipulating with documents.
Commenting on these dangerous accusations, Sufian al-Sulaiti, a front man for Tunisia's counter-terrorism apparatus, said: "The prosecution is investigating the accusations made at the presser of the defense team of Brahmi and Belaid and about Ennahda Movement’s theft of files related to their liquidation."
We are waiting for the judiciary’s last word in this regard. However, a clean conscience makes a soft pillow... what is important is that this behavior, i.e. acting in two different ways: apparent and vague, public and secret, soft and hard and elusive and frank, is a characteristic of the old Brotherhood traits as there are things that can be said to the "brothers" and things to be said to others.
It’s an old trait which source is religious preaching about the virtue of "secrecy" and which is a result of the political and partisan atmosphere in which the Brotherhood was born in the first half of the past century, and which was the era of secret movements and militias par excellence in Egypt, where there were the green and black shirts and the iron guard, and outside Egypt in Leb and Iraq. All this is imported from the political European culture especially Spain, Italia and of course Germany.
Hence, it’s not strange if this is the case with the Tunisian Ennahda Movement. As we said, the final word is for the Tunisian judiciary. We’re here just ending this shock which some kind people may feel.
In brief, there are always words said in public and other words said in private, there is always what’s evident and what’s hidden and what’s public and what’s secret. This is how they’ve been and this is how they will remain. Those shocked must save their shock for what’s worth it!
Posted by: Fred ||
10/11/2018 00:00 ||
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[PJ] The guy who gave Donald Trump his own town hall forum in early 2016 has had the worst, and most fun to watch from a schadenfreude perspective, case of buyer's remorse since late 2016.
Now he's got theories:
I will be the first to admit that one of the things I enjoy most about President Trump is that he isn't a career politician. Because of that, he may very well decide he is bored with the nonsense and not run in 2020, but he really does seem to enjoy this POTUS gig so far. The idea that he will just bail on the whole thing seems more like a feverish liberal (yes, Scarborough is a liberal now) fantasy.
The discussion in the video here is part of the still-ongoing, and quite ridiculous, breathless MSM speculation about the announced resignation of UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Haley openly stated that she is looking forward to returning to the private sector, which many in the left media immediately seized upon as code for "I'm running in 2020." At least one of the MSNBC panelists in the clip has enough sense to declare that idea is a non-starter. The rest, however, are coy, wandering into that "kinda/sorta/maybe" speculation that passes for political punditry these days.
As someone who has been professionally writing about and commenting on politics for a long time, I understand that punditry not only involves commenting on the issues of the day, but some opinion-based speculation as well. That speculation, however, has to be informed by some sort of reality. What most left media pundits do these days is spin tales based on their own fantasy world. In that world, Donald Trump should never have been president. This is why on any given day MSNBC or CNN is convinced that there is another game-changing event in the ridiculous Russia collusion investigation that will finally rid them of their bogey man. They are completely unaware that all of sane society recognized the investigation as garbage and moved on a very long time ago.
One thing that undoubtedly is confusing the MSM lefties about the Haley resignation is the very idea that someone would want to leave government work. To liberals, making a living off of the taxpayers is the highest and best calling for human beings. That's why they can say that someone making a hundred or more thousand a year (looking at you, Bernie Sanders) is engaged in "public service" and do it with a straight face. It is positively mystifying to them that anyone would ever want to leave that.
The most amusing thing (to me, anyway) about the speculation is that liberals are so desperate to get rid of President Trump that they are actually wishing Nikki Haley will run. She may very well be the most formidable non-Trump opponent they have looming on the horizon.
#8
Trump said he is running in 2020 in a Fox interview this a.m. I have been getting email solicitations from his 2020 campaign. Wishful thinking on the part of Scarborough.
#12
I do not think Trump will run for re-election, either. He's checked the block and will leave with a good economy (or, at the top and on its way down).
#13
wait til you see the Fed Judge appointments article from LI I posted for tomorrow - lasting impact for decades
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/11/2018 20:52 Comments ||
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#14
From Frank's article: (SenateDems) agreed to the demand from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to confirm roughly the number of judges he could confirm between now and the election if he kept the Senate in continuously.
Vitamins? Lifting weights? Dunno what Mitch is doing lately, but I've got new-found respect for the guy.
McConnell is a weasel and only riding the Trump wave...I find Lindsey Graham's "turn-around" quite similar. I mean, Graham and Songbird McCain were quite the RINO pair for a while.
[WSJ] WASHINGTON‐FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday that the Bureau’s background investigation into sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had been limited in scope, but he added that it was consistent with previous such checks.
Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Mr. Wray distinguished a background check conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from a criminal inquiry, and said that the bureau’s only authority to investigate Justice Kavanaugh came at the direction of the White House.
"Our supplemental update to the previous background investigation was limited in scope, and I think that is consistent with the standard process for such investigations going back quite a long ways," Mr. Wray told senators in response to questions from Sen. Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California.
In a background investigation, "our only authority is as requested by the adjudicating agency, which in this case is the White House," Mr. Wray said.
The FBI conducted an initial background check of Justice Kavanaugh as a routine part of a Senate nomination after he was tapped in July as President Trump’s pick to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court.
The background check was then reopened after Christine Blasey Ford, a California psychology professor, came forward on Sept. 16 to allege that Justice Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers, which he categorically denied.
Her accusation came as the Senate was considering whether to confirm him to a lifetime appointment as a Supreme Court justice. The allegations disrupted his confirmation process, delaying a final vote while the charges were investigated further.
The FBI’s renewed investigation found no corroborating information for the assault, which was alleged to have occurred in 1982 in suburban Maryland. But Democrats on Capitol Hill said it had been limited in scope and rife with political interference.
Justice Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court in a 50-48 vote at the conclusion of the investigation, after winning the support of a handful senators. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia was the only Democrat to support him, while Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the sole Republican opposing him.
Dr. Ford wasn’t interviewed as part of the FBI’s renewed investigation, nor was Justice Kavanaugh. Some friends and acquaintances of Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh said they were willing to testify but weren’t contacted.
Mr. Trump said on Twitter that he wanted the FBI "to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion." Mr. Wray said that the FBI and the White House had been in contact throughout the process.
[Breitbart] WASHINGTON, DC ‐ The United States is facing an "escalating" threat from the use of civilian drones as weapons by the likes of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) and MS-13, the FBI director cautioned on Wednesday.
In written testimony prepared for hearing by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray declared:
The threat from Unmanned Aircraft Systems [UAS] in the U.S. is steadily escalating....While there has been no successful malicious use of UAS by terrorists in the United States to date, terrorist groups could easily export their battlefield experiences to use weaponized UAS outside the conflict zone. We have seen repeated and dedicated efforts to use UAS as weapons, not only by terrorist organizations, such as ISIS and Al Qa’ida, but also by transnational criminal organizations such as MS-13 and Mexican drug cartels, which may encourage [the] use of this technique in the U.S. to conduct attacks.
The FBI assesses that, given their retail availability, lack of verified identification requirement to procure, general ease of use, and prior use overseas, UAS will be used to facilitate an attack in the United States against a vulnerable target, such as a mass gathering.
According to the FBI, the MS-13 gang maintains a presence in at least 42 states in the District of Columbia and counts with the support of "about 6,000-10,000 members nationwide."
While describing shifts in the threat landscape more than 17 years after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen identified the use of civilian drones to advance nefarious activities as an example of emerging threats that are outpacing America’s defenses.
The DHS secretary, who appeared alongside FBI Director Christopher Wray at the hearing, told lawmakers via written testimony:
"Our supplemental update to the previous background investigation was limited in scope, and I think that is consistent with the standard process for such investigations going back quite a long ways"
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] I guess that the operation that shook Ahwaz, the capital of Khuzestan (Arabstan) Province in western Iran, targeting a military parade will be an important landmark in the already unhealthy relations between the Mullahs’ regime in Tehran and the Arab world.
To begin with, and from a humanitarian standpoint, I fully regret and condemn any loss of innocent lives, if there were civilian casualties. Some reports, in fact, have reported some civilian casualties among dozens of military dead and injured. My full sympathy goes to those innocent victims.
In the meantime, however, what the Iranian leadership has perpetrated and continue to perpetrate, both internally and in the neighboring countries; namely, Arab countries from the Arabian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean and southward to the Strait of Bab El-Mandeb must not be overlooked.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
10/11/2018 00:00 ||
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[8 views]
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[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] In the years following the 1979 revolution, there was a major shift in the economy, and Iran witnessed a gradual and extensive presence of the Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC ) in this area.
This paramilitary institution began its economic foray after the end of the Iran-Iraq war and today it is responsible for a third of Iran’s GDP. Given the economic crisis that has occurred in recent months in Iran, the role of this institution in triggering mass protests against IRGC policies both domestically and abroad is undeniable.
Economic monopoly to the extent that no other private entity can compete, the massive $50 million embezzlement in the "Sepanir company", affiliated with IRGC, and the involvement of "The Mostazafan Foundation of Islamic Revolution", the financial sponsor of IRGC, in the embezzlement of 123 billion Tomans in the 1990’s is among the major financial crimes of this institution.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
10/11/2018 00:00 ||
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I liked it when the howling loonies started pounding on the bronze doors of the Supreme Court like Brett Kavanaugh was totally going to open them up and invite the freaks in to air their many stupid grievances over a hot cup of Too Damn Bad. I also liked it when Lindsey Graham dissed that silly shrieking harpy as he adjusted his tie and smirked. And I liked it when Jesse Kelly channeled Andrew Breitbart by heading down to the protest with a t-shirt that said "Hands Off My Uterus." I liked a lot of things about last week, and all of them involved liberal jerks being unhappy.
[Washington Examiner] The national security threats against the United States have changed dramatically even in the past two years, according to senior Trump administration officials.
Whereas homeland security and federal investigators used to focus on fighting terrorism abroad, FBI and Department of Homeland Security leaders told the Senate Wednesday that the fight has come home because the threats are now stateside as well as in cyberspace.
The top five areas of concern that keep senior officials awake at night fall into the categories of critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, terrorism, border security, and drones. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are the countries with both the intent and capability to attack the U.S. in cyberspace.
"After 9/11, our strategy was to take the fight to enemies abroad so we did not have to fight them here at home," DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "Unfortunately, that is no longer the world we live in. Our enemies do not respect borders are not constrained by geography. Today’s threats exist in a borderless ‐ and increasingly digital ‐ world."
Today, the federal government’s biggest concerns are attacks on critical infrastructure, hacks into America’s private and public cyberspaces, and gaps in America’s physical borders. The issue of foreign and domestic terrorist attacks remain significant but a growing threat is the use of drones to surveil law enforcement and smuggle contraband.
Terrorists and nation-states could attack the U.S. through its critical infrastructure: banks, energy, telecommunications, and other industries. By disabling America’s power grid or shutting down financial institutions, business would be suspended and communication networks shut down.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/11/2018 7:16 Comments ||
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#2
Our enemies do not respect borders are not constrained by geography.
Why should they? Open borders and a fifth column in our anti-Western Civ elites make it all possible. That and trying to make war gentler kinder rather than going full Mongol as a deterrent to others thinking bad thoughts about us.
#3
Here are the top five national security threats to America
Wrong. The top 3 threats to US national security are the Democratic Party, the progressive propaganda machine (i.e., the MSM) that supports it, and the "education" system that does little anymore but indoctrinate fanatical young socialists.
The other five threats are ancillary.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
10/11/2018 8:31 Comments ||
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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.
[PJ] The guy who gave Donald Trump his own town hall forum in early 2016 has had the worst, and most fun to watch from a schadenfreude perspective, case of buyer's remorse since late 2016.
[Breitbart] WASHINGTON, DC ‐ The United States is facing an "escalating" threat from the use of civilian drones as weapons by the likes of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) and MS-13, the FBI director cautioned on Wednesday.
